After all those Art Deco interminabilities yesterday, just a short posting today to tell you that I recently did a piece on Ubersportingpundit about "When is a sport not a sport?"

My personal beef is against those alleged sports where they have a row of judges deciding who did best not only in such semi-sporting matters as "technical merit", but also, if you please, in "artistic impression". That's not sport. That's bloody art. I'm thinking of ice-skating and formation swimming and diving, but I'm sure there are others. Yeah, dancing. But at least they don't do dancing at the Olympics. Yet.

Not only is "artistic impression", sportswise, a crock of four lettered waste matter, so is "technical merit", if it is being indulged in for its own sake, rather than to knock over some stumps, plant a ball on a designated patch of grass, or kick a ball into a rectangle or H, or something along similar lines. There needs to be a place in sport for players who ooze technical merit and who make a huge artistic impression, but this is no fun unless they can come up against cloggers who can scarcely walk and who look like brick, er, waste-houses, but who do the business. There's no romance in sport, if the romance is just a matter of moves, and if non-romance automatically loses you points.

Culture blog material also, I hope you agree, even if expressed in somewhat locker room language.