How to Waste Time, Vol. 28

Say you're a sports-minded person facing issues, tasks, assignments or whatever name has been given to this particular instance in which you personally are being kept down by the man.

Say you've got access to these things we call the internets, on which you can find cool stuff, smart stuff, relevant stuff and all sorts of other things (Links not provided as my choices would make it obvious that I am neither cool, smart nor relevant). And say you don't really want to cooperate with the man in his efforts to keep you down.

Then obviously you must point your web browser to the site of the Sports Illustrated Vault. There you can use many hours of the time which the man would otherwise use to keep you down. He of course will know that you are trying to counter his down-keeping efforts and will try to deride them as "time-wasting," but you and the people will know that for the hollow oppressive claim that it is.

While at the Vault, you can look back through SI history to times when the magazine dared to talk back to the schools and teams it covered, like this. Or looked at some of the less seemly aspects of professional athletes that are now smoothed over and covered up by a sort of unspoken commitment to boosterism between the teams, their leagues and the media outlets that want to cover them. You could also check out SI's early commitment to covering athletes equally and fairly, regardless of race. That Althea Gibson article, by the way, hit the scene seven years before the U.S. Civil Rights act outlawing segregation did. Ms. Gibson wasn't the cover story that issue, but she made it the next year. I imagine one could count the number of national magazines in the 1950s with African-American faces on the cover without involving one's second hand.

If you're in a goofy mood, you could check out how many times a favorite athlete made the cover. Or how many times some oddball sport made the cover, or was featured in an article. Rumor has it that there are some issues which feature attractive young ladies in swimsuits. I will not link those either -- I may be a revolutionary fighting oppression, but my mind is firmly away from the gutter, and I know what you will think of if you look at them.

Eventually you may run out of ways to keep your time as your own, and be confronted again with whatever oppressive tactic the man is trying to force upon you in his imperialist desire to take away your time. But there are other ways to continue the struggle, as we will explore in How to Waste Time, Vol. 29, "Blogging About the Time You Have Just Wasted."