The original 1950 version of Ghostbusters

Ah, they've finally released the orignal Hope-Lewis-Martin-MacMurray version on DVD. Why do studios insist on remaking perfectly good films?

( I ain't afraid of no YouTube embeds )

That time of year again

I've mentioned before the week-long span from my mother's birthday to my sister's birthday, which also encompasses my birthday, the anniversary of my first date with nellorat, and the Independence Day holiday.

It also encompasses one of the bleakest days of my personal calendar--a genuine memento morey amsterdam mori lest I get too cheerful from all of the good.

Et in arcadia, ego, y'all.

World Cup: Those rules suck, have some new ones

I'm surprised by the enthusiasm with which the World Cup has been greeted by the traders in my office. (My desk is smack-dab in the middle of our New York trading floor--fixed-income and convertables to my west, high-touch and low-touch stock traders to my east, in a single room which stretches about 25 feet x 150 feet. There are five large TV screens throughout the floor, and all of them are tuned in when a game is on.) So I ended up caught in the excitement during the overtime finish of the Ghana-Uruguay game, and let me tell you, those rules are simply broken. Uruguay flagrantly cheated itself to victory.

The game was tied at the end of regulation, so the game was extended another 30 minutes of extra time. Neither team managed to score during the first 29 minutes, when the ball went out of bounds off a Uruguay player. Ghana inbounded the ball near the Uruguay goal, and a ferocious back-and-forth which lasted about eight seconds with the ball moving caroming among all of the players in the entire world. The Uruguay goal keeper got pulled forward by the action, and a Ghanese player kicked the ball at approximately three-quarters the speed of light straight into the goal, straight at a Uruguayan defender (Suarez) who was standing behind the goal line. Suarez did what any sane person would do if a deadly object was coming straight at his face: he punched the ball away.

(You can see all of this in slo-mo on this page at the Huffington Post.)

Of course, in world football, punching the ball violates the absolute most important rule of the game. Suarez cheated to stop Ghana from getting the goal and certainly winning the game. (Even in the most Hollywoodized film ever, there's no way Uruguay could have scored a catchup goal in the two or three seconds of time remaining in the game.)

Any good game designer knows that players will take the actions that the game rewards. The current penalty structure for deliberate handling is not sufficient, because the worst that can happen to the team that steals a goal by cheating is that they might lose the goal anyway on a penalty kick. Okay, they also lose the player; Suarez was immediately ejected from the game. But that didn't matter--the game was already over. And Ghana got its penalty kick, but penalty kicks go astray--and this one did. In effect, Suarez broke the most important rule of football and paid no cost; the worst that could have happened was that Ghana would have managed to score the goal that they had already scored, and the best that could happen was that Uruguay would get to win the game on the post-game shootout. (Which they did.)

So it's completely unsurprising that Suarez did what he did.

This strikes me as a situation where massive overkill is the only appropriate penalty. To use the phrasing from the FIFA Laws of the Game, I would propose that if a player "den[ies] the opposing team a goal or an obvious goalscoring opportunity
by deliberately handling the ball", the referee should have the ability to

1. eject the offending player


2. give the offended team a penalty kick


3. and award the goal as if the offense had not occurred.

Yes, this is nuking from orbit. But the current rules are a disgrace to game design.

As a side matter, I was trying to think of situtations in other professional sports where a scoring action could be awarded to a team in response to a offense by the other side. All I could think of for certain was that it's possible in baseball, though difficult, to score on a balk. supergee correctly remembered that in basketball, a call of goaltending awards the offended team a full basket plus possession of the ball, which seems about right. I know that hockey has an incredibly elaborate set of potential penalties available to the referees, including ejecting a player for 20 games (!), but I don't know if a goal can be awarded as a penalty. (Goals in hockey are almost as rare as in world football.) Anything else?

ETA: I was wrong; defensive goaltending in basketball does *not* result in the offense getting points plus possession, just points. Which means that a player has a reason to goaltend if a) he is certain that the basket will score, b) he has any hope that goaltending might not get called, and c) the penalty of an individual or team foul is unimportant (e.g., it's likely to be the last play of the game). This is pretty much exactly the same problem as in the Ghana match yesterday.