• Mood: exaggerating for effect, obv.

Sounds like Fighting Talk to me

Fighting Talk is a BBC radio show that solicits sports journalists to discuss sporting and other topics of the day quasi-competitively in a fashion that might very reasonably be compared to the USA's ESPN show Pardon The Interruption. The final round sees two of the initial four competitors invited to speak, off the cuff, in support of a contrary or distasteful theme for twenty seconds. The show has been running weekly, on and off, for about five years now, and has built up a reputation over that time, winning some radio awards. Certainly it has developed the confidence to play with its own format, and develop in-jokes that reward regular following, in a fashion that relatively few TV and radio shows ever attain. On the downside, I don't think it's quite as funny as it thinks it is, though probably because I very nearly only ever listen to the radio when I'm driving, and when I'm driving, I don't want to have to think about what's being said.

fx: theme from "Rocky" plays

jiggery_pokery, in this very special online edition of Fighting Talk, you have argued your way through to the Defending The Indefensible round at the end of the show. You have twenty seconds to defend each of the following three topics. Here they are:

If you don't love LiveJournal's new Journal Flagging feature, you're not thinking of the children.

It doesn't affect Friends-locked posts, you can't set up trolling accounts just for the purpose of shutting down other people's journals, you can't campaign to lock more than five posts away in a day and if you start abusing the flagging feature then they'll stop taking notice of your flags. Even if one of your posts does get found to be naughty, the worst that happens to it is that it gets hidden behind a LJ-cut, and even then it's only cut for users who haven't claimed that they're over 18 years old. If there must be abuse flagging, how could it possibly be any less obtrusive than that?

Who needs college football play-offs when we've got the Bowl Championship Series?

You can't fit play-offs into an already crowded season without making it longer still, changing dates or doing away with beloved Thanksgiving rivalries. Nobody wants any of these because college football is all about tradition. For every National Championship nerd, there are lots of Big Ten and Pac Ten fans who care about nothing more than winning the conference or the Rose Bowl. The BCS formula improves from year to year and learns from its mistakes - there's really very little computer influence, which is good because humans play football, not polls, and yet there's enough to counteract polls' tendencies to reward fashionable teams rather than good ones.

The best thing Six Apart ever did was to sell LiveJournal to СУП.

You can't see me, but imagine, if you will, that at this moment in time I am opening Winamp, I am loading up the .mp3 of the Soviet National Anthem that Comrade folk once sent me, I am enjoying its stirring orchestral charge, I am getting out of my chair, I am standing up and raising my right fist in a properly respectful salute to the way of the future. Don't know about you, but I, for one, welcome our new Russian overlords.