Almost all of my hobbies are pretty geeky.  I play video games, read fantasy novels, watch sci-fi movies.  But I did have a solitary non-geeky hobby, listening to sports talk radio.  Well, one sports talk radio show in particular, Mike and the Mad Dog on WFAN. 

Now, sports can be geeky.  Look at how the sabermetrics movement uses mathematics and statistical analysis to measure performance in baseball.  And the whole fantasy sports thing is pretty geeky when you think about it.  It’s basically an online multiplayer game.  Of course, when I first played we had to read the newspapers for results and get our standings in the mail.  But it was still a geeky game. 

But Mike and the Mad Dog hated fantasy sports.  They despised sabermetrics, preferring to rely on factors such as “heart” and “intangibles” and “momentum” in their analysis.  They both firmly resisted any new technology, often talking about “the intahnets” as if it was a foreign country.  I think finally Mike learned how to read news stories off of a webpage but I don’t think Dog even got that far.  They would break out these giant, dusty books to look up a statistic I could have found in seconds on the web.  Even their studio in Astoria looked archaic, like something out of a radio museum.

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