From the ridiculous to the sublime, David Roth buried the lede. Roth — not the Van Halen guy, not the musician, it’s the other David Roth — is an annoyingly young and irritatingly good writer, and even his Tweets are clever, though sometimes bitterly sarcastic. He made me and many another Twit laugh out loud with repeat video postings of a llama, bounding happily along in time with a rap sample. (It didn’t even have to be late at night for me to grin egregiously.) Later, he argued that a similarly goofy, arresting video about otters was a sports thing, because he likes sports and he likes otters, I guessed. Then I read the piece, which was very short, though long on otter love, in the midst of which he suddenly he broke out this wonderful definition. Sport, wrote young Mr. Roth, is this:
There I was, though I wasn’t sure why, mostly minding my business, loitering in a new place but with enough quasi-official approval that, even though I didn’t know anyone well, they sort of knew me and blandly accepted that I was fiddling around in some vaguely useful way behind that desk. That’s one thing.
I don’t know why they ran a film, but they’d have probably argued for some linguistic or educational purpose behind the CGI, though I think they were just as bored as I was and equally content to be that way. So there we were. This happened:
I couldn’t stop looking, either. Mysterious!