Roland Garros Crisis Center, Day 13

Mornin' Tribe - it's a damp, humid day in Paris; it isn't raining at the moment, but the sky hangs heavy and it's hard to imagine that we won't have some kind of interruption today. We've been dodging bullets in that regard for days now, and let's hope it keeps up. *

Deep Thought* of the day: the ultra-popular website featuring player karaoke in the laundry room featured Roger Federer lip-syncing You're Simply the Best. Does anyone else tire of the relentless, dreary, anti-whimsical way that everyone is always looking to hook Roger up with All Things Exceptional?  Do the marketing folks really need to rub our faces incessantly in his genius, which represents the toweringly obvious - and therefore most banal - perspective?  And doesn't it risk completely alienating not just those fans who respect and appreciate Federer, but don't necessarily love him, or those, like me, who are simply turned off by  reports of the Second Coming, unless they involve a bearded dude in sandals (and I'm not talking about Cat Stevens)?

Call me crazy, but I prefer to the counter-intuitive in general, and in this context the most simple level I mean that as a practical, crass comment on marketing strategy. You want me to fall in love with The Mighty Fed doing karaoke? How about he lip syncs Been Caught Stealing (Jane's Addiction), which he hopes to make the theme of this next two days anyway. Now that would be as rich as listening to and watching Mrs. Santa belt out My Heart Will Go On (Celine Dion).

i think it's a disservice to TMF enclose him in too small a corral, and drown him in encomiums. It's a difficult thing for anyone to survive.