I Mean It Man

2002-06-05T23:32:00.000-04:00

OK, I like the World Cup now.

2002-06-04T23:30:00.000-04:00

Wash Post 125 years.

2002-06-03T16:09:00.000-04:00

Flora Lewis was not, to put it kindly, one of the more exciting writers around--"Worthwhile Canadian Initiative", which The New Republic famously referred to as the most boring headline ever written, was the title of a Lewis column. The notion that "she could outdrink and outsmoke" her competition comes as a surprise to me, given that I can't think of anything memorable she ever said.
But she was a pioneer for women covering foreign affairs, and I like to remember journalists of note. So there it is, my tender reminiscence.

2002-06-02T23:16:00.000-04:00

Why is it so important that we all watch the World Cup?

2002-06-01T23:26:00.000-04:00

Rand Simberg

2002-05-31T14:02:00.000-04:00

The New Yorker piece by Philip Gourevitch on the disaster of contemporary Zimbabwe is online now. The author of the chilling We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow we will be Killed with our Families is someone to be listened to when it comes to bad news out of Southern Africa. We can only hope that Father Time deals with Robert Mugabe sooner rather than later...
The real disgrace is the unwillingness of South Africa to speak out against this criminal. If they don't provide leadership, who will? The old colonizer?

2002-05-30T23:22:00.000-04:00

LOLOL.

2002-05-29T21:15:00.000-04:00

Perhaps we don't hear about these gaffes becasue the traveling media are too busy putting out puff pieces like this one from Judy Keen of USA Today, in which Bush comes off as a cross between Pollyanna, Will Rogers, and Elmo. "The loose, regular-guy style that Americans have grown accustomed to..." Regular guy. Right.

2002-05-29T21:08:00.000-04:00

"Do you have blacks too?" I mean, as a loyal American, I really want this to be false.
My question is, why has this Bushism gotten so little publicity? I know it doesn't have the news value of Al Gore claiming to invent the Internet--scratch that, he never said it--but it's still an interesting thing to know about our president, isn't it?

2002-05-28T21:14:00.000-04:00

Via Charles Kuffner, an idea that I can't endorse strongly enough--voting Expos and Twins into the All-Star Game, scheduled to be played in Bud Selig's Milwaukee, currently the home of baseball's worst team. Anything to embarrass Beelzebud.
The nation's sports media has not exactly played "rally 'round the owners" this time, which is a welcome change from labor disputes of the past. Given the utter idiocy of the people calling the shots, it's hard to see any way this won't end with another season-ending strike, but I'm a crazy optimist as only a lifelong Cleveland Indians fan can be...

2002-05-27T23:27:00.000-04:00

Heellloooo.

2002-05-26T23:00:00.000-04:00

Peeeee!

2002-05-25T22:53:00.000-04:00

Peeee.

2002-05-24T23:40:00.000-04:00

I love it when a writer or a critic turns an evaluation of something relentlessly non-entertaining into great entertainment. Such is the case with espn.com's Bill Simmons and his evisceration of the horror of Celebrity Boxing 2. That photo of Dustin (Screech) Diamond will haunt me forevermore, I just know it.
I don't watch a good deal of network TV, but the end of the season still sucks in a big way. I just saw NBC run an ad for Spy TV; apparently the sleazefest from last summer will be coming back. At least the basketball (Go Kings!!) is pleasurable tonight....

2002-05-24T23:26:00.000-04:00

A couple of thoughts while perusing blogworld....two days ago, in a fairly predictable snide reaction to Eric Alterman's new MSNBC blog, Andrew (No Permalinks) Sullivan said the following: "Then [Alterman] sharpened his criticism to say he loves weblogs, he just can't stand mine, with all its narcissistic (code-word for gay) preening, and so on." Narcissistic is a code word for gay? When did this happen? Is the relentlessly anti-P.C. Sully now playing the gay card? And is calling him snide evidence of my own homophobia? I'd better check.
Sullivan caught (and was bothered by) the same weird reference in Kausfiles yesetrday that bothered me: "Gary Condit may well be cleared of the Chandra Levy murder – that would be intensely disappointing, but it's possible." So beyond hoping that the disappearance (now the death) of Chandra would be solved, Mickey was actually rooting for a particular outcome? (This leaves aside the not-insignificant detail that Chandra's death has not yet been declared a murder.) Imagine the reaction in the conservative media/blogdom if Kaus were to say "It looks like George W. Bush is in the clear on Enron--that would be intensely disappointing, but it's possible."

2002-05-23T23:27:00.000-04:00

Ulotrichous.

2002-05-22T23:22:00.000-04:00

Ugh.

2002-05-21T23:12:00.000-04:00

The new and exciting InstaPundit! That most familiar of blogs has changed....and nothing will ever be the same. Seriously though, I like it. The non-Blogger blogs have unique looks. The old templates (like mine) are declasse (as the "Still on Blogspot" taunts from Rand Simberg and Kathy Kinsley remind us--or reminded I should say, as that designation now appears to have been removed on both sites). I suppose I'll switch over eventually myself depending on how long I go on with it...

2002-05-20T23:43:00.000-04:00

Oogy-doog

2002-05-19T23:25:00.000-04:00

Let's try this again.

2002-05-18T23:33:00.000-04:00

And away we go!!

2002-05-17T23:19:00.000-04:00

Hello Dolly. Good to see you home.

2002-05-16T23:47:00.000-04:00

9/11.

2002-05-15T23:14:00.000-04:00

Could it be that this might put an end to the dumbest trend in sports? Let us hope.

2002-05-14T23:46:00.000-04:00

The Weblog Foundation...I suspect that such an idea is eventually going to rise and fall almost entirely on the favors of one or two rich individuals. I would love for the Foundation to work, to enable several of our Best and Brightest to keep at it, and perhaps make the sort of money one might ordinarily make at a weekend job (and allow a few more bloggers to get their own domains). But I suspect blogging is always going to be for hobbyists, and for journalists/political journals looking for a timely outlet (The Corner and Tapped are likely the first of many).

2002-05-13T23:53:00.000-04:00

AAARRRRGGGGHHHHH! I was the King of Pain long before Sting. Watching the Spurs completely bomb out in the last 6 minutes against the Lakers yesterday was par for the course....keep in mind that I've lived through John Elway's "drive" and the Indians blowing a 9th inning lead in Game 7 of the World Series (there have been other lowlights--I was a Washington Capitals fans before Columbus got an NHL team--but these are the most prominent). At least Red Sox fans have something to fall back on. The Spurs 1999 championship is looking more and more like the biggest fluke of my sports-watching life.

2002-05-12T23:20:00.000-04:00

Remember we went through that phase in the second half of the '90s, where no matter what bad thing happened anywhere in the world, it was the fault of the Internet? (I think it all started with the Heaven's Gate mass suicide--in 1997, the news that these fools had a web page seemed to strike many in the traditional media as evidence of their eccentricity).
Tom Freidman is reliving these days with Sunday's off base, vaguely anti-Internet column. The main problem with the Arab/Muslim world isn't access to the Internet, but educational institutions that don't teach critical thinking and a culture drenched in hate (I agree here with some I usually don't agree with, Susanna Cornett). I seriously doubt the Internet is exacerbating the situation. If millions in the Arab world actually believe the rumors about the Jews who were warned away from the Twin Towers on September 11, in the face of all the evidence (web and non-web) to the contrary, how can we then blame the Internet if they choose to accept the word of crackpots? No matter if the information was distributed via pamphlet or via mosque or via the Internet, such lunacy obviously has fertile ground in which to grow.
If one assumes (and I do) that Muslims are as capable of reason as anyone else, Internet access may actually be a source of hope that millions of people will be able to learn something about the reality of life on earth that isn't filtered through the local imam or the pathetic government-run media.

2002-05-12T23:01:00.000-04:00

The end of the line for Lucaino Pavarotti at the Met. I guess it happens to all of them eventually...for people my age and younger, Pavarotti was opera; the Met will have to develop a new signature star. Salvatore Licitra--not sure I can get used to that one.

2002-05-11T23:24:00.000-04:00

Hmmm...it appears that someone is giving serious thought to how to make money off this thing. It's worth a shot. They are being read, after all.
Hey, I'm game. Would I write more or better if paid? My old media editors might disagree....I don't believe there's anything disreputable about blogging for dollars, of course. Hell, I'll do sports, or share it with Justin Slotman and Oliver Willis and Tony Pierce.
By the way, on the subject of Mickey Kaus leaving independent blogdom for Slate: good for Mickey. But too bad that in doing so we lost his permalinks at the bottom of the old Kausfiles page, which I used frequently.

2002-05-10T22:42:00.000-04:00

Even before we had a name attached to the alleged pipe bomber, Blogworld was already speculating: left-wing nut or right-wing nut? When Luke Helder was identified and later arrested and his history of odd writings came to light, the word went forth from certain quarters: "YES!! One of them!"
The sense I got reading Helder's bizarre pronouncements was not embarassment over "one of our own" freaking out; rather, I was wondering both what the hell he was talking about and what exactly was "left" about it. He seems to me more like a denizen of that spot on the belief graph where far left and far right wrap around and blend into each other.
Anyway, the best thing I read on the "blame game" topic was posted by Gary Farber, who said basically what I was thinking (and didn't write, as my own writing here has gotten noticeably lazier in the last 2 weeks). After a few months of reading these things, I'm getting a sense of who's thinking for themselves and who's just playing root, root, root for the home (Republican) team. And I notice I don't have the need to check in on the latter more than once a week or so at this point. Too much else to do and too much else to read.

2002-05-09T19:14:00.000-04:00

Whad'ya know? The powers that be got it right for a change.
All you New Jersey whiners can kiss my Go Spurs Go club (class of '74) butt.

2002-05-08T17:00:00.000-04:00

Tuesday was primary day in Ohio--the first statewide election since redistricting--and there was the usual lack of news committed, with one huge exception: veteran congressman Thomas Sawyer (D-Akron) was defeated in his bid for an 9th term.
Ordinarily a member of the House won't lose a primary unless 1) redistricting has forced him into the same primary as a fellow member; or 2) his last name is "Condit". But neither was the case with Sawyer, although he did pick up some of the old James Traficant district, which likely made the difference.
I didn't know much about Sawyer, except that he was a rare Rustbelt Democrat who was persuadable on the subject of free trade (he voted for NAFTA). For that reason if for no other, his defeat is unfortunate, as new nominee Timothy Ryan is saying all the "right things" from the standpoint of labor. Certain aspects of Ryan's past (a 1993 conviction for disorderly conduct and possessing a false ID, as well as the campaign contribution flap referenced in the Beacon Journal story) lead me to wonder if he'll be a worthy replacement for Traficant in more ways than just casting pro-labor votes.

2002-05-07T23:28:00.000-04:00

Well, so much for "peace". And the stated motive (not that Hamas needs one other than murdering Jews) is revenge for Jenin. So it continues.
We shouldn't have been surprised. Via Steven Chapman, from Debka, May 5: "According to DEBKAfile’s intelligence and Palestinian sources, far from preparing to step aside, [Yasser Arafat] is brooding on new schemes for upsetting the Bush-Abdullah-Sharon program, aiming to time a terror spectacular to coincide with Sharon’s White House talks on Tuesday, May 7. It would not be the first time that a major terror strike has forced the Israeli prime minister to cut short his Washington trip and come rushing home."

2002-05-06T22:51:00.000-04:00

Blogmania has hit (cough!) respectable journalism. The weekend brought the rumored New York Times Book Review piece by Judith Shulevitz, and--not anticipated--a column by John Leo in the new issue of U.S News.
The Shulevitz piece has some of the condescension one typically associates with the Times ("the current craze is for something called a blog. The name is the diminutive of 'Weblog,' an online news commentary written, usually, by an ordinary citizen, thick with links to articles and other blogs and studded with non sequiturs and ripostes in sometimes hard-to-parse squabbles"). Another complaint, "to read blogs requires a willingness to wander from link to link in the hope that some mind-numbingly detailed dispute...will resolve itself into a usable insight," is just silly; the same charge could easily be leveled at any number of regulation op-ed pages. However, she does suggest that bloggers are providing a personality that has largely disappeared from daily journalism, in addition to fact and opinion.
Leo seems to have more respect for the talent of bloggers than does Shulevitz: "Bloggers can say anything they want and get their message out with blinding speed. This is unsettling to us lumbering print guys. Six or seven times I had to abandon a column because some upstart blogger beat me to it" (I've done that more than once myself).
But the right-leaning Leo, like Norah Vincent a few weeks ago, puts more emphasis on blogs as a conservative alternative to the "liberal media" (a common explanation for the prominence of conservative talk radio). If he really believes that "political bloggers are overwhelmingly [my emphasis] right of center, either conservative or libertarian," he needs to expand his horizons beyond Glenn Reynolds's permalinks. I don't know if this was true 6 months ago--perhaps--but it sure as hell ain't true now. As for his noting with approval that "bloggers have given encyclopedic and favorable analysis to Bernard Goldberg's charge that the 'right wing' label in journalism is applied much more commonly than the adjective 'left wing'," I would point out that other bloggers have said that Goldberg is full of guano. Let this please be the last column to suggest that "Blogworld" shares one set of opinions.

2002-05-05T17:58:00.000-04:00

Just checking in with Rand Simberg, he of the Blogspot up/down feature, when it occurred to me that it's been quite a while since the last Blogspot outage. It's been quiet...a little too quiet.
In the same way Wile E. Coyote could run off the cliff with impunity until he happened to look down, I hesitate to post this...but too late now!

2002-05-04T22:16:00.000-04:00

About Bill Clinton hosting a TV talk show...well. It seems too weird to be true, but then again, a whole lot about Bill Clinton would have seemed impossible ten years ago...and we did, in fact, live through all of it. This Post editorial has the right mix of bemusement and quasi-horror. It just doesn't seem right in a way, even if we can't put our fingers on exactly why. Compared to the ways other ex-presidents have made money, is it really less useful than round-the-clock golf or less dignified than making speeches?
I have to say, however, that if a Clinton talk show is going to avoid politics (conflicts of interest with his wife in the Senate you see, and then there's the whole "fair and balanced" issue), I can't imagine why anyone would watch, and it's hard for me to believe Bill would really want to do such a show. The former leader of the free world interviewing the fifth-billed actor on Third Watch, picking the brain of Dr. Phil or a Phil wannabe, cooking with Emeril Lagasse...there's something very DeNiro-at-the-end-of-Raging Bull about it all. But I suppose it has to be better than The View...

2002-05-03T22:06:00.000-04:00

Let's hear 'em:

1) Hey Catholic boy: how come you never say anything about what’s going on in the church right now? Partially because (gotta give credit where credit is due here) Andrew Sullivan has been on such a roll the last few weeks. His measured outrage has set the proper tone, as an organization that doesn’t even much care for being scrutinized by the Catholic man and woman in the pew, let alone the media of a majority non-Catholic nation like the U.S., is being forced to open up. And all for the good, say I. It's not the American way to accept arguments from authority or trust that "the right people" can handle things in secret, something the U.S. bishops and John Paul II themselves are painfully finding out. "When you have a structure like this - immune from outside input - it is bound to create crises like this one. It has no real means of self-correction," said Sullivan in Time this week. He's right.
I do think one always has to be concerned with the witch hunt syndrome--opportunists are going to emerge. And it's painful that the genuine good done by priests and nuns on a daily basis is rarely acknowledged (I'm hardly a paranoid on the subject of Catholic-bashing, but unfamiliarity with Catholicism is legendary in the media and in Hollywood). But the PR hit is so harsh now precisely because the situation was ignored for so long.
The recent talk about the number of priests who are gay surprises me. Even had I known much about homosexuality as a kid, the idea that any of our priests might be gay…come on! Though there was that one Brother in my high school, the Bette Midler fan who asked us one day if we knew what a phallic symbol was…
Now it turns out that the priest shortage would be a priest endangered species list if not for gay men. Does this make a difference, and should it? Even Newsweek’s generally fair-minded Kenneth Woodward seems to imply that gays have more trouble controlling their sexual desires than do straights, a judgment that seems to be based more on watching Queer as Folk than on any systematic study. The "problem", if you will, is lack of faithfulness to the vow of chastity, not being gay or straight. And of course, gays who want to be priests are still a minority of a minority. Better the church honestly examine why fewer heterosexuals want to be priests than try to screen out gays.
2) How many college bowl games can we possibly need? Of course, we don't "need" any of them, but I have to think that the recent announcement that the NCAA will now certify a grand total of 28 bowls (up from 25) may bring more people around to my point of view.
Since there are 117 teams playing Division I college football, and you need a winning record to qualify for the postseason, this now means that nearly every eligible team will be in a bowl. And there aren't 56 teams that even a rabid football fan wants to see more of, not even close. The bowl system asks people to accept that a game between, say, Texas Christian and Mississippi State that would attract zero national attention if it were played the second week of October has suddenly taken on importance because they play it on December 29 and call it the Fiberglass Bowl or some such. A half-empty stadium is the norm anymore for games like this.
One of these days big-time college football, like everyone other NCAA sport, will accept the wisdom of a playoff system, one in which every postseason game has objective importance. But that day seems far off still.
3)What's will all the nostalgia on TV these days? And why do we want to remember '70s TV in the first place?The three main networks, gearing up for the end of the season and looking to boost ratings, aren’t even giving lip service to originality anymore, as they are busily preparing reunions and clip shows featuring favorites from decades past. And how can you argue? We lap it up.
The latest nostalgia craze (it sometimes seems as if we've spent the last 30 years doing nothing but re-living previous eras) was touched off when a tribute to The Carol Burnett Show drew stunningly high ratings a few months ago. I can sort of understand this: the stars of Carol Burnett are not widely seen these days, and it’s the type of program that’s been absent from prime time for years. But now we're getting reunions for almost everything that was on long enough ago and for a long enough time. That's Incredible!--who missed John Davidson? Laverne and Shirley--that was already a nostalgia show. L.A. Law? It seemed prestigious at the time, but it's aged very poorly. Compared to David E. Kelley's later lawyer show (The Practice) and the show that replaced it on NBC (ER), L.A. Law isn't really worth remembering, unless you're the sort of person who relates better to fictional characters than to real life.
I will admit, though--I'll probably watch the NBC 75th anniversary gala on Sunday.
4) Are we ever going to get the truth about Jenin? As the
Yasser Arafat Pyrrhic Victory Tour '02 proceeds through various parts of the West Bank, arguments about the "Jenin massacre" continue, in spite of the growing evidence that there was no "massacre" as the word is commonly understood. Facts and evidence be damned, it is now accepted among the Palestinians and their allies that Jenin was a turning point in the long history of man's inhumanity to man. To me, it seemed more like, well, a battle--house-to-house combat involving terrorists who deliberately took cover in a residential neighborhood, and a nation that chose to resist the easy way out, which would have been to just bomb the place from the air. As Charles Krauthammer pointed out, there are no shortage of identifiable innocent victims in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, but since they're Jewish it's hard to get people interested, apparently. One hopes (likely in vain) that the international community will wise up for a change and stop making excuses for anti-Semitic rhetoric and violence, and that the truth about Jenin will become generally recognized. But Jenin serves too many interests for the Palestinians--the comparisons to the Alamo are telling. And this was already a people addicted to self-pity and worshipful of death.
5) Why are national anthems being booed at various sporting events? Can’t we all get along? My, my, my. We just came through the Olympics, which featured no anthem booing, and are about to embark on the World Cup--you may have heard that soccer has been known to get nationalistic blood boiling. Yet over the last two weeks, we’ve seen national anthems booed in North America in NBA and NHL games involving both a U.S. and a Canadian team (there have been scattered reports from several cities, but it seems that Detroit Piston fans and New York Islander fans were the biggest offenders).
There are all sorts of weird things about this, beginning with the obvious fact that most of the NHL players listening to “O Canada” being booed on Long Island are themselves Canadian, and the vast majority of NBA players are American. In other words, the national honor isn't in any way at stake--the "winners" will be Canadian (NHL) or American (NBA), no matter which team wins.
The story was a much bigger deal in Canada than in the U.S.--the booing apparently started in Detroit, and many Canadians believed it particularly offensive considering the country was mourning the victims of the Afghanistan friendly fire incident when the rudeness began (blogger Jamese was particularly incensed). Others have insisted--and I can't vouch for accuracy here--that booing of national anthems at hockey games is nothing new; it's always been a pastime on the rare occasions when drunks attend an NHL game.
I'm sure there wasn't any real animosity behind the booing. It was a way of venting about the opposition, not a true expression of hatred. That doesn't make it right, but as Mark Kreidler says, "A sports crowd doesn't always strike you as the most thought-diverse crowd that can possibly be assembled, does it?" I suppose it's asking too much that we should wonder why it's still necessary to play national anthems before sporting events at all...

2002-05-02T22:08:00.000-04:00

Glenn Reynolds hosted an interesting discussion on interracial marriage earlier this week. It began when he linked to this column by William Raspberry, which dealt with the fact that so many middle- and upper-middle class black women aren't married--implication being that there is a shortage of "marriageable" black men.
Reynolds took exception to what he took as another implication: "Buried in Raspberry's piece -- and no doubt in the minds of the women he describes -- is the assumption that black women should only marry black men. Isn't that kind of, you know, racist?" he asks.
That led to several replies, which Reynolds posted over the next two days (here and here and here.)
I thought Reynolds was being deliberately naive with his first remark. There's nothing at all "racist" about assuming that a person might exhibit at least a preference for someone of their own race, although I suspect the number of people who would flat-out refuse to consider dating outside their race is now under %50 and dropping every year (marrying outside one's race--now, that may be changing slower). The number of interracial marriages is growing rapidly, though black/white intermarriage is still relatively rare. And in my experience--strictly anecdotal evidence here--it's white men and black women who tend to object most often.
The children of these marriages will change American society in ways that can't really be predicted right now, though I suspect it will be mostly for the good. Anything that lessens tensions and brings the races, uh, together (remembering Warren Beatty's classic line in Bulworth here) is a positive in my book. The correspondent in Reynolds's last post has it right--the racial melting pot of California is leading the way here.

2002-05-02T21:29:00.000-04:00

The blogging community agrees on little these days, but there was general outrage at the apparent new policy of the Dallas Morning News regarding "deep links", a ban on which would pretty much end blogging as we know it. This would be the proverbial stupid and futile gesture, assuming that such a ban would even be legal. But one point I wanted to make: while in the process of following a link onto some paper's website that I don't look at every day (that describes every paper in the world other than the Post and the Times), I often see a link on the margins that intrigues me, and I click on it just to check. That in turn might lead to a second interesting-looking link, and so on. So even a deep link that bypasses the website's home page can reach more eyeballs than one might think.
Update: According to a letter from company flack Scott Baradell that appears on the medianews.org letters page, (Morning News owner) Belo isn't against deep links per se...but "deep linking without Belo's permission is a violation of DallasNews.com's terms of service, and in specific instances -- a small number of instances -- we seek to enforce these terms." Translation: don't piss us off and we'll be happy to leave you alone.

2002-05-01T22:24:00.000-04:00

The saga that began in Salt Lake City in February ended yesterday, in a decision that satisfied nobody. Marie Reine Le Gougne, the "French judge" with the ever-changing stories from the Olympic pairs figure skating competition, and Didier Gailhaguet, the head of the French ice skating federation, were suspended from the sport for three years, and banned for the 2006 Olympics. Being French, they whined about the harshness of the decision; personally, I though anything short of a lifetime ban was getting off light ( Sally Jenkins says the same thing, basically). Remember, Jim Thorpe was stripped of his gold medals for getting paid to play semipro baseball. In 2000, Andrea Raducan lost her gymnastics gold medal in the all-around for taking the wrong kind of medicine. Apparently, actually conspiring to fix an event in Olympic competition is not as serious.
This will not stop a recurrence of similar situations in the future. Sports bureaucrats are cannon fodder, but the prestige of a gold medal can live on and on.

2002-05-01T13:25:00.000-04:00

Another examination of the differences between U.S. and European media coverage of Jenin and the Israel/Palestinian conflict generally, this one from Boston Globe media critic Mark Jurkowitz. Here's an unintentionally revealing quote from the managing director of the Arab-American Institute: ''European coverage is much more balanced and much less fixed on terrorism.'' I suppose "balance" to him means that the Europeans ignore real Israeli civilian victims and play up the civilian victims of Jenin, who are still proving stubbornly hard to locate.

2002-04-30T22:30:00.000-04:00

Wow. The Indians lost tonight 21-2. I figured they'd be worse this year, but still...this is a disgrace. If I sound even more incoherent than usual the next few days, you'll know why...

2002-04-30T22:27:00.000-04:00

Via Ted Barlow ( glad he noticed it--I sure didn't): The American Prospect now has a blog, called (ugh) "Tapped". A nice knock-off of the success nationalreview.com has had with The Corner, except for people...well, people who think more like me. The Prospect posts are unsigned, however.

2002-04-29T22:30:00.000-04:00

Salon's "Masterpiece" column has not really fired my interest in the weeks since its introduction, but I did enjoy today's appreciation of the Holiday Inn "Great Sign", the jaunty emblem of the chain that grew up with the Interstates in the '50s and '60s. Man, I used to love looking for those things on long trips; they certainly gave a cachet to Holiday Inn that the other chains just couldn't match (to my childhood mind, anyway). I suppose I never realized that the signs disappeared in 1982, in an attempt to "modernize". Who were the dumbasses that signed off on that idea?

2002-04-29T22:20:00.000-04:00

More apparent evidence that the Bush administration subcontracted out the formulation of their energy policy to various lobbyists. Nice to see that Judicial Watch is being at least a small percentage of ass-pain to the Bushies as they were to Bill Clinton...

2002-04-28T22:33:00.000-04:00

In sports, we're in draft season--the NFL draft was last week, and the NBA and Major League Baseball drafts come up in June. This past NFL draft saw its usual share of juniors decide to come out early, and a good many non-seniors in college basketball have made the same decision (you don't have to be at least a college junior to declare for the NBA draft, and there will probably be a few high schoolers who decide to take the plunge again this year).
Many of these decisions, particularly those by the basketball players to leave college as sophomores or freshmen if not to bypass college entirely, have prompted the usual cries from reporters, columnists, and TV commentators that the kids are "making a mistake" (virtually all of the best college baseball players leave for the pros after their junior year; as college baseball isn't widely followed, nobody much minds this). Many of the stories about Maryland's national championship men's basketball team stressed that the team started three seniors; a contrast with those greedy early entrants to the NBA was clearly implied.
There's no question that some of these guys do end up making a mistake, and would benefit from being able to play more regularly in college (let's leave aside here that developing athletic talent for professional leagues really isn't the main purpose of a higher education). But people make career mistakes all the time. And just because a player with promise leaves college early and fails as a pro does not mean he would have succeeded if he had stayed in school.
Another thing I notice: "making a mistake" only goes one way. No player is ever deemed to have made a mistake when he stays in school instead of going pro, even when one can make a case that he did in fact hurt himself financially. Wisconsin wide receiver Lee Evans decided to return for his senior year, and suffered a very serious knee injury in spring practice, one that will likely mean he won't play at all this coming season. Evans may have been a high draft choice had he come out this year; with the injury, he'll be a major question mark in next year's draft. Scoonie Penn of Ohio State received a lot of praise locally in 1999 when he came back for his final season of basketball. It's unlikely the diminutive Penn would ever have been a high draft choice, but he had a disappointing senior year and was picked very late, and never has caught on in the pros.
Did Penn make a mistake? Did Evans? If they say they didn't, then they didn't--I can't tell players what makes them happy. But its hypocritical for sportswriters, all of whom write for a living, to pretend that their calls for athletes to stay in school are based solely on a belief that it's what's best for the players, and to continually insinuate that a football or basketball player who wants to be paid for what he does best is disloyal or money-hungry.

2002-04-27T21:53:00.000-04:00

Glenn Reynolds went 29 hours, 12 minutes and 31 seconds between posts. Make a note of that.

2002-04-27T21:14:00.000-04:00

Few recent stories have amused me more than the Republican whimpering that the CNN standard Crossfire, whose format has always pitted one liberal and one conservative (and guests) against each other, is now unfair because the liberals are too effective!
As Joe Conason pointed out a few weeks ago, while conservatives have traditionally raised hell about liberal bias, complaints about the pundit shows are less frequent. And little wonder--the two oldest of these shows, The McLaughlin Group and Crossfire, have always had something of a conservative sensibility: McLaughlin due to its conservative host and the outsize personalities of original panelists Pat Buchanan and Robert Novak; Crossfire because co-host Buchanan was so much more effective at the talk show format his original liberal foil, Tom Braden, and more ideological than Braden's replacement, Michael Kinsley.
Liberals have longed for someone who could really go toe-to-toe with their conservative Crossfire counterparts, and whatever else you might think about James Carville and Paul Begala, they don't lack for agressiveness. How simply having an effective liberal on Crossfire makes the show unfair is something that RNC Chairman Marc Racicot, by all accounts the whiner-in-chief, can take up with his friends on Fox. I'm sure he'll be welcome there any time.
The other half of the age-old liberal brief against the Crossfires of the world is that the "on the left" co-hosts aren't really that liberal (this is a favorite argument of Fairness and Accuracy in Media). That part doesn't really bug me as much, since Michael Kinsley (to take one example) is a significant influence on my own thinking (if not, unfortunately, on my writing). I prefer more nuance than one tends to get from the screamers on TV, which is why I'm more apt to watch C-Span, or (it goes without saying) read a good blog. I rarely watch Crossfire any more myself; I get so much politics from the Web that the shout shows and even the Sunday shows have little to offer me.

2002-04-26T22:07:00.000-04:00

The 10th-anniversary-of-the-LA-riots "Can't we all get along?" edition of Friday questions:
1) Are you completely alarmed about the implications of Jean-Marie le Pen? The fact that the French have brought forth a mental midget in public life is hardly surprising, though such idiots usually don't get this close to getting elected to anything. Not that le Pen really has a chance to do better than an eventual crushing defeat at the hands of Jacques Chirac. As has been pointed out elsewhere, le Pen scarcely budged from what he was able to do in earlier elections--the difference is that the vote was so badly split this time, with a ridiculous 16 candidates for president. The left refused to unite behind Socialist Lionel Jospin and doomed him to third place (hmmmm...the left shooting itself in the foot--why does that sound familar?) The main argument against the Electoral College is that it's unfair that a candidate can get the most votes and lose, but the College does have one important thing going for it--it works against the lasting influence of minor parties or even a strong third party, insuring that the eventual president takes office with some semblance of a mandate.
In the meantime, the French, perennial critics of the decadence of America, have had the collective smirk wiped off their faces for at least a few weeks. This is a lovely thing indeed.
2) Where are the Rolling Stones of yesteryear? I think that’s a roundabout way of asking me about the startling news that for the first time in nearly 40 years, there are no songs from British acts on the Billboard singles chart, the Hot 100 (link via Metafilter).
I’ve often been mystified at what sells in Britain—perhaps because it’s smaller than the U.S., fad acts come and go with even greater speed there than they do here, and stupid novelty hits are particularly popular. The British are out of sync with current American tastes, but this has happened before—one can think of any number of trends that swept Britain while making scarcely a dent on the charts here, punk being the most prominent. Eventually, the music media in the U.S. will go through one of their Anglophilic periods (the two-year stretch that gave us Oasis and the Spice Girls being the most recent one) and we'll get British crap on the radio again, some of which may even be half-decent. I'll say this for the Brits: the whole Korn/Limp Bizkit thing really hasn't caught on there at all.
3) I need to know what to do with my $5.99. Is Anna Kournikova getting naked or not? It seems fitting that the washed-up Kournikova (now ranked #66 in the world) and the flailing Penthouse are going down together (although there now seems to be some dispute whether the person in the heavily-hyped upcoming issue of Penthouse is actually Anna K). At any rate, I’m guessing whoever it is will be more worth seeing naked than Bob Guccione’s last big catch, Paula Jones.
What I’m wondering, though: Is it just my imagination, or do celebrities seem to need to take their clothes off more than the rest of us? I have some sympathy for people who are photographed in the nude when they have a reasonable expectation of privacy—in their bedrooms or even in their backyards. But I’ve managed to go my whole life without wandering around nude on my property—is it really so amazing a feeling that celebrities, who have so much to lose, just have to drop trou? This isn’t even counting all of the nude beach shots (like the alleged Annas) and the occasional Jennifer Lopez “My underwear don’t cost a thing” pic.
4) The Saudis still don't get it, do they? It's pathological. First we had the Saudi ambassador to Britain write a poem praising suicide bomber Aayat Mohammed al-Akhras. Then a "secret source" (how cloak-and-daggery!) provides Diane E. with a tape filled with violent rhetoric.
Crown Prince Abdullah, visiting Crawford for his long-awaited meeting with Dubya, told Bush to pull back on US support of Israel, lest the region descend into chaos (yeah, we wouldn't want chaos in the Middle East). Now as bloggers go, I'm hardly one of the great bashers of Saudi Arabia, but I hope Bush is giving Abdullah a harder time behind closed doors than his mild statements of yesterday might suggest ("the crown prince and I established a strong personal bond"). Saudi Arabia is one deeply fucked-up society. A lot of us who should have been paying attention before September 11 are watching and listening now, but the Saudis clearly haven't caught on yet.
5) Who should be the MVP in the NBA this year? I'm not unbiased here. I've been a San Antonio Spurs fan since the team moved from Dallas 29 years ago, and I suffered through numerous playoff disappointments before they won the 1999 NBA championship, making them the only one of my teams that's ever won even one goddam title in anything--and as a fan of Ohio State, the Cleveland Indians, the Cleveland Browns, and (until recently) the Washington Capitals I know all about near-misses and postseason disappointment.
So with that full disclosure in mind, Tim Duncan should be the MVP, of course. And frankly, if Duncan played in New Jersey and current favorite Jason Kidd of the Nets played in South Texas, there wouldn't even be an argument. Duncan has already been screwed out of one MVP, in the championship year of 1999 when Karl Malone won. Now Kidd is the favorite becasue he supposedly turned the underacheiving Nets around. But check out the Spurs record before Duncan (1996-97, 20-62) and after (1997-98, 56-26). The Spurs were healthier all around in 1997-98; Duncan wasn't the only reason for the improvement. But the same goes for New Jersey this year. Duncan is being punished for his consistent excellence and for playing in a relatively minor market, but if every player in the world went into a pool to stock a brand-new league, Duncan would be the first player picked, I'm almost sure of it. And that spells MVP to me.

2002-04-26T16:21:00.000-04:00

The cover story in this week's Other Paper concerns this interesting fact: a city whose population is right around 1/4 African-American has black leaders in most of the major municipal positions: mayor, school board president, school superintendent, city attorney, police chief, and now fire chief. The two major party candidates for Lieutenant Governor, Jennette Bradley and Charleta Tavares, are black women from Columbus.
There are certainly black Republicans in town--Bradley and Larry James--but one factor behind the new prominence of blacks in city government is that the Democrats are on the verge of becoming a solid majority in Columbus. This is a major change from when I first came to town 21 years ago. It's simply easier now for a Democrat to win a citywide election, and black Democrats who hold partisan offices-- Michael Coleman, Janet Jackson--have been the beneficiaries.
This is less because longtime residents have changed their politics than it is a reflection on the area's growth, and the different sorts of people who choose to live in the city and in the burbs. Columbus is still thought of as Republican, but the strong partisan Republicans in the metropolitan area don't live in Columbus any more--increasingly, they don't even live in Franklin County. To the extent that African-Americans make up a disproportionate percentage of area Democrats, they will continue to play a larger role in city government than their numbers might suggest.

2002-04-25T21:15:00.000-04:00

Yahoo! Internet Life's Net Buzz closed down Wednesday. Tough break--it was a fun site (having a blog really makes one appreciate the hard workers who sift through zillions of potential links). But goodnews--the man behind Net Buzz, Steve Knopper, now has a blog, and early indications are promising. He's already alerted me to the Samuel L. Jackson soundboard, which is so cool all I can do is say "Hold on to your butt."
Steve is used to writing a lot, so he'll fit right in. But the last week has seen some newer bloggers retire or threaten to do so. First came Sgt. Stryker announced he had "run out of shit to say"; within two days he was back with more shit. Diane of Letter From Gotham then announced that blogging had started to take up too much of her time, and she would be more low-key from now on. Happily, her output hasn't dropped all that much, and her mood seems to have picked up a bit too.
The copy editor behind Media Minded has issued what looks to be a more definitive retirement, though I'll give him another few days before declaring the patient dead (edit: he's already reconsidering). In signing off, he noted that there are plenty of other conservative media critics out there, and I certainly can't disagree with that. A more recent discovery, Jamese, was making some ominous noises there for a few days.
I've said it before: if you're a writer, ain't nothin' gonna keep you from writin'. It might not be for a blog--those who were merely caught up in warblog fever will likely move on. But in the last year hundreds of people who never realized they were writers have found out differently. It's fun, isn't it?

2002-04-24T21:20:00.000-04:00

Sometimes I wonder what purpose this site serves, other than providing me another creative outlet. But I'm starting to think that since so many of the other blogs tend to cover similar ground and from a similar point of view (yesterday was Tuesday, therefore "Let's Gang Up On Paul Krugman Day"), anything that I say that is even slightly different might be of some use.
While perusing Spinsanity today, I came upon a rather remarkable quote in a piece about the current Republican attack on Sen. Patrick Leahy. The political director of the Republican National Committee, Blaise Hazelwood, said the following: "Fellow Americans, we are fighting two wars right now. Abroad we fight terrorism and at home we fight the disgraceful and obstructionist Democrat senators."
Now am I being oversensitive here, or is Hazelwood implying (or giving the appearance of implying) that the Democrats are similar in some way (either in morality or in danger potential) to the villains of September 11? Little shocks me when it comes to politics, but demonizing an opposition party in this way is beyond the bounds of civilized discourse. It doesn't seem to bother anyone else in Blogworld though, or perhaps no one else has noticed yet? I'd love to believe it's the latter.
Of course, Andrew Sullivan would rather speak out against nonexistent slurs, accusing Krugman yesterday of likening Dubya to French wacko Jean-Marie le Pen. This leaves out one small detail: Krugman doesn't mention Bush at all in Tuesday's column. This isn't the first time that Sullivan has exhibited a problem with basic reading comprehension, which makes me wonder how The New Republic ever got edited during his tenure.

2002-04-23T23:27:00.000-04:00

I just stopped by Salon to check out the Wednesday articles, and as it happens they had a few questions for me.
1) "Have you ever heard of weblogs?" Um...yes.
2) "Do you operate a weblog yourself?" You're reading my mind.
3) "If we were to launch an easy-to-use blog publishing service that was linked on Salon, would you be interested?" I'd at least look into it. I live on the edge.
4) "How much would you be willing to pay for such a service?" I'll give you what I'm paying Blogger, how's that? Actually the choices were $25, $50, $75, I wouldn't pay at all, or "no answer", which is what I selected. I've held off on Blogger Pro mostly because I wasn't sure how long I could sustain this, and I'm continuing to consider that (with the speed I typically bring to all important decisions), so it would be dishonest to say I would "never" pay to have a blog (and I'm sure everyone will have to pay eventually). But I'd at least want to see how it works for others before jumping in myself.
Anyway, that seems to be Salon's big new idea. And who knows? I never thought they'd make it through 2001.

2002-04-23T16:41:00.000-04:00

Yeah, me too. It's good to be king:

which "monty python and the holy grail" character are you?

this quiz was made by colleen

2002-04-22T22:55:00.000-04:00

Everybody has already linked to and commented on today's Howard Kurtz column on the blog phenomenon. It's noteworthy in that 1) he isn't dismissive out of hand; 2) he goes beyond the obvious (Sullivan, Reynolds) to cite people like Asparagirl and Susanna Cornett. "A perfect pastime for anyone with an attitude and some spare time" sums it up very nicely.
As bloggers go, I tend to shy away from the "blogs will change the world" attitude, perhaps to some extent because my blogging represents a fraction of my overall writing. I think many of us tend to forget how small this really is from the standpoint of public attention. It's perhaps only a bare majority that really takes any interest in news, much less the version of it served up in blogs. But as I said when I started out, I do it because I find the writing enjoyable; changing the world would be a nice byproduct but it's hardly the reason I'm here.
I did want to mention the second part of Kurtz's Media Notes column today, which discusses how the film Panic Room has inspired all sorts of lazy quasi-commercials for the film in the guise of news stories. At least one of my local news affiliates carried a similar story. I think this is less a case of journalists not checking their facts than it is news organizations using a now-familiar phrase as an easy hook to keep viewers interested. "They want any way to extend a real hot story," says Gavin de Becker, and he ought to know.

2002-04-21T22:07:00.000-04:00

While continuing to virtually page through the Houston Chronicle, I came across an interesting story about the changing ways that San Jacinto Day is now being taught in Texas schools, as the Mexican-American population continues to grow (166 years ago today, Texan forces won the decisive battle in their war for Independence).
I went to elementary school in San Antonio between 1972 and 1976 (fifth through eighth grade), and the depiction of the old way of teaching Texas history (which was 7th grade history for me) very much rings true. The idea that there might be a "Mexican side to the story", or that Austin, Houston, Crockett and the boys might be something other than the spiritual descendants of Washington himself, never remotely crossed our minds then. This seems to be one case where revisionism has had a laudable outcome--and from the standpoint of improving historical rather than political correctness.

2002-04-21T21:39:00.000-04:00

Returning to the subject of Cynthia McKinney, there are other members of Congress who are saying nutty things and not getting quite the same amount of attention. Take, for instance, Tom DeLay, who ranks third in the House Republican leadership.
You may recall DeLay for 1) his rodent-like face; and 2) blaming the Columbine shooting on the theory of evolution. Back on April 12, he spoke at a Baptist church in Pearland, Texas and claimed, among other things, that "only Christianity" can provide the answers to life's great questions (leaving the majority of the human race hopelessly in the dark, apparently). He also opined, hilariously, that he's "the most investigated man in America". C'mon! You serve with Gary Condit, for heavens sake!
This story in the Houston Chronicle stressed a slightly different part of the same speech: DeLay's contention that Baylor and Texas A&M, two of the most conservative universities in America by virtually any standard one could think of, are now off-limits to right-thinkers. He's under the impression that students at A&M just recently began having sex. I wouldn't think of denying him this illusion--I wonder if he'd be mollified if he knew that it was a missionary position-only campus? I wish someone had thought to ask DeLay what colleges he would find acceptable for a good Christian; you just kinda know that "Bob Jones" would have popped out.
Above link courtesy of Ginger Stampley, who has added me to her blogroll in what is certifiably the greatest achivement in the history of I Mean It Man. Thanks, Ginger!

2002-04-21T16:23:00.000-04:00

When it comes time to remember worthy causes, please consider the Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation, which is searching for improved treatment options and a cure for this little-publicized but quite serious form of cancer (myeloma makes up %1 of cancers, but %2 of cancer deaths).

2002-04-20T22:43:00.000-04:00

A sizable segment of Blogworld went off on Rep. Cynthia McKinney (D-GA) this past week, after she suggested that George Bush may have known about Spetember 11 ahead of time. Actually, she admitted there was really no evidence that this was the case, but she urged it be investigated anyway.
OK, McKinney is a goofball. But what about the charge raised in the current issue of Insight--that the Iraqis were behind the Oklahoma City bombing and the Clinton administration covered it up? This absolute lunacy has gotten a "hmmm....maybe it's true" reception from two prominent bloggers, Rand Simberg and His Eminence. Both make the point that Clinton had a clear political motive to pin the bombing on the far right; left unsaid (they no doubt believe it goes without saying) is that he is the sort of person who wouldn't have thought twice about pinning the bombing on the wrong people. So McKinney is paranoid, but this charge is at least semi-believable? I see.
By the way, you may remember Insight as the publication behind one of the more spectacular bogus charges made about Bill Clinton: that he sold burial plots in Arlington Cemetery to the highest bidder. A lot of conservatives accepted that charge at face value too; a few may have even apologized when it turned out to be bullshit.

2002-04-19T21:59:00.000-04:00

The hot-and-humid-in-April edition of the I Mean It Man version of Friday Five:

1) Was there wailing and rending of garments from you when the cancellation of Ally McBeal was announced? That was still on the air?
Judging from the ratings, my drift away from Ally McBeal--regular watcher the first 2 seasons, an irregular watcher the next two, a non-watcher this season--pretty much mirrors the rest of the country. At some point it all just got too outre´ for my taste--these people were supposed to be lawyers, for cryin' out loud. The fantasy sequences, that freak that Peter MacNicol played....(shudder). And Calista Flockhart herself just became hard to watch--her appearance was off-putting. David E. Kelley's track record for letting his series go to hell after about 3 seasons (very much including The Practice) remains intact.
What I don't get is why the cancellation of Ally was such big news, as it was hardly unexpected. At one point yesterday the headlines on the MSN homepage read as follows: Plane crashes into Milan skyscraper, 4 Canadian soldiers killed in Afghanistan, Fox cancels Ally McBeal. A little disproportionate, maybe?
2) Speaking of the accident in Afghanistan, what does Dubya have against Canada, anyway? It should be said upfront that the bombing of the Canadian troops is an awful tragedy, and not in itself cause for any humor. But Bush's failure to make a quick public expression of sorrow irritated a lot of already frayed nerves north of the border.
And it's that whole "north of the border" thing that's clearly a problem for Bush. This is someone, after all, who had given very little thought to the world outside Midland for the first 54 years of his life. To the extent he thought of neighbors at all, he thought, naturally enough, about Mexico. Canada was....well...somewhere up there in one of those places where it snows a lot. When Bush took office Canadians, on the lookout for expressions of American arrogance and/or indifference even at the best of times, were on especially high alert for any signs of neglect. Their fears were quickly realized. Bush clearly made Mexico our neighbor numero uno--strike one. Failing (inexplicably) to mention Canada during his September 20 speech to Congress was strike two. The American-led fight for justice for the beleaguered Canadian pairs figure skaters (not to mention our hospitality in losing two hockey matches to the MapleLeafers) won back some good will, but now comes this tragedy, which would be hurtful enough without Bush doing what seems to come naturally--blowing Canada off.
Canada was already a nation ambivalent about its role as part of the allied coalition. Bush would be wise not to ignore stories like this. A Canadian relative of mine was a German POW during World War II; I have a lot of respect for their toughness and pride.
3) How can you call yourself a blogger when you haven't yet posted your views on circumcision like Andrew Sullivan? Yeah, Andrew has been a real tiger on that topic, hasn't he? Calling it "mutilation" sort of gives away his views on the subject...his posting on matters penile climaxed with a lengthy and bizarre quote from the British Journal of Urology which purports to prove that the intact member produces more orgasms for the woman, something that I must admit has not crossed my mind. The passage contains terms like "corpus spongiosum" which I've never heard of even though I think I'm equipped with one.
Of course, circumcision never really caught on in Andrew's native Britain like it did here. Back in, say, 1962, when yours truly made the scene, the practice was more or less second nature for newborn boys in the USA. Now, a good deal of the energy of the not-completely-dormant men's rights movement is spent arguing against circumcision. I suppose I'm "enlightened" enough that I would at least have to really think it over before subjecting a newborn son of mine to the knife. A photograph exists of my nephew, taken a day after his birth. His face is red and he's grimacing. It was explained to me that he had just undergone his circumcision. Yeah, I guess I can understand that.
4) Will success spoil Ozzy Osbourne?The Osbourneswill end its scheduled run in a few weeks, and probably for the best--they've gone from a cult curiosity to ominously overexposed in the space of a few days, with cover stories in Entertainment Weekly and Rolling Stone and lengthy pieces in the Washington Post and USA Today (to name only the most prominent). We're seeing the first little signs that having introduced Ozzy to a non-headbanger audience for the first time, the family won't go away quietly. No one really wants to hear Kelly sing "Papa Don't Preach", to name the most unpleasant storm cloud on the Osbourne horizon.
The quartet originally announced that there would be no second season, with teenagers Jack and Kelly being the most adamant in their dislike of the idea. But for the right amount of money, they will apparently reconsider (mom Sharon is Ozzy's manager, and as viewers of the show know full well, no dummy). I feel safe in predicting that a sophomore season simply won't be the same. Self-consciousness will be unavoidable--the Osbournes will know that they're stars, know what got the best reaction from the first season, and this knowledge will inevitably inform how they act on camera. MTV's original reality success, The Real World, is now casting 20-22 year olds who can't remember when the show wasn't on the air. They know exactly what to do to get cast, what the producers want to see, and the sort of footage that makes it into the finished product (fighting, drinking, and screwing--preferably some combination of the three). The show has steadily gotten more unwatchable as a result.
5) Today is April 19. Where have I heard that before? It was well into the PM hours before I realized that today is the seventh anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing. And I'm going to go out on a limb and say it was the first time an anniversary has passed without being the main or at least a major news story of the day.
o some extent this is an inevitable function of the passage of time, but it also reflects how much things have changed in this country since last April 19. Consider that the September 11 attack on the Pentagon, which is often nearly forgotten in the Trade Center-centric remembrances of that day, took more lives than did the crime of McVeigh and Nichols. I recall Glenn Reynolds saying last November that the anniversary of the JFK assassination had gone unremarked upon, something that in his view was both new and culturally significant.
I suspect that's right. I'd have to talk to people who lived through the era to know whether remembrances of Pearl Harbor lessened in intensity for many Americans after the assassination of Kennedy, but it stands to reason that they may have. Perhaps Americans can only handle so many "milestones of shock" at once. But that doesn't mean that the victims of April 19 should be forgotten, and I'm sorry that for most of the day, I did forget.

2002-04-18T23:35:00.000-04:00

I rip them all the time, so it's only fair I should credit the Wall Street Journal for a tough editorial Wednesday chastising the recent foreign policy missteps (as they see it) of the administration. They echo my own concerns about our hypocrisy with regard to Venezuela: "Mr. Chavez, a Fidel Castro clone, has behaved as an anti-American thug. But he is a twice-elected thug, and some expression on behalf of democratic values from the White House would have helped U.S. credibility in the long run." Exactly.

2002-04-18T23:24:00.000-04:00

CNN is on and it's a reunion of the O.J. Simpson All-Stars, celebrating (I don't think that's too unfair a word) the arrest of Robert Blake. Finally, you can almost hear them exclaim--something to distract us from this boring West Bank stuff.
I should be upfront here: I followed the Simpson case very closely. If I had had a blog in 1995, it would have been mostly O.J.--Den Beste-style posts every night. But without knowing any of the details just yet, I suspect we're not going to get a similar level of public obsession this time around. There isn't the racial angle to jack up interest, and the cast of characters for the Simpson trial was right out of Dickens.
There were two good stories on the apparently-cold case in March, from two very different sources. James Ellroy's piece in GQ last month was typically eccentric, but he lives for this sort of crime. And even TV Guide got into the act with an unusually long and well-done investigation.

2002-04-18T13:27:00.000-04:00

It goes without saying that the sports world has harbored its share of wife-abusers and girlfriend-abusers over the years. So when Chuck Finley of the Cleveland Indians refrained from retaliating when his wife, actress Tawny Kitaen, hit him with her high heels, you would think he'd get praised.
Think again. Finley filed spousal abuse charges against Kitaen (he's now filed for divorce too) and has gotten temporary custody of his daughters. In the sports world--and very much, I fear, among many sports fans--that makes Finley a hopeless wimp, a figure of ridicule (this column by Jim Caple is typical). In a transparent taunt, the public address system at Comiskey Park played Whitesnake music on Tuesday during a game in which Finley pitched; Kitaen is perhaps best known anymore for her lead role in her then-boyfriend's videos.
And Finley was just awful on Tuesday, allowing nine runs in the second inning. Other players have struggled as their marriages fell apart less publicly, but it certainly can't help that the country thinks of Finley as a joke. Professionally, he'd be better off if he had kept the incident quiet (to the possible detriment of his daughters), and perhaps even if he had been violent in return. What a wonderful message we're sending to young athletes.

2002-04-17T00:45:00.000-04:00

The Post goes Page One with a lengthy investigation of the Tora Bora campaign, headlined by the belief that Osama bin Laden is still alive. This covers a lot of the same ground militarily as a long piece in the Chrsitian Science Monitor several weeks ago, with the addition of the administration's resigned attitude about bin Laden's survival. The messages seem to be: 1) it's no big deal that Osama got away--it's really not about him; but just so we're clear on this 2) it's all Tommy Franks's fault.

2002-04-16T22:34:00.000-04:00

"We did not even wink at anyone" insists the nameless senior official quoted in this story about ties between the White House and those involved in the aborted Venezulean coup. How much credibility does the administration have on this issue, given their obvious glee at the overthrow of Chavez?
And I was indulging myself in a little sarcasm yesterday when I suggested the Bush people may have not-so-deep-seated reasons for their dismissive attitudes towards an elected president. But I doubt this "administration official" was speaking ironically on purpose:

Asked whether the administration now recognizes Mr. Chávez as Venezuela's legitimate president, one administration official replied, "He was democratically elected," then added, "Legitimacy is something that is conferred not just by a majority of the voters, however."

2002-04-16T22:06:00.000-04:00

I saw the posts at Instapundit and Little Green Footballs last night, alerting readers to the poll at the CAIR (Council of American-Islamic Relations) website: "Should Ariel Sharon be tried for war crimes?" When Reynolds posted (24 hours ago), the results were running %94 yes, with 513 total votes cast. Only eight hours later however, with the totals augmented by blog visitors (including me), things looked quite different. There had now been over 11,000 votes cast, with %94 against the idea of trying Sharon. "I'm predicting a sudden onset of 'technical problems' in an hour or two, but I could be wrong," predicted Reynolds.
Sure enough, within a few hours CAIR first apparently attempted to fiddle with the results, and then took the poll down altogether, citing the allegedly inappropriate attempts to manipulate the poll. Hey, all I did was express an opinion--I just voted the one time. CAIR didn't like the opinion it got, obviously. They could always commission a scientific poll, but I suspect that wouldn't tell them what they want to hear either.

2002-04-15T22:41:00.000-04:00

Al Gore made his long-awaited (well, in some quarters anyway) return to the political arena over the weekend, making his most concentrated attack on the administration yet, even including the pre-September 11 days. The speech and the generally positive reaction to it is being widely interpreted as a sign that Gore is running for sure in zero-four (conservablogger Patrick Ruffini has a reaction from the unsympathetic side of the political spectrum; he seems to think Gore has the nomination for the asking, and that's fine with him).
I doubt Gore will have a cakewalk to the nomination. First off, there are too many important people in the party who want anybody but, and I look for them to eventually coalesce around two or three plausible alternatives. Also, 2004 will be perhaps the one chance to run for president for a whole generation of Democrats--those who sat out 1996 and 2000, and even those who failed to run against the "inevitable" Bush the Elder in 1992. Someone like John Kerry fits into this category. If he deferred to Gore and Gore then won the election, what chance would Kerry ever have to run for president himself?
It's obviously way too early to handicap the presidential election; too much can happen by this November, much less by 2004. But it does help to look at broad trends, the ones that are more or less independent of the identity of the party's candidates for president. At a similar point in his first term 20 years ago, Ronald Reagan didn't look all that strong. But he did have the Republican "electoral lock" going for him. At the time California was pretty much a Republican state in presidential politics with New Jersey and Illinois likely battlegrounds in any close election. However, 2000 was as close an election as we've ever had, and all three states went solidly Democratic.
The emergence of a real Democratic base that approaches the size of the Republican base in the South and Plains/Mountain states is an important development in our politics, and means one of two things is likely to happen in 2004: either it will be another close election essentially fought out in a dwindling number of true swing states (Florida, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin), or Bush will win fairly easily, as Clinton did in 1996. Americans like to re-elect their leaders unless given a good reason not to, and certainly Bush looks strong now. But stay tuned.

2002-04-15T22:22:00.000-04:00

I have no great love for Hugo Chavez and the half-assed populist way he has governed Venezuela, and there seems little doubt that legitimate grievances underlay the military uprising that briefly deposed him late last week. But Chavez is back now, and the Bush administration is left to explain why it seemed so eager to countenance the overthrow of a popularly elected president, no matter how much a thorn in American sides he may be. I suspect the situational ethics from the White House on display here won't soon be forgotten in the rest of Latin America.
A return to the bad old days of knee-jerk support for whatever regime is willing to do our bidding, regardless of what the people of said country think, is not going to serve our long-term interests. Apparently the administration cares as little for the sanctity of the vote in Venezuela as it does for voting in Florida.

2002-04-14T20:42:00.000-04:00

It takes a lot to shock the old boy anymore, but this photo (which I first saw at Little Green Footballs) pretty much left me speechless. The fact that the demonstration was taking place in Berlin merely adds to the disgrace.

2002-04-13T22:05:00.000-04:00

Last week, in a discussion of errors in Michael Moore's Stupid White Men, Glenn Reynolds said the following: "As the Michael Bellesiles affair proves, book reviewers are virtually useless at pointing out factual errors in books: they just don't check. That's especially true given book review editors' tendency to assign leftie reviewers to review leftie books."
Well...I do review books, and I suppose I'm a leftie (lefty?) of sorts, and without coming across as overly defensive I did want to say that I try to call them as I see them. There may have been other critics who gave simultaneous bad reviews to Moore's Downsize This! and Robert Bork's Slouching Towards Gomorrah, but it's unlikely I had much company. I suspect I wouldn't much care for Stupid White Men, based on my previous history with Moore; on the other hand, I did very much enjoy Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich. I doubt I'm fully successful at separating my politics from my judgment about political books that I read, but I do my best.
On the subject of fact-checking--whenever possible, by all means. But the average freelance book critic (not the sort of "name" critic you see in the New York Times Book Review) makes about enough to buy a copy of the book he or she is reviewing. I point out errors when I recognize them right off; but asking the average reviewer for the East Armpit Gazette to vet something like Michale Bellesiles's Arming America...it just ain't gonna happen. Fact checking ought to be done at the editorial level, but these drudge jobs seem to be the first thing that's cut when, say, a publishing house's big study of the Florida recount goes into the remainder bins within a week of its release.
But Reynolds--and frankly, everyone else who has laid into Moore over the last few weeks--ought to be honest and admit this goes both ways. Does anybody doubt, for instance, that the Wall Street Journal and National Review will pan Bill Clinton's memoirs when they are finally published? For all I know this will be fully deserved (I remember the guy's speeches and shudder to think how long the damn thing will be), but the Journal, scourge of "political correctness", routinely reviews books, movies, television, etc for the "correctness" of the politics or perceived politics revealed within--conservative good/liberal bad, virtually without exception. And it goes without saying that the conservative wing of blogdom was a good deal more eager to point out the errors in Moore's book than they were to fact-check the various shaky assertions in Bernard Goldberg's Bias.
I think it's also fair to say that Moore has gotten a more skeptical reception from the left than Goldberg got from the right--it was Salon, after all, that first published the Spinsanity takedown of Stupid White Men. Conservatives do not have a monopoly on "fair and balanced".

2002-04-12T20:53:00.000-04:00

My random Friday questions are even more random than usual...beginning tonight with a nod to the greatest Wake Forester of them all (pending the conclusion of Tim Duncan's career):

1)Why did the mean old Augusta National Golf Club kick all those nice old guys out of The Masters? Till now, former champions of The Masters have gotten a lifetime exemption to play the tournament. Technically, they still do, but in an effort to streamline things, the club asked 3 former winners who have consistently brought up the rear in recent years (decades in the case of Doug Ford, who last made a cut in 1971) to please not play this year
I don't think it's a good idea to have an official policy that old champs can play, only to ignore that policy when it becomes inconvenient. The more honest thing would be to grandfather the current ex-champions in and pass a new rule for future champs that the "lifetime" exemption only holds if you happen to die before you turn, say, 65 (that's what the British Open does now). No one gets very far in sports without an abnormal level of competitiveness--and certainly not in a sport like golf, which routinely frustrates even the best. One can sympathize with the old fellas feeling that they belong, even when they have long since stopped contending.
However, I'm glad that Arnold Palmer has decided to hang it up, and will now limit his competitive golf to more or less honorary appearances in senior events and his PGA tournament at Bay Hill. Palmer has stuck around to this extent for his fans, who don't want to let him go, but it's long past time. Hell, I'm too young to remember when Palmer was one of the world's best, and I'll be 40 later this year (though I did see him inducted into the Wake Forest Sports Hall of Fame when I was a kid). He was a most entertaining figure--the favorite pro of the working stiffs, who appreciated Palmer's go-for-broke style. Golf could use more colorful personalities--even one would be a nice start.
As for The Masters, the most self-important sports event on earth other than the Olympics, even a dozen iconoclastic Palmer-types wouldn't be enough.
2) Got your ticket for the $70 million jackpot in Ohio's Super Lotto? yes, I do--I'm a hypocrite.
I'm an opponent of state lotteries, as I really don't think the government should be involved in an enterprise that couldn't possibly survive without blatantly dishonest advertising. The notion that lotteries work because the proceeds are earmarked for good government deeds, such as (in Ohio) education, is also bogus, since money is fungible. If the lottery ended tomorrow, the state would just make up the education shortfall elsewhere; raising the tax needed to make the budget even out would be a fairly easy task.
But when the jackpot gets north of $50 million, even my fabled common sense takes a holiday--or rather, begins dreaming of holidays in the Virgin Islands or in Northern New Mexico, often accompanied by close personal friend Charlize Theron. I have a few Super Lotto numbers for tomorrow's drawing; they will no doubt be losers. But it's the price of one beer, I tell myself, so the money is going to no good cause anyway.
Even with this jackpot and the increasing sales provoked thereby, interest in the numeorus Ohio lottery games has been flagging. Apparently, you cannot fool people indefinitely. The goal now is find a way to keep jackpots high permanently, and Governor Bob (no relation) Taft wants Ohio to join a multi-state game (his predecessor, George Voinovich, was notoriously anti-lottery).I'll do my civic duty and keep our collective IQ high by refusing to play...unless we get to at least $71 million.
3) Are you a bad person if you're enjoying the trial of a guy who killed 7 people? You probably are. But the trial of Michael "Mucko" McDermott is one of the weirder things you'll ever see, and I'm hooked, damn it. If his insanity is an act, it's damn good--he's so logical-sounding that one can almost believe he did storm Hitler's bunker in 1940. Although faking is now what he's being accused of by the prosecution.
And like any self-respecting celebrity defendant worth anything, McDermott now has himself a fiancee´. I'll say this: he's the one defendant you don't get freshly scrubbed befroe putting on the witness stand. The look works for him.
4) Is it my imagination, or is postal service getting noticeably slower at the very time they're about to impose another rate increase? Let's put it this way; there's a reason magazines are "periodicals"--they come at regular times. For as far back as I can remember, the newsweeklies generally arrive on Tuesdays, TV Guide on Wednesdays, and Sports Illustrated on Thursdays. It's now Friday, and I still don't have my SI. Last week it was late due to coverage of the NCAA Tournament (which ended on a Monday), but no such good excuse this week. On more than one occasion recently, I've gotten SI after the new week begins, which means that in some cases, I'm reading two-week-old news (this happened with the Columbus hockey death cover). The newsweeklies come on Tuesdays about half the time anymore. Only TV Guide, which I really don't even need till Saturday, still comes "on time" most of the time.
I know, I picked on the post office a few Fridays back, but I get so little mail that I actually want to see. When I receive my issue of Columbus Monthly five days after my sister (who lives 2 miles away)--an issue that contained two of my articles--I get pissed all over again. If I thought the new rate increase would remedy this situation, I might find it more tolerable. But these guys are competing with fax machines and the Internet now. Asking for more money at a time of both declining service and a growing array of alternatives is a recipe for extinction.
5) The chewed gum of Arizona Diamondbacks star Luis Gonzalez is being auctioned off for an insane amount of money. Is this a trend? First Justin Timberlake's French Toast, now the Gonzalez gum. The mind boggles...think of all the jockstraps Michael Jordan has gone through in 20 years.
In the event I ever write that classic novel that's been kicking around inside me for years, or even become the best-known blogger in my zip code, I will hereby begin saving all my old clothes, all my dirty towels, and all my used dental floss...just in case it's ever worth anything on eBay.
Yeah, I'm single--why do you ask?

2002-04-12T17:32:00.000-04:00

A notorious figure from Ohio's recent past has gone to that great minimum-security prison in the sky:

OCALA, Fla. (AP) -- Marvin L. Warner, who headed the Cincinnati-based Home State Savings Bank when it collapsed in 1985, triggering a run on savings and loans in Ohio, died Monday. He was 82.

Warner suffered heart failure at Cape Canaveral, where he was preparing to watch the space shuttle Atlantis launch. Emergency workers were unable to revive him at the scene.

The collapse drained Ohio's private savings and loan insurance fund and caused then-Gov. Richard Celeste to close 69 thrifts.

Warner was convicted of nine counts of fraud-related charges in 1987 and served two years and four months in an Ohio prison.

About 90,000 people lost access to $143 million in savings because of Warner's investments in ESM Government Securities Inc., which sold bonds to governments, institutions and individuals.

The Florida-based ESM sent out false financial statements that portrayed it as healthy when it was deeply in debt. ESM closed in 1985 after federal authorities charged it with fraud.

It took years for savers to regain their money. The recovery included $102 million from state-filed lawsuits, including $4.5 million from a settlement of the bankruptcy of Warner. The rest came from the sale of real estate, apartment buildings, offices and other properties owned by Home State.

After his release from prison, Warner moved to his 150-acre horse farm in Ocala, sheltered from creditors under Florida's ``homestead'' law.

Warner also served as U.S. ambassador to Switzerland under President Carter from 1977 to 1981.

He was one of 13 part-owners of the New York Yankees from 1973 to 1975. He also had ownership stakes in the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Birmingham Stallions football teams.

The Birmingham, Ala., native purchased Home State Savings Bank in 1958 and through his career bought and sold several financial institutions, including Century Banks of Fort Lauderdale to SunBank of Orlando.

2002-04-11T17:44:00.000-04:00

It couldn't happen to a more deserving guy.

2002-04-10T20:30:00.000-04:00

It's all men's fault, says Maureen Dowd (it's a Times link). All our fault, that is, that professional women aren't marrying and having children.
Today's column is merely the latest examination of Sylvia Hewlett's new book Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children, which I had never heard of before Hewlett was featured on 60 Minutes three days ago. Suddenly, it's being discussed everywhere, proving that there's always a market for stories about professional women who foolishly listened to Gloria Steinem and got jobs, only to realize too late that they had ignored their feminine destiny by remaining childless, thereby dooming them to a miserable and lonely old age.
But there's another side to this story that's interesting to me as a man: the implication that professional women aren't marrying primarily because men are intimidated by them. Dowd quotes Hewlett: "Nowadays, the rule of thumb seems to be that the more successful the woman, the less likely it is she will find a husband or bear a child. For men, the reverse is true." Dowd has it all figured it out: "The problem here is not only that women are procrastinating too long; it is that men veer away from 'challenging' women because they have an atavistic desire to be the superior force in a relationship."
Of course, this comes from a woman whose most well-known relationship was with someone even more famous, Michael Douglas. The flipside of Dowd's rant is a little fact of life that 99% of the men in America know all too well: the majority of women want to "marry up" socially and financially, or at least marry sideways. A good many professional women choose to limit their personal dating pool to other professionals, and since professional men are a good deal less likely to vet their potential mates in a similar fashion (not to mention the number of men who prefer to marry younger women), there will always be a "shortage" even when one accounts for the much larger number of professional men overall. The idea that a woman would have trouble finding a date simply because she attends the Harvard Business School is just unbelievable.
Of course, I may be dealing in bygone stereotyping here, and indulging in just the slightest bit of sour grapes. And if this is the case, I look forward to Dowd's tender account of her date with the friendly neighborhood butcher or the LaGuardia baggage handler.

2002-04-10T20:14:00.000-04:00

The McDonald's commercial that features an endlessly replayed snippet from the Spice Girls' "Wannabe" is seriously cutting into my enjoyment of Cleveland Indians baseball this season (though the Tribe has been red hot, to my surprise). 30 seconds of sheer throbbing hell.
I'd much rather listen to this.

2002-04-09T23:26:00.000-04:00

Like other observers, I suspect there’s a little more to Oprah Winfrey’s decision to end her Book Club than meets the eye (and David Kirkpatrick covers some of those suspicions in this story). The number of books selected dropped noticeably last year; also, it’s become apparent that while all of the books she picks invariably become bestsellers, they aren’t selling in quite the same numbers as they did 3 or 4 years ago. Perhaps she feared that her ability to influence her audience was waning (she has always said that book club shows are among her lowest rated). And I wouldn’t discount the impact of Jonathan Franzen Corrections controversy, which she no doubt found bothersome, and for good reason.
I poked fun at the book club over the years but it was a unique undertaking that will be missed. Today, which has announced a replacement group of sorts, has an impact on sales now too, but not to the extent of Oprah.

2002-04-08T23:37:00.000-04:00

I guess we all knew that coverage of 9/11 would end up dominating the roster of Pulitzer Prize winners—who else are you going to give the commentary award to if not Friedman?—but the extent of the dominance surprised me. The Times is blogdom’s favorite whipping boy (journalism division), but it had a helluva year. The big upset is that Thomas Franklin didn't win the spot photography award for "that" photo.
I now have to wonder if I underrated Empire Falls, the prize winner for fiction. I liked it well enough but it hasn’t really lingered with me in the nine months since I read and reviewed it. Congratulations to Richard Russo, though I doubt that PR professionals for the state of Maine will be trumpeting his win…

2002-04-07T17:45:00.000-04:00

The phenomenon of "blog triumphalism" makes a stunning comeback...Glenn Reynolds has turned into Napoleon, judging from his (apparently serious) post calling on the United States to "invade and conquer" Saudi Arabia. Right. As if we didn't have enough problems with the Arab and Muslim world without creating the biggest one imaginable. You'll find me at the barriers if we ever tried such a ridiculous thing, which I'm confident we wouldn't. Besides, imperialism, regardless of what the far left may think, is simply not part of our national tradition. Look how quickly we unloaded the Phillipines.

2002-04-06T21:24:00.000-05:00

Thoughts while paging through the current issue of Sports Illustrated:
*A story on the awful first start of Red Sox ace Pedro Martinez, who is apparently struggling with a bad shoulder....the piece is thankfully free of references to the poor beleaguered Red Sox fans and the "curse of Fenway". Lordy people, you just won the Super Bowl! Can you please stop your whining now?
* An examination of athletes and their entourages, focusing in particular on young NBA players. "Posses" are a sore point for a good many journalists and fans alike, an issue that invariably comes up whenever a "what's wrong with the NBA" discussion takes place. Author L. Jon Wertheim is somewhat sympathetic to the entourage phenomenon, believing that it's an inevitable outgrowth of very young black men thrown into an unfamiliar world of big money. Why not surround yourself with old friends whose interest in you predates your wealth, Wertheim seems to say. I concede the point, but wonder what it is these hangers-on are supposed to do with their lives once their meal ticket hangs up the jockstrap. "Flunky 1993-2002" doesn't look all that good on a resume´.
* Speaking of a bad resume´, there's also a very long profile of George O'Leary, who became a national joke when he was forced to resign as head coach of Notre Dame after only 2 days on the job, a victim of having fabricated a college football career and a master's degree (needlessly, as it turned out). Authored by one of SI's best, Gary Smith, the article leaves one with a sense of ambivalence. O'Leary went thorugh terrible embarrassment, but the wounds were self-inflicted, he landed more or less on his feet as an assistant coach with the Minnesota Vikings (his blameless former assistants weren't so lucky), and he had stressed integrity and honesty throughout his career (early in his coaching career, O'Leary had heard Ohio State's eccentric legend Woody Hayes speak, which explains a whole lot). Once he became the coach at Notre Dame, his embellishments were bound to come out. I can't feel too sorry for the guy.
At one time, and certainly 30 or so years ago when I started reading it, Sports Illustrated was a writer's magazine. The sports world moved slower then--no ESPN, and highlights on local news were rare--and readers were more willing to sit through long stories and profiles. Nowadays all the previous week's action has been hashed over in myriad ways by the time a new issue can come out, and SI, not really a "news" magazine any longer, has to find niches and angles (most of its story on the NCAA championship, which focuses on MVP Juan Dixon and Maryland coach Gary Williams, could have been written before the final game was even played). But they still have a quality product when they make the effort.

2002-04-05T21:12:00.000-05:00

Friday "Questions for the Prime Ministah!", Queen Mother memorial edition.

1) Should the powers that be revoke the Nobel Peace Prize award to Yasir Arafat? Not the Nobel people's finest hour, was it? You hardly ever hear about the Henry Kissinger/Le Duc Tho howler any more.
It appears that it's impossible to revoke a Nobel prize (though it is possible to refuse one, as Jean-Paul Sartre did) but there is a nascent Internet effort to strip Arafat of his share of the 1994 Peace Prize (his co-winners were Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres). revoketheprize.org has an online petition that as of this instant has been signed by 216,538 people. And--how predictable is this?--via Instapundit, this story quotes several bonehead committee members fretting "that the Israeli government's actions in general and Mr Peres' involvement in particular are threatening to bring the prize into disrepute." That's right: Israelis are being slaughtered at seder and at the very least Arafat is failing to disapprove, but the real tragedy is the damage being done to the precious prize. Glenn Reynolds calls this idiocy "negative moral judgment", and it's hard to disagree.
But if we start revoking Nobel prizes, where do we stop? I could have a field day with the Literature prize alone--maybe do something about that little James Joyce oversight, and Mark Twain too while I'm at it. Better, perhaps, to leave the Arafat prize on the books as a monument to the fallibility of human judgment, and a warning to future prize committees about the peril of prematurely turning a career terrorist into a man of peace.
By the way, nothing yet from Time on revoking the 1993 Man of the Year award that Arafat shared with Rabin, Nelson Mandela, and F.W. de Klerk. You remember--Time called them "The Peacemakers".
2) I heard something on the radio by Kylie Minogue. Where have I heard that name before? Kylie Minogue had a major U.S. pop hit in 1988 with her cheeseoid remake of The Loco-Motion--the hit versions of that song, from Little Eva to Grand Funk to Minogue forming an almost perfect downhill slope. For some reason, she disappeared by American view while remaining not just a viable recording artist in her native Australia and the U.K. but a tabloid celebrity of near-Madonna/Princess Di magnitude.
But out of the mists of '80s nostalgia, here comes Kylie with the dumb but very catchy dance hit "Can't Get You Out of My Head" (which I will now be humming to myself the rest of the night--La la la...). It's what should have been the first single on the last (now nearly dead, apparently) Britney Spears album, if her handlers weren't too busy trying to turn her into a multimedia celebrity to concern themselves with song quality anymore.
So now that things from 1988 are coming back, I look forward to the return of my 32-inch waistline.
3) Should Michael Jordan retire now? He should if he wants to. If HE wants to.
Whenever an athletic legend is at the stage where he is no longer the undisputed greatest, the calls intensify for him to hang it up, lest our opinions of him be marred forever by memories of the way he went out. Willie Mays's last go-round with the 1973 Mets at the age of 42 is always cited here--as if most people actually remember Mays more for his decline phase than his All-Star years (that is the phase I remember, but I was born halfway through Willie's career too).
This column by Michael Ventre is typical of the genre. Couched in concern for Jordan's health, it's really all about Ventre and a self-esteem that is apparently dependent on another self entirely, namely Jordan. "There were reasons why many of us [my emphasis] did not want Michael Jordan to attempt this current comeback with the Washington Wizards....by returning to the game, he was endangering all of his achievements. At 38 (now 39), he could only go downhill [thanks a lot, says the 39-year old blogger]... yet the longer this current Mike lingers in our memory, the more likely that his greatness will be tarnished. The further this Mike pushes his sore and battered body, the more damage he does to his legacy."
Crapola. How is Jordan's legacy going to be tarnished? I don't get it. Are they going to take away his NBA championships, his MVP awards? Is it really so bad to no longer be the greatest, merely very good and a little injury-prone late in a sporting life? And I say this as someone who has now been skeptical twice that a Jordan comeback would work out. Mike, do what you want and don't listen to these idiot columnists.
4) How did the dual pro-Israel/pro-Palestinian demonstrations in Columbus go today? The two groups were both downtown at different times, so no confrontation. But in spite of the lack of fireworks, I enjoyed the coverage of the two events, though it's safe to say that my sympathies are more on the Israeli side at the present time. From what I could tell, both rallies were blessedly free of the acidic rhetoric we see from the West Bank and the Arab media these days.
It's more than just the stereotypical midwestern niceness at work here. The U.S. as a whole, after all , provides proof that different religions can coexist nicely. Where on earth do Muslims and Jews get along better than here? In increasingly secular Europe, Jews are now the targets of attacks. But in the much more religious America, there's very little of this kind of violence. Tolerance of religious differences, respect for freedom of speech...the Arab world should try it sometime.
5) What are those new names I see on the side over there? I finally got around to making a few additions to my permalinks, which had not really reflected where I spend a lot of my blogging time. So a few introductions, for those of you who need them:
Insolvent republic of Blogistan: Justin has more permalinks than anybody. He's my gateway to blogland...and writes about sports more often than me.
This Modern World: Lefty cartoonist Tom Tomorrow has proven to be a terrific blogger. I think the conservabloggers have been pleasantly surprised.
Live From the WTC: Megan McArdle makes a good an sometimes caustic libertarian case. She's a fine writer if more conservative than I am (I could say this about the majority of blogs I read, though that's starting to change as some ideological compadres enter the fray).
Little Green Footballs: Charles Johnson, scourge of the house of Saud.
Ted Barlow: One of the first liberals to get wide respect from a skeptical majority, he backs up his opinions. Likes Andrew Sullivan about as much as me, it appears.
Asparagirl: Likes Sullivan a lot. She's cool anyway; I hope she keeps her youthful enthusiasm for a good long while. The newest "must drop by every day" on my list.
USS Clueless: Steven den Beste has a page unlike any other; his eloquence made him an early cult figure when the whole warblog ball got a-rollin'.
Shouting 'Cross the Potomac: Hub of the Tony Adragna/Will Vehrs Quasipundit operation. Differnet points of view wih a minimum of chest-beating.
Pet Rock Star: "You're reading the ramblings of folk musician Shannon Campbell. Most likely obscene, but at least fairly entertaining." Could her music be as good as her journal? Could we be that lucky?
James Lileks: Minnesota humorist and kitschophile who doesn't save it all for the day job, and we are all better for it. The Bleat is the daily "bloglike" portion of the site, but the rest of it is a great time-waster too.

Somebody--maybe Glenn Reynolds--claimed not long ago that conservative bloggers link to liberals more often than the reverse. I don't really know, but I like reading the conservatives as long as they can make me think. I can't imagine why anyone would want to read only people they always agree with anyway. So I hope I have a good mix...and the list will continue to grow.

2002-04-05T19:56:00.000-05:00

Oh, dear. I hate to pick on Andrew Sullivan again, but what can you do...?
Yesterday Sullivan linked to this poem by Frank Bidart, in the apparent belief that it represented an attack on the victims of September 11, and therefore was a potential recipient of the "Sontag Award", Sullivan's umbrella term for those who in his view show insufficient enthusiasm for the war on terrorism.
Some people (a majority of those who e-mailed on this topic) contacted Sullivan to insist that he had been unfair to Bidart--that the poem was actually about the terrorists themselves. Sullivan, perhaps keeping in mind that his typical reader may not ordinarily be inclined to give the benefit of the doubt to an English professor at Wellesley where the topic of the war is concerned, concedes that he may have been mistaken but chalks up his potential misreading to the opacity of Bidart and of modern poetry in general. (His posts regarding the poem are here, April 4 and 5.)
Let's take a look at this poem. To me the key line that implies Bidart is addressing the terrorists is "Of your rectitude at last disenthralled, you seek the dead": seek the dead, i.e., take your own life. The poem's other sarcastic reference to "rectitude" ("eat like acid the bubble of rectitude that allowed you breath") could be seen as a bitter request of people who believed they were acting on God's will. However, the opening lines of the poem, "May breath for a dead moment cease as jerking your head upward you hear as if in slow motion floor collapse evenly upon floor as one hundred and ten floors descend upon you," may imply that he is addressing someone who is alive to witness the collapse of the towers, which of course none of the suicide bombers were. The line "May what you have made descend upon you" is ambiguous--"made" the towers themselves, or "made" their destruction?
My verdict? It's no sure thing, but I think the evidence strongly tilts toward the poem being addressed to the terrorists and not the victims. And barring any evidence that Bidart has taken a pro-Al Qaeda position or equivocated about the horror of 9/11 in any way (and, it should go without saying, barring a persuasive alternate interpretation of the text by someone a lot smarter than myself) that should be the default position for all of us. I have to wonder why Sullivan was so quick to pounce on this poem as an example of the moral turpitude of academia. Brendan Nyhan, Jim Romenesko, and Frank Bidart...sounds like Sullivan is having to dig pretty deep these days to find enemies.

2002-04-04T19:25:00.000-05:00

Andrew Sullivan...I'd say about 1/4 of the time I more or less agree with him, and another 1/4 of the time I might disagree but feel that he's made a serious argument nonetheless. But perhaps half the time these days he's completely out to lunch--imparting sinister motives to people who disagree with him, or conjuring up imaginary enemies.
His bizarre attack on two people generally regarded as nonpolitical (or at least a hell of a lot less political than Sullivan himself), Brendan Nyhan of Spinsanity and Jim Romenesko, is case in point (Sullivan's links don't work terribly well; scroll down to April 3 and the post "Moore and September 11").
It all started with a Times of London column this past Sunday, Sullivan's latest on the post-9/11 moral bankruptcy of the left; his specific subject, Michael Moore and his bestseller Stupid White Men. He wrote the following: "There is also barely a mention in Moore's book about the current war on terrorism. You can understand why. It raises questions the left simply doesn't want to answer." Nyhan pointed out, correctly, that Moore's book was completed prior to September 11; the terrorist attacks were not deliberately omitted (or "barely mentioned"). Romenesko's crime, apparently, was linking to the Spinsanity article.
Sullivan came back to admit that while he was technically wrong, "Moore could have changed the book if he wanted to." This is likely true; a foreword or afterword mentioning the attacks, if not a full re-write, would have been no big deal--Bernard Lewis has a paragraph on the attacks in a foreword to What Went Wrong?, which came out in January, several weeks before Stupid White Men. But Sullivan then concludes, "My sentences: 'There is also barely a mention in Moore's book about the current war on terrorism. You can understand why,' therefore stand up."
Uh, no Andrew, they don't. As Nyhan points out, the phrase "barely a mention" clearly implies that Moore did mention 9/11. In my opinion, it also implies that embarrassment or a simple unwillingness to come to grips with the attacks ("It raises questions the left simply doesn't want to answer") was behind the "omission", not the more prosaic truth that the book had been completed. Today Sullivan says that Spinsanity "nit-picked me for what they regarded as a misleading implication." Hmmm...I also regarded it as a misleading implication, because it was in fact misleading. How many of Sullivan's readers made the same supposition? Tom Tomorrow has a great recap of the whole affair.
I don't know the genesis of Sullivan's obvious personal animus towards Jim Romenesko, though I suspect that Medianews coverage of Sullivan's brush with tabloid fame last year has a lot to do with it. But accusing him of having a "gay left agenda"...I dunno. Thousands of people read Romenesko daily, and Sullivan is seeing something there that I doubt anyone else sees (today's Medianews, for instance, has gay-friendly links about Lou Dobbs, octogenarian rock writer Jane Scott, and the Kent State homecoming queen--yes, she's a woman). And Spinsanity, which attacks Moore's work in its most recent piece, is hardly a bastion of apology for the left (though with a Republican in the White House, it's likely they have more conservative targets).
Sullivan needs to learn how to accept criticism with grace, and knock off the bullshit about a "left-wing jihad" every time someone draws a little blood.

2002-04-03T17:59:00.000-05:00

Proving once again that there's nothing so self-evident that you can't build a conspiracy theory around its opposite, no matter how insane, there's now a bestseller in France which claims that the attack on the Pentagon was faked. ( I found this link via Richard Bennett.) The whole Jerry Lewis thing seems like an outbreak of good sense by comparison. Oliver Stone is no doubt nailing down the film rights as we speak.
Coming soon, my own first book: Liberte´, Egalite´, Wimpe´, an examination of recent French military history, and %100 factual.

2002-04-02T23:55:00.000-05:00

On Sunday I was out driving and Casey Kasem's show popped up on the radio. About once a year I'm reminded that Casey is still around and not keeping company with contemporaries like Marconi. Anyway, he's still doing those maudlin "dedications". On this past show a woman dedicated "It's All Coming Back to Me Now" to her ex-boyfriend.
I have to admit, if I wanted an ex to know exactly how I felt about her, I'd definitely pick something by Celine Dion.

2002-04-02T23:48:00.000-05:00

A good many bloggers are also ahead of me (damn, I'm slowing up in my dotage) in linking to Tal G., who weighs in from Jerusalem. Yes, I agree that there's never an inappropriate time for The Simpsons.
I was alerted to Tal by Diane at Letter From Gotham, who was none too pleased when she passed the word to Instapundit without getting a citation. Glenn Reynolds took a little heat a couple of months ago for not mentioning everyone who sent him link ideas (as opposed to Reynolds linking to original commentary from bloggers themselves). I thought he had a good point at the time--the man does get a lot of mail, after all--and I believe it was also a mention from Reynolds that alerted me to Letter From Gotham in the first place. I do think, though, that Diane's gesture of trying to drum up some publicity for Tal (and a mention from Reynolds can do that like nothing else) could have been acknowledged.

2002-04-02T22:41:00.000-05:00

OK, everybody has had their say about the latest and most snide "explaining blogging to the masses" article, the one by Alex Beam of the Boston Globe. Some people have pointed out that this sort of thing is Beam's shtick; I really wouldn't know.
I agree with the general consensus regarding Beam's cluelessness about blogging. He's most off base with his insinuation that blogs and newspapers are necessarily working in opposition, or that bloggers have grand designs on replacing newspapers. There was some strutting there for a while late last year, but I think most of us are doing this purely for fun and have no illusions about our significance.
And of course, a great many of the more prominent blogs are written by journalists--Jeff Jarvis, James Lileks, Andrew Sullivan, Matt Welch, Josh Marshall, Mickey Kaus. I'm not prominent in journalism and even less so in blogdom, but I have no interest in leaving traditional (read: paying) journalism behind. I'm also aware that there are an awful lot of talented and "unpublished" writers in this country and abroad who have been empowered by their blogs, and those who are fat and happy at newspapers or at opinion magazines are going to feel a little pressure--unwelcome for them, but good for the readers.
What I found strangest about Beam is the implication that it's weird to want to write if you're not widely read, or for free. I loved writing before I started getting published, and if no one wanted to publish me any longer I'd still keep up the blog. The smarter people in traditional journalism aren't dismiisive of blogs, much less afraid--they're jumping aboard.
Best posts on this subject: Jeff Jarvis ("Old v. New"); Ken Layne (he posted this just a few minutes ago and was thinking along the same lines as me); James Lileks (the April 2 Bleat) , who publishes the amazingly arrogant e-mail he got from Beam; and Stephen "Vodkapundit" Green.

2002-04-01T15:19:00.000-05:00

From Christine Spolar's story in today's Chicago Tribune:

Recent polls show nearly 70 percent of all Palestinians support the suicide attacks.

A poll released Sunday by the Palestinian Center for Public Opinion showed Arafat's support has skyrocketed recently. It found that 81 percent of all Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem support Arafat, a near doubling in a matter of months.

For that reason, among others, political analysts contend that getting rid of Arafat would backfire and radicalize average Palestinians. Those engaged in sending out suicide bombers would try to outdo each other, analysts predict.

Seems to me the "average Palestinian" is already pretty radicalized, if 70 percent of them support the current terror campaign. I don't understand the expert opinion warning what might come after Arafat. How could it be any worse than the barbarism of the past week? I wonder what the "average Israeli" thinks...

2002-03-31T22:32:00.000-05:00

Joe Hallett of the Columbus Dispatch really blasted the state legislature today in a column prompted by the departure of OSU President Kirwan. It's what I wish I would have written when the news broke last week. Rather than link to it--the necessity of registering with the Dispatch website makes linking problematic--I'll quote the choice part.

Sitting in Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder's office on Dec. 18, Kirwan was passionate about an idea he was discussing via video hookup with the Glenford Republican and James W. Wagner, president of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.

A 10-year state bond issue to raise $1 billion for research and high-technology job development "will certainly point our state in a new and exciting direction,'' Kirwan told Householder and Wagner.

On a mission to make OSU one of America's 10 best public, research universities, Kirwan salivated over the $7 in private-sector grants that would be leveraged by each $1 spent by the state. With $1 billion, Ohio might chip away at the big lead Michigan and other states have in developing the technologies that create jobs.

"I honestly believe the stars are aligning around these ideas,'' Kirwan said, with his customary optimism....three months after the meeting in Householder's office, the bond issue remains just an idea in the General Assembly.

OSU and Ohio are losing a leader they can't afford to lose. In a state government hogtied from moving forward by a governor without a plan and a legislature without a clue, Kirwan has had the passion to prod Ohio to be more than mediocre.

Sadly, mediocrity would be a step up for Ohio. The state ranks 41st in the nation in personal-income growth, 40th in funding for higher education and 41st in percentage of population with a bachelor's degree. Nothing thwarts job creation more than an undereducated work force.

The emotional pull of family and home are luring Kirwan back to Maryland to finish his career as chancellor of that state's university system. There is no doubting, though, that Kirwan was growing weary of the General Assembly's indifference to higher education and of state budget cuts that hobbled his plan to make OSU a top-tier university.

But there is something else, I fear, that may have caused Kirwan to leave an OSU job he truly enjoyed.

Ohio is backsliding. The state's decline not only is evident in statistics, but also in a gut feeling that the energy and passion necessary to move forward are being discouraged by a legislature going backward. Ours is becoming a state for progressive thinkers to avoid. At least 150,000 Ohioans between the ages of 20 and 54 fled the state for better opportunities and higher-paying jobs elsewhere over the last 10 years, according to the Ohio Board of Regents.

Rather than devote attention to college accessibility by lowering the nation's eighth- highest tuition rates, the legislature fights old battles over how to force religion into public-school classrooms and curriculums.

Rather than ensuring that poor children receive their rightful child-support payments, the governor and legislature pay back a campaign-generous financial industry by enacting a law to prohibit cities from protecting their poor from predatory lenders.

Rather than finding the courage to enact long-term solutions to budget problems, as did Ohio governors and legislators in the early 1980s and 1990s, lawmakers pass a bill that would allow citizens to carry concealed weapons almost anywhere, including into a Statehouse secured against terrorism with hundreds of thousands of dollars.

It is difficult to run a public university in a state with a government lacking vision and rationality. It is difficult for a leader with a passion for progress to operate in a backwater. Kirwan is going home to be with his kids and grandkids in a state that values his passion.

The Dispatch has come a long way from the days when their Washington editor went directly from the newsroom into Republican politics in North Carolina, but it's not exactly bleeding heart. This is a remarkably tough indictment...too bad that Ohio has an opposition party in name only.

2002-03-31T01:09:00.000-05:00

Speaking of the Queen Mother...the phrase "the end of an era" is overused, but in this case it's true in the following sense: unless there's someone I've weirdly forgotten, she was the last "political" figure of world significance from World War II who was still alive. That could be an interesting exercise, related to my previous post--how many people who were "famous" during World War II are still alive? Katharine Hepburn...Bob Hope...Bob Feller (of the Cleveland Indians)...I assume Strom Thurmond was famous in South Carolina at least.
For people (like me) who only knew her as even more of a figurehead than your average royal, this obituary contained a few tidbits that surprised me. Who would have guessed that nice old lady was a Churchill-hater?

2002-03-30T21:45:00.000-05:00

After the announcement of Milton Berle's death on Wednesday, I began reading and hearing of people wondering "who was next"--because, as "everybody knows", famous people always die in threes. The following day, when it was announced that Billy Wilder had died Wednesday night, it seemed to add credence to the die-in-threes talk...to my irritation.

There are two major problems with the idea that famous people dying in threes. First, the whole concept of "famous" is so subjective that countless thousands of people could fit. Few days go by without someone dying that I've at least heard of. If you're famous enough for me to have heard of you, then "dying in threes" could take place virtually around the clock. Some formulations state that it's "celebrities" who die in threes, which perhaps implies that "famous" more specifically means people in show business or entertainment. If on Wednesday the roll call of deceased had included not Milton Berle but, say, a former Japanese prime minister instead, I strongly doubt anyone would have said "Look! Dudley Moore, Billy Wilder, former Japanese prime minister! They always die in threes!"
Second, there's no time frame during which the dying has to take place. I haven't researched this, but I feel safe in saying that it is quite unusual for three people as well-known as Moore, Berle, and Wilder to die on the same day. All three had careers in popular entertainment, making the coincidence more noteworthy for the average person. (By the way, three famous people died on November 22, 1963. The other two were Aldous Huxley and C.S. Lewis.)

However, it isn't necessary for three famous people to die on the same day to kick the superstition into gear. While attempting to research the origin of the belief (I had little luck, other than relating it to other connotations of the number three such as the Trinity), I saw a note that Ron Fineman made last year of a discussion on Larry Elder's call-in show. Jack Lemmon had just died; Carroll O'Connor had died the week before. A caller said that another famous person was bound to die within 90 days (gee, ya think?). But then a different caller said, no, John Lee Hooker had died the same day as O'Connor, so Lemmon completed the cycle. Then someone else recalled that Anthony Quinn had died a few weeks before, making Quinn, O'Connor, and Hooker the "real" three. You see how ridiculously subjective it can get.

A writer on screenmedia.com mentioned the deaths of Gianni Versace, Princess Diana, and Mother Teresa as an example of celebrities dying in threes. But Versace died six weeks before the princess--if she hadn't famously attended his funeral, it's unlikely anyone would have thought to connect them. The fact that Versace and Diana died so suddenly may have reinforced the connection also, but none of this week's celebrity deaths were similarly unexpected--Wilder and Berle were nonagenarians and Moore was known to be in failing health.
It's also true that factors other than mere proximity can reinforce the die-in-threes belief. The deaths of Wilt Chamberlain, Payne Stewart, and Walter Payton took place three weeks apart in the fall of 1999...not nearly as close as Moore/Berle/Wilder. But all three were athletes, two of the men (Stewart and Payton) died in their 40s, and Stewart and Chamberlain both died unexpectedly. There were other famous people who died in this general time frame--Akio Morita, Hoyt Axton, Raisa Gorbachev, Morris West, George C. Scott--but it seemed more natural to connect the athletes.

What it comes down to is this: human beings tend to seek out patterns to make our random world seem a little less so. And anybody looking for a particular pattern in something as universal as death will have little trouble finding one. If, for instance, it was believed that famous people "die in fours", then today's death of the Queen Mother would serve to "prove" that quite nicely (OK, that sounds callous). You could similarly "prove" that famous people die in eights or in forty-fours or in one hundred-and-ninety nines. All it takes is a willingness to interpret data optimally.

I know I've gone on at great length on this subject, but few things bug me more than superstitions. If anybody does happen to know where this belief arose, clue me in, willya? And I'll continue to research it myself.

2002-03-29T21:41:00.000-05:00

Question Time: Play Ball Edition.

1) In this story, Yasir Arafat says "I want to be a martyr, martyr, martyr, martyr." Yet the latest Palestinian "martyr" is a teenage girl. Does this make any sense? One does not reach the age of 72 in Arafat's line of work with a death wish. Sending others out to do the dying is his specialty. Remember the line attributed to Patton, "No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country"? Arafat isn't "winning the war", and he's forcing his deluded followers to die in a vain bid to destroy Israel. He's not strapping on the explosives himself anytime soon. (Thanks to Charles Johnson for the second link.)
2) We almost had a death in reality TV this past week. Is it only a matter of time? I'm not a basher of reality TV; it's no more ridiculous than the rest of network television. But you have to wonder, particularly when the network of Fear Factor gets involved, if we're going to have ourselves a tragedy one of these days as the stunts get more and more outlandish.
I'm pleased, though, that my guiltiest of guilty pleasures is coming back, Big Brother. This, of course, was the series that cast a knife-wielding sociopath last summer. But all in fun.
3) What's worse: Gwyneth Paltrow singing with Huey Lewis in Duets, or that dress she wore at the Oscars? I might also add her manifestly unsexy layout in the debut issue of Talk, which ended her sex symbol days in my eyes before they had really even begun.
I didn't mention Gywneth's dress in my Oscar wrap-up, which shows that my story-sniffing instincts are desperately out of whack. I had no idea it would provoke that level of horror among Feminine-Americans. A lot of it is schadenfreude, plain and simple. Gwyneth is pretty, an Oscar winner, the daughter of show business parents, ex-boyfriend of Brad Pitt...seeing her embarrassed in this way is a dream come true. Admit it, ladies. (Look for her people to engineer a quick self-deprecating response to the red carpet disaster, perhaps on Saturday Night Live, where Paltrow has performed well in the past.)
4) Can we just skip ahead now to the Yankees getting the World Series trophy handed to them? Well, they're the favorites. But they were also the favorites last season...anything can happen in a short series. The Yankees have not been far and away the best team in baseball over the past several regular seasons, but in the postseason, where the competition is toughest, the Yankees invariably step up their game.
The joy of their Game 7 loss has yet to totally fade, but a new season awaits us...and here are my picks for said season, in brief. In the American League, I look for the Yankees (going way out on a limb here) to win the East without too much trouble, and the Twins to win a dispiriting race in the Central (my Indians having decided that winning was getting boring, they spent the offseason giving away their two best players). In the West, I like Seattle in a tough three-team race, and the Rangers to finish second and grab the wild card. I'll keep picking the Rangers until they get it right.
In the National League, I think the Braves will take the East behind future MVP Gary Sheffield. In the Central, the Cardinals look mighty strong, but I think the Cubs will hang on for second place and the wild card berth. In the West, the Giants to edge out the Diamondbacks--just a hunch that Johnson and Schilling can't keep it up at this level. And look for--may the planets align correctly--the Cardinals to defeat the Yankees in 6 games in the World Series. At which point George Steinbrenner will hopefully blow a gasket, start doing dumb things, and send the Bombers and their (who knew?) unctuous new first baseman into terminal decline.
5) Is the whole "What (fill in the blank) are you?" thing getting completely out of hand? I think it's at the point now where everyone knows they're silly, so why fight it? To summarize: My Trading Spaces character is someone named "Doug"; my sister tells me he's the show's resident pain in the ass. My "rock boyfriend" is Thom Yorke of Radiohead. Neither Yorke nor I are gay--it's nice that we have at least one thing in common as we start our relationship. My "What Rock Chick Are You?" answer was Bjork--I can live with that. My Simpsons character is Bart, based on God knows what.
The best resource for all these tests that I've seen is at Sekimori's place. And here's the quiz to end all quizzes: "What completely random person or thing are you?"
And here's my answer:

2002-03-29T10:08:00.000-05:00

A story out of Cleveland: a woman gets drunk and assaults a cop. The terms of her probation are apparently based in large part on her having Cherokee and Scotch-Irish ancestry.
I'm not entirely sure why a presentencing report would contain information about one's great-grandparents; hopefully I'll never be in position to find out for myself. But if the report states that the woman is not an alcoholic and the judge ignores that based on who her ancestors were, that's bogus.
I don't endorse Ms. Madey's actions and hope she learns her lesson, but it's certainly possible this was a rare loss of control on her part. I understand how one could lose track of his or her drinking at a Browns game. That's something I have found out for myself.

2002-03-28T23:32:00.000-05:00

Immigration is a hot topic these days of course, but it's always helpful to think about the success stories. Think about Billy Wilder, who died yesterday.
Was Wilder the greatest director of all time? He would be on everyone's short list, and his company on the list of great screenwriters is even more exclusive. Just look at his filmography and marvel. Amazing fact: a man who began learning English at age 28 received 12 Academy Award nominations for his screenplays (written with collaborators, but still).

2002-03-28T23:15:00.000-05:00

A generally negative reaction throughout the blog world (we're so insular) to today's Times article declaring the latest Death of the Internet. The problem with Ms. Guernsey's Deep Thought: if the Web is so boring, if people are spending less time online, what are they doing instead? Watching TV? The ratings say no. Are they reading more books? I assume that's a "no" as well. Volunteering at the neighborhood soup kitchen? Praying? Buying more copies of the New York Times? Suuuure, that must be it. The slowing in the rate of growth of new web sites is not only not surprising, it was inevitable.
I do agree that the growth of instant messaging has cut into surfing time, but overall I found the article less than persuasive--but then a blogger would say that, huh?

2002-03-27T23:08:00.000-05:00

I've been remiss in thanking Ted Barlow for the link. Does this mean I have to work harder now? I know this is going to sound horribly fake and ass-kissy, but Ted does great work and has a knack for zeroing in on the inconsistencies that we all should have noticed. I'm behind in updating my own permalinks; look for a few changes there soon that better reflect the blogs that I'm reading most often these days.
For those of you reading me for the first time...well, I'm usually a whole lot more eloquent than what you're seeing here. Or what you'll see in the archives. Please take my word for this...I don't take myself all that seriously in here--figure skating and trash TV have figured prominently in my first two months of blogsistence--but I hope I occasionally come up with an interesting take on weightier matters too.
And a little advertisement--I've been working myself up to a rant on the way that Tom Daschle's alleged antiwar remarks have been spun over the last month. I hope to have it up sometime tomorrow.

2002-03-27T22:47:00.000-05:00

Doesn't this have to end eventually? I keep thinking that a last straw has to have been reached, yet the carnage goes on--and on the eve of Passover yet (not that I really believed that the Palestinians would show a good deal of respect in that area).
Charles Johnson provides a link to an interview with Daniel Pipes . His academy-bashing is tiresome, but Johnson does zero in on a noteworthy prediction--Pipes says that "the Palestinians soon will realize they cannot sustain this battle and their will at that time will break." I've been wondering just how many homicidal/suicidal lunatics Arafat can call on. His supply doesn't seem to be running low just yet, but I hope Pipes is correct. In the meantime though, Israeli civilians are being slaughtered left and right. Losses like this are intolerable for a democracy--either capitulation or all-out war seem to be in Israel's near future.

2002-03-27T22:32:00.000-05:00

Romanesko has been following the strange controversy that has broken out over Maxim naming 13 different cities as "the Greatest City on Earth". I thought it was an obvious (and not unfunny) commentary on the popularity of magazine covers targeted to different regions, and the numerous "special collectors editions" that TV Guide in particular has made a habit of publishing. Clearly such a ploy could not be hidden for more than 24 hours or so, yet the cities involved are getting bent out of shape and blaming Maxim marketers for the scheme (highly unlikely in my opinion). People need to lighten up a bit and accept that they were had--shouldn't having named Detroit the Greatest City on Earth have raised comedy alarm bells? (Not that Columbus, which swoons over the tiniest morsel of national notice, would have acted any differently.)

2002-03-27T15:13:00.000-05:00

If you had told the Blue Jackets brass in 2000 that the team would be featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated in the second year of its existence, the reaction no doubt would have veered between joy and utter disbelief. Unfortunately, it's the tragedy of last week that has landed them on the cover--a shock to me that the story is still getting such play (the issue came out 8 days after Brittanie Cecil died). While nothing compares to the loss of life, it's a shame that until the team does something worthwhile on the ice--which doesn't look as if it will happen anytime soon--the Jackets will be best known throughout North America for this tragedy.
I also feel bad for Espen Knutsen, the player shown on the cover and the man whose shot was fatally deflected into the stands. He is by all accounts a terrific guy and is a national hero in Norway. But the cover photo of him with his back turned to the camera and his head slightly bowed, while perhaps not intended to suggest any sort of guilt, is uncomfortable nonetheless. Things are hard enough for Knutsen right now as it is. Why compound the pain by linking him with Brittanie in such a graphic way?

2002-03-26T22:12:00.000-05:00

From Ken Goldstein via Justin Slotman--the text of Halle Berry's acceptance screech, which definitely loses a lot in its translation to the page.
Also Will Saletan, who doesn't write about pop culture all that much if memory serves, has his own postmortem on the Oscars. He's a little hard on Ron Howard--I thought the story about his mom was cute.
Two days ago I was wondering how the Berry speech would come across to the general public. From everything I've read, it's pretty damn close to a 50/50 loved it/hated it split. I'm a little surprised that so many have been upfront in accusing the academy of voting for Berry and Denzel Washington solely for "politically correct" reasons. This is probably unavoidable, but it's silly to pretend that this is the very first year in which something other than "the merits"--whatever that even means when you're comparing five dissimilar performances and movies--have impacted an Oscar vote. The extraneous things that factor into the various races are so predictable anymore that prognosticators talk more about them than they do about the actual performances. And a rare African-American win for acting in a lead role--or even two in the same year--is hardly evidence that the Academy Awards have become "hijacked by the left", as Mickey Kaus implies. If that were the case, wouldn't famously liberal Hollywood have doled out more Oscars to black performers over the years?

2002-03-25T23:04:00.000-05:00

Ohio's reputation as a place that runs off the best and the brightest was not enhanced today when William "Brit" Kirwan announced he was heading back to Maryland to become chancellor of the state university system, leaving the presidency of Ohio State after only 4 years. Good luck to the Board of Trustees finding somebody to head up the flagship public university in a state that has ceased to adequately fund higher education for a generation, with a benighted and frequently silly legislature and a thoroughly mediocre governor; a state whose current raging public debate is over whether or not (ahem) "intelligent design" should be taught in schools.
It might just the sort of stock-taking one naturally does as a milestone birthday nears, but I think more and more about leaving myself. If not soon, then probably never.