Now that a strike has been averted, Drayton McLane can go back to moaning about how much money he loses. We've been down this road before (here and here). As before, the Chron is as critical of McLane's claims as they once were of Enron's business model.
I don't doubt that the Texans have diverted attention from the Astros, but c'mon. Counting the preseason, they'll play maybe four or five home games before the World Series. Not all of those games will occur when the Stros are at Your Name Here Field. The Rockets don't even start playing until October. Are you saying that people would rather sit at home and watch local news coverage of the Texans and Yao Ming instead of coming out to the park? If so, McLane has a bigger problem than he thinks.
Finally, as is the case with so many other teams, the Astros create their own payroll woes by overpaying for replaceable talent like Orlando Merced and Jose Vizcaino, a fact that goes largely unnoticed when they start whining about how they can't afford to keep Lance Berkman and Roy Oswalt. It's a simple matter of priorities and budgeting. Why are you tying up capital in non-essential commodities when you know you've got more important expenses looming? I'll bet McLane doesn't run his grocery distribution business that way.
Did you miss a few early episodes of 24, the best show on TV last year? Well, now's your chance to correct your mistake. FX is running a 24 hour marathon of 24, starting at 11 PM on Sunday. This has been a public service announcement.
Did you know that Miss American contestants have to compete in a pop quiz as part of their quest for the crown? I didn't, but that's because I think the Miss America pageant is not quite as exciting as a bass fishing tournament, and slightly cheesier than a Quattro Fromage pizza. If only I could suggest a few questions for the hairspray divas to ponder, then maybe I'd find a reason to be interested. Well, thank $DEITY, my wishes have been granted:
Eager to prove its beauties are brainy, too, the Miss America Pageant will expand its pop quiz this year, offering fans the chance to pose questions to contestants and help pick Miss America 2003.The new wrinkle, announced Wednesday, will allow viewers to suggest questions -- via the Internet -- to be asked of the five finalists in the pageant, scheduled to air live on ABC on Sept. 21.
The results will count for 10 percent of each woman's score.
So what are you waiting for? Head on over to the Miss America homepage and help 'em out. You may very well play a small part in determining who will be the next to wear the tiara.
WNBA referee Bill Stokes has been discharged from the hospital ten days after suffering a heart attack during the Comets-Starzz playoff game.
"I feel absolutely wonderful," Stokes, 56, said in the lobby of Memorial Hermann Southwest Hospital, where he underwent heart bypass surgery and had a defibrillator implanted after his Aug. 20 collapse at nearby Compaq Center where the Houston Comets were playing the Utah Starzz. "I have walked to the edge of death and turned and gone back the other way."
Even better, he hopes to get back to officiating. That's two great sports stories today.
As for whether or not the game should have gone on after he was rushed to the hospital, here's Stokes' opinion:
"I'm not what people came to see," he said. "I'm not the show. I'm just part of the game, an integral part to make the game run smoothly. Obviously, that game should be completed. The kids should not have to come back another night and finish."
Best wishes for a full and speedy recovery, Bill Stokes.
A deal has been reached between the MLBPA and the owners, at the last minute as so many predicted, thus averting a strike. Woo hoo!
I am a bit concerned that the players have agreed not to challenge "any contraction moves in 2007", but that's a long way off and things may change by then. $DEITY willing, Beelzebud Selig will be selling used cars and not doing any more damage to the sport.
Meantime, I wholeheartedly agree with the following sentiments from the Baseball Prospectus, written on Wednesday when a lot of people thought there'd be a short strike:
Anyway, the strike--I hope that no one who has made any comment about not coming back after a strike comes back. I don't want to hear "oh, I meant an extended strike". Nope, you should have written that on the sign you held up for the cameras.I don't go telling my lovely and talented wife I'm going to leave her when she doesn't (uh, for instance) clean the cookie sheets she's cooked on. I don't threaten it because I love her, and I understand it's part of the package. Professional sports are no different--it takes an immense amount of money to pay the best athletes in the world on the field, and those same athletes are going to want fair compensation for their services. That they're going to argue about it sometimes shouldn't surprise anyone. Would it be in the best interests of everyone if the owners stopped seeing the players as an exploitable resource and instead as potential partners in growing the game? Sure. But there aren't a lot of companies, much less industries, who have that kind of enlightened vision.
If your relationship with baseball, or any professional sport, is so filled with jealousy and anger that you can't enjoy the beauty of the game and the talent of its players because management is inept, go watch Friends (which has been beset by labor, money, and drug issues throughout its history) and forget all about the greatest sport there is.
A seven-day strike that gets us four years of labor peace (and, likely, increasing competitive imbalance, but I digress) and clears out the angry, "players are overpaid" crowd? Sign me up.
Play ball!
Chad Orzel makes a great point about the debate over the Kyoto Protocol:
[S]ome of the same people who vociferously oppose Kyoto on economic grounds are just as quick to argue that the entertainment industry is a lumbering dinosaur reflexively seeking to protect an outdated business model, and foolishly resisting inevitable technical progress. It wouldn't take a whole lot of work to cast the energy industry in the same light-- fossil fuels are the technology of the past, and by clinging to the current oil-and-coal-based model of energy generation, energy companies are missing a big opportunity, etc.
The whole post is worth reading. Check it out.
The Ain't Life A Bitch award for daily jounalism goes to the Chron's Andrew Guy for drawing the lousy and thankless task of doing a puff piece on the Houston Texans cheerleaders. Alas, the online version of this story omits most of the photos that accompanied the print version, including one of an oppressed marketing dude helping the ladies try on their shiny white boots, and another of "Jessica, Jennifer, and Erica relaxing on the sidelines".
It's true what Brendan O'Neill says, kids: We should all aspire to be journalists.
In today's College Football Preview section, Chron sportswriter Fran Blinebury picks BYU to win the Western Athletic Conference title. That will be quite a feat, considering that BYU hasn't been in the WAC since 1999, when they and seven other schools left to form the Mountain West Conference. Thankfully, all his other picks for conference champion actually play in the specified conferences.
Well, Chief Bradford has testified before the City Council, and he appears to be wimping out.
Houston Police Chief C.O. Bradford told City Council on Wednesday that he was embarrassed by the mass arrests of 273 people on trespassing charges earlier this month, and he implied that officers should have disobeyed orders to arrest them.Bradford, in his first public appearance since the Aug. 18 raid, said officers should have given out citations that night, rather than arresting hundreds of people at a westside Kmart Super Center and a Sonic Drive-In in the 8400 block of Westheimer.
"Officers are taught beginning in the academy that they are not to follow an unlawful order," Bradford said. He added later that "arresting citizens for minor offenses has not been a department policy. I wouldn't approve of a plan as it was executed that night."
No word about the memo that Captain Aguirre wrote in May outlining his plan to arrest people for such infractions, so draw your own conclusion about whether Bradford is clueless or dishonest. This doesn't exactly give me a warm fuzzy either:
Bradford deflected responsibility for the raid, saying he was out of town the week before it took place and never saw or heard about the plan. He said he first learned of the operation on the news the next day, leading some to question his control over the department.
As Casey Stengel once said about the hapless 1962 Mets, doesn't anyone here know how to play this game? I have to agree with Hans Martuciuc here when he says that the chief needs to be more accountable. If the captains have the authority to do this sort of thing without the chief's explicit knowledge and approval, then we need captains who don't order the arrest of everyone in sight when a planned raid turns into a dud.
There's another thing about this that has bugged me. You've got a huge mobilization of officers and tow trucks for a raid that is intended to bag drag racers. Would it kill you to have an advance scout in place to let you know ahead of time if there are any drag racers there?
On a side note, Kevin has spoken to the manager of the James Coney Island where a similar raid occurred prior to the K-Mart raid. He had been very critical of some comments this manager had made about the arrests, but after speaking to the man in person he has retracted his stronger comments. Since I had agreed with Kevin's assessment at the time, I also retract my comments. Thanks to Kevin's followup I have a much better understanding of what really happened.
I was reading this article in the Chron about shock jocks and crossing the line when it struck me: Ann Coulter is to punditry what Opie and Anthony are to deejays.
Opie and Anthony's sex-in-church stunt has earned them a place in the shock-jock hall of shame, and they have plenty of company.Broadcasting's biggest mouths regularly push the boundaries of bad taste with the blessing of their bosses -- until the day they cross an invisible and movable line.
Really, I don't know why this came as such a revelation to me. I should've seen it a mile off. She's exactly like a shock jock in every way. She coarsens the debate, as O&A coarsen the culture. She pushes boundaries and gets rewarded for it as long as she's a cash cow. When she inevitably pisses off the wrong person, there's always someone to defend her. Eventually, someone remembers that she's a cash cow, so she gets a new home where all is forgiven and she can start again.
Therefore, in honor of current events, I propose we call her Ann "Opie" Coulter from here on out. Who's with me?
From today's Chron:
WACO - A fraternity has been suspended from Baylor University for a year after a picture of some members, fully clothed, appeared in Playboy magazine.About 50 men and four women, all students at the time, posed on a sand volleyball court, some wearing Sigma Phi Epsilon T-shirts and others waving Baylor pennants.
A student who has since graduated posed nude for another photo and used an alias. The pictures are in the October issue featuring the Big 12 conference.
There's just something funny to me about a frat being disciplined for a photo in Playboy, y'know?
Baylor and Playboy are old adversaries. Way back in 1980 when Playboy featured the Women of the (late, lamented) Southwest Conference for the first time, you'd think that Satan himself had arrived in Waco. Baylor made such a fuss that the Rice MOB saluted them the next time they visited the Bears by attaching paper bunny ears to the horns of their instruments. A photo from that event depicting a dozen or so bunny-eared tubas ran in a subsequent Playboy, and a similar shot hangs on the wall of the band office today.
Awhile back I wrote about how the Kaldi Cafe was encountering resistance from a nearby church in its efforts to get a private members-only liquor license. Today I discovered that Stephanie, the manager of the Kaldi, had left a comment on that entry thanking me for the kind words and reminding me that the deadline to be a charter member of the Pomplemoose Lodge and Social Club is September 1. (All you Houstonians, you know what to do.) I don't know how you found me, Stephanie, but thanks for dropping by!
UPDATE: My Pomplemoose membership is now in place. I had lunch at the Kaldi yesterday and dropped off the form to Stephanie herself. She'd found me the old fashioned way, via Google search.
From MSNBC, Iran harboring al Qaeda deputies:
Two figures who have assumed critical roles in the al Qaeda hierarchy in recent months, including one reported dead by the Pentagon, are being sheltered in Iran along with dozens of other al Qaeda fighters in hotels and guesthouses in the border cities of Mashhad and Zabol, according to Arab intelligence sources.
Combine this with Will Saletan's recent deconstructions of Tom DeLay and Dick Cheney, and I have to ask again: Why is it Iraq we're planning to invade? Why Iraq and not North Korea, or Iran, or Syria, or Pakistan, or Saudi Arabia? What one reason applies to Iraq and not to any other WMD-hoarding, terrorist-sponsoring, America-hating, despot-impaired nation?
If and when Team Bush ever cogently answers those questions, then they can count on my support. Until then, this threatens to be the kind of naked, imperialistic aggression that the US used to rightly denounce when practiced by other countries.
MSNBC link via Lean Left.
Unlike Ginger, I'm sorry to see that Houston has been dropped from consideration by the US Olympic Committee as a potential host city for the 2012 Olympics. I didn't see Houston's bid as a "wallflower girl throwing herself at the quarterback", as Ginger colorfully put it, but others did.
The thing is, I saw the possibility of the Olympics as being a catalyst for more rail lines, something which I definitely consider a benefit. It's my opinion that the biggest failure of the Lee Brown administration has been that they've made a piss-poor case for rail. We never should have had to go through the motions and the expense of voting (again!) to keep working on the Main Street rail line. Orlando Sanchez should have been a pariah for abetting the rail opponents instead of a serious threat to a two-term mayor. Unfortunately, Lee Brown never sold a vision for mass transit to Houston. He never made people understand that we can't keep widening highways. Whether he didn't think he needed to or was just incapable of doing so I can't say, but I can say that we'd be much better off if he'd at least tried.
There's one other thing about Houston that I think ultimately dooms efforts like the bid for the 2012 Games, and it goes hand in hand with our overall image problem: Houston has a boring downtown. Oh, there's plenty of nice restaurants and bars and theaters, but if you're the travelling companion of someone who's in Houston on business and you're staying at a downtown hotel without a car, what is there for you to do during the day?
Not a whole lot, and that's my point. The museum district and the zoo aren't downtown, though they will be served by the rail line when it's ready to go. The Landry's restaurant chain is building a restaurant with an aquarium in it, which ought to be cool. There is a shopping mall downtown, but it's not exactly loaded with top name retailers, let alone places that are interesting in their own right such as an ESPN store, a Niketown, or an FAO Schwartz. There are a couple of small parks, which are nice but again, not exactly destinations. The one real stretch of green space is the bayou that runs along Allen Parkway, and it's separated from downtown by I-45. I can't even think of a single tall building downtown that has an observation deck or a family-friendly restaurant up top.
There's a lot to do in downtown Houston at night, but a great downtown has stuff to do all day. We have bits and pieces of that, but until the day that it's a coherent whole Houston will continue to be found lacking Olympic committees and their ilk. One may consider this a feature rather than a bug (and let's be clear here: I love Houston anyway, and my main reaction to this announcement is that it's everybody else's loss), but I think it's important to understand.
From today's Chron:
MARBELLA, Spain -- It's the hottest hour of the day at the Puente Romano beach club when a girl of 13 dashes out of the hotel gardens, throwing a black cloak over her flowing hair, T-shirt and jeans and leaving the topless sunbathers behind.Sarah al-Kabbani, child of Saudi royalty, is obeying the muezzin's call to prayer, and she's running late.
King Fahd, leader of one of the world's strictest Muslim nations, has come to his vacation residence in Marbella, the Mediterranean capital of sun and sin, bringing along thousands of members of the House of Saud.
As usual, Saudi princes and princesses are expected to snap up Hermes scarves and Rolex watches by the display case, slap down millions on roulette tables and boogie into the night with the bejeweled blondes at the Olivia Valere discotheque.
It's a lifestyle strictly prohibited in Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Islam, where boys and girls are forbidden to hold hands in public and the constitution is based on Islam's holy book, the Quran.
Read the story, then take a look at this picture. Makes you proud to be an American, doesn't it?
Meryl is organizing a Buffy Blog Burst for September 24, the date of the Season 7 premier. All Buffy fans (and I'm looking at you and you) should check it out and let Meryl know if you want in.
Less than four weeks till Buffy. A bit more than two weeks till The Sopranos. Life is good.
Ginger gives me the good news that our mutual friend Greg "Dr. Elmo" Morrow has started his own blog. He lives outside Loop 610 and thus is ineligible for the Houston Heights Area Axis of Liberal Bloggers, but he and Jack can join us all in the Greater Houston Area Axis.
Anyway, go check him out, he's a good writer who can speak on a wide range of topics.
Via the Daily Kos comes this report from ESPN's Jim Caple that George W. Bush is among 60 non-players being considered by a screening committee for inclusion on the Hall of Fame veterans' ballot. Caple gives this notion the dismissal it deserves, noting that FDR, Reagan, Nixon, and even George H. W. Bush have a better case for the baseball Hall of Fame than Dubya does.
The Veterans' Committee, I should note, has been the big black box of Hall of Fame ballotting for some time now. In the past, it was little more than 18 old ballplayers who got together and picked a supposedly deserving yet overlooked player who was no longer eligible for enshrinement. Unfortunately, since the committee met in secret, it was highly susceptible to lobbying by one guy on behalf of his cronies. As Bill James documented in his excellent history of the HOF The Politics of Glory, when Frankie Frisch was on the Veterans' Committee in the 1970s he helped induct quite a few of his teammates from the 1920s, many of whom (Jim Bottomley, Chick Hafey, Ross Youngs, etc) fall far short of standards.
The list that Caple writes about is part of an effort to de-emphasize this group, and a long overdue effort it is. Fortunately, the overall list is a lot more serious than the inclusion of Dubya would indicate, and the voters will have their hands full. I can see a few names that stand out to me (Gene Autry, Billy Martin, Whitey Herzog, and Marvin Miller are all good choices) and quite a few more that will send me scurrying off to do some research. I applaud the effort and am optimistic that the 15 finalists will all be worthy of consideration.
UPDATE: Edited to fix the parenthetical list of bad Hall of Famers. Thanks to Mac for the assist.
Some small-town yahoos have their panties in a bunch because they discovered a book in the libraries called It's Perfectly Normal that doesn't condemn homosexuality as a crime against nature. They're trying to get the book removed from the shelves lest it seduce innocent youngsters into a lifestyle of interior design, techno music, and fashionable haircuts.
"It's not sex education," said Frances Brown of Cut and Shoot. "It's pornography. It's horrible."Monte Lane, a GOP state delegate also from Cut and Shoot, said the person responsible for the purchase of the library system's four volumes of It's Perfectly Normal should be fired.
Retired elementary school teacher Wynne Harris, also from Cut and Shoot, called the work "vulgar."
Those gripes resonated with [County Judge Alan] Sadler, who vowed to "do everything in our power to ensure that book is taken out of the library immediately." Commissioners concurred although no vote was taken.
[...]
Sadler said he was irked to learn that the book, as he put it, "tries to minimize or even negate that homosexuality is a problem."
Don't you go settin' up any big tents around here.
Twelve more police supervisors have joined Captain Aguirre on the sidelines as HPD scrambles to get its story straight. Aguirre's lawyer says that he doesn't think there were "innocent people" arrested at the Kiddie Roundup. A $100 million lawsuit has been filed by someone who disagrees with that assessment. Houston Police Officer's Union President Hans Martuciuc says that the officers who made the arrests are the real victims. There's confusion over who exactly is investigating this mess.
I can't wait for the public hearings.
Blah3 reports that the San Diego Union-Tribune has posted a correction (scroll down) to syndicated columnist Joseph Perkins' claim about DNC attack ads. Perkins had come across one of the "Money" ads on the Blah3 page and had written a screed accusing the DNC of producing these ads and planning to run them in "selected" congressional districts.
I have to say, I've trashed more than one post after coming to the conclusion that the facts I started with were either wrong or unverifiable. I'd consider it to be profoundly embarrassing if I made a claim like Perkins did and found out later that not only was I wrong but that I could have prevented my error with five minutes' worth of Google searches. How is it that a guy who puts out one or two columns a week, for which he presumably has an editor, can live with himself after publishing something so ludicrously wrong?
Anyway, you can read more about this here in the Blah3 archives.
I am the sole Google search result for Ogallala Aquifer capacity nude. I don't even know how to make a joke about that.
Another person found me by searching for a picture of flouridated water. Be careful - you may find a picture of ordinary unflouridated water and be tempted to believe it's the real thing. At least they weren't searching for nude picture of flouridated water which I must say yields a disturbing number of results.
Slowly but surely I've started to import my Blogspot archives. July is now fully in place. I'll be doing this one month at a time. Since I want to add categories to everything, and in some cases need to update titles, it takes longer than it would if I just imported and didn't futz with it.
Once all that is done, I may comb through for some Greatest Hits, and I'll also add a search button. Don't know how long all that will take, but I'll get there eventually.
A new passenger train between League City and Galveston is set to open next weekend, and if it's a success the scope may be extended to Houston and more trains.
Financed mostly by a $750,000 federal grant, the alternative transportation program also is expected to provide free rides from the mainland to Galveston Island during the Dickens on the Strand Festival in December and Mardi Gras and Memorial Day weekend in 2003."The initial demonstrations will be on holiday weekends, when the congestion on the causeway reaches its peaks," said Houston transportation consultant Barry Goodman, whose firm has helped develop the new rail plans. "We hope to demonstrate the effectiveness of rail passenger service as an alternative."
Smart idea. I-45 into and out of Galveston is a parking lot over holiday and festival weekends, so if this is ever going to be viable, that's the time for it.
No one expects rail service to supplant cars as the main means of rush-hour traffic, but Goodman and others say every option should be explored to help solve a problem that has existed for decades."I have read discussions that go back at least 70 years in which the Houston City Council was talking about the same problem," Goodman said. "They were talking about how Houston was getting so congested and how they needed to find alternatives to cars.
Insert standard those-who-forget-the-past quote here.
I hope this project is a success. Any momentum for rail is a good thing in my book.
So I got a haircut over the weekend. You'd think this would be a pretty unremarkable event. I would too, except for the fact that just about all of my coworkers have in fact remarked on it, some of them practically swooning when the first laid eyes on me today.
I swear, I get a haircut about every two months or so. Maybe I went a bit longer than usual this time, or maybe I just cut a shorter cut than I usually do, but I really didn't think it was that much of a change.
Of course, I still recall my graduate student days, when my haircut schedule was approximately "once per equinox, or just before my parents see me, whichever I can afford". Compared to that, the difference in my pre-haircut and post-haircut look nowadays is like the difference between Dubya's economic plan pre-deficit and post-deficit.
Maybe they're just giving me a hard time. Guess it's a good thing I didn't wear the brand-new shiny white sneakers as well. Some of them might have blown a gasket trying to figure out what to razz me about first.
I have just come across Britney's Guide to Semiconductor Physics. I may never be the same again.
Be sure to visit the wallpaper page so you can make this your new desktop.
Via the MOBSHOWS mailing list.
The Sunday Texas Magazine in the Chron has a nice cover story on former Railroad/Ag Commissioner Jim Hightower. Hightower is one of the old guard of Texas liberalism. He's a founder of Texas Observer, author of several books, columnist for The Nation, and radio broadcaster.
I've always liked Hightower but prefer him at a bit of a distance. He's a fair bit farther left than I am, and he supported Nader in 2000 (though he hasn't abandoned the Democrats). Basically, if you take Michael Moore and add in actual intelligence and writing ability while maintaining the humility and humanity of a real populist, you'd get Jim Hightower.
Richard Connelly of the Houston Press takes his shots (scroll down) at Rachel Graves' Crawford Weblog. Took you long enough, Rich.
It was the final weekend of the Hatch Chile Festival at Central Market, which we discovered as we pulled into the parking lot this evening. The place was packed, but it was worth it because they were giving away lots of free samples - mostly of dishes made with the Hatch chiles - and everything we sampled was yummy. They had a pot of Hatch chile stew, complete with recipe, that was sufficiently good we altered our shopping list to include everything needed to make the stew ourselves. I'll post the recipe after we've tried it.
Central Market has been one of the best reasons to live in Austin for a long time. Fortunately, parent company HEB decided to build one in Houston last year, and it's been a big hit. If you consider yourself a foodie and you live within driving distance of a Central Market, you really need to check it out. (Note to Mom and Eileen: Make sure we take you there next time you visit.)
Now if we could only get an Italian grocery store like Pastosa's on Staten Island, I'd officially be in heaven...
Not too surprisingly, Val Ackerman's decision to keep playing Game 3 of the Comets-Starzz playoff series after the collapse of referee Bill Stokes has drawn a mixed reaction from Comets fans. Like I said, whatever she did someone was going to criticize.
On a side note, the third letter is from someone who also understands why football has "competitive balance" and baseball supposedly doesn't. Nice to know I'm not the only voice crying in the wilderness.
Well, Captain Mark Aguirre has been suspended with pay pending the outcome of an internal investigation into the K-Mart Kiddie Roundup. As Kevin and Ginger have noted, it looks like Aguirre will ultimately be the fall guy for this debacle, as even the Houston Police Officers Union has backed away from him.
(On a side note, will someone please explain to me the difference between "suspended with pay" and "extra vacation"? I realize that this is likely leading to Aguirre's dismissal, and even if it doesn't the suspension will go on his Permanent Record, but still, how exactly is paid time off a punishment?)
Kevin has already noted the similarities between the sidebar story on Aguirre and this prescient feature from the Houston Press, so I'll just point to this Chron op-ed piece which asks some of the questions that we've been asking since the shinola first hit the fan, and to this somewhat self-serving op-ed piece by Houston Police Officers' Union President Hans Martuciuc, which blames poor staffing for the raid.
One thing that has struck me about the whole Aguirre case has been the disparity between his popularity with the people in his precinct and his popularitywith the brass. Aguirre is apparently a proponent of broken-windows policing, which was used with wide success in New York City in the early 90s. Given the longstanding problems that the Houston inner city has had with nuisance crimes, it's no surprise to me that the neighborhood associations love Captain Aguirre. I'm less clear on why this is a problem with the powers that be, though I suppose anyone can be abrasive enough to overshadow their successes.
Of course, as the TNR article linked above notes, when broken-windows policing turns into zero-tolerance policing - and the K-Mart Kiddie Roundup is a clear case of zero-tolerance policing - community support can drop off in a hurry, precisely because more innocent bystanders get swept up with the bad guys, sometimes with deadly results. I hope that when and if Aguirre is shown the door that HPD and the mayor's office recognize that the problem was as much personal as procedural and that they shouldn't abandon proven tactics as a response to overzealousness. On the other hand, given HPD's longstanding reputation for being out of control, this baby may have to be sacrificed with the bath water. One way or the other, I suspect we'll all be a little worse off.
Remember that Enron made-for-TV movie I mentioned a few days ago. The Sunday Chron has a review of the book on which it's based. I wouldn't prepare an Emmy speech if I were Brian Cruver. Here are a couple of bits from the review:
Cruver's writing relies heavily on cliché and superlatives, however, as he talks about his new colleagues."These people had money. Lots of money. And soon I would have lots of money, too."
He later gushes about the extremes of wealth and debauchery at the company: "It was top-down sports cars and top-off dancers. It was river rafting trips and River Oaks Country Club. It was the American dream to an extreme."
I'm trying not to giggle.
A co-worker, Liz, is used to introduce Enron's cultural history, such as the sexual proclivities of top executives, the large bonuses and how the infamous "rank and yank" employee review program works. Bernie Bickers, a stock-analyst friend who calls frequently to complain to Cruver about Enron's confusing accounting, serves as the voice of warning throughout.And a character named "Mr. Blue" is used to impart the moral of the story: Don't sell your soul for money. Mr. Blue, a senior Enron executive Cruver knows from his pre-Enron days, meets with him over drinks throughout the book to warn him about the financial and spiritual decay of the company.
Anyone want to bet that the movie will use narrator voice-overs? I can already hear some of it. Get the popcorn ready, this could be as entertaining as one of the Poseidon Adventure sequels.
It's hard for me to convey the depths of my despair when I read articles like this about baseball's labor wars, but I'm going to try. There's just so much distilled ignorance and misinformation, it's almost awe-inspiring.
Let's start at the beginning:
Alex Rodriguez offered to slash his record-setting salary if it would help baseball, a novel approach to solving the sport's problems as it moved within a week of another strike."I would take a cut in pay -- 30 to 40 percent -- if it would make the game better," the Texas shortstop said Friday at Yankee Stadium. "It's not a very realistic proposition."
Rodriguez's $252 million, 10-year contract is the richest in sports, and many owners have pointed to it as a sign of baseball's imbalance between rich and poor.
First of all, Tom Hicks paid A-Rod a good $5 million a year more than anyone else offered him. He was bidding against himself. Keep this in mind for later.
Second, while there is undoubtedly an imbalance between rich and poor teams, the definition of who's "rich" and who's "poor" is one of convenience rather than reality. As has been noted numerous times by the Baseball Prospectus, one-time sad sack small market franchises Cleveland and Seattle are now considered "haves" while poorly run teams in Anaheim and Philadelphia - metro areas with far more people - are beneficiaries of revenue sharing.
Third, as any fan of the Orioles, Dodgers, Mets, Red Sox, and Rangers can attest, being rich is no guarantee of being a winner, while teams like Oakland, Houston, Minnesota and San Francisco demonstrate that teams with limited financial resources can still win and win consistently. Yet owners continue to peddle the lie that only the rich teams win and only the rich teams can win, and damn few sportswriters call them on it.
Finally, A-Rod's salary isn't the problem. The problem is the plethora of players who are essentially replaceable in terms of talent but who are paid as if they're star quality. Rosters are littered with such examples. The really galling part is that cash-poor teams are often the worst offenders. Had the Pirates not thrown guaranteed contracts at the likes of Kevin Young, Derek Bell, and Terry Mulholland but instead used their roster spots on kids from their farm system who'd be earning minimum salaries, they could have afforded to sign Barry Bonds as a free agent for the $18 million salary that he now earns. Think about that.
Meanwhile, former commissioner Fay Vincent predicted baseball won't be able to avoid its ninth work stoppage since 1972.
For the record, only three work stoppages - not all of which have been player strikes - have actually resulted in lost games. They were in 1972, 1981, and 1994. That doesn't really change any of the current issues, but again, it's lazy reporting.
Some owners, such as Texas' Tom Hicks and San Diego's John Moores, said in the past week that baseball needs revolutionary change, but Manfred is confident he can work out an agreement owners will ratify. Moores said he would prefer a yearlong shutdown to a bad deal.
And here we come back to Tom Hicks, who bought the Rangers, spent money like Imelda Marcos at a going-out-of-business sale, and now is bleating that "revolutionary change" is needed. Never mind the fact that he paid too much for A-Rod (who's still worth whatever you pay him) and the fact that he followed that up with the signing of other high-price low-yield veterans like Andres Galarraga and Ken Caminiti, he says we must now impose strict controls to make sure that other stupid owners like himself can't do that again. He has all the credibility of an Arthur Andersen executive saying that the accounting industry just needs to police itself a little better, but again what he says appears unchallenged in print.
Finally, note that last statement by John Moores. Moores and fellow hardliner Drayton McLane know fully well that "greedy players" will get more of the blame for a strike than they will. They're willing to force the issue because it plays into their hands. Keep that in mind before you rant about who's at fault here.
All that said, I still think there won't be a strike. The sides aren't all that far apart, and I think they will both be under a lot of pressure to accept some kind of compromise. Even an agreement to keep the existing system in place through the next season, with renewed negotiations during the winter, would do. Until it actually happens, I refuse to worry about it.
Some sad news: Dr. Marnie Rose, a 28-year-old medical resident at Memorial Hermann Hospital who was featured on the show Houston Medical, has lost her battle with brain cancer. She died on Friday afternoon at M. D. Anderson Cancer Center after being admitted on Thursday with pneumonia.
The pediatric resident at Memorial Hermann Hospital made a dramatic first impression, pulling off her wig to reveal to viewers that she was not only a doctor but also a patient.Throughout the series, she allowed viewers to ride the roller coaster that cancer had made of her life. One week she would be a glowing poster girl of cancer in remission. Another, she would be a shaken example of cancer's cruel resiliency.
Along the way, she let viewers into her life, publicly exposing her pain at being rejected by boyfriends, displaying her anguish at being the subject of rumors and revealing her kindheartedness as she kept discouraging medical news from her worried parents.
In May, she said she agreed to be on the TV show because "I think Hermann's a great hospital, and I think we always get overshadowed in the big Medical Center.
"Also, I thought it would be a good chance to let other people see that a positive attitude can help, and that they're not alone out there."
Rest in peace, Marnie Rose.
In the continuing saga of the story that just keeps getting stranger, we now learn that freshman City Council member Michael "Boy Wonder" Berry knew about the raid and had actually attended the August 17 raid at James Coney Island. He admits he was surprised by the police tactics but didn't say anything about them.
Asked if he should have encouraged Aguirre or other police officials to be less aggressive in the second raid, Berry said, "Sure, it's easy to say `Yes,' and that's the proper thing to do."But looking at what I knew and when I knew it, I was trying to understand police techniques," Berry said Friday. "I didn't know that's not what is done every time. I just didn't know that.
"Most of what the police do is outside the view of the public, and I was trying to get an idea on that because if I'm ever put in a position as mayor to make the decision on whether to fire the guy who called the command, I would like to have some level of experience to draw on."
I'm not too worried about that last part, Boy Wonder, and neither should you be.
The meat in this story is the revelation that Captain Aguirre sent a memo to Police Chief C. O. Bradford about his proposal to crack down on drag racing by arresting people instead of just issuing citations which has "little or no impact" on the problem. The memo was written in May. The Chron story couldn't confirm whether or not Bradford had actually seen the memo, which means Bradford has an Enron-CEO type of choice: Do I admit I know what my underlings are doing and thus implicate myself, or do I deny all knowledge and thus demonstrate that I'm completely useless as the man in charge? Stay tuned.
Meanwhile, the comments on this entry contain the following account from the father of a 19-year-old who was among the arrested:
My 19 year old son was among those arrested. We were in from out of town to sign the papers for my father to have hospice care, and it really tore my son up. He went out to get out of the house and try to decompress and was arrested for the heinous crime of going to the Sonic drivein to get a limeaid. (For trespassing in the Kmart lot while eating at Sonic.) They arrested people in their cars in the drivethru, impounding the cars.I lived in Houston for years, I've seen HPD get away with throwing handcuffed suspects in the bayou and any number of shootings, but this is too much even for HPD to get by with. I expect that the judges and prosecutors are gonna be running for cover and trying to avoid the lawsuit splatter that's coming. Welcome to Houston, y'all, heh.
I'm hard pressed to imagine any definition of trespassing that includes cars in a drive-through. This just really stinks.
And the ACLU has now officially threatened lawsuits unless all charges are dropped. They may throw in reckless prosecution if the DA's office drags its feet. Yeesh.
UPDATE: As always, Kevin is on top of this as well, with more info about Aguirre's memo to Chief Bradford.
25 years ago this November, LA Laker Kermit Washington nearly killed Houston Rockets forward (now head coach) Rudy Tomjanovich with a punch to the face. A book called The Punch about what happened is due out around then. According to today's Chron, the two men involved have put the incident behind them. Check it out.
Interesting story about an increase in the rate of low birth-weight babies being born in Houston suburbs. There seem to be a number of factors driving this - more multiple births due to older mothers and in vitro fertilization and more poor people in the suburbs being the main two. The suburbs of all major Texas cities saw similar rises. This looks like a trend to watch.
Also noted by Kevin Whited, the manager of the Sonic drive-through was not happy with the police raid on Saturday, and unlike the James Coney Island manager, hadn't agreed to cooperate with police on it.
Sonic officials said Thursday that they never complained to police about the regular weekend crowd, had no warning of the raid and ordered employees to protect customers as the operation began.Dismayed Sonic employees refused to allow police to tow 12 cars that the arrested customers were forced to leave in the lot.
"We wanted the opportunity for our customers to come get their cars without paying towing charges," said Celina Abernathy, a Sonic spokeswoman. Such charges can exceed $100. "Obviously we don't want our customers arrested. That is just common sense."
Sonic has never warned trespassers, filed complaints or signed paperwork to allow police to make arrests under the city trespassing ordinance, Abernathy said. Kmart officials have declined to explain the steps they took before the arrests.
"We have no no-trespassing signs on our property, though there are some nearby," Abernathy said. "And we never signed any paperwork."
Sonic officials are waiting for the result of a Houston Police Department internal investigation before they decide whether to pursue further action.
Have they started an Aguirre Death Watch yet?
Checking the referral log is always fun. Seeing new links in the referral log is even more fun, even if they're apparently random links that couldn't actually be referring to you.
Once in awhile you come across a link in the referral log and you just have to wonder if it's there for a purpose or if it's just a coincidence. This is such a link. If this is a new marketing technique, I may as well surrender now. They know too much about me.
UPDATE: And now my first Google search referra since I moved to the new domain: "Liberals stop West Nile Virus spraying". Nice to know that Ann Coulter is a fan of Off the Kuff.
Shock jocks Opie and Anthony have been fired by radio station WNEW and their syndicated show has been cancelled. They'd gotten into trouble for broadcasting a live account of a couple supposedly having sex in St. Patrick's Cathedral.
They've been fired before, in Boston in 1998. As long as someone thinks they'll get ratings, they'll get hired again. Nothing shocking here.
Fellow Houston blogger Alex Whitlock has endorsed Democrat John Sharp for Lt. Governor, noting that the race is all about qualifications, and Sharp has them in spades. Moreover, he notes that his fellow Republicans are starting to see it that way, too.
"I am a dedicated Republican who whole-heartedly supports the Republican ticket. However in the Lt. Governor's race I believe John Sharp is the better choice. I have seen him in action and trust him to be a conservative problem solver." -State Senator John Carona (R-Dallas)
Glad as I am that Sharp is doing well and that he's got crossover appeal, I can't help but be wistful at the realization that more progressive candidates are still all but unelectable at the state level. After eight years of being shut out, though, I'll take what I can get and work on it from there.
The Houston Press has another good argument against term limits in this impressive hatchet job on freshman City Council member Shelley Sekula-Gibbs (formerly Sekula-Rodriguez).
The law restricts elected city officials to a maximum of three two-year terms, so every two years at least a third of the experienced officeholders are flushed out of their jobs. This system encourages instability through political musical chairs, with councilmembers jumping for the higher positions of mayor or controller whenever the incumbent is forced out.City races are officially nonpartisan. However, the term-limits rule has encouraged incumbents to stake out positions as Democrats or Republicans with an eye ahead to county, state or federal races, where strong party identity is a must. What's good for the city sometimes takes a backseat to what's good for a political future.
Since term limits began forcing out Houston officeholders in 1995, with each succeeding cycle the pool of prospective city candidates has gotten thinner and thinner in terms of municipal government experience. It has reached the point where political unknowns with any claim to fame at all -- like a TV anchor's widow with a temporary Hispanic surname -- can find themselves in office, with a staff and an open microphone on the Municipal Channel.
The article is pretty harsh on Sekula-Gibbs, who apparently combines cluelessness and single-mindedness into an especially unattractive package. Check it out.
Nathan Newman was pretty upset by Cynthia McKinney's loss in the Democraatic primary on Tuesday. See here and here for his reaction. The particular bone of Newman's contention is the amount of outside money, much of it coming from the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC, which went to McKinney's opponent, Denise Majette. His argument is that, among other things, blacks will resent seeing two black members of Congress (the other being Alabama's Earl Hilliard) being targeted and defeated.
I have two big problems with Newman's argument. First, it overlooks the fact that both Earl Hilliard and Cynthia McKinney were defeated by black candidates. The only conclusion I can draw from this line of reasoning is that Majette and Artur Davis are somehow not black enough. Both McKinney and Hilliard levelled such charges about their opponents, in fact. I really don't know what to make of this other than to note that were there a white candidate involved, appeals to vote for one or the other based on race would be considered, well, racist.
More importantly, the idea that Majette and Davis were elected because of some nefarious outside plot is just plain insulting to the voters. Hilliard and McKinney were long-term incumbents. The people they represented knew who they were and what they stood for, and they chose someone else. Voters can certainly be manipulated by misleading campaign ads, but it seems to me it's much harder to to do that to a well-known candidate.
(It's this same type of thinking that underlies term limits. The voters are too dumb or too easily led to reelect unworthy opponents. Only by restricting the voters' choices can we ensure that viable newcomers have a chance to win.)
Down here in Texas, one of the surest rallying cries for a politician is that he or she is being targeted by outsiders. I'm hard-pressed to think of a worse epithet to throw at a candidate than a charge that he or she is a puppet of Powerful Outside Forces, especially if those forces are Northern or Eastern. John Cornyn is already making a campaign issue out of Ron Kirk's national fundraising. It resonates with the voters here, who'd rather vote for "one of us" and thus stick a finger in the eye of those outsiders. That the voters in Georgia and Alamaba rejected such entreaties speaks volumes about the candidates involved.
Even after the election, friends of McKinney are still beating the Powerful Outside Forces horse. Look at this quote from Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX) of the Congressional Black Caucus:
"If [Majette] comes here willing to work with us and is not skewed by the agenda of her supporters, of course we work with her," Representative Johnson said. "We all know we have to move past this."
"Skewed by the agenda of her supporters"?? You mean the people who voted for her, Eddie? What a shame it would be if Denise Majette were skewed by the wants and needs of the people in her district.
Why don't we listen to some of those people, quoted in the NYT article linked above and in this WaPo article. We might learn something.
"People in the black community still think of the comments [McKinney] made after 9/11, and they are still a little apprehensive," said Alfreida Capers, 51, a DeKalb County resident who campaigned for Ms. McKinney."There were some in our community who saw Ms. Majette's advertisements on television and thought they reflected a young, Christian woman with a family who would be less boisterous," Ms. Capers added. "Some certainly thought our congresswoman was too boisterous and they carried that thought with them to the polls."
"There was a change in DeKalb, and Cynthia didn't pick up on it," said William Boone, a political scientist at historically black Clark-Atlanta University. "There's a growing black middle class here, a middle class that is much, much different from the black middle class of the civil rights era.
"Cynthia had the civil-rights-era politics down pat. But the voters were looking for someone more focused in the issues, not just someone who is black and will look out for them."
That changing attitude drove 63-year-old James Nelson to vote against McKinney for the first time.
"I looked at the way she talked, and along down the line I didn't like it anymore," he said. "I saw the Majette lady on TV and I liked what she had to say."
Ken Turner, a longtime supporter of outspoken Democratic Rep. Cynthia McKinney, had had enough of what he called old-style black politics.
McKinney was "living off the old ways," said Turner, 39. "Just yelling and making any statement you want and thinking as long as you're black, people are going to vote for you. Well, we're not that stupid."
Couldn't have said it better myself.
For all the bashing I give the Chron, I have to admit that they could be worse. They could be like the NY Post, for example, who has given us such immortal headlines as HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR.
I thought of that today when I saw the headline on the top story, Kopper admits kickbacks, referring to a former Enron executive who has pled guilty to defrauding Enron by paying kickbacks to former CFO Andrew Fastow and others as part of various money laundering schemes. Were the Chron more like the Post, we might have been treated to KOPPER KONFESSES KICKBACKS or maybe KOPPER: I WAS FASTOW'S BITCH. Thankfully, the Chron, where "vanilla" is more than just an ice cream, it's a way of life, would never do such a thing.
Turns out the same Captain Aguirre who ordered the K-Mart Kiddie Roundup also was in charge of a raid at a James Coney Island which netted customers as well as trespassers. It just doesn't look good for Captain Aguirre, does it?
I do agree with Kevin that the JCI manager is shedding crocodile tears. Maybe you should give the paying customers badge that identifies them before you have the cops in to clean up the riffraff, eh?
This is too funny. A conservative writer named Joseph Perkins has denounced the DNC for ads they didn't create. The ads in question (you've probably seen them, they've been widely linked to) can be found here, along with a letter to Mr. Perkins which points out his error. Will Perkins admit that he was too lazy to check his facts and thus wrote something that was totally wrong? We'll see.
Via Atrios.
Two and a half Claudes to this headline: More Americans unhappy at work. I'm even more shocked to report that people who make less money are also less happy at their jobs:
Households earning less than $15,000 a year were the least satisfied of all groups, while those earning more than $50,000 a year were the happiest. But in all income brackets, job satisfaction levels have fallen since 1995.
"Oh, you hate your job? Why didn't you say so? There's a support group for that. It's called EVERYBODY, and they meet at the bar." -- Drew Carey
WNBA referee Bill Stokes, who collapsed during last night's Comets-Starzz playoff game, has been upgraded to serious condition. Still no details on what happened to him, but that's good news.
Via Larry, who gives a more detailed description of the events as we saw them. As I recall, it did happen during a timeout, Larry. Haley the mascot and the dance team had just come out for the throw-T-shirts-to-the-crowd gig they do every game. They, and the music that accompanies them when they do this, stopped as soon as people noticed what was going on. Timeouts at Comets games are usually boisterous, but for the rest of the game there was none of the usual stuff - no silly Haley stunts, no Team NRG dancing, just some loudspeaker music and a bit of cheerleading.
UPDATE: From today's Chron, some more detailed information about Bill Stokes and word that Val Ackerman has received criticism for her decision to let the game continue. Last night Tiffany said to me that she agreed with John Lopez. She called the decision to continue the game "devaluing the life of Bill Stokes". I note that Ackerman now says that her decision came only after she received word that Stokes had been revived. I suppose that makes her choice more defensible.
Two New York deejays have stirred up a hornets' nest after broadcasting a live, eyewitness account of a couple having sex in St. Patrick's Cathedral.
Opie and Anthony, co-hosts of WNEW-FM's popular afternoon drive-time program, remained off the air for a second day Tuesday while a 350,000-member Catholic group pushed for their station to get its license revoked. The pair allegedly broadcast a live, eyewitness account of a couple having sex in the landmark Manhattan church."Nothing would make us happier than for WNEW's license to be revoked," said William Donohue, head of the Catholic League, which has also demanded a hefty fine for WNEW's parent company, Infinity Broadcasting.
The couple claimed they were only simulating having sex. Somehow, I can't imagine that will mollify the Catholic League.
Chron society columnist Shelby Hodge has the scoop:
You loved Mike Farrell as Dr. B.J. Hunnicut on TV's M*A*S*H, but will you love him as Ken Lay in the CBS-TV movie The Crooked E?The lanky Farrell with the hangdog expression has signed on as the beleaguered former Enron CEO for the movie based on Houstonian Brian Cruver's book Anatomy of Greed: The Unshredded Truth From an Enron Insider.
The wraps are off the cast of characters who are lined up to portray the Enron figures in the movie that begins shooting in Winnipeg, Canada, next week.
Cruver should be smiling. Handsome Christian Kane, who co-starred in last summer's baseball flick Summer Catch with Freddie Prinze Jr., will play Cruver. Houston native Shannon Elizabeth of American Pie and American Pie 2 fame will have the role of Cruver's wife, Courtney.
As mentioned Monday, Brian Dennehy will play Cruver's friend "Mr. Blue," a pseudonym for an Enron exec. Cameron Bancroft, who played Joe Bradley on Beverly Hills, 90210, will strut through the film as one of Cruver's hip trading floor buddies.
Getting short shrift from the filmmakers are Jeff Skilling and Andrew Fastow.
"The film is Brian Cruver's story and Skilling and Fastow have lesser roles. They are being played by unknowns, not by biggies," said Alys Shanti, Los Angeles-based executive producer of the film.
As for the Winnipeg shoot, Shanti said, "We would have loved, loved to come to Houston to make this film. But we simply couldn't afford to do it there." The advantage of the weak Canadian dollar and tax incentives made Winnipeg a more attractive locale.
I'm just speechless.
Remember that $5 billion budget shortfall that's predicted for next year? It's now $7 billion. And both candidates for governor know exactly what they're not going to do about it:
"We're going to scrub the budget. We're going to look for waste and inefficiency in government," said Mark Sanders, spokesman for Democrat gubernatorial candidate Tony Sanchez. "There will be no sacred cows."Taxes are off the table and will remain off the table," he added.
Republican Gov. Rick Perry's spokesman Kathy Walt said "it's way too early" to be talking about a $7 billion budget shortfall. Rylander won't release her revenue estimates for the coming budget cycle until late this year or early next year, and the economy could improve.
"With a $114 billion budget, he is not going to support new taxes and he doesn't think the Legislature is going to support new taxes," she said of Perry. "It ought to be able to do it by setting its priorities on spending."
It's just a game of chicken. The budget is $114 billion, but only $61 billion of that is discretionary, so a $7 billion shortfall is more than ten percent of the pie. As the story notes, $7 billion funds the prison system and the Department of Public Safety. Good luck finding $7 billion to cut that enough people agree needs to be cut.
The University of Houston has agreed to give unrestricted access to its main plaza next month to an anti-abortion group. I'm as pro-choice as they come, but UH was wrong to restrict these guys to a quieter corner of campus. Free speech means free speech, even for ugly and hateful things. As long as they're not engaged in an illegal activity, the Pro-Life Cougars have the same right to speak as anyone else.
Of course, it would be just fine in my book if they're met by a peaceful group of pro-choice demonstraters exercising their right to speak as well.
Ginger notes that Chron columnist Thom Marshall asked some pretty good questions about the K-Mart Kiddie Roundup. He also agrees with me in that towing fees should be refunded and all convictions should be overturned. Not that I normally brag about being in agreement with the potted plant of the Metro section (tm, Kevin Whited), but at least I can say that I said it first.
In the Equal Time department, one neighbor of that K-Mart is damn glad that the cops busted everyone in sight. Note to self: Be more careful about where I get a midnight snack in the future.
Last night I attended the Comets-Starzz playoff game (which, alas, the Comets lost) along with Larry. We had fun at the game, even if Larry was confused by Haley, the Comets mascot.
Unfortunately, it wasn't all fun. With about 15 minutes remaining in the second half, referee Bill Stokes collapsed in front of the scorer's table. We watched in shocked silence as the Comets trainer started performing CPR on him, then later defibrillated him. He was eventually taken to a nearby hospital, where he is now listed in critical but stable condition.
WNBA Commissioner Val Ackerman was in attendance, and she made the call to have the game continue after this happened. Chron writer John Lopez was appalled by that. It's hard to argue with Lopez on anything but logistical grounds. Is suspending the game fair to the players? How do you handle the schedule when the next playoff round starts on Thursday? How do you handle the fans in attendance - do you charge for another game, or do you let anyone with a ticket stub in to the makeup game? What if a fan has already thrown out her ticket stub? Ackerman had to weigh all that against the emotionally correct response of calling the game that Lopez wants. She's in a no-win position, for I guarantee that had she called the game someone else would be criticizing her.
That said, if the Comets announcer had to tell us that Bill Stokes had died on the way to the hospital, I can't imagine anyone wanting to participate in the remainder of the game. Val Ackerman is lucky that her tough choice wasn't tragically misguided.
One odd note: Lopez said that after Stokes was wheeled off the court, the fans "broke into an impromptu recitation of the Lord's Prayer", while the sidebar story says that one fan "coerced the crowd" into saying the prayer. What happened was that the announcer asked for a moment of silence and prayer for Bill Stokes. One person called out "Comets fans! Let's say the Lord's Prayer!" and people followed the lead. I don't believe in public prayer - I'm one of those people who thinks that "under God" should be stricken from the Pledge of ALlegiance - but I'm uncomfortable with the implication that people were coerced. I felt no coercion, and no one looked to see if my lips were moving. I think silent prayer, for those who pray, is the right thing to do in this context, but I'm not particularly bothered that someone wanted group participation.
Ginger has found two stories in the Houston Press about HPD Captain Mark Aguirre, who appears to be the bad guy (or perhaps just the fall guy) for the ill-advised K-Mart Kiddie Roundup from Saturday. Check 'em out.
Tom Tomorrow points to this story which asks where the "peace candidate" is in regards to the possible/pending/inevitable Iraq invasion. Glad as I am to see people talking about alternatives to war, I'm not sure that this article presents the best case for an anti-war candidate:
So far, many people in Iowa, a longtime incubator for peace movements, say they do not see any of the potential 2004 candidates positioning themselves to be the Eugene McCarthy or George McGovern of this era. Those men were anti-war candidates of the Vietnam era, U.S. senators who challenged sitting presidents over their war policies and drew surprisingly large numbers of followers.
Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern. There's a couple of Presidential candidate role models for you. $DEITY help us all if we get a 2004 version of McGovern. I don't know who this article was meant to inspire, but it sure didn't work on me.
Atrios prints a letter from a reader named D.M. which discusses this Thomas Sowell column. He notes the following items from Sowell:
According to the U.S. Bureau of the Census, in 2000 median income in the United States reached `the highest level ever recorded' up to that time. This included black and Hispanic incomes that `hit new all-time highs' for these groups. But did you hear the news reported in the media amid all the gloom and doom?
and
One undeniable accomplishment of Bill Clinton's presidency: it kept Jimmy Carter from being the worst U.S. President in history.
D.M. goes off on a rant about how Herbert Hoover is a good candidate for worst president ever, but doesn't spend enough time talking about the obvious flaw in Sowell's reasoning (though he did mention it), namely that the two cited bits would seem to contradict each other.
There are a number of ways in which one can evaluate a presidency: handling of a crisis, significant achievements, popularity, and so on. Surely one such way is to look at basic bread-and-butter measurements like the one that Sowell cites. How could any president who saw median incomes reach their highest recorded levels ever be considered a candidate for the bottom of the pile?
You can certainly make the case that presidents don't have all that much effect over the economy. There's a lot of truth to that. Clinton benefitted from being in the right place at the right time, no doubt about it. But while presidents can't do all that much to help, they can certainly do a fair amount to hurt, as Jimmy "National Malaise" Carter and George W. "The fundamentals are sound" Bush have demonstrated. If nothing else, Clinton wins a Hippocratic Do-No-Harm award for his term in office.
And let's face it: Sowell is a standard Clinton-hating partisan. He must believe that presidents have some effect on the economy, as he has no trouble lionizing Ronald Reagan for the 1980s, but gives no credit to Bill Clinton for the good times of the 90s. You can't have it both ways.
By the way, be sure to check out the comments on that post for some interesting theories about who was our worst president and why.
This is really ugly: The weekend bust of a couple hundred teenagers in a Kmart parking lot was supposed to be a raid on illegal drag racing, but when no such activity was found, the order was given to arrest everyone anyway. It's such a looming disaster that cops are criticizing the bust and the captain who ordered it on the record:
"I couldn't believe we were being told to arrest all those kids. It was just utterly, utterly senseless," said one officer involved, who violated department policy by discussing the arrests and spoke on condition of anonymity."Captain [Mark] Aguirre was put in charge, and it went to hell in a handbasket," said a police supervisor who was at the scene, also violating department policy and requesting anonymity.
[...]
The two supervisors said police had "scout cars" and undercover officers working surveillance at the gathering spot for weeks in preparation for Sunday's raid.
"But we got out there, and no one was racing," said one of the supervisors. "So Aguirre just said, `Arrest them all for trespass.'
"It was like, `Kill them all and let God sort them out,' " said the other supervisor. "I guess we're just lucky he didn't order us to fire warning shots into the crowd or anything."
Both supervisors said many of the people arrested were not in cars. Many were eating food from the Sonic, which was open until 2 a.m., or had been shopping at Kmart.
That's bad, but what really sets me off is this quote:
Many of those arrested Sunday pleaded guilty in order to get out of jail quicker and go about the business of retrieving their cars, all of which were towed away.Martin DeLeon, an HPD spokesman, said the tow fee is $103 and the storage fee averages about $15 a day, but some auto-storage facilities can charge more.
So not only were a bunch of law-abiding kids arrested and thrown in jail, many of them now have a conviction on their records. According to the TV news last night, these kids were advised to plead guilty so they could get out earlier. This is just wrong on so many levels.
If I'm the city attorney, I'd be in Lee Brown's office right now saying that we need to void all of these convictions, refund everyone's money for the towing and storage, and fire the captain who ordered this mess. Maybe that will stave off some of the inevitable lawsuits.
UPDATE: Forgot to mention that Mayor Lee Brown was quoted on the teevee news last night about this. He basically distanced himself from the whole thing, saying that the incident was under investigation. That's a pretty sure sign that the Powers That Be recognize this for the fubar that it is.
We had the local newscast on during dinner, and there were at least five political ads during that half-hour. The Big Issue appears to be insurance rates, as that was the focus of spots by Governor Goodhair, Tony Sanchez, and David Dewhurst, the GOP candidate for Lite Guv. It was pretty amusing seeing Dewhurst, a corporate politician through and through, take a pseudo-populist stance against Big Evil Insurance Companies who are Gouging Honest Citizens. Of course, since Dewhurst is to populism as Linda Tripp is to discretion, he can't attack them head-on. His tack is to blame Evil Trial Lawyers whose Evil Frivolous Lawsuits are the real, untold reason behind high insurance rates. It's a fairly common hymn from the Texas GOP Songbook, where tort reform is as much an article of faith as tax cuts and highway expansion are.
The main lesson one learns from this is to always have the remote nearby when watching TV from August to November. The mute button is your friend.
Doris Wishman, whom Joe Bob Briggs hailed as "the greatest female exploitation director in history", has died at the age of 82. She was famous for making about nudist camps, often running into problems with censors as a result:
"Nude on the Moon," in which astronauts are greeted by naked women with pipe-cleaner antennas poking out of their bouffant hairdos, was banned in New York State. The censor board at the time allowed only films about nudist colonies, turning aside her argument that it was about a nudist camp on the moon.In her next phase, she made sexual melodramas in which women were depicted as tragic heroines being exploited by men. There was nudity and plenty of violence against women but no explicit sex. In the grainy black-and-white pictures, which included titles like "A Taste of Flesh," she defined a quirky personal style: bizarre cutaways to ashtrays, lamps and squirrels; suggestive lesbian subplots and gratuitous nudity and violence.
I'm feeling the need for a retrospective. I'd better get Pete Vonder Haar on the phone.
Via my friend Andrea on the Roundtable list.
Presented without comment, as there are some things that need no embellishment: Scientists have proven that alcohol helps people get laid.
Want to be more attractive? Then make sure those around you are having a drink.British scientists have found even modest amounts of alcohol will make the opposite sex appear better-looking.
"We have carried out experiments which show that what is known in the trade as the 'beer-goggle effect' does actually exist," said Barry Jones, professor of psychology at Glasgow University.
Throw in the recent study about how beer is good for you and you have to wonder if maybe Delta House is funding these things.
Houston police conducted a massive raid on a K-Mart parking lot on Saturday night, arresting over 400 teenagers who were supposedly loitering.
(Do I really need to make the obvious Martha Stewart jokes here? Talk amongst yourselves.)
I don't have any idea if there was merit to the complaints by nearby businesses that these kids were "causing a commotion" or not. What I do know is that this seems like an awful lot of police to throw at a bunch of alleged misdemeanors. What in the name of Sam Walton is going on here?
Jeff Cooper has a really cute picture of his eight-month-old son on his page, which you'll have to scroll down to see as another variant of the Evil Blogspot Permalink Bug (tm) appears to have reared its head again. Of course, in dressing his son in a Mets onesie, he has started the poor lad down a road which is sure to be filled with plangent heartbreak and horrible feelings of inadequacy. It's not too late to get young Noah back on the right track by buying him a Yankees outfit, Jeff!
(And if you find the suggestion repugnant, look at it this way: Whose team logo would you rather he poop on?)
My parents were up visiting my brother and sister-in-law in Whidby Island last week. Naturally, while there they took the opportunity to slake their thirst for the Yankees by catching a game at Safeco. The good news (in addition to the fact that they saw a Yankee victory) is that my three-year-old niece Vanessa made it all the way to the ninth inning before announcing that she was ready to go home. The bad news is that she refused to wear the authentic Derek Jeter uniform shirt they bought for her because (alas) it doesn't come in pink. I suppose if she were older Mom and Dad could get her this pink stars sleeveless Yankees tee-shirt, an item whose very existence I find vaguely disquieting. Different strokes, I guess.
Given the way I've bashed sportswriters for their ignorant parroting of MLB owners' talking points, I'm glad to note that Chron baseball writer Richard Justice seems to get it, especially since I've barked at him in the past. That's two kudos to the Chron today. I think I've fulfilled my quota for some time.
For all the gritching I do about Houston's Trailing Information Source, the least I can do is single them out when they tell me something useful. Today's front page contains a story about how people abuse the privilege of temporary disability parking permits.
Disabled-person hang tags are portable. The recipient can use them in a second car, another person's car or even in a car pool.But they are supposed to be used only by the disabled person. About 110,000 Harris County residents have the tags, more than 4 percent of the driving-age population.
A doctor must prescribe the tag based on state rules, including, primarily, that the person can't walk 200 feet without rest.
But there are at least four ways to cheat:
- Find a lenient doctor. The Harris County Tax Assessor-Collector's office, which issues the tags, says it isn't qualified to question a doctor's opinion.
- Forge a prescription.
- Use the tag of a friend or relative when that person isn't in the car.
- Steal it.
The Chronicle checked only for the last two -- using a borrowed or possibly stolen hang tag. The results weren't pretty.All hang tags list the driver's license number of the owner, clearly visible from outside the vehicle. In a sample of 39 vehicles parked beside expired meters, the Chronicle compared the names of the people issued the license plates to those who were issued the hang tag.
Sixteen were clear mismatches.
A mismatch could, of course, mean someone was carpooling or borrowing a car. But follow-up phone calls and in-person interviews found none of those.
I've long suspected this was the case, having seen too many obviously healthy people entering and exiting cars with hang tags and no passenger in sight. Even still, I'm appalled at how high the fraud rate is and how little shame is displayed by the fraudsters. I hope this story leads to some action.
Be sure to also check out the sidebar story, which lists other places that these tags are abused.
The MLB Players' Association has finally set a strike deadline date of August 30, and the reaction from the sportswriters is sadly predictable. Jack cites this article from Arizona, while Rob has this one from MSNBC.
I've left comments on each of their entries that basically says the following:
The players have one weapon in their arsenal, and that's a strike. If they don't set a deadline (and that's what this is, a deadline), the owners can simply declare an impasse and impose a lockout in April until they get what they want. That's a consequence of the antitrust exemption.The players aren't making any extra demands. They're asking that things stay the same. It's the owners who are making demands. The players, very reasonably, are refusing to give back what they're won fair and square in the past.
I remain optimistic that there won't be a strike, but I'm really pissed about the lousy coverage that the major media gives to the subject. Blaming "greedy players" as Celizic [in the MSNBC article] does is just ignorant.
The problem has always been that the owners' dishonest assertions about their proposed luxury tax have been cast as the One True Way to save baseball from greedy, overpaid players who are bent on ruining the game. Putting aside the fact that no one forces an owner to overpay any player, the fact remains that the proposed tax would have a big drag on salaries and wouldn't do anything to address the competitive balance myth. This article from ESPN does a decent job of discussing the tax, while Doug Pappas and Derek Zumsteg propose solutions that might actually work. Finally, Jayson Stark seems to get it.
Getting back to my point about coverage, Joe Sheehan, who has sadly retired from the Baseball Prospectus, addressed this a few weeks ago, and I think he's dead on:
I was pretty frustrated and angry after reading a column Phil Rogers wrote for Sunday's Chicago Tribune, another in his long series of economically illiterate pieces on the current CBA negotiations. Rogers is probably the most openly pro-owner shill out there, and this article fit right in with the rest of his work: Bud Selig is a heroic figure who only wants to do the right thing for baseball, and if the greedy players would just do what their NFL and NBA brethren have done, everybody would be a lot happier.I'm guessing Rogers gets a lifetime pass to the front of the press-box buffet line for this piece, but any resemblance to this or any other reality is entirely coincidental.
The coverage of baseball's economics by the nation's largest media companies would be an embarrassment if said companies actually cared. But because so many of them have an active interest in baseball's anti-marketing campaign--how many of you have consumed information this morning from Disney, Fox, the Tribune Company or AOL/Time Warner?--the work they do on the back page or in Section C is held to a standard so low you can't see it without a shovel and a miner's hat.
It's frustrating to read a Phil Rogers, or a Hal Bodley, or a Dave Kindred and know that their message of jealousy and their counter-factual argumentation reaches so many people and drives so much of the discussion. The cacophony of pro-establishment media drowns out reasoned voices, ones that acknowledge the complexity of the issues and the forces involved. It's hard for a Doug Pappas or an Allan Barra to reach enough people to counteract that.
I, and many others here at BP, take a lot of grief for our "pro-player" stances. The point I try to make, over and over, is that I'm not necessarily pro-player as much as I'm pro-honesty, pro-not-having-my-intelligence-insulted. When Don Fehr stands in front of a microphone and tells me Alex Rodriguez made $6.45 an hour last year, then I'll equate him with the people who still insist Wayne Huizenga lost money in 1997.
My advice is to take a deep breath and ask yourself why, in a capitalist free-market system, baseball players shouldn't have the same right to earn what they can that the rest of us do.
Via Josh Trevino comes some news on the upcoming Star Trek: Nemesis from Wil Wheaton. It's not a spoiler, so click away.
The Daily Kos notes that Katherine Harris has been sued by her Republican opponent, who alleges that she should be kicked off the ballot for violating state law. Harris resigned from office on August 1 instead of the required deadline of July 15, saying she "misunderstood the resignation letter rules". See, her old job didn't necessitate any prior knowledge of electoral rules, so it's just an honest mistake that could have happened to anyone.
Much as I'd enjoy seeing Klueless Katherine disqualified on a technicality, this seat is likely to remain Republican, so it would be a symbolic victory at best. But hey, you take 'em where you can.
The Fundraiser In Chief, that is. Dubya is now the record holder for both a single fundraising event as well as the all-time leader for his 19 months in office.
Aren't you glad we have someone in the White House who is focused on the business of the nation and not the business of politics?
Naturally, I went and wrote the entry below before I finished my daily reads, so I hadn't yet gotten to Avedon's ringing defense of MWO. She makes many of the same points I do, in a typically more spirited way. Go read what she has to say, then ask yourself: Does the contrast between her style and mine make our essentially identical argument more or less effective? I know what my answer is.
There's another kerfuffle going on about MediaWhores Online, thanks to this article in SpinSanity. Patrick doesn't much care for MWO, while Atrios and his merry band of commenters are fans.
I wrote about my ambivalence with MWO back in my Blogspot days. I'm not an attack-dog site. I have a fairly limited appetite for that kind of red meat. I've come to realize, though, that whatever one feels about sites like MWO, there's not only a place for them, they actually serve a vital role in the public opinion environment.
What helped me in this discovery was this David Brooks article in The Atlantic about my favorite theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr. Brooks writes about Niebuhr's unrelenting moral realism:
Niebuhr soon tired of what he saw as the self-righteous naiveté of the Social Gospel activists. He wrote a series of essays exposing their idealistic pieties and became a spokesman for moral realism, arguing that reform had to be conducted by people who were acutely aware of the limits of human capabilities and the intractability of sin. Niebuhr believed that "man is a sinner in his deepest nature," as the humanities professor Wilfred M. McClay wrote this past February in First Things. "But man was not merely a sinner, but also a splendidly endowed creature formed in God's image ... still able to advance the cause of social improvement."The classic Niebuhr pose was to argue the middle against both ends—to argue for reform but against the pride of idealists, who hope to achieve too much, and against the cowardice of standpatters, who are afraid to get their hands dirty. Niebuhr could be bloody-minded in his realism: every action causes some collateral damage, he acknowledged, but people must act nonetheless, begging forgiveness for the evils they commit in the service of good.
Niebuhr's heyday was the era of World War II and its Cold War aftermath. Brooks, who believes that we'd be better off in our geopolitical debates today if we had someone like Reinhold Niebuhr around, nonetheless recognizes Niebuhr's main flaw:
I disagree with two thirds of what Niebuhr wrote. To begin with, he was naive. Just as the problem with pragmatists is that their plans never work, the problem with realists is that they are unrealistic. In the real world people do not undertake great tasks in the mood of cold, ironic realism that so delighted Niebuhr. People need to have their hopes fired and their passions engaged. The American Revolution could not have succeeded or even gotten off the ground without firebrands like Patrick Henry and Thomas Paine. Slavery would not have ended without the zeal of the abolitionists.Niebuhr overlearned the lessons of his age. Because communism and fascism were fomented by zealous idealists, he came to suspect all displays of passion, all righteous indignation, and all poetic elements in public life. But idealism in defense of democracy is no vice, at least not on balance.
Our problem today is not, as Niebuhr might have predicted, excessive zealotry or an overpoliticized life. Our problem is that most people are entirely disengaged from great public matters. Consumed by private pleasures, they almost never invest their passions in dreams of a better world. We could use a little more idealistic zeal, a little more hope and confidence.
These words struck a chord with me. I don't want all political discourse to be like what's on MWO, but without MWO or something like it I don't believe that liberal and progressive ideas would be as widely heard. There's a lot of shouting out there, and for better or worse you're going to have a hard time being heard unless you do a little shouting yourself. Asking others to hush so you don't have to raise your voice accomplishes little.
I believe, therefore, that it's silly to ask MWO to be more like Jack Germond or EJ Dionne, and it's silly to denigrate MWO for not being like that. It's like asking Shaquille O'Neill to play point guard - their talents are best used on other things. But just as five Shaqs would make a lousy basketball team, a lineup of all MWOs or all EJ Dionnes would be a poor way of making the case for liberalism.
Does this mean that I therefore approve of Rush Limbaugh? Well, no, I firmly believe the world would be a better place without him. My reason for that belief isn't just because I think Limbaugh is an overheated blowhard. It's because I know damn well how much effect Limbaugh has on the public debate. Whether or not you agree with his methods and veracity, he gets the word out to a lot of people. I'd much rather people saw things my way because of appeals to logic and reason, but on Election Day it doesn't matter why they're punching a chad for a particular candidate. If a little MWO frothing helps to elect the people who will implement policies I approve of, I say bring it on.
Kevin and Jack have also noted this story about Texas A&M's sports information director falling asleep at the copy-editing switch. All I really want to say is that while Lubbock may be, at best, an acquired taste, people who went to school in College Station are hardly in a position to criticize other schools' cities.
The greater Houston Heights area, known primarily for its Axis of Liberal Bloggers, is also one of Houston's oldest neighborhoods. It was once an independent city, but like many such places was annexed by Houston in 1918. At the time, it was a dry city, and the area has stayed dry ever since.
Now a local restaurant is applying for a private, member's-only liquor license which is causing a nearby church to kick up a fuss. Tiffany and I eat at the Kaldi Cafe regularly. It's a fairly low-key place, favored by slackers and families alike. I really don't understand why there's a problem. Other restaurants in the area have BYOB policies, so it's not like you can't have a bottle of wine with dinner.
I'm rooting for Kaldi. We have an application to join their club at home, and I know Tiffany's all set to fill it out and pay her dues.
Ginger also takes note of this.
The best suggestion I've heard for a WTC Memorial in New York comes courtesy of my friend Ben on the Roundtable list:
Replacement towers of some sort. The only thing I specifically want is the following component:1. Excavate.
2. Catch OBL.
3. Chain him in the hole.
4. Start pouring.
The only thing I would add to that is to have someone standing by reading from Poe's The Cask of Amontillado while the cement is pouring.
Somewhere along the line since I started blogging, I started receiving email from Center for Immigration Studies. I'm not exactly sure how they came to get my email address, but at least the mail they send me is interesting. Today in the inbox is a link to this overview of Middle Eastern immigrants in the US. A few of the bullet points they highlighted in the email:
- Middle Easterners are one of the fastest growing immigrant groups in America. While the size of the overall immigrant population (legal and illegal) has tripled since 1970, the number of immigrants from the Middle East has grown more than seven-fold, from fewer than 200,000 in 1970 to nearly 1.5 million in 2000.
- The INS last estimated that 150,000, or about 10 percent, of Middle Eastern immigrants are illegal aliens. Preliminary Census Bureau estimates show a similar number.
- Assuming no change in U.S. immigration policy, 1.1 million new immigrants (legal and illegal) from the Middle East are projected to settle in the United States by 2010, and the total Middle Eastern immigrant population will grow to about 2.5 million.
- These figures do not include the 570,000 U.S.-born children (under age 18) who have at least one parent born in the Middle East, a number expected to grow to 950,000 by 2010.
- The religious composition of Middle Eastern immigrants has changed dramatically over the past thirty years. In 1970, an estimated 15 percent (29,000) of immigrants from the region were Muslim; the rest were mostly Christians from Lebanon or Christian ethnic minorities such as Armenians fleeing predominately Muslim countries. By 2000, an estimated 73 percent (1.1 million) of all Middle Eastern immigrants were Muslim.
- Interest in coming to America remains very strong in the Middle East even after September 11. In October 2001, the Department of State received approximately 1.5 million applications from the Middle East (not including Pakistan) for the visa lottery, a program which awards 50,000 green cards each year to randomly selected applicants.
- Middle Eastern immigrants are one of the most educated immigrant groups in America. In 2000, 49 percent had at least a bachelor’s degree, compared to 28 percent of natives.
- There is little evidence of discrimination in the job market against the group. Median earnings in 2000 for Middle Eastern men were $39,000, slightly higher than the $38,000 average for native workers.
- Given their high citizenship rates, relative affluence, and strong interest in Middle East politics, absent a change in U.S. immigration policy, continued Middle Eastern immigration appears likely to lead to changes in U.S. policy toward the Arab-Israeli conflict as elected officials respond to this population’s growing electoral importance.
- California has the largest Middle Eastern immigrant population, with nearly 400,000. Of states with the most Middle Eastern immigrants, Virginia has the fastest growing population, followed by Texas, Michigan, and New York.
There's more, so take a minute and check it out.
OK, I give up. I'm appealing to all the lawyers who read this site. Please take a look at this Salon article about Ira Einhorn and explain to me why exactly the law that Pennsylvania passed in which "any American fugitive caught in a country where extradition is denied on account of a previous in-absentia conviction may, when returned to the United States, be guaranteed a new trial" is such a human rights travesty. I just don't get it. Thanks!
Well, as expected I had no trouble finding more than eight people in Ann Coulter's America who oppose the current plan to invade Iraq. I've since discovered that others such as Michelle at A Small Victory have successfully performed the same challenge to Ann's math skills. Behold the power of the blogosphere!
Here's a hint for the future, Ann: If you take off your shirt and your shoes, you can count all the way up to 22. (This is an advantage that women have over men, by the way - we can only count up to 21 by similar means.) I'm sure you'd blame the public school system for this obvious failure of your education, except that you went to private school. Oops.
On a more serious note, be sure to check out Ginger and Jim for some clear thinking on this subject.
Today, alas, is the last day of the Crawford weblog, as intrepid reporter Rachel Graves gets to come home tomorrow. Which is too bad, because she's just starting to verge on being interesting. Yesterday, in a day that must have been slow even by Crawford standards, she answered viewer mail. The burning questions included one asking whether any of the reporters had gotten it on during their copious free time (alas, this went unanswered) and one asking if the hay bales that you can see in the background of TV reporter shots are real or props (they're real, but they're not on the Bush ranch).
The highlight from an Actual Bit of Information perspective was this answer to the question about why we've gotten so little real news:
In an ideal world, we would get to ask as many newsworthy questions as we want and get good answers. In reality, President Bush carefully controls the flow of information, both by limiting how many questions he takes and by staying "on message" with answers that are repeats of what he has already said. I can assure you that every bit of news that has happened since I've been here has been reported in traditional news stories in the newspaper and on the Web site.
I suppose I should just file this under "tell me something I didn't already know", but what the hell.
Today's final report is about yesterday's public relations stunteconomic forum, and it shows signs that maybe, just maybe, she's beginning to understand what makes a blog worth reading. Here's some actual Insider Scoop that I wouldn't have known about otherwise:
The easiest place to watch from was yet another gym-turned-filing center - this one at Baylor. There, reporters could watch the presidents' progress on television. He took notes during the panels, and during one camera close up, Washington Post reporter Mike Allen ran up to the screen and turned his head upside down to try to see what Bush was writing.Bush slipped into folksy Central Texas-speak for many of his comments and talked about things such as making Wall Street data simple enough for the regular folks in Crawford to understand, not just people on the East and West coasts. (ed. note: So does this mean that Bush thinks the regular folks in Crawford are too dumb to understand all that highfalutin' financial stuff?)
Reporters kept up a running commentary of our own on what Bush was saying while taking notes and listening for anything that hadn't been said before.
The panels were followed by a summary event at which the president made a lengthy speech. Before Bush came in, Enya was playing, a bizarre contrast to the heartland feel of the event.
Finally, Graves noted that in the $5 billion that Bush is threatening to cut is money for Central Texas flood relief. Sure does feel good to have a president from your own state in office, doesn't it?
I can't believe I'm saying this, but I'll kinda sorta miss this weblog. Maybe the next one will learn from this and won't take so long to get warmed up. If there is a next one, anyway.
Matt and Brad and Patrick write about Martin Amis' book Koba the Dread and in doing so meander off into topics such as who was worse, Hitler or Stalin, and the usefulness of each as a rhetorical club with which to beat your ideological opponents. Having read all that, I thought this would be a good time for me to clear up a few points about myself.
I am not now, nor have I ever been, a member of the Communist Party.
I am not now, nor have I ever been, a Communist sympathizer.
I am not now, nor have I ever been, a defender of or apologist for the Soviet Union.
I am not now, nor have I ever been, a supporter of Stalin, Trotsky, Mao, Castro, Peron, Guevara, Zorro the Great, Zorba the Greek, or Hank the Angry Drunken Dwarf.
I therefore respectfully suggest that any attempts to blame me for the evils of Communism are at best misguided and should be avoided.
In return, I promise to not blame conservatives for the evils of Nazis in general and Hitler in specific, although I do reserve the right to single out those who have made public statements in favor of them.
If you find yourself in dire need of a rhetorical club with which to beat me, feel free to drop me a line and I'll help you find one. There are plenty of things that I've actually said, done, or believed in which are fair game. One of these days, I'll even get around to importing my Blogspot archives and adding a Search button so you can do this on your own. I'm a big believer in self-sufficiency, my liberal tendencies notwithstanding.
Thanks in advance for your kind consideration.
Mets co-owner Nelson Doubleday, who had filed a lawsuit alleging accounting shenanigans against MLB, has agreed to sell his half of the Mets and to drop his lawsuit.
"I am pleased this is behind us," Doubleday said in a statement issued by the commissioner's office. "While I was not happy with the results of the appraisal, I deeply regret and apologize for the conclusions many drew from the papers that were filed last week by my lawyers."I did not in any way mean to impugn the integrity of the commissioner, who has been a longtime friend and will continue to remain one."
Sounds to me like someone got to him. I sure hope he got the price he was looking for, because I believe there was merit to his lawsuit. Alas, I was right in predicting that this would never see the inside of a courtroom, so we'll never know.
UPDATE: Jeff Cooper sees it the same way.
Mark Evanier makes a safe prediction about 2004:
I have only one prediction, which I've made here before. I think, in '04, the question will be, "Do you feel safer now than you did on September 11?" If most voters feel that, as a result of the actions of the current administration, they're less afraid of annihilation, Bush could get caught humping a sheep and still win a second term. If they feel not enough has been done and/or that "the war" (whatever its scope at the time) has been bungled, almost anyone will be able to beat him. The other stuff may matter in terms of Congress because the less the country trusts Bush on the economy, the more likely they are to want Democratic representatives to stop him from running amok. But none of it has anything to do with who'll win the presidential election of 2004 or even who'll be on the ballots.
UPDATE: Craig Biggerstaff expands on this.
My buddy Pete Vonder Haar has embarked on a side career as a film critic with the debut of his biweekly Footage Fetish feature on Film Threat. His first review is a little know Man vs. Rat flick called Of Unknown Origin. Pete's a funny guy who knows way too much about B movies, so check it out. I'm looking forward to his next installment.
I've tried to find a reason to praise Dick Armey for his recent apostasy on Republican red-meat issues. Really I have. I just can't quite bring myself to do it.
It's not that I'm unhappy with what Armey has done. It's just that I don't trust his motives. I just can't believe that after all these years of championing the GOP that he suddenly feels free to speak up and say that maybe there are a few things that his buddies are wrong about, especially as they head into a midterm election with their fragile House majority in jeopardy. The timing is all wrong. We all know how tightly the White House controls leaks and how much Bush values loyalty. Am I expected to believe that they'd let a top Republican and fellow Texan undercut the President less than three months out from an election that will largely determine the success of his agenda and possibly his re-election without at least giving him a talking-to?
I'd like to believe that Armey's adherences to the principles of limited government led to his decision to help kill the TIPS program. Were it not for his track record in redistributing income to GOP districts, not to mention his sense of entitlement in doing so, I just might. I'd like to believe that his opposition to invading Iraq and support for ending the trade embargo to Cuba are based on principles that can finally see the light of day now that he's no longer bound by the need to be re-elected, but I can't. I'm seeing a pattern in Armey's recent behavior, but it's not the pattern of behavior normally attributable to one who is finally free to shake the shackles of orthodoxy.
What I see is a plot by Karl Rove to provide some ass cover for Dubya. Think about it. Everyone knows TIPS was a loser. How can Bush back away from it without giving the Democrats a victory or a campaign issue? Simple: Get a trusted lieutenant who isn't running for re-election to kill it for him. Suppose there are enough issues (logistical or otherwise) regarding the invasion of Iraq that it needs to be delayed or - heaven forfend - scrapped. It'd be awfully nice if a prominent conservative or two expressed doubts beforehand so that should Bush have to change his tune he can cite such people as helping him to see things from a different perspective. How can we change direction on the Cuban trade embargo and not endanger Jeb's re-election? You see where I'm going.
I freely admit that I find Dick Armey to be reprehensible and small-minded. I believe that today, as was the case before these odd public pronouncements, that Armey's only rock solid principle was "ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for the GOP". I'm very much not impartial here, and my antipathy to this man may well be taking me way past the point of healthy cynicism and into the land of the Tinfoil Hat People. My alternate explanation here may be ridiculous and perhaps even insulting, but I firmly believe that it's at least possible.
UPDATE: I'm not the only one thinking conspiratorily today. Check out Arthur Stock's comment on Matt Yglesias's blog for a dandy.
Thanks to everyone who has responded to my call for people from Ann Coulter's America who oppose an attack on Iraq. Be sure to read through the comments, there's some good stuff in there. Meantime, I'd like to expand on this a bit.
First, I suppose I should state my own position. Basically, I'm still wrestling with it. I find the case for attacking Iraq that Josh Marshall has made here and here to be fairly compelling. If I heard more of this kind of talk coming from Team Bush, I'd be a lot more reluctant to lob spitballs at them over this issue.
On the other hand, I mentioned Jim Henley for a reason, and that reason is that he's easily the most articulate and convincing spokesperson for the anti-attack side. Hawks and libertarians really ought to read Jim's open letter to Perry de Havilland as well as these two posts in which he lays out his case against Gulf War II in more detail. Jim and I do not sit in the same pew at the church of politics, but I find myself admiring some of the hymns he sings.
Cutting to the chase: I don't oppose attacking Iraq on principle, but if I were in Congress and I were asked for a straight up-or-down vote right this very minute, I'd vote No. Josh Marshall may have reluctantly come to see the hawks' point of view on Iraq, but his more recent writing about whether Team Bush is right for the job shows that the question is more complicated than that. It's easy to talk about kicking Saddam's ass. But where do we go from there? In the absence of a well-defined plan for a post-Saddam Iraq, my vote will remain No.
By now you've probably heard of Ann Coulter's latest contribution to civil discourse:
HOW IS IT that the New York Times managed to locate the only eight people in America opposed to attacking Iraq? (By "America," I obviously mean to exclude newsrooms, college campuses, Manhattan and Los Angeles).
Call me crazy, but I suspect there may be more than eight people in Ann Coulter's America who have misgivings about attacking Iraq. In fact, I'm willing to bet I can find more than eight such people all by myself. I'll open the bidding with Jim Henley. For the rest, I look to you, my readers. If you meet the following criteria, please say so in the comments:
- You oppose attacking Iraq.
- You do not live in Manhattan or Los Angeles.
- You are not a college student.
- You are neither an employee of a newspaper nor do you work for a news broadcaster.
Let's see if we can find at least nine such people. I'm sure Ann will appreciate the clarification.
I've received feedback that this site doesn't render well under the Opera browser, apprently due to a known problem with CSS. I'm going to dig through the MT support forum to see if there are any tips, but if you happen to be in possession of the key to fixing this, I'd greatly appreciate a heads-up.
I'm also told that Netscape 6.2 and my SiteMeter code don't like each other. Moving the SiteMeter code to the bottom of the page is supposed to fix this. That's been done - any improvement?
I certainly want to be readable, so if your browser doesn't like this page, please drop me a note at the address above or leave me a comment and let me know. Thanks!
Two Houston City Council members who voted against Mayor Brown's reparations resolution are feeling the heat, according to John Williams in today's Chron. One of them is my Council member, Gabriel Vasquez, whom I lauded for doing so.
Last week, Tiffany and I attended a briefing on some scheduled construction on the main road through our neighborhood. It's going to be really disruptive and will take about 18 months. Our neighborhood association has had a couple of these meetings, in which city and state transportation officials presented an overview of the project and answered many questions. Gabriel Vasquez was at both meetings. This last one started at 6 PM and ran until at least 7:30. Vasquez looked like he came straight from the office, with a couple of staff members in tow. He ran the meeting and promised another one when the contractor had been hired. He was accessible and forthright.
That's what I want out of a Council member. I have no respect for anyone who thinks a meaningless vote about a non-binding piece of feel-good politics is more important than that.
One year ago this week, Jeff Skilling resigned as Enron CEO, and Sherron Watkins sat down to write a memo that would make her a household name. Time flies.
The never-ending debate over which side of the political spectrum is more likely to engage in ad hominem name-calling is raging anew. Reynolds started one such conflagration in the comments on this post, while Will Vehrs points to an entry of Bill Quick's. I'm sure there's more of this going on, but I have no desire to look at this sort of thing any more than I have to.
This argument will never end. It will never end because each side sees their own and the other through a filter. That filter is common cause - Us versus Them, if you will. When someone says that the Other Guys use invective and insult more than My Guys do, they're stating a tautological belief that My Guys are better, more honorable, nicer, dress better, tip better, dance better, and make better parents, than Their Guys.
Many moons ago, I was on a mailing list that contained a couple of obstreporous members. These two people - I'll call them T and G - often got into catfights about which of them was the more obnoxious. Whenever this happened, T would inevitably start whining that the rest of us always sided with G because we'd known G for a lot longer (many of us had gone to school with G). T regularly claimed that we let G get away with behaviors that we'd have excoriated T for.
Fact is, T was right. We did let G slide on a lot of things that we yelled at T for, and it was because we had a much longer history of friendship and beer-drinking with G. We'd always known that G could be a king-sized butthead, and that G's argument style was basically "admit nothing, deny everything, and make counter-accusations". When called on it, our response was generally "well, yeah, but that's just G. G has always been like that."
What T never understood was that this was a perfectly fair way for us to judge them. We had common cause with G by virtue of our long acquaintance. We'd been to G's house, we'd been to G's wedding. G had built up a sizable store of good will that T didn't have and was never going to have. To this day, while many of us will agree that G said a lot of obnoxious things on that mailing list, we have a lot more dislike and contempt for T. (It should be noted that even people who were never on this list but met T in real life thought that T was a jerk. Not that this lessens G's culpability, but our good will for G wasn't the only reason we were harsh on T.)
It's the same thing here. People have more good will for those who sit on the same side of the political aisle as they. They shrug off or minimize when their fellow travellers commit the kind of sins that they deplore in the opposition. It's just human nature to do so. I do it all the time.
As someone once said, there are two things that are universal: Hydrogen and stupidity. There's no exemption for fellow believers in a political philosophy. I expect this will have the same extinguishing effect on this argument as a bucket brigade has on a Colorado wildfire, but I think it's worth noting anyway.
(Footnote: As far as I know, neither G nor T has a blog. They cannot be found in my blogroll or anywhere else in my blog. I've never mentioned either of them in this space before.)
Michael Croft has submitted an excellent list of questions for Cary Sherman, President of the RIAA, who has agreed to be gang-interviewed by participants in Eric Olsen's BlogCritics project. I highly recommend you read Michael's list and ask yourself what you think the RIAA's answers will be.
The question that drew my attention was this one, #13 on the list:
How does the RIAA respond to allegations on foxnews and elsewhere that their member labels must be using deceptive accounting practices when they claim that records that sell 2 million copies have not ever broken even or turned a profit?
Any time I hear the phrase "deceptive accounting practices", I think of Major League Baseball, where it has been raised to somewhat of an art form. Regular Readers know how loudly I've beaten this particular drum, but especially with the specter of a strike looming, I can't say often enough how vital it is to understand what's really going on.
The best source of information I've seen on MLB's books has been a series of articles by Doug Pappas in the Baseball Prospectus. You can find an index of these articles here, in the last article of the series. Take a close look at article number 5, which talks about some of the ways that baseball teams have been known to inflate their expenses. Article number 2, which talks about national and local media revenues, contains this illuminating quote:
Four major-league clubs are owned by large national-media companies: the Angels (Disney), Braves (AOL Time Warner), Cubs (Tribune Company), and Dodgers (News Corporation/Fox). This is a red flag for analysts, because the common ownership of a baseball franchise and a related enterprise can allow the parent company arbitrarily to apportion revenues and expenses between the companies.In particular, an entity that owns both a baseball team and its local television outlet may well charge the TV station less than fair market value for the club's media rights. This strategy not only allows the club to cry poverty during baseball labor talks, but artificially inflates the station's profits, a figure closely watched by stock analysts. All four of these clubs report suspiciously low media contracts, but in only two of these cases do the suspicions appear justified.
I also recommend Forbes Magazine's annual survey of MLB's finances (registraton required), an article that Commissioner Beelzebud Selig has termed "pure fiction" and "the type of journalism one expects from a supermarket tabloid."
So, my somewhat longwinded point here is that there's any number of ways that the RIAA and the labels can cook the books. Paul Beeston, formerly of the Commissioner's office and now with the Toronto Blue Jays, once famously said that he could, using GAAP, turn a $2 million profit into a $4 million loss. You can be sure that if MLB knows how to do that, the RIAA does, too.
In other news regarding Houston development, this article attempts to quantify the economic impact of the Texans NFL franchise on Houston. It's a good picture of what money is really new to Houston and what is just being transferred from one pocket to another. While the economists quoted are a lot more conservative in their estimate of the benefit to Houston than the average Chamber of Commerce type, it should be noted that research exists which says that the real overall impact is actually a slight negative. I voted for all of the new stadium construction in Houston and I'd do it again, but after reading articles like that, the only arguments I'll make for them will be ones about utility, not growth.
Nice article in today's Chron about the success of Asian immigrants in Houston. While there is an established Asian enclave on the south end of downtown, the booming area for new arrivals and their second-generation children is out west and southwest, starting in the Sharpstown area and heading out into the suburbs.
A little more than 20 years ago, this vast ethnic retail strip along Bellaire [Boulevard] was barren prairie with a building here and there. It is now the largest Asian business district in the South, and poised to get much bigger.Stretching for miles, New Chinatown is unlike any other American Chinatown.
San Francisco's is an Old World scene with laundry strewn across windows, and in New York's crowded district, merchants hawk trinkets to tourists.
New Chinatown, meanwhile, is pure Houston, a string of strip centers with air-conditioned stores, built on the most basic of Houston formulas: Develop affordable land in driving range of your target suburban customer and keep expanding.
An ethnic retail community, the size of New Chinatown shatters the suburban stereotype and makes Asian immigrants feel at home as they assimilate into the mainstream.
One of the first developments in New Chinatown is the site of a little hole-in-the-wall restaurant that's been a favorite in my crowd for years now:
New Chinatown was born in 1983 when Hong Kong native T.D. Wong and his nephew Kenneth Li developed a shopping center at Bellaire and Ranchester, in partnership with Chinese investor Chun Yao. They named it Diho Plaza.They chose the spot for retail, Li said, because Bellaire was a major thoroughfare that went all the way to the Medical Center and it was near U.S. 59 and surrounded by residential development.
Li's uncle, with another partner, had already developed a Diho center in Monterrey Park in Los Angeles and believed a similar plan might work in Houston. Wong and Li approached Los Angeles entrepreneurs.
"We told them, `It's a new world,' " Li said. " `It's good for the young and the brave.' "
Recruiting from the Diho shopping center in Los Angeles, Yao, Wong and Li duplicated three of the businesses in Houston: the grocery store Diho Market, Lai Lai Dumpling House and World Bookstore.
If you live in Houston and you've never been to Lai Lai's, you need to go. If you don't live in Houston but may visit some day, you need to make someone bring you there. It's not fancy, it's not haute cuisine or nouveau cuisine or anything else pretentious and expensive enough to be called cuisine, it's just a little family run place that serves lots of good food cheap. My friend and coworker Andrea and I just took a group of coworkers there, where we joined Ginger for lunch. The tab for eight people, all of whom came away full and happy, was just over $30 before tip. We always bring a large crowd to Lai Lai's, and they always treat us like prodigal children returning home.
(Damn. Now I'm hungry...)
Three computer scientists at the Indian Institute of Technology have discovered an algorithm for determining if a number is prime which is both deterministic and relatively fast.
This is a very cool result, one that is likely to help cryptographers in the future as much of cryptography such as public key encryption is based on large prime numbers. The story mentions the "sieve of Eratosthenes", which was a method for finding prime numbers that was determined in ancient Greece. The sieve works like this: Write down all the numbers from one to however high you want to go. Circle the number 2, which is known to be prime, and then cross out every multiple of two. Once you've done that, the first number that isn't crossed out (in this case, 3) is prime. Circle it, then cross out every multiple of it. Continue on in this fashion, and when you're done you will have circled all of the prime numbers from the range you wrote down.
This method is deterministic, in that it will find all of the primes and nothing but primes, but it's really slow. The length of time it takes for a computer to run this algorithm grows exponentially with the size of the largest number. For really large primes, the kind that are needed for public key encryption, the fastest computer in the world would need all the time since the Earth was created and then some to run the sieve algorithm.
The new method is also deterministic but works in polynomial time, which is orders of magnitude faster. With a little refinement, it will be a boon to cryptographers everywhere.
You can read their press release here and download the algorithm itself (it's a nine-page PDF file) here.
First Ted, and now Rob. Whatever you guys sprinkled on your Cheerios this morning, I think I want some.
You should have kept the karaoke machine, Larry. I feel a song soming on...
UPDATE: I can't believe I forgot to mention that Ginger had also gotten into the act today. Sorry, Ginger!
Now that I've discovered it, I have the ten-car-pileup kind of fascination for the Chron's Crawford weblog. So much about why our daily fishwrap is the way it is can be gleaned from her permalinkless dispatches.
Let's start with today's, in which Our Cub In Crawford answers reader mail about why she's there and why she's blogging about it:
I am in Crawford essentially in case of news. Many of the major news organizations in the country believe that it is crucial to always have someone with the president, especially in these turbulent times. That way if another Sept. 11 happens, the president is hurt or the United States bombs Iraq, we are here to cover the cataclysmic events. None of those things are likely to come with advance warning, and so we must endure the boring times, just in case. Trips to Crawford have added importance to the Chronicle because it is in our home state.
"In case of news". Excuse me while I fall on the floor and laugh hysterically. Do you think it's ever occurred to Rachel Graves that reporters sometimes ask questions of people who are in a position to know things that maybe the public might also like to know, or do you think she was given a Stern Admonishment not to pester Mr. Bush and his busy staffers with her bothersome inquiries? How exactly do you threaten someone who's been consigned to a month in West Texas in August? "You behave yourself, young lady, or we'll ship you right back to civilization!"
Which brings me to the point of this weblog. Usually we leave the boring parts out, synthesizing down for the readers what is most interesting and/or most important. This is sort of an experiment for us, showing you what goes into what you read in the paper. We thought trying it from Crawford and sharing the rural flavor that characterizes the president's Central Texas vacations might be more entertaining than giving you the day-to-day rundown of life in the newsroom.I know from my friends and family that many people are curious about what it is like to cover the president, and so we thought we would try to explain it. But, like I said, this is new for us, and we are interested in whether you think it is informative and interesting or not.
Well, she's sure done a fine job of not taking the boring parts out. How do you synthesize down nothing?
Maybe I'm being too harsh on Rachel Graves. Maybe there's such a fanatical level of control in Team Bush, such a harsh code of omerta for loose lips that there really isn't anything to do but cogitate about chicken fried steak and the meaning of life. Of course, smartass that I am, I'd suggest that perhaps that's a topic for exploration. At least someone there understands this, as witnessed by this pool report:
"Karen Hughes dropped back to chat with her pals in the press pool, and much frivolity ensued. Oh, how your pool laughed and laughed!" reads a report from Tuesday. "She went on with other platitudes, which your pooler dozed through."
But alas, Ms. Graves appears to have learned at the feet of Thom Marshall, the Chron's Seinfeldian sultan of nothingness. Tune in tomorrow and see if her quest to find someone, anyone, in Crawford who did not vote for Bush ever yields fruit.
What do you get when you cross grass-roots political activism with Green Stamps? Why, you get the GOP Team Leader program, of course.
Team Leaders get the inside scoop on what's going on at the Republican Party. Each week you will receive an update, The Team Leader, about the latest stories, bills, and actions around the country.In addition to being given a "political edge" over the competition, you earn GOPoints for each Action Item completed. Action Items range from writing a letter to your editor to calling local voters and gauging public opinion. The GOPoints you earn can, in turn, be redeemed for collateral of your choice, ranging from coolers to mouse pads.
There is no limit to what you can accomplish, or what you can earn.
A photo of sample GOP Team Leader Official Booty can be found on the benefits page. Who'd have thought that a GOP group would take its direction from a PBS pledge drive?
Via Ruminate This.
Ted Barlow and Charles Dodgson point to this story about how record label J Records is attempting to manufacture a new pop music sensation, a 23-year-old named Amanda Latona. Having read the article and Ted and Charles' commentaries, I have to ask: Did anyone else think about the Brady Bunch episode in which Greg is discovered by a talent agent who wants to make him into a pop star? Of course, they totally mangle his music to fit their needs, so much so that Greg can't recognize his own singing. He's greatly upset by this, and it becomes worse when he realizes that his artistic vision is completely irrelevant to them. When Greg figures out that he's just a disposable commodity to the label and producer, he asks why they chose him. "Because you fit the suit", they said, referring to the outfit that he's to wear for the album cover photo. His dream of stardom crushed by reality, Greg rips up his contract and goes home.
"The Brady Bunch". It's not just a fluffy piece of kitsch, it's a better predictor of future trends than a carload of Toefflers. Except for the artistic integrity part, of course.
Michael forwards me this story about PitchTrax, the new technology by QuesTec that follows the trajectory of a thrown baseball. The screenshot shows the sorts of things that it can do, and ESPN and Fox have been all over it.
One of the things that it may some day do, of course, is replace the home plate umpire for calling balls and strikes. As Gary Huckabay notes, this technology is way better than anything a human can do:
Think about exactly what we ask of a home-plate umpire. They must stand behind a man prone to sudden movements, behind and perpendicular to another man who may swing a large club. For their own protection, they wear a mask that slightly impairs their field of vision. Then, they must determine whether a small sphere traveling at 90 mph and intentionally hurled to maximize movement along one or more axes passes through a small three-dimensional space. That three-dimensional space, by the way, changes approximately 80 times throughout the course of a normal day's work.Sound difficult? It's not. It's impossible--at least to do it at a level acceptable for a game so dependent on the ability of a human to do this job.
I spent a summer umpiring youth baseball back when I was in high school. Even at that level, it's awfully tough. To this day, I remember a game where a pitcher had a 2-2 count on a batter with two outs and men on base. He threw a beautiful pitch for strike three to end the inning. Unfortunately, I called it a ball. I meant to call it a strike, but the word "Ball" came out of my mouth. I can still see the look on the pitcher's face when I made the call. Naturally, it was huge - the batter reached base, and his team scored several runs in an inning that should have ended with no runs scoring. The fact that I still think about it 18 years later should give you some idea about how I felt about it at the time.
(And no, I couldn't just say "Oops, sorry, my bad, I meant to say Strike Three". You learn in umpire school that you stand behind every call you make. To do otherwise undermines your authority. Make your call, make it with confidence, and move on. It's not perfect, but the other choices are worse.)
Human error, of course, is a part of the game. It's even celebrated as such, though that's not much consolation to players and fans that get jerked by lousy officiating. Baseball can be pretty well Superglued to its traditions sometimes, so I don't see any change occurring any time soon. However, if local affiliates start acquiring and using PitchTrax, so that fans can see many times over the course of a season just how inexact the science of calling balls and strikes is for humans, then there will be pressure on baseball to Do Something, just as the NFL and now the NBA have been pressured into adopting some form of instant replay. I won't hold my breath waiting, but ten years from now, who knows?
By the way, QuesTec is working on even more nifty toys for us baseball fans. Man, I love the 21st Century.
Eric and Lisa make some good points in the comments to my post about Steve Olafson, the Chron reporter who was fired for running a weblog on the side. While I remain sympathetic to Olafson and think the Chron was wrong, I can see it from their perspective. And hey, I don't know the full story. Maybe they can prove he used their resources or committed some other violation of the employee handbook. That sort of thing is usually a ticky-tack reason for canning someone, but it can be a back-breaking straw.
What really takes the cake on this, and sums up Houston's Only Information Source (motto: As If You've Got A Choice) better than I ever could, is that right now, as we speak, the Chron has a reporter down in Crawford doing a "working vacation" with President Bush, and telling the world about it in (wait for it) a weblog. Go read it and see for yourself what kind of weblog the Chron thinks is worth their readers' time.
Amazing, eh? To think they could've sent Cragg Hines, or John Williams, or hell, Leon Hale or Ken Hoffman. But no, they send some cub off to write a daily postcard about things like chicken fried steak and Dr Pepper. That's our Chron.
Thanks to Erica for pointing this out in Ginger's comments.
From the NYT:
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Marquis de Lafayette, who fought alongside George Washington and secured the aid of France during the Revolutionary War, on Tuesday became the sixth person to be conferred with honorary U.S. citizenship.
Boy. I knew that INS paperwork takes forever, but I never knew it was that bad.
Via Mac.
Ginger has discovered what happened to the Chron reporter who ran a blog on the side until said blog was discovered and reported to his boss: He's been fired.
It's a damn shame. I can understand the complaints, and I can understand the Chron ordering him to take it down, but firing? That's an overreaction. Actually, it's more than that: It's a demonization of something the Chron should have embraced.
Yesterday I drove downtown for a meeting, and had to walk past the Houston Press office on my way from the parking lot. As I did I thought of the original story and how I was going to write a letter to Chron editor Jeff Cohen in support of Steve Olafson. I'm sorry to say that I never did do that. I will rectify that error this week.
Nelson Doubleday, co-owner of the New York Mets, has accused Beelzebud Selig of conspiring to "manufacture phantom operating losses".
Doubleday is attempting to sell his half of the Mets to Fred Wilpon under an agreement they signed in 1986 when they bought the team. An auditor named Robert Starkey, who used to be with Arthur Andersen and is now a consultant to MLB, was brought in by Selig to assign a price to Doubleday's portion of the team. Doubleday is suing Wilpon to accept Starkey's price, but Wilpon is asserting that Starkey, at the behest of Selig, deliberately set it too low.
After Starkey put a $391 million value on the team in April, Doubleday balked at going through with a sale and Wilpon sued him last month."Unbeknownst to Doubleday, MLB was at the same time engaged in a systematic effort to undervalue baseball franchises as part of its labor-relations strategy," Doubleday's lawyers said Tuesday in an answer filed to Wilpon's suit. "In short, MLB — in a desperate attempt to reverse decades of losses to MLB's players' association — determined to manufacture phantom operating losses and depress franchise values."
One can only put so much faith in what a plaintiff's lawyer says as the lawsuit is being filed, but if this can be proven, it would be huge. Given baseball's paranoia about its books, I can't believe they'll actually let a real discovery process happen. Watch for this to be settled in one of those "both sides claim victory" kind of ways.
Finally, Dan Lewis notes that Doubleday has a good case when he says that auditor Sharkey understated the Mets' appraised value.
I see that the President has a full schedule for his time off:
Jackson [Mississippi] is among the 15 cities Bush intends to visit during his monthlong working vacation at his 1,600-acre ranch.
There are so many things wrong with that sentence it's hard to know where to begin. I don't know about you, but I'm either at work or on vacation. A "working vacation" to me is an oxymoron. If it's not really a vacation, then either Bush is telecommuting or he's on a business trip. And when you consider all the things Dubya is leaving behind at the office, I have to ask why we're not calling this what it really is: Hitting the campaign trail. There's no way in hell that I'm going to call a monthlong trip to 15 cities to raise money for GOP candidates a "vacation", working or otherwise.
Tonight was National Night Out, an event created in the 80s as a means of fighting crime by getting neighbors to know each other as well as their local patrol officers. Our neighborhood loves a party, so NNO is always observed around here. We've hosted NNO at our house for the past couple of years, and since we're in a new house this year we were especially looking forward to it.
We have some neighbors who've been here for a long time. One lady three houses down has lived here since 1946; the woman next door to her since 1966. The folks to our left bought their house in the mid sixties after having lived a few blocks away for 11 years. On the other hand there are a number of younger couples, several of whom have just bought in. Some have kids, one other is expecting their first in October. Many of them were new to us.
It's not easy doing an outdoor event in Houston in August. I figure NNO must've been dreamed up by a Northerner, where houses are un-air conditioned and the front porch is the coolest place to be. Still, we had about 25 people drop by for some homemade ice cream and conversation, and a good if somewhat sweaty time was had by all.
One story we heard tonight was how a couple of years ago some kids got the idea that NNO would be a good time to break into houses, since many residents were out visiting. Unfortunately for them, a big part of NNO is making sure the residents get to mingle with the local constabulary, who spend much of the evening cruising through the area. They were caught red-handed.
I'm often amazed at how Houston can be just a big ol' small town. The house across the street from us was recently bought by a couple about our age. The husband is the son of one of Tiffany's mom's best friends. The wife went to high school with my cousin. Sometimes, living here is like Mayberry with traffic jams.
NNO is also the kickoff of the fall social season around here, with Halloween (our neighborhood is a huge magnet for Trick-of-Treaters) and Lights in the Heights to follow. Only three more months before I have to start hauling Christmas decorations down from the attic...
UPDATE: Here's the Chron's writeup.
The DVD version of Fox's excellent "24" has an alternate ending included. I'm going to put the story under the More link as it's a big spoiler. And if you failed to watch "24", the best show on the air last year, you can still catch up - FX will be running a marathon later this summer.
In the DVD version of "24", there's an alternate ending in which Teri Bauer lives.
The wife of government agent Jack Bauer died in the season finale of the Fox series, which depicted a single story in real time over 24 episodes. She'll remain dead when the series returns next season.But the Sept. 17 DVD release of the first season of 24 will include an alternate ending in which Bauer's wife survived, said co-creator and executive producer Joel Surnow.
I've gotta have it. And I can't believe I'll have to wait until October 29 for the season 2 premier.
I've been noticing a few new sites in my referral log lately: The Road To Surfdom, A Level Gaze, The Green[e]house Effect, Arseblog, and Ruminate This. I don't know how some of you found me - was it perhaps The Lefty Directory? - but however you did, I'm glad you're here and I'm flattered that you blogrolled me.
I've been pondering some site policies, including a link policy. So far, I've generally reciprocated on blogroll links (at least, the ones I'm aware of). For the most part, the linkers are bloggers I'd be reading anyway. Now that my blogroll has 80 entries in it, I'm going to have to give this some thought. Maybe I've got an overload of liberal guilt, but I've always been slightly put off by blogrolls that are divided into categories like People I Read and People Who've Linked To Me. Is anyone else bothered by this, or should I just get a grip?
Whatever I decide, I've been meaning to reorganize my blogroll anyway. I just wanted to say that I appreciate the links.
On a strange side note, I've been seeing the White House Spanish language page in my referrer log for several days now. Can anyone offer an explanation for this? I know that in Netscape 4, if you type in a URL it will report the URL you just left to referral logs. Had I seen this page once, that's what I'd have assumed it was. Since I've seen it now at least a dozen times, there must be something else going on. Any suggestions on this are welcome in the comments.
Well, the Houston Texans made their debut last night, losing 34-17 to the Giants in a preseason game. I must confess that I didn't watch. I love football, and I'll root for the Texans, but I just can't bring myself to give a rat's heinie about an exhibition game. I'm hard pressed to think of an activity with a higher ratio of hype to meaning than preseason football.
How long do you think it will be before fawning accolades become impatient brickbats? My money is on November.
Lubbock is attempting to deal with a problem of noncompliance with nitrate levels in treated wastewater by getting rid of thousands of prairie dogs who live in the field where the wastewater is sprayed.
The causes reach back over decades. For more than 70 years Lubbock has been spraying "gray" water (wastewater that has been through primary treatment) on 6,000 acres east of the city. The wastewater, rich in nitrates, has produced bumper crops of corn, cotton and, most recently, rye grass, now being grazed by a herd of heifers and a growing colony of prairie dogs.Over the years those nitrates also have accumulated in the soil and percolated down to the Ogallala Aquifer, adding to the pollution that already exists in West Texas' primary water source. That pollution accumulated to the point that in 1989 the TNRCC ordered the city to improve the groundwater quality below the fields.
The fields are watered by a process called "center point irrigation," in which massive, wheeled sprayers move around a circle from the middle of the field, leaving only the corners untouched by their spray. Those corners have always been home to a few prairie dogs, said site manager John Hindman, but in recent years their numbers have grown.
"We used to rotate the crops and we plowed every year," said Hindman. "Then, around 1992, we planted rye grass."
Rye grass, an Italian import, is said to absorb large amounts of nitrates. Its dark green stems now cover about 3,000 of the city's 6,000 sewage treatment acres. It is a protein-rich fodder for cattle, but prairie dogs thrive on it as well.
"I don't know why, but about four years ago the prairie dogs started to increase," said Hindman. "Now they're taking over. They're completely covering the corners and working their way out into the middle."
No one knows how many prairie dogs occupy the site, but Texas Parks and Wildlife has estimated 40,000 to 50,000. Nor does anyone know exactly how many holes they've dug.
It was the holes, however, that drew the attention of the TNRCC. On June 3 Pat Cooke, a TNRCC field investigator, found that nitrate contents in monitoring wells at the site had spiked. He issued a now infamous noncompliance notice to the city, directing it to come up with a plan to lower the pollution by Aug. 6.
In it, he cited prairie dogs and made the somewhat broad speculation that: "explosive growth of the prairie dog population could lead to crop failure due to overgrazing, which, in turn, could allow effluent constituents to migrate further into the soil and possibly the groundwater."
He then directed the city to come up with a plan to control the prairie dog population.
It's a pretty sad state of affairs for a town that boasts a tourist attraction called Prairie Dog Town.
The usual suspects are up in arms, with some of them noting that it's nothing but one man's say-so that the prairie dogs are the cause of the problem. There is, of course, the question of what to do with several thousand displaced prairie dogs. Linda Watson, who has been busy trapping them since the noncompliance memo was released, relocates some of them, including across the ocean:
"There're not that many places you can put them, of course," said Watson. "Parks and Wildlife has been taking some to a state park near San Angelo. There are some philanthropists and, then, there are the Japanese."Prairie dogs have become a popular pet in Japan in recent years and Watson has built a following there.
"They're great pets for the Japanese," said Watson. "They're absolutely nonagressive. They only bite in the wild and then only when you grab them. They're smart, they're born housebroken and they don't take much room. I hear the Japanese are even registering them now."
God bless the Japanese.
Larry, naturally, also noticed this.
My mother-in-law Sharon is one of the world's greatest shoppers. Drop her blindfolded into an alien department store, and she'll not only find a bargain, she'll get the salesperson to sweeten the deal. If there is a genetic disposition for this sort of thing, she's got it in spades.
So I was greatly amused to hear that she had gone along with my father-in-law Tim on a trip to Fry's Electronics. Fry's, if you're not familiar, is a superstore for geeks. Sharon is not technically inclined. A few years ago, when Tim got the computers in his law office hooked up to modems, I showed Sharon (who is also Tim's legal secretary) how she could find various state documents and forms online. I told her how wonderful this would be, since she could now get this kind of work done without having to spend hours on the phone with state bureaucrats. She looked at me earnestly and said "But I like to talk on the phone."
What would happen, I wondered, when the world's greatest shopper found herself in a giant discount retail outlet that specialized in things she knew nothing about? I imagined a conversation like this:
TIM: But we don't need a four-port wireless router.
SHARON: At these prices we do!
I should have had more faith. Sharon came home triumphantly with several Vornado fans, all slightly irregular and 75% off retail. One of them now sits in our computer room at home, quietly humming away. Tiffany reports that her mother was fascinated by Fry's. I may have to go along on the next trip. It's always enlightening to watch a master in action.
Congrats to Jack Cluth for his successful move of The People's Republic of Seabrook to a new home on the web. Be sure to drop in and give him a good word, and don't forget to update your blogrolls.
Beelzebud Selig is at it again, calling the Minnesota Twins' success "an aberration". Jeezus. They were good last year, they're better this year, and they have the potential to be just as good next year. They have good young talent and a reasonably deep farm system. What's so hard to comprehend about that?
Even worse, Selig attempts to rewrite history:
The Twins and Montreal remain the two teams in the league with the least potential for growth, Selig said. "There's no secret. They're number one and number two,'' he said.
In 1988, one year after winning the World Series, a Twins team that went 91-71 drew over 3 million fans. Last year, their first winning season since 1992, the Twins drew 1.7 million fans, which placed them near the bottom of the league. Attendance is up slightly this year. Imagine how they might be doing if the fans had a reason to believe that the Commissioner of Major League Baseball did not want to see their franchise fail and die. There's plenty of room for growth here, if only the powers that be would remove their hands from the Twins' collective throats.
Via TPRS.
UPDATE: Aaron's Baseball Blog also gives Beelzebud the business.
Frank Deford, who used to be a good writer, makes the inevitable case for Pete Rose to be placed in baseball's Hall of Fame. In doing so, he makes the usual arguments about how the guy with the most career hits isn't in the Hall of Fame, then goes on to reach a really amazing conclusion:
Rose sets up shop every August right down from the Hallowed Hall and sells his autograph at handsome prices. I have watched as the line for Pete's John Hancock wound around, out into the parking lot, while, across the way, all sorts of great Hall of Famers sat pretty much alone, at tables, looking forlorn, like neighborhood kids trying to peddle lemonade to uninterested commuters. Now there is even a permanent Cooperstown store that pays tribute to the Official Pariah of Baseball, Pete Rose Ballpark Collectibles, on Main Street. He is also the star of a whole Pony sporting-goods campaign: "Why isn't Pete Rose in the Hall of Fame?" Billboards. Ads. Rose even went on The Today Show to talk about it.Doesn't baseball understand? The best thing that ever happened to Pete was to be denied a passport to Cooperstown. If ever he goes in, he goes away. Then he's just another George Kell, another Rod Carew, another Golden Oldie, another bump Down Memory Lane. Yesterday's newspaper.
So in other words, the best way to punish Pete Rose is to give him exactly what he wants. I sure hope Deford never writes a text about parenting.
Like everybody who argues that Pete Rose belongs in Cooperstown, Deford ignores the reason why Rose is persona non grata. He ignores it because if you really face it, you realize that you just can't explain or wish it away. So what he does is try to dismiss it as a nonissue:
Of course Pete Rose is guilty of betting on baseball. He's as guilty as, well, Paul Hornung, who bet on NFL games while playing in the NFL but is properly plaqued in Canton. He's as guilty as all sorts of putative baseball immortals who stoke up on steroids. But Rose was guilty only when he was a manager. Even if he bet on baseball, even if he disobeyed the infield fly rule or shot Cock Robin, there is not a scintilla of evidence that he did anything untoward when he was playing the game.
The facts of the case are pretty simple, and readily accessible even to Frank Deford. There's a nice FAQ of the case by Sean Lanham that spells it all out. The evidence strongly indicates that Pete Rose bet on baseball games, including Reds games while he was their manager. Rose has never offered a plausible alternate explanation for this evidence, though he denies the allegation. He never bet on the Reds to lose, but I daresay there's quite a few people who would call the fact that he was betting at all "untoward".
There's a damn good reason why baseball is so fanatical about gambling. You may have heard of it, it has to do with the 1919 World Series. Baseball's strictures about gambling are much more strict than the NFL's, which is why a gambler like Paul Hornung is in the NFL Hall of Fame and Pete Rose is not in MLB's. Baseball has One Big Rule: Thou Shalt Not Gamble. Pete Rose broke that rule. Why am I supposed to feel sorry for him?
In the end, Pete Rose signed an agreement in which he agreed to his punishment. Here it is in black and white from the agreement Rose signed:
Peter Edward Rose acknowledges that the Commissioner has a factual basis to impose the penalty provided herein, and hereby accepts the penalty imposed on him by the Commissioner and agrees not to challenge that penalty in court or otherwise. He also agrees he will not institute any legal proceedings of any nature against the Commissioner of any of his representatives, either Major League or any Major League Club.
Pete Rose not only agreed to his punishment, he agreed that then-Commissioner Bart Giamatti was right to impose it. He agreed not to sue to have this punishment overturned by a court.
Which is why he's been the gadfly pain-in-the-ass to baseball ever since. The only avenue he has is to convince dupes like Frank Deford that he got screwed. Maybe if the Frank Defords of the world knew and understood the facts of the case, they wouldn't abet Rose in his quest.
Local anti-smut crusader Geneva Kirk Brooks died yesterday after a bout with lymphoma. Normally, when I link to an obituary, it's because I liked or was impressed by the deceased. That's not the case here, though I will say in Ms. Brooks' defense that she was one of the more entertaining professional puritans around.
For example, about ten years ago she got a bee in her bonnet about Hippie Hollow, the nudist park on Lake Travis in Austin. She put pressure on then-Governor Ann Richards to ban nude sunbathing there, claiming that some of the nudists were visible from a nearby church parking lot. As you can see from these photos, Lake Travis is essentially a canyon, surrounded by trees. When asked how exactly it was that she could see anyone at all on Lake Travis from her perch in the church's parking lot, Brooks said "Well, I was using binoculars." Governor Richards declined to take action.
So, if there is a heaven and Geneva Kirk Brooks gets there, I can only hope for her sake that all the cherubs are decently dressed.
Jim Henley asked why there is no "lefty" equivalent to Glenn Reynolds, which led to a number of interesting followups (see here, here, here, here, here, and here). I've been thinking about this, and (at long last) I have a few thoughts on the subject myself.
First, I don't think there's ever going to be another Instapundit, at least not in the same way. Instapundit was and is a one-of-a-kind phenomenon. He came on the scene when Slate had a section called "Mezine Central", featuring the likes of Josh Marshall, Mickey Kaus, Andrew Sullivan, and Virginia Postrel. While Postrel occasionally links to other people (indeed, it was a link from Postrel to Ginger that directly led to me getting a blog; I guess this makes Postrel my blog-grandmother), the others hardly ever do, except to each other.
When Reynolds, who got a lot of link-love from Postrel, started showing up in the Mezine section, it was clear that he was different. He wasn't a professional writer, he pumped out an enormous volume of posts, and he freely linked to many people. We all know about the Instapundit Phenomenon: He inspired all kinds of people to start their own blogs, he was the go-to guy when dead-tree media did a story about This Newfangled Blogging Thing, and he's just about everybody's first blogroll link. In short, he was blogdom's first real star.
My point is that while others may get Instapundit's traffic or blog links, the reason no one else will ever truly be another Instapundit is that like Babe Ruth, he's forever changed the game. The conditions which gave rise to Instapundit are long gone. Blogging isn't some new fad any more. There aren't just a handful of people doing it. The next big star of the blogosphere will be someone who achieves that fame in a different fashion. Don't ask me who or how, but the next Instapundit will not be like the current one.
For that reason, it's folly to talk of a "liberal Instapundit". Josh Marshall or Eric Alterman may someday start posting and linking like Glenn Reynolds does, but it won't be the same.
What I've observed here on the left-hand side of the equation is that we do a pretty good job amongst ourselves of discovering and promoting new talent. When a smart new voice* makes the scene, it doesn't take long for them to show up on a lot of blogrolls. The method is the same - one or more bloggers points them out, the rest of us check them out and link accordingly. What's different is that any number of lefty bloggers may be the first one to give the new kid a boost. It's an egalitarian thing, which is surely something a bunch of liberals can appreciate.
So while a liberal with the hit count, crossover appeal, and link generosity of Instapundit would surely be a Good Thing, I think we're doing all right anyway. And while it's not quite the same thing, we now have Brian's Lefty Directory as well. Who knows, maybe the Next Big Thing is already there.
* Such as Kevin Raybould, Jeff Cooper, Ann Salisbury, Eric Hallstrom, Chad Orzel, and Jeanne D'Arc. So what are you waiting for? Go check 'em out.
I don't quite understand the reactions of certain people to Brian Linse's Lefty Directory. It's only a label, folks. Would you have preferred that Brian call it his Blogroll of People Whose Opinions Are Reasonably Similar To His Own?
I see Brian's list as a resource for people who may not know about some of their fellow travellers. I've gotten some referrals from it, and I think that's great.
How would I feel if some other blogger listed me on a roll of Righty Bloggers? Assuming it was intended, as Brian's list clearly was, as a compliment, I'd take it in the spirit in which it was given, and I'd let my words speak for themselves. Just because I call myself a liberal doesn't mean you have to call me one. I repeat: It's just a label. Draw your own conclusions about who and what I am. Don't let a keyword do your thinking for you.
As for Ken Layne's assertion that "lefties generally can't write" and are "rarely funny", all I can do is wonder which of those blogs he's been reading. I honestly don't know how anyone could read Ginger or Ted or Patrick or Avedon or any of a number of these people - how about your good buddy, Ken? - and say such a thing. Unless Layne himself was trying to be funny, of course. But hey, I'm just a humorless lefty, so how can I tell?
Dave Pinto points to this Dan Lewis article in the National Review Online, which reiterates once again why baseball players may go on strike: It's the only leverage they have.
If the owners do not get their way, they can lockout the players, shutting down their industry, and, provided they prove to the National Labor Relations Board that negotiations are at an impasse, they can impose their terms by fiat. It'd be like GM, Ford, et al saying they are going to close up shop until all auto-workers took a 20% pay cut. If one company did this, fine — competitors would snatch away the idle laborers, and the idle company would suffer immensely. (That's probably why lockouts in non-sports industries are incredibly uncommon.) But when all the companies collude — or all the owners, as in baseball — there's nowhere to go. And no harm done to the owners.The players have little choice: sign on the dotted line or don't come back. And ballplayers can't make much green hitting cork and rubber 400 feet in the real world.
The reason why a strike may occur in September is simple: By September, the players have received most of their paychecks, while the owners get a lot of revenue from the postseason. It's the same reason why a lockout would occur in spring training - the players have gone all winter without a paycheck, and there's little gate and TV revenue at stake.
The photo of Harris accompanies this story about Harris' retroactive resignation as Secretary of State in order to run for Congress. As Atrios says, it wasn't retroactive enough.
I'm sure this will be a great comfort to their families:
The militant Islamic group Hamas denied on Thursday it had deliberately targeted U.S. citizens in a deadly bomb blast at a cafeteria frequented by foreign students at Jerusalem's Hebrew University.[...]
"The fighter of Hamas did not ask the students about their identity cards and he can't do so. He does not know if they are Arab or Israelis. But we are not targeting at all American targets," Abdel Azziz al-Rantissi, a senior leader of the Palestinian group, told Reuters.
Thanks for the clarification. I'm sure we all understand how tough it is to be in the suicide bombing business. Bastards.
It was an 8-7 vote, but the Houston City Council rejected a resolution in favor of a House bill "that would establish a commission to examine slavery and recommend remedies, including possible reparations". Thank $DEITY for small favors.
Voting against the resolution were Berry, Tatro, Wiseman, Mark Goldberg, Mark Ellis, Bert Keller, Gabriel Vasquez and Shelley Sekula-Gibbs. Voting for were Brown, Edwards, Parker, Quan, Carol Alvarado, Carol Galloway and Carroll Robinson.
Good on Gabriel Vasquez, my councilman, for understanding what the Council's purpose in life is. Boo to Gordon Quan, who originally opposed this resolution.
Who is Bill Mallow? A prolific inventor, who worked on such diverse items as Liquid Paper, cat litter, M&M's, and anti-terrorist devices:
The polymer chemist spent nearly 40 years with Southwest Research Institute, where he worked on a variety of projects, from tiles for the space shuttle to improving the silicone rubber skin covering on the robotic dinosaurs in the Animal Kingdom at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Fla., and figuring out how to remove the peanut butter from the molds at M&M candy factories.Liquid Paper, the correction fluid, was invented by San Antonio native Bette Nesmith Graham -- mother of Monkees star Michael Nesmith -- but Southwest Research helped refine the product at her request.
The cat litter, known as Scoop Away Clean, allows clumps of urine and solid waste to be removed daily, leaving the rest of the box fresh.
More recently, Mallow, who retired from Southwest Research in 1998 but remained a technical adviser, was working on a gel for the U.S. Marine Corps. The gel, called the Mobility Denial System, can be sprayed on everything from asphalt to windows of buildings.
Anyone who walks on it will fall, and vehicles will slip and slide. The gel, which could be deployed in 2003 or 2004, likely will be used to thwart enemy attacks on embassies and government buildings and for crowd control.
I'm a Yankee fan, so any time the Red Sox do something to challenge my pinstriped heroes, I don't like it. But the Red Sox's theft of Cliff Floyd from Montreal stinks on a number of levels. Let's take a close look at this.
First, as Dave Pinto points out, the Expos were as close to the wild card spot when they got rid of Floyd as they were when they picked him up from Florida. He hadn't hit all that well yet as an Expo, so there's reason to believe that he hadn't really helped them yet. So why trade him, especially for two low-grade prospects?
Joe Sheehan calls it a fraud. He notes that the prospects are marginal and the Expos are supposedly going away after 2002 anyway, so what's the point of playing for the future? He also notes that even the left-for-dead Montreal franchise can draw more fans if they just try to win:
It's as if Selig didn't realize what might happen if he allowed [Expos general manager Omar] Minaya to make the deals. Since the acquisitions of Floyd and Colon, the Expos had broken 10,000 in attendance in 11 of 13 home games, something they'd done just eight times all season before the trades. Oh, hell, let's run a chart:
Average Att. Median Att.
Expos, Not Trying 8,429 6,091
Expos, Trying 14,064 13,402
The trades seemed to prove what we've been saying all along, that fans will come see a team--in any market, in any stadium--that has success, and more importantly, that shows a commitment to winning. On a typical July night, twice as many people came to see the Expos as did before the team made a significant move that signaled that the team was trying to win.It's like Selig said, "OK, you can do this so I can say that Montreal is a dead issue," and when it wasn't a dead issue, made sure that he stopped the momentum.
Finally, Yankee broadcaster Michael Kay connects a few dots:
All together now: The Expos are owned by baseball, the Red Sox are sold to a group that is hand-picked by the Commissioner, the Yankee organization has seemingly emerged as the Darth Vader of the sport and the Red Sox are trailing them in the AL East. The team, owned by baseball, has a chance to help the team whose ownership is hand-picked by baseball, to catch the team that is supposed to represent everything wrong with the game.The sinister Yankees are asked for a king's ransom to acquire Floyd while the Red Sox get him for two questionable prospects. Even the most ardent anti-Yankee fan would see that somewhere in that mess is a scintilla of something improper. As someone who does not worship at the altar of Oliver Stone, I certainly do not subscribe to a big-time consipiracy theory. But the fact that someone, somewhere could piece all this together and doubt the overall purity of what took place is a gigantic black mark on the game.
I'll keep saying it until people believe me: The vast majority of baseball's problems can be laid directly at the feet of its management. Problems caused by the players are dwarfed in comparison.
From today's Chron, some really disturbing allegations about what goes on at the city pound. In the interest of not upsetting those with more delicate constitutions, I'm going to put the quote behind the "More..." link.
Days like this, you just wonder about some people.
Testifying in a whistle-blowing suit by a Houston veterinarian Wednesday, city pound workers admitted some puppies had been accidentally washed down drains as cages were hosed down and that other dogs suffocated after a city truck overheated while it was filled with animals.They denied, however, other accusations by Dr. Sam Levingston, a vet who worked eight years with the city before being fired. He testified that he heard about employees throwing puppies around like baseballs, cats in a burlap bag run over by a city truck and attempted drownings of animals held down by choke sticks in flea dip.