Random Thoughts for Today

I've decided to post some random musings for get-to-know-your-blogger purposes, but this is not a "link round up." There may be links, but usually it will be to clarify the comment for those who don't happen to know to what I am referring. Also, I don't plan on making this a daily thing because sometimes I don't have anything worthwhile to share with you and I don't want to force it.

Yes, for reasons I've explained before, I'm voting today. The Voting Rights Act passed in 1965...when my dad was 37 years old. (Call me sentimental.) Oh, and if someone posts pics of me from later tonight smiling, that's not joy--that's just deep-seated schadenfreude.

Congrats to the Giants on winning the World Series. As the champagne corks popped in San Fran, I'm sure Brian Cashman was on the phone with Cliff Lee's agent expressing his heartfelt condolences as Pink Floyd's "Money" was playing in the background. [insert evil laughter here.]

Say what you will about Donovan McNabb, on no planet and in no parallel universe is benching him for Rex Grossman a reasonable decision. I'm sure many Chicagoans were rushed to emergency rooms after falling off bar stools and laughing uncontrollably after seeing the substitution...and then the hit...and then the fumble...and then the touchdown.


bellum medicamenti delenda est.

Quick Comment on LeBron

For my sports fan readers:

I don't watch the NBA. I grew up watching it, but haven't been invested in a team since Sir Charles retired. I may get into the reasons why at another time, but suffice it to say that I could not have cared less where LeBron James chose to play.

The way he did it, however, was nauseating.

How nauseating? That a lifelong Red Sox fan unfavorably compared LeBron to Roger Clemens. It's hard to explain the depth of disgust that Boston feels for the Rocket, but part one is a pretty good explanation. The whole post is worth the read, but the comments/mailbag is just...well. You should at least skim it for the Cleveland(er? ite?) comments.

Pro tip on image: If whatever you do makes someone like Kobe Bryant look humble by comparison, YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG.

Somebody Somewhere Loves My Sports Teams

I don't know what sports god I pleased, but the Yankees winning the World Series followed up by my two
favorite teams in the Super Bowl has made my sports year. Of course, it would be nice if Notre Dame football and IU Basketball were on top too, but perhaps you didn't catch that last part--


THE NEW ORLEANS SAINTS ARE GOING TO THE SUPER BOWL.

People were always sort of curious as to how a kid from Indiana became a Saints fan. I'd usually tell them a story about my love of Buddy Ryan's 46 Defense--made famous by the '85 Bears--and how his subsequent coaching stints after he left Chicago left me without a team to root for.

Then I found the Dome Patrol--the Saints' sack-happy linebacking corps of the late '80s and early '90s. Pat Swilling and Rickey Jackson stuck out in my mind the most, but most people who haven't followed football as long as I have--or knew anyone on the Saints in pre-Brees era--didn't know what the hell I was talking about. They just assume that the Saints were always terrible--and they never had anything to be proud of.

Au contraire...

I had never thought that they actually had a wikipedia page, but, in fact, they do. So, for all those people who are just this season discovering the Saints--I can simply point to this lovely little page passed on to me by my former colleague and fellow Saints fan, Jamie Plummer.

Although I'm pretty touchy about accusations of being a bandwagon Yankees fan--in spite of my favorite baseball player being Don Mattingly--I must admit, it feels kinda good being accused of being a bandwagon supporter of the Saints, of all teams.



WHO DAT! WHO DAT! WHO DAT DEY SAY GONNA BEAT DEM SAINTS!

Oh, and of course, here's the link for Mood Music Monday.

March Madness Called Off

I wrote this to the office NCAA Bracket pool I organize. (I know they're illegal. If you feel that strongly about it, arrest me.) I happen to be in the lead, and as I try to make the points updates entertaining, I came up with the following, which a player and reader of my blog suggested I make public:

Dear March Madness participants,

President Obama believes that competition is hurting America. Because excellence and failure are incompatible with our way of life and that we all owe our national wealth and greatness to redistribution policies—and that the President’s pick to win it all, UNC, will fail miserably once they run into Big East competition—all forms of achievement and competition are hereby banned by executive order.

In response, the NCAA has suspended all competitive play in March Madness after the first round this year. That means—by way of alphabetical supremacy and the fact that, clearly, Pittsburgh would have won it all—I declare myself the winner. The Zachs will receive their second and third place monies—I haven’t decided in which order to place them yet. I may just give it to the players who didn’t fare so well in the tournament because they are so clearly helpless and deserving of other people’s money.

Oh, and please ignore all the basketball games that continue to be shown on television. The NCAA hasn’t told fans yet, but I assure you, the exhibition games you see mean nothing. All the athletes are playing for the love of sport and to make everyone feel like a winner. This also means that the “One Shining Moment” montage of excellence at the end of the tourney will more closely resemble ESPN’s weekly “Not Top 10 Plays” of gaffes, blunders and missed dunks because, well, they tried and that’s what’s important.

You will all be receiving your participation ribbons in the next 4-6 weeks via US Mail.

Sorry to do this to you after the rules were established, but that’s just how America operates now.

Have a good day and thanks for playing!

Jonathan

"I'm very sorry and deeply regretful"

Yep, Alex Rodriguez just admitted to steroid use:

"I did take a banned substance. For that I'm very sorry and deeply regretful"

I make absolutely no secret about my love for the Yankees--but my problems with this whole mess are entirely separate from that. There was a problem, it is no longer a problem, let it go. Now Congress is just dragging baseball through the mud to make examples of Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens--and taking down every person they can in the process.

What's next, shall we start dragging in college football programs--unless, of course, you really think that many 20 year old men are naturally that big, fast and strong? I'm fine with policing the sports, drug testing and all that, but tearing apart a man's reputation 6 years after his last positive--and might I add "ANONYMOUS"--test, is ridiculous, wrong, and probably illegal.

The government has better things to do than pursue these ridiculous perjury charges which led to the outing of A-Rod. The witch hunts are causing nothing but pain for baseball players and fans--all in the name of cleaning up a game that has, now, the strictest anti-steroid policy among major American sports. American politicians holding athletes' feet to the fire for lying is akin to them lecturing the American consumer for spending beyond their means and then...

Oh yeah.

I Mean, Really

Caught this over at Volokh Conspiracy--point very well made, and funny to boot.



If I have time, I'll be blogging later about A-Rod's steroids allegation.

I Have Nothing to Add to This

Please read it.

Point Guard-in-Chief

I don't often watch the late night talk shows anymore. If I do happen to have them on, as I did the other night, I watch Letterman.

I happened to be watching this week when Don Rickles was on and he made a joke that bombed:

[Rickles] was absolutely killing the audience on David Letterman's show the other night with his trademark scorched-earth put-downs. Rickles seemed at the top of his game -- until he tried to tell a joke about the new president-elect. Not even a well-timed rimshot from the band could have saved him.

It was just a quick bit in which he imagined Obama, faced with his first international crisis, telling his advisers he couldn't be interrupted because he was busy playing basketball.

Yeah. And?

Apparently, people got uncomfortable when an old white guy mentions our first black president in the same sentence as "basketball."

I don't read entertainment news because, well, its vapid and soul-sucking, so I don't know what kind of attention this seeming faux pas has been getting. But it certainly was enough to get an op-ed in the Washington Post today.

If President-elect Obama had not campaigned as a basketball player, or put up videos of him playing basketball on his campaign's YouTube site, or talked about basketball being his "first love", I could see a certain amount of "Oh no he didn't just say that" directed at Rickles. But Obama repeatedly played up his b-ball skillz as a reason to vote for him--especially in places like Indiana. (The night before the election, ESPN played this interview where Obama talks about the wisdom of his coach whom he favorably compares to Bobby Knight. This is my best guess as to how he won the once unquestionably red Hoosier state.*)

I can understand the sensitivity of the Letterman audience that led them to think that the boundary-pushing comic may have gone too far, but he didn't. Funny? Perhaps not. But Rickles is not a racist and his joke wasn't either.

Lighten up, America. It is still ok to poke fun at people--even if they're black.

*And just in case you're wondering, that's a joke too.

Rays Are Going to the World Series!

And I can finally stop caring about baseball. The Red Sox have been eliminated and things are right with my (sports)world. Sure the Rays are a great story--and I'll watch the Series if it's on and I'm near a TV, but I'm just waiting for NCAA basketball to start now to supplement my football addiction.

Good luck to the Rays. See you next year.

Goodbye, Yankee Stadium

I am certainly among the minority of my friends insomuch as I hail from the Midwest and I am a Yankees fan. People ask why--most think it is because of their ridiculous run in the late 90s and that I, like so many of the people sporting the spankin' new blue hats with the red "B" emblazoned on their ignorant domes, was some sort of bandwagon jumper. Au contraire. Strat-o-matic baseball and Don Mattingly are to blame for this Indiana boy's love of the pinstripes. But I digress.

Anyway, so last night was our final farewell to the House that Ruth built 85 years ago. As a Yankees fan, there was certainly something missing as there is only a slim mathematical (i.e., no) chance of the Yankees making the playoffs this year. But, it was good to watch it anyway.

But for those of you who, like so many of my friends, are Yankee haters--envy, it seems, becomes most baseball fans--I found this little gem this morning over at Volokh:

Yankee Stadium, R.I.P. Today is, of course, the final game for “the Yankee Stadium,” as it used to be called, and the Sunday NY Times has a terrific 2-page spread with reminiscences of their “Stadium moments” by Paul Simon, Jill Abramson, Robert Creamer, Keith Olbermann, Michiko Kakutani, and several others. They’re quite moving. I’m a Brooklyn boy, and I was six years old when our Dodgers left town, never to return, and to say I never got over it is an understatement. I couldn’t root for them anymore, needless to say – damn you, Walter O’Malley, damn you to hell! – but at least we still had the Yankees . . . to continue to loathe and despise. It was a hard time to be a Yankee-loather – from 1957 to 1964, the Yankees of Mantle, Berra, Ford, et al. won 7 American League pennants in 8 years (though, blessedly, they only won the Series three times in that span). But in my candid moments, I have to concede: at least they were the kind of team worth hating. That was always the thing (and still is) about the Yankees; I guess there are people who “hate” the Atlanta Braves, or the Colorado Rockies, or the Houston Astros – but you can’t hate one of them like you can hate the Yankees, which is a purifying, soul-affirming, life-enhancing kind of hate.

I had the chance to see the Yankees at the Stadium twice this year. (both losses, but whatever.) The second time was with two of my best friends--one Cards and one Cubs fan--and even they got a little misty when they showed the video of Yankee Stadium highlights.

Love 'em. Hate 'em. You have to respect them.

There's always next year. LET'S GO YAN-KEES!

Yankee Stadium 1923-2008, R.I.P.

REDEMPTION!

Yes, Michael Phelps was amazing. Yes, our gymnasts were stellar. Yes, all of our medalists --and other participants--are important and should be commended.

But there was one, and only one, gold medal I cared about...



And they earned it. Congratulations to the "Redeem Team" for sticking together, playing hard, and representing our country proudly and honorably--oh yeah, and that lovely new bling:

Marvin, His Bar, and His Gun

When I turned Mike and Mike in the Morning on as I was getting ready for work today, I heard veteran ESPN reporter and resident Phillyophile Sal Paolantonio go on and on about the shooting outside the garage and down the street from a bar that Colts WR Marvin Harrison owns.

What bugged me about the story is two-fold:

1) Paolantonio, whose reporting I normally respect, harped on the type of gun Harrison handed-in for the investigation: a custom made Belgian pistol designed to 'kill cops.' This is an assertion Paolantonio made because it reportedly is so powerful its ammo can go through many layers of Kevlar at 50m. Granted, the gun may be particularly powerful, but for some reason I don't think there are a bunch of police-hating Belgian gun designers plotting to perfect "cop-killer" weapons.


2) Paolantonio then began to speculate as to why Harrison, a multi-millionaire and probable future Hall of Famer (provided he's not taken down in this or another scandal of some kind) , would bother to run a bar, a garage and car wash in his very violent neighborhood back in Philadelphia. It was unfathomable to this man, who lives and breathes life in Philly, that a native son would own businesses where he was raised. Apparently Sal believes that NFL players should stick to filming United Way ads and volunteering in their adopted communities instead of providing people needed jobs and desired services where they grew up.

I don't know enough about the story to say whether Marvin is guilty of a crime or not. Looking over some reports, it looks like the weapon--while legal and registered--was not in the place it was supposed to have been (Harrison's home). And if there was any impropriety, God knows the NFL will act swiftly and, in all probability, harshly against the star receiver. But those issues are for the courts and the NFL to decide.

In the meantime, Sal and co. should stick to reporting more of Donovan McNabb's whiny dramathon and the success of the Philadelphia Flyers in the Stanley Cup Playoffs than criticizing an unaccused man for owning a legal firearm and running legitimate businesses in his hometown.