Little Yurt on the Steppe

Flammable or inflammable?

2007-07-31T06:04:00.000-07:00

Just caught an ESPN teaser for a story on the death of Hall of Fame football coach Bill Walsh:

A legendary coach takes his place among the immortals ...

Now, I might be nitpicking, but "immortal" means, roughly, someone who doesn't and can't die. So saying Bill Walsh became immortal because he just died ... well, that's just stupid.

If this continues, funding will become easier

2007-06-03T20:10:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I wonder why my research and interest in communism in Eastern Europe is relevant.

And sometimes, the DoD solves the dilemma for me.

Soviet-style 'torture' becomes 'interrogation'

If a Stanley Cup Finals is played in Orange County, does anybody care?

2007-05-30T11:14:00.000-07:00

Evidently not, according to TSN's intrepid man-on-the-beach reporting.

There was plenty of volleyball going on at the beach Monday but little sign of a hockey fan. Some say they are fans but it's wise not to scratch too deeply below the surface.

''Yes I am. I live right near where they train for the Ducks,'' said Anaheim's Sheryl Lobbig, who was taking a break from suntanning. ''I like how they get in fights. It's very aggressive. I like the aggressiveness.''

But can she name the team facing the Ducks in the final?

''No, not now I can't,'' she said. ''I'm not up on that right now. The Kings?''

Lobbig turned to her two friends.

''Who is the team from Canada?'' she asked.

The responses were ''Minnesota'' and ''the Royals''.

Nice. I especially like how someone evidently located Minnesota in Canada. Not that I'm surprised. I recall the fourth-grade classmate who said "Canada is under Texas," so you can see OC-educated folks are routinely stumped by Canadian geography.

Someone knows where the bodies are

2007-05-02T10:22:00.000-07:00

Earlier today someone broke into the grave of János Kádár, the longtime Communist leader in Hungary (though not the last, as Reuters is erroneously reporting), and stole his remains and an urn containing those of his wife.

Needless to say, someone in Budapest has a couple of skeletons in the closet.

What a country, redux

2007-04-29T14:42:00.000-07:00

The only thing more brilliant than Chevy blending antiwar and pro-war imagery without any sense of the obvious irony, is their decision to use a similar ad campaign north of the border.

Watch the CBC, and sooner or later you'll encounter Chevy ads with the same Mellancamp ditty about how "This is our country," but with images of Canadian natural beauty, pond hockey, and other quintessential bits of Canadiana.

So, to recap, "This is our country (America, or possibly Canada, or maybe both)!"

However, they were packing Swiss army knives

2007-03-02T08:40:00.000-08:00

Scandal!

It'd be a lot more fun to see Liechtenstein step it up and respond with some sabre rattling of its own. Maybe they can't start campaigning for autonomy for the Letzenburgers in Switzerland.

ZURICH, Switzerland (AP) -- What began as a routine training exercise almost ended in an embarrassing diplomatic incident after a company of Swiss soldiers got lost at night and marched into neighboring Liechtenstein.

According to Swiss daily Blick, the 170 infantry soldiers wandered 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) across an unmarked border into the tiny principality early Thursday before realizing their mistake and turning back.

A spokesman for the Swiss army confirmed the story but said that there were unlikely to be any serious repercussions for the mistaken invasion.

''We've spoken to the authorities in Liechtenstein and it's not a problem,'' Daniel Reist told The Associated Press.

Officials in Liechtenstein also played down the incident.

Interior ministry spokesman Markus Amman said nobody in Liechtenstein had even noticed the soldiers, who were carrying assault rifles but no ammunition. ''It's not like they stormed over here with attack helicopters or something,'' he said.

Liechtenstein, which has about 34,000 inhabitants and is slightly smaller than Washington DC, doesn't have an army.

So, if I claim Swiss ancestry, and were to develop somehow a modicum of Swiss pride, would I now have to start boycotting all those Liechtenstein goods I use. Like, uh, postage stamps.

Scenes from a mall

2006-12-04T09:04:00.000-08:00

Much as I hate dealing with the hassles of big crowds and overpriced crap, I found it impossible to avoid going to the mall this weekend to do holiday shopping. But going to the mall during holiday season has its advantages, namely that stores have enough customers that I don't have to deal with bored or pushy clerks asking if I need help whenever I walk in a store. "No, thanks. I'd much rather wander around meekly and avoid human contact."

Whilst at the mall, I got the bright (and by "bright" I mean "laughably ill-conceived") idea to go into the requisite bookstore, thinking I might be able to pick up paperback copies of Hobbes' Leviathan and Machiavelli's The Prince. Major works of the European canon, sure to be on the shelves of any bookstore worth it's salt. Ahem.

Needless to say, there was no section labeled "political philosophy," or "philosophy," or anything else that would've seemed remotely apt. (Self-help, perhaps?) Rather than ask for help and earn a lot of blank stares, I retreated, my faith in humanity shaken yet again.

On the bright(?) side, I happened to notice the bookstore now has a larger section devoted to "military history" than to "U.S. history." Which strikes me as matter of truth in advertising, since I don't think the selection of titles has changed appreciably.

Hail Colbert!

2006-11-03T21:46:00.000-08:00

Stephen Colbert is the new Oprah. Get him to promote your Hungarian bridge or junior hockey club and worldwide interest will skyrocket. Well, at least if you're willing to potentially use your project to feed his deserved egomania.

So, Mr. Colbert, if you want to sponsor my blog and direct millions to it and allow me to make enough on the ad revenue from all that web traffic to finance my upcoming nuptials, I'll gladly rename this space Little Stephen on the Colbert.

What a country

2006-10-30T19:30:00.000-08:00

If you've watched any playoff baseball, or apparently any other major sporting event recently, you've probably been bombarded by the new Chevy ad campaign featuring a crappy song by John Mellencamp called "This Is Our Country," which, logically, is being used to sell trucks.

Sports columnists (OK, Bill Simmons) have been griping about this for a while, mostly because they can't seem to avoid getting the jingle stuck in their heads after hearing it ad nauseam. And now it's getting the attention at the Old Gray Lady, where they're grappling with the symbolism of the iconic scenes of civil rights heroes and disasters being used to hawk a new pickup.

Unfortunately, the so-called "media experts" seem equally clueless as the sportswriting types when it comes to the most boggling aspect of the ad. Namely, the part where a short scene from Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech practically dissolves into images of American troops in Vietnam.

Uh, hello?! Can somebody please pick up on the fact that this is a ridiculous juxtaposition, blending one of the most prominent and vocal critics of the Vietnam War with images that seem to glorify it? It could've been worse. They could've dissolved from the image of Rosa Parks to a picture of a Klansman burning a cross or a black church. Maybe then someone else might have picked up on a glaring incongruity. But, hey, all's fair in commercial capitalism, right?

The misuse and abuse of history

2006-10-08T15:26:00.000-07:00

The Times' Week in Review has a piece by Roger Cohen comparing the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 to the Iraq War. It was, after all, 50 years ago this month that Hungarians rose up against Soviet domination and wound up getting crushed by an invasion.

Cohen's article is interesting, if for no other reason than it being the first story on Hungary I've seen by a U.S. news organization in several months that didn't recount the triumph of Stephen Colbert over Jon Stewart, Chuck Norris and a litany of other Hungarian national heroes in the running to have the new M0 bridge in Budapest named for them. And the sidebar's list of recommended reading is legit, with major works by respected scholars.

But Cohen's seeming premise is deeply flawed. He more or less accepts the idea of some connection or similarity to events in Hungary in 1956 and those in Iraq circa 2003, using this as a point of departure for ruminations on what the best course of action for the U.S. should've been then and ought to be now.

Yet to even suggest such parallels fails to appreciate the essential nature of these two, distinct, unrelated phenomena. Hungary in 1956 was a genuine revolt of much of society (with eventual support even from Communist leaders like Imre Nagy, who threw in his lot with his people). Certainly it was encouraged by the broadcasts of Hungarian emigres on Radio Free Europe, who more or less told their compatriots that Western and American support would be forthcoming. But the upheaval was indigenous, and it would've been a full-blown revolution (or at least a very ugly civil war) if not for Soviet intervention. Cohen seems to grasp that.

But when Cohen comes back to the subject of Iraq, he loses touch with the essence of the situation there. The current quagmire of civil war in Iraq is not the product of domestic desires to overthrow oppressive government and reorder society along liberal democratic lines, but rather it's a reaction to the Iraq War and the political vacuum it created by provoking "regime change" in the absence of a suitable social base. Iraq might well end up with liberal parliamentary democracy some day, but I don't know that any of us will live to see it. And, really, it's not surprising, since the Iraqi people didn't exactly create this situation of their own volition.

Comparisons between Budapest and Baghdad can be instructive, but only to highlight the essential contrasts between them. Revolutions are tricky things. They're difficult to produce even when widespread desire for political and social reordering exists, even when the natives are restless. But without a restive population, without a homegrown revolutionary movement, they're impossible.

The lessons to be learned from Budapest and the Cold War are that upheavals are highly improbable events and that they can't be imported. At least not if there groundwork has already been laid. So whereas communism had popular domestic appeal in many of the countries of Eastern Europe at the end of the Second World War, it was completely illegitimate in Hungary and regarded as a foreign imposition by most Hungarians. Look where that led in '56 and '89. Now consider Iraq.

Music and fashion

2006-09-12T22:01:00.000-07:00

Recently I found myself in the Las Vegas Hilton, formerly home to Elvis and Liberace, and the current home to Star Trek: The Experience and Barry Manilow's Vegas extravaganza, "Music and Passion."

Shockingly, I didn't take in either of the nightly performances by the Greatest Showman of Our Generation. (Barry's taking leave from his show to have his hips replaced, you know.) But, we did walk past the official Music and Passion gift shop, which featured, among other items, babydoll tees emblazoned with "Barry Fanilow."

Egads.

Wackipedia

2006-07-27T01:48:00.000-07:00

The Onion nailed it. Its skewering of Wikipedia is more truth than fiction. Especially since today's featured article, "Mosque," earlier included the phrase, "The primary catfish of the mosque is to serve as a place where Muslims can come together for prayer."

Purple monkey dishwasher.

More proof that ESPN's ombudsman is a joke

2006-06-29T09:35:00.000-07:00

For at least several months, ESPN.com has joined the cavalcade of media organizations and introduced its own ombudsman, George Solomon, to point out the sketchy journalism practices at the self-proclaimed "Worldwide Leader." And some of Solomon's criticisms are on the ball, like his regular harping on using anchors and other "personalities" in commercials for products other than their shows.

But it's very clear that Solomon still doesn't quite get it, like in his reflection on ESPN's coverage of the World Cup.

Aside from a somewhat vague remark about how ESPN's analysts "haven't always been balanced," he really doesn't get at the fundamental issue, which is that they've all been irredeemably biased. Now, maybe that's a product of employing almost exclusively ex-members of the U.S. national team to provide color commentary and studio analysis. But that doesn't excuse their endless use of the "we" pronoun in reference to the current national team, and the thinly veiled rooting for the U.S. in its matches.

Plus, Solomon described the lead broadcast team of Dave O'Brien and Marcelo Balboa as "solid," when in fact Balboa is one of the worst sports commentators I've ever heard. He's prone to contradicting himself (saying a referee was overzealous in issuing bookings, then praising the job the the ref did), and in general he just detracts from my enjoyment of the matches.

I wish I had thought to do like some bars and taverns have evidently done, namely muting the ESPN audio and listening to the match on BBC radio. That would have been much better. Better yet would've been to have just gotten the BBC television feed. If the crumminess of ESPN/ABC's coverage persists, I might have to seek out Univision, Telemundo or whichever station is carrying the Spanish-language broadcasts.

Brilliant

2006-06-12T11:05:00.000-07:00

The raisin bran was crispy, the iced tea cold and the footy brilliant.

As predicted in this space a few hours before, the endless hype, buildup and cockiness surrounding the first U.S. match in the World Cup yielded an embarrassing result.

The Czechs carried the pace really the whole match, orchestrating an impressive 3-0 win. It was a rather dominating performance, beginning when Jan "Goal Monster" Koller headed in a gorgeous cross from Zdenek Grygera in the fifth minute. Later in the first half, Tomas Rosicky drilled a beautiful strike from about 30 yards into the upper corner, and struck the woodwork in the second half before flicking a shot past the U.S. keeper Casey Keller for his second goal of the match. Truly impressive.

Truly unimpressive was the performance of the U.S. side, which failed to live up to any of the hype. There were very few quality scoring chances for the Americans, and in general they just couldn't create anything near the goal. It seemed like every ball they sent in the box was cleared from danger with ease. And the supposed U.S. "stars," namely Landon Donovan, and also Damarcus Beasley, didn't seem to show up. A great result all around.

Of course, ABC/ESPN's coverage remains dubious. I especially liked when play-by-play man Dan O'Brien asked color commentator if it would hurt the Czech side when Koller went off with an injury near the half. Because it would be really bad for a team with a 2-nil lead to lose an attacker. And for the record, the Czechs still managed to score without Koller.

I also found it endlessly annoying how ABC/ESPN kept trying to rewrite history, claiming that the Czech Republic hadn't played in the World Cup since 1990. News flash: the former Czechoslovakia didn't merely change its name to Czech Republic. It became two completely new countries. And while the Czech Republic is one of the successor states, it's not the same thing as saying it's still Czechoslovakia.

Don't even get me started on all the mispronunciations. Saying Tomas Rosicky "put the sick in Rosicky" made me cringe every time.

Rants

2006-06-11T20:56:00.000-07:00

First, I'm still pissed that Continental charged me a $100 change fee plus a $41 "fare difference" for cancelling the first half of my round trip ticket from Vegas to Cleveland so I can instead attend a family funeral in Indiana. How does me not filling a seat on the first leg of the trip make it cost them more money? And why should I get hosed for not using the outbound portion when, had the tables been turned, I could've simply not shown up for the return trip and paid zilch for not taking up space on their airplane. If anything, one would think they'd be grateful that I was willing to forfeit half my ticket without a refund, thereby giving them the chance to sell the seat twice.

This is why Southwest will ultimately bankrupt the major carriers, or at least force the legacy airlines to switch to the Southwest model. (For comparison's sake, I cancelled my Southwest one-way ticket from Seattle to Vegas and not only was not charged for the change, but was also allowed to apply the funds for the original ticket toward future travel, which means that I didn't have to shell out extra to buy a new ticket from Indianapolis to Buffalo so I can belatedly begin the vacation I'm interrupting for the funeral.)

I also like that Continental offers "bereavement fares," which means they'll give you a whopping 5 percent discount after the fact to travel to a relative's funeral. They'll still gouge you for purchasing travel so late in the game, but a least they gouge compassionately.

Second, I like how ABC is overhyping the U.S. team in advance of its World Cup opener Monday. Evidently this is America's chance to show the world it's now a football powerhouse. And U.S. coach Bruce Arena is similarly letting the hype go to his head, harping on how his side is a "sleeping giant" and likely playing the "no respect" card.

Right, because when your most highly touted star, Landon Donovan, is a hack who couldn't get off the pine playing in the elite German Bundesliga, clearly you're ready to compete with the world's best.

Actually, this is really less of a rant than a welcome omen, because all this cockiness can only augur poorly for the U.S. side in the opener. And that is music to my ears.

My only dilemma now is which Czech football jersey to wear while I watch the match tomorrow morning: Pavel Nedved (the creative Juventus midfielder playing in his only World Cup) or Jan Koller (the hulking "goal monster" of Borussia Dortmund)? Decisions, decisions.

Pardon my French

2006-06-03T13:13:00.000-07:00

Evidently it ain't easy being French-American. Although the Franco-American community in Maine is trying to revive the French language.

I find it really interesting that this article notes how "Maine elected its first openly French-American congressman, Michael H. Michaud, in 2002." I guess being French-American carries almost as much stigma as being gay. Who knew?

Teacher's pest

2006-05-20T00:24:00.000-07:00

While scanning the Internet to see if a paper had been plagiarized, I came across a paper site that had an interesting section on plagiarism.

It turns out, lazy, procrastinating students aren't to blame, but rather overworked, "uninformed" teachers who shirk additional mountains of work. See, teachers are really to blame, since we don't require students to turn in outlines, drafts, etc.

Why don't teachers follow these 4 quick and easy steps? Are They overworked? Lets see… How long does it take them to have the students place the papers on their desk? 5 seconds? 10 seconds? So perhaps before a teacher gets on the band wagon of, "Lets kill the evil Free Essay Sites", they can help students not get into a situation where they think plagiarizing is their only choice. Maybe they can look inward and help students not be procrastinators.

Ah, looking inward. That's awfully audacious from a web site that promotes cheating and plagiarism. I especially like the reasoning that it's viable to have students submit all that preliminary work. In my experience, there's seldom enough lead time for students to turn in something like a draft far enough in advance for the teacher to have an opportunity to read it and make comments on it, return it to the student, and give the student enough time to incorporate that feedback into the final product. And I like the assumption that students won't bitch if they have to submit a rough draft without getting any feedback on it.

But what do I know? I'm just a stupid, lazy, uninformed teacher who refuses to look inward when my students plagiarize their papers. Evidently I'd also be too dumb to notice if a student copied a paper from the encyclopedia. Because I was too stupid to catch the students copying large sections of text from Spark Notes and other free essay sites.

Them's fightin' words

2006-05-14T22:17:00.000-07:00

Jackaninny San Jose fans booed "O Canada" before Game 5 against Edmonton tonight.

I can't wait to see how Edmonton fans return the favor up in Alberta Wednesday night. And best of all, I get to watch the broadcast on the CBC.

Color me skeptical

2006-05-14T15:59:00.000-07:00

From a Times article proclaiming the dawn of the digital library:

What is the technology telling us? That copies don't count any more. Copies of isolated books, bound between inert covers, soon won't mean much. Copies of their texts, however, will gain in meaning as they multiply by the millions and are flung around the world, indexed and copied again. What counts are the ways in which these common copies of a creative work can be linked, manipulated, annotated, tagged, highlighted, bookmarked, translated, enlivened by other media and sewn together into the universal library. Soon a book outside the library will be like a Web page outside the Web, gasping for air. Indeed, the only way for books to retain their waning authority in our culture is to wire their texts into the universal library.

Now, I certainly welcome the trend toward digitized versions of hard copies. It's a big step for preservation at the very least and, as this article notes, it will certainly make information more accessible, also good.

But I think it's preposterous, not to mention shortsighted, to assume that this will signal the virtual end of the printed book. At the very least, in the academic community, lots of scholars and students and the like will still want hard copies to make notes, have a handy reference, etc. And while it might be true that some day we'll all own iPods loaded with most of the world's books, I still think there will always be people who just prefer hard copies. Then there's the matter of 500-year-old technologies dying hard.

And that's where I think the real problem is with this article. It's predicated on a blind, total faith in technological progress, which strikes me as entirely misplaced. For one thing, I don't know that people realize how unwieldy this universal library could be to search, especially if the full text of books is made searchable, which could be more of a hindrance than a benefit.

Brutal

2006-05-07T01:06:00.000-07:00

And now I bitch.

I've begun the long, arduous task of grading my own students' papers, roughly half of which are on one of the two topics about the Russian revolutions of 1917.

I'm finding the reading and the grading rather trying and depressing because I've encountered so many papers that can only be described as bad to terrible. I've already given two zeros, both to papers that weren't even halfway to the 7- to 8-page limit required for the assignment. I've also given out a few D's for papers that are really quite terrible. But in general I've been utterly appalled by some students' total inability to write comprehensible prose. I mean, normally the emphasis in grading is -- or at least ought to be -- on assessing the quality of the argumentation and analysis. There's still plenty of room for that, but I'm finding myself having to do the prose equivalent of yelling at my students for being crappy writers. "Since your prose doesn't make any sense, I can't begin to ascertain what argument you're trying to make, let alone assess whether you've made this argument persuasively." Or something to that effect.

It's challenging, because normally I try to say at least something positive about every paper, just to give students some hope of improvement. But with some of these papers I don't think I could do that without being completely dishonest. Some students' papers truly have no redeeming qualities. It's flabbergasting.

And that doesn't even begin to address the issue of big, glaring historical mistakes. Many of my students have a greatly flawed understanding of the general contours and chronology of the revolutionary process in Russia. No, Bloody Sunday did not occur in 1917; try 1905. No, the Bolsheviks did not overthrow the tsar in February 1917; they overthrew the Provisional Government in October 1917. Good grief. I wouldn't necessarily expect my students to understand all the nuances of the revolutionary epoch in Russia, but at the very least you'd think they could walk away from this course with the big picture of what happened in 1917. How in good conscience can I give a paper like that a respectable grade?

So, I'm flummoxed. Even students who did well on the midterm are now demonstrating a startling inability to write a coherent sentence. Damn the mean, these papers are going to produce the worst grades I've ever given in a course. And the hell of it is that I'm not sure whether I'm not being punitive enough. And I still have another 20 essays to read. Argh.

Pub grub me

2006-04-29T16:10:00.000-07:00

As independent filmmaker Morgan Spurlock showed us two years ago in "Super Size Me," eating nothing but three squares at McDonald's every day for a month will practically kill you.

But thanks to a courageous Czech volunteer, we now know eating nothing but Czech pub grub for a month can have some positive effects on your health.

The volunteer, who ate copious amounts of pork, dumplings, cabbage, beer and other heavy, fat-laden Czech dishes, loss about 13 pounds and saw his cholesterol and blood sugar levels drop. And, as he notes, "there were even enough greens in the garnish."

OK, OK, so part of it was because the volunteer's lifestyle had been unhealthy to begin, so eating regularly made a big difference. And I think I'd like to have more green stuff in my diet than the peas or whatever other fodder he was eating as garnish.

But I think this just goes to show that pub grub and beer get a bad rap. I know I'd try to drink more beer and more regularly if I could. For the health benefits, of course.

Thank you, Luc!

2006-04-17T22:16:00.000-07:00

If they only had a heart

2006-03-24T17:40:00.000-08:00

Now, who looks worse?

Fidel Castro, for being a Communist dictator? Or the U.S. government, for preventing Cuba from donating its runner-up share from the World Baseball Classic to Hurricane Katrina victims?

I mean, we already knew Bush hated black folks. It's just nice to see that his hatred of the non-WASP population can dovetail so smoothly with an ineffective, inhumane, 44-year-old grudge.

Only an East Europeanist Could Love This

2006-03-24T08:43:00.000-08:00

Franz Ferdinand Frontman Shot By Gavrilo Princip Bassist

GLASGOW, SCOTLAND—Lead singer and guitarist for pop band Franz Ferdinand, Alexander Kapranos, is in critical condition today after being shot by a man identified as the bassist for rock group Gavrilo Princip. "We ask fans to cooperate with Interpol to find the assailant, and call upon British Sea Power, Snow Patrol, and The Postal Service for help," drummer Paul Thompson told music magazine NME Monday. "The suspect had links to The Decemberists and The Libertines, and we are following up on all leads." It is unclear whether the shooting was linked to The Polyphonic Spree's invasion of Belgium earlier this week.

(via the Onion)

An Army of Dumb

2006-03-11T00:02:00.000-08:00

Remember, the U.S. military needs extralegal measures like torture to get hard evidence about terrorist networks.

Weeks after complaining about the garbage, he said, he was surrounded by Humvees, hooded, tied up and carted to a nearby base before being transferred to Abu Ghraib. Then the questioning began.

"They blamed me for attacking U.S. forces," he said, "but I said I was handicapped; how could I fire a rifle?" he said, pointing to his hand. "Then he asked me, 'Where is Osama bin Laden?' And I answered, 'Afghanistan.' "

How did he know? "Because I heard it on TV," he replied.

Yup, solid evidence. I'm glad they subjected him and so many others to torture and other forms of abuse. Now we know with certainty that they're linked to al-Qaida and other terrorist organizations.

Colored by color-blindness

2006-03-10T12:47:00.000-08:00

ESPN.com's Pat Forde has a new column remarking on the phenomenon that the consensus two best players in men's college basketball this season happen to be white.

Maybr, as Forde claims, it's newsworthy since such a scenario hasn't been around in 30 years or more, a testament to the great strides blacks have made it finding opportunities and succeeding in the college game.

This occurs at a time when today's college kids seem encouragingly unburdened by The Race Thing. There appears to be less obsessing over race, less distrust between races in today's youth, more melding of black and white music and dress and vernacular. That's societal progress.

Of course Forde unwittingly calls that "societal progress" into question by drawing attention to the fact that, oh yeah, the two best players are white -- in the very next paragraph:

Still, anyone who says they haven't noticed that Redick and Morrison are white hasn't been paying attention. And anyone who shrugs it off as nothing unusual hasn't checked the history books.

The way Forde proceeds to laud the accomplishments of white hoopsters seems almost quaintly reminiscent of how the African American press in earlier years heralded the achievements of blacks who did good. Of course, the black press and community needed to latch onto anything and everything they could when it came to black achievements, since racism and discrimination were rampant in American society, and remain so to a somewhat lesser extent. White achievements in, well, anything aren't noteworthy in the same sense, since last time I checked whites had few institutional and societal barriers to success (see the top management of Fortune 500 companies, which in 2000 was 97 percent white male). Poor widdle whites.

Of course, Forde's column has other, more chilling echoes. Were he to have substituted for "white" the term "Aryan," the piece would've read like some sort of perverse Social Darwinian or National Socialist tract.

All of which, again, is to underscore the point that in the way in which Forde writes of this phenomenon as a harbinger of social progress actually reveals how little road has been traveled in the quest for a real transformation of attitudes on race and equality.

Putting the petty in petit-bourgeois

2006-03-03T12:29:00.000-08:00

Centuries from now, when archaeologists and historians try to determine what caused the decline of our society, they can turn to this this article for answers.

Yes, hypercompetitive application processes for preschool are a sign your civilization has grown too decadent to survive.

Long Live Slovakia!

2006-02-18T17:15:00.000-08:00

Slovakia 2, United States 1

Serve those silly United Statesians right, for not knowing where Slovakia is, or that the people who inhabit the country are Slovaks, not Slovakians.

Of course, I'm sure most Slovaks don't [sic] really know the difference between the USA and the USSR.

Halos 1, Stupid People 0

2006-02-09T17:41:00.000-08:00

An Orange County jury ruled against the city of Anaheim today, finding the Los Angeles Angels (of Anaheim) did not violate their lease agreement by changing the team's name to include "Los Angeles" and making that city more prominent in its name and marketing efforts than Anaheim.

Good riddance, too. I for one applaud the team's efforts to downplay its ties to Anaheim, and by extension to the dark days when the franchise was owned by Disney. The name change was a nice move to capitalize on the greater visibility of L.A. while distancing itself from the bush league operation that is the city of Anaheim.

Besides, this whole episode was probably the best thing that could've happened to Anaheim. The city claimed not being featured as prominently in Angels marketing cost it something like $100 million in lost tourism, promotion and buzz, but it probably gained at least that much as a result of the name change. Sure, it seems a bit odd (though the city never demanded the Los Angeles Rams rename themselves when they moved into Anaheim Stadium), but the change really helped to put Anaheim on the national radar. Of course, it also made the country aware that the city is a real Mickey Mouse operation, but then there's no such thing as bad publicity, right?

Outfoxed

2006-01-31T20:42:00.000-08:00

Why does Fox hate America?

Tonight, the dear leader of our great nation delivered an important State of the Union address. Many television networks saw fit to preempt regular programming in order to broadcast this critical speech live. These included NBC, CBS, ABC and PBS.

And yet, Fox saw fit to carry a repeat of the Simpsons. For shame!

I suppose Fox doesn't think it important to support our president at a time when national unity is crucial. This leads me to think they're just part of the liberal, America-hating, terrorist-supporting, scum media, attempting to offer comfort to America's enemies.

We should hardly be surprised. After all, the head of Fox, Rupert Murdoch, is a foreigner. And he wasn't even born here [sic]. It's just the sort of thing we should expect from his kind of people.

I expect Bill O'Reilly to place this at the head of his "Talking Points" on the next Factor. And Sean Hannity will probably do the patriotic thing and call for Murdoch's head, and for all other Australian-Americans to be detained and tortured without due process.

(See, not so much fun when it gets thrown back in your face. At least they didn't preempt the Simpsons, which would've required me to make a rant about why the CBC is so great, since it doesn't preempt its Simpsons repeats so the asstastic president can stumble through a major speech saying idiotic things.)

Oh, the ignorance

2006-01-31T13:26:00.000-08:00

Take a look at this chart. Pay attention to the third name on the list, Peter Stastny, and make a note of his country.

Now take a look at this page.

Just for the sake of clarity, the Peter Stastny listed as the third-highest European scorer in NHL history (and a native of the Czech Republic) on the chart is the same Peter Stastny listed on the second page as a member of the European Parliament from Slovakia.

No, Stastny didn't move from the Czech lands to Slovakia after the Velvet Divorce. He was and remains a Slovak (though he also holds Canadian citizenship, obtained during his tenure as a member of the Quebec Nordiques). He also played for Slovakia at the 1994 Olympics and is general manager of the Slovak national team. Obviously he's a proud Slovak.

Of course, it's silly for me to expect people to get this right. Or to comprehend that, just because there once was a country called Czechoslovakia that has the Czech Republic as a successor, that means everything from Czechoslovakia was Czech.

It's interesting, though, how the Czech Republic seems to have inherited all the legacies, good and bad, of Czechoslovakia, while the Slovaks somehow have been cut off from that period of their history. The same thing occurred last fall, when the Czech Republic qualified for the World Cup for the first time, only the stories (including those from the Czech media), touted it as the Czechs' return to the World Cup after a 16-year absence. Sure, the last time Czechs played in the World Cup was 1990. But they also played on a team with Slovaks, and for a country called -- you guessed it -- Czechoslovakia.

Really, even though this example doesn't pertain directly, I'm just more convinced that when I teach classes on East Central Europe I should have on the final exam a map of Europe asking students to identify Slovakia and Slovenia, and they have to get it right to pass the class (or at least to avoid a severe blow to their course grade). I think that's fair. It's not like I'm throwing Slavonia into the mix as well.

Idiots

2006-01-28T18:34:00.000-08:00

I looked forward to reading Bill Simmons' first book, Now I Can Die in Peace: How ESPN's Sports Guy Found Salvation, with a Little Help from Nomar, Pedro, Shawshank, and the 2004 Red Sox. His columns for ESPN.com's Page 2 are consistently its best material, especially since the death of Ralph Wiley (though Scoop Jackson has tried to fill the void left by Wiley to a certain extent). His column is written from the perspective of a regular fan from Boston, and I'm not sure anyone else could pull that shtick off. Certainly not as well. Simmons writes well and is funny, which is a nice change of pace from a lot of the drivel that passes for sports journalism.

So, needless to say, I was eager to see what he had to say in his first book, a look back on the events that defined him as a tortured fan of the Boston Red Sox and led to their World Series title in 2004.

Of course, before I got a copy, I wish I had done some investigating and discovered that the book is just a compendium of columns from the past seven years or so, with little new material. There are some brief introductions to each section, and an endless stream of witty or illuminating footnotes, plus he includes the bits censored from the original. So, if you really like profanity, I guess that's new.

I find myself fundamentally conflicted about my assessment of the book. The writing is good. And Simmons chose columns he thought withstood the test of time, which is generally true, even if some of the cultural references are dated, as Simmons delights in noting with several footnotes. Not to mention, the columns date back well before Simmons' ESPN days, when he was writing for his Boston Sports Guy web site, so there's a lot of material that's new to me, and to most of his readers.

But on the other hand, I can't escape the feeling of being cheated. Probably a lot of this is just my own failure to have learned going in that I was getting a book of old columns. It's just difficult to get past that. Maybe I'd feel differently if I found this in a bargain bin for four bucks in a year or two. Then it might seem like a surprising gem. But I don't know that it merits the hype surrounding it. (Then again, I should always know better than to get sucked in by the ESPN publicity machine.) It just seems like if one of your favorite bands hadn't released anything in a couple of years, then you found out there was a new album and ordered an advance copy, only to have it show up and discover that it's just a greatest hits album, with maybe one new track. You'd feel shorted, too.

So maybe other people will have different experiences, especially if they know in advance what they're getting. The writing is still good, and there were plenty of moments where I laughed out loud. I just hope the next book from Bill Simmons is actually a book.

How the mighty have fallen

2006-01-27T16:56:00.000-08:00

There's a joke in here somewhere.

I think it's comical, the Mighty [sic] Schmucks of Anaheim have decided to improve their image by dropping the "Mighty" from their name for next season, when they'll be just the Anaheim Schmucks. Like people will forget that they're still named after the crappiest hockey movie franchise ever, just because the modifying adjective is gone.

It's also amusing that this comes on the same day as a story that perennial doormat the Tampa Bay Devil Rays are mulling dropping "Devil" from the team's name. Because the Tampa Bay Rays sounds so much better.

It's times like these I yearn for the alma mater to ditch the Wildcat nickname and return to our roots by calling ourselves the Fighting Methodists. Or for Stanford to accept one of the proposals from when the school dropped the "Indian" nickname and someone with a sense of humor and history proposed they be called the Robber Barons.

Photos Schmotos

2006-01-26T17:46:00.000-08:00

I can't see why people are making a stink over photos featuring Bush and Jack Abramoff, who probably plundered more from Native Americans than anyone since Andrew Jackson.

Quoth the president: "I mean, there's thousands of people that come through and get their pictures taken. I'm also mindful that we live in a world in which those pictures will be used for pure political purposes, and they're not relevant to the investigation."

Well put, Mr. President. I mean, it's just preposterous to suggest that if you posed willingly and gleefully with an admitted felon (oops, that should be felon-in-waiting), then there must be some reason for associating you with his treachery.

You know, sort of like all those namby-pamby folks who insisted that the war against Iraq was duplicitous, all because of some irrelevant photo from 20 years ago.

Way to not let them drag you down, sir.

This is supposed to impress me?

2006-01-25T00:10:00.000-08:00

The lead from a short story on Bush's efforts to appear less scripted:

President Bush is in the midst of a campaign-style effort to show that he has broken out of his White House bubble, and three times this month he has taken unscreened questions from audiences that appear to have been chosen largely at random, rather than for their qualities as cheerleaders.

Three whole times. From audiences "that appear to have been chosen largely at random." Wow. This sounds like the hallmark of a president concerned with trifles like accountability.

So, what sorts of bold, "unscreened questions" is Dubya courageously feeling from possibly non-sycophanic interrogators?

"You're a rancher. A lot of us here in Kansas are ranchers. I was just wanting to get your opinion on 'Brokeback Mountain,' if you've seen it yet."

Great. That's really hard hitting there, fellas. Worse still, he managed to dodge the pink elephant in the question, not even acknowledging the whole gay cowboy plot, just tiptoeing around it by talking about how he's a rancher. And a really good one, as we'll recall, since he spent lots of time clearing brush from his Texas ranch instead of talking with a mother whose son was killed fighting in Iraq. Terrific.

Hating Microsoft Redux

2006-01-24T21:09:00.000-08:00

Today IE crashed when I tried to use its "find word" function. Either Microsoft has a deep-seated prejudice against Puerto Ricans and the Catching Molina Bros. (I was trying to find the reference to "Molina" on a page I had Googled), or more likely it simply can't perform the most mundane tasks without fouling them up. At least it'd didn't crash the whole system when I launched IE. Though we'll have to see what's in store for me tomorrow.

Version 2.0

2006-01-23T23:17:00.000-08:00

For quite a while I've been mulling creating a new site, probably something centered on a blog, but ideally with other content as well.

The problem with this is that I haven't been able to come up with a theme. I've been kicking around some ideas, but I don't know if I'm sold on any of them.

One difficulty I keep encountering is trying to decide what I want my blog to be. I could try to do some sort of running social and political commentary, but that would require me to be more up on current events and to scour a much wider array of news sources than I'm currently doing. Not to mention, there are other blogs probably doing a better job filling this niche.

So that's probably out.

Other obvious ideas that come to mind include something to do with my current Czech and Slovak history (this probably wouldn't be a very successful idea since there just aren't that many people literate in English likely to take an intense interest). Or I could write mainly about being a graduate student, which certainly lends itself to a wider audience, but not that wide. Or, maybe I should just more or less keep the stream-of-consciousness format I currently have, though that seems unsatisfying to me somehow. I'm not really sure. Maybe there's a great idea floating out there that just hasn't crossed my mind yet.

Then there's the matter of a format. Ideally this would follow from the theme. But maybe it will work the other way round. I don't know.

So far I've come up with only a couple of half-baked notions. One is to title it something like "The Ivory Tower," which would be appropriate since I'm a graduate student with intellectual pretensions. Then again, "The Ivory Tower" just seems kind of lame. The other one is probably even less conceived, little more than a title, "My Empire of Dirt." I keep contriving rationales for it, like that it corresponds to being apropos of a graduate student living at or below the poverty line, so I don't really have much. But really it's just homage to Trent Reznor, and I feel like I'm a bit old to be doing that, even though I know I'll never fully outgrow my fascination with Nine Inch Nails.

Anyway, I invite feedback on this, though I wouldn't necessarily expect any major developments on the new site front for a few months.

Hating Microsoft

2006-01-23T22:48:00.000-08:00

As most of you know, I use a Mac. I (or my family) have owned an Apple computer since I was three. So, in a certain sense it's never been a choice so much as it's a function of socialization. My dad has always been a big Machead, and I'm marrying another Mac devoteé. Needless to say, Macs will probably be in my home till death do I (de-)part.

Of course, I like Macs. I like their simplicity. I like their elegance. And since Apple moved the platform onto Unix with OS X, they've shown the most amazing stability. Normally I have to remember to reboot my machine every few weeks just to get a clean slate, since it has never crashed on me. Truly beautiful.

The other side of the coin is that I dislike PCs. In fact, I'm growing to loathe them. Invariably, the computers I've had at the various jobs I've worked have been Windows machines. And not in a good way.

Sure, it wasn't bad in my old jobs, where at least I had enough user privileges to be able to download and install applications, meaning I could ditch Internet Explorer in favor of Mozilla. (Honestly, I don't know how Windows users live without tabbed browsing.) The machines still sucked, but a little less.

Now, however, I don't even have that relative luxury. The network in our department is set up so that no one can install anything without admin privileges, a policy that evidently extends to tenured faculty as well. This is justifiable, and probably prudent on the part of the IT administrators, since it means no one's downloading malware and viruses. But by the same token, it makes things a good bit less tolerable for us users.

For instance, all the computers on the network have ZoneAlarm, which I assume serves the purpose of updating virus protection. Probably a good thing, especially with Windows. But it becomes an issue when ZoneAlarm pops up after each log-in notifying us that a new version is now available. Only we can't install it, since we lack admin privileges. And it's utterly futile to select the "Remind me again in X days" option, since it doesn't remember that between log-ins. So every damn time we log in, this stupid little alert pops up. And since our machines all predate the Bush administration, this slows down the machine's performance considerably. I'd like to argue that it's a quality-of-life issue, which it is, but that probably get us anywhere. Especially since the department's dedicated computer support person seems to change every three months.

Or then there's the issue that keeps cropping up on my machine. When I get a Word document via e-mail, it seems incapable of opening it without going through a complicated process of first saving it to the desktop, then opening Word, and finally opening the document from within Word. Even then, it's an iffy proposition. A one-click task takes way more steps than it should. I find this particularly galling since it's not like these are third-party apps. I'm trying to open a Microsoft Word document from Microsoft Internet Explorer on a machine running Microsoft Windows. And it doesn't work. Can you imagine this happening with Apple? Me neither. Apple manages to integrate its software rather seamlessly, and it usually works fairly well with third-party apps. There are various idiosyncracies of the Mac OS, but they're little more than minor nuisances. Not something as fundamental as an issue with Word. (Incidentally, I don't have any of these issues using Word on my Mac.)

But hey, I'm sure Microsoft is hard at work on this issue, which is probably why its much-ballyhooed new OS is several years overdue.

Well, at least George W. Bush's happy, eh?

2006-01-23T22:44:00.000-08:00

Woe, Canada! Canadian Voters Oust Incumbent for Conservative

Frontrunning

2006-01-18T21:16:00.000-08:00

Never let it be said that Alex Rodriguez wasn't loyal to the frontrunner.

He jumped ship from the Mariners when they wouldn't make him quite as stinking rich as he hoped to be, then passed on other offers of less money from potential contenders to take a quarter-billion-dollar contract from the doormat in Texas.

Only, after three years of toiling for a cellar dweller, despite padding his individual numbers and winning an MVP on a last-place team (quite the individual achievement in a perverse way), he decided that something was missing. Namely the chance to play to be the poster boy of the Evil Empire. Or to land more opportunities to whore himself for corporations. So he joined forces with George Steinbrenner, a class act whose legacy includes funneling illegal campaign contributions to Dick Nixon and hiring a low-life gambler to dig up dirt on true good guy Dave Winfield after Winnie sued the Boss for failing to pay the $300,000 to his foundation as stipulated in his contract. (Sadly, George also served as an assistant coach at Northwestern in 1955, and though he only lasted one season, the Wildcats never won another bowl game -- karma's a bitch.)

Mercifully (and I'm willing to admit this as evidence in support of the case for the existence of a merciful God), A-Rod has done bupkes in the postseason, helping to extend the Yankees World Series title drought to a whopping 1910 days. (I tried to figure out how many days have elapsed since the Chicago Cubs won a World Series, but blew a microchip in my calculator.)

Anyway, not content to take the easiest and most lucrative path, A-Rod has been at the center of a minor controversy this offseason, unwilling to make a decision on whether he should play for the U.S. or the Dominican Republic in March's inaugural World Baseball Classic. A-Rod was born in the U.S., but his parents immigrated here from the Dominican, making him eligible to play for either country.

At first A-Rod vacillated. His parents and family were lobbying hard for him to respect his roots and play for the Dominican, but A-Rod felt conflicted about not playing for the country where he holds citizenship -- and perhaps more important, made approximately a zillion dollars. Rather than choose between the countries, he said he wouldn't play at all, a cop out that dissatisfied all but the Yankees, who preferred not to have A-Rod play in the hopes that it might help the club prevent its title-less string from topping the 2 million-second mark.

But while such a decision -- or non-decision, as it were -- may have been justifiable, even if it showed no backbone, A-Rod has reversed himself once more in splendid fashion, announcing, contrary to all previous announcements, that he will, in fact, play in the WBC ... for the United States. Instead of showing some respect for his heritage and giving his parents and their homeland a measure of pride (with the possibility of great national pride if the Dominicans win the WBC title), A-Rod has opted to suit up for the one team in no need of help, and the one country that certainly could do without the ego boost.

A classy move by a real class act. Who, fittingly, made a max donation to George W. Bush's re-election campaign.

Eh?

2006-01-17T13:33:00.000-08:00

One of the nice things about watching hockey broadcast on Canadian networks is the chance to view Canadian campaign ads for the upcoming parliamentary election.

A particular favorite is one from the governing Liberal Party that repeats the Washington TImes' editorial assessment of Stephen Harper, leader of the Conservative Party, which tells of how Harper could be the most pro-American foreign leader in the Western world. Harper's election, says the Times, would bring a smile to the face of George W. Bush.

And to underscore the point that this is bad, especially if you're Canadian, the ad closes with a small editorial comment in response to this possibility: "Well, at least someone will be happy, eh?"

My name is (not) Joe, and I am (not) Canadian!

Death to the death penalty

2006-01-17T13:11:00.000-08:00

Many folks, including those in his hometown of Graz, Austria, found it unprudent and harsh when California executed Stan "Tookie" Williams, a founder of the Crips, after Arnold Schwarzenegger declined to grant clemency. Even if Tookie had committed the murders for which he had been convicted, most folks thought his outreach from behind bars as an anti-violence activist warranted a commutation of his sentence to life in prison where he could have continued to do good. Tookie's execution seemed tragic and Schwarzenegger's inaction hardhearted.

But now my home state has taken judicial murder to new levels of barbarism. Shortly after midnight this morning, it executed Clarence Ray Allen, a 76-year-old blind, mostly deaf, wheelchair-bound inmate on Death Row.

Now, Allen's crimes strike me as horrific and worthy of punishment. Also, I don't know that he made any acts of redemption like Tookie had. But I'm pretty sure that reviving a man after a nearly fatal heart attack only to execute him four months later violates that little constitutional principle outlawing cruel and unusual punishment. (Then again, I also happen to think torturing detainees flies in the face of that protection, but the current administration obviously disagrees.) I find it appallingly twisted to put to death a man already knocking at death's door and liable to die without state intervention. All, evidently, to provide some convoluted notion of "justice."

It's high time Americans had a serious discussion about capital punishment and considered joining the overwhelming majority of the rest of the world in outlawing it. Unless we think we should remain in the company of Saudi Arabia, China, North Korea, et al.

Truthiness

2006-01-14T17:50:00.000-08:00

In case you didn't pick up on it from his early books (Rush Limbaugh Is A Big, Fat Idiot and Other Observations and Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced View of the Right), Al Franken really doesn't like the modern conservative movement. Who can blame him?

His latest, The Truth (with Jokes), aims to debunk the wisdom circulating in the immediate aftermath of the 2004 election, namely that America had turned sharply to the right and embraced the extreme right-wing view touted by Bush, Limbaugh, et al.

And, he does a reasonable job with this mission, pointing out the many blunders, deceptions and outright lies used to spin the election results in such a way. There is a good bit of empirical weight behind most of Franken's assertions (except for the jokes - but at least they're funny), so while it's certainly not a scholarly tome (again, the jokes are important), it feels less like a soapbox rant.

Still, nothing Franken wrote struck me as terribly earth shattering. Then again, I'm probably better informed than the average American, even though I feel underinformed on much of what's happening in the world. (To wit: I only discovered that postage rates had risen over the weekend thanks to an oblique reference to it in an NHL column Monday.) Thus, even though I found Franken's book highly entertaining (the lies Franken makes up about Sean Hannity are hilarious, such as his bogus claim that Hannity doesn't find anything wrong with getting drunk and urinating in mailboxes), it didn't strike me as some great exposé. (Of course, the chapter exposing what sleazeballs Jack Abramoff and Tom DeLay are seemed especially salient, though maybe this is because I didn't really follow that story until DeLay got sacked as majority leader late last year.)

And one current that bothered me a bit was the unmitigated love Franken has for the Clinton administration. Clinton looms large as Bush's foil, and the Clinton presidency as a whole stands as the model of progress in Franken's view.

I'd have preferred a more critical, or at least slightly less fawning assessment of the Clinton years. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to dislike Clinton (doing nothing during the Rwanda genocide and slashing welfare come to mind), but you wouldn't know that Clinton was fallible from reading Franken.

And then there's also his wholly sympathetic portrait of John Kerry. Let's not delude ourselves into thinking a Kerry victory would've changed things radically. Not unless Kerry, deep down, really is the sort of pinko-liberal the right-wing mudslingers claimed he was. But somehow I doubt that.

Then again, maybe this is just symptomatic of a greater flaw with the mainstream liberal movement. Namely that it's too, well, mainstream. There's not a lot in the Democratic platform, at least not in the ones hyped in the last two presidential elections, to excite the troops. Clinton could compensate for that with his legendarily electric personality, but Gore and Kerry affected all the verve of lox.

So while Franken's read might make you chuckle aloud on the bus, it probably won't fundamentally shift anyone's worldview.

Tooling around

2006-01-13T15:51:00.000-08:00

University of Oregon prez Dave Frohnmayer takes issue with a recent ESPN.com story examining the powerful pull Nike founder Phil Knight wields over his alma mater. The UO prez says he was "offended by implications" made in the article.

His rebuttal, however, took the form of a rather semantic non-denial, with apparent emphasis on the concept of whether big donors like Knight merited such sway:

Your article implied that donors, especially generous donors such as Phil Knight, exercise undue influence over the governance of this university's operations. That is simply not the case. Ascribing importance to the ideas and thoughts of involved supporters deserved better than cynical stick figure caricatures.

In other words, Frohnmayer doesn't deny "involved supporters" (hereafter: Phil Knight) get a hearing for their "ideas and thoughts" (say, whether a track coach should be retained who doesn't run his program according to the individual whim of our involved supporter).

What Frohnmayer appears to really say here is that he resents the charge that Knight's influence is undue -- have you noticed the size of the wad of cash he's dropped on UO?

This isn't really the place to argue about whether rich donors should get such power in how universities and their athletic programs are run. (Answer: No)

But you can see how much Frohnmayer squirms when someone happens to make informed observations about the fact that he is, in many instances, a tool.

It'd be even funnier if it turned out Frohnmayer drafted and submitted his response at the urging of Phil Knight.

Shame

2006-01-10T17:35:00.000-08:00

Some billionaire alum donated $165 million to the athletic program at Oklahoma State. That's terrific.

I'm sure there aren't departments and units on campus reeling from rounds of budget cuts, struggling to attract and retain faculty and students, units for which a much smaller chunk of change would probably make a world of difference.

That's not important. But football and ego are.

"What I keep coming back to is we're in the Big 12 and it's a tough conference. I want us to be competitive," [Boone] Pickens said. "How it impacts me? My name's on the stadium. I don't know what else they could do. I guess they could put it on each one of the seats."

OK, so there's a significant Freudian quotient of vanity at play on the part of the donor. But that doesn't excuse the OSU president from acting like this is just as good as if that much money had gone, oh, I don't know, into some of the academic programs instead.

"It'll impact the whole university," Oklahoma State president David Schmidly said. "It'll make it easier for us to recruit students, it'll help us recruit faculty. Every aspect of the university is going to benefit from this."

Sure, this will probably help recruit prospective student-athletes. And faculty (especially if "faculty" is understood as anyone who answers to "Coach" instead of "Doctor" or "Professor").

After all, there's nothing like privileging the small minority of athletes among the student body and giving them all sorts of perks and breaks that wouldn't be tendered to any normal, non-athlete.

I have to say, this is really doing a lot to make me more convinced that athletic programs (at least above the recreational, intramural level) are just a bad idea in general at the university level. I know that it's fun to root for the alma mater, even if they haven't won a bowl game since the Truman Administration. And it can be exciting to be on campus when the basketball team has a realistic shot at winning a national title. And athletic programs do generate a lot of revenue.

But I have to question how much of that revenue is actually get distributed throughout the university (say, to academics), and how much just gets pumped right back into the athletic department's coffers. My guess is that the athletic program isn't subsidizing academics as much as it's the other way around. Especially if you consider non-monetary forms of support provided to student-athletes (like writing make-up exams and assignments, for example).

Yes, I'm speaking out of a little bitterness here. I have at least one student in my section who's a student-athlete and will have missed at least the first two sections, and probably more this quarter. In this case there isn't a lot of extra work required on my behalf, since I'm just making the student produce a lengthier version of the weekly assignment.

But still, I feel like there are fundamental questions of fairness. Is a student entitled to makeup work if s/he misses class due to athletic commitments? Functionally, I can't see what difference there is between someone who misses class for a game or meet, and someone who misses for a job interview, work on a school project or paper, a long weekend or the opportunity to sleep in. There's some relativization there, I'm sure, but the main difference is that faculty are in effect expected to provide opportunities to make up work missed by the student-athlete, whereas the non-student athlete is at the mercy of the individual faculty member. I never agreed to such a condition when I accepted my appointment, but it's basically presented as a fait accompli. It's easy to see how student-athletes appear to constitute a privileged caste on campus. And a particularly privileged one when you consider that tuition, room and board, etc. are often provided free to scholarship athletes.

Now, I might feel differently if universities were doling out at least as many scholarships for meritorious students. Particularly when tuition at many a private institution can run close to $30,000 a year these days, not that it's really "cheap" anywhere.

Perhaps the greatest shame in all this, though, is that it doesn't really do justice to the athletes themselves. Unless I missed some part of the university charter, the mission of the university is fundamentally to provide an education and to promote learning and personal development (or some similar combination of buzzwords). The emphasis, of course, is on education.

That's not the case, though, with student athletes. No one taking classes during their athletic season is able to give anywhere near the appropriate amount of time and effort to their coursework. I have no doubt that student-athletes need tutoring and other academic aids because independent learning can be pretty difficult, especially if you haven't already developed strong skills in the discipline. But student-athletes are subjected to such conditions so they can help the athletic department rake in millions of dollars. If that's not exploitation, I don't know what is.

Unfortunately, I don't have any concrete answers for how to resolve this situation. One might be to release student-athletes from coursework during their season, so they don't have to try to balance sports with schoolwork. Of course, that doesn't work so well for sports with a long season that can span multiple terms, and especially since most sports hold practices and workouts year round. Maybe the answer is to allow students to defer their academics altogether until they've exhausted their academic eligibility, though taking four or more years off between school is not much more conducive to learning. Or maybe we should simply make athletics less important. Keep them if you must, but make it something on the level of club sports, where there aren't scholarships involved, or the same monetary and time commitments.

But throwing more money -- $165 million -- at college athletics isn't going to improve matters.

That must be why they changed the name from Humanitarian Bowl

2005-12-30T10:39:00.000-08:00

I can't speak for everyone, but I know many folks, including some from Idaho, who think of the state as a bastion of white supremacy. Incidents like Ruby Ridge and other militia and paramilitary groups hunkered down in the state don't help dispell such impression for most folks. Nor, for that matter, do ethnically and racially insensitive comments at one of the state's big events of the year.

At a banquet Monday night before the MPC Computers Bowl between the Eagles and Boise State, {MPC Computers CEO] Mike Adkins read a list of the top 10 things Boise and Boston have in common, including, "No one in either city can properly pronounce Mathias Kiwanuka." Adkins mispronounced Kiwanuka's name in the punchline and some Boston College players said later they found the joke insulting and disrespectful.

Kiwanuka is the grandson of Uganda's first prime minister, assassinated by mass-murdering dictator Idi Amin. Adkins apologized to Kiwanuka in a statement Thursday.

Stay classy, Idaho.

Should I end up getting lynched for treason June 12 ...

2005-12-09T15:10:00.000-08:00

... you'll know why:

Czech Republic v. USA, opening match, 2006 World Cup, Gelsenkirchen, Germany.

Here's a change

2005-12-07T15:53:00.000-08:00

It's not every day I find myself wanting to defend Dubya. In fact, I believe this would be the first time.

Rather shockingly, the official White House greeting cards this year contain a generic holiday greeting, rather than wishing a "Merry Christmas."

That's surprisingly tolerant and inclusive, especially coming from such a born again who routinely milks opportunities to invoke his religion whenever possible. After all, he didn't really stop to consider other people's beliefs when he tried to shift social programs to "faith-based initiatives," or when he pushed for "abstinence-only education [sic]," so why start now, and here?

It's mystifying. But the best part is, he seems to have really pissed off the hardcore evangelical right, which is having a conniption.

The key passage, without doubt, is the following:

Bush "claims to be a born-again, evangelical Christian. But he sure doesn't act like one," said Joseph Farah, editor of the conservative Web site WorldNetDaily.com. "I threw out my White House card as soon as I got it."

That would have to also rate as a first. Not too many folks capable of transcending their prejudices would make such a preposterous claim that Dubya hasn't acted like a born-again. Some might argue that Bush hasn't behaved in a way very befitting of a Christian ("I think it's more important to put Christ back into our war planning than into our Christmas cards," quipped the Rev. Bob Edgar, a former Democratic congressman).

If the Religious Right is so offended by having this "un-Christian" greeting foisted upon them, then maybe it's just for them to get a taste of what it's like for the non-Christian part of the country to have an evangelical agenda rammed down their throats all the time.

Besides, it's not like most folks celebrate Christmas in a fashion that seems to particularly stress Christ. Unless you consider mad shopping sprees and crass consumerism emblematic of a man who thought the poor more virtuous than the rich. (Or maybe not.)

So I guess I should wish the Bushes a happy holiday as well.

Yet another reason to hate liberal Hollywood

2005-12-06T20:50:00.000-08:00

ABC has tabbed Mel Gibson's production company to make a miniseries about a Holocaust survivor.

It's right for me to find this patently offensive, no? I mean, as the lead from the story notes, Gibson's big film, "The Passion of the Christ," was criticized as anti-Semitic, and his father, Hutton Gibson, is a Holocaust denier.

Granted, Mel Gibson himself might not actually be involved with this project, other than having his production company undertaking it, but it still sends a very strong a disturbing message to put the two together.

And it's really insensitive, I think, that ABC seems to relish the controversy it'll create, since it'll drum up interest and thus viewers, meaning profits:

But Quinn Taylor, ABC's senior vice president for movies for television, acknowledged that the attention-getting value of having Mr. Gibson attached to a Holocaust project was a factor.

"Controversy's publicity, and vice versa," Mr. Taylor said.

Yeah, except that when part of that publicity is generated by a tangential link to Gibson's father, who has stated publicly that stories of the Holocaust were largely "fiction," and that Europe emerged from the Second World War with more Jews than before; and when Gibson hasn't distanced himself from those comments, only acknowledging that "some" of the tens of millions killed in the war were Jews, it's a good bit more problematic.

But hey, I guess ABC thinks it's OK to exploit a genocide 60 years down the road if there's money to be made off it. Perhaps I sound a bit crass, but I'd say I'm no more so than the ABC execs who think this is a really good idea.

I would disagree

2005-12-02T22:17:00.000-08:00

A judge in the US state of Texas has agreed to allow President George W Bush to postpone jury service - on the grounds he is busy running the country.

Now, it's true that, technically, Dubya is the president, and thus would have an excuse for avoiding jury duty.

Except that it doesn't seem like he's really working that hard at running the country. Unless by "running the country" one means "running the country into the ground." After all, this is the president whose vacations would make a Frenchman envious.

Not all of us have the luxury of spending more than a quarter of our time on vacation, but then, this is no ordinary president.

Besides, all those days clearing brush on the Crawford ranch really eat into Dubya's time to do other things, like serve on a jury, or meet with the mother of a slain G.I. Or act like he gives a damn.

At least if he's going to shirk jury duty, he ought to try to come up with a better excuse than the "I'm the president" business.

Then again, Dubya certainly has shown a propensity for being above the law in his nearly five years in office.

Three cheers for racism

2005-11-29T20:35:00.000-08:00

Apparently not everyone thinks it's such a good idea that Southern universities are trying to distance themselves from certain aspects of their Southern heritage -- namely slavery, or the Klan -- in an attempt to make their campuses more attractive to prospective students from minority groups and other parts of the country.

"I think they ought to leave it the way it is," said Dr. David W. Aiken, an alumnus who is an orthopedic surgeon in Metairie, La. "I wouldn't be for changing anything. I think they're doing quite well. What is the purpose of making it a more national school? Do I want kids from California, New York coming there? Not really."

Right, because the whole point of the academy is to create a cloistered environment where students and faculty won't be exposed to diverse viewpoints and feel comfortable with frank exploration of weighty issues. That sounds like my kind of university.

Honestly, this whole "the Confederacy is part of our heritage" song and dance is about 140 years out of date. You don't exactly see German universities retaining swastikas in their logos and keeping buildings named for Hitler, Goebbels, etc., with the candy-ass excuse that "the Third Reich is part of our history."

Sure, Nazism is a part of German history, just like the Confederacy is for the South. But Germans tend not to draw attention to the fact that their forerunners murdered 12 million Jews and members of other undesirable groups, since most people prefer not to glorify tyrannical, racist regimes.

And that whole argument about how the Confederacy represented states rights is just window dressing. Yeah, the Confederacy wanted to protect states rights. Like the right to hold hundreds of thousands of people in bondage simply due to the color of their skin.

But hey, if you want to keep touting your "heritage," go right ahead. You keep your Stars and Bars and your white gowns. Just keep on calling attention to your bigotry.

National birds

2005-11-22T14:31:00.000-08:00

Pardoned Turkey Is Going to Disneyland

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: November 22, 2005

WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush has pardoned two Thanksgiving turkeys, and they are headed for Disneyland.

Indicted vice presidential aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby and his puppetmaster, Karl Rove, are being shipped to Disneyland in California, where Rove will serve as grand marshall of the annual holiday parade.

Previous national traitors spared by the president also got to spend the rest of their days in Orange County, where former President Richard M. Nixon escaped public scrutiny after the Watergate scandal.

The 185-pound Libby was raised on the side lawn of the White House during the Reagan administration. Bush says the bird's probably going to feel pretty good ''strutting around sunny California scot free.''

Lies and the lying liars who tell them

2005-11-21T18:33:00.000-08:00

Dick "I'm Dick Cheney yes I'm the real Cheney all you other Dick Cheneys are just palpitating" Cheney supports "vigorous debate" and finds criticism of the war in Iraq fair game.

Just don't go claiming the president lied about intelligence reports to lead the country into war.

"Senator John McCain put it best: it is a lie to say that the president lied to the American people," Mr. Cheney said.

Good for him.

And good for Dick. I'm glad to see he still professes to uphold democratic principles while he does his damnedest to undermine them.

Why I hate the Ivy League

2005-11-19T14:49:00.000-08:00

This article really seems to describe all the things I hate about the Yale and Harvard types.

At one fraternity gathering, where upholstered chairs had been hauled in and set up on the grass, girls in cable-knit sweaters swigged from bottles of Champagne, some of them perched on the laps of boys wearing tweed jackets and glassy-eyed expressions. It was slightly before noon. Most of them remained there through the first half of the game.

You can dress a pig in a tweed blazer and give it an Ivy League education, but it remains, fundamentally, a pig.

Do the math

2005-11-19T12:43:00.000-08:00

In case you missed it, a recording surfaced online this week of a rap song some students at the University of Miami (Fl.) made. The song made by the "7th Floor Crew," which included members of the school's football team, was noteworthy for its vulgarly misogynistic lyrics, which evidently describe group sex by multiple men with individual women, and other extremely offensive terms that demean women.

Although, apparently, the track begins with someone saying, "This song in its entirety is not meant to disrespect any women, in its entirety. Well, you know what I mean. All right, play the track."

Uh, yeah.

The song has become a national story, though, due to the participation by the aforementioned members of the Hurricanes football team, a program historically known for the less than exemplary off-field behavior of its players.

Still, college football pundits seem more than willing to mitigate the impact of the song, if not defend its creators, on the Miami football program.

I particularly enjoyed this screed, which wistfully regrets that five years of work to restore the integrity of the football program has evidently been jeopardized by a 9-minute rap song:

It should be noted that the song is said to be 2 years old. You can decide for yourself what the statute of limitations should be on misogyny.

Hmm. Now, call me crazy, call me capable of using a calculator, but if the song really is two years old, doesn't that mean it still was produced in the middle of this apparent "restoration of integrity" supposedly going on for the past five years? It would seem to me that it's perfectly fair for this to taint the current administration, even if this wasn't hot of the presses.

Moreover, one current football player, Sinorice Moss, made the following appraisal of the song when asked about it Wednesday:

That's something that they did like two years ago. A couple of the freshmen and older guys made a rap song. It was a really cool song.

Really cool. So, even if the current crop of football players hasn't produced anything so offensive in, oh, two years, they still see nothing wrong with demeaning women.

Yeah, it sounds like that program has really done wonders to restore its integrity.

Then again, in fairness, I'd say that this probably doesn't vary dramatically from the attitudes of the vast majority of football players at this level or above, which is just another reason why football is a lousy sport. In addition to it being really boring to watch.

Alma nutter

2005-11-16T22:31:00.000-08:00

I can't figure out which part of this disturbs me most.

A. Hanson came to speak at my alma mater.
B. People still turn out in numbers to see Hanson.
C. People turned out to see Hanson speak.
D. Hanson is still being taken seriously.
E. Hanson was ever taken seriously.

While the message they're evidently trumpeting about the need to fight the major label scene in the recording industry is laudable, it's just hard to hear it coming from three teeny-bopping brothers from Oklahoma who played wholesome music.

Especially when they make stupid remarks.

The lyric “Just a figure in a big monopoly game,” from the song “Strong Enough to Break,” “is not a reference to Milton Bradley,” Isaac said. “It’s a reference to corporate monopoly.”

Thanks a lot, Captain Obvious.

In fairness, it's probably not safe to assume that every college student knows what a monopoly is, even at a prestigious university. Or that the three Hansons -- I refuse to use the words "Hanson" and "brothers" in proximity to refer to these three, since they're an unworthy namesake of the star line of the Charlestown Chiefs in "Slapshot" -- know that "Monopoly" is from Parker Brothers, not Milton Bradley.

Truth in "Mission Accomplished"

2005-11-16T13:12:00.000-08:00

The headline from Sport says it all:

Mise splněna, Češi jsou po 16 letech na MS

Roughly translated, that's be: "Mission Accomplished, After 16 years Czechs Are in World Cup"

Czech Republic 1, Norway 0

On to Germany.

Olé, olé, olé!

Does this qualify me for hazard pay?

2005-11-15T19:53:00.000-08:00

As some of you may be aware, I'm currently in my first quarter as a TA. It's not bad, particularly since the assignment I've drawn this quarter, U.S. military history, isn't much of a demand on my time. I don't have to lead discussion sections, I hold two office hours a week that no one has yet attended, there's a single 600-page textbook (the sum total of reading for the entire course), and just a single midterm plus a final exam, as listed on the syllabus. (More on that in a moment.)

The one major drawback, or at least it would like more of one if I wasn't already taking a course in my own field that meets at 9:30 a.m. daily, is that the lectures are at 8:30 a.m., Monday through Friday.

Now, I'm not totally unsympathetic to the students. I mean, it wasn't so many years ago that I was an undergrad and the thought of any course before 11 made me think twice (since I'd have to get up before 10 and there was some psychological aversion to waking up at a single-digit hour not appended by p.m.). Sure, I took a few courses that met before 10. Two to be exact. Both my senior year. One a required course not offered at any other time. (Plus there was the course that met at 8:30 twice a week my junior year, though I dropped that midway through the term once I decided to drop my journalism major altogether.) And I distinctly remember how I mentally discounted any classes in the course catalog that met at 9. Once I even consciously decided not to take a class I wanted and would've otherwise taken, French history from 1789-1815, for the singular reason that I didn't want to get up at 9 a.m. three times a week.

So, I look at these undergrads and have to admire them for braving an 8:30 class. The professor who teaches this class is also sympathetic. I think 8:30 is a bit earlier than he'd prefer to have it if he had his druthers, but the time was assigned.

And I also recall from being an undergraduate the easy temptation to skip class and sleep in. Particularly in large lecture courses where attendance wasn't taken, where there was no participation component, where the course grade was based solely on two exams. I mean, I had an art history class not unlike that at the beginning of my freshman year that met twice a week in the afternoon, but I took to skipping it roughly midway through once I decided 1) I was getting absolutely nothing out of going to lecture other than dozing off and 2) I'd rather sleep in my own bed if I was going to be unconscious those three hours a week. Actually, about half the time I just went to work earlier, reasoning that I was better off earning about $9, or whatever it worked out to after taxes for the hour and a half spent on the job.

Anyway, the point of that long and rambling introduction is to say that I sympathize fully with students not making it to lecture regularly. I think I'd have a much harder time summoning the motivation myself if I didn't have a class right after taught by my adviser that's really crucial. A couple of weeks ago when my adviser cancelled two classes after the midterm since he went to a conference, I wound up skipping my TA lecture one day. It happens.

But being on the other side now, this doesn't mean that undergrad attendance patterns don't provide me a certain amusement.

To wit, I received the following e-mail this afternoon from a student:

Hey Scott,

I was curious when our 2nd midterm is. Honestly, I come to class sporadically and I haven't heard a single mention about it, is this because we are only having a midterm and a final? Also, I was curious how I could find out about my grade on the last midterm, do I have to come to your office hours???

Sincerely,
[name omitted]

A few remarks. First, I'm just glad the student in question didn't call me by the other TA's name, as an earlier e-mail from a different student did. It's good to know that the students have half a clue as to who I am, though my interaction with students is admittedly low. (Of course, if any of them bothered to come to office hours, that might change.)

Second, can't you just hear the student pleading wistfully, "Please don't make me come to class at 8:30 in the morning!"

Third, as anyone who bothered to read the syllabus can tell, there's only one midterm and one final. Now, there might be some confusion created by the home page for the course, which has a syllabus from a previous year when the class was structured slighly differently and had two midterms and a final. But, one would hope that the student in question had looked at the actual hardcopy syllabus received on Day 1.

Still, it's fun to see students betray how little they've come to class or done on their own. Our prof actually moved back the date of the midterm, which was listed all along as "tentative" on the syllabus. The date change had been announced daily for at least the week prior to the exam. Nonetheless, we still had one student come up at the end of class the day before the original exam date, asking questions about test content, and then finally he asked the prof whether it was still tomorrow, which prompted a rather incredulous sound from the prof, who informed him that it was Friday and then inquired as to when the last time was the student came to class.

And you get more of that on the actual day listed for the midterm on the syllabus. Attendance spikes, and a few people look perplexed when they don't see other people reaching for bluebooks.

So, I guess the only sporting thing to do in regard to this particular inquiry is to promise to bring the student's exam to tomorrow's class. I mean, that would be the obvious time to return an assignment ... although I think I'd be more embarrassed that it's now been nearly two weeks since we first returned exams, and we even announced at the midterm the day when we would return them, and still this student has clearly not been to class once in that period.

In any event, I won't have any particular sympathy when it comes time for me to grade the student's final, since it's not like the student has made a demonstrative effort to come to class and learn. Though I do admire the candor of confessing regular absence.

Survival of the fittest

2005-11-09T11:40:00.000-08:00

In an encouraging victory for intelligent -- not intelligently designed -- people everywhere, voters in Dover, Penn., swept from office school board members who called for the introduction of "intelligent design" theory into the district's biology curriculum.

Really, it's a refreshing manifestation of natural selection in the democratic process -- normally not known for producing the fittest elected officials (see Congress) -- since the old board clearly was composed of individuals who had no business choosing a science curriculum since they had no ability to do so intelligently.

And to stretch the metaphor still further, had these officials not been voted out of office, the repercussions of passing along bad knowledge of science to future generations of students would have left their students unable to compete and survive in the wider world, which would have caused them to have trouble entering university, obtaining desirable jobs, finding suitable mates, producing offspring, etc. Such is the natural order of things.

Thirty million Canadians can't be wrong

2005-11-04T14:50:00.000-08:00

Some refreshing honesty from a bizarre workers comp case involving a minor league hockey player injured in a fight his coach told him to start:

"This court finds that fighting is an integral part of hockey," Emmert said. "Thirty million Canadians could have told you that."

Nary a Ron 'Mea' Kulpa

2005-11-01T22:53:00.000-08:00

"World Series crew chief Joe West defended umpires against criticism of their postseason performance, saying "I think we did just fine."

Well, sure. Yes, the umpires got the vast majority of calls right. But this postseason was particularly memorable for the unusually high number of blown calls in significant spots. Or, for the cynical, the unusually high number of blown calls in significant spots that benefited the White Sox.

Missed calls are certainly a part of the sport, and I doubt I'd be complaining much if the Angels had been the beneficiaries of all those calls, though I like to think I'd be more willing to acknowledge that they caught a bunch of breaks, unlike the bitterly defensive and hyper-sensitive Sox fans who seem unwilling to do that much.

Anyway, the disappointing thing in this story is that there hasn't been any admission by any umpire or umpiring supervisor that calls were missed, and badly. I know they're only human, and mistakes happen, but it'd be nice to see some ump with the honesty to admit that, "Yeah, I totally missed that call. My bad."

Sure, they don't want to invite second guessing, though the innumerable replays have already done that much. But I know from experience that I always gained respect for umpires who fessed up to their mistakes. Plus, it was surprisingly effective in defusing a lot of frustration, just to have confirmation from the source that he blew it.

Evidently these umps need to demonstrate a certain machismo.

Worry

2005-10-31T07:41:00.000-08:00

All you need to know about Samuel Alito, Bush's new pick for the Supreme Court vacancy?

He has been nicknamed "Scalito" for his ideological similarity to United States Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonin Scalia.

I wonder what that investigation will entail

2005-10-25T19:27:00.000-07:00

Legal fun in Brazil

Ouch

2005-10-22T16:11:00.000-07:00

One ESPN columnist's recollection on growing up a White Sox fan:

The White Sox have been a constant in my life during that time. But, here's the scary truth. In that same year, 1975, my Dad took me to my first Northwestern football game (can you believe this guy? The Department of Children and Family Services has made home visits for lesser offenses). And, despite the fact that, at one point, they lost 34 games in a row and won just six in my four years of college there, up until the past month, Northwestern football had brought me far more memorable moments in my life than the White Sox. Being a Sox fan is like having a pet goldfish. It's just kind of uneventful.

I'd just like to point out that the alma mater beat a ranked opponent for the third consecutive week this afternoon, thank you very much.

I also disliked his analogy of a Sox fan being like a Zoroastrian yak herder from Uzbekistan. After all, I have no reason to dislike Zoroastrian yak herders from Uzbekistan.

Go Cats!

Lies, damn lies and misapplications of probability theory

2005-10-22T13:16:00.000-07:00

I received some spam this afternoon. It happens frequently in my Gmail account, since I have a fairly common first and last name, and had the mixed blessing of scoring my name soon after Gmail launched. It's nice not having to append numbers or strange punctuation, but it means a lot of people trying to send mail to my namesake end up misdirecting it to me

Now, normally such things aren't of much interest, aside from the mild amusement at having folks ask if I'm coming to their barbecues or what my weekend plans entail.

Today, however, I was forwarded this month's edition of "Gentle Conquest," a newsletter from some evangelical ministry. And this particular newsletter explains -- mathematically, no less! -- why intelligent design is infallible and evolution is a load of anti-Christian bunk (typos in original):

Whether we are theologians or scientists, we can still prove by unwavering mathematical law that our universe--and life in it-- were designed by a transcendent engineering Intelligence. For example, take ten pennies and number each of them one to ten. Put them in your pocket and shuffle them. Mathematically, your chance of drawing out number one on the first draw is one in ten; numbers one and two in succession is one in 100. To draw out one, two, and three, in perfect order, your chance is one in one thousand. By fixed, mathematical law, your chance of drawing out all ten in uninterrupted order is one in ten billion. These are the odds of chance. Simply stated, it can't be done. Yet with such evidence before us, some still persist in arguing defensively for accidental evolution. You could more easily argue that your automobile--everything from cruise control to axles--resulted from a factory explosion in which all the parts coincidentally joined togeth! er in mid-air.

Amazing, isn't it? Simple probability revealed decades of science to be promoting fallacies.

Except that it doesn't.

For one, the numbers here don't add up. The minister (or whoever wrote this) failed to check his math. That is, he failed to grasp the concept of dependent variables. If the pennies are numbered one to 10, the odds that the first one drawn comes up with No. 1 is, of course, one in 10 (1/10). But the odds of drawing No. 2 on the second one are only one in nine (1/9), assuming we didn't put the first penny back, which seems to be the case in this example. And that means calculating the correct probability is thus 1/10 * 1/9 * 1/8, etc., or 1/10!. And that yields odds of 1 in 3,628,800. Not great odds, but almost three times likelier than one our minister-mathematician would have us believe.

Of course, what this problem has to do with evolution is a mystery, though it speaks to the larger issue of this person not grasping fundamental tenets of evolution theory. Or refusing to believe them. I assume this person rejects carbon dating and believes the earth is actually only 6600 years old, or whatever it's supposed to be according to the Bible.

A Velvet reconciliation?

2005-10-20T12:42:00.000-07:00

Not so fast. While I've been lecturing people for several years now to cease using the term "Czechoslovakia" with the present tense, Czech Premier Jiri Paroubek seems more willing to bend to the intractability of the name abroad.

Paroubek has proposed that the successor states -- that is, the Czech and Slovak republics -- resurrect the name Czechoslovakia as a marketing tool, apparently since no one outside of the two countries seems capable of differentiating between the Czech Republic (previously branded abroad as the wince-inducing "Czechia") and Croatia or Chechnya. And pity the poor Slovaks. Major daily U.S. newspapers -- I'm looking at you, USA Today -- can't even tell the difference between Slovakia and Slovenia. It's a good thing, then, that the Croatian province of Slavonia isn't its own independent country, simply because that would introduce a further element of confusion.

OK, so really this just reveals that most people are stupid, or else intellectually lazy. (Sadly, I've encountered some highly educated people who lapse into use of Czechoslovakia, whether of ignorance or inertia.) But it seems that Paroubek is just as stupid, or lazy, for even suggesting this idea.

Of course, it is a bit of a conundrum. "Czech Republic" doesn't roll off the tongue any more gracefully than does "Czechia," and my adviser resents it as well for according special status to the Czechs when pretty much every other country, at least in Europe, has as its official name the "So-and-So Republic," e.g. the Slovak Republic, Hungarian Republic, Russian Republic, etc.

And that doesn't even get into the deeper, thornier issue of the term "Czech" being synonymous with both Bohemia and the country as a whole.

Justice American style

2005-10-20T12:26:00.000-07:00

Yup, Saddam Hussein's trial pretty much confirms the obvious: that Iraq is a lot worse off in many ways than it was before Hussein was deposed.

"I watched some of the trial and I was upset, because his rule was better than what we have today," Qusay Muhammad, 24, said as he sold tea from a sidewalk booth. "I don't mean to say I love Saddam. I'm just making a comparison between the old regime and the government today."

Conservatives in particular should know that this sort of sentimentality for a bygone era always spells trouble for the current order, which in this case is America and whatever current semblance of an Iraqi government it's trying to prop up.

This anecdote strikes me as particularly telling, too, in that it isn't unflinching praise for Hussein from one Sunni Muslim to another. Without doubt, there were excesses and atrocities on Hussein's watch that no one should want to repeat, and for which a full and proper reckoning should be made.

But, it just goes to show that you need more than bayonets and "smart bombs" to build a democracy, that it can't be imposed by force from without, that forces from within have to do the heavy lifting throughout the entirety of the process.

Then again, we all knew this already. Or at least the sensible among us did.

You build a better brand of justice, I'll go ahead and build a dumber breed of criminal

2005-10-20T11:13:00.000-07:00

Now, I've heard of people doing some crazy and not-so-crazy things to show their devotion to a favorite sports team or athlete.

Getting a vanity license plate that says "GOKINGS"? Not so crazy.

Getting your favorite team's logo tattooed on your posterior? A little bit crazy.

Naming your child for a playoff hero? Getting a bit more bonkers (though this psychosis has likely afflicted the greater Boston area in the past year, with an alarming proliferation of infants named Johnny, Manny or Ortiz in New England).

Extending the length of your prison sentence so that the number of years matches the number your favorite player wore on his jersey? Needless to say, this is just lunatic asylum insane.

The lawyers reached a plea agreement Tuesday for a 30-year term for a man accused of shooting with an intent to kill and robbery. But Eric James Torpy wanted his prison term to match Bird's jersey number 33.

"He said if he was going to go down, he was going to go down in Larry Bird's jersey," Oklahoma County District Judge Ray Elliott said Wednesday. "We accommodated his request and he was just as happy as he could be.

At least he chose not to honor hockey's Great One, Wayne Gretzky, who wore No. 99.

Or another memorable figure from Boston sports history, Bill "The Spaceman" Lee, a pitcher for the Red Sox who requested jersey No. 337 so that when he came out to pitch at Fenway Park he could do a handstand and have the back of his jersey read "LEE". Of course, that would be more appropriate in the case of this guy.

New adventures in toadying

2005-10-19T22:36:00.000-07:00

An unfortunate byproduct of watching a lot of playoff baseball (and really, at this point I only seem to watch much of any sport -- OK, just hockey and baseball -- during its postseason, largely because it's more accessible) is having to sit through a lot of commercials. And a lot of the same commercial repeated to death.

Few commercials are ever good. Particularly for the non-Super Bowl division (and frankly, at this point the commercials are the only reason to watch the Super Bowl, or any American football for that matter, but that's a topic for another rant).

But some commercials are especially bad. Take a commercial for, well, I'm not sure what. (I do my damnedest not to pick up on the "product" being peddled, since that's what they want, and even if I did recall, it would only further serve the advertisers' purposes if I gave their wares free publicity. So I won't.) The whole message behind this campaign, I think, is that this product makes more things possible for business, which I think really means that corporate managers can use this product to further erode the places where their employees are relatively free of managerial oversight.

That in and of itself is bad enough. But the tag line for this is something to the effect of "Be a yes man," with various actors playing professionals reciting a line about how "I'm a yes man (or yes woman)".

Excuse me. Did they just confess to being a sycophant and take pride in it?

It's really sad that we live in a corporate culture (there's a contradiction in terms if ever one existed) where being a sycophant is something to be publicly proclaimed and boasted. I mean, I know they don't actually use that word, but they should. It'd at least make the spots comical, which would make them only slightly more bearable for me to have to watch.

Sheep go to heaven, Yankees go to hell [New York]

2005-10-10T21:01:00.000-07:00

Angels 5, Yankees 3. Angels win ALDS, 3-2, to advance to ALCS vs. Chicago.

Suck it, Yankees fans!

¡Viva el Presidente!

2005-10-10T19:52:00.000-07:00

Being a fan of anyone who dares to point out the emperor is naked, I really have to appreciate the candor of the Venezuelan government of Hugo Chávez.

On the CNN program "Late Edition" on Oct. 9, Mr. Robertson was back on the attack, citing unidentified sources who accused Mr. Chávez of sending "either $1 million or $1.2 million in cash" to Osama bin Laden after the Sept. 11 attacks and asserting that Venezuela was trying to acquire a nuclear weapons capacity. The Venezuelan vice president, José Vicente Rangel, dismissed Mr. Robertson's remarks, saying, "He's crazy, at the very least."

And you just have to love their sense of humor. For one, they refer to Dubya as "Mr. Danger." For another, Venezuelan state television broadcasts clips of American officials criticizing Chávez, with the Darth Vader theme playing in the background.

Of course, the merriment in all this is sobered by the fact that the level of threat is much more grave. While it would defy logic for the Bush administration to try to depose Chávez, it's certainly not beyond the pale. Even if they claim otherwise.

"The U.S. has not planned, is not planning, will not plan and cannot plan to assassinate Hugo Chávez," the American ambassador to Venezuela, William Brownfield, said in Caracas. "It would be a violation of both U.S. law and policy."

Right, because the administration has so often opted against military action where it would be in violation of U.S. law. That's reassuring.

Why not have some cheese with that $200 million bottle of whine

2005-10-03T19:32:00.000-07:00

The New York Yankees -- yeah, those Yankees -- are miffed because Texas Rangers skipper Buck Showalter (a former Yankee manager) pulled three starters in the third inning in the season finale against the Angels, and the Rangers wound up turning a 4-1 lead into a 7-4 loss that gave Anaheim home field advantage in the Division Series against the Yanks.

Showalter said he wanted to pull his three stars to allow them to get a proper, final ovation from the home crowd in recognition of their fine individual seasons. It's commonplace for the final game of the regular season. Stars often sit out that last game, or just make a token appearance solely to please the fans one final time before the offseason starts. Evidently the Yankees don't find that very apropos, though:

Former Ranger Alex Rodriguez, who played for Showalter in Texas, was one of the Yankees who was peeved at the Rangers manager's decision.

"There's a code of honor when so much is on the line," Rodriguez told the New York Daily News. "You hope people do the right thing. But you can't control what people do."

That's right, the $250 million man and self-promotion machine extraordinaire A-Rod is speaking of a "code of honor." God, I love the smell of hypocrisy in the morning.

Of course, the Yankees, in typical New York fashion, can't possibly look in the mirror to notice that, hey, had they not gotten blown out in their own season finale on Sunday, they would've finished with a better record outright and rendered the game in Texas irrelevant. But then, the earth revolves around the Yankees, who clearly have every right to expect other teams to cater their strategies to suit the Yanks' needs.

And as an aside, let me just note that this sort of arrogance extends to Yankee fans as well. Prior to the 2001 World Series, a Yankee fan remarked to me that she hoped the series would go seven games, just because it would make it a little more exciting for her, since the Yankees hadn't stretched things out at all in winning the World Series the three previous years. Mercifully, karma came back to bite the Yankees in the ass.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: GO HALOS!

Military-industrial complex?

2005-10-01T14:50:00.000-07:00

From the introduction to Allan R. Millett and Peter Maslowski's For the Common Defense: A Military History of the United States of America, the textbook for the American military history I'm TAing for this quarter:

"When gauging America's strength against potential enemies, policy makers realized that the nation could devote its energies and financial resources to internal development rather than to maintaining a large and expensive peacetime military establishment." (xii)

I'd hate to see what the tab would be if we had a "large and expensive" military buildup, since ours is evidently more modest.

A regular pissing match

2005-09-26T16:53:00.000-07:00

Here's one sight I definitely didn't see in Prague over the summer.

Kafka once wrote a short story about Kampa, the quiet little section of Prague where this artwork is installed, and while his story obviously couldn't have mentioned the installation, you have to think it wouldn't have fazed him. I also wonder if he is one of the notable Prague denizens "quoted."

(via Dave Barry)

Toothless

2005-09-24T17:41:00.000-07:00

It would not be exaggeration to say I had been waiting five-plus years for last night. Ever since I saw Nine Inch Nails perform in Chicago way back in April 2000 on the Fragility v 2.0 tour, I knew that the next time they went on tour I would do whatever it took not only to get tickets but to get floor tickets, just to ensure that I had an optimal viewing experience.

Fragility was incredible. It pioneered the use of giant LCD screens for not only video clips, but also lighting and other stage effects. And, oh yeah, the music absolutely kicked ass. I had been to some good shows, and I've definitely seen acts that were worth catching live again, but never had a show before or since had such an transformative impact.

Granted, that wasn't entirely the doing of the concert. The timing was simply fortuitous in that I really began to discover NIN in a meaningful sense at a time when I was in the middle of a mentally torturous, emotionally abusive friendship. I could not (and still can't) help listening to The Fragile without getting this profound sensation that, lyrically, Trent Reznor had simply decided to describe my personal feelings with tremendous precision. If nothing else, since then I've felt a sort of kinship with Trent in that I can imagine what sorts of anguish and grief he's endured. And ever since, I've just had this transcendant relationship to the entire NIN catalog. Stated simply, if ever I were to try convey such emotions and experience musically, I think I'd just wind up copying Trent (assuming I ever had a millionth of his musical talent) because he's captured it so perfectly.

Last night's show was no different. Much like Fragility, the With Teeth tour has added a multimedial depth to NIN music that overwhelms my sensory perception and achieves that sort of sublime experience.

Actually, as I awaited the beginning of NIN's set, I got a bit anxious. After all, Fragility was such a visually revolutionary production that I had to wonder what could be done for an encore. How could Trent top that? I mean, really, he couldn't. But thankfully, he's still ahead of the curve, even if there's less that's drastically new from With Teeth that will inspire copycats for the next several years.

Vaguely reminiscent of Fragility, With Teeth opened with the band beginning to play behind a curtain. Only this time it wasn't a black curtain in front of a pounding strobe light, but a translucent white one, and this time they didn't remain behind the curtain until the completion of "Somewhat Damaged," but quickly transitioned from "Pinion" to a ripping version of "Love Is Not Enough" as the curtain lifted.

There were many things I really appreciated about this show. For one, there was a terrific mix of songs. The set list featured about half the songs off With Teeth, but ranged far and wide across the NIN catalog, with the better tracks off the debut, Pretty Hate Machine, healthy doses from the classic The Downward Spiral and the epic tour de force The Fragile. But then there were songs off the often overlooked but outstanding extended LP Broken, as well as "Burn" from the "Natural Born Killers" soundtrack and "Deep" from the "Tomb Raider" soundtrack. And, best of all, we got to hear a new, unreleased track, "Not So Pretty Now," which pushes musically in a different direction for Trent. All outstanding choices. There were 22 songs in total they played about two hours, and it was fabulous. Some songs were missing from the set list that I would've loved to have heard, in particular "The Great Below," "Into the Void," "The Day the Whole World Went Away" and "Somewhat Damaged" -- OK, really I wanted to hear The Fragile in its entirety, plus the rest of the NIN catalog. ("The Perfect Drug" springs to mind as a non-Fragile track.) But I can't complain about hearing as much as I did.

Musically, it was also rewarding in that the versions of several songs varied widely from the album versions. While I really, really like "Only" off With Teeth and find its campy, New Wave-ish beat a perfect underpinning for the tongue-in-cheek lyrics (it's also a great dance song), the harder version was sonically powerful. Likewise, variations on "Sin" and others made me feel like I was getting treated to one of the many NIN remix albums that are actually worth eight bucks.

THe highlight of the concert for me, though, was in the middle of the set. The curtain came down again, and suddenly it made sense. As in, it was a sort of mesh material that could be used as a screen onto which video was projected. The best part was during "Right Where It Belongs," when it played a montage of clips of happy people juxtaposed with images of destruction, the perfect illustration of the political (and other) meanings of the song. So, old clips of dozens of couples ballroom dancing in their finest were interspersed with images of supersonic bombers destroying desert landscapes. It was so profoundly tragic and emotionally resonant that I felt close to tears. And then, in case anyone in the crowd was too stupid to pick up on the allusion (and I'm not putting that past this crowd -- more on that later), there was a final scene of ballroom dancing with George and Laura Bush in the middle. That elicited several middle fingers and "fuck yous," and might have been the high-water mark for audience participation.

Seriously, that was the worst part of the entire show. The crowd was practically dead. The overwhelming majority of people in the seats remained on their asses for the entirety of the show, and even down in the floor where I was there wasn't a lot of energy. It was a stark contrast to the raw adrenaline and sweat coursing through the stage and through those few of us in the crowd who actually had a pulse. At one point Trent seemed to look into the stands and almost shrug his shoulders in that sort of "what gives?" way. I felt deeply ashamed to have been in that audience and I also felt embarrassed for Trent and the band to get such a lukewarm reception. I've heard that Seattle crowds are kind of low key, and I know the culture here is laid back, but give it a break. This was the epicenter of the whole grunge movement. Did folks just sort of watch quietly when Nirvana and Pearl Jam were in their primes? At several points in the show I kept being reminded of the lyrics from Nirvana's "In Bloom" ("He's the one/He likes all our pretty songs/And he likes to sing along/And he likes to shoot his gun/But he knows not what it means"). Perhaps this was Kurt Cobain's ode to Seattle concertgoers.

The strange part of the evening was provided by Trent Reznor's physical appearance. It took me at least 20 minutes to get over the fact that he now has a shaved head, and his sleeveless leather shirt revealed some large, well-sculpted arms. He looked more like he just got out of the military rather than a recording studio. It was a bit offputting, if only because it was thoroughly unexpected.

So, in sum, NIN rocked, Seattle crowds sucked, and I will once again wait impatiently and pay whatever it takes to get to see Trent live again.

Actual bumpersticker

2005-09-20T23:42:00.000-07:00

Seen today on the back of a scooter in Seattle:

"75 mpg: Suck it, big oil!"

Cat food

2005-09-14T08:49:00.000-07:00

German scientist has apparently developed a process for converting cat cadavers into diesel fuel..

According to the story, it takes about 20 dead cats to yield a full tank, though it didn't specify the size of the tank or the kind of car. But I'm sure an SUV would require a larger number of cats for the same mileage. (PETA must be thrilled about the thought of that.)

Just imagine the possibilities, though. Instead of fighting wars on countries rich in oil, we could start launching wars against countries rich in cats. (Uh, Siam?)

Of course, I must caution that heightened demand for dead cats could destabilize a longstanding equilibrium, causing dogs to gain an insurmountable advantage over cats and thus become an unchecked superpower of the animal kingdom.

At least we know where Dubya got it from

2005-09-09T12:26:00.000-07:00

You have to love (read: loathe) compassionate conservatism.

Take ex-First Lady Barbara Bush, who showed her sympathy for Katrina refugees in that special Bush way:

"What I'm hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas," Barbara Bush said in an interview on Monday with the radio program "Marketplace." "Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality."

"And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway," she said, "so this is working very well for them."

Right. The myth of welfare mothers lives, even as corporate welfare fathers (Halliburton, anyone?) get ever fatter suckling at the government's teat.

And I'm sure the evacuees' desire to remain in Texas has nothing to do with the fact that, you know, their homes and everything else they left behind in Louisiana are in ruins. I mean, just because there's nothing but devastation left, that's no reason they shouldn't want to return to the nothingness.

Snakes alive!

2005-09-07T08:36:00.000-07:00

Thomas Friedman (yes, that Thomas Friedman) has written a stunningly good column, lambasting Bush-Cheney for all the right reasons.

I don't think Tom's taken a turn toward the left, but at the very least he's shown that, once in a blue moon, he's capable of intelligent critical thinking.

Graphic

2005-09-06T19:09:00.000-07:00

Arrr!

2005-09-04T14:35:00.000-07:00

This could be one way to spruce up the first day of the TA training conference.

International Talk Like a Pirate Day, coming to a gangplank near you, September 19.

You know Avril Lavigne is punk because her corporate-produced t-shirt says so much

2005-09-01T12:04:00.000-07:00

I'm resisting my kneejerk reaction to lambaste the New York Times arts page as a whole. After all, one must keep in mind the Frank Rich's outstanding column began on the arts page before getting relocated to the op-ed page where he greatly outshines the middling-at-best columnists who also populate that section of the newspaper.

But this idiotic piece from a so-called "music critic" about Hilary Duff and the supposed "love affair between punk and pop."

Evidently Duff is now collaborating with her boyfriend, some guy from the atrocious band Good Charlotte, to make pop music that, according to critic Kelefa Sanneh, has "punk" elements.

And here's the best part: the music they're making is really good.

Throughout the 1990's, the default genre for young pop stars was R&B; most of the time, teen-pop - for example, Britney Spears or 'N Sync - was merely R&B by another name. Then came the astronomical rise of Avril Lavigne, alongside kid-friendly punk bands like Blink-182, and it soon became clear that teen-punk made a sneaky kind of sense. Kids loved the hint of rebellion, parents loved the lack of sex. And as punk bands got more squeaky-clean (a trend that peaked, perhaps, with the cheerful, violin-enhanced band Yellowcard), pop stars like Ashlee Simpson got more brazen about creating their own, radically defanged form of punk.

I don't even know where to begin dissecting this excerpt, or the article as a whole. Suffice it to say that this critic (and Duff, Avril "I don't know how to pronounce David Bowie's name" Lavigne, etc.) wouldn't know punk if it jumped out of the mosh pit at a Fugazi show at CBGB's and stabbed them in the eye with a safety pin.

The whole notion of "squeaky-clean" and defanged punk isn't even oxymoronic; it's the sort of nonsensical fallacy that could only be spewed by someone with a dilettantish knowledge of punk.

But then, what would you expect from a "critic" who suggests that Hilary Duff should be taken seriously as a musician, or at all?

Now here's a president with his priorities in order

2005-08-30T15:07:00.000-07:00

Dubya is making the ultimate sacrifice.

He's cutting short his five-week wartime vacation by a whole two days to help monitor assistance to hurricane victims along the Gulf Coast.

I know I'm moved.

This would be awesome

2005-08-28T23:39:00.000-07:00

Hugo Chavez is trying to get Pat Robertson extradited to Venezuela.

"I announce that my government is going to take legal action in the United States," Mr. Chávez said in a televised speech. "To call for the assassination of a head of state is an act of terrorism."

Grammar in the court

2005-08-28T21:52:00.000-07:00

"The language ought to be used precisely, particularly by lawyers and judges," Mr. Sorensen said. "This is the best thing I've heard about Judge Roberts so far."

Now there's a ringing endorsement of John Roberts. He may hold offensive opinions on women's rights, etc., but at least he knows the difference between "affect" and "effect." Not to mention "ensure" vs. "insure."

No, seriously, I'm not trying to knock this. It would give Roberts some redeeming quality, however minor and relatively trifling, whereas Dubya can't even make up words properly.

Seems reasonable

2005-08-27T15:23:00.000-07:00

In a further display of its status as a "haven for Islamic terrorists" (read: they hate our Christian, god-loving way of life), Venezuela has temporarily tightened permits for foreign preachers.

This, of course, comes on the heels of Pat Robertson calling for the assassination of democratically elected Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, then trying to backpedal from that remark by lying, claiming not to have mentioned "assassination" specifically (he did), but claiming that "take him out" could've meant something less criminal, such as kidnapping.

On Friday, Mr. Chávez said that President Bush would be to blame if anything happened to him after the comments by Mr. Robertson.

"He was expressing the wishes of the U.S. elite," Mr. Chávez said at a public event. "If anything happens to me, then the man responsible will be George W. Bush. He will be the assassin."

He said, "This is pure terrorism."

The measures taken by Venezuela seem eminently reasonable. A foreign elite openly broadcasts his wish to see the country thrown into turmoil by assassination, so the government immediately responds by taking targeted measures to safeguard national security.

I mean, it's perfectly responsible. You wouldn't expect the government to fail to act on an intelligence report with an awfully ominous-sounding subject line Certainly not a responsible government.

Whatever you do kids, don't take ... milk?

2005-08-25T14:42:00.000-07:00

You can tell the batboys association has no clout (possibly because it doesn't exist):

On a dare, a Florida Marlins batboy tried to drink a gallon of milk in under an hour without throwing up. But not only did the batboy not succeed in the challenge, his mere attempt cost him his job for six games, the Miami Herald reported Wednesday.

In other words, had the unidentified batboy been a big leaguer caught using steroids for the first time, his suspension would've been a mere four games longer.

And Major League Baseball wonders why it isn't taken more seriously.

And Jesus? What would he do?

2005-08-23T05:17:00.000-07:00

Stunningly. Stupid.

Pat Robertson, the televangelist asshole, called for U.S. operatives to assassinate Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez on air Monday.

''You know, I don't know about this doctrine of assassination, but if he thinks we're trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it,'' Robertson said. ''It's a whole lot cheaper than starting a war ... and I don't think any oil shipments will stop.''

Right, so to hell with that inconvenient commandment -- how does it go? "Thou shalt not kill"? Oh yeah, that one.

It's also refreshing to see him being honest enough to insinuate what his real concern is. No, not that Chavez is turning Venezuela into "a launching pad for communist infiltration and Muslim extremism." (Earth to Pat: According to the CIA World Factbook -- put out by the CIA, those folks you'd like to have kill Chavez -- Venezuela is, at least nominally, overwhelmingly Catholic. What Muslim extremists there might be would fall into the 2 percent of "other," if that.)

But rather, it's all about oil. And when it comes to Pat, it's always about the Benjamins. Not Jesus. Though love of Jesus and Muslim-hating evidently provide a nice cover for Pat to protect his investments. And, uh, those help to support his televangelism, so that millions of people the world over can hear Pat expound on such Christian concepts as "love thy neighbor," "blessed are the meek," "thou shalt not kill" and "let's assassinate the democratically elected president of a predominantly Christian country so I can make more money in the oil market."

It's the same sort of Christian kindness that led him to speak out against the U.S. government when it tried to oust Liberian President Charles Taylor, a war criminal, because Taylor's ouster would turn over control of the country to "Muslim rebels." Oh, and it'd also jeopardize the sweetheart investment deal Pat had with Taylor in Liberian gold mines. Meek indeed.

(via Joe)

Co to znamená?

2005-08-22T12:39:00.000-07:00

What does it mean, indeed?

I've been pretty frustrated with my language skills of late. Mainly this is the product of trying to jump into reading a collection of conference papers I picked up that are written in Czech and Slovak. I thought I'd forgo the Slovak, since I've never studied Slovak in the least, so I started reading the first two or three articles in Czech.

Now, I don't want to say my efforts met without success. Let's just say that this wasn't the most efficient use of my time. Granted, my tempo was slowed considerably by my desire to look up all the words I don't know (a terribly high number), which slowed the pace quite a bit. But it was still laborious. I was reading at a rate of maybe three pages an hour. At that tempo I'll never be able to do any significant research.

Then today during break, while I was waiting for the lecture to begin, I started in on the next article in the book, which was in Slovak, just to see what I could understand, since I had nothing else to do and about 10 minutes to kill.

And the hell of it is that I seemed to get through the Slovak article much more easily. As in, I was reading the damn thing at something resembling a normal reading pace. Moreover, I was actually understanding probably 80 percent of it, all without benefit of a dictionary.

I realize that Czech and Slovak are very closely related languages, sometimes even classed as members of a subgroup of the West Slavic branch of Slavic languages. That said, I still can't figure out why I can read in the language I've never studied much more quickly than I can in the language I've been learning for most of the past four years, particularly when my ability to understand Slovak is wholly dependent on my knowledge of Czech. Crazy, no?

OK, so there are a few potentially mitigating circumstances. I had lower expectations when I started, reading for general comprehension rather than direct translation and even then not expecting to be able to rough out much at all. And, Slovak, I'm told has fewer words than Czech, which perhaps spares me from encountering lots of new or unfamiliar vocabulary, as is too often the case for me with Czech. And, probably, it didn't hurt that all those vocabulary words I had to look up to get through the first few articles in Czech perhaps came in handy for reading stuff in Slovak on the same theme.

Still, it puzzled me.

Don't get me wrong; I was thrilled to have done so well. And this is certainly welcome encouragement at a time when I kept thinking I was going to have to abandon course because I didn't think my language skills would permit me to do extensive research in Czech, let alone Slovak. So that's good.

It was also good that, when the lecture started, I concentrated really hard and understood about 90 percent of the talk, which is phenomenal from my standpoint.

It now remains to be seen how this translates to the final exam I have to take tomorrow morning. At least I already completed my report for my fellowship, complete with the grade I received "or think I will receive."

Hick chick -- er, chic

2005-08-22T05:15:00.000-07:00

Some people nearing retirement age seek to escape from the grind of urban life and return to the land, so to speak. THere's nothing wrong with deciding to relocate to a little cabin in the middle of the woods, miles from civilization. Hell, J.D. Salinger has been living in the middle of New Hampshire for decades.

But then there are the folks who think, "Gee, Thoreau went and lived in the middle of the woods. Why don't I move to middle of some wooded area and build a rustic-looking house with ultramodern features and pretend like I know what I'm doing there!"

Such is the "moderated ruralism" of the "Cracker Modern" (no, that's not my appellation; the developer is really calling it that) development) development in rural Florida.

The idea is a corporate reinvention of new urbanism, an antisprawl movement that advocates compact, old-fashioned towns where residents can commune in parks, shops and restaurants within walking distance of their homes. Instead of connecting with neighbors, new ruralism promotes connecting with the land - though these cabins in the woods come with wireless Internet access and porches with screens that unfurl by remote control.

Now, it'd be silly to think that people could actually be expected to suffer the unpleasantness of the untamed wilds. You know, all that nature and stuff.

"We honestly asked ourselves, 'Will people live in this environment?' " said Kevin Fox, the St. Joe executive overseeing RiverCamps. "We've got critters, we've got heat, we've got humidity."

Not to worry. The developers have it covered.

At RiverCamps on Crooked Creek, which is near Panama City Beach and offers two-acre lots for up to $1 million, the overhaul involved thinning the forest and burning the thick underbrush so that softer, greener grasses would emerge. With the land reworked, a landscape architect identified 54 "environmental jewels" - Spider Lily Marsh and the like - and mapped them out for prospective buyers. Brochures promise homes in the "Cracker Modern" style: lots of wood, metal roofs, broad roof overhangs to block the sun and screened porches.

Of course, some might argue that the enviromental jewels were, you know, all that thick underbrush that occurs naturally and makes the nature, well, nature. Unspoiled if a nuisance to the latter-day faux Thoreau.

And then there are the thornier matters, like the fact that all this people who want to "go back to the land" don't exactly know how to do that. But, fortunately, once again, the developers have thought of everything.

At the first WhiteFence Farms site, southeast of Tallahassee, St. Joe is preparing 373 acres of former watermelon and peanut fields for "people who have always wanted to live on a farm but don't see themselves as farmers," Mr. Fox said. They must also be willing to pay $20,000 to $45,000 an acre for the land alone. The company is digging ponds and smoothing pastures for buyers it imagines dabbling in horse riding, beekeeping, wildflower growing and field plowing.

You have to wonder about the folks who have this desire to settle an urbane backwater. It recalls a phrase frequently used by a sage philosopher, who spoke often of people "with more money than sense." (Or was that "cents"?)

Ms. Dudley said she wanted to emulate Florida's early rural settlers, known as crackers, who, wrote a British traveler in 1857, "lived among the pines, raised a few hogs and cows, grew a little patch of corn, and just barely survived." Yet Ms. Dudley said she also expected the comforts that cracker settlers sorely lacked.

"Absolutely I want that privacy and those woods," she said. "Yet at the same time, I want to be able to invite a neighbor over for a glass of wine and I want a nice kitchen with a Sub-Zero refrigerator."

True that. We couldn't have the place going all rustic.

I have to think that, had Thoreau had the chance, he probably would've tricked out Walden with a 42-inch plasma TV, Dolby surround sound and lightning-fast wireless Internet. It really helped with all the meditation and convening with nature. He probably also could've used a few "farmhands" to do all the chores, too.

Things I could've done without

2005-08-21T12:58:00.000-07:00

Riding back from the Bohemians match this evening, our tram got quite an unexpected and definitely unwelcome vocal performance.

A group of Americans -- who else? -- launched into an impromptu concert of various Christian worship songs. Ugh. Several on the tram reached for headphones and the rest of us envied those with the good fortune to have brought something to blot out the choir. One of my companions, a Dane, tried to reciprocate by starting a Bohemians chant, but it didn't catch on, so for several stops we had to endure the church choir.

Ugh. It was bad enough that Bohemians lost the match, and that we had stood for the second half in a steady rain, which made us quite soaked and a bit chilly by the time we boarded the tram. But the last thing I would've wished for was a reminder of what I'm "missing" by not being in the United States.

Nothing against persons of faith, but there's a difference between belonging to a faith and proclaiming it to anyone and everyone, the fellow believers and those who'd rather not be disturbed. Not to mention the attempts at proselytizing. It's quite inappropriate and rude to just horn in on someone with such a personal and potentially volatile issue. And still worse to be a captive audience when you have no escape.

It was just a little disappointing, because you generally don't get that in Europe. Especially here, in a country where the plurality religious affiliation is atheist, a nation that has been suspicious of organized religion for more than six centuries, where religion is relegated to its realm and where religion doesn't encroach on the secular. Normally.

Devolution

2005-08-20T11:23:00.000-07:00

This whole "teach-the-controversy" approach to classroom science teaching of evolution being spearheaded by the misnamed Discovery Institute is downright ridiculous and shameful.

It'd be one thing if, say, there were legitimate differences of bona fide scientific opinion on the subject, something where there were multiple theories of scientific merit. That, of course, would warrant teaching science students about the various arguments postulated for a natural phenomenon.

But, of course, this is pure politics. There is no "controversy." And the notion that a fictitious controversy exists is a disturbing testament to the ability of the extreme conservative movement to fabricate such a debate in order to get into the picture.

Mainstream scientists reject the notion that any controversy over evolution even exists. But Mr. Bush embraced the institute's talking points by suggesting that alternative theories and criticism should be included in biology curriculums "so people can understand what the debate is about."

I certainly don't consider Dubya an expert on scientific matters, or much of anything intellectually rigorous, so I find it highly inappropriate that he and others of his ilk would lecture us on something like science, which in its purest form strives for true objectivity in the form of empirically derived and verifiable results.

And it's all high and noble of these conservative cultural crusaders to couch their PR campaign in the language of academic freedom, when clearly the real controversy is simple whether religion has any business in a science classroom, or in most classrooms, for that matter.

While it's tempting to term the "intelligent design" missionaries cultural Luddites, that'd be a misnomer. The Luddite movement only aimed to forestall technological progress; the anti-evolution crowd wants to turn back the scientific clock at minimum a good century and a half.

"We are in the very initial stages of a scientific revolution," said the center's director, Stephen C. Meyer, 47, a historian and philosopher of science recruited by Discovery after he protested a professor being punished for criticizing Darwin in class. "We want to have an effect on the dominant view of our culture."

But therein lies the problem. It's advocacy of science grounded in religious and cultural prejudices, rather than pure, empirical science, the bedrock of, well, pretty much every major advance in knowledge since the real Scientiic Revolution and Age of Enlightenment, at minimum.

"All ideas go through three stages - first they're ignored, then they're attacked, then they're accepted," said Jay W. Richards, a philosopher and the institute's vice president. "We're kind of beyond the ignored stage. We're somewhere in the attack."

Well, that's certainly one route. But there are a lot more ideas that fell by the wayside because they couldn't withstand proper scrutiny. We can only hope this creationism-in-sheep's-clothing business meets a similar fate.

What strikes me as particularly dangerous and damaging in this whole controversy is that it doesn't address real, pressing needs in scientific learning and education. I don't know the current figures, but I know American schoolchildren have routinely scored dismally in comparison to the students of other leading industrialized countries in math and science. This hubbub over a pseudo-controversy on evolution doesn't help to rectify that gap. Certainly American science students aren't falling behind their counterparts in Asia and Europe because they aren't being taught hokey, meritless rebuttals to evolution. But, you know, if it was really about learning and not cultural politics, then we wouldn't be discussing this at all.

Except that cultural conservatives are growing ascendant, or at least gaining influence in powerful places, with dire consequences for all involved.

A watershed moment came with the adoption in 2001 of the No Child Left Behind Act, whose legislative history includes a passage that comes straight from the institute's talking points. "Where biological evolution is taught, the curriculum should help students to understand why this subject generates so much continuing controversy," was language that Senator Rick Santorum, Republican of Pennsylvania, tried to include.

Ironic in all of this is that these and other arguments about growing ecumenicalism and an emerging Christian majority have unacknowledged echoes of bastardized social Darwinism.

Crikey, people in L.A. are pathetic!

2005-08-19T14:43:00.000-07:00

The dog days of August means a slow news period for the media ("cucumber season," as the Czechs call it). How the news media of different countries choose to fill the news hole is instructive and interesting.

Take the Czechs. They've taken to some good old-fashioned muckraking, reporting on CzechTek, an incident that's making waves here since riot police appeared to brutally attack about 5,000 ravers at an outdoor techno party in the countryside at the end of July. This has had everyone weighing from the current and former presidents to the average raver who just wants, you know, to throw a wicked techno party without getting his head bashed in my the police.

The image of police beating young people remains especially problematic for the government, says Jirák, because it brings to mind violence used by communists to stifle opposition before — and during — the 1989 revolution.

Then there are the Brits. Seems Tony Blair is doing his best Dubya impression by taking a long vacation in the middle of the war. Only, Tony's people asked the British press not to say where he's taking his holiday, citing "security concerns." And, incredibly, the British media have gone for it.

Sort of.

Unable to report on "Tony and Cherie get a tan," the British media are at least having some fun with it.

The Sun, publishing photographs of Mr. Blair and his wife, Cherie, said the images had been taken somewhere in the Caribbean. On Thursday, The Daily Mail published a spoof quiz entitled "Where's Blair," offering readers 10 possible venues for the prime minister's vacation, including Afghanistan and Iraq, along with more plausible places like the Caribbean. A columnist in The Sun suggested that Mr. Blair might be staying at the home of a "bachelor boy" - the title of an early Cliff Richard song.

And then there's the L.A. media. From the folks who never fail to cut to live coverage of the high-speed police pursuit du jour, the media that go into "Storm Watch" whenever measurable precipitation falls, the TV networks that make a big to-do of weather forecasts for a climate that has some of the most monotonously nice weather in the country, we have the epic story of the summer: Gator Watch. Apparently there's an alligator that was someone's pet and has since been released into an area lake, and the media are treating this like, well, like the O.J. Simpson chase. But it's just another example of how lame-ass L.A. "news" media are.

Now, maybe if this were, say, more serious, and not purely whimsical, it might warrant some coverage. Kind of like when someone got loose in San Diego with a military tank and a death wish.

But let there be no doubt about how frivolous this whole farce is:

It was time to call in a professional. Enter Jay Young, a 31-year-old, $800-a-day hunk and alligator hunter from Colorado. Wearing a leather cowboy hat and alligator-tooth necklace Young surveyed the scene and dismissed the danger involved: "At most I can lose a couple of fingers," he declared.

That's right. When people in L.A. need to catch a gator, they turn to some bloke from Colorado, a state known for having a large gator population.

But hey, he's an "$800-a-day hunk," and it wouldn't be L.A. if they weren't superficial.

Dia de los dictadores

2005-08-19T14:14:00.000-07:00

Today in conversation we continued the ongoing theme of the week, whereby various students talk about their hometown or homeland.

Now, while this normally wouldn't be terribly edifying (lucky me for getting to talk about the crap factory that is the Orange Curtain), today's was unusually so.

Why, you might ask? Because we had presentations on Belarus, Florence and ... North Korea.

For whatever reason, Prague is evidently authorized by the Great Leader as a destination for exchange students, which accounts for the apparent popularity of Czech (we were told it's popular, which evidently meant that maybe 10 people in all study it).

And we got the party line about the country. "Thanks to the People's Army," the country was liberated after the Second World War. Then she passed around some magazines about the country, most of which for whatever reason were written in Russian, but one of them was a brochure about this cabin or campsite in the mountains where the Great Leader, Kim Jong Il, had been born. But it was in English, which was fortunate, since I can only sort of decipher Russian; my knowledge of the Cyrillic alphabet is imperfect, and even then I'm limited to roughing out the common Slavic roots based on my knowledge of Czech. I want to see if there's any way I can get a copy of that pamplet, though, since it's not your garden variety tourist brochure.

Pretty much everyone was captivated by the opportunity to not only hear about North Korea, but to actually get to ask questions about life there. Lots of questions. We spent roughly half an hour or so doing this.

And, I got to ask a very interesting question, namely what do people in North Korea thinking about America?

We're Enemy No. !.

Surprise, surprise.

I had thought about telling her that North Korea is maybe enemy No. 3 for us, since I assume the countries we're currently trying to occupy rank higher, even though I would think North Korea should also be at the top of the list, as it poses a more direct threat to U.S. territory should it keep progressing with that nuclear program.

But I opted not to, in part because it seemed undiplomatic. But I was also strongly discouraged by not quite having the vocabulary for it.

Catholicism Wow!

2005-08-19T06:23:00.000-07:00

Cardinal Ignatius Glick would be proud to see the connection the world's youth are making with His Eminence, Pope Benedict XVI:

"As Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger he was like the church's bulldog; he was putting the smack down on heresy," said Pedro Russell, a 21-year-old Montanan who had both green-dyed hair and a rosary around his neck.

Do you think he has a Buddy Christ?

700 Free Hours of Jesus with New Version 9.0!

2005-08-16T08:35:00.000-07:00

Warren Smith, the publisher of an evangelical Christian newspaper in Charlotte, N.C., compares the movie "Jesus" to the jawbone of an ass.

Yours truly, as the sole proprietor of this blog, compares evangelical Christian newspaper publisher Warren Smith to a jackass.

However dated its production values, "Jesus" has come to be viewed by many evangelical Christians as a singularly modern tool for spreading the Gospel. It speaks, though without special effects or quick editing, to a populace fluent in Hollywood. It comes in multiple languages on one disc. It concludes with a "salvation prayer" the viewer can recite with the narrator. Its local distributors consider it so effective that millions of dollars have already been spent toward the goal of delivering a copy to every household in the United States, as if it were free trial software from America Online.

The comparison to AOL junk mail is instructive, if only because it seems likely to gain just as low a reputation as those ubiquitous AOL trial discs.

So the question becomes, how will you use your unsolicited copy of "Jesus: The Campy Movie"?

A) coaster
B) frisbee
C) fuel for a home-produced laser show in the office microwave
D) adhered to a brick and returned to sender with postage due
E) other (leave your ideas below)

AC Sparta Praha 2, FK Siad Most 1

2005-08-13T12:23:00.000-07:00

At long last, I attended a professional football match.

You can pardon me for having not attended previously as, well, there really isn't much in the way of professional football played in the U.S. I missed out on the World Cup in 1994 (too young to have had a highly developed interest), and I don't really see the point of shelling out a lot of money to watch Manchester United or one of the other top European clubs play an exhibition of some sort on a preseason tour.

But now, the tables have turned. Or, rather, I have the good fortune to find myself in Europe at the start of domestic league play.

And thus I made my way to a venue whose official name shall be stricken from the record for being corporate.

It was the second round of play in the 2005-2006 Gambrinus League (yes, I realize that's also a corporate name, but 1) it's for a very good domestic brand of beer and 2) you've probably never heard of it and didn't even know that Gambrinus referred to a product), AC Sparta Praha against FK Siad Most, the first home match of the young season for Sparta.

Pity, though, that these matches aren't better attended. This match drew 7,782 fans, or about 37 percent of the stadium's capacity of 20,565.

I'm not sure why domestic matches don't draw more fans. I mean, it's not an expensive proposition, at least in comparison to going to any sort of North American sporting event. Maybe it's a bit more by local standards, but I really find it difficult to believe that it's truly beyond the means of most folks.

Here's what I spent at the stadium today:

Ticket: 70 Kč
Beer: 3 X 20 Kč = 60 Kč
Sausage: 30 Kč
Program: 35 Kč

Grand Total: 195 Kč

In other words, I spent a shade under $8(!)

Then again, it actually wound up costing me 95 Kč, as I later discovered that the ticket vendor had wound up giving me incorrect change, and thus ended up giving me 1030 Kč after I had given him a 1000-crown note to pay for my 70-crown ticket. So this wound up being quite a bargain indeed.

And mind you, it's not like I went super stingy. Granted, I could've paid as much as 230 Kč for a ticket, but as it was, I was sitting in the eighth row behind the goal line, down near one corner. And I drank three large draft beers. I mean, I can't remember the last time I bought a ticket to an American sporting event for as little as I spent on the entire outing today. And the only time I've ever had a beer at a sporting event was when I went to Game 1 of the 2003 NLCS at Wrigley Field, where I spent $7 for a 12-oz. can of Molson, only because I was buying a beer for Nikolai, who had managed to procure our gratis tickets. So, in other words, my outing today, seeing one of the two powerhouses of the Czech league and drinking lots of excellent beer cost a smidgeon more than the one mediocre beer I got at a Cubs game. (OK, in fairness, I could've saved a buck or two by buying Old Style, which would've made me one of the people, but most people in Chicago -- and America, for that matter -- drink truly awful beer.) I love this game!

The match itself was interesting. There were a good number of chances for both teams, and the level of play, while maybe not World Cup-caliber, was still pretty good.

It was scoreless for a while, but then Most took down a Sparta player in the box, setting up a penalty for Sparta captain Karel Poborský.

Poborský scored, prompting jubilation from the home crowd and his teammates.

A little bit later, a foul near the corner brought up a set piece, with Poborský taking the free kick, a low, swooping cross, which Tomáš Sivok headed past the Most keeper, making it two-nil.

But it wasn't a rout. Just before the half, Most answered. And late in the second half, they damn near netted the equalizer off a cross when a header rang off the woodwork.

At one point toward the end of the match, a loud noise sounded from the section of Most supporters, some sort of bang akin to maybe a firecracker or other small explosion or gunshot. Police, festooned in fluorescent yellow vests, rushed into the section and began beating down some fans. This comes at a particularly difficult moment for police in general in the Czech Republic, coming three weeks after Czech police brutally broke up a large techno party, CzechTek, which has prompted an unending flurry of criticism of police conduct from all quarters here.

Possibly alluding to CzechTek, but mostly out of good humor, fans in the Sparta section began chanting "S-T-B, S-T-B," a reference to the StB (Státní bezpečnost), the Communist-era secret police, in response to the police action in the opposite end of the stadium. Later, the Most fans picked up the chant on their own, which allowed Sparta fans to return to chanting slogans of support for their squad.

So the match was at least worth the price of admission. Actually, that'd be a disparaging description. I'd say it was worth more than the price of admission.

So I'm now eagerly awaiting my next chance to see some football. I already bought a ticket to see the second match of the third preliminary round of the Champions League, pitting SK Slavia Praha against RSC Anderlecht of Belgium. But, Slavia plays another home match next Sunday, which has me itching to go to that as well.

Of course, the really pressing thing is to pick a side to root for: Slavia or Sparta? It's an eternal dilemma for Praguers, and while I can get away with just rooting for the home side at the moment, the day will come in the future when I have to take sides.

It's tough, because Sparta has the working-class tradition, but Slavia has a sort of dissident intellectual tradition (it began in 1892 a rebellious debating society). The pedigrees of both clubs have much to endear them.

(At a football game) nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!

2005-08-12T06:05:00.000-07:00

From a piece about a mammoth public mural project in New York:

But while working in the United States, he said, the idea of the resolutely upbeat cheerleader - her charms alternately infectious and annoying - appealed to him as something quintessentially American. "You as a nation are the cheerleaders," he said.

So he started picking up copies of American Cheerleader magazine - "I thought I'd be arrested when I was buying it," he said - and using photographs for paintings. At the same time, he was struck by how much cheerleaders' contorted poses, in tight focus, can seem to be images of people being tortured. Later, a friend in Britain sent him a copy of a painting, probably a Flemish work from the 15th century, of a man being crucified, most likely one of the thieves executed alongside Jesus. The man's arms are lashed atop the horizontal bar of the cross, and his body is bent backward, with one leg extended back almost delicately. Finally, the last element was in place: Mr. Hume decided to paint a crucified cheerleader.

I'm not sure which part amuses me more: the equation of America with cheerleaders, or the observation that American cheerleaders of the 20th and 21st centuries bear a striking resemblance to torture victims of the Middle Ages.

Perhaps both of those say something about cheerleading; I'm just not sure what exactly.

Bizarre

2005-08-07T11:04:00.000-07:00

Spotted, on multiple billboards yesterday, while returning from Karlovy Vary to Prague by bus:

"Big Brother vidíte tě."

Literally, this means "Big Brother is watching you." It's an ad for the upcoming season of the Czech edition of "Big Brother." But these ads are a bit creepy, especially when you consider that they're in a country that endured one of the nastiest bouts of Stalinism in the entire Communist bloc in the late 1940s and early 1950s. I mean, if you're going to be so brazen, why not also include a huge-ass picture of Big Brother himself?

Where's Johnny English when you need him?

2005-08-06T23:08:00.000-07:00

How about that? It seems British "intelligence" is just as sharp as its American counterpart after all.

As in, evidently they got a warning from Saudi officials weeks before the London bombings about a likely attack:

Saudi Arabia officially warned Britain of an imminent terrorist attack on London just weeks ahead of the 7 July bombings after calls from one of al-Qaeda's most wanted operatives were traced to an active cell in the United Kingdom.

Although, I suppose, in fairness, this wasn't intelligence gather by MI5 and MI6 themselves, nor did it come across anyone's desk as a memo with a title like "Islamic Terrorists to Coordinate Suicide Bombings on London Public Transit."

Because if you had just a glaring memo, there's no way you could ignore it. Oops.