Occasionally it's interesting to listen to the voiceovers from commercials to see if you can tell who the speaker is.  Car makers and other sometimes use "known" voices in their commercials because the actors are assumed to have voices that will appeal to their target audience, and it may even be the case that there's some kind of subliminal "good feeling" that can be generated if it's a "familiar" sounding voice.

But last night watching "Monk," I found myself paying attention to an ad I normally would have ignored.  It was for a prescription drug called Enablex, which is apparently prescribed for what is now called "overactive bladder," and what used to be called incontinence.  The commercial featured brightly colored cartoon water balloons traveling through a black and white cartoon backdrop of various European scenes such as London by double decker, Paris, etc.

Why did the commercial get my attention?  The voice of the woman narrating the ad.  It seemed familiar.  I haven't been able to track it down to confirm it, by by the time the ad was over, I was virtually certain that it was Andrea Martin.

At 42 I hope I'm a long way from the point where I may need something like Enablex.  But it certainly made me feel very old to think that the great Andrea Martin, creator of Edith Prickley, Edna Boil, Pirini Scleroso and so many other classic sketch comedy characters on SCTV is now doing voice work for incontinence drugs.  Hopefully I'm wrong and the narrator just had a similar voice.

A lot of time is spent in law school trying to teach the idea that judges are somehow involved in practicing something grand in terms of legal theory in rendering opinions.  In some cases, perhaps they are.  But it often seems more the case that judges, and especially federal judges, are simply practicing politics without having to run for office.  This is something that has bothered me for a long, long time, and also something that will probably never by "fixed."  There is simply too much money and too much power wielded in Washington and by the Federal Government for there to be any realistic hope that the overall role of the Federal Government can be significantly cut back.

The foregoing is a somewhat tangential reaction that I had upon reading a post by Andrew McCarthy at National Review's blog, The Corner.  I think McCarthy has agreed to work on the Romney presidential campaign, and he writes the following on the topic of the importance of what John McCain apparently said about how he would view potential Supreme Court nominations if he were elected president:

You’ve got to be on drugs if you think Chief Justice Roberts is inherently more acceptable to liberal Democrats than Justice Alito.  I mean, c’mon:  This can’t be divorced from context.  Roberts got a relatively easy time of it because, as it worked out, he was replacing Chief Justice Rehnquist.  Confirming him made the Dems look reasonable at a time they were blocking Bush nominees to the Circuit Courts without changing the ideological balance on the court.  It was a lay-up.

By contrast, Alito was replacing Justice O'Connor and thus shifting the Court to the Right.  THAT, and not something about Alito that was purportedly absent in Roberts, is what impelled Democrats to rake him over the coals.

Thankfully, McCarthy didn't use the formulation that really sets me off by referring to an nomination to "fill the XX seat" on the Court.  My recollection is that various stories at the time of Justice Alito's nomination referred to his being nominated "to fill Justice O'Connor's seat on the Court."

It's probably really nit-picky, but such a description drives me nuts.  It's not ANYONE'S seat on the Court.  There are 9 Supreme Court Justices.  No one person, group, ethnicity, etc., has a claim to such a seat.  And it's silly to worry about who a nominee is going to replace.  Presidents should nominate qualified judges who they feel will interpret the laws fairly and uniformly.  Period.  End of story.  Full stop.

The fact that instead it becomes a discussion of how the balance of the Court may shift, or whose "spot" is being filled is exactly the kind of talk that confirms the reality that it's all just politics at that level, with judicial impartiality and legal theory largely ignored.

I mentioned to my lovely wife this morning that I have an idea for the book publishing world that needs to be acted upon.  Television has given us various cross-over scenarios where characters from one show or series make an appearance on another show or series.  Often times this is done reciprocally so the shows become intertwined for a few episodes.  If you don't know what I'm talking about, here's a blog post I found describing the particular blogger's favorite television crossover episodes.

So how does this relate to book publishing?

I've read several books by a couple of different authors.  First, I read some books by Vince Flynn that feature a CIA superagent named Mitch Rapp.  It's very fast paced writing and reading, good to take on a plane, at the beach, etc.  It reads very much like it should be made into big blow 'em up action/thriller movies.

I have also read several books by Daniel Silva that feature an Israeli superagent named Gabriel Allon.  These books are similar in style to the Flynn books, and are also good plane/beach reads, and would also make excellent action/thriller movies.

Rapp is the quintessential tough guy, loner American, while Allon is a few years older, more cerebral in some ways, but equally devastating to his foes.

But having read these books, I find myself wondering, as I prepare dinner or do other mundane tasks, asking the kind of question that usually arises in sports debates.  The typical "which player is better" type of consideration to which sports often lends itself.  Except for these fictional characters, it's "which superagent would prevail if a scenario were to arise where Mitch Rapp and Gabriel Allon were on opposite sides?"

That probably doesn't really lend itself to a crossover, as neither author would probably be too interested in having his lead character killed off in such a conflict.  Can't blame them.

But what about having the superagents working together to create all kinds of chaos for Islamic terrorists (the typical opposition in each of the series)?  Flynn and Silva are with separate publishing houses, so it would take some negotiating to get it done, but I think it would be awesome to have the two of them collaborate on a book where each of their agents and their respective teams come together to kick the crap out of some truly deserving terrorists.  Given the short chapters and multiple settings typically involved in each of their books, it seems at least possible that the authors could alternate chapters for much of the book as they weave the story and characters together and then build it to a climax.

It's probably a pie-in-the-sky thought.  But who knows?  Something kind of like it is out there in print with this.  If ten authors can each contribute a chapter to a story like the book I just linked, maybe book publishing crossovers is the next step.

Bill Katz has a great new blog that I've been checking in the mornings.  In his evening update post for last night, he commented on commented on a story in the Contra Costa Times in Northern California on a resolution by the Berkeley City Council to try to make the Marines feel even more unwelcome in their recruiting office there.  Nothing terribly surprising about that, really, but in the spirit of the editing / corrections I offered relating to the Roger Clemens / Agent debunks steroids story recently, I noticed Mr. Katz passed on pointing out another convenient omission / obfuscation by the reporter and editors at the Contra Costa Times.  To wit:

In addition, the council voted to explore enforcing its law prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation against the Marines because of the military's don't ask, don't tell policy imposed on the military by the Clinton Administration in the early 1990s.

That's a little more clear, I think.

Also, in actually clicking through the link provided by Mr. Katz, I thought it was a little bit amusing that the headline writers obviously didn't bother to read the text of the story itself.  Let's take a look:

Council says Marines unwelcome in town
BERKELEY: Board votes 8-1 to tell recruiting office it's 'uninvited,' allow peace group protest hours

Article Launched: 01/31/2008 03:05:57 AM PST

Hey-hey, ho-ho, the Marines in Berkeley have got to go.
That's the message from the Berkeley City Council, which voted 6-3 Tuesday night to tell the U.S. Marines that its Shattuck Avenue recruiting station "is not welcome in the city, and if recruiters choose to stay, they do so as uninvited and unwelcome intruders."

Huh.  The headline tells me the vote was 8-1 to tell the Marines they are uninvited.  But the first paragraph blows that out of the water with the news that the vote on this message was instead 6-3.  So Berkeley's City Council is perhaps closer to 66 2/3 percent out of its mind rather than 89 percent out of its mind.  Whatever.

So where does the 8-1 from the headline come into play?  Well, if you actually read further in the story, you get this:

Finally, the council voted 8-1, with Wozniak dissenting, to give Code Pink a designated parking space in front of the recruiting station once a week for six months and a free sound permit for protesting once a week from noon to 4 p.m.

I guess there's only so much truth and accuracy a newspaper can manage to come up with in the limited space they have on the internet.  As long as they portray maximum contempt for the military, I guess their job is pretty much done.
 

When I saw this link on SI.com's homepage, I got kind of excited that maybe college football legend Woody Hayes was somehow making a return from the grave:

Ex-Ohio St. coach allowed to return after ruling

Turns out it's a lot less exciting / interesting:

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) -- Jim O'Brien, fired by Ohio State and essentially banned from coaching by the NCAA for paying a recruit, won an appeal on Thursday and can return to the college sidelines.

Great.  Another crook is free to return to college coaching.  Makes sense for the geniuses at the NCAA.  I have to assume that their investigation of John Wooden continues, while O'Brien can now try to convince another school to allow him to take them on a march toward an NCAA death penalty for its football program.

This time an anniversary.  I see from the Refdesk.com homepage that today is the anniversary of the execution of Private Eddie Slovik in 1945.  I have vague memories of having seen the movie about Slovik on late night television when I was a kid, and after reading the blurb about Slovik from freedictionary.com, it's hard to understand how Slovik became the only U.S. soldier to be executed for desertion since the Civil War.

The recap of Slovik's life and military career don't make him out to be a very sympathetic character, to be sure, but he doesn't sound like a monster or completely irredeemable.  From the summary of his desertion and court martial, is sounds almost as if Slovik went out of his way to get himself court martialed for desertion.

Even if that's the case, however, it's somewhat hard to believe his was the only such case in the entire war.  Perhaps it was a highly unique case of desertion that warranted execution.  And maybe there were other issues at play at the time, what with trying to impress on the troops the seriousness of what they still faced in trying to fight their way into Germany to finish off Hitler and the Nazis.  It seems possible that the Allied command needed to make an example of someone like Slovik in order to reduce / eliminate further desertions or unwillingness to continue the fight into the heart of Germany.

Perhaps after the long fight to that point, the worry was that soldiers would be more interested in simply kicking the Germans back into their own country and calling it quits, while the higher ups were more focused on the complete unconditional surrender that required invading and conquering Germany itself.

I see via a post by Jonah Goldberg over on The Corner at NRO that Private First Class Ray Jacobs, one of the marines who participated in the first flag raising on Mount Suribachi, has died.  RIP, Mr. Jacobs and thank you for your service.

Figured I would try to help out by fixing the headline from this morning's story on SI.com, as well as provide the necessary editing on the lead paragraph:

NEW YORK (AP) -- Roger Clemens' agent released an 18,000-word statistical report Monday to refute allegations "proving" that the pitcher's career rebounded around the time period he was accused of did not occur at the same time Clemens started using performance-enhancing drugs.

My lovely bride and I watched a fair amount of the recently concluded Australian Open tennis championship, and were both glad to see someone other than Roger Federer and Raphael Nadal in the men's finals.  We were getting a bit tired of seeing so much of them.  Perhaps that makes us poor sports fans, but there it is.

One thing that I noticed for the first time during the tournament, however, was Roger Federer wearing a new Nike hat with a large "F" on it.  This apparently is a new line of hats that is Federer's equivalent of the hats Nike has made for Tiger Woods with the interlocked "TW" for golfers.

I was hoping to be able to copy and paste a picture of each of the hats for comparison purposes, but it doesn't look like I can put images on the blog.  Well, in any event, you can see the Federer hat here.  And you can see one of the Woods hats here.

Now, having looked at them both, it seems pretty clear to me that Woods has the "A" team designing his gear, and Federer is getting the Euro-trash "C" team.  Federer should be embarrassed to wear a hat like that.  Granted, it's not as phenomenally awful as the "mushroom cap" that Michelle Wie wore early last year, but it's a pretty big step down from the much classier, more elegant design that adorns Woods' cap.

There were stories last year around the time of the US Open tennis championship about Woods and Federer having finally spent some time together, and perhaps having exchanged some messages about their respective performances on their tours.  If Roger is lucky, maybe the next time he hears from Tiger he'll also ask the golfing phenom what Federer needs to do to get Nike to hire a decent graphic design team for Federer's gear.

My recollection of flag duty from elementary school is that no one was ever foolish enough to do what these two boys from Chesterton, Indiana, did:

CHESTERTON, Ind. —  Two fourth-grade boys mimicking a scene from the movie "A Christmas Story" wound up with their tongues stuck to a frozen flagpole.

Gavin Dempsey and James Alexander were serving on flag duty at Jackson Elementary School Friday morning, with the job of raising and lowering the school's flags. They decided to see if their tongues really would stick to the cold metal.

"I decided to try it because I thought all of the TV shows were lies, but turns out I was wrong," Gavin said.

Sounds like they didn't have to go through the humiliation of having the fire department come and pour warm water on their tongues and the pole to get them loose, though.

I was surprised yesterday afternoon to see a blurb on ESPN.com's homepage referring to one of their on-air sports anchorwomen, Dana Jacobson, being suspended for comments she apparently made at an event in Atlantic City.  There was apparently some kind of celebrity roast of ESPN radio hosts Mike Greenberg and Mike Golic, ESPN's morning radio team for the Mike and Mike Show.

I haven't heard much of the show recently, so I don't know if this was discussed on their program or not, but given the information below, my guess is that they have talked about it at least in brief terms.

Why did the celebrity roast make news, and wind up with Dana Jacobson being suspended by ESPN?  Well, let's go to this morning's this morning's USA Today for a quick summary of the story so far:

Dana Jacobson, co-host of ESPN2's First Take, will remain off-air until Monday for comments at a social event she now says were "foolish and insensitive."

Jacobson spoke at a roast of ESPN's Mike Greenberg and Mike Golic in Atlantic City Jan. 1. Onstage there, according to The Press of Atlantic City, she was "swilling vodka" and "cursing like a sailor" and made "an absolute fool of herself" as the crowd booed.

That prompted her current one-week suspension. Says ESPN spokesman Mike Soltys: "She's been disciplined."

Also at the roast, Jacobson, a Michigan grad, made vulgar references about Notre Dame in trying to joke about the school with ex-Irish lineman Golic. Those references involved references about Jesus Christ — prompting the Catholic League to put out a statement entitled "ESPN Anchorwoman Trashes Jesus Christ." Jacobson, in a statement of her own, says she has "respect (for) all religions and did not mean anything derogatory by my poorly chosen words."

Ok, it's still a little unclear what happened, or at least, exactly what Jacobson may have said that created a problem.  The reference to the Catholic League issuing a statement accusing Jacobson of trashing Jesus, however, made me curious if I could find anything more to the story.  So I went first to The Press of Atlantic City to see if their story, surprisingly not linked in the USA Today article, provided further details.  And it does provide a little bit more information:

Earlier this week, Jacobson made a public apology through a statement after Catholic League president Bill Donohue expressed displeasure for her alleged vulgar comments regarding "Touchdown Jesus," the moniker for a statue of Jesus raising his arms on the Notre Dame campus in South Bend, Ind.

Ok, "vulgar comments regarding 'Touchdown Jesus'" may or may not be the same thing as trashing Jesus himself.  But it's still a little confusing what Jacobson may have actually said.  So, let's go to the Catholic League's press releases.  Here's the relevant portion  from their January 22 statement:

According to some news and sports websites, ESPN anchorwoman Dana Jacobson graphically attacked Jesus Christ at a recent roast of her colleagues; she was reportedly intoxicated. At the January 11 event, Jacobson roared from the podium, “F*** Notre Dame,” “F*** Touchdown Jesus,” and finally “F*** Jesus.”

“When pressed on this issue, ESPN’s response is to e-mail a statement by Jacobson, which includes the following: ‘My remarks about Notre Dame were foolish and insensitive. I respect all religions and did not mean anything derogatory by my poorly chosen words.’

......

“This response fails on several counts. First, there is no evidence that ESPN is taking this matter seriously. Are we to believe that her hate speech is of no consequence? Her comments were not made at a private function, rather they were made at a public event where she represented ESPN. Second, it is worth recalling that it was during a luncheon interview that Jimmy ‘The Greek’ Snyder made his racist remarks about blacks, and CBS Sports promptly fired him anyway. Third, it is also important to note that being drunk didn’t help Mel Gibson’s case when he made bigoted remarks about Jews.

Well, that certainly sounds a little worse for Jacobson's case.  And I think points 2 and 3 in the paragraph immediately above are exactly right.  While I'm not sure Jacobson should be fired for what she apparently said, her comments certainly seem to be much more intentionally offensive than those made by Golf Channel anchorwoman Kelly Tilghman.

But did Jacobson actually say what is quoted above?  In today's world of YouTube and access to everything, and with ESPN's ubiquitous marketing and media presence, it's difficult to imagine that there were not cameras and audio recordings of the celebrity roast of ESPN's morning radio team, right?  Which brings us to the Catholic League's January 23 press release:

“We know that Jacobson said ‘F*** Notre Dame’ at the January 11 celebrity roast for radio personalities Mike Greenberg and Mike Golic. We also know that ESPN has suspended her for a week as a result. What we don’t know is whether, as reported on some websites, she also said ‘F*** Jesus’ at the event. If she did, then that changes everything.

 “I have a call into a top official at ESPN on this matter. He will be asked to verify what is on the video. If Jacobson did say, ‘F*** Jesus,’ then the penalty in force is obviously inadequate: it is one thing to use an obscenity to rip a Catholic university, quite another to use the vilest of terms about Jesus. Our curiosity was heightened when an ESPN official whom we’ve already spoken to refused to confirm or deny that Jacobson said ‘F*** Jesus.’ If she didn’t, then all they need to do is make the video public—put it on YouTube. If she did, then it looks like we might be dealing with a cover up.

At this point, ESPN might be smart to try to come clean on this whole thing and release the tapes, let the chips fall where they may.  Dana Jacobson may or may not still have a job with ESPN when it's all over, but at least the network will have provided transparency and shown some willingness to respond seriously to apparently justified anger at one of their employee's public remarks.

I'm glad I had my coffee already by the time I saw this item in this morning's USA Today so that I could fully appreciate the lawyers' approach.  Apparently, Barry Bonds' attorneys are trying to have the pending perjury indictment against Bonds dismissed because they don't like the way the federal prosecutors write.  From the story:

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Barry Bonds asked a federal judge to dismiss perjury charges against him Wednesday, arguing the indictment is "scattershot" and noted for its "striking inartfulness."

Bonds was charged in November with lying to a grand jury about his use of performance-enhancing drugs.

In the motion filed in San Francisco federal court, the former San Francisco Giant neither admits nor denies taking the drugs, but argues the questions asked by prosecutors during Bonds' December 2003 grand jury appearance were vague, ambiguous and confusing.

I guess I wasn't paying attention that much in the only criminal law class I took.  Or maybe I missed the lecture where they explained that a good defense attorney strategy is to ignore the substance of the allegations in the indictment, completely fail to address them, and request that the judge throw out the case because you find the prosecutor's writing scattershot and strikingly inartful.  Seems like the kind of advice I would have remembered had I been there.

Ok, the title is intended to be tongue in cheek, and I want to make that clear at the outset.  I intended the title only as a jab at Duke fans, of which I am most definitely not one.  It turns out that Kelly Tilghman, one of the Golf Channel hosts/analysts who handles their PGA Tour coverage (and a Duke alumnae who played on their women's golf team), made a comment on the air a few weeks ago about what the players on the tour could do to improve their chances of winning golf tournaments in the Age of Tiger Woods.  YouTube has a news clip including the relevant portion of the Golf Channel conversation between Tilghman and Nick Faldo.

If you don't want to watch the approximately 30 second clip, here's a recap from the latest story on ESPN.com:

Toward the end of the second round at the Mercedes-Benz Championship, Tilghman and analyst Nick Faldo were discussing possible challengers to Woods when Faldo suggested the players gang up on Woods.

"Lynch him in a back alley," Tilghman said, laughing.

Woods' agent had issued a statement before Tilghman was suspended, noting Woods and Tilghman were friends and he considered the matter over. Under increasing pressure, however, Golf Channel suspended the anchor for two weeks.

From what I've read, Woods has pretty much treated this as a non-story and accepted Tilghman's apology, acknowledging that he and Tilghman have been friends for approximately 10 years.

All in all, I think Woods' approach on this has been admirable and correct.  But one thing that I haven't seen anywhere is any kind of follow up comment or interview with Nick Faldo on whether he was surprised by Tilghman's comment.  From the brief clip on YouTube, it seems like Faldo kind of chuckled and moved on, taking the comment to be no big deal at the time, and maybe it went right by him as my guess is the on-air team had a lot to do in covering the tournament where the comments were made.  It just surprised me that I couldn't find any subsequent comments by Faldo on this.

Tilghman's remarks seemed to me to be just a very poor choice of words, and I think her two week suspension is probably punishment enough, but it wouldn't surprise me to see this incident continue to dog her for a while.  Jemele Hill, a columnist for ESPN.com, wrote an interesting column on this matter, [ed. - fixed the spelling of Ms. Hill's name and provided the link to her column!] arguing that Tilghman shouldn't be fired for her remarks, but also criticizing the PGA Tour and the world of professional golf more broadly for its lack of racial diversity in which she wrote the following:

I'm in no way defending Tilghman. While I don't believe she is a racist, I certainly wouldn't classify what she said as a "slip." A cussword is a slip. This was a constructed racial scenario that is a frightening reminder for some people in this country. Considering the Jena 6, and the increasing number of nooses that have shown up at college campuses recently as methods of intimidation, Tilghman should have known better.
Now comes the hard part. Ultimately, should this cost Tilghman her career? There's an assumption out there Tilghman will be back on the air in the same capacity once her suspension is served, but a spokesperson from the Golf Channel told me Thursday that nothing was decided.
Tilghman's comments were more serious than Don Imus', but she is not the habitual offender he was. That must be taken into consideration, since Tilghman seems on the verge of following in the footsteps of Fuzzy Zoeller, Jimmy The Greek, Steve Lyons and Al Campanis.

It's the last part of this that caught my attention.  My take on Imus is that he's a buffoon and provocateur who intends to get people riled up by saying things that may be offensive.  Clearly Tilghman's role with the Golf Channel is nothing like the niche Imus carved out for himself.

But I think Tilghman's comment was also different from at least Jimmy the Greek's and Al Campanis'.  My recollection of the Jimmy the Greek brouhaha is that he made comments on the air about alleged breeding practices of slave masters and how that related to the prevalence of black athletes today.  And I believe Al Campanis made generalizations about the relative ability of blacks to manage baseball games in the major leagues.  Both of those discussions were more general conversations about race and sports in a way Tilghman's comment was not.  She made the unfortunate choice to use the word "lynch" in her conversation that involved a black (by the media's general view, though I believe Woods has wisely used words like "cablanasian" to describe his "race") athlete.

Given this, I don't think citing Jimmy the Greek and Al Campanis is quite accurate for the present situation.  And from the recap of Steve Lyons' broadcasting career controversies, it seems that he's also in a different league than Tilghman.  Which leaves only the analogy between Tilghman and Fuzzy Zoeller.  Again, Zoeller's remarks seem to be different in nature than Tilghman's.

So is Tilghman on a slippery slope in the world of broadcasting, soon to be exiled to oblivion like some Ms. Hill has cited?  I doubt it.  Certainly Tilghman could have made things even worse had she compounded her poor word choice of "lynch" to say something like, "lynch him in a black alley."  Seems to me you would have a lot more people wondering just what she was thinking if she had said that.  Fortunately, she didn't say that, and so I'm not in agreement with Ms. Hill's description of the comment as not a slip but rather a carefully constructed racial scenario.

Funny how such a seemingly small thing like a choice of words can have such a large impact (within the admittedly small world of Golf Channel broadcasting and viewership and sports commentators in general).  Had Tilghman simply joked about the tour players "jumping" Woods in an alley, or even a more golf-nerdy reference such as slicing his hamstring a la Carl Spackler's advice regarding Judge Smails in Caddyshack, no one would ever have commented on the entire matter.

Sad news out of England this weekend.  From the BBC web site:

A World War II veteran who took part in the prison camp breakout immortalised in the film The Great Escape has died.

Bertram "Jimmy" James, 92, of Ludlow, Shropshire, died on Friday at the Royal Shrewsbury Hospital.

The Times' obituary is well worth reading as well.

I believe Mr. James was one of the veterans who participated in the History Channel (or maybe A&E) documentary about the real story of The Great Escape.  Rest in Peace, Squadron Commander.  Thank you for your service and example.

Based on the highlighted bit below in this story about Bobby Fischer's death, it looks like we have been crime free in the US since around 1992!

REYKJAVIK, Iceland (AP) - Bobby Fischer, the reclusive chess genius who became a Cold War hero by dethroning the Soviet world champion in 1972 and later renounced his American citizenship, has died. He was 64.

Fisher died in a Reykjavik hospital on Thursday, his spokesman, Gardar Sverrisson, said Friday. Icelandic media reported that he died of kidney failure after a long illness.

Born in Chicago and raised in Brooklyn, N.Y., Fischer was wanted in the United States for playing a 1992 rematch against Boris Spassky in Yugoslavia in defiance of international sanctions. In 2005, he moved to Iceland, a chess-mad nation and site of his greatest triumph.

If I had to come up with a more ridiculous "crime" to investigate than taking / lying about steroids, it would probably be playing a chess match in violation of international sanctions.