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Can anyone reconcile these two bumper stickers?

Posted by Ed Lilly on Sunday, July 27, 2008 8:58:31 AM
Here in New Jersey, I typically see a lot of Obama lawn signs and bumper stickers.  But in the Target parking lot this morning, I was actually stopped in my tracks by the two bumper stickers on the car parked across the aisle from mine.  The bumper sticker on the right hand side of the car was a standard Obama '08 model.  But on the left was a bumper sticker that read:

Work Harder!
Millions on Welfare are
Depending on You!

I still have no clue how these two bumper stickers go together on the same car.

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Should the executive editor of the largest newspaper in the second largest city of the most powerful nation in history understand the difference between me, myself and I?

Posted by Ed Lilly on Saturday, July 26, 2008 5:07:19 PM
Granted, it's a little bit of a pet peeve of mine, but the following sentences from an email reportedly sent by the Executive Editor of the Los Angeles Times, Meredith Artley, really set my teeth on edge:

I should have first not encouraged posting on this topic, but if any of you feel that you have a post you really to write, to please discuss it with Tony and myself first since we must always tread carefully on unverified stories.

First, we're apparently missing the word "want" between "really" and "to write."  All right, it's an email. [Thanks to cakinli for the catch.]  It happens when you don't proofread.

Second, the word "to" following "to write," either needs to be removed, or the thought should be more fully expressed by writing something along the lines of, "we ask you to please discuss..."  Again, we'll give Ms. Artley the benefit of the doubt and chalk it up to email haste / sloppiness.

But "discuss it with Tony and myself..."?  Would you tell another person to "discuss it with myself" if you wanted them to discuss it with you?  How can you get to a position as the executive editor of a newspaper as large as the L.A. Times and still make this kind of mistake, even casually?  I have seen this same awful usage in several books recently as well, so perhaps there is a great shortage of competent editors throughout the publishing world.

Well, maybe it was just an isolated incident.  No.  The first sentence of the very next paragraph of Ms. Artley's email is as follows:

Russ, myself, Tony and all the editors you work with trust you guys to engage us in open and frank dialogue on just about anything that’s on your mind, and we’ll do the same.

So, myself trust you guys to engage in open and frank dialogue?  Is that really what you would say or write?  It can not be that difficult to figure out which word you should use in different contexts.  Maybe an enterprising writing instructor in the L.A. area can offer to give the folks at the Times a few refresher courses.


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In praise of Steve Bartman

Posted by Ed Lilly on Thursday, July 24, 2008 9:41:11 PM
If the name Steve Bartman sounds only vaguely familiar to, you must not be a Cubs fan.  Let's go back to the fall of 2003, Game 6 of the NLCS, when the Cubs were a mere five outs from a trip to the World Series.  Mark Prior, at the time one of the Cubs' great young starters, was on the mound and his club had staked him to a 3-0 lead.

Then, as with all things Cubs, it all went downhill.  The most famous and memorable incident of the meltdown was the foul ball down the left field line that landed just in the seats.  Moises Alou, the Cubs left fielder, was in position to try to make a play on the ball, leaping up over the wall to reach into the first row to try to make the catch.  But instead of coming away with the ball, Alou collided with Steve Bartman, an unfortunate Cubs fan who made a terrible mistake in trying to catch the ball himself rather than get out of Alou's way.

So the Cubs didn't get an out on that play, and of course they wound up losing that game, and then the NL Championship Series in Game 7.  And Steve Bartman's life would never be the same.

To his credit.  Bartman has not changed his name to try to get away from this unfortunate incident.  He did not move away from the Chicago area to try to start over.  And now, he has turned down an offer of $25,000 to sign a photograph of the infamous Alou play from Game 6.

It's rare in today's world that someone doesn't try to cash in on whatever type of fame they may have.  Bartman could have probably done local ads that played off the incident.  He probably could write a book about his experience after Game 6.  And it's hardly surprising that some sports memorabilia dealer would try to get him to sign a photo of the play to make a few bucks.

But Bartman has refused to profit from his trip to the spotlight.  Good for him for continuing to be a regular human being and die-hard Cubs fan.  Should the unthinkable happen in my lifetime, I hope Bartman is also around to appreciate it.

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Front office incompetence, or a sign that, finally, they really are serious about winning at 1060 W. Addison?

Posted by Ed Lilly on Tuesday, July 22, 2008 11:00:35 PM
The Yankees and Red Sox are the teams you usually hear about when it comes to trying to just buy a pennant or World Series.  Their payrolls are staggering, but there are certainly other teams that have the resources available to compete if that's the approach they want to take.  The Mets spend a lot of money, and I seem to recall the current Angels owner as being reputedly willing to spend big to try to win.

One team that manages to usually spend a fair amount of money but still not make its way to a World Series title is of course the Cubs.

So the latest news that the Cubs have been fined half a million dollars tells us what?  Here's the quick and dirty:

The Cubs' fine for violations related to the June draft of first-year players was a whopping $500,000, SI.com has learned.

Major League Baseball ruled that the Cubs violated a couple of baseball rules, including failing to report a signing to MLB's New York offices and putting the player on the field before receiving approval for the signing from MLB offices.

The Cubs were said by people familiar with the case to have exacerbated the situation by how they responded to MLB's concerns. MLB higherups apparently didn't believe Cubs people were completely forthcoming regarding their actions in the case when questioned about them.

I would certainly like to think that the Cubs front office is made up of sharp-eyed baseball minds who somehow made brilliant acquisitions that will help turn the team into a juggernaut over the course of the next decade.

A century of futility and a little bit of common sense makes me think it's far more likely that the front office is badly run and that if this year's team manages to win a title the most appropriate analogy for the role of the front office in all this would be to think of them as the thousand monkeys that finally produced a Shakespearean play.


 

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When your mind has a couple of hours to wander as you cut the grass...

Posted by Ed Lilly on Sunday, July 20, 2008 10:21:14 PM
...you sometimes think of some seemingly very disjointed things.  But in the end, you can kind of make sense of them.

For instance, today I found myself thinking about baseball, as I often do when cutting the grass.  As a Cubs fan, now living in between New York and Philadelphia, I was thinking about the Yankees and their manager, Joe Girardi.  Girardi started out with the Cubs, and I wound up meeting him and actually sitting next to him on the Cubs bench when I was asked to serve as the Cubs batboy for the day.  That's a long story perhaps for another time.  The point is, I met Girardi, but would certainly never expect him to remember me.

As it turns out, however, Girardi attended Northwestern University at the same time as one of my cousins.  More importantly, she mentioned at one time that she knew Girardi from college.  I don't know if they were anything more than casual social acquaintances, if even that, but she apparently remembered having met him and spoken to him when they were students at Northwestern.

So I found myself wondering about a potential conversation with Joe Girard should I ever run into him somewhere.  It would be interesting to see if he in fact remembered my cousin from school, and my guess is we would have a few laughs about my one game with the Cubs.

But then my mind turned to thinking about how small the world is in some ways, and how it seems really ridiculous that some middle-aged guy who grew up in a smallish town in northern Indiana, now cutting his grass in central New Jersey, has some albeit very thin and tenuous connection to the manager of the New York Yankees.

Which of course made me think of the idea of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, and whether, through Joe Girardi, I somehow am a short couple of hops from Kevin Bacon.

Then it struck me that the same cousin who went to school with Girardi also was an extra in the movie "About Last Night...," with Rob Lowe, Demi Moore, Jim Belushi and Elizabeth Perkins.

And since Demi Moore was in "A Few Good Men" with Kevin Bacon, and Elizabeth Perkins was in "He Said, She Said" with Kevin Bacon, I guess I kind of have a Kevin Bacon Score of 3 through my cousin, as we were in multiple high school drama productions (and countless family productions of varying degrees of taste).

Which of course makes the relevant question:  What movie did I wind up falling asleep to last night after everyone else had gone to bed
Tags: Media   culture  
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Maybe it's just a "conspiracy" backed by Big Belt?

Posted by Ed Lilly on Sunday, July 20, 2008 9:57:24 AM
A south Chicago suburb is the latest place to try to legislate against young men who wear their pants around their mid-thighs:

LYNWOOD, Ill. (AP) - Be careful if you have saggy pants in the south Chicago suburb of Lynwood. Village leaders have passed an ordinance that would levy $25 fines against anyone showing three inches or more of their underwear in public.

Eugene Williams is the mayor of Lynwood. He says young men walk around town half-dressed, keeping major retailers and economic development away. He calls the new law a hot topic.

The American Civil Liberties Union says the ordinance targets young men of color.

Young adults in the village, like 21-year-old Joe Klomes, say the new law infringes on their personal style. He says leaders should instead spend money on making the area look nicer.

 

Interesting how the ACLU automatically drags race into it, saying it targets young men of color.  From my experience this past school year doing a fair amount of substitute teaching, I can say that the tendency to wear baggy pants way too low, exposing one's boxer shorts, is not a phenomenon that is limited to young men of color.  Perhaps in other areas, and if looking at the nation as a whole, the numbers show a different story.  But my own eyes tell me differently here in small town New Jersey.

More interestingly, as the story clearly notes, the ordinance calls for a fine against anyone who violates it.  I expect that the goal is indeed to have a selective, and discriminatory effect.  But it is one that is directed at all young men.  Young women, at least from what I have seen in the greater Trenton area, have not adopted the drooping, baggy pants style with 6 inches of boxers showing.

I guess that's just more of how the game gets played.  By harping on the racial angle, the ACLU hopes for publicity, and in the inevitable court challenge, by making it about race they hope to get "strict scrutiny" analysis, which is pretty much impossible for a government body to pass.  If they only focus on the more realistic gender discrimination, then there is at least a chance that the ordinance could survive the less exacting "intermediate scrutiny" test applied by the courts.

 
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Why don't these kinds of things ever happen to that other Stanford alum?

Posted by Ed Lilly on Sunday, July 20, 2008 9:53:44 AM
Michelle Wie, a Stanford  student who knows a little bit about golf at its highest levels, has been disqualified from this weekend's play at the ongoing LPGA event for failure to sign her scorecard before leaving the scoring tent after Friday's round of play.

If you click through to the story and/or watch the embedded video in the story from ESPN News, Wie offers no explanation, citing it as just an inexplicable, but honest, mistake.

Perhaps she's right, but Wie has a curious history already in competitive play.  Just off the top of my head, I can remember her having a 2 stroke penalty assessed after a round at the Women's British Open for grounding her club in a hazard.  After that incident, she fired her caddy.  (Whoever was on her bag this week better be making some phone calls to have a new gig lined up - the story makes a cursory reference to it not being known whether Ms. Wie's caddy accompanied her to the scoring tent.  My guess is he'll be gone by Monday evening.)

Wie then had the fiasco involving her agent essentially taking her off the course at a tournament where, had she continued the round, she very likely would have shot an 88 or higher, running afoul of the somewhat obscure "Rule of 88" as it was called at the time, which would have meant she could not have competed in LPGA events for a lengthy period because of her score.  Wie and her agent cited her lingering wrist injuries as the cause for her poor play and reason for withdrawal.  She then showed up early at the next week's LPGA McDonald's tournament, a women's major, to practice.

Perhaps her earliest snafu was her disqualification for having taken an illegal drop, an error that was not caught until a golf journalist questioned it and a subsequent "investigation" and discussion showed that she had indeed taken a drop in violation of the rules.

By almost all accounts, Wie is cited as a bright girl and clearly a very talented golfer.  She must be pretty smart if she was accepted at Stanford.  Granted, she's rich and famous, so it's not exactly a shocker that a big school that wants a prize like that to put in it's publicity material would let her in.  But she can't be a complete blockhead if she's any kind of student at all there.

Yet still she keeps running into these problems.

Very much unlike another young golfer who went to Stanford a few years ago - Tiger Woods.

Wie is still very young and may go on to become the "Female Tiger" that so many expected her to be when she was only 13.  But the more these little things keep happening to cause distraction and derail her efforts to win, you have to wonder whether she'll instead be some kind of serial female Roberto De Vicenzo.
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Well, it's not like he kept the beaches open after sharks were spotted or anything

Posted by Ed Lilly on Saturday, July 19, 2008 7:48:34 AM
Apparently the mayor of Belmar, NJ, a beach town that relies on summer tourism to boost its economy, had a blog about goings on in Belmar.  That's right, HAD a blog.  I guess it was going pretty well, and the locals found it pretty entertaining, until...

To the Staten Island girls who may have been taught to fight dirty in Brownies, Ken Pringle is sorry. To the muscle-bound, tanned-as-coconut-shell visitors he referred to as "guidos," employing a term widely considered an ethnic slur, the mayor of Belmar offers his apologies.

And to blondes everywhere, whether they know how to take out the trash or not, the blog-writing mayor is really remorseful.

The comments in his blog for summer renters in this legendary party town on the Jersey shore were meant, Pringle says, as tongue-in-cheek jabs at visitors behaving badly—which Belmar surely has each summer.

 

My hunch is that the folks at the local chamber of commerce just about stroked out when the mayor started peeing in the Cheerios of all the tourists those businesses rely on to have a good year.
Tags: Media   culture  
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Olympics preparation update

Posted by Ed Lilly on Wednesday, July 02, 2008 8:58:36 AM
From Bloomberg.com:

Olympic organizers struggling to stem an algae bloom at the sailing venue in Qingdao are turning to another threat: a plague of locusts heading for Beijing.

Uh oh.  But, the Olympics being such a hugely important event, and with the eyes of the world watching, surely the ChiComs will find a way to deal with the algae bloom and locusts using organic, earth-friendly techniques, right?  And if they don’t, the environmentalists will be in an uproar, right?

Well....

The northern Chinese province of Inner Mongolia has mobilized 33,000 people to repel swarms of locusts

Sounds good so far.  Use superior human resources to somehow “repel” the swarms.  But let’s see, the story tells us that the locusts:

have infested an area of 1.3 million hectares (5,000 square miles)

Hmmm.  Each of the 33,000 Chinese will somehow “repel” the locusts from an approximately 6.5 square mile area?  I wonder how they’ll do that.  Oh:

Locusts in full flight may not be so easy to tackle. Inner Mongolia authorities are using 200 tons of pesticides, 100,000 sprayers and four airplanes to kill the pests...

Let’s just hope that’s 200 tons of hemp-based, organic, earth-friendly pesticides sprayed by solar or bio-diesel powered, zero emission airplanes.

Perhaps there’s better news on the algae front:

The locust alert comes as 10,000 workers scoop up blue- green algae along the coast...

Sounds earth-friendly, again using immense man-hours to somehow scoop up the algae.  And they’ve already had some reported success:

About 4,000 troops are helping the Qingdao clean-up, which has removed 150,000 tons of algae since June 25...

Wow.  That's a lot of tonnage to remove in a week's time using environmentally friendly techniques.  But I'm sure the ChiComs have been environmentally responsible.  Best of luck in their continuing cleanup and preparation for the Games.

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Leaving Las Vegas - For the Children!

Posted by Ed Lilly on Tuesday, July 01, 2008 8:50:50 AM
I read a short news story yesterday on Sen. Reid's comments on fossil fuels, but it took James Lileks to craft the perfect response.  Here is the relevant section of Reid's statement (via The Bleat):

“The one thing we fail to talk about is those costs that you don't see on the bottom line. That is coal makes us sick, oil makes us sick; it's global warming. It's ruining our country, it’s ruining our world. We’ve got to stop using fossil fuel.”

Taking Reid's words to heart and extending his argument to its logical conclusion, the Bard of Jasperwood opines:

There’s only one sensible response: we have to shut down Las Vegas.

Brilliantly done.  I highly recommend it.  The Vegas section is in the bottom portion of today's Bleat, but it's well worth your time to read the whole, brief piece.

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Information that would have been helpful YESTERDAY!

Posted by Ed Lilly on Monday, June 30, 2008 9:13:22 PM
From SI.com:

Indiana University's president told the NCAA infractions committee that the hiring of ousted basketball coach Kelvin Sampson was "a risk that should not have been taken."

Well, gosh, how fortunate for President McRobbie that he assumed his position only after Sampson was hired so that McRobbie does not have to join AD Rick Greenspan on the next Trailways out of Bloomington.

I realize that IU is not solely, or even most importantly, about college basketball.  But the reality is that college hoops is big business.  And it’s been pretty clear since Kelvin Sampson’s hiring and subsequent resignation that the IU administration has screwed up that big business in a huge way.

Hopefully, the removal of Sampson and Greenspan, the hiring of Tom Crean, and possibly sound decision-making by the administration in finding Greenspan’s replacement will mean a big turn around for the business of IU basketball.
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Justin Gimelstob tries, fails to create interest in women's tennis? UPDATED

Posted by Ed Lilly on Sunday, June 29, 2008 8:31:37 AM
Professional tennis has had a long, slow decline in popularity over the years, but a link caught my eye the other day in the tennis headlines.  It said something about a U.S. tennis official calling women’s tennis players sexpots and bit¢hes.  I didn’t save the link at the time, but I have found the story again, from the website This is London.

From the link, it appeared that perhaps a women’s tour official was caught making some really outrageous remarks.  Turns out, it’s former men’s tour pro Justin Gimelstob, who is now an ATP (the men’s tour) director, who was shooting off his mouth.

The specifics of Gimelstob’s comments, made during a radio show interview in the U.S. before he departed to cover Wimbledon, are about what you might expect from a former professional athlete being outrageous in a radio interview when talking about female tennis players, and he has of course now apologized to pretty much all women past, present and future for his inartfully expressed comments.  I even saw one link that mentioned Gimelstob apologized to Billie Jean King, which I guess somehow makes her the women’s tennis equivalent of Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton as the go-to person for apologies when the relevant minority group is insulted.

But what I really found interesting out of this whole kerfuffle was that the Gimelstob story came out on This is London’s web site on Friday, June 27.  As of this morning, June 29, even with the wave of stories about Gimelstob’s subsequent apologies (a search of Gimelstob and Kournikova, who was mentioned prominently in the article, gave me over 23,000 online hits, and it took me to about the 5th page of links to get back to the original story), the original story from This is London has ZERO comments on the web site.

How can this be?  Granted tennis is not the most popular sport in the world, but the whole point of running this story was to shock and draw attention, right?  So no comments at all in 2 days?!  My guess is they got a lot of comments from men that they didn’t want posted, and they simply haven’t allowed any posts to go up.

UPDATE:  I may have been incorrect in where I saw the original link/story.  Further down the online search results, I found essentially the same piece via the Mail website, where there are now 34 comments.  Most are taking Gimelstob to task, and a few are "supporting" him by saying he just spoke his mind and shouldn't cave into political correctness for exercising free speech.  So perhaps the lack of comments at This is London is because they don't get much traffic?  Don't know about that.  I'm a bit surprised at only 34 comments at the Mail site.

Tags: Media   tennis  
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Maybe Kelvin Sampson can find him a job...

Posted by Ed Lilly on Thursday, June 26, 2008 5:28:06 PM
Sometimes, the right thing happens, even if it takes a little longer than you might expect.  News came over the wires this afternoon that Indiana University Athletic Director Rick Greenspan is resigning is resigning as part of the probe into the mess created by Greenspan's hire, Kelvin Sampson, in continuing his violations of NCAA rules in contacting potential recruits.

Sampson's resignation came just before the end of the Big Te(leve)n season, and it would have been better had Greenspan done the right thing at that time and fallen on his sword.  He was the one who backed Sampson for the IU position despite Sampson's previous NCAA rule-breaking.

Unfortunately, this resignation will probably result in rumors of Isiah Thomas going back to Bloomington to be Tom Crean's new boss.  But if they didn't bring back Zeke to coach, I don't think they'll want him as AD.  Breathe easy, for now, Hoosier fans.

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You mean, actual lawmakers are going to keep making and enforcing laws?

Posted by Ed Lilly on Thursday, June 26, 2008 7:52:50 AM
Instead of just letting the self-appointed legislators on the judicial bench try to take over everything instead?  Maybe:

Unbowed, politicians vow to execute child rapists

Well, I should hope so.
Tags: law   courts  
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We had a PACT!!

Posted by Ed Lilly on Tuesday, June 24, 2008 9:32:23 PM
There have been numerous stories over the past few days about an apparent "pact" made by a group of high school girls in Massachusetts.  The girls were thought to have made an agreement to all get pregnant and have babies.  The latest link at Refdesk.com reads as follows:

Pregnant Mass. teen says there was no pact

I am reminded of this long-running dispute between Jerry and George in "Seinfeld."  At one point, George and Jerry decided they needed to grow up and make some changes in their lives.  Which led to George asking Susan to marry  him, and resulted in this exchange (h/t to the indispensable Seinfeldscripts.com):

George:  Oh, she's got the hue. So, what's going on with you and Melanie? I mean, I know you're not getting married, but uh, things are happening?

Jerry:  Well...actually, we kind of broke up.

George:  You what?

Jerry:  Well, you know, we were having dinner the other night, and she's got this strangest habit.  She eats her peas one at a time.  You've never seen anything like it.  It takes her an hour to finish them.  I mean, we've had dinner other times.  I've seen her eat Corn Niblets.  But she scooped them.

George: . . . she scooped her niblets?

Jerry:  Yes.  That's what was so vexing.

George:  Uh-huh.  Uh-huh.  What about the pact?

Jerry:  What?

George:  What happened to the pact?  We were both gonna change.  We shook hands on a pact.  Did you not shake my hand on it uh?

Jerry:  You stuck your hand out, so I shook it.  I don't know about a pact.  Anyway, you should be happy you're engaged.  You're getting married.

I always thought Jerry had the weaker position here.  It seemed pretty clear from the interaction that George's take on what happened was more accurate.  Still, it would have been nice if one of the girls at Gloucester High had had the decency to throw in a sly reference to never having shaken hands on anything.

Tags: Media   culture  
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