Not That We Condone The Forcible Buggery Of Children Too Young To Know The Times Table, Of Course

WELL, first, what Scott said, and I have no hopes of being so brief.

There's no real reason for me to add my slender reed to the general moral condemnation of everything connected with this episode occurring everywhere outside of State College, PA. I'm wiling to presume that the college yahoos who fanned the stench into every corner of the university weren't thinking clearly, and aren't really equipped to do so, anyway. I'll even tip my hat to the Trustees who made the only decision sane people could have, because, god knows, that's almost more than we can expect, anymore.

I know you know that in 2002, a 27-year-old grad student named Mike McQueary supposedly walked in on the anal rape of a 10-year-old boy. And his immediate reaction was that he'd better call his father. I'm guessing in order to clarify whether the laws and norms of 21st century America or 1st century Rome took precedence in the Penn State showers.

We don't know either the internal or the external dialogue that ugly scene engendered. And we are justified in asking, if not concluding, that Mike McQueary's first thought in that situation was for his career. And that everyone else's first thought when--if!--they were informed of it was for the reputation of a big-time college sports program. And everybody managed to carry it around for a decade, and sleep, however well, and maybe, on occasion, hope like hell that no other boy got buggered, or if he did, at least that the news didn't get out.

How'd we get here? Shame is not a strong enough word; I'm not sure what is. If we're so willing to accept, or pretend not to see, the Ancient Roman's preferred choice of carnal destination, maybe we could say a few good words about their willingness to open a vein when the situation called for it.

Let those who did nothing face that fact, forever, now. I believe in the power of redemption. I don't believe it's likely to occur when one reportedly is busy drunk-dialing his receiver corps for a little pre-game wallow in self-pity.

I'd rather ask how we can look at this and treat it as though some unspeakable Evil just happened to land in Happy Valley, and Mistakes Were Made, and those responsible Will Be Punished. We are evidently supposed to realize that the near-instantaneous (in news cycle terms) punishment of higher-ups shows just how serious we are about things this time. If this had been Iraq, Paterno would have his Medal of Freedom ceremony scheduled.

This is corporate culture, and this is American culture for the last three decades; Winners get to fuck the skinned and the scorned, and call it Freedom (and, if they're smart about it, take a charity deduction into the bargain). It ain't like you had one catamite fancier who happened to be caught, and tossed back, by one former Penn State quarterback. The entire athletic hierarchy at Penn State acquiesced. So too did people at the charity harem Jerry Sandusky ran. We are in Good German territory here, and we are justified in asking why. How did career, and self-love, come to trump every other consideration, even protection of the most vulnerable and most innocent? This is vile, this is inexplicable and unconscionable and maybe unforgivable, but does it really differ all that much from what we've been proudly doing to the poor since 1981?

Oy

Fun With Monogamy And Pathologically Oversized Craniums, Vol XIV

MY Poor Wife helps me shop for a bike helmet as I bring the '77 Raleigh Super Course out of mothballs*.

ME: "Universal fit" my ass! Look at this thing. Gyro says it fits 98% of the population.

PW: The other 2% are you and the Elephant Man.


________________

*

* It's a great bike, which cost me about $200 back in the day, which was a lot of money for me, but it had all Sun Tour components, a big step up from similarly-priced stuff. And it's cleaning up remarkably well for having spent the last twenty years in garages and basements. I never sold it because by the time I was too spoked to ride in traffic, and there no longer was any farmland in Marion county that wasn't a half-hour's drive away, the long contagion of the mountain bike had set in and nobody wanted a racing bike. I dunno if anyone does now, either--and I'm not selling--but, god bless the internet, it's now easy enough to find other people out there who pine away for this stuff, most of whom are too young to've known it except as an antique. I feel like Rip Van Winkle. If this works out--no test rides until a complete tune-up is finished--I'm breaking out the Yamaha CA-400 tube amp and the Yonex racket with the head smaller than grandma's stove.

Because It's My Blog, That's Why

It's the fearsome Carmel "Fence Post Flex" defense.

Bob Kravitz, "Here's where the responsibility belongs: If allegations are true, perpetrators are the only ones to blame". May 18 [note: link to hyper-valuable Indianapolis Racist Beacon* material subject to expire in twenty minutes]

OUR story so far: sleepy farm-market village (Carmel, IN) north of Indianapolis grows explosively from 1960-2000 thanks to White Flight, Federally-funded, conveniently located interstate ring around Marion county, and Republican "zoning" "laws". (The population boom continued into the Naughts, but in part because it annexed every bit of unincorporated land that didn't have the money to defend itself.) Becomes the wealthiest city in the wealthiest county in the state, and even more Republican, though only about as white as it ever was. Or could be theoretically.

Now, much of what follows is even ranker speculation than is normal around here, sprinkled liberally (get it?) with class envy. And the simple reason for that--okay, the former--is that these are not the sort of people who volunteer information, or generally have it demanded of them by investigative reporters, police interrogators, or an opposition party. So, to begin with, back when I was in high school the town had a population of around 6500. Today it is almost 70,000 (they bought themselves a Special Census back in Naught Seven so they could gobble up more tax revenues. Republicans.) and the high school's almost the size the town was back when. Because it's still the same high school, expanded several times; it's whispered in educational circles ** that the intention is to maintain the benefits of super-sizing in athletic and other competitive, trophy-awarding educational tussles.

So: last February it suddenly became public knowledge that some sort of "hazing" incident had occurred on a Carmel bus heading home from a boy's basketball game in southern Indiana a month before. And that, as a result of this information--which had come to light only because schoolyard gossip had gotten back to some parents--three seniors had been thrown off the team. Rumors did what rumors do: they swirled, enough to disturb the slumber of the Local Media, which stuck a microphone in front of the principal so he could announce--this is not speculation, but observation--that the incident hadn't risen to the level of criminal behavior, that the suspensions were the appropriate and sufficient response, and there was nothing more to see here, folks.

But among the rumors was a report that one of the attacked freshmen had required a trip to the emergency room, and that the attack was sexual in nature. The latter, of course, kept the news hounds on the scent, and the school's story fell apart like a substandard library parking garage. By the next week the Carmel cops and Hamilton county prosecutor were launching investigations which somehow hadn't been triggered by the hospital's incident report of a month earlier.

The completion of the investigation and announcement of possible charges was delayed, and delayed again; another senior joined the suspended when an earlier incident came to light. At some point someone pointed out that the alleged attack on the alleged bus allegedly occurred in Hendricks county, which somehow turned the thing into some sort of ad-hoc cross-jurisdictional extra-legal CYA fest. And then yesterday, after an extra weekend's delay, prosecutors signed off on the recommendations of a grand jury. The four were charged with varying degrees of misdemeanor activity, though the rumored charges of criminal deviate conduct--which requires forced sexual behavior--were not among them.

Connoisseurs of political hegemony, small-town shenanigans, and the Constitutionally-enshrined privilege granted wealthy real-estate developers and corporation lawyers gathered in mid-sized groups probably have already guessed that the excessive redaction of the original investigation continued unabated into the release of actual charges. Out of concern for the victims, of course. Professor emeritus of Law Henry Karlson called it "one of the
most outrageous cover-ups I've ever seen." If you'd like a little whipped cream with that, the security tape from the bus, said for months to've been taped over the following week, turned up like magic Monday.

Which brings us to Bob "Contraindication" Kravitz, Indianapolis Racist Beacon sports columnist:

When it happens, when something as twisted and inexplicable as the Carmel hazing case happens, our base instinct is to cast blame. Who is responsible for the kind of venal behavior that landed four former Carmel basketball players with misdemeanor charges Monday? How could this happen on the parents' watch, on the coaches' watch, on the school administration's watch?

Let me simplify this:

The four young men -- Scott Laskowski, Oscar Falodun, Brandon Hoge and Robert Kitzinger -- would be the ones to blame, and nobody else.

Bzzzzzzt.

Here's what is generally accepted as established: the bus assault occurred on the freshman team bus, which was not supposed to be carrying any upperclassmen. There were three (!) freshman coaches on that bus, said to be sitting in the front and talking shop. The seniors boarded that bus at a rest stop, and the alleged assaults allegedly occurred in the back.

Let's just note for starters that teachers in many ways have a stricter legal responsibility towards their charges than even the parents, and that this is precisely the way it should be. "It was dark back there" or "Who knew?" or "The perps are the real criminals" are not excuses. It should be second nature for any teacher to watch for bullying, especially of younger students, and especially where athletic teams are concerned. Three coaches; none supervised the reloading of the bus, none walked to the back and checked out his charges, none noticed that two seniors got on board. As a result one student, whose crime was playing basketball, wound up in the emergency room, and who knows what else was visited upon those boys. At least one of the victims is said to no longer be enrolled at Carmel. We'll accept for the moment the Grand Jury's decision that none of the coaches should be indicted, but spare us the idea that they're simple victims of circumstance. They had a serious responsibility and they failed to live up to it. All were released as of yesterday, apparently, as was the head coach, but that should have happened at the onset, by their accepting responsibility and resigning in shame, if not by administrative action. Instead, once this became public knowledge, the head coach released a statement about "facing adversity", not facing up to your obligations and taking blame for not doing so.

Understand, I am not coming close to comparing the horror of Columbine, which happened just miles from my old house, with what happened at Carmel. I am only saying that when bad things happen, we, as a community, look for a way to place blame. Maybe it comforts us to believe that there's a reason, that this wasn't some completely random act that cannot begin to be understood.

As we've pointed out before, the principal of Columbine High took the stage shortly after the massacre to announce he didn't really know Harris and Klebold and had never heard of the Trenchcoat Mafia, despite a rather obvious and fairly disturbing yearbook picture from the year before. Columbine is a school no bigger than one class at Carmel. In both instances information well-known to the student body didn't seem to reach the ears of the administration. Is it not your job as an administrator to know what's going on in your school? Or as a coach to know what's up with a dozen students in your charge? If anything, it's the enormity of Columbine which could not have been fully anticipated. Hazing in the Carmel athletic program? The district had already been sued over it.

And it ain't like this is some unforeseen problem; the state just passed a (toothless) anti-school-bullying law a couple years ago. This is a serious problem in the forefront of educational issues, and people who're caught flat-footed by it aren't innocent bystanders. They're complicit.

The Carmel school board is going to vote in a new hazing rule, after which everyone will congratulate each other on bravely facing the problem head-on. Then they'll announce they're busy looking forward. Through the same old prescription lenses.

______________

* As has been the case since shortly after the story broke, the Racist Beacon has closed comments on any Carmel stories. Which, of course, merely serves to underline that the blatant racist garbage which half their stories attract are there at their sufferance.

** Joke. As with all circles, nothing in education is "whispered".

Forget It, Jake

A) Young, good-looking, famous, and incredibly wealthy guy bangs cocktail waitresses two at a time.

B) Fame and wealth are courtesy legions of teevee viewers, synods of teevee executives, and bordellos of advertisers paying homage to his ability to hit a ball with a stick, provided it ain't raining and no one sneezes.

C) Accidental discovery of his abilities swinging a different kind of stick, a circuitous revelation via a goddam nation of full-time celebrity window-peepers, leads to a country in shock, advertisers in apoplexy, and innocent ESPN writers discovering that athletes sometimes have illicit sex, though, thankfully, such seems to have been limited to just this one case so far as they're aware.

D) Discovery of human failure of the sort which occurs in approximately 40% of all the sacred marriages in this country--where over 50% end in divorce for one reason or another--causes sudden realization in prime teevee-commercial-viewing demographic that lifeless celebrity testimonials provided any paying advertiser--be they financial shenanigan specialist, child-labor exploiter, or producer of unsafe, crappy, carbon-belching suburban Panzers--might be something less than heartfelt.

E) Withdrawn endorsement income and possibility that impressionable young golfers might try this sex business, find it enjoyable, and therefore give up golf compels weepy-assed (though still utterly affectless, proving all those commercial pitches really were his best efforts) "confession" of poon addiction to large teevee audience and brutally confined friends and family, thereby leading both print and teevee punditocracy to ponder how this played vis-a-vis the national catharsis required before golf fans will be able to enjoy watching him chip onto the manicured green at some restricted country club ever again.

And maybe it's just me, but the thing that came immediately to my mind was "We only demand psychological purgation of (A), when it's the one thing any of them did which is halfway understandable."

Sudden Stop

FIRST: Bode Miller is the greatest Men's skier the United States has ever produced, and not by a little. This is not subject to review, and he shouldn't be subject to his self-appointed Good Ol' Grampa, Tom Bwokaw, second-guessing him, his effort, or his balls-out style. We would, however, be a much better nation if the opposite were the case, and the fucking disaster Mistah Bwokaw and his chums helped launched by not doing their jobs, balls-out, or at all, was subject to regular review by honest people like Miller with no fucking crippling ego issues. Or if, for example, Bwokaw wasn't the latest freeloading beneficiary of what Noah Cross said about old whores and ugly buildings becoming respectable if they hung around long enough.

Miller, you may recall or have had impinged upon you since, was the Practically a Goddam Hippie who ungraciously failed to win five Golds at Torino, thereby letting down NBC, which had spent some fraction of the 2% of its Winter Olympic budget that doesn't go to shill figure skating or skateboarding on snow hyping him as a lock. That was bad enough, but what was several orders of magnitude worse, Miller failed to thank Jesus anyway, apologize profusely to Yum! Brands International, or, in general, act as though how he performed was the business of anyone besides himself.

Blasphemy jail for you! It's interesting that hundreds of thousands root for the Chicago Cubs every season, that Bosox fans only grew more vehement with each passing year of the Curse of the Bambino, and that there's still a Baltimore Colts Marching Band, but Miller misses a couple of gates, in a year in which he placed third in the World Cup--like any American gives a shit what happens in snow sports after the Olympic torch is extinguished--and wound up as the Shoeless Joe Jackson of the Naughts. No, take that back; Shoeless Joe has supporters.

As the Worst Decade in the History of the Republic Not Accompanied by an Almost-Providentially Chosen Leader as a Counterweight draws to a close, it is clear that no argument, no pristine example, will convince Americans to look at how Money has besmirched Sport. Even sports they care about, let alone how this was translated to the Olympics, which used to be a cesspool of semi-amateurism, before the Quadrennial Celebration of Peaceful Intercontinental Competition was told what's what by US television networks. The only people old enough now to remember the near seamless transition from the Cosmic Unfairness of the Soviet hockey team getting to train year-round as the Soviet Army hockey team, while our amateurs were unfairly forced to get by on small stipends and full college scholarships, to the Cosmos-Approved Dominance of Team USAUSAUSA! brought to you by Chevy Trucks, Dow Chemicals, and Rosebud Sleds, seem to approve of it. Provided you win the all Gold Medals you're supposed to, or thank Jesus for letting you try.

Yes, indeed, that battle was lost a generation ago, which is why it's hardly surprising that the New York Times last week brought us the tragic plight of US speedskaters who did not become overnight millionaires just for training. Or why it's more-or-less to be expected that the IOC, and the Games Canadian organizers, would blame Nodar Kumaritashvili for his own death on a luge course they immediately shortened, walled-off, and padded, not because it was unsafe, mind you, but because of the fragile emotional state of the athletes in the wake of his death.

I mean, what'd we expect? The Governor of Indiana, whose name escapes me at the moment, blames the Federal government for asking Toyota to maybe fix the problems that make its cars unmerchantible sometime before they kill everybody. This is what you get. It's what you get when you turn things over to people for whom profit is the one motivator and money the only standard.

And I'm not going to be a hypocrite. I'm a fan of open-wheel racing, and I've seen five wrecks that killed men involved. I've also seen that the people in charge worked to make things safer, and did. At various points they've slowed Indy cars down rather than have raw speed outpace a reasonable guarantee of safety. And that goes back thirty and forty years, back to my youth, when wearing a bicycle helmet was a sure way of getting your brains knocked out by schoolyard yahoos, not a requirement every parent enforced without thinking.

It's 2010. You had a course where speeds were running 20 kph faster than what was called for, and the structural pillars just outside the course weren't already padded? What happened? Couldn't find a corporate sponsor? You try Bubble-Pak? Serta? Silly-Putty?

Shaddup.

Frank Rich, "Tiger Woods, Person of the Year". December 20

UH…

If there’s been a consistent narrative to this year and every other in this decade, it’s that most of us, Bernanke included, have been so easily bamboozled. The men who played us for suckers, whether at Citigroup or Fannie Mae, at the White House or Ted Haggard’s megachurch, are the real movers and shakers of this century’s history so far. That’s why the obvious person of the year is Tiger Woods. His sham beatific image, questioned by almost no one until it collapsed, is nothing if not the farcical reductio ad absurdum of the decade’s flimflams, from the cancerous (the subprime mortgage) to the inane (balloon boy).

Uh…

As of Friday, the Tiger saga had appeared on 20 consecutive New York Post covers. For The Post, his calamity has become as big a story as 9/11. And the paper may well have it right. We’ve rarely questioned our assumption that 9/11, “the day that changed everything,” was the decade’s defining event. But in retrospect it may not have been. A con like Tiger’s may be more typical of our time than a one-off domestic terrorist attack, however devastating.

Uh…

Indeed, if we go back to late 2001, the most revealing news story may have been unfolding not in New York but Houston — the site of the Enron scandal. That energy company convinced financial titans, the press and countless investors that it was a business deity. It did so even though very few of its worshipers knew what its business was. Enron is the template for the decade of successful ruses that followed, Tiger’s included.

What makes the golfing superstar’s tale compelling, after all, is not that he’s another celebrity in trouble or another fallen athletic “role model” in a decade lousy with them. His scandal has nothing to tell us about race, and nothing new to say about hypocrisy. The conflict between Tiger’s picture-perfect family life and his marathon womanizing is the oldest of morality tales.
What’s striking instead is the exceptional, Enron-sized gap between this golfer’s public image as a paragon of businesslike discipline and focus and the maniacally reckless life we now know he led. What’s equally striking, if not shocking, is that the American establishment and news media — all of it, not just golf writers or celebrity tabloids — fell for the Woods myth as hard as any fan and actively helped sustain and enhance it.

But…

The most lethal example, of course, were the two illusions marketed to us on the way to Iraq — that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and some link to Al Qaeda. That history has since been rewritten by Bush alumni, Democratic politicians who supported the Iraq invasion and some of the news media that purveyed the White House fictions (especially the television press, which rarely owned up to its failure as print journalists have).

Now look: I'm no historian, but I'm pretty sure that by most reckonings The Naughts were more than a year-and-a-half old when 9/11 Changed Everything, and that much of that time had been given over to a Presidential campaign which was decided on the pressing issues of Al Gore's make-up, Al Gore's sighing, Al Gore's choice of suits, and Al Gore's outlandish claims that he 1) invented the Internet; 2) personally cleaned up Love Canal; 3) wrote, directed, and starred in that Love Story piece of shit, which was based on his cleaning up Love Canal while in college; and 4) did not enlist in the Army, and go to Vietnam, just to show George W. Bush up. And even though there is as yet no historical consensus on whether these matters were Total Fucking Bullshit or simply So Mother-Fucking Trivial as to Bugger Belief, there is no question that among their most ardent champions was one Frank Rich, Times Opinionator.

So do go on, Frank, with that "the television press has rarely owned up to its failure" routine. I can't tell you how fascinating I find that observation, coming as it does in the middle of a piece which ignores your own responsibility for setting this piece of shit decade in motion.

Because, fuck, Frank, teevee news is nothing more than a less-popular version of So You Think You Can Sing Like a Fifth-Grader? It may not have apologized for wrapping Bush's Iraq Adventurism in Old Glory, but then the worst War Whoredoggery on FOX can't have measured one-third the way up Judith Miller's contribution. Print media has a helluva lot to apologize for, Frank. And furthermore, I don't recall authorizing anybody to accept those apologies in my name. And, what's more, I don't.

No, "We" didn't willingly suspend disbelief, the better to enjoy the story. "You" did, and lots of "Us" were begging you to stop. Shock and revenge may have been natural reactions to 9/11. Shock and Awe was a wholly manufactured one. There may've been perfectly good reasons why thinking adults should have abandoned thinking because they "didn't want to question their leaders"--I'll leave that to you folks and your personal experience of the phenomenon--but there's no excuse for the Press having done so. And there was an entire year of Bush administration "hyping misleading intelligence", which, truth be told for once, wasn't as much misleading as "obviously fanciful and at the service of a pre-conceived war plan designed for transparently political ends". What exactly was it supposed to take to get you to snap out of your reverie? (Maybe what it appears to have taken, namely, the total collapse of Bush administration popularity?)

And it's not just the creative excision of Campaign 2000 from the Official Rundown of Shit That Went Wrong in the Naughts, itself an exercise in self-absolution; it's the suggestion that it's just a matter of a couple Bad But Understandable habits we "all" fell into in this particular decade. Television gave up covering news in the 1970s, Frank. The remainder of the Press agreed to sit quietly in its chairs and wait for Ronald Reagan to call on his pre-arranged questioners shortly thereafter. Our newspapers looked like the tabloid press for two decades; now they look like local shopping fliers. We have, in the meantime, gone from the post-Industrialized country with the world's most deceptive and corrupt financial and advertising practices to the post-Industrialized country with the world's most deceptive and corrupt financial and advertising practices which have their own major political party as a defense team.

Fer chrissakes, Tiger Woods didn't suddenly expose (or reinforce) the ugly hidden truth about ourselves (which somehow we'd only managed to glimpse in wildly popular boob tube excrescences) when fate revealed his hobbyist collection of cocktail waitresses. Tiger Woods "exposed" that truth by being an endorsement magnet, same as Sam Waterson advising people on financial planning, or Pat Boone on acne treatments, or Wallace Reid on quality sock garters. Whatever our Deep Dark Secret is, Tiger Woods selling automobiles, after shave, and brokerage houses ain't it. If his image didn't work on a gullible public he'd have been out on his ass with or without a notarized certificate of virginity in his back pocket; if it wasn't already certain just from talent alone that he'll be back birdieing 17 at Augusta, and being hosannahed for it, when the same Press now sniffing his underwear drawer returns its collective nose Back Where It Belongs, Woods would already have announced his entry into rehab, his sudden religious conversion, or his upcoming Pay Per View wrestling match with Danny Bonaduce. You can't talk about this shit as though it has real meaning anymore, because it doesn't. Whose fault is that? Maybe the same people who couldn't be bothered pointed out that a fully functional Iraqi nuclear program posed no real threat to us, on account'a everybody really wanted the President to do well.

And whose fucking image was it, anyway, Frank? Woods was rather famous for on-course exhibitions of anger and outbursts of profanity that never made televised coverage, while Long John Daly could get arrested for wearing a loud shirt. Either that's selective enforcement, or it's outright protection of the Investment. Am I supposed to feel sorry now that the people trying to cash in got rooked? What promise did Tiger Woods make you or me? Never to three-putt? How do major national advertisers--how does Accenture, fer chrissakes, which, if you don't know, is the shit Arthur Andersen, LLP, left in the bottom of the pot that nobody rinsed out--come to be guarantors of personal merit? I don't trust them to do their own jobs. On occasion I trust some of them to install my brakes, hold my money, or distill my whiskey, but the possibility of failure due to sub-standard materials, shady dealing, or the inclusion of anti-freeze as a cost-cutting measure, respectively, is never entirely out of my consciousness. If the entire Accenture board assured me a $5 check was good I'd still ask for three pieces of ID. Getting dropped by Gillette is supposed to be a black mark on your permanent record? They're the ones who hired Woods to stand stock still in a commercial while cupping his hands to the bill of his cap on the grounds that this would make me want to shave with their product rather than Schick's. Th' fuck would I listen to them?

On the other hand, Frank, your paper does promise me it'll try to print the truth.

Did The IOC Mention Anything About "Deplorable Medical Care" And "Loose Gun-Wielding Psychopaths On Every Street Corner" By Any Chance?

Chicago Loses Bid for 2016 Olympic Games

Well, at least now the President can turn his full attention to health care reform. Which means the odds are good Spain will get some.

In Other Words, He Blocked A Shot.

"There's a constant chess match between the middles of which way they're going to hit--wrist-away or cross-body. Players are always getting more information about where the set is, split-second information about the approach angle of the hitters, and factoring into that the history. David Lee taking that all into account, making an amazing blocking move."

--NBC "indoor" volleyball analyist Kevin Barnett

Do Not Get This Sort Of Electricity Anywhere Near A Pool.

HELL yes, since some of you asked, I still manage to enjoy Track & Field, with reservations, whenever NBC can cut away from its coverage of the five minutes between every platform dive.  If I want to watch young women showering I will go elsewhere.  Elsewhere in the house.  On video.  In case I need to make that clear.  

I've enjoyed a lot of what's on the Korean feed I get:  table tennis, badminton, team handball.  Swimming's okay, it's just not nearly as compelling as Track, just like soccer's no football; opinions vary.  It's the goddam jingoism and corporatism I can't stand.  I could probably even watch Gymnastics, were they to be edited to the meat, instead of  the action being tolerated as the price of admission to the sidelines-full of soap opera and waterworks.  That, and the fact that you cannot look at a female American gymnast without the acute awareness that the star machinery surrounding her is the very engine that has driven her, and especially her Loving and Sacrificing Parents, for years, making it a bit like investing real emotion rooting for the heroine of a Busby Berkeley movie.

Why I Can't Tell Ossetia Commentary From NBC's Olympic Coverage, Part XVII

"We are not going to distribute footage. We are not doing these kinds of things. Everything is good. What are you going to do with the footage? See what the Serbians already saw? It is clarified for us beyond any doubt.

“He’s the winner in any way. He’s the winner no doubt. Even if you could see the pictures, I don’t know how you could use them."

-actual comments of Cornel Marculescu, actual executive director of the international swimming federation FINA, explaining why actual underwater photographs of Michael Phelps' .01 second victory in the 100m butterfly would not actually be released as actually announced earlier

FOR one thing, we need seriously to consider not only whether "Conspiracy Theorist" should, in The Age of Bush (Clinton=blow jobs!), still be considered a mild-to-medium slur, or whether, in fact, the presumption should not now be reversed, and we assume anyone not wearing a tinfoil hat is harboring secrets which would Blow various Lids off various Things now safely Lidded. I don't like this turn of events any more than you do, even though I've pretty much always avoided hurling charges of home-made radio-wave-repellant headgear usage on general principles.  Paranoia is overrated.

And even though, to be clear about it, I'm not exactly convinced one way or t'other about that 100 butterfly decision. My personal concerns could be summed up as follows: 1) how has dishonesty become so profitable--mainstream profitable--that risking the appearance of dishonesty, even in a situation where honesty would seem to be central, crucial, the Without Which Nothing, is practically automatic? and 2) why is it that Americans always seem to be in the middle of this?

I mean, in 2008 is there any reason a sane person would chose "Believe FINA" as the default? In 2008 should we be looking for some reason other than the obvious one for such an institution giving us an argument instead of information?

True stories (we accept no advertising!): 1) I watched a replay of the race with my Poor Wife, the former competitive swimmer and high school swim coach. I am, by nature, a man who suspects that Stories Too Good To Be True may, in fact, suffer the occasional embellishment, and I have just enough of a grasp of mathematics to feel reasonably sure that 1/100 sec. is not, technically, a feasible margin of error given the circumstances of athletic competition, even one so well funded. So when I heard Phelps had won by 0.01 I suspected, not chicanery, but the pretension of precision beyond the likely. Then we watched the replay, and I said, "Hell, he won.  Close but no question." And then they showed the touch-out again, and I realized I had the lanes mixed up. The guy I thought had won, close but not 1/10 of an eyelash batting, was Milorad Cavic. 2) Later, in an effort to apply the same exacting empirical standards that make the NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams the global standard for professional journalism, the studio peacocks showed us underwater footage said to "prove" Phelps' touch-out, except the damned thing looked like a Ben Turpin two-reeler being hand-cranked by a spastic. They showed it over and over again, and each time I kept expecting the jump from about .35 meter out to their resting positions to disappear, but it never did. 3) The accompanying expert testimony, from the Golden Olympian Ambrose Gaines IV ("Rowdy")--who in a post-race interview once compared one of his own Olympic victories to the emotions generated in the residents of Hooville by the satisfying conclusion of How the Grinch Who Stole Christmas--noted that Cavic pulled his head up at the finish (a technical faux-pas) while Phelps employed a half-stroke (another technical faux-pas, but subsumed here as "risky", since it "worked"). My Poor Wife concurred. 4) I bow to their expertise, but I still question long-term exposure to chlorine; none of it meant we'd actually seen who touched first. 5) Meanwhile, the Indianapolis Racist Star's Bob Kravitz pens a column about Women's Gymnastics Outrage #4 or 5, the one where a tie on the Monkey Bars, or the High Beam, or some such was determined according to the rules, thus possibly depriving a button-cute American of her right to endorse the Chevy Tahoe. One day earlier I'd happened to see (on a hench network; contact sports don't make it to the Big Show much) two boxing matches in a row decided by precisely the same system, but neither of them involved countries whose sense of moral superiority hinged on the outcome.  

(By the way, I have a Solomonic, if I do say so m'self, solution to that But Chinese is exploiting young girls! outrage which robbed Béla Károli of his sleep last week--limit participation in Women's Gymnastics to women.  Of course, as a humanitarian, I favor first making sure you cannot open the windows of NBC's boardroom from the inside.)

This reminds me: I forgot to thank the folks at the Racist Star for directly appending the comments of their self-befouling microencephalic racist readership (and, if anything, I'm being nice) directly to the end of stories, instead of requiring one to click a link and wait two seconds before renewing one's hatred of one's fellow man. I'm sure that, like me, you can never get enough of "Your a moran", or suggestions that every non-white citizen of The Greatest Country in the World earns his living, between prison stints--where he is coddled by PC liberals--"pimpin his ho's" (funny how the missing apostrophes always turn up somewhere). And no, these are not, in the main, trolls, and no, you really should not go find out for yourself. Kravitz, naturally, wrote a column about how there couldn't possibly be any argument with the apodactic observation that Michael Phelps was The Greatest Olympian There Could Ever Be, and--I had no choice but to see--a mild admonishment by a time-wasting sports fan that, seeing as how Swimming hands out Olympic medals the way public clinics hand out condoms, maybe we ought to try to achieve something approaching Perspective was met with accusations that the writer must really hate America.

And I was replaying this, ad nauseam, for my Poor Wife last night--she either has the patience of Job or is hiding profound deafness--and I mentioned that the Nixon administration had spawned John Dean, John Sirica, Archibald Cox, and John Ruckelshaus, while the intervening forty years have not only given us...Nobody, but people were now obligated to apologize to rich people who shoot them in the face. And this, Dear Reader, is the Deformed Amphibian Epidemic of the American soul.

Why, Yes, I Do Have To Ruin It For Everybody.

Pat Forde, ESPN, et. al. ad nauseam, "Michael Phelps, Greatest Olympian Ever".

C'MON. He's a swimmer. How many Golds would Carl Lewis have if, in addition to running the 100 and the 200 the normal way, he could pick up another running backwards, and a third by goose stepping, and another long jump medal for flapping his arms like a cartoon duck during his approach? For that matter, how many would Paavo Nurmi have won (in distance running!) if he hadn't been robbed of his ability to compete in more than two (for [bogus] excessive travel expenses! Phelps will get a $1 M bonus from Speedo if he takes eight Golds). In 1924 the Flying Finn won the 1500 and the 5000, setting world records in each, with 30 minutes in between races. The other day the teevee drones were protesting the brutality of the schedule which had Phelps swimming three laps in a single 24-hour period.

And look, this is not to say Phelps isn't one of the greats; it's just that someone who earns a living writing about Sport ought to show a little more respect for his field than the guy who earns a living writing about Malto, The Maltilicious Breakfast Ballast. I exempt the teevee yammerers, who are, in fact, precisely the guy who writes about Malto.

Al Oerter won four Golds in discus. Alexander Karelin won three Greco-Roman wrestling Golds, lost the fourth by a point (to Rulon Gardner, the Nancy Zerg of athletics), which was the only point he'd given up in a decade. Find whatever story you wish the Most Compelling, if you absolutely have to, but don't act like all questions have been banished. Swimmers, and gymnasts, and people who specialize in great bursts of speed over short distances have, not just an advantage, but a lock on total medal haul, not to mention that they get to tack on team medals and relays.   Act like you understand this, assuming it doesn't take all the fun out of sniffing the lead dog's butt.

And yes, I am a former middle-distance runner married to a competitive swimmer, and yes, she did get tired of hearing this around 1978 sometime.  Lucky guess. 

They Started It, Ma.

JUST  like to mention that the only thing that would make the Giants victory last night sweeter is the revelation, two days from now, that they had been caught taping the Pats sideline during the regular season.

World Series Note

Dear City of Boston:

If possible, could you please settle on six different official cap designs and your seven favorite color combinations for them, and stick to those?

Thanking you in advance,

James B.S. Riley ("Doghouse")

If God Is Love, Why Does It Take So Long For Regional Dialects To Evolve Into Mutually Incomprehensible Languages?

BILL Simmons, ESPN's The Sports Guy, Friday:

Broncos (+9.5) over COLTS

Come on, this line shouldn't be higher than 7.

For the benefit of those of you who do not gamble on football or who do have ESPN columns advising those people who do, the betting line is designed, not to predict the outcome of the game, but to attract equal wagering on each side. And the final score of yesterday's game--Indianapolis 38, Denver 20--means that the Colts, by virtue of winning by eighteen, did what is known as "covering".

I'm not paying the Colts Tax because Denver has two quality CBs to handle Marvin Harrison and Reggie Wayne,

That would be two-time Pro Bowler Dré Bly, acquired this year from Detroit, and seven-time Pro Bowler and three-time All-Pro Roland "Champ" Bailey, one of the best to ever play the position.

Since Denver acquired Bailey in 2004 they have faced the Colts five times, including twice in the post-season. In one of those games, Week 17 of the 2004 season, the Colts had already clinched their playoff spot and Peyton Manning played only the first series of a Broncos 33-14 win. In the other four, all Colts wins, Manning:

is 101 of 125 (80.8%) for 1373 yards, 15 touchdowns, and 1 interception as the Colts have put up 162 points

after going 20-27, 193, with 3 TDs and no picks yesterday in a game where Marvin Harrison went out in the first quarter and the Colts offense didn't get untracked until late in the first half.

So I suppose it's understandable why The Sports Guy would think the addition of Bly was the missing piece which would shut the Colts down completely:

which means Joe Addai has to run all over them for Indy to cover this spread. (I'm not ruling it out, but it seems like a stretch.)

Addai went for 139 on 19 carries with one touchdown. It's the highest yardage total of his second-year career, but he went for 118 against New Orleans in Week one, and he gained 1000 yards last year despite splitting RB duties with Dominic Rhodes all season, so calling this "a stretch" is something of, well, a stretch. Backup RB Kenton Keith added 80 yards on 10 carries after Addai left the game at the beginning of the fourth quarter. Maybe the stretch was believing the Broncos, whose rushing defense ranked 29th going in, could stay in deep coverage all day and still keep Indianapolis from running the ball, let alone stopping the short passing game while they were at it.

And if that's not enough, everyone and their degenerate brother will be throwing the Chargers, Cowboys and Colts into a three-team teaser on Sunday. That's never good. Out of those three, the Colts seem like the shakiest link, don't they?

You tell me, Bill. The spread in those other two games was a dozen points, and the Chargers, last year's designated West Coast sportswriter fluff object, who're already this year's designated Two Bagger and who were getting the twelve couldn't crack it. Looks like the bookmaking industry has survived another week's encounter with the Simmons brain.

Look, I'm sure nobody in the country appreciates Simmons' four-sport, twelve-month/year mock-comic Beantown homerism any more than I do, especially those times when he imagines we aren't sated by his own production and reprints a half-dozen emails saying the same thing, except without the mock-comedy. Which is, roughly, every goddam column.

But, y'know, is it too much to ask that you remove your head from Bill Belichick's lap long enough to, say, look at the teams before you make your picks?

And aside from the joy there was in imagining you'd actually bet the mortgage on Denver, there was this:

(Random fantasy note: On my 3-0 West Coast team that's morphing into the 2007 Pats of fantasy teams, I have Kenton Keith and Selvin Young stocked on my bench just in case Addai or Travis Henry get injured and I can trade Keith or Young to the teams that have Addai or Henry. That means I'll be watching this game rooting for the starting running backs to get injured every time they touch the ball. Can you think of another avenue in life when you'd openly and shamelessly root for two human beings to pull a hamstring, sprain a knee or break a foot for three straight hours? Me neither. I love fantasy football.)

They both got hurt. Did that mean you had to wash your own underwear so your wife wouldn't see what you did to it, or is she used to that sort of thing by now?

Okay, Think Back. 5th Grade History? Declaration of Independence? Jefferson? Franklin? Hancock Guy Signed It Real Big?

Dear ESPN:

I don't presume to tell you your business. Maybe the demo for thoroughbred racing skews Suburban Pretentious, or it eyeballs Patrician, or however it is you guys talk. Still, if it's not asking too much, would it be possible to explain to your field reporters, or tossers, or whatever you call them that citizens of the Commonwealth of Kentucky are not subjects of the fucking Queen of England? Or that they are not obligated to wait until spoken to before they speak?

Otherwise, wouldn't it be a good idea if, sometime in your fourteen hours of pre-race coverage, which included a total of three two-minute sporting competitions, you found the time to squeeze in a Proper Way To Curtsey piece?

Yours,

J.B.S. Riley