ESPN's Rich Eisen, covering the NFL combine, runs the 40 yard dash. It's by far the most entertaining footrace I've ever seen:
The New Orleans Saints’ strategy in last month’s NFC championship game was primitive and perfectly suited: Take advantage of quarterback Brett Favre’s 40-year-old body by inflicting a caveman’s clubbing. Hundreds of pounds of muscle and anger and adrenaline hit him at high speed a total of 17 times, and Favre, perhaps playing the last game of his career, managed to withstand the punishment until the third quarter, when he severely hurt his ankle.
We are witnessing a major escalation of right-to-life opinion-mongering--and backlash against it--in the sporting world, thanks to an ad starring football idol Tim Tebow for James Dobson’s Focus on the Family. It will air during the Super Bowl. According to an AP sports article:
Actually, the crowd was a bit larger because the overflow was in a room across the street from the Northeastern University gymnasium. Two of my friends, foreigners who can't vote, said that right next to them was an anti-abortion hysteric--"Abortion! Abortion! Innocent Blood!"--noticed by the cops and taken out by them only after a noisy hassle. In fact, there were three of these hysterics.
Everybody's making football analogies these days. Ezra Klein argues that political reporters should follow the example of football, and have political specialists and policy specialists, rather than try to make their reporters do both:
Six years ago yesterday, the Washington Redskins lured their three-time Super Bowl-winning coach, Joe Gibbs, out of retirement in an attempt to restore the team’s vanished glory. To commemorate the news, the local paper of record published--above the fold on page one--a large and dramatic photo of Gibbs.
Six years ago yesterday, the Washington Redskins lured their three-time Super Bowl-winning coach, Joe Gibbs, out of retirement in an attempt to restore the team’s vanished glory. To commemorate the news, the local paper of record published--above the fold on page one--a large and dramatic photo of Gibbs.
(Note: if you're not either a football fan or a legal aficionado, you probably want to skip over this post.)
Ashby Jones from the Wall Street Journal's Law Blog flags an interesting discussion in the legal blogosphere from last week: why are instant replays in the NFL and college football subjected to a heightened standard of review? As football fans know, a call on the field is supposed to be overturned after instant replay only if there is "conclusive" or "indisputable" video evidence that the call was wrong. If the video leaves room for debate, the call on the field stands.
Law professor Joseph Blocher questions that policy. Why not have plays reviewed (to use legal terminology) de novo, with the call changed to whatever the video suggests is most likely the correct result, even if it's not indisputable? In law, as Blocher notes, heightened review is used primarily when there is reason to believe that the lower decision-maker is in a better position--often for reasons of institutional competence, such as when a trial court makes findings of fact--to make close judgment calls than the reviewer. But that doesn't really seem to be the case in football. Particularly during nationally televised games where there are multiple camera angles, stop-action footage, and close-ups, the reviewer will usually be in better position to make close calls than the referee on the field. So why not give them the authority to overturn calls upon de novo review?
The coaching rein of Charlie Weis, with its endless gifts to satirists and Notre Dame-haters, has sadly come to its inevitable conclusion as he was relieved of his coaching duties yesterday. Weis began his career riding an epic wave of hype, exceeding even that of his predecessor, Tyrone Willingham.
On an Indian summer afternoon in front of the Justice Department yesterday, a group of dark-suited ministers gathered to protest recently-passed hate crimes legislation, saying it had had a “chilling effect” on religious freedom.
“We will not be bullied!” cried Reverend Pat Mahoney of the Christian Defense Coalition, to a rank of cameras. “We will not be pressured! We will not go silently into the night!”
A black-clad traveling minister from Colorado Springs, Chaplain Klingenschmitt, upped the ante with a press release containing some choice anti-gay Bible verses and a challenge to arrest him for saying that homosexuals are “worthy of death.” “That does not mean that I am going to take action, or that I believe anyone should take action in that way,” he explained, calling the Matthew Shepard Act a “thought-crimes bill.” “My intention is the free exercise of religion. What other peoples’ intention is is up to them.”
Try as they might to pull a Cindy Sheehan, however, no federal sledgehammer descended. The police watched quietly from the perimeter as ministers decried homosexuality as an “abomination,” intervening only to clear gay rights activists off a concrete rise behind the podium (officers confirmed that there was not, in fact, anything the clergymen could have said to get themselves arrested—the act contains explicit protections for religious speech). Still, the ministers pressed on, undaunted by law enforcement’s refusal to persecute them. They hold tight to the belief that the anti-Christian crackdown is coming, because it’s happened before. Michael Marcavage, a young, green-eyed minister hugging a leatherbound Bible to his chest, has lived it.
The Book of Genesis
Illustrated by R. Crumb
(W.W. Norton, 224 pp., $24.95)
A certain amount of sensationalistic misinformation was circulated in the press last spring, here and in England, when word got out that R. Crumb had done an illustrated version of Genesis. Crumb was the leading innovative figure of the underground comics movement of the late 1960s and has enjoyed a devoted following ever since. His graphic work, always memorable, is often physically aggressive, raunchy, and sexually explicit. Against that background of countercultural tawdriness, the press reports suggested that Crumb’s Genesis meant to make a mockery of the biblical text, and that some of it verged on pornography. Even though the jacket of the finished book bears a warning in bold lettering--"ADULT SUPERVISION RECOMMENDED FOR MINORS" (the same may be said, in fact, about Genesis itself)--these scandalous imputations are entirely groundless.
Nobel reactions from around the web.
What's more important for China's future: social or financial reforms?
I’m fed up with the anguished deliberations about whether former Atlanta Falcons quarterback Michael Vick, who served 21 months in jail for promoting dog-fighting and killing, should be allowed to play pro football again. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, who has spent his adulthood as a pro football front office guy, is going to judge whether Vick is morally fit to put on a helmet and pads and risk life and limb before thousands of screaming fans.
As the Iraq war grinds into its sixth year, policy-makers in the U.S. would do well to remember the story of Phineas Gage. For those in need of a refresher, the 25-year-old construction foreman lost a hunk of his frontal lobe back in 1848 when a three-foot iron rod shot through his left cheekbone and out the top of his head.
This fall, New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. launched a search for a new conservative columnist. It had been nearly three years since William Safire had retired from his weekly column in 2005, and Sulzberger’s initial replacement, libertarian John Tierney, lasted just 20 months before abandoning his column.
Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think By Brian Wansink (Bantam, 276 pp., $25)
This summer's Philadelphia Eagles training camp was a pretty exclusive affair. The Eagles invited only about 100 people from all of the hundreds of thousands who annually yearn to play pro football. The average male who received an invitation stood six feet, three inches and weighed 230 pounds. Most of the Eagles candidates had played before in the National Football League and on major college football teams. But for every 225-pound monster who received an invitation, a 145-pound weasel was admitted too.
This summer's Philadelphia Eagles training camp was a pretty exclusive affair. The Eagles invited only about 100 people from all of the hundreds of thousands who annually yearn to play pro football. The average male who received an invitation stood six feet, three inches and weighed 230 pounds. Most of the Eagles candidates had played before in the National Football League and on major college football teams. But for every 225-pound monster who received an invitation, a 145-pound weasel was admitted too.
Americans, from William James to Jimmy Carter, have been searching for a “moral equivalent to war”: some commitment to high purpose which benefits mankind yet evokes the same degree of discipline and self-sacrifice that war does. Because the vision of such a state is so attractive it has figured rhetorically in the expressions of many presidents, most notably Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson and Mr. Carter.
Americans, from William James to Jimmy Carter, have been searching for a “moral equivalent to war”: some commitment to high purpose which benefits mankind yet evokes the same degree of discipline and self-sacrifice that war does. Because the vision of such a state is so attractive it has figured rhetorically in the expressions of many presidents, most notably Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson and Mr. Carter.
