Random Notes

• The annual fantasy baseball draft was last Saturday. Last year I picked first and finished last. This year I picked close to last, so we'll see if that improves my success any. In a 16-team league, I drafted 14th. My first five picks were Vladimir Guerrero, Lance Berkman, Roy Oswalt, Garrett Atkins, and John Smoltz. I also took a flyer on Barry Bonds staying out of prison in the 11th.

• Something I'm seeing more of these days: the gal (it always seems to be a woman) smoking a cigarette in her car who wants the smoke to go out the window but also wants the benefit of air conditioning. To accomplish this, she cracks the window open, oh, about a micron wider than the actual width of the cigarrette itself. She then, after each puff, carefully tries to stick the burning butt out the tiny window opening and hold it there--all while driving. That's a move I always enjoy. If you ask me, all these problems started with the 19th amendment...

• I've still never seen "American Idol." But I read the papers, and so I'm confident enough to form the opinion that this kid needs to be taken out and beaten:
  

• This has already made the rounds, but if you haven't yet seen it, you must watch "The Great Global Warming Swindle" that aired on British television last month. My favorite part is when the former head of Greenpeace, Patrick Moore, describes realizing that his own environmental movement was in deep trouble when they began talking about banning chlorine worldwide. He says he told them, "You guys, this is one of the elements in the Periodic Table, you know. I mean, I'm not sure if that's in our jurisdiction to be banning a whole element."

• A friend also pointed me to a Michael Crichton speech from a couple of years ago that's a wonderful (and necessary) read: "Aliens Cause Global Warming."

• Again I'm late to the ball on this, but earlier in the month one of my heroes, John Piper, wrote about the death of his father a few days earlier. It's monumentally good: "Hello, My Father Just Died."

Related Tags: American Idol, Global Warming, Great Global Warming Swindle, Patrick Moore, Greenpeace, Fantasy baseball, John Piper

March Miracle

In 1987, I left home for Butler University in Indianapolis for my freshman year of college. They had an excellent broadcasting program (which was my interest), and a beautiful, semi-urban campus. It was not, however, a pleasant year. I was homesick and lonely, and wound up transferring as a sophomore to the University of Missouri-Columbia where I already had lots of old friends from high school (thus beginning my attendance at what became a truly breathtaking succession of colleges and universities).

During that difficult 87-88 school year, one of my lifelines was Butler Bulldog basketball. My roommate and I, and the two guys across the hall [I wish I'd kept up with all of them; they were good guys, and impossible to find now. My roommate's name was Pete Smith. That should narrow it down to a few million...] had season tickets and went to every game, where we were part of an average crowd of about 500. It was so sparse at the games that we broadcasting majors could just stroll in and plop down courtside and "broadcast" the games into a tape recorder for practice if we wanted--no press pass or clearance necessary.

The Bulldogs played (and still play) in this incredible old-time field house where the championship scene of the movie "Hoosiers" was shot the year before I got there. To this day, it's the greatest place I've ever watched a basketball game. When the team wasn't using it for a game or practice, we'd sometimes play late-afternoon pickup games right on that court; it was open to everybody.

The season I was there, I think Butler finished something like 14-14 playing teams like Wabash, Valparaiso, and Indiana State. I remember one night watching ESPN with my friends (our dorm had just been wired for cable) and getting really excited that they actually mentioned the score for the game we'd just attended. It kind of felt like it might feel if you played ping pong in your basement one evening and later saw Dan Patrick give the score on the air.

That's why it's particularly thrilling for me to see the Butler Bulldogs in the NCAA Sweet 16 this year. It's nearly incomprehensible that the team I was once excited to merely see play against Xavier ("Wow, we're playing Xavier!"--who pasted us, incidentally) has been consistently ranked in the top 20 this season and is now among the top 1/4 of teams in college basketball's Big Dance. They play the defending champion Florida Gators tonight, and it would take a minor miracle for them to advance any further. But the major miracle has already occurred--the Butler University Bulldogs are a college basketball power. A minor miracle shouldn't be anything next to that.

Incidentally, during the year I was at Butler, one of the basketball players sat in front of me in music appreciation class. Butler was a school of maybe 3000-4000 people, so many of the classes were pretty small--25 to 30 people at the most. You got acquainted with the people in your classes. He was probably only the third or fourth best player on a mediocre basketball team, but I always remembered him because he was a nice guy and his name sounded odd to me. That player also happens to be participating in the NCAA tournament this year. As it turns out, his playing career was merely a stepping stone into the coaching ranks. Thad Matta is now the head coach of the first-seeded Ohio State Buckeyes, which just advanced to the Elite Eight last night.

I visited Indianapolis last year on a business trip. I dropped by the Butler campus for the first time in more than 15 years and wandered around. It had changed some, but not much. I trekked around in my old dorm (where everybody looked about the same as I remembered except for one graying old guy--namely, me) and revisited campus haunts. The pain of that freshman year has now largely been replaced by affection and nostalgia. I have two teams to root hard for among the 12 remaining. And if either one of them gets to the Final Four, I have an old Butler sweatshirt in the closet waiting to be put on.

Related Tags: Butler University, Butler Bulldogs, Thad Matta, Ohio State University, NCAA tournament

The Truth Is Out There

Last week, I was invited to appear on the Richard Syrett Show on CFRB radio in Toronto to talk about a television documentary I helped produce last year called Darwin's Deadly Legacy.

Richard, who is described as "Canada's Art Bell," was extraordinarily nice and I had a great time on the show. We even got to take some listener phone calls. If you're interested, you can now hear it here in Real Audio in the program's audio archive. (Just scroll down the page to Tuesday, March 14th.)

I was followed in the second hour of the program by a Registered Hypnotic Anesthesiologist talking about alien implants.

Death Of A Showman

Today brings the sad news of the death of one of entertainment's greats: Larry "Bud" Melman. Larry became a star on NBC's "Late Night With David Letterman" in the early 80's (in fact, his was the first face ever seen on the program--he opened the inaugural show with a warning that NBC was airing it without having first reckoned with God), and moved over to CBS with Dave in 1993 (where he had to revert to using his real name, Calvert DeForest, because NBC claimed--get this--that the name Larry "Bud" Melman was the company's "intellectual property").

As a result of his exposure on Letterman, Larry become a pop-culture icon, appearing in everything from movies to long-distance commercials to a Run-DMC music video. So put on a pair of huge eyeglasses and have some Toast-On-A-Stick tonight in memory of Larry "Bud" Melman.

(And where else have you seen this breaking story today? This, people, is why you need me.)

Related Tags: Larry Bud Melman, Calvert DeForest, David Letterman

Must've Slept Through The Alarm

It's been a while since I posted, and I hesitate to make mention of it since I am renowned for hating blogging about blogging (and for mercilessly ridiculing those who do it). But since I've received some kind emails from folks concerned that perhaps I could be trapped under something heavy, a word or two about the absence is in order. There have been two causes for my lengthy absence:

1). I was knee-deep in a work project that consumed most of the month of March.

2). I didn't have a single thing pop into my head worth writing about.

However, number 1 has now ended, and I've come to the realization that number 2 has never once stopped me before. So as we enter our fifth year (!) here at Rabe Ramblings, I hope to return to the same kind of blogging you've come to know me for.

Which ought to be a real disappointment for all of us.

(Incidentally, I've avoided switching to the new Blogger because I figured if I did, it would irretrevably screw up my template. Today, the thing basically forced me to switch when I logged in. And my template is now busted all to...um... heck. So I've had to get a new one. By the end of the day, I may have accidentally erased everything; we'll see what happens.)

Dawkins' Delusion

Some great stuff on the web this week regarding Richard Dawkins' recent book The God Delusion. Doug Wilson, whose able (and hilarious) blog-demolition of Sam Harris' Letters to a Christian Nation is being published as a book, now gives Dawkins the what-for:

But the point is apparently not how high the aspiration [of the book] has to be, but what you can get other bits of protoplasm to say about it in the blurbs, which is almost as good. But they need to say it in an energetic enough way to sway the general mass of protoplasmic bi-pedal carbon units out there, which is to say, the reading public. Because if enough bits of protoplasm get together on this, we can get ourselves a consensus going, and first thing you know you are dealing with the voice of Reason. The voice of Reason is what happens when any kind of physical wave (sound waves are best) shudders through a portion of the vegetable soup, dispelling the voice of Superstition forever.

....Reason, being a quaint and superstitious name we give to random neuron firings in the brain, wields no power at all. On atheist principles, expecting to find a correlation called "truth" between the chemical activities of the cerebral cortex in some people and the outside world is more than a little bit like astrology -- or tying the bulls and bears of the stock market to the batting averages of professional baseball players. Can be done, I suppose, but why would we ever think that this random dance of atoms had anything whatever to do with that random dance of atoms?

Indeed. Even our own atheist correspondent to these parts has never attempted a real answer to this question.

And Alvin Platinga, one of the most brilliant and respected philosophers in the world, also takes a few moments to eviscerate Dawkins' pretentions in this Books & Culture review:

Dawkins is perhaps the world's most popular science writer; he is also an extremely gifted science writer. (For example, his account of bats and their ways in his earlier book The Blind Watchmaker is a brilliant and fascinating tour de force.) The God Delusion, however, contains little science; it is mainly philosophy and theology (perhaps "atheology" would be a better term) and evolutionary psychology, along with a substantial dash of social commentary decrying religion and its allegedly baneful effects.

....Now despite the fact that this book is mainly philosophy, Dawkins is not a philosopher (he's a biologist). Even taking this into account, however, much of the philosophy he purveys is at best jejune. You might say that some of his forays into philosophy are at best sophomoric, but that would be unfair to sophomores; the fact is (grade inflation aside), many of his arguments would receive a failing grade in a sophomore philosophy class. This, combined with the arrogant, smarter-than-thou tone of the book, can be annoying.

Related Tags: Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Douglas Wilson, Alvin Platinga

Wicked Cool

My wife and I just got back from Massachusetts, where I had taken her for our anniversary. From what I gather, it's rather unusual for visitors to go up to Cape Cod in February. (I deduced this from the fact that everything, including hospitals and 7-11's, is closed there at this time of year.) But my wife wanted to go somewhere cold--the exact reverse of the kinds of vacations taken by 98% of North Americans where they go from cold places to warm ones--so Massachusetts it was.

Still, it was a lovely long weekend, highlighted by my delightful attempts to say the word "scrod" over and over again in a pitiful New England accent, and capped off by a final full day in Boston--a place I'd never visited before. It was a win-win situation there. As we walked around the city, she got to see historical things she wanted to see like Faniuel Hall, the Old North Church, and Old South Meeting House. And I got to see that bar from "Cheers." So we both got what we were looking for.

Okay, so that's Monday. We'll see if I find I have anything to say this week, unlike the past few.

Good Intentions: The First Domino

From the blog of Gene Edward Veith:

Tortilla prices have doubled in Mexico, causing Mexico's legions of poor people, who depend on tortillas as a major staple of their diet, to riot, destablize the government, and, one suspects, motivating more of them to illegally immigrate to the United States. Why are tortilla prices soaring? Because of the push in the U.S. to replace gasoline with ethanol.

The demand for ethanol, subsidized by the government at the rate of some 50 cents per gallon, has sent corn prices to the moon. This pleases the farm belt, of course, but the high corn prices are not only impacting tortillas, they will soon show up in higher meat prices. The tangled web of unintended consequences. . . .

(HT: Justin Taylor)

A Matter Of Perspective

Anna Nicole Smith died four miles from my house yesterday, which is kind of bizarre. It's not so much that she died; that much was sadly predictable. What's bizarre is the realization that I live only four miles from the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel. I lived in Las Vegas for three years and wasn't that close to a Hard Rock Hotel.

What I do know is that the luckiest, happiest person in the world right now is that crazy, diapered astronaut lady who just got bumped off the front page. She's doing a touchdown dance right now the likes of which haven't been seen since Congressman Gary Condit flipped on the tube and saw those Muslims flying jetliners into the Twin Towers.

Anna Nicole Smith Gary Condit Lisa Nowak

Love Story

Okay, I suppose domestic abuse isn't funny, but...well...it really sorta is, especially when a celebrity family suddenly breaks out into an episode of "The Jerry Springer Show."

See how many Maury Povitch moments you can spot in this recap of a typical weekend at the Ryan O'Neal household:

The incident happened after O'Neal arrived home after dining out with a group of friends, including his former girlfriend Farrah Fawcett, according to O'Neal's manager and a friend who attended the dinner. The group had been celebrating Fawcett's 60th birthday and that she was cancer-free after four months of treatment.

In a statement, the 65-year-old actor said Griffin [O'Neal, Ryan's son] was at the house and began "wildly swinging a fireplace poker."

His son grazed him four or five times and "aimed at my head, I ducked, he hit his own [pregnant] girlfriend in the head," O'Neal said in an interview published Monday in the Los Angeles Times.

"I got a little nervous at that point and fled to my room ... and I got my gun," he said.

O'Neal said his son began to come up the stairs with the poker. "So I just fired it (the gun) into the banister, and that scared him and he fled," he told the newspaper.

Good times. Please, somebody snag me a Thanksgiving invite over there.

A friend of Ryan O'Neal's backed his account, while adding some important visual details:

Charlie Mattera, a close friend of O'Neal who had been at the dinner and arrived at the house shortly after the incident, said O'Neal told him that when he got home Griffin was beating up his younger brother, Redmond.

"Griffin attacked his brother, Redmond, smashing an ashtray over his head," Mattera told The Associated Press. "Ryan walked into this and told Griffin to get out of the house. He couldn't do anything but protect himself and Redmond."

But O'Neal's daughter, [Oscar-winning actress] Tatum, said it was Griffin who was trying to protect Redmond.

So if you're keeping score at home, Oscar-winning actress Tatum O'Neal (who was formerly married to volatile tennis star John McEnroe) says that her brother Griffin (who was once convicted of contributing to the boat accident that killed Francis Ford Coppola's son) was trying to protect his half-brother Redmond (who is Ryan O'Neal's love child with Farrah Fawcett, who is currently recovering from anal cancer) from the elder O'Neal, who was accused of punching out Griffin's teeth in 1983. And Griffin's pregnant girlfriend was injured in the melee.

And Griffin O'Neal is today agreeing with sister Tatum and disputing his father's account of events. About the only way this story could become more surreal is if ubiquitous harpy/media-whore attorney Gloria Allred somehow were to wedge her way into it.

Wait for it...

Ryan O'Neal was responsible for injuries his son's pregnant girlfriend suffered during a confrontation with the actor at his Malibu home last weekend, a lawyer for Griffin O'Neal told reporters Wednesday.

Joanna Berry, who is expecting a baby at the end of March, suffered facial lacerations that took eight stitches to close, as well as head trauma and a corneal abrasion during the confrontation, said [And...the payoff!] attorney Gloria Allred.

..."We vigorously reject any assertion that the injuries suffered by Joanna and Griffin were as a result of Ryan O'Neal's acting in self- defense," Allred said in a statement handed to reporters at the beginning of a news conference in her office. Allred then immediately shriveled up and died when the television lights, from which she derives her energy and evil powers, were shut off after the conference. [Okay, I added that last sentence myself.--JR]

So, like, is this an Irish thing?

Okay, I know that's a wildly inappropriate and politically incorrect thing to say, and of course I'm joking. But I am hoping and praying that VH-1 picks this up as a reality show posthaste. Are you telling me you wouldn't watch this?

The Advertising Bowl

It has now become an annual ritual to dissect the advertisements from the Super Bowl broadcast, analyzing the super-expensive ads on which corporate America splurges for the largest television audience of the year. The best analysis of a commercial that I've seen this year comes from Seth Stevenson of Slate:

Frito-Lay offers a warmhearted spot celebrating the fact that two black coaches have reached the Super Bowl. "Who's winning?" it asks. "We all are." The ad is low-key and likable. And wholly fitting, given the vital role Tostitos played in the civil rights movement.

My own favorite of the evening was the ten-second "Late Show with David Letterman" promo.

We All Learn It At Age 5. Some Move On.

In an age of militant, perennially-aggrieved, entitlement-oriented special interest groups, one has become so utterly obnoxious that it stands heads and shoulders above all the rest. I am speaking, of course, about bicyclists.

You know who I'm talking about, at least if you've ever tried to drive to the grocery store on a Saturday morning. There they are in their ridiculous spandex shorts, bullet-shaped helmets with Hubble telescope mirrors jutting out all over, and bottles of fluid fastened all over the bike frame. Breezily they ride along, oblivious to the throngs of drivers stuck behind them gripping the steering wheel, muttering curses, and calculating intricate cost-benefit analyses between the satisfaction of running one of them over and the inevitable prison time. A five minute trip to the Wal-Mart to buy some wiper blades becomes a two-hour, heart-exploding debacle.

I personally blame this jerk Lance Armstrong for all of it, of course. Before this clown came along, the world was as it should be, with eccentric, spandex-clad geeks confined to the gravel shoulder of the road where they belonged, not venturing out for fear of being knocked into a ravine never to be found again. Now we have to treat them as delicately as if they were a flock of baby ducks crossing the road, practically required by state law to jump out of our cars and genuflect as these herds of yuppie scum ride by gnawing on their power bars and clogging traffic for miles.

Everywhere you drive now, you'll see a lane at the side of the road specifically for bicyclists. Think about this for a minute. State and local governments have spent billions of dollars nationwide in creating these extra lanes in order to support somebody's little hobby. It would be as if the government came by and put a publicly-funded pool table in everybody's basement. How did these people become so powerful that their hobby is not only ceded a chunk of public roadway, but is also mandated to be treated with the kind of wide-berth deference normally reserved for bald eagle nests and visiting presidents? And yet it's still not enough. Despite being given their own lane on the road (which raises the question: Where is the go-kart lane? How about the roller-skating lane? Why isn't there a pogo-stick lane?), they still like to gather in groups of, oh, say about fifty, and ride in flocks about five wide, expecting us to simply drive back home and hang our heads in automobile-driving shame until they've decided they're finished using the road.

And yet it's still not enough. The amazing thing about these bicyclists is that they still think society owes them something more. They become huffy and indignant if someone drives too close to them, even when they're practically pedaling right down the striped line in the road. They say stupid things like this, published in today's South Florida Sun-Sentinel:

...Clemente rides with a group every Saturday with up to 50 cyclists on A1A who take up a lane of the road. He acknowledges the large group is inconvenient for drivers, but he also feels they have a right to be there partly because there are few places in Palm Beach County for cyclists to ride safely.

Think about this logic for a minute. The state hasn't provided me with a good place to do my bungee jumping. Therefore, I have a right to do it from the top of the Empire State Building. The city has failed to provide us with a good venue for our jousting matches. Therefore, we like to gig each other off our horses in the middle lane of the Interstate. Of course, this makes perfect sense, because the world owes you a place to practice your little hobby.

Talk about a sense of entitlement. Blue-haired Social Security geezers and militant affirmative action gurus look like meek, hat-in-hand wallflowers compared to these rubber-pantsed, ankle-socked, pedal-pushing tyrants. And come on, do we really have to wear the little outfits? Isn't getting dressed up in a costume to go out and play a little childish? I rode my bicycle for miles every day when I was a kid, and I never felt like the blistering speeds required me to shave myself and put a spoiler on my head to reduce drag. I mean, these goofballs are pedaling down the road at 15 miles per hour, not hurtling through the stratosphere into orbit. Although if I can draw a good bead on one and have enough room accelerate up to fourth gear, maybe I can make that happen for one of them.

Hey, I'm feeling better already. I can hardly wait for Saturday morning to come.

Journeys With Alexandra

I was finally able to watch Alexandra Pelosi's much-talked about HBO documentary "Friends of God" on Tivo last night. The film features interviews with the likes of Jerry Falwell and the now-disgraced Ted Haggard, among many others. Some Christians have called the film a hit-job on evangelical Christianity, others (like evangelical-friendly Rabbi Daniel Lapin) say it's a surprisingly fair treatment of evangelicals, and others still (like the San Francisco Chronicle, which complains that allowed her subjects to "charm" her) go so far as to charge Pelosi with being downright solicitous in her treatment of evangelicals.

So what did I find? The truth is that Pelosi (daughter of House majority leader Nancy Pelosi) allowed her subjects to speak largely without commentary and that evangelical Christianity comes off looking like the trite, shallow, often-creepy mess that it all too often is. To be sure, the film is far from objective. While Pelosi adds little verbal commentary, there's no question in the film that she views the Christians she's talking to with a somewhat jaundiced, superior eye, and this underlying commentary shows up in her choices of shots and subjects. The interviews, for instance, are filmed at frighteningly close range through a fisheye lens that subtly distorts the appearances of the interviewees, making them look like odd, "Napoleon Dynamite" characters. But mostly she just lets the camera run.

And the sad fact is, plenty of what her camera captures is disturbing regardless of the photographic technique. Watching Ted Haggard, for instance, it's almost impossible imagine that large numbers of people who knew him didn't see his fate coming. I had never seen the man speak before the scandal of last fall, but his effeminate mannerisms are startling in the segments Pelosi devotes to him--which were shot a full year before his downfall amidst allegations of homosexual misconduct. As she travels the country, Pelosi encounters an evangelical Christian pro wrestling circuit, a drive-through church service, a Christian "comedian," and a low-rent Bible theme park, among other things--all of which frankly made me want to cry.

Ultimately, regardless of her intentions, Pelosi captures something that we Christians desperately need to see. The truth is, we evangelicals have trivialized and cheapened our faith by simply conforming it to lame, white, American middle-class culture. Sadly, I don't think most of us can even see the difference at this point. We've so commingled our suburban cultural preferences with the historic truth of Christ that we're no longer able to tell one from the other, while a yawning (and lost) world meanwhile searches for something more authentic than ugly pre-fab steel buildings and Starbuck's card giveaways.

As we watch Pelosi's images of a well-intentioned Christian leading us through his "Christian" miniature golf course (complete with a play-through facsimile of the empty tomb of Christ), or see pro wrestlers (tights embroidered with Bible verses) gouging each other's eyes out before giving a requisite come-to-Jesus altar call to the crowd, perhaps we will start to realize that we're making our God, who is a consuming fire, look like a piece of kitsch sold at a Branson gift shop. Perhaps we'll wake up from our treacle-induced sugar coma to realize that the good and right purpose of sharing the gospel of Christ is inestimably damaged when we make it one of many cheap products to be sold alongside truck tires and pop music. Can we expect God not to remove the American church's lampstand when we've made the Kingdom of Christ about tacky amusement parks, derivative pop music, bumper sticker slogans, and self-fulfillment therapy?

Pelosi's documentary is damaging--precisely because it shows a large swath of evangelical American culture as it really is.

Related Tags: Alexandra Pelosi, Friends of God, HBO, Ted Haggard

And Now For Something Completely Different

Doug Wilson, in an unrelated context, supplies an excellent analogy to my conversation with the conspiracy theorist:

[It] reminds me of an old Monty Python skit where a television interviewer is talking to a man who claims to be Queen Elizabeth I. The host raises a series of objections, which the interviewee deftly handles, but finally the interviewer says, "But Queen Elizabeth has been dead for three and half centuries!" And the man responds, "Yes, well that's where my theory falls apart."

Conversation With A Conspiracy Theorist

ME: So you believe President Bush had something to do with 9/11?

HIM: Yes, he had at least something to do with it. Too much doesn't add up.

ME: So he conspired in actually killing 3,000 Americans.

HIM: I think it's very possible.

ME: Okay, I'm confused about something.

HIM: What's that?

ME: What is absolutely destroying Bush's presidency right now?

HIM: Iraq.

ME: I agree. His popularity numbers are as low as Nixon's. Rock bottom.

HIM: Right.

ME: And you think he arranged a conspiracy in which literally thousands of people would've had to take part--all secretly--in planting explosives in the Twin Towers and detonating them on national television.

HIM: They probably would've been disguised as workers. Those buildings were really big, so they probably wouldn't have noticed a few hundred people dressed as telephone repairmen or maintenance people or whatever.

ME: While they were planting explosives all over the building.

HIM: Right.

ME: Here's my question then. If George W. Bush is so malevolently competent as to be able to pull off a conspiracy of thousands of people, all of whom have remained silent, to destroy the World Trade Center on national television and blow up part of the Pentagon, why couldn't he have arranged to have a few weapons of mass destruction found in Iraq?

HIM: Well, there weren't any there. If there had been, they'd been smuggled out.

ME: Yeah, but he's doing all this for his own nefarious purposes anyway. Under your theory, the whole war is just a pretext anyway. And it's destroying his presidency. So if he's able to pull off 9/11, surely he's capable of planting a few weapons of mass destruction in Iraq to legitimize this war, right?

HIM: Well, I think there's also an Iran angle, and you have to remember...

ME: No, no, no. Respond to what I'm saying. Why couldn't the man who was capable of pulling off 9/11 stick a few WMD's out in the desert, which would have legitimized the war, saved his presidency, shot his approval ratings into the stratosphere, and perhaps even set us up for further wars to benefit whoever this is supposed to be benefitting? Surely a guy who could do what was required to pull off 9/11 could arrange to stick a few chemical weapons out in the Iraqi desert somewhere. What would that take? Maybe a hundred people?

HIM: Well, but what about the fact that the military was late scrambling planes to get the airliners on 9/11?

ME: [Banging head against wall and whimpering.]

(This conversation really happened.)

Around The Horn

• Someone sharing my name does a pictorial comparison of Cardinals fans versus Yankees fans.

• Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (one of the few remaining living members of the dissolute Kennedy family) has called radio/television talk show host Glenn Beck "CNN's chief corporate fascism advocate." Oh, well as long as we're being reasonable about it. Why does Kennedy say this? Because Beck has foolishly advocated actually knowing what we're doing before we go off half-cocked on implementing high-cost, low-yield global warming "solutions." Of course, the Kennedy family hates corporations. Their trust funds were built the old-fashioned way--through bootlegging. I suppose if anyone would know a fascist, though, it would be a Kennedy, since Grandpa Joe (whose money he lives on) was such a noted supporter of Hitler's Third Reich.

• If you've missed the spectacular flameout of Internet racists Harry Seabrook and Greg "Badonicus" McDivitt of Little Geneva infamy, you're missing quite a show. I haven't seen anybody get their pants pulled down on the web like this in a long time. They evidently made one highly motivated and resourceful enemy along the line. May God grant them repentence.

• You've no doubt by now heard about the exchange last week between Sen. Barbara Boxer and Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice in which Boxer impugns Rice's judgment on the basis of Rice not having immediate family members in the war. I know this argument carries a lot of popular currency, but if Rice did have children in the war (or even of fighting age), wouldn't this be what in other arenas we commonly call a "conflict of interests?" Why is it suddenly considered good for a public official to make decisions based on how they might affect personal family members?

• I'm surprised more hasn't been said about this, but "Mr. Decency" Gerald Ford taking slaps at President Bush with the proviso that they only be published after Ford's death was an utter weasel move. Max Schulz at National Review Online lays out the situation. And when's the last time Bob Woodward actually interviewed somebody who was alive? I wonder if he's in Art Buchwald's hospital room right now getting quotes from him.

And Now, On With The Countdown

For Christmas this year, my lovely wife gave me an XM Satellite Radio, which may be the coolest gift I've ever received. Frankly, I never thought she'd get it for me, since it's long been a foregone conclusion in our home that my musical tastes, formed in the early 1980's by acts like Def Leppard, Prince, and the Rolling Stones, will ultimately propel my children into hopeless degeneracy. But XM also has the Major League Baseball broadcasts on it, and we're all pretty cool with that. I think ultimately she was willing to place the possible father-son bonding that can take place this summer listening to Mike Shannon call Cardinals games above the possible side-effects from the kids accidentally overhearing me singing along with "99 Luftballoons" on the 80's channel.

Anyway, one of the really, really cool things for me about the XM radio is that on 70's and 80's channels on the weekends, they rerun old episodes of Casey Kasem's "American Top 40" from those decades. I can't tell you what a great thing this is. The top five or ten songs from any given period are usually still widely played even today, so those are all too familiar. But when you get down to the 20's and the 30's on the charts, you find some real forgotten gems which are always fun to hear.

It also gives you the occasional opportunity to hear some of the absolute worst pop music ever foisted upon mankind. Such was the case with a rancid little number I heard for the first time this weekend, moving into #23 on the pop chart in 1972. It's absolutely the worst song I've ever personally heard, which means it has to be among at least the top ten worst songs in pop history. Don't get me wrong; it's highly entertaining, in the way Shatner singing "Rocket Man" is entertaining. It's mawkish, self-important, simple-minded, didactic, naive, and supremely idiotic. Just an utter trainwreck. It's something called "Things Get a Little Easier (Once You Understand)" by Think. You can listen to it here, if you dare. And as you do, keep in mind--the kind of people who thought songs like this would transform society are basically the kind people who run today's Democratic Party.

Also, make sure you don't bail out early and miss the hilariously ham-handed "surprise ending." It will amply reward your persistence. I've heard better acting in local used-furniture store commercials. Perhaps the only thing funnier than the song itself was Casey Kasem's super-somber outro (which I can only wish were also on the Web) at the end. "Moving up to number 23 [pause] that's 'Things Get a Little Easier' by [pause] Think." I think by using dramatic pauses, Casey was trying to give us the opportunity to Think about what we had just learned. And I did.

So as far as I'm concerned, that's worth the XM Satellite subscription fee right there.

Related Tags: Things Get A Little Easier, Once You Understand, Casey Kasem, XM Radio, Think, William Shatner, Rocket Man

A Kick In The Grass

Okay, the baseball stuff has pretty much killed traffic here this week, so we'll change gears. To soccer!

Here's something that everybody needs to get straight: Soccer is a boring third-world snooze-fest that Americans will never, ever like to watch in any large numbers. The reason we have to bring it up again is because someone who evidently wants to bankrupt his business and flee the country as soon as possible (otherwise known as the owner of something called the Los Angeles Galaxy) signed English soccer star David Beckham for $250 million over five years. Evidently there was a drizzle, so the owner wasn't able to just set the money on fire.

Of course, that money would be better spent on, say, programs for teaching cats how to water ski. But I'm sure some dope somewhere is convinced that this copiously gelled semi-poofter and his Spice Girl wife are just the thing to finally kick soccer into high gear here in America. Not gonna happen. I'll bet you a Pele and raise you three Mia Hamms. But it will at least be something to talk about in five years when the Galaxy's owner runs out into the intersection to clean off my winshield for a lousy greenback.

Is The Hall of Fame "Just For Men"?

Most discussions about the baseball Hall of Fame are devoid of reason and logic. Few topics of discourse are decided ultimately on "gut feeling" or "something indefinable" or what somebody "looked like" than the subject of who should or shouldn't be in the Hall of Fame.

Most people look at a Willie Mays, Babe Ruth, or Joe DiMaggio and say, "That's a Hall of Famer." The reality is, however, that those guys have never been the standard for the Hall of Fame. They're the absolute cream of the crop even in the Hall itself. To look at the top 10% of the guys who are in the Hall of Fame as the standard for the Hall of Fame is simply not a valid way of going about the process. It might make for a nice imaginary, ideal, Platonic Hall of Fame, where only 20 guys are members, but the real Hall of Fame has never been limited to the Ted Williamses and the Stan Musials.

So in discussions about the Hall of Fame, we need to look at the real Hall of Fame rather than some figment of our imagination, and see how a proposed player fits into the real one. We need to look at what a player actually accomplished, as opposed to indefinable, subjective criteria (e.g "He didn't look like a Hall of Famer to me.")

With all that having been said, I want to propose someone for the Hall of Fame who ought to be there but doesn't even get serious consideration. Indeed, he recently dropped off the ballot altogether. That player is...(drumroll please)...Keith Hernandez. Yeah, you heard me. Keith Hernandez.

"But wait a minute, John. Keith Hernandez was a fine ballplayer. But he didn't look like a Hall of Famer to me." As I said before, I don't know what that means. It doesn't cut it. Facts and logic must rule the day (though, of course, they haven't).

Here are the facts. Keith Hernandez may well be the finest defensive first baseman of all time. Is there any other position in baseball (except for pitchers, who only play every five days and thus are not evaluated on their hitting or fielding) in which the finest defensive player ever has been excluded from the Hall? Hernandez made all the routine plays at first base, and he also made plays I've never seen any first baseman make before. "Aha!" you might object. "Now you're arguing for a player based on what he looked like." Fine. Let's go to the objective facts. Hernandez won eleven gold gloves at first base. There are only five position players in baseball history who have won more Gold Gloves than that, and all the eligible ones are in the Hall of Fame (with Ivan Rodriguez still in the process of winning more). If we admit that baseball is a two way game, and if we are willing to put power-hitting, zero-fielding first basemen in like Harmon Killebrew, how do we keep the best defensive player at the position out of the Hall?

Presumably, if we were going to try to keep such a player out, we'd have to strongly penalize him for his hitting. He'd have to be an unusually subpar hitter in order for us to negate his tremendous fielding achievements. Is this warranted in Hernandez's situation? No; to the contrary, he was an excellent hitter. He won the NL batting title (as well as the MVP award) in 1979 with a .344 average, finished in the top 10 in the league in average seven times, and won two Silver Slugger awards at first base (awarded to the best offensive player in the league at each position--and he did not win the award in his MVP year).

But we're not done yet. What else did possibly the best defensive first baseman of all time accomplish offensively? He was in the top ten in the league in runs scored five times (including leading the league twice), finished in the top ten in doubles eight times (including leading the league with 48 in 1979), and was in the top five in on-base percentage seven times (and in the top two five different times!). He drove in 90 or more runs in six different seasons. He finished a 17-season career with a lifetime .296 average.

In addition to all this, he played an integral role on two different World Series championship teams (including as captain with the '86 Mets) and was a five-time All Star. And he played an integral role in one of the greatest "Seinfeld" storylines ever.

So how does a guy like this not even get considered for the Hall of Fame? I think two things are at play. First, Hernandez's position has come to be considered a power position, and Hernandez was not a big power hitter (though he had some respectable pop in his bat: 162 lifetime homers in the pre-steroids, pre-bandbox ballparks era, playing the majority of his career in cavernous Busch Stadium). But this is arbitrary at best. Where is it written that a power-hitting, poor defensive first baseman like Hank Greenberg is better than a great defensive, excellent doubles and average guy like Hernandez? It's utterly arbitrary to single out home runs as the main criteria for first basemen and give no credit for great defense and otherwise excellent hitting.

Second, I think that Hernandez's drug problems, brought to light in the infamous Pittsburgh drug trial probably torpedoed any real chance he ever had. Heck, one might even think I'm arguing for Hernandez because he was a Cardinal and I'm a homer, but I've hated Keith Hernandez for years, ever since his drug involvement came to light at about the same time that his Mets were the Cardinals' fiercest rival. If even I feel that way, I have no doubt it influenced Hall voters. (Also, those "Just for Men" commercials with Walt "Clyde" Frazier can't be helping.) Nonetheless, the members of the Hall of Fame would never comprise an ideal citizenry. They should, as I've argued all along, be judged for what they did on the field. And by that standard, Hernandez is a legit Hall of Famer.

A knowledgeable baseball fan will say, "Well what about Don Mattingly, then? He has very similar qualifications." To which I say: That's correct. Donny Baseball belongs in the Hall of Fame too. Both of these guys are more deserving than at least 1/3 of the people who are currently in the Hall of Fame.

Related Tags: Hall of Fame, baseball, Keith Hernandez, Don Mattingly

Talkin' Baseball

In any case, it’s unfortunate that the McGwire controversy will taint the elections of Ripken and Gwynn, two of the game’s undisputed good guys. I’ve gotten to do some amazing things in my Forrest Gump-like life, and one of them was talking hitting with Tony Gwynn, a lifetime .338 hitter.

Around 1994 I was covering a Cardinals/Padres game for KFNS in St. Louis. After the game, as we reporters streamed into the clubhouse, I spotted Tony Gwynn getting dressed in front of his lockers. No reporters had gotten to him yet. I nervously strolled over to introduce myself and get a few comments for my tape recorder. But Gwynn was such a genial, likeable, enthusiastic guy, I decided to try to have a full-blown conversation with him.

Seizing the moment, I skipped the incidental information about that night's particular game and started asking him about the science of hitting. He lit up like a kid on Christmas morning. Hitting the baseball was Tony Gwynn’s passion, and I got the sense he’d talk about it all night if you wanted to. I asked him about bats, about the use of video in preparing for hitters, about training, and on and on. Of course, I heard about half of what he said. Mostly I heard a running loop in my mind saying, “I’m standing here talking to Tony Gwynn about hitting! I’m going to be able to tell my grandchildren about this someday!” Other reporters began gathering around to get quotes from Gwynn regarding the actual game that had been played that night. As my line of conversation continued, they began to get annoyed. “Hey, c’mon, we’re on deadline here!” they started grousing. Gwynn ignored them and kept talking about hitting. He treated me like I was the only guy in the room.

After about 15 full minutes, I finally gave way to the other reporters. I thanked Gwynn for his time and excused myself. “I enjoyed it,” he said. And I think he really meant it.

By the mid-90’s, there were a lot of jerks in baseball. There were guys after only money, and guys (like Bonds) who practically walled themselves off from the media and even their own teammates. But Tony Gwynn was a guy who decided to take less money to play in one town--his hometown--his whole career. And he was a guy who, even in the middle of a Hall of Fame career, was willing to sit with some dope reporter after a game and just talk about hitting. Today Tony Gwynn was elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame on the first ballot, garnering 97.6% of the votes. There’ve perhaps others who have been as deserving, but I don’t think there’s ever been anyone more deserving of the Hall of Fame than Tony Gwynn.

(And for what it’s worth, tomorrow I’m going to make an argument for someone to go to the Hall who is being severely overlooked. And it’s not any of the people you think. He's not even on the ballot anymore.)

Related Tags: Tony Gwynn, Hall of Fame