Northbound

This will be the last post of this year. “Northbound” is heading southbound, heading back to Texas for the holiday (and, not unimportantly, for Cowboys-Eagles on Monday night.) When I get back, I will be hard at work on finishing The Source of the Amazon (Chapter 1 is here), and will not have a great deal of time, I don’t expect, for blogging. Expect things to be a bit more sporadic, although I hope to provide the occasional literary update along the way.

We close the year with two bits of good news on the War on Terror front, for everyone who is getting all depressed and defeatist about our efforts, both from the WP. First, a successful feat of arms:

U.S. military spokesman Col. Tom Collins described Osmani’s death as a “big loss” for the ultraconservative militia.

“There’s no doubt that it will have an immediate impact on their ability to conduct attacks,” Collins said. “But the Taliban is fairly adaptive. They’ll put somebody else in that position and we’ll go after that person, too.”

He was regarded as highly ideological and was instrumental in some of the excesses of the Taliban rule such as the destruction of the ancient Buddha statues in Bamiyan and the trial of Christian aid workers in 2001, Rashid said….

“The vehicle was completely destroyed, there was nothing to recognize,” Collins said. “But we have various intelligence assets that we monitor, that we look at very closely, and of course we work with the intelligence agencies of the Afghan government and through those sources we are sure that he is dead.”

Those Christian aid workers were fellow Baylor grads Heather Mercer and Dana Curry, and that’s a score we needed to settle. (I expect Mercer and Curry may not agree, if so, they’re better people than I am.) Congrats to our military, and COL Collins, and I hope everyone involved gets to enjoy some gin with lemon juice and soda water, with syrup and mint, and soon.

The second bit is on a pioneering civil-rights lawyer (with a disability!) in, of all places, Saudi Arabia:

The rape victim was sentenced to 90 lashes for having been with a male friend, which is illegal in this strictly segregated country.

Lahem, a slight, fragile-looking man, said he took the case because he was so incensed by that verdict.

“Instead of ordering post-traumatic treatment for her and making sure she’s appointed a lawyer,” he said, the judge “sentences this young girl, after what she’s been through, to lashes.” He shook his head.

“This could completely damage her,” he said, fingering the handle of a gray cane he carries because of a pronounced limp caused by a fall when he was an infant. “This is not justice; this is jungle sharia.”

Jungle sharia! I love it. Three cheers and a hooray for Abdul-Rahman al-Lahem, and I’ll think of you next time I order a vanilla vodka and Coke or enjoy a nice pork chop.

For the rest of you, wishing a Happy Hanukkah for those who celebrate, a Merry Christmas for those who celebrate, a Happy New Year, a successful end to the season for the Dallas Cowboys, a bowl win for the Longhorns, success to the Baylor roundball teams, best wishes to the Delta airline crews who will take us back and forth to Dallas, and God bless us, every one.

I am usually no fan of E.J. Dionne, but his WP piece on Mayor Bloomberg (again, not a fan) has one great sentence:

There is no better way to win public support for government programs that work than to be serious about shutting down the ones that don’t.

That ought to be embroidered on pillows and delivered to every office in the Cannon and Russell buildings — offices for both parties, mind you. But I am guessing that the Democrats don’t think they were put in office to cut funding for government programs.

This is a horrible story, of course, about a trove of icky material confiscated in Britain, and I wouldn’t bring it up except that I like the approach that law enforcement is taking here:

The collection, which took half a century to amass, was discovered after undercover police infiltrated the International Paedophile Child Emancipation Group and its subsidiary, Gentlemen With An Interesting Name. Both championed the legalisation of sex between adults and children.

I like this. This is the obvious approach. There’s a lot to be said for being subtle and clever and all this other smart stuff, but there’s nothing like fishing where you know the fish are biting if you want to catch fish. Well done.

Michael Wilbon, on the MSG brawling:

Of the four major team sports in America, basketball has the least amount of fighting. The NHL sells fighting, promotes and glorifies it. Major League Baseball can’t go two weeks without somebody rushing the mound to start a bench-clearing brawl, and suspensions are minimal. Pro football, in what seems almost an outgrowth of the mandatory contact, has its skirmishes and fights all the time. Basketball hasn’t had a fight in two years.

So, fighting’s okay in baseball but not basketball? Why? Fighting is cool for the NHL, but not the NBA? Why?

Why indeed? Wilbon again:

Because the NBA is the only one of those leagues that’s perceived as being a “black league.” The NFL is more than 60 percent black, but enough of its stars are white that you would never hear anybody, regardless of the percentages, refer to the NFL as a “black league.” If black participation drops any more in Major League Baseball, it’ll rival the overwhelmingly white NHL. I don’t hear any great outcry for suspending pitchers or hitters for a meaningful number of games when there’s a beanball war, even if the participants are men of color.

I think you have to interject a caveat in here, though. (“Interject a caveat”, you can tell I went to law school.) I don’t discount what Wilbon is saying here, but I don’t think race is the only issue. There’s at least one other difference between the NBA and other team sports, and that’s that the players are wearing no protective gear. In the NFL and the NHL, the players are all padded to within an inch of their lives. You’d have to have a real freak accident for someone to actually get hurt in one of those fights. (The same applies to NASCAR, which also is an all-white league with occasional fighting, but they’re wearing helmets and flame-retardant suits — hell, the sponsor logos alone provide all sorts of padding.) In MLB, there’s always a lot of fighting, but nobody — with the possible exception of Robin Ventura, who deserved it — gets hurt.

In the NBA, it’s not like that. You could ask Rudy Tomjanovich about that. The players aren’t wearing any protective gear other than the occasional tattoo. Someone could get seriously hurt out there, and that makes a big difference — at least as big as skin color, or at least I think so.

Wilbon doesn’t mention three other incidents that I think prove my point. First, there was the big fight between Miami and Florida International earlier this year. That ended in suspensions, too. Wilbon would, I think, argue that Miami is a “black program” with a “thug image”, and it gets put into that same level of racial scrutiny as the NBA. But the key moment in that melee was the Miami player swinging his helmet around — despite what I said about the NFL fighting not being dangerous, you could very easily hurt somebody that way. Same goes with the NFL’s suspension of Albert Haynesworth (again, a black player) but he stomped on someone’s face, something that’s guaranteed to cause injury, and he got a big suspension.

Same goes with Delmon Young, the Tampa Bay farmhand who threw the bat at the umpire earlier this year. Would Wilbon argue that Young got a longer suspension because he’s black? Maybe, but I think it has more to do with the possible damage he could have caused.

Is race an issue? Sure it is, and I’m not saying otherwise. But it’s not the only issue.

The DMN on a proposed mega-development in South Grand Prairie that’s being scotched, partly because of the traditional retrograde Grand Prairie ideas about development, but also for a deeper, much more stupid reason:

But there are more than 1,000 hurdles to overcome before that can happen.

That’s roughly how many people own the approximately 1,635 undersized lots that make up the undeveloped property known as Lakeside Addition.

“We’ve been waiting for something to happen out there forever but didn’t see a way to get it done,” said Bill Crolley, Grand Prairie’s planning and development director.

The area can’t be developed without acquiring titles to the 25-by-50-foot lots, a process hampered by the property’s history. The sites were mostly given out as prizes at the State Fair in the 1930s and promoted as prime spots for fishing cabins or campsites on the western edge of a proposed lake.

But the lake was moved south, the roads were never built and the lots were largely forgotten.

All you have to do is to look at the satellite map; there isn’t a blessed thing anywhere near the I-20 and Belt Line Road interchanges but a beat-up driving range, a couple of gas stations, and a Waffle House. There very easily could be all kinds of development there, and mostly that has to do with the thought (so prevalent in Grand Prairie) that development is something that other cities do. That a big chunk of the land remains undeveloped because of a goofy 1930′s real estate scheme makes it even more of a Grand Prairie thing than normal.

Lots of other people will have more to say about the silly brawl between the Knicks and the Nuggets than I will. I just have one point, and it’s about Eduardo Najera, a Nuggets forward who got ejected along with the other nine idiots on the court.

I am not a fan of pro basketball, but I follow Eduardo Najera. I used to have season tickets for Baylor basketball when I lived in Texas, and I saw him play for OU when they came to town. Najera killed the Bears every time I saw him play; just killed them. He was the best player on the court by about a mile. I was glad that he got into the NBA, was very pleased when he took the floor for the hometown Mavericks, and he’s made himself a nice little career in the pro game.

So when the fight footage came on, I watched him closely, and he didn’t throw a punch or do a thing but try to restrain his teammates. When you see Carmelo Anthony throw that punch, Najera is standing between him and the Knicks player that he hit. There is no reason why he should have been ejected, and if he gets suspended, it’s a shame. Commissioner Stern, free Eduardo Najera.

T.O. on his favorite topic; how hard it is to be T.O.:

Then again, coaches might not want more plays for No. 81 because he leads the league in dropped passes.

“I’m not Superman,” he said. “I’m human. Michael Jordan doesn’t make every shot. Jerry [Rice] hasn’t caught every pass. Tiger [Woods] doesn’t make every putt. I understand the expectations of me. People want me to catch every ball. The likelihood of that happening is not going to be great. I understand that.”

You know, I read a lot of sports news. A lot. And I don’t remember, not one single solitary time, reading anything, ever, that said that Michael Jordan missed a shot because someone was snitching on him, or that said that Jerry Rice was “faking it” in practice, or that Tiger Woods lacked focus because he was so consumed with his own self-regard. I don’t remember hearing anything even remotely like that for one second from any of these people.

I do think, though, that if any of these august personalities had the chance to talk to T.O., they would all tell him the same thing. Quit complaining. Grow up.

UPDATE: Dan Shanoff is much more succinct:

T.O. is griping about the leaks on the Cowboys that reveals his lunacy to the world. Maybe he should start by not being such a lunatic.

I haven’t seen all the artist’s renditions of the design of the new Dallas Cowboys stadium in Arlington, but I agree with Gil LeBreton of the Startlegram 100%, and I defy anyone to say different:

My first concern, therefore, was how a billion-dollar football palace is going to fit into the neighborhood. Ameriquest Field, home of the Rangers, is all red brick and green-painted steel and has a steer-studded retro ambience about it.

Owner Jones’ new stadium, on the other hand, looks like a giant cell phone.

The idea of blending the new home of the Cowboys and the current home of the Rangers was never considered, according to Bryan Trubey, principal designer for HKS Architects.

“As a matter of fact,” Trubey said, “it will make [the baseball park] more contrasting.

“All great cities are characterized by uniquely eclectic architectural styles.”

He’s right. But these are athletic stadiums. And there’s a Wal-Mart across the street.

In most American cities, where baseball and football stadiums have been constructed in proximity to one another, the venues have shared a complementary style. Check out Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati and Kansas City.

One of the two Arlington stadiums — probably, the baseball park — is going to look misplaced.

If you want an illustration of what Gil and I are talking about, drive down the 610 Loop in Houston some day, over on the south side of town. You’ll see the new (ugly) Reliant Stadium parked next to the Astrodome. The Astrodome, sitting off that 610 expressway, was an awesome sight from the driver’s side, sitting there under the Texas sun. With the monstrosity of Reliant Stadium next to it, the poor Astrodome looks like what it once was — a refugee shelter.

Now, will the new Cowboys stadium make the Ballpark in Arlington look ugly? Of course not. Nothing could do that short of an airstrike. But it will be a jarring, wretched contrast that can’t look good. It just can’t.

I’m not prepared to say that this is worse than firing Tom Landry. Not yet. Let’s see how this thing shakes out. But Jerry Jones, you’re still on my bad list. And it could get worse.

On Holocaust denial:

Sometimes I like to think that’s my great-uncle Leo in the front of the line, looking back over his shoulder at the camera. But that man seems to have two working arms, so I doubt it’s him.

H/T: Althouse

The Rangers get Eric Gagne.

The Angels get stuck with Darren Oliver.

Let me say that again.

The Rangers get Eric Gagne.

The Angels get stuck with Darren Oliver.

Hee-hee!

It’s just so much fun to say over and over again.

The Rangers get Eric Gagne.

The Angels get stuck with Darren Oliver.

Of course, Gagne could still be hurting, and might not pitch at all. And Oliver could get the Angels out of a few rough spots — or, more likely, just eat up some innings.

But for today, we know this.

The Rangers get Eric Gagne.

The Angels get stuck with Darren Oliver.

Yes!

And then there’s Barry Zito. I might have to sit down for that one. If it happens. Which I bet it won’t. But it might. You never know. Because, after all:

The Rangers get Eric Gagne.

The Angels get stuck with Darren Oliver.

I just love saying that.