For some time now, I have watched the parade of "sports fan" favorites selling me NutriSystem on my TV. Everyone from Mike Golic to, well, Dan Marino has dropped by to extol the virtues of a pot roast-based diet plan that arrives in the mail.
y bag in.Attendant: "Drink?"So, no progress there on the negotiations. She got her soda, and took out a bag of Russian chips. She was enjoying what was either a bag of Russian Beggin' Strips or a package of Бекон-flavored crisps when the snack basket came by. The attendant held out the basket for her. She took ten or twenty minutes to touch every one of the snacks, before deciding on some cookies. While taking them, she knocked a bag of almonds on the floor, looked at them, looked at me, then pointed her sharp digit at me and then down to the floor, telling me to pick them up. I grabbed them and gave them back to the attendant.
Putin's grandma: "Please."
(pause)
Attendant: "What would you like?"
Putin's grandma: "Soda."
There's been a lot of excitement lately Chez Cynicor due to the unprecedented success of the Yale hockey team this season. The team won both the regular season and playoff titles in the ECAC, for the first time ever. (And this is the 114th season they're playing.) Back in the dark ages, I was the student manager of the team. It's about one step above towel boy (I did travel planning, stats, shot charts, handed out per diems, crap like that), but I look back upon that time fondly.
For three decades, Yale was led by coach Tim Taylor. As a leader, Coach Taylor was unparalleled. He taught me more about integrity and doing the right thing than just about anyone in my life. One story in particular stands out in my mind to this day.
During the season, we had a player who was injured. He healed up, and skated in a JV game for conditioning. During the the course of the game, this player threw a really dirty hit on an opponent. It was one of those "why did he do THAT?" moments. He didn't get called for it, but it was nevertheless ugly.
The next day, the varsity team had a practice before leaving for Cambridge to play Harvard. Coach Taylor gathered the team together without the one player. He informed them that because of the cheap hit, the perpetrator was going to sit out the weekend back in New Haven. Taylor said words along the line of, "It doesn't matter that it wasn't called. It was a cheap hit, it wasn't right, and it has no place in Yale hockey."
When you are being led by a coach who would send a message like that - that you play hard and with integrity - it never leaves you. So many coaches take a "boys will be boys" mentality to stuff like this. To this day, when I'm faced with a situation, at work or in life, where it may be a matter of integrity, I often think back to that moment. If you do the wrong, backhanded, or dirty thing, where does it really leave you? You might advance temporarily, but it's never worth it. Anyone who knows about your actions has problems trusting you from then on. You can't go to sleep knowing you always did the right thing. What you've done is always out there to see, and people take notice even if it's not called right away.
I have had situations where I spoke up when I saw that something was not the right thing to do, and situations where I should've spoken up but didn't. The immediate incidents have long since passed. Guess which ones I feel good about today?
Three years ago, Yale named Keith Allain head coach. Allain played under Coach Taylor 30 years ago, and he has built the team into quite a successful group. Today he was named the College Hockey News National Coach of the Year. It's just been a great year for both him and the team.
I'm not with the team on a regular basis the way I was way back then, but I have no doubt that his values were shaped in part by his close association with Coach Taylor all those years ago.
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From this morning: "Men, anger, and heart disease. The terrible trifecta that can threaten men's health."
It seems somewhat, well, self-referential to include men in the list of things that threaten men's health. Maybe they should've said that anger and heart disease are the "daily double that threatens men's health." But since disease threatens health by definition, that doesn't work either. So we're down to anger as the only factor that can threaten men's health. Time to break out the cigars, booze, and red meat!
Man, these reports about anger just piss me off.
Obama Assassination PlotI see it with people I know. I had one person tell me that "Obama's not qualified to be president because he's black. Maybe president of an Aunt Jemima bottle." What do you even say to someone in their late 40s who would voice a thought like that in public? You know it's not acceptable. You know it's offensive. This type of racism - mostly designed to make others feel uncomfortable - is really no different from the smoker who decides that no one's going to tell THEM they can't smoke, and then lights up on a train or in a restaurant. It's a pure attempt to wield power over others by inviting a challenge to known repellent behavior. The racist slurs are often then followed with "You know I'm just bustin' your chops." Oh, OK then. You're just playing the character of Racist Asshole. You're not actually one yourself.Nathan Johnson, 32, an associate of Gartrell and Adolph, was also arrested Sunday morning. He told authorities that the two men had "planned to kill Barack Obama at his acceptance speech." "He don't belong in political office. Blacks don't belong in political office. He ought to be shot," Johnson told Maass.
The McCain campaign isn't being overtly racist, but it certainly is attracting overt racists. And the campaign is to be faulted for letting them fester.A man told today how he was shot three times in a London street for wearing a Barack Obama T-shirt.
Dube Egwuatu was buying a mobile telephone top-up card in an off-licence when the gunman confronted him and glared at the top, which carries an image of the Democrat US presidential candidate underneath the legend 'Believe'.
The man then launched into a tirade of racist slurs, shouting 'I f***ing hate n*****s' and urging 36-year-old Mr Egwuatu to leave the shop with him.
The GOP has often run on some message of racial discord and undercurrent, from the origins of the "low taxes" quest (high taxes are being spent on THOSE people) to the Willie Horton ads of the 1988 campaign.At one point, McCain asked, “Who is the real Barack Obama?” A member of the crowd yelled out, “a terrorist!” McCain paused while the audience laughed at the comment, and then continued with his attack — without condemning or admonishing the audience member.
"Sit down, Boy."This isn't an issue of North vs. South, or rich vs. poor. This misbehavior can be found everywhere you look.
One Palin supporter shouted a racial epithet at an African American sound man for a network and told him, "Sit down, boy."
7th grade teacher and coach Greg Howard is no longer an employee. He was suspended without pay for 10 days starting Thursday for making racial slurs at presidential candidate Barack Obama.
Howard asked his students what "change" stood for and proceeded to write out the acronym "change"- come help a n(word) get elected.
Sometimes the person involved is directly connected to the campaign, but often they're not.
A local newspaper columnist, in a spoof of Obama’s platform, wrote in one recent piece that the Democrat would hire the rapper Ludacris to paint the White House black (a reference to a pro-Obama song by Ludacris), and divert more foreign aid to Africa so "the Obama family there can skim enough to allow them to free their goats and live the American Dream." He joked that Obama would replace the 50 stars on the U.S. flag "with a star and crescent logo," an Islamic symbol, and that his policy on drugs would be to "raise taxes to pay for Obama's inner-city political base."
What's more upsetting is that in the 1990s, we saw the culmination of the "Patriot Movement," where violent white separatist groups and sympathizers committed major acts of terrorism in Oklahoma City and Atlanta. The language that we're hearing now about Obama is becoming increasingly violent, and the McCain/Palin campaign is not addressing it. Can they? Or is this a small but significant voting bloc that controls them?
One thing is clear. We can't just smile and pretend that no more racial divide exists in this country, because especially in the closing weeks of the campaign, we're seeing increasing numbers of disgusting incidents. Is it the desperation of people who realize that McCain is about to lose big? Or the economic downturn a factor, since hard times tend to lead to people blaming groups they view as outsiders?"Now it turns out, one of his earliest supporters is a man named Bill Ayers," Palin said.
. . ."Kill him!" proposed one man in the audience.
This won't be over in November, and frankly if someone can still make a Jemima joke in 2008, I don't know that it ever will be over. But the McCain campaign sure doesn't help it by ignoring it when it happens right in front of their noses.Martin arrived at the conclusion that Obama, whom he called a "media witch doctor," has "locked his granny away and refused to allow her to be seen" in order to "pretend he has no white relatives."
Salter said to expect more of the same, saying the campaign was tired of “catching the spears.”
Also in 2003 he was cast as flamboyant anal rapist and aspiring actor Tobias Fünke in the much-celebrated Fox sitcom Arrested Development.
