Books Lying Open
¤ A Clash of Kings, George R. R. Martin
¤ Shelters of Stone, Jean M. Auel
¤ The Complete Tales and Poems, Edgar Allen Poe
¤ The Year's Best Horror and Fantasy, 2001, Editors: Terri Datlow and Ellen Windling
¤ A Game of Thrones, George R. R. Martin
¤ Abarat, Clive Barker
¤ Hearts in Atlantis, Steven King
¤ Everything's Eventual, Steven King

Soul-Devouring Worry
¤ Too much pizza after months of too little pizza.

Curse of the Day:
¤ May your old furniture not even be good enough to give away.

Phrase of the Moment:
¤ Phrase: "mostly".
¤ Usage: "They mostly come out at night.  Mostly."
¤ Synonyms: N/A
¤ Deviations: Most any qualifying word you can use in a sentence, and then repeat afterwards for extra emphasis.  Eg: "probably," "sometimes," and so on.
¤ Origin: Newt's famous line in Aliens.
¤ Notes: Cribbed from Cartman who cribbed it from Aliens, this word and its deviations spice up most any conversation.  Malaya and I have developed it to a science, where one of us will speak a viable sentence, and then after a momentary pause we'll both repeat the repeatable word in almost perfect harmony.  Yes, we realize how sickeningly cutesy this is. 

The best usage yet? When I said, after we saw the results of this boxing match: "Who kicked Oscar de la Hoya's ass tonight?
*pause*
*M and F speak together*
"Mosley." -- September 18, 2003

I should talk about some real life stuff in tomorrow's blog, since the grand Halloween Tree project is getting underway, we had another scary encounter with the mean old lady at the Salvation Army thrift shop, Jinx and Dusty are being screwballs, we're buying more new furniture and redecorating, and so forth.  There have also been several interesting reader mails lately, plus I want to post the results of my: Frames = roxor/suxor question. Lots to blog about, is my point.

And no, the photo up here serves no purpose, it's just a cute shot of the Jinxers playing with the Halloween-eyed Dusters, since a reader emailed to say she couldn't get enough of those and that she wanted the Jinx photo page online like yesterday.

¤ There's all sorts of media coverage about P. Diddy's plans to run in the NYC Marathon lately, and it all confuses me.  Why is he still famous post-JLo? Did he shoot someone again or something?

Combs is backed by corporate sponsors like Nike Inc., McDonald's Corp. and MTV Networks, as well as high-profile friends. Anyone is free to donate, but the hip-hop entrepreneur said he needs other forms of support as well.

"It's gonna be a rough one. Probably around the 13th mile, I'll really need your support -- water, Gatorade, whatever," Combs said of the grueling 26.2-mile race.

Combs admitted he has only been training for three weeks but said he plans to complete the Nov. 2 race, even if it means crawling across the finish line. MTV is making a documentary chronicling his training as he readies for the event.

I suppose it's cool that he's using the publicity to raise money for some charity, though it's pretty clear he mostly just wants publicity.  But let's be real, but does anyone seriously think he'll make it more than about 5 miles?  Are his big fat bodyguards going to be allowed to accompany him on scooters or something?

¤ There's a very good interview with retired General and current Democratic Presidential front-runner Wesley Clark over on TPM.  I recommend it if you've got any interest in politics or the American presidency, since he may very well be in charge in 2004.  He comes off as very knowledgeable, thoughtful, and not afraid to speak his mind.  You wonder how long that will last once he's a full time politician, but enjoy it while it lasts, at any rate.  I like that he gives long answers to complicated questions; it's not just a bunch of soundbites that some advisor cut and pasted into a scripted press conference, like the ones Bush entertains.

TPM: There are all sorts of critiques about the present administration's domestic policies. What's the central one? What's the central problem, the central flaw in this administration's domestic policy?

CLARK: There's an underlying ideological drive that overrides pragmatism. The American people want government to fix the things they can't fix themselves. The American people are basically individualists. They like each other; they're very charitable and generous; they're bound together in a hundred different ways -- they're not a big-government country. They're not socialists. But they recognize there are things they can't fix, like healthcare, or education--public education.

And this administration comes in with an ideology that blocks its ability to see, articulate, and resolve those problems. It's an ideology that's a sharpened sort of right-wing Republican party ideology. It has no real intellectual base to it. It's just the ideology of a party. By intellectual base, I'm talking first, trickle-down economics. No reputable economist stands up and says, "Trickle down economics really works." Because we know the marginal propensity to consume of people who are making $100,000 a year and less is much higher than the marginal propensity to consume of people who are making $350,000 a year and more.

So therefore when you say you're going to give money to the rich so they'll make jobs for the poor -- that's not a very efficient way of producing jobs in the American economy. We know that, all things being equal, that the lower the tax rate at the margin, the greater the incentive to earn the extra dollar. But we also know -- it's just human nature to figure that out -- that in a society where you've got a lot of people that are struggling to pay the electricity bill and the telephone bill and you've got a few people who don't care what the electricity and telephone bill is, that the few people who don't care about these things ought to pay a higher proportion of their income to help the rest of the country than the people who are struggling with the necessities in life.

I mean this is just sort of basic principles. I think most Americans understand and appreciate it. For some reason, this administration can't. This administration has crafted an ideology that basically is designed to roll back the institutions that have helped this country. They promote the ideology through sloganeering, through labeling, name-calling, talk radio. But when you really get down and scratch it, there's not much there.

¤ In other ridiculous marathon-related news, some nut who regularly makes a mockery of marathons by running (walking) them in an antique diving suit (average time: five days) is planning to take his diving suit antics to Loch Ness.

Scott, who in recent years has taken part in the marathons of London, New York and Edinburgh clad in his 80-kilogram (175-pound) deep-water diving suit -- exploits which set new standards for the longest times ever recorded in those races -- is embarking on his latest endurance feat to coincide with a marathon around Loch Ness.

Aiming to raise money for a charity that helps children suffering from leucemia -- a deadly form of cancer of which he himself was cured -- he is to make a series of dives each day during which he will trudge along the lake bottom, fed by air from helpers in a boat above. He hopes to cover some five kilometres (three miles) per day.

"I've been told the big copper helmet could give quite a big headbutt to the monster, so it will be quite nice to make his acquaintance," he said, referring to the heavy headpiece of his diving suit.

I have trouble with this story, since I hardly know what to mock first.  The stupidity of walking around the edge of a lake, underwater, in an antique diving suit?  The stupidity of pretending there's some sort of immortal dinosaur in the lake?  The stupidity of acting as though an aquatic life form is so dumb that it would just swim right into some very slow and very stupid human in an antique diving suit?

And yet at the same time, I know he's doing it for a good cause, which makes me feel bad about mocking him.

This kook and P. Guilty are both annoying in that whole, "I desperately want attention so I'll do something really stupid, but get media coverage by saying it's all for a charity cause."  And when you see me wakeboarding down the entire Amazon in about 10 years, all to raise money for AIDS research, while incidentally earning huge media attention just as I have a new novel coming out, you can feel free to mock me too.

Lloyd Scott, 41, poses for photographs wearing an antique deep sea diving suit in Loch Ness, in Scotland, ahead of his underwater marathon world record attempt to raise money for children with Leukemia, September 28, 2003. Scott, a former leukemia sufferer, who also completed the 2002 London Marathon in a diving suit, begins the attempt on Sunday and will take 14 days to complete his 26-mile underwater trek where he will be 30 feet (9.14 meters) below the surface of the loch, the home of the mythical Loch Ness Monster. REUTERS/Christopher Furlong

¤ Yet another new book about the differences between male and female brains has been released. This one is by a man, and therefore explains "scientific" reasons why men do things that drive women crazy.

So while women find emotional conversations a good way to chill out at the end of the day, the tired male brain needs to zone out all that touchy-feely chatter in order to relax -- which is why he wants the remote control to zap through "mindless" sport or action movies.

His brain takes in less sensory detail than a woman's, so he doesn't see or even feel the dust and household mess in the same way. Anyhow, the male brain attaches less personal identity to the inside of a home and more to the workplace or the yard -- which is why he doesn't get worked up about housework.

Male hormones such as testosterone and vasopressin set the male brain up to seek competitive, hierarchical groups in its constant quest to prove self-worth and identity. That is why men, paradoxically (from a hormonally altered new mother's point of view), become even more workaholic once they have kids, to whom they must also prove their worth.

So now men have valid scientific reasons to excuse their couch potato'ing, disinterest in house work and family life, and general sloth.  That'll come in handy, eh?

Since he's not any sort of football genius, ESPN was obviously hoping for him to say some controversial stuff and to bring an element to their coverage that the usual parade of sports nerds and inarticulate ex-players can't. Simultaneously, ESPN had to be hoping he wouldn't say anything so offensive or racist or sexist that it would get them boycotted.

Rush apparently kept his mouth from running off too much the first few weeks, but last Sunday he finally got into a comfort zone and said the sort of thing he does constantly on his radio show.  But since a national sports show is very different from the clubby dumb white guy audience his radio show enjoys, he's gotten into trouble over his analysis of the play of Philadelphia Eagles Quarterback Donovan McNabb.

"I think what we've had here is a little social concern in the NFL. The media has been very desirous that a black quarterback do well," Limbaugh said. "There is a little hope invested in McNabb, and he got a lot of credit for the performance of this team that he didn't deserve. The defense carried this team."

Limbaugh did not back down during his syndicated radio talk show Wednesday.

He reiterated that he does not think McNabb is a bad player, just that he isn't as good as some members of the media think he is.

"This is such a mountain out of a molehill," he said. "There's no racism here, there's no racist intent whatsoever."

"All this has become the tempest that it is because I must have been right about something," he said. "If I wasn't right there wouldn't be this cacophony of outrage that has sprung up in the sports writer community."

I loathe the man, but I don't think Limbaugh is lying in his explanation. Like a lot of casual racists (his past racial history is documented here), he isn't aware that he is one, and therefore has no idea why his comments would be viewed as racist by others.  Additionally, since he's built a career on insulting and vilifying people whose politics he doesn't agree with, he assumes that any criticism of his words/actions is motivated by personal animosity.  I'm sure much of it is, but there are also a lot of people who just think he's completely wrong on this issue.

Numerous sports writers have taken him to task on factual matters (McNabb has a higher QB ranking after four years than Elway or Favre had. McNabb has been voted by the players to the ProBowl the last three seasons.  There is a whole collection of sports writer comments on the issue here.) as well as expressing their general disgust with his comment.  Through it all Limbaugh remains unrepentant, since in the best blowhard tradition, it's inconceivable to admit to making a mistake or to change your behavior no matter how foolish it proves to be.

Rush is a racist, and this comment springs from his general outlook on life. He's not out burning crosses or murdering immigrant shop owners, but his perception of society is that blacks and other minorities are simply inferior to whites like himself. Therefore he feels that any black who enjoys success in a previously white-dominated field must be lucky, or is being helped along by white people who want the black to succeed.  In that light, all accomplishments by non-white males are viewed with great suspicion and this leads to him overlooking most of their successes and focusing on their failures. 

Wondering why ESPN doesn't just fire his fat ass to avoid the negative publicity?  Take a wild guess:

Limbaugh has helped increase the ratings for "Sunday NFL Countdown." Nagle said ratings are up 10 percent overall. Sunday's show drew its biggest audience in the regular season since 1996.

I've given this issue some thought in the past, so here's my opinion on the whole "black quarterback" topic. 

Blacks were for many years denied the opportunity to play quarterback. Segregation ruled high school, college, and pro football for decades.  When it finally began to decay, it cracked slowly.  Blacks were good at running fast and tackling and such, since those tasks are mostly physical in nature.  White racists could accept that.  They didn't like it, but they wanted their teams to win, and when the other teams are letting blacks play and regularly wiping the floor with you, your racist principles are going to vanish in a damn hurry.

So through the 60's and 70's the number of blacks playing football increased steadily, at a far greater rate than their percentage of the general population.  Today something like 70% of the NFL is black, while blacks make up around 14% of the US population.  And it's not as if that's due to any shortage of white guys trying to play football; the very best black athletes are just better than the very best white athletes (and Asian, and Hispanic, and so on).  The one bastion of whiteness that persists (persisted?) in football was at the Quarterback position.

He is the most important guy on offense, he handles the ball on every play, he has to make good throws and figure out what the defense is doing, and so on.  The position requires great ability, but less so than most other positions on the field.  Certainly less than any defensive position.  Playing QB also requires a lot more mental analysis and speed than any other position, and that's where the white racist mindset hung on.  Sure, they thought, blacks are faster and stronger and can jump higher. But whites are naturally more intelligent, and the black man is not smart enough to play quarterback.

It's a country club mentality, the sort of institutionalized racism that greeted Tiger Woods as he took the predominantly-white sport of golf by storm. People who didn't give a thought to blacks playing basketball or football or baseball somehow found it wrong that a black man (Well, "Cablanasian", or whatever Tiger calls himself, but since his daddy looks black, and he looks at least half black, that's what people think of him as.) could be the best golfer on earth.  After all, golf was a sport that wasn't about physical strength or speed; it was about mental strength and consistency and finesse, things that they just knew blacks couldn't excel at.

Back to football, and the barriers separating blacks from playing QB eventually began to crumble at the high school and then college levels, but remained in the NFL. It wasn't like the Negro Leagues again, where the best black QBs were not allowed to play, but they were encouraged to shift to receiver or running back, since after all, they just couldn't be smart enough to deal with an NFL game. It was too much faster and more complicated than the college game.

There were successful black QBs in college for years, but they were only successful due to their physical skills.  They could run faster and throw farther than whites, and that made up for their smaller brains, or so the racist institutional mindset went.  Black QBs were great at running simple, run-oriented offenses like the Option, but they couldn't succeed as passers, and even if they could do so in college, they certainly couldn't in the pros, where the offenses and defenses are so much more complicated and the game moves so much faster.

There was an NFL institutional dislike of QBs who ran at all, for many years. That sort of scrambling around was fine for college and high school, but it was never going to work in the pros.  An NFL QB had to stand in the pocket and scan the field and find a receiver.  He was not supposed to run for yardage.  Of course when white QBs ran they were being smart and taking what the defense gave them and making the best play available.  Black QBs would just run at every opportunity, they weren't "pure pocket passers" and relied too much on their physical skills to get by.

I can't point to quotes on this type of thing or articles discussing it, but I remember hearing this sort of thing for years in the 80's, when I was young and a rabid football fan. I always wondered why a Quarterback couldn't be both a great passer and a runner, and why all of the QBs had to be tall, slow, white guys who couldn't pick up a 3rd and 6 scrambling if the field were paved in ice and they were the only one wearing shoes.  I loved Randall Cunningham and his high speed exploits, and always wished he could have been on a team with some talent surrounding him, so he didn't have to try to win the game single-handedly.

But while there were isolated black QBs who were successful, the usual NFL draft was another bunch of tall, husky white guys with strong arms and "pocket presence," while the fast black guys who could throw it 70 yards flat footed were converted to RB or WR or CB, or just not drafted at all. Never mind the fact that the vast majority of all college QBs aren't good enough to make it in the pros, it was the blacks who didn't that stood out to the Rush-style racists.  They remember Andre Ware, Akili Smith, and other prominent black college QBs who didn't do anything in the pros, yet somehow the legion of top drafted white QBs who amounted to nothing is just discounted.  Jeff George, Dan McGuire, David Klingler, Rick Mirer, Heath Shuler, Jim Druckenmiller, Ryan Leaf, Tim Couch, Cade McNown, and on and on, those white guys who were first round draft picks from 1990-1999 aren't evidence that whites can't play quarterback, at least not to people with Rush's mindset. I'm not saying it's a consciously racist "pick on the black failures" mindset; it's more like their mental filter simply screens out the aspects of reality that they find upsetting or that just don't fit into their perception of world events.

This is what it's like to be Rush Limbaugh.  He sees a player who he doesn't think is as good as the media says he is.  But while a normal person would stop there, in Rush's world there must be more to it.  Why does the media say this guy is better than Rush thinks he is?  After all, in Rush's world he's the smartest person on earth, so whatever he thinks of something must be true.  Why the media must have some sort of hidden agenda! And since the player in question is a black QB, and Rush knows that the black man isn't intellectually capable of taking on that sort of responsibility, that must be it.  Why it's yet another example of the insidious liberal media putting down the hard-working white men who built this great nation, in preference for the uppity minorities that just want welfare handouts to get through life!

The current situation in the NFL is that white guys can play QB pretty well, but so can black guys.  The pro game is far faster and more difficult than the college game, and the vast majority of successful college QBs fail pretty miserably in the pros, both since they aren't good enough, but also since so many of them land on bad teams that have poor offensive schemes.  A great deal of success in a team sport like football comes from having a good team, and there are very, very few athletes who are so great that they can make a team noticeably better all by themselves. The flip side is that a quarterback can definitely lose a game all by himself, and in fact it's quite often that one does.

Also, part of the whole "pure pocket passer" thing is true, and of benefit to white guys.  You can be a successful quarterback in the NFL while being basically slow and clumsy.  You just have to have a particular knack for seeing the open man, realizing where the defense is going to be, and throwing the ball a long way with great accuracy.  If you can run and make yards with your feet that's great, but the ability to throw the ball successfully is so valuable that plenty of teams will overlook their QB's glaring inability to run or avoid the rush so long as he is a good passer. There are white guys and black guys who can throw and also run, but as the 70% black NFL testifies, the very best athletes in the US are black guys, for the most part.  And while the whole "doesn't really need to run very well" aspect of being a successful QB will keep more white guys there than in any other position, I think that we'll eventually see mostly black QBs, just like every other position.  Look at the NBA if you're doubtful.

And of course, after I spent time writing this Wednesday evening, I checked ESPN to see the baseball playoff scores and saw that Rush had resigned.  There's probably more to the story than meets the eye; just how much this was a save face by "resigning before we fire you"  sort of thing isn't yet known. ESPN initially said they stood by him, but if the NFL objected officially, you know ESPN would roll over. I'm pretty well ruling out any possibility of Rush actually feeling bad or wanting to resign on his own.

It will be interesting to see how the story develops the next few days.

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