This is Kenny. Say hi to Kenny. (Hi, Kenny. You are a cutie pie.) Kenny is about to move in with my friends Mark and Judy. All this talk of dogs this week prompted them to send a baby picture. Always happy to put your dog pix on the internets, folks. Especially when they’re of Kenny.
(Please note: His eyes aren’t really that creepy-looking. My Photoshop red-eye removal technique is pathetic.)
One of our number here — I think it’s Brian — wants me write more about “The Looming Tower,” the current On the Nightstand selection. Patience, Brian. I’m not finished with it yet, although I’m finding it fascinating and really should make a run at polishing it off this weekend. In the meantime, I’m savoring the details of Osama bin Laden’s road to piety, which at some point included a shift to playing soccer in long pants. A few more inches, a beard and a skullcap, and Sammy bL will find Ohio State University’s new basketball uniforms entirely pleasing to Allah. As it is, the hemline of those shorts would pass muster in the strictest academy for Catholic girlhood. Isn’t fashion funny?
Note the uniform allows for “personalization” among players. “Uniform” and “personalized” would seem to be in opposition to one another, but I never claimed to understand sports.
I’m tapped out of amusing anecdotes about life in the snowy Midwest (two inches last night, temperatures expected to push 50 by the weekend — winter’s back is to the wall, but not yet broken), so let’s make this an all-bloggage Wednesday:
Everybody loves a right-wing man in uniform, particulary when he goes on Fox News, but I love a right-wing man in uniform when he has a colorful past as a gay-porn star known as “Rod Majors.” It’s Corporal Matt to you, however. Link is safe (links from that link are decidedly not), and scroll down for bonus photo of Ann Coulter posed with a real you-know-what. His high-and-tight haircut doesn’t look like it requires the styling attention of John Edwards’, however, so we know who the real faggot is.
Odd Detroit factoid: The bridge to Canada, which carries one-quarter of U.S. trade with the Great White North, is owned outright by a single individual who doesn’t like to answer questions about it. Jack Lessenberry thinks the newspapers should pay more attention to this intriguing fact. Me, too.
Showerward, ho.
Kirk said on March 7, 2007 at 10:32 am
re: osu basketball uniforms. it’s more a matter of poorly written cutlines (too often par for the course) than of “personalized” uniforms.
but who knew that culottes would make such a comeback?
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MarkH said on March 7, 2007 at 10:52 am
Culottes, indeed; those things are culottes PLUS! Sorry, I just don’t get this ultra-baggy look. Is it that much of a hip-hop influence?
Just for reference, I pulled out my high school senior yearbook (yes, from 35+ years ago [sob!, gulp!, barf…]) to look at our b-ball team’s getup. Downright skimpy; brief boxers with undershirts, basically…
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LA mary said on March 7, 2007 at 11:18 am
I wonder if the culottes slide down to show their underpants. That’s part of the look they’re going for, I think.
I’m sorry, but I think those uniforms are dumb. The shirts are ok, but that’s a lot of swooshy fabric going on in those pants.
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brian stouder said on March 7, 2007 at 11:46 am
Well – those uniforms struck me as kinda slick..the form-fitting jersey is more striking to me than the exaggerated shorts. One thing I learned as a fan of motor-car racing (as the English might say) is that the toy car makers have a HUGE imput on the design of the livery for the major racing teams – the better to sell little models.
Looks like Nike is designing those OSU duds with an eye squarely upon what will sell to the younger fashion consumers.
While some folks look to Hollywood (and over-the-top glitz such as at the Oscars) for fashion pointers (pardon the unintentional bra joke there), others look to the big-time basketball courts, for theirs
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LA mary said on March 7, 2007 at 11:55 am
Don’t the pants look like something modest young ladies of the early 1900s would wear for gym class? All they need is black woolen stockings and they could be spinning hoops at…I’m blanking out the name of the overpriced women’s college in Vermont….on May Day.
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Connie said on March 7, 2007 at 11:55 am
Culottes indeed. My first thought was even the local Pentecostal girls would be allowed to wear those. OTH whenever I see pics of those short tight shorts the bball players wore in my college days, I wonder what they were thinking.
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MarkH said on March 7, 2007 at 12:45 pm
My sentiment exactly, Connie. Until I saw my old photos, I’d forgotten the look.
Brian – they might but they don’t. In Britain as well as Europe, it’s ‘motor racing’. At least that’s what’s in my collection of car and racing history books by British authors, as well as old car magazine articles I remember. Say, you don’t suppose we attended some of the same races in the midwest way back when, do you? I’ve never been to Raceway Park, but Road America, Brainerd, Summit Point, Watkins Glen and, of course, Mid-Ohio, yes. Old Can-Am, F5000, Trans-Am, SCCA Nationals in the 60’s and 70’s; those were the days, no?
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LA mary said on March 7, 2007 at 1:04 pm
Bennington.
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LA mary said on March 7, 2007 at 1:08 pm
Hmm. Bennington isn’t the hoopy place. Maybe Smith?
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brian stouder said on March 7, 2007 at 1:39 pm
Mark – I became a ticket-buying race fan (open wheel) in 1995. and have been to IMS @ Indy, MIS in Brooklyn, Chicago Motor Speedway in Cicero (gone now for cars; but still a horse track), Gateway @ St Louis, Daytona (won a free trip from Palmer chocolates – long story!), Road America, and Mid Ohio….saved my favorite two for last.
Mid Ohio is just beautiful; first time I was there was for a day-long open test session (CART); all the teams were there, and the cost was $5 to get in!! – and you got the run of the place, including that marvelous garage (or paddock!) area, where you can go upstairs and walk along and literally look gain an overview on what all the teams were wrenching on.
RA and Canada Corner (and the Johnsonville brats you really have to buy at the top of the hill on the way to Canada Corner) was sublime.
But the best $20 you will ever spend on motorsports is on the Saturday of the Formula One weekend at Indy! I haven’t missed one yet…the sound alone is worth it
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Danny said on March 7, 2007 at 2:41 pm
Nancy, I can’t really agree with your take on Coulter. She is a satirist by and large. In comparison, Keith Olbermann passes himself off as a semi-serious news guy and he says pretty bad things about people that he really means, not as satire.
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brian stouder said on March 7, 2007 at 3:03 pm
pass
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LA mary said on March 7, 2007 at 3:12 pm
Lots of people take Coulter very seriously. She knows this, and works it hard to sell her books.
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John Brown said on March 7, 2007 at 5:42 pm
According to Webster’s Intermediate Dictionary satire means something to make fun of and show the weaknesses of human nature. What she spews is nowhere near that definition.
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czucky Dimes said on March 7, 2007 at 8:45 pm
Brian S and Mark H: The race tracks you guys mentioned are all great places, (especially The Glen and Road America) but for pure bottom-of-the-brain-stem, visceral racing essence, nothing beats watching sprint cars from the infield at Eldora Speedway, a high-banked dirt half-mile in western Ohio. Jackie Stewart is said to have been struck speechless the first time he saw them there.
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MarkH said on March 8, 2007 at 8:49 am
Ha! Eldora; now THAT takes me back, too. Back in the day I attended a few races where Stewart competed. He always left the track so quuickly after the race, I’m surprised he had time to take in anything like Eldora. Except for the Glen Can-Am in ’71, when he stuck around the paddock and held court with a big group of fans; a very gracious man. This was when the best international drivers competed in many series and seemed to be in different places at the same time. When I was a kid in Pittsburgh, Heidelberg Raceway was very much the same kind of track track as Eldora.
That’s one hell of a bargain, Brian. I’ve always heard of the skyrocketing costs of attending F1 in Europe these days, and assumed Indy was not far off the mark. One of my buddies here goes to the Canadian and US GP every year; I may take him up on his offer to go this summer. I was last at the USGP in Vegas in ’81. Very sad; in the parking lot at Caesar’s. And yes, the sound. THAT’S what really hooks you when you’re there.
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john c said on March 8, 2007 at 10:28 am
I’ve never understood the ridiculously baggy shorts thing. A few years back I covered a Pistons game (I’m a sports fan, but not normally a sports writer.) I went into the locker room after the game and was interviewing one of the star players. He had taken off his uniform but had those tight-fitting under-uniforms that are so popular now (under-armor, I think) I remember thinking that he looked strange, then it hit me. He looked like an adult, highly conditioned athelete – like a professional basketball player. His thoughs, normally burried under massive shorts, were themselves massive. He did not look like a kid where his older brother’s gear.
Also, I was at a high school basketball game in Richmond, Indiana a few years ago. A kid got sent to the free throw line at a big moment in the game. In my day he might have hiked up his shorts a bit, both for practical reasons and as a gesture of resolve. Instead I watched him cinch them down, the better to look like they were about to fall off, I suppose.
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4dbirds said on March 8, 2007 at 11:27 am
I think the baggy look is a reflection of homophobia. They don’t want guys looking at their packages and they certainly don’t want other guys thinking they might WANT other guys to look at their packages.
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brian stouder said on March 8, 2007 at 9:55 pm
Well, I WILL patiently await Nance’s book report on Looming Tower. I finished that book just before ABC’s miniseries came on, and therefore conciously decided to skip that show altogether.
I loved Wright’s journalistic eye for detail, all through the narrative. The centrality of the Egyptian prison system (and the torture therein) to the birth of al Qaeda was news to me. The centrality of the Egyptian Ayman al Zawahiri and his own minions to al Qaeda was another. The great FBI effort in the wake of the Dar es Salam and Tanzanaian bombings was also very good; enlightening. And then, many of those same FBI agents immediately got on top of the attack on the USS Cole at the port of Aden.
And the author also delineated (and demystified) the wall between CIA efforts and FBI efforts. CIA didn’t trust FBI, because FBI indicts people and exposes sources….while CIA tries to cultivate and maintain sources -INCLUDING inside the United States.
When those (ultimately murderous) chuckleheads with the apartment in California were being bankrolled by the Saudi national – it was at the behest of the CIA (since it is illegal for the CIA to operate directly in the US…!), which had hopes of turning them into double agents.
‘Course, that all went to hell one sun-shiney Tuesday in September.
To me the book is, in a word, striking.
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brian stouder said on March 8, 2007 at 10:08 pm
Oh – and in keeping with the dog-themed header and pics -I challenge the dog people hereabouts to read this story and NOT get a lump in their throat
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17525736/
The lead –
ANDERSON, Ind. – A collie named Lassie roused her owners and enabled them to escape their burning home but died in the fire, relatives said. “The dog saved their life,” said Judi Thompson after her parents’ home burned Wednesday morning. “Even the firemen said that. Isn’t that amazing? It gives me goose bumps.”
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michaelj said on March 10, 2007 at 2:33 am
This is distressing. I think you’re a pretty good writer, Nancy Nall, keedo. I don’t think I say that about very many people. For instance, there’s Dan Froomkin, who’s self-referential and not too suave.
I grew up in Detroit. Not really. In the suburbs. But we had the bus-shaking by the Doughboy fans. And my friend was the ultimate hero, Bill Thigpen, who trashed the Tractors and outplayed Rudy T and the Tractors and Mass in Polish in Hamtramck. Best basketball player the city ever saw, inclkuding Spencer Heywood.
You’re not quite as old as I am. But I’d say, Bob Seger rules at the Birminghan Teen Cnter, if you’re talking about Heavy Music and Ramblin’ Gamblin Man. So, Nancy. I lived in cetrer field at Tigers games when the bottle got passed around, I got into the Chessmate when you had to do do the two-doors and I was just a kid. Not packing. Two doors. Detroit. John Lee.
Anybody that was around for the real deal knows it was SRC and MC5, and SRC first. Iggy was a secomd thought. It was pretty much the equal to Boston music in the Seventies, and I don”t mean Boston, although More Than a Feeling was a mighty fine imitation of the Cars. There were so many better bands then. Private Lighetning, for instance. The Rings. Limbo Race
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