An End of an Era . . .

Or at least a pause in one. This week I officially resigned my membership with the Chicago Curling Club. I didn't want to but the dues were getting pretty pricey (they work on a graduated scale and for my 3rd year it was going to be $500), we now live a whole lot farther away from Northbrook, and we only have one car. I did the math and figured that I'd probably be able to play in about 10-15 games and I just don't think it's worth $35 - $50 per game. As weird a sport as most people consider it, I will miss it because it was something different to do and I felt like I was just starting to "get it". Hopefully I'll be able to go back to it in a few years when time and money become more plentiful but it has been my experience these last 10 years that free time gets ever more, not less, scarce.

I'd also like to make a comment on the "controversial" call in the Bears game last weekend, so I apologize to you readers that couldn't care less about football. OK, well obviously I'm a Bears fan so there's no way that I can disprove that I have a bias here. However, a lot of random fans and commentators have commented that they had never heard of this rule before. Well I have. In fact, this exact rule has screwed me over on at least half a dozen bets over the last couple years. But usually you don't see it in the end zone. Usually it's on the sidelines; a receiver catches the ball, gets both feet in bounds, then lands 5 feet out of bounds and drops the ball in the process. That's ruled an incomplete pass; and if that one is then so was Johnson's. It's the same rule. It is, however, the most ridiculous manifestation of that rule. Before last Sunday that would have been one of those hypothetical situations someone would have brought up and everyone would have said "pssh, that'll never happen". And I might add that the rule is basically the same as it is in baseball. If a fielder dives for the ball, clearly has it in his mitt, and then in the course of landing the ball comes out it's not a catch. In fact it's not a catch until he takes his other hand and reaches for the ball in his mitt (then it's considered lost in transfer). So imagine a third baseman catches a pop-up bunt with his bare hand, tumbles to the ground, and the ball squirts out as he taps it on the ground. In my opinion, that wouldn't even be controversial that it was called a non-catch. What trips a lot of people up is that on end-zone plays sometimes a player will fumble the ball but it will still be ruled a touchdown because he broke the plane before he fumbled it. In other words, as soon as a player has possession and breaks the plane the play is over. The difference is the word "possession"; in that situation there is no question of possession because it's already been established well before the player reaches the goal line; in the Johnson catch "possession" is not achieved until he completes the catch by maintaining control all the way to the ground.

Did You Hear the One About the Imam, the Pastor, and the Burning Books?

I don't even really know where to start with this whole thing. So I'll just start by saying that Pastor Terry Jones is a lunatic. Seriously, I can make some coherent and logical arguments here but all you really need to do is look at him:

I mean, if you're not a major league closer or a 40-year-old softball player, you have no business having that 'stache. Seriously, you're an insult to the ghost of Rod Beck.

And you're an even bigger insult to one of my heroes who has the misfortune to share the same name as you:


But of course besides those two individuals, there's also the minor matter of the roughly 1.5 billion Muslims you've managed to insult in the last week. And that fact alone would actually be mightily impressive if it wasn't for something so despicable. I mean, I'm lucky if I get around to insulting 9 or 10 people per month.

So if you happen to be one of the few people who haven't yet made up your mind about whether or not this guy's crazy, you can read an interview with him here. Here's one of my favorite passages, which does a good job of summing things up. He was asked about the comparison between him and the Nazis, who were also quite fond of books as an alternative energy source:

"Well I think it is very easy to see a difference. We have tried to make it very clear that even though this is a very radical message, a radical way of doing something we are not against Muslims. We do not hate them. And plus the Nazis, what the Nazis did was the Nazis gathered up all the books that were against their ideology and burned them. That's not what we are doing. We are not by any means promoting the burning of books."

So let's play a quick game of "Spot the Hypocrisy"; it's like "Where's Waldo" only waaaaaay easier. OK you're not against Muslims, you just want to burn their sacred text. You're not like the Nazis because they burned books that were against their ideology whereas you are just, um, burning a book because it doesn't agree with your ideology. And finally, you are certainly not by means promoting the burning of books, you're just hosting "International Burn a Koran Day."

This is my 2nd favorite passage:

"But we have also made it very clear that here in the United States we have a constitution, we have freedom of religion they are more than welcome to be here and worship and build mosques."

This one is particularly good because now he has apparently decided to call off the burning because he's supposedly gotten an agreement that the so-called "Ground Zero Mosque" (which is neither a mosque or at ground zero) will be moved. Prior to calling it off, he had never made any connection whatsoever that his burning had anything to do with the GZM.

One of my favorite expressions (which to my knowledge I made up) is "don't act surprised when crazy people say or do crazy things." That would appear to be obvious but apparently it isn't. When Ahmadinejad, or Dick Cheney, or Sarah Palin, or Glen Beck, or Carl Everett, or Pat Robertson say offensive and inflammatory things it shouldn't be news. They're crazy, and that's what crazy people do (quick aside, for the sake of this discussion I am not differentiating between actual insanity and politically calculated insanity). So really I'm arguing (yet again) that this should not be being covered to the extent that it is. If some group of wackos wants to burn a Koran, it's pretty clear that in this country they are within their rights to do so. So let them, and don't give them the thing that they desperately want: attention. And at this point, from a damage standpoint he might as well go ahead and do it. The Muslim world is already pissed off enough about it that most of them are not going to bother following up to see if he actually did it or not.

But what I think is probably most striking is that we need to step back and ask the question of why exactly is this happening now. Why specifically the 9th anniversary of 9/11/01? Why didn't this happen a year ago, or five? And I'll just cut through the suspense and say, yes, I'm going to blame the Republicans for this one (technically the Republicans and Tea Partiers if you consider them different). George W, for all his numerous faults, always made it very clear that we were not at war with Islam and that it was paramount to respect peaceful Muslims of all nations. And when a Republican leader says that, the right doesn't jump on him for it and the left certainly doesn't (of course they generally don't give him credit for it either). But let a Democratic leader say the same thing and now the right not only doesn't agree with him - they accuse him of being a Muslim! And of course it doesn't do any good to make that accusation unless you whip up an anti-Muslim frenzy. The "Ground Zero Mosque" and this latest incidents are perfect manifestations of that. In the last few decades Republicans have been the "freedom of religion" banner-carriers. I think it's now been exposed once and for all as only a "freedom of Christianity" banner.