Go Steelers

William Woodson, an apparently avid fan of the defending Super Bowl champion Pittsburgh Steelers, kicked his girlfriend's puppy to death because the puppy was misbehaving prior to kickoff in a game with the hapless Kansas City Chiefs. Jailed for his extreme method of discipline, Woodson recounted that the puppy resisted going for a walk and was barking uncontrollably. Mr. Woodson's animus was rooted in his unhappiness that the girlfriend had brought the dog home in the first place. In light of the Chiefs stunning overtime victory over the Steelers, it is fair to say that the girlfriend was spared a similar fate.

Going Rogue

Sarah Palin, former Republican vice presidential candidate, has kicked off a nationwide promotional tour for her memoir Going Rogue. The book, which has been described, in par,t as a score settling effort, accuses the McCain campaign of micromanaging the mercurial former Alaska governor. But the question nobody seems willing to deal with is, why did McCain's people deem it necessary to monitor and control an individual who, as they say, would have been one heartbeat away from the presidency? That they apparently felt it necessary demonstrates that they believed that Palin lack the qualifications for the office of vice president.

An Idiotic Headline

A letter to the editor Washington Examiner Newspaper regarding a particularly stupid front page story on the Washington Redskins:

Re: Redskins are still Indians, November 17th.

Of all the professional sports franchises in the Washington, D.C. Metropolitan area, the Washington Redskins are indisputably the most popular. So I get it that the Examiner would devote front page coverage to the United States Supreme Court's refusal to hear arguments from a group of Native Americans that the team's trademark is patently offensive. What troubles me is the meaning of the headline "Redskins are still Indians." Are you suggesting that the high court's action is tantamount to saying that Redskins is an acceptable term? (Suppose the situation was different and the team was named the Washington Honkies, would the headline read "Honkies are still white people"?) Or, that the current roster of players are Native Americans? And what is the point of trotting out the photograph of the buffoonish Zema Williams, the misguided negro who poses as Chief Zee and unofficial team mascot? (There is perhaps hidden meaning in an African American masquerading as an Indian for a team that had to be forced by the Federal Government to accept black players).

Essence of Cool

There is interesting piece by Peter Aspden of the Financial Times attempting to explain to a friend the essence of "cool" and ending up, not surprisingly, with the man who personified the concept - Miles Dewey Davis:

He still didn’t really get it. We went on like this for a while. I wish I could have sent him to an exhibition currently running in Paris, which would have saved us both a lot of time and arcane argument. We Want Miles, at the Musée de la Musique, is a tribute to a figure who was so cool that he actually produced a work of art called Birth of the Cool, not even allowing for the pre-existence of this precious philosophical state.

Miles Davis made most of his profound announcements with a few long, sparse notes from his trumpet or flugel-horn. They spoke with uncommon eloquence, but he wasn’t bad with words either. A man of towering confidence, he knew humility. Towards the end of his career, he was asked, in a video clip shown here, whether anyone had influenced his musical style. “Not really,” he rasped, “but I used to want to quit when I was with Bird.”

An Appropriate Response

Last night John Allen Muhammad was executed by lethal injection in Jarratt, Virginia, specifically for the murder of Dean H. Meyers who was gunned down as he pumped gas. But of course Muhammad along with Lee Boyd Malvo was responsible for the murders of ten people in the Washington, D.C., Maryland, and Virginia area in September and October 2002. As an opponent of capital punishment, Muhammad's death sentence initially gave me pause but I have since come around to the view that there are some crimes so heinous, so horrific by their very nature that a death sentence is the only appropriate punishment. John Stuart Mill, in his 1868 Speech In Favor of Capital Punishment, said it best:

When there has been brought home to any one, by conclusive evidence, the greatest crime known to the law; and when the attendant circumstances suggest no palliation of the guilt, no hope that the culprit may even yet not be unworthy to live among mankind, nothing to make it probable that the crime was an exception to his general character rather than a consequence of it, then I confess it appears to me that to deprive the criminal of the life of which he has proved himself to be unworthy solemnly to blot him out from the fellowship of mankind and from the catalogue of the living is the most appropriate, as it is certainly the most impressive, mode in which society can attach to so great a crime the penal consequences which for the security of life it is indispensable to annex to it.

Death Cannot Part

That this is a sports crazed society is a given. But news that some fans’ passions extend beyond life itself takes the phenomenon to entirely new level. “From baseball parks to football stadiums to golf courses, sporting venues regularly field requests to scatter a loved one's cremated remains at the pitcher's mound, under a goal post or on a fairway overlooking the sea -- anywhere a sports hero has trod and triumphed.”

On Grumpiness

A University of South Wales researcher Professor Joe Forgas writes that while cheerfulness fosters creativity “negative moods trigger more attentive, careful thinking, paying greater attention to the external world.” The professor’s experiments suggest that miserable people are far more superior at decision-making than their happy counterparts. As an individual who has often been accused of being grumpy, this is welcomed news because it brings perspective to a condition so universally misunderstood. Of course, there is the danger that I am simply embracing this information because it provides a convenient justification for my propensity for peevishness. But so be it.

A. I.

After sitting out three games because of injury, Allen Iverson made his much anticipated debut as a member of the Memphis Grizzlies against the Sacramento Kings. In eighteen minutes of action, the Answer scored 11 points. With characteristic honesty and selfishness about his role as a reserve, he proclaimed:

I had no problems (with the hamstring). I had a problem with my butt from sitting on that bench so long. That's the only thing I got a problem with.

Go look at my resume and that will show you that I’m not a sixth man. I don’t think it has anything to do with me being selfish. It’s just who I am. I don’t want to change what gave me all the success that I’ve had since I’ve been in this league.