Anne Enright on life after winning the Booker, the appeal of flawed women and why her latest novel is a 'less uneasy' read

I am having lunch with Anne Enright in a restaurant in Dun Laoghaire, which lies between the city of Dublin, where she was born and brought up, and the seaside town of Bray, where she now lives with her husband, Martin Murphy, a theatre director, and her two children. Inevitably, we are talking about Ireland's ongoing economic crisis.

"One thing the crash did was show up just how much blather, both written and spoken, that there is in this country," she says, laughing. "The national conversation has been going on forever and now it just bores the pants off everyone. And you know what, the people who talk for a living don't actually do a damn thing except talk. I think that recently there was almost a collective realisation that this was the case and, you know, I was kind of delighted by that."

Enright cackles into her soup and looks slightly guilty at the same time. She has the air of a mischievous and unruly child and her thoughts flow into words with a kind of lateral logic you have to concentrate hard on to keep up. Her irreverence and her easygoing, though often caustic, wit are present in her fiction, particularly in the voices of her female characters. In her new novel, The Forgotten Waltz, the narrator, Gina Moynihan, is a young woman who has tasted, but is now in furious retreat from, everything that is expected of her: early marriage, house, family, the slow erosion of spontaneity for routine. Like her creator, she has an eye for the absurdities of modern Irish life and a gift for describing them with a gleeful attention to detail.

Early on in the book, Gina attends "the kind of party where no one ate the chicken skin" and surveys the room with the withering gaze of the natural outsider.

"They were talking about plastic surgery. Indeed, a couple of women in the room had the confused look that Botox gives you, like you might be having an emotion, but you couldn't remember which one. One had a mouth that was so puffy she couldn't fit it over the rim of her wine glass… I recognised someone from the telly over by the far wall, and an awful eejit from the Irish Times… the Enniskerry husbands stood about and talked property: a three-pool complex in Bulgaria, whole Irish block in Berlin."

As vignettes about the vulgarity of pre-boom Ireland go, that passage takes some beating for its brevity and black humour, its near-perfect evocation of a certain lifestyle that epitomised those unreal times. But the giddy rise and sudden fall of the Celtic Tiger economy provides only the glimpsed backdrop to The Forgotten Waltz, which is essentially a novel about illicit desire and its consequences. It is deft in its delineation of an adulterous affair that wreaks the usual kind of havoc but then grows slowly into something more, in its disregard for the conventional moral imperatives that still stalk many novels on the subject of forbidden, and potentially destructive, female desire.

"Gina is someone who acts, who sets the affair in motion," says Enright. "It was not something she was helpless to. I am interested in creating female characters who are no better or worse than they should be, who are, in fact, just themselves. I don't want to invest them with some idea of the goodness or the wickedness of female nature, but I am drawn, as most writers are, to flawed female characters – flawed as opposed to bad."

Were it not for the quality of Enright's prose, her acute ear for dialogue and her tendency not to take the well-trodden narrative path, The Forgotten Waltz might seem slight after the sustained intensity of The Gathering, the novel that won her the Booker prize in 2007. That novel was a thing of brooding beauty which touched on the collective trauma that attended Ireland's belated acknowledgment of the systematic sexual abuse of children by priests. The new book is a lighter read. Is it, I ask, a reaction to the weight of expectation the Booker accolade inevitably engendered?

"Well, I've heard people, usually writers, say that no one wrote a great book after winning the Booker, but I honestly did not feel any big pressure. The Gathering did hang over me in that it was darker than I thought at the time. I wrote it at a desk in a small room that I have not been back to since. It was a quite unpleasant place to be in some ways, just personally for me, and I wanted to close the door on that and to move on. This is an altogether less uneasy read and intentionally so."

Did winning the Booker prize, for better or worse, change her life? "No, not really. What happens is that the world changes very quickly, but you don't. The world suddenly looks at you with different eyes, but you're not different. So, that's interesting. The crowd is illuminated suddenly and I don't really do crowds all that much. Readers only happen in ones."

Enright grew up in Dublin "on the border between Terenure and Templeogue", the youngest of a family of five, all of whom, she says, "were brainy and did well at exams". She was the youngest and the lone creative in a family of successful professionals, gaining an international scholarship that took her to "a funny school in Canada" for two years in her teens. "When I came back," she says, "Ireland did not make so much sense." You could say she has been trying to make sense of it through her writing ever since.

Having gained a degree in English and philosophy at Trinity College Dublin, she was given an electric typewriter by her family for her 21st birthday and, soon after, won another scholarship, this time to the University of East Anglia, where she studied creative writing under the tutelage of the late Angela Carter. In a recent essay for the London Review of Books, she wrote of Carter's importance to her and of her fractured sense of self when she first attended the course.

"I was 24. I had no idea how to live in the world, let alone write about it; the self who was supposed to produce some kind of narrative by the end of the year seemed increasingly fugitive and fragmented… I worked all the time, but inspiration did not strike. There was no shaft of light. If the words came from anywhere, it was from a point over my left shoulder, like a taunt. I do not think I was entirely well."

Even after her stint at East Anglia, Enright came to fiction slowly, first working as a successful producer and director for the Irish national television channel, RTE, where she produced the acclaimed comedy show Nighthawks, a groundbreaking mix of standup and satire. While working in children's television, she wrote The Portable Virgin, a short story collection that won her the Rooney prize for Irish literature in 1991. It was followed by her first novel, The Wig My Father Wore, in 1995, an uneven tale that blends surreal comedy – a stern Irish father sports the ridiculous hairpiece of the title, which everyone else pretends not to notice – and Angela Carter-style fantasy – an angel falls to earth and marries Grace, the female narrator.

Two other novels followed, What Are You Like?, which examines the ties that bond through the story of identical twins separated at birth and raised apart in London and Dublin, and The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch, which saw Enright use a third-person narrative for the first time to recount the story of an Irishwoman who, in the 19th century, becomes the long-term mistress of the Paraguayan president, Francisco Solano López.

"The next book will be in the third person," she says, as we order coffee and the interview winds down. "I'm starting to think my narrators' sentences are getting too big for them, and they are getting to sound a bit samey and, more disturbingly, a bit too much like me." She cracks up laughing again. "The thing is, though, I love doing voices. And I love the characters not knowing everything and the reader knowing more than them. There's more mischief in that and more room for seriousness, too."

In 2004, Enright published her first and, to date, only non-fiction book: Making Babies: Stumbling Into Motherhood, a kind of antidote to all those self-satisfied books about the joys of giving birth. Of late, despite what she jokingly calls "the curse of the Booker", she has been prodigious: another short story collection, Taking Pictures, came out in 2008, and she recently edited The Granta Book of the Irish Short Story.

Does she consider herself an Irish writer? "No, I was always on the side. Like a salad." Another cackle of laughter gives way to a frown of concentration as she reflects on the question. "I guess I'm engaged with the tradition even insofar as being against it. The periphery has always been the more interesting place for me. I didn't quite fit and that suited me. I never wanted to be mainstream as a writer, but look at what's happened."

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The Sacramento Kings should move to Mexico City, college sports fans should not blame bananas for being bananas, and lawyers would be more interesting if they had NFL scouts assess their shortcomings.

Sports Meme Power Rankings this week examines the pressing issue of the Masters, a long-drive competition held in an obscure Augusta, Ga., municipal course, the only honest way to cheer for college athletics.

1. A TRADITION LIKE NO OTHER.  A "tradition unlike any other" is on the menu this weekend, and we all know what that means! 

(via)

That's right: BUMFIGHTS! Oh, Bumfights does make me nostalgic for the days when you had to send your credit card information to a sketchy 1-800 number to watch the despicable but entertaining. It's reminiscent of a time when everything wasn't on demand and on the Internet, a time when things happened without constant coverage and instant access.

Fighting homeless men will be nowhere near Augusta, but the meticulously scrubbed fairways of Augusta remain in the VHS age in many ways. They are run by men who wish it was 1989 again. They will be described in loving, bland detail by Jim Nantz, who first started broadcasting the tournament in that year. They will be torn up by people not named Tiger Woods, which is very 1989-ish indeed since he had dominated the sport from the mid-90s leading to the derailment-by-wandering-penis he experienced recently. (Per Slate, he's getting better! Yay ratings!) They will be, as always, rolled out like rare documents on display from a museum's collection.

Sadly, Steve Spurrier will pee on none of them to illustrate that this is just a golf tournament, and one that takes place at a club that would sooner burn down its own clubhouse than have you as a member. There is a long list of things that make the Masters quite pleasant, however, and we all know what they are:

• Napping to bright colors and soothing quiet.
  

 

That is not a long list, actually. It is one thing, but a very important one for the men of this country who watch golf. They are on the whole the oldest viewing audience, and the Masters' 2010 median age of 57.8 indicates that naps will not only be desired but required. Don't be ageist, though: anyone of any age can nap to the Masters, and wake up to the beautifully maintained azaleas before yawning, fending off chores with "Honey, it's the Masters," and then rolling back over to sleep until you hear someone applaud. 

In fact, to keep this dodge alive, we encourage all of you to watch the Masters, America's last and best excuse to do nothing on a beautiful spring weekend afternoon. (Additional bonus fun: Rick Reilly reading Laffy Taffy wrapper quality puns over a montage of footage at the end of each round!)

2. COLLEGE ATHLETICS IS CORRUPT AND I SUSPECT WRESTLING MAY BE SCRIPTED. The easiest way to be a columnist in the year 2011 is easy: hard trollin'. Professor Doyel, take the stage!

"Are we done talking about Gary Williams?" he later asked. "I want to make this very clear, that if Gary Williams does not return my call, he’s scared of me. And so he can act all big and bad, and he can stand there on his coaching bench and turn around and yell at his assistant coaches, who've done nothing wrong. And when a guy on the court travels, he can turn around and yell at the 12th man on his bench, because he’s a little bit tiny coward runt of a man. He can do all that.

Just troll the living daylights out of all your targets, engage in some bold grandstanding on a personal level, and behold! Internet traffic and brand recognition.

The second method for success is more traditional, however: being both easily surprised and idealistic. If you can add a dash of "dim" in there, it would really help, since the first reaction to UConn winning the ugliest title game in recent sports memory was to bemoan the state of college athletics as being, well, take your pick: A cesspool, a sewer, some other word borrowing excremental imagery or implying great stench. The other step to this formula would be to talk about this as if it were something new, horrendous or correctable. If you have  D-3 coach who wins 10 games a season in football while raising five orphans to cite, please do so.

But at all costs, please do not bring up the inherent impossibility of being a college sports fan without tainting the very thing you're watching. The minute you pay attention and spend money on the games you monetize it, creating an economy around the sport. That economy is turned into a black market by the NCAA's codes surrounding amateurism. Then everyone has to buy their talent on the sly, and here we are in the situation we are in and have been in for the past century or so.

Don't blame the bananas for showing up on the shelf of the dodgy underground banana store. (I know, banana stores are like the worst idea ever for a business, especially an illegal one. Go with it.)  Admit that loving college athletics is to embrace a system that, as it stands from the ground up, contains a structural flaw not enabling but demanding corruption. 

The allure is the price of the payment. The allure corrodes the sport, and this corrosion is the cost of your interest. There isn't even a joke here: just a demand that you stop making stupid assumptions about collegiate sports that ignore the very setup of the universe itself. As flawed as it is, it's not like this is the first thing you've personally invested in that is going to end badly. The first one would be life, and we're all still pretty gung-ho about that, aren't we? Yes? Excellent.

Now, in apology for lack of jokes, here is a picture of Jason from "Friday the 13th" referencing last month's tired meme to tide you over until the next entry. 

3. THE NFL LOCKOUT NEEDS LEGAL FANTASY FOOTBALL.  Is there anything interesting left to say about the lockout? Well, the NFL has retained David Boies, motor-mouthed genius lawyer, and you should probably get to know him in the fashion NFL fans are accustomed to discussing things in:

NAME: David Boies

SCHOOL: Northwestern, Yale, NYU.

HEIGHT: 6-foot-2

WEIGHT: I dunno, rich guy weight? Whatever that is? One hundred affluent-y seven pounds?

WHAT SCOUTS LIKE: Speedy, quick to the point of attack. Photographic memory allows him to move quickly on the fly against arguments once he sees an opportunity. Played in a pro system at Yale. More than a game manager with the billable hours, but is instead a genuine playmaker. Big time plays against Microsoft and the State of California. 

WHAT CONCERNS SCOUTS: Took tough losses in Bush v. Gore. Horrible 40 time. At the age of 70 is a risky signing for a free agent. 

WHO SCOUTS SAY HE REMINDS THEM OF: Peyton Manning's processing power with Drew Brees' delivery.

I'm working with my friends who are attorneys to come up with some kind of fantasy football for NFL legal battles. When we do, we will be wealthy beyond our wildest dreams. 

4. THE RED SAWX HAVE FAAAHCED THE LONGEST TWITTAH DROUGHT EVAHHHH.  The Red Sox have started the 2011 season 0-6, a tragedy that has forced Bill Simmons to stop Twittering altogether until the team wins a game. For a fanbase whose charter demands extreme solipsism, this makes complete sense, and may be the most Red Sox fan thing to ever happen besides someone named "Heidi Watney" nearly gagging on a Chicken and Waffles sandwich.

Blame not poor Heidi, but the heinous cooking skills of the largely English/Irish population of New England for her inability to appreciate something as noble as the chicken/waffles combination.

Watney: "What's that spice? It burns!" 

"It's black pepper, ma'am."

"THAT'S CRAZY."

5. BARRY BONDS' COMPLETELY MANUFACTURED TRIAL COMES TO A REST. Do not ever, ever lie to the Feds about anything under oath. State officials? Sure. Hell, I encourage you to lie to state officials, especially those state Fish and Wildlife bastards who ask stupid questions like, "Who shot this alligator with a rocket launcher," and "Is that a rocket launcher mounted to your airboat, sir?" or worst of all "Did you know you can't actually have a licensed piece of U.S. Army Artillery bolted to an airboat, much less shoot an alligator with it?" I'm sorry, officers, I thought this was America. 

Anyway, Barry Bonds' trial is over, and now we all know important things, thanks to the expenditure of millions of taxpayer dollars to pursue one baseball player among hundreds who used steroids during in the 1990s. Key findings!

"The shape, size of his testicles were smaller. He had some trouble keeping an erection. He tried some things to resolve that."

Bell said Bonds threatened to cut off her head and leave her in a ditch, burn down a house he helped her buy in Arizona and "cut out (her) breast implants because he paid for them."

Thanks to Jeff Nedrow, you can construct a timeline of Barry Bonds' ball size over time, and can also scratch him off your list of potential dates for your friends. Exhibits A and B, please.

And B, Your Honor: 

 

Don't say this entire exercise has been fruitless, and don't lie to the Feds, ever.

6. THE SACRAMENTO KINGS RAISE THE IRE OF SENATOR JACKSON. Phil Jackson stands firmly against Sacramento moving to Anaheim, and that counts for something since Jackson is as close to Senatorial as anyone really is in the NBA. (Gregg Popovich is so quiet down in San Antonio that he's more like a cabinet-level official in the Stern Administration. Secretary of Labor or something dull like that.)

This story is anything but done, the Kings did have to move, have they considered getting doubly festive and going to Mexico City? It plays to David Stern's obsession with the global market, isn't all that far away, and would allow for what I guarantee will be the most festive crowd in all of professional sports. A scenario where Ron Artest could be hit with a bag of urine? Mariachi bands? Univision-quality cheer squads? 

I pity Sacramento, but if the Seattle Sonics' scenario has to play out yet again, let's go ahead and get something truly spectacular from the deal. A fiesta, if you will.

7. LEBRON JAMES MOTHER SLAPS A MAN WITH A SPECTACULAR NAME.  Wealthy people acting a fool does not shock us, but what does surprise in the case of LeBron James' mother allegedly slapping a valet for absolutely no apparent reason is the alleged victim's name: Sorel Rockefeller. How this man did not make the Name of the Year Bracket for 2011 is beyond me, though he's surely entered himself in the field by ending upon the wrong end of Gloria James' hand and the right end of the out-of-court settlement sure to follow.

8. CARLOS BOOZER ALMOST BEAT UP PRINCE WHO IS A TERRIBLE HOUSE GUEST. Please, oh god please let this be true:

Supposedly, Prince changed the front gate to the Prince sign, he changed the master bedroom to a hair salon, he changed the streaming blue waters that led to the front door to purple water, he knocked out walls, he changed the molding on top of the ceiling," Boozer’s former Duke teammate and good friend Jay Williams told ESPN Radio. "Booz was livid."

So in this bit that was not part of the Dave Chapelle Show and that actually happened in real life between Real Prince and one of the few Duke basketball players we would not take a punch from for a hundred dollars, Carlos Boozer then seriously considers beating up the man who wrote "Batdance" before Prince hand him a check for a million dollars and says, "Man, I'm sorry." 

/head explodes

/in a good way

9. BARCELONA IS MORE THAN A CLUB BUT SOMETHING LESS THAN A WEAPON OF MASS DESTRUCTION.  The Champions League rolls on, but two recent data points bear mentioning. The first is that Manchester United defeated Chelsea 1-0, and that the standard commentary for any Chelsea loss must be included in a link you should not play out loud on speakers near co-workers or children.

The second point is that Barcelona in the early 21st century will be remembered by most teams in hushed words spoken quietly in the dark when the fearful witnesses believe no one is listening to their tales of unspeakable horror.

10. REFUSING TO DIE AT THE 10 SPOT FOREVER: The Ever Present Brett Favre PR Death Star and Country Bear Jamboree. There are 1,851 words in Charley Walters' column on TwinCities.com, but only 22 of them are enough send Carolina fans and those tired of those who "play like kids out there" running toward the nearest open window facing out of a tall building.

Don't discount the possibility of Brett Favre, who turns 42 in October, returning next season, but not with the Vikings. Maybe Carolina.

Jimmy Clausen and Brett Favre on the same bench. Just ponder that, and then reconsider just how soon you really want the NFL to come back.

 

Turns out ex-senator Ted Stevens’ "series of tubes" may just catch on after all. Chairman Billy Payne put the Augusta National stamp of approval on today’s technology Wednesday when he told the media gathered for the 75th running of the Masters that the web was just swell.

"We view the Internet as an accepted, safe, efficient, and convenient way" to sell tickets and whatnot, Mr. Green Jacket said of the club’s discovery of Al Gore’s invention. The Masters’ website "offers many options," including live high-definition video, real-time scores, and "up to nine live video feeds."

For sure, the site is nifty, and the Head Patron has extended such capabilities to mobile apps for iPhones, iPads, and Androids (just don’t smuggle your mobile device onto the course or there could be hell to pay).

And that’s not all. After three years of development, Augusta partnered with EA Sports to deliver Tiger Woods PGA Tour 12: The Masters, which launched to rave reviews last month. But did you know the reason ANGC hopped on the video-game bandwagon was to help grow the game of golf?

"Our involvement just may, we hope, inspire greater appreciation for golf and encourage participation [in the game]," Payne said.

Because Augusta’s all about increasing rounds and boosting play, apparently. No argument here that investing all of its proceeds from the game into the newly created Masters Tournament Foundation is a generous act on the part of ANGC. The club’s Junior Patron Program and "kid-friendly" Par 3 Competition show the younger generation just how much fun golf can be, and participation in the Asian Amateur Championship supports "the growth of the game domestically and around the world," Payne said.

And how about the segment of golf that the National Golf Foundation said represented the greatest potential for growth and comprised some 66 percent of new players? You know -- the players who spend $4,300 annually on golf-related activities and goods, according to Pam Swensen, chief executive of the Executive Women’s Golf Association? Can’t wait to hear how Augusta is going all out to save golf by attracting women to the game.

What’s that, Mr. Payne? You got nothing?

Oh, that’s right. Phil Mickelson’s favorite golf course in the whole world won’t allow his wife Amy to join -- and shows no signs of doing away with its "chauvinistic, immoral" policies (according to Golf Hipster’s Gregory Hughes) any time soon. As Hughes pointed out, just whispering about Augusta’s medieval, women-need-not-apply attitude (as Martha Burk had the unmitigated gall to do in 2003), and Augusta-apologists blame you for ruining everybody’s good time.

Billy Payne, chairman of Augusta National, talks to the media prior to the 2011 Masters (Photo: David Cannon/Getty Images)

"Aw, look!" Hughes wrote. "Jim Furyk’s kids are caddying for him in the par-3 tournament! Look how cute they are -- swimming in those massive caddie uniforms…What the hell is [Burk] screaming about?"

Yeah, yeah. As a private institution, Augusta is free to practice prejudice as it chooses. And let’s not forget "tradition." Even promoters of equal opportunity (like this one) enjoy some established pastimes -- such as the Masters itself. Other quaint institutions, like discrimination -- and denying membership to half the population based on gender is just that -- not so much.

Sports Illustrated’s Alan Shipnuck tweeted in passing Wednesday that he believed Payne, as "an agent of change," would eventually allow his club to go coed. "but he has to take this one slowly," Shipnuck typed on Twitter.

By "slowly," we hope Shipnuck meant a pace that’s a tad faster than Ben Crane navigating 18 holes. As Al Czervik might say, "While we’re young!"

First of all, this writer despises Ohio State with a passion. His hatred for the Buckeyes burns very deep, equally as much as it does for Oklahoma, Texas, Notre Dame, and USC ... basically any program worth its salt in college football.

He hates their fans, their condescending attitude towards other fan bases, the "my Dad is bigger than your Dad" mentality, making high school juniors out to be the next Peyton Manning on internet message boards, the whole lot.

He loathes Ohio State because when it loses yet another BCS game, the fans want to run a head coach in Jim Tressel that produced your only debatable National Championship in the modern era. If it’s not Tressel, they want coordinators canned.

For years, Ohio State was the paper champion. Overrated ‘Rivals Babies’ players churn in and out of Ohio State more-so than any other program in the country.

The players look the part, the 6-foot-6, 250-pound quarterback that can run a 4.4 in the 40.

Can these Maurice Clarett’s and Andy Katzenmoyer’s really play?

Ohio is one of the top high school football producers in the country. That is hardly debatable. For every ‘Rivals Baby’ paper chump that comes out of Ohio, you can find just as many great players. Much like any other state like Texas, California, and Pennsylvania.

Ohio State is up there in arctic country during this time of year. Big 10 football is different. For example, you have very average teams like Iowa and Michigan State making improbable runs from out of nowhere. Iowa’s came in 2009, a BCS bowl appearance, while Michigan State caught Wisconsin on a horrible day and looked like a Rose Bowl threat into deep in November.

Current quarterback Terrelle Pryor was the King ‘Rivals Baby’. At times in his college career he has looked amazing, usually against slow talent in the Big 10. Other times he has looked average against defenses that can actually run.

NFL scouts have this monster ranked below 6-foot-nothing, 100-and-nothing southpaw Kellen Moore of Boise State, a team that deserves to be in the BCS much more than Ohio State.

It was announced two days before Christmas that Pryor, leading rusher Daniel Herren, and No. 2 receiver Devier Posey were among five players suspended for receiving extra benefits. However, the act is not severe enough to warrant suspension from the Sugar Bowl on ESPN for millions of dollars.

Don’t get this writer started on Bristol’s influence on this decision. Then you have Mothership Walking Incorrect Fact Mark May say that if Ryan Mallett of Arkansas did what Pryor did, he would be suspended for the Sugar Bowl against Ohio State.

Leave it to Bristol to run out the scripted reply to this great tragedy while Big Daddy walks to the bank.

When this news broke yesterday, the Mothership treated it as Terrelle Pryor had suffered a tragic accident.

Pryor will probably go to the NFL despite being maybe a third or fourth round pick. Pryor’s measurables will make him a popular late bloomer. Some idiot, or genius depends on how good Pryor really is (this writer thinks he can do some things no other NFL quarterback has done. It’s a different game in the 21st century, view it as much), will probably “reach” to get him.

As in the case of former Florida paper gem Tim Tebow, the SEC’s "Great White Hope", it only takes one idiot to make him a first round pick. Or again, genius depends on what happens.

Pryor has faced resentment for some reason since he has been quarterback at Ohio State. Even with Bristol blabbermouth Kirk Herbstreit doing everything possible in order to set Pryor up for Heisman success in 2010. The sports writers on these shows on the Mothership that haven’t the slightest clue what they are saying half the time and couldn’t wait to give the Heisman in October to Michigan quarterback Dennard Robinson.

This was pre-Cam Newton, seems like ages ago. In reality, it was a shade over two months ago. Light years in 21st century media, nearly 24 hours, 7 days a week live SportsCenter. Which is why this writer believes Newton had the single largest impact of any player in one single college football season in the history of the game.

How Pryor is not in the same discussion with Stanford’s Andrew Luck and Washington’s Jake Locker, both white quarterbacks, is beyond me. Even a lefty that plays in snow in October on a blue field is more ballyhooed in the NFL Draft process.

This is the A.J. Green situation Part II at Georgia. Green, arguably a can’t miss wide receiver prospect, got four games for selling his own jersey for around $1,000. Green declared himself eligible for the NFL Draft, more than likely seeing all the million of dollars university presidents are making from his talents. Good for you A.J. Go get paid, kid.

You have a situation with Pryor, a man who has Miami Heat villain LeBron James on his cell phone on speed dial and probably has a LeBron ring tone for it, where instead of merely texting a friend in James he sold his own awards to collectors for around $2,500 so his mother could pay rent and buy food.

Rumor has it, Green’s situation was similar. That has not been confirmed.

Ohio State will not lose a dime for these suspensions next season or this season when the acts occurred. Due to the fact that the Mothership is due to make millions as the BCS games move to basic cable this year, a slap in the face to the people that struggle every day to buy groceries, pay rent, and can’t afford basic cable, Pryor can play on pay-per-view college football in the Sugar Bowl.

Next season when Ohio State uses backups to dismantle Akron, Toledo, Colorado, and Michigan State next season at home, the Miami game on the road is tricky, Ohio State will still be a BCS contender when it goes on the road and faces Nebraska.

Its 2011 alignment with the millions of dollars is on track.

Why is this being allowed to continue to happen?

Seriously. Could somebody with relevance please answer that for me?

Give me a break.

He hates Ohio State with a passion, yet here is a kid that has done everything everybody has asked of him during his time as an amateur athlete except this situation to help out his family while white presidents and cable network executives pocket millions and millions of dollars of his talents.

Yet if the Mothership gave him an award for Sugar Bowl MVP, he couldn’t turn around and sell it to a collector for $500 so he could enjoy it and actually live a somewhat normal life.

The acknowledgement of the why the rule is in place is noted and not debatable. Any booster could drop $25,000 for an award rather than the $2,500 for numerous items Pryor allegedly received.

This is slavery all over again, just inconsiderate of race.

Ban me. Hate me. Cuss me. I don’t care.

I will never watch another second of college sports ever again. I will never care about the life of an 18-year-old after seeing his videos ever again. I will never again watch as another cent is made off their talents while they receive no compensation.

Somebody needs to do something. If you take a serious look into the situation and see the dollars these guys are rolling in and you don’t think it’s slavery … what is?

Pryor did what any decent human being would do—he helped out a family member. Lack of money is the thing that stresses out human beings more than anything

Trouble with this whole process is Caucasian players, Hispanic players, and all other races and creeds of players are just as used as African-American players.

Here’s to hoping Auburn quarterback Cam Newton, whose father was allegedly seeking up to $200,000 for Newton’s verbal commitment just 12 months ago, sells his Heisman Trophy before the BCS National Championship Game.

Here’s to hoping the NCAA finds out about it on Jan. 9 to watch Bristol’s Mothership go into panic overdrive. It already has watered us down with Newton this season and Oregon so you are convinced that the best two teams are in the BCS National Championship Game on ESPN 

This writer won’t be watching. I will worry more about 18-year-old American soccer players because when they can turn pro whenever they want to, they are free to sign with whichever European club they please.

It’s called free agency. The NFL Draft process ought to be outlawed. If the Dallas Cowboys want a two-trillion dollar payroll, so be it.

Wake up, sports fans. Pay $100 for one ticket to a Ohio State, Texas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, USC, or Michigan game and then try to convince yourself you are not the problem, but part of the solution.

Ever notice how I never refer to the Southeastern Conference with examples?

Completely different subject. Completely different sport. Players are bought and paid for in that neck of the woods, and the NCAA is looking the other way*.

(* - Until two years after when the NCAA has already made it money off Newton and can then take his Heisman because it’s the “right thing to do”.)

The whole product is giant sized *.

National championships that can be debated for eternity. Even in 2010, you can’t honestly tell me Auburn and/or Oregon is far better than Wisconsin or TCU, even Boise State. Except, Auburn rolled through a watered down SEC and Oregon beat up on a paper tiger non-conference slate (Rocky Top) and a deplorable Pac-10 where Arizona is considered a good team.

Mark Cuban, put your money away—it's no good here.

These professionals don’t get paid. They created these mythical legends in medium-sized towns all across America that chiefly weren't privileged with professional sports. Then, they hamstrung them when they were winning in recruiting by limiting everything under the sun and to top that all off, they ripped 30 or so scholarships away in the process from these programs.

Suddenly, football is then relevant in places like Eugene, where 20 years ago Oregon was a joke. Boise State and TCU are examples of what parody in modern-day college football can bring.

These players that would sit on rosters at the 12 best programs in the country are spread out all over the place these days.

Though, not enough to allow Akron to hang with Ohio State next season with or without Terrelle Pryor.

If a crime is punishable and is against the rules, so be it. Fine. Just be consistent. Either it's serious enough to warrant an immediate suspension or it’s not.

Don’t appease the college football nation’s capitol by not spending Pryor because they need television ratings after moving the games to basic cable.

Pretty soon, non-conference games between Ohio State and USC will be on pay-per-view. Big time programs already have their weak non-conference slate on pay-per-view. Obviously, the practice is paying well because they continue to do it and more and more programs are starting to see the light.

Maybe when that inevitability takes place will people finally wake up and realize what they are contributing to.

To superficial observers, this week's European summit in Brussels will look like any other high-level conference.

Prime ministers, chancellors and presidents will rub shoulders, pose for photographers, and dally with waiting journalists. Once again it will all seem a bit like a school reunion. But the pretty pictures of smiling politicians cannot conceal that the continent is in crisis and the European Union is falling apart.

It was a horrible year for Europe. In May, Greece narrowly escaped bankruptcy by receiving emergency loans from other European countries. In October, France came to a standstill over president Sarkozy’s pension reforms. In November, Ireland was forced to accept help from a trillion-dollar fund meant to stabilise the common European currency, the Euro. To make matters worse, speculations are growing that further countries will soon need vast amounts of money to prevent them from crumbling under their debt loads. And we haven’t even mentioned the ongoing soap opera around Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi’s affairs.

As we are watching the European crisis from afar, questions need to be answered. How did Europe get into this mess? What will the fallout be for Australia? And finally, are there any lessons for us to learn?

What is surprising about Europe’s decline is the fact that it took international experts so long to detect it. Not long ago, there were books predicting the beginning of a new golden age for Europe.

There was The European Dream: How Europe’s Vision of the Future Is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream by US sociologist Jeremy Rifkin; Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century by British foreign policy expert Mark Leonard; and The United States of Europe: The New Superpower and the End of American Supremacy by US publicist T. R. Read. Now available at heavily discounted prices, such overly-optimistic accounts of Europe appear completely outdated, though they are only a few years old.

It would be easy to blame Europe’s sudden decline on the fallout from the global financial crisis. Such scapegoating would be convenient, but it is inappropriate. The economic crisis only brought to the fore a number of developments that started long before Lehman Brothers collapsed.

In most European countries, government spending grew rapidly after World War II. In 1960, government spending as a share of economic output was around the 30 per cent mark in most European countries, even in Sweden. In Switzerland, it was as low as 17 per cent.

By the year 2000, the state had grown dramatically across Europe. In Spain, it accounted for 39 per cent of GDP, in France it was 52 per cent and in Sweden it was 55 per cent. In the case of Sweden, this was actually a slight improvement because the Swedish state had consumed more than 60 per cent of GDP in 1980.

In order to finance such excessive public spending, taxes were no longer sufficient. Budget deficits became the normal state of affairs across the continent.

For a while, this seemed to work. European countries could offer generous benefits, pensions and public services. No wonder American authors looking at Europe were impressed. However, European spending levels were not sustainable as the financial crisis revealed.

On top of the results of irresponsible government spending, Europe now suffers from the attempt to unite countries in a monetary union. The export-dependent German economy, the Celtic tiger Ireland and the sluggish economy of Greece were too different for a single currency to work. These countries would have required different interest rates. Instead, they were subjected to a one-size-fits-none monetary policy. Now that this experiment has failed, the struggling members of this monetary union are neither allowed to leave the Euro zone nor to default on their debt.

For Australians, there is no reason to watch this unfolding tragedy with schadenfreude. Europe is still one of Australia’s most important trading partners. If it continued its way into financial meltdown, we are bound to feel it here, too. Capital markets are highly connected, as we found out in the GFC. A series of sovereign defaults of European countries would surely affect Australia.

There is another reason why Europe’s decline should make us worry. It demonstrates all too clearly what can happen if you put off good economic policy making for too long.

If you went to Ireland or Spain in 2005, you would have experienced countries that were overwhelmingly optimistic. Government finances looked fine. House prices kept going up. Unemployment was low.

If all of this reminds you of Australia, it should. At the same time that dark clouds were forming on the horizon, Europe celebrated its last big party. By the time the clouds burst, it was too late to stop the deluge.

Above all, Europe’s crisis is a warning against political complacency. Australia should take notice or risk falling into the same trap.

Dr Oliver Marc Hartwich is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies. His report Europe’s Painful Farewell: An Essay on the Decline of the Old World was published by CIS today and is available at www.cis.org.au.

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Ever wondered what happens when the smartest guys in the room turn out to be saps? Then cast your eyes over to Ireland, where the Celtic Tiger that roared through the dawn of the 21st century is being rapidly turned into cat food even as I type. How bad is the Irish economic crisis? The truth is that nobody knows.

The need for a bailout is the consequence of the government's incompetence. It should pay for its failure

It never seemed to matter in the boom years, but strictly speaking, there is no such thing as a Celtic Tiger. The image was coined in the mid-90s to compare Ireland with voraciously expanding economies in east Asia.

Now that boom has turned to bust, and Ireland is negotiating a European bailout, the mythical nature of the beast is poignant. There were no big cats in Dublin after all.

But there were fat cats. The Irish boom saw a vast property bubble puffed up by appallingly managed banks with the complicity of idle regulators and political cronies. House prices between 1994 and 2006 rose by around 520%. The relationships between developers, their financiers and the officials who authorised the building spree were usually cosy, often corrupt.

Towards the end of the growth years, the country's financial sector descended into full-blown mania. Banks doled out credit indiscriminately and borrowed on international capital markets on a scale that far exceeded the nation's economic output. When the bubble burst, the government stepped in to rescue the banks, but their debts were ultimately bigger than the state's capacity to raise revenue. Ireland started sliding towards insolvency. Hence, the bailout.

Not all of the boom was bogus. The initial expansion was driven by growth in exports. A young, well-educated, cheap labour force attracted investment. So did an aggressively competitive 12.5% corporate tax rate. Ireland positioned itself as a lean, buccaneering start-up economy, challenging Europe's unwieldy giants. Membership of the single currency gave seamless access to export and capital markets.

But there was a shift at the start of the 21st century. As success fed into higher disposable incomes and demand for houses, the returns on property investment soared. The government, in turn, became dependent on tax revenues – and in some cases bribes – from the building trade. Politicians kept consumer demand buoyant with generous public spending, while rewarding developer friends with public works contracts. Ireland's narrow elite ran the economy like a casino and awarded itself free chips. No one, save a few lonely economists, had much incentive to call time on the party. By 2007, around one in five Irish jobs depended in some way on the property market.

Much of that story is familiar from other countries caught out by the credit crunch. But Ireland's unique misfortune is to have, in Brian Cowen's Fianna Fáil government, leaders who shipwrecked the economy and then capsized the lifeboats. The initial crisis response in 2008 was designed in such a way as effectively to absorb the doomed banking sector into the state, with no safeguards for taxpayers. While fitting as a kind of poetic commentary on what had happened in the boom years, as policy it was insane. Every cent of tax revenue disappeared down a black hole of debt; a ballooning budget deficit demanded brutal austerity measures – public sector cuts, tax rises – which drained any remaining cash out of the economy and prolonged recession.

Ireland is not bankrupt yet. The Treasury is forecast to run out of cash some time next spring. Finance minister Brian Lenihan had hoped to bring the deficit under control and appease nervous investors before then. But the country's eurozone partners are not waiting to see if domestic remedies work. They are forcing Ireland to take medicine prescribed by the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The exact shape of the package is not yet known, but it is likely to include tens of billions of euros in bailout money in exchange for more tax rises and spending cuts.

It is a dark day for Ireland. It is also a momentous event for the rest of Europe. When Greece needed bailing out in May, the EU was unprepared. Markets were demanding action and a panicked response was cobbled together. Dublin's case is subtly different. Creditors were certainly nervous, but the European intervention is essentially pre-emptive. Ireland has sacrificed control of its budget for the greater good of restoring investor confidence in the wider eurozone.

It is easy to portray that as an act of cruel martyrdom. Eurosceptics in Britain have been quick to weave a tale of Irish sovereignty surrendered to Brussels bureaucrats. Thus is the folly of the single currency proved, they argue.

But on the question of sovereignty, the European angle is overplayed. It is debt that has deprived Dublin of budget autonomy. Countries that suffered financial crises ended up taking money and policy dictation from the IMF long before the euro was born. At least today, Ireland retains its political rights in EU institutions. Arguably, the fact that this is a pan-European rescue gives Dublin more clout than it would have in a lonely one-on-one fight with the bond market.

Besides, without access to ECB emergency finance, Irish banks would have collapsed last year, possibly taking the Irish state down with them. The ensuing panic would have infected the UK, regardless of its euro-aloofness.

The threat to Ireland now does not come from visiting European officials. And the last thing the country needs is a surge of embittered introspection and "ourselves alone" nationalism. In the past, when Ireland has suffered economic malaise, younger generations have sought a better life elsewhere. One of the great achievements of the boom was to retain the services of a young, cosmopolitan, entrepreneurial class. They helped transform the country's economic prospects and its self-confidence. Now the Tiger generation is eyeing the exit.

There is a real danger of Irish society being hollowed out, with a discredited political elite holding nominal power and no legitimacy while an angry, disoriented, heavily indebted and increasingly poor population chase dwindling jobs. Ireland needs social and political renewal as much as it needs economic recovery.

That cannot happen under the current government. Fianna Fáil and Brian Cowen have no authority left. Their task now is to oversee the technical agreement of the European rescue to the satisfaction of international creditors and then, with some stability restored, call an election.

The situation is not irreparably bleak. There is much productive potential in a young, well-educated – and increasingly cheap – labour force. Private sector investment has proved surprisingly resilient in the downturn.

Ireland can still be a good place to do business. But it needs to rediscover the vigour and imagination that fired the early years of the boom and jettison the lazy cronyism and corruption that marked its decadent demise.

The moral bankruptcy of Irish politics is the biggest obstacle to recovery. The EU can bail out the budget; only a public vote can clear out the government.

Tigers are such magnificent, strong creatures that I think a lot of people don't realize how endangered they actually are. Leonardo DiCaprio and World Wildlife Fund president and chief executive Carter S. Roberts recently wrote an article in The Washington Post covering the great threats facing tigers today and how the U.S. can help address them.

"A century ago, some 100,000 tigers roamed the wilderness across much of Asia," DiCaprio and Roberts write. "But 100 years of human overhunting of tigers' prey, such as deer and wild pigs, and of poaching driven by demand for tigers' skins and other body parts has been catastrophic. As few as 3,200 tigers remain, living in only 7 percent of their original natural habitat."

Now, 2010 is the Year of  the Tiger and a special tiger summit in St. Petersburg hosted by Vladimir Putin is scheduled for November 21st through 24th (after being pushed back from September). The purpose is clear: save tigers from extinction.

The 13 Asian countries where tigers live in the wild have agreed, in principle, to a goal of doubling tiger populations by 2020 (the next Year of the Tiger) and will try to figure out how they can do so at this summit. But it would make a world of difference if the U.S. attended this meeting as well and put its weight behind this issue a little more.

"Washington must signal its commitment by sending its top diplomat to St. Petersburg: Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton," DiCaprio and Roberts write.

While the U.S. is not home to any wild tigers, it could play a strong role in these efforts by working with others to step up international conservation efforts.

Additionally, there are almost twice as many tigers living in the U.S. (in captivity) as there are in the wild worldwide. The U.S. can do a lot more  by putting more money into their monitoring and into enforcement of animal protection laws.

Help push Obama to send Secretary Clinton to Russia, increase funding and technical support for tiger conservation efforts, and create stronger regulations for tigers in captivity in the U.S. by signing the petition below.

Photo Credit: law_keven via flickr (CC license)

Follow Change.org's Environment page on Facebook and Twitter.

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Is it true that there are cows on the roads? Yes there are cows on the roads. If you are lucky then you might get two dogs and a dozen pigs too. If you are not so lucky then you might find a tiger and it can eat you too. Welcome to India. This is how India has been and will be for quite some time. When you see a cow, pig, dog, or a tiger on the road then take a picture. Because that is something you might not see for your next visit. India’s is changing and it is changing real fast. But that’s not the point. Whenever I try to read any reference to India or an article written on India by foreign media then it is hard for them to get through 200 words without mentioning few of the standard things.

And those few things are the things which were being mentioned about India ever since I knew I was an Indian. Now that I have access to material published much before I was born, that material is no different. Without doing an extensive research these, are the most regularly used phrases or clichés or references used by the foreign media. You already know about the cow reference. We are left with nine. Here we go. 

1. License Raj  and the Burra Sahibs : This is history. Dusted and done. The license raj still exists in some sectors and most of the government offices still are full of burra sahibs. That is changing slowly but surely. When someone mentions the license raj again in any of the articles then two things are certain. The author can’t get creative than going beyond the obvious or the author is trying to fill up the word count limit on the article. In some cases it could be both.
2. Economic reforms of 1991 : Let me settle this once and for all. India has achieved economic independence in the summer of 1991. This summer is dubbed as golden summer when four persons with the utmost power came together and burnt many of India’s self-built economic walls.  Alright this is hard to avoid but it has been 20 years now and the summer 2011 would be its 20th anniversary. Yet we need to get away from it. Please.
3. Comparing India with elephant : Does anyone here think that elephants are slow? Have anyone seen an elephant run and wreak havoc? If you are comparing India with an elephant only under the assumption that elephants can’t run then you are so wrong. And if you thought elephant is the animal to represent India, then you are wrong again. Tiger, not elephant, is the national animal of India. Now don’t tell me that there are only 1411 tigers left. I might add that up to this list.
4. Bollywood and Cricket : India is not all Bollywood. There are several film industries in India and bollywood is just one part of India’s cinema. Many innovations in Indian films have come from down south. The most expensive film to date, Robot is a film made in Chennai. And that is not Bollywood by any means. Don’t make the mistake of representing the whole of India with just Bollywood. I know it will take some time for people to get there, but get there faster. Coming to cricket what can I say. It’s not your fault. It’s ironic that Indian media chose to highlight the splendid performance from Laxman against Australia when the whole world is concerned about commonwealth games. Yet that should not be an excuse for you to hyphenate India with cricket and Bollywood.
5. India’ demographic dividend : This is rather new and came into existence only few years back. India’s population was supposed to be a burden till yesterday and it turned out be a boon today. India’s population will be young and will remain young for a generation. Giving an edge to India, which other Asian nations like Japan and China don’t have. That’s good to know. Now get over it.
6. xxx million people are living under $x per day : This beats me. The statistic has been stale for not sure how long but I am amazed at the number of articles and people still using this statistic. I read that 300 million people are living on less than dollar per day or 220 million people are living on less than one dollar per day. There is nothing wrong with this statistic. It has become monotonous and may be the writers have to find new ways of providing perspective.
7. Bumpy roads, Pot holes and traffic jams: People take potshots at India’s potholes. We understand. India has poor infrastructure and there are investments coming in to get past that. Traffic jams are ubiquitous in Indian cities. Remember, Rome wasn’t built in a day. Neither were Tokyo, New York and London. Phrases like “Potholed road to prosperity” should be rephrased.
8. Curry : India is diverse. Many Indians eat curry and some don’t. This reference is infrequent but should be avoided. Referring to curry is like referring to Burgers or French fries. You don’t refer to either burgers or French fries when you refer to France or Germany, do you?
9. India has more cell phones than toilets : Providing the number of subscribers is a mandatory requirement for the cell phone companies. That gives us the figure of 700 million odd subscribers and 50-100 million of them could be duplicate connections. I get this count as there is a proper way to count it. There is no such requirement for plumbers association of India to provide the number of toilets they have installed. Or the toilet which was installed is a hole or a so-called western toilet. I might even say that the count for toilets just came from someone’s hat. Just curious, why are you counting toilets anyway?

It is not even fair for a country which reeled under foreign rule for 200 years and expect it to  come out clean and lead the world in the 21st century. After all India has enjoyed a mere 63 years of Independence. There are countries which enjoyed a longer spell of independence or always independent and yet lag behind India on several parameters.

Try writing something without mentioning any of these 10 things above. May be then you would be able to write something new. I know. It is hard to get away from the stereotypes and the clichés the foreign media has been used to for as along as India existed.  Start trying and please stop counting toilets.

PS : I have to give some credit though. India is used to be often hyphenated with Pakistan. There was hardly an article about India without a mention of Pakistan. That changed and changed for good. India is now mentioned along with China and the US and I acknowledge the shift. India should be remembered and recalled for its umpteen entrepreneurs who are bringing tectonic shifts in the way people live. India should be known for its frugal engineering and great money-saving innovations. 

[Image from Flickr user : Mehul Antani]

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Filed under: Personal Finance, News

On the homepage of The Huffington Post today there is an article titled: "7 Shocking Facts About Minority Unemployment." It's great that this esteemed news site is taking a deeper interest in minority unemployment (more accurately black unemployment when you look at the piece), and they do a very good job in general of covering black news. What's odd about this list is that BV on Money has been writing about most of these issues for months. We have whole articles on each topic that The Huffington Post gives a few sentences to a piece. If they are "shocked" by these facts, we're as shocked by the superficial nature of their reporting.

The sole piece of new information they give that we have not covered relates to the prison population not being counted in unemployment statistics. While this has a shady racial undertone in its presentation that is not explained in the article, we'll let that pass. Admittedly, this is something that has not been covered in BV on Money. Kudos to The Huffington Post for breaking this small piece of news regarding black unemployment. But regarding the other six facts, the readers of Black Voices are not shocked at all.

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Related:
+CNN's Black in America Gets it Wrong on Black White Wealth Gap
+Unemployment For Blacks Remains High at 16.5%: Latest Report
+Black Males See 53% Unemployment in Milwaukee
+Black Unemployment Dips Overall, While Black Teen Joblessness Rises
+Congressional Black Caucus Weekend to Focus on Black Unemployment, AIDS
+Fighting for Jobs, Fighting for You: A Message From Rep. Barbara Lee, Chair of the Congressional Black Caucus
+White Families Are $95K Richer Than Black Families, on Average
+Black Women Get Good News About Unemployment Again
+Open Letter to Obama: Black Unemployment Must Be Addressed
+Black Unemployment Rate Increases 700% More than White

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In particular Dr. Boyce Watkins has made it his mission to fight African American unemployment on all fronts, using BV as his megaphone to address the issue. For example Dr. Watkins wrote a widely circulated open letter to President Obama asking that he address this crisis issue, in addition to a stream of popular pieces that have drawn attention to the issue for over a year. In addition, we ran an exclusive op-ed piece from the chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus, Rep. Barbara Lee, addressing jobs and black unemployment. Because of our consistent reporting, BlackVoices.com readers are not shocked by the facts that The Huffington Post presents as revelatory. This sort of reminds you of that moment in history when the British "discovered" (and renamed) Victoria Falls after being shown the site by locals.


If anything, perhaps the editors of The Huffington Post are "shocked" that the black unemployment rate is twice that of whites, that better educated blacks have a harder time finding work than poorly educated whites, or that the wealth gap between blacks and whites persists. But we knew.

It's very interesting when readers comment on Black Voices or write in to the site asking why we exist. When pieces like this one about the economic realities facing African Americans are treated by a mainstream site like breaking news, it is a great demonstration of why the world needs BV. There are still many matters for which having a focus on the black perspective is very necessary, and finance is one of them.

 

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The Alphabetical this week is really just about the Tennessee-LSU game's insane finish, but there's other, less amazing things like Bama destroying Florida, Denard Robinson's onslaught on reason, and one very unhappy BYU fan.

A is for AMAZING HAPPENS HERE. The Alphabetical this week may just be 26 separate entries devoted to the madness of the last two minutes of the Tennessee/LSU Game. 

You know a classic piece of live football atrocity when the highlight film begins with a converted 4th and 14, especially when it's against a Tennessee team that has no business being in the game in the first place, a Tennessee team playing a lawn chair at center, a Tennessee team with linebackers whose ACLs explode for no reason, a Tennessee team whose depth chart just reads "NOPE" at no fewer than seven major positions. Tennessee's there, and like a novice climber stranded in the death zone on Everest, you know it's a matter of time before they run out of oxygen, take off their clothes, and begin rolling in the snow like dying men suffering from mountain madness and cerebral edema. 

Tennessee's already doomed in theory as the inferior team late in the game even on basic football princlples before you activate the computer worm capable of crippling the entire football matrix as we know it: Les Miles
Some men just want to watch the world burn. Others set it on fire accidentally and call their friends to come over and watch. Les Miles is both. 

Jarrett Lee throws a pass into triple coverage to start the sequence. Jarrett Lee, he of the multiple pick sixes and benching two years ago. He's back, and that's how bad LSU's offense is at this point with Jordan Jefferson attempting to "make pass go that way into hands." They now use him as a kind of running quarterback, which he's not. That would be Russell Shepherd, who is now a wide receiver who never gets the ball. Jordan Jefferson, the non-running QB, scored LSU's only TD to this point in the game on a wholly uncontested 83 yard run through the gut of the Tennessee defense. You knew the demons were in charge of this game from this play forward, and also that when you run on offense as nonsensically as LSU does, the only logical cure is to face an equally nonsensical defense. Tennessee rose to that challenge, and we toast you for this, Volunteers. 

LSU gets the ball on the two as a result of a pass interference penalty (natch) and does what any good coach would do with three downs and a running clock with 32 seconds left  in the game: call a quarterback sweep with your non-running running quarterback. Like much of Dangermouse and Cee-Lo's work together, the matchup of Gary Crowton's playcalling and Les Miles' attitude makes for sometimes nonsensical but always disturbing, affecting work. 

The clock runs. You do two things when you might want to stop the clock on the goal-line down 14-10 with a running clock. You may spike it---wait, that's not happening. There's a thing about spiking the ball at LSU, if you'll recall. They could call time out, but they have no timeouts because Les Miles is pretty sure the federal government demands those back at the end of the year if you don't spend them all. Though they've been on the two yard line ever since the pass interference penalty, the LSU offensive staff suddenly remembers OH MY GOD WE HAVE A GOAL LINE PACKAGE and sets off a fire drill the People's Republic of China would call "disgracefully hurried and chaotic." 

Huge men sprint off the field and onto it. The clock winds. Les Miles is seen throwing live chickens onto the field. Who knows where he got them, but they're all part of the plan now. The LSU sideline's complete anarchy triggers a disproportionate reaction on the Tennessee sideline. They send off three men, put in four, and one of the three sent off rushes back onto the field like a child terrified of missing the school bus for a field trip. (This child then ends up in the wrong town because they got on the wrong bus.) Derek Dooley wraps the headset cord around his neck and attempts to choke himself to death rather than watch what's happening. The crowd silences itself by placing a eighty thousand bourbon bottles in eighty thousand mouths at once and draining them simultaneously. 

Then the most magnificent part of the play happens. This sentence appears in its own box because everything about it is spectacular: 

Then the ball is snapped with the game on the line between two major college football powers with one team having 13 men on the field and another with a non-running running quarterback who watches in horror as the ball is snapped over his head and covered for a game-ending busted play. THIS ALL HAPPENED IN REAL LIFE. 

Competence is overrated as a form of entertainment while incompetence can be side-splitting stuff. I watched this in a bar full of people in Tuscaloosa, and the reactions were giddy not because of any real mass hatred toward both teams, but because they knew that with a quality arsonist like Miles on the sidelines something was getting set on fire: LSU, Tennessee, or possibly both. Oh, and LSU scored on the next play when a penalty was called on Tennessee for too many men on the field because a 9-4 defense is effective but highly illegal, and Tennessee players started weeping on the field.

I'm applauding, all of you, as loud and as hard as I can in your general directions. We shall not see another ending to match this beautiful hatchet job until next week when LSU beats Florida at home 7.5 to 2 on a blocked extra point and a half a point awarded for hitting all three crossbars on a single missed FG attempt. It's in the rulebook, look it up. 

B is for Boulder'd. This is how low the Buffaloes have fallen: Colorado fans rushed the field after beating a 1-3 Georgia team that lost to Mississippi State. There should be some kind of body to sanction this kind of poorly applied field-rushing, but...well, it is Colorado, and it's been Donner Party dismal there. You go right ahead, Buffaloes. 

C is for Catenaccio. Italian for "door-bolt," and the soccer term for locking down a lead by dropping everyone into defense and watching you, the opponent, flail uselessly into the face of wall of defenders, Alabama currently ranks 107th in the nation in tackles for loss. This is acceptable because Alabama simply wants to stop everything you do right at the line of scrimmage, score 24 points or so, and just wait for you to implode while they run the ball, slap down every attempt you make at doing anything whatsoever on either side of the ball, and work on the art of time-killing. They don't care about conquering: trench warfare and strangulation will be more than enough for them, thank you very much, and they happen to excel at it. Of all the hypothetical BCS matchups, the Oregon/Alabama one tantalizes the most since it involves a team one hundred percent committed to rapid scoring offense facing a team that would be happy to hammer out a ten point lead and then punt in between face-punching defensive series.  

They are to college football what Italy is to World Cup soccer: precise, tactically conservative, and brutally efficient. Forza Alabama! is too Euro-fied for the All-American Brawndo tastes of the Alabama fanbase, but it would be an oddly fitting cheer given their style of play. 

D is for Dantzler. You're no Woody Dantzler, Denard Robinson. First, you're not named "Woody," an underutilized nickname in the 21st century thanks to Toy Story. Second, Clemson sort of occasionally had a defense to back up the former Tiger great's game-length solos on offense, something Denard Robinson does not have in the slightest. Tennis game-planning had to be the case for Michigan: break serve a few times, get the ball last, and hope you could run out the clock just as you skated across the goal line. Denard Robinson crossed the goal line with 21 seconds left to put Michigan up 42-35. (Tennis math seems to work just fine for the moment for Michigan, actually.)

Third, you're not Woody Dantzler because you're better than the legendary Panther of the Piedmont, and that hurts to admit because Dantzler is my favorite obscure spread option QB of all time, the brave prototype who ran Rich Rod's nuclear veer attack before it was even a proven commodity at the FBS level. Going for 494 yards of offense and 5 TDs all by yourself in a game where you received no help from your defense whatsoever gets you the throne, son. Enjoy its splendors. (Splendors= the double plush terrycloth robe that says "Dancin' Dantzler" on the back. They even washed it for you!) 

E is for Ebbed. As in receding from its high point at the worst possible time. Ben Chappell's line for the Hoosiers is the stuff not normally seen outside of the Big 12 South: 45-64, 480 yards, and 3 TDs to one INT. Michigan's defense is horrible, and as good as it would feel you can't even blame Greg Robinson with a secondary full of walk-ons and part-time epileptics (they only seize when the ball is in the air; otherwise they're fine.) 

F is for F#$@*# Seriously: Denard Robinson's 905 rushing yards are more than 91 teams totals on the year in total rushing.  

G is for Gums, Bleeding. Northwestern QB Dan Persa took a shot in the face from an onrushing Minnesota defender, the kind of awful, neck-snapping blow to the upper body that in football comes with yellow flags, and in rugby comes with a cup of tea and complimentary kick to the balls. Against any other team this goes for a wounded duck for INT, or a fumble, or otherwise a positive play, but this was against Minnesota, so it flies into the back of the endzone for an acrobatic TD and eventual Gophers loss. Dan Persa's lip is probably split today making speech difficult, but even he could mouth the words "Tim Brewster is so fired" with ease and accuracy. 

H is for Hale. And hardy, as Robert Griffin found just what his rebuilt ACL and Baylor needed for a football comeback: the Kansas Jayhawks. Griffin finally recovered some of his freshman form against the Jayhawks, who appear to be protesting their unequal take of Big 12 football revenue by driving the value of the brand through the floor. Griffin's 380 passing yards, 64 rushing, and four combined TDs outgained the total production of the entire Kansas team in a 55-7 rout of the Jayhawks that was as fine a bid for Sun Belt membership as one can ever hope to see. (But Kansas fans, remember: this rout was brought to you profanity-free by Turner Gill.) 

I is for Inefficiency. Jacory Harris is not a fan of it, and like master power bench presser James Henderson, he would rather roll with them big dollars than mess around with spare change. Harris was only 13-33 on Saturday against Clemson, but on 6 of those 13 throws something really exciting happened. Harris threw four touchdowns to two interceptions, leading Miami to a 30-21 victory in Clemson and generating plenty of sideline excitement when Miami celebrated in their traditional fashion: punching each other in the groin. 

via the Seventh Floor  

J is for JDAM. Oregon had 31 first downs and 626 yards of offense on Saturday. Which Saturday? Oh, any of them at this point. At this point Chip Kelly's offense has become like the Joint Direct Attack Munition: strap it to anything and it instantly becomes a well-targeted piece of weaponry. Oregon remains on pace to smash Oklahoma's 2008 scoring record after their 52-31 victory over Stanford despite losing their starting quarterback to off-the-field nonsense in the offseason and having nothing you would define as a go-to receiver in their offense. (Don't even tell me, non-Oregon fan, that you could pull "Jeff Maehl" from your pocket before reading this. You didn't and couldn't.)

They are to offense right now what Alabama is to defense: a system whose composite parts make up a greater whole no matter the parts. The running back will have at least 200 yards, the quarterback will pass for 200 and run for 100, and as a defense your best plan is to pray someone fumbles once and gives you a stop. 

K is for Knox. Jim Knox is going to die doing his Mountain Dew Red XTREEM sideline reporter work one day. Just know that he'll die happy, and most likely in front of your horrified eyes. 

His inspirations never end. Remember: no other sideline reporter has ever been dropped from a couch in Manhattan, Kansas, and no other sideline reporter ever will. 

L is for Least Comprehensible Playcall of the Week. Any time Florida ran John Brantley on a pure speed option to the short side of the field. It really had to become comedy at one point, since otherwise the call was a minor tragedy in the making as defenders hammered down on the running back and dared the dropback passer to run. Brantley didn't even look like he wanted to live, much less run an enthusiastic, committed option. He made Chris Leak look like an option genius, and I remember Chris Leak running exactly two successful options his entire career at Florida. 

M is for Milquetoast. Can one call an offense polite? Texas' comes close, as their blocking is genteel, their passes gently lofted to receivers, and their running backs courteously avoid hitting the hole too hard in order to avoid offending anyone who might appear in the gap.  They have a monopoly on team courtesy, however: Texas extended Oklahoma drives with rude penalties and didn't so much have the courtesy to write up a decent thank you note. Like Florida, Texas is a ridiculously talented team who can't figure out what to do with the weapons they have, and the resulting fumbling has been embarrassing to watch. 

N is for Nooner. For one reason or another the noon shift of games, usually stocked with at least one surprise, have been uniformly dreary this year. Even the upset special of Saturday--Illinois taking an early lead in Champaign on Ohio State--turned out to be the usual Ron Zook swoon as Illinois was ground down slowly by the hammering Buckeye offense and some serious dosage of Tresselball. (BTW, long-term strategic advantage of Tresselball: when you have a game where your star QB only throws for 76 yards, no pollsters get on you for looking like warmed-over crap because "That's just the way they play." INeg

O is for Opine. The best open mike moment of the entire weekend came during the BYU/Utah State debacle. Over the air: 

BYU fan: I CAN'T BELIEVE WE'RE LOSING THIS GAME. 

Utah State fan: GO BACK TO WHERE YOU CAME FROM! 

BYU fan: THIS IS TERRIBLE. 

Utah State fan: Boo! Booooooo!

BYU fan: GO COUGARS! THIS IS NOT FUN! 

I kind of like to imagine Will Ferrell doing the dialogue here. I also imagine he's eating a hot dog, because that's what i do in blowout losses: hit the concession stand to eat my sorrows. 

P is for Pain. Texas Tech lived about three awful games in the span of a single game against Iowa State. First, a blowout in allowing Iowa State to go up 24-0; then a comeback to tie the game at 24; then a horrendous collapse capped by a play almost as humiliating as Fat Guy Touchdown: the onside kick attempt returned for a touchdown for Iowa State. The Cyclones scored 28 in the fourth against Texas Tech, because when they collapse they like to make sure that whatever is standing beneath them is killed and killed quickly. 

Q is for Questionable Quarter Quadrant. This has to be an event on par with blood red lunar eclipses, but every team that played a game for the SEC east this week lost: Tennessee, Kentucky, Vandy, Florida, and Georgia all took the o-fer on the weekend, with only South Carolina's flawless victory over the bye keeping the division from taking the universal donut on the week. The West, by contrast, won all five of its games, including three over SEC East opponents. 

R is for Repossessed. Rutgers had been missing payments here and there, falling behind to lesser competition all year, but the Repo Man came at last for Rutgers against Tulane, a truly not good team who patched together some trick plays and horrendous play by the Scarlet Knights into a win. Greg Schiano, having lost to Tulane, will now probably win the Big East because that is just how horrendous and inconsistent the conference has been. 

S is for Sprinkler System. Jerrod Johnson at quarterback, dishing balls in all directions at once. Sometimes they lead A&M back to a tie with minutes left in the game, as they did against a resurgent OSU Cowboys team in the second half of their Thursday night game. Then again, Johnson's picks helped keep OSU in the game, and ultimately gave them the win when on the final drive he drilled a deep ball right into the hands of the Cowboys' defense for the game-winning possession and ensuing field goal. The ball's going somewhere, and you may not know exactly where, but give him enough time and Jerrod Johnson will eventually water the whole field with passes. 

U is for Unimpressed. Go ahead and win by a field goal, Washington. It's not like Lane Kiffin's gonna look impressed. 

via 30fps.mocksession.com

Just after this a Washington defender came over and accidentally bumped Kiffin. At that point the sad music from Charlie Brown began playing, and it just all got a lot funnier from there. 

V is for VanderBeek Of the Week. 

This week's Weepy Dawson goes to Tennessee, who had players literally weeping openly at end of the game. No fun shall be made of you, for what happened there was truly inexplicable and tragic, and also because the men weeping can power clean you or me through the roof with ease.  

W is for Withdrawn: The vote of confidence in NC State, who we ranked with shaking hands last week before they lost to Virginia Tech this weekend 41-30. Cartons of skim milk all around to the NC State coaching staff, and shame on us for believing anyone in the ACC wasn't going 8-5 or 5-8 this season like every ACC team ever. 

X is for Xanax. I don't even want to think about how the LSU/Florida game is going to end this week. The only guarantee in life is that no matter how horrifying and incomprehensible the end of the last LSU game was, the only thing capable of topping it is the next LSU game. Just listen to him: even he's managed to boggle his own mind. LES MILES IS HAVING FUN ON THE LES MILES RIDE BECAUSE EVEN HE DOESN'T KNOW WHAT'S HAPPENING. 

/mindblown

Y is for Yes. [Jeopardy Buzzer Noise] "What is are Mike Locksley and Butch Davis both still employed?" Locksley was on his best behavior in a 38-20 loss to UTEP, while Butch Davis and UNC beat ECU 42-17. 

Z is for Zapp Brannigan. The blowhard space captain from Futurama, whose quote may be useful for the ever-growing list of fans whose teams whose teams suddenly self-detonated this weekend: 

Stop exploding, you cowards. 

Zapp knew it was a long battle, and so should you. Hold tight: today's top five are tomorrow's casualties, and you should remember that the race is not always to the swift, nor the strong, but sometimes to those mad enough to keep going no matter the circumstances. I don't even think you need to ask who we're talking about here. 

 

Section: iPhone / iPod touch / iPad, iPad, iPhone, iPod touch, iDevice Apps

iPhone, iPod and iPad product updates and announcements for September 29, 2010:

• Apps
• Accessories

Apps

• Three iPhone and iPad entries made the list of finalists at this year’s International Festival of Independent Games. From the puzzle-meets-orchestral gameplay of Auditorium to the abstract, artistic gameplay of feelforit and guided platform style of Spirits, they really do represent some of the best that independent gaming has to offer with plenty of creative, unique style.
• Carl R. Andrews has released an update to Grumps, one of those games you simply can’t put down, no matter how hard you try. The objective of Grumps is to prevent your virtual avatar from being hit by grumpy faces while collecting all the happy faces (smileys). A parade of grumpy and happy faces fall from the top of the screen, and you simply tilt your device sideways, avoiding collision with those evil grumps that destroy one of your five lives. Your mission is to collect the smileys to gain points, and when you successfully reach a set amount of points (10,000) the environment (background and avatar) changes, thus keeping the visuals appealing and pleasant to watch.
• Time Geeks is a revolutionary seek and find game based on pixel art graphics, retro style and a lot of fun—just like in the ‘80s. The gameplay is extremely easy to understand in both the main game as well as the mini-games. The difficulty increases but always keeps within reasonable limits so everyone can enjoy the game. The graphics and the original music are designed by the artist Markus Gmür.
• Mykhaylov Dev Studio has announced Fast Tarot 1.1 for iPhone and iPod touch. Like an Oracle in your pocket, Fast Tarot is based on the ancient art of cartomancy and allows to receive answers concerning you future, to estimate chances of success, to warn of a danger or to give advice. Tarot cards are special ancient cards for divination. Interpretation of each card depends on its place in the deal and position.
• Dot Next has announced the release and immediate availability of ABC - Magnetic Alphabet 1.0, their classic magnetic board game for iPhone and iPod touch. ABC - Magnetic Alphabet is an ideal tool to help preschool age children become familiar with letters and numbers. With 28 5-star ratings and 11 four-star ratings ABC - Magnetic Alphabet is one of the most appreciated apps in the education category.
• Moonswing has released Bet Settler 1.4 for iPhone, iPod touch and iPad. This latest version of the popular betting calculator features an expanded range of bets, many of which are not found on any similar type of calculator in the App Store. With this latest release, Bet Settler, which has already reached Number 15 in the Paid Sports App category in the UK, as well as number 2 in Ireland, is now more powerful than ever before.
• Sinusoid Pty Ltd has released Audio Kit 1.3.1 for iOS. Audio Kit is a collection of four applications which are essential for those working in audio and sound. The app features a real time Spectrum Analyser, a Scope to display waveforms, an SPL Meter, and a Signal Generator producing sine waves, white noise and pink noise. Users can view a real time spectrum of audio, identifying peak frequencies, as well as view the actual waveform of the audio signal and much more.
• While Firemint has previously applied permanent price reductions, this is the first limited-time sale of Real Racing. At a saving of 40% off, Real Racing will be available for the ridiculously low price of only US$2.99 (€2.39 / ₤1.79 / AU$3.99) for one week from Sep 30. This is the lowest ever price for the App Store’s champion racing game, proud recipient of an Apple Design Award for bringing “console-like performance and capabilities” to iPhone. Because the sale is for a limited time only, racing fans will need to get in quick to avoid missing out.
• Marko Games has released Sporty Women V2 for iPhone and iPod touch. Sporty Women V2 is a fun, entertaining and informative app with a great variety of wild and intense women competing in various sporting events and other activities. The app also has informative training tips, techniques and regimens that amateur and professional athletes use to train for the various sporting events included in this app. Plus you’ll get fun and little known sports histories.
• Bow + Tie has announced Burrow 1.1, their new physics-based iPhone game. Hungry and adorable woodland creatures have set their sights high as they aim to eat the delicious and healthy food in the recycling bin. Their only hope of achieving this is by being launched from a trashcan-canon into the bin. With realistic physics simulations, attractive graphics and fun sound effects, Burrow allows for intricate and satisfying puzzles throughout 50 levels, with 50 more on the way.
• OCRKit Mobile is a text recognition app specifically developed for mobile use and brings a fast, accurate and easy to use text recognition to iOS. By taking a picture of a document, letter, contract, poster, note or business card OCRKit recognizes the text and shows it on the screen. Version 1.1 adds support for six new languages and improved the text recognition for all languages. In addition, OCRKit is now also designed for iPad and the user interface got improved as well.
• VelvetRope for iPhone provides partiers with more nightlife options in the Las Vegas market. VelvetRope has consistently delivered increasing value to nightlife venues, generating new clientele in a down market. Recently finalized partnerships have added VIP guest list access for 8 of Las Vegas’ most renowned venues, establishing VelvetRope as the premiere app for nightlife connoisseurs, especially those in Sin City.
• Jiin Feng has announced Battle for Rebirth: Savage Tiger Fighter’s Repentance 1.0.2 for iPhone, iPod touch and iPad users. This martial arts fighting app was designed by a Kung Fu instructor and 3D programmer. The game features sophisticated 3D fighting characters, large, realistic locations, and the smoothest fighting moves available. This latest release also features special weapons to be unlocked during game play.
• Quantum Clockwork has released Morris 1.0.0 for iPhone, iPod touch and iPad users. Quantum Clockwork developers have taken a collection of three classic medieval board games, revamped them for modern usage and are now releasing them in a new product under the name, Morris. Taking advantage of smart phone technology and retina displays, Morris provides users with quick, intensely challenging games, amazing high resolution graphics and iOS4 fast-switching.
• Weather HD bucks the trend of boring weather apps by displaying the weather for your city in stunning high-def video, and it’s now available for the iPhone and iPod touch. Originally released for the iPad and maintaining its position as a top-selling app, Weather HD lets the user experience the beauty of Mother Nature on the go, displaying both the current and forecasted weather with gorgeous animations that blur the line between photo-realism and fantasy. Why just check the weather when you could be soaring through the day’s forecast instead? From explosive thunderstorms to a full harvest moon beaming through serene fluffy clouds, this app brings the elements to life, and it’s all for under a dollar.
• BeeTV has announced the launch of the BeeTV online service into public beta, as well as the BeeTV Guide for iPhone and iPod touch devices. BeeTV is a TV show and movie recommendation service that helps consumers find content on the television, web and mobile platforms. The BeeTV service enables TV and movie fans to receive personalized recommendations, based on their individual tastes and preferences, from the over 10 million TV shows, movies, and original web series options and more.
• IngZ, Inc., has announced the availability of two new mobile apps—Tour Guide Tool (TGT) and touringZ—which allow area experts to create custom GPS-guided audio tours that can be enjoyed by anyone with a smartphone. Currently available on the iPhone App Store, these applications connect guides and travelers through multimedia, GPS-based experiences.
• Jambasoft has released Camera Duo 1.0, a new application that provides the ability to simultaneously capture of photos and video on compatible iPhone devices. Providing two different photo capture modes, Camera Duo was designed to be both easy to use and to take advantage of the latest technologies available. In “Real Photos” mode, the app will use the physical camera to obtain each photo. In “Extract from Video” mode, photos will be acquired from the video data and sequentially saved.
• After two month of private beta, the Mopapp team has announced the immediate availability of the free public beta. Mopapp does Mobile Sales Analytics: it allows mobile application developers to track and analyze sales for their apps. It integrates with most major stores, including Apple iTunes, Google Android Market, RIM App World, Handango, MobiHand, and counting. Everyone is invited to sign-up now and get a free subscription to the Professional Plan.
• Pearson and the Commonwealth of Virginia have launched the nation’s first-ever complete social studies curriculum for the iPad. Pearson has developed four new iPad Apps plus digital curriculum aligned to the Virginia editions of Pearson’s U.S. History and World History programs for seventh and ninth graders. The new iPad program will be piloted in several schools for 12 weeks beginning November 1 as part of Virginia’s Beyond Textbooks initiative.
• Seek and Find, a new app exclusively for iPad, is a fast-paced game focused on family fun and education as adults and children alike work with each other (or against!) to attain high scores while also exercising their memory skills in this new reflex trainer. Essentially, players are asked to find and identify cute, funny faces hidden among a plethora of different faces by locating the particular face and touching it with their finger. The quicker a face is found the more points a player receives! The game is easy to pick up but also has a bit of depth as it features 45 levels and offers various mini-games. As levels progress, the game gets challenging as faces start to move around, look similar to one another, become shadowed, and more.
• Daniele Fruzzetti I created Muse Tour Guide for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad for fans to get all the info about the Muse Tour, including daily updates and concert set lists. Search within the app for YouTube videos of concerts. Search for concert photos on Flickr. The Muse Tour Guide also provide info about ticket availability and links to buy them.
• Same goes for Bon Jovi.
• Widget Revolt, a maker of popular apps for the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch, has announced an update to its time management utility app, Timewinder. Timewinder is a multi-step timer and alarm clock utility app that allows users to compose and run timers that are comprised of varying length steps. Each timer step can play a different alert sound, display text, change a background picture, and repeat. Users can save and run timers they have created to support common everyday activities such as exercise routines or cooking timers.

Accessories

• The House and Senate have passed the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act authored by Representative Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.). This landmark legislation will make it easier for the blind and deaf to have access to the Internet, smart phones, television programming and other communications and video technologies. Rep. Markey also released a new video today on the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act. The video highlights the landmark accessibility features built into the iPad, iPhone, and similar devices.
• Solid Line Products, LLC has announced the company is now taking orders for its brand new, all-in-one leather case & Bluetooth keyboard for the iPad for shipment next week. The Bluetooth 2.0 silicone keyboard is built into the quality leather folio case designed to protect the iPad from nicks, scratches, and scuffs. Designed for those who find the iPad’s soft keyboard impractical for any serious typing, the built-in keyboard pairs seamlessly to the iPad with three simple steps. The case allows for easy positioning of the iPad at an optimum angle for viewing a horizontal screen and typing. Put another way, Solid Line’s case allows consumers to use their iPad as they would a laptop as needed.
• Booq has announced the Boa folio iPad case. Boa folio features a three-position design for typing, presentations, and desk work, making your iPad as versatile as your work day. Available at booqbags.com and retailers throughout the country, booq’s innovative designs help make today’s creative professional more mobile and stylish than ever. 

Full Story » | Written by Kirk Hiner for Appletell. | Comment on this Article »

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Before last Thanksgiving, Tiger Woods was living his life as he saw fit - cheating behind his wife and childrens' backs, living a double life, and God knows what else. Until both The National Enquirer and Jaimee Grubbs decided to target him, Woods' off-course activities were mostly unsubstantiated whispers in certain circles. Those whispers usually didn't leave Orlando or Vegas.

But when the world became aware of his philandering ways, Tiger Woods immediately lost significant endorsements. AT&T didn't need Tiger as a poster child for texting. The best a man can get? Not a Perkins waitress, according to Gillette. Tiger was no longer G enough. Maybe R.

Easy puns aside, just about a year removed from the beginning of the mess Tiger's life spiraled into these last ten months, what impact has Woods had on the endorsement market?

Sports Business Journal looked at the entire marketplace this week (verdict: more athletes, less money) but also spent significant ink on Tiger, the self-inflicted impact, and the reach of his actions to the pockets of the PGA Tour.

First, Mark Steinberg weighs in on what the scandal has done for Tiger's own opportunities to be a pitchman. (RIP Billy Mays.)

"There is still demand, for sure," Steinberg said. "I’m not sure we’ve had the right offers yet. But I’d say the time is right where I’d start to look at expanding his portfolio."

"Right offers" probably do not include offers from gambling sites and AshleyMadison.com, a site promoting arranged extramarital affairs. But there may be some other less racy offers on the table.

As for the impact his affairs have had on his athletic peers, brands are obviously now more cautious about contracts and language protecting themselves in the event of such morally hazardous revelations. Then again, Ray Lewis is sponsored by Old Spice, so that can be thrown out the window like the Raven he rides on to shoot lasers into Saturn. There also is little deference paid to Kobe Bryant's personal issues, which certainly were worse than those Woods faces.

On a broader level, the biz doesn't appear sure what impact Woods' downward spiral had on Tour sponsorships. Then again, it's hard to even say accurately what Woods' impact has been in the prior fourteen years on Tour. It ranges from labeling Tiger as the only face worth endorsing on Tour (untrue, ignorant opinion) to modest impact. In truth, Woods' presence and dynamism created more opportunities for golf at large, but he was not the sole reason golf experienced a boom that just happened to coincide with the greatest American economic expansion since World War II.

Since 1996, Tiger's rookie season, until the latter portion of the last decade, people were getting richer. The technical recession under George HW Bush had already thawed by the time Bill Clinton took the Presidency in early '93. By the elections in '96, everyone was winning. Save for a very brief reactionary recession to 9/11, the economy continued to explode. (Sure, a lot of it was paper worth, but contracts are signed on papyrus.)

Woods' surge to the top of golf and the sporting consciousness just happened to coincide with an even more compelling American economy. The companies that love rich people - financials, autos, etc. - were in golf already. They just had a bigger audience now because of the combined interest Americans had in golf's 21st century superhero and spending obscene amounts of fake wealth. The PGA Tour stood to benefit.

(If this were a book, I would delve in chapter upon chapter of macroeconomic and PGA Tour analysis in some kind of interwoven, highly engrossing narrative. But, this is a blog, so we'll leave it here.)

With the economy now struggling to move forward in a tangible growth of true individual wealth and jobs and coupled with Tiger facing his worst season on Tour, the folks selling sponsorships have some serious challenges. Like Tiger, though, they are better off than they were ten months ago.

The simultaneous rise of India and China, arguably the great story of the 21st century, hasn't so far inspired great cover art.

Cracked Magazine's epic "The 6 Least Sportsmanlike Moments in MMA" has spurred me to highlight a dark chapter of MMA history I've been meaning to feature for a long time: Gary Goodridge vs "The" Pedro Otavio at International Vale Tudo Championships 1 (IVC 1), July 6, 1997.

I've written about the historical context in which this fight took place in my MMA History series:

...the era when Brazil didn't just export talented fighters to the rest of the world, instead Brazil played host to top international talent at major events. With the UFC on the run in the states, and every attempt to compete with the UFC on PPV having failed, there just wasn't an outlet for the sudden explosion of American MMA fighters. Between the "stars" produced by the early UFC's and the discovery of MMA by top American wrestlers, there was a surplus of fighting talent in the states.

Unlike the early events like Desafio, Circuito de Lutas and Brazilian Vale Tudo Fighting which featured only Brazilian fighters. Promotions like the World Vale Tudo Championship, the International Vale Tudo Championship, and Universal Vale Tudo Fighting sprang up and put on many shows featuring top Brazilians and American fighters including UFC vets Dan Severn, Oleg Taktarov, Gary Goodridge, Steve Jennum and Pat Smith as well as top wrestlers (and future UFC and PRIDE fighters) like Dan Henderson, Kevin Randleman, Tom Erikson, and Mike Van Arsdale. (Watch these matches between Marco Ruas and fellow UFC vets Pat Smith and Steve Jennum).

Brazilian stars more than held their own. Whether it was jiu jitsu exponents like Renzo Gracie, Murilo Bustamante, Carlos Barreto, Wallid Ismail and Fabio Gurgel or Luta Livre champs like Hugo Duarte, Johil de Olivera, Ebenezer Fontes Braga, Pedro Otavio and Eugenio Tadeu or muy thai-based fighters like Marco Ruas, Pedro Rizzo, Wanderlei Silva and "Pele" Landi-Jons.

As I detailed elsewhere, the era of Brazil hosting big time MMA climaxed in 1997 with the disastrous Pentagon Combat show, but IVC continued into the 21st Century and even featured big time fights as late as 1999, before they lost Wanderlei Silva to PRIDE.

IVC 1 was a tournament featuring Goodridge and Otavio as well as UFC veteran Cal Worsham. There was also a "Superfight" featuring former UFC champ Dan Severn against Ebenezer Fontes Braga, the most formidable of the Luta Livre fighters of the 1990s.

Here's how Cracked summarized the action:

Gary was under The Pedro in butterfly guard and suddenly his entire offensive strategy centered around The Pedro's dong. Gary snaked his foot into his opponent's tiny trunks. He was wiggling his foot, sometimes feet around in there, switching between massages and attacks. Sometimes he was just trying to pull the trunks completely off, because at this point why not? Make no mistake, fight fans: Inside The Pedro's cup, a second and better championship bout was taking place between Penis and Foot. The crowd booed as Gary's toes wiggled out from under The Pedro's briefs which read "The Pedro" on the butt. It was a celebrity footjob that the executives at Tinactin wish they would have thought of first. This fight inspired a torta shop in The Pedro's home town of Rio de Janeiro to name a sandwich after him. It's a hot dog and a human foot served in a salty cup. Sorry.

Like all romances, the love affair between Gary's foot and The Pedro's balls ended badly. After they stood up, Gary threw a blatant field goal kick into The Pedro's crotch like a rape victim in a self-defense book. Then he reached into The Pedro's trunks and used his battered dong as a handle to throw him to the ground. And it didn't stop. Ever. Gary punched it. He squeezed it. He told the cops it fell down the stairs. Within five minutes, Gary Goodridge was finding more uses for a human dick than I did during two years of puberty. And I grew up on a farm.

In the era in which this fight took place, turning a man's junk into cube steak was technically allowed in MMA rules. The referee practically had a nervous breakdown as he struggled against his instincts to stop this inhuman basket strangling. There was so much testicle damage being done that 20 years in the future, The Pedro's son was shrieking at his own hand while he faded from existence. The crowd booed and whistled and sometimes threw garbage because no one could agree on the proper social etiquette for watching a man legally kill a penis. But legal or not, exploiting the delicate nature of genitals is no way for a gentleman to win a fight.

It's really a testament to the sporting nature of the early NHB (No Holds Barred) fighters that this sort of thing happened as rarely as it did. Other than Royce Gracie kneeing Kimo Leopoldo in the groin at UFC 3 and Keith Hackney pulverizing Joe Son's nuts at UFC 4, I can't recall many instances of groin attacks from the old days. 

Presumably since it was in the interest of no one, fan, fighter or promoter for the nascent sport to devolve into a nut shot contest, they held back to protect their own jewels from reprisal. 

In the full entry, we'll look at the "blow by blow" as well as a deadly ninjitsu technique that may have inspired Goodridge and the video of the full fight. 

In the image above, Cracked breaks down the many and varied techniques Goodridge used to incapacitate The Pedro.

Below is a diagram from  Ninja Mind Control by Ashida Kim, a "classic" of "ninjitsu" -- ie hoo ha and hogwash -- of the "Monkey Steals a Peach" technique. 

Here's the text, please use this forbidden knowledge wisely! Bloody Elbow is not responsible for any misdirected chi kung attacks:

Monkey Steals the Peach
This is the classical name for the upward groin slap. Drop to the right knee, swinging the arms like windmills to distract the enemy and deflect any defense he may offer. The left arm ends in jodan, the rising forearm block, protecting the head as you drop low and slide forward without stepping. The right arm swings up and back, circling from the shoulder. Turn the palm up as it swings between the enemy's feet to stun him.

Application of Monkey Steals the Peach
Whip the arms as described and strike the enemy's groin with the open palm, fingers bent at the first join in a Monkey Paw or Tiger Claw fist. The impact will lift the enemy off the ground. Those skilled in chi kung can direct energy up the Ch'ueng Mo channel of the body and stop the heat. Followers of the Iron Hand styles immediately clench their fists tightly, with a crushing grip, and jerk the hand sharply back to the near hip, effectively ripping away the genitals. Massive blood loss causes death.

One of the truly undisputed good things about MMA is the way it has blown away the haze of humbug from martial arts and given us a laboratory to test what works and what doesn't in a real fight. 

Here's the full fight:

Ken Fox fell in love with the wall of death at 13. By 16, he was riding it. His two boys were on it by 11, and now one son's fiancee is part of the act. But he won't let them ride on the roads because it's too dangerous…

A wall of death is a fairground attraction – a giant barrel around the inside of which motorbikes, and sometimes go-karts, are ridden horizontally while an audience looks on from a gallery built round the top.

I think I first heard of them through reading comics: wall-of-death rider was very much the sort of profession pursued by lantern-jawed heroes of Tiger and Jag, which I had on subscription as a boy. In Roustabout, the ghastly Elvis film of 1964, the only interesting sequence occurs when Elvis, who has fallen in among "carney" (or carnival) folk, is challenged to ride what he insists on calling his "motor-sickle" around the wall of death. The proprietor of the wall – who is also given to odd pronunciations – says, "Cent-riff-uggal force holds you to the side – you couldn't fall off if you wanted to." (Not strictly true, as Elvis discovers.)

In the inter-war years, there were perhaps 50 wall-of-death shows touring Britain. Today, there are two and the one that tours most extensively is the Ken Fox Troupe, which might also be called the Ken Fox Family. The troupe consists of Ken, his two sons, Luke, 23, Alex, 16, and Luke's fiancee, Kerri. These are the bike riders – "the 21st century hell riders" as the slogan painted on to the "bally" or the stage-like area outside and to the front of the wall itself, has it. Ken's wife, Julie, takes the money at the booth to the side of the bally, and his best friend, Neil Calladine, does the spieling from the bally itself, drawing in the crowds with the traditional enticement: "Step inside now!"

The show begins with Kerri entering the pit at the foot of the giant barrel, and giving the bikes a wipe down. I'm going to risk stating outright that Kerri has an excellent figure, shown off to advantage by knee-high boots, leather trousers and a skimpy black top, and after she has finished the fairly cursory clean, she is given a round of applause by one young man in the gallery – until he is checked by the look on his girlfriend's face. Kerri exits the barrel, then returns a few minutes later with the men of the family. Ken kicks shut the door behind them, so that it is flush with the side and the riders begin revving up their bikes.

In that confined space, the sound alone is thrilling, instantly blotting out the adjacent fairground organs (we are at the Lincoln steam fair) and making me think of all the other shows on offer as namby-pamby irrelevances. As I look down the sheer wall, I can't believe the bikes will climb it and when the first rider, Alex, gets up to speed and begins circling horizontally, I still can't believe it. Then Luke climbs higher on the wall and begins swooping crazily about, coming within inches of the top. Next, Kerri does the same thing in a go-kart; then Ken does some trick riding, including side-saddle with no hands, legs on the down-facing side of the bike. I can't get my head round this: centrifugal force might be holding the bike to the wall, but what is holding him on to the bike?

At our first meeting, I ask Ken his age, and with a defiant grin, he replies: "I am not going to tell you." Julie adds: "There's lots of women up and down this country who still think he's in his 20s." Ken is a trim, muscular man who could pass for 40, but has the paternalistic charisma of an older man. His whole life has been a clash of the rebellious iconography of the wall and traditional family values.

"Ninety-nine per cent of fairground attractions are run by families," he says.

His own family ran a shooting arcade on Pleasure Beach at Skegness. Directly opposite was a wall of death. From the age of 13, transfixed by the racket, the glamour and speed, Ken was making tea for the riders. By 16, he was an apprentice rider himself – and so began a bachelorhood dedicated to riding on, and maintaining, a series of touring walls.

In 1997, Ken married Julie, with a blessing held inside the wall of death at the Great Dorset steam fair. They had met about 10 years before that when Julie went to see the show at Southport amusement park – she was working as a dental receptionist at the time. She began going round with the show at weekends. "I liked the life, the fresh air ... "

In short order, she qualified for her heavy goods vehicle licence and was driving a 40-tonne articulated lorry. I ask if this was the biggest lorry in the Ken Fox convoy, at which Ken raises an eyebrow and replies, "Mine's the biggest lorry."

Home is a patch of ground outside Ely, in Cambridgeshire, where the family park their caravans and lorries for a couple of months in winter. During these interludes, Luke and Alex attended local schools. They liked the schools, and liked it that they weren't there all year. The rest of the time they were educated remotely, using packs supplied by the Department for Education, designed for touring families.

Ken's winter task is maintenance work on the gear. According to Julie, he doesn't need a machine to be broken before he fixes it. "It's called keeping ahead," he says. I ask if he is a workaholic, and he says "no" and Julie says "yes" at exactly the same time.

Ken runs a very tight ship indeed. "You've to sit up straight at meal times," says Luke. This applies even if the table is a plastic one in a field. He doesn't like the idea of his sons riding motorcycles on the road, either – which neither of them does. I mention that my own eldest son was thinking of applying for a licence and Ken shook his head, "If you look at the accident figures ..."

But the wall of death is not named for nothing. At least one British rider has died on the wall (although I can't get his, or her, name out of the Foxes – I think it may be taboo for them to talk about it) and several in America. Earlier this year, Ken broke his shoulder. Both boys have fallen off – Luke most seriously while "trying to impress a pretty girl upstairs" (he means on the gallery).

Ken taught the boys how to ride on the wall when they were 11. They had both wanted to learn earlier but, as Alex says, "You have to be tall enough to touch the ground with your toes when you're sitting on the bikes."

Ken's shows have been supplemented by a succession of riders from outside the family – quite often women. I ask why, and he grins. "The extra flash on the front – the extra bling. And they learn better." There's a long tradition of women riding the walls. In fact, the first wall operated in Britain was brought here from South Africa in 1928 by the suburban-sounding riding partnership of Billy and Marjorie Ward.

Kerri was recruited by Ken six years ago with what must have been one of the most compelling ads ever to appear in Colchester job centre: "Wanted: Wall of Death rider to replace recently retired lady rider."

"With the sex discrimination laws," says Ken, "it was the nearest I could come to saying I wanted a woman rider."

Kerri, whose own early life had been itinerant, as the daughter of an army major, answered the ad. It helped that she was a trained horse-riding instructor. When she landed an interview, her father insisted on going too. "He wanted to make sure I wasn't running away with the circus – I mean, that they were a nice family."

The modification of her first remark is necessary, because the Ken Fox Troupe is a kind of family circus, and it is the itinerant nature of the life that appeals to them. "You see," says Ken, "if this place [the gaudy, cacophonous extravaganza that is the Lincoln steam rally] turns out to be bad professionally or financially or personally, then we all know we'll be somewhere else on Monday. And that's the thing, you see – we've always got Monday."

The Ken Fox Troupe are at the Great Dorset steam fair today and tomorrow, and at the Haddenham steam rally on 11 and 12 September.

Johnchow.com teaches others about blogging and making money, which begs the question, “Why do I care about being a celebrity?” Reason is because celebrities make more money than anyone and blogging and other online tools help make this possible. Celebrities like Shakira, Tiger Woods and Julia Roberts are all A-list mainstream celebrities who earn hundreds [...]

For years, Tiger Woods was on top of the world like no golfer we'd ever seen before. Now that he's crashed back to earth, it's fair to wonder. Can he get back up again?

In the past nine months, Tiger Woods has fallen faster and harder than just about any athlete in history. We all know this by now, but it has to be underscored—we've never really seen something like this before.

Since his arrival on the PGA Tour, the questions surrounding Tiger have evolved.

From "Can this amateur beat the pros?" to "Can he prove it wasn't a fluke?"

Then, from "Can he keep beating people like this?" to "Can anyone beat him?"

"Can he beat Jack Nickalus' Majors record?"

"How much will he beat Jack Nickalus by?"

It all grew more surreal with each passing year. And then this year happened.

In April it was, "Can he still beat people?" Now: "Will he ever beat anyone again?"

Even at the highest levels, golf renders everyone human. You can be the greatest golfer on earth, or even in the game's history, but there's just no getting around it: Some days, the golf course wins. It's like the ocean. Some days the current is stronger than others, but it never stops, and eventually, the ocean always finds a way to remind us we're inferior. So does golf, even among the very best.

But Tiger cast doubt on all of that. He made golf's ocean seem like his own, personal lap pool, and for a little while there, you could say that Tiger was playing a different game. Competing against ghosts, himself, and the soul of the sport.

It sounds like heresy to wax poetic over this now, after the revelations that Tiger was really quite a disastrous human being during much of this stretch. But still. Tiger Woods was the only golfer I've ever seen that made golf look something less than impossible, and golfing perfection something close to attainable.

What we've seen from Tiger has been nothing less than very best and worst of what humans can do in life. He mastered his craft to a level that almost none of us can ever know firsthand. He was so good, we called him inhuman.

And now, as his future twists in the wind, he's been so distinctly human that more and more, we're beginning to wonder whether he'll ever be good again. Erratic, vulnerable, apathetic, and often irrelevant—all of a sudden, he's just like the rest of us.

Does that mean he's finished? Over at New York Magazine this week, Drew Magary wrote a pretty compelling essay on the question. His answer? Yeah, it does:

Perhaps Woods would have been able to withstand this horrible year if there were an actual person behind all the ads. But there isn't. Athletes like Woods and LeBron James were raised to cultivate a brand identity, and when you're raised that way, your brand identity becomes your actual identity. There's no separating the two. Woods spent his entire life cultivating his image, and when that image was destroyed, he was destroyed. There was no actual person to fall back on. No separation of church and state.

When Tiger Woods had the image of being an indestructible force of nature, he was precisely that. He needed that reputation. It fed him. And now that it's gone, he has nowhere else to draw strength from. Tiger Woods built his perfection upon the illusion of it. And that's why, as far as major championships are concerned, Tiger Woods's career is now over.

It's a fair interpretation from someone I respect a whole lot. For my money, Drew's the best sportswriter online, comingling the perfect amount of insight and entertainment, and tearing through the coporate-sponsored veneer of 21st Century sports to give us an unsentimental look at what this stuff really means.

But he's wrong here. It's popular to be unsentimental about Woods these days, because frankly, he's left us very little option. We've learned more about Tiger Woods in the past nine months than we had in the previous nine years, and none of it's been flattering. Even when he's talked about his Buddhist faith, it's been as an explanation for infidelity.

So I understand where the critics are coming from.

Woods was raised on a golf course, sheened for presentation by billion dollar corporations, and (clearly) never  developed into anything resembling a decent human being. His world has been insulated from the start—first by his father's design, and later, by Nike's.

But what struck a chord with me is the idea that this is somehow unique to Tiger. I mean, for all the cynicism out there about Tiger and what created this mess, maybe the most unsentimental perspective of all is also the most forgiving. Tiger's just another human.

And as humans, we're all insulated from various realities at one point or another. As life unfolds, we come understand it differently. The attitudes that govern our actions at 16 are very different from those which run our lives at 60. But that only happens after we experience pain, learn our limitations, confront weakness, and adjust. When something pops our little bubble and smacks us in the face. The difference with Tiger is his bubble was stronger than ours, and went unchallenged for years.

He's been the best practically since birth, and because of that, he's never had to confront the demons and doubts that plague normal people. He's rich beyond anyone's wildest dreams, he's won at everything, he's had a beautiful wife, and for the last 15 years or so, he's been pampered to death by a media grooming him as some sort of athletic deity.

Now that his reputation's been shattered, a number of people wonder whether he has the tools to weather the adversity. And right now, he doesn't. It's completely accurate to say that Tiger has never to "play from behind" in life or in golf. But it's completely ludicrous to say that he can't learn.

How else do we do evolve? Humans only change through pain, and the process isn't pretty.

We all hit rock bottom sometimes. Tiger's behavior for the past 15 years was more reviling than most, but that's not a reason to think he can't or won't recover. That's just what it took to pop what seemed to be an impenetrable bubble insulating him from the character judgments of the real world, and all the pain that comes with it.

Now we're watching him grapple with the wreckage he's created for himself, trying to cobble together something resembling a coherent round of golf, and it's seen mixed results. It's been six months.

When someone as famous and successful as Tiger Woods gets broken down, it's easy for cynics to call his downfall inevitable and permanent, but also naive. Fact is, regardless of fame and success, we all get broken down in life, and generally, it takes a little while to get back up. Turning weakness into strength takes time, especially for someone that's never confronted weakness before.

I'm not betting on Tiger Woods' redemption because he's Tiger Woods, the most inhuman golfer I've ever seen. I'm betting on him winning again because—and maybe this is where I'm being naive—where Tiger may lack character necessary to weather this storm, this storm is exactly the sort of thing that builds character in people. And beneath the fame and marketing campaigns, Tiger's just a person. Give him time.

For now, it's an open question as to whether Tiger can redeem himself, let alone in time to start winning majors. But it's absurdly pre-mature for anyone to be offering a post-mortem on Tiger Woods.

"Will Tiger Woods win again, or is he finished?"

Amidst a carrer seeped in surreal speculation, that's about as down-to-earth as it gets. You may not identify with where Tiger's been, but chances are, at some point, you've experienced where he is. Shamed into change.

Ten years ago, Tiger Woods' life was fantasy compared with the rest of us. But life, like the ocean, swallows you whole sometimes. And today, he's been spit back at us as a reality that's all too familiar. He's just a guy, wracked with self-pity, self-doubt, and maybe even self-loathing. It happens to the best of us along the way, except we're not on national television every weekend. 

But that passes. We get back up, learn from our mistakes, and move on.

Can Tiger Woods win again? Win the way he used to? Maybe not, but keep in mind: Betting against human resilience is almost as risky as betting against Tiger Woods 10 years ago. 

In the final days leading up to "The Decision," LeBron James kept a very tight circle. One of the few outsiders who caught a close glimpse was author J.R. Moehringer, whose chronicle of James in the weeks prior to the announcement appears in the August 17 issue of GQ, which launched Tuesday. Moehringer conducted multiple interviews with James and was on his hip in Greenwich, Connecticut when James made his declaration on live television.

Moehringer's article seeks to widen the narrow lens through which we've been viewing James' decision to sign with Miami. We've been gnawing on the how for weeks, which makes Moehringer's examination of the why all the more useful. We caught up with Moehringer by phone on Monday afternoon:

In the piece, you write that you know what it sounds like when LeBron James is BS-ing you. What specifically does it sound like?
It sounds like he's not thinking about the answer. It sounds a bit rehearsed, like he's said it before and will say it again not long after you leave the room. He's been interviewed since he was a kid, and I think he's gotten too good at it maybe. It sounds audibly different than when he's speaking from the visceral part of him. It literally has a different tone to it.

You've written features on Kobe Bryant and other big-name athletes. Is there a particularity to LeBron's BS or is it a uniform brand of athlete-speak?
There's a uniform athlete-speak, but we all have our own music. Kobe is guarded because he's had an up-and-down history with the press. But this is not guarded. That's something different. This is more ... rehearsed is as close a word as I can come to it. It sounds as if he knows what he's supposed to say. He knows the most benign thing he can say and he sticks with that and doesn't deviate. If feels like he's been coached in locker-room speak. When he says something like he's not including other people in his decision-making, you just feel like it's ridiculous.

One of my favorite moments of the piece is when you're looking for a room within this large complex to sit down and interview him. You find one that seems to work for you, but you're told that it's "too private" for LeBron.
His publicist tells me that.

It's a theme that runs through the entire article -- that LeBron can't be alone, something you write in italics at one point. Your conclusion is that LeBron chose Miami in order to replicate his high school experience. You offer a disclaimer about the dangers of becoming a pop psychologist...
It was Buzz [Bissinger] who said that it's always dangerous to be a pop psychologist. Buzz has probably spent more time around LeBron than any writer on the planet, so I was anxious to run my theory by him. And he agreed in part, that it was clear [James] was replicating his high school experience. I think that's what it all boiled down to for me. I was surprised that no one put this together. I agree with Buzz that's it's dangerous to do pop psychologizing, but it seems to me that [James] has one formula for success in his life and that comes out of his high school experience.



This really comes across when you watch the "More Than a Game" documentary about LeBron and the Akron Fab Five. He thrives, he's happiest, he does his best when he is surrounded by friends. He just didn't feel like that was happening in Cleveland. It seems pretty clear that Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh aren't just the best talent he can surround himself with, but they're a combination of talent and friends. He's looking for camaraderie. That's the formula that has worked for him -- and the only one that has worked for him. And that comes out of his early childhood when he was completely alone in the apartment he shared with his mother, not knowing his father, not knowing when or if she'd come home. It seems to me these were formative scarring moments that created this need for constant intimate contact. It came across to me watching the documentary. It came across to me reading Buzz's book. And it especially came across to me when he was introduces to the fans in Miami with Wade and Bosh by his side. He's not just looking to win. He's also looking to be happy, and he's only happy when he's surrounded by people he cares for and trusts. He's at his best when he has his brothers in arms around him and he's at his worst when he's completely alone.

You wrote that "He should have rehearsed. There were so many other, better ways to put his announcement." There's been so much critiquing of "The Decision," but what would you have had him do differently?
I don't think people have critiqued his performance as much as the announcement himself. And I'm surprised there hasn't been more critiquing of what he said and how he said it. That was so fixable. I don't think there was any way the decision was going to be a success. It was doomed from the start. An hour-long documentary about where he was going to play is, on the face of it, such a bad idea it couldn't succeed. But it didn't have to be the debacle it was had he gone in more prepared, ready to say more about the heartbreak that would be caused in Cleveland, ready to say more about New York and New Jersey, ready to say more about how he regretted hurting anyone in this process. If he'd prepared more things to say that were contrite and humble, it would've been a lot better or less grating to millions of people. He wasn't told going in, "You're going to be disappointing -- jilting -- millions of people and you need to speak directly to them. Not talk about winning, not talk about what's good for you, but rather emphasize the idea that you know you're leaving Cleveland in the lurch, and you know that you're disappointing other fans, and that you wrestled with this." That could've been expressed better.

But you think the backlash was inevitable, just by virtue of his picking someplace other than Cleveland? Don't you think that LeBron was going to turn villain the moment he announced he was leaving Cleveland no matter how that announcement was framed?
To some extent. I think he's very analogous to Brett Favre. I think what we've learned from him and Favre is that sports fans in America in the early years of the 21st century don't like a drama queen so you have mitigate the impression that you're being a drama queen. Favre irritates people every year when he wrestles with his decision, but at least when he announces it, he doesn't do it in an hour-long special. You have to be aware that sports fans like their athletes to be self-effacing, humble, contrite when they make a mistake. I think he could've been more aware of the American sports fan today. If someone had said going in, "We need to minimize the appearance that you're being narcissistic," I think it could've played better.

Americans may like self-effacing athletes, but they follow narcissists. LeBron's favorables have dropped but I'm guessing more people will watch him next season than ever before.
Yes, I think we're simultaneously turned off by narcissists and fascinated by them. That's not to say that I think LeBron is a narcissist. I think "The Decision" itself, the TV special, was narcissistic by definition. But the jury is still out on whether or not LeBron is a narcissist. But he has a public image as a narcissist. And, yes, you're right. His favorables may go down, but the ratings on Christmas Day when the Heat play Kobe and the Lakers will be astronomical. But what will this do for his marketability? What will it do for the sneakers and the sports drinks he endorses? I don't know. Time will tell.

But there is a psychic toll to being a villain. We've never really seen this in sports before where someone goes, almost overnight, from hero to villain -- and not for anything they've done. This guy didn't cheat on his wife. He didn't have affairs. He didn't do drugs. He wasn't stopped for a DUI. All of this rancor, all of this animosity because of a marketing decision, because of a TV special. This is unprecedented in sports history. We don't really know how forgiving Americans are going to be long-term. Brett Favre was a villain last year. Then he put together the greatest, grittiest season of his career and all was forgiven. And now we're back to square one where he's being villainized again.

Mike Royko once said that sports fans are the biggest a******s in America. Is that what we've seen over the past month or so?
I think sports fans are not blame-free. They are complicit in this because 13 million of them tuned into this show. The vehemence, the animosity in the days that followed were completely out of proportion. Okay, the guy sat there for an hour and talked about himself. Maybe he's guilty of too much self-regard but how does that merit the kind of scorn that's been heaped on him. I just don't see it. He was a free agent and he went to play for two guys who came into the league with him he loves like brothers. I just don't understand this kind of animosity -- more animosity than we saw for Tiger. Tiger was the butt of jokes but I didn't see this kind of hatred or anger aimed at Tiger. Is it because in the midst of the worst unemployment since the Great Depression, the guy is publicly wringing his hands about where to go make $100 million? Maybe that's part of it. But I think the Royko quote is a good one at this moment, because I don't think anyone is blameless in this whole fiasco.

What do you make of the notion that LeBron is taking mental notes of everyone taking shots at him, as he tweeted? You asked him in the interview about anger as a motivator. At the time -- this was before "The Decision" -- it didn't seem like a premise he was comfortable with --
Yeah, I got the sense he was uncomfortable talking about that. He might be in touch with his own anger, but he's not very good at expressing it. What I make of that tweet is that it says more about Twitter than it does about LeBron. If everyday you have an open Twitter account, you might be tempted to tweet things like that and it doesn't really reveal as much of your true nature as we like to think. If he starts to play with that kind of anger, with that Jordan-esque vengeance, then we can look back at that tweet and as a foreshadowing. But from what I've seen, this is still a guy who doesn't play with a lot of anger.

Of course, he never walked through the firestorm that he's walked though in the last month. But it's easy to say in a tweet that you're taking mental notes. It's much harder to go out and live it every day and let that anger be your fuel. I really don't think I see that as being part of his personality. I see him as a guy trying to be happy as much as he's trying to win. Winning is part of happiness, but being on the floor with guys he loves and trusts is as much a part of his motivation as anything, and it's a bigger part of his whole psyche than anger as far as I can tell at a distance, peering at him across the barriers of helpers and handlers and friends and family. Right now the LeBron we all know is a filtered LeBron. I don't know that any of us have had a real look at the real LeBron. He's still only 25 and still very much evolving. That's the other reason why I think it's unfortunate people have cast him as a villain. He's just begun.

I thought I had seen it all, but noooooo!

Golf is full of surprises as weird names are still atop the leader board at the end of Day Three of the PGA Championship held at Whistling Straits in Kohler, Wisconsin.

The main attraction on Saturday was the Chinese professional Wenchong Liang.

Liang calmly shot a course record 64, then politely explained through his interpreter saying that he would like to bring golf to the public eye of his country from his good play and hopes to continue success tomorrow.

Our leader is currently at 12-under par, that being the sizzling Nick Watney, previously said from England, but if I bothered checking a fact or two, is from Northern California.

Watney just increased his lead to four shots at 13-under par. Watney is playing perfectly right now fairway to green.

Does Watney have the stones to finish this on Sunday is the question that many are thinking through the night as we await the final 18 holes of this great championship.

Six players are stacked up at nine-under-par, four shots behind.  Out of these good players one to two of them will make a serious run tomorrow, possibly.

Tiger Woods has finished with two birdies to fight his way back to three-under-par, 10 shots behind. Playing better, but for all intensive purposes out of this final major of the season.

This list has some well known players and a few players unknown to the fans here, but well known on the European PGA Tour.

Dustin Johnson is tied for second place at 10-under par, erasing memories of a bad U.S. Open finish.

Rory McIlroy is also at 10-under par, looking for his first major at a young age. Having  learned a lesson at the British Open, by not having that disastrous round that keeps you from winning on Sunday.

Along with that record 64 by Liang to get to 9-under par, Jason Day,Martin Kaymer,Zach Johnson,Bryce Molder, and Jim Furyk are all tied at 9-under par.

Steve Elkington playing along with Tiger Woods today was six-under-par, and reached minus eight for the weekend, just five shots back.

Here's the tricky question?

Who wins this major shootout tomorrow? I will look very closely at Jim Furyk as he seems in total control of his swing making another par to stay at nine-under-par now on the 15th hole.

Zach Johnson bogeyed the final hole and fell back to minus eight.

The top three players on this leader board are all in their 20's, as the young guns are out-shooting the old legends this week.

Matt Kuchar had a difficult time today, as the magic faded from the putter, and tee shots went hither and dither.

Steve Stricker has fought his way to four-under-par and tied for 21st after a miserable triple bogey on par three 17th hole yesterday.

No one is making a move on Watney yet, and a good round tomorrow say 68, 69 should win this.

Wenchang Liang flew in from Hong Kong on Sunday, after an 18 hour flight.

He had 18 practice holes in all, and is feeling pretty spaced out with the time difference and the fact that if the ball bounces strangely his way, he could jump into the professional golf conversation quickly.

Tomorrow's round should be pretty interesting and not at all predictable.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Pilotcast #080 - Podapalooza 2010 from Oshkosh from Pilotcast - Aviation Podcast for Pilots, by Pilots | It's that time again! The pilotcast is happy to present the Audio from the 2010 edition of the Podapalooza from EAA Airventure in Oshkosh.  This is the audio that ran live on EAA Radio on Friday, July 20th, 2010. Thanks for listening.  We've got even more great content coming from this years Oshkosh, so keep checking back! Show notes can be found at http://pilotcast.com.

Walker: Remembering fallen stars - Times Record News | Will Rogers, humorist, actor, columnist, was killed when a plane piloted by aviator Wiley Post crashed near Point Barrow, Alaska, in 1935. ...

The Incredible Woody: Airshow Acrobatics by The Incredible Woody - Airshow Acrobatics. Air shows have a lot of acts to see. While maybe all of them don't have the superstar status of The Thunderbirds, they are very very cool. Like a demonstration by a C-17. These planes are HUGE! ...

United States - Washington - Seafair 2010 - Seattle - 08/06/10 from FenceCheck Forums:

A fight's brewing over a historical monument honoring a World War 1 aviator - FayObserver.com
It reads something like this: "To American aviator, sergeant pilot James McConnell, who enlisted voluntarily in the French aviation forces on Dec. ...

In Search of Amelia Earhart - Deer Park Progress | Seventy-three years after aviatrix Amelia Earhart vanished she still occupies our national consciousness. Just ask Megan Lickliter-Mundon. ...

Wings of Freedom - Akron Beacon Journal | The Wings of Freedom Tour of the WWII vintage B-17 Flying Fortress and Consolidated B-24 Liberator will be on display until noon Monday at the air museum at ...

'Wings of Freedom' tour attracts WWII flyers - Canton Repository | Block, who was sitting in the radioman's chair for this B-17's landing, looked around at the mostly metal interior of the bomber. ...

Veterans honored at ceremony marking 65th anniversary of end of WWII - San Bernardino Sun | The B-24 and B-25 pilot was among 14 World War II veterans honored at during a ceremony marking the 65th anniversary of the end of World War II when Japan ...

Remembering when World War II ended - AbbevilleNow.com | He and other servicemen who flew on 30 B-17 bomber missions were sent to Montana because there was no more need for bombers. "We were waiting for the war to ...

National World War II Museum in New Orleans salutes the Greatest Generation - Los Angeles Times | I've read most of Ambrose's books, and I have a relative who died in World War II — a cousin, whose B-17 bomber was shot down over France a week before ...

Ryan SC-W's Got New Shoes from Antique Airfield News | Just in time for frantic polishing in preparation for Blakesburg, Russell Williams' Ryan SC-W has new wheel pants. Master metal shaper Norm Archer, at Sonoma Valley Airport (aka Schellville) in Sonoma, CA shaped and finished the wheel pants, fabricated custom-shaped cupped mounting brackets, and made upper cuff fairings…

Harlow PJC-2 70th Birthday Surprise Party for Matt and Wendy Malkin from Antique Airfield News | On August 6th friends and Wendy Malkin put together a surprise 70th birthday party for Matt Malkin's Harlow PJC-2 at Renton, WA. Matt was called to the airport under false pretenses of helping a fellow antiquer with a project, and the surprise was sprung. Wendy provided the cake…

Polar mission from AF.mil Photos | Maj. Leroy Kinlocke (left) and his co-pilot, Lt. Col. George Alston, have a front-row view of the diverse landscape July 28, 2010, in Greenland. The pilots are with the New York National Guard's 109th Airlift Wing, based out of Scotia, N.Y. (Department of Defense photo/Fred W. Baker III) Download Full Image

One of the more fascinating aspects of the study of history concerns the genesis and propagation of large new ideas.

An example from the 19th century was the concept of natural selection, which gave birth to the meme now commonly labeled “the survival of the fittest”. The idea spread like wildfire through Western societies over the course of six or seven decades, in the process spinning off corollary memes such as “the death of God” and “social Darwinism”. This popular craze reached its climax in the first half of the 20th century, bringing us scientism, eugenics, Communism, Fascism, National Socialism, and hundreds of millions of corpses.

It wasn’t the result that Charles Darwin intended, but there’s no controlling a powerful idea once it has been set loose amongst a susceptible population.

Big ideas can have effects that reach far beyond the mere political. A more recent example is the widespread notion of “tolerance and inclusion”. This new meme has enjoyed its greatest vogue since 1945, partly in reaction to the apocalypse generated by its immediate predecessor. Among many other dubious practices, it has given rise to affirmative action, the collapse of traditional education, homosexual marriage, mass immigration from the Third World, the all but total elimination of Christian practices from the public square, the sexualization of children, and the destruction of any cultural tradition which tends to favor one group or value system over another.

Although it was a gift to us from the Frankfurt School, its immense popularity and rapid distribution throughout the West tell us that it was an idea whose time had come — something about “tolerance and inclusion” has a deep appeal for the middle classes that has made them ready to incorporate it.

Sometimes it’s hard to spot an intellectual trend until long after it has taken hold and transformed the culture. For the last few months I’ve had my eye on what I call the “Potemkin Syndrome”, which, in contrast to my other examples, is primarily a disease of the elites.

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In the late 18th century Prince Grigory Aleksandrovich Potemkin was a minister under (and lover of) Empress Catherine the Great of Russia. Besides the eponymous battleship which became famous during the 1905 Revolution, Prince Potemkin is known to history mainly for his alleged creation of “Potemkin villages”, which were artificial edifices designed to fool his monarch into thinking that all was well among the peasantry in the new Russian colonies in the Crimea and southern Ukraine.

Prince Potemkin was charged with preparing for the Empress’ tour of the lower Dnieper in 1787. According to legend, he made sure that what she saw would please her: he constructed false-front villages along the shores of the river, painted to look like prosperous houses and farms. The story also says he costumed a few well-fed peasants in respectable clothes to stand in front of the flats so that Catherine would see the countryside as the abode of well-fed and happy subjects instead of desperate serfs starving in hovels.

This myth has no discernible basis in fact, and is considered by most historians to have been fabricated by Potemkin’s political enemies.

Alas for the poor Prince, however — it was an idea whose time had come, and the name stuck. Potemkin villages they were, are, and always will be.

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A “Potemkin village” has come to mean “any deliberate construct which lacks actual substance, but is cynically designed to fool others into thinking it is real”. As the modern bureaucratic welfare state has metastasized into the gargantuan tumor that it is today, the incidence of Potemkin-like behaviors has increased exponentially. The more labyrinthine the bureaucracy, the more opportunities for its functionaries to set up false fronts to fool their superiors — or the public they ostensibly serve.

The Soviets were famous for Potemkin-village constructs, with entire industries spun out of gossamer to please the Central Committee or fool the capitalists into thinking that Socialism really did work. Now that the 21st century Western social democratic welfare state is rapidly transforming into a U.S.S.R. Lite, it’s no surprise that Potemkin villages of various sorts are popping up all over the place.

For example, modern Europe is packed with Potemkin villages of happy law-abiding hard-working well-integrated immigrants.

What? You don’t believe they exist? You think they are all painted false fronts?

Then let’s look at the statistical facts. No, wait; we can’t — the governments of Europe mostly prohibit the accurate collection of statistics on race and ethnicity as they concern crime and unemployment. They can’t keep all those Moroccan and Turkish and “Asian” Potemkin villages propped up using real statistics.

To make its village really attractive, Germany insists that the term “race” must disappear:
- - - - - - - - -

Apparently Germany has no problems. So the taxpayer-financed German Institute for Human Rights is sending an insistent reminder to strike the term “race” from Article 3 of the Constitution. The term “race” is, well, racist. Aha!

[…]

Dpa reports:

Each theory that bases itself upon the existence of differing races is in itself racist, said Director Beate Rudolf on the occasion of the publication of a positional paper by the institute Tuesday in Berlin. The European Parliament has already declared itself against the term “race” in the legal texts of the European Union. A few European countries have distanced themselves from the term in their national law.

“Such a step is overdue in Germany,” Rudolf said. The term “race” should be replaced with a ban against “racial” discrimination or preference.

But wait — how can we guard against racial discrimination if the term “race” itself is banned? Never mind that! Leave it to the Central Planning and Coordination Bureau — they’ll figure it out somehow.

In the meantime, just look how attractive those Potemkin cottages are, with their thatched roofs and flower boxes!

The same syndrome is deeply embedded in the urban welfare systems of the United States. No honest assessment of the effects of race-based policies can be publicly made. Even though the dreadful statistics are available in most cases, to cite them publicly or use them as a basis for a change in policy is simply not done. It’s a career-ender. Anyone who dares to question the orthodox view is instantly buried in a hail of “racism” accusations.

We have our nice Potemkin village of multicultural diversity painted in all the colors of the rainbow. Isn’t it beautiful? Why would anyone want to say anything bad about it?

But the biggest Potemkin villages of all may be found scattered throughout the current financial crisis. I’ve written previously about the Potemkin Economy, and new examples of it are being feverishly constructed every day. It’s imperative hide the hovels and emaciated serfs that cover our post-bubble landscape.

Media outlets in European countries have been requested by their governments not to publish alarming data about the state of the Eurozone economy or the danger of collapse. That’s the EU plan to cope with the continent’s economic problems: hide them where the public can’t see them.

The Obama Administration has similar methods of coping. To deal with the effects of globalization, it decided to close the International Labor Comparisons Office. Without all that annoying information, there are no nasty facts to interfere with the latest upbeat talking points:

Like a scorekeeper for the world, a tiny unit within the Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks globalization’s winners and losers, and the results are not always pretty for the United States. Manufacturing jobs here, for example, have fallen faster since 1979 than in Canada, Germany or Japan. Compensation for those jobs dropped here in 2008 but jumped in South Korea and Australia.

Soon, however, Americans may be spared the demoralization in these numbers: The White House wants to shutter the unit that produces them.

President Obama’s budget would eliminate the International Labor Comparisons office and transfer its 16 economists to expand the bureau’s work tracking inflation and occupational trends. The White House says the cut, estimated to save $2 million, is one of many difficult decisions the president was forced to make to control spending.

No statistics, no facts — no problem!

Another major false front may be observed in the handling of the debt crisis. The massive load of sovereign debt hanging over the United States has made the traditional customers for Treasury bonds chary of buying any new ones. China has all but ceased its lending to the U.S. government, and Japan has reduced its level significantly. Under normal circumstances, this would cause the interest rates on our bonds to rise, increasing the expense of capital and forcing down demand until it matched the supply.

But the geniuses in our government have figured out a way to short-circuit this process: the Federal Reserve is buying up Treasuries to keep the interest rates down. This makes as much sense to me as drinking your own urine when you’re thirsty — but then, I’m not an economist, so what do I know?

The establishment of the Potemkin U.S. economy is now complete. It looks great — all that pretend money being created and borrowed and created and borrowed, over and over again, until we’re all as rich as we can possibly be.

What a wonderful village! O brave new world!

Europe is doing something similar: the European Central Bank is busy buying up the sovereign debt of “problem” EU member states like Greece and Spain. This serves a dual purpose: it cuts down the debt costs for the countries involved, while allowing the maintenance of a smiley-face economic cover for the European Union. With the help of the compliant media, all dutifully avoiding discussion of imminent economic doom, the shaky European Potemkin village is holding together — so far.

These debt shell-games are just part of a larger Potemkin strategy. National, state, municipal, and private pensions are grievously underfunded, but that’s another distasteful reality concealed by the brightly-painted false fronts. The demographic bomb will detonate all too soon, but nothing much is being done besides some sporadic attempts to raise the retirement age.

The most deceptive fronts of all are the global Potemkin villages that are simultaneously erected by mainstream media outlets all over the Western world. State and private media alike shy away from disclosing many of the ugly realities that face their audience. The great issues of the coming generation will be demographic and fiscal collapse, exacerbated by the opportunistic virus of expansionist Islam.

But we don’t talk about that. The banner headlines hanging from the eaves of our charming little village concern global warming, or racist Tea Party participants, or AIDS, or Tiger Woods, or “Sex and the City”. There’s no need to look at all those distasteful and vulgar facts behind the colorful but flimsy front.

Big Media doesn’t care, because it doesn’t have to.

Truly, Death by Silence is the Potemkin Metropolis of our time.

I'm sure that were a young Kwai Chang Caine to stroll through the streets of any town or city today, he would be wondering if he could not have better spent his youth learning a variety of programming languages rather than the intricate postures of the Preying Mantis Form, or the Hot Urn Forearm Technique.

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Worsening electricity shortages fuel growing crisis

Global electricity demand is growing again after a lull last year related to the economic slowdown.

The result is more countries face electricity shortages.

This is not just a matter of insufficient fuel or high energy prices as the world has a glut of natural gas, the fuel of choice for thermal power generation.

Instead, it mainly reflects poor government planning and neglect of essential infrastructure. It also reflects the accelerated urbanisation of the developing world, which has become a hallmark of the 21st century.

Recovery strains electricity grid

Electricity demand is rising once again as the world recovers from the worst economic slowdown in decades.

A return to levels of demand unseen since early 2008 spells problems for many countries that failed to make adequate preparations for the predictable follow-up to the sharpest decline in energy consumption on record.

See also: Round-up of global electricity developments

UAE firms adopt energy-saving solutions

With utility bills in UAE for commercial buildings rising by over 50 per cent in the last two years, more and more companies are adopting energy-saving solutions to cut down their costs and carbon emissions, said an expert.

It is the financial as well as environmental issues that are driving energy-efficient lighting solutions, observed Anita Mathews, exhibition director of Middle East Electricity, which takes place at the Dubai World Trade Centre on 8 to 10 February 2011.

Iraq’s volatile north still a powder keg

WASHINGTON — As US troops withdraw from Iraq, a large swath of the oil-rich north coveted by the Kurdish regional government remains a powder keg that threatens to explode in violence, experts here say.

EU to hammer Iran with oil sanctions

BRUSSELS — The European Union will hit Iran with tough sanctions against its vital oil and gas industry on Monday in a bid to lure Tehran back to the negotiating table over its disputed nuclear programme.

EU foreign ministers will formally approve the sanctions following Iran’s repeated refusals to halt sensitive nuclear activities, which the West fears are aimed at building a bomb.

Iran launches nuclear fusion program, says atomic energy chief

Tehran, Iran (CNN) -- The head of Iran's nuclear energy agency announced Saturday that the country had launched a "serious" nuclear fusion research program, according to state-run Press TV.

Ali-Akbar Salehi, the chief of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI), said as many as 50 scientists were participating in the research to break into alternative energy, Press TV said.

BP set to being drilling off Libya

TRIPOLI, Libya (UPI) -- British oil company BP confirmed Saturday it would begin a deepwater drilling program off the coast of Libya in a matter of weeks.

Israel's gas take even lower than thought, Knesset study finds

The Israeli government takes one of the smallest percentages of revenues from natural resources in the world - only 32%, compared with the average 53% among other Western countries with similar fiscal regimes, the Knesset Research and Information Center said in a report published over the weekend.

Relief well vessel returns to oil spill site

New Orleans, Louisiana (CNN) -- The vessel that engineers are using to drill a relief well was back on site near BP's ruptured deepwater well on Sunday. However, officials said storms could continue to thwart containment and cleanup efforts.

"We're going to be playing a cat-and-mouse game for the remainder of the hurricane season," retired U.S. Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen told reporters Saturday.

Hayward departure from BP called imminent

LONDON — Chief executive Tony Hayward's departure from spill-plagued BP appears imminent, British media reported.

While a company spokesman told Reuters Saturday that Hayward still has the full backing of BP's board, industry insiders said Hayward may announce his departure by Tuesday, when the oil giant releases its six-months earnings report.

How crisis PR hasn't kept up with the turbulent times

A veritable deluge of crises since 2008 has shown that crisis PR is no longer up to the job. The BP oil spill, Apple's Antennagate, the fall of Goldman Sachs, Toyota's Great Recall, the sexual travails of Tiger Woods, the trysts of Al Gore, the loose lips of Gen. Stanley McChrystal -- all these combustions would have been fixed, in the good old days of 2007, with a call to Burston-Marsteller or Sitrick and Co. The accepted wisdom was that you didn't want to be on the other side of a Mike Sitrick counterattack. Crisis PR wasn't just effective, it was feared.

But the new crisis paradigm is spinning hopelessly in the dark. By mid-2010, the stories were changing too rapidly to control, much less to revise. Like a violent postmodern vortex, the bad news sucked down all who struggled to escape it. Unsurprisingly, the Internet is to blame. But the phenomenon goes beyond the 24/7 news-and-comment cycle. It forces the PR world to confront something far more disruptive -- and something that will undercut its $700-an-hour fees.

New Study Shows Positive Effects From Marcellus Shale Drilling

CHARLESTON -- It's an industry often criticized for its negative impacts. But now, a new study says natural gas production in the Marcellus Shale region -- if developed -- could create 280,000 new jobs and add $6 billion in new tax revenues to local, state and federal governments.

The study was just released by the American Petroleum Institute.

Oil Democracy - Government of Ghana, By GNPC For the Chinese

The Petroleum Agreement (PA) gave Ghana 10% initial stake that is free of charge. In addition, Ghana has 5% in royalties – also free. Next, Ghana gets to collect 35% taxes for being the host country. Finally, Ghana has a paid interest of 2.5%. That is called a paid interest because for Ghana to enjoy the benefits of that percentage, it has to pay 2.5% of all developmental costs leading up to production and thereafter. Even that Ghana cannot pay. We are relying on the very people whom we are damaging to pay that for us so that we can reimburse them when the oil starts flowing.

Small N.Y. hamlet gets big train-car contract

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- The town of Elmira, an upstate New York community that once prospered during the manufacturing boom, got a spot of good news Friday.

A total of 575 jobs are coming to the small city, after Amtrak awarded an Elmira-based company a contract to build 130 new train cars.

Tesla Electric Cars: Revved Up, but Far to Go

The sedan fits five adults as well as two children in rear-facing seats, Mr. Musk said, and could drive halfway across the country between breakfast and bedtime. It would, he said, be on the road in 2011. Tesla already had a factory lined up and hundreds of millions of dollars in financing on the way from the Energy Department.

Today, production of the Model S hasn’t even begun. Some critics doubt whether the sedan can actually transport seven passengers. And Mr. Musk concedes that driving halfway across the country would take at least 16 hours at a rather heady average speed of 75 miles an hour — not including stopping at swapping stations that Tesla has yet to build to change a heavyweight battery that will have, at best, a 300-mile charge.

Ethanol-free gas running on fumes

Drivers seek stations selling conventional fuel, paying more to get better mileage. But those outlets are getting hard to find.

Huhne Backs Wind Turbine Increase

Energy Secretary Chris Huhne has paved the way for a controversial increase in wind turbines to prevent the UK suffering a power crisis.

A Deutschland disconnected from its Volk

For the German renewables technology mission masters however, aiming for the clean energy high ground at a global scale is rather different from the view from the ground at home, in the streets of Berlin's suburbs and its middle-class housing enclaves, where a steadily ageing population is struggling more with every passing year to make ends meet.

Babysitters for backyard chickens

PORTLAND, Ore. (CNNMoney.com) -- You've heard of cat-sitters, dog-sitters and, of course, babysitters. But chicken-sitters?

In Portland, Ore., a city known for its deep do-it-yourself streak and poultry-permissive laws, two backyard farmers have stepped up to meet an unusual need: watching hens when their owners go on vacation.

The Risks Of Fiddling

American Empire provides bread, circuses, and all the toys we (think we) need, stolen from other countries and future generations. I can understand why people are reluctant to abandon the empire. In exchange for inhabiting a cubicle, you get to harvest the fruits of empire while avoiding any steps toward self reliance. You get to shower in the morning, kibitz at the water cooler with your friends, flirt with the hot thirty-something in the next cube, and dine on Thai take-out. What’s not to like, especially if, like most Americans, you couldn’t care less about the people we oppress to do your bidding or the costs to the living planet?

Immorality aside, there is a risk. The risk comes in two flavors. One flavor is the opportunity cost of abandoning the empire too soon. The other flavor is the bitterness that comes when you realize you waited too long to abandon the empire, and you are suffering and then dying as a result. And surrounded by a bunch of ugly boxes we call suburbia, no less.

It's A Race To Failure Between Rogue States And Global Oil Output

Dwindling global oil supplies are leaving the world ever more reliant on a group of unstable countries – many of which are themselves facing major domestic problems right now.

Believe it or not, many of the world’s major oil exporters cannot maintain their own domestic energy requirements. Venezuelan consumers endure electricity blackouts of “seven or eight hours a day,” but less well known is the situation in the Middle East, where residents are facing rolling power outages just as summer temperatures soar, and with it, the demand for air conditioning.

China questions review of controversial carbon program

A Chinese government fund has told a U.N. panel it supports project developers that earn carbon offsets under a lucrative Kyoto Protocol program, and rejects the idea that they are overcompensated.

New Map to Help Calculate Antarctic Ice Loss

High-resolution satellite images and newly developed computer software have enabled NASA researchers to create the most accurate map to date of the snaking line that marks the edge of the ice sheet covering much of Antarctica.

Heading into the college football season, only 30 teams mathematically have a chance to win the national championship.

Only 25 percent. A quarter of 120 schools equals 30. You don’t need a Masters degree in mathematics to figure that out.

I have my degree in common sense.

Heading into college basketball, each and every team mathematically has a chance to win the national championship.

In every other sport to include English Premiership football, each and every team mathematically has a chance to win the league title, whether it be world superpower Manchester United, or recently promoted Blackpool. 

Why? Because they play for it.

College football is the only major sport in the free world not to have a true winner at the end. It’s voted on much like a Presidential election in a third-world country. A bunch of old, fat, never-played-a-down sportswriters and media from across the country, and another poll for the coaches that have better things to do, like prepare for Iowa State than to vote.

We involved the people with a Master’s degree in mathematics and computer science to determine our best teams.

Was Boise State the best team in college football season in 2009? Could Boise State and its god-awful blue artificial surface breakthrough to win the national title in 2010?

Even if Boise State were to play in the BCS National Championship Game on the same field in Glendale, AZ where we were forced to take them seriously after Oklahoma didn’t, could Boise State have run the table in the SEC, Big 12, or Pac 10?

We will truly never know.

January 10 is the date of the 2010 National Championship Game by the way, but not enough time between Thanksgiving weekend and the 10th day of the following calendar year to fit in a 16-team playoff.

A 16-team playoff that makes total sense if you allow the conference champions in the major “BCS”—more like “Total BS”—conferences, and even the little guys in the Sun Belt and the Mid-American Conference (MAC).

A MAC that, for a point in recent memory, beat the Big Ten just as often as it has lost to it. But these senile coaches, overweight sportswriters that have never played a down of football in their lives, and the university presidents of the “Total BS” schools say that they are not big enough to matter. When in reality, the likes of Boise State, TCU, and the occasional Fresno State are just as good as the “big boys” of college football. 

Scholarship reductions means parity. More true freshmen are playing meaningful college football snaps six months after their high school prom. These are kids, mind you, that are worshiped by these college football factories from their junior years on Rivals and Scout.

Gone are the days where Nebraska could show up at nearly any stadium in the country where, away from Lincoln, there were more Nebraska fans at the games in Manhattan and Lawrence than fans of the home team.

That was then, this is now. Nebraska will never see those days again no matter what. Not only because it physically, mentally, and mathematically cannot intimidate the major football programs in Kansas, and it won’t ever play there again because they are going to the Big 10 over money.

Money that Nebraska didn’t want Texas to get with its own television network. Texas threatened to end the Big 12 and two weeks after not even being discussed as a viable option, Nebraska was heading to have away games in Bloomington, IN and Madison, WI instead as a member of the Big 10.

Colorado saw the writing on the wall and finally did what it has wanted to do for 30 years anyway. It took care of itself, and made the best move it could dream to make in bolting for the Pac-10.

Colorado made sense in the Big 8, but the Big 12 with the Texas schools made zero sense for Colorado. Colorado was good for a time because it started a recruiting coup in southern California, and it was gone when it had to start visiting the Texas schools.

Nebraska was mad because Texas has only been good for ten years. The school wasn’t thrilled with adding the Texas teams to begin with in the mid-90’s, when Texas and Oklahoma got together and tried to force Nebraska out of the equation.

For a while, it worked. Nebraska wasn’t very good in the first decade of the 21st century if you ask the traditionalist, but still was mathematically better than 75 percent of the teams in major college football.

In Nebraska, it wasn’t good enough. In Columbia, MO, it was a godsend. Missouri—the true definition of paper tiger or sleeping giant—tried and failed to break into the upper echelon of college football.

Missouri, according to our favorite sports media and coaches that aren’t paying attention to anything more than the next week on the schedule, was really good. At the end of the day, Missouri wasn’t that good.

Missouri was awful, just like the rest of the Big 12 North when Nebraska and Colorado were away hibernating.

Now, Nebraska has reclaimed its stranglehold on the North, as it will again in 2010, and will be a viable threat to make a BCS run every year.

Nebraska fixed its bad football problem and is going to make the Big 10 a ton of money. Again, more common sense mathematics.

For those of you who truly believe there will be a college football playoff in the next 20 years, keep lying to yourself. Keep dreaming. Hope and pray they make a playoff option on the NCAA Football video game series by EA Sports.

They added conference alignment this year. Kind of accurate, don’t you think?

There will not be a playoff as long as I’m alive.

Ain’t gonna happen.

So, college football stinks. I’m through with ESPN owning college football. I’m done with Texas acting like it rules the world after being good for only 10 years in history. And I’m done with the cheaters at Florida, USC, and it’s coming again at Alabama.

College football is stupid. Until you realize that you break items in your house over the fate of 18-to-23-year old kids, you are part of the problem and not the solution.

Bowl games make money, playoffs do not.

Common sense mathematics. 

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Kick-Ass co-creators Mark Millar and John Romita Jr sat down for a chat about comics with Total Film last week.

Naturally, the first question on our lips was – What can we expect from upcoming comic sequel Kick-Ass 2? And naturally, we were expecting a lot of vague dodging about the matter. Instead, Millar offered us some juicy insight into about how he will be continuing the adventures of Kick-Ass.

“I always had this planned as three volumes, and each is a sequel,” he explains. “It’s not like a regular comic where it’s issue nine, 10 and 11. It’s Kick-Ass 2, Issue 1 sort of thing. It’s just starting where we left off last time.”

Cool, so what does that mean for the characters we grew to love in the first issue? It’s all about widening the spectrum, according to Millar.

“Through success [he’s] inspired other people, and what the heroes do is form gangs,” the comic writer reveals. “It’s a bunch of people in masks looking at each other’s Facebooks and going out and fighting each other. Like a massive fight in Time Square with hundreds of superheroes and hundreds of supervillains, and the police trying to break it all up.”

So does sequel mean darker? Sort of. “I think I’m actually just trying to do the flip side of it, because the first one was all about becoming a hero. And the second one really is about becoming a villain,” Millar says.

“It probably is darker because it’s exploring the villains a little bit more like this, you’ve got Red Mist who’s become like Alex in Clockwork Orange. So he’s a bit Heath Ledger’s Joker, a bit of all the bad guys I’ve ever loved in movies. So yeah I suppose it is darker, but I think a big part of Kick-Ass is the jokes, so it’s still funny.”

The first Kick-Ass, though, ended with foul-mouthed 12-year-old hero Hit Girl pledging she would never kill anybody again. Surely a bit of a spanner in the works for the sequel? Hardly.

“Hit Girl, of course, is back. At the end of the last movie she promised her step-father she wouldn’t kill people anymore, she’s just a kid,” muses Millar. “So I like the idea of doing a Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven, you know where the gunslinger hasn’t picked up a gun in 20 years, but doing that with a 12 year old girl. She’s watching Glee and all that - she’d rather be out there fighting crime.

Check out our full Q&A, in which Millar and Romita discuss Kick-Ass, Spider-Man, and their all-encompassing love for comic books…

Next: Mark Millar & John Romita Jr Q&A

Mark Millar & John Romita Jr Q&A

How much were you involved working with Matthew Vaughn on Kick-Ass?
Mark Millar: It was really non-stop, it was two years of both of our lives. I live in Scotland and I just seemed to be down in London every week, even in the six months before we released that issue, just getting there for initial talks and chatting through the plot because I’d only written up to issues five and a half, and part of issue six of the comic book before Vaughn started writing the screenplay. So he didn’t know how it ended and things, so we were getting together at kind of Wayne Manor to just sit and chat about it. It was great, he said to me, the very first conversation we had about it when he said he wanted to buy the rights was: ‘You’ll be involved at every stage of the process’, but every writer hears that from every director and he can almost dismiss it. Vaughn was actually very true to his word, which is very unusual.
John Romita, Jr: Yeah that was his intention, he said do your work and I’ll tell you which artwork, which boards I want in it. So I would do a slew of them and then he would pick and choose, so he was the Director and I was a small D director.

John, how was it directing a scene for the movie?
JR: Interestingly enough, the irony was that it wasn’t difficult because Matthew Vaughn insisted upon it being an homage to the comic book, he wanted that consistency. I didn’t want this just to be a movie based on a comic book, I wanted it to be enriched by the comic book in that first the visuals are bright and spark in their colours, different from what he’d already done. And then he wanted the comic book influence, and there’s where specifically the animated sequence comes from. And his words were, ‘Stick to what you do. Do not attempt to make a movie animated sequence, make it a comic book illustration, we will turn it into an animated sequence.' And that is where it comes from, and this is all thanks to Matthew’s vision. I appreciate what he said, he settled me down because I would have been severely intimidated being told by this genius that I had to do a scene for a movie. And he said, ‘Don’t worry about it, just do what you do best, and we will turn it into an animated sequence’. So it was my direction in so far as visuals, but it was the computer generated guy’s double negative that turned it into the animation.

Do you feel it’s a sign of how far comic books have come that movie adaps now try to stick close to the source?
JR: That’s a great point, yes. That is due in large part to the quality of computer generated images. Computers have a lot to say in this, in that these brilliant out of this world ideas in the comics industry have suddenly been able to be adapted into film. And I think all it does is it enables somebody to take a wild idea and apply a quality story to it. And that’s why thousands upon thousands of projects created by comic book creators are now fodder for the movie industry.
MM: The minute people start fucking with it is the minute it starts looking bad. There are exceptions, but generally you go into a Punisher movie because you want to see the Punisher, you don’t want to see Dolph Lundgren. It happened I think with Sam Raimi, he was very true to the original Stan Lee Spider-Man, I think Richard Donner was very true to Superman, the costumes. Video game characters and comic book characters are very different, there’s just something about comic book characters that translate very well to the big screen.

Why is that?
MM: I think it’s a couple of things. One, they tend to be quite iconic. The ones that work in the comic, they tend to be quite iconic. And they also tend to have quite a good heart, and a very simple idea behind them. You can describe Superman pretty simply, and you can desribe Batman very simply. Kick-Ass is actually pretty simple as well. I think the reason these things work is that they’re very simple, iconic characters and that works on the big screen just as well. They wouldn’t work in novels, I think a Superman book would be boring as hell, or a Kick-Ass book, they wouldn’t work very well.

Next: First Heroes

First Heroes

What was your first experience of comics?
JR: My father is a cartoonist and has been one since he was a young man, so when I was a very young boy he had been a romance comics illustrator, they didn’t pay much attention to it. He went off into a different direction in romance, and then back in the early '60s he began working for Stan Lee again. And I remember the day I walked up to his desk in the attic and watched him work on a Daredevil cover. And at eight years old I said, ‘What in god’s name-’, I didn’t say those words, but I said, ‘What are you doing?’ He explained to me what a superhero was and I was hooked. That was my first experience. As a matter of fact it was Daredevil #12, it had Ka-Zar and his sabre tooth tiger and the Plunderer all on the cover, and my father explained the whole superhero genre to me and I was hooked. So I was eight years old, and I can describe my father’s office down to the last rivet in the wall.

Were any of those heroes for you?
JR: Specifically Spider-Man because that was my father’s work, but when superheroes were explained to me, this was the beginning of the humanisation of superheroes. What I mean is that Stan Lee took Superman and made it a better character, and came up with Spider-Man. It was perfect. And here was Spider-Man, who was a kid from Queens, new York, whch is where I’m from, that was the other attraction. My father would tell me, ‘listen, this is Peter Parker and he lives right down the block!’ that kind of thing. And there was that hook of reality added to the superhero genre, and it explained to me that Pete Parker catches a cold and he gets beat up and he loses – this guy loses! – but he’s a superhero, he's got superpowers and he’s got an aunt and he dotes on his aunt and he worries about her dying. All of a sudden you have a connection and that’s what dragged me in, and it hooked me.

You brought that bang up to date with Kick-Ass…
JR: Excellent, excellent point, that’s exactly what Mark and myself attempted to do. Mark from the inception, that was Mark’s attempt was to go further than Spider-Man and be real within the real world, not real within the superhero world. And yet bring superheroes to that real world where people put superhero costumes on and try it out anyway. And it’s actually happening, here in the states people dress up and patrol the neighbourhoods, and things. It’s unreal how this has all played out.
MM: Yes I think, going back to Clark Kent, he was the first nerd’s superhero. And then Peter Parker made that nerd’s superhero a bit more real. He was actually a bit more three dimensional than Clark Kent, he had problems and so on, and then I think Dave Lizewski is the next step to that, it went up another level. So the character went from one dimensional to two dimensional, to now Dave I think is quite a real life guy. He’s got a Myspace page, he’s got bands that he likes, he’s got his favourite TV shows. He is a little person, more than Clark Kent and Peter Parker I hope. He does all the things that regular teenagers do that Peter Parker was never allowed to, like squeeze his spots or masturbate on the internet or whatever. So he’s just a real 15-year-old boy.

He’s very much modern day, of our time…
MM: Yeah, I think he’s a 21st century Spider-Man. Sometimes you have to pinch yourself, because the movie got made when only five and a half comics had been written, that even now there’s only been eight comics out there and Kick-Ass has already been a movie. You think, Superman and Spider-Man took 40 years. It’s just odd, it just caught on. You don’t know what it was, but the comic outsold Spider-Man Issue 1. It’s just weird, it’s one of those things that I think there was a gap in the market, somebody wanted a 21st century version of these guys.

It tapped a vein…
MM: It did, it’s just massively luckily. It just came along, I think if we’d done it five or ten years earlier no-one would’ve given a shit, but it was absolutely on the money.

Were you surprised at how much it took off?
MM: Are you kidding me? Yeah, it’s crazy. I was watching Conan O’Brien the other week, and Jim Carrey walks out dressed in a Kick-Ass suit. I actually thought I was hallucinating, I felt like Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind or something. This is something that was literally a doodle on a WHSmith’s pad three and a half years ago, and for it now to be something that, you know, people get dressed up as a joke and the audience recognise it on the other side of the world, it’s just crazy. So yeah I’m amazed. I’m amazed to find Angelina Jolie in Wanted and things. I have no idea what this massive run of luck is that I’ve had, but I’m delighted about it. I don’t know what makes one book commercial and another book not commercial, I just do what I want to read.
JR: Yes Kick-Ass has [been so successful], more so internationally, as well as just here in the States. An interesting aside, I don’t know if you’re familiar with a website called national review online, but in the states here, it’s a political weekly magazine and also online. And because of the comments about President Obama kicking ass over the gulf oil spill, they did a cover to their magazine where President Obama is dressed as Kick-Ass. The ultimate in compliments!

Your president is Kick-Ass…
JR: Oh yeah, and I think Nancy Pelosi dressed as Hit Girl...

Next: Hit Girl

Hit Girl

Was it a shame that certain people in the media made such a fuss about Hit Girl?
MM: No I thought it was great actually, it worked out really well. Almost everybody loved it, there were only a couple of people who didn’t. There was really just Roger Ebert and the Daily Mail guy Chris Tookey. It was interesting, Tookey in particular, the reaction on the Mail’s own website – and I read the Mail which makes it even funnier – even Mail’s own readers were like, ‘What the hell are you talking about?’ Actually I think common sense kind of prevailed, people saw it for what it was.

Kick-Ass 2 is obviously geared towards a movie sequel. Do you feel the pressure of carrying it on?
MM: Not really, no. I always see the comics and the movies as quite distinct. Whenever I sell the rights to one of my books, I just try to make sure it goes to the best possible person. I see the comic as the main job, and the movie or the video game or the T shirt or whatever is just really extras. It’s wonderful ‘cos it’s a nice advert for your book, but primarily that’s what I like doing. I have no interest in screenwriting or anything like that. I love the comics, and I make sure I don’t sell the rights to anyone who isn’t going to do a good job. I joked with Matthew that I saw it as a big million dollar ad for the book.

When you sit down at your desk to take on something like Kick-Ass 2, is there pressure there?
MM: I suppose there is a little bit of pressure, but no more so than if you’re a band that’s already got an established audience. I mean, you do have that difficult second album, if you’ve had a great first album. But I’m lucky that I’ve been doing this since I was 19, so I’ve had a lot of books that I’ve done that people have liked. So that worry about it kind of leaves you. And in a way it’s actually nicer, because with a new book it might not catch on, but if you’re doing a sequel for something that was very popular then it’s got an established audience already. It actually feels quite nice.

Would you say you’re a fan of comic book movies?
MM: Potentially they can be disastrous, because they are very difficult really to do. But I think the pedigree was been spectacular, when you think about there are maybe 40 comic book movies, and in the last 10 years there’s been about 25. And almost every one of them has been really good. You’ve had two good Batmans, three good Spider-Man films, pretty much the X-Men films overall were very good. Who would’ve guessed that old TV directors and the guy who did Jaws 4 would be the guy you’d get to do a superhero movie. Who would’ve guessed there’d be all the A-list talent, Bryan Singer, Chris Nolan, Sam Raimi, Ang Lee – these guys are doing superhero movies! In the last 10 years for some reason, they’re attracting the best actors and the best writers, and I think the movies have been quite good. It’s got to end at some point, but really over the next few years it still looks strong. I mean this year there aren’t really any major ones out, Iron Man 2 was okay. Next year there’s Green Lantern, a new X-Men film, there’s like four massive comic book movies, Thor and Captain America as well. Then there’s Batman 3, The Avengers and Spider-Man 4, it’s just crazy. It’s not showing any sign of stopping yet.
JR: Not necessarily comic book movies, I think that’s a danger in that people think that it can rest on its laurels, they have to be a quality story and I am a fan of balance between reality and fantasy. Too much of either cn be dangerous. If you balance t properly I think stan lee or my father once said this, you do 80% of reality and 20% fantasy, if that fantasy is set up properly by the reality, you have a brilliant story. If you do much of either, you get in danger, but it has to be a quality story. And yet conversely, if you do 80% fantasy and make reality the attraction, you can do the same thing. It has to be a quality story, but you cannot do too much of each without having a nice balance. And even if you have an overabundance of one, if you do it properly. I think Neil Gaiman does that well, as a modern day, more up to date writer, he throws in just a small twinge of fantasy in his stories, enough so that you beg for it. I think when we did Eternals together, here’s complete fantasy, but he threw in that twinge to reality to it. And I think that’s the brilliance of balancing it. So I do not per se love comic book movies, I do love movies that have that comic book fantasy element to it.

What’s your working day like?
JR: Alright, I’ll give you yesterday as an example. I get up at around 6am, get my son to his school for his finals, came back, exercised and by 9am I am at my desk and work until 11pm. That’s the way things should be. I’ll be working possibly until midnight tonight, that’s just – Listen, I’m not digging ditches and I’m not building bridges, physically it’s not taxing. I sit in my own house with my beautiful wife and beautiful son, so it’s a comfort zone. But you have to work six and seven days a week, minimum of 12 hours a day, and that’s just the way it is.

Is it a good job?
JR: It is as good as it sounds because there’s no age that doesn’t enjoy this. Whether it’s 85 years old or 52 years old, or 14 as my son is. Every age group loves this genre, and as an artist I will never feel like an old man. I will always feel like a child because I’m in that fantasy. This is the most fun you can have with your clothes on.

John, what are you going for look wise with Kick-Ass 2?
JR: The look - I am almost concerned with keeping up with what I did before because I didn’t know we would be doing two and three, second sequence and third sequence. The trick is to keep the quality up, I know Mark will keep it up with the stories.

The other artists Tom and Dean will do equally as well. I think the storytelling is what I’m concerned with, doing different. My attempt, as soon as I begin, is to try to do something that I have not done before and that’s where I’m concerned. I know the artwork will be there, but to do something I haven’t done before visually is my quandary. That’s why I work 12-15 hours a day trying to do that.

Next: John Romita Jr

John Romita Jr

Where do you look for inspiration?
JR: It’s equal parts film, imagination, perhaps a little bit too much tequila in my youth. But I have a very vivid imagination. I have technicolor dreams that I write notes on. There’s also the influence from film, again if you take film and reality and infuse it with a little bit of fantasy it’s a nice combination. All the projects that I’ve been making notes on and writing treatments on are that, equal amounts of fantasy balance against reality and vice versa.

So what I try to do at all times is to infuse cinema with my business, and think of it in that respect. Because this is basically sequential storytelling and working with a writer or working with my own imagination, it’s just applying it to the attempt at a film. It’s stop action filming, that’s what we’re doing. I think anything from here on in that I work on has got to be able to be adapted into a film, it’s only natural.

Do you feel you’re racing against yourself to improve?
JR: Wow that is very insightful yeah, I think of it in a good way. It’s almost like an athlete always trying to improve himself. At some point you will run into a wall. I don’t know if I will run into the wall, I think I will only get better as I get older. Perhaps I won’t be able to in my 70s, if I ever get to a point where I won’t be able to work 12-15 hour days, maybe that’ll be a concern but that’s a long time down the road, I’m healthy as a horse and I work at that for the sole purpose of being able to produce. Yeah I am racing against myself, and I’m always competing with myself trying to do better. But again, working with different writers that does help that because it takes you off on a different tangent. That’s why I’m working with Mark and his twisted imagination. It’s the same thing with his reaction to working with me, maybe I stretch his imagination too. But you’re very, very insightful in what you said, it is a race against yourself, to improve yourself. As I get older its much like playing the piano, you can only get better as you work longer. If you don’t get better then you’re going to regress.

What people do you think read comics and why are they so popular?
JR: I think everybody reads comics, and because of the advent of the connection to film I think adults read them. But the attraction is the fantasy and especially because of Stan Lee, and I specifically go back to when he created Spider-Man, it linked reality and fantasy. Whereas before that, it was just Superman being perfect. And Batman being the multi-billionnaire. This is what Stan attempted back in the early 60s was to make reality and fantasy a great combination and he did, Spider-Man is a superhero with human failings. I think that’s what the attraction is – every kid picks up a comic and here we are with Kick-Ass, a kid picks up a comic and puts on a costume. That’s what we have in attraction is to put that in your mind – to read a comic and to fantasise about being a superhero! What would you do? What mistakes would you make? And that’s what is so good about Stan Lee’s vision, was to infuse that reality into it. And it’s come to this! When Kick-Ass has been formed, and in complete compliment to Mark Millar, he got that perfect toe-hold on an idea that had been beaten to death. He found that vein, that opening, that new road. And I think that’s a testament to Mark. Then he handed it off to me, and like a good rugby player I held onto it and ran as fast as I could.

It sounds like Stan Lee’s a bit of a hero...
JR: Yeah, he is, his work is. And that’s what I feel about my father and Jack Kirby. They did something that has set 50 years worth of ideas about, I’m just so impressed with it. Because Stan did, with the intention of infusing reality into it, he has done this. This is all because of what Stan did with Spider-Man. You cannot do anything except tip your hat to him, because that’s exactly what he intended to do. That’s books, everything you think about, novels are that way. Fantasy into political intrigue, that’s what you get with James Bond, er the Jason Bourne novels. Anything that combines the two, because listen reality can be boring. [laughs] That’s why people have drug problems and alcohol problems. So you infuse it with fantasy and that’s what we’ve come to. Stan Lee’s work is my hero. Stan per se? No. My father’s my only hero. But Stan’s work is, that’s correct.

Do you hope that Vaughn makes Kick-Ass 2?
JR: Yeah I hope so. At the very least for consistency, but at the most because I think he’s a brilliant director. Brilliant talent, and I like the guy! I hope it’s the same group of people and we’ll see. I’m holding my breath and crossing all of my fingers.

I'm sure that were a young Kwai Chang Caine to stroll through the streets of any town or city today, he would be wondering if he could not have better spent his youth learning a variety of programming languages rather than the intricate postures of the Preying Mantis Form, or the Hot Urn Forearm Technique.

Oh, these naughty alpha males and their uncontrollable libidos! We've had a parade of powerful men in picture-perfect marriages, exposed as lying horndogs: John Edwards, Mark Sanford, Tiger Woods, Eliot Spitzer, now even (allegedly) Al Gore. And just look at their lovely, betrayed wives, each one "handling" the situation with her own brand of dignity.

It's like some postmodern myth cycle, Zeus and Hera in a 21st century of zoom-lens pap photos and...

A feminist comedy show examining the representation of working women in mainstream media and the evolution of women's place in the workforce over the past 50 years with a special focus on contemporary women's issues.
Structured as a local news program featuring two female anchors (JC Wyatt and Tess McGill, formerly of Working Girl fame) this show uses slapstick comedy, man-on-the-street interviews, live music, kitschy camera techniques, big hair-dos and plenty of cribbed footage to examine a myriad of issues related to the contemporary working woman. Topics covered include the economic crisis of 2008, the current state of women in the workforce, a profiles Non-Traditional Employment for Women, a New York based non-profit that helps women enter the construction and building trades, and a creative critique of mainstream media representations of women working.
The live show also features special guest performer, the inimitable, glitter punk, accordion toting Mira Stroika singing her original song "Norman Rockwell," as well as a traditional Russian folk song and a beautiful rendition of Leonard Cohen's "Chelsea Hotel."
To view this show and more like it, go to blog.papertiger.org.

The technology behind Microsoft's Kinect for Xbox should seem impossibly magical, but I see only drawbacks

About 10 minutes into the 21st century it became a cliche to complain that all those old Hollywood dreams of spending the year 2000 zipping about on jetpacks and playing moon golf with robots were wild works of fiction after all. Now, 10 years on, the present is actually overtaking those movies. And it needn't have bothered.

Everyone remembers how astounded they were by the Nintendo Wii, right? You wave a stick around your living room and pretend you're playing tennis. Well at last week's E3 Expo in Los Angeles, Microsoft launched something called Kinect for the Xbox, which takes things one step further. Suddenly there is no stick. There's just you. You are the stick. Except they prefer to say, "You are the controller," because "stick" sounds a bit demeaning.

There's no pesky handheld interface at all with Kinect. You simply stand in front of your television sweeping your arms about like an unemployed conductor having a breakdown in front of daytime television, and the game reacts to your movements. It actually manages to make Minority Report look dated. Tom Cruise had to don special gloves to use his hand-waggling computer interface. Loser. What is this, 1976? Kinect lets you ride bareback.

And it doesn't just notice your hands, but your entire body. The most promising application was Dance Central, a dancing game from the creators of Guitar Hero. There have been dancing games before, of course, but they were rudimentary hopscotch affairs where you had to step on the right footpad at the right time. Dance Central tracks what your shoulders are doing and encourages you to correct your hips – just like the morning exercise routine Winston Smith had to perform in front of his telescreen in 1984, but with a Lady Gaga soundtrack and slightly less emphasis on dictatorial hectoring.

But wait: Kinect has ears as well as eyes. So as well as jigging around to impress in-game characters who aren't really there, you can also converse with them, thus enabling you to enjoy all the fun of a full-blown psychotic hallucination without feeling compelled to go out and stab someone afterwards. Unless that's the purpose of the game, of course, which it probably isn't, given the bad press that'd generate.

Instead it all looks rather twee: another centrepiece is Kinectimals, a virtual pet simulator which lets children play with cuddly imaginary tiger cubs and the like. You can talk to the tiger cub, tickle it under the chin, dance for its amusement, or hide behind the sofa and watch it whimper morosely until you jump back into view. You can do virtually anything with the cuddly not-there critter, apart from taking the only sane course of action: screaming "BEGONE, VILE WRAITH!" while stamping on its head. If you try that it'll just stare at you, blinking vacantly every 2.3 seconds as prescribed by its software, until you admit defeat and crumple weeping to the carpet – at which point it'll detect your despair and do a funny little handstand to cheer you up, and you'll catch sight of it and momentarily smile through your tears despite yourself and THUS KINECTIMAL IS THE VICTOR.

The technology behind Kinect should seem impossibly magical. A computer you can talk to, a computer that responds to your facial expression and tone of voice? So you're basically like Captain Wow issuing commands to his Plutobot 2000? The teenage me would've kicked himself in the balls with excitement. But now I'm so used to being dazzled by the white heat of technology, my eyes have grown accustomed to the glare. No longer blinded by progress, I see only drawbacks.

As Charles Arthur remarked in this paper last week, much of this technology only comes about about because of the "Star Trek effect" that turns sci-fi movies into self-fulfilling prophesies. A scientist sees a sliding door on the USS Enterprise, gets excited, tries to recreate one in reality, and before you know it you can't even enter your local Tesco without passing through at least two of the bastards. This phenomenon also explains the invention of Laser Quest, the iPad and Soylent Green flavour Pringles.

But movies often do things that work better in movies than in real life. Take talking to computers. The Kinect demonstration showed a man saying "Xbox, play movie" in order to make his Xbox play an HD digital copy of Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland. Then he said "Xbox, pause", and the Xbox paused it. Then he said "How cool is that?" and the audience took a while to respond, because there's no polite collective noise that means: "We appreciate the ingenuity, but CHRIST you look like a dick."

We've got buttons now. Buttons. If you want to play a movie, there's a button right there. You don't have to plead with it. Just press it. Shut up and press it.

Movies show people talking to machines for the same reason they'll still show the whistleblower turning up on the hero's doorstep to deliver urgent news in person, rather than sending a text: because it's more dramatic. It's also more cumbersome. Dancing software that rates your performance and turns exercise into a brightly coloured game: that's a step forward. Holding dorky conversations with your Xbox: that's a leap backward. Or to put it another way: no matter how far into the future we run, we're always lagging slightly behind.

Life is not fair. Ask Armando Galarraga.

The Detroit Tiger pitcher was one out away from a perfect game against the Cleveland Indians, when a close play at first base involving Galarraga covering, was ruled in favor of hitter Jason Donald.

He was out, as Galarraga clearly had control of the ball and foot on first before Donald reached the base.

Umpire Jim Joyce, who made the call, was booed mercilessly immediately after the call, and for the rest of the time he was on the field.

The only excuse Joyce may be able to give is that it was a bang-bang play, and he could not be sure the Tiger right hander had complete control of the ball in his glove.

As much as that may be plausible, Galarraga and anyone at the game, or watching it on television was robbed of history in many ways.

This would have been the first time in baseball history three perfect games were thrown in one season, let alone two within one week. It also would have been the third in one season, the first time that would have happened since the 19th century.

Jim Joyce is not a bad umpire, but he clearly cost a pitcher a chance at a dream come true.

Galarraga was just a stop gap pitcher for Detroit this season, and earned his spot with the trade of Dontrelle Willis to Arizona for reliever Billy Buckner. Do you think this would have happened if the D-Train made a pit stop again in Detroit? No way.

I was able to watch this unfold live on MLB Network via Fox Sports Detroit. I am a White Sox, but also a fan of history. It was by chance that I even saw this happen, because I am also a Chicago Blackhawks fan. The game was being recorded so I could watch it with my dad when he got home from work. What a moment of chance for me to see another perfect game, but it was not meant to be.

To all of Detroit, Galarraga, and baseball fans, I am sorry for your loss.

Gary Younge, whose new book is about race and identity, will be online between 5pm and 6pm UK time, to answer your questions

Tiger Woods has described himself as "Cablinasian" – a combination of Caucasian, black, Indian and Asian – but what meaning does his chosen racial identity carry? Is it helpful or confusing?

Could Barack Obama, raised by a white mother and grandmother, just as easily have declared himself white as black?

Gary Younge's book Who We Are – and Should It Matter in the 21st Century? tackles ideas such as these as he considers why the world is so riven by identity, from the US to Ireland and South Africa.

He will be online to debate the politics of race and identity at 5pm. What's so great about integration? And is it unpatriotic not to support England in the World Cup if you were born in the country? Please post your questions for him here.

Before he was engulfed in a sex scandal Tiger Woods was a poster boy for a multiracial America. Gary Younge on the real legacy of golf's fallen hero

On 13 April 1997 Tiger Woods putted his way to golfing history in Augusta, Georgia. The fact that he was the first black winner of the US Masters was not even half of it. At 21, he was the youngest; with a 12-stroke lead, he was the most emphatic; and finishing 18 under par, he was, quite simply, the best the world had ever seen.

But the fact that he was black explained much of the excitement. Golf in the US was never just a game. Long regarded as the bastion of the white, Christian and middle class, it was a gatekeeper to respectability and networking, open principally to local and national elites. Black players had been allowed to compete in the Masters in Augusta only since 1975. Until 1982, all the caddies in the tournament there had to be black. And until 1990, Augusta didn't allow black members and even then conceded only because, if they hadn't changed their policy, they would have lost the right to host the tournament.

Woods apparently understood the symbolic meaning of his victory beyond golf. He was quick to thank Charlie Sifford, Lee Elder and Ted Rhodes – three former black golfing giants who had never been granted full recognition for their achievements – for forcing open at least some courses. His sponsors were no less aware of his broader significance. Woods appeared in a commercial for Nike saying, "There are still courses in the United States that I am not allowed to play on because of the colour of my skin."

Given the emphatic nature of Woods' triumph, he was consumed both as an example of unrivalled sporting prowess (like Björn Bjorg, Michael Jordan or Pelé) and as a representative of racial breakthrough (like Althea Gibson, Jackie Robinson or Lewis Hamilton). His racial identity was understood by those who embraced his achievements and those who sought to disparage them.

But within a fortnight of black America gaining a new sporting hero, it seemed as though they had lost him again. From the revered perch of Oprah Winfrey's couch, Woods was asked whether it bothered him being termed "African-American". "It does," he said. "Growing up, I came up with this name: I'm a 'Cablinasian'."

Woods is indeed a rich mix of racial and ethnic heritage. His father, Earl, was of African-American, Chinese and Native American descent. His mother, Kutilda, is of Thai, Chinese and Dutch descent. "Cablinasian" was a composite of Caucasian, black, Indian and Asian. When he was asked to fill out forms in school, he would tick African-American and Asian. "Those are the two I was raised under and the only two I know," he told Oprah. "I'm just who I am ... whoever you see in front of you."

It's not difficult to see where Woods was coming from or to sympathise with what he was saying. Few people relish having their identity reduced to tickable boxes. "By choosing to embrace all of who he is," argued Gary Kamiya in Salon.com, "an entity for which there is no name, except one that sounds like a tribe from the imaginary country of Narnia – Woods, the goofy 21-year-old with the golden-brown skin and the beautiful swing, has become a messenger for a larger truth: Our race does not make us who we are."

True. And yet, if that is the case, Woods' insistence represented not an advance but a retreat in our efforts to retire race as a restrictive category. For far from abolishing racial categories by coining "Cablinasian", he simply created a whole new category just for himself.

Some black Americans, not unreasonably, felt Woods was trying to write himself out of their story. Most recognised his right to call himself whatever he wished, but many also objected to the choice he had made. "When Tiger admits having a problem with being referred to as an African-American, it is as if he thumbed his nose at an entire race of people," wrote Mary Mitchell of the Chicago Sun‑Times. "His actions are as conflicting as they are confusing. On the one hand, Tiger Woods gladly accepted the mantle of hero. On the other, he wants to transcend race, at least the African-American part of it. Such a feat would be possible in a color-blind world. In such a place, I would not be a black columnist. There also would be no black politicians, ministers, leaders, athletes or businessmen. There would be no barriers and no barriers to break."

Elsewhere in the paper, the editorial writers disagreed, praising Woods for his ability to shed the confining skin of antiquated racial terminology and write himself into a bigger story. "Our view is that Woods represents the best of the American dream," claimed the editorial. "That we are a nation of immigrants – even forced to come as slaves – whose descendants have sloughed off old identities to become something new. He justly rejects attempts to pigeonhole him in the past. Tiger Woods is the embodiment of our melting pot and our cultural diversity ideals, and deserves to be called what he in fact is – an American." Given that there are more black people in the world than there are Americans, why "black" should be considered more a pigeonhole than "American" is not clear.

And when Woods was more recently struck low by sexual scandal, his bespoke racial category bequeathed its own particular stigma. In different times with a different personality, the almost identical procession of blond-haired women with whom he had affairs might have prompted a circling of the wagons around race and gender. Instead these transgressions were not understood as the tarnishing of racial purity but the contamination of a commercial brand. Those called to the podium to claim ownership or express distance were not the likes of Jesse Jackson, but Accenture and Nike – his sponsors. It was a brand, as James Surowiecki argued in the New Yorker as the story was breaking in December 2009, that was built on "the embodiment of bourgeois virtues: dedication, hard work, single-mindedness".

At root, all identities are created by us to make sense of the world we live in. That doesn't mean that there are no differences between people. Black people generally look different from white people, who in turn look different from Asian people. But the meaning assigned to these differences is a matter of social construction.

There is no essential difference between people on different sides of national borders; it is by attempting to pass off as eternal, innate "national characteristics" what is socially acquired and ephemeral on either side of the line that the nationalist and xenophobe peddle their wares. Often, the emphasis on racial and ethnic differences is rivalled only by the negligible basis for those differences in biological fact. The outward differences of skin, eyes, lips, nose and other physical attributes are just that – outward. It is only thanks to the way race is constructed that these physical differences are transformed into racial characteristics.

In 1998, the American Anthropological Association declared, "Evidence from the analysis of genetics (eg DNA) indicates that most physical variation, about 94%, lies within so-called racial groups. Conventional geographic 'racial' groupings differ from one another only in about 6% of their genes. This means there is greater genetic variation within 'racial' groups than between them." In short, we really are more alike than we are unalike. If race is an arbitrary fiction, then "race-mixing" is a conceptual absurdity. To the extent to which "mixed race" makes any sense at all, we are all mixed race.

Where blacks and whites in the US are concerned, race was specifically constructed in order to preserve the power differential between master and slave, and to protect the master's property and outward integrity, even as he consorted, usually by force, with his female slaves. To ensure that the progeny of these liaisons could never have a claim on the wealth of their fathers, racial classification was governed by the rules of hypodescent, or the "one-drop rule" – that anyone with a single drop of black blood should be regarded as black. So while there were light-skinned black communities – particularly in places such as Louisiana – these would never have been considered "dark-skinned white communities".

Economically and politically, all of this made perfect sense. Intellectually, it was and remains a nonsense. As Barbara J Fields pointed out in her landmark essay Ideology And Race In American History, it meant that "a black woman cannot give birth to a white child" while "a white woman [is] capable of giving birth to a black child".

Arbitrary in its conception and definite in its application, "one drop" is a pernicious and easily ridiculed rule. Nonetheless it remains the rule to this day. Choosing to ignore something or declaring it invalid does not abolish it. That said, the construction of race in the US has evolved over time: there is nothing to suggest that it won't keep doing so.

In this respect, Woods' decision to come out as a Cablinasian could not have been more timely. The day before he was on Oprah, Congress held a hearing to explore how the federal government measures race and ethnicity. "Tiger Woods is not alone in wanting the racial background of both his parents and all his relatives reflected in how people describe him," said Douglas Besharov of the rightwing American Enterprise Institute.

On this point, Besharov was quite right. In the 10 years after the Supreme Court's 1967 decision of Loving v Virginia declared bans on mixed-race marriage to be unconstitutional, various strands of a mixed-race movement emerged in the US. Some were started by mixed-race couples, others by those who adopted across the colour line, yet others by mixed-race people themselves. Through various networks, they provided advice and support, and sought to make their voices heard in national and political forums. From the late 80s to the mid-90s, one of their central priorities was to ensure that government bodies gave the option of putting mixed race on official forms. This battle reached its greatest intensity in the mid-90s as activists fought for a specific "multiracial" category on the census.

"Whether he wants to or not, [Tiger Woods] is sort of becoming the poster person for multiracial identity," said Ramona Douglass, the president of the Association of MultiEthnic Americans (AMEA). Following the hearing in 1997, one Republican, Tom Petri, introduced legislation backing the multiracial check-off for the 2000 census. He called it the "Tiger Woods bill".

Some made great claims for what the inclusion of such a category might achieve, but many civil rights leaders argued against the multiracial box, viewing it as a direct assault on their ability to redress racial inequality that would dilute resources earmarked for minorities. "It would be much more difficult with this additional category to measure the effects of discrimination in our community and to be able to adequately redress them," said Kweisi Mfume, then leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

When the US census put out trial questionnaires with the multiracial box on it, they found that different people understood "multiracial" to mean very different things. "One of the largest percentages of people who filled out the multiracial category were people who would not generally be considered multiracial at all," said Ruth B McKay, an anthropologist at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. "They were people whose parents were of Irish and Italian origin or white American and French – people who are generally considered white. They were mixing race and ethnicity."

Congress passed a version of the Tiger Woods bill. With multiracial people in mind, the census bureau decided to amend its categories for 2000 to include the option of ticking two or more races and specifying which ones. In the end, only 2.4% of Americans claimed it – less than half of those who chose "other". Meanwhile, the proportion of African-Americans effectively remained unchanged (it actually rose by an insignificant 0.24%).

Nonetheless, in this entire saga, two important principles had been established. First, everyone has the right to call themselves whatever they want. If Woods wants to call himself Cablinasian, or Teresa Heinz Kerry (the white millionaire wife of former Democratic hopeful John Kerry who was born in Mozambique) wants to call herself African-American, then we should respect that.

Second, with this right comes at least one responsibility – that if you want your identity to have any broader relevance beyond yourself, it must at least make sense. I found this out the hard way when I was 17 and living in Sudan. Until that time, I never described myself as British, even though I was born there. During my childhood, so many white British people had constantly reminded me of my "foreignness" – "Go back to where you came from"; "Where are you from originally?" – that Britishness didn't seem like a viable thing to claim. So instead, I told people I was Barbadian, where I had been for just six weeks on holiday as a four-year-old.

However, when I went to Sudan, the fact that I was a black man who did not speak Arabic would prompt a question about where I was from. Initially, I told them Barbados. They had never heard of it. A few would ask what it was like. I would make something up from memory. Then I started saying that my mother was from Jamaica because, thanks to Bob Marley, they had heard of Jamaica. Before long, I was claiming I was from a place I had never been to and where I had no family. As a response to such a simple question, this was clearly unsustainable. In the end, I had simply to admit that I was British and reorganise my sense of self accordingly.

Similarly, those who insist that, because Barack Obama has a white mother and grandmother who raised him, he could just as easily be described as another white president as the first black president are in a losing battle with credibility. "Obama's chosen to identify as an African-American male," explains Jennifer Nobles, the campaigner for multiracialism. "It's the same thing with Halle Berry. That's their choice and it makes sense. But he could identify as white. The trouble is no one would receive it that way."

"But if no one would receive it that way, then it would have no meaning," I suggested.

"In theory he could call himself white, but in reality it doesn't work because people see he's that way and understand him that way. On paper he could be the next white president."

"And where could that theory be applied?" I asked. "Who would look at that piece of paper and understand it?" Nobles shrugged. She conceded that the distinction between how he might describe himself and how that description would be comprehended was a problem. But, according to her, it was a problem only because of how everyone else misunderstood race rather than how she understood it. This discrepancy cannot stand.

"A tree, whatever the circumstances, does not become a legume, a vine, or a cow," explains Kwame Anthony Appiah in The Ethics Of Identity. "The reasonable middle view is that constructing an identity is a good thing (if self-authorship is a good thing) but that the identity must make some kind of sense. And for it to make sense, it must be an identity constructed in response to facts outside oneself, things that are beyond one's own choices."

A society in which "Cablinasian" makes sense has yet to be created. Like a Rwanda full of Hutsis, it exists only in the imagination. That does not necessarily mean that such a society could not or should not emerge. But "the facts beyond one's own choice" do not yet allow it. Identities may be constructed and can be built differently. But we can only work with the materials available.

• This is an edited extract from Who Are We – And Should It Matter In The 21st Century? by Gary Younge, published by Viking on 3 June at £14.99. © Gary Younge 2010. To order a copy for £9.99, visit guardianbooks.co.uk. In the first of the Guardian & Observer's Meet the Journalist series, Gary Younge will be in Kings Place on 17 June to talk about his new book.

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The Institute on Assets and Social Policy at Brandeis University just released a new study revealing startling information about the spread between black and white families when it comes to wealth. According to the study, the wealth gap between white and black American families has increased four fold since 1974. Over a 23-year period, the authors of the study found that the wealth gap rose from $20,000 to $95,000. They define wealth as the dollar value of your assets minus your debts.

Thomas M. Shapiro, Tatjana Meschede, and Laura Sullivan worked on the study and found other results that were equally revealing:

1) Middle-income white households saw greater increases in wealth than high income African American households. Middle-income whites have seen a $74,000 increase in wealth during this time period, while high income black families saw only an $18,000 increase.

2) In 2007, one-in-ten African Americans owed $3,600, doubling their debt since 1984.

3) At least 25% of all African American families had no assets to turn to during tough economic times.

The results of this study bolster the move for reparations, paying back the black community for wealth losses during slavery. Part of the gap in wealth between whites and blacks comes from divergent community structures that give whites more power than blacks to control economic decisions. One example is the 16.5% unemployment rate for black Americans, which is about double the rate for whites.

Danielle Douglas, an expert on small businesses and wealth-building, said that even though there are reasons that the community deserves reparations for the wealth gap created through slavery and Jim Crow, we are probably going to be waiting forever for that inequality to be addressed. "We tend to still come from a victim mentality and while we are deserving of our 40 acres and a mule, we aren't getting it. So we need to learn to navigate the system and find ways to create our own destiny. It's a mindset."

Douglas, who trains small business owners to find the resources they need, says that African Americans have to ensure that they and their families are financially literate and empowered to increase their own economic prospects. Also, the government can take steps to create economic opportunities for small businesses in urban communities to allow black families to have a share of the economic pie.

Do you have any ideas for how the black community can address the crisis of this wealth disparity? It's clear that no one is going to help us but ourselves. As even the Latino community is beginning to outpace us in terms of employment, now is the time for us to take complete control of our economic destinies.

Lawrence Watkins is the Founder of Great Black Speakers. He is also the owner of speakers' bureaus dedicated to Hispanic speakers and Christian motivational speakers. His book, "Frame Your Future: 8 Principles to Effectively Focus on the Future and Not Dwell in the Past", will be released in August 2010. If you would like Lawrence's articles delivered directly to your email, please click here.

 

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Yes, the Lunar New Year (which we usually think of as “Chinese New Year”)-- this year the Year of the Metal Tiger (DH's year), and it falls on Valentine's Day. I thought it might be fun to combine the two together, so, on Saturday, I'm hosting one of our vegan dinner parties, with five vegan couples all contributing to the dinner. It also happens to be one of our group's birthday (not mine!).

I'm going to be cooking quite a bit in the next 2 days (and housecleaning!), but check back for a post about the party. This is going to be a rather short blog post today, as it's getting late. We had a power outage today (wind storm!) and I haven't been able to get online all afternoon and evening until now.



Just in case you like my idea, here's some research I did for the party: Valentine's Day harkens back to the Ides of February in ancient Rome-- the Feast of Lupercalia. Young men chose small papers, on which were written young women's names, out of a large urn. The chosen couples would be sweethearts or erotic partners (depending on your source!) for the coming year. Since the early Church could not seem to eradicate this custom, it chose to Christianize by making it the feast day of the apocryphal St. Valentine. (Some Valentine's Day customs also recall those of the old Irish and English festivals of Brigid's Day/Candlemas or Beltane/May Day.)

In all of these European cultures, great stock was put on various aphrodisiac foods, and almonds were one of those. It's convenient for our purposes on this double holiday that almonds are much used in Asian cuisines!

On Lunar New Year’s Eve there is a huge family feast for as many members of the family as possible. The children get to stay awake all night, because the Chinese believe that the longer the children stay awake, the longer their parents will live! (Better not let that get around!)

The color red is associated with both holidays, which is also very convenient for us (for decorating purposes). Red is a good luck color in Asia, so you see red everywhere. The table for the feast is set with a red cloth and red candles. And, surprise, surprise-- it is traditionally a vegetarian feast, on the first day, anyway (the celebration lasts for several days). No meat is served because harm would have to be caused to obtain meat and this would be bad luck.

While the grown-ups enjoy a long meal, the children play games and ask riddles. They usually also receive gifts of “lucky money” (lai see) wrapped in red paper envelopes. The giving of gold-wrapped chocolate “coins” is a modern-day custom, but one that serves our mixed holiday well, as chocolate is a well-known Valentine commodity (with purported aphrodisiac qualities).



Fireworks are a big part of the celebration in China, but they're illegal here, so we'll have to make do with sparklers!

My stepson Sean is in Beijing right now, visiting an old friend of his who has a filming business there. Here he is posing with ALOT of fireworks:



The belief is that whatever happens on New Year’s day will influence the rest of the year, so everyone is very careful to say and do the right things, to think good thoughts and speak kind words. Visitors are offered gifts of sweets and fruit. The house is cleaned thoroughly and lots of food made ahead. Red and orange scrolls with Chinese characters conveying messages of good health, good, luck, long life, prosperity, and happiness, and flowers and pyramids of fruit decorate the houses. Oranges, kumquats and apples are the usual fruit, since apples are symbols of good luck and apples and oranges are both round (another lucky symbol) and are red and orange— colors of joy! (Apples are often known as “forbidden fruit” in Western mythology, which would add the requisite frisson of eroticism to the mixed festivities.) Sweet things are for the sweetness of life; dumplings and stuffed foods represent wealth; long, uncut noodles are for longevity.

Lots room for creativity there!



I had a tough time finding decorations in our small shopping area, but I managed to find some small paper lanterns, one big red and gold Chinese paper lantern, some of those little paper umbrellas, some sparklers, a paper dragon, and some gold-wrapped chocolate coins. I'm making some dark chocolate truffles with orange and ginger, and I found some red foil candy cups for them (they were all out of gold cups). These truffles will decorate an orange/ginger chocolate cake with chocolate/orange mousse filling and chocolate glaze.

So far, I know we have a yuba dish, a rice dish, an eggplant dish and a noodle dish coming. I'll make some plain rice, of course, and I have some flowering tea for a treat (read about it here!), but I'm still trying to decide on the other dishes (besides the cake and truffles). Gyoza (potstickers), I'm pretty sure.


Flowering Tea


Gyoza (potstickers)


"Buddha's Chicken"

Maybe "Buddha's Chicken" or "Buddha's Roast Duck"; maybe Lion's Head (a braised dish of "meatballs" and cabbage). Other possibilities (it depends on what I have in the house!)are: Pineapple Sweet and Sour "Pork"; Chinese Mushroom/Rice "Sausage"; Stir-Fried Vegetarian "Duck" with Chili, Bell Pepper and Black Beans (all these recipes are from my Chinese cookbook). I should do something with almonds!

On several sites I read that fresh tofu and other white foods (except for rice, obviously) are not served during the New Year's festivities because white is considered unlucky for New Year, as the color signifies death and misfortune.So I was thinking that you could use marinated or baked or smoked tofu, or bean curd skin (yuba) in your vegetarian feast. But Eve+line commented: "There is no such taboo about tofu or white colour food. In fact it's common to use tofu and other "white foods" (like radishes; scallops) in Chinese New Year dishes. However, we usually stir-fry or braise tofu with lots of other colourful foods so the white colour is not an issue at all.

In fact it is traditional for Singaporean Chinese to have "steamboat" during the Chinese New Year Eve, and the meal will feature lots of "white food" like tofu, enoki mushrooms and meat dumplings." Perhaps it is different according to region-- I don't know. But I'm relieved that she wrote in about that!

I'll be back in a few days with a report, pics and recipes!

Kung Hey Fah Choy!

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For 16 years, I have been a fan of LSU football, mainly because as a boy, I would pick up LSU games on my old Radio Shack transistor radio from WWL in New Orleans.

When my 9-year-old brain was indoctrinated into LSU Tigers football, Jamie Howard was making the art of passing look like Precious at a track meet while Curley Hallman was doing his best Tommy West impersonation.

In the 16 years between Jamie Howard and Jordan Jefferson, there have been quarterbacks who have made me stand up and cheer and those who have made me shake my head.

JaMarcus Russell was a quarterback in the mold of Byron Leftwich, blessed with a strong arm as well as the other intangibles.

In 2007, when LSU defeated Notre Dame in the Sugar Bowl, Russell showed the LSU faithful that he was indeed ready for the NFL, throwing for 363 yards in a 41-17 rout of the Fighting Irish.

And it seemed that way.

When he was drafted No. 1 by the Raiders, it seemed the team had found its quarterback of the future.

Instead, Russell, who is older than me by two months and 40 times richer than I, turned out to be the Raiders' 21st century version of Todd Marinovich.

Although it's not typical for rookie quarterbacks to stumble in their first season (see Peyton Manning and Troy Aikman for proof), Russell did improve in his second year.

In 2008, with a solid running back in Darren McFadden (who scared me with his postgame interview after the "Battle for the Golden Boot" in 2007), Russell threw for 2,000-plus yards, 13 touchdowns and only got picked off eight times.

Last season, Russell regressed, throwing 11 interception and only three touchdown passes for Oakland.

In contrast, Jordan Jefferson last year threw for 2,166 yards, 17 touchdowns, and 7 interceptions, good for a QB rating of 137.18 for the Bayou Bengals in 2009.

Russell's was 50.0.

On Thursday, when Russell was quietly released by the Raiders, I felt a tinge of sadness for him.

You hate to see a guy with endless talent, a guy that provided so many memories for you as a fan, waste it all away by simply not giving a damn.

That's the bad part.

In order for Russell to get another look from the NFL, he has to find within himself the same passion that he had under the lights at Tiger Stadium.

Deep down, that passion is there.

Just needs the right coach to get it out.

It started with Louise Bourgeois's giant sculpture. Since then, Tate Modern's Turbine Hall has been filled with a succession of spectacular slides, sunsets and visions of the apocalypse. As the gallery turns 10, we talk to the artists who took on the commission of a lifetime

Since it began in 2000, the Unilever series of annual commissions in Tate Modern's Turbine Hall has become the most significant long-term project instigated by any museum in the early 21st century. There are now similar installations in Paris and New York, and the series has developed its own cumulative energy. Let's hope this is sustained through the current economic crisis.

Invitations to participate are increasingly daunting for artists. The Turbine Hall presents an enormous opportunity, but also a huge career risk. One doesn't want overblown monstrosities, or for artists just to make grandiose versions of the kind of things they have done elsewhere. The space is too compromised for Richard Serra, for instance, who installed a great work in Paris's Grand Palais in 2008.

What I'm always hungry for is artists who turn us back on ourselves, who provide an experience that refreshes the way we think. I want them not to perform according to type, but to queer the space and make us think about art and ourselves differently.

The appeal of the spectacle, for a singular and gobsmacking novelty, is hard to resist. The best artists have not gone for the obvious. But however subtle their proposal, and no matter how serious their intent, Doris Salcedo's Shibboleth still became Doris's Crack, while Olafur Eliasson's The Weather Project had the public using the mirrored roof to spell out rude phrases with their own bodies as they lay on the floor below. The recent How It Is, by Miroslaw Balka, seemed an invitation for spooked-out blunderings and fumbles in the dark. There are better ways of looking.

The Turbine Hall is the most public museum space anywhere, and is spectacular in itself. Being here is like being in a stupid movie we have already seen. To show here is a test of an artist's capacity and ingenuity. No one accepts the commission lightly, and no one can get away with going through the motions. This is exhilarating. The series has demonstrated the limits and capabilities of artists, of their work and ideas. In an age of spectacle, it continues to put art itself to the test.

Adrian Searle

2000 Louise Bourgeois: Maman

Bourgeois will be 100 next year, and no longer gives interviews, so the fact she's even speaking to me proves how much the first Turbine Hall commission meant to her. The twisted steel legs of her giant spider Maman, alongside a sequence of fabulous, hellish towers, gave the brand-new Tate Modern an instant visual signature, and made the then 89-year-old French-born New York artist a household name. Until then, Bourgeois had been revered by a small world of contemporary art fans; did this sudden popularity surprise her? "No," she says modestly. "The space is so beautiful – anything placed inside it would cause a strong reaction."

As an artist, Bourgeois dwells on the strange and darkly remembered interiors of her childhood; the intensity of her meditations on sexuality and power easily filled the colossal space. Maman turned the surrealist obsession with the male psyche on its head, creating a haunting image of motherhood – a spider carrying her eggs.

Before this, Bourgeois says, "I made a series of small sculptures with mirrors and chairs. They were about looking and being looked at. To continue these concepts on a large scale was an opportunity I could not pass up." What mattered to her most about this installation was the audience's engagement with it. Her towers were designed to be ascended, paving the way for subsequent participatory installations. "The towers were meant to be an experience. If you did not experience all three towers in sequence, then you did not get the piece."

Did Maman affect future work? She says not, beyond the opportunities afforded by scale; As she points out, her work is relatively immune to outside influences: "It has an internal logic all its own." Jonathan Jones

2001 Juan Muñoz: Double Bind

After completing Double Bind in June 2001, Muñoz said he wanted to retreat from constant travel and exhibitions. He had just finished preparing a mid-career survey show, to open in the US that October. He wanted to pay more attention to drawing and to his writing, both of which he felt he had neglected. He died suddenly in August that year, aged 48, while on holiday with his family in Ibiza. The things he had been writing that summer have been lost, somewhere in the hard drive of a broken laptop.

Muñoz was extremely aware of the potential this space offered, but also the risk. "It's a killer," he told me as we stood on an upper level of the gallery, looking down, just before his project was announced. The problems of installation were both artistic and technical. There were arguments and accidents. He had wanted to place figures on the false floor he constructed at the level of the bridge, where, in the distance, he had also installed a pair of empty lifts that rose and fell through the full height of the space. But in the end, he said, the floor resisted whatever figures he put there. Instead, it became a vast image of unapproachable emptiness. There were figures, little groups of them, in the cavities between the floor and the false ceiling he created below it. Despite the crowds and the work's complexity, there was something pensive about Double Bind. It induced feelings of solitude and wonderment.

I think Muñoz saw this as a summation and the beginning of a new phase of work. Since his death, there have been proposals to reinstall it in various locations, none of which the artist had in mind. The Atocha station in Madrid was one such possibility, an idea curtailed by the al-Qaida bombings of 2004. An old warehouse on the river in Bilbao was also considered when his Tate Modern retrospective travelled there in 2008. As it is, all the elements remain in storage. AS

2002 Anish Kapoor: Marsyas

The title of Kapoor's vast scarlet trumpet referred to the late Titian of that name: a depiction of the mythological character Marsyas, flayed alive by the god Apollo. The most obvious aspect of Kapoor's piece, a "skin" stretched over a frame, was its scale: it was almost too big for the space, and that was the point.

Though it divided critics, some of whom thought it bombastic, Kapoor remains delighted by Marsyas. "Just a big thing is boring," he explains, "but a big thing with another purpose can be awe-inspiring. Marsyas did everything I wanted. I wanted it to occupy a space that hadn't been imagined, [to be] a work that wasn't viewable as a whole, but in bits."

Visiting the sculpture after it was installed, "was the first time I had been able to get to know the work. You'd go in, and visitors were having exactly the same experience I was." In particular, people noticed the hum of the electricity substation next door – almost as if it came from the sculpture. Kapoor laughs: "Yes, I think it's a low G, actually." The piece formed a backdrop to an impassioned anti-war staging directed by Peter Sellars, while Arvo Pärt composed a work in its honour. (Of the Sellars, Kapoor says cautiously: "When Peter's pieces become agit-prop, they can become a little overwhelming.")

The commission taught him some practical lessons. "It needs to be organised as a real campaign. You have to install it over two to three weeks – it's got to happen quickly." Since then, he has resisted the more grandiose offers that have come his way. But next year, Kapoor will take on one of Europe's biggest and most intimidating spaces, Paris's Grand Palais – almost as scary as the Turbine Hall itself. Charlotte Higgins

2003 Olafur Eliasson: The Weather Project

"At the time, I was incredibly happy with people's reactions – they were so diverse," Eliasson says of the gigantic wintry sun he installed at the far end of the hall. All through the winter of 2003/4, visitors basked in its orange light and saw themselves reflected in the mirrored ceiling the artist installed high up near the roof. "It had its own life. There was a sense of personal and collective experience: they're not opposites. The work sailed off into the realm of the public, but it's like when a big ship goes adrift – where will it end up? The Weather Project entered popular culture, and there were some who wrapped it all up in to some kind of new age, universalistic ritual – this I didn't like."

Eliasson thinks earlier projects linked the work with the gallery in a way his did not. "My project brought the city spilling in, and there was a collapse in the contract of how you are supposed to behave in a museum. Public space is becoming ever more controlled, while the Turbine Hall is more relaxed. Museums want objects, but reality changes that. With these projects, the museum itself begins to produce reality."

Eliasson welcomes this development, with some reservations. "Projects like these mostly happen in close agreement with market-driven thinking, which leads to little diversity. Everything comes at a price. But as a space, this is old and quirky, and it still shifts with every commission. There are plenty more projects in front of us. I am happy to have set the standard." AS

2004 Bruce Nauman: Raw Materials

On his first site visit after having been invited to undertake the fifth Turbine Hall commission, Nauman remembers that "a number of large Henry Moore pieces were arranged on the floor beyond the bridge. My first thought was to fly the sculptures around the space using the two gantry cranes below the roof structure."

Some proposals inevitably go beyond the feasible, and the American artist rejected this initial, startling idea. Nauman once made a sculpture called Henry Moore Bound to Fail, and has also remarked that we never know when the grand old man of British modernism might come in handy again. In the end, he returned to his own work and decided to limit himself entirely to sound.

Raw Materials directed our walk down the ramp and through the hall via a succession of human voices (including the artist's), revisiting 22 of the texts and soundtracks of earlier works. The piece was inspired by the gallery's incessant hum (the buzz from that electrical substation again). "The deep variable sound was persistent throughout the space, and eventually it occurred to me that the texts and voices, sung or spoken, that I have used over the years could be incorporated. The large number of people and the various ways to enter and leave the space – meeting, talking, eating lunch, making a public space private – all contributed to the idea of using these sounds to redefine and direct the experience. I don't know why I didn't use some of the non-verbal sounds as well.

"It has taken some time after this installation to use this [way of working] with large spaces again. Sometimes it requires a long period to digest this kind of risk." AS

2005 Rachel Whiteread: Embankment

Whiteread says Embankment liberated a new playfulness in her work. Certainly, hers was a remarkably introspective and personal sculpture for this space. Tottering icebergs, crumbling Carrara marble quarries, the sprawl of a Bernini fountain: these were some of the associations provoked by her thousands of white boxes, arranged to tower over visitors.

Whiteread had recently visited the Arctic. "I really wanted to use the whiteness of the landscape and to bring that inside. Where we were, no one had trodden before, and lichen was the only thing that was growing. We had to be together all the time, and it was very claustrophobic. Here, I wanted to make something really gargantuan and breathtaking."

Yet its use of boxes began in grief. "The starting point was my mother's house: she had died a year before and we were clearing it out. There was one box I had used for Christmas decorations when I was a child. From this came the casting of 14,000 more. All my work has an emotional starting point, but I wanted it to be completely recyclable. Afterwards, we recycled it all on site."

She directed the installers by walkie-talkie. "I made a maquette. You need to be prepared. I'm very much a hands-on artist, and it's difficult to work in there because it's so public. [But] it was very freeing, being able to build massive areas and then go to the bridge and take it all down again. It was like playing with giant building blocks. I had a letter the other day from an 83- year-old woman about it." She had meant to write at the time, to say how much she admired it.

Whiteread admits to being sceptical of some of the other commissions. "I don't think all the artists have responded well: it's been about 50:50. You can deal with it in a very theatrical way, as Eliasson did – that was like being at Glastonbury. Some of the others that have been more participatory I've struggled with." JJ

2006 Carsten Höller: Test Site

Höller had visitors queueing and screaming and slithering down his spiralling slides. It was fun, though there were those who wondered whether it was really art. But art, Höller tells me, is changing its character, like it or not. In the 1970s, projects such as Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty were of minority interest. In London, Höller says, "every newspaper wrote about Test Site, and every taxi driver knew about the slides. British popular culture embraces something like this in a way other countries don't."

So the Turbine Hall became a playground. Höller doesn't believe that the hunger for spectacle signals the death of art: it's just a logical consequence of what came before. "It is a very tricky, strange development," he says. He was overwhelmed by the public's response and concerned by the uniformity of much of the coverage. "I was trying to make a serious architectural contribution – and to ask, why don't we use slides everywhere? I was also dealing with the space, all those grids and straight lines. Putting the slides there was an artistic, even poetic intervention. The spirals relate to natural growth and form. No one mentioned this. I wanted to make the people part of the work, but you didn't have to use the slides. Standing and watching could be like looking at a painting by [Hieronymous] Bosch."

While it is becoming a bigger challenge for each new artist who takes it on, Höller is adamant the series should continue. Other countries now mount similar projects, but "this is the first one. And you can't pretend this is just an ordinary space. It's one of the few spaces in the world that has this fantastic possibility. There is no way back." AS

2007 Doris Salcedo: Shibboleth

When Salcedo was designing Shibboleth, a long crack running the length of the hall, she imagined it would be quiet and elusive in impact. "I thought it was an extremely humble piece. I saw it as an angry piece, but basically defined by a radical absence. I imagined it was going to be overlooked by visitors." So she was startled by both the blanket media coverage and the intensity of the public response, ranging from fascination to dismissal, as people came to gawp at (and even fall into) Tate Modern's hole.

It started with politics. "I am a third-world person [she is Colombian], and came as such to this modernist, industrial space that has become one of the main – if not the main – cultural centres in Europe. Many questions were raised: questions about the relationship non-Europeans have with European modernity, and with European culture in general. I had to bring to that public space the obliterated history of defeated peoples."

Excavating the floor with a team of engineers was not difficult. "I had been making anti-architecture for several years, so the scale was not an issue. I am not a solo singer. For the past 13 years, I have been working with architects and engineers." The more difficult part was the response from press and public: "There were all kinds of interpretations – some quite insightful, others full of cynicism. Most articles remain obsessed by the supposed dangers of the piece. I think that was the easiest way out of thinking about the issues it addressed."

Is the Turbine Hall a place where serious ideas can be raised, or does its reputation for spectacle get in the way of true engagement? "I believe the accidents that took place were the result of a lack of attention," Salcedo says. "Art is about experience, and that experience will reveal itself only when the viewer silently contemplates the piece. Neither I nor Shibboleth can be blamed for that terrible lack." JJ

2008 Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster: TH.2058

Set 50 years into the future, Gonzalez-Foerster's wry take on art and the apocalypse filled the Turbine Hall with the patter of a biblical deluge, super-sized sculptures seemingly swollen with rain, metal bunks strewn with disaster literature and a big-screen montage of end-of-the-world film clips.

Walking around the hall now, she says that "working with the scale of the space is like the difference between a short and a feature film". Her blown-up copies of works such as Louise Bourgeois's spider were realised by a props team from Pinewood Studios. Gonzalez-Foerster remembers: "The hall looked like a giant puppet theatre. There were so many cables holding the sculptures. I discovered a new group of people: riggers!"

What happened when the plastic curtains that marked the entrance were finally parted by her cast of imaginary refugees, the public? "After one month, almost all the books had disappeared," she says. Nearly 1,000 of them, by Jorge Luis Borges, JG Ballard and others, had to be replaced. It was the many photographs posted on Flickr that proved the high point. "This was a big editing moment, connecting different fields of culture. For a lot of visitors, it became their own montage." The critics, she feels, tended to pass over the references. "They wrote a lot about the beds. Why the beds? For me, they're only part of it, like the chairs in a cinema."

Already, TH.2058 has inspired two new works. In its final week, the installation served as the set for Gonzalez-Foerster's film Noreturn, in which a group of children get locked inside a museum; the Spanish writer Enrique Vila-Matas put TH.2058 in his latest novel, Dublinesca. This was one of the best things, she says, "that something dealing with fiction [has gone] back to fiction". Skye Sherwin

2009 Miroslav Balka: How It Is

Balka took his title from a terse, late work by Samuel Beckett and analysed each of the earlier projects in order to develop his own. "What other artists have done is part of the deal. It's good that some of the branches of possibility are cut off. In a way, my project was a dialogue with Olafur Eliasson's. I created a sort of negative situation to his. London is open and international: I wanted to create its opposite. You have to deal with spectacularisation, but I wanted to show and not show, " he says. "It's a serious task."

He didn't spend much time observing the way people engaged with his big steel box and its impenetrably dark, felt-lined interior. "I just wanted the last day to be over. I had anxiety dreams that someone would switch on the light." How It Is will now be recycled. The artist jokes: "I had an idea to send it to the desert in New Mexico, to stand in the sun with nothing but snakes and stones around it."

Balka's next project will involve showing his own work alongside that of northern Renaissance painters, including Hans Baldung and Matthias Grünewald. "After How It Is, I wanted to return to a relationship with humility. I like the word humility. I don't know if something like this will happen again in my life."

What's fascinating about the series, Balka says, is the growing conversation between artists. "Ai Weiwei is a great choice for the next commission [in October this year], because he doesn't come from the western, essentially European tradition – which even Bruce Nauman and Doris Salcedo belong to. It's time for the Chinese tiger to jump over the bridge of the Turbine Hall." AS

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Email your best shot of a Turbine Hall installation to your.pictures@guardian.co.uk – we will print a selection in G2. By submitting your photograph you agree to our terms and conditions (see guardian.co.uk/terms). Tate Modern celebrates its 10th birthday with a free festival of art and music, 14-16 May. Details: tate.org.uk

There may be no new news about the Next to Normal Pulitzer win, but there are still things to learn about it.

I still find the decision of the Pulitzer Board to overrule its own appointed expert jury's recommendations in favor of a show that only questionably even qualified...upsetting.  Sure, awards are silly to those who truly value art, as some have argued.  But to the rest of the world...they actually do still matter.

Especially, the Pulitzer Prize in drama matters.  Let's start with the $10,000 prize itself.  You don't get cash for a Tony.  And I see plenty of evidence that in the media coverage of theatre that the Pulitzer does indeed matter more than the Tony, making it the most prominent award a dramatist can win in this country.  Go ahead and google a playwright who has won both awards, like Mamet: note he is almost always identified as "Pulitzer Prize winning playwright", not "Tony Award winning playwright."  Same for Tony Kushner. In fact, I remember when ads started appearing for the HBO Angels in America, the tagline was: "based on the Pulitzer Prize winning play," even though it also won the Tony and nearly every other award imaginable. Maybe they thought "Tony-winning" would bring to mind flashy musicals?  That it would sound just too...gay?

Probably because of the Pulitzers' other high-minded categories like literature, classical music, not to mention all those "civic" journalism citations that are its bread and butter...the Pulitzers denote a certain class that other prizes don't.  In the arts--short of a Kennedy Center lifetime achievement honor, maybe, or the MacArthur "genius" awards--they are our ultimate "legitimation."  Indeed, the halo of their "civic" obsession--typified the awards' own self-romanticized "fourth estate" heroism--washes off on the arts as well.  Thus the plays we associate most with the Pulitzer (from Death of a Salesman to Angels to the recent Doubt and last year's Ruined) tend to be "serious" plays of outward civic engagement.

So, long story short--one gets the sense with the Pulitzer art prizes, it's not about the art, really.  It's about bestowing a social honor on an artist that a big majority of the entire Pulitzer board of 17 newspaper execs, columnists, and non-arts professors can feel proud of.  While the board every year appoints an expert jury to adjudicate with their inside knowledge on what represents the best in their field, the jury's findings are treated merely as a "recommendation."  (Like some blue-ribbon policy panel in Washington.)  The ultimate award--especially in the case of drama--is not decided by experts in the field at all.  Again this year's board includes not only no theatre specialists, but no one evidently with any arts experience at all.  Of the total eighteen, eleven are basically executive editors and/or publishers of major news outlets. (Even the online DC gossip-rag Politico, for chrissakes) .  There are two professors, but one is from social sciences, the other from history. I'll grant that Columbia University President Lee Bolinger has a long history of arts patronage.  But that's the best I can do at finding arts expertise in that body.

No wonder, then, that, when it comes to theatre, such a body would be fatally biased toward only the most visible examples of the artform--those on display in New York City, especially on Broadway.  In other words, the (like much of the cultural cognoscenti of our land) our fatally stuck in 1955, when it comes to theatre.  (Just like art-lovers who still expect paintings to look like something from life, or music-lovers who wait for the tune.) 

So the Pulitzer is a middlebrow award. What else is new.  The list of past winning plays certainly proves that's always been the case, even when the plays are good.

So why am I still upset?

First, there's the sheer arrogance of the Board, once again, brazenly overruling (i.e. ignoring) their own expert jury of respected critics and practitioners.  For the third time in recent years.  (Once to award Rabbit Hole, once to deny any award at all.)  Either the board believes it knows better about theatre.  OR--perhaps more unsettlingly--is determined to not let the experts go against what they feel is popular opinion.  Or, frankly, just their own personal tastes.

That this happened in the Next to Normal case is clear.  The jury recommended three plays: The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity by Kristoffer Diaz; Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo by Rajiv Joseph; In the Next Room or the vibrator play by Sarah Ruhl.  These are all works of a new generation of playwrights, who bend the old dramaturgy in different ways to allow for more free-association, magical realism, and linguistic unorthodoxy.  They also are more likely to breech the standards of "good taste" and decorum of earlier generations.  (I mean, can you imagine the vaulted Pulitzer going to a play with the word "vibrator" in the title?  My, what would the Board tell their grandchildren! or their newspaper subscribers...)


Of the three, In the Next Room should have had the best chance, by standard Pulitzer practice.  It was on Broadway, under the aegis of the prestigious Lincoln Center Theatre.  The playwright was one of the most lauded of her generation--including being one of those MacArthur "geniuses".  So what's not to like?


Well it didn't help that it had already closed.  And that it's Broadway run ended over the Christmas holidays when no one on the Board would have thought to see it--if the subject matter had not already turned them off.  The Board would have had the chance to read the play, but I wonder if on the page all the rampant orgasming


I haven't seen the other two finalists so can't discuss in detail what the Board might have found objectionable. (And I hope some of you can--please tell us!)  But some things I do notice about those plays by the way--their authors aren't MacArthur geniuses, their plays didn't run on Broadway, and their titles are just, you know, weird.

A majority vote of the entire Board is required to give any jury recommendation a seal of approval, and none of these three reportedly received those nine out of seventeen votes that would win it the prize.  (Again look at the board list and imagine any nine of them voting for any interesting new play that wasn't already a "hit.")
So what happens next?  The Board consulted the jury's complete list of apparently 70-odd first round finalists--basically all plays of note that opened in the 2009 calendar year.  One title stood out: Next to Normal.  Why?  Maybe some had already seen it (it had been playing on Broadway for almost a year).  Maybe some of the Board's DC contingent caught it at Arena Stage in the pre-Broadway (post off-Broadway) tryout of its revised edition.  Maybe some had heard about how much Bill and Hillary Clinton loved it after (coincidentally?) just seeing it on April 3, a week before the award. Or maybe some had just read this NY Times article on March 28 about a plucky little musical that could--because one thing these folks do is read newspapers, especially NYT.


I'm not implying anything nefarious here.  Probably just a really good marketing campaign by the Next to Normal pr team to lobby for that Pulitzer, once they realized they were in contention in what was basically an open field.


But should they have even been in contention?  Here's a question I haven't seen seriously addressed yet in the coverage of this.  Next to Normal first opened in New York--to little enthusiasm--at Second Stage theatre company in February 2008.  Yes, this was an Off Broadway run.  But Off Broadway has never been out of bounds for the Pulitzers before.  Last year's Ruined was only Off Broadway.  So was How I Learned to Drive, Wit, Dinner With Friends, Three Tall Women, Driving Miss Daisy, and even Buried Child when it won back in 1979.  No one was talking up Next to Normal as a Pulitzer finalist for 2008.


(At this point let's clarify that in 2007 the Pulitzers switched from considering a traditional Fall-Spring season to a calendar year.  So eligibility for this year's 2010 award meant opening between January and December 2009.  What the Pulitzer Board defines as "opening" and/or "premiere", though is a question I have not yet seen resolved in any reporting.  Anyone know?)


Now, as was their right to do, the Next to Normal creators decided to give the show another try, go back to the drawing board and revise the show with a future Broadway transfer in mind.  They unveiled the "new & improved" edition at Washington DC's Arena Stage later that year, opening there in November 2008, closing in January 2009.  Then, emboldened by the tryout, they open on Broadway on April 15, 2009.


Rightfully this put the show in Tony Award contention for the 2008-2009 season as a "new musical," since the Tonys only consider Broadway by charter.  But no one else in the theatre awards business considered this a brand new property in 2009.  I remember the Drama Desk, for instance, to which I belong, ruling it out for '08-'09 contention since it had already been considered the previous season.  (Drama Desk doesn't distinguish between Broadway and Off.) I don't care how much tinkering the creators did with the show--the Pulitzers basically gave them a very rare do-over opportunity.


I imagine many would kill to have such consideration.  And I imagine many of the truly 2009 contenders might feel a little cheated by that.  Especially for those not on Broadway and as far from it as LA and Chicago, as two of the jury finalists were.  I mean competition is tough enough with Broadway for recognition as it is.  But competing with last season's shows, too?


So to me this is something perhaps to be the most upset about--that Next to Normal would never have had a chance at the Pulitzer if it didn't re-open on Broadway.  Which sends totally the wrong message to the new dramatists of today.


Back to April 2010: So, with all this new publicity one year into its Broadway run, no wonder Next to Normal would have been one of the rare titles that rang a bell for this group out of a list of 100 current American plays that opened in 2009.  Whatever the reason, the Board mustered the three-quarters majority required to place another title in contention other than the jury recs.  In this case, that means at least 12 of the 17 Board members said to their own expert jury: thanks but no thanks, your expertise is irrelevant in this category, we'll take it from here. 


Talk about "everyone's a critic"!




So what next?  A bunch of Board members hop in a cab and go see Next to Normal of course!  According to NYT's Patrick Healy:

on Thursday night [April 8], several members of the board – who were in New York for their final meetings – went to see “Next to Normal” on Broadway at the Booth Theater. Mr. Gissler declined to say how many of the 17 voting board members attended the show that night. A second person familiar with the board’s deliberations, but who spoke about internal board matters on condition of anonymity, said that “a lot of them” – referring to the board members – went to see “Next to Normal” that night.

One thing not mentioned here I'm curious about...did they pay for their own tickets?  If not, who did?

The next day, April 9, according to Healy, "the Pulitzer board took at least one vote on conferring the drama Pulitzer on 'Next to Normal,' and a majority voted in favor."  Again a majority here means at least nine of those seventeen Board members voted to overrule the jury with a play of which the jury chair himself says, "The musical's rock score may be generic and its understanding of mental illness simplistic."  Hardly a ringing endorsement.

Well at the very least this is a pretty fucked up and embarrassing situation for the nation's most prestigious arts awards to be in.  But then again, how fitting for a body that is literally stuck in about 1925.  I mean for starters--there is no Pulitzer film or screenplay award.  Why? Because when the awards were founded, the Board must have believed these "photoplays" were best used for peepshow nickelodeons. Many might argue today--in the age of Mad Men, Sopranos, and The Wire--that no body can pretend to celebrate what's best in American arts without recognizing fine television writing.  But don't expect the Pulitzers to catch on anytime soon.

Take music, too.  Since its inclusion in the awards in 1943, the Pulitzer music prize has been solely concerned with contemporary classical music.  The current citation reads simply "distinguished musical composition by an American that has had its first performance or recording in the United States during the year." But as recently as 1996 it stipulated:

For distinguished musical composition by an American in any of the larger forms including chamber, orchestral, choral, opera, song, dance, or other forms of musical theatre, etc...

Yes, Wynton Marsalis once won, in 1997, but that was for his symphonic composition, Blood on the Fields.

So even now that Bob Dylan's lyrics have for years been published and studied as poetry, that the Beatles and Rolling Stones can be knighted by HRH The Queen...the Pulitzers still cannot expand their definition of "music" beyond Juilliard circa 1965.

What hope then for "theatre"?

Maybe if theatre is to advance into the 21st century, we're better off without these old fogies.

The nuclear-security summit in Washington on 12-13 April 2010, attended by forty-seven states, resulted in a four-point communiqué and seven-page work plan that outlined tasks to be achieved by 2014.

The sense of progress was reinforced by the deal between the United States and Russia to destroy weapons-grade nuclear material; the decision by Ukraine to abandon its stockpile; and the scheduling of a follow-up meeting in Seoul in 2012. But the atmosphere of the gathering was shadowed by the prospect President Barack Obama described in his opening address as one of the greatest threats facing the world, namely the possibility that terrorists might acquire and use a nuclear weapon:

“Two decades after the end of the cold war, we face a cruel irony of history - the risk of a nuclear confrontation between nations has gone down, but the risk of a nuclear attack has gone up.”

The imagery of such illicit action by dangerous non-state networks such as al-Qaida is alarming enough. But Obama’s remarks also raise practical questions that deserve to be probed in a bit more detail than is usual:

* is there a real risk that a paramilitary movement could make or obtain a nuclear weapon?

* are there groups that would explode such a weapon?

* are there responses to this putative threat that are being ignored or neglected?

The trying game

On the first question, there is a small but definite possibility that a determined group could obtain a useable nuclear device illicitly either from a major existing nuclear state or from one of the newer powers. It is impossible to estimate the size of that risk, but it is probably the case that there was a greater danger in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Even so, as nuclear weapons slowly proliferate, especially in countries with weaker security controls, then the chances of this outcome grow.

The availability of nuclear material, whether highly-enriched uranium or reprocessed plutonium, does tend to rise as nuclear power and research reactors proliferate. At the same time, turning even weapons-grade fissile-material into a deployable weapon is very difficult - far more so than developing chemical or biological weapons, even though its destructive effects might usually be much less (see Pam Benson, “Official: Terrorists seek nuclear material, but lack ability to use it”, 13 April 2010).

On the second question, there is no clear way of assessing the chance of unofficial groups gaining access to a nuclear capability; but it exists. The important issue then becomes the level of motivation and willingness to use such destructive weapons if they were to become available (see Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, Al Qaeda Weapons of Mass Destruction Threat: Hype or Reality?).

Most paramilitary groups since the 1980s have had clear and usually defined and regional- or national-related political agendas that endorsed violence in the context of furthering those agendas. Some groups developed very sophisticated tactics. The Provisional IRA, for example, by the early 1990s effectively faced a stalemate after two decades of its “long war” against British rule in Northern Ireland: it could not win in any terms but could not readily be defeated militarily either. It chose at that point to place considerable emphasis on economic targeting in Britain, with much of the focus being on financial districts and transport links in London - as in the huge bombs of July 1990, April 1992, April 1993, and February 1996, which rendered great destruction but caused minimal loss of life (see “The asymmetry of economic war”, 14 February 2008).  

The effects were considerable, as London was at the time competing intensively with Frankfurt for financial-market pre-eminence. Although no British politicians would admit it, this strategy made Westminster and Whitehall far more ready to recognise the need for a genuine peace process and to act on it.

The Provisional IRA was not strategically or ideologically committed to indiscriminate mass casualties, indeed when its bombs did kill civilians (as in Birmingham in 1974) this was almost always seen as counterproductive to its aims. This applies to many other paramilitary movements, though not all. Algerian militants who hijacked an Airbus A300 on 24 December 1994 intended to crash it on central Paris, for example; the operation was foiled by French commandos during an attempted refuelling stop at Marseilles. When the Sri Lankan army sought to clear the Jaffna peninsula of Tamil Tiger (LTTE) fighters in January 1996, the LTTE responded with a massive truck-bomb in the financial heart of Colombo that killed nearly a hundred people and injured 1,400. 

Moreover, two potentially catastrophic attempts were made around the same period - and each is more indicative of possible future motives. Three months after the Algiers operation, on 20 March 1995, the Aum Shinrikyo sect attacked the Tokyo subway by releasing sarin nerve-gas. The nihilist attempt to “destroy the world to save it” killed twelve people and affected thousands, numbers that meant it failed to have the full global impact that the death of thousands would have guaranteed.

The most potent anticipatory incident occurred earlier, on 26 February 1993, when a radical Islamist group exploded a van-bomb containing 1.5 tonnes of explosive in the car-park under the north tower of the World Trade Center (WTC) in New York. The aim was to bring the entire tower down across the twenty-six-storey Vista Hotel and into the south tower, which might have killed perhaps 30,000 people in a matter of seconds. The wholesale attempt failed, although six people were killed and many injured, and the Vista Hotel came very close to collapse.

Aum Shinrikyo was a rare example of a well-financed religious sect that espoused millennial and potentially self-destructive aims. But the much more significant consideration is whether networks whose roots lie in more established movements (religious, ethnic or nationalist) would act, if they could, to kill many thousands of people. The WTC attack of 1993 suggests a positive answer; but this must be put in context, even at the cost of some intellectual discomfort.

The view from afar

The biggest mistake is to assume that a group such as al-Qaida is based on entirely irrational thinking. Rather, its planners and theoreticians are far more likely to be highly intelligent and rational, as well as thoroughly infused with a sense of purpose.

Moreover, that motivation is almost certain to have its own context. Its components from an al-Qaida perspective might include the felt need to respond to a “far enemy” that has brought wars to Afghanistan and Iraq that have killed tens of thousands of people (100,000-plus in the latter case); is using armed drones on an almost daily basis in Pakistan; and is a close ally of the Zionist state of Israel that has too killed thousands of Muslims in its many wars (including over 10,000 civilians killed during the weeks-long siege of west Beirut in 1982).

None of that cuts any ice in the west, and a nuclear blast in New York or London is almost too terrible to contemplate. But it is also worth remembering that nuclear targeting at the height of the cold war - only a generation ago - involved a willingness to commit to “first-use” of nuclear weapons, including so-called “demonstration-shots”; a policy that carried the risk of escalation to a nuclear holocaust that would leave scores of millions of people dead. Both Nato and the Warsaw Pact were all too ready to equip, train for and contemplate such destruction. Whatever might come from a paramilitary group at some time over the next decade or two would still be very small compared with that.

The hard lesson

The implication of all this is that Barack Obama is one sense absolutely right to highlight the danger, and to use it to encourage movement towards a denuclearised world. But this is not enough. The risk of nuclear, or indeed chemical or biological attack will continue to exist; and far greater attention must be paid to the background of groups that might be tempted in this direction, and to the policies of powerful states that provide them with much of this motivation (see Losing Control: Global Security in the 21st Century [Pluto Press, 3rd edition, 2010]).

Roger W Barnett, a United States navy captain who went on to run a Washington think-tank, made a key point soon after the cold war ended when he spoke of the “[impact] of high-technology weapons and weapons of mass destruction on the ability - and thus the willingness - of the weak to take up arms against the strong” (see Asymmetrical Warfare: Today's Challenge to U.S. Military Power, Potomac, 2003).

The point is even more valid now, with the qualification that as much attention needs to be paid to “willingness” as to “ability”. That lesson has yet to be learned. If it is, the answer to the third question above might begin to come into focus. 

Sideboxes

'Read On' Sidebox: 

Department of peace studies, Bradford University

Sustainable Security

Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs - Nuclear terrorism

Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, Al Qaeda Weapons of Mass Destruction Threat: Hype or Reality?, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, January 2010.

International Atomic Energy Agency

Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

Acronym Institute for Disarmament Diplomacy

2020 Vision Campaign

Roger W Barnett, Asymmetrical Warfare: Today's Challenge to U.S. Military Power, Potomac, 2003.

Sidebox: 

Paul Rogers is professor in the department of peace studies at Bradford University, northern England. He has been writing a weekly column on global security on openDemocracy since 26 September 2001.

Bradford’s peace-studies department now broadcasts regular podcasts on its work, including a regular commentary from Paul Rogers on international-security issues. Listen/watch here

In addition to his weekly openDemocracy column, Paul Rogers writes an international security monthly briefing for the Oxford Research Group; for details, click here

Paul Rogers’s books include Why We’re Losing the War on Terror (Polity, 2007) - an analysis of the strategic misjudgments of the post-9/11 era and why a new security paradigm is needed. His most recent book is a third edition of Losing Control: Global Security in the 21st Century (Pluto Press, 2010)

Related stories: 

The nuclear-weapons moment

The nuclear-weapons agenda

The nuclear-weapons opportunity

The nuclear-weapons prospect

Two steps to zero

The United States, nuclear weapons, and Iran

By any means necessary: the United States and Japan

Iran, America, Israel: the nuclear gamble

America, Russia, and a nuclear-free world

Britain's nuclear-weapons fix

Iran, the United States and Europe: the nuclear complex

The asymmetry of economic war

Welcome to BlogHer's Wall of Shame and Fame, where you'll find the stuff so crazy we can't make it up: the most inspiring and insane of the week's headlines. Below:

Wall of Shame:

• Tiger Woods Gets Lectured From the Grave
• Bristol Palin Says Unmarried Teen Pregnancy Is OK ... if You're Famous
• Woman "Returns" Adopted Child to Russia
• Cosmo Presents: Crafts for Your Crotch!
• Tina Fey Gets Mean Girl on "Saturday Night Live"

Wall of Fame:

• Bloggers Turn "Mommy Meanest" Today Show Segment Into Awesome
• Pulitzer Prize Tiptoes Into the 21st Century
• CNN, Huffington Post Realize: Food Blogging Is Hot
• Headline of the Week: "Dumb Masochism"
• Justin Bieber and Tina Fey are Hysterical on "Saturday Night Live"

And now for the good stuff...

WALL OF SHAME

Tiger Woods Gets a "Keep It in Your Pants" From the Other Side

Which facet to this commercial is more horrifying? Is it the use of the late Earl Woods' voice? Is Nike's crawling through the mud of Woods' personal story in a commercial to sell shoes? Is it the creepy, stunned look on his face? Or maybe the sea change from "Just Do It" to "Well, You Did It?"

Bristol Palin's Public Service Announcement: Have a Kid! If You're Rich!

As an "Abstinence Ambassador" for the Candie's Foundation, Sarah Palin's 19-year-old teen-mom daughter asks: "What if I didn't come from a famous family? What if I didn't have all their support? What if I didn't have all these opportunities? Believe me, it wouldn't be pretty. Pause before you play."

Cosmo Mag Presents ... Crafts for Your Crotch!

As Dodai at Jezebel puts it, "You know, mixing hot wax, paper stencils, and lady bits — while trying to read — seems like a painfully bad idea. " The best worst part: Cosmospeak like "Add some down-there flair" and "Start a game of naughty GPS. Destination: Downtown."

Tina Fey Goes "Mean Girl" on "Saturday Night Live"

Fey's attack on Bombshell McGee for Jesse James' infidelity to Sandra Bullock -- calling her a whore and "a dirt bag's binder from 7th-grade metal shop" -- felt a whole lot closer to Lindsay Lohan than Liz Lemon. (We're sick of "Mean Girls" references, too -- but can't resist, since Fey both wrote and starred in .)

Woman "Returns" Adopted Child to Russia

A Tennessee woman, Torry Ann Hansen, sent her seven-year-old adopted child back to Russia alone with a typewritten note explaining why she wouldn't be parenting him anymore. With only a backpack full of candy and Magic Markers to accompany him. While we haven't walked a mile in her shoes, since when do people treat kids like Amazon orders?

WALL OF FAME

Mom Bloggers Own the Today Show

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

The Today Show profiled mommybloggers this week under the headline "Mommy Meanest." Good thing the guest bloggers were Isabel Kallman, Susan Getgood and Jen Singer -- who were able to play "Mommy Quick on Their Feetest," turning the conversation around to the support parent bloggers receive in our community.

CNN, Huffington Post Finally Realize Food Blogging Is Hot

On the heels of the launch of HuffPo Food, CNN announced Eatocracy, led by Tart.org blogger helmed by CNN food reporter Kat Kinsman, aka KittenWithaWhip -- all just in time for a collective American heart attack at the launch of the KFC Double Down Sandwich (pictured above).

Sheri Fink of ProPublica Wins a Pulitzer for Online Reporting -- Well, Half-Online Reporting

In a collaboration with the New York Times magazine, Sheri Fink of the nonprofit news service ProPublica was awarded a well-deserved Pulitzer for investigative reporting. Her series on euthanasia in hospitals in the wake of Hurricane Katrina is the first Pulitzer for online reporting. The first. In 2010. Yes, really.

With "Dumb Masochism," Jezebel Achieves Best Post Title Ever

"Dumb Masochism: Give Yourself a Brazilian With These Handy Stencils" is equally horrifying and hilarious. Brava, Dodai and the Jezebel team. Slow. Hand. Clap.

Tina Fey + Justin Bieber = Funnier Than Maybe It Should Be

Go ahead and accuse us of Bieber Fever -- but The Beeb (a "dreamy Christmas elf" whose whose "smile is like watching a baby bunny sniff a tiny flower") bleating inappropriate fantasy serenades to Fey ("Hey girl, I wanna watch you do your Pilates. And skip the hard part. Cause baby? You’ve got the motherlode")? Comedy gold.

Get more bizarre, brilliant and beastly news in BlogHer's Wall of Shame (and Fame) archive.

By: Erin Evans

Everybody here is equally kind, (In Living Color) What's mine is yours and what's yours is mine, (In Living Color) And how would you feel knowin' everybody was your friend From thin to thick and through thick and thin And even egotistical trips was put to an end (In Living Color)

-Heavy D, In Living Color theme song

"Sit down and be still," my mother would say as I jumped around the living room, Heavy D's lyrics flowing out of my mouth verbatim.

I remember watching In Living Color every Sunday, laughing feverishly at the Buttmans, a hardworking West Indian family named the Hedleys, Homey D. Clown, and Fire Marshal Bill. It was the early '90s, before James Carrey went by his nickname Jim, when David Alan Grier portrayed scandal-ridden Marion Barry, while T'Keyah Crystal Keymah lived in "Black World" where Jesse Jackson was king, and Kim Wayans wrote a "fast song" by way of Tracy Chapman.

That In Living Color made such an impact on a young girl who, at the time, probably didn't understand the punch line is a testimony to the show's influence on not only black television but on television, period. In Living Color set the stage for up-and-coming comedic talents such as Carrey, Grier, Jamie Foxx, Tommy Davidson, and Kim Coles. Keenen Ivory Wayans, as the host and creator of the show, put his siblings--Damon, Kim, Shawn and Marlon--front and center, making the Wayans family a household name. When the Wayanses left, the show's comedic genius--and in turn its popularity--faded to black in 1994.

But as I prepared to celebrate the 20th anniversary of In Living Color on April 15, I realized that while reminiscing about the ‘90s is nice, not all of the '90s humor holds up today. After recently popping in a DVD of the show's first season and watching a marathon on BET, I found the laughs were few and far between. Ugly Wanda, Homey D. Clown and Anton Jackson? OK, they're still funny. The Buttmans and the Adventures of Handi-man? Ehh, not so much.

And speaking of Foxx's Ugly Wanda, at last year's BET Awards, Wanda (and Martin Lawrence's "Sheneneh") was welcomed into the 21st century. Twitter was flooded with "Skank Robbers" buzz, with "Wanda" and "Sheneneh" as trending topics; a Facebook "Sheneneh and Wanda The Movie" fan page shortly followed; message boards asked, "is this trailer for real?" With an outpouring of support, Screen Gems has green-lighted production.

But that's not all that's next for Foxx. Late last month, the Fox network announced that the comedian would be executive producer of an untitled sketch comedy show pilot. Affion Crockett, a standout comic from MTV's Wild n Out, will be one of the show's stars. Is Foxx positioning himself to become the next Keenen Ivory Wayans? I hope so. There's no doubt that he's funny, and I've always preferred Jamie King to the Auto-Tuned Jamie "Blame It on the Alcohol" Foxx anyway.

However, as opposed to following the traditional network-television route, perhaps the 2010 sketch-comedy show should follow a new format, even bigger than TV. Welcome to the world of Internet TV, the new realm of video, dramatically different from the '90s kinda world when In Living Color first debuted.

Network television execs, and black folks in general, should get with the (online) program. Where are all the funny black folks who should have a television show? They're on the Web, starting up trouble on Twitter, posting their diary-style videos on YouTube, or impersonating America's first black president.

Here's my proposal: Fox, TV One, or any other interested network should launch a sketch-comedy Web series, a la In Living Color 2.0. Hire some young, funny, and most importantly, smart writers; put together a motley crew of actors and comedians; tape short segments as often as possible; and post them online. Promote and tweet, tweet, tweet. This model has proved to be successful with Funny or Die, which began as a comedy video series in 2007 and made its way to HBO this year.

It has to be smart, edgy and witty. If it comes in short clips to watch while you're BAW (bored at work), then it gets bonus Internet points. It must be as much political/cultural commentary as it is laugh-out-loud shenanigans. Let's call it progressive comedy with a bit of "ignant" sprinkled in between.

The multicultural dream cast of characters: Iman Crosson, Lil Duval, GloZell Green, Andy Milonakis, Anjelah Johnson and Nicole Randall Johnson. (Bonus points for snagging Parks and Recreation's Aziz Ansari and Community's Donald Glover.)

Now, many of these names you've probably never heard of. A quick rundown: Iman Crosson made a name for himself in the 2008 presidential campaign with his spot-on impressions of President Barack Obama, and now he's taken on Tiger Woods. He's essential to bridging the funny with the political. Lil Duval is one of the funniest, albeit Twitter-controversial, young comedians out today. Maybe you've seen him in a T.I. video or have stumbled upon one of instant trending topics on Twitter. GloZell Green, well, she's a burgeoning YouTube sensation. Watch her sad, Saturday night attempt to have "fun" in her apartment. Andy Milonakis, the teenage-looking 34-year-old, once had his own short-lived comedy show on MTV. Anjelah Johnson channels the stereotypical nail technician, but she also does a quickly agitated burger-joint cashier who will "cuuuut you." (You may have seen her in Our Family Wedding.) And Nicole Randall Johnson? Well, if Wanda and Sheneneh perfected the black man as a woman, then Ms. Johnson as Darrell ("spelled like Darrell, but it's pronounced Duh-rellll") is the consummate woman as a young black man tryna holla'. Mix some young writers with a few veterans, perhaps Fax Bahr and Alex Small, former In Living Color and MadTV writers, and there's my recipe for success.

Straight-to-the-Web series are increasingly popular. Granted, BET's Buppies didn't fare well, but the number of Web series continues to rise. There's Malik Yoba's Shop Talk, where young men talk about love, manhood and Obama. Michael K. Williams and Jamie Hector (both of The Wire fame) will star in Lenox Avenue, a story of three friends seeking love and relationships in Harlem. Monica Calhoun stars in Robert Townsend's Diary of a Single Mom, which will soon begin its second season.

To be sure, the rise in Web series shouldn't let television networks off the hook for having so few black writers, actors and directors. We want to be accurately portrayed on the traditional small screen, too. But, as much as I miss the days of the Dog Pound, Khadijah and 'em and WZUP, they are long gone. But here's to hoping that the future of blacks in television--be it on the Web or on the boob tube--is live and in living color.

Erin Evans is writer and copy editor for The Root. Follow her on Twitter.

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