I Hate What You Just Said

From the AP:

ORLANDO, Fla. (July 12) - An Orlando man has traded the naming rights to his unborn son for a $100 gas card.

David Partin recently heard that a local radio station was giving $100 worth of free gas to the listener who called in with the most interesting item to trade.

Stop Tape!  I’d feel a lot better about this if it was more than $100.  I mean, aren’t we about 3 decades past people getting excited about winning $100 on the radio?  Roll tape:

Central Florida radio hosts Richard Dixon and J. Willoughby were quick to take Partin up on his offer, The Orlando Sentinel reports.

Stop Tape!  We all knew this was coming out of Florida when we saw the headline, didn’t we.  Will Florida please secede?  Seriously.  Please, Florida, just go away.  Roll Tape:

When the baby is born this winter, he will be named Dixon and Willoughby Partin — with the “and” included.

Stop Tape!  This Winter!  You mean this idiot has this tiny award on layaway!  He’s set the bar so low that he knows two seasons from now he’s gonna need gas money bad enough to sell out his son?  This is bad.  Roll tape:

Partin’s girlfriend, Samantha, says at least her son will have an interesting story about how he got his name.

Stop Tape:  It goes something like this.  My Dad’s a douche and my Mom didn’t use one.  They both listen to two douches on the radio.  My douche Dad thought he needed gas money until he learned that the car needed more than gas to run.  It needed to be taken off blocks in the front of the yard and affixed with tires and an engine among other things.  Roll tape:

Dixon and Willoughby plan to be at the hospital when the baby is born and will hand over the gas card when they see the official birth certificate.

End Tape:  Of course Dixon and Willoughby will be at the hospital - he’s the one being born.  Oh, wait, the radio guys.  Got it.

This comes from the AOL sports blog:

The New England Patriots are exporting the all-American art of cheerleading to China, where 200,000 people have volunteered to learn how to cheer at the Summer Olympics.

Cheerleading is foreign to China, so very few of those 200,000 volunteers have any experience. But the Chinese wanted to institute cheerleading as part of the Games, and Patriots owner Bob Kraft is a longtime proponent of exporting American football to China, so he spearheaded the effort to send the women who work as Patriots cheerleaders to Beijing to give cheerleading lessons.

Of those 200,000 volunteer cheerleaders, Olympics organizers have chosen 400 to be part of an elite group that will put on special performances. Patriots cheerleader Carrie Binette, who is working with those 400, told the Christian Science Monitor that the Patriots cheerleaders are teaching “how to entertain a wide crowd,” and that the most important things are not dancing ability but “spirit” and “poisemanship.”

Says a Chinese cheerleader named He He, “Everyone knows cheerleading is a Western activity, but we hope we can find a Chinese way to do it [and] show the world.”

Why do I feel like He He is mocking me?  Is it because she appears to be taking something so absurd so seriously?  Or is it just her name?

Thank God someone finally said it:  

The media’s reporting of Tim Russert’s death has been so over the top it’s embarrassing.  The above link does a nice job of undressing the media on this point but I’ll go a step further.  I will attack a dead man.

I can’t say that I’ve watched a lot of “Meet the Press” so it may be unfair for me to critique Russert.  However it’s also important to note that a big reason I haven’t watched a lot of “Meet the Press” is that I never really liked Russert.  I saw something in his big puppy dog eyes and sloppy posture that read desperate to me.  Like a tough guy who actually was nothing more than a thumb sucking sycophant.  

That’s a lot to read into the way a guy looks into a camera from behind a fake desk, I know.  But it wasn’t just his look.  It was the things he’d say.  How many interviews did I see with this guy talking about being from Buffalo and being the son of Russ?  I saw “Meet the Press” one time where at the end he looked into the camera and talked about how much he loved being “Luke’s Dad.”  I can’t remember if it was the kid’s birthday or a past Father’s Day or what - it may very well have been apropos of nothing.  I just remember a sensation tingling up my spine - a douche chill.  It also enraged me.  I don’t have enough space in my head for valuable information, but I can’t erase from my hard drive that this windbag has a son named Luke.  God Dammit.  

On an episode of “Bill Moyers Journal” titled, “Buying the War” Moyers asks Tim Russert about the Bush administration’s use of “Meet the Press” to sell the upcoming war in Iraq.  The exchange is priceless for so many reasons.  Allow me to paraphrase:  When Russert was asked why he simply took the administration’s word for things instead of checking to see if what they were saying was true or made sense, Russert responded,

“Hey look, I’m a guy from Buffalo.  I work my sources hard…”

Seriously.  He responded that he was from Buffalo.  

The implication then and every time he brought up that he was from Buffalo was that he was a strong, hard worker who didn’t take guff from anybody.  But as this exchange reveals so vividly, people who actually are that way don’t need to say it, and those that aren’t often rely on this background as a way of overcompensating for something a tad less noble.  

That brings up the other thing I know about Russert that no one seems to be memorializing.  His work as an author.  If James Fry were to die tomorrow I’m guessing that within the first one and a half sentences of his obituary there’d be some hint to the fraud he perpetrated by calling, “A Million Little Pieces” a non-fiction memoir.  Why then has no one brought up that this “journalist of our generation” took sole credit for writing a book that was actually written by a ghostwriter?  Not only was the ghostwriter not credited on the cover, the book is about Russert’s relationship with his father.  Shouldn’t this brilliant journalist be able to write his own book when the subject is his relationship with his Father - the man who made him so noble and tough to begin with?  

But what about Russert’s work on “Meet the Press”… and the Today Show, and MSNBC, and the Nightly News? (How hard can a man “work his sources” when he’s on TV every minute anyway?)  

Frankly I was never that impressed with Russert’s brand of gotcha journalism.  So a guy says one thing and then Russert rolls out video (provided by the work of a production assistant paid five hundred dollars a week to watch C-Span) of him saying something else?  Big deal.  As the Moyers interview points out, there’s a lot more to journalism than simply what an interviewee says, whether they said it recently or long ago.  Furthermore it reduces a subject to what its proponent (or opponent) says about it.  

If, for example, a journalist interviews a politician about tax hikes and that politician says there should be a tax hike but we see a clip of him years ago saying there shouldn’t be a tax hike, what have we learned about the real issue of whether it’s a good idea to raise taxes?  The interviewee becomes the subject and not tax hikes, or the war in Iraq, or global warming, etc.  

As the first link in this story points out, the memorializing of Russert is more about the media then about Russert.  They liked the guy.  Fair enough.  They have tons of footage of him that they can now rerun and plenty of outlets they need to fill time on anyway.  True dat.  But for a guy who was quick to bring his own personal life history into a realm it shouldn’t be to begin with, I think even he may blush at this overkill.

When I heard Tim Russert died I was sad the way a person is usually sad to hear of the passing of someone familiar.  Now I just want this coverage to die.   

In an interview with Steven A. Smith on ESPN’s “The Sunday Conversation,” Kobe Bryant makes a startling claim.  When asked what happened to change things in Lakerland so dramatically from the off-season, when he was demanding to be traded, to the team’s fast start in the fall, Bryant responded:

“I tweaked some things in my leadership in terms of trying to instill, you know, my DNA into the rest of the team.”

When Kobe refused to elaborate, perhaps on the advice of counsel, Smith begged for more.

“You talkin’ about pretty much implementing your DNA into teammates, people wanna know how you did that.”

The last time the spread of Kobe’s DNA was a topic of discussion he was on trial for raping a young woman in Colorado.  Rumor has it that he went “back door” on that occasion as well.

The NBA has, since at least the Jordan era, celebrated the individual over the team.  If a team loses we’re told it’s because it either didn’t have a star to carry them or because its star was not a big enough star to carry them and therefore said star is not a true star.  Players are happy to proliferate this foolish message with declarations about “my team” and the like.  Even amongst this megalomania, though, Bryant has always stood out.  Now that his team is on the brink of a championship he’s taken the opportunity to literally call his teammates his bitches and reminded us vividly how he keeps order in his pack.

Here’s hoping Kobe will be watching the Celtics celebrate their seventeenth championship while icing down his strained groin.