As noted earlier here and here, CBS settling up with Don Imus for a substantial portion of the compensation remaining under his terminated contract was inevitable. My sense is that, based on favorable market conditions, there is a good chance that Imus will end up making more money as a result of the CBS settlement and the new contrat that he enters into with another media outlet than he would have received had he worked through the term of the CBS contract.
The seemingly insatiable desire of American prosecutors to criminalize as many ordinary and law-abiding citizens as possible has now reached the Dean’s office:
A pair of schools officials, including the dean of students, and three students from Rider University have the campus community stunned after being charged with ìaggravated hazingî in the death of a freshman student that died following a night of binge drinking at a fraternity house late last March, authorities said Friday. [. . .]
“The ramifications of this for colleges and universities in New Jersey, and across the country, is that it will send some kind of message that the standards of college life, when it relates to alcohol, need to be policed carefully,” Mercer County Prosecutor Joseph Bocchini Jr. told the Associated Press.
Bocchini didn’t mention that he could have also obtained the indictment of a ham sandwich if he had asked the grand jury for one. I’m looking forward to hearing about the “evidence” that the Dean had anything to do whatsoever with the alleged hazing incident that led to this young man’s unfortunate death. If, as I suspect, there isn’t any, then what exactly is the message that Bocchini is sending?
Gee, I thought the fields for the Shell Houston Open Golf Tournament had slipped badly over the past several years. But those depleted fields are nothing compared to the experience of this week’s Greater Greensboro Open (now called the “Wyndham” or some such thing). The PGA Tour’s final tournament before the season-ending series of “playoff” tournaments known as the Fed Ex Cup is having a bit of a problem getting any leading Tour player to show up:
The Wyndham is the final regular-season tournament of the PGA Tourís FedEx Cup, and only the top 144 players in the points race advance to the playoffs, which will start next week.
There is no shortage of players hovering around the 144th spot on the points list, but those already secure for the playoffs are taking the week off. Only two of the top 50 in the updated world rankings are in the field – Davis Love III, the defending champion and ranked 43rd, and Carl Pettersson, ranked 48th. Pettersson, a former player at N.C. State, lives near Raleigh and played his high-school golf at Greensboro Grimlsey.
And after publication of the foregoing, Love withdrew from the tournament to undergo a medical procedure for kidney stones. The Tiger Chasm widens.
Clear Thinkers favorite Dan Jenkins is the best writer on golf of our times, but his daughter Sally is a darn good golf writer in her own right (previous posts here). In this column after Tiger Woods’ Saturday round this past weekend in preparing to win the PGA Championship, Sally Jenkins does as good a job as I’ve seen of capturing Woods’ special talent:
Woods is the only player who matters in this PGA, and frankly, he’s the only player who consistently matters in all of golf. To properly appreciate Woods’s performance here, you better enjoy dictatorships because that’s what his reign as the best player in the world has turned into. Woods has reached the point where he can apparently quell an entire field with an imperious look. He has never lost a major championship when leading after three rounds, and his career record when holding a lead entering the final round of any tournament is 39-3, . . .
All Woods had to do to extend his lead in this PGA was stand there and lash a series of steady iron shots. His strategy was to hit the center of the green and lag his putts on an afternoon when scoring was difficult and only five players finished 54 holes under par. His round of 1-under 69 was hardly dominant, but it was enough to stretch the lead over an array of opponents who showed the resistance of Farina. Woods’s average score in the third round of majors is 69; the average score of his partners is 73. [. . .]
If Woods’s legacy lacks one thing at this point, it’s a sense of the dramatic. At his best, his game is lulling, a matter of swing planes straight as the creases in his clothes, and perfect parabolas. It’s difficult to render what he does so well, precisely because it’s so modulated and well regulated. [. . .]
His genius comes without emotional torture; he’s not especially revealing and demonstrative, like Sergio Garcia, or an emotional conduit for his audience, like Phil Mickelson. He’s all about chilly excellence. Greatness is his most definable quality. It’s a peculiar fact that Woods is actually more spectacular to watch when he’s struggling a little, when he has to hit creative recovery shots, and is forced to give up a bit of control.
The par 70 of Southern Hills has at once brought out the very best and yet most unspectacular aspects of Woods’s game. The doglegging layout is like a series of intricate locks. But Woods’s genius here is that he has turned a difficult puzzle of a course into an assembly line. He hits 4-irons off the tee to the middle of the fairway, plays his approaches below the hole and then either makes the putt or doesn’t.
His strategy has been, in his words, “just try to keep hitting fairways and put the ball in the center of the greens and lag-putt well.”
Even his 63 in Friday’s second round, which tied the record for low round in a major championship, was oddly unexciting. The score itself was probably the most interesting about it. His boldest shots of the day were a 35-foot putt to save par on the 12th hole, and his missed horseshoe putt on the 18th. There was no pin-seeking and bouncing it off the flagsticks, or driving 350-yard bombs.
The only drawback to any of this — and it’s not a criticism — is that Woods’s victories aren’t always especially memorable. They might be memorable for his margin of victory, but not for his Arnold Palmer-like Sunday charges, with whooping galleries at his back. This is not his fault, but frankly the fault of his opponents, who have failed to challenge him.
There is a handful of players capable of making noise on a course, who can capture the attention of the golf world for an instant, or maybe even part of a weekend. But when they quiet down — and they always do — there remains the relentless Woods, poised, with his hands finishing high over his shoulder, then twirling the club and letting it slide back down, as he watches the ball descend to another green.
I enjoy the football season as much as anyone, but I absolutely abhor the football pre-season.
For weeks, we are forced to endure literally hundreds of glowing newspaper articles and media reports regarding football practice, which happens to be one of the most boring exercises in organized human activity ever invented. Prior to the Texans’ 2006 season, I noted a couple of times (here and here) how the Chronicle sportswriters have elevated the pre-season cheerleading about the local NFL team to absurd levels, which means that we will then be treated to dozens of more inane articles and media reports after the season begins on how disappointing the Texans are performing.
The sheer amount of over-analysis is overwhelming. Today, while flipping the radio dial in my car, I happened upon two radio show hosts analyzing for about five minutes two incompletions from Saturday night’s Texans-Bears pre-season game. Here is a typical Chronicle entry regarding Monday’s Texans’ practice:
The offense looked strong Monday with Bethel Johnson making some big catches. He may have earned himself a little more playing time this weekend. He saw the field Saturday, but didn’t record a reception.
Pretty earth shattering stuff, don’t you think? The amount of time expended on all of this is really absurd.
At any rate, from the looks of this article (pdf here), the Chronicle sportswriters are off and running again this pre-season in their role as the primary Texans cheerleaders:
A cornerback by trade in the NFL, Von Hutchins is getting a serious look from the Texans at free safety, and that’s where he was playing Saturday when he intercepted a Rex Grossman pass late in the first quarter.
Hutchins stepped in front of intended receiver Mark Bradley and made the pick at the Chicago 36, then returned it 20 yards before being run out of bounds at the 16.
The heads-up play, which set up the second of Kris Brown’s four field goals in the Texans’ 19-17 victory, . . .
First, the interception was thrown by backup Bears QB, Brian Griese, not Grossman. And, of yeah, it would be nice if the Chronicle reporter noticed that the Texans actually lost the game, 20-19.
It’s going to be a long season enduring media reports about the local football team.
Drayton McLane may have allowed the Stros franchise to decline steadily on the field over the past couple of seasons, but he rarely misses an opportunity to make a buck with his baseball franchise. That’s why I’m a bit surprised that he has not picked up on this idea. Looks like a natural, particularly given the proximity of the Corpus Christi and Round Rock minor league clubs.
I swear, you cannot make this stuff up:
A little-noted side effect of the property boom of the past decade has been the real-estate-enabled divorce. Home values might have slid in some markets, but in the New York City region, where prices remain high, divorce professionals like therapists and lawyers, along with real estate brokers, say unhappily married couples are cashing in appreciated homes to underwrite a split.
ìThe equity that there is in real estate is one of the impetuses why there are so many divorces,î said Nancy Chemtob, a Manhattan divorce lawyer, adding that the net worth of her clients has doubled in the past three years mainly thanks to real estate. The price of the average Manhattan apartment was $1.3 million as of June, up 7 percent from a year ago, . . . [. . .]
Economists are familiar with this phenomenon. Even though divorce rates are declining over all, as far back as 1977 the economist Gary Becker showed that couples experiencing any unexpected, drastic rise in net worth are at risk of divorce. (The same holds true for a drastic decline in net worth.) [. . .]
And then there are cases in which couples decide a divorce settlement would ultimately be too costly because of the on-paper appreciation of their property.
One New York real estate executive, who has separated from his wife and would not speak on the record because he is unsure if he will divorce, said most of his peers in the industry who are unhappily wed seem to be staying put. They donít want to carve up the real estate portfolios they bought or built during the boom.
ìI know plenty of people who are enormously wealthy and just donít want to cut it up,î he said. ìThey find it hard to divide the real estate.î
Decisions, decisions, decisions! ;^)
So, Republican Texas Supreme Court Justice Nathan Hecht obtains a discount on his legal fees from Chip Babcock of Jackson & Walker for his successful defense of Hecht last year in the dispute with the Commission on Judicial Conduct over his endorsement of then U.S. Supreme Court nominee, Harriet Miers. That gets Justice Hecht an ethics complaint and a possible criminal investigation by the Travis County District Attorney’s office.
Meanwhile, Democrat Bill White, the Mayor of Houston who is almost certainly going to seek a statewide office in a year or two, leans on local law firms to provide free or heavily discounted legal work for the City of Houston, most of which helps Mayor White’s political aspirations. That gets Mayor White a glowing article (see Anne Linehan’s report here) in the Houston Chronicle.
What am I missing here?
If you thought that Bill O’Reilly’s ideas about gasoline prices were screwy, Bryan Caplan surveys the debate responses of the Democratic Party presidential candidates on the subject.
I don’t know what’s more troubling. The candidates’ answers or the fact that those inane answers are formulated because they help get the candidates elected to office?