My old friend Coach Mac is in town this week with his Iowa State Cyclone football team to play the TCU Horned Frogs tomorrow afternoon in the EV1.net Houston Bowl at Reliant Stadium. As a result, blogging will be a tad sparse this weekend as I participate in some of the bowl festivities, but I wanted to pass along the following pieces for you to peruse while watching the flurry of professional and college football games over the next several days:

Kerry Packer — the media tycoon who was one of the wealthiest Australians — died earlier in the week at the age of 68. Packer was an inveterate gambler in business, in the casinos (where he was known as a generous tipper) and on the golf course, where he frequently played on one of the world’s best and most exclusive courses — his own.
Yesterday was the anniversary of the late and legendary Ohio State football coach Woody Hayes going haywire on the sidelines before a national television audience during a 1978 bowl game.
Banjo Jones detects a bit of editorial glee behind this Forbes article ($) about wealthy Houston plaintiffs’ lawyer John O’Quinn being scammed by a trusted employee.
Larry Ribstein is back from a month-long jaunt to Southeast Asia and is talking about why the U.S. government better quit acting like a monopolist in the market for regulating international companies.
Bill Hesson passes along author Michael Crichton‘s engaging speech to the Washington Center for Complexity and Public Policy entitled Fear, Complexity, & Environmental Management in the 21st Century in which he reminds us of the late David Brinkley‘s wise observation:

“The one function TV news performs very well is that when there is no news we give it to you with the same emphasis as if there were.”

Crichton’s speech includes his observations about Chernobyl, the “dead area” around which is the subject of this fascinating picture journal of a Russian woman’s motorcycle journey.
Ted Frank passes along this entertaining New Orleans Times-Picayune article about a different kind of flood spawned by Hurricane Katrina — the lawsuit flood. Among the more entertaining are the lawsuits against the Army Corps of Engineers for damages resulting from the the failed levees despite the fact that the 1927 statute that authorized the Corps to build levees in the first place specifically exempts the Corps from liability. And as between the Corps and private business, guess which is more effective in cleaning up the mess left from Katrina?
Edward Rothstein of the NY Times and Daniel Drezner provide interesting reviews of Speilberg’s new movie, Munich.
Finally, P J O’Rourke tells Christopher Bray that he’d rather clean the fridge than write, and also passes along this observation about his conversion from communist to capitalist:

“You see, the real reason I became a communist was to impress girls. Back then, all the pretty ones were revolutionaries. One of the things that’s gone wrong for the Left is that their girls just aren’t cute any more.”

Have a great weekend!