Great timing! The first weekend of NFL football regular season play – and it really is so darn playful the way those boys run around – begins today. So we couldn’t be more delighted that the National Football League has asked us to help explain why their players – please don’t call them “warriors”; that...
North Korea is launching rockets, Syria is slaughtering its citizens, and the Filipino community is organizing a massive get-out-the-vote campaign for a crucial election (not for something boring and unimportant like a public office but a cause that’s got folks passionately engaged: the American Idol finals). So the astonishingly weird five-game suspension of Miami Marlins...
Outrageous. Horrifying. Disgusting. These were some of the adjectives hurled in the press when news broke that the former world champions of football, the New Orleans Saints, for years had instituted a bounty system that rewarded their players for knocking opponents out of the game. Players contributed to an in-house pool and collected $1,000-$1,500 when...
Life just got better for millions of Americans. The badly paid semi-professional scholar-athletes begin their campaigns this weekend at college campuses around the nation. The extravagantly paid mercenaries of the NFL begin theirs next. Are you ready for some football?! Of course you are. Our corporate overlords wouldn’t have it any other way. Bread and...
When a metropolis wishes to attract a professional sports team to their precincts, the City (obstensibly with the blessing of a majority of voters) offers the team owner attractive financial incentives. These enticements often include newly built stadiums (with copious luxury boxes available for rental) and substantial tax breaks. Does this situation best exemplify…? 1)...
Reliable sources report that there’s some sort of governmental event going on this week in Washington, D.C. But anyone who has cable TV knows that the really big news is that the NFL Divisional Finalists have been set, and either the Pittsburgh Steelers or Arizona Cardinals will win the upcoming Super Bowl. Lest you scoff,...
If you enter the phrases “betting on” and “stock market” in the Google search function, .12 seconds later you’ll be furnished with 322,000 Web page matches. Nearly every state in our great union — except for Hawaii and Utah — oversees some form of gambling, including State Lotteries, which serve as a regressive tax and...
The eternal battle between Good and Evil rages on. We watch (and learn) in awe, each of us better somehow for having witnessed Virtue collide with Sin. But America’s most instructive forum of late hasn’t been the Church pulpit; it’s the sporting scene. The characters in these Morality Tales are so clearly identifiable, so devoid...
Hope RekindledThis past week has given us more hope for our diseased republic than any other time in 50+ years of paying attention. Observing and participating in a long-overdue peaceful uprising, occupying the streets, feeling the righteous energy of people of all ages, colors, faiths, and wealth (or lack thereof), has…
Used traditionally, in most Western music the bass keeps time churning out fat quarter-notes based on the root of a chord. Ba-dum-dum-dum-dum. On his addictive new recording Tines of Change, the visionary master bassist and composer explores his instrument’s under-utilized sonic possibilities. The concatenation of squeaks, grumbles, twitters, growls, whistles, knocks, cries, howls, and, yes, nice...
