I don’t recall if I’ve plugged this one before, but here’s a blog about nothing but baseball. I’ll be permalinking it next time I update “Other Journeys”, but for now, check it out. (I seem to like Joe Morgan more than he does, but nevertheless….)

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Many watchers of American Idol (yeah, I’m one of them; give me a break!) were surprised that this week saw the elimination of Rickey Smith, a wonderfully exuberant guy who performed very well this week (in the opinion of the judges, as well, including Simon) instead of, say, the woman who did a warbling rendition of Blondie’s “Call Me” or the other woman who did Bryan Adams’s “Everything I Do” not very well. It was surprising that the clearly stronger performer was eliminated, but it’s worth remembering that last week, no one was eliminated, and thus those vote totals were combined with this week’s. That’s probably what did Rickey in, plus the fact that I suspect Ruben and Clay are piling on more votes each week as they win more and more converts. I’d like to see the vote tallies, though — I wonder if Rickey somehow lost in a squeaker, or if he was legitimately blown out. (And why is it that voting can only be done on a cell phone? What’s up with that?)

Of course, I think that only a stiff case of laryngitis could stop Ruben from winning this thing in a walk.

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Well, that’s just great.

By now I suppose everyone is aware that the great joy of liberation, felt by the Iraqi people as the yoke of tyranny has at last been lifted from their backs and the millstone of Saddam Hussein has been removed from their necks, has turned to that most predictable of human endeavors when joy and lawlessness mix: looting and rampant destruction, which is bad enough when it destroys businesses and economic infrastructure — infrastructure that, as the WaPo article linked above points out, was left intact after all of the bombing only to be demolished by Iraq’s own people — but becomes downright tragic when hospitals are ransacked and the halls of the Iraq National Museum, a repository of some of the oldest artifacts of human culture, are plundered and their contents either stolen or smashed outright. The human impulse to celebrate through destruction is one of our species’s ugliest traits, and given the antics that surround big sporting events in this and other “more civilized” countries, it seems to be pretty universal.

I’ve tended to think of the war in Iraq as a case of the United States doing the right thing for the wrong reasons (and doing it in ham-handed fashion, to boot). That part of the price has to be yet another bit of excision of our cultural memory — and by “cultural”, I mean the entire human species — makes me sick at my stomach. By destroying the Museum, the people of Baghdad have exacted a heavy price on every human being for this war.

I’m a bit unsure of whether the American forces could have prevented all of this looting and criminal behavior — there probably aren’t enough troops there to really control as populous a city as Baghdad. But they could have done more than simply sit by and watch, evidently waiting for it to die down and the looters to go to sleep. They could have protected the museum, the hospitals, and some of the more important governmental agencies in Baghdad whose functioning was essential to the daily business of the city, and whose destruction now will just make what I fear will be a rather half-assed exercise in nation-building that much harder. And I must admit that while I’ve never bought into the occasional left-wing idea that this war was only about oil, I’ve never abandoned the notion that it was at least in part about oil. The only question was, to what degree. Reading in this article that the only governmental facility in Baghdad to receive significant American protection after the conquest was the Oil Ministry does not bode particularly well.

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Nifty! My wife just handed me the new Alabama Quarter, which has a neat image of Helen Keller on it, including what I assume is her name in Braille. (Not that anyone’s going to be able to read the Braille writing here, since it’s freakishly tiny on the actual coin.) I’m glad that Alabama came up with something other than a dull outline of their state for their quarter, and I confess that I didn’t know that Helen Keller was from Alabama in the first place. I would have figured Alabama would put Bear Bryant on their coin — but then, my general knowledge of that whole part of our country is really limited. I doubt I could name more than a couple of famous Alabamans without including Forrest Gump.

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Buffalo sunlight watch: three days and counting. Man, this must be what Hawaii feels like!!

(Yes, I know I’m tempting the Snow Gods.)

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Last night NBC aired what is, in all likelihood, the last episode of Ed, which had been one of my favorite shows. I’ll miss it, but I also think that like a lot of “bubble” shows that survives to a third season, Ed lost its way a bit. Oh, it wasn’t as bad as the third season of Millennium; nor did it come close to the depths plumbed by Star Trek‘s infamous third year; but it still fell off a bit in the quality of writing. My late, lamented Once and Again held in strong until the end of its third year, maintaining its high quality, but Ed suffered because it fell victim to a common mistake of shows like this: allowing the on-again, off-again romance between the leads (Ed and Carol Vescey) to become dominant to the near exclusion of everything else on the show.

When Ed debuted, it was a smart, quirky show about a New York City lawyer who returns to his small-town-Ohio roots to buy a bowling alley and run his own tiny law firm for the town’s inhabitants. This allowed all manner of interesting supporting characters, some of whom were former high school classmates of Ed’s while others were simply denizens of Stuckeyville. Ed’s law work manifested in cases that were sometimes amusing, other times not so amusing, but always illustrative of decent values and a sense of what’s really important in life, which was always the show’s main theme when it was really “on”. The romance between Ed and Carol was generally something of a subplot, something to give the show a larger sense of continuity behind the more prosaic weekly comings-and-goings.

But gradually Ed-and-Carol took over, to the point where multiple episodes would go by at a stretch and the only indication of Ed’s status as a lawyer would be a shot of him sitting at his desk reading a brief or something. The show’s courtroom aspect provided a nice contrast to the ongoing plotlines, and they were usually written with the kind of gentle humor and wit that I’ve come to enjoy more in recent years. For some reason I always enjoyed the courtroom stuff on Ed, despite the fact that I generally lost interest in courtroom drama a number of years ago. (I only watch maybe two or three episodes of Law and Order in any given season, I can’t stand The Practice, et cetera. Personally, I blame David E. Kelley for ruining courtroom dramas for me. But I digress….)

The first two seasons of Ed always conveyed a sense that Ed was just a guy living in the town of Stuckeyville, and that the show was really about this small town. (In fact, the show’s original title was intended to be Stuckeyville.) But the focus shifted, becoming more and more focused on Ed and Carol than on the town and its wonderful citizens.

And then, in the course of executing that romance, the show gave us not one but two love triangles complicating the whole thing, and while both were begun well, neither was resolved well. First Carol became involved with the new principal at the school where she teaches, Dennis Martino. Dennis was a very prickly soul — he could be very caustic, initially he went out of his way to annoy Carol, and he later turned out to be a recovering alcoholic. Despite this, the writers skillfully gave Dennis an underside of warmth, so it was clear that Dennis, while prickly, was still a sympathetic man who was trying to make his life better and get back to where he had once been before. Dennis showed a lot of warmth, and by creating a love triangle with three sympathetic people, the writers of Ed created a situation that could only end in one of these characters that I loved suffering a broken heart. Nevertheless, I was confident that the writers could handle it in the appropriately bittersweet fashion.

Unfortunately, they blew it. The Ed-Carol-Dennis triangle straddled the second and third seasons, and when the third season commenced, Dennis’s warmth had been surgically removed, and all that was left was the “prickly” stuff. Where he had been a good man who had suffered some blows in his life, he was now simply a harsh man, and occasionally he bordered on emotionally abusive. Thus when he was shown the door, we were meant to be glad that he was gone — but I remembered the good Dennis from the year before, and it was all highly unsatisfying.

So, then, Ed and Carol go about their lives for a while, until Ed takes on an assistant at his law practice — a lovely and intelligent woman named Frankie. Frankie was all warmth, a wonderful character — who was promptly injected into the Ed-and-Carol dynamic, thus creating the second triangle. And once again, we know that either Carol or Frankie was going to end up heartbroken. To shorten the telling of a long tale, it ended up being Frankie as Ed ultimately decided that Carol was the love of his life. This was all handled very quickly, with nothing at all of Frankie’s reaction depicted, and the show had previously established that in the event of Ed dumping her she would simply fly off to Houston to attempt a reconciliation with the guy she had dumped earlier in the season. I guess I was supposed to be happy that Ed and Carol were together at last, but the entire thing felt incredibly rushed in the end, and I was irritated that an excellent character like Frankie was introduced only to be tossed aside once the drama-stuff was over.

If Ed is truly done, then I’ll miss it. I don’t want to convey that the third season was a waste, because it wasn’t — there was a lot of good stuff there. But Ed-and-Carol should never have been allowed to take over the show as it did, because it was never one of the show’s prime strengths. Had Ed-and-Carol been the show’s focus at the outset, I doubt I would have bothered following the show much at all. I think that the writers, to a certain degree, lost the sense of the show’s actual strengths.

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Sad news from San Diego: John Butler, the general manager of the San Diego Chargers and, prior to that, GM of the Buffalo Bills, has died of cancer.

I never quite knew what to make of Butler as GM — he seemed to have a good eye for talent, putting together a scouting team that constantly had the Bills selecting quality players despite the fact that all through the 1990s the Bills always had their picks coming late in the draft rounds, a consequence of their decade-plus of being one of the league’s better teams (and four consecutive years of being the league’s second-best team). Butler had a tendency, though, to goof up on some of the financial stuff — giving big contracts at the same time to Doug Flutie and Rob Johnson, for example, a move that fouled up the Bills’ salary cap and resulted in a massive talent-purge and a 3-13 season two years ago; and I never thought Butler had as good an eye for coaching talent as he did for on-field talent. But he was an excellent football man, and he was a major part of the success the Bills enjoyed for more than ten years, starting in 1988 and only ending in 2000, with only two losing seasons in between. And from all reports, Butler’s Chargers were on the road to respectability.

John Butler was a fine football man, and he will be missed.

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This simply cannot be for real, can it? Is this a delayed April Fool’s thing or something?

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Apparently the image of Saddam Hussein’s statue being toppled is to be this war’s defining image, becoming symbolically iconic as did the fall of the Berlin Wall fourteen years ago. Here were the teeming masses of Baghdad Iraqis rejoicing as the symbol of their nation’s brutal regime came crashing down…except for one thing. Those teeming masses, it turns out, weren’t really all that teeming. Bigger crowds have swarmed college football fields to tear down the goalposts after particularly hard-fought and dramatic victories.

So why can’t the media actually show it like it really happened?

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Yesterday I got to listen to The Jim Rome Show for the first time since leaving Buffalo last fall. (Syracuse didn’t air it; but then, Syracuse had an ESPN Station, which to my knowledge Buffalo doesn’t have.) I’d forgotten how weird the Rome Show can get, what with the e-mails and the incredibly odd calls from “The Clones”….

One thing that Rome pointed out yesterday, which for some reason I found hysterically funny, is that in yesterday’s edition of The LA Times, a story about the Lakers was on the front page of the Sports section — despite the fact that the Lakers had not played the night before — while, four pages in, the results of the other LA basketball team, the Clippers, was only covered in a wire report from the Associated Press. Thus, the Clippers are now so woeful that the biggest paper in LA doesn’t even have a reporter assigned to cover them. I couldn’t help but laugh at that.

[Political stuff ahead]

Rome also apparently discussed the flap surrounding the decision by the Baseball Hall of Fame to cancel a ceremony marking the 15th anniversary of one of the great sports films, Bull Durham, because actors Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon have both been vocal in their opposition to the war in Iraq. My take is pretty much exactly what Rome’s is: this is colossally stupid, and I’m getting awfully tired of the whole “You have the right to think whatever you want, but you really shouldn’t say it” meme that seems prevalent on the Right these days. A boycott is one thing; but I’m frankly sick to death of these veiled insinuations of treason on the part of anyone whose reaction to our President’s actions is anything less than “Yes, sir, how high would you like me to jump, sir?”

I’m tired of being told that anti-war Americans are “America-haters” who “blame everything wrong in the world on America”. I’m tired of the whole “Love it or leave it” crap; I’m tired of being told that “Supporting the troops while opposing the war” is somehow impossible (this despite the fact that when it was a Democratic President ordering American military action that Republicans opposed, “Support the troops but oppose the war” was the order of the day); and I’m tired of this business of informing protesters or people in the opposition that the mere act of opposition — you know, that pesky free speech thang — somehow gives aid to the enemy.

This is complete crap. Stealing technical specifications for an Apache helicopter and giving it to the Iraqi commanders is aiding the enemy. Hacking Donald Rumsfeld’s laptop and handing over the plans for troop movements to the Iraqis is giving comfort to the enemy. Going to Iraq and giving anti-American speeches gives aid to the enemy. Protesting a war that a sizable portion of the American public has at some point considered questionable, and doing it peaceably and in the United States, is not treasonous, it is not anti-American, and to imply that it is is more insidiously anti-American than anything that has likely ever crossed the lips of Tim Robbins or Susan Sarandon.

Besides, Bull Durham is a classic film, dammit.

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