The New Dan Patrick Show: End of the ESPN Embargo?

After Dan left ESPN he’s been mined like Haiphong Harbor. ESPN would not allow any of its employees to appear on the syndicated show and DP lost a flock of regulars: Peter Gammons, Michael Wilbon (get well soon!), Mark Jackson, Tim Kurkjian, and others. The Big Show shrank to nothing as Keith Olbermann remains under contract with ESPN. As soon as Rick Reilly left Sports Illustrated and joined ESPN he stopped appearing on the show.

Bummer.

But at least twice on today’s show DP mentioned that Reilly would be on the show this week. A pleasant surprise. Hope they don’t get into a spat and cause Reilly to do a T.O. no-show.

DP has mentioned that in his departure settlement with ESPN he agreed to do no tv work until after the Super Bowl. This and Reilly’s scheduled appearance on the show got me thinking that 4 February might be the day that DP will be completely free and clear from his contractual obligations to the Worldwide Leader and will no longer be prohibited from having ESPN personnel appear on his show.

DP and KO reunited?

Sweet!

Keeping my fingers crossed ….

Lent: T minus 7; Pitchers and Catchers: T minus 14

I’m still putting thought into what I should do for Lent this year. The New Yorker ran an interesting piece on Art Garfunkel and the list of books he has read:

Candidates for political office, and the reporters who cover them, like to believe that a reading list reveals a great deal. In recent years, the cherished-book list has become as compulsory a component of the Presidential campaign as a church affiliation or a health-care plan. Hillary Clinton named “Little Women” and “The Poisonwood Bible.” Mike Huckabee: the Bible and “Mere Christianity.” Barack Obama: “Song of Solomon” and “Moby-Dick.” John McCain: “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” When mishandled, the book thing can lead to grief, as when Mitt Romney cited “Battlefield Earth,” by L. Ron Hubbard, or when John Edwards, four years ago, went with I. F. Stone’s “The Trial of Socrates,” which earned him the skunk eye from Robert Novak. (“Did [Edwards] know of evidence that Stone received secret payments from the Kremlin?”)

Then there is Art Garfunkel, who is not running for President but who has nonetheless provided the world with a list: the Garfunkel Library, a chronological index of the thousand and twenty-three books that he has read since June, 1968.

– from The King of Reading, by Nick Paumgarten

It’s interesting to see what another person is reading. You can tell a lot about a person by what he/she reads. It’s kind of like the Dinner Guest Question. Or the Athlete You’d Most Like To Meet Question. When Dan Patrick asked Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue model Brooklyn Decker (25 December 2008 show, re-aired on New Years Day) which athlete she’d most like to meet I expected her to say Tom Brady or some other pretty boy type — a conventional answer I’d expect from just about any young woman asked about sports. But nope, Decker — a dedicated Carolina fan — said Michael Jordan. Mad props to her for that.

I love reading but have got to be the slowest reader on the planet. I also don’t put aside enough time to read, squeezing in maybe 30-45 minutes a night right before bedtime. The fate of reading was discussed in another New Yorker article:

There’s no reason to think that reading and writing are about to become extinct, but some sociologists speculate that reading books for pleasure will one day be the province of a special “reading class,” much as it was before the arrival of mass literacy, in the second half of the nineteenth century. They warn that it probably won’t regain the prestige of exclusivity; it may just become “an increasingly arcane hobby.” Such a shift would change the texture of society. If one person decides to watch “The Sopranos” rather than to read Leonardo Sciascia’s novella “To Each His Own,” the culture goes on largely as before—both viewer and reader are entertaining themselves while learning something about the Mafia in the bargain. But if, over time, many people choose television over books, then a nation’s conversation with itself is likely to change. A reader learns about the world and imagines it differently from the way a viewer does; according to some experimental psychologists, a reader and a viewer even think differently. If the eclipse of reading continues, the alteration is likely to matter in ways that aren’t foreseeable.

– from Twilight of the Books, by Caleb Crain

When I lived in NYC and had those long commutes to work I read a lot of short stories. (I bought a copy of Italo Calvino’s “Difficult Loves” because I liked the title; he’s become one of my favorite authors of all-time and I’ve read almost all his works.) It was a great way to pass the time, but after a while I felt that in reading short stories my attention span was shrinking. So I switched to reading novels. I think I’m in the same boat now, reading a lot of short pieces — newspapers and blogs via this computer, hard copies of a few magazine and the local paper. Not bad stuff, but not much in the 100-200+ page range to really engage my focus. I only read three or four books last year. I honestly feel that my attention span isn’t what it used to be.

Hence another bright idea for Lent: read a book. I’d like to get into the habit of reading something long and involved, maybe 20 pages a night. To some, 20 pages is nothing, but to me that’s a lot.

I used to read books a lot more than I do now and have left only a few unfinished:

• Moles Pity — I never could get into it
• Henderson the Rain King — I liked it but started a new job when I was about 100 pages into it, put it down and never picked it back up
• The Magic Mountain — My Sisyphean boulder. I tried reading it five or six summers in a row and never got more than 150 pages into it. Maybe my attention span was already slipping back then. I can’t even remember why I picked it up in the first place. The story is interesting. Hans Castorp is on a train going up a mountain to (I think) visit his cousin who is in a sanitarium. That’s all I recall from the first 100 or so pages of the book.

Maybe I’ll give “The Magic Mountain” another try. It’s a fat book. I have a paperback copy that is about two inches thick. 500 pages, at least. It would certainly keep me busy during Lent.

Hans Castorp’s trip up the mountain makes me think about the upcoming baseball season. Rick Peterson, Mets’ pitching coach and font of metaphors, said “A full season is like crossing an ocean.” Last year was not a good one for us. Not only did we not make it to the top of the mountain, we fell off a cliff and the ship sank as well. I hope we do better this year.

The New Dan Patrick Show: The Other T.O.

OK, I’m not surprised that Terrell Owens was a no-show today. Dan’s been calling him “Sniffles” and “a coward,” anxious for the chance to ask him about why he called DP “a member of the white media who is trying to keep the black athlete down.” I was hoping that Owens would be on the show, not so much to hear if he could defend himself but just to see if he was as good a conversationalist as he is a wide receiver. But as DP related, when they met yesterday to tape the interview things did not go well. Oh, well. C’est la vie.

But I wish they would have gone to The Other T.O., former Nebraska head coach and current Nebraska athletic director Tom Osborne. So it’s not college football season and sports shows are wall-to-wall Super Bowl this week. (Scant mention today of the tentative deal between the Minnesota Twins and the New York Mets — something I’m not going to comment on until the deal is signed, sealed, and delivered. What? Me superstitious?) But I think Osborne would have been a great interview. I’m not big on college football, but I became an Osborne fan when he had his team go for a two-point conversion and the win in the 1984 Orange Bowl when he could have played it safe, gone for the PAT and a tie and the National Championship. DP could have asked him about going undefeated during the regular season. And about college coaches going to the NFL, college coaches not living up to their contracts, the bad and sometimes criminal behavior of players and giving players second chances. Osborne is also a former Congressman and DP could have asked him about performance enhancing drugs in sports and government involvement with the issue.

Maybe they can have Osborne on next month when the Roger Clemens Circus pulls into Congress for the hearings on steroid use in Major League Baseball.

State of the Union: Separated at Birth?

What a boring speech. It was like the president was reading a list. He’s had better State of the Union presentations. The audience — especially the Republican side — got a lot of exercise standing up and applauding.

The big revelation of the night was that Dick Cheney looks like Curt Schilling. He could pass for Schilling’s father.

State of the Union: My Passion Bucket is Half-Full

Then again this will be George W. Bush’s last State of the Union address, so I got that going for me.

I always make an effort to catch the address, either on tv or on radio. Most people I know don’t. It’s not like I’m a politics junkie, but I feel an obligation to hear what the president has to say. Even though the address is produced with a lot of theatrics (the applause lines get to me after a while), you get to hear the president spell out his policies and vision for the country. I haven’t been impressed with President Bush, but — what the heck — he’s the president and I’ll give him and his speech writers an hour or so of my time.

It’s also fun to play Name That Dignitary during the broadcast when the camera pans across the crowd and shows various senators, congressmen and congresswomen, Supreme Court justices, etc. I guess I am a politics junkie.

It does make me kind of nervous when just about every key national political figure is in one spot. Next to the inauguration this is probably the event that elicits the highest level of concern from the Secret Service and other agencies.

I don’t suppose President Bush will drop “passion bucket,” but you never know.

Thank you, South Carolina

I heard a few times last week that if Barack Obama didn’t win the South Carolina primary the Democratic race would be over. I don’t hate Hillary Clinton (although she and Bill are pushing me in that direction), but I like Obama more. Thanks to the Palmetto State for injecting some life into his campaign. I am anxious to see what Super Duper Tuesday brings.

For someone who grew up in the 1960s I found Caroline Kennedy’s opinion in the New York Times very compelling: A President Like My Father. I don’t usually put a lot of stock in endorsements; I like to make decisions based on hard information. I suppose I’m still taken with the Kennedy mystique, even though JFK died when I was a child so it’s not like I remember his adminstration except for what I learned from studying history. I remember more of Bobby Kennedy. Sometimes when I think this country is going to hell in a handbasket I look back to my childhood when massive anti-war and civil rights protests were happening and political figures were getting assassinated left and right. I remember thinking to myself after RFK was assassinated “Not again!“

I read Caroline Kennedy’s statement last night and today I read that Senator Edward Kennedy is set to endorse Obama. It’s interesting to see more Establishment Democrats siding with Obama instead of Clinton. Even more interesting are Republicans who are voting for Obama and longtime Clinton supporters backing the senator from Illinois:

In the fall of 1971, a Yale Law School student named Greg Craig sublet his apartment, on Edgewood Avenue, in New Haven, to his classmate Hillary Rodham and her boyfriend, Bill Clinton, for seventy-five dollars a month. Over the following decades, Craig and the Clintons continued to cross paths. Craig, who became a partner at the blue-chip law firm Williams & Connolly, in Washington, D.C., received regular invitations to White House Christmas parties, where Hillary always remembered to ask about his five children. In the fall of 1998, President Clinton asked him to lead the defense team that the White House was assembling for the impeachment battle. On a bookshelf in Craig’s large corner office are several photographs of him with one or both Clintons, including a snapshot of the President and his lawyers—their arms folded victoriously across their chests—taken after Craig’s successful presentation during the Senate trial. An inscription reads, “To Greg. We struck the right pose—and you struck the right chords! Thanks—Bill Clinton, 2/99.”

In spite of his long history with the Clintons, Craig is an adviser to Barack Obama’s campaign.

– from The Choice, by George Packer

The next week and a half of campaigning is going to be very interesting. It’ll be a good respite from the Super Bowl hype.

The New Dan Patrick Show: Passion juggernaut continues …

OK, so it’s not in Webster’s yet, but passion bucket is now in the Urban Dictionary.

Cool.

(Kind of weird that the author of the first entry spells “Brett Favre” correctly but misses on “Kobe Bryant”. Must be a Clippers fan.)

Keith Olbermann’s Crazy Friend Tom

I’ve heard about that Tom Cruise Scientology video. I think this is the real thing (there are a lot of spoofs and parodies on YouTube):

I’ve only watched the first few minutes of it. He is very intense about his faith, but if you’ve ever seen evangelical ministers on tv they get pretty en fuego, too.

I read a very interesting piece on Scientology in The New Yorker, Château Scientology
Inside the Church’s Celebrity Centre:

From the outset, the conversion of celebrities was important to Scientology. An internal newsletter produced by the Hubbard Communications Office, probably in the mid-fifties, asserts, “There are many to whom America and the world listens. On the backs of these are carried most of the enthusiasms on which the society runs.” It goes on, “It is obvious what would happen to America if we helped its leaders to help others. Project Celebrity is part of that program. It is obvious what would happen to Scientology if prime communicators benefitting from it would mention it now and then.”

Hmm. “Prime communicators.” That’s kind of like getting Bob Costas and Kobe Bryant to drop “passion bucket.”

This is also weird: To achieve salvation you have to pay up:

Celebrity Centre is used for Scientology courses and for “auditing,” a mainstay of the religion, in which a person undergoes a guided talk-therapy session, usually while holding a device known as an E-Meter, which is supposed to measure one’s spiritual state. … An initial twelve-and-a-half-hour auditing session costs between six and seven hundred dollars, Greg LaClaire, a vice-president of Celebrity Centre, says. (Aspiring Scientologists can mitigate the expense by choosing to be audited by a fellow initiate rather than by a staff member.) In the Holiday 2007 Dianetics and Scientology catalogue, a deluxe Planetary Dissemination Edition E-Meter—billed as a “tool for Golden Age of Tech certainty,” to assist in “faster progress up The Bridge”—was offered, in “Diamond Blue,” for five thousand five hundred dollars.

Other religions use the practice of tithing or passing around the collection plate. But charging a fee to monitor someone’s progress on the road to salvation? How can anyone take that seriously?

I don’t know much about the church, but it strikes me as really odd that any faith would grant preference to celebrities. Whatever happened to “We are all equal before the Lord?” OK, well I guess that’s a Christian concept. I’m very skeptical of an institution that categorizes its worshippers based on fame and fortune.

It’s not too far off from politics. You can vote for some candidate over and over, but there’s no way you’re getting into the Lincoln bedroom unless you donate a ton of bucks.

The Big Etymology Show

Boy, the term “passion bucket” has been taking off. A ton of people have come to this blog after searching on it. Kobe’s usage of the magic words has hit YouTube:

NB: For those who don’t follow sports closely, the woman interviewing Kobe is Cheryl Miller, former college basketball star, Olympic gold medalist, and sister of The Greatest Three-Point Shooter in NBA History.

It would be neat if Dan Patrick could get William Safire on the show to discuss language and the origin of words. OK, so Safire was a speechwriter for Nixon; don’t hold that against him. I love his On Language column in the New York Times Magazine.

There are a lot of sports-related terms that deserve explanation:

Rubber match — The deciding game when two team or players are tied
Hot stove — The baseball off-season
Dime — In basketball , an assist
Fungo — In baseball, hitting fly balls so players can practice their defense
Yoko Romo — Did Dan really coin the nickname?

I’m with Rich Eisen who said that DP needs to get Bill Belichick to say “passion bucket.” If Dan could get The Hoodie to say it then that would be a step towards solidifying DP’s stature as an arbiter of taste and culture.

Lent: It also means that baseball season is near

On My Coffee is Fat:

rrgirl writes: I take every-day coffee trucker-style. strong, black, no sweetener, venti, large, or the biggest mug in the cupboard. I prefer a dark roast concentrated enough to pass through my body with the aroma rising from my urine hours later. by midday, the craving has passed, and I sip jasmine tea or ice water until wine with dinner. caffeine late in the day will trigger insomnia. on weekends, I pick up an americano with equal water (or ice in the summer), artificial sweetener and cinnamon while I run errands, decaf after lunch. I love coffee, and I love dairy. combined, they don’t get better, though they do each other no harm. I’d rather have a cookie than a latte and I can’t have both very often.
switching from full fat to skim or low fat yogurt was hard but fresh berries help. it’s been so long since I gave up whole milk for skim, I don’t remember any more. I did it with the bargain that I would moderate but never compromise on cheese and ice cream. I’ll cut back on the quantity but not the fat content. no low fat brie or nasty butter substitute. I’d rather have a squeeze of lime and dash of cayenne if it comes to that.
the last year was stressful and it took a toll on my body. I’m well, but the wear and tear shows. I feel like I’m on a threshold where my good habits and healthy impulses won’t be enough to maintain good health without some adjustments. I need more exercise. doing without some indulgences won’t keep me healthy without more of the right things.

Barb comments: I love Starbucks but $4 for a cup of coffee is steep. Nice for a once in awhile treat. Like what rrgirl says about trade-offs, going for the skim milk but keeping cheese and ice cream. Some low-fat foods are alright, but some have a taste that screams “artificial.” I need more exercice, too. So hard in the winter, though.

Jace adds: Trade-offs, yes, especially when you get older. And once you have kids there’s less time to go to the gym. Cutting down on sweets hurts sometimes but is good because you set a good example for your kids. Even thought it’s killing you that you want another scoop of ice cream or another piece of pie!

I have a low Starbuck’s IQ. I don’t know what a latte is. I know it’s some coffee drink but that’s about it. Like Barb I can’t see paying $4 for a cup of coffee, except when I am travelling and feel like I deserve a treat when I am stuck in an airport. Besides, I make a great cup of coffee (geez — you grind the beans, put water in the machine — it’s not rocket science), brewing it as strong as rrgirl likes it except I add sugar and half-and-half.

As the years go by it’s getting harder and harder to find or make time to exercise. I used to be very active in a couple of different sports several years ago. Now I am only moderately active. It’s important to make physical activity a part of your life when you’re young; that makes it easier to maintain the habit as you age. I feel like I’m on the cusp of turning into a couch potato and need very badly to become the active person I used to be.

Lent is coming up which for me is a good time to try something new. I wrote about this last year (here and here.) I’m not Christian, but I like some of the tenets and practices of the religion. For the past several years I’ve chosen a task for Lent in order to try to become a better person. I had always thought that Lent was a time when people gave up a bad habit, and that is what some do. But a few people I knew chose instead to incorporate a positive activity in their lives — as opposed to taking away a negative activity. It sounded like a good idea to me.

Lent is pretty handy because it’s a set time period (40 days) with a nice ending (Easter) and comes in the dead of winter when it helps to have a goal — something to reach for and distract you from how freaking cold it is. (I thought it was supposed to warm up today. It was 18F and sunny yesterday and almost felt like suntan weather. But today the high reached 12F, it was cloudy all day, and it snowed. It’s going to be below zero again tonight.) New Year’s resolutions are OK, but they can be so vague as to be useless. The forty days of Lent are like the little baby steps you can take toward your ultimate goal.

Last year I read AmericanCatholic.org’s daily scripture passage. It was interesting and while I enjoyed it there were a lot of readings that I simply could not buy into. Another thing I tried last year was to add a minute to my daily exercise routine. The results were mixed, but I did add about 30 minutes. But it didn’t last, dang it.

So back to the drawing board.

I guess I’ll try the exercise thing again. In the beginning adding a minute a day seemed ridiculous. But towards the end it became a good chunk of time. I just have to try harder to make the longer exercise period stick once Lent is over.

On the spiritual side, I read something about the Koran a few weeks ago and thought it would be interesting to read it someday. Reading the Koran for Lent might seem kind of weird, but — hey — how many non-Christians celebrate Lent anyway? I could stand to read some Buddhist scripture as well. One of my goals for the off-season was to learn more about Buddhism, and all I’ve really done is read Mets blogs and message boards and fret over whether or not we’ll get Johan Santana.

Lent begins on 6 February, Ash Wednesday. So there’s still time for me to decide on what I want to do.