Ross responds to my gentle tweaking about baseball and cricket here. He makes some fair points. But thinking about it just now, it occurs to me that there’s another major difference between British sports and their American counterparts that sets British sports apart. Namely, participation. With the obvious and notable exception of basketball, it’s notable
If Furman Bisher (great name!) is typical of the sports staff at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution then, you know, newspapers probably do deserve to die. Baseball used to be a game played with nine men to a side, two managers, four umpires, and the major-league season always opened in Cincinnati. Come to think of it now,
From Stephen Pollard, interrupting his holiday to enjoy the chaos at Heathrow’s new Terminal 5: Does anything work in Britain? Ever? Well, does it?
John J Miller at The Corner: I’ve always had some fondness for the NFL’s Baltimore Ravens because their team name is a literary reference. Last weekend, while visiting the in-laws in South Carolina, I went to an NCAA baseball game featuring the Coastal Carolina Chanticleers. Literary references in team names don’t get much better than
Fine Peggy Noonan column today: Many in the press get it, to their dismay, and it makes them uncomfortable, for it sours life to have a person whose character you feel you cannot admire play such a large daily role in your work. But I think it’s fair to say of the establishment media at
Travis Daub at Foreign Policy: A couple weeks back, we pointed out that John McCain likes to refer to America as “She,” a habit that I assume builds some linguistic distance between himself and Hillary Clinton. Hillary could never refer to America as “She,” so McCain subtly infers that a president
Add this to the reasons to be skeptical of Barack Obama… Vice-President Bloomberg*? I want to thank Mayor Bloomberg for his extraordinary leadership. At a time when Washington is divided in old ideological battles, he shows us what can be achieved when we bring people together to seek pragmatic solutions. Not only has he been
Gosh, from this remarkable exchange with Jamie Rubin you could almost be forgiven for thinking that Hillary Clinton had more to do with the Northern Irish “peace process” than, hmmm, David Trimble. As Toby Harnden relates: You can watch the video here. The relevant part starts about 5 minutes and 30 seconds in. Andrea Mitchell
I wish this surprised or even shocked me. True, this is Dundee, but even so… Six young brothers and sisters face being taken from their parents and put into care because they are overweight. Social workers have warned they will intervene if three of the youngsters – including a 12-year-old boy who weighs 16 stone
Is this Glenn Reynolds post a plea for more coverage of Tibet or less of Palestine? GOOD QUESTION: Why Do Palestinians Get Much More Attention than Tibetans? But, just perhaps, the Israel-Palestine question receives lots of coverage because it’s a question, at root, of competing rights, not because the media has an incurably anti-Israeli bias
It’s entirely possible that the research cited in this New York Times story has been corrupted by the fact that it seems to have been sponsored, in part or at “arm’s length” , by a tobacco company. That’s fine. But I would have thought a more useful article would have spent its time demonstrating that
So I see this at The Corner: British Future “Muslims ‘to outnumber traditional churchgoers.’” Score one for Steyn. Interesting (well, sort of) if true! But it turns out that the Telegraph story reports that: The increasing influence of Islam on British culture is disclosed in research today that shows the number of Muslims worshipping at
One of Gordon Brown’s flunkies* writes in today’s Telegraph: More than a year ago I argued that a debate about the future of the United Kingdom was long overdue. I suggested that, unless we start to focus more on what unites us than we do on what divides us, there is a real
America’s drug laws are wicked. So too are the scandalous conditions inside American prisons. And sometimes the people running those prisons are crueler than you might think possible. Radley Balko has the details of what is, alas, just another outrage.
Hillary’s latest*: On saying last week that she landed under sniper fire during a trip to Bosnia in 1996, when she was first lady: “I was sleep-deprived, and I misspoke.” That’s what will happen when you insist upon answering the telephone at 3am. *Of course, her story was in her prepared remarks.
Today, being perhaps the best day of the year*, is a good moment to consider Ross Douthat’s assertion that John Rawls was right. We do not speak of philosophy, of course, but of something much more important: sport. More specifically, Rawls’ belief that “baseball is the best of all games.” There’s something to this, for
The latest salvo in the War on People of Smoke: Displaying cigarettes in shops could be banned under government plans being considered in a bid to reduce smoking and discourage children from starting. Ministers are also considering tougher controls on vending machines in pubs and restaurants. A public consultation due to start within months will
As I’ve argued here on several previous occasions, Hillary Clinton’s pretence that she was a serious foreign policy player during her husband’s administration is simply laughable. Now her White House schedules have been released, prompting the New York Times to publish a piece that demonstrates that she was an important player in precisely zero foreign
How do you measure a truly awful movie? Joe Queenan explains: To qualify as one of the worst films of all time, several strict requirements must be met. For starters, a truly awful movie must have started out with some expectation of not being awful. That is why making a horrific, cheapo motion picture that
Megan McArdle is surely right that Jamie Kirchik’s prediction that Massachusetts may vote Republican this November seems, shall we say, implausible. Kirchik suggests that: a Scots-Irish war veteran as the Republican nominee complicates predictions about whom Kennedy Country will support come November. Well, up to a point Lord Copper. As Megan says, “Irish” America is