Remember when the Houston Astrodome was called the "Eighth Wonder of the World". I used to think that was the height of pretentiousness, a symbol of Texan pomposity and vulgarity. The Astrodome was viewed as an ugly eyesore by the rest of the country, and the teams that played in it never really obtained an advantage from the home crowd, which was usually seated too far away from the action to provide any assistance. Perhaps the two most memorable events held in the Astrodome, the King-Riggs tennis match and the 1968 Houston-UCLA basketball game, were played on surfaces that were hundreds of feet from the front row of fans, giving the TV viewer the antiseptic experience of watching a practice in an empty gym.

The city of Houston has now built two "modern" stadiums for their baseball and football teams, and the world's smallest indoor football stadium lies dormant for most of the year, according to this Washington Post article. The logical thing would be to tear down the monstrosity, since any effort to renovate the Astrodome into a museum or shopping mall would be incredibly expensive. However, sharing an opinion that is held by no one outside of Harris County, some locals want to maintain the stadium as an historic landmark, and I think they're right. Like the ugly uniforms the Astros used to play in, the Astrodome might have been tacky and vulgar to the rest of us, but to the people of Houston, it meant something grand, and it was what gave them an identity. Like it or not, we shouldn't only try to preserve the beautiful things in our society, since we're much, much more than that.

This news really made my weekend !! The San Fernando Valley is finally going to be served by a weekly paper, after years of non-existent (or worse, condescending) coverage by the LA Weekly, called the Valley Beat. Even better news, though, is that this might lead to the return of Jill Stewart. For those of you who have never read her column, Ms. Stewart has long been a guilty pleasure of mine, comparable to those half-hour ads Lyndon LaRouche use to run during the Presidential elections, or to a movie like J.F.K.. Just as LaRouche tried valliantly to warn America about the nefarious dealings of the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations, and would obsessively spin loopy stories involving the Queen of England, Ms. Stewart would dwell on the nefarious dealings of L.A. School Board administrators and the teachers' unions, and would obsessively spin loopy stories about Kevin Murray. The return of Jill Stewart is even better news than the Cubs besting the Rocket this afternoon. KOBE AKBAR !!!

UPDATE: Jill Stewart is not going to be writing for Valley Beat. Her fans will have to settle for her vanity site for the time being.

This will probably kill any chance I have of winding up on Tony Pierce's blogroll (well, that and sponging off him at the Dodger game in April), but I must sadly report that the selection of his current amore as the new Miss Universe has not been a popular one among pageant aficionados. Eighteen year old Amelia Vega, Miss Dominican Republic, won the title in spite of being described as "very immature", and having allegedly been involved in "several incidents" with her competitors.


Miss Universe 2003

The high school senior becomes the ninth winner from Latin America in the last nineteen years(and third straight), leading to some complaints that the process for choosing a winner is little different from how the W.B.C. ranks boxing contenders.

Howard Owens has a thoughtful analysis on the aftermath of the Iraqi war (well, duh, all of Mr. Owens' takes are thoughtful; any conservative on my blogroll has to be thoughtful--I ain't linking to a right-wing version of Smythesworld). He doesn't try to soft-pedal the non-discovery of WMD's, or pretend that it doesn't matter in the face of the brutality of Saddam Hussein.

When we attacked Iraq on March 19, I listed what I thought were twelve inarguable points about the war. Since I started this blog last year, I have made any number of statements that I regret, that were unfair, unkind, and/or just plain daffy. Visiting my own site's archives, I find posts that are truly cringe-worthy, exacerbated by the fact that this blog is read by many dozens thousands of people each day. The problem with self-publication and self-editing is that anyone can smell the cerebral farts I cut.

That post was not one of them. If only I could be half as brilliant the rest of the time, I could start charging for the privilege of dispensing my wisdom. That post alone should place my talents in demand as a foreign policy expert; a post in a future Administration awaits.

In particular, Point No. 6 is more interesting now than it was when I wrote it: "The U.S. withheld evidence from the inspectors that might have made discovery of WMD’s possible, but didn’t provide it so as to not minimize the case for going to war." As it turns out, the evidence we "withheld" was that we weren't really sure if Iraq had any WMD's. This is no small thing, since the primary justification we used to attack Iraq before the international community was that they had violated U.N. Resolutions 687 and 1441 in not disarming. Bush also used Iraq's ties to terrorist organizations as a rationale, but since any direct connections to Al Qaeda prior to the 9/11 attack were tenuous at best, it took a back seat to the WMD issue. It was most decidedly not that Iraq had a poor human rights record, or that Iraq might have a WMD program in the future, or that a "free" Iraq would get both sides to the table over a Palestinian state. Skepticism about the extent of the Iraqi WMD program was the principal reason France and Germany opposed going to war before the Security Council; for such statesmanship, those countries were deemed part of the "Axis of Weasels".

If we weren't certain that the information we were providing to the world was accurate, but continued to act as if it was, then we were lying. Even if WMD's are ultimately found, it will not lessen that lie; it will only mean that our hunch paid off. A free people do not deserve to be lied to by their government, especially over an issue as fundamental as whether to go to war.

Well, this story ties up two threads on this board: the Ducks, and unethical journalistic practices. It now turns out that the New York Post, the infamous Murdoch-run tabloid aimed at people who can't read, fabricated a boast allegedly made by Anaheim owner Michael Eisner, to the effect that he "guaranteed" there would be a "victory parade" in Anaheim after the sixth game of the Stanley Cup finals. The only person who's guaranteeing Ducks' victories around here is me !!

Let's see: you accept the resignation of the managing editor of your newspaper, ostensibly because of credibility problems in some of the stories your paper has recently covered. Then, as his replacement, you re-hire the editor on whose watch two of the biggest frauds in journalism history, the Whitewater "scandal" and the persecution of Wen Ho Lee, were published. The New York Times will never learn !!

How on earth is Hans Gruber ranked behind Joan Crawford? Behind Freddie Krueger? Behind (egads !!) Annie Wilkes?

When even William F. Buckley is questioning the validity of the WMD rationale, you know the President has some 'splaining to do. [link via Hobbs]

Lord Love a Duck: I'm going to go out on a limb and predict that the winner of tonight's game wins the Stanley Cup. Obviously, if the Devils win, they're up 3 games to 1, needing to win only once in the two games scheduled at New Jersey. After their incredible, mind-addling win in Game 3, a repeat performance tonight by Anaheim will tie up the series, reinforce their mystique as a team-of-destiny, and stick a dagger so deep into the subconscious of New Jersey that I don't think they could recover. Anyways, a stool awaits at Over/Under....

In the wake of the current troubles coming out of New York City, several controversies have recently arisen concerning our own hometown newspaper, the Los Angeles Times. The first concerns an opinion article written by Robert Scheer that called into question the Pentagon's account of the "rescue" of Jessica Lynch; the second, a memo written by a Times editor attacking "liberal bias" in an article about an anti-abortion measure recently enacted in Texas.

In both cases, the more important story was the reaction by the right to any journalist who dares criticize one of their shibboleths. In the case of Robert Scheer, his original article summarized the findings of a BBC report that questioned the official Pentagon account concerning Private Lynch's capture and liberation. As Scheer correctly points out in a follow-up, subsequent reporting by such lefty rags as the Chicago Tribune have reaffirmed what the Beeb originally reported, that while certain claims made by witnesses were unlikely, such as the use of blanks in the raid, the full scale raid to "rescue" Private Lynch may have been executed more for show than necessity. Conservative outrage at Scheer's opinion should be humbled by the pattern within both the Pentagon and the Bush Administration for consistently dissembling to the public during the recent Iraqi adventure.

Others on the right are also having a field day with a memo written by Times editor-in-chief John Carroll, attacking one of his own writers for allegedly putting his leftist leanings into an article about a recent law passed in Texas, requiring pregnant women to receive "counseling" about the link between abortion and breast cancer. Perhaps in the journalistic tradition of finding someone in the Flat Earth Society to rebut claims that the world is round, or quoting an economist who actually believes that the Bush tax cut will help the economy, Mr. Carroll was upset that the writer mentioned the overwhelming evidence that there is no such link, but didn't give equal time to medical "experts" who believe that it does exist. Of course, the writer did quote such an expert, but nevermind.

The other examples of liberal bias consisted of the writer referring to the law as requiring "so-called counseling" to pregnant women, and his reference to the fact that a legislator who supported the bill was not a doctor. The latter point is too trivial to expand on; the former, far from being an ideologically-slanted phrase, reflects the fact that there is a dispute about whether pregnant women who are being told something that the vast majority of experts do not believe to be true are receiving "counsel".

Ironically, abortion is one issue where complaints about liberal media bias have some merit. In fact, the most famous study concluding that reporters tended to be pro-choice, and that bias seeped into articles on the subject, was published in the LA Times back in 1990, by media analyst David Shaw. Eric Alterman devotes an entire chapter in his recent book to exploring that very fact. I would be very surprised if most reporters covering national affairs didn't vote for Bill Clinton in 1992, or even Al Gore last time. After Shaw's study came out, newspapers took great pains to confront this alleged bias, which can be attested to by the fact that the article Mr. Carroll complained about gave a supporter of the new law the last word, and made no reference to the fact that the faction in the Texas state legislature that passed the bill recently attempted to use the Department of Homeland Security to locate and arrest their opponents.

The complaint, though, seems to run far deeper than simple ideological animosity. People who whine the loudest about the political bias of the media, both on the left and the right, are those who are most threatened by any sort of independent inquiry into their values and beliefs. So they kill the messenger.

Unfortunately for them, there are not two sides to every issue. Just as a journalist need not quote David Irving in every article about the Holocaust to provide "balance", a writer should not be browbeaten by an editor to pretend that the scientific mainstream believes a link exists between abortion and breast cancer.

Russian tennis "phenom" Anna Kournikova (subject of posts here and here) is prepared to test the marriage waters once more, this time to international singing "sensation" Enrique Iglesias. Both bride and groom are winless on the women's tennis circuit.

One of the more amusing sidelights of being a sports fan is getting to read English newspapers cover American sporting events. For example, here is the Guardian's take on the Stanley Cup Finals, complete with a reference to Martin Brodeur being the "man of the match" last night.

Since the Game 1 debacle, I will try a different site for tonight's game--Over/Under in Santa Monica. Go Ducks !!

Size Does Matter: According to Adam Felber, there was a side benefit to Clinton's extracurricular activities--it was also good for the economy !!

For those of you missed it this afternoon, AC Milan edged Juventus, 3-2, on penalty kicks, to win the Champions League Final, after playing 120 minutes of breathtakingly dull, scoreless soccer. Milan is owned by an authentic, honest-to-goodness Fascist, Silvio Berlusconi, and like all Italian teams, plays an anally-retentive defensive style. Watching this match was like having to watch this year's Stanley Cup Final, if you're not into either team.

Speaking of fascists, while commenting on another website (and btw, sorry to Mr. Welch for lowering the civility of his comments board, and invoking Godwin's Law), I was surprised that the notion that Ann Coulter is a Nazi isn't universally shared, and that some people even seem to think she makes a lot of sense. In that I have referred to her on occasion as "Fraulein Goebbels" and "Ilsa, she-wolf of the S.S.", it's safe to say I feel pretty strongly that her opinions are extreme, and that she is a dangerous bigot.

In any event, one of the commenters asked me to put up or shut up, so I made the following five points:

1. She said she wished it was the NY Times that had been destroyed on 9/11;
2. She called for the indiscriminate killing of Arabs;
3. She wrote a book (Slander) that utilized fabricated sourcing and footnotes, thereby giving Goebbels "Big Lie" theory a Regnery twist;
4. She's a white supremacist;
5. She told a crippled Vietnam War veteran that our country lost in Indochina because of him.

I thought each of the points above would have been self-evident to anyone who followed the controversy over the past two years. However, as you can see on the comments board, there were people who still weren't convinced, so I now give you footnotes to the above five points:

1. She said she wished it was the NY Times that had been destroyed on 9/11;
My bad--she said that she wished Tim McVeigh had blown up the New York Times, not the 9/11 terrorists. She said that here.

2. She called for the indiscriminate killing of Arabs;
Check here (first paragraph), and here.

3. She wrote a book (Slander) that utilized fabricated sourcing and footnotes, thereby giving Goebbels "Big Lie" theory a Regnery twist;
Check here, and here

4. She's a white supremacist;
As seen here, here (scattered quotes) and here.

5. She told a crippled Vietnam War veteran that our country lost in Indochina because of him.
Here (fourth quote down), here and here.
Q.E.D.

I hope I don't have to do this again.

UPDATE: Michael Totten, in an otherwise favorable reference to the above, takes issue with my use of the term "nazi". Generally speaking, I think his point is well-taken. As I noted in the comments, using that term is not something I do lightly. In an effort to differentiate Ms. Coulter from the historical events of 1933-45, and realizing that there are still actually "Nazis" in the world who believe that Hitler was a great leader with admirable goals, I used a small-case reference. If he (or anyone else) can think of a better term for me to use to describe someone who makes crude, racist statements and advocates right-wing authoritarianism, I'll use it.

A pint or two and the Mighty Ducks await at a friendly neighborhood pub in Culver City....

As if failing to supervise Jayson Blair wasn't bad enough, conservative pundit Mickey Kaus now accuses NY Times editor Howell Raines of attending a trial involving 1963 Birmingham terror bombing suspect Bobby Frank Cherry. According to the Mickster, that Raines "...attended the Ku Klux Klan trial at all (was) more evidence, if any was needed, of Raines self-encasement in the identity of a 'white man from Alabama,' circa 1963." Imagine that; a big city editor whose life was altered by the death of four little girls !!!!

And people wonder why the GOP never gets more than 10% of the black vote.

Blew off M2 yesterday and went instead to a second-run cineplex in Northridge to see The Two Towers, a worthy sequel but inferior to the original. A cagey move, on my part: admission was only $3.50, and I didn't have to fight my way through a crowd to see it. Now I know why my friend predicted that if they ever made a movie of my life, I would be played by Brad Dourif. The other important discovery from this film is that Elvish is now the second language in which Liv Tyler cannot act.

The always-amusing Los Angeles Times published one of its hardy perennials this morning, a column decrying the fact that motion pictures are increasingly geared towards teenagers and young adults. Together with the complaint that "there are no roles for women over 40" in movies (btw, why is that supposed to be so outrageous, but not the fact that there are no positions on NFL rosters for men over 40), it's safe to say that some variation of this theme has been published every year since 1960.

C'mon, is anyone really shocked or outraged at this state of affairs? Let's face it, the only people motivated to get out of the house to see a movie (and brave the conditions referenced here) are the young. Movies are a relatively cheap date, where you can kill a couple of hours and maybe even get lucky. Naturally, in the free market, movie studios are going to aim their product at that audience, whilst adults are served for the most part by HBO and the TV networks. If you are a bit more, well, settled, it's much easier just to wait til the films you want to see go to video, where you can watch them in the privacy of your home without losing anything.

Not that adults are missing a whole lot. Just look at the last few movies to win the best film Oscar. Gladiator. A Beautiful Mind. Chicago. The English Patient. Titanic. Braveheart. All of them, pure unadulterated crap. Probably the best of the lot, Shakespeare in Love, will be remembered only because Miramax waged one of the most vulgar campaigns on record to win the award, which it stole from a legitimate classic. I have nothing but kind words for American Beauty, since my sister worked on it as an Assistant Art Director, but lets just say that it loses quite a bit of its sting the second time you see it. And none of those movies are "youth-oriented". You have to go back to Schindler's List to find the last time the Best Film Oscar went to a movie that was better than an average episode of "The Sopranos" or "The Shield".

In any event, complaining that movies are geared to adolescents is a sure sign of fogeyness, hopefully one that I can inure myself to. I may be saddened at my own departed youth when I realize I don't "get" the popularity of Seann William Scott, or that I can't identify any rapper other than Eminem, but there's no point whining about it. Youth shall be served.

Ever wondered what would happen if all (or most) of Congress were to be killed or incapacitated by some cataclysmic event? Well, the A.E.I. and the Brookings Institute have a modest proposal. Although less sweeping than every political scientist's least favorite constitutional amendment, I am still concerned about any measure that might be cooked up by a body that is currently under the control of Tom Delay.

How do Keanu Reeves, media consolidation, Barry Diller, movie marketing, Laci Peterson, Hermann Hesse, Iraqi "possession" of WMD, Jayson Blair, and the crappiness that is Matrix: Reloaded interrelate? Frank Rich explains it all in this column. Quoth the Only Pundit Who Matters:

"The Matrix Reloaded" is so dull, so literally ruled by Laurence Fishburne's trance-inducing Morpheus, that I had to reload the "Matrix" DVD to remember why I had been taken with all those streaming digits the first time around. But never mind. You can't argue with a $135.8 million four-day opening, which in itself validated the movie's premise.

It's the conceit of the "Matrix" films that most of mankind is plugged into a virtual-reality program conjured up by all-powerful machines to tease our brains while they loot our bodies for bioelectric power. AOL Time Warner, the powerful machine behind the films, pulled off a comparable feat by plugging the country into its merchandising program for "The Matrix Reloaded" to loot our wallets."

(link via Matt Y.)
Ironically, there's a good chance I might go see M2 this weekend anyway. The advent of digital technology, DVD's, and cable have made actually going to a movie theatre to see a movie rather pointless. With few exceptions, there is more creativity on television now than there is in motion pictures, the acting is better, the stories are more original: only a few films (M2 possibly being one of them) actually gain anything artistically by being seen in a movie theatre. And of course, you're not being gouged for $20 a person for popcorn, soft drinks, parking and all the other accoutrements arising from a trip to the neighborhood mall.