Today my new favorite newspaper, the Houston Chronicle, reported that Lawrence Taylor had agreed to coach a group of models in the upcoming Lingerie Bowl. Jim McMahon is coaching the other team. The actual Lingerie Bowl is apparently a pay-per-view live event during Superbowl half time. It will involve, apparently, women in lingerie playing full contact football. Two questions. First, isn't this just that Lite commercial with the blonde and the brunette fighting on pay-per-view? Why pay for this when you can just record the commercial. Second, Jim McMahon has always been comfortable mocking himself, so his coaching is no surprise. L.T. on the other hand . . . well. Someone please tell me if this is worse than Dick Butkus and his newspaper grill ads in the mid-1990's.
Staying in the South, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution ran a story today about a Tires Plus employee arrested for soliciting prostitution and pandering because he called a woman who decided not to purchase tires because they were "too expensive" and offered to give them to her if she would have sex with him. He is 42. She is 25. I'm not even sure what to say about this. Except, ewwww.
In another news story, Law.com reported that Zachary Sanders, who passed the New Jersey Bar exam in 2001 has been denied a law license in light of his admitting that he, "travel[ed] to Cuba three times through Mexico, Canada and the Bahamas; deceiv[ed] U.S. Customs officials about the visits on re-entry to the country; l[ied] to customs agents about trying to smuggle Cuban cigars into the United States and bl[ew] off a query by the U.S. Treasury Department seeking information about his first visit. That last move led to a $10,000 department fine for ignoring the query, a fine Sanders acknowledged he made no effort to pay."
Sanders apparently argued that, "being a lawyer does not mean blindly following unjust and immoral laws . . . A healthy respect for the rule of law, and one's duty to comply with it as an officer of the Court, does not prevent one from engaging in civil disobedience." He quoted Gandhi, Thoreau and Martin Luther King Jr. while making this argument.
The beauty of this story is that the court actually seems to have gotten it right. It focused on the fact that he returned with cigars and did not engage in civil disobedience as much as smuggling. See, civil disobedience involves BEING ARRESTED to focus people on the immorality of the policy in question. Presumably Sanders did not realize that Martin Luther King was not visiting someone in his Letter from Birmingham Jail. By the way, please note that Doctor King never complained about being arrested as such. He attacked the morality of the laws under which he was arrested by challenging the states to convict a person under those ludicrous laws. Similarly, here is an account of Gandhi getting himself arrested. Finally, here is a short biography of Henry David Thoreau that discusses HIS being arrested.
The irony is that I actually believe that the Cuban embargo is terrible policy, and counterproductive both for the Cuban people and the American people. Still, it is galling to have this guy invoke Gandhi, Thoreau and Martin Luther King Jr. while lying about smuggling cigars. Clown.
As many of you may know, I am no Anglophile. However, I have to admire the Brits for their policy of destructive engagement with David Blaine in London. Blaine is currently suspended over London in a transparent box, and plans to stay that way without food for 44 days. This feat stands to break no world record. It is not even particularly interesting. Thus, he has been awakened by a drum beat, taunted with fish and chips, and now had eggs thrown at his box. The drummer is quoted as saying, " We were watching him at home on TV and it was really dull so we thought we would come down and liven things up. I wanted to wake him up." The guy who threw eggs at Blaine's box was "given a stern talking to," but not arrested. When, oh when will some clever Briton realize that Blaine is just a big piñata right now and go for the prize inside?
Today's Christian Science Monitor has a great article about a novel charitable enterprise. The idea is to actually make accurate maps of national parks in impoverished countries. They are starting in Mongolia, and the thesis is that tourism is hurt by the fact that these places simply don't appear on maps, or have absolutely no materials to help people get the most out of the park. A couple of notes here. First, I have to thank my aunt NM for turning me on to the Monitor when she was in college. The name always scared me off, but they really run thoughtful pieces that others do not. Second, I am imagining people driving from Yakutsk to Beijing on a road trip a la L and I driving around Lake Michigan, and one of them saying, "hey, let's swing over to Mongolia. It looks like they have a national park there." Cracks me up. Anyway, what I take away from this article is that if you see a Conservation Ink pamphlet for a Mongolian national park, go ahead and buy it. Couldn't hurt, right?
Finally, the BBC reported that something like 180 mud-constructed buildings in Timbuktu, Mali have been destroyed by flooding. These buildings are ancient, some dating back 600 years. Thus, this is a generally unhappy story. However, can anyone tell me to build a mud building that will last through even one rain, let alone 600 years? How is this done? Anyone?
Staying in the South, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution ran a story today about a Tires Plus employee arrested for soliciting prostitution and pandering because he called a woman who decided not to purchase tires because they were "too expensive" and offered to give them to her if she would have sex with him. He is 42. She is 25. I'm not even sure what to say about this. Except, ewwww.
In another news story, Law.com reported that Zachary Sanders, who passed the New Jersey Bar exam in 2001 has been denied a law license in light of his admitting that he, "travel[ed] to Cuba three times through Mexico, Canada and the Bahamas; deceiv[ed] U.S. Customs officials about the visits on re-entry to the country; l[ied] to customs agents about trying to smuggle Cuban cigars into the United States and bl[ew] off a query by the U.S. Treasury Department seeking information about his first visit. That last move led to a $10,000 department fine for ignoring the query, a fine Sanders acknowledged he made no effort to pay."
Sanders apparently argued that, "being a lawyer does not mean blindly following unjust and immoral laws . . . A healthy respect for the rule of law, and one's duty to comply with it as an officer of the Court, does not prevent one from engaging in civil disobedience." He quoted Gandhi, Thoreau and Martin Luther King Jr. while making this argument.
The beauty of this story is that the court actually seems to have gotten it right. It focused on the fact that he returned with cigars and did not engage in civil disobedience as much as smuggling. See, civil disobedience involves BEING ARRESTED to focus people on the immorality of the policy in question. Presumably Sanders did not realize that Martin Luther King was not visiting someone in his Letter from Birmingham Jail. By the way, please note that Doctor King never complained about being arrested as such. He attacked the morality of the laws under which he was arrested by challenging the states to convict a person under those ludicrous laws. Similarly, here is an account of Gandhi getting himself arrested. Finally, here is a short biography of Henry David Thoreau that discusses HIS being arrested.
The irony is that I actually believe that the Cuban embargo is terrible policy, and counterproductive both for the Cuban people and the American people. Still, it is galling to have this guy invoke Gandhi, Thoreau and Martin Luther King Jr. while lying about smuggling cigars. Clown.
As many of you may know, I am no Anglophile. However, I have to admire the Brits for their policy of destructive engagement with David Blaine in London. Blaine is currently suspended over London in a transparent box, and plans to stay that way without food for 44 days. This feat stands to break no world record. It is not even particularly interesting. Thus, he has been awakened by a drum beat, taunted with fish and chips, and now had eggs thrown at his box. The drummer is quoted as saying, " We were watching him at home on TV and it was really dull so we thought we would come down and liven things up. I wanted to wake him up." The guy who threw eggs at Blaine's box was "given a stern talking to," but not arrested. When, oh when will some clever Briton realize that Blaine is just a big piñata right now and go for the prize inside?
Today's Christian Science Monitor has a great article about a novel charitable enterprise. The idea is to actually make accurate maps of national parks in impoverished countries. They are starting in Mongolia, and the thesis is that tourism is hurt by the fact that these places simply don't appear on maps, or have absolutely no materials to help people get the most out of the park. A couple of notes here. First, I have to thank my aunt NM for turning me on to the Monitor when she was in college. The name always scared me off, but they really run thoughtful pieces that others do not. Second, I am imagining people driving from Yakutsk to Beijing on a road trip a la L and I driving around Lake Michigan, and one of them saying, "hey, let's swing over to Mongolia. It looks like they have a national park there." Cracks me up. Anyway, what I take away from this article is that if you see a Conservation Ink pamphlet for a Mongolian national park, go ahead and buy it. Couldn't hurt, right?
Finally, the BBC reported that something like 180 mud-constructed buildings in Timbuktu, Mali have been destroyed by flooding. These buildings are ancient, some dating back 600 years. Thus, this is a generally unhappy story. However, can anyone tell me to build a mud building that will last through even one rain, let alone 600 years? How is this done? Anyone?
posted by David at 2:13 PM
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