Donald's Blog
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This old house was only a few blocks from the state Capitol in Madison,
Wisconsin. All the neighborhood cats lived in the basement during the
winter. The house has long since been torn down, but in 1972 there were
AR2ax speakers in the front room, and a lot of good music was heard there. |
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In the 21st century I am just as opinionated as ever,
and I now have an outlet. I shall pontificate here about anything
that catches my fancy; I hope I will not make too great a fool
of myself. You may comment yea or nay about anything on the
site; I may quote you here, or I may not. Send brickbats etc.
to: dmclarke78@icloud.com.
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April 29, 2010Karl Rove's Dishonesty, AgainIn his column in today's Wall Street Journal (one of several diatribes against Barack Obama in today's paper) Karl Rove asks, "Who is suggesting that Wall Street should not be regulated?"
Well, nobody, now that Wall Street has driven the country into the ditch. But not very long ago, Reagan, two Bushes, Rove and Greenspan and all the rest of the so-called American "conservatives" were not just suggesting that Wall Street should not be regulated, but repealing some of the regulations that had helped keep the country afloat since the Great Depression. Now they are hoping that the public's short memory will allow them to fib their way back into power. And it will probably work, sooner or later.
April 29, 2010Who is Bela Karolyi?There used to be periodic polls of newspaper readers which always concluded that the least-read part of the newspaper was the sports pages. In other words, the sports fanatics may read every word, but they're a minority of newspaper readers. Yet every newspaper has to have a sports section, and every bar has to have several TV sets all tuned to sports, most of them featuring Tony Kornheiser, who was once a pretty good humor columnist but has now been demoted to barroom talking head.
I never read a sports section, but today a photograph in the Morning Call caught my eye. It was a young woman flying through space at an awkward angle, and I wondered how she was doing that. The story was written by a retired sports writer named Paul Reinhard, and it was about gymnastics. It began,
Dear Bela Karolyi,
Take that, big guy. You don't win this one.
You tried your best to douse the competitive fire that made America's 2000 Olympians some of the best female gymnasts in the world.
And when they struggled on the first day of competition of the Sydney Games as a result of the relentless pressure you put on them, you ripped them.
And so on. The single-sentence paragraphs are typical of most newspapers now that it is assumed that most people would rather watch TV in a sports bar than read a newspaper, but anyway the story turns out to be about Kristen Maloney, apparently a Pennsylvania kid, and there must have been a number of gymnastic events in Sydney in 2000, and Maloney was not chosen to compete in the uneven bars rotation. When we get to the meat of the story, it turns out that the Chinese were cheating: their team took third place for the bronze medal, but they had fielded a girl who was too young. So after ten years they have been stripped of the bronze, which has been awarded to the American girls, who had placed fourth.
But who is Bela Karolyi?
There is now a sports page in the Wall Street Journal, as though anyone reads that paper for the sports news; this morning there was an article about this Chinese cheating in the 2000 games (but not on the sports page). I read to the 11th paragraph, and was rewarded: Bela Korolyi was "The U.S. team's coordinator in Sydney". And the American teams had not been very successful for some years, so Karolyi, a legendary gymnastics coach from Romania, had been hired to run the show, and he had to decide which girls should compete in which events; and in fact he had protested about two of the girls on the Chinese team because he knew they were too young: they were supposed to be 16, but only months earlier they had been competing as 14-year-olds. And after ten years it turns out that the team that Koralyi was coordinating are medal winners after all, including Maloney. I had to go to Wikipedia to learn some of this. But I still don't know why Paul Reinhard is cheesed off with Bela Karolyi, who seems to have done his job very well.
I should know better than to try to read about sports.