April 28, 2004
Incredible shrinking Kerry
Kerry is a terrible, terrible, terrible candidate.
So writes John Podhoretz in the New York Post.
This flap over whether presumptive Democrat nominee John Kerry threw his Vietnam medals (or ribbons), or someone else's medals or ribbons over a fence in a 1971 protest, is devastating to a candidate already with a reputation as a flip-flopper. This country simply isn't going to select a candidate who doesn't know whether to brand himself as a war hero or radical pacifist in times that require a leader for a battle against radical Islam and terror that may last generations.
Even the left-wing Village Voice has bailed on Kerry: "John Kerry Must Go," writes a columnist there.
I wrote on March 15, in a blog entitled John Kerry, fog machine, that Kerry reminded me of failed Maryland Dem candidate for governor Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, who generated not one iota of excitement within her own party.
My earlier blog appeared six weeks ago. Now an avalanche of criticism from within his own party threatens Kerry.
Somewhere, Hillary Rodham Clinton is smiling.
- posted by jbelliveau at 11:22 AM in Culture
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April 27, 2004
Mary McGrory laid to rest
I grew up reading Mary McGrory's columns in the wonderful Washington Star and eventually worked near her office at the Washington Post. Yesterday she was laid to rest in a funeral attended by Kennedys and their staff.
Toward the end of my three years at the Washington Post, in 1995, the paper got a new computer system and the National section was moved to new quarters that rearranged everyone's desks and placed us graphics specialists, myself and Barbara Saffir, outside Mary's office.
McGrory was thoroughly confused at how to operate the new terminals, and came to rely on Barbara and me to help her. I felt a great deal of empathy for her. The entire idea of a graphical interface and using menus and a computer mouse was just plain confusing to someone of her generation. I tried to put my hand over hers on the mouse in teaching her how to create, save and send stories on to editors so that muscle memory might take over and relieve her anxiety. Eventually she got the hang of it.
Mary took us out to a wonderful lunch as a thank you for helping her. The more I read about her orientation toward friendships with men rather than women, what Joel Achenbach called her masculine bias, the more I realize that it was rather special of her to take two women out to lunch.
David Von Drehle quoted a former Star colleague of hers as saying:
She never identified with other woman writers nor did she take up the cause of feminism. Her approach was to say, "I made it in a man's world and you must make it, too, without depending on any philosophical principle like feminism."
Mary reminds me of my Aunt Anna, also Boston Irish and born a few years after Mary, who once worked for Sen. John Kennedy when he first came to Washington, D.C. Both got far in their careers but never married, and it seems that "having it all" eluded many female pioneers.
My life experiences traveling the world and living later in Baltimore led to new viewpoints that put me at an ever-greater remove from McGrory's staunch liberalism; for examples of McGrory's writing, see here.
It might be said that time passed Mary by; not only in the guise of new computers, but realities that mugged many a 1960s liberal. Fresh winds guided more creative thinkers on ways to tackle issues ranging from welfare to terrorism to feminism. As a woman, I eventually decided that Kennedys and Clintons had an innate innobility toward females,
She continued to love Kennedys and to despite Nixon, to hate our efforts in Iraq the way liberals once hated Vietnam. While fellow liberals such as Maureen Dowd called McGrory "the most luminous writer and clearest thinker in the business," conservatives such as Andrew Sullivan berated her for ill-thought-out analogies comparing Iraq and Saudi Arabia and others noted they never agreed with a single one of her columns — so McGrory merely preached to the choir for some portion of her career.
Chappaquiddick and the William Kennedy Smith rape trial and Soviet adventurism and Monica Lewinsky and Sept. 11 changed many once-liberals and Kennedy supporters into apostates. But not McGrory. I kept silent at our lunch about the fact that I had made a switch to conservatism much earlier, by voting for Reagan for president twice. Of course, that had to be kept secret from most of my Washington Post colleagues, and McGrory most of all. One was under no illusion, based on her entire ouevre, that she would view a conservative as anything but a blighted soul.
Still, one feels for her, having been felled by a stroke from writing during her last year. Godspeed, Mary McGrory.
- posted by jbelliveau at 1:45 PM in Media
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April 26, 2004
The journalist doll
I saw famed actress Maggie Smith onstage enacting a play, "Night and Day," by Tom Stoppard. "The journalist doll," she said in an slashing and bitter aside. "Wind it up and it gets it wrong."
For most of my early, post-Watergate journalism career in the United States, journalism had a reputation of containing at least some pockets of integrity. Meanwhile in Britain, where playwright Stoppard operates, the "hack" label seems to have stuck through the centuries.
The scandal of Jack Kelley's made-up stories for USA Today, on top of the Jayson Blair, Stephen Glass and Janet Cook travesties, seem to have allowed the hack label to apply to journos on this side of the Atlantic, too.
There is at least one Jack Kelley, on a minor scale, right now at the Washington Post. This reporter, who has manned a number of foreign bureaus and gets lots of acclaim, makes his copy editors shudder when each story lands and they attempt to excise the fantasy aspects of the piece. The exact same modus operandi, of underlings well aware of a star's falsities, is described in USA Today's internal memo on Jack Kelley.
What is fascinating is how the public and informed public officials display no surprise whatsoever at reporter lies. Jayson Blair wrote in the New York Times of the views of cow pastures and tobacco fields from Jessica Lynch's front porch in West Virginia, when he never even went to her home town for the story. If he had, he would have noted no such pastures visible. The Lynch family reaction? They just assumed reporters made up stuff all the time. So what?
The USA Today report (remarkable how poorly written and difficult to follow it is) similarly suggests that Defense Department officials, as well as national security and intelligence officers, for example, decided to just ignore Kelley's lies unless they would harm national interest, because complaining to the editors got them nowhere. Isn't that pitiful? As with the Lynch family, newspaper readers came to assume -- correctly -- that reporters lie and newspapers don't care.
You will get a big truckload of lip service by editors at all the nation's top newspapers that they care passionately about accuracy. But star reporters (and others) get away with sloppy work all the time, caught by lower-level copy and assignment editors.
The root of the problem?
Newspapers have perhaps the worst management across the board of any segment of the private sector. Reporters get promoted to editor, editors get promoted over other editors, and there is never a hint of management training along the way or even a reasonable lay grasp of common sense ways to manage people and tasks.
It's no wonder star reporters get away with so much for so long, their shenanigans well known to their colleagues -- and to readers -- but not the top people.
For more, read Howard Kurtz, who notes the jaw-dropping lack of remorse by top editors at the New York Times and USA Today:
But when news organizations screw up, their executives often fail to admit culpability or tell readers and viewers they're sorry. In many cases, they merely issue canned statements and slink into the shadows without answering questions from the sort of nosy reporters they employ to harass everyone else.And as the implosions at USA Today and the New York Times make clear, newsrooms are sometimes more dysfunctional and paralyzed than the government agencies they cover, with top editors uninformed about problems with subordinates, missing obvious warning signals or intimidating their staff against bringing them bad news.
When Karen Jurgensen was prodded into resigning as USA Today's editor last week in the wake of Jack Kelley's serial fabrications, she did not address her staff or take questions from the press. Neither she nor the two top editors who are also leaving their posts assumed blame or apologized. Managing Editor Hal Ritter said in a statement that he was "upset" about the Kelley situation.As for Jurgensen, her statement said of Kelley, "I wish we had caught him far sooner than we did" -- not all that far from Bush saying that, like everyone else, he wished he had known the 9/11 attacks were coming.
- posted by jbelliveau at 1:17 PM in Media
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April 25, 2004
A dreadful tax plan
Baltimore Mayor Martin O'Malley's tax plan seems to go out of its way to display ossified thinking on public finance.
Let's tax people, the mayor's line of reasoning seems to run, where it really hurts — home heating and light and basic telephone service — with no effort to cut frills in the budget, such as the plan to offer tests for erstwhile firefighters 24 times as often.
The Baltimore Sun (April 25, 2004) reports:
One proposal would impose a 4 percent energy tax on manufacturers, residents, churches, nonprofit organizations and state and federal office buildings. Another would create a $3.50 monthly fee for cell and conventional phones with billing addresses in the city, and a third would raise the fees people pay when they buy real estate.For a household with a $150 monthly gas and electric bill, plus a cell phone and conventional phone, O'Malley's proposed tax increases would cost about $114 a year.
The mayor proceeds to pull the oldest stunt in the local government book of war: threatening to cut first popular programs, such as police and recycling, rather than more ancillary programs.
And taxing energy? When the cost of natural gas and electricity has been soaring steadily? I personally have been frantic to lessen our energy use for years now, caulking every seam in our 1848 house, adding Styrofoam plugs to our skylights, installing ceiling fans (new installations -- what a chore -- when you do it yourself to save $$), pulling the ducts in our basement to find crawlspace air leaks and then sealing the duct seams. All these tasks were guided by an infrared energy audit of our property.
We keep our winter thermostat at 65 degrees (!) and we are paying a lot of money to be not very comfortable. I bet this is the case across much of the city.
At some point, O'Malley's energy tax is going to send city residents already struggling with the energy costs of running a city rowhome (with their impossibly different microclimates between the ground and top floors) not just out of Baltimore but down to the Carolinas or elsewhere in the Sun Belt.
Then there's the attempt to further load up our phone bill with yet another line item having nothing to do with service. Over the years, our monthly plan has gone from $15 to $30 so as to fund all manner of dubious taxes and services for the ostensible poor. If the mayor proceeds with this tax, I will be calling Verizon to change our plan, getting rid of Answercall, most likely. Something has got to give in our family budget and it will be that. So we shall see in micro form the way higher taxes exert their drag on the economy.
- posted by jbelliveau at 10:39 AM in The Neighborhood
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April 24, 2004
Let's ban ass pants!
A small sign that one member of our mass culture, down in Louisiana, possesses a shred of common sense and decency:
BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) - People who wear low-slung pants that expose skin or "intimate clothing" would face a fine of up to $500 and possible jail time under a bill filed by a Jefferson Parish lawmaker.State Rep. Derrick Shepherd said he filed the bill because he was tired of catching glimpses of boxer shorts and G-strings over the lowered belt lines of young adults.
Of course if you read the article a little ways down, you will learn from the usual source (ACLU) all the legal reasons that the greater society must be forced to continue to view teen underwear.
For years, young men have flaunted this style, said to come out of prison, where belts are confiscated. It's an obvious attempt to disrespect basic social notions of how to appear in public. When I was a young teen, just wearing jeans ("dungarees" as my uncle called them) to school was close to shocking.
Today's more nihilistic bunch is running out of ideas, and thus pushing the fashion envelop past informality, past indecency, and into the realm of the surreal, wearing pants that require being pulled up, but not too much, so that the wearer can walk (barely) and offend at the same time.
Some time ago, when I belonged to Baltimore's expensive Downtown Athletic Club, a guy on the basketball court wore his shorts below crack level so as to expose his boxers. Bad enough that such a coarse fashion statement assault our eyes on the streets, but in a health club? I complained to the front desk. "The only man whose underwear I have the slightly interest in seeing is that of my husband, if that," I said. The DAC staff made murmurs of understanding, but I doubt they did much about it.
More power to Rep. Shepherd. It's about time somebody stood up and declared to the watching world,
"We DON'T want to see your underwear in public!"
- posted by jbelliveau at 11:31 AM in Culture
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April 21, 2004
Where's the fire?
Much ado in a Baltimore Sun article (April 20, 2004) about the firefighters' test that resulted in an all-white cadet class in Baltimore.
"The department, from the division chief of personnel on down, was concerned something like this would happen," said James Gardner, a department spokesman. "It was just one of those anomalies where a great number of minorities did not take the test and, number two, a great number of them did not score high on the test."
The article presents the views of retired black firefighters that essentially demand that the process of advertising the test, the test itself and hiring be manipulated until more minorities become part of the department.
In other words, let's start with the skin color results we want, and work backwards.
The current system seems to reward applicants with experience gained in other jurisdictions, to which one can only say bravo. The one somewhat grey area is that hearing about the test seems to require having an inside track, i.e., firefighting friends already "in the club."
Gee ... reminds me of journalism! You have to be part of the club to even know where the jobs are. This happens all the time.
You read the article top to bottom waiting for the other shoe to drop, for the first inkling that for some nefarious reason, the fire department is unfairly screening out minority applicants. And that other shoe never drops. It looks like this year, the same process that in the past produced mixed groups of cadets this time did not.
The problem, one suspects, lies right under our noses, in a crippled school system and crime-riddled city that per usual does not produce graduates able to do much of anything.
It is especially alarming to contemplate that "the Fire Department interviewed several black candidates who had passed the entrance exam but in nearly every case the person was disqualified for failing either a criminal background check or drug screening." One wonders about less care being taken in the future with the criminal background check, and the stage being set for the kind of problems seen a decade ago in Washington, D.C., when the city waved in a group of criminals into the ranks of its police.
Some sense appears in Gregory Kane's column (April 21, 2004, Baltimore Sun) on the flap, wherein he quotes the current fire chief, William J. Goodwin Jr.:
But by Goodwin's own admission, that same process worked for the eight black and six white command staffers standing behind him. When I suggested that the process that resulted in an all-white class was completely color-blind and in accordance with the law of the land, Goodwin couldn't disagree."Was [the process] fair?" Goodwin asked. "It was absolutely fair. Did we follow all the civil service laws? Absolutely. But the process has to be something we need to do better at. Up front, the process is flawed."
No chief, the process isn't flawed. You are tumbling in Wonderland, like Alice, where fair means not fair, where colorblind means color obsessed, and where schools can continue to fail because society will rig all jobs everywhere to camouflage its failures of education.
- posted by jbelliveau at 10:14 AM in The Neighborhood
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April 19, 2004
Jury duty in Baltimore
What a surprise. Not even one third of the Baltimore residents summoned each day to jury duty actually appear, according to an article in the Baltimore Sun (April 19, 2004):
Nationally, poor juror turnout has reached a "crisis level," according to the Washington-based American Legislative Exchange Council, an information clearinghouse. Jurors avoid service whenever they can - and even when they can't, according to the council.
The article does little to explain the fury of the average Baltimore citizen, especially the self-employed, toward the jury system.
First of all, the city demands you be at the courthouse at 8 a.m., where pretty much nothing happens for two hours except that you get processed and exposed to some awful third-tier video from Blockbuster on the closed-circuit TV.
Then you get called in to a big room for jury selection. Most of the time, it is to listen to the judge describe that you are being considered to hear the case along the following lines, where some congenital liar with dollar signs in his or her eyes claim that an MTA bus hit them. One feels miles away from any feeling that one is doing one's civic duty to protect the innocent from murder and mayhem. No, it is more often a bunch of litigious nonsense from scam meisters, inventing tales of falling into uncovered manholes etc., who hope that a claim against a public agency will help them buy a new sofa.
Think I'm being cynical? Then you haven't lived in a declining city with a population so evenly divided between law abiders and law breakers, and with so many scammers exploiting their right to a trial by jury, that jury duty becomes onerous.
Some jurors with salaried employment no doubt look forward to a jury duty as a break in their routine. People doing day work or self-employed, such as myself and others, can usually be found complaining to high heaven, however, about losing a day's time for cases that are pure nonsense.
If you actually get on a jury, for a real criminal case, you can usually count on one, two, three or four jurors to ritualistically chant, "Police lie, they lie," so that the merits of the case often have little bearing on the verdict. This is another manifestation of the deep split in this city between law abiders and law breakers, and the many who live in the grey in-between world of scamming.
Further thinning the jury pool is the absence of Appalachian whites such as some of my neighbors who do construction work. One of them told me he wrote a letter to the jury supervisor saying that he couldn't be on a jury because he was "prejudiced." Another chimed in that he went in person to the courthouse to make the same claim. It's one way to get out of jury duty.
What's the answer?
- Not wasting the jurors' time with nonsense civil suits.
- Wasting less of the jurors' time by making them get to court hours before screening begins.
- Going to the system of six jurors vs. 12.
Citizens have voted by stubbornly doing everything in their power to avoid jury service. The court system needs to fix itself by looking into the reasons why.
- posted by jbelliveau at 12:42 PM in The Neighborhood
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April 11, 2004
A pair of successful small films
Two new DVDs caught my eye this weekend. The first,
Lost in Translation, had me not knowing exactly what to expect. Others seem to find it either a wonderful look at disorientation overseas or a film in which close to nothing happens.
Both camps seem to be correct. We have plenty of imagery of lonely young wife Scarlett Johansson and aging star Bill Murray hanging out doing not very much at a luxury hotel in Tokyo. Even on such a micro stage, however, strange things happen in their separate rooms: beeps and buzzers and faxes emit noises incomprehensible to a Westerner, and curtains open themselves, apparently in response to sunrise.
Anyone who has ever been to Japan will no doubt find Lost in Translation intriguing. Japan is indeed where Western stars go to reap huge sums for liquor commercials. Channel surfing reveals cultural oddities, brilliantly captured in a bit with Murray appearing on "Matthew's Big Hit TV," a show with a screaming host with dyed-blond hair in a neon candy-striped suit.
One can scarcely imagine a corollary situation, say, of a non-English-speaking guest on Jay Leno appearing with the obligatory wrapped present in hand and translator at his side. The DVD contains a gem, an extended version of Murray's appearance with Matthew as seen through the principal camera on the set.
I mostly admired the film's reluctance to have the two principals fall into the sack at the first hints of marital loneliness. They share a deeper sort of intimacy, watching TV together on a hotel bed without having sex, or even touching each other, except for a brief resting of Murray's hand on Johansson's foot.
I say mostly because the ending hints that Stateside, they will embark on an affair, and it's clear they can barely hold a conversation even in Japan, where they have plenty of motivation to band together in an alien place. As I wrote in the Burma chapter of An Amateur's Guide to the Planet :
Lesson Number 3: English speakers form groups for mutual support when attempting to navigate in a little-visited foreign land.
The other DVD we watched was
American Splendor, about the life of Cleveland comic book author Harvey Pekar. Kudos to its blend of actors, their real-life models and animation!
The film gets funnier as it goes along, and Pekar meets Robert Crumb, a nerdy co-worker, his future wife, David Letterman and his eventual daughter! The nerdy co-worker seems almost too much to believe, until we see his inspiration, expounding on the different flavors of jellybeans on the set.
A big hoorah for this look at how a guy with a boring job as a file clerk at a VA hospital found an outlet for his creative muse.
- posted by jbelliveau at 1:40 PM in Culture
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April 9, 2004
Baltimore's Upper Fells Point: Worst of all worlds
When living in a generally poor Northeastern city such as this, one might reasonably expect to have one of two possible constellations of problems in your neighborhood.
Maybe you're in a rough area, with drug dealers on the corner, pit bulls owning the park, and so many car break-ins that you just leave a taped shopping bag in the window to avoid your third call to the insurance company in a few months.
(Not just our sedan, but many others in the neighborhood wear paper-bag windows, and sometimes my walks take place through a sea of shattered, celadon-green safety glass.)
Or you might be a bit luckier and live in a Yuppified district, where higher home values have driven out the hookers and hillbillies (who actually can be far more intriguing individuals). But in this case parking becomes impossible, with each 15-foot-wide rowhouse needing spaces for two SUVs. Your once private roof deck is ringed by others, with satellite dishes set up exactly to block your water view and chimes hung by those who have never read letters to "Dear Abby" by neighbors driven insane by those who crave quiet.
In an improving neighborhood, some rowhouses become home to three or four twenty-something girls and their rotating boyfriends, chewing up most of the block's parking spaces, and oblivious to how their drunken revelry at 2 a.m. Sunday morning travels undiminished into your rowhouse bedroom.
Welcome to Upper Fells Point, Baltimore's eastside neighborhood with the worst of both worlds.
The neighborhood that first enthralled me when I arrived in Baltimore in January 1987 seems quite tarnished now. Despite constant rehabbing in these parts, and the more than doubling of our house value, life often feels crowded and mean.
The drug corner
Walking our two shelties the two blocks to the nearest park crystalizes the problem. The walk has turned into a virtual gauntlet. A drug gang arrives each evening at the corner store at Ann and Pratt streets, slinging bicycles over the entry steps and loitering with pit bulls under the benevolent eye of the Sri Lankan shopkeepers.
DeWitt, Erika and their crew of dealers arrived exactly two years ago. We had a flurry of calling the police on them, but I think everyone eventually realized that the shopkeepers want their trade and are the crux of the problem. And the more we called police, the more the kids' most hard-core friends arrived to make trouble.
I know one neighbor who just left Ann Street because of the constant "transients" the store attracts and is much happier on her quiet street in Canton.
If I steer clear of that corner, I must cross one-way Pratt street outside of a crosswalk and in the blind spot of turning drivers.
Dog poop
One block up Ann Street, an unleashed dog with Yuppie owners (new) on the north side of the street charged us on Wednesday night. The south side has long has Jake, another frequently unleashed dog. We can now walk in the street I suppose, or take Regester Street, strewn with broken glass.
I pick up after my dogs once at the park, stepping carefully around giant piles of turds left by apparently 95 percent of the other dog owners. For this trouble, I was visited today by Animal Control, with a complaint that I (!) don't pick up after my dogs. I showed the officer my stack of plastic bags sitting right beside the front door and demanded to know who reported that I didn't pick up after my dogs.
Oh ... the complaint is anonymous. Hmmm, do you think it could possibly be a drug dealer, or one of their sympathizers?
The drug kids operate with complete impunity, and their cohorts work the system to load petty irritants on the taxpayer.
The neighborhood is now packed with unleashed dogs (and snapping leashed pit bulls) making every walk tense.
Rehabbers
Adding insult to the injury of petty and/or criminal neighbors are the rehabbers, including the flaming jackass who did the property next door and rammed a new roof deck against our chimney with no gap whatsoever. The inspector made him cover the side of the (flammable wooden) deck with a sheet of metal. So much for our water view. How the new neighbors are supposed to stain and waterproof their wood, jammed against our brick wall, is a mystery.
Our rehabbers, including out-of-town dilettantes who read somewhere that property investment was the next big thing after the dot.com collapse, take up parking spaces with their waste containers, spray acid everywhere when they clean brick, and make our neighborhoods filthy, dirty, gravelly messes. Supposedly this should eventually improve Fells Point, but it is a painful process when you have so much substandard housing stock that rehabbing looks like a 30-year permanent condition.
Some of our neighbors point to our increasing property values. What happens when you simply decide you don't like where you live very much any more?
Yuppies
I moved to Baltimore with a mind to exploring it like a foreign country, and was amazed by my early encounters with neighbors including Crazie Margie, Crazy Bob (you can see a certain nickname pattern developing ...), Cissy the porch-sitter with the foghorn voice, her nefarious and delinquent grandsons Karl and Bonzo, and Melvin with his safety pin holding his coat together and his "I've Fallen and I Can't Get Up" ballcap.
Now, our neighbors are people from ... Montgomery County, Maryland, where I'm from. Nothing against that, except that one redeeming feature of being in a discordant area is a few laughs from the colorful characters. Now all these characters have moved, to Pennsylvania and Ohio, no doubt after careful investigation into various Social Service entitlements.
Let me distinguish between yuppies, who are big into catalogs of home furnishings, and homesteaders, also young professionals but with a certain toughness and realism about real life in the city. I would put my neighbors Blaire and Linda into the homesteaders category.
What's left for us homesteaders? A yuppie suburb, with more crime!
- posted by jbelliveau at 4:53 PM in The Neighborhood
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April 4, 2004
Adu's debut
Soccer phenom Freddy Adu began his professional career yesterday with D.C. United, but it was two other young players and a seasoned vet who stole the spotlight.
Veteran Jaime Moreno set up one goal for young Alecko Eskandarian and completed another in the 2-1 victory over San Jose. And Bobby Convey, some years ago D.C. United's first teenage phenom, was a danger all game long, with fierce runs up the left sideline that left him wide open for a shot he inexplicably missed.
Adu came on in the 61st minute and seemed either muted or self-contained compared to Convey and Eskandarian. Still, on the few occasions when he got the ball, he moved beautifully and showed amazing quickness in his passes. His teammates will have to get used to Adu's speed.
We are very fortunate that this teenager originally from Ghana will be starting his career in the United States and that those of us in the Baltimore-Washington area get to make a short drive to see him play.
NOTE to D.C. United officials: PLEASE turn down the volume of the announcements and the music before the game starts and during half time. Painfully loud! We met my nephew Matt and local soccer coach Rick Crow and couldn't converse at all except as the game was being played. Arrggh.
Also, the concession stands seemed disorganized, running out of O'Douls, burritos and other items even before the game started.
- posted by jbelliveau at 3:23 PM in
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Duke's out
How poetically apt that Duke's run in the men's NCAA basketball tournament should be cut short by whistle-happy refs who kept Shelden Williams and Shavlik Randoph on the bench with strange foul calls. Shades of what happened to Maryland in their abominable match-up with Duke in 2001, a point noted in this thread on Fark.com. Said Skydog:
There's just soooo much delicious irony seeing Dookies complain about the officiating.
Perhaps surprisingly, it's hard to take much cheer in Duke's misfortune, given the way the umps made the entire game vs. U-Conn into a choppy match. As Michael Wilbon, noted, "A Good Thing, Nearly Spoiled:"
The referees were responsible, directly, for [Emeka Okefor] playing only 22 minutes. U-Conn. suffered through bad calls early. Duke was saddled with its share of ridiculous foul calls late, all of it regrettable. The referees should never, ever, ever be The Story of a game this big. I hate writing about refs because by and large they do such good work. But the zebras cannot be ignored in the retelling and dissecting of this game.There was barely a possession in the second half without a whistle interrupting it. The officials called tacky, nothing little fouls. They whistled fouls that didn't exist, occasionally made calls that suggested total incompetence. They came very close to ruining the game. With eight minutes to go half the people in the Alamodome, some with no rooting interests in Duke or Connecticut whatsoever, began chanting, "Let them play. . . . Let them play!" David Hall, Olandis Poole and Ted Hillary apparently never heard the sentiment that zebras should be seen but not heard.
- posted by jbelliveau at 3:19 PM in Sports
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