January 10, 2008
Ask Michael Wilbon? Not!
I suspect Washington Post sports columnist Michael Wilbon, self-anointed as omniscient and "never surprised," got banned from writing columns about the Redskins for a while after he posted the following about Sean Taylor in a chat as the Redskins safety was dying:I've known guys like Taylor all my life, grew up with some. They still have shades of gray and shouldn't be painted in black and white ... I know how I feel about Taylor, and this latest news isn't surprising in the least, not to me. Whether this incident is or isn't random, Taylor grew up in a violent world, embraced it, claimed it, loved to run in it and refused to divorce himself from it. He ain't the first and won't be the last. We have no idea what happened, or if what we know now will be revised later. It's sad, yes, but hardly surprising.Though what Wilbon said was true of Taylor until age 22 -- no one in the organization seemed to find him especially likeable until his daughter was born, and he only grew up the last two years of his life -- it goes too far to say he "embraced" and "claimed" a violent world anymore by the time he was 24.
While the blogosophere has hammered Wilbon for the particulars of this remark -- both his timing and his facts were w-a-a-a-ay off -- no one takes him to the woodshed better than the sports parodists at Kissing Suzy Kolber, in this column, Ask Michael Wilbon!
Bob T., Bethesda: Hi Mike, I’m a big fan. I just wanted to get your most recent thoughts on Sean Taylor’s death. Has your perspective changed at all in recent days?Read it all here. Am I jealous that I didn't write this myself? Yes. Am I surprised that a blog with the inspired name of Kissing Suzy Kolber has this caliber of parody? No.
Michael Wilbon: What a stupid question. I’m a journalist, okay? I stand by what I wrote. Is his death sad? Yes. Did it surprise me? Not in the least. Not any aspect of it at all. Not even the time it occurred, which was early morning. Now I knew Sean a little bit. Not a lot. Just a little bit. And I can tell you, that bad elements WERE a part of his life at some point. Maybe not anymore. But they were there. So don’t bring that junk about me having to change my perspective. Okay?
An inebriated Joe Namath leans in to try to kiss a ducking Suzy Kolber, announcing, "I want to kiss you. I couldn't care less about the team struggling." See the full YouTube video here, including the announcers' inane reaction, "Joe's just a happy guy!" ... "Isn't he!"
This reminds of this laugh-out-loud sports parody: Washington Redskins' long snapper Ethan Albright's profane purported rebuttal to John Madden at being rated the lowest of all the players on Madden '07: Ethan Albright Strikes Back. I've reproduced it with a few strategic earmuffs emoticons:
Albright even responded to the letter in this Post interview:
Even with the rating he probably would have remained anonymous were it not for a profanity-filled letter to NBC Sports analyst John Madden, who helped EA Sports develop the game. The letter carried Albright's name on the bottom with the signature line "Rot in Hell" that made its way around the Internet. He did not write the letter and admits that when he first saw it, "I laughed my butt off."Update Jan. 26, 2008: Ethan Albright has been added to the Pro Bowl, reports Redskins Insiders' Jason La Canfora, prompting a witty comment from micmoliver, "Wonder if this will increase his rating on Madden?"
Finally, as embarrassingly in the tank for Joe Gibbs as was my recent blog entry -- it might as well have been titled "How Joe Gibbs Saved My Marriage" -- apparently I am restrained compared to some fans of the coach, who believe Gibbs is both Jesus and want polygamy legalized so they can marry him. Blogger Patty Nixx writes:
I have to say that I have matured and blossomed into quite a gal. The first time Joe Gibbs retired, I climbed under a desk and wept like a turtle. This time, my phone rang at 6am and I figured either someone was dead or Joe Gibbs had retired so I approached the phone like a cougar hunting a bunny, took the news like an adult, and reached for some Xanax...like an adult. Joe has earned the right to do whatever he wants. He is Jesus in burgandy and gold. Ergo, if he wants to leave to spend time with his family, that's ok.......but if I see him out and about, he had better be covered with grandkids and cousins and doing family stuff or my new found maturity may decrease.She noted earlier during the Redskins' winning streak:
If anyone trash talks the above man, Joe Gibbs, they'll have to go through me. This man is a saint and after the way he's held the team together through Sean Taylor's murder, injuries, and all the heart breaking losses this year, win, lose, or draw, he is the man. If polygamy were legal in the state of Virginia, I would get down on my knee and offer both him and his lovely wife my hand in marriage. I think I speak for many in Redskin Nation when I say, "I'm sorry I ever doubted you, Joe". I actually declared my football season over about a month ago out of frustration. Now, Joe's leadership and Sean's guidance from above has had me drunkingly prancing about on Sundays again the last few weeks. At this point, when I look at Joe Gibbs, I see him wearing a robe and sandals with a beard and long hair turning water into wine. In fact, next time I see him, I shall simply hand him a jug of water, tell him I'm planning a cocktail party but I'm broke, so please do your thing. Help out a sister!Patty goes on to note, "I think every traffic circle in D.C. should have a bronze statue of him and I'd kiss the feet of the statue at every opportunity."
Wilbon's Post columnist buddy Mike Wise about nails all our hyperbole in this column when he notes that Gibbs was welcomed on his return four years with a rapture and "fanfare befitting George Patton and, well, Gandhi."
I finally was granted minutes ago a one-on-one interview with noted Redskins fan and Washington mood bellweather Mary G. Belliveau, my mother, who gives permission to quote her in my blog.
In this interview, she channels her late brother Robert F. Williams Jr., a long-time basketball coach in suburban Boston, in her understanding of sports:
"Coach Joe Gibbs, oh my goodness, we will miss him. Well I can understand why he retired, he gave 1,000 percent for four years, and I don't know if he could see the light at the end of the tunnel with Collins or not. He had a few moments of the spotlight and a few moments of hope, and an awful lot of of downers. What I remember about all the four years is the dropped footballs, I'm sorry to say, as a spectator. I don't know what he could do about it.
"There were some valiant efforts, some fellows who never stopped trying, there are some you wonder what they're doing there.
"He's such a wonderful person to have around anyway, he and Danny were matched, like the one before, Jack Kent Cooke, they were kind of matched."
Well that about says it. Here is a nice Washington Post graphic of bizarre problems and miscues that dogged the Gibbs II era -- Mom is on the money in her impression.
Now we'll just sit back and see if the 'Skins hire Bill Cowher, promote Gregg Williams, or go with Plan C. Maybe get some big receivers who can hang on to the ball along with a new coach.
January 8, 2008
Joe Gibbs returns -- a true story
Washington Redskins Coach Joe Gibbs at his resignation press conference, with team owner Dan Snyder standing behind him.
Gibbs with Sean Taylor during a press conference after Taylor signed his contract on July 27, 2004. The Washington Post reported that Gibbs and Taylor formed a bond over the years, making Taylor's death in 2007 that much harder for the coach and the team.
Joe Gibbs returns -- a true story
Jan. 8, 2004Ours is a mixed marriage. Not in the superficial sense that my husband is black, and I white; that he is younger and I am older; that he is a Protestant and moderate-to-liberal and I, Catholic and moderate-to-conservative — though all these things are quite true.
No, ours is a mixed marriage in a far more significant sense: He loved the old Baltimore Colts and now the Ravens. I, even more passionately, breathe for the Washington Redskins. We make our home in Ravens territory. From our Fells Point roof deck in Baltimore, we can see the upper ramparts of the stadium where Ray Lewis imposes his will to win on the random events of sporting contests and on the lesser talent of his teammates.
Yet on our roof deck also arrive the signals of Washington’s Channel 5, captured by a powerful antenna pointed southwest for Redskins’ broadcasts.
This year around Christmas, we had one of those typical holiday disagreements, one involving getting ready for a breakfast for his family. I know that Seasonal Affective Disorder Syndrome affects my winter mood, but in the bumbling era of Redskins Coach Steve Spurrier, a second malady dogged me: Football Affective Disorder Syndrome.
After our subsequent making up, we stood in the sun under the skylights of our bedroom on the last Saturday afternoon of 2003.
“You know,” I told Lamont, as my teddy bear in a burgundy-and-gold uniform bore witness, “if the Redskins did better, it would certainly help our marriage.”
He thought and eventually replied, in the spirit of "South Park’s" Eric Cartman weighing two very closely balanced propositions, “Hmm, better Redskins? Marriage? Redskins? Marriage?” We laughed.
In the movie Diner, a fan screens his fiancée on her knowledge of Baltimore Colts trivia. In modern Washington, the situation might be reversed, given a knowledgeable female fan base. My 76-year-old mother in a Washington suburb and I watched the ‘Skins via long-distance telephone. The ringing had been constant during the scoring of the good years. Now, with fourth-quarter collapses the rule, the phone often stood silent after the first half.
Anthropologists could have a field day analyzing why so many Washington women attended games, in marked contrast to, say, the male-dominated demographics of a Latin American soccer match. D.C. had a concentration of influential females who seemed to gravitate towards the corridors of power and sport alike.
And under Coach Joe Gibbs’ leadership from 1981 to 1993, the uniquely felon-free team had been quite friendly towards family values ... heck, a famous video clip showed the coach praying on his knees during a playoff game. This went over big with Mom, who never forgave Gibbs’ successor, Norv Turner, for audible-ing a wordy dirty on the sidelines as the team slid to mediocrity.
If the Redskins did better, it would certainly help our marriage.
The truth of my remark hung in the air of our bedroom. My subconscious had sent a vital telegram to my waking mind.
Eleven mornings later, Mom related the latest: Gibbs was returning as head coach of the Redskins.
I asked Mom how she felt.
“Euphoria,” she said simply.
The Sports page of the Washington Post reported that the paper’s printers had cheered louder at the news than at the capture of Saddam Hussein.
I reassessed my life. The past decade seemed to me one where I had had ups and downs, and maybe taken the downs too hard.
Something had hung over me, perhaps a woman’s hormonal odyssey through her 40s. Now, I suspect that the real problem all along had been the absence of Joe Gibbs. The Messiah had felt called to NASCAR. A huge region of 5 million fans paid the costly psychological toll. The Redskins had been so consistently excellent and entertaining, no one handled their post-Gibbs fall well.
A memory returned. I had been scheduled to work at the Baltimore Sun the night of the 1988 Super Bowl. I was one of three Washingtonians to ask for the night off, which was granted by our boss, to each of our's undying gratitude.
Our family had gathered at my parents’ in Rockville to watch the contest. A nephew, then a toddler, shrieked with joy, tearing around holding aloft a corduroy burgundy mini-football. Adults high fived. My California brother-in-law was barraged for supporting the Broncos as the Redskins piled on one, two, three, four, five touchdowns in the second quarter.
Had a people ever been happier?
In 2000, after the Ravens’ Super Bowl victory, Lamont, my now-grown nephew, Matt, and I boogied in the streets of our neighborhood, Fells Point, jammed with cars honking or abandoned by dancing drivers. Neighbors said they saw us on TV.
After coming on the field with a war dance, Ray Lewis had crushed our enemies, driving them backwards with the football.
But Ray-Ray’s ability to collect heads for a team that could stymie others and even win at times on a few field goals simply was not the same as watching a decade of Gibbs’ quarterbacks sling arrows to Heaven and vindicate the tribal soul of a national capital that united around just one symbol, its football team.
Happiness overcame me. Our coach had returned. Our mixed marriage will draw greater strength from having, let’s hope, two teams in every postseason.
I'll set up a big TV and a little TV to watch both games at once, with the Redskins on the big one.
.........................
I'm struck on rereading this by how maudlin yet honest it is. I really did feel this at the time and have to conclude that some things are truly unshakeable, including D.C.'s gratitude to Coach Joe. And yes, maybe I am as ridiculous as a Da Bears Superfan. I think Lamont definitely benefitted from having a less irate spouse during football season the last four years.
January 2, 2008
Female sex tourism video on YouTube
Anyone wanting to see the terrain explored in the film Heading South
and the book How Stella Got Her Groove Back in documentary form -- albeit brief -- might want to take a peek at this video, Rent a Dread, on YouTube.This shows some of the action in Negril Beach, Jamaica and on Dominica.
What I notice is that we have the local men willing to participate in the video, as well as expatriate white women, but not the female tourists themselves, who, to date, have only been interviewed in any depth by UC-Santa Barbara's April Gorry, who devoted months living in Belize to an interview project for her doctoral dissertation.
Rent-a-Dread video, click arrow to play
During the time from July to December of last year when my blog was broken, I wasn't able to keep up with my occasional roundups on news in sex tourism and dissociative mating. Let me try to catch up a bit now.
• The big tidbit is probably the marriage of a 51-year-old English grandmother to the 27-year-old son of Osama bin Laden in wake of a holiday romance. Here's The Times version of the story, and a photo of the couple:
Mrs Felix-Browne, who has been married five times previously, met (Omar Ossama) bin Laden in Egypt in September while undergoing treatment for multiple sclerosis. She says that their fairytale romance began when her future husband saw her riding a horse near the Great Pyramid. They were married in Islamic ceremonies in Egypt and Saudi Arabia and are awaiting permission from the authorities in Riyadh to make their marriage official.This touches on a number of themes in Romance on the Road, including how Arab men, emulating Mohammed, often find older women attractive, as well as an examination of the possible role of sexual frustration experienced by young Arabs with few mating options in contributing to world terrorism.
• From the U.K.'s Daily Mail, the world champ on chronicling tabloid-y travel romances, we have a related story: "Our nightmare daughter: The teenage girl who keeps running to Egypt for her men."
I have no idea if any word of this is true, but for what it's worth:
Holed up in a £60-a-night hotel room in the Egyptian resort of Hurghada, 17-year-old runaway Amy Robson cuts a rather forlorn figure.• From Mangalorean.com, "Goa Tourism: Love knows no borders," comes an article noting that Indians from elsewhere and Nepalese men are flocking to Goa for jobs -- with marriage to a foreigner considered the ultimate success.Her pillow is wet with tears over what might have been and she doesn't know what to do with herself.
This desolate scene, she tremulously explains, wasn't how it was supposed to be. When she secretly sneaked out of her home in the Cumbrian village of Beaumont last week, her pretty little head was filled with romantic images of being reunited with her 29-year-old "fiance" Mohamed El Sayed.
During the arduous 24-hour journey to the Red Sea resort - involving three flights via Gatwick, Amsterdam and Cairo - she'd been sustained by the thought of being swept up in her handsome lover's arms before dashing off to get married and live happily ever after.
Love they say knows no boundaries and what better way to epitomize the feeling in the case of Raj, Prabhakar and Bharat. The trio's love for their partner's and now wife's has transcended the boundaries of colour, religion, nationality and religion.• From the International Herald Tribune: "Letter from Thailand: Variations on a Theme: Thai Women and Foreign Husbands:"The former waiters present the other side of the Goa shining example materialisng through the tourism platform. Goa, which served as a spring board for them, a life beyond taking orders from hotel guests. Love and marriage has opened new doors for the trio as they now live and work in Europe along with their wives.
Raj would not agree with anyone who argues that holiday romance, remains an affair confined to the holiday season and no further than that. Typically in most cases the holiday fling and Goa included, the romantic liaison is all over after the holiday ends. As one of the partner packs his bags and leaves to head home to his home country.
But for Raj and for two of his colleagues, working at Dominic beach side seasonal restaurant in Benaulim, in South Goa, the holiday romance was not just fleeting moments, but a long lasting relationship which has been solemnized in marriage.
About 15 percent of all marriages in the northeast, a study published by Khon Kaen University found, are now between Thai women and foreign men. Most of the men are Europeans, but there are upwards of 300 or so Americans, many of them veterans of the Vietnam War who were based in Udon Thani in the 1960s and early 1970s and are living here, most of them with Thai wives as well.• Here's a blog entry from Koren Shadmi, who came up with a delicious illustration for Bust magazine for an article, "Ticket to Ride," mentioning me and Romance on the Road:There is a sort of calculated redemption on both sides of these marriages. Many of the women have painful stories, of working as prostitutes, of abandonment by Thai husbands and boyfriends, of children they couldn't afford to take care of. They make no secret of the fact that marrying some nice, older foreign man saved both them and their extended families from poverty and unhappiness.
I was asked to do an illustration for BUST magazine for an article about sex tourism, from a female point of view. Apparantly there are over 25,000 women in the US who travel abroad on a regular basis to have sex with some of the locals. Its not often that you get such a fun subject to work with. I got the job a day after I landed from my visit to france, so the whole intercontinental atmosphere combined with the jetlag created good grounds for an illustration.Koren, like Lamont, apparently graduated from New York's School for the Visual Arts.
• From the Associated Press, as run in USAToday, "Interracial marriages surge across the U.S.:"
NEW YORK — The charisma king of the 2008 presidential field. The world's best golfer. The captain of the New York Yankees. Besides superstardom, Barack Obama, Tiger Woods and Derek Jeter have another common bond: Each is the child of an interracial marriage.The 1967 Supreme Court decision mentioned is significant. Lamont's parents could not get married in Maryland -- it would have been illegal -- so they went down to Howard University in D.C. to tie the knot.For most of U.S. history, in most communities, such unions were taboo.
It was only 40 years ago — on June 12, 1967 — that the U.S. Supreme Court knocked down a Virginia statute barring whites from marrying non-whites. The decision also overturned similar bans in 15 other states.
Since that landmark Loving v. Virginia ruling, the number of interracial marriages has soared; for example, black-white marriages increased from 65,000 in 1970 to 422,000 in 2005, according to Census Bureau figures. Factoring in all racial combinations, Stanford University sociologist Michael Rosenfeld calculates that more than 7% of America's 59 million married couples in 2005 were interracial, compared to less than 2% in 1970.
• And finally, here's an article, again from the Daily Mail, that links highly intelligent women to low emotional IQs that lead to romantic failure, a possible reason for some women to explore travel sex as a pick-me-up, Anna Pasternak writes: Why are intelligent women such fools in love?
However, recently it has struck me that I am not alone in my ability to have made the right career choices - but hopelessly wrong choices in love.This similarly is examined in Romance on the Road, which notes the presence of female university professors in sex tourism zones.I know of at least seven girls in my year at school - I went to St Paul's Girls' School in London, one of the most academic schools in the country - who are single mothers, while my female friends from Oxford, who are also divorced or single mothers, runs into double figures.
The most high-profile casualty of those is Earl Spencer's ex-wife, Caroline Hutton, who was famously left with two children by her first husband, PR guru Matthew Freud, and then left again with two more children by her second husband, Earl Spencer. Not, it seems, the perfect judge of men.
So what does all this mean? Well, I believe that at the root of all this is the fact that many women with a high IQ have a perilously low EQ (that's their emotional intelligence quotient). Put more prosaically, this would explain why bright girls are often fools in love.
Last year, American writer Michael Noer created outrage when he wrote a piece in Forbes Magazine warning men off marrying career girls. He claimed that recent studies had found that clever, professional women were more likely to get divorced, more likely to cheat and less likely to have children.
Simultaneously, the American Journal of Marriage And Family cited studies that claim the divorce risk rises when women out-earn their husbands. Evidence, everywhere, seems to point to the fact that thousands of bright women can't sustain meaningful relationships for a plethora of reasons: they are too controlling, they can't tolerate less successful men and equally, men resent higher-earning partners.
- posted by jbelliveau at 4:03 PM in Love, Sex, Romance and Travel
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