Mark Byron

Front Page Haiku, 3-8-09

Dallas dumps TO
North America's Head Case
Buffalo Shuffle

He's christened his new border-straddling club "North America's Team;" the Bills have started to play some home games in Toronto. If the good TO shows up, he'll be a nice addition, but the locker room cancer doesn't always show up right away.

One year contract. That's about right, for year two is generally when he starts to wear out his welcome. The wag on Billy Martin was that he was "the best manager in baseball on a one-year contract." Might that be said of Owens?

UK 8-and-8
Long Knives Out For Billy G
NIT ain't it

Kentucky finished it's regular season 19-12 and 8-8 in the SEC after losing to Florida yesterday. If you finish the regular season in a major conference at .500, you'd better have some bragging rights in your out-conference schedule in order to get a Big Dance invite; a neutral-site win over West Virginia was the best UK could trot out. Michigan went 19-12 and 9-9 Big Ten, but they have wins over Duke and UCLA on their resume.

Kentucky doesn't have a legit point guard. It has two NBA first rounders in Jody Meeks and Patrick Patterson and a solid role playing power forward in Perry Stevenson who may well make a living at the sport, albeit at a European or NBA backup level. However, Meeks is their only outside threat, so defenses can play a box-and-one on Meeks and clog the paint. Give Gillespie a point guard and this team is a title contender.

 

Front Page Haiku

Terrible Ivan
refuses to go away;
visiting Houston.

We may be using the wrong Russian metaphor; this storm looks more like Rasputin in that it refuses to die, sneaking back into the Gulf for one more go-round.

Front Page Haiku-Cat's in the Bag

Ride on the Peace Plane.
Oops, hung out at the wrong mosque.
Back to the UK.

If you're under the age of 35 or so, the flap over Yusef Islam ne Cat Stevens will fly over your head. Back in the early 70s, he was a big singer-songwriter, reeking of liberal goodness, but in such a way that was hard to criticize; I can't think of a more LibProt song than Morning has Broken. Later in the 70s, he converted to Islam whole-hog (maybe not the most halal adjective) and dropped his music career, only to show up on radar a decade later when he agreed with the fatwas on Salman Rushdie. He's come back into the limelight the last few years as a peace activist, merging his quarter-century old faith with his old beliefs.

He was on an no-fly list, but they only noticed when a London-to-Washington plane was en route; the plane was forced to touch down in Maine, he was removed, and the plane went on to Washington.

The open question is why he was on the US' radar. This Detroit Free Press piece asked whether this was "...more like religious profiling than an anti-terrorist measure." Or possibly payback for doing a remix of Peace Train in protest of US activity in Iraq? My guess was that he might have been hanging out with the wrong crowd; that plus his publicity might have made him persona non grata.

Front Page Haiku

Congress in charge Good for the Indian Church Bad for stock market That's the bottom line. The Gandhis have been secular socialists; one of the upsides of the BJP is that they were an improvement in economics. In this case, secular is good, since the alternative is a nasty Hindu-centric government that lays the climate for killing off Muslims and Christians.

The one downside is that, as the new government starts to try to enforce the rights of non-Hindus, the hard-cases might start rioting or increasing their buring of churches and killing of Christians.