campaign '08: the final four ... already?

While I'm tryingtryingtrying to avoid politics on this thing, I can't help but lament that we're pretty much down to Clinton and Obama among the Democrats, and McCain and Romney with the GOP, if only because most of us haven't yet had a say in the matter. I mean, Rudy's pretty much out on the Republican side because he chose to ignore Iowa and New Hampshire -- two states really representive of the electorate at-large, eh? -- while Edwards was basically dumped by the Dems because he lacks the star power (and identity politics) of Hillary and Obama. But how many states have already staged primaries and caucuses? Has it even been 10? How cool must the old days have been, when delegates were chosen in a timely manner and the parties' nominating conventions actually possessed the drama of who might get picked instead of the drab infomericals they've long since become. And to think, only nine more months 'til Election Day. Wake me when it gets here.

the aussie party kid

This dude's just awesome. Heroic, even.

david simon on the (sad) future of newspapering

Other than sports and movies, I don't watch television. That said, after reading David Simon's remarkable piece in Esquire, I might have to start watching "The Wire." I dunno, people. The suits at the papers have to adjust, but there's something to be said for old-fashioned, shoe-leather, waiting-people-out kind of journalism. Fuck it. It's more than that. You can read the blogs (ahem) or watch the talk shows to find out what they're doing in, say, Washington, but you really have to read a paper -- and particularly a local paper -- to know what they're doing in your backyard. To be selfish, though, Simon gets to the heart of the matter when he writes this:

And so this was journalism. A scavenger hunt -- from A to B to Z on a patchwork of known facts and guesses. It was not the most important story I’d report on, nor my best work. There were stories to be written that would argue for social change, stories that might challenge the institutional status quo, stories that might win prizes. Many of them would be legitimate and some would be manufactured, and, yes, there is stuff in my yellowed clip book that creeps into those categories. But when I think back on what I love about newspapers, I think of sitting in that car, waiting with Bill Zorzi. For me, the religion was in the chase, the pursuit of accumulated fact and quote, the rush to deadline, and the arrogance of standing up like the village griot at the campfire and running down a story that hadn’t yet been heard. And then the next day, maybe, doing it again. For that alone, I can have no regrets. Nah, son, fuck law school. And fuck the M.B.A. I’ll never have. And fuck all that Chaucer and Cervantes and Proust I might never get around to reading. On a given day, I learn something that you didn’t know and then, my authority drawn only from scrawl on pages of a pocket notebook, I write it up clean so the rest of you can get your hands filthy with ink, reading my righteous shit. In the less fevered lobes of my brain, it was as pure as that.

Amen. Here's hoping the suits help this wonderful enterprise survive, because it deserves to.

20 years later, jerome lane reveals the truth

Friday was the 20th anniversary of Jerome Lane's Dunk, that famous moment when Pitt's then-junior forward shattered a backboard at old Fitzgerald Field House with a thunderous fast-break slam against Providence. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, as one might expect, published a story to commemorate the occasion, the first half of which is a standard boilerplate retrospective that fails to mention the game was blacked out in Pittsburgh, so it was (incredibly) never seen on live TV by anyone locally. [As a 12-year-old at the time, I recall tuning into the radio after it happened, though unaware. I only remember being puzzled as to why it was only halftime nearly two hours after tipoff, when the game should have been close to over. But then Bill Hillgrove explained that there was a 30-plus minute delay because of what Lane had done. I nearly died from anticipation, wanting badly to see the play.] Anyway, the story then gets to a startling revelation about that 1988 Pitt team, which I still believe was the best in the country but was somehow beaten by Vanderbilt in the second round of the NCAA Tournament. Lane's comments answer a question a lot of us in Pittsburgh have wanted to ask all these years: Why didn't they foul Vandy guard Barry Goheen at the end of regulation, when they had a three-point lead? Lane's answer is incredible. And let's just say I now have a lot more respect for John Calipari, a Panthers assistant coach at the time. Read the story for yourself here. Unbelievable.

long live jimmy breslin

What better way to start this blog, which will be about things of interest to me, than by pointing you to last Sunday's New York Times profile of the one and only Jimmy Breslin, that grand, grizzled old New York reporter and writer. It concludes with the following money quote:

Jimmy Breslin stood there, his hands at his waist, his glasses at the far edge of his nose, frowning, nodding, making soft uh-huh sounds, listening to yet another loser, another one of them, of him.

Awesome.