I noticed that while UNC was beating up on less-than-stellar talent over the holidays, the announcers kept telling us to just wait for the conference season so they'd be tested. As I was listening to the UNC-Maryland game last weekend, I noted that barely into the second half Woody and Mick were talking about how great the Georgia Tech game was going to be on Wednesday. Then as the first half of the UNC-Georgia Tech game was ending, Dick Vitale started talking about what a great game Wake Forest is going to be. Two games against quality conference opponents and they're such blowouts that the announcers are already talking about the NEXT game with half the game to go. Even JennySlash (NOT a basketball fan) noticed that the Jacket players seemed to be moving in slow motion compared to the Heels.

Sports fans (heck, I guess fans of everything) are always comparing today's team or players to years past. I'm guilty of that too and I can think of a lot of parallels with the 1993 UNC team. Heralded recruiting class now juniors, senior forward (Lynch/J Williams) taking over as the locker room leader, the feeling that they're a real team and not just a collection of guys, good bench - we've even got a center (Montross/May) that grew up in Indiana as the son of a ballplayer that everyone just assumed was going to go play at Indiana before he shocked them by coming to Chapel Hill. Talent-wise, this team is clearly better - I'll take Felton over Phelps in a hearbeat and May over Montross (as much as I loved Eric) and it would take both Donald Williams and Brian Reese to begin to match up with McCants. Lynch was probably a better overall player than Jawad, but not by a huge margin. The '93 team had chemistry and a will to win and I'm sensing that in this team as well. My biggest fears are either that they revert to the "me" ball of last year or that they get an injury that ruins the chemistry. I think about the 1984 team with Michael Jordan, Sam Perkins, Brad Dougherty and Kenny Smith - an early '90's NBA team with those four guys would have dominated (they might not even have needed a fifth player) - but an injury to Kenny Smith that put him out for a good chunk of the ACC season really messed them up. Here's hoping Felton stays healthy (at least no more banged up than he is right now).

I certainly don't expect a blow-out against Wake - I think they're too good for that to happen to them twice so Illinois got that honor. I'll be more than happy with a one point win.

Tuesday, January 11, 2005

Whiskey Bar Reopens, but for how long?

Man, why didn't somebody tell me that billmon was back? It apparently took the Newsweek article on the "Salvadoran Option" being considered by the Bush death squads administration for Iraq. The Whiskey Bar is kind enough to remind us of what the original was really like:

On the Afternoon of 10 December 1981, units of the Atlacal Rapid Deployment Infantry Battalion (BIRI) arrived in the village of El Mozote, Department of Morazan, after a clash with the guerrillas in the vicinity . . .

Early next morning, 11 December, the soldiers reassembled the entire population in the square. They separated the men from the women and children and locked everyone up in different groups in the church, the convent and various houses.

During the morning, they proceeded to interrogate, torture and execute the men in various locations. Around noon, they began taking the women in groups, separating them from their children and machine-gunning them. Finally, they killed the children. A group of children who had been locked in the convent were machine-gunned through the windows. After exterminating the entire population, the soldiers set fire to the buildings.

UN Truth Commission on El Salvador
The El Mozote Massacre
April 1, 1993

A GOP I Actually Like

I try not to get too excited about retail, but I was quite happy to find out that Great Outdoor Provision Co. is moving into the old Domicile location in Eastgate Shopping Center in CH. Sure, there's the REI over at Southpoint but a) GOP is a North Carolina company and b) it'll be in Chapel Hill instead of Durham. It's an outgrowth of an outfitter that started in Carrboro before I came to town, so this is almost a homecoming for them. There's been a store at Northgate Mall in Durham for awhile, but their hours are a little short so this'll be much easier to get over to - I'm pumped!

Monday, January 10, 2005

This Ain't Freakin' Florida!

I've not been complaining about the ridiculously warm weather the past few days, despite being unable to get out and enjoy it much due to hacking up a lung every time I move more than a couple of feet. What's going to kill me though is that I got so busy with work and holiday prep after Thanksgiving that I never gave the lawn that last pre-winter mowing. It's looked a little scruffy since mid-December, but I figured it'd keep until the spring. But after over a week of abnormally (and in some cases, record-setting) high temps with more to come this week, it's starting to grow again. Even that wouldn't be too bad - I could cut it next weekend - except that now it looks like it really and truly is going to get cold by Saturday. Crap.

Went walking on campus Sunday afternoon to try to get cleared out a little bit so that maybe, someday, I can start running again and you'd have thought it was the last week of February. Obviously the campus flora did - the daffodils were a foot tall in and full bloom over by Graham Memorial, the redbuds on Polk Place were, well, red - man, are THEY going to be in for a rude surprise in a few days!

From the Some-Things-Never-Change Dept.

Some years ago, I found the first half of a book called Total War: The Causes and Courses of the Second World War in the bargain section at Barnes and Noble for three bucks. One of the authors was Peter Calvocoressi, a name I remembered positively from one of the texts I'd had in History 15 at UNC many years earlier. It was published as one volume, but for trade paperback publication it was split into a European theater volume 1 primarily written by Calvocoressi, and a Pacific theater volume 2 written initially by Ben Wint and updated in 1989 by John Pritchard. I found the volume 1 to be one of the best books on World War II I'd ever read and looked from time to time for volume 2 with no success. Finally, after remembering over the holidays that I have a town borrower's card at UNC that needed to be renewed (d'oh!), I found it at Davis Library and have been working my way through it. Frankly, I find Wint and Pritchard's writing style to be much less readable (and somewhat more Anglo-centric) than Calvocoressi's but I found this next passage about the US prior to the war to have a remarkable bearing on today:

"One must not forget, however, that few modern nations are as politically volatile as the United States. Its elected officials are quick to follow the whims and fashions of a free but often xenophobic press, which itself is conscious of its need to balance its duty to inform an unsophisticated electorate with its duty to satisfy its advertisers and investors. In this government of the people, by the people and for the people, charismatic national figures with little knowledge of foreign affairs and party hacks with an inadequate grasp of the history of events, wield an uncommon control over generals, admirals and career civil servants, a control which is often undeflected by the weigh of professional advice or experience."

Certainly there's a lot of the snarky career British civil servant attitude presented by the author, but he's not wrong and the problem has clearly been exacerbated by the enormous media buy (and apparently media personality buy) by the "party hacks" currently controlling the Executive branch. Does that mean I'm anxious for a military that isn't answerable to the civilian authority? Of course not. It does mean though that if we're bound and determined to be in a war, we ought to listen to the guys that know something about fighting one.