Dowbrigade

Blogging
with the Dallas-Phoenix playoff game on in the background, the best of
the playoff matchups so far. As we get closer to the NBA
finals, the Dowbrigade, inveterate sports fan that he is, has been ruminating
on the state of professional basketball and the prospects of the team
he follows, the recently eliminated Boston Celtics.

The Celtics are in a sorry state, loaded with talent but sorely lacking
in gamesmanship, character and class. Their two best players, Antoine
Walker and Paul Pierce, have superstar ability and yet have failed utterly
over the years in forming the kind of cohesive core around which a championship
team can be built.

Antoine Walker is the single most frustrating player we have seen in
all our years as a basketball fan.  He has all the tools; size,
strength, coordination, passing ability, shooting range and rebounding
instincts. He wants to win and tries so hard it almost hurts to watch
him sometimes. And yet he continually makes the most boneheaded decisions
on the court, taking the ball to the basket against three defenders while
teammates
stand around, completely open, shooting threes when a lane to the basket
is available, playing on the perimeter when his talents were needed inside,
trying to take over a game when the defense is keying on him.

It got to the point that we just couldn’t watch the games any more when
he was on the court. It was like watching a wayward child whose heart
is in the right place, but who keeps getting into trouble that "isn’t
his fault". He was traded away last year, and Celtics fans breathed a
collective sigh
of
relief.

Then, halfway through this year, the Celtics pulled off a trade and
brought him back.  To everyone’s surprise he was like a different
player. He really seemed to "get it". He was playing inside, rebounding
and blocking
out,
and
shooting nary a three. Boston went on a streak, won 8 in a row, and the
fans embraced him. Americans in general, and New Englanders in particular,
love a story of redemption – the prodigal son returned, reformed, resplendent.
Where there’s a heartbeat, there’s hope.

But you can’t expect a tiger to change its stripes, the changes didn’t
last, and by playoff time Antoine was back to all his old, bad habits.
It seems
clear that in order to place their new talent in a winning context and
take the team to the next level, management needs to blow things up and
start again with a younger core, sans Antoine.

In the NBA there are three ways to improve your team; trading, drafting
and signing free agents. The first depends on having tradable talent
on your roster, and the last requires deep pockets, so let’s look for
a moment at the annual draft of college, high school and foreign players,
coming up next
month.

Fully cognizant of drifting into dangerous waters, the Dowbrigade is
of the opinion that the Boston Celtics should take their first round
pick and select the BAWG – the Best Available White Guy. 

What! Haven’t we transcended that color thing here in the 21st century?
Are we suggesting that the team would be any better or more popular if
it had a white guy on it? Well, yes. Not that we think white guys are
so great at basketball – all of our favorite players are black.  But
in as diverse a city as Boston, it seems as if on a roster of 15 players,
they could find at least ONE paleface, at least an oriental or native
American.

We know that it isn’t easy to find an NBA-capable white guy in American
colleges these days. There are no Larry Birds or Bill Waltons out there
waiting to be drafted. The only decent non-black big men out there are
foreigners; Dirk Nowitski, Yao Ming, Andrew Bogut. The Americans that
do make it to the league are inevitably freaks of nature like Mark Eaton
(7’5") and Shawn Bradley (7’6"), or deadeye outside shooters like the
Barry boys, who have obsessively honed their shot with millions of repetitions
over decades of dedication. The big bruisers in the league, the power
forwards,  are almost exclusively black.

Sure, the Most Valuable Player in the league this year was a white guy,
Steve Nash, but he’s a hippie from Canada, for God’s sake.  So we
strongly suspect that when the Celtics pick 18th next month, the BAWG
is going to be a foreigner.

From the look of things, that Yao Ming is the real deal; 7’6" with legs
as solid as oak trunks, not a scarecrow like Bradley.  There must
be more where he came from. Not known as a basketball stronghold or a
particularly tall race, the Chinese have one thing going for them – demographics.
Even if finding a reasonably coordinated seven-footer is a one in a million
proposition, that would mean China has about 1,400 of those guys to choose
from.

Speaking of which, by the same token India should have over a thousand
coordinated seven-footers, and as far as we know there has NEVER been
an Indian NBA player. What are
all those really
tall Hindus up to? They can’t all be playing cricket! If we were running
the Celtics we would send a scouting team to scour the Indian sub-continent
for the Hindu Yao Ming.

We still love this game, even if we can only get excited about it in
our imagination these days.

BOSTON
— Two Waterville, Maine, teenagers are in hot water after one was arrested
on suspicion of skateboarding nude through the center of town as his
friend videotaped the stunt.

Jason Bowbly, 18, allegedly skateboarded through a parking lot about
4 p.m. on Friday, May 13, clad only with a strategically placed sock
puppet.

A worker in a nearby office said he went outside to see what the commotion
was all about.

"I didn’t believe it. I had to see it," a bemused Charles Roy said. "And
I came right back in after I saw it."

Another witness said she was the person who called a disbelieving police
department on Bodley.

"They didn’t believe me at first, they made me repeat it again," Eva
Michaud said.

Video: Watch
Full Report On Skateboarder

from local
6.com

If winning is everything, British anthropologists have some advice:
Wear red.

Their survey of four sports at the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens shows competitors
were more likely to win their contests if they wore red uniforms or red
body armor.

"Across a range of sports, we find that wearing red is consistently
associated with a higher probability of winning," report Russell A.
Hill and Robert A. Barton of the University of Durham in England. Their
findings
are in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature.

Red coloration is associated with aggression in many animals. Often it
is sexually selected so that scarlet markings signal male dominance.

Just think of the red stripes on the scowling face of the male Mandrill,
Africa’s largest monkey species. But red is not exclusively a male trait.
It’s the female black widow spider that is venomous and displays a menacing
red dot on her abdomen.

Go, Crimson!

from the Associated Press

PATTAYA, Thailand (AP) – At the Miss Tiffany Universe pageant – which
boasts dozens of gorgeous, lithe, smooth-skinned contestants – one thing
is undeniable: Thailand turns out some of the most beautiful transvestites
and transsexuals in the world.

As contestants glided across the stage in glittering ball gowns Saturday night,
one might never have guessed they were all born boys. Only when they open their
mouths do their vocal cords reveal the truth.

"Most people can’t tell because I’m very petite, but when I talk, they know," said
21-year-old Wararat Saengchai, who started taking female hormones at 14 and underwent
sex change and breast implant operations a year ago.

Thailand, a predominantly Buddhist country, is widely tolerant of homosexuals,
transvestites and transsexuals – one reason, perhaps, that men who opt for the
transformation here are so stunning and convincing.

from AP

Front-line
soldiers in Iraq have been using Radio Shack remote control cars to prod
suspected
Improvised Explosive Devices. If they explode, they’re bombs.  If
they move, they are too light to be bombs and are safe. If they
are heavy, they merit more careful examination. The military has $50,000
Darpa-developed robots to do the same thing, but
they are
deployed
and
operated by a
limited number of specially trained bomb disposal teams. The robots are reportedly
big, slow, and clumsy, and an actual patrol finding one of these explosive devices
(a depressingly familiar happening
these
days, and the most common cause of American casualties) often
needs to wait many hours for the robot team to arrive, if there is even
one in the area.

Depending on one’s point of view, the fact that our courageous front
line military personnel, many barely removed from finding these $50 toys
under
their
Christmas
trees,
are
using them to defend their lives, is either a testimony to American ingenuity
and cheap Chinese technology, or to military waste the woeful lack of
preparation and equipment for our troops on the ground. Or both.

A young private [named "E.S."]
in that platoon has one of those radio-controlled toy cars. When they
find unidentifiable debris
in the road, E.S. sends out his little RC car and rams it. If it’s
light enough to be moved or knocked over, it’s too light to be a bomb,
so we
can approach it and get rid of it. If it’s heavy, we call EOD [explosive
ordnance disposal -- the military's bomb squad]. At night, they duct
tape a flashlight to the car.

from Defense
Tech

This Star
Wars sacrilege, along with the Red
Sox Last Supper, are stunning
testimony to the tolerance of our secular society and first amendment
protections.

link from BoingBoing