Well, I Prefer Mine Black, Hot, With One Ice Cube, But That’s Just Me

John Kass says “History could have helped Starbucks foresee revolt”.

Starbucks is in the process of closing 600 stores nationwide, while Dunkin’ Donuts — that oh-so-unhip place where you can pay less money, get good coffee, much less attitude, and even a sinful doughnut if you dare — is opening 500 stores. Draw your own conclusions; I’ll go out on a limb and say that the demand for expensive coffee doesn’t go above the price of a gallon of gas. Who knew these things were tied together economically?

And then go read about this goofiness, where a hoity-toity coffee house in Washington, D.C. has a set of policies about just exactly how their customers are allowed to order their coffee. One of them is “no ice with espresso”. A customer got kinda P.O.’d, and blogged about it. Hilarity ensued.

Links to this ridiculousness can be found in the story; I’m not going to bother reading any more about this than I already have, because those are precious minutes of my life I can never get back.  But I basically agree with the customer in this case.

This is the explanation given by the owner:

At his cafe, Cho explained the policy: “The way we do espresso is different than what people are used to. It’s a very exacting technique. … When you pour it over ice, it creates a certain acidic reaction that makes the drink sour.”

In his letter on Murky’s site, Cho wrote: “To others reading this I will say that if you don’t like the policies, I respectfully recommend that you find some other place that will give you what you want, or select something that we can offer you.”

Maybe some customers like it sour. People have different tastes; you can still take their money. In fact, as somebody running a business, the whole idea is to think up more ways to take their money.  I just don’t see the problem here.

But, of course, the problem is obvious:  it isn’t just coffee for these people, it’s a quasi-religion.  There are coffee beliefs, and Thou Shalt Not Disobey Them.

Yes, even if you fork over your hard-earned $4.50, you are still too stupid to make decisions about what you like, so just bend over and take it, and learn to like it!  Oh, and come back soon!

Some AP sports writer named Paul Newberry is shocked and amazed that he couldn’t get Phil Mickelson to say “Tiger Woods”. Or “Tiger”, or “Woods”.

He asked three separate questions meant to hound Mickelson into finally admitting “yes, YES, fine, I’ll say it: winning this tournament might be a little easier without Tiger here, because, quite frankly, the rest of us are not as good.”  And he even wastes extra words, and precious seconds of my life that I’ll never get back, noting that Phil wouldn’t even say “Tiger”.

Oh, good grief.

Well, it probably is true that Tiger Woods is just better than everybody else, but that doesn’t matter.  He may go down as the greatest golfer of all time, but that doesn’t matter either.  Because it isn’t about Tiger Woods.  Since, he, you know … isn’t in the golf tournament.

Yet the media wants to continue yakking away about him.

Phil Mickelson, as a professional golfer, can’t afford to buy into the Tiger Woods Cult of Personality that the rest of the media world enjoys so very much.  And any writer covering the frigging British Open, the most storied tournament in the history of golf, should damn well know that.

Let’s review.  If you’re a professional golfer, your goal is to win the tournament you’re playing in that week, not to obsess over a player that is not at the tournament in question, and is out for the rest of the year. You should really not spend a single second of your week even thinking about a golfer who isn’t there.  Mental toughness is part of the job as a professional athlete — the major part, at the highest level — so if you’re smart, you don’t take the bait of just any old goofy writer that jams a microphone in your face and asks about some other golfer that isn’t even there.

Even if that golfer is Tiger Woods, and even if the writer happens to be right.

I guess the thing that annoys me the most about such stories, though, is the way they are constructed.  The whole story revolves around a game of “gotcha”, where the writer baits the athlete, hoping to get him to bite.  What is this, Watergate?

Who do these “journalists” think they’re kidding?  Harrassing a great guy like Phil Mickelson, just so you can get a Tiger Woods angle in there?  No thanks, I’m trying to cut down.

Other than that, though, nice story!

Faith, Recovery, and Good Baseball — What’s Not to Like?

Josh Hamilton might not have won the overall Home Run Derby last night, but he put on an amazing display of hitting in the first round, with 28 homers, many of them in the upper deck. He hit 500+ foot blasts not once, not twice, but three times.

But Home Run Derbies come, and they go. The main thing to understand about Josh Hamilton is that, in the most important ways, he’s already won. After being drafted number one overall by Tampa Bay in 1999 — and being called “the best I’ve ever seen” by multiple scouts — he ended up taking a detour as a drug addict and an alcoholic for three or four years, and was out of the game from ‘03-’05. He could easily be dead already.

But because of his new-found faith, and his wife, and his family, he’s turned his life completely around, and can now show the world his talent for hitting baseballs. Win … win … win.

So good for him. God Bless Josh Hamilton.

Sports is often filled with stories of failure and disappointment, especially because so many young men with too much time and money on their hands are central to just about every sport. It’s sad to watch, even if it is inevitable much of the time; young men will do what young men will do. But because Josh’s recovery is faith-based, it would seem that he has a higher chance at success; here’s a quote from UT-Southwestern addiction specialist Dr. Bryon Adinoff (from the above link):

“If you replace addiction with religion, it’s not an addiction, it’s something meaningful, socially appropriate and rewarding,” Adinoff says. “It’s typically very healthy behavior.”

It was interesting to me how neither the broadcast crew on ESPN, or the article I read this morning (AP), noted that faith played the central role in Josh’s recovery. It’s like they’re scared to even mention it.  Out here in the real world, we know that oftentimes, religion helps people, and we also understand that acknowledging one specific instance where it quite likely saved a man’s life is just mentioning a true fact.

If they all care so much about the Josh Hamilton story, don’t they owe that to him, if nothing else?

Chuck Freaking Norris! … vs. a bunch of Congresswimps.

It’s like a dream come true. A cage match featuring a True American Bad-Ass against a body of elected officials currently enjoying a NINE PERCENT approval rating.

Nine. One less than ten.

Just to amplify on that point … if you tripled it, you’d still be on the wrong side of 30%.  I think even car salesmen and dentists have higher approval ratings.  President Bush, too.

Actually, after reading the article, it turns out that Chuck just wants to thin out the Congressional herd a little bit. By changing the rules, not by actually fighting 535 people.

Huh.  Well, I guess that could work too.

Amazing Ability to Both Dominate AND Avoid Testing Positive for PEDs? How DO They Do It?!

Tribune sports writer Phil Hersh writes a pretty good blog about Olympic sports called Globetrotting. Even if he does descend into ill-advised political commentary sometimes.

Recently he posted a couple of good items about cycling champion Lance Armstrong and 41-year-old Olympian swimmer Dana Torres, and asked some pretty sensible questions about their ability to outperform others.

Lance Armstrong, for those who don’t remember, won the Tour de France seven times in a row (1999-2005). Here’s Phil:

… all we know about Lance is he rode during an era when dopers were everywhere in the sport, and he crushed those dopers climb after climb, time trial after time trial, year after year.

And we know that five of his ex-teammates have been involved in doping.

Hey, maybe Armstrong’s stunning success was due to some previously unknown benefit from cancer treatment, which gives people super-human strength and endurance. Or maybe, just maybe, not having any testicles gives you more endurance.  You never know.

About Torres:

Torres told Eric Adelson of ESPN the Magazine she was diagnosed as an asthmatic about 18 months ago –- coincidentally, about the time her second comeback began to pick up speed.

Torres told Alan Abrahamson of nbcolympics.com she takes Symbicort, an asthma medicine in which the active ingredient is formoterol, and Proventil, an asthma medicine in which the active ingredient is albuterol.

Athletes are allowed to use both banned substances, which increase lung capacity, in an inhaler as long as they ask for a therapeutic use exemption (so many Olympic athletes applied for anti-asthma drug exemptions at the 2000 and 2004 Summer Games it concerned anti-doping officials, who found 10 percent of those asking in 2004 had no asthma.) But if the amount of albuterol in the system exceeds an established limit, 1000 nanograms per milliliter, it is considered a potential doping violation. And what about athletes who know how to stay just below the limit, say at 990?

The media storyline is that Torres has too much integrity to pretend to have asthma in order to take albuterol and formoterol.  Based on what, I’m not sure; truth be told, an athlete who is clean, or an athlete who knows in advance they will test clean, are both in the same position re: testing.  But in any event, we’re supposed to both (a) acknowledge that a 41 year old mother can whup a bunch of 22 year olds in the pool, and (b) assume that nothing untoward is going on there, despite the fact that both common sense and history fly right in the face of such a thing.

I just got done reading “Game of Shadows”, about Barry Bonds, Marion Jones, BALCO, and that whole mess.  It’s a pretty seamy tale, and one thing that comes through, loud and clear, is that whenever a new record seems too good to be true, or an athlete has unexpected and spectacular success, a healthy dose of suspicion is a good idea.

It’s Just a “Perception” Problem … Really, These are the BEST REFS in the WHOLE WORLD !

NBA Commissioner David Stern has brought in Retired Army Maj. Gen. Ronald L. Johnson to “oversee” the referees.

A couple of quotes tell us all we need to know about this hire. Here’s Commissioner Stern:

“Our referees are the best in the world,” Stern said in a statement, “but they never stop striving to improve and Ron has made a career out of getting the very best out of people.”

And Joel Litvin, president for league and basketball operations:

“We don’t want to make him a star, insofar as the point of an officiating program is be as invisible as possible. But we do understand we have a perception problem and to that extent, we hope to put a better face on the program. It deserves that much.”

Um, OK.

Well, one reason they might have a perception problem is because they rarely call traveling, double dribble, or hanging on the rim anymore, and they often play to the home crowd on foul calls. And so, the perception is that they don’t enforce rules and are too compliant to the home crowd.

In other words, the perception is true. Perception is reality, in this case. In fact, this is the norm; whenever you hear somebody in a position of power talk about a perception problem, it’s actually a reality problem. Almost always.

Because it’s harder to fix reality than to fix perception, of course. Especially when your refs have a union, and some of them have egos the size of an airplane hangar.

And with all of these things that they consistently don’t call, the most obvious violations, that any junior high school ref would call in a heartbeat … these are the best refs in the world? That’s pretty brazen. False, too. NCAA refs seem to call the rulebook more closely, for one thing. High school refs are even more stringent. Rules are rules, and ignoring them does nothing useful for the game itself, but it does empower the officials too much, by giving them excessive influence over the game.

So let’s be frank here — first, it is more than just a perception problem, and second, I don’t suspect that addressing just the perception problem is going to make them blow the whistle to call traveling anytime soon.

Hence, not much will change. Except maybe the perception, which fools only the easily fooled, but is the preferred method of dealing with just about any PR crisis these days.

On Monday night, around 8:30, three-year-old Ryan Flake somehow wandered away from his house in Oswego Township.

12 hours later, he was found, alive and unhurt, in the woods about a mile from his house.

Ryan Flake and Dad

What a miracle. The odds of finding a missing child alive go way down the longer they are missing; I don’t remember exactly what they are, but after 12 hours, they can’t be very good. I heard about this story on the news Tuesday morning, when they said he’d been missing 11 hours at that point. I thought, “oh no”. It sounded like this wouldn’t end well. But then this morning, when I went to the Tribune’s website, I saw it had a happy ending, and even though I don’t know the child, or the family, it brought me great joy.

We confront quite enough bad news; I like to hear something good once in a while.

Of course, I can’t imagine the grief and heartache those parents had to endure for all those hours, and the fear in a little three-year-old boy, alone in the woods, all night long. Words fail me. We lost our then-kindergartner at Epcot a few years ago, for 10 minutes or so, and while I try not to freak out about kids getting lost for a few minutes, it was Epcot. Have you seen Epcot? It’s very, very big. Lots and lots of people. Who knows what a little kid is going to do in that situation? But our little boy was so smart, and went up to a uniformed security guard, and said “I can’t find my parents”, and then I saw them walking towards me, and … well, the sense of relief was indescribable.

So for this one story at least, it’s nice to hear everybody is OK.  I like that.

Last year, there was a similar miracle, that I wrote about here.

No Kidding!

So, Indiana University Athletic Department … how’s that whole “firing Bobby Knight” thing working out for you?

Seems to me, the post-Bobby-Knight Knight era is actually more embarrassing to the University han the actual Bobby Knight era.

Now the school finds itself with an AD, Rick Greenspan, that is resigning due to the Sampson fallout, but not until the end of the year, which is more than five months away. Plus, a new coach (Tom Crean), and a bunch of players recruited by Sampson. And, a whole bunch of egg on its face.

You have to figure this isn’t going to help with recruiting.

Not that I’m complaining, though. As an Illini fan, anytime something embarrassing happens to IU, you just have to drink it in. And when it is a disaster as complete and perfect as this, you savor it, and swirl it around in your brain, and enjoy a little schadenfreude.

Joe Buck, lead announcer for Fox Sports baseball coverage, recently admitted on a sports talk radio show that he doesn’t have time to watch much baseball.

He said the games are too long, and too available, and kinda boring, and people are busy. It’s not like it was when he was a kid, when many games weren’t on TV at all, and the Saturday afternoon Game of the Week was a huge deal, especially if your hometown team was featured.

Both Awful Announcing and Big League Stew are annoyed.

I’m sort of down the middle on this one. I get what they’re saying, and agree with it to a point; it is a bit odd that a lead baseball announcer, who is really also a diplomat for the game, would come out and say such a thing. But let’s not shoot the messenger here; I also find it hard to argue with anything he says.

The games are too long. Especially in the American League, which (praise the Lord) I don’t watch much of. Who wants to watch baseball, even good baseball, for 3 hours and 35 minutes? I’m from the “more is not always better” school on the length of sports events and movies. Movies should be 90 - 130 minutes long, with very few exceptions. Baseball games are best when pushed along in 2:30 - 3:00. Call me crazy. Punishing me with more is just being self-indulgent, and encourages me to find other things to occupy my mind during the slow times. Though, this doesn’t bother me that much, as long as the quality of the baseball is good. I can find the time, if my alternatives are watching marginally interesting TV shows. If the Cubs were a train wreck this year, I’d be finding other things to do, and even cutting the grass might start to sound . And I sometimes listen on the radio while doing other things — and it’s always a treat to listen to Pat Hughes cover a baseball game on the radio.

The games are too available. I have noticed the same “not as special when it’s on all the time” type of sentiment. More supply = less demand. Remember Economics 101 in college? Same deal.

The games can be kinda boring. See “too long” and “too available”, above.

Some people are too busy. This is not baseball’s fault, or Joe Buck’s fault. And, maybe I’m not as busy as some. It’s summertime, it’s supposed to be relaxing. Life is meant to be lived at a slower pace in the summer. It’s a law or something. What are all these people doing on summer nights that is so important, that they don’t have time to watch a ballgame? Might be time to re-evaluate how you spend your time, eh? Of course, we have no way of knowing if this is even a relevant point to the discussion or not, it’s just the ramblings of a couple of guys on the radio. Take it for what it’s worth.

But as usual, there is a bigger picture here. I think it’s pretty clear to those of us long-time fans that something is definitely missing today, something we remember from “back in the day” when baseball was THE sport. It is still a great sport, and when played well is better than any other, in my view. But something is missing.

What that “something” is, I’m not sure. Probably a combination of different things, that all add up to “just not as interesting to me as it used to be”. Things like steroids, and free agency, and idiot unions and owners that shut down a World Series in 1994, and too much coverage on cable. In fact, let’s talk about coverage for a moment; today’s game coverage is so filled with screen graphics and crawling headlines at the bottom of the screen that you’re lucky if you can see the actual game for all the visual noise. In this way, the very coverage of the game itself is telling you to divert your attention to other things. Right now! Talk about your mixed messages. Here’s an idea: lose all that crap on the screen. It devalues the game.

Still, baseball is a great game, just not as great as it was, and for this, we can blame the things listed above. So if Joe Buck has the audacity to be honest with us, and tell us what he sees wrong with the game today, and how he remembers it being different, and better, in his youth, maybe we should pause for a moment, ignore who is saying it, and pay attention to the message itself for a few minutes.

Maybe it’s true that such criticisms are useless because you can’t turn back the clock. And maybe it’s true that this kind of thing is more yuppie whining about adulthood not being as special as we remember our youth to be.

I don’t know. I just know that Major League Baseball could be the great game it was, with some better leadership, better owners, fewer agents, and fewer crawling headlines and station promos. And to hear the authoritative voice of Joe Buck — who bugs some people a lot, but doesn’t either annoy or excite me one way or the other — offer his take on it, well, it seems kind of refreshing. For me, at least, people saying what they think is just about always better than being a politician.

WOW:

The Hawks made the biggest splash on the free agent market Tuesday when they signed two-time All-Star defenseman Brian Campbell to an eight-year, $56.8 million contract and also obtained the top available goaltender in Cristobal Huet, who received a four-year, $22.4 million deal.

These were the top-rated defenseman and goaltender available in free agency; this is the top story at nhl.com today.

Longtime Blackhawks fans are stunned, and ecstatic, because this is the latest message from the new ownership that they want to bring championships home for the fans.

Of course, eight years seems an awfully long contract for a 29 year old like Campbell, but maybe that’s what it took in order to get him here. He brings excellent skating, lots of ice time, and passing ability:

“He has ability to move the puck and to skate up ice to get you out of trouble combined with his ability to play lots of minutes—half of the game most of the time,” Tallon said of Campbell, who led the league in ice time at 29 minutes 19 seconds per game. “It gives us more foot speed, more creativity [and] more ability to move the puck out of our own end. He has the ability to pass and see the ice. [He can] go from defense to offense in a split second.”

Campbell was courted by many teams and chose the Hawks because of his desire to move closer to his family in Strathroy, Ontario, and because he likes the direction the club his heading.

Not sure where Strathroy, Ontario is, but apparently it’s, like, a Chicago suburb or something. In Ontario.

The Hawks are hoping Campbell can help improve the power play, too, which has been pretty useless the last few years.

As for the signing of goalie Cristobal Huet, this seems a clear message to No. 1 goalie Nikolai Khabibulin, who is a free agent after the upcoming season, that his perch is tenuous. The Blackhawks already have a young goalie they played a few times last year, Corey Crawford, that was very impressive, and he appears ready for at least backup duty already. So now they have 3 very capable goalies, which protects them from injury, inconsistent play, and pending free agency next off-season. As Tallon says:

“The No. 1 goaltender in this market was Huet and we made a decision … that it’s important to make sure we’re really good in the net,” said Tallon, whose current plan is to keep both goalies. “That goaltending tandem is as good as there is. Without strong goaltending you have no chance.”

The 32-year-old Huet appeared in 52 games last season playing for Montreal and Washington. He posted a record of 32-14-6 with a .920 save percentage and four shutouts.

So, the bottom line? The Hawks and their fans now have good reason to expect improvements in their defense, power play, and goaltending, all things that a championship team needs.