The easiest way to add a little more drama to the final weeks of the NBA season would be to add financial incentives either for the players or the teams. These are rough ideas that are probably full of holes, but still may be worth a try.

In the last month of the season for each game, you could require the losing team to pay the winning team one million dollars. You could play a bit with the numbers, of course. The amount needs to be high enough to influence rich owners, but not enough to bankrupt mediocre teams.

Or you could require that all NBA player team contracts have incentives for games won in which the player played at least half the game. If the incentives were based on percentage of the players salary, it would pretty easy to get players to beg to be in the game. Say each win is worth a quarter of a percent of a players salary. That is real money when you are making millions a year.

I don't think this would ever happen, but it would be fun.

The sunstainlane report seems dubious at best. They say that define "renewables such as solar, wind, geothermal, and small-scale hydro energy." I know that hydro power has environmental side effects, but since when do only small scale hydro-electric plants count as renewable.

If all hydro power were counted, the listing would be much different, since a high percentage of the power of the Pacific Northwest comes from hydro-electric power.

King,

Do you have something against Don Zimmer? He has done some stupid things, but I can't figure out why his latest comments even deserve mention. His record as a manager is not great, but it isn't awful either. I mean, he is not Buddy Bell or anything. He has a history with the Yankees, so it is obvious that his comments are far from unbiased. Beyond that who cares?

Personally, I always liked Don Zimmer, but then again I guess I have a soft spot for slightly wacky old coots.

nt

Though the Onion may not have been well known outside of Madison at the time, it predates the Web by a bit.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Onion

Karlos,

There is quite a bit of overlap between talent pools

of sports. Especially these days, when baseball players are getting bigger, there is a lot of overlap between body type between between baseball and basketball players. Of course, kids are specializing earlier than they used to, so there are fewer multi-sport athletes, but there are still some.

One great example is Dave Winfield. He was drafted in baseball, basketball, and football. He likely would have had a decent career as an NBA player, though likely not a hall of famer. The NFL would have been iffy, but he probably would have played a few years.

As for Michael Jordan, if he had picked baseball instead of basketball, I bet he would have made the majors. Trying to start back up on baseball after 10 years off was just too late, even for such a great athlete.

ABC puts that same SAP message on the screen in English at the start of every episode of Lost. I always figured that they did that because they have more English speakers who need help turning the Spanish

track off than they have Spanish speakers who needed

help turning it on.

The problem is not that women can not be good newscasters, it that Couric does not seem to be one.

I would be just as sceptical of Bryant Gumbel or Matt Lauer as an anchor.

With that said, I don't really watch TV news anymore unless there is a crisis or election. With the current less than stellar choices Couric on CBS is probably my third choice behind CNN and ABC. Brian Williams is painful to listen to.

Uhm, I am sure that it would be nice for India to have a woman President, but is it really a big deal. I mean Indira Gandhi was Prime Minister for quite a while. I am not an expert on Indian government by any stretch of the imagination, but is my understanding that the Prime Minister is the one with power.

So electing a woman President would be nice, but a bit like if we in the US got a woman as President pro tempore of the Senate after a woman had already been President of the country.

Good luck, King.

The midwest will miss you.

sgaana,

Take a look at a longer article about what Kyuma originally said, such as:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070630/ap_on_re_as/japan_atomic_bomb_comment

The key point is that Kyuma agreed with the US point of view that dropping atomic bombs was a justified way to end the war. This plays against the view by some in Japan that the war was all the fault of the US, and that the use of atomic weapons was an unforgivable travesty.

So Kyuma was definitely playing against Japanese victimhood. He seems to agree with the typical US view that the war was largely the fault of the Japanese quest for empire, though the US definitely did some things to hasten its start.

To me 54% to 47% seems like a surprisingly big drop in teen sex. Of course it may just mean that abstinence education is convincing kids not to admit to having had sex.

This democratic primary voter is still longing for someone else to get in the race too. Maybe one of the current candidates will grow on me, but I am not particularly hopeful.

jumpyd,

If Shaw really had that quote (I can't find it online) about letter length he was paraphrasing Mark Twain's “I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”

It is Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF warf.org),

not Association.