I don't think the importance of role models should be discounted and it doesn't have to be about race, although that is important.

When I was growing up, it meant a tremendous amount to me that Rosey Grier -- big, mean, undeniably powerful and male -- did needlepoint and sang on children's shows about it being okay to cry. For me, as someone who despite being athletic never felt completely at home in jock culture, it was incredibly comforting to know that someone could be their own person and not follow the crowd.

Similarly, the more often we have high profile success stories of black men who do well in something other than a physical activity, that's a great thing. Who knows how many young men will look at Dungy (as I did with Grier) and relate it their own life. They needn't say "I'm going to coach in the NFL" for it be meaningful. It might just be a small seed of admiration planted in recesses of their minds which someday will become something else entirely.

Finally, as a white father of a biracial son (who presumably will be labeled black by American culture at large) I am happy to know there another bit of evidence that race is not something which needs to stand in the way of your desires.

This article, despite its nice little caveat about the constructed nature of morality, seems to miss the analagous point that common sense is equally constructed and rooted to a termporal and geographical location.

The author writes: "Conventional wisdom held that meat was essential to proper nutrition" and that the presence of vegetarian Hindus showed it was possible to exist without eating me.

What? Conventional wisdom for whom? Rich folks, probably. The so-called Rising Middle Classes, possibly. But regular folks, you've got to be kidding.

Please, Europeans didn't need Indians to show them this since until fairly recently most people were too poor to eat more than a handful of times a year. Even more prosperous common folk would possibly only eat meat on the occasional holiday and Sunday (the proverbial Sunday roast).

Finally, as a professional historian, I find most popular histories to be often lacking rigor and full of unquestioned assumptions and anachronisms which render them good yarns, but rarely accurate. Adam Hochschild's Bury the Chains is not one of these. It is a brilliant history (as was his King Leopold's Ghost) which should be a model for historians, popular and academic alike.

I have been advocating a relegation system for the NHL for years, although I don't think there's a need to go to the minor leagues. At least not initially.

I think they just split the current league. The top sixteen teams could become the NHL Labatt's Premiership and the bottom fourteen could be the Barclay's Bank First Division or some such with the bottom two from Labatt's moving down and the top two from the Barclay's moving up.

I envision a straight 8 team playoff in the premiership and a six team playoff with byes for the leaders. That way the season is meaningful for almost every single team unlike the EPL where midlevel teams know they're not going up or down from about halfway through the season.

The two 8 team divisions in the premiership would change according to who was moved up and who was relegated. But I'd like to see a north/south divide rather than a east/west one to get all the Canadian teams and Buffalo into the same league.

If the season ended now, the Premiership would have a northern division of Buffalo, Detroit, NJ, Montreal, Ottawa, Calgary, Vancouver, Minnesota; and a southern division of Nashiville, Anaheim, San Jose, Atlanta, Dallas, Carolina, Tampa Bay and Colorado.

Wouldn't it be great to mock Toronto for being a second tier team? Maybe next year, eh, Leafs' fans?

Hosers.

I am wondering if there has been any study as to the environmental costs of large scale soy farming. I try to eat as much healthy, non-processed food as possible. I buy some organics when the cost-benefit strikes me as worth it (milk, yes; apples, no). I eat meat that I either killed myself or purchased on a local farm, had butchered and packed in my freezer.

But I am always horrified in the organics section of my supermarket. It all seems so processed and while I am impressed that they canmake soy into so many things, I also wonder what they hell they have to do to it to make it so.

I always get the feeling that somehow we'll find out that all these seeming hippy brands of organic almond butter or cruelty free veggie pops are actually owned and manufactured by shell corporations belonging to ADM or ConAgra. It just strikes me as so much marketing.

I'd rather buy the ingredients and make something myself even if it's just a porkchop, steamed broccoli and a microwaved potato.