Letters to the Editor
Published Letters: 211 Editor's Choice: 44
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A bit about A-Rod and more about Clarett and Early Entry
[Read the article: King Kaufman's Sports Daily]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]With regard to "what happened to A-Rod", I always look back on his last game as a Mariner, Game Six of the 2000 ALCS with the Yankees. The Mariners had blown a lead (Lou Piniella didn't remember not to pitch Arthur Rhodes in Yankee Stadium) and in the eighth inning A-Rod brought them back into the game with a homer. Then in the ninth he doubled and you could watch him standing on second base literally trying to will Edgar Martinez to get a hit and keep the game going. Here was a man leading his team by example, even to the extent of pushing the man who was his mentor and surrogate father.
A lot of that fire seemed to disappear from A-Rod the day he got his contract with the Rangers, but at the same time, it never seemed to affect his day-to-day performance on the field. So the "swing" explanation makes a lot of sense.
The issue I had with King's position on Clarett's attempt at early entry was that it ignored the fact that it was for the NFL and the NFLPA to set the rules for who can be an NFL player by collective bargaining. Clarett essentially wanted to have a special set of rules for Maurice Clarett. Whether it's good or bad or indifferent for the NFL to deny an individual player the right to play before a certain age or period since high school is a nice issue to talk about, but it's longterm public policy in this country that such rules are subject to collective bargaining, even if the collective bargaining might leave persons who are on neither side of that bargaining out in the cold.
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100% Safety is Impossible; Soft Solutions Help
[Read the article: Getting beyond our airport security obsession]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]As Patrick Smith has said on numerous occasions, there is no perfect solution to airline safety. Some degree of terrorist vulnerability will be involved so long as there are people who want to blow up airplanes.
Part of the problem, as other letter-writers have pointed out, is the barn door locking nature of many of the "improvements" put into the system. Box cutters were no longer a viable option by the time of Flight 93, but we kept knitting needles out of planes for years. No other country screens shoes, including Israel. Now I have friends contemplating taking a non-stop flight from Seattle to Copenhagen with two young children without so much as a bottle of water. There are dangers on flights other than terrorist attacks; when someone starts to suffer severe dehydration over the Pole, and the flight crew simply has nothing left to serve (having, of course, no warning that they'd need to double their stock of beverages today, and no extra space in the galley for it), who is being served?
One of the things I appreciated on one of the first flights I took after 9/11 was the captain coming on and requesting everyone to take a moment and introduce themselves to their seatmates. Vigilant air marshals on such a flight might notice who was not getting into the spirit of the occasion, and perhaps move their seats near them, or make sure they followed them into the restroom, or whatever. I'm not up on the exact tactics that might work, but I remember well the way the captain's announcement cut down on the tension and fear in the plane.
Being required to take a ten-hour flight without a laptop or even, if the reports are to be believed, a book, is not going to lower tension, is not going to increase passenger safety, and is not going to make airlines financially sound. And the terrorists consider that they win either way, because making millions of airline passengers squirm is only by degrees less enjoyable to them than blowing up a plane in the sky.
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"Welcome to America" is what was offensive
[Read the article: Stepping in "macaca"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]You give Allen way too much credit for even understanding what "macaca" might mean, though the word sounds offensive regardless of its meaning. But "Welcome to America", addressed to a brown-skinned man born in this country, is worse than offensive. The man is a Virginian, and thus Allen's constituent. To make the assumption because of someone's appearance that he is not an American is worse than offensive. It is a violation of everything this country stands for. Allen's half-assed apology is just spin.
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Team by Team Encyclopedia a Great Find
[Read the article: King Kaufman's Sports Daily]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I happened to run into it while carrying a 25% off coupon from a large national chain of bookstores that shares its name with the collective term for the Rio Grande and the 49th parallel. It really is a superb reference book, and a helluva lot of fun, too. Just seeing how some teams' all-time records are really impressive (Tigers) or surprisingly unimpressive (White Sox) is fun, and the lists of starting lineups and rotations going back year-by-year is simply mesmerizing (although including fifth starters before about 1970 is rather misleading; fifth starters in those days were the equivalent of spot starters today). The capsule histories are great and the decision to cover entire franchises instead of only when a club moved to a particular city makes for some interesting reading (a large number of "Orioles" top-ten all-time season performances are held by George Sisler and Harlond Clift, who were St. Louis Browns, or by Brady Anderson, whose one good season sticks out like a sore thumb). Bathroom book, indeed!