Detroit Pistons winning streaks this season

I was gonna post this earlier, but I purposely waited till the latest Pistons winning streak came to an end.

8 (Nov. 2- Nov. 18)
6 (Nov. 26- Dec. 11)
9 (Dec. 14- Dec. 29)
11 (Jan. 10- Jan. 31)

And so the Coco Crisp era begins...

(photo courtesy of Boston Dirt Dogs)

What Would You Do for a Lifetime Ticket to Baseball?

Would you be an Iranian hostage tied up and blindfolded for the better part of 14 months while being subject to beatdowns and mental anguish each day, not knowing whether you were going to live or die?

Safe at Home
25 Years Ago, a Gift From Major League Baseball Helped Iran Hostages Reconnect With America

By Les Carpenter
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, January 20, 2006; A01

It was a small thing really, barely bigger than a credit card, tucked unpretentiously in a small black case. For each of the 52 American hostages who bounded off the plane, free at last, the ticket stuffed inside the box was another of the trinkets that piled up around them. A modest reward for the cold, metal muzzle of a shotgun pressed against their faces.

For 444 days they had been tied and blindfolded, held hostage in the U.S. Embassy in Iran by student revolutionaries incensed at the United States' decision to admit Iran's ailing and deposed shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, for medical treatment. Long before 9/11, Afghanistan and Iraq, there were the Iran hostages. Their plight paralyzed a country unaccustomed to such an affront and likely cost President Jimmy Carter reelection in 1980. Then, 25 years ago today, they were released the moment Ronald Reagan took the oath of office.

They returned to an adoring nation that gave them a ticker-tape parade and welcomed them as heroes. They were besieged with flags, yellow ribbons and countless gifts, among them the tiny box from Major League Baseball. Inside was a lifetime pass to any major or minor league game.

What each did with the pass says something about the group of 52 diplomats and military personnel. Some embraced it, using it often. Others tucked it away, rarely, if ever, pulling it out. The response was as varied as the ways they approached their notoriety and fame, back then and in the quarter-century that has passed, a quarter-century that has seen the number of living former hostages dwindle to 42.

Rocky Sickmann, a Marine guard from outside St. Louis, immediately put his in a safety deposit box. Bruce Laingen, the embassy's charge d'affaires, would later gush about the pass: "Not many people have that!" Steve Kirtley, another Marine guard who now lives in McLean, used it last June to take his two youngest sons to a Nationals game.

In the case of Barry Rosen, the embassy's press attache from New York, the little gold card helped to heal his family.

He stepped off the plane at Stewart International Airport in Newburgh, N.Y., on Jan. 25 gaunt, weary and a disheveled mess. He scanned the crowd and found his wife, Barbara, "looking as beautiful as ever." Beside her stood their son, Alexander, dressed in a suit and their little girl, Ariana, an infant when he had left more than two years before, in a red coat and a matching red dress.

"The movie should have ended right there," Rosen said with a laugh.

But the hero to America was a mystery to his family. Alexander, just 2 1/2 when Rosen left for Iran, had only vague recollections of his father; Ariana didn't know him at all. His return was an intrusion.

"My children were very fearful of me," Rosen recalled. "It wasn't that I was an ogre, they didn't know who the hell I was. They were with their mother all the time and then this strange man walked in the house. I couldn't take them out of the house. They wouldn't go anywhere with me."

Then the baseball pass arrived. Rosen grew up in Brooklyn a Dodgers fan and loved National League baseball. Maybe his kids would, too. "If it's a way of bringing us together, let's use it," he remembered Barbara saying.

Their first game, at Shea Stadium in New York, was so wonderful, he couldn't have drawn it better himself. The sky was clear, the sun sparkled on the grass. They arrived early to watch batting practice and then didn't want to leave.

"They had never, never been to a baseball game," he said. "You see a baseball field for the first time and it's a beautiful, beautiful thing. I got Alexander a glove, I got the kids hats. My little girl was squirming all over the place. But we were all together and that was the important thing."

For the next several years, the family fractured by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Iran's revolutionary leader, went to baseball games together, often as many as 10 times a season. The ritual was always the same, as soon as the coming year's Mets schedule came out, Alexander and Barry picked the games they wanted to see. Then Barry called the Mets and the tickets would be waiting.

"It really cemented my family," said Rosen, who now runs Columbia University's Afghanistan Education Project. "Even now, my son is going to be 30 and we still go to games. It's a way to connect."

* * *

In the days after they came home, the gifts started arriving. It began with a rush of American flags, attached with overwrought missives insisting the flag had flown for 444 days over the sender's home and how they wanted the hostage to have this memento. "A lot of them looked like they had just been sewed," Laingen said.

But it was more than just flags. Soon, some or all began receiving an eclectic collection of presents -- a new Electrolux vacuum cleaner ("the really good one" recalled William Belk, an embassy communications and records officer), a Ducane grill, the promise of a new pair of jeans every year, free rentals from Budget Rent-a-car in Detroit, free dinners, trips to Mardi Gras, trips to Hawaii, trips to Puerto Rico.

There seemed no end to the glut of handouts.

It's hard to pinpoint the worst moment of the 444 days, but the mock executions seem a good place to start. For several days in late January and early February of 1980, the captors showed revolutionary films to the hostages, gory movies with scenes that always ended the same way: with a supposed enemy being tortured and shot.

Then, one morning, about a week later, Sickmann remembers being jostled awake at 2 a.m. by men wearing masks, just like the executioners in the revolutionary films. Sickmann was pulled out of bed and dragged by his hair to a hallway outside where, he said, the other hostages were lined up against the wall. His heart dropped.

"You thought instantly that there had been a military rescue and they're going to shoot us," he said. "You want to be tough in that situation, but everything changes. You lose body fluids. Some were praying, some were cursing left and right."

They took Sickmann into a room and told him to strip -- an act of shame in Islamic culture. His mind flew back to the films. There were three men with rifles and he was certain this was the end. They told him to turn around and put his arms in the air, then they blindfolded him, which in the films was the final act before the killing.

He braced himself and waited for the bullet to crash into his skull.

Only it never came. After a few minutes the guards told him to put on his clothes and go back to his room.

And while shots weren't fired, something died in him, in each of them that night.

"How does someone ever forget that?" Sickmann, now the director of military sales for Anheuser-Busch in St. Louis, said all these years later. "Life was uncertain after that. You didn't know if you would live or die."

* * *

In the garage of his home outside Jacksonville, Fla., Alan Golacinski, an embassy security officer, keeps three boxes of things that were sent to him after his return from Iran. In the containers are football jerseys, sports memorabilia and letters. He hasn't opened them in years. His wife keeps after him about throwing away the cartons and one of these days he is sure he will.

"I don't want to sound ungrateful," he said. "I just don't remember all" the gifts.

But still they kept coming: a box of Idaho potatoes, tickets to a Broadway show, a VCR back when VCRs were cutting-edge technology.

Another Marine guard, Kevin Hermening, was given a scholarship to the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, though he later turned down the offer to study journalism at UW-Oshkosh. The Ducane grill he received was stolen off his porch several years ago.

What is the reward for suffering? Baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn discussed the topic one day in the middle of the hostage crisis with Jeremiah Denton, a Navy admiral who had been held captive in Vietnam and later became a senator from Alabama, as they sat at a baseball game in Cincinnati. Sometime that afternoon, Kuhn is convinced, the idea of a lifetime baseball pass was discussed, though he can't remember the actual conversation. What he does know is that the gift is unique.

"You know, I'd be hard-pressed to tell you that we gave out passes to anyone other than them," Kuhn, who retired in 1984, said recently.

Charles Scott, an Army colonel who was the embassy military attache, often found himself face-to-face at Atlanta Braves games with the man most responsible for his captivity and ultimately his release -- Jimmy Carter. To this day, Scott, now a public speaker, can't forgive the former president for allowing the shah into the country.

Still, whenever he would run into Carter, he'd eschew the traditional handshake and bury the former president in a giant hug.

Many years ago, Scott offered the Carter Library several boxes of letters he received in the days after his return, but when the library told him he would have to catalogue each envelope, he took the package to the back of his yard and burned it.

"Life does go on," he said.

Hermening, the youngest hostage who celebrated his 21st birthday in captivity, came home to the Milwaukee area and immediately into the best years of the Brewers. He loved going to the games in those days. So much so that he and his wife drove from Milwaukee to Baltimore the last weekend of the 1982 season for a showdown that would determine the winner of the American League East.

Belk settled in Bellingham, Wash., not far from the Canadian border and fell in love with the local minor league team, going to games on a regular basis. He brought the pass when he traveled, watching games in Seattle, Baltimore and Los Angeles.

He now has a home in Georgia. "In fact, from here I'll probably go down to Atlanta quite a bit; I can use it there," he said.

Laingen, who lives in Bethesda, used it to go to Orioles games but gave up after the franchise seemed to spiral into disarray. Embassy political officer John Limbert, who grew up watching the Washington Senators in Griffith Stadium, used the pass in Baltimore as well, but he lost interest.

Like many of his colleagues, he got busy and fell into work, in Limbert's case as president of the American Foreign Service Association, the union that represents active and retired foreign service officers. He held the post until last year.

* * *

In Marin County north of San Francisco, an Iranian immigrant and oriental rug dealer named Taghi Rezaian made a public declaration: He would give each hostage a $1,000 oriental rug. All they had to do was call.

"I wanted to welcome them back," Rezaian said. "I'm Persian by birth but by choice I'm American. I'm a proud American."

The hostage crisis had not been good for Rezaian or his business. Several times people threw rocks through his window. The first few times he called the police but after the police reports of the attacks on his store started to appear in the papers, he stopped calling.

"I wanted to tell everyone that I'm an American no matter how long I've been an American citizen and a taxpayer," he said.

When asked how many hostages had taken him up on his offer, Rezaian said he thinks 48 or 49 eventually got rugs. However, none of the 10 hostages reached for this story said he took one of Rezaian's carpets.

When he first returned from Iran, Kirtley went to baseball games all the time. He was a Marine drill instructor stationed in San Diego. Sometimes in the evenings, he'd drive over to where the Padres played, flashed the pass and spent the rest of the night sitting in the bleachers.

"I used it to just go down and watch the San Diego Chicken," he said.

But eventually life took over. He became a father and moved to a new, stable life in McLean, working as an information technology consultant. He turned out to be more of a football fan than baseball, but it was hard not to notice the new baseball team that came to Washington last year.

Only Kirtley didn't know how to go about using the card at the Nationals games.

"It took me literally weeks of research," he said. Finally he stumbled across a site for the D.C. Sports and Entertainment Commission. He called and the woman who answered told him to just come to the game. So one night last June, Kirtley brought his two youngest sons to Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium. They showed up early to the main gate only to discover the ticket takers had no idea who he was or why he had this strange pass. Some calls were made and suddenly the woman he had talked to on the phone came racing up shouting, "Mr. Kirtley! Mr. Kirtley!"

She led them inside and brought them to a section of seats 12 rows from the field, just to the third base side of the Nationals' dugout. But the woman didn't leave; instead she walked to the bottom of the section, spoke to a security guard and then waved Kirtley's two boys down, giving them seats in the front row right next to the dugout. About 15 minutes later, the guard came up to Kirtley and said, "You can go down too."

"It was amazing," Kirtley said. "But the thing that was too bad is I don't think my kids knew what a big deal it was. I did know but it was their first game, they didn't know that this didn't normally happen."

After all, how many fathers get a lifetime ticket to baseball?

On this day in 1977...

it snowed in Miami. I shit you not.

----

The coldest recorded temperature in the city of Miami was 27 °F (-2.8 °C) on February 3, 1917, though the coldest temperature ever recorded in the metropolitan area was 20 °F (-6.6 °C) near Homestead, Florida, on January 19, 1977. That same day, Miami experienced its first and only recorded snowfall since weather records began in the 1830s.

linkypoo

Peyton Manning is a Loser

Divisional Playoffs: January 15, 2006
PITTSBURGH 21, INDIANAPOLIS 18

When the camera zoomed in on Peyton Manning's face after Vanderjagt missed a potential game-tying field goal with only 21 seconds left against the Steelers on Sunday, you could see Peyton mutter with a half-grimace/half-grin, "He missed it." Vanderjagt’s missed field goal ensured that Peyton will continue to carry the dubious label, “can’t win a big game.”

The game wasn’t as close as the final score indicated – the referee even tried to help the Colts by inexplicably overturning an obvious interception by Pittsburgh Safety Troy Polamalu with 6 minutes left in the 4th quarter (the league later admitted that it was clearly the wrong call; I would dare say that it was the worst call ever made in the NFL “instant replay era,” and it would not shock me to learn that the referee had portions of his salary riding on Indy at his local sportsbook.)

Despite the bye week, home field advantage, and huge help from referee Pete Morelli, Manning somehow ended up losing another postseason game that he should have won; the Colts were 10-point favorites over the Steelers – the kicking game should have been a non-factor if Peyton took care of business the way he should have. Indy was a team that started 13-0 and had many folks talking “undefeated season.” They were a lock to make it to the Super Bowl and even-money to win it all. With the shocking loss to Pittsburgh, Manning’s postseason record drops to a pitiful 3-5.

Even if Vanderjagt had made the 46-yard field goal to tie the score against the Steelers, history indicates that Peyton would have eventually lost the game anyway. Despite the impressive regular season statistics Manning generates each year, the end result is always the same – he ends each season watching the big game from his living room, just like you and me.

Good Thing We Legally Changed Our Names to Lavinius and Cooch...

By Declan McCullagh
URL: http://news.zdnet.com/2100-1009_22-6024695.html

Commentary--Annoying someone via the Internet is now a federal crime.

It's no joke. Last Thursday, President Bush signed into law a prohibition on posting annoying Web messages or sending annoying e-mail messages without disclosing your true identity.

In other words, it's OK to flame someone on a mailing list or in a blog as long as you do it under your real name. Thank Congress for small favors, I guess.

This ridiculous prohibition, which would likely imperil much of Usenet, is buried in the so-called Violence Against Women and Department of Justice Reauthorization Act. Criminal penalties include stiff fines and two years in prison.

"The use of the word 'annoy' is particularly problematic," says Marv Johnson, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. "What's annoying to one person may not be annoying to someone else."

Buried deep in the new law is Sec. 113, an innocuously titled bit called "Preventing Cyberstalking." It rewrites existing telephone harassment law to prohibit anyone from using the Internet "without disclosing his identity and with intent to annoy."

To grease the rails for this idea, Sen. Arlen Specter, a Pennsylvania Republican, and the section's other sponsors slipped it into an unrelated, must-pass bill to fund the Department of Justice. The plan: to make it politically infeasible for politicians to oppose the measure.

The tactic worked. The bill cleared the House of Representatives by voice vote, and the Senate unanimously approved it Dec. 16.

There's an interesting side note. An earlier version that the House approved in September had radically different wording. It was reasonable by comparison, and criminalized only using an "interactive computer service" to cause someone "substantial emotional harm."

That kind of prohibition might make sense. But why should merely annoying someone be illegal?

There are perfectly legitimate reasons to set up a Web site or write something incendiary without telling everyone exactly who you are.

Think about it: A woman fired by a manager who demanded sexual favors wants to blog about it without divulging her full name. An aspiring pundit hopes to set up the next Suck.com. A frustrated citizen wants to send e-mail describing corruption in local government without worrying about reprisals.

In each of those three cases, someone's probably going to be annoyed. That's enough to make the action a crime. (The Justice Department won't file charges in every case, of course, but trusting prosecutorial discretion is hardly reassuring.)

Clinton Fein, a San Francisco resident who runs the Annoy.com site, says a feature permitting visitors to send obnoxious and profane postcards through e-mail could be imperiled.

"Who decides what's annoying? That's the ultimate question," Fein said. He added: "If you send an annoying message via the United States Post Office, do you have to reveal your identity?"

Fein once sued to overturn part of the Communications Decency Act that outlawed transmitting indecent material "with intent to annoy." But the courts ruled the law applied only to obscene material, so Annoy.com didn't have to worry.

"I'm certainly not going to close the site down," Fein said on Friday. "I would fight it on First Amendment grounds."

He's right. Our esteemed politicians can't seem to grasp this simple point, but the First Amendment protects our right to write something that annoys someone else.

It even shields our right to do it anonymously. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas defended this principle magnificently in a 1995 case involving an Ohio woman who was punished for distributing anonymous political pamphlets.

If President Bush truly believed in the principle of limited government (it is in his official bio), he'd realize that the law he signed cannot be squared with the Constitution he swore to uphold.

And then he'd repeat what President Clinton did a decade ago when he felt compelled to sign a massive telecommunications law. Clinton realized that the section of the law punishing abortion-related material on the Internet was unconstitutional, and he directed the Justice Department not to enforce it.

Bush has the chance to show his respect for what he calls Americans' personal freedoms. Now we'll see if the president rises to the occasion.

In Memory of the Sago, WV Miners

Image from John Deering, The Arkansas Democratic-Gazette

Top facts about Chuck Norris...

Chuck Norris' tears cure cancer. Too bad he has never cried.

If you can see Chuck Norris, he can see you. If you can't see Chuck Norris you may be only seconds away from death.

Chuck Norris is currently suing NBC, claiming Law and Order are trademarked names for his left and right legs.

Chuck Norris counted to infinity - twice.

When the Boogeyman goes to sleep every night he checks his closet for Chuck Norris.

Chuck Norris ordered a Big Mac at Burger King, and got one.

Chuck Norris once challenged Lance Armstrong in a "Who has more testicles?" contest. Chuck Norris won by 5.

Chuck Norris once ate three 72 oz. steaks in one hour. He spent the first 45 minutes having sex with his waitress.

Chuck Norris lost his virginity before his dad did.

Chuck Norris once ate a whole cake before his friends could tell them there was a stripper in it.

Chuck Norris is 1/8th Cherokee. This has nothing to do with ancestry, the man ate a fucking Indian.

stolen from here

Size DOES matter...

"This may take a few minutes, if you have a large blog."

yes, folks. cooch's blog is so large, it took several days to republish it...

Bills aiming for a "fresh start" in Buffalo

Let's see, 87 year old owner Ralph Wilson is set to bring in 81 year old ex-Bills coach Marv Levy to be the new GM and assist in running football operations.

What next, Dick Clark for offensive coordinator? The Golden Girls as cheerleaders?

Let me guess, beer to be replaced with prune juice at the concession stands?

"Geritol- the official sponsor of the Buffalo Bills"

What kind of friggin "fresh start" is this?

The crack in Baltimore must be realllllllly good...

Baltimore's latest demands...

Manny, Clement, cash, and an outfielder or young Sox arm (i.e., Papelbon or Lester) for Tejada.

Cooch replies, "What in the fuck are you guys smoking?"

Seriously, Manny and Cash for Tejada would be a decent deal. It's not like Tejada's a big on-base guy (career = .338). Add Clement and a little cash, okay, we're desperate to move Manny. Add an arm on top of that? Fuck you.

Regarding the Orange Bowl...

cooch texts lavinius via cell: "lavinius, what's your take on penn state vs. florida state in tonight's game?"

lavinius: "i like state to win."

Sad, but true...

from Dave Granlund at www.davegranlund.com