The Blog @ http://www.terrylyons.com

Here's to John Smallwood, one of the very best people on the planet

noreply@blogger.com (Terry Lyons) — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 14:27:00 +0000

As the headline says, this post is to John Smallwood of Philly, one of the very best people on this planet. Let's just make sure he's back on the road to a full recovery and we can stand at his side at a sporting event (of his choice) very, very soon.

Here's his column from today:

John Smallwood: Away from sports, and appreciating them more

By John Smallwood

I miss the rhythm of a Phillies game; the collisions of an Eagles Sunday; the lightning pace of Flyers hockey; the athleticism of a Sixers game.

Watching on television is not the same, not when you've covered sports up close and personal for 22 years.

I haven't been to a live sporting event since the Eagles' home opener.

On Sept. 24, I had successful surgery to have two defective heart valves replaced. Then something went terribly wrong.

I had complications, unrelated issues that turned a lifesaving procedure into a near-death experience.

I've been hospitalized ever since. I was placed into a medically induced coma for 2 weeks. Some of the doctors thought I would die.

I don't remember the first half of October, but it was weird to have person after person come into my room and say it was amazing how good I looked and tell me how far I had come.

Thanks to a lot of support from a lot of people, I'm still here.

I hope none of you ever finds this out, but hospitals are truly amazing places. I'm in the Christiana Care System, and the people here literally saved my life.

Obviously, you start with miracle-working doctors, who suddenly were faced with the unexpected during my surgery and reacted instantaneously to combat the issues.

But my true heroes have been the registered nurses and nurse assistants. Without their 24-hour care and assistance, I don't think I could have made it.

It's been amazing how much care they've shown. I was a stranger, but they've guarded me and watched over me as if I were their child.

Yes, I know that is their job, but it takes special souls to care the way they do.

I thank them all.

Sometimes you forget how good something is until it has been taken away.

Sports writing is the only job I've had since graduating from the University of Maryland in 1986.

But lately, I've become frustrated.

These are hard times for newspapers, and the cutbacks, layoffs and slashing of travel budgets have been taxing. Sometimes you feel as if external forces are preventing you from doing your job to the best of your ability.

I won't lie. I'm in this for the paycheck, but I still take pride in what I do.

I want to be the best columnist I can be. I want to serve our readers with the respect and appreciation they deserve. I want to continue to help the Daily News produce the best sports section in the country. Sometimes I'm not sure I am doing that.

I have one of the coolest jobs around. I get to write about things that are my passion. I've covered some of the greatest sporting events.

This has been a harsh way to be reminded of that, but it's an offshoot of what I'm going through.

By now, most of the people here know I'm a sports reporter. Naturally, the talk for a while was about the Phillies and the World Series. All I could think about was, I should be there.

I should have been at the Sixers' home opener, or writing about Allen Iverson's future. I should have been writing about Temple becoming bowl eligible for the first time in a generation. I should have been attending an Andy Reid "say-no-evil" news conference, after a bad loss to the Cowboys.

Watching the World Series on television was no fun knowing you could have been experiencing the atmosphere of a sold-out Citizens Bank Park or Yankee Stadium.

Television doesn't accurately display the explosion of emotion during a big Eagles victory.

I'm in physical therapy rehabilitation now. Hopefully, I will able to go home soon and get back to work.

The games must go on. It's just been painful to watch them go on without me.

Send e-mail to smallwj@phillynews.com.

For recent columns, go to:

http://go.philly.com/smallwood.

See:

http://www.philly.com/philly/sports/columnists/20091111_John_Smallwood__Away_from_sports__and_appreciating_them_more.html

NBA Buries NY-NJ Basketball...

noreply@blogger.com (Terry Lyons) — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 12:01:00 +0000

It's official. Basketball in the New York-New Jersey metropolitan area is officially dead. The New York Knickerbockers and the New Jersey Nets, the city's two professional teams, were ranked at #29 and #30, respectively, by the league's official online site, NBA.com by its league-hired columnist John Schuhmann.

Now, throw in the fact that St. John's and Seton Hall are totally in the tank in the BIG EAST and what do you have?

Hockey season in NYC and NJ.

Bruce and The River

noreply@blogger.com (Terry Lyons) — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 21:55:00 +0000

The Boss rocked MSG on Sat and Sunday nights, performing two of his best albums live. While I was fortunate enough to see Bruce Springsteen at his final Giants Stadium shows where he did "Born to Run" and "Born in the USA," I was not able to get to the World's Most Famous Arena to see "The Wild, The Innocent & the E Street Shuffle" and "The River."

My buddy, Spy, who has seen over 100 shows, put Sunday's concert in his "Top 3" all-time. That is a statement that Spy takes seriously and doesn't toss around lightly, trust me.

More artists should play their albums live and in their entirety as so many young fans now purchase songs for their ipods with itunes and don't even listen to an album in full and from song-to-song. Springsteen can lead the charge for people to get back to the basics of listening to full albums.

I woud also note that the Fab Faux does such a great job of performing The Beatles albums live and in their entirety. Last month, I enjoyed "Let It Be" and "Abbey Road" both done perfectly.

Back to Bruce... I am going to suggest to one of our pals, Wayne LeBeaux, who runs Bruce's tour, that the Band entertain the idea of doing "The River" on a special short tour next summer, maybe in Boston, NY, Philly and LA.

Here are some reviews:

NYC NIGHT TWO: The River
Another magnificent night at the Garden with The River, the first-time (and if Bruce's prediction ("too long!") proves true, only) complete performance of the 1980 double album that Bruce honored as "the gateway to my future writing" on albums like Nebraska and Tunnel of Love."

Some of The River's songs, of course, are mainstays of the E Street Band's touring repertoire, like "Hungry Heart", "Out In The Street", "The Ties That Bind," and the title song. And some are brought out a tantalizingly few times a tour, usually in some far-flung outpost lucky enough to hear a rare "Drive All Night" or "I Wanna Marry You". So forRiver aficionados to hear the entire album, and so thoughtfully and energeticaly performed, it was a night to remember. The last part of the show featured some very strong performances, including one of the best "Atlantic City"s in memory, a rousing "Sweet Soul Music," not played by E Street since 1988, and a loose but moving "Can't Help Falling In Love," culminating in a great, almost endless "Higher and Higher" to lift the crowd from their seats and out in the street.

***

11/8, NEW YORK CITY: THE RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT

From Backstreets.com
Context has always been important to Bruce Springsteen's music, and he reinforced that notion with a galvanizing performance of The River in its entirety for the first time on Sunday night at Madison Square Garden. In a precise, exhilarating, and high-energy show, Springsteen faithfully reproduced all 20 of its songs. Most have appeared in shows on various tours since the album's 1980 release, and usually to great effect. But hearing the songs in their original order left many in the building gasping in astonishment.

Ramble On...THE Future of Journalism in sports is DIGITAL SPORTS DESK

noreply@blogger.com (Terry Lyons) — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 13:14:00 +0000

Interesting... and right down my alley for my "The Digital Sports Desk," a new and simple sports journalism concept to be launched soon...

By JEFF JARVIS...

The future of news is entrepreneurial:

There’s a lot in that statement. It says: The future of news is not institutional. The news of tomorrow has yet to be built. The structure – the ecosystem – of news will not be dominated by a few corporations, but likely will be made up of networks of many startups performing specialized functions based on the opportunities they see in the market. Who does journalism, why and how will change, and the skills of journalists will change (to include business). We don’t yet know what the market will demand and support from journalism, though news will look disordered and messy. There will be more failures than successes in the immediate future of news.

That statement also holds many implications for sectors of the economy and society: investment (put money into the new, not the old), public policy (don’t protect and preserve the incumbents but nurture the startups by creating a fertile and level playing field), education (how do we train journalists when everyone can do journalism? How do we train everyone?), marketing (advertising won’t be one-stop shopping anymore and that means it may support news less), PR (influence will be no longer be concentrated) and technology (there are opportunities here).

Finally, that statement does not say some things. It does not say that the incumbents’ institutions will necessarily die, only that they have proven not to be the source of innovation and growth in news.

One more point: The statement is essentially optimistic. It says there is a future to be built.

This is not the discussion we hear about the fate of news journalism. That discussion defaults too often to current models and old realities, to protection over creation, to fear over opportunity.

Columbia’s Reconstruction of Journalism report, in my view, gives up on the business prospects for news and resorts to what I believe are desperate measures – namely, the public option for news. The Washington Post has run two op-eds lately endorsing tax-supported journalism (pardon me for asking, but are things that bad there?). Alan Mutter reported on a Harvard confab last week that “gravitated to the predictable yadda-yadda: foundation funding, federal subsidies, subscription schemes and a smattering of random ruminations about revenue.” That’s hardly uncommon; it’s all we hear.

Bit by bit, I’ve separated myself from that worldview, first by teaching a course in entrepreneurial journalism at CUNY, then by directing the New Business models for News Project to research and propose sustainable futures for news. But I didn’t boil down my essential worldview to this – the future of news is entrepreneurial – until now.

If you buy this view – and, I know, many won’t want to – then it affects so much, as I’m learning myself. Last week at CUNY’s Graduate School of Journalism, I presented to my colleagues our New Business Models for (Local) News (the segment of the project funded by the Knight Foundation, which we’re also presenting at a Nov. 11 event here that will be streamed) and the discussion turned afterward to one aspect of what we do: what we offer students in career services. No longer is that just about getting job interviews at big publications – though, of course, it still will include that as long as it can – but it now should expand to giving students who are starting businesses the services of an incubator (which we are doing for my entrepreneurial students who are now launching businesses) and perhaps to giving them the training they need to be proprietors of journalistic businesses. We’re teaching them in our January intersession how to build their own brands online. Should we give them a workshop to help them with billing and business? I’ve asked the heretical question about teaching hyperlocal blogging: How will they learn to sell ads? These are questions raised by the entrepreneurial worldview.

The public policy implications of this view for government are many. Last week, I gave a Skype talk to a session assembled in London by MP Sion Simon looking at government’s possible role in the future of news – what it should and should not do (see posts here, here, and here). Here in the U.S., the Federal Trade Commission is holding sessions starting in December(where I’ll appear on a panel with folks who don’t agree with me about all this) and the FCC appointed Steven Waldman to continue the work of the Knight Commission looking at the information needs of communities.

As my Guardian column this week makes clear, I get hives at the notion of government interference in news – in speech of any sort. I especially fear government taking a role as a nonmarket player competing with not only the weak incumbents but also with the tender sprouts of entrepreneurial ventures. I also fear talk of governments – in the U.S. and Germany – extending copyright just to protect incumbents. What should government do? Broadband for all. I’d start – and stop – there.

For investors, the entrepreneurial worldview says not only that it’s time to get their money out of old media companies – that, given their market caps and bankruptcies, has already happened – but also that it is time to invest in new and innovative ventures. That requires investors to believe, as I do, that there is a robust and growing market demand for news and that there are new opportunities to meet it efficiently and profitably. But until we start proving that, investors will be shy. This is why I wish that the capital that has gone into not-for-profit news ventures in cities across the country had gone instead into creating for-profit enterprises; so we can prove the market, so we can learn how to make news sustainable. That is god’s work.

For other industries that work with news – advertising – I would have scouts, laboratories and pilot projects staying on the forefront of entrepreneurial developments in news and even encouraging it with marketing dollars. Ad agencies and sponsors have tremendous opportunities to build relationships with customers in new, more targeted, more effective, and more efficient ways but they must shift spending to online to learn what works and create it; their old habits of one-stop-shopping with big media only leave them behind.

As for technology, there is much development of news already occurring in startups (I’m a partner in one such effort, Daylife, and I advise others; we are seeing some sprout already alongside our New Business Models for News Project). But the technology giants can also play a role. I’ll write more about this another time, but I believe Google should be packaging what it already has to help create a framework for anyone – anyone – to build news enterprises (and it should stop wasting time trying to make friends with the dinosaurs who only want to find enemies to blame for their problems). I also want to see it help support labs to develop its tools – especially Wave and Marissa Mayer’s notion of the hyperpersonal stream – for news. This, I believe, will force us to rethink our fundamental assumptions about what news is and that, in turn, will lead to new opportunities.

Where does this leave the incumbent institutions when I say the future is not theirs? I’m no longer the only one holding them accountable for their lack of innovation in the last 15 years – even Ken Auletta is. But what’s done is done, and looking back I now see it was probably my mistake to think they could have reinvented themselves. I talked with someone recently at an old, large media company who said he believes it is impossible for them to remake themselves for this new, much smaller entrepreneurial world. There’s just too much shutdown cost and pain involved and the people inside these towers don’t think like people in garages. Still, I see opportunity for them. That’s why, on this blog and at the Aspen Institute this summer, I pushed the idea that when journalists leave those towers, their companies should invest in their futures as entrepreneurs: Set them up with blogs, sell their ads, promote them, and continue to reap the value of their experience and brands (without the cost). The Washington Post should fund the next Politico in town, not see its talent walk out the door to start it elsewhere.

And what of these journalists? Well, that’s why I’m writing this. That’s why I teach what I teach. I believe journalists must become entrepreneurs. They don’t all need to be sole proprietors of hypersomething blogs. But they need to make smart business decisions when they decide where to put their effort. They need to sense and serve the market. They need to work with innovators. They need to see a future for journalism that looks different – better, even – than its past.

The future of news is entrepreneurial.

BTW- the info above written by: JEFF JARVIS

Jeff Jarvis blogs about media and news at Buzzmachine.com (http://Buzzmachine.com). He is associate professor and director of the interactive journalism program at the City University of New York’s new Graduate School of Journalism (http://journalism.cuny.edu/). He is consulting editor of Daylife, a news startup. He writes a new media column for The Guardian. He consults for media companies. Until 2005, he was president and creative director of Advance.net, the online arm of Advance Publications. Prior to that, Jarvis was creator and founding editor of Entertainment Weekly; Sunday editor and associate publisher of the New York Daily News; TV critic for TV Guide and People; a columnist on the San Francisco Examiner; assistant city editor and reporter for the Chicago Tribune; reporter for Chicago Today. He says he is at work on a book.

***

Yahoo's Marc Spears reports on Allen Iverson:

A frustrated Allen Iverson (notes) has left the Memphis Grizzlies and is not expected to return anytime soon, if at all, a source close to the situation told Yahoo! Sports on Saturday.
The Grizzlies granted Iverson a leave of absence to allow him to return to his offseason home in Atlanta. The source said Iverson wants to clear his head and is extremely unhappy about the lack of communication with Grizzlies coach Lionel Hollins over his playing time and role with the team.
Grizzlies officials said Iverson was allowed to leave the team so he could attend to a personal matter. The decision came after he met with Grizzlies owner Michael Heisley Saturday morning in Los Angeles.
“I’m not going to get into the personal reason but it has nothing to do with the other stuff,” Heisley told the Memphis Commerical Appeal, which first reported Iverson’s departure on Saturday. “I’m the guy who said he could go. It’s a real family issue that I don’t think should be reported.”
TL Take: I think AI deserves the benefit of the doubt and should be given a week or two of room before anyone makes any judgement.

EUREKA, a Bill..

noreply@blogger.com (Terry Lyons) — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 04:28:00 +0000

As reported by the WSJ:

In a tight vote, the House passed its sweeping health bill late Saturday, marking the biggest victory yet for Democrats in their drive to create near-universal health insurance.

The bill passed by a 220-215 margin. It came after House leaders made a surprise last-minute concession that blocks abortion from the new government insurance plan in order to win over wavering Democrats.

As reported by TL:

Thank God. We have moved forward with -- at least a start -- on a real health care program for the citizens of the United States of America.

Full Story:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125757198373535753.html

Breeder' Cup Seven World Series Games in One Day.

noreply@blogger.com (Terry Lyons) — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 13:43:00 +0000

Yes, the question has been asked and answered once or twice before.

Q- Best day in Sports?

A- Breeders' Cup.

It's seven World Series games in one day. Yes, it's seven Super Bowl horse races all packed into one day (two days, now that they ruined it by expanding the format).

I will add a column from ESPN.com to preview the races, but first I'll highlight this great piece by Rick Reilly who called a race at Santa Anita and found out for himself just how difficult it is to keep "track" of those nags on the "track."

Reilly's best line comes early in the race when he identifies a horse trailing the field and makes a pretty harsh reference to a former actress. I won't spoil it for you. Listen in by clicking the button midway down on the page I am linking HERE.

***

Here's some info on the Breeders' Cup to be televised by ESPN (today at 3:45pm) and ABC (Saturday at 1:45pm est) from beautiful Santa Anita (Oak Tree) in Arcadia, California.

By Jay Privman

ARCADIA, Calif. - The Breeders' Cup was designed to showcase the sport's best runners and decide year-end championships, and even in its current 14-race format, it has been a great success over its 26-year run. Yet as good as this year's event is, and it is quite good, the sport's ultimate title might not be on the line, even with such accomplished horses as Summer Bird and the unbeaten, popular mare Zenyatta meeting on Saturday at Santa Anita's Oak Tree meeting in the premier event, the $5 million Breeders' Cup Classic.
Rachel Alexandra has been considered the leader for Horse of the Year, based on a series of impressive victories that included the Kentucky Oaks and, against males, in the Preakness, Haskell, and Woodward stakes. She, however, is not here, her 2009 campaign having ended in September, with majority owner Jess Jackson saying he did not want to run her on Santa Anita's synthetic Pro-Ride surface, where his Curlin was fourth in last year's Classic.
There are those, though, who believe the Breeders' Cup should be supported regardless, that it should be as advertised, the venue to decide championships.
"This is what the Breeders' Cup is all about, so we feel it's our responsibility to participate," said Zenyatta's trainer, John Shirreffs.
"This is supposed to be the championship races," said Tim Ice, who trains Summer Bird. "Whoever wins should get top honors. My opinion is that each sport has its championship game, and you should compete in them for championships. This is the stage where Horse of the Year should be decided."
Both Zenyatta and Summer Bird certainly have the credentials. Zenyatta, owned by Jerry and Ann Moss, has won all 13 of her starts, including four this year. The Classic will be her first try against males. Summer Bird has put together victories in the Belmont, Travers, and Jockey Club Gold Cup. If either adds the Classic, it makes for a compelling resume.
Regardless, a horse with a worthy campaign will be slighted. Especially if the vote comes down to Zenyatta vs. Rachel Alexandra, because they never met, yet both will have stepped out of the box to beat males.
"If Zenyatta wins it, I wish they could give Horse of the Year to both owners," said trainer Bob Baffert. "We need more of that in racing."
"It'll be like the year Ted Williams hit .406 and Joe Dimaggio had his 56-game hitting streak and was the MVP," said Rick Mettee, the North American-based assistant to Godolphin Racing trainer Saeed bin Suroor, who has Girolamo and Regal Ransom in the Classic.
"We'd like it to be on dirt, but it is the championships," Mettee added. "You can't win the AFC Championship game and then pass the Super Bowl because you don't like where it's played."
Zenyatta is certainly the star attraction in the Classic, which highlights Day 2 of the 26th Breeders' Cup. She is unquestionably the best older filly or mare in the country. Now, the stakes get raised.
"For Zenyatta at this point in her career, the Classic is obviously a big challenge," Shirreffs said. "But to not do it, when she's doing particularly well, would be just as big a mistake. Mr. Moss is not thinking Horse of the Year as much as wanting to see Zenyatta compete at the highest level."
The fans are expected to be in her corner. Jon White of Santa Anita has installed her as the morning-line favorite.
"Zenyatta brings so much excitement to the race," said Baffert, who will try to beat her with Richard's Kid.
Zenyatta will put on a show before the race. She is quite the ham in the paddock, stretching and prancing, throwing her legs out like a Rockette. But first, she admires the scene.
"When she walks to the paddock, she stands there like some Roman god," said her jockey, Mike Smith.
Zenyatta regularly trains at Hollywood Park. She came to Santa Anita on Wednesday afternoon, and had a routine gallop on Thursday morning. She will be racing 1 1/4 miles for the first time.
"She's never failed to catch her target," said her exercise rider, Steve Willard.
Even those who rarely have seen Zenyatta accord her great respect. Christophe Clement, who is sending out Gio Ponti in the Classic, wishes Zenyatta would have run Friday in the Ladies' Classic, which she won last year.
"We're all trying to make a living around here," Clement said, joking.
Rip Van Winkle, the European standout expected to vie for favoritism with Zenyatta, galloped on Thursday morning. Even though he has been battling foot problems, he was not wearing any corrective shoeing on Thursday morning.
The Classic is the ninth race on a 10-race card that begins at 10:05 a.m. Pacific with the Damascus Stakes. Eight Breeders' Cup races follow, beginning with the Juvenile Turf at 10:45. The Sprint begins an all-Breeders' Cup pick six that has a mandatory payout. The Classic, the last BC race of the day, has a scheduled post time of 3:45 p.m. The Oak Tree Derby follows the Classic and completes the card.
All the Breeders' Cup races will be televised live, first from 10:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Pacific on ABC, then from 12:30 until 4 on ESPN.
The weather has been delightful all week and is forecast to remain so through Saturday, with predictions calling for a high temperature of 75 degrees, partly cloudy skies, and no chance of rain.

Misc Items from the Past Few Days ...

noreply@blogger.com (Terry Lyons) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 14:36:00 +0000

This in from the Election Night Returns...

COLUMBUS, Ohio - Tuesday's election transformed Ohio from an anti-gambling state to one that will welcome four major casinos, including a glitzy new one in the Flats, just across from Quicken Loans Arena.

Issue 3, the constitutional amendment for casinos in Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati and Toledo, coasted to victory Tuesday night with 53 percent of the vote, thanks in large part to voters in Northeast and Southwest Ohio.

With Cavaliers majority owner Dan Gilbert pledging that construction of the $600 million Cleveland casino would begin no later than the second half of next year, city supporters are looking forward to thousands of new jobs and more tourism from this new form of entertainment.

"We're going to deliver something very special," said Gilbert, who declared victory shortly before midnight at a party in the Cavs' practice court on the fourth floor of the Q, a couple of hours after the Cavs' win over Washington.

***

President Barack Obama's Facebook Page, according to SLATE:

http://www.slate.com/id/2234008/

***

The Phoenix Business Journal profiled Suns CEO and former NBA Properties Prez Rick Welts. In the sports world front office category of talent, it doesn't get any better than Rick Welts:

Rick Welts is bracing for a challenging 2009 season, both on and off the court.
The Phoenix Suns play 17 of their first 22 games away from their home court at US Airways Center, and Welts knows how important that tough stretch will be for the franchise — and its bottom line.
The Suns, notorious burners out of the gate, will have to do it again this year, not only to ensure a playoff run, but to make the season financially stable.
“Anyone who says the economy isn’t what they’re focusing on is on a different planet,” said Welts, who was named team CEO in April, taking over the position from Managing Partner Robert Sarver. Prior to his promotion, Welts was president and chief operating officer of the franchise. He remains president.

***

Wow, the next thing you know, they'll no longer use wood and will make graphite sticks. Whoops been there and done that, eh?

See this from our friends at the NYT:

New Skate-Sharpening Method Takes Hockey by Storm

By JEFF Z. KLEIN

The technological history of hockey is littered with elaborate ideas that did not pan out, like the Fox network’s glowing puck, the heated skate blade and Cooperalls.

But since last November, a simple innovation that costs next to nothing has become popular among N.H.L. professionals and weekend warriors alike: a skate-sharpening method called the flat-bottom V.

“It’s been great for me,” said Jack Johnson, a defenseman for the Los Angeles Kings and a candidate for the United States Olympic team. “It’s sharper, but at the same time, you can get just as much glide as with the old sharpening, so you get the best of both worlds.”

BlackStone Sports, the Ontario manufacturer of skate maintenance equipment that developed the flat-bottom V method, says players on about 20 of the N.H.L.’s 30 teams have switched from the traditional sharpening method in use for decades. The list of notables includes Zach Parise of the Devils, Joe Thornton and Rob Blake of the San Jose Sharks, Jason Arnott of the Nashville Predators, Milan Michalek of the Ottawa Senators and Doug Weight of the Islanders.

“It started with Cory Stillman in Florida,” said Steve Wilson, who founded Blackstone with his father, Murray, and developed the flat-bottom V cut with him and with company engineers.

“I was down there last year with a prototype to show the Panthers’ equipment manager, and Cory said, ‘Hey, I want to try it.’ He went out, loved it, and demanded that I leave the prototype there.”

Word spread through the Panthers’ dressing room, Wilson said, and other teams picked up on it.

“You know how hockey players are,” Wilson said. “They talk to each other.”

Proponents of the new method say this combination provides a sharper bite on turns and a freer glide in straight-ahead skating.

Conventional skate sharpening uses a grinding stone that creates a concave arc in the bottom of the blade.

The flat-bottom V uses specially made spinners to carve out tiny fangs along the skate blade’s ridges that bite into the ice for turns. The flat bottom between the fangs, similar to the flat cut of a speedskater’s blade, puts more of the blade’s surface in contact with the ice and is supposed to increase speed.

“Having the angles instead of the arc was quite intriguing,” said Wilson, who is awaiting the results of a University of Ottawa kinesiology study on the effects of the flat-bottom V. Depending on the angle at which the fangs are cut, he said, “when a player stops, he doesn’t have that ‘chattering’ effect.”

The dimensions involved are minuscule. A flat-bottom V cut of 90/75 means the width of the flat bottom between the “fangs” is 90 thousandths of an inch, and the height of the fangs is 75 ten-millionths of an inch.

Tiny, yet some players swear by it.

“My turns feel good, and I don’t feel slow coming out of them, so I’ve got no complaints,” Johnson said.

The Devils’ David Clarkson said: “I feel like I have more of a stride, that I glide a lot better when I push. So far I like the way I feel.”

Clarkson’s teammate Paul Martin started using the cut at the end of the preseason.

“It’s a little more efficient, so you glide better — you’re not working quite as hard,” Martin said before he sustained a fractured arm that will sideline him for up to six weeks.

Beyond the different feel, the flat-bottom V costs next to nothing in a sport where one player’s equipment can easily exceed $1,500.

“It cost me $10 to get my skates sharpened this way instead of the usual $5,” said Mike McBride, a 53-year-old recreation-league player in Detroit. “I had it done about two months ago, and I noticed a little difference right away. It didn’t make me go faster, but it provided me with more stability; it made me firmer on the ice.”

Internet message boards for rec-league players have been alight over the cut for several months.

The last innovation in hockey skates came about five years ago and involved heated blades, which were meant to create a thin layer of water between blade and ice to add speed. But it never caught on, because of its expense and the cumbersome battery pack players had to carry.

There, in the dustbin of hockey history, it joined Cooperalls (long pants of early-1980s vintage to replace the customary shorts and socks, and worn briefly by the Philadelphia Flyers and the Hartford Whalers) and the glowing puck (a visual aid on Fox telecasts of the mid-’90s meant to make it easier for American viewers to follow the action).

The flat-bottom V seems more likely to have a longer shelf life.

“I’ve got four sons,” Wilson said. “I know how much it costs to outfit a player. The nice thing about this is that it costs pretty much the same as regular skate sharpening. It’s definitely not like buying a pair of $800 skates or a $300 stick.”

McBride, who said he never played organized hockey as a youth and considers himself “no better than the average weekend player,” recalled that he heard about the flat-bottom V from someone at his office whose 12-year-old boy was playing at the pee-wee level.

“His son was raving about it, as were the other kids on the team, so I decided to try it,” McBride said. “I’m going to stick with it.”

What a Moron...

noreply@blogger.com (Terry Lyons) — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 22:33:00 +0000

Countdown with Keith Olbermann featured this item during the Monday night "Oddball" session... and the name of the MSNBC feature fit the article's writer -- Mr. X -- perfectly:

Why the US Congress Should Revoke ESPN's License to Broadcast

I have just about had it with ESPN.

On one hand, I can imagine that ESPN employs respectable people, yet the big picture of ESPN is that ESPN is nothing more than propaganda that only serves to divide people in many ways, including racial lines.

ESPN is nothing more than yellow journalism and not in a harmless or entertaining way.

On one hand, you'll get hacks that laugh at distraught fans (see, College GameDay); on the other hand you'll get more hacks that washed out from some school yet somehow insinuate themselves into places that they don't belong (see, cast of Around The Horn ).

Ooh, but we should feel badly about ourselves because we aren't puppets that, "get to" be on the flickering idiot box, believing that the job is inherently a higher plane of intelligence.

It seems fitting that the former host of SportsCenter would be Keith Olbermann, whom is one of the most divisive names in the mainstream media. Olbermann even called ESPN a "Godforsaken place," and later backed down from his criticism and shouldered the blame in an article called, "Mea Culpa."

I wonder how many pellets they had to feed to Olbermann for him to cave. But don't get me wrong, Bill O'Reilly has been just as bad, but Olbermann relates to ESPN.

ESPN has stooped to a new low. One of the few shows on ESPN that may have had a scintilla of integrity, Outside the Lines, has now engaged in a hit piece against Raiders coach Tom Cable, in which his ex-wife and former girlfriend accuse Cable of repeated abuse.

This hit piece by ESPN is transparent. The sports media has already allowed for Randy Hanson to defame Coach Cable with bunk accusations of assault.

Now, with egg on their face, because you know, they aren't journalists, columnists, or even sufficient critics, they have decided that it would be prudent to report this junk about Cable after ESPN refused to report the civil charges of rape against Ben Roethlisberger.

For years, ESPN refused to investigate the problem of steroids in baseball, only to allow their job to be dumped on the US Congress.

ESPN refused to investigate Spygate. ESPN refused to investigate the veracity of accusations against Pacman Jones and thus allowed Commissioner Goodell to in effect end the career of the troubled player for unsubstantiated accusations against him.

And yet, ESPN will report this nonsense that was never reported to law enforcement or any other agency.

Why? Because the one incident against Cable was 20 years ago. Cable admittedly slapped his wife on the face in anger, because he learned that she had been adulterous. Cable openly regrets what happened and has stated that he has regretted ever since.

Yet, ESPN in their malice has decided that they need to cover their rears after giving a forum to Randy Hanson and picking on that story like vultures.

ESPN has shown over the course of the years to engage in malicious attacks against the Raiders organization, including Bill Plaschke of Around the Horn and Jay Mariotti of the same show.

In August, the Pittsburgh native, Mariotti would even refer to the legendary organization as a "God-awful franchise," and that Cable should be suspended and that Al Davis should "vanish."

While Plaschke openly used his time on ATH to call for the suspension of Cable even after the Napa County DA announced that there would be no charges against Cable for assault, and that Hanson had broken his jaw after falling backwards in his chair, because he had his feet on the table.

Even Tony Kornheiser of Pardon the Interruption asserted that the witnesses "may have" been intimidated, which is a ridiculous assertion and effectively questions the integrity of the Napa County DA.

Had the Napa County DA believed that intimidation was occurring, the DA surely would have investigated.

Kornheiser has also admitted to his "East Coast bias" when talking about how much he loves the match-up between the New York Yankees and Philadelphia Phillies.

ESPN doesn't have a FCC license as its a cable network... and

God Help Us All...

noreply@blogger.com (Terry Lyons) — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 05:41:00 +0000

This story from the Philadelphia Inquirer:

Tim Donaghy's tumultuous journey through the federal prison system, which he says included a beatdown from an inmate who claimed to have New York mob connections, finally is coming to an end.

The Havertown-bred former NBA referee is scheduled to be released (Wednesday) from the Hernando County (Fla.) Jail, where he's finishing a 13-month prison term for his part in a gambling scandal that triggered an avalanche of negative publicity for the league.

Donaghy, 42, pleaded guilty in 2007 to federal wire-fraud and gambling charges. He admitted to accepting cash payoffs from two childhood buddies from Cardinal O'Hara High in exchange for betting tips that were based on his inside knowledge of the game.

"I've dealt with a lot of felons and I think he is sincerely repentant and contrite,'' said Pat Berdan, of Executive Prison Consultants, a firm that has been assisting Donaghy in prison.
"I see no intent, not even a hint of it, of revenge or retaliation or attempting to put the NBA in their place or anything like that,'' Berdan said. "He is quite remorseful about the whole thing.''

The Villanova grad served the bulk of his sentence at a minimum-security prison camp in Pensacola, Fla., where he suffered a knee injury when, he said, a man who claimed to have mob ties assaulted him.

Donaghy was transferred to a halfway house in June, but was sent to a county prison in August for a federal rule violation. His attorney, John Lauro, said Donaghy believed that he had permission to go to a health club to work on his knee, but federal authorities said it was an unauthorized trip and locked him up.

Lauro said the last few months have been tough on the ex-ref, who still needs knee surgery.

"County prison is the last place in the prison system that anybody would want to be," he said.

***

TL Comment: I just can't even believe this guy is doing testimonials for Executive Prison Consultants. You just can't make this stuff up? An admitted liar and felon being your go-to guy as a spokesperson? Someone who hasn't proven - for one second - that he is remorseful or looking to make a positive impact in life. Christ? Volunteer for some local charity or join the Marines. Do something.

By the way - this is ACTUALLY on the Executive Prison Consultants online site:

"Executive Prison Consultants did more for me than I ever thought possible. They helped me get things done that attorneys told me were not realistic. Thanks to EPC, I left prison months before my originally scheduled release date. The professionals at EPC get results!"
-- Tim D (convicted liar and felon)

Look Back: One Year -- Where is the Drive and the Determination?

noreply@blogger.com (Terry Lyons) — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 13:30:00 +0000

A year after the most important election in our lifetime, the spirit and the drive that was the backbone of a new, young, impactful candidate has been reversed and undermined by the political opponents defeated a year ago tonight.

I ask why?

Why have we allowed the enthusiasm and the desire for change to be sucked right out of our daily lives?

Why have we cowered underneath the pressures put forth by the people who bring you Fox News?

Why aren't we out there making the changes happen instead of backing down to the very people who stand by their actions to sabotage something as basic and decent as providing health care to our fellow citizens, many of whom can not afford a doctor or simple check-up?

I ask? What happened America?

You were out there a year ago. Now, you sit on your ass and complain or - worse yet - you listen to the Republican political sabotage machine that has taken this country into the worst economic period of our times and now have the gall, the audacity, to try to revise history and blame others.

Get out there and vote today. And, nearly as important - get out there and work. Take a minute and decide what you are going to do to help move this country forward. Don't stand still and settle for what was yesterday, what was troubling, what was setting us back. Don't settle for so-called leaders who put barriers in front of change and then question why hasn't change come quickly.

I am doing that by backing Michael Flaherty of Boston for mayor. I am not settling for the past 16 years of ancient and back room political influences. I want Boston to be a better place for me and my family. I want some progress.

It's Election Day 2009 and Election Day is the most important day of the year. It is not just your right to vote, it is your obligation.

Tommy Sheppard...Nothing but the Best

noreply@blogger.com (Terry Lyons) — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 11:59:00 +0000

Here's to T-Shep with a story courtesy of Eddie Sefko at the Dallas Morning News. Sefko "broke" this baby quite quickly... must've had a source at the NBA or in the District:

The NBA has an award for everything and one of them that fans don't hear much about but means plenty within the fraternity of people involved with the NBA is the Splaver/McHugh "Tribute to Excellence'' Award.
Every year, it goes to a person who is or has been a member of the NBA public-relations family.
This year, the pickers could not have done better, awarding it to Tommy Sheppard, the Washington Wizards' VP of Basketball Administration who oversaw all internal and external player relations with the Denver Nuggets before joining the Wizards.
Sheppard has been in the NBA 16 seasons and is universally considered one fo the best communicators and organizers in the league, not to mention one of the best dudes.
He's scouted, dealt with agents, mastered the salary cap, evaluated college and high-school talent and pretty much done it all as Wizard president Ernie Grunfeld's right-hand man.
Among other winners of the award are: Former NBA VP of international communications Terry Lyons (2008), former Seattle PR director and current Phoenix Suns' president and CEO Rick Welts (2006) and former Mavericks' PR Director Kevin Sullivan in 2004. He went on to be White House Communications Director under President George W. Bush.
--Eddie Sefko

Message from Sam Yoon on Michael Flaherty

noreply@blogger.com (Terry Lyons) — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 23:28:00 +0000

Be sure to get out and vote today. It is your right, yes, but it is really your obligation.

Cecil Watkins: A Great Friend of the Game

noreply@blogger.com (Terry Lyons) — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 15:30:00 +0000

When I started at the NBA league office back in December of 1980, Cecil Watkins was right at my side. In a matter of minutes, we bonded and I could tell, I had met a man who was as sincere as he was connected, a man who knew the game and loved the game. Cecil was the Assistant Director of Officiating and ran the Pro-Am basketball program that was the major lifeline to identify, train and cultivate NBA officials before they would be game tested in the CBA and, eventually, the NBA.

Cecil hailed from Westbury, NY (Long Island) - home to a regular supply of top level basketball talent, a real hoops hotbed. Great players like Joe DuPree and Richie Gilkes attended Westbury HS but which was a pipeline to the St. John's University Redmen.

Appropriately, retired St. John's Coach Lou Carnesseca, a Hall of Famer, will speak at Cecil's service to be held today in Garden City, NY.

Like Lou, I really loved Cecil Watkins. He was "good people" and we always found time to catch up, talk St. John's hoops and, sadly, lament about the current situation with fond memories of days gone by, BIG EAST championships and sold-out games at Madison Square Garden.

I remember one BIG EAST tourney when Cecil asked me to join him at the BIG EAST finals when St. John's defeated Boston College and Billy Goodwin hopped up on the rim at the Eighth Avenue end of the Garden with a "We Are St. John's" sign propped up on his lap. Cecil had some sweet tickets that day and I remember how happy I was to witness that big day in SJU basketball history.

I will miss Cecil a lot, but I will smile today with a keen knowledge that he led a great life and his family - wife Valierie and kids Keri and Kari - should be very, very proud of their husband and father.

***

Cecil Watkins Gave Back to the Game and the Community

Cecil Kenneth Watkins passed away on Saturday, October 10, 2009, due to complications from pancreatic cancer. He is survived by his wife of 46 years, Valerie Morgan Watkins, daughters Kara Watkins Tillman and Keri Watkins, sisters Caroline Townes and Ruth Ross, sisters-in-law Dorothy Watkins, Shirley Mack and Ruby Rolle, brothers-in-law John Mack, Anthony Rolle and John Townes, son-in-law Emmanuel Tillman, granddaughters Amadia Tillman and Elysia Tillman, and a host of cousins, nieces, nephews and friends who will miss him greatly. He was preceded in death by his brother, LeRoy Watkins, Sr., sister, Henrietta "Mazie" Smith, and nephew, Michael Velazquez.

Cecil was the President and CEO of the National Pro-Am City Leagues Association, Inc., a national organization that develops both players and referees for the National Basketball Association (NBA), the Governor and Boys Basketball Chairman of the New York Metropolitan Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) and an active board member for several organizations. During his 18 years with the NBA, he served as Director of Community and Special Programs and as an Assistant Supervisor of Officials. He was also a co-founder and former executive director of ELMCOR Youth & Adult Activities, Inc., a community service organization serving East Elmhurst, Corona and Jamaica.

He was respected nationwide for his knowledge and leadership in sports and community recreation. His efforts were largely responsible for providing countless inner city youth with positive outlets to express themselves and grow through their participation in sports. In recent years, Cecil was awarded an honorary doctor of laws degree from Adelphi University and selected as a finalist for the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame's Mannie Jackson-Basketball's Human Spirit Award. He was inducted into the Hall of Fame for NYS Basketball, NYC Basketball, ELMCOR and Adelphi University.

Most importantly, he made a difference in the lives of so many people. Cecil was a gentle giant who transformed communities with his uncanny genius and touched the hearts of those who knew him with his candor, his humor and his generosity.

Adelphi President Robert A. Scott on the passing of Cecil K. Watkins '75, M.A. '86, 07 (Hon.) "Adelphi University mourns the passing of its distinguished alumnus and long-time friend, Cecil Watkins. His boundless good will and commitment to youth and sports had a tremendous impact on the lives of many people. The University will deeply miss him and will continue to honor his extraordinary efforts. Our thoughts and prayers are with his wife, Valerie, daughters Kara and Keri, and the entire Watkins family."

Adelphi Associate Dean and Director of Intercollegiate Athletics Robert E. Hartwell on the loss of Cecil K. Watkins '75, M.A. '86, '07 (Hon.) "Cecil Watkins had an incredible can-do approach to life which enabled him to provide life-changing experiences for many. Respected nationwide for his knowledge and leadership in sports and community recreation, we are proud that he is a member of the Adelphi University Athletic Hall of Fame. We shall never forget him and he will always have a place in this program and in our hearts."

***

Rivals.com and NYCHoops.net wrote:

Mr. Watkins was the governor and boys basketball chairman of the New York Metropolitan Amateur Athletic Union, a youth sport organization dedicated to the promotion and development of amateur sports programs. The basketball programs are designed to initiate, stimulate, and improve opportunities for amateur basketball competition and to promote and develop leadership, sportsmanship, fitness, and athletic excellence.

As evidence of Mr. Watkins dedication, Fox said, "On Monday, even though he was extremely ill and had just finished treatment, Cecil tried to come to the executive board meeting but was too sick to make it up stairs, so I went downstairs. He said to me, 'Just tell them that I tried.' That's the kind of man that he was."

Watkins was also the president and CEO of National Pro-Am City Leagues Association, Inc., a not-for-profit community service organization that specializes in developing and administering turnkey sports league programs and high visibility sporting events in major urban and suburban areas across the country. In addition, the organization is widely recognized as a premier venue for youth and adults to acquire professional experience and employment in all aspects of sports administration.

Mr. Watkins was respected nationwide for his knowledge and leadership in sports and community recreation. Prior to his current leadership roles, Mr. Watkins held various positions, including director of recreation of New York City's Department of Parks & Recreation, director of community and special programs for the National Basketball Association, and served in the Army as a recreation specialist for two years. He established the prestigious Ray Felix Summer League, which evolved into City-Wide, a nationally recognized summer basketball program in New York City. He co-founded the Elmcor Youth and Adult Activities, Inc., a human service agency serving Corona, East Elmhurst, and Jamaica in Queens, New York. In the past 36 years, he has secured more than 1,800 scholarships for student athletes from the New York metropolitan area.

Mr. Watkins had received more than 100 awards, including the Basketball Congress International Commissioner of the Year Award, Boy Scouts of America Recognition Award, and Queensboro President Lifetime Achievement Award. He is a member of the Adelphi University Athletic Hall of Fame and New York City Basketball Hall of Fame.

He earned his B.A. and M.A. in sports administration and management from Adelphi University and is survived by his wife Valerie and two children, Kara and Keri.

NY Post writer Peter Vecsey wrote:

Lou Carnesecca, former NBA referees Lee Jones and Ronnie Nunn, Queens borough president Helen Marshall and 10 other speakers from the countless tributaries of Cecil Watkins' particularly giving life will honor him Sunday (3 p.m.) at The Center for Recreation and Sports at Adelphi University, mourning one of its most distinguished alumni.
There are those who apparently make a difference and then there was Watkins. He altered the reality of thousands, whole communities, with his supernatural aptitude for providing inner-city youth outlets to express themselves and grow through their participation in sports.
Watkins, 79 when he died Oct. 10 from pancreatic cancer, received an honorary doctor of laws degree from Adelphi in '07, was selected as a finalist for the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame (Manny Jackson Human Spirit Award) and he was inducted into the HOF for NYS Basketball, NYC Basketball, ELMCOR and Adelphi University.
Valerie Morgan and Cecil were married 46 years. After his most recent award, she asked him how he wanted to be remembered. He said: "As someone who loved, cared and gave back to the community."

Monday Morning Maniac Music with Rich Pagano

noreply@blogger.com (Terry Lyons) — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 14:55:00 +0000

Check out Richie's new album, featuring Trey Anastasio, Ian Hunter, Fab Faux keyboardist Jack Petruzzelli who is one of the TL personal favorites along with Jeff Kazee. See Rich Pagano's cool online site for many other reviews.

See part of the recent review in Hi-Fidelity:

Pagano's backing musos, the "sugarCane cups," are an all-star collection of the best and the brightest that NYC has to offer, with guitarists Andy York, Steve Conte, and Jack Petruzzelli, along with keyboardist Jeff Kazee shouldering the heavy loads, while various name-brand talents like Trey Anastasio, Ian Hunter, Willie Nile, and David Johansen drop by to lend a hand. Recorded in bits-and-pieces over the course of a year, Pagano used whatever friendly collaborators that he could rope into a session, but the results are surprisingly uniform, with the obviously inspired participants leaving behind some good work when they walked out the door.

As a result, Rich Pagano + the sugarCane cups is an album that looks forward towards the future while gazing longingly towards the past. Pagano's rough-hewn vocals are a welcome throwback to the pre-Pro Tools era, glorying in their warm authenticity and sometimes ragged emotion, while his percussion work sits comfortably behind his fellow players, rising now and then in the mix to add an invigorating blast of energy.

Ramble On ...Baby, Baby

noreply@blogger.com (Terry Lyons) — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 16:20:00 +0000

"Baby baby, don't get hooked on me,
'cause I'll just use you then I'll set you free
baby, baby, don't get hooked on me" - Mac Davis

The Celtics held a pregame press conference on Friday to address questions from the media with regard to Glen Davis injury. Davis broke a bone in his hand when he was horsing around with his longtime friend from childhood days after a night out in the Boston suburbs. Davis will miss a significant portion of playing time to allow the injury to heal but the Celtics announced that he will not be suspended from the team. Davis was fined and reprimanded by the team's ownership and GM, Danny Ainge, who called the incident "stupid." Ainge, however, showed support to his young player and vowed to "move forward" while Davis told media he "would learn" from the situation. Here is the NBA TV coverage of the pregame press conference:

***

Regarding the Glen Davis situation, Boston Globe columnist had a pretty interesting take on it and he reminded Celtics fans of the days gone by:

"Big Baby got into a fight with a friend at 4 a.m., broke his thumb, and won’t be able to play until at least December. He is young and foolish and he hurt the team. The Celtics owners are mad at him. Fans are mad at him. It’s not a good situation. But let’s not throw Big Baby out with the bathwater. This stuff is as old as dirt. Young athletes have been doing goofy things at odd hours since before the days of the original Big Baby, George Herman Ruth. It even happened to Larry Bird. That’s right. Larry Bird. On the night of May 16, 1985, in the middle of the Eastern Conference finals between the Celtics and Sixers, Bird was involved in a scuffle that started at a now-defunct bar called Chelsea’s and spilled out to the corner of State Street and Merchant’s Row. After the altercation, Mike Harlow, a bartender/former Colgate football player, claimed he was sucker-punched by Bird. Nick Harris, a man who was with Bird and Quinn Buckner on the night of the incident, was treated at Massachusetts General Hospital’s emergency room that night. There was a lawsuit and a settlement. The Celtics told Bird to stay away from Harris. None of the parties ever talked about it. Ever."

***

Just call him... BatMan

San Antonio Spurs guard Manu Ginobili, who led his native Argentina men's basketball team to victory at the 2004 Olympics Games, is now the protector of good vs. evil as he snatched a bat from mid-air and stopped a short delay during his team's game at the AT&T Center in Texas.

Here's the AP story and the tale of the tape:

SAN ANTONIO (AP)--The Spurs' Manu Ginobili showed off his quick hands-- capturing a bat.

"That was amazing," teammate Tony Parker said after the San Antonio Spurs beat the Sacramento Kings 113-94 on Saturday night. "The legend continues with Manu. Unbelievable. ... He's always doing crazy stuff."

Late in the first period a bat swooped into the AT&T Center and descended onto the court. Players scattered and officials stopped play. The bat circled and left only to return--briefly.

That's when Ginobili performed his Halloween trick, swatting the bat out of the air with a bare hand. He then carried the creature off the court to thunderous cheers.

As the theme song to "Batman" played, a few Sacramento players applauded, too. A trainer emerged to squirt sanitizer on Ginobilil's hand. "When you can't dunk anymore, you have to find a way to make it into the news," Ginobili said. "So that's what I did. I grabbed a bat. I didn't think it was a big deal."

On the court, Parker led the Spurs with 24 points and seven assists, and Ginobili scored 13 points in a reserve role. He ended the first period with a driving layup at the buzzer. Richard Jefferson added 21 points for San Antonio. San Antonio beat Sacramento 113-94.

The only performance anyone wanted to talk about was Ginobili's.

***

Don't Put that Letter Aside ...

noreply@blogger.com (Terry Lyons) — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 12:06:00 +0000

Price of a stamp = .41

Price of Paper = .02

Minimum Wage in Wisconsin = $7.25

Judgement in lawsuit vs. Pepsi = $1.26 Billion

Legal System = Priceless

An interesting story today from the National Law Journal via Yahoo. It caught my attention and I thought I would pass it along:

from:

Price to PepsiCo for Not Being in Court: $1.26 Billion

What's the cost of not showing up to court? For PepsiCo Inc., it's a $1.26 billion default judgment. A Wisconsin state court socked the company with the monster award in a case alleging that PepsiCo stole the idea to bottle and sell purified water from two Wisconsin men.

Now the company is scrambling to salvage the situation. The damages award was handed down on Sept. 30. PepsiCo filed motions to vacate the order and dismiss the claims on Oct. 13, saying it wasn't even aware of the lawsuit until Oct. 6.

The litigation began in April when Charles Joyce and James Voigt sued the soft drink maker and two of its distributors, alleging they had misappropriated trade secrets from confidential discussions the plaintiffs had with the distributors in 1981 about selling purified water. The information was illicitly passed to PepsiCo, which used it to develop and sell Aquafina bottled water, the plaintiffs allege in the case filed in the Circuit Court of Jefferson County before Judge Jacqueline Erwin.

In court documents, PepsiCo argues it was improperly served with the Wisconsin lawsuit in North Carolina, but also asks the court to excuse the corporate bureaucracy that buried a legal document for weeks. While plaintiffs say they served the lawsuit in June on PepsiCo's registered agent in North Carolina, where the company is incorporated, PepsiCo says its law department at the company's Purchase, N.Y.-based headquarters was not notified until September.

"The bottom line is there was a defect in the process for us, but also for" the plaintiffs, said PepsiCo spokesman Joe Jacuzzi, who called the case "highly dubious."

Robert Roth, a lawyer for PepsiCo at Menomonee, Wis.-based Niebler, Pyzyk, Roth & Carrig, couldn't be reached for comment. Another lawyer for PepsiCo, Dean Panos, a partner at Chicago-based Jenner & Block, declined to comment.

In court papers, PepsiCo claims it first received a legal document related to the case from the North Carolina agent on Sept. 15 when a copy of a co-defendant's letter was forwarded to Deputy General Counsel Tom Tamoney in PepsiCo's law department. Tamoney's secretary, Kathy Henry, put the letter aside and didn't tell anyone about it because she was "so busy preparing for a board meeting," PepsiCo said in its Oct. 13 motion to vacate.

When Henry received a forwarded copy of the plaintiff's motion for default judgment on Oct. 5, she sent that to Yvonne Mazza, a legal assistant for Aquafina matters. Remembering that she still had the other document, Henry passed it to Mazza too. The next day Mazza sent the documents to David Wexler, a department attorney, and he "immediately" called the agent to get a copy of the complaint.

Lawyers for PepsiCo distributors Wis-Pak Inc. and Carolina Canners Inc. made court appearances in June and July. PepsiCo was at a loss to explain why it hadn't heard about the case from them. "It's just another unfortunate thing that didn't come together," Jacuzzi said.

In seeking to dismiss the case, PepsiCo argues that the statute of limitations should preclude the lawsuit, brought 15 years after the company started selling Aquafina and more than two decades after the alleged confidential talks. Moreover, "the $1.26 billion judgment that has been entered is unprecedented in size and justice requires that PepsiCo have a chance to defend itself," the company said.

The lead plaintiffs lawyer, David Van Dyke of Chicago-based Cassiday Schade, said Wisconsin courts have been "pretty clear that they don't like" vacating default judgments. "There is a possibly that a judge may say we're going to litigate the damages aspect of it," Van Dyke said.

A hearing is scheduled for Nov. 6.

Doing Anything for WS tickets?

noreply@blogger.com (Terry Lyons) — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 12:03:00 +0000

AP Report and Phila TV - FOX29:

"I didn't do anything wrong, so I'm not embarrassed about my actions. I'm embarrassed about how I was arrested," Susan Finkelstein told The Associated Press in a phone interview Wednesday, a day after meeting at a suburban bar with an undercover police officer responding to an ad on Craigslist.

Finkelstein's lawyer said his client is merely "a nice lady overcome with Phillies fever."

She might have dropped double entendres in her Craigslist ad but never explicitly offered sex, her lawyer William J. Brennan said.

The 43-year-old University of Pennsylvania graduate student wanted to take her husband to a game between her beloved Philadelphia Phillies and the New York Yankees. The self-described "buxom blonde" said she was simply trying to score tickets online, as she had in the past.

Over a few beers at a suburban bar, she told a police officer she needed two tickets, one for herself and one for her husband. No price had been discussed, and Finkelstein and her lawyer stopped short of recounting specifics of what was said before several officers sitting at a nearby table came to arrest her.

Brennan hopes to get the misdemeanor charge of promoting prostitution dismissed.

"If somebody read into that posting a sexual connotation, that's on them. There's no overt sexual reference," Brennan said.

Finkelstein told WPVI-TV she was looking to get a deal on tickets.

"I was hoping to get cheap tickets," she said, "maybe meet someone, and talk, and bat my eyelashes and maybe get some tickets."

Finkelstein faces a preliminary hearing in Bucks County on Dec. 3. On the bright side, she's been offered a pair of tickets to a weekend game in Philadelphia, courtesy of a radio station and car dealer.

"It definitely wasn't worth all this ... turmoil and anxiety," she told the AP with her lawyer and husband, 56-year-old John LaVoy, on the line. "Hopefully, the silver lining is I do get to see the game."

She is not worried about the notoriety that might follow her to the stadium in the wake of national news coverage of her arrest.

"I think most people will be focused on the game," Finkelstein said.

This just in from Philly:

Happy Opening Night from the NYT?

noreply@blogger.com (Terry Lyons) — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 16:45:00 +0000

I saw this piece in today's NYT Op-Ed section and just had to bring it up to the surface. It's a pretty interesting take on the NBA and its age limitations for those 0-18 years of age, wouldn't you say?

Well, upon further review, I offer a very different opinion.

The article is the most poorly written, poorly researched NYT piece since the Alan Schwarz botch-job on some Penn business student's hallucinations about NBA officiating. And, on the opening night of the NBA regular season, I am surprised that the NYT dedicated an inch of valuable Op-Ed space to the garble below. If it had any relevance at all, which it doesn't, wouldn't it be more appropriate to run it when the NCAA season was winding down in April or, maybe in June, when the NBA Draft was coming about?

Regardless, I thought I would point out (see the italicized paragraphs below) a few passages in the column and make note of the inaccurate assumptions Mr Bissinger has put forth while I also underline the ridiculous request(s) tossed toward the NCAA, NBA Commissioner David Stern and his league.

First. The distinguished professor of law from Vermont should stick to pontificating on the Frost Heaves rather than real, global pro basketball or football leagues. I ask this? Why should one professional basketball league that is based in the United States operate differently than the thousands of leagues operating globally? And, just because a High School player or his reps and family decided to put his name in the draft, why does that automatically qualify him as an NBA prospect?

The premise of measuring the success or failure of players, based on whether they hit superstar level in the greatest basketball league in the world should not be the barometer. I ask you, is success for every music student at Berklee or Julliard measured by whether they become multi-platinum entertainment artists who tour the world with the best classical music or rock/pop/country music acts?

Then why is that standard put up against NBA players and why is crime even mentioned in the same paragraph? Do they also measure and compare the employment history, hiring practices and crime rates for young writers, musicians, artists, bankers or government workers? Wouldn't that be a better point of comparison rather than just arbitrarily tossing out nonsensical facts and figures from some law professor? How can the NYT even think of printing such a random and irrelevant statistic?

To further illustrate my point, I ask Mr. Bissinger and Prof. McCann to go back to the drawing board and provide some back-up statistics on a 'reported' figure of 60-percent of NBA players "going broke" and give us some insight into how that number was obtained and determined? Then, after they have that ironed out, I might ask them to compare it against the general population of employed workers, educators/teachers/professors, restaurant owners, insurance agents, civil service workers or politicians. Get back to me on that, eh guys?

Now, my last take on this poorly written and poorly researched story -- maybe we can just tag it as a ridiculous article -- is the notion that David Stern has any influence over the policy-makers at the NCAA and the ill conceived notion that the NCAA has a say in the business matters and collective bargaining agreement of the National Basketball Association and its players association or the NFL and its players union? Buzz, my boy, are you for real? You are living in La-la land if you think the NCAA rules are going to change because of some chatter by David Stern?

And, with many an NCAA football and basketball program pocketing multi-six-figure profits from TV deals and gate receipts, not to mention licensing revenue, why - on earth - should two American-based pro leagues be asked to pay for the training of collegiate athletes? Should the ACB in Spain chip in too?

Cmon? Get real.

Bring Back Basketball’s Little Big Men

By BUZZ BISSINGER

As one of the few fans still starry-eyed and silly enough to believe that some sliver of integrity remained in Sportsworld, I applauded David Stern, the commissioner of the National Basketball Association, in 2005 when he engineered a ban on players entering the league’s draft directly out of high school. I assumed that teenagers, no matter how great their potential, were far too young to make the transition to the pros, their baby-faced awkwardness palpable and painful to witness.

Yes, there was LeBron James, whose entrance into the league in 2003 from his high school in Akron was seamless. But for every James, I figured, there have been all too many who had terribly stumbled. (Disclosure: I co-wrote a book with James about his high-school career.)

So I was pleased that, as part of a new collective bargaining agreement with the players’ union, rules were established requiring American players to be at least a year removed from high school and a minimum of 19 to be eligible for the N.B.A. draft. This meant that young superstars would generally go to college, at least for one year. Beyond simply advancing their skills, I thought, it might turn them on to the value of an education, maybe enough to stay in school longer.

Now, with another N.B.A. regular season beginning today, the issue still rages, with ramifications that go directly to the heart of whether any professional sports league has actual concern for its athletes beyond a smokescreen of clever spin. And in looking back at Stern’s decision, I am now convinced that we got punked.

Stern, to his credit, said that it was a business decision to give players another year of development before being drafted. But it also sounded like genuine altruism on his part when he said that it was time to get N.B.A. scouts and general managers out of high school gyms. This effort to insulate teenagers from scouts seemed particularly necessary for professional basketball, in which players, regardless of age, seem even more removed from the real world than athletes in other sports.

Perhaps this was a way for Stern to start to come to grips with the reported statistic that close to 60 percent of N.B.A. players ultimately go broke. Or to help rectify what a professional agent once told me: that some players, after suddenly coming into money and buying houses and cars for themselves and their family and their posse, were still so naïve about life that they had no idea there was something called income tax. Maybe Stern was actually embarrassed by the paucity of college graduates in the N.B.A., about 20 percent. But I should have known better.

The honest move by Stern would have been to keep the old rule in place. Raising the age actually flew in the face of statistics showing that drafted high school players were relatively successful on and off the court. Did anyone truly believe that sending them off to college for a year would make any real difference, emotionally or academically?

Stern raised the age in large part because N.B.A. owners and general managers resented the amount of time it took to train players straight out of high school. He did it because owners did not like the possibility of players becoming free agents, able to join any other team in the league, in their early 20s. My guess is that he also did it to appease the National Collegiate Athletic Association; you could hear the whining that the N.B.A.’s version of cradle-robbing was denying the college game great players who could sell out arenas.

There are disaster stories of players entering the draft from high school and failing spectacularly. But as tragic as the stories are, they are an exception. A study by Michael McCann, a professor at Vermont Law School who is an expert on sports and legal issues, pointed out that of the 21 high school players who declared for the draft from 1975 to 2001, four became superstars — Kevin Garnett, Kobe Bryant, Jermaine O’Neal and Tracy McGrady — and only four never made it to the N.B.A. This trend held with the high school draft classes of 2002 through 2005, the year the ban was put in place: of the 26 players drafted, 20 were still playing through last season and three have become superstars: Amar’e Stoudemire, Dwight Howard and James.

The frequent argument that players drafted straight from high school are more prone to quickly get into trouble because of their age has also proved wrong. According to a study by McCann in 2005 of the most recent 84 arrests of pro players, more than half the arrestees had spent four years on a university campus but only 4.8 percent never went to college (even though players without any college experience made up 8.3 percent of the league population).

As for high school students not being ready for the pro game, Jon Nichols of the Web site Basketball-Statistics.com crunched the numbers for the years 1996 to 2006 and discovered that players drafted out of high school had better efficiency ratings — a measure of overall play based on a player’s points scored, rebounds, steals, turnovers, fouls, shooting percentage and other statistics — during their rookie seasons than players drafted as college juniors and seniors.

One thing is clear: raising the minimum age to 19 hasn’t helped the players in any way. Superstars may go to college for a year, but for most it has nothing to do with getting an education. As the legendary coach Bobby Knight has pointed out, these players can retain their first year’s college eligibility without ever going to a class after their first semester.

Perhaps the greatest paradox is that some superstars actually do get turned on to the importance of college, but only after they have already left for the N.B.A. Shaquille O’Neal got his degree from Louisiana State eight years after leaving it; the former New York Knicks Larry Johnson and Allan Houston also eventually got diplomas. But when you are faced with a season that can go as long as eight months, fitting in school work is a precarious juggling act.

In professional football, the general requirement is that an athlete be three years removed from his high school graduation date. That may sound more caring than the N.B.A. rule, but it’s actually pragmatic: football players need those years to develop physically for the pros. If enough of them had bodies mature enough to make the transition straight out of high school, the N.F.L. would likely change its rules in a second.

Now Commissioner Stern says he wants to push the N.B.A. age limit up to 20; once again, don’t be fooled. Such a change would mean that superstar players get two years in college to further sharpen their skills. That would certainly make the N.C.A.A. happier as well as the N.B.A. owners who reap the benefits of a free farm system.

But the right decision would be to abolish the N.B.A. age limit. Equally important, professional sports leagues and the N.C.A.A. should stop jumping into the same Jacuzzi together, turning the idea of “student-athletes” into a farce, padding university coffers and keeping the pro owners from having to pay for the grooming of young talent.

If David Stern truly cared about his players’ well-being, he would advocate that all the silliness over the sanctity of the college academic experience stop and that N.B.A.-bound players get some share of the millions of dollars they generate: in the greatest capitalistic society in the history of the world, this may be the greatest inequity.

And if the N.C.A.A. truly cared about improving colleges instead of settling for the extra year before eligibility that Stern is talking about, it should use its considerable influence to demand that both the N.B.A. and N.F.L. foot the college’s bill for training pro athletes by paying a given amount each year for each player successfully drafted from college. The money would go into a fund for academic scholarships at the colleges these players attended. It wouldn’t perhaps turn young superstars into student-athletes, but in today’s hideous economic times, it might turn some deserving teenagers into students.

Buzz Bissinger is the author of “Friday Night Lights” and the co-author, with LeBron James, of “Shooting Stars.”

Mayor Menino Speak or maybe...,,,mmissspeak...

noreply@blogger.com (Terry Lyons) — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 12:06:00 +0000

This from the Boston Herald - Howie Carr column:

Mayor Mumbles Menino’s final debate, and he hit the ball out of the park, just like Ted Williams’ last at-bat in Fenway in 1960.

Let’s go straight to the audio cuts from the last mayoral debate the other night. If you doubt my stenography, please play the associated audio for yourself.

My own personal favorite came when Mumbles was bragging to the TV audience about how well he manages the city of Boston. Even outside groups (or somebody) agree:

“They say Boston, you know how to manage your finances. We’ve done a good job of it with diminishing returns.”

Now that’s worthy of Norm Crosby, or at least the Bowery Boys. Moving along, let’s talk about the lack of people of color in your administration, Mayor.

“You know I just lost one of my administrations to the Obama administration.”

Next topic, development policy in the city. Any thoughts, Mumbles? “We have a zoning plan on the uh outer bounds of uh the Greenway to put some plans together in the kether.”

You can’t make this stuff up folks. No, I just keep playing back the tapes, again and again, so that you don’t have to.

“Matter-a fact the city was in Boston just today.”

Education. You’ve already heard the cut where Mumbles says that on the public schools, he gives himself a grade of “maybe a B+, no a B. I give myself a B, I’ll be generous.”

But wait, there’s more.

“We have schools who need improvement.” Not schools THAT need improvement, but schools WHO need improvement.

Fortunately, Mumbles’ programs are already in place, and they have outside backing.

“Some of the found-ocean folks who support that program...”

Perhaps you hadn’t heard that the Atlantic Ocean had been lost. But now it’s found, by the found-ocean folks.

“I just want to say that uh we as a city continue - also, SATs - we have three programs in the city of Boston - SATs that work at our library in the city of Boston... We’re gonna improve the underperforming schools in our city to raise the level those schools are not performing.”

Did you know that ex-cons have problems getting certain jobs because employers have access to their CORI records? You probably didn’t consider that a problem. But Mumbles says it is, and he’s going to do something about it.

“You know CORI reform? I’ve signed, I’se formed, uh, I filed legislation on CORI reform...I believe we’ll get some CORI reform this year in the Legislature. It’s oooooong overdue.”

Not long overdue. It’s oooooong overdue. Go ahead, fact-check me on these sound cuts. I double-dare you. What about the charges of corruption at City Hall, Mumbles? Flats Flaherty mentioned the toxic words “pay-to-play.”

“We’ve had at any corruption issues over the last several years that become to my administration.”

And finally, the Boston Redevelopment Authority.

“BRA was both the only agency both in state and federal who stepped up to plate to help Chicago - uh Cambridge Biomedical.”

Next stop, election night, Nov. 3. Mumbles and his minions, together in the kether, for a victory celebration. A victory celebration that is oooooooong overdue.

R.I.P. Here's to - The Big Whistle in the Sky

noreply@blogger.com (Terry Lyons) — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 22:27:00 +0000

The heavenly hockey games will now have a very good ref or a helluva TV commentor.

I just heard about the passing of Bill "The Big Whistle" Chadwick, one of the greats who taught us the game of hockey.

The Big Whistle came up with one of my all-time favorite hockey sayings when he was describing inept NYR center Gene Carr, once a promising Rangers prospect who became the punch-line to may a joke. Well, Chadwick once said:

"Well, Jim, he couldn't put the puck in the ocean if he were standing on the pier."

Other included, "Jim, they're skating in sand! Or, "Jim, I think they're playing this game on a hill."

As the NY Islander and NY Rangers rivalry intensified in the mid-1970s, The Big Whistle would often coach the NYR players, especially a big, burly defenseman who had one hell of a shot, but could never find the net vs. The Isles.

"Shoot the puck, Barry, shoot the puck!” said Chadwick on many a Sunday night when defenseman Barry Beck would opt to pass up a good slapshot and send a pass cross-ice, along the blue line where it was often fumbled by the likes of Carol Vadnais, Larry Sachuruk or some other chump. Chadwick's commentary on Beck would then be followed by, “Jim, that guy handles the puck like a cow handles a gun."

Of course, the "Jim" was Jim Gordon, who was one of the great voices of New York Ch 9 sports - long before the MSG Network and Cable TV took over the broadcasts.

Here is NYR PR man John Halligan's column from the NYR website:

'The Big Whistle' passes away at age 94

Hall of Fame referee was Rangers broadcaster for 14 years from 1967-1981

Saturday, 10.24.2009

Bill “The Big Whistle” Chadwick, who will forever be remembered by Rangers fans for the 14 seasons he spent as a radio and television color commentator, passed away on Saturday, just two weeks after turning 94 years old. Chadwick had been in declining health for a number of years and died while in hospice care.

Bill Chadwick

A Hockey Hall of Famer for his 16 years as the first American-born NHL official, the native New Yorker Chadwick was already known as one of the greatest referees in hockey history when he first began working alongside Marv Albert on Rangers radio broadcasts for the 1967-68 season. He remained on the radio for the next five years before jumping over to WWOR-TV (Channel 9) prior to the start of the 1972-73 season.

If there were two voices that defined Rangers hockey of the 1970s, they were Chadwick and play-by-play man Jim Gordon, who passed away in February 2003 at the age of 76. Working in tandem, they called more than 650 regular-season and playoff games, and were right there when the Blueshirts went all the way to the 1979 Stanley Cup Finals.

First nicknamed “The Big Whistle” by Rangers statistician Arthur Friedman in 1969, Chadwick had begun his hockey career as an amateur player in the old Metropolitan League before earning a spot on the New York Rovers -- a Rangers-sponsored amateur club of the Eastern League -- in the mid-1930s. Sidelined by an injury to his left eye, he switched to officiating and reached the NHL as a linesman for the 1939-40 season.

Just before he turned 25, Chadwick was promoted to the role of full-time NHL referee, and he worked in that capacity from 1940 to 1955. During that time, he became the first ref to use hand signals so that fans in the stands would know what type of penalty was being called -- a practice that continues to this day.

One of the things that made Chadwick’s success as a referee remarkable was that he was legally blind in his right eye as a result of an injury suffered while playing for a Met League All-Star team at Madison Square Garden in 1935. He did not publicize his vision problems during his officiating career, but whenever fans or players that he was blind, he was known to yell back that they were “only 50 percent right.”

In 1964, nine years after his retirement, Chadwick was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in the Referees/Linseman category. Ten years after that, he would become the first referee ever inducted into the United States Hockey Hall of Fame.

At the age of 51, Chadwick was urged by Rangers coach and general manager Emile Francis to pursue a second hockey career in broadcasting. He began his radio duties alongside Albert, but it wasn’t until he arrived on television five years later that Chadwick’s voice became synonymous with Rangers hockey to fans in New York.

“Bill was a natural for broadcasting even though he wasn’t formally trained in it,” said Francis. “He and Jim Gordon got more mail than some of our players."

Chadwick truly put the “color” in the role of color commentator. Outspoken and opinionated, he was never afraid to say what was on his mind, even during the course of a game. His somewhat unlikely pairing with Gordon was magical, since Gordon often found himself having to keep Chadwick in check, and their banter became a kind of entertainment in itself for fans watching the Rangers on TV.

For example, Chadwick once criticized Rangers center Gene Carr, saying Carr “couldn't put the puck in the ocean.” Carr was later traded to the California Golden Seals and scored a goal against the Blueshirts in a game at Oakland that Chadwick was calling.

"I thought you said Carr couldn't put the puck in the ocean," Gordon said during the broadcast.

"Well," Chadwick responded, "it's a bigger ocean out here."

Chadwick connected with Rangers fans like few broadcasters could because he was one of them. Born in Manhattan, he grew up in the city and spoke with a distinct New York accent. He had first embraced the team as a boy, when the Rangers were a new NHL team. He wore his passion on his sleeve, and it was clear that he spoke for the folks watching at home when he questioned an official’s call or even encouraged one of the players as if he were sitting in the stands, rather than the broadcast booth.

One of Chadwick’s most memorable catch-phrases evolved during his final two seasons as a broadcaster, after defenseman Barry Beck joined the Rangers. Frustrated by Beck’s seeming desire to pile up assists as the expense of possible goals, Chadwick began emphatically saying “Shoot the puck, Barry!” during broadcasts. The sudden, repeated urging struck a chord with fans, who began chanting it at The Garden whenever Beck got the puck at the point during a power play.

Chadwick’s outspoken nature and willingness to criticize players on the air might have been one reason he was asked to yield his position in the booth to a recently-retired Phil Esposito in 1981. Chadwick remained with the Rangers for one season as a special-assignment reporter before retiring from broadcasting at the age of 66.

Retaining his ties to the Rangers, Chadwick joined former Blueshirts star Steve Vickers and former public-relations executive John Halligan to organize the first Rangers Golf Classic to benefit the Rangers Alumni Association in 1983.

Chadwick also remained opinionated well into his later years and was no fan of the league’s current two-referee system.

"Look at the game today, it's too damned crowded out there," Chadwick told a reporter in 2002. "You got two linesmen, you got two referees. And they're not getting any better officiating. They're not getting any even officiating. No two men in the world think alike at the same time. And you get a game that's refereed tightly on one end, and loosely on the other. I just don't understand it.”

Chadwick was pre-deceased by his wife Millie. In addition to his son Bill of Malibu, Calif., Chadwick is survived by five grand-children, Arielle, Chelsea, and Kylie Chadwick, all of Malibu, Jessica Andrews of Highlands Ranch, Colo., and Matthew Kolon of Bejing, China; four great grandchildren; and his long-time companion Joan Langemyr of Cutchogue, N.Y.

***

Monday Morning Maniac Music

noreply@blogger.com (Terry Lyons) — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 09:05:00 +0000

U2 played to a global audience via the webcast from the Rose Bowl last night which is being rebroadcast as you read this, I am sure. So, a fond memory of the band. Here's U2 and Bruce. Say No More:

Ramble On ... Catching Up on Some Notes

noreply@blogger.com (Terry Lyons) — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 13:37:00 +0000

I have a million things all squirreled up in the reporter's notebook of my mind. I thought I'd empty the trash today. Let me know what you think, please?

Yes, with tongue planted firmly in cheek, I wonder if NY Congressman Peter King (R-Seaford, Long Island) is asking NBA Commissioner David Stern why Maccabi Tel Aviv Coach Pini Gershon was "giving the business to the NBA, its replacement officials and New York Knicks?

Or, better yet, maybe the governments of the rest of the world should be asking Rep. Peter King why the rest of the world should do business with the US of A as the likes of Lehman Bros., Goldman Sachs and chumps like Bernie Madoff (Queens) were responsible for the global financial crisis. Also, the most recent financial meltdown-man - Sri Lanka's Raj Rajaretnam --was holed up in some Manhattan penthouse when he brought down Galleon Group, the hedge fund failed flavour of the day. The WSJ has the story.

***

I know you've come to expect the unexpected while being thoroughly informed of newsworthy tidbits and current events by reading The Blog @ TerryLyons dot com, so here's something new and completely different, as Monty Python's Flying Circus used to say. Tell me? You haven't lived a complete life unless you've witnessed the World Conker Championships. Read on: click here

***

I like to watch George Stephanopoulos on This Week on ABC News and I regularly log into his blog and have his twitter/tweets on my Blackberry. That's a full dose of George. Here's what he informed me about earlier this week:

It’s not quite the Nobel Peace Prize, but Japanese college students have awarded President Obama something a bit more hip: a place in their vernacular.
Jim Fallows points to reports that a new verb is popping up in Japanese college students’ conversations: obamu (literally “to Obama”).
One blog in Japan offers a definition:
obamu: (v.) To ignore inexpedient and inconvenient facts or realities, think “Yes we can, Yes we can,” and proceed with optimism using those facts as an inspiration (literally, as fuel). It is used to elicit success in a personal endeavor. One explanation holds that it is the opposite of kobamu. (which means to refuse, reject, or oppose).

***

My fave Boston Bruins player Milan Lucic is out for the count. It will be a long four-to-six weeks. Here's what the Globe ran on Tuesday, a day after Lucic had surgery.

Bruins general manager Peter Chiarelli announced earlier this afternoon that forward Milan Lucic underwent surgery yesterday on his right index finger, which was broken in the second period of Friday’s 3-0 win over Dallas.

“He’ll be out four to six weeks,” Chiarelli said, following the team’s morning practice at Riscuccia Arena in Wilmington.

Yesterday, the right winger was placed on long-term injured reserve, which means he must now miss at least 10 games and 24 calendar days. In his absence, the Bruins recalled Brad Marchand and Vladimir Sobotka from Providence. Guillaume Lefebvre, who played in the P-Bruins’ 7-2 win over Portland last night and was recalled as an emergency backup Saturday, was also brought back up.

"Any time you lose a guy like Looch, one of those players that usually has a pretty good impact on the game when he's on top of it, it's certainly going to hurt," coach Claude Julien said.

***

Plastics? In the movie, The Graduate, Dustin Hoffman was told by a friend of the family that the newest technology that was the secret to his success was 'plastics,' I will now predict that the secret to financial security and success in 2010+ will be "Bluetooth."

SEATTLE (AP) — Starting in mid-2010, new versions of gadgets like cameras, cellphones and computers will be able to talk to each other using Wi-Fi without needing to connect to a wireless network first.

The Wi-Fi Alliance, an industry group, said it is nearly finished putting together a Wi-Fi Direct specification, a set of technical “rules” that guide consumer electronics companies that plan to add the new capability.

Kelly Davis-Felner, the Wi-Fi Alliance’s marketing director, said Wi-Fi Direct will make it easier to liberate the mounting gigabytes of digital family photos that are trapped in cameras, smartphones or PCs. Now those gadgets will be able to connect directly to digital photo frames, TVs or printers.

In creating the specification, the Alliance is moving into the territory of Bluetooth, a competing wireless technology that already handles direct gadget-to-gadget connections.

Bluetooth uses less power but has much shorter range and a lower transfer speed. To tackle the latter problem, the industry group behind Bluetooth announced last year that it would co-opt Wi-Fi technology to make it possible to send videos and other bandwidth-hogging files around the house, much as Wi-Fi Direct promises to do.
Only one of the gadgets need have the new Wi-Fi Direct technology to make a two-way connection work.

In one scenario, you could connect a smartphone with Wi-Fi Direct to a laptop and piggyback on its wired Internet connection for a quick e-mail check without tapping your phone’s data plan.

Terry Lyons Sports Marketing and Communications LLC has a deal with Ace Marketing & Promotions of NY to market Proximity Marketing and other solutions of which Bluetooth technology will play a major role.

***

Booby-Booby, Say It Ain't So...

noreply@blogger.com (Terry Lyons) — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 01:28:00 +0000

Soupy Sales, Dead at 83.

Oh no. This was such a cool show.

See the LA Times obit..

Soupy Sales dies at 83; slapstick comic had hit TV show in 1960s

The comedian acquired a cult-like following among adults with a show ostensibly meant for children. His signature routine, which he elevated to an art form, was pie-throwing.

By Elaine Woo

October 23, 2009

Soupy Sales, a comic with a gift for slapstick who attained cult-like popularity in the 1960s with a pie-throwing routine that became his signature, has died. He was 83.

Sales had numerous ailments and died Thursday at Calvary Hospital in the Bronx, said Kathy O'Connell, a longtime friend.

As the star of "The Soupy Sales Show," he performed live on television for 13 years in Detroit, Los Angeles and New York before the program went into syndication in the United States and abroad.

Ostensibly for children, the show had broad appeal among adults who found Sales' puns, gags and pratfalls deliciously corny and camp. His cast consisted of goofy puppets with names like White Fang, Black Tooth and Pookie, and a host of off-camera characters, including the infamous naked girl.

The high point of every show came when a sidekick launched a pie into Sales' face. Sales once estimated that he was hit by more than 25,000 pies in his lifetime.

The gag became more than hilarious; it evolved into a hip badge of honor. Frank Sinatra was first in a long line of celebrities who clamored for the privilege to be cream-faced, including Tony Curtis, Mickey Rooney, Sammy Davis Jr., Dick Martin and Burt Lancaster.

"I've never done a pretentious show; it's always had a live feeling, the kind of thing that comes across when you don't know what's going to happen next," Sales told author Gary Grossman in the 1981 book "Saturday Morning TV." "I've never done anything simply because I thought I could get away with it. I've just wanted to do the funniest show."

The possibility of humor dogged Sales from the start. He was born Milton Supman on Jan. 28, 1926, in the North Carolina backwater of Franklinton. The Supmans were the only Jews in town. Sales' father ran a dry goods store that sold sheets to the Ku Klux Klan.

The family name was often mispronounced as "Soupman." To make matters worse, his parents, who had nicknamed his brothers "Hambone" and "Chickenbone," dubbed him "Soupbone." Eventually, Milton became just Soupy.

His father died when he was 5, prompting a move to Huntington, W.Va. Sales acted in school plays and in high school was voted most popular boy.

World War II did not dampen his showbiz ambitions. He fought in the Pacific theater in the Navy and participated in the invasion of Okinawa but managed to entertain crew mates with routines broadcast on the ship's PA system.

After his discharge, Sales returned to West Virginia and enrolled in Marshall College as a journalism major, earning a bachelor's degree in 1949. He went to work for a radio station in Huntington as a scriptwriter. At night he did stand-up in nightclubs. Soon he became a disc jockey.

In the early 1950s he moved to Ohio, where a Cleveland station manager gave him the professional name of Soupy Hines. That was nixed in Detroit, where his new station manager thought Hines would be confused with an advertiser, the Heinz soup line. Thus was Soupy Sales born.

In 1953, Sales launched a daily live children's show on Detroit's WXYZ-TV, called "Soupy Sales Comics." The show caught on, causing the station to give him a nighttime slot for "Soupy's On." Sales created characters such as Wyatt Burp, a belch-prone sheriff, and Calypso King Harry Bella, a crazy-eyed South American with a mop top.

In 1955, the show was picked up by ABC as a summer replacement for "Kukla, Fran and Ollie" and renamed "The Soupy Sales Show." Its star soon became Detroit's top-rated daytime television personality.

Sales was joined by White Fang, "the meanest dog in the United States," and Black Tooth, "the nicest dog in the United States," of whom all that viewers saw were giant paws. Other characters included his irrepressible girlfriend, Peaches, the vivacious Marilyn Monwolf, and a bloodthirsty neighbor, the Count, who touted an album titled "Love in Vein."

Every show featured a segment called Words of Wisdom, an opportunity to offer silly sayings such as "Be true to your teeth and they won't be false to you."

The highlight of each show, of course, was the pie-throwing, which Sales elevated to an art.

Sales took his first pie in the face in 1950 when he played an Indian in a spoof of the James Stewart movie "Broken Arrow." That pie was real. Later, he would switch to shaving-cream pies. But he swore that the secret of a good pie was the crust: If it stuck to the face, it was, in Sales' opinion, no good.

"A pie has to hit you and explode into a thousand pieces," the expert explained, "so you see the person's face and see it take away his dignity."

By 1961, the face that launched several thousand pies in Detroit began to dominate local TV in Los Angeles. Critics were unkind, calling the show "a mishmash of mediocrity" that was meant for "kids with low IQs." But viewers lapped it up, making it the No. 1 local show by 1962. A survey at the time revealed that more than a third of Sales' fans consisted of adults. Some of them were hosting pie-lobbing parties in their basements.

One day, Sinatra called. "Hey, Soupy, it's Frank," he said. "I want to come on your show on one condition: I get hit with a pie." Sales was happy to fulfill the legendary crooner's wish.

The appearance by Sinatra stirred a stampede of stars hungry for the same humiliation. One night featured a triple-header: Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr. and Trini Lopez were all pied together.

In his evening show, Sales also featured jazz musicians including Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie and Duke Ellington. The Ken Burns jazz documentary included a clip from Sales' show.

Once, the crew played a joke on him by posing a naked woman in a stage door. When Sales opened the door, he gasped and feared his career was over, but the scene was never telecast.

For notoriety, nothing beat the show that aired New Year's Day 1965, when Sales was producing the program in New York. Told he had a minute to fill, the comic told the children watching on WNEW-TV to find their parents' wallets and "get all the green pieces of paper with the pictures of guys in beards" and mail them to him. In return, he said, he would send them "a postcard from Puerto Rico."

Sales had used the same joke in Detroit and Los Angeles. But this time, the prank elicited some $80,000 "in Monopoly money," as well as a complaint from a viewer filed with the FCC. Sales' show was suspended, prompting fans to swamp the station's switchboard with protest calls, mostly from high school and college students who demanded that their favorite television fare resume. Within a week, it did.

On a website devoted to the Sales show, a fan recalled that the first program after the New Year's episode opened with stock footage of dancing girls kicking up their heels and crowds cheering; the musical accompaniment was "Happy Days Are Here Again." "It was obvious to all of us that our beloved Soupy was unrepentant," the fan wrote, "and we repressed youths were behind him. I must dispute the thesis . . . that Froggy from 'Andy's Gang' was the cause of '60s rebelliousness. It was Soupy who inspired my generation to anarchy."

Sales called the episode "the most brilliant minute of ad-lib in television history because it proved how powerful the medium is."

Later that year he invented a dance called "The Mouse," a loony version of the Twist in which Sales bared his upper teeth, raised his hands to his ears and wiggled his fingers while chewing in time to the music. He performed it several times on "The Ed Sullivan Show," where he met dancer Trudy Carson. They were married in 1980.

When animation took over children's programming in the 1960s, personalities such as Shari Lewis and Sales began to lose their appeal. In 1966 his show was not renewed in New York and went into syndication. A new version was produced and syndicated in 1978-79.

During the next few decades, Sales starred in a short-lived Broadway comedy and became a regular panelist on the long-running TV game show "What's My Line?" He also was a featured performer in the musical variety show "Sha Na Na" from 1978 to 1981.

In the mid-1980s, he emceed a radio show on WNBC in New York, sandwiched between Don Imus and Howard Stern. He acted in several movies, notably in the role of Moses in the 1993 cult comedy " . . . And God Spoke."

He once acknowledged that his trademark pie routine hurt his career: "Producers say, 'Hey, all he does is throw pies.' It kept me off a lot of shows."

His authority in pie-tossing even landed him in court -- as an expert witness. In 1974 he was called to testify in the court-martial of a sailor accused of pitching a pie into an officer's face. Noted defense attorney William Smith enlisted Sales to tell how, after launching more than 19,000 creamy missiles, he had never been prosecuted for assault with a pie. Pie-hurling, Sales told the court, was "a harmless joke" designed to "relieve tensions and frustrations." He offered to perform at the Port Hueneme naval base Christmas show if the charges were dropped but was turned down. The sailor was found guilty.

Sales kept up club appearances through the 1990s, performing before audiences of baby boomers.

"A lot of people grew up watching me," he told The Times several years ago. "I'll probably be remembered for the pies, and that's all right. That's fine and dandy. I'm flattered."

He is survived by his wife of 29 years, Trudy Carson Sales; sons Tony and Hunt from a previous marriage; a brother; and four grandchildren.

elaine.woo@latimes.com

Tony P and W ... all on one $19 ticket

noreply@blogger.com (Terry Lyons) — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 04:28:00 +0000

Let's Get Motivated Texas!

C'mon Down!

Sometimes, the unintentional comedy meter goes right off the charts. This is one of those times.

The office of the POTUS is now reduced to a speaking gig at this type of motivational gala? God help us all.

Now add on Terry Bradshaw and Rudy Giuliani and you get a pocketful of folks who are just sure to stage a "motivational" gala and extravaganza!

PuH-LEEZE.

Tony, we thought we knew ye!? Your Dad grew up in Chicago, now.

You Like?

noreply@blogger.com (Terry Lyons) — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 23:54:00 +0000

Let me know what you think of this ad: