Blogules again?
Yes, a link dump is a cheap way of highlighting another date on that little calendar over to the left. I’m allowed to be cheap, though. So…
- New face #1 on the blogroll: Ben Wright, an Ottawan and Wake Forest alum who splits his stuff between Occasionally Wright for personal/political and The Net Files for sports (primarily hockey and ACC basketball). That seems like a reasonable solution to the whiplash I probably give some of you guys, careening from sports to travel to politics with nothing but <hr> tags for transitions.
- New face #2: Pete Holiday, Bama student and one of the evil geniuses behind Fanblogs.com. Welcome, guys.
- Yet another soccer book: Offside: Soccer and American Exceptionalism, by Andrei S. Markovits and Steven Hellerman. This one is considerably more academic than the previous two I mentioned, but the reward matches the effort required to read it. Certainly every four years we get a spate of big-media columns pontificating about why soccer hasn’t made it here; Markovits, a naturalized American citizen and professor at Michigan, decided to take a more systematic, sociological approach to this question. The result is not only a comparison of the superficial, modern-day aspects of the game with popular American sports, but a historical analysis of how the “Big Three-and-a-Half” got to their dominant position in American society (and what that position really means) versus how soccer blew its chance(s). Some post-read Googling also led me to his recent Harvard presentation on European anti-Americanism, which is also definitely worth the effort to read.
- And continuing on the political beat, what does President Bush’s Harvard Business School MBA really mean? Thomas Lifson, who both studied and taught there, addresses it in the American Thinker, a new Web journal. It’s a very good breakdown not only of what the MBA itself means (hint: you can’t just buy it with a name and money), but of how the writer believes Bush has applied what he learned toward his mission as President.
For my opinion on the Marcus Vick situation, scoot on over to Fanblogs for my initial story and yesterday’s followup. In short: I’m disgusted.
18 February 2004 / 0 Comments / Tags: politics, football