Random Thoughts

The following are some random thoughts that have come to me while getting over a stomach bug, proving once again that an idle mind is the devil's workshop:

TERRELL OWENS- It is indeed hard for the average person to pony up the first ounce of pity for the plight of the professional athlete in a team sport who demands that his contract be renegotiated. It is particularly difficult when the athlete in question is as narcissistic and has as few roots in reality as Philadelphia Eagles wide receiver Terrell Owens, who was quoted last week in the Miami Herald as saying:

" At the end of the day, I don't have to worry about what people think of me, whether they hate me or not. People hated on Jesus. They threw stones at him and tried to kill him, so can I complain or worry about what people think?"

I am no scholar, but try as I might, I don't recall a biblical account of the stoning of Jesus. And the historical record is clear in that the Romans did actually succeed in killing Jesus, albeit only temporarily, depending on your religious persuasion. But let us forget for the moment our inability to comprehend someone being unhappy with a contract that pays him 49 million dollars over 7 years. And let us try to overlook the hubris of a man who, intentionally or not, equates his business dispute with the agony of Christ.

The fact is, Owens has every right to take this action and to hold out of training camp if he feels so led. People often confuse business relations with moral obligations. And while there is certainly a moral element to the concept of living up to one's agreements, of equal dignity is the concept that implicit in every contract is the right to breach. This is Contracts 101.

Unlike Major League Baseball, the NFL has revenue sharing. This ensures that every team is awash with money from television and radio as well as from merchandising. This means that every NFL team is turning a healthy profit no matter how incompetently it is run ( read Phoenix Cardinals). Secondly, unlike the NBA, the NFL's owners are not madmen. Accordingly, there are no guaranteed contracts in the NFL. Or there are none that I know of. This means that teams can get rid of guys who underperform or get dinged up without having to eat their salary in perpetuity (read New York Knicks and Portland Trailblazers).

Both Owens and his agent, the equally reptilian Drew Rosenhaus know that he is an injury away from getting cut. And so, they are threatening to breach by "holding out." The Eagles, for their part, are threatening to sue to get the signing bonus back. These are all big boys here. And it says here at TMFW that Owens will go back as they are taking quite the PR hit. I mean, Rosenhaus is so obnoxious that he managed to save a little boy from drowning last week and still come across as a jerk.

Owens has every right to do what he is doing, even if you and I cannot comprehend it. I am not one to invoke pop theology, but since TO has brought it up: What would Jesus do?

I have no idea. But I would like to think that He would have a greater sense of perspective and that He would comport Himself with a lot more dignity than Owen and Rosenhaus have displayed thus far.

PROFESSIONAL TENNIS IS SUCH BULLSHIT- The US Open, will crank up here in about a month. I don't know if you have seen it yet, but the USTA has given nicknames to some of the players in its advertising. Really. Roger Federer is called "The Boss." Justine Henin-Hardenne they refer to as "The Comeback Kid." Andy Roddick is "The Rocket" and Venus Williams is "The Goddess." You can see for yourself at http://usopenseries/news/fullstory.sps?inewsid=194928 .

Why would the USTA adopt the subtle elegance of Pro Wrestling to hype its product?

Because nobody watches tennis anymore. At least not the men. The women are more interesting. They are , for the most part, easy on the eyes. Which I know should be an irrelevant consideration, but hey, I'm a guy. And the women all hate each other. This adds an aura of bitchiness that you just don't get with the guys.

Besides, the men are just boring. They, for the most part, rarely stray too far from the baseline. Assuming that the point gets past the first serve that is. The only serve and volleyers left are Great Britain's Tim Henman and USA's Taylor Dent whose main claim to fame is getting his ass kicked by Andre's 4 year old in that commercial. The rest of them approach the net as if it is radioactive. Where's the excitement in that?

I mean, I will watch the US Open because I used to be a player and I know how hard it is to play tennis at a certain level. That, and I know for a fact that Roger Federer may be the best player ever even if he is allergic to play at the net. And so, I will watch.

But there is no reason to make a BFD out of changing the color of the courts from green to blue. There's no reason to give the players these stupid nicknames (and by the way, there is only one Rocket and his last name is Laver) and there is no reason in this day and age why the women don't play 3 out of 5 just like the men.

No reason other than the fact that tennis is just bullshit. And that nobody much watches anymore.

HOCKEY IS BACK!-Who cares?

BERNARD HOPKINS-Just shut the hell up. What is it about you guys from Philly anyway?

And this are my random thoughts delivered while my stomach sounds for all the world like a flooded out Evinrude.

Dispatches from the Field

My friend Steve asked me to pick up his mail last week while he took the wife and kids to St. Louis for the family vacation. While I certainly don't pry, it is always interesting to see what other folks get in their mail. I'm sure that when Steve gets my mail for me, he can't help but see all of the returned checks, threatening letters from attorneys as well as the various items of correspondence from various state and local taxing authorities.

I am quite often badly misunderstood. It is an awesome responsibility being me.

Similarly speaking, I couldn't help but notice the stuff Steve gets. Indeed, I found the experience so fascinating I could not resist "text-messaging" him about it.

"You get more bills than even I do." I wrote.

A few minutes later came the reply across the ether, all the way from Six Flags over St. Louis or some place equally dreadful.

"I have four more kids than you do. Please don't bother me again unless the house is on fire."

He also gets one more copy of the "Arkansas Catholic" than I do, so I took the liberty of reading last week's edition. Evidently, there wasn't much of any import going on in the One True Church. At least not here in the Diocese of Little Rock. There was a nice article from Catholic News Service about how the new Pope is cooling his jets at the Papal villa in the Swiss Alps. The reporter quoted someone as saying that he was heard playing Mozart on the piano. Some guys really know how to let their hair down when they are off the clock. There was a weird little piece about the need to maintain reverence during Epiclesis.

For you Protestants out there, this is the moment in the Mass wherein the priest asks God to sanctify the gifts of bread and wine by sending down the Holy Spirit. I'm willing to bet that if you typed the word "Epiclesis" into a search engine, you would find all kinds of crazy articles and websites devoted to the subject. This is one of the reasons I love Catholicism. Five tool crackpot stuff like this abounds among the faithful. Finally, there was a thoroughly pleasant essay by the Bishop upon his memories of summer as a kid growing up in Memphis.

I confess that I was somewhat disappointed to see no red hot flaming letters to the Editor about gay marriages or the ordination of gays to the ministry in the Arkansas Catholic. To read the Arkansas Methodist you would think that this is about all us Methodists have on the brain anymore. What the hell kind of church newspaper wastes newsprint on the doctrine of Epiclesis when there are larger issues like eliminating social concerns and the "homosexual agenda" to obsess about?

I felt the phone buzz again while I was still yet engrossed in my ecumenical pursuits. It was my buddy D checking in from North Carolina.

" My first ex-wife just called and said she's leaving town Wednesday, so I just got in touch with my second ex-wife and arranged for her to take care of my youngest daughter until I can get back in town next week. " he wrote.

And what is he doing in North Carolina that is keeping him so damn busy that he is required to put in a call to the former spouse bullpen in order to relieve the starter, as it were? He is preparing to take the bar exam there. And why would an otherwise sensible man in a responsible position in a prestigious law firm in California and already armed already with three law licenses be sitting for the North Carolina bar?

To ask the question is to answer it. He is in love. To make a long story short, he saw C again for the first time in years at their college reunion. Zing went the strings of their hearts. And thus began their bi-coastal relationship. She has a young son in the home and cannot move. D's youngest is headed off to college in the fall. Hence, the plan to head east to the land of pine trees and big time college basketball.

I think this is utter madness and have made my position abundantly clear. I see no need for this foolishness especially when it ain't like there is a shortage of available women in Southern California. Besides, Me, I wouldn't take another bar exam for Sela Ward. This consideration has become even more acute since I am recent friends with a woman who is, even as I type this, slaving away at the law school preparing to sit for the Arkansas bar exam next week. And to think JL forsook the honorable and useful teaching profession for the wholesale agony of the bar exam. An involuntary shudder crawls up my spine anytime I look at her bar review books. It is indeed testimony to what a great gal she is as being around her is bringing back perfectly horrible memories.

Similarly speaking, honesty compels me to admit that C must be one hell of a gal to inspire such misery. I look forward to meeting her. And I hope she doesn't have any eligible sisters that are as obviously spellbinding as is she as I am not a particularly strong man nowadays.

And so, my sensible advice about all of this remains completely disregarded. They are a couple of crazy goddamn kids in love. There is nothing more that I can do.

Except to write back, " I'm certain that your future ex-wife would help if she could."


Steve came safely back last night and came by to get his stuff. I recognized on him the same poleaxed expression that my father used to wear after a week in the car with his four kids. JL is grimly beavering away at her notes and index cards. D is trying to remember what the hell arcane phrases like "the expectation is subsumed in the reliance" and other stuff equally not germane to an environmental defense practice actually means. Still, I have all the faith in the world that they will do just fine next week.

And that they too, like my buddy Steve, will all come safely back.

After Steve left, I got a reply from D to my earlier missive. It was succinct but it was not fit to relate in this space, devoted as it is to a general audience, as they say in the movie business.

I am quite often badly misunderstood. It is an awesome responsibility being me.

Sula vs. THE HURRICANE

I suppose that every now and again it does a person a bit of good to survive an act of craziness. As for me it has been a long time since I did anything crazy. And most of my brushes with bad craziness generally involved people wearing short skirts and high heels. But I'm not talking about that. And I'm not talking about other examples of forms of bad craziness such as reposing trust in e-mails from ersatz Ethiopian bankers asking for your bank account information or joining the Scientologists (or the Christian Scientists for that matter). No.

I'm talking about willingly doing something that could stand you a reasonable chance of getting yourself killed. Or worse. Like pumping gas while smoking a cigarette. Going up on the roof to mess with the satellite dish during an electrical storm. Standing between David Wells and an umpire. Stuff like that.

My friend Sula is an unlikely candidate for "Crazy Person of the Year" award. Sula on the one hand is the very model of the buttoned down kind of person that gravitates toward the practice of real estate law whose idea of an interesting day is to form condo associations and/or rifling through musty records in county courthouses. All the while racking up big honking fees for the title company where she works in Destin.

So you can understand my concern when Sula called to tell me that she was going to ride out the arrival of Hurricane Dennis instead of getting the hell out of Dodge, a course of action that I gently suggested a more prudent person might well be advised to take. Nope. She was bound and determined and could not be otherwise persuaded. After all, as she wrote in the blog (http://gulfbreezecourt.blogspot.com )that she maintained while the electricity stayed on during this adventure, "I'm...fairly adventurous, and am an able handy person who will take risks."

Well...just so long as she didn't have a stupid reason for taking on 150 mph winds.

But you know? If you think about it, this is not of unheard of down here in the South. History's immortal scroll is replete with instances where Southern women took on equally daunting tasks against insurmountable odds and prevailed. A couple of quick ones come to mind. It took fully six weeks of siege from his gunboats in the Mississippi before Ulysses S. Grant forced Vicksburg to surrender. This is in no small part due to the indomitable will of the women of Vicksburg who never gave in despite some of them being reduced to in caves and dugouts during the worst of it. Another example is the women of Little Rock during the integration crisis of the fifties who decided that keeping the public schools open was simply too important to be left up to the men. It is no exaggeration to say that probably 40%, if not more, of the social progress that has been achieved in these parts probably had its origins in the parlors of halfway dotty Episcopalian or Presbyterian broads who,when confronted with overwhelming crises, simply folded their hands in their laps and said, "Now this just won't do."

And perhaps the issue was similarly no more complicated for my dear Sula who, maybe looked around at her home and her stuff and said, "Now this just won't do."

Maybe Sula isn't crazy. She is, after all, an able handy Southern woman.

In retrospect, Dennis never had half a chance.

The Human Torch

I was driving through Hattiesburg the other day when I remembered a girl from Mississippi. Once upon a time, years and years ago, I was once crazy in love with a girl that was born in Hattiesburg. Now, it struck me as passing strange that I would think of her at that particular moment. After all, I was staying in Jackson where she has lived for 30 years and which is where we met. And yet, I didn't give her the first passing thought until I got out on Highway 49.

It's funny how we remember old flames. There is just no telling.

When I think of her, I remember her red hair, her green eyes and a deep voice, deeper than mine, that came from somewhere in her long, skinny body. She used to tell me that she yearned for me when we were apart. Really she did. Only it sounded like "yunned"when she said it.

I can safely say without hesitation or fear of contradiction that no woman has "yunned" for me before or since.

Of course, this reverie on Highway 49 did not pass by the many detours and obstacles along the way. There is no good way to get to Jackson from here. And despite her being as fit as a horse, she managed to rupture a disk in her back while mopping the kitchen floor, which made riding in a car uncomfortable. She had two young daughters, a deadbeat ex whom she was constantly haling into court and she wanted to go to graduate school.

That's a lot to unpack from 256 miles away. The timing could not have been worse. It could not work.

But I chose not to dwell on any of that. I vastly preferred remembering that a beautiful woman from Mississippi once yearned for me.

Werner Heisenberg would understand this completely. Surely you remember Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle which posits that the findings of the experimenter cannot be completely accurate for the reason that by virtue of conducting the experiment, the observer becomes part of the observed system. In other words, participating in a system necessarily colors one's perspective. Insert the word "relationship"for the word "system" and Werner Heisenberg prefigures Dr. Laura in history.

I once took a deposition in a sexual harassment case. The plaintiff worked with a man with whom she fell in love. They got engaged. It didn't work out and she broke it off. The ex still carried a torch for her and made numerous overtures to her in an attempt to win her back. She admitted that she went back with him but stated that she broke it off again after a couple of months.

The problem with carrying a torch is that sometimes you have to play with fire in the process.

She claims that he persisted in trying to hug her and kiss her after she broke it off for good. She claims that he called her house and that he pestered her in the halls. She is lovely, intelligent, articulate and believable. My client's guy, the ex, swears up and down that he left her alone after the second breakup. He is handsome, intelligent, articulate and believable. There are no witnesses to the acts complained of, which is not unusual in these matters.

So who is telling the truth and who is lying? Or are they both telling "truths" as whispered to them by their memories? Memories that are necessarily colored by their prior relationship if not their current relationships as well? Think of other "women scorned" of recent notoriety. Think of Anita Hill. Think of Paula Jones, if you must. Who was telling the truth? Who was lying?

The old country lawyer says, "Everybody lies a little bit." The problem is, everybody also tells the truth a little bit.

None of which would trouble Dr. Heisenberg in the least. What's good for describing quantum physics is equally good for describing failed relationships. The observer becomes part of the system.

Which is why I prefer to let my mind linger over the memory of a certain girl from Hattiesburg instead of remembering what a goddamned fool idea it was in the first place.

It is funny how we remember old flames. There is just no telling.

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The "Do Run Run"

Isn't this a pretty house? It is in Lake Providence, Louisiana which is an otherwise wretched little town not too far from the Arkansas state line. I was thinking of Jennifer Willbanks the other night and these ruminations brought back memories of this stately old home. You may be asking, "What in God's name does an old house in East Carroll Parish, Louisiana got to do with the "Runaway Bride?" Bear with me. All will be revealed in the fullness of time.

By now everybody has heard about the so-called "Runaway Bride" from North Georgia who told the authorities she had been kidnapped when in reality she was merely freaked over the huge high society wedding she had planned with her fiance. As you may recall, half the town went searching for her all over when in reality she was on a Greyhound bound for Las Vegas. When she finally turned herself in and her kidnapping revealed to be the scam that it was, there was much outrage on the part of the citizens and the cops.

I have recently become friends with an exceedingly proper woman from over in those parts. She knows many of the players. She even knows the prosecutor. And being a proper Georgia girl, she went into apoplexy the other night at the mere mention of RB's name and the recent news that she has sold her story to a production company who will make it into a movie. "Why that girl's crazy." she hissed. " She's been nothing but trouble. She's been arrested a couple of times for shoplifting. Now this. It's just not right that she should profit from her wrong-doing."

And so on.

Me? I got no problem with her making a buck if she can do it. After all, this is America where one person's difficult circumstances is another's "reality show." And I can kinda see RB's point about the wedding Nothing brings out the serious weirdness like a High Society wedding in the South. Granted, she ought not to have troubled the FBI and all with her personal problems. ( Parenthetically, I loved what the female FBI agent told RB when her story started falling apart: " We can't start a federal investigation just because you have cold feet, Jennifer." Hear, Hear!) But getting back to the nuptials, I have been in a bunch of these affairs and I could have told RB that she would have been better off to take the money it would have cost to put the damn thing on and to elope.

The following are TRUE STORIES from some of the weddings I have been in:

My first HS wedding was a Baptist affair I was singing for over at the old Immanuel Baptist Church here in Little Rock. The father of the groom was a local politician and the bride was some doctor's daughter. About an hour before the actual service began, the groom, who I knew a little, came up to me.

" Ummmm, about how long do you think it will take you to get through the Lord's Prayer?" he asked.

" I dunno. You were there last night at the rehearsal. Why?"

" Well, could you maybe speed it up? The less time we are all up there standing together, the better."

" I'm not sure I follow you."

He fidgeted and rubbed his forehead. " After the rehearsal dinner, we all went back to the hotel where we all stated drinking. And we all got pretty drunk I have to say."

" Okay?"

" C (the bride) was tired and went to her room."

" Okay? What's that got to do with the music? Do we need to speed it up because she is not feeling well?"

" No, we need to speed it up because I f_ _ _ _ _ the Maid of Honor. Who is all pissed off at me now. And the less time those two spend standing next to each other the better."

I went and told the organist that we needed to do the presto version of the "Lord's Prayer" before eyes were clawed out and bouquets were hurled.

He just shrugged his shoulders. "Something like this always happens at one of these big deals. People just go nuts." he said. "Either that or the groom makes a pass at me."

I never saw any of the wedding party again. The last I heard, the Bride and Groom got divorced and he and the Maid of Honor got married in Houston where they have lived happily ever after.

So some good did come out of this.

The second really big HS wedding I was in was a grand affair between a couple of my law school classmates in Birmingham, Alabama. The bride came from the toast of Birmingham society. Her father was a prominent physician in addition to having a considerable reputation as a rake. Her mother was a southern fried version of a woman straight out of Eugene O'Neill or Edward Albee depending on how much vodka she had in her. The groom's parents were Ozzie and Harriet by comparison.

F. Scott Fitzgerald once made the famous observation that the rich are different than you and I. I don't think that Fitzgerald had ever encountered Birmingham society. Otherwise, he might have said that the rich are more useless and relentlessly supercilious than you and I. Never had I been surrounded by more completely worthless human beings and never have I since. The small talk at the numerous parties given throughout the week were mind numbingly vapid recitations about golf scores, investments, SEC football and all the women the bride's father was hitting on.

Some examples: Upon identifying myself as being from Arkansas to one lady she said, "They fought. They fought."

Upon telling one gentleman that I was an attorney, said, "You work. How unfortunate." This same gallant bastard went on to tell me that he had plea and arraignment coming up on a DUI case in which he had run a police roadblock. Which I am certain amused the Birmingham cops to no end at the time.

" I told the officers that due to the bursitis in my shoulder I was not able to cut the wheel quickly enough." he said with a straight face. They are wrongfully insisting that I was drunk despite the fact that I told them about my bursitis. I intend to take this up with the judge and I will have some badges before this is over."

Finally, after the brunch before the wedding, it came time to clear the tables. A large epicene man who taught art at a local high school was in charge of the decorations. He enlisted the help of some matronly types in removing the orchids that festooned each table. He flitted about crying, "Quickly, quickly! Remove the orchids before the nigras get them."

All of these things I saw and heard in Birmingham, Alabama. Just for fun, repeat these quotes in your most ridiculous southern accent, preferably after consuming 3 glasses of Rebel Yell. That should give you the flavor of it.

Finally, let us turn to the house at the top of the page. The reason this house figures so prominently in my personal history is that the last really decent fistfight I ever got myself into was within the confines of its stately walls. During guess what? A reception after the rehearsal dinner at a HS wedding in Lake Providence.

Let me provide some background. Another one of my law school buddies was marrying a girl who was nominally from Lake Providence. I say nominally because K was packed off to boarding school about the time she started eating solid food. My buddy S came from a working class Polish family out in Scranton or something. He was serving in Army Jag in Ft. Dix, NJ at the time and this would be where he and K would make their home. This went over big with some of the bride's family as you might imagine. As also did the initial decision of the groom's party (all in the JAG Corps) to wear their dress blues in the wedding. The groom quickly realized that their waltzing into the church wearing the uniform of the Army of the Invader might evoke certain unpleasant memories, especially in the elderly in attendance, and they drove to Monroe to rent tuxedos.

So tensions were high by the time I got down there from Little Rock and C, another classmate, got up there from Thibodeaux.

Let us cut to the chase. After the rehearsal dinner, we all went to a reception at the house in the picture. After drinks were served, toasts were made and eventually it came time for the poems written by the bridesmaids. It is SOP in southern weddings for the bridesmaids to recite poems written by them for the occasion usually commemorating events known only to them or to family. As I did not expect any of this insipid doggerel to make me forget Wallace Stevens, I felt that my time was more wisely spent in the back catching up on news with C. And this is where the trouble started.

I immediately was set upon by one of the bride's family, a med student who accused me of " not taking our traditions down here serious enough" thereby causing he and his family great offense.

" You got to be f_ _ _ _ _ _ kidding me!" I explained, trying to be helpful. Whereupon he attempted to perform neurosurgery on me with a beer bottle.

Naturally C, being both Cajun and drunk, pulled me off so that he could take a crack at him. After all, fistfights are to wedding receptions in Acadiana as goofyass poetry is to receptions in the rest of the South. Not much came of it as the altercation was quickly put down by cooler heads. And after an exchange of a few more high words, we took our leave. But not before stealing a cooler of beer that was foolishly left unguarded on the porch.

This was many years ago. We have all settled into our lives and careers. In fact, rumor has it that C is on the short list to be a federal judge down there.

I spoke to him on the phone not too long ago.

" You think that the FBI will ever find out about that night in Lake Providence when they do the background investigation?" he asked.

" They will if they ask me." I said, trying as usual to be helpful.

My friend from Georgia, who incidentally just returned herself from a big wedding in Atlanta in which a makeup artist was flown in from New York for the bride and her attendants conceded that it was all a bit much. (The only other useful information I have gleaned about the event was that the bride was fortified at all times by Bloody Marys and valium.)

"But you know what?", she said. "If that boy goes ahead and marries the Runaway Bride, he's even crazier than her. After all, life doesn't often give you such a good 'head's up' that you are marrying a nut."

So maybe he will have an attack of sense and we will have a "Runaway Groom."

Hope he gets a good deal on the movie rights!

The Strange Man Walks, the Rich Old Guy Doesn't and Wally Gets It All Wrong

Today we go straightaway to the criminal justice system wherein you can find all the action you want from the sports and entertainment world.

Let us begin with the BIGGEST STORY IN THE KNOWN UNIVERSE which is the acquittal of Michael Jackson. We at TMFW don't really have much to say about this except that we are reminded of what some wag said when OJ Simpson was acquitted: "The prosecution worked really hard to frame a guilty man." I mean, of course, he's guilty. One doesn't share a bed with another warm body over 300 times without having sex.

Without being married,that is. But I digress.

They proved beyond the shadow of a reasonable doubt that Michael Jackson is a sexual deviant, a semi-retard and a consummate strange ranger. The strategic advantage the One-Gloved One had over law enforcement was that he wasn't charged with any of that.

People will say that the outcome here is more proof that the jury system doesn't work. We at TMFW say it is proof that it does. When the prosecution comes in with a half assed case where its star witnesses are impeached to a fair-the-well and revealed to be a bunch of whack jobs and grifters, the defendant ought to walk. Even one as repellent and obviously guilty as Michael Jackson.

They proved Michael Jackson is a nut and a creep. The people of Los Angeles County should be grateful to the prosecution for spending millions of dollars to prove the self-evident. As Norm McDonald said years ago upon the divorce of Wacko and Lisa Marie Presley, " I guess being married to a homosexual child molester was just not what it was cracked up to be."

At least Elvis was spared this circus.

But enough about Neverland and the strange ranger that lives there. Let is turn instead to an offense which is near and dear to all of us who follow college sports: Dirty Recruiting. Wealthy businessman and Alabama booster Logan Young was recently sentenced in federal court in Memphis to 6 months imprisonment, which is to be followed by home detention and restitution. This was after he had bribed a Memphis high school coach to deliver local high school football phenom Albert Means to the Crimson Tide. I vividly remember the comments of an assistant coach for Oklahoma (whose name escapes me) who was in town to attend a local banquet. When asked what he thought about the then-breaking scandal he was quoted as saying, "150,000 bucks? For just one guy?"

In any event, the sentencing of Mr. Young, who was described in his June 15 disquisition of this subject as "friends with two of my buddies", drew the peripatetic gaze of Wally Hall, the sports "editor" of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette who decried the fact that a 64 year old man was going to prison for such a trifling matter. Wally should have left it at that. But no, he felt compelled to turn this case into the second coming of the Rosenberg Trial.

Wally wrote, " Young should not have been in federal court. Period." and "Apparently, Young gave [the coach] $ 150,000 to make sure Means signed with Alabama five years ago. How is that a federal crime?"

Well, we at TMFW will explain just how Mr. Young found himself in front of a jury of his peers over his participation in the dirty arm's race that is recruiting in SEC football.

First let us examine Wally's contention that Young was "found guilty of bribing a public official, which is a federal offense." Wally is correct. The crime of Public Servant bribery is indeed a violation of the United States Criminal Code. Ask Edwin Edwards. He knows.

Only Young wasn't convicted of that. Hell, he wasn't even charged with that.

The following is a TRUE STORY which might help illustrate the mysterious ways of how federal criminal jurisdiction happened to reach this latest example of the old "hundred dollar handshake" which is the mother's milk of Division I sports in these parts.

I was once visiting a lawyer buddy of mine in his office in Jackson, MS. He had just got off the phone with an Assistant United States Attorney concerning a sentencing date for his client.

" What's he pleading out to?" I asked.

" Rape." Hugh replied.

" Since when is rape a federal offense?"

" When you do it on an Indian Reservation."

The lesson? Federal Jurisdiction often depends on where you commit the crime, whether you used the telephone, put it in the mail or if you crossed a state line to commit the offense. Even if the crime is not a federal offense.

Basically the underlying charge for which Logan Young was indicted was of crossing a state line to commit a crime, namely breaking state bribery laws. Is that a slender reed upon which to make a federal case? Hell, yes it is. Which is why his defense team filed a Motion to Dismiss. The Court denied it citing Tennessee case law on bribing public officials which it felt would cover the offense of bribing a coach to induce a kid to play football at a particular crime. As the court stated, reference to a violation of state law is necessary only to identify the type of unlawful activity the defendant intended to engage. After that ruling came down, Young "had hisself a problem" as the old-timer defense lawyers say.

Or as my friend Don, who used to represent white collar criminal types back in Alabama, is fond of saying, "State lines are troublesome things."

You get the idea.

He was also indicted for conspiracy to commit racketeering and structuring bank withdrawals to avoid detection through the law requiring banks to report withdrawals over 10 grand to the Treasury. This is known as "stacking charges." And it goes on every day Grand Juries meet in courthouses throughout the land. Ask Jim Guy Tucker.

But he wasn't convicted of bribery. Wally was absolutely 100% flat-assed wrong on that one. One thing about stuff that's on the public record? It can be looked up. From your computer.

But what do I know? Maybe it's just easier to make stuff up.

I also have no idea how Young found himself in the cross-hairs of the FBI. Rumor has it Tennessee's Phil Fulmer snitched him off. Perhaps he made the mistake of dealing with someone who was already the subject of an investigation or who had bragged to someone who was who came forward with this tidbit in exchange for his own freedom. Who knows? The criminal justice world is a dark and evil place. Tassel-loafered good old boys like Young need to leave crime up to the professionals. They are better at it.

Young is free pending appeal. Maybe Wally and his buddies can console him with dinner at Corky's. It might be easier, all things considered to have this pity-party over at the one over in Memphis. He just might not be able to leave Tennessee without Court approval.

Back to the Toy Store

It has been a hectic 10 days here at TMFW. Quite frankly, I am tired. So let's do something simple just to get something up here and let people know that I am still alive.

So, let's return to the Toy Store! Let's bitch about sports!

1) The NBA! As many of you may know, the NBA Finals are upon us. Which means that the conspiracy theorists that follow the sport, and their name is Legion, will be on the 'Net and the talk shows claiming that the games are fixed, pretty much by the edict of NBA commissioner David Stern.

The most recent example of this thinking comes from the irrepressible Rasheed Wallace of the Detroit Pistons, who after they lost game 5 in the Eastern Conference Finals to the Miami Heat claimed, "They (the league) wants there to be a Game 7." This extemporaneous opinion cost Rasheed $20,000.

Forget Rasheed. He is a lunatic. And lest you think TMFW be hatin' on Rasheed, let us examine the record. He set the NBA record for ejections from games when he was with that roving jail break known as the Portland TrailBlazers. This should come as no surprise when you consider that 'Sheed may be the only player to have ever gotten tossed in McDonald's All-American game when in high school for Christ's sake. You could look it up. Indeed, an NBA scout once said of Rasheed, "Portland's biggest problem is that Rasheed Wallace isn't their biggest problem." Whoa! So let's forget Rasheed.

One of the reasons that conspiracy buffs find it easy to believe that games can be fixed is that, well, basketball is one of the few team sports in the modern era where games have indeed been fixed. You had the scandal at CCNY in the early fifties. Former NBA superstar Connie Hawkins took money from gamblers while in college. More recently gamblers got to players at Boston College and Tulane in the eighties. (As an aside, despite being bribed to shave points, Tulane's Green Wave always played it straight against Louisville because they hated them so much. Ya gotta love those idealistic college kids.) And Eddie Sutton, back when his paranoia was in full flower at Arkansas and Kentucky, would sometimes refer reporters to the power ratings and the point spread in the newspaper after a close loss as proof that the game was rigged from the opening tip.

Look, the common denominator in all of these scandals is criminal activity. It would not surprise me at all if the NBA would like each series to go the full seven games to milk the maximum advertising revenue out the event. But if you actually believe that David Stern could possibly orchestrate a conspiracy between the league and the refs to favor one team over another and to keep it a secret, well, you need to stick with Intelligent Design, the Homosexual Agenda and the DaVinci Code. You would be better off and your time would be better spent. Conspiracy theories thrive in the Petri dish of the unprovable. Thinking that the NBA is fixed is just stupid.

2) Wally! On June 7, Wally Hall wrote a typical discursive ( the unkind might say rambling and incoherent) piece in which he opined that Susie Gardner, the coach of the women's basketball team at Arkansas, might be in Frank Broyles' cross-hairs after a couple of mediocre seasons. On June 8, he was back pedalling at warp speed.

In a piece entitled " Observation of power not meant to be offensive", Wally wrote that his suggestion that Frank Broyles is running the Athletic Department up there was not meant to be a knock on Bev Lewis who is the Women's AD. He even apologized in print to her for suggesting that she would allow Broyles would to intrude upon her turf.

What has Wally been smokin'? Frank Broyles is practically omnipotent. He could have Mike Huckabee fired if he wanted to. But Broyles is nothing if not politic.

Here is how it would work:

Rinnnnnng!

" Bev Lewis."

" Bev, this heah is Frank. I want you to fiyuh Susie. Call yah press conference at 2 this aftuhnoon. I'll be on a flight to Augusta by then."

" Ok. Cool. Who do you want me to replace her with?"

" I'll have to get back to you. Aftuh all that shit with Nolan, the lawyuhs say it needs to be a black woman who is over 40. Meanwhile, I gotta call in to Pat Fostah. Bye now, heah?"

But is really interesting is the first sentence of the piece wherein Wally writes, " As soon as I read it, I knew it hadn't worked."

Didn't work? I thought journalism was supposed to be fair, accurate, thought-provoking even incendiary. It's not suppose to work. And if he knew it didn't work as soon as he read it WHY RUN THE PIECE?

This is just another example of what we at TMFW have always maintained about Wally: that he pretty much writes the first thing that flies into his head which for some reason is allowed to grace the front page of the sports section of the State's largest paper without having been first scrutinized by an actual journalist-editor.

We do not know this, but we suspect that somebody up on the Hill called and bitched and Wally retracted so as to not offend.

God forbid we ever do that on the sports page. Especially in a column entitled "Like it Is."

Fade

Mother started talking crazy about a week ago. The folks at the assisted living facility said she was getting lost inside the building. She had forgotten how to use dining utensils. She was talking about her husband, dead and gone these many years as if he were still alive.

Not good. Not good at all.

My brother the nurse took her to her local treating physician on Monday. He ordered lab work and a CT scan. He was asked if her meds could causing this. After all, the psychiatrist had increased the dose of her anti-depressant just the week before all of this amusement started. He told my brother that while he had an open mind, he suspected that the Parkinson's Disease had finally caused her to lapse into dementia. A call to the neurologist offered the same opinion. Her psychiatrist was on vacation and unavailable for comment until Friday.

Mother has a pretty complicated medical situation. She is pushing 84. As if the Parkinson's was not sufficiently burdensome, she also suffers from anxiety and depression. She takes at least 8 or 9 pills a day. This is the main reason she is in assisted living as she was having trouble keeping track of all the damn pills she consumes on a daily basis. Somehow I wonder how the staff at her facility keeps up with it.

Mother's precarious mental status resulted in her needing a level of care beyond what assisted living is designed to do. So, Tuesday I got her eligible for home hospice care. I arranged for a home health care aide to "backfill" around hospice. I started signing her up for nursing homes in the local area. I actually had to catch up on my work Wednesday and Thursday. And Friday I called the Reynolds Center on Aging.

For a little jerkwater town, we in Little Rock are lucky to have two first class medical facilities in Arkansas Children's Hospital and the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS). The Reynolds Center is on the south side of the UAMS campus. We take mother there twice a year for check-ups, mainly to keep a handle on the dementia. I called them on that Friday morning. A nurse promptly returned my call. I described what was going on and I informed that the tests run earlier in the week were all normal. She told me to bring her in that afternoon and she would be seen.

The Reynolds Center is a beautiful place. It has a light and airy feel to it. The walls are adorned by photographs and paintings-mostly depictions of rural scenes-created by Arkansas artists. God knows I am no decorator, but it seems to me that the spaces in the building are designed to impart feelings of peace and hope. As we waited for the doctor to enter the room, I thought back to our first visit there two or three years ago. As a matter of coincidence, a local lawyer friend here in town was there with her father on that day. They do not allow family members to go back on the initial evaluation. So we passed the time talking on our cell phones and poking at out PDAs. Meanwhile the respective members of "The Greatest Generation" that brought us into this life were back there in the clinic counting backwards from 100 and trying to remember the name of the President.

Eventually the doctor arrived in a swirl of white as they tend to do when they know someone has been waiting. She was an Asian woman, tiny and serious.

She took a history and examined the medical record from Mom's home.

" So, the blood work was normal?" she asked me.

" Yes, and CT was normal?"

" Yes."

" I see here some mention of her receiving injections from a son who is a nurse. Are you a nurse?"

"No. I'm a lawyer."

"Oh."

She turned to type on the computer keyboard.

" So she is lucid on the 11th when she sees the psychiatrist, he increases the Cymbalta and by the weekend she is talking crazy? Am I getting the picture?"

"Yeah. Pretty much."

She swivels and faces me. And then this serious, pretty little woman in a lab coat crossed her eyes and shrugged her shoulders as if to say " Durrrrrrrrr."

Which caused me to laugh out loud in spite of my anxiety.

She turned to Mother. "I'm going to call a friend one that knows all about these medicines. I will be right back."

She returned with a box of medicine and written orders for the folks at Mother's facility. "You are off the Cymbalta. Here is a 2 week supply of something else that I want you to take beginning Tuesday when the Cymbalta is out of your system."

She took Mother's hand again. " You are going to feel better soon. I want to see you in two weeks. And if you are not better by then we will try something else until we get this figured out."

No mention of Parkinson's related dementia or any other organic brain syndrome. No mention of anything but hope for a better day and continued assistance.

I got an e-mail from her brother last night. He said he had a good talk w/Mother. I talked to her sister the other day. Ditto. Charlsie said that she told Mother that she was lucky to have 4 good boys for sons. Mother said that she wrote our names down and put them in her purse so she wouldn't forget who we were.

I didn't have the heart to tell Aunt Charlsie that Mother has lost her purse!

Even though things are looking up, I am still going to explore nursing homes here in the area. We dodged a bullet this time. But that day will come when Mother's needs will exceed the additional help we can provide to keep her in assisted living. It's just a fact.

The Greatest Generation, the one that survived both the Depression and Hitler, is slipping away before our very eyes. I thank God for their sacrifice and for His lending me breath, as the old hymn so eloquently puts it.

And I thank God for the kind and thoughtful people at the Reynolds Center for providing care and comfort to The Greatest Generation as it inevitably recedes into history and eternity.

Patriot Act

Wally Hall, the inimitable "editor" of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette's sports page, is given to occasionally overwrought, if not completely maudlin prose under the best conditions. However, it is when he summons his muse in the service of meditations upon subjects other than Razorback athletics or kissing up to Charles Cella that he really loses his bearings. A primo example of Wally at his most incoherent bathetic self is found in this Sunday's sports page wherein he waves the bloody shirt in attempt to honor the service of athletes who have served our country in her foreign wars. Here are today's gems.

Upon the lesson of history: " During World War II, 638 men who had played in the NFL served in the military, and 19 died. All of them were about the same thing as Pat Tillman, patriotism." How does Wally know that each and every one of them "were about the same thing, patriotism?" Also, before invoking their son's name, maybe he should have interviewed Pat Tillman's parents about how happy they are with the way the Army handled the news that their son was tragically killed by "friendly fire."

Upon the impact a two-year hitch Army hitch had on the career of Willie Mays: " Mays finished his career with 660 home runs, but if he had played those two years when he was in his prime and hit his career average of four-baggers, he would have had 720 and been second on the all time list, trailing only Hank Aaron." 720? No more? No less? This is the kind of extrapolating that got the wiseguys at Enron in so much hot water.

Upon making stuff up: " Yes, there were thousands more (athletes who served), and many of the former athletes who served were drafted, but remember, none of them went to Canada." None? Not a single discus thrower or wrestler said, "Screw this. I'm outta here?" Nobody? How the hell does he know? I don't know if any athletes went to Canada to avoid military service or not. And more importantly, neither does Wally. But I do know a rather prominent athlete in the Viet-Nam era who went to prison rather than serve in the military. His name was Cassius Clay who later became the fighter and icon known as Muhammed Ali. History is full of inconvenient facts like this. This is why it should be consulted before putting out blanket statements of "fact" in an attempt to justify a point.

Look, we at TMFW think it is a good thing to always honor those who served and continue to serve our country in harm's way. Two of my best friends just came back from Iraq. I am humbled and honored by their service and I thank God that they have been returned to their homes, families and friends. And the point is well made that the sacrifice that Tillman made was extraordinary in an era when basketball players can't be bothered to play in the Olympics and tennis players blow off Davis Cup.

A coherent and thought-provoking piece along these lines would have been ideal for Memorial Day. It's too bad that nobody that could actually write provided us with one.

Location, Location, Location

I was sitting in the waiting room at the doctor's office idly flipping through one of those local real estate flyers where all of the homes on the market around here are listed. For some reason my eye was drawn to an ad entitled "Foreclosures! Bank Owned Properties!" And there on that page was a red brick ranch style home set off from the street.

It was described thusly: " 5 bedroom, 2 bath home on 5 acres. Conveniently located across from an elementary school with room for everybody!"

Shit. I grew up in that house.

My boyhood home got took back by the bank!

I have no idea about the circumstances surrounding the fact that Mother's house is now on the auction block other than the obvious fact that the lady I sold it to didn't or couldn't keep up the payments for some reason. Mother would be horrified by this turn of events. But then again, she has always had a semi-morbid penchant for infusing excessive significance into places and things. As for me, I am able to look at this with the sense of bemused detachment with which I regard most events in life's rich pageantry. Bemused detachment works for me. It would also tend to explain my marital status.

But to be fair to Mother, she is not exactly the Lone Ranger in this regard. A friend of mine in the real estate game says that sometimes you can get "a house in your head." And to be completely unfair to the noble profession of realtoring, this is how they separate you from your money. But I digress.

Here is a True Story.

One day, I went out on the porch and discovered the man who sold me my house sitting on the swing that was formerly owned by him. It was around 2 in the afternoon. He was drunk. Being the intuitive sort of person that I am I immediately sensed that SOMETHING WAS WRONG. I sat in the rocking chair across from him.

" Is it ok if I sit here a minute?" he asked.

" Sure." I replied. "Ummm. What's up with you?"

" Well, things haven't gone too good for me in the last couple of years. Vicki and I bought that house in Leawood so her mother could move in with us. About halfway through remodeling, she decides she wants a divorce. And then the software firm I worked for went under and I lost my job. Took me almost a year to find work. And all I could find was a sales job for a business that sells rubber stamps. "

" God, Jimmy. That's awful. I don't know what to say."

" Ain't nothing you can say."

" Well, why are you here?"

" I'll tell you the truth. I come by here at night sometimes. I climb up on the fence in back and look in the backyard. Today, I was walking by and just thought I would sit here for a minute. I figured you wouldn't mind."

"Okaaaaaaaaay.......Why are you doing this?"

" Vicki and I lived in this house for 22 years. Now in a year's time I am out on my ass, she's getting remarried and I'm living in a goddamn apartment. I just wanted to come and spend a minute at the last place I was happy."

He began to cry.

"Sure." I said. "You sit there for as long as you want."

We both rocked in silence for about 15 minutes.

" Can I have a beer?" he asked.

"I don't believe you need anymore beer, Jimmy." I said.

" Then I guess I'll head out."

We shook hands and he walked away. I never saw him again.

Jimmy sold me the only house I have ever owned. I like where I live. I've sometimes thought about selling but where else would I go? I've thought about adding rooms but I'm the only one that lives here and that looks like it will never change. What would be the point?

I am on my front porch as I type this. It is a beautiful spring day. One of my neighbors is planting flowers in her yard with the alleged assistance of her daughter. I just got off the phone with a buddy that wants to play golf on the neighborhood goat track this afternoon. The breeze blowing in from the West is cool and inviting. A stunning redhead unfolds out of a convertible T-Bird to go into the antique store across the street. She waves and says " What a great day, huh?"

Note to self: Cultivate an interest in antiques.

Note# 2 to self: Forget first note to self. This is how the troubles always start.

Some day I will leave here. And I will always have happy memories of my time here. But unlike my mother or Jimmy I will never have a "house in my head." Change is inevitable. The trick is to not believe for one minute that your happiness is tied to places or things. Or other people for that matter. Because then you start taking it all for granted.

But it is a beautiful spring day. And I am on the front porch of a little house that I love.

And that is enough for now. That is enough for now.

Ain't Gonna Drown in the Gene Pool

If it is true that biology is destiny we are completely screwed, blued and tattooed. Our grandfather died at 56. Father died at 53. Both were the victims of massive coronaries. So, if a crude mathematical progression (or regression as it were) is any barometer of our lifespan we are scheduled to buy the farm at around 50. Which is annoys us considerably given the fact that we are are about 5 months from achieving that distinction.

We don't particularly dwell on the fact that we caught a lousy break in the genetics department. But it is evident that our internist does as our yearly physical-which we were forced to endure last week- becomes significantly more arduous the closer we get to the mid-century mark.

We spent the first thirty minutes in his office going over our history. Our doctor, an intense and owlish man, asked us exceedingly personal questions concerning our daily habits which we felt were none of his concern. We consider our use of the crack pipe to be quite moderate in its breadth and scope. And we did not feel led to confess the recreational sex we had with those hookers during our vacation to Zaire. When it comes to the doctor-patient relationship, we still believe in a zone of privacy.

We then moved on to the examination itself during which every square inch of anatomy was poked, pulled, thumped and listened to for approximately an hour. We were ordered to give urine samples in 2 different labs. And believe us, we were in the Doctor's building long enough to accomplish this feat. An EEG was administered. Possessing a manly chest is its own reward when it comes to applying and removing electrodes. 5-count 'em-5 vials of blood were extracted from our left arm. Finally, 2 x-rays were taken of said manly chest. 2 hours later, we were finally discharged into the Arkansas sunshine.

Again, we try not to dwell on these things. We don't much believe that we will punch our ticket at 50. We don't smoke cigarettes which was the drug of choice of our progenitors. We have managed to pretty much keep our girlish figure over the years through a fairly sensible diet and vigorous exercise. We probably enjoy our martinis more than we need to. But everybody needs a hobby. We don't have certain stressors that a lot of other people have. We don't have a bad marriage. Hell, we don't have any marriage. We have been blessed to be gainfully employed through out our adult life. We are under the medical supervision of a talented and caring physician who seems to have taken it as a personal challenge to drag us through the fifth decade of life. Finally, we are fortunate to have adequate insurance which gives us the means to do the preventive care that may keep us from having to cash the genetic check given to us by our forebears.

But sometimes, in the stillness of the morning, we wonder. It is said that we know not the day our the hour when our souls will be required of us. And we know that some day, maybe sooner than later, we will be told some news that we don't want to hear.

Still, so far so good. Everyday we wake up to a new sunrise. The heart in our chest is still banging away even though in the past couple of months it has seen way too much action (to steal a line from Joe Jackson). We have the best friends a man can possibly have. We are returning to Little League. Not to get all Paul Greenberg on you, but it is always, always, a good thing to be around little boys and baseball. Life, despite the pain and loss that occasionally attends it is, for the most part, exceedingly beautiful. And we are grateful beyond measure to be here.

And so, call us crazy if you will, we like our chances.

Still, you might want to check on us in 6 months or so. Just in case.

And so it went

We got to play Mr. Mom the other day. It was nothing that we particularly set out to do. But our neighbor across the street came over about 7:30 am with the frantic news that she was going to be stuck in a meeting after work and that she couldn't find anyone to pick up her first grader at the after school program over at the Methodist church and could we pleasepleaseplease pick up Caroline and keep her until around 7 or so?

It is our privilege to know many single Moms. The vast majority of them are resemble drill sergeants in that they are used to imposing structure upon their respective environments. Days are planned out to the most minute degree. Which is only natural when you consider that they have to work, make sure everybody gets to the soccer practice or violin lesson on time, provide meals, check homework, clean house-clothes-dishes only to start planning to do it all again for the next day. Come to think of it, the foregoing could pretty much describe all of the Moms we know, single or otherwise. The time demands are just a little more acute on the ones who don't have a helpmate-or alleged helpmate-around the house.

But even the best planners get thrown a curve every now and again. And we may not be the most intuitive person in this Zip Code but we knew from the exasperated expression on this particular Mom's stressed out face that this was not the time to drop the ball neighborwise even though we had not planned to spend our early evening with a 7 year old girl. After all, it was a measure of her desperation that she was applying to us. Petitions to terminate parental rights have been filed over less.

So,"sure" we said. "Be no problem."

"Thank you, thank you, thank you!" she said as she ran to her car. "I'll call the church to make sure that there's no problem."

Yeah. Like physical arrest or something.

On the way home from church Caroline, uncorked the first of the zillion questions that would park themselves in her little brain during the 2 hours that she was under my care and supervision.

"Mom says you are a lawyer. What did you do today?"

We looked in the rearview mirror. How does one explain the black art of lawyering to a child of tender years?

"Wrote some papers for the judge to read."

" And will he read them?"

" Maybe."

And so it went as we sat on the porch swing.

"Does ivy have eyes?"

"No."

" Then how does it know to climb?"

About that time AngelOne passed over en route to Children's Hospital.

" How can helicopters fly without wings? Even birds have wings."

" Do you know science? This is what I know about science. There are solids, liquids and gases. Is there more?"

By and by the unseasonable cool of the evening chased us indoors. Once inside she pointed at a picture of a young woman on the mantle.

" Who's that?"

"That's Audrey. She is our goddaughter." we explained, persistent in our use of the third party voice that many readers of these ramblings find highly irritating.

"What's a goddaughter?"

" Well, in the Catholic and Episcopal Church, a godparent promises to take care of the baby in case something happens to the parents."

"What's 'piscopal?"

And so it went, this call and response from one so very young to one who can no longer make that claim. And while we have never considered ourselves to be a natural in the area of pedagogy, we felt like our liberal arts education actually came in handy for once as we answered Caroline's questions fairly accurately, seeing as how they spanned from science to theology. Our afternoon with Caroline made us feel almost useful as it is a good thing to spend time with a child. It takes a village and all that.

And yet, for some kids, an afternoon spent on a porch swing going over the reading assignment is as likely to happen as spending the afternoon on Mars. Earlier last week we received an e-mail from a friend who teaches first grade at another school in Little Rock. It said:

" I should have been a doctor and not a teacher. There is a boy in my room-his dad was killed a few years ago. His uncle was shot and killed yesterday and his sister's daddy was shot in the leg. This was yesterday also. This is what I deal with. I need more peace in the workplace."

How can a child possibly be expected to learn and develop while surrounded by so much violence? Do we expect our teachers, underpaid and stressed out as they are, to work miracles? Some people lead far different lives than our different lives than our little Caroline. She gets to cool her jets at the neighbor's house until while her mom is through with her meeting. Across town some other kid's uncle and stepfather got plugged on the same day.

And so it went last week in elementary education in Little Rock.

Avoidance and Perverse Results

Have you ever noticed that nobody takes responsibility for anything anymore? Barry Bonds says that he took steroids but that he just didn't know it at the time. Gary Sheffield says he used a salve known as "clear" and took some supplements but didn't know what they were. Ken Lay and Bernie Ebbers both deny they knew the extent of the chicanery going on at Enron and MCI Worldcom. This defense didn't work real well for Ebbers as the jury found him guilty. Which has got to make Lay and his lawyers reeeeeeeal nervous about their chances when their day in court rolls around.

A variation on this theme are those folks who utilize avoidance when they don't have the discipline to moderate their behavior. We all know folks who are in 12-step programs because the cannot drink responsibly. We know people on diets who have altered their daily route to work so they don't drive by the doughnut shop. These are perfectly useful and benign approaches to making lifestyle changes. However, there are also some corporate entities who cannot trust themselves to regulate or moderate their behavior. So they they fixed the system so that they don't have to deal with the underlying problems. Which created what the law refers to as "perverse results." A couple of recent examples of this more sinister version of avoidance therapy may be found in two diverse industries: The National Basketball Association and the credit card industry.

If there is anything the NBA hates it is players declaring their eligibility for pro hoops right out of high school. So, it has proposed a league rule making 20 the minimum age for eligibility for the NBA draft. The stated reason for this is that players need time in college or junior college to mature both mentally and physically before they subject themselves to the physical and emotional rigors of an 82 game season in addition to learning to live on their own.

A lawyer friend of ours is fond of saying, " There are reasons. And then there are the real reasons." The real reasons the NBA doesn't want teenagers in the league is because the general managers of the teams in the league live in complete mortal terror of giving a wad of money and a guaranteed contract to a player that is a bust. Another reason is that the colleges act like so many unpaid farm clubs for the NBA. It would vastly prefer that players develop and mature on good old State U's dime so it doesn't have to deal with them.

So why don't they just leave it up to the individual clubs? Impractical. No club is going to refuse to draft guys out of high school as a matter of policy and let a conference rival sign the next Kevin Garnett. Why not outlaw guaranteed contracts? No other professional sports league is insane enough to offer them to their players. Yeah, right. The NBA Players Union would go full-blown batshit crazy if that one ever got floated. So why not start a minor league system like the NFL has done in Europe? Too expensive. Why not increase the scouting staffs for each club? See the preceding sentence. What's the difference between paying money to an 18 year old bust and paying money to a bust with a bachelor's degree? They don't know. Maybe it just pisses them off worse.

So rather than deal with the problem the NBA is just trying to avoid it. The perverse result is that a young man who is eligible to vote and to die for his country is not eligible to make a living at a perfectly legal occupation. There are teenagers in abundance in professional baseball and tennis. Hell, Boris Becker was a yearling boy of 17 when he won Wimbledon the first time. What so different about hoops?

For years, the credit card industry has had the red ass about people using the bankruptcy laws to discharge credit card debt. And the disdain the NBA harbors for kids who declare early is nothing like the hatred the banking lobby has for Chapter 7 of Title 11 of the United States Code. Which is the liquidation section of the Bankruptcy Code wherein a Debtor can receive a Discharge of his debts in exchange for the surrender of his non-exempt assets for liquidation to pay the secured creditors. We are sorry. Bankruptcy lawyers talk like this. Bear with us. We are translating as best as we can.

The banking lobby has long clamored for a change to the Code in order to tighten the eligibility requirements for Debtors in Chapter 7. After years of their incessant bitching the interestingly named Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act got through Congress and was signed into law last week by President Bush. This new law will impose a "means test" based on a formula which takes into account the Debtor's debts and his income (based on his state's median income) to determine whether he will be eligible for a 7 or whether he will be forced to file a Chapter 13 Repayment Plan.

We are all for folks paying their just debts. But the majority of Chapter 7 filers do so on the heels of personal calamity such as divorce, illness or unemployment. Why come down hard on them?

Why not make sure that an applicant is creditworthy on the front end before giving them an unsecured line of credit? Too slow. A competitor might get someone signed up. (Does this sound familiar? We wonder how many NBA executives got their start in banking.) If this is such a big crisis that is costing the industry millions why don't they contest more discharges? You kidding? You know how much money that would cost? After all, we are talking unsecured debt here.

No, it is easier to lay all of it of on the consumer, all the while making a big deal about personal responsibility in order to make it more palatable to avoid corporate responsibility.

And if that is not a sufficiently perverse result to come out of the new legislation, here's another one: The new means test for eligibility might actually encourage the unbridled use of credit cards. Here's how.

Let's say your debt-to-asset ratio is a little too robust to qualify for Chapter 7. Which is nothing to particularly be bragging about by the way. And let's say you have the usual 4 or 5 credit cards that the average American household has. Hell, run those suckers up until your financial picture is sufficiently precarious to where they can't put you in a 13! As long as you don't go on this bonanza less than 90 days before you file your Petition the debts are not considered fraudulent.

Talk about the Mother of all perverse results. Only in America. Where the real reasons that things get done don't take account of the potential for the perverse result.

Wally Hall and the Sickness Unto Death

"[T]here is here a certainty,namely,that objectively it is absurd; and thus absurdity,held fast in the passion of inwardness, is faith."
Soren Kierkegaard, Danish Philosopher

"His ( Earl Woods, the father of Tiger Woods) expectations never exceeded his imagination."
C. Wallace Hall, Sports Editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

It is often said that "Sports is a metaphor for Life." And yet rarely has this ancient bromide posed such wide philosophical implications-at least not around here- as when Wally Hall explored the dynamics of the relationship of Tiger Woods and his father in yesterday's "Like It is" column.

It is well to ponder the quality and nature of a life in which one's expectations exceed one's imagination. Perhaps such a state would produce, at worst La Nausee spoken of by Sartre or at the minimum the condition of perpetual ennui as exhibited in French intellectuals and/or teenaged girls.

Kierkegaard employed language dense and abstruse in pondering these questions. Only a master craftsman of the language like Wally Hall could bring his penetrating insight and crystalline intellect to bear on these issues while reducing same to the common and friendly parlance of the sports page in order that we common people might more easily grasp them.

And so, it is mere quibbling to suggest that the man described in Wally's piece as being the soul of probity and proportion once predicted that his son would be as important to mankind as Jesus or somesuch. It is Jesuitical hair-splitting to question whether the "Jimmy Piersall Story" is a story primarily about preseverance in the home of a cruel father (which Wally assures us Earl Woods was not) and not a troubled man's triumph over mental illness. Perhaps we are not comprehending that Wally is simply putting his own slant on Kierkegaard's interpretation of the parable of Abraham and Issac from whence the famous notion of the "leap of faith" originates. A great writer's work is often susceptible to nuanced interpretations.

No matter. Like fellow existentialists Sartre or Camus, Wally comprehends that the only valid response in the face of the absurdity of an indifferent universe is to act. In the context of the average "Like It Is" column, this translates into speculation about relationships between people he does not know and whom he did not interview. It is to make unwarranted assumptions about the motivations of men. It is , upon occasion, to just make stuff up. It is to kiss, without surcease, the ass of Frank Broyles.

Kierkegaard also said, "People understand me so poorly that they don't even understand my complaint about them not understanding me."

It is probably wrong to impose out own construct on Wally Hall's body of work. Perhaps his ouvre is the absurdity held fast in the passion of inwardness. Perhaps somewhere in his deathless prose is buried the"leap of faith" that the stuff he writes has some remote and tenuous connection to journalism.

Or like the critics of Kierkegaard maybe we just don't understand.

Jesus of Hillcrest and The Hiker from Hell

There is a crazy person in our neighborhood. Actually there are several, some of them are known to us actually, but this one is conspicuous even by the high standards for eccentricity we have laid down here in the People's Republic of Hillcrest.

This man of whom we are referring can be seen about two or three times a week running up and down Van Buren St (which is a good 40 degree angle if you don't know) bearing a large nylon backpack on his shoulders. He is always dressed in the same uniform: one of those hideous gray sweatshirts issued by the United States Army, blue shorts, white socks and white court shoes. We don't know what is in the pack: bricks, books, concrete blocks or the E.R.A of the pitching staff of the Kansas City Royals. Whatever the hell he's got in there it is always filled to the brim with something heavy. And up and down Van Buren he goes, neck veins bulging, eyes popping, muttering and cursing under his heaving breath as he makes his grim way.

He is not the first itinerant nut we have had around here. Why, just last Spring our neighborhood was graced by the cameo appearance of one of the two Jesuses who have briefly walked amongst here in the 72205 zip code in the last 10 years or so. Last year's model looked like he was fresh from an open casting call for a Mel Gibson movie. If you can use the word "fresh" to describe a guy in robes, lugging a cross on his back while adorned with thorns on his head and stage blood on his face, chest and shoulders, that is. Alas, one sharp eyed witness noticed that his cross had casters at its foot, which undoubtedly contributed greatly to ease of operation insofar as taking up one's cross goes. And this adversely impacted upon what little rapport he had hoped to gain with the rabble here in the neighborhood as this discovery turned His rendition of the Via Dolorosa into mere shtick. Which is not the easiest thing to do if you think about it.

His predecessor Jesus I was first seen around here around about the summer of '98 or so. Jesus I was a stripped down (no cross or fake blood) version, and a slightly more malevolent one as well. His ministry consisted mainly of staring at people. One night the teenaged niece of a friend of ours suffered unto Jesus I as he stood staring at the passersby on Kavenaugh from in front of the convenience store.

" What's your name?" Gretchen asked.

" Jesus." he said.

" Where ya from Jesus?

" Fayetteville."

The Trial before Pilate it was not.

It is our understanding that the earthly ministry of Jesus I came to a close when He attempted to address the faithful gathered for noon mass at Our Lady of the Holy Souls. Unfortunately for Him, one of Little Rock's finest was in attendance during his lunch hour and swiftly put the cuffs on him and took him away. He has not been seen in these parts since.

Which brings us back to the Hiker from Hell who makes his Sisyphean journey on a thrice weekly basis past our little house here in the People's Republic. It occurs to us here at TMFW that we all have stuff that we carry with us. Some of us don't exercise as we should. Some of us spend money beyond our means. Some of us eat and drink to excess. Some of us choose our romantic partners badly. (A friend of ours says that you could put her in a room full of Mormons and she would be attracted to the one guy who was a drunk.) Some of us are just unlucky. And so on and so forth.

Do I mean to suggest that the Hiker serves as metaphor for human existence? Or human existence as it obtains in the People's Republic of Hillcrest at least?

Of course not. This cat is smooth running crazy. He serves a metaphor for the limits of psychiatry.

But it is nonetheless true that we all got to carry that weight every day that we are able to get out of our little beds.

Some people just don't make as big of a production of it as do others.

Human Dignity and the Law

Our Uncle Bill is dying. He sustained a stroke on New Year's Day in 2004. He did fairly well until just after last Christmas. Since then his decline has been precipitous. He is only intermittently lucid. He spends most of his time in the bed. When he is alert enough to converse often times he speaks of matters from the past such as the need to sell his Ford. As in the Model T. He still pines for Aunt Jean who didn't wake up one morning last summer. They had been married for almost sixty years. He hates his life and the loss of his former vigorous health.

He is receiving hospice care in his home. He is cared for by a private duty nurse. He is fed and kept clean. He receives medication in sufficient doses to help him stay reasonably comfortable. However, in the event he sustains another stroke or acquires an illness, he will not receive aggressive medical care. Further, should he lapse into unconsciousness, he will be allowed to pass away. This decision was made by the family. After all, he is 86. He will never get be restored to his old pickup driving, deer hunting, Baptist church attending self. He will never see Jean again from this side of the shore. We think that this is what he would want. Are we assuming facts? Of course we are. But we know Bill. He is an Uncle, a father and a grandfather. Everybody is in agreement that this is the best plan under the circumstances.

Please let's keep this to ourselves. We do not wish Uncle Bill to be disturbed by Rev. Randall Terry and his so-called "Right to Life" acolytes. Maple Street in Benton, Arkansas is not wide enough to accommodate a mob of protestors and the media that would surely be there to record every hotheaded speech, every hysterical act of someone falling out, and every time a child was arrested for attempting to "rescue" Uncle Bill. And we simply do not need the unbidden presence of Jesse Jackson. The family has enough to contend with, thank you very much.

Is there one among us who does not own a heart that was not moved to pity as Terri Schiavo perished last week in Florida? And yet, for some of us at least , that pity was tempered by the knowledge that the poor woman was incapable of comprehending that her last days had unleashed a firestorm of protest, legal machinations and inflammatory commentary from both media and politicians alike. She had no knowledge of the psychodrama outside the door.

Let us be clear on what the Schiavo case was and was not about. It was not about the fact that Terri Schiavo was "alive" when the state court judge ordered the feeding tube removed. It was not about whether her husband is a heartless cad who fathered two children out of wedlock while seeking to terminate his wife's life. It is not about whether it is ethical or whether it should be legal to deny food and nutrition to a living person although this is a worthy subject for discussion for another day. And it is not about whether a spouse gets to make these decisions when the family of the vegetative person disagrees although this too is a worthy subject for a later date.

It is about respect for the rule of law. The sad details of the Schiavo case were litigated for almost 10 years. The decision of the state court judge was upheld by Florida's appellate courts. Despite the extraordinary special statute conferring federal jurisdiction over this case, the federal courts declined to intervene for the reason that Terri Schiavo's right so to due process had been protected by the Florida state courts.

What otherwise would be considered an exercise in judicial restraint is now considered an act of "judicial tyranny." Veiled threats have been leveled at the federal judges involved by unscrupulous politicians. Not so veiled threats were made against the state court trial judge who ordered the tube removed. The judge, a Southern Baptist, and his family are now under 24 hour guard. Certain radio and cable pundits urged Governor Jeb Bush to send the State Police in to "rescue" poor Terri. Amazingly enough, he evidently considered it but thought better of it when told that the local cops would enforce the court's order and block the entrance. Bless their underpaid little hearts.

Go to any law library in this great land of ours and you will see walls full of books that report the decisions made by the state and federal courts. In each and every one of the cases reported, exactly 50 percent of the parties to those cases left the courthouse pissed off. Some were incarcerated, some were ordered to pay money, some lost their land. And so on.

So where do we go from here? Will the Schiavo case stand for the proposition that you can take the law into your own hands when the court renders a decision that you don't agree with? Will the Schiavo case henceforth mean that the "Right to Life" trumps a person's right to a dignified death on terms dictated earlier by him or her? Or will the short life and tragic death of Terri Schiavo set off a reasoned and dispassionate nationwide discussion about "end of life" care for the elderly and the disabled? What will be Terri's legacy concerning these issues that all of us will have to face eventually if we have not already done so?

On second thought, we think that it would be interesting if the Reverends Terry and Jackson were to show up to "rescue" Bill from his family. We think that Bill's huntin' and fishin' buddies from Haskell would find their unbidden presence in the community thought provoking and useful.

And they would deal with them accordingly.

Like Andy Rooney Died

Last week we were struck down with the flu bug that has been making the rounds here in Little Rock. Accordingly, we were ordered home by our physician where we spent four days. Which is something of a record. This gave us plenty of time to reflect and to make the following observations. As if Andy Rooney is not dead yet. As if we needed more proof that an idle mind is the devil's workshop.

1) We have a job and are not home much during the day. We were amazed at how often the phone rang with calls from political action groups and solicitors. We thought we were on that list that would bar these sort of calls. If we are, it obviously is obeyed mostly in its breach. Equally irritating was the fairly constant barrage of itinerant gentlemen holding themselves out as "yard men." Some of them even had tools and mowers with them. One guy knocked on the door offering his services, even after my yard had obviously been raked and mowed by the college kid I use for this purpose. We were sufficiently irritable as it was, running a fever of 100 degrees for 4 days will do that for a person, without the unbidden intrusion of these solicitation. A sign is going up on the door next week. That'll show 'em.

2) Being confined to quarters as we were, we were able to linger over the "Letters to the Editor" section of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. We are always amused by people who write these screeds against Darwin's Theory of Evolution. Or conversely in support of the teaching of "intelligent design." When we were a kid, the fundy types we knew eschewed scientific explanations for such things as the origin of the universe, reposing trust in their belief that " you can't find God in a test tube." Which they certainly had every right to believe. The problem with this as a matter of tactics is clear. You can't put God-or at least a certain kind of God- into the classroom without getting Him into the test tube first. Otherwise, you are teaching religion. Which, last time we looked, was still against the law.

So how did the Bible-bangers get around this? They made stuff up. They created their own colleges and think tanks, which produced experts who came up with a theory. And since all Darwin had was a "theory" the "theory" of intelligent design should be accorded equal dignity to Darwin's and taught alongside the theory of natural selection.

And now that the educators are presented with an "alternative theory" you have people who write to the paper "supporting" the use of the alternative theory, just like people write letters in support of bond issues. No matter that the Darwinian model of evolution is pretty much accepted as Gospel by professional biologists. No matter that we run the risk of exposing our kids to bad science. If you can frame this lunacy into an issue of choices then it simply becomes a "fairness" issue.

Is this a great country or what?

We at TMFW are not so sure that this matters all that much mainly because we don't pretend to be scientists. Unlike the letter writers who argue that evolution violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics. We had no idea that so many evangelical types were amateur Lord Kelvins.

Rather, we repose faith in a God that created His universe and the creatures therein in any way He Himdamn well saw fit. And that the science explains what it explains. Without regard to fairness or political correctness.

But those letters to the editor sure are funny.

3) There was much speculation last week as to whether or not Britney Spears is preggers. This is because recent photographs of her relentlessly overexposed midriff seem to suggest that she is gaining weight. We have no idea as to whether Britney is expecting or whether she remains an entropic system as the proponents of intelligent design might say.

And like those proponents we offer an alternative theory. Britney, when you get down to it, is white trash. Our experience with white trash women is that typically they are as pretty as they come up until around the mid-twenties. By then the lifestyle dedicated to serial marriages to worthless men, smoking Newports and raising a trailer full of kids takes its toll, accelerates the rate of decay and they go to seed.

We know that Britney smokes and we know that she has had a tempestuous love life leading up to her recent nuptials to one the few ostensibly straight dancers we have ever heard of. Which must present its own kind of stress.

At least if she doesn't have one in the oven we will now have a theory that the condition of being white trash is genetic and should be monitored much as people with a genetic predisposition to diabetes monitor their blood sugar.

And this could be taught in the public schools.

As an aside, if you wish to learn Britney's thoughts on semi-conductor physics go to http://britneyspears.ac/laser.htm. It's at least as stupid as anything else mentioned in this post.


4) We also love it when Baptists get all huffy. We come from a long line of Baptists ourselves. We have a beloved aunt in Oklahoma who is so Baptist she pronounces the word BAPtist exploding the "p." we like to poke gentle fun at our aunt. She once asked us why we drank. We told it it made the pills go down easier. She never asked us another question like that again.

Anyway, one of the polemicists that grace the Letters section of the paper made reference to Baptists as Protestants. Whoooo boy! You would have thought that he had called them the Bolshoi Ballet from the responses from all of the readers whose noses were put out of joint by the suggestion.

The typical response was to the effect that the Baptist church is the one true church founded at the Pentecost and that all the other denominations, teevee ministries, websites and cults that have spun off since are offshoots therefrom. Which certainly raises the question of just where the hell they were while Rome and Constantinople were fine tuning the theology and coming up with the secret handshakes. Their answer to that is this was the period of time that the Baptists "went underground."

We do not believe this. "Going underground" is very unBaptistlike behavior. But we have an open mind on this issue. Their having gone underground would explain the absence of accounts of them meddling with Roman politics, why the Bible does not mention that baked ham with pineapple was served at the Last Supper and why the art of that period depicts Jesus as having long hair and a beard, which no Baptist deity would tolerate.

We shall keep an eye on the Letters section for further teaching on this issue.

5) During our convalescence last week, it occurred to us that the antivirals we were consuming by the fistful would be greatly potentiated by the application of alcohol, martinis to be precise. So we slowly and painfully went to a merchant down the street from us that sells a certain variety of olives that we fine particularly therapeutic during times of stress, illness and female troubles.

We could not help but notice that the guys behind the counter were discussing baseball while looking at the computer monitor on the counter.

" Sure Palmero can hit, but do you need 2 first basemen on the roster?" the older one said to the younger.

Our knees began to buckle and we reached for our inhaler.

"Don't tell me you guys are...."

"Fantasy baseball? You bet!" said the older one. "Want in on our league? Yahoo runs a great league. Been doing it for 20 years."

"20 years?" we said, rapidly fanning ourself with a cheesecloth." Yahoo hasn't been around 20 years."

" But fantasy baseball has been." he replied.

We declined the invitation. We know us some baseball but we don't pretend to know baseball, say, the way evangelicals know thermodynamics or Baptists know the History of Christianity. Which is how you have to know baseball to play with those guys.

Besides, we wouldn't consider the league to be sufficiently lifelike or accurate without fantasy drug testing, fantasy paternity suits or fantasy Congressional hearings.

But we were comforted by the thought that even though baseball may be screwed, blued and tattooed right now there are a couple of guys excitedly getting ready for the season in a chic-chic food store in the Heights surrounded by a day-spa and interior decorator. Only baseball can survive itself.

And these are the things we thought about as we stumbled our way toward 98.5. Like we said, idle hands. Like Andy Rooney died.

Barry Shrugged

" I'm tired of my kids crying. You wanted me to jump off a bridge, I finally did. You finally brought me and my family down...So now go pick a different person."


When you write about spring training in baseball you have to described the experience as being encamped. And when the players leave for the regular season session of sptting, scratching and chasing women who are not their wives, you have to write that they "broke camp." It is in the rules. This is despite the fact that these various "camps" where these "athletes" "train" are more day spa than Valley Forge (Now there was a camp). The San Francisco Giants are in currently encamped in Scottsdale, Arizona. This is where Barry Bonds attempted to come across as Christ figure of the pharmaceutical labs during an impromptu press conference yesterday.

We know us plenty of lawyers here at TMFW. And we know a thing or two about the criminal justice system if only by osmosis. We think, but do not know, what might have instigated yesterday's pity party. We suspect that either Bonds, his trainer and the woman who has come forward claiming to be his mistress are getting sweated by the Feds concerning his involvement with steroids.

Let's assume for the sake of argument that Bonds has progressed from a mere Grand Jury witness to a target of the investigation. This is what they are most likely doing:

1) It has been reported that Greg Anderson, Bonds' personal trainer and "life long friend" is trying to cut a deal. According to a transcript leaked to the San Francisco Chronicle which purports to be the secret Grand Jury testimony of Barry Bonds, Bonds testified that while he had used steroids, he didn't know what they were at the time. So, they probably went back to Greg and asked him "Oh yeah?" If Greg says Bonds knew, better yet if Greg has documents that reflect that Bonds knew that the substances he was taking were steroids, Bonds has a problem.

2) About a month ago, a woman named Kimberly Bell popped up claiming to be the mistress of Barry Bonds. She says that Bonds told her that he was taking steroids between 1999 and 2000 for the reason that it helped him recover from injury quicker. She also said that Bonds gave her 80 grand which she used for a down payment on a new house. What do you want to bet that she didn't report this payment, or any others if any, to the IRS? And what do you want to bet that the FBI already has her last 5 tax returns? And what do you want to bet that they would be willing to go light on the tax evasion charge in exchange for her testimony that Bonds was on the juice? So now Bonds has problem # 2 in addition to a problem with Mrs. Bonds. If we were Bonds we might be consulting with Kobe Bryant about his suggestions for a jeweler.

3) If Bonds isn't a target of the investigation why wasn't he subpoenaed by Congress during last week's grandstanding hearing on the issue of steroids in baseball? As some wag said, " Not subpoenaing Barry Bonds for an investigation into steroids in baseball is like not subpoenaing Al Capone for an investigation on mob crime in the Twenties." Even Congress is not that stupid. We suspect that the Committee looking into these matters was advised by the prosecutors that compelling Bonds to appear before it would jeopardize the criminal case against him.

And we suspect that Barry Bonds has been advised about all of this by his lawyers. Which might explain why he is so frigging touchy nowadays. We rather prefer Barry Bonds the sullen prick to Barry Bonds the whiney bitch.

We suggest that he get back on the juice. But only after getting a prescription first. We think he needs the testosterone boost.