MLS Lives! Toronto FC Edition

Wow. Just wow. I watched the internet broadcast of Kansas City Wizards at Toronto FC… and it was awesome. Toronto had 20,000 fans in attendance in a real stadium, they had microphones on the crowd to get the experience of being there and they had real, proper match commentators. Even though the quality of the match was sub-standard on the field… it still felt very satisfying to watch because of the atmosphere around the game. The way the game was broadcast further demonstrates how far the US broadcasters have to go still in terms of “getting it.” Just watch the highlight clip to get a taste (make sure you pick Wizards @ Toronto FC and not the Toronto FC @ Wizards higher on the list). It looks and sounds like proper football!

ESPN, by the way, is not incapable of broadcasting a proper football game. They just need to get real play-by-play guys (If Tommy Smyth can do Champs League and MLS, why can’t Derek Rae? These two have called Europe’s best matches for years together and do a very nice job… especially Derek Rae), mic the fans in the audience (presumably they’re not doing too many Thursday night games in Arrowhead when 8,000 people show up, but seem to be going to the soccer-specifics for big games), and for crying out loud, in all of the editions of Sportscenter, can’t they find a place to give match highlights? Must we really know so much from Barry Melrose about the NHL when ESPN declined to even pay to televise it anymore?

One last point about MLS through four weeks: the games have been much, much better on the whole. The league has been able to fill out one or two roster spots with imported talent across the board in the league, and it is removing the players on the field who are not quite up to the standard of play of everyone else. We’re seeing sides that don’t just have good attacking players or defending players, but teams with very skilled attacking units, and this has made a big difference in quality of play.

Also helping play has been the reforms to the playoff format, the international tournament qualifiers, and increased player bonuses for winning matches. this league is getting much more interesting fast. On top of this, the star power is there on almost every club. Eddie Johnson, Landon Donovan, and Jozy Altidore make Wizards, Galaxy, and Red Bulls worth watching by themselves to this point.

Forget Freddy, the future of USA Soccer looks like it’s going to be Altidore… and we should all embrace it with big, warm embrace. It is sacrilege for a United fan to say this, but I love watching him play, even if it is for Red Bulls.

Juan Pablo Angel will be playing in a week or two. So will Guillermo Barros Schelotto. Mid-summer brings Blanco and Beckham. But before you decide to wait for the old talent to come in, I suggest enjoying Altidore, Mapp, EJ, and Brian Ching while they are still here.

Bottom line, MLS has a season that is shorter than every other major sport except the NFL, but it makes up for having twice as many games as the NFL by playing each game in half the time. Ignore the “hard core” soccer fans, ignore the “Euro-snobs” you don’t need to know the difference between a 4-4-2 and a 3-5-2 to appreciate Landon Donovan’s rediscovered aggression, EJ rediscovered work ethic, or the coming of “the one” that is Jozy Altidore (I cannot stress this enough, he has 4 GOALS in SEVEN pro games! Including his team’s only playoff goal last year! Did I mention he was 17? Did I mention he comes back on defense? Did I mention that he actually goes out wide and tries to play the ball in from the corner of the 18 yard box – the way Arsenal strikers like to play?)

Don’t become a soccer snob – just watch these guys and have fun. if you don’t like it fine… but I think if you catch the right game you’re going to like it.

Farewell to “Drive”

A sad day that I knew was coming since the premiere is finally upon us.  Tim Minear’s newest show, “Drive,” has been canceled by Fox.  I really liked this show, and I’ll tell you why.  Like Joss Whedon, with whom Minear collaborated on with “Firefly,” (thirteen of the most terrific shows ever mostly put on television in almost the correct order) Minear is interested in taking broad American genres that have been almost cartoonishly overdone and then try to reclaim them and put some meaning back into them by displaying a fascination with why they are part of Americana in the first place.  “Firefly” did this with science fiction and westerns, “Drive” was shaping up to be a wonderful mix of the car-chase genre, the modern suspense serial, and reality television.   It wasn’t off to a perfect start, but I thought it was pretty good.  Obviously no one else thought it sounded interesting, and many people who saw the premiere (both of them) simply could not swallow the conceit of an illegal cross-country road race being a watchable launching point for a television show they would watch.  This is too bad.  I thought this was a show with something interesting to say, but hopefully it’s on to other projects for Minear, Fillion, and Dylan Baker, in particular.

Can Political Briefings at Federal Agencies be Appropriate?

An interesting story from The Washington Post today:

White House officials conducted 20 private briefings on Republican electoral prospects in the last midterm election for senior officials in at least 15 government agencies covered by federal restrictions on partisan political activity, a White House spokesman and other administration officials said yesterday.

The White House claims that these briefings were informational.  At first, this sort of made sense to me, I’ve seen informational briefings on the electoral landscapes for coming elections before, and they tend to be aimed at communicating objective information.  What could be so bad about that?  Because, while not strictly saying “vote Republican,” if someone comes into your office and projects that Republicans will lose at current pace,or might lose, and then they project that this might effect how much money the White House gives your agency, they have essentially told you to vote Republican.

In short, the problem is not even a problem of objectivity, although maintaining the integrity of such briefings would likely be challenging, the problem is that the White House is giving out taxpayer funded infomercials to its own employees with regards to major political races.  No matter how verifiable the presentation is, there’s something that still seems fundamentally unfair and inappropriate about doing so.

Cezanne’s Doubt

“The rules of anatomy and design are present in each stroke of his brush just as the rules of the game underlie each stroke of a tennis match.  But whatever motivates the painter’s movement can never be simply perspective or geometry or the laws governing movements from which a picture gradually emerges there can be only one thing: the landscape in its totatlity and in its absolute fullness, precisely what Cezanne called a ‘motif.’”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Peter Levine on Charter Schools

From Peter Levine’s latest post:

Currently, seven percent of the charters in my city are meeting the standards for “adequate yearly progress” under federal law, compared to 19 percent of the city’s standard public schools. Nevertheless, the charters are growing by 13 percent per year as parents move their kids to them.

And later on:

Although I would not ignore test results and “adequate yearly progress,” these are not the only criteria. Parents may be shifting to charter schools because of other values. I spent part of the morning looking for national survey results about what parents want for their kids. The questions that I found struck me as excessively narrow or beside the point. But everyday experience suggests that in a diverse city like Washington, people want various things for their children–values, cultural references, experiences, and supports. They may be looking for charters that match those preferences more closely than the public schools do.

Congratulations Evan Coren

In a former life, I was a believer in the Democratic Party.  I was 18, and I was very interested in being involved in politics.  I met a good friend in college who was very serious about his studies, was a Truman scholarship finalist, and poured hours and hours into his undergraduate dissertation while I went out, met people, glad-handeled, socialized, and practiced my rhetorical skills in College Debate.  Naturally, I became political science professor and Evan became a successful Maryland politician.

Congratulations to Evan, and congratulations to Columbia.  Everyone always says that they’re friends are truly principled and committed to doing what’s right, but you have no idea of how principled, stubbornly principled a representative you have selected.  Lots of people say they love democracy, but Evan actually loves it, and he has pursued thinking about it and caring about it with the type of devotion that all of our representatives should, but almost none do.  Good show, Columbia, good show.

“A Return to Normalcy”

Warren Hardingonce ran for President on the slogan ‘A return to normalcy.”  That “normalcy” is not even a word was a very telling preview of the Harding administration.  Nevertheless,normalcy is now part of our collective vocabulary, and it is an appeal for steady times in the aftermath of a time of great destruction.

For Virginia Tech, that time is now. Teachers must once again teach, students must go to class, and administrators must figure out how to finish the school year, coordinate summer classes, and prepare the school for next year… all while trying to be sensitive and sensible about what happened.  It is by no means an enviable task, but I do wish them well in their efforts.   Normalcy is not likely to come swiftly, but it will eventually come.

Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn

I’d be pretty upset… once I got my strength back

Could you imagine running a whole marathon and losing by only 3 seconds?  Or finishing 3rd, being only 6 seconds behind?  It happened at the London Marathon. I maintain that running any more than 4-5 miles is boring, and racing anything longer than 5k is also boring… though my exploits at my last 5k were such that I thought I was only halfway finished until I realized I was 200 meters from the finish line, so perhaps I could have felt sufficiently entertained for longer.

Republican Senators – Bailing on or Defending the President?

After the heavy salvos fired at the Attorney General by Republican Senators Arlen Spector and Tom Coburn, it is unclear whether or not we are seeing such Senators abandon ship on the President in favor of their own survival, or if they are possibly trying to signal to the President that the only way to keep this investigation from reaching the White House is to throw Gonzales overboard right now.  If I were a Republican strategist, I would leave Gonzales and his staff to take the enormous beating, and advise the White House to hire a competent and independent Attorney General who shares the same general views as the White House but is not as directly manipulable.  It turns out, and I think that this is a good thing – that the potential political costs for interfering with DOJ in this manner far outweigh whatever benefits the Executive Branch is likely to accrue from getting away with it.

Of course, the story above indicates that if Senate Republicans were telling President Bush to throw Gonzales overboard in order to save them from investigations of White House officials, it seems that the White House is not taking notice, at least publicly.  I continue to be amazed by the fact that this controversy could have easily been discarded by the White House if they only swallowed their pride for the briefest moment, taken the initiative in firing DOJ leadership, and called on Congress to reform the appointment laws.  had they done this, this whole affair could have been short, sweet, and minor… instead, the Senate Judiciary committee has been practically invited into a Constitutional showdown with the White House that they will almost certainly win.