Paul Soglin: Waxing America

Best. Horserace Call. Ever.

This call of a Monmouth race is hilarious, as a horse named "My Wife Knows Everything" beats out one named "The Wife Doesn't Know."  Posted here so Soglin can't claim to be the only Waxing America horse racing source:

-Barry Orton

Like Boxing, Football Causes Brain Damage - And Not Just In The Pros

Charles Pierce puts it out there:

Let us be very clear about this. It is impossible to play professional football for any length of time and not suffer brain damage. There will never be a helmet sturdy enough to spare you. There is no tweaking of the rulebook that will eliminate it. There is no fine, no penalty, severe enough to stop it. Play in the NFL and you will damage your brain. Period.

The Chris Henry story should not only scare NFL players. Pierce only focuses on the NFL, but what about all the other football players at every level going through thousands of contact drills and hits in games and practices?

Editing Pierce:

Playing professional football is intrinsically unhealthy. Every player knows it. Every coach knows it. Every fan and pundit ought to know it, but too often, they all pretend they don't. The NFL game is the great gravitational force at the center of the American sports industry. And it traffics in the destruction of the human body.

...There is nothing they can do about this, no matter how well-intentioned the league is about improving its workplace safety. The players are too strong, too big, and too fast for any rule changes, or improved safety equipment, ever to be fully adequate. It's about inertia and momentum, and not even Roger Goodell can suspend Isaac Newton.

Malcolm Gladwell's New Yorker piece last October went even further and compared football to dogfighting. Over six months ahead of the  sports pages, Gladwell exposed football's epidemic of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the chronic neurological disorder that results from brain trauma. Concussions are only the tip of a very large iceberg of brain damage that is being found in football players as young as high school.

Much of the attention in the football world, in the past few years, has been on concussions—on diagnosing, managing, and preventing them—and on figuring out how many concussions a player can have before he should call it quits. But a football player’s real issue isn’t simply with repetitive concussive trauma. It is, as the concussion specialist Robert Cantu argues, with repetitive subconcussive trauma. It’s not just the handful of big hits that matter. It’s lots of little hits, too.

...in an average football season, a lineman could get struck in the head a thousand times, which means that a ten-year N.F.L. veteran, when you bring in his college and high-school playing days, could well have been hit in the head eighteen thousand times: that’s thousands of jarring blows that shake the brain from front to back and side to side, stretching and weakening and tearing the connections among nerve cells, and making the brain increasingly vulnerable to long-term damage.

Read the whole Gladwell piece, which explores the links between football, boxing and dogfighting in a way that will not let you enjoy watching any of the three "sports" ever again.  The University of Wisconsin stopped participating in NCAA boxing after Charley Mohr's 1960 death - a story well-told in Doug Moe's terrific book Lords of the Ring.  Fifty years from now, will football be seen as a brutal anachronism, as boxing is largely seen now? Will universities still have teams and arrange much of their schedules around the games? Will parents still encourage sons to play as a means of earning an education at the literal expense of the health of their brains?

- Barry Orton

Good news about the storm - UW Student snow ball fight - The news you need.

In its never ending pursuit of covering important stuff, Waxing America brings this link to Isthmus, which provides Second massive UW - Madison snowball fight on Bascom Hill of  2009 caught on video.

Road Trip: Hot Dogs, Race Track, Elementary School Gym Teacher, 50 years.

Going back almost three decades, Bill Kessler, Frankie Pots and Pans, and I made regular trips to see live horse racing in Chicago. A combination of the introduction of off-track betting and our advancing age ended the practice almost fifteen years ago.

Determined to make a trip this year, we scheduled one for last Thursday. We were joined by Doug Moe of the Wisconsin State Journal, who not only enjoys horse racing but knows a good hot dog, and best of all, tells a great story.

Our itinerary was slightly altered when I got a surprise call from my elementary school gym teacher Ed O'Farrell, famous from that old spiritual, Go Down Moses*.

Coach was great then, and when we met him at Fat Tommy's he was as wonderful as I remembered him fifty years ago. Doug Moe wrote about our sojourn on Sunday,  

Colorful characters hit the track:

Before getting to Hawthorne, we stopped at a small restaurant called Fat Tommy's for another Soglin passion, a Chicago hot dog. We were joined by Ed O'Farrell, Soglin's 77-year-old former elementary school gym teacher. The two hadn't seen each other in 40 49 years and had recently reconnected on the Internet. They embraced.

After lunch, Kessler said, "Ed is a gracious gentleman."

Frank Pots and Pans nodded. "Something we're not used to."

I look forward to the next visit to see the Coach, another Chicago hot dog - (Fat Tommy's gets a B plus), a pleasant day of racing, and my Madison companions are great.

 

*Go down, Moses

Way down in Egypt's land

Tell O'Farrell

(To) let my people go.

At holiday assemblies our fifth grade class sang these lyrics repeatedly to the chagrin of our music teacher at Phillip Murray School in Chicago.

Joel McNally on Crime: UW-M and Milwaukee

A week ago Joel McNally wrote a column, Location is everything in raising fear of crime which appeared in The Capital Times and in Milwaukee's Shepherd-Express as Panic in University Streets.

McNally's point is that a 'crime wave' is relative.  In an area with little crime, a bump up may be show a high percentage increase, but numerically is small.

But city residents need to be aware that random crime can occur anywhere and pay attention to what is going on around them...

...The UWM shooting actually occurred at a time when crime was down overall in the university area. Robberies were down 23 percent from the previous year, and burglaries were down 24 percent.

McNally is right, the problems around UWM pale in comparison to problems on the South Side and west of the river on the North Side.

He is also correct in noting that around UWM, "most complaints are about noise and litter caused by partying college students." I would go a step further and admonish the students, including my daughter, to keep it down. As in Madison, Milwaukee should not use valuable police resources to attend to campus carousing when there are neighborhoods who would benefit from more neighborhood-based community patrols.

And again I concur with Joel when he writes, "One particular target of complaints -- large groups of students roving from party to party -- may actually contribute to safety in the university neighborhood."  Going back to Jane Jacobs, and the Death and Life of Great American Cities, we know that clusters of people tend to drive away crime.

You can never have too many eyes and ears, unless it is a mob.

Where I part with McNally, and perhaps, it is more a matter of emphasis, is when he reviews the statistics around the UWM campus and concludes, after noting that assaults in the area were up 67% from 2006, "The truth is the biggest concern of residents living in the university neighborhood is not major crime."

Since the fall, I have had weekly, and sometimes daily reports from my daughter about kids in the area being assaulted. The descriptions of the details lead me to conclude that these are not the brawls associated with bar fights. My guess, like most sudden and quick rises in crime, this is the result of a handful of perpetrators. If a few culprits are apprehended, it will end as suddenly as it began. It may be the result of a gangbangers figuring that student are an easy target or some sort of gang initiation.

In any case, the assaults provide two reasons for concern, though they pale by comparison, to shootouts in other parts of the city. First the attacks are random. Secondly, it does not help UWM. Just as the school is reasserting itself as a significant economic force in Milwaukee, parents should not have second thoughts about the safety of their children.

Update 11:33am: A comment below notes, "That UWM is spending half a million dollars more than it already does on campus security. Not enough to merit mention? The argument is that it needs to spend more? Or what?"

Sorry I was too subtle. As a parent I appreciate the additional expenditure on campus security. As a parent and a citizen, I do not believe it is a good or permanent solution. The 'or what' that is needed is to address the larger issue of crime in Milwaukee that is so prevalent in other neighborhoods.

Dominatrix, Cosmopolitan, and Dead Old Men

Dominatrix Acquitted in Bondage Death

A dominatrix was acquitted of manslaughter Monday in the death of a man who prosecutors say suffered a heart attack while strapped to a replica of a medieval rack.Barbara Asher, a 56-year-old woman who called herself Mistress Lauren M, was also cleared of dismemberment...Michael Lord suffered a heart attack in .... a bondage session.

Asher had her boyfriend chop up the body of the 275-pound retired telephone company worker, and they dumped it behind a restaurant in Maine, prosecutors said. His remains have never been found.

Besides the death of Nelson Rockefeller * , all this reminds me of a Cosmopolitan article from the 1970's. Let me do my best to recreate it:

Ten Fabulous Pointers If You Have An Affair With a Married Man.

6.  If He Has a Heart Attack While Having Sex, Call An Ambulance: Don't hesitate to call the ambulance.  You will not be able to handle the matter yourself.  Some women try to dress their dead lovers and place him on the couch or even get him down to the street.  Have you ever tried dressing someone else, let alone a 200 pound corpse?  It just won't work and even if you can get his shorts, shirt, trousers, and jacket on, it will not look right. And you still havent fixed his tie.

Eventually law enforcement will figure it out. Then you have to confront the revelation that he died on top of you in an extra-martial affair, and that you are cold and heartless for failing to call the ambulance.

People will call you cold and selfish.

Call the ambulance.  Then all you will be called is a 'slut' and that doesn't hurt as much, in fact, it will probably bring you more suitors.

*Rockefeller details:

When he collapsed of a heart attack, Megan Marshak was pinned underneath him. She had to struggle to get out. He was naked. It was not known that he had a mistress. For these reasons, she was reluctant to call the ambulance. Instead, Megan Marshak called her girlfriend, who lived nearby.

The girlfriend walked over, arrived, saw the naked former Vice-President sprawled on the floor, and then she and Megan Marshak had a discussion about what to do about this.

Finally, fully one hour after Nelson Rockefeller had collapsed, the girlfriend called the ambulance. Megan Marshak did not make the call.

When the ambulance arrived, Nelson Rockefeller was still barely alive. However, he died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital.

Halloween VI

Time to revisit Halloween.  Well, there is not much progress since the post on November 13, 2005 Halloween IV-Only 50 more weekends until the next Madtown Halloween or the subsequent post, Halloween V- Nightmare on State Street.

We are down to 40 weekends until the festivities break out. Nothing has changed.  The consumption of alcohol at the private apartment parties has not abated.  It is the drinking of large quantities of alcohol, mostly  underage transgressions, that is the fundamental source of the problem. Until this year-round practice is abated, the flash point will occur every year.

Get the kids back in the bars where they belong. Either that, or force the underage violators to imbibe in speakeasies so quiet that the police can't find them.

There is always going to be illegal and underage drinking. Try to control the worst source of the problem: the over the top, too large, too dangerous, private parties.

Secondly, since there is this fixation on New Orleans' management of Mardi Gras, focus on how they prevent trouble, not how they deal with it after all hell breaks loose. New Orleans does not offer a challenge to every reveler that makes it to the Big Easy to participate in a tear gas laden, head splitting bacchanal at midnight.  New Orleans invites its guests, and asks them to stay within certain boundaries of civility, overlooking when prudent the overexposed breast or fallen-down-drunk.

Finally we arrive at Jim Hopson's commentary in Sunday's Wisconsin State Journal: Make the Bars Pay for Halloween .  The problems are many:

• It takes us down the road to creating one more special district, one more unit of government.  No.
• No matter where the line is drawn there will be one bar inside the district that does not benefit and one bar outside the district that benefits from Halloween.
• It ignores all of the other retailers who profit significantly from the event; true, they don't sell booze. but they also make significant profits from the Halloween gathering.
• Most importantly, it avoids the real problem:getting control of the event without having to muster a brigade of law enforcement from multiple jurisdictions decked out in riot gear. This can be managed rationally with proper planning. It was done in the past and it can be done in the future.

Move over Barbie, here comes Fulla

I guess the only question is what took so long?

Ann Coulter Gets it Wrong, Again

I did my usual review of the news and then, because so many of you rely on Waxingamerica for the latest on political commentators Borat and Ann Coulter, turned my search engine to them.

Sadly, nothing new on Borat.

Sadly, something new on Ann Coulter.

The wannabe gangsta Barbie went on a tear about FDR and Japanese internment camps. The context is unimportant:

"Note the following about the Japanese internment:

(1) The Supreme Court upheld the president's authority to intern the Japanese during wartime;

(2) That case, Korematsu v. United States, is still good law;

(3) There are no Japanese internment camps today. (Although the no-limit blackjack section at Caesar's Palace on a Saturday night comes pretty close.)"

Observations: just because over sixty years ago the Supreme Court said it was OK to have internment camps, doesn't make it right.

Oh, Ann, there is no such thing as no-limit blackjack. There is no-limit poker and there is high stakes blackjack, but Caesar's Palace and the rest of the casinos do not  offer 'no-limit blackjack.' If you want to be hip, get it right.  Very uncool.

And another thing - the subtle attempt at racist humor doesn't work either.   

Barbie A "Myth" -Who Forgot to Tell Ann Coulter?

Now word comes that the whole Barbie thing is a myth from the folks at Live Science.  According to British researchers, we do not have to worry about young girls emulating Barbie: Just before Christmas, however, a team of British researchers announced that many young girls mutilate and torture their Barbie dolls. According to University of Bath researcher Agnes Nairn, “the girls we spoke to see Barbie torture as a legitimate play activity….The types of mutilation are varied and creative, and range from removing the hair to decapitation, burning, breaking, and even microwaving.” The reason, Nairn said, was that girls saw Barbie as childish, an inanimate object instead of a treasured toy...

...Yet recent evidence, including the University of Bath study, suggests that the “Barbie ideal” may be a myth. Just because a girl plays with a Barbie doll does not mean she idolizes it or views it as a physical role model. Critics cite statistics such as that if Barbie were real, she couldn’t walk upright, or bear children...

...The claim that Barbie can cause eating disorders also rests on shaky assumptions. Anorexia nervosa and bulimia are serious diseases that cannot be “caught” from playing with dolls.

I guess Ann Coulter never got the memo.