Nobody 691

Sunday, March 25, 2007
Nobody # 691

Nobody Asked Me But:

The news that cancer has resumed its assault on the body of Elizabeth Edwards both saddens and depresses me. Yes, I care about a stranger and about my own mortality as well. Under the circumstances, should Edwards continue his campaign for president? That’s not my business. It is a private decision between the two of them. In the same circumstances, I wouldn’t, but it will not cause me to hesitate to vote for him should he become my favorite.

What it isn’t is a woman issue as Rachel Singer, 53, a writer who lives in Brooklyn tries to make it — “another woman oppressed by male expectation and ambition.”

To me this is nonsense - the kind of knee-jerk reaction that hurts the real issues in the American’s women’s fight for equality.<<<

I don’t know whether any of you had time to try the example of Bracketology that I included last week. I hope so, as I find them fun, interesting and revealing. Doing one is a painless way to clarify your thinking on subjects both important and mundane.

(aside) The Bracketology book is hot and was reviewed (favorably) in the current Newsweek.

This week I am going to do things differently. I will include the opening round contests and leave it for you to fill in your brackets without first seeing my choices. The subject of today’s tournament is memorable final scenes from movies. Take it from the opening 32, chose a winner in each contest and you will have cut it o a Sweet 16. Do the same for the 16 and you cut the list to an Elite 8, then a Final Four and finally you are left with two from which to choose your national champion, i.e. – most important of the original 32.

If you decide to try, let me know how yours turns out.

To show you what I mean, here are the first 2 matches in round one last week:

Berlin Wall comes tumbling down (1989) x
Apollo I disaster: Grissom, White, Chaffee die (1967)

First time you heard the Beatles (1963)
Nixon resigns over Watergate (1974) x

As you can see by the x’s, I chose Berlin Wall over Apollo disaster and Nixon over the Beatles.

So in my second round I would have to choose between the Berlin Wall and Nixon.

I know it is much easier with a normal horizontal bracket arrangement but, since I cannot reproduce one here, it has to be vertical.

And away we go:

MOVIE FINAL SCENES ROUND ONE

King Kong falls from Empire State Building
Debra Winger dies of cancer in Terms of Endearment

Bonnie and Clyde riddled with bullets
Walken loses Russian roulette in The Deer Hunter

Titanic sinks and DiCaprio drowns
Bambi’s mom shot by hunters

Alec Guinness blows up The Bridge Over the River Kwai
Susan Hayward gets the chair in I Want To Live!

Nazis melt in Raiders of the Lost Ark
Dirty cop suffocates in corn silo in Witness

Scarface goes out with a bang
Wicked Witch melts

Alan Rickman’s skyscraper plunge in Die Hard
Cagney goes up in flames in White Heat

Wallace Shawn’s wine poisoning in The Princess Bride
Robocop criminal gets toxic waste bath

David Warner’s decapitation in The Omen
John Hurt’s bursting stomach in Alien

Telekinetic Carrie sends knives into her mom
Travolta shoots backseat passenger in Pulp Fiction

Airbag accidentally deploys, killing Final Destination girl
Mr. Big expands and pops in Live and Let Die

Psycho shower scene
Shark attack on female swimmer in Jaws opener

Sonny Corleone gunned down at tollbooth
Darth Vader strikes down Obi-Wan Kenobi

Dr. Strangelove’s Slim Pickens rides nuclear bomb
Babes chase sexist off cliff in Python’s Meaning of Life

Willem Dafoe’s fatal battlefield collapse in Platoon
Tom Hanks shot on bridge in Saving Private Ryan

Thelma and Louise drive car off edge of Grand Canyon
Russell Crowe’s death match in Roman coliseum<<<

I want to write a little about my reasons for the choices I made in last week’s bracketology tournament. The criterion I used in each contest was which of the two had the greater long-term effect on America and the world.

With this in mind, a boxing match went to my Elite 8 - farther than you might think - but I feel that Cassius Marcellus Clay, Jr., AKA Muhammad Ali, had a huge impact on race relations in the United States. If Joe Louis allowed white Americans to admire and respect a black man, Ali demanded it and made it commonplace.

One of my hardest choices was in the Elite 8 when I picked the first man on the moon over the Munich terrorists. I did so because, although the Olympic attack was a tragic and very important milestone on the way to our terrorist world of today, the moonwalk somehow symbolized the human ability to turn dream into hope.

On the other hand, my two finalists show the darkness that continues, too often, to win out over hope.<<<

John Prine is almost certainly the best little-known singer/song writer of the past 35 years. The other day, while I was musing about my recently declining interest in reading, thinking and writing about politics, a line from one of his great songs, “Hello In There,” came to mind:

“And all the news just repeats itself
Like some forgotten dream that we've both seen.”

And then I saw these two cartoons and another line from the same song played in my head:

“We lost Davy in the Korean war,
And I still don't know what for,”

Declining interest in politics? Yes! Brain dead to them? No! So ladies and gentlemen place your bets. As of this week in the 2008 race for the presidency to win $100 you would need to bet the following: (source - Slate)

Hillary Clinton - $24.30
Rudy Giuliani - $21.60
Barack Obama - $18.00 J
ohn McCain - $13.50
Mitt Romney - $7.80
Al Gore - $7.10
John Edwards - $6.50
George Allen - $0.50
Mark Warner - $0.50<<<

When you reach a certain age, beware of reading the health section of your local newspaper, because for every disease, old and new, you will be able to identify symptoms working on or in your body. So imagine my pleasure in discovering one for which I am symptom-free. I do not have orthorexia – which is – “a clinical fixation on righteous eating.”<<<

From the San Jose Mercury News: “Christian teens face off with Bay Area progressives.”

The teens came to talk of Christian values such as love thy neighbor shown clearly in the statement of Eden West, a 16-year-old Christian: referring to a man holding a sign proclaiming he was both gay and Christian, West said, "If he really loved God, he wouldn't be gay."<<<

THE SPORTS PAGE

Clint Amberry, the star forward for Los Alamitos (MN) High School, stepped to the line in a recent play-off game with only a few seconds left and his team trailing 48-47. He missed the front end of his 1 and 1. Game over. So what so unusual about this?

Amberry’s grandfather, Tom Amberry, holds the world record for the most consecutive free throws at 2,750.<<<

I am sorry but there will be no Nobody next Sunday. IT JUST SO HAPPENS THAT BARB AND I WILL BE IN ATLANTA. What a season! What a game! The Brusin’ Bruins."

I love the postgame quote from Seth Davis of Sports Illustrated:

“Isn’t it a strange coincidence that so many teams seem to have poor shooting games when they play the Bruins.”

From the Sacramento Bee: “These Bruins are built to inflict pain, designed to leave opponents staring into the mirror afterward at an assortment of bumps and bruises, feeling as if they had been in a prizefight instead of simply fighting for the prize trip to the Final Four.”

“They cause opponents to hesitate around the basket, to become intent on avoiding the hit, leading to an inordinate number of missed layups and close-in shots. There are no freebies coming out of Westwood anymore.”

From Lorenzo Mata while wearing the basketball net that the Bruins cut down in San Jose: “I’ll take this over gold, platinum, any jewelry. I’ll take it over anything.”

And finally, this headline that says it all- from the Lawrence (Kansas) Journal-World: "(B)ruined!"