It would appear that the fans of my college football team, the Virginia Cavaliers, can't take a joke. Greg thinks he caused the problem, but I'm sure that the original poster could have come across the poems in question through Google, where they are hit #6 for the good coach. (Note: The new link for the George Welsh poems is now on this site.)

For what it's worth, I really respect Welsh. His work as a football coach made us cheer much more often than it made us moan. But in 1993, after watching yet another press conference after a win where he smiled about as much as a man with a gastric ulcer, Tyler, Joe, Patrick and I realized that there was something funny about the thought that this stoic man might have a secret literary life. Hence the poems. Of course half the fun was parodying the lit crit that might surround Welsh's oeuvre.

Pork Products Transcend
    It's fourth and ten, boys,
    Florida State... You gonna
    eat that 'wurst, Frank?  Damn.

Doc: More on what's fucked about radio. Doc lays the blame for the sorry state of commercial radio at the feet of radio's business model, which treats the listener as secondary to pleasing the advertiser.

This is another reason I grew to dislike Ziff Davis magazines. After a while, I realized that the stuff in between the ads felt like an ad too, for things I couldn't afford to buy.

The title for my previous post referred to "rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic," my new favorite way to say "fiddling while Rome is burning." Credit for the phrase belongs to Eric Norlin, whose Titanic Deck Chair Rearrangement Corporation is required reading for marketing folks who fondly imagine that they understand their customer.

Time: Could 9/11 Have Been Prevented? Scary view into how the sloth-like, generally arteriosclerotic processes of government caused a plan to take out Al Qaeda to be lost during the transition between the Clinton administration and the Harken-Halliburton administration. The article details a series of missed opportunities, the detailed warnings that a big attack was coming--and the breakdowns in government function that caused a failure to act. Scary thoughts:

No other great power handles the transition from one government to another in so shambolic a way as the U.S.-new appointments take months to be confirmed by the Senate; incoming Administrations tinker with even the most sensible of existing policies. The fight against terrorism was one of the casualties of the transition, as Washington spent eight months going over and over a document whose outline had long been clear.

Thanks to Scott Rosenberg at Salon for the link. While I was writing this, Dave summed up the essence of the nightmare here: "Sometimes when we bluster and attack aimlessly, we cement relationships between forces that wish us harm."

Esta moved into a new place in downtown Richmond this weekend. Apparently she's quite happy with her new place, 6-minute commute and all.

One word of advice to Esta for her new place's hardwood floors: Swiffers. A finer cleaning product has yet to be seen. Not an employee, just a happy customer. Procter & Gamble really understand their customer too. There's nothing more satisfying than picking up the Swiffer mop, shuddering at all the dust, hair and other detritus that's been picked up, then throwing the crap away.