What I’ve Learned So Far

If you thought England’s Ashes tour couldn’t get worse (and yes, I know you’ve been lying awake nights just like I have thinking that very thing) . . . you were mistaken about just how shambolically (?) this England side can play. A choice of headlines and nut grafs:

• Australia bury sorry England in three days
  Australia’s game plan can, finally, be revealed: lose toss, bowl England out for not many, score lots more, bowl them out again for not many, go fishing.
• England routed inside three days
  England’s surrender was as abject as anything yet witnessed on this tour. . . . The loss at Adelaide will forever be more painful, but this capitulation takes an entirely different type of biscuit.
• Ashes sweep a hot chance
  AUSTRALIA’S mission, and England’s demoralisation, is almost complete. Ricky Ponting last night said his team was building towards “something very special” after the most crushing defeat of the series inside three days at the MCG and remarked on the increasingly disturbed minds of the English, who must try to avoid a 5-0 whitewash in Sydney next week. With the Boxing Day Test in the bag, by an innings and 99 runs, and with 4-0 lead ahead of the fifth Test at the SCG, all that remains is to send off Shane Warne and Glenn McGrath with the first Ashes clean sweep in 86 years.

So, there you are. You thought, reasonably enough, that England could not do worse than in the prior test. But you were wrong.

Sad, really, what the England team has reduced itself to. Australia have the better side, but it’s not that much better.

This is hardly an original observation on my part.

The short version: Goode, a U.S. Representative from Virginia, has taken public exception to the plan of Representative-elect Keith Ellison of Minnesota to take his Constitutional oath with one hand on the Koran . . . which would seem to be a sensible thing for Mr. Ellison to do, given that he is a Muslim.

A better, fuller explanation, complete with good-’n'-clueless quotes from Goode, is here:

In Virgil Goode’s America, no room for Muslims

An acid take on Mr. Goode mindset is here:

Oh Noes! I Caught Teh Izlam!

Here is Goode’s biography from his House site . . .

. . . and here is Ellison’s biography from his campaign site.

Man, seeing Ellison sitting on the porch of his house with his math-teacher wife and their four cute kids really makes me fear his religion . . .

The brief update, in case you haven’t been following The Ashes cricket series currently being played in Australia: Australia is taking England to the woodshed.

It’s one thing to face a superior opponent in the arena, and Australia clearly is the superior cricket side, man for man, in this contest. It’s something else, though, to fold like a house of cards in the face of a superior opponent, which is exactly what England has done in its disastrous second and third Tests (matches) of this series.

In the English summer of 2005, England reclaimed The Ashes from Australia for the first time in 18 years. Australia was the better side then, too, but England played with great fire and verve to pull out a couple of nail-biters in one of the most thrilling sporting contests I’ve ever followed. (How to follow it from the States? Why, the ball-by-ball text updates provided via the live scorecard feature at CricInfo. For Test matches played in England, you can also listen to live radio commentary from the BBC’s cricket broadcasters.)

This time around, playing Down Under, the England side has collapsed during key sessions of the second and third Tests. Their chances of winning either Test were slim, but in cricket it’s perfectly respectable to escape with a draw and live to fight another day. Instead, in both of these tests, England squandered chances to win or draw by failing to stand and fight when they most needed to.

It would be easy enough for me to read this into events from a great distance, especially since I’ve seen very little of the action on video. But I’m hardly alone in my view. Consider, for example, this from top cricket writer Peter English:

What a waste. A decent Test series was developing over the first four days but it was ruined by two sessions of England negativity. In the winning corner was Australia, whose only weakness is not knowing when to stop attacking. Then there was England. Sad, sorry, insipid England. […]

What was so upsetting was the ease at which they turned from a team on the move into a rudderless, thoughtless, defensive outfit. Intent on survival, they virtually killed themselves and the Ashes contest.

The contrast with the Australia side could not be more stark. Australia have sewn up the best-of-five series by winning the first three Tests outright. Given the predelictions of Australia and its captain, Ricky Ponting — a prince of a man away from the field, a pitiless competitor while on it — Australia will surely be looking for what Americans call a “sweep” but what cricketers call a “whitewash”. England may mount some sort of comeback to prevent a 5-0 thrashing — they are famous among their fans for playing nobly after the outcome has been decided — but it would not surprise me if they fail even in that.

After Australia lost in England in 2005, they returned home and immediately started preparing for this contest. Boot camp-style practices became de rigeur, even though many members of the Australia team are millionaires who have plenty of other cricketing duties to keep them busy when the national side isn’t playing. They could not console themselves to losing to, to . . . England, and so they recommitted themselves to showing the Poms (as they call the English) which country is the best at cricket.

Closer to home, the Chicago Cubs have lavished large contracts on several new players and a new manager. It looks as though they will finally invest enough in their team to make a go of things. Good: Cubs fans should stop embracing the team as lovable losers and start demanding more of the club’s management. No one engaged in a sport at the top level should put up with endless losing. And the financial rewards of winning are plain to see, as for example in the case of the long-woeful but now-competitive Los Angeles Clippers of the NBA.

England’s cricket authorities must sack the team’s feckless coach, Duncan Fletcher, and bring in someone who can get the team to play with verve, even when they are outmanned on the field. England fans deserve better than the displays of aimless dithering that have marred the most recent two Tests. The side’s next chance to redeem itself — to stand and fight, even in defeat — begins on Boxing Day, when the fourth Test begins at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. Here’s hoping the Poms find their fighting spirit so that they can hold their heads high, win or lose.

My new pal Jake Boshernitzan is the motive force behind Ridester, which unleashes the power of this here “Internet” to solve the age-old problem of finding a ride from hither to yon. You pick a few simple parameters — where you’re starting, whether you’d like to ride with a male or female, a smoker or non-smoker, etc. — and the service helps you link up with a driver or rider who’s going that way. Cheaper than Greyhound!

The service looks cool in itself, but I’m just as amazed by Jake’s ability to drum up coverage for his young venture. Dig this spread of coverage:

• KVUE News in Austin.
• Austin Business Journal
• Lifehacker
• TIME Magazine
• CNET’s “The Queue”
• U.S. News & World Report

So, more power to Jake and his entrepreneurial verve!

No real organizing theme here, except that these are stories that caught my interest . . .

The bloggers at FP are underwhelmed by ExxonMobil’s take on the future of the energy business.

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Jon Lebkowsky points to the Be Green site, which looks like a cool way to mitigate your household’s energy impact.

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Oil nationalism, anyone?

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GM is reaping the rewards of energy conservation. (Now, in their case, it’s not going to fix their larger problems, but that’s not energy conservation’s fault . . .)

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Speaking of the excellence of energy efficiency and conservation, note this good tidbit from Joel Makower. (Yes, I’m tidying up some old notes here.) And this piece from the IHT, which gives to lie to Dick Cheney’s erstwhile idea that conservation was no more than an individual virtue. On the contrary, it’s a meaningful approach to curbing growth in energy consumption.

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Strange things are afoot with the giant Sakhalin II oil & gas project on the island of . . . Sakhalin off the east coast of Russia. It looks like Gazprom — with the backing of the Kremlin — is forcing Shell out of the picture, or forcing them to swap their holdings on the island with gas holdings in mainland Russia. Maybe.

FP item

Forbes’s interview with Putin advisor Igor Shuvalov.

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The more I look at Russian journalist Litvinenko’s recent murder, the scarier it becomes. He was poisoned with polonium — which you don’t just pick up at your local pharmacy supply warehouse.

The simplest conclusion to draw, which Charles Krauthammer rightly labels as an Occam’s Razor explanation, is that Vladimir Putin is ultimately responsible for Litvinenko’s death. Here is Krauthammer’s excellent analysis of the matter. (Just a general indicator if you’re not familiar with my politics: if I’m agreeing with Krauthammer, it’s a red-letter day.)

Another excellent view on the subject is provided here by Charlie Stross. He’s a damn smart guy, and he has a smart take on Litvinenko’s death.

So, you know, just in case you wanted to get creeped out by world events today, there you go.

John Scalzi dug up this awesome ukulele version of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”.

For contrast, here’s the famous Prince solo on the same song from the 2004 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction.

Rock on, and whatnot.

Here’s a community issue that my wife has rightly encouraged me to rant about. Wal-Mart wants to build a new supercenter — the largest in the area — on the site of the current Northcross Mall. Now, economic redevelopment is all to the good, especially since Northcross has been moribund for years. But the scale of what Wal*Mart is proposing is far beyond the pale: a store of more than 200,000 square feet, open 24 hours per day.

What’s the big deal, you say? Wal-Mart has lots of big stores, you say? Well, here’s the big deal: Northcross is surrounded by city streets, not highways. Burnet Road and Anderson Lane, which flank the site, are major thoroughfares, but they’re not built to accommodate the level of traffic — in customers’ cars or suppliers’ trucks — that such a store would draw. There are many, many ways that Northcross could be redeveloped, and it’s hard to imagine many that would be worse than the proposed Wal-Mart plan.

Two things worth noting:

1. I’m not anti-Wal-Mart per se. Some of their labor practices have been shady, and the company ought to be penalized for that. Wal-Mart has very often been callous to local opinion in siting its stores, for which it should suffer. Box stores in general are not a great environmental solution to anything. BUT, before we get all knee-jerk about how Wal-Mart is The Source of All Consumerist Evil, consider that (a) they’re putting serious muscle behind intelligent, greener consumer products like compact fluorescent light bulbs and organic coffee, and (b) there are a lot of poor people who can afford more of life’s comforts by shopping at Wal-Mart. My own view is that a lot of the knee-jerk reactions against WM find at least some of their roots in middle-class hauteur toward the unwashed masses. Yes, Wal-Mart deserves loads of criticism for various reasons, but it’s not the spawn of the Devil.

2. This is not a NIMBY issue. It’s not about the fact that this Wal-Mart would be a few hundred yards from my house. It’s about the fact that it’s clearly the wrong kind of store for the site. When Cabela’s built its new superstore in this area, it chose an exurban site in Buda. That’s appropriate, given the huge amount of car and truck traffic the store generates. There are important reasons you wouldn’t build a new baseball stadium or 40-floor office tower on the Northcross space — and these reasons apply to a 219,000-square-foot Wal-Mart as well. If Wal-Mart wanted to put one of its smaller, sleeker urban stores there (it’s done this in downtown Los Angeles), especially as an anchor to a well-designed Arboretum-style shopping/living district, that would be fine by me. The company has a right to do commerce within the city center. It just shouldn’t do it in the way it’s trying to.

For more on this issue, start with Responsible Growth for Northcross, a local group that has been all over this issue. Also see the short Austin Chronicle write-up here by my family friend Katherine Gregor (Ctrl-F for “Grow It Great” to jump to the story), and the longer Chronicle analysis by Michael King here.

So, Austinites: contact the City Council. Tell them you don’t want 100,000-square-foot box stores in the city center. That’s for starters.