Brent's Blog

We dropped cable a while back. By that, I mean we dropped all but basic cable. So we get the four major networks, and WUNC. Plus TBS, WGN and a random sampling which includes Versus and VH1 Classic.
I don’t miss it. Paying for things like the Food Network when I never watched it drove me crazy. I knew, though, that I would miss the ESPNs during college football and basketball seasons.
But then it hit me that ESPN is a force for great evil and that I needed to get it out of my life.
Apparently, on Tuesday ESPN featured 24 hours of college basketball. Here’s the schedule

Midnight ESPN/ESPN360.com Cal State Fullerton vs. UCLA
2 a.m. ESPN/ESPN360.com San Diego State vs. Saint Mary’s
4 a.m. ESPN/ESPN360.com Northern Colorado vs. Hawaii
6 a.m. ESPN/ESPN360.com Monmouth vs. St. Peter’s
8 a.m. ESPN/ESPN360.com Drexel vs. Niagara
10 a.m. ESPN/ESPN360.com Clemson vs. Liberty
Noon ESPN/ESPN360.com Northeastern vs. Siena
2 p.m. ESPN/ESPN360.com UA-Little Rock vs. Tulsa
4 p.m. ESPN/ESPN360.com Temple vs. Georgetown
5:30 p.m. ESPN2/ESPN360.com CBE Classic: Binghamton vs. Pittsburgh
6 p.m. ESPN/ESPN360.com Dick’s Sporting Goods NIT (from Duke)
7 p.m. ESPNU Tennessee vs. Texas Tech (women)
7:30 p.m. ESPN2/ESPN360.com Hall of Fame Showcase: Arkansas vs. Louisville (St. Louis)
8 p.m. ESPN/ESPN360.com Gonzaga vs. Michigan State
8 p.m. ESPN360.com Northern Illinois vs. Illinois
9 p.m. ESPNU Duquesne vs. Iowa
9:30 p.m. ESPN2/ESPN360.com UConn vs. Texas (women)
10 p.m. ESPN/ESPN360.com Hall of Fame Showcase: Memphis vs. Kansas (St. Louis)
11:30 p.m. ESPN2/ESPN360.com Dick’s Sporting Goods NIT (from Arizona State)

OK, I understand playing a late West Coast game and the game in Hawaii works out great. But Monmouth and St. Peter’s playing at 6 in the morning? Is that really worth it just to get on ESPN?
This is already a channel that is forcing Conference USA football to Tuesday and Wednesday nights. I swear, I think some schools would play in the nude if ESPN asked them to.

Here are two YouTube clips of Andy “Big A” Forrester, father, standup comedian, graphic designer and the guy who introduced me to my wife.
He’s based in Raleigh but will perform jokes at the drop of a hat, or the serving of a cheese product all over central North Carolina.
See him when you get a chance.

- Clint Eastwood gives it to you straight.
- 90-year-old former SS man charged with murdering Jews in 1945.
- The 12 unfunniest comics, at least according to Newsweek.
- Scientists say don’t worry about doomsday in 2012.
- First U.S. marijuana cafe opens in Portland.
- The best American breweries.
- Five times MC Hammer changed history.
- Detroit’s Silverdome bought for less than $600,000.

I’ll take McNulty over Coach K and Ol’ Roy

This used to be my favorite time of the year.

Men’s college basketball, specifically men’s Atlantic Coast Conference basketball, is getting started. There was a day when I’d be bouncing off the walls with excitement.

No more.

In the old days, I would have absorbed the ACC Basketball Handbook, the best of the preseason rags, by now. I’d be watching nearly every early season game, from the preseason NIT to the Maui Invitational. During the season, I’d watch any game I could, no matter which two teams were playing.

This was the 1980s mostly, when my team was still relevant.

“Here’s Lancaster whining again about how sorry State’s basketball program is,” you might say.

That’s part of it. Before this amazing two-decade run of either mediocrity or outright putridity, the Wolfpack was right in the thick of things, both in the conference and nationally. When Jim Valvano was fired, State’s program had the same number of national championships as North Carolina and 10 conference championships to Carolina’s 11.

It’s hard to get too fired up when your team hasn’t won the conference since 1987. But that’s just part of it.

There’s no parity in the ACC. Either Carolina or Duke have won the conference tournament 12 of the last 13 years. Even a nonaffiliated fan wouldn’t want to watch the same teams win over and over. In my youth, Duke and Carolina were good, but so were a lot of other teams.

The coaches are underwhelming. Even leaving out Dean Smith and Mike Krzyzewski, we had Bobby Cremins at Georgia Tech. Lefty Driesell at Maryland. Terry Holland at Virginia. The ACC had the best coaches in the country. They were guys with long track records and outsize personalities.

These days, Virginia has a new coach every three years. Though I like Oliver Purnell at Clemson and Paul Hewitt at Georgia Tech, they don’t have that same presence on the sideline.

I don’t know the players. Mark Price. Johnny Dawkins. Horace Grant. Elden Campbell. JR Reid. Danny Ferry: You got to know ACC stars in those days over a four-year playing career. I can’t keep up with today’s players because they are gone to the NBA before they play their best basketball.

God only knows what kind of officiating you’re going to get from night to night.

My dear friend Frank Permar, currently detained in the backwater state of South Carolina, has a theory that basketball is inherently unfair, that it’s the only sport in which you can show the same play to any two referees and get a different call.

I’ve been watching basketball most of my life and am still amazed at the results of block/charge calls, but I’m not sure he’s completely right about basketball. Lord knows you can call holding on every play in football and I’m still perplexed by how a baseball strike zone that’s supposed to go from the armpits to the knees can be called the way it is.

I am sure that ACC officiating is bad. For once in my life, I’m not saying that it’s biased in favor of the two shades of blue east of here. I’m just saying it drives me crazy.

So these days, it’s just mid-November to me. ACC basketball is starting, but I’m more excited about season two of “The Wire,” which Netflix will be sending to my house soon.

City editor Brent Lancaster can be reached at brent_lancaster@link.freedom.com or 506-3040. Read his blog at brentsblog.freedomblogging.com.

Growing in to the family truckster

Having a child cramps your style a little bit.

No taking off for Cabo for the weekend anymore, at least not without getting a sitter first. No dragging it in at 2 a.m. on a Friday night, unless you can routinely live with waking up again at 6 a.m. when your kid is ready for a day of running, falling down and just standing there and yelling at the dog.

I can’t even take my son to the grocery store without making sure he goes to the bathroom first and that I know where the restroom is located in the store.

Most of that stuff doesn’t bother me, though. I didn’t do anything exciting before I had a kid, and I certainly don’t have the money to do much more than go to the beach even if my life was wide open.

I am a little concerned, though, about the prospect of driving a minivan.

I love having a child. I gladly walk around with a Vera Bradley diaper bag on my shoulder and don’t flinch, but there’s something about driving a minivan that seems a little different.

I can make pushing a stroller down the street look awesome. I’m not sure I can make driving a mommy taxi look awesome.

We have one child and are waiting on another. That will probably be it for us. That’s certainly not a brood, but a minivan would definitely help out with hauling all our stuff, especially on long trips.

My problem is that as my boat drifts toward 40, I still keep an anchor hitched in the shallow water of my 20s. It’s the only way I can deal with how old I am.

So I wear the same fatigue jacket I bought at the Army & Navy Surplus on High Point Road in Greensboro when I was 19. I listen to the same music and like the same things. I use the same slang that was popular in the late 80s and keep up with what the kids are into these days. Unfortunately, sometimes I act like I’m still in my 20s.

Driving a minivan does not anchor me in my 20s.

I keep going back to my childhood, when station wagons and minivans were strictly for old people. Woe be unto anyone cruising in Myrtle Beach in their parents’ van, especially if it had one of those shells on top for storing luggage.

My brother-in-law, who was wilder in his youth than I can stake any claim to be, joined the minivan legion years ago and hasn’t looked back. He loves to show me how the doors slide closed automatically or how much he can put in the storage bins under the floorboard.

It won’t be my main vehicle, I keep telling myself. When the journeyman Honda Civic we’ve had since 1997 finally gives up the ghost I’ll lay claim to my wife’s Toyota Camry, which was built this decade and has a sunroof and a muffler that can’t be heard two blocks away. She can drive the van.

I keep having visions of Clark Griswold driving cross country in his station wagon in “National Lampoon’s Vacation.” I can at least be cooler than that, right?

I can drive a minivan and still be young.

Right?

City editor Brent Lancaster can be reached at brent_lancaster@link.freedom.com or 506-3040. Read his blog at brentsblog.freedomblogging.com.

Expectations and geography

My jaw dropped, too.

We reported this week on the number of Advanced Placement courses taken by Alamance County high school students last year. The numbers varied widely from school to school, especially between the two high schools in the city of Burlington.

At Williams High School, 211 students took 511 Advance Placement courses. At Cummings High School, seven students took seven Advanced Placement courses.

Advanced Placement courses are college-level courses offered through the College Board and taught by the system’s teachers. Students who take end-of-course exams and earn a 3 or higher on a 5-point scale can get credit for the courses at many colleges and universities.

As someone whose employer maintains an online bulletin board allowing anyone to tell me what a complete moron I am, I understand how easy it is to point fingers when you don’t know what goes on behind the scenes. I’m not here to do that.

Williams and Cummings have their differences, but the expectations for their future shouldn’t be any different.

It’s very easy to draw conclusions about Burlington by dividing the town up by the railroad tracks and using money scales to judge east and west and the city’s two schools. Those conclusions aren’t always true, but it’s hard not to think that some east Burlington students don’t have the same opportunities as some of their counterparts on the west side of town.

Figuring out how to eliminate such disparities within a school district is a challenge for educators across the country. The Wake County School System, which has been praised by some in recent years for using wealth instead of skin color to divide students up, has seen a recent upheaval on its school board because of anger over that same policy.

Administrators at Cummings face a stiff challenge. Three years ago, the school was on Judge Howard Manning’s list of low-performing schools that were required to take immediate action to improve. It has the highest percentage of English as a second language students and the highest number of students getting free or reduced school meals of any high school in the system.

It’s hard for teachers and administrators to talk about college to students whose home life might be unstable or whose family is struggling to pay the bills. Some kids just don’t come from a family culture that has expectations for college and, at the same time, not all kids need to go to college.

Getting students to sign up for harder work is a challenge. Students who don’t have plans to go to college aren’t going to take on a heavier workload just for the fun of it.

But just maybe, those students could have their minds changed about college, and that change, if it happens, is probably going to happen at their high school. Maybe a high school culture that pushes college could be the difference they need.

One thing is for sure, there shouldn’t be this much of a disparity in college expectations between two schools only a few miles apart, no matter which side of town they’re on.

City editor Brent Lancaster can be reached at brent_lancaster@link.freedom.com or 506-3040. Read his blog at brentsblog.freedomblogging.com.

Give it to us straight we can take it

Politicians lie.

That saying is one of those truisms that people seem to agree on, like assertions that taxes are too high and Brent doesn’t listen to me.

More often than they lie, though, politicians cover their true intentions by emphasizing some aspects of an issue more than other aspects, those other aspects usually being the more important ones.

I believe, for example, that leaders in Washington pushing for a new public health insurance program want to do so as a first step toward a single-payer system, in which all health insurance is administered by the government.

Start a public option funded by an bottomless pool of taxpayer dollars that won’t exclude anyone because of a pre-existing condition and businesses that now provide private health insurance for their employees will dump those employees into the public option in droves, eventually putting us all in a government-run plan.

I don’t support throwing out our health care system. Others do. What I wish is that they would be honest about their intentions. But too many people would raise too much of a stink about going to single payer, so public option proponents frame it as an innocuous little program that will cover the uninsured and not interfere with your private insurance.

The Iraq war provided perhaps the most stunning case of covering true intentions I’ll see in my lifetime.

I felt we had some reasons to invade Iraq. Saddam Hussein was a destabilizing force in the Middle East. Bases in a democratic Iraq would allow us to get our troops out of Saudi Arabia, which is what set Osama bin Laden off in the first place. Turning on the spigots in Iraq would provide more of the oil that we will still need for years to come, green technology or not. We can’t depose every dictator, but when getting rid of one aligns with our interests, that’s a good thing.

In the end, these reasons didn’t justify going to war. But if the American people had been told that these were the reasons for invading another country on the other side of the world, they would have balked. And loudly. Hundreds of thousands of lives would have been saved. So instead, the war was about weapons of mass destruction that didn’t exist.

The more stories I read by our Raleigh reporter, Barry Smith, about the federal stimulus package and how the money is being spent in North Carolina, the more convinced I am we’re looking at yet another classic case.

The stimulus money is going to roads and water projects and schools. It’s funding improvements in medical records and technology

Those are all good projects and are putting people to work, no doubt. But that’s a byproduct.

If the stimulus was truly about creating jobs, there was a better way to do it, by helping private sector employers instead of funding more government.

What the stimulus was designed to do was address a huge dip in tax revenues at all levels of government. Those who passed the stimulus package were more concerned with maintaining the size of government in the face of a recession. But “job creation” sounds a lot better than “government subsidy.”

The voters have put them in charge, so they have the right to do that if that’s what they think is best.

Just be honest about it.

City editor Brent Lancaster can be reached at brent_lancaster@link.freedom.com or 506-3040. Read his blog at brentsblog.freedomblogging.com.

- America’s overreaction crisis.
- Interstate 40’s route along the Pigeon River at the Tennessee border was never a great plan to begin with. Now the road’s covered with boulders again.
- Are you sleeping too much?
- The most scandalous sexual harassment cases of all time.
- Pabst brewery for sale.
- Twenty-three college presidents earn more than a million.
- Pretty good column by NYT reporter about his son, who poses nude for art students at Penn State.
- Verizon’s new smartphone faces an uphill battle.

- McDonald’s is giving up on Iceland.
- Even Campbell Brown can’t save CNN.
- The ten worst wives and girlfriends in sports history.
- Your Dear Leader story of the day.
- Have to admit, this Levi’s ad is pretty nice.
- Kids watch more than a day of television each week.

- Swine flu “state of emergency” starts the rumor mill turning.
- Obama ties Bush on golf rounds while president.
- How to memorialize the deceased on Facebook.
- Fidel Castro’s sister worked with the CIA.
- A rare version of the Sgt. Pepper’s cover.
- The most hated Yankees of all time.