It’s the Sunday morning round up of the usual and unusual. Sports seems to be the popular topic. So pour that cup of whatever you drink when you read and add your opinion to theirs.
In the realm of stranger things, Carlos Ruiz Zafon looks at sports and a psychic octopus and how it has reshaped a country.
HIS name is Paul, he has eight legs and he flaunts a flexibility that would put to shame the ethics code of any self-respecting investment bank on Wall Street. What’s more, he’s one of the stars of the World Cup blazing on zillions of TV screens around the world. Yet Paul has never set foot on a soccer field, never kicked a ball and to this day most of his running has been devoted to chasing lobsters. Paul, you see, is an octopus.
OctoPaul is, at present, an inmate at the Oberhausen aquarium in Germany, where he has entered the V.I.P. lounge of animal oracle lore due to the uncanny precision in his predictions on the outcome of crucial sports events. He works his magic according to a strict procedure: his caretakers introduce into his tank two boxes containing the flags of the opposing teams (and a mussel in each for him to snack on, post-decision). Then, while the world news media eagerly waits, OctoPaul, cucumber-cool and donning his trademark deep-thinking face, settles on one of them.
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What the future will bring, maybe only Paul the Octopus knows. And by the way, Paul predicted Spain will win the final.
Eugene Robinson wonders why everyone is upset with Lebron James
Why is everybody hating on LeBron James? I mean, is this a free country? Or did a couple of important amendments to the Constitution get repealed while nobody was looking?
I understand, of course, why the good people of Cleveland would be disappointed, distraught, even irate. King James is, at the very least, the second-best basketball player in the world. For a city that has seen so many ups and downs — and let’s be honest, the general trend for the past half-century has been down — the departure of a hometown superstar must be a cruel blow. But let’s try to keep things in perspective.
Maureen Dowd discusses Lebron James’ move to Miami’s Hoops Cartel
After the heady courting, the King changed courts.
And there were such loud howls about betrayal, disloyalty, selfishness, revenge and intrigue that it might have impressed even a Shakespearean court.
“I’m going to take my talents to South Beach,” LeBron James told Jim Gray on ESPN’s special – and specially obnoxious – show, “The Decision,” as though he were going on spring break.
It’s always a bad sign when people begin talking about themselves in the third person. “I wanted to do what was best, you know, for LeBron James, what LeBron James was going to do to make him happy,” LeBron James told Michael Wilbon on ESPN after the special.
ESPN’s 28 minutes of contrived suspense over James’s narcissistic announcement.
The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank talks about Headless bodies and other immigration tall tales in Arizona
Jan Brewer has lost her head.
The Arizona governor, seemingly determined to repel every last tourist dollar from her pariah state, has sounded a new alarm about border violence. “Our law enforcement agencies have found bodies in the desert either buried or just lying out there that have been beheaded,” she announced on local television.
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Brewer’s mindlessness about headlessness is just one of the immigration falsehoods being spread by Arizona politicians. Border violence on the rise? Phoenix becoming the world’s No. 2 kidnapping capital? Illegal immigrants responsible for most police killings? The majority of those crossing the border are drug mules? All wrong.
On the 50th anniversary of Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird”, Kathleen Parker takes on Revisionist fire at author Harper Lee should be dampened.
Fifty years ago Sunday, a novel hit America’s bookshelves that changed the way millions thought about race and the inexplicable South.
Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird,” by some estimates the most-read book in American schools, has grown old enough to have become slightly dotty in the minds of fresher readers, many of whom have only a textbook understanding of the way things were.
Indeed, it is fashionable to dis, as we now say, the great and humble Lee, a writer so without vanity that she has declined all attention to herself since the publication of her novel in 1960 and continues to live quietly in her home town of Monroeville, Ala.
Another Washington Post columnist, Michael Lind, thins the pols in Washington, DC need to think smaller
Washington has fallen in love with “comprehensive reform” — legislation aimed at solving all aspects of a big problem in one dramatic and history-making move
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No doubt, the problems we face — massive unemployment, a broken immigration system, a malfunctioning financial sector — are monumental. But it does not follow that each complex, giant problem must be addressed by one complex, giant bill. If anything, history shows that piecemeal reforms are often more lasting than a legislative Big Bang.
2 comments
Offsides or not?
I mildly agree with anything Parker has to say.