September 2002

Paleontologist Gregory M. Erickson of Florida State University answers the question, “What are the odds of a dead dinosaur becoming fossilized?” on this week’s Scientific American: Ask the Experts.

It’s been one week.

So this is the first anniversary of sorts. And next week it will be two weeks. And then it will be a month since. And then it will be six months. And then a year. And then five years.

When all the networks went back to “regularly scheduled programming” it felt wrong. I’m not trying to pick a scab or dwell or anything like that, but it seems like it’s still right here, y’know? It seems like it just happened this morning. I don’t like the idea of “getting back to normal”. I’m not talking about some demented, bleeding-heart, “the people that died can’t go back to normal” empathy. I just mean that it doesn’t feel right to “go back to normal”. What the #$*@ is normal? Nothing is normal.

Spurrier serves notice he’s for real
After one week of pro football, it’s Ball Coach 1 - NFL 0. The Washington Redskins’ “ball coach,” Steve Spurrier, upped his record in coaching debuts to 4-0 with a 31-23 victory over the Arizona Cardinals that highlighted a bizarre first weekend in the NFL.

Of all the wins and losses, none was more anticipated than Spurrier’s because it made two things clear. First, maybe The Ball Coach, as he calls himself, knows more about coaching than his critics want to believe. Second, maybe his Fun ‘N Gun offense is a bit more than his critics around the league want to think it is.

Certainly the latter was true Sunday as the Redskins piled up 442 total yards with oft-criticized quarterback Shane Matthews passing for 327 and three touchdowns, wide receiver Rod Gardner hauling in seven passes for 131 yards and a score and running back Stephen Davis bulling for 150 yards rushing.

Miami dominated. Florida flopped.

I’ve seen SportsCenter nine times tonight and we lose every time.

from A Man-child in Lotusland, at rebecca mead dot com

O‘Neal is one of the largest men alive. He wears size-22 basketball shoes, which are made for him by a company called Starter; they are all white and finished with a shiny gloss, reminiscent, in their sheen and size, of the hull of a luxury yacht. (When the Lakers’ equipment manager, a rotund man in the mid-five-foot range named Rudy Garciduenas, carries the shoes into the locker room before a game, he cradles them in gentle arms, as if he were the nursemaid of Otus and Ephialtes, the twin giant sons of Poseidon.) O’Neal’s cars must have their interiors ripped out and their seats moved back ten inches before he is able to drive them. (His most recent acquisition is a Ferrari Spider convertible, a birthday gift from his father that was, as he pointed out to reporters in the Lakers’ locker room one night, bought with his own earnings. O’Neal’s Spider has its top down permanently, since he’s too big for the convertible to convert.) O’Neal’s pants have an outside seam of four feet six and a half inches. He has never encountered a hotel-room showerhead that was high enough for him to stand under, an inconvenience for a man who spends months at a time on the road. When he speaks on a cell phone, he holds it in front of his mouth and talks into it as if it were a walkie-talkie, and then swivels it up to his ear to listen, as if the phone were a tiny planet making a quarter orbit around the sun of his enormous head.