"Where is America?" bemoans Libyan rebels. They bitch when we go in, and they bitch if we stay out. Damned if we do and damned if we don't.

Did the Japan earthquake screw up GPS systems? Yes! Uh, no! Well, kinda. . . .

Lionfish: deadly to our reef populations, but tasty, too. At the top of the food chain, our message to these dangerous nuisances: "We will kill you and eat you with your own spines."

When I was seven years old, there was a TV show that, for some reason I loved. It involved a goofy superhero who was able to fly. He wore some sort of silvery flight jacket/apparatus; I remember this because I would turn my coat inside out to play like I was that guy. I couldn't even remember the name of the show or the superhero. I despaired of ever learning this piece of useless trivia.

Enter the Web, namely YouTube! Turns out that the show was called "Mr. Terrific." It played for just 17 episodes in 1967. Here's the theme song, which I even kind of remember:



There are even some clips on YouTube:



I could even view the unaired pilot for this show.

Sometimes, the Internet is just plain cool.

I happened to come across this while shirking my duty to pack up. Kenny Chesney, from Luttrell (metro Knoxville), and a big football fan, has made a documentary on Condredge Holloway, to be aired on ESPN on Sunday, February 20, at 8:00 pm ET. Here's an ESPN print story on the documentary. Here's the trailer:



This movie has special significance for me. I started watching Tennessee football in 1970. I first saw Condredge play in the 1972 spring "Orange and White" game. He was so good that the coaches had to put him on the other team after halftime, because whatever side he was on was unstoppable. My parents and I looked at each other and said, "this guy is special."

And, boy, was he. Although diminutive -- he stood 5' 9" on his tippy toes -- Condredge played like a giant during his three years with the varsity (Freshmen were not allowed to play with the varsity in those days). He could run, he could pass, and he could scramble. A lot of the time, Condredge didn't have a lot of help, and ended up making things happen by himself.

We loved his talent, but most of all we loved his heart. An episode much remembered in Holloway lore is the 1974 UCLA game. The Bruins had knocked Condredge out of the game -- I mean, they took him to the locker room. It was 10-10, when he not only returned to the sideline, but immediately -- and without consulting the head coach -- re-entered the game. His courageous play allowed Tennessee to turn a sound defeat into a tie, on the order of "Tennessee Beats UCLA, 17-17." Here's the video:



I figure the documentary is going to make a big deal of the fact that Condredge was the first Black QB in the Southeastern Conference. I can tell you that, from my 12 year old perception, as well as the perception of anyone I talked to about football at the time, his color was of no consequence whatsoever. He was just a great player, and that was all that counted. I'm proud of Vols fans from that era for having such a color blind attitude.

I've been off the radar screen for a while, mostly because it appears that we will be moving out of our office at the end of the month. Maybe that doesn't sound so traumatic, but consider that in the 53 plus year history of this firm, we have moved exactly once, in 1987, from the old Bank of Knoxville Building to the Medical Arts Building. We have been here ever since. Until now.

Stay tuned for our new address and directions to our new office.

Dr. King and Sarah Palin: Pretty Much the Same Person. Not.

Making the world safe for democracy: Hooters comes to Japan.

Wear clean underwear: Routine traffic stop results in body cavity search under anesthesia. Tennessee law requires a search warrant be issued before a body cavity search is performed. Did Oak Ridge police request a federal prosecution in an attempt to get around state law?

Kibbutz Centennial: Degania Aleph turns 100 years old.

Carnival: dead in the water. I love that the cruise line is offering a free trip to the Splendor's passengers. If it was me, I don't know if I would be too eager to take another trip with Carnival.

The New Republic: Lessons From Bush 43. Here's the most interesting quote:

Those who study his presidency, then, won’t find a huge amount in the man himself. They’ll try to reach out and touch Bush the man, the thinker, the politician—and accidentally punch through a cardboard cutout. Behind the cutout? People who had been wanting to invade Iraq forever and got their way. People who had wanted to cut taxes for the rich forever and got their way. People who had been waiting forever for lucrative Pentagon contracts and got their way. The list goes on and on. The story of Bush will be much more about the myriad ambitious thinkers, ideologues, charlatans, and capitalists who threw themselves gleefully into the president’s orbit than it will be about the man himself.

This confirms what I have been saying since the 2000 presidential campaign: that Bush was a nothing -- simply a placeholder for the Republican establishment whose positions had been repudiated by the success of the Clinton Administration. We traded the Clinton success -- both foreign and domestic -- for eight years of the Republican/Bush chaos that ensued. Is it any wonder that we are where we are?

Important economic news! Oh wait, this is a joke. Isn't it?

Mick Jagger replies to Keith Richard's autobiography's criticisms. I like this bit:

I am forced into the role of martinet, the one who gets blamed for silly arbitrary rules. (Like, for a show in front of 60,000 people for which we are being paid some $6 or $7 million for a few hours' work, I like to suggest to everyone that we start on time, and that we each have in place a personal plan, in whatever way suits us best, to stay conscious for the duration of the show.)

I like Jagger a lot better -- and Richard a lot less -- after reading this non-apologetic, "sadder-but-wiser-girl" rejoinder.

Slate: Democrats didn't lose the battle of 2010. They won it.

Yes, Virginia, there is scuba diving in East Tennessee.

Your archetypal "Tea Party" candidate? The New Republic:

Since winning the Republican nomination for Joe Biden’s Senate seat in Delaware (thanks in part to $150,000 in out-of-state Tea Party money), Christine O’Donnell has provided virtually all of the race’s rhetorical oxygen. She has been asked to explain why it took her 15 years to get her college degree; what exactly happened when, in high school, she and a witch had a midnight meal “on a satanic altar;” how serious she was when she campaigned publicly to stop people from masturbating; and why the IRS has taken a lien on her property for unpaid taxes.

I'm still waiting to learn her answers.

John B. Judis:

The Tea Party is an accretion of various movements of the past decades, including the Christian right and, as Wilentz shows, the older anti-Communist Right. But it fits above all into the framework of American populism, which has always had right-wing and left-wing variants, and which is rooted in a middle class cri de coeur—that we who do the work and play by the rules are being exploited by parasitic bankers and speculators and/or by shiftless, idle white trash, negroes, illegal immigrants, fill in the blank here.

There's an ugly mood in the political air these days. Times are hard and the public is looking for someone to blame. The tea partiers are blaming -- who? Mostly, they blame Democratic politicians, despite most of the perceived problems occurring on a Republican watch. Regardless, my sense is that the "tea party movement" is more about scapegoating than anything else. And whether it is scapegoating to further Republican or Libertarian aims, this movement is certainly taking advantage of a weak economy to further such right wing partisan goals.

What worries me is that, the last time a national public was looking for someone to blame for bad economic times, we ended up with the Germans electing Hitler as Chancellor of Germany. And the internal group that got blamed for the disastrous German economy was, well, you know. While it hasn't happened yet, the ever-cyclical nature of anti-semitism suggests that, sooner or later, someone's going to try to lay it all on the Jews. Or the Muslims, or the Catholics, or the Blacks. And so forth.

The irony is that, despite the apparent middle class domination of the "tea party movement," that same middle class is unlikely to be the beneficiary of the the "movement's" success: "What’s undeniable, though, is that those most likely to benefit from right-wing middle class insurgencies are not the embattled middle classes, but the business interests and the wealthy associated with the Republican Party. That was certainly true of the 'Reagan Revolution,' which put an end to the movement toward income equality that had begun in the 1930s. So who benefits from these movements is not the same as who controls them on a day-to-day basis."

There's an ugly mood in the air.

Henley Bridge closes Jan. 3 for at least 2 years: But where will they have Boomsday?

Every homeowner's nightmare.