The Great Wall lays down the smack

Our man just keeps on improving, his game and his English.



Tip of the backwards cap to HouStoned.

Fox News to surge forces in War on Christmas

"FNC will present a three hour primetime O’Reilly Factor Christmas Marathon beginning on Monday, December 25th at 8PM EST," a Fox News release states. Also, Shoutin' Sean Hannity will host a one-hour special, "A Nashville New Year", starring several of country music's leading Republican freaks.

Under the President's directive to "go shopping more", Orally will no doubt release some casualty figures related to victory, such as ...

-- the number of credit card accounts maxed out

-- the percentages of parking lot capacities at shopping malls around the country during the week before Christmas, and

-- a panel of pundits predicting the amount of the next rise in interest rates by the Fed due to inflation fears.

The day after (the trade, the election, the rest)

-- So after the Philadelphia 76ers swapped their malcontent superstar to the Denver Nuggets yesterday, it appears that Allen Iverson and Carmelo Anthony might be headed for a *ahem* rocky relationship. The league's two leading scorers forced to share the ball? The Answer, the perpetual adolescent -- rebellious, sullen -- suddenly recast as thirty-something sage and imparter of been-there, done-that wisdom to Melo?

"A.I. will love it there for the next 14 games," one Eastern Conference official laughed on Tuesday afternoon, a reference to the suspension Anthony is serving for fighting in Madison Square Garden last week.

Carmelo will return to the court on January 20 in Houston against the Rockets, and the problems could start as soon as he takes the floor with Iverson that night. That's when the question first gets asked: "Whose team is this?" In these selfish times, the answer is probably not "ours". The dynamic of Carmelo Anthony and the Nuggets changed dramatically last Saturday night in New York; Anthony showed himself to be a flawed young man with that sucker punch, an error in emotional judgment compounded with the way he swung and started running back on defense in a sight never seen before in his basketball career.

Just a guess, but I don't think Melo is going to like fitting into A.I.'s game. This was Carmelo Anthony's ball and his team until he gave Iverson the opening to take it away.

-- The runoff in HD-29 will be between two Republicans. Anthony Di Novo and his gang of volunteers -- including Hal, muse, and K-T (multiple postings from the field at each of those locations)-- worked hard, but the blue wave was turned back by the Texas red levee again.

Perhaps some of these conservatives can be dispatched to New Orleans to help with flood control. That is, if they don't choose to help serve their President in Iraq.

-- Judith Regan, the book publisher who green-lighted OJ Simpson's "If I Did It", was fired by HarperCollins over the weekend. You may recall her previous co-starring role as the girlfriend of slimy former NYPD commissioner Bernard Kerik. She seems perfectly suited for a position in the Trump organization counseling wayward girls, don't you think? Second chances and all?

-- If Fidel Castro is reported to be dead sooner or later, officials fear a mass exodus from Cuba. Even here in Houston they are preparing for it.

Preparations are underway for the traditional Cuban celebration of Noche Buena in my father-in-law's household. About ten of us with Cuban and Salvadoran roots will gather and celebrate. Here's a good description of the celebration, complete with the roast pig.

Knicker-boxers (and other news)

I hope it was worth it. The sucker-punch that Carmelo Anthony threw -- after which, it should be noted, he vanished to the opposite end of the court as quick as if he was on a fast break -- has cost him a significant portion of his reputation and season. I'm all for sticking up for your teammates, but if there's a proper way to go about it, his actions would have to be the complete opposite. The league's leading scorer on a less-than-average team now gets to sit and watch for a tad over 25% of his team's remaining games. Way to go, Melo.

Fights in basketball used to be as common as they still are in hockey, as HouStoned reminds.

-- Today is Election Day in HD-29, the statehouse district covering a few counties south of Houston. Lots of mi compadres have been covering the race to replace deceased representative Glenda Dawson. The Democratic candidate -- he lost to Dawson in November -- is Dr. Anthony DiNovo and he could move on to a runoff in January with one of the three Republicans vying for the job. Pearland is a GOP-freaky place, so to steal a seat away from them here would be schweet. It's all about today's turnout.

-- This news is nothing short of huge for diabetes sufferers, of which I am one. If it turns out that an injection of pepper juice cures it, Big Pharma is going to be pissed.

-- These are the rules of presidential primary season blogging.

-- Eugene Robinson:

Here's an idea: Let's send more U.S. troops to Iraq. The generals say it's way too late to even think about resurrecting Colin Powell's "overwhelming force" doctrine, so let's send over a modest "surge" in troop strength that has almost no chance of making any difference -- except in the casualty count. Oh, and let's not give these soldiers and Marines any sort of well-defined mission. Let's just send them out into the bloody chaos of Baghdad and the deadly badlands of Anbar province with orders not to come back until they "get the job done."

I don't know about you, but that strikes me as a terrible idea, arguably the worst imaginable "way forward" in Iraq. So of course this seems to be where George W. Bush is headed.

Yes, that's about right.

-- Like Dick Cheney's shooting (and Dick Cheney's health, and Dick Cheney's still-undisclosed location), the White House kept Laura Bush's cancer a secret at long as they possibly could. Note to the First Lady: now would be a good time to stop smoking.

-- The administration, presumably under the direction of its new Defense Secretary, is sending another aircraft carrier to the Persian Gulf. This is meant to send a message to Iran. It has no other intention, so go back to watching American Idol.

-- You didn't miss the Sunday Funnies, did you?

TIME's Person of the Year? ME!

And you, too.

To be sure, there are individuals we could blame for the many painful and disturbing things that happened in 2006. The conflict in Iraq only got bloodier and more entrenched. A vicious skirmish erupted between Israel and Lebanon. A war dragged on in Sudan. A tin-pot dictator in North Korea got the Bomb, and the President of Iran wants to go nuclear too. Meanwhile nobody fixed global warming, and Sony didn't make enough PlayStation3s.

But look at 2006 through a different lens and you'll see another story, one that isn't about conflict or great men. It's a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It's about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people's network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It's about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.

The tool that makes this possible is the World Wide Web. Not the Web that Tim Berners-Lee hacked together (15 years ago, according to Wikipedia) as a way for scientists to share research. It's not even the overhyped dotcom Web of the late 1990s. The new Web is a very different thing. It's a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter. Silicon Valley consultants call it Web 2.0, as if it were a new version of some old software. But it's really a revolution.

And we are so ready for it. We're ready to balance our diet of predigested news with raw feeds from Baghdad and Boston and Beijing. You can learn more about how Americans live just by looking at the backgrounds of YouTube videos -- those rumpled bedrooms and toy-strewn basement rec rooms -- than you could from 1,000 hours of network television.

Congratulations, you wild-eyed rebel.