A blog is born (and less weighty matters)

Put your hands together for Feet to the Fire, a collaborative effort by some of my favorite people -- including me, of course. Muck will be raked.

-- Another of the Astros journeyman hurlers who sent the team into their glorious 1980 playoff run, Vern Ruhle, passed away at MD Anderson over the weekend. I thought that Ruhle was a tremendous pitching coach and felt bad when the Astros canned him in 2000, coincidentally the same year they began play in Enron Field Minute Maid Park. Crawfish Boxes has a nice compendium of stats (like always) and an old baseball card. Vayo con Dios, Vern.

-- As more global warming news warns, the fair-and-balanced pushback manages to get itself into the Chronic. Shame on you, Eric Berger. All the conservative freaks in town will continue to think the newspaper is too liberal, so you may as well quit trying to appease them.

I'll have more than these bite-size pieces later on as I'm sitting around doing nothing but scratching where it itches all day. (Pajamas media, indeed. I'm wearing sweats.)

Sunday Funnies

(click to view larger)

I smell postpourri

-- excellent point-counterpoint by Markos regarding the 2008 Democratic declareds.

-- there are several conversations going on about the past and future direction and management of the Texas Democratic Party.

-- another Houston police shooting of an unarmed African-American man has a neighborhood on edge. On a lighter note, this is the HPD news I count on HouStoned for.

-- the Texas corporations who benefited the most from Republican administration paid most of the$2 million tab for Rick Perry's inaugural. They include TXU, which is rushing to build several coal-fired plants in Texas. We're also getting gouged by the cellular phone companies. Surprised?

-- Iran got military parts and equipment from the Pentagon. Bush caved on his wiretapping efforts. Cheney thinks it's OK to look at your credit report. The White House visitors logs are now classified 'top secret'.

-- The Sunday Funnies and more tomorrow.

Scaling Mt. Mutombo

I was all set to post about the Rockets and then Norbizness said everything I was thinking (and more, and better):

The most interesting senior citizen player in the NBA reached a milestone (on January 10), as a rejuvenated Dikembe Mutombo collected 19 rebounds and 5 blocks to pass Kareem Abdul-Jabbar as second on the league's all-time blocks list. More importantly, I think he's some sort of prince, he speaks 12 languages, he probably never used "Who wants to sex up Mutombo?" as a pick-up line at college bars in DC (although he should have), and, most importantly:

A well-known humanitarian, Mutombo started the Dikembe Mutombo Foundation to improve living conditions in his native Democratic Republic of Congo in 1997. His efforts earned him the NBA's humanitarian award in 2001. In the same year, ground was broken for a hospital in his hometown, the Congolese capital of Kinshasa, with Mutombo personally donating $3.5 million toward the hospital's construction. On August 14, 2006, Dikembe donated $15 million to the completion of the now named Biamba Marie Mutombo Hospital, named for his mother. When it opens in February 2007, the $29 million facility will become the first modern medical facility to be built in that area in nearly 40 years.

The Rockets, despite injuries to their two main players at different points in the season, are inexplicably 23-13 after blowing out the paper-tiger Lakers (January 10). Unfortunately, they are jockeying for midseason position in the Western Conference, which has approximately 100% of the top teams in the league. Put another way, teams like the Clippers that miss the playoffs in the West would probably be 3 or 4 seed in the pathetic, interest-less Eastern Conference.

Boy, that's cold