The Chris Moeller Archives

What I was reading this weekend

Nothing.

I was watching television at the 8th Annual Moeller TV Fest. Thanks to all for their contributions. The programs were captivating and hilarious. Your comments witty and insightful. I had to run the dishwasher twice. Things got a little crazy that way.

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The big sports story in Iowa last week was the top prep basketball recruit in state history, Harrison Barnes, signing a letter of intent to play at North Carolina. Fans of my alma mater, Iowa State, hoped he would choose the home team being that he's born and raised in Ames, his parents are a woman on the staff of the university music department and a former Cyclone cager, Ron Harris, and he's a high school teammate of the son of Iowa State head coach Greg McDermott. I admit my stomach was turning a little on Friday afternoon with the expectation that the Cyclones might be Barnes' upset choice of schools.

Barnes owes nothing to anybody but himself in making his choice, but if our world was set up just a little bit differently, he would understand that his best choice would be to skip college altogether and go make his fortune right away in the NBA. That college basketball racket is for the birds, cooked up to make coaches, administrators, and television executives rich off the efforts of young, unpaid athletes, and supported by the NBA so that they can have a developmental league they don't have to pay for. It's not even worth it for the books. He can always go to college later, and he'll get a lot more out of it academically when he can go without the distraction of playing ball. Iowa State's greatest player ever, Jeff Grayer, stuck around school for four years and boasts being the school's all-time scoring leader, but he busted up his knee during his junior year and surely cost himself millions of dollars over his playing career.

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The media war of words between Sarah Palin and Levi Johnston has no business being this fun. I can't get enough.

Says Palin on Oprah about her daughter's baby daddy and his possibly-nude Playgirl pictorial, "I don't think a national television show is the place to discuss some of things he's been doing and saying... By the way, I don't know if we call him Levi -- I hear he goes by the name Ricky Hollywood now, so, if that's the case, we don't want to mess up this gig he's got going.... Kind of this aspiring, aspiring porn -- the things that he's doing. It's kind of heartbreaking." (And incidently, who knew that Oprah would be a softer interviewer than even Larry King?)

Of course, Johnston says Palin's just being that way because she knows the goods he's "got on her" from his time spent in the Palin house.

I think I know why I dig it so-- they're bringing back the Larry Flynt/Jerry Falwell feud. That was fun.

posted by CM @ 8:28 PM