We (CL) opened up our doors Wednesday night for about 50 potential new contributors. There was wine, beer, pizza and a micro-symposium on 21st-century community journalism. We got a chance to recruit some new voices and our guests got to feel out our site editors. Look for their contributions in the coming days.
One of our newbies, Robin Miller, captured the whole thing on video, which you can see below the jump:
Have you ever heard the Vietnam-era quote, “war is not healthy for children and other living things?”
It is a staunchly obvious and painstakingly reasonable appeal that cuts to the ethical core and casualties of war. I read an article this week that reminded me of it, but instead of war, the murderous culprit in this story is climate change.
A new report by the Global Humanitarian Forum (GHF) says that global warming already kills about 300,000 people a year. If that projection is not startling enough– or if you have more of an economic mind, and are not much swayed by stacks of human figures—the report also says that climate change costs around $125 billion in economic losses annually.
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And we thought the Glazers weren’t paying attention.
In a terse statement on their website, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers announced just before 6 p.m today that they had fired head coach Jon Gruden and general manager Bruce Allen .
Here’s the team’s statement:
“We will be forever grateful to Jon for bringing us the Super Bowl title, and we thank Bruce for his contributions to our franchise, however after careful consideration, we feel that this decision is in the best interest of our organization moving forward.”
Maybe the move doesn’t qualify as a shocker, but it’s definitely a surprise.
This is not the way head coach firings generally go down in the NFL. The rumor mill usually churns and the community has a sense of what’s in the offing. Locally, the sports media was definitely not abuzz with the idea that Gruden was on his way out. Further, most coaches are dismissed within a few days after the end of a season. Gruden’s ouster comes 19 days after the Bucs final game, a home loss to the Oakland Raiders that eliminated them from the playoffs.
My hunch is that the Glazer family came to the decision after considerable thought and deliberation. The owners have always been a group that seemed detached from the Tampa Bay community, but you get the sense that they were hearing the Gruden/Allen-bashing that was taking place on sports radio and in other forums.
There were a lot of empty seats in Raymond James Stadium this season, even though the Bucs sprinted to a record of 9-3 (only to lost their last four games in a historic collapse). The fans have been in a generally dour mood since the season’s end, and maybe top team brass realized it and took action.
So the topic of the moment — other than speculation about who will replace the coach and GM — is: Should Gruden and Allen have gotten the axe?
If I were in the owners’ chair, I would not have pulled the plug now. The late-season cave-in obscures the notion that the Bucs 9-7 record was about what fans should’ve expected, given the team’s level of talent. The Bucs put a roster together for the 2008 season that left an estimated $35-million of space under the NFL salary cap. If Allen was relucant to spend it, then he should certainly have been dismissed.
But there’s been a lot of speculation that the Glazers, leveraged to the teeth with their ownership of the British soccer franchise Manchester United, were running the Bucs on the cheap. If that is indeed the case, then the fault lies with ownership. Allen, hamstrung by tight purse-strings, could only do so much, and I honestly think Gruden did a decent job this year with the players he had.
That said, the Gruden act had gotten pretty stale after seven seasons at the Bucs’ helm. Some new blood will be welcomed.
In the end, it appears that Jon Gruden finally ran out of the good will he had earned by bringing the long-suffering Tampa Bay Bucs a Super Bowl championship.
Web TV site Hulu plans to run the Obama inauguration in its entirety. Their player is even embeddable on other sites. Not too shabby.
Remember how every episode of GI Joe ended with a public service segment teaching kids about not getting into cars with skeevy Cobra agents, or how to field-strip an M-16 and the like? Thrilling, useful information in every one.
About five years back, independent filmmaker Eric Fensler took 25 of those PSAa and re-edited them with new dialogue. The result is sometimes incomprehensible, always absurd, and occasionally hilarious enough to make you shoot milk out of your nose.
Fensler got a cease and desist order from Hasbro in 2004, but put the shorts back up on his site a few years later. You can see all of them there, but a few of my favorites are after the break:
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