text:
Ah, sweet relief.
Now, passersby in SoHo won't have to look at the billboard of that threesome involving nearly naked young models. It's just a hot girl dripping wet in a red bikini.
Calvin Klein switched out the billboard near the busy intersection of Houston and Lafayette streets after the billboard caused a mini-uproar last week.
Many locals complained about the topless young female model lying on top of a bare-chested male model while she was kissing another bare-chested young man. A third open-shirted slab of beefcake lay on the floor in front of the couch the other three were on.
The new one keeps the sexy theme, while toning down the heat.
"I think it's a good thing," neighbor Rae Vermeulen told The Daily News.
Added Rebecca Edmonson: "This is a lot better than the full blatant threesome they had before."


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Seppuku: A Samurai Suicide Miscellany
For a little entertainment this Thanksgiving, I read Andrew Rankin's Seppuku: A History of Samurai Suicide (Kodansha, 2011).1 Since I'm teaching both Samurai and Early Japan this semester, seemed like a good supplemental read, and this is the first thing resembling a lull I've had all semester. This is an attractive little book, substantially researched, but not much of a history. It's more like a miscellany, a collection of materials in search of a thesis.
- It helps to have friends who are journal editors: my colleague at Midwest Quarterly passed it on to see if it was worth a review, shortly before the journal gave up reviewing. [↩]
Comments Off

subset: commoncrawl


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Perennial under-achievers at big-ticket ICC events, South Africa will start their campaign to shed the 'chokers' tag when they take on minnows Zimbabwe in their opening Group C match of the World Twenty20 here tomorrow.
The game should not prove too much of an ask for the Proteas as it would take a very special effort from Zimbabwe after being thrashed by hosts Sri Lanka in their opening match yesterday.
On paper, it is a battle of unequals with the A B de Villiers-led South Africa looking way too formidable for Brendan Taylor's Zimbabwe. Whatever the department of the game, the South African stand far superior in talent and experience.
And it would be tough for Zimbabwe to bounce back from the opening-match thrashing against a quality opposition, for which winning this match would be good enough to make the Super Eight cut.
Zimbabwe's batting completely fell apart against Sri Lanka and chasing 182, the line-up folded for 100 with four batsmen contributing nothing to the total and two others falling for single-digit scores.
But Taylor insisted that it was a one-off flopshow and his team is far better than what the scoreboard might suggest.
"We have played enough cricket to go back from today, rethink, have a good look, start training and come back a better side," he said last night.
Zimbabwe's bowling effort too was pedestrian to say the least with the combined might of six managing to grab just one wicket.
In the absence of that one inspiring player which almost every team banks on, Zimbabwe can hardly be given a chance to staging an upset win and go through beyond the group stage.
South Africa, on the other hand, is a team which once again looks good enough to go the distance but will have to improve their ability to handle pressure.
"I think we have definitely put certain things in place to give ourselves the best chance.
We have buckled in previous ICC events, so hopefully we can go all the way this time around," said batsman J P Duminy summing up what the under-achievers would have to do.
The Proteas seem to have adapted well posting a good warm-up win over New Zealand in which most of their key batsmen got good match practice.
The form of Richard levi, who clinched the ICC Twenty20 Performance of the Year, would be crucial along with the ever-reliable Jacques Kallis and Hashim Amla.
They have the pace battery, led by Dale Steyn, to intimidate any opposition but it is the spin department which would be a slight cause of concern.
Teams (from):
South Africa: A.B. de Villiers (c), Hashim Amla, Farhaan Behardien, Johan Botha, JP Duminy, Francois du Plessis, Jacques Kallis, Richard Levi, Albie Morkel, Morne Morkel, Justin Ontong, Wayne Parnell, Robin Peterson, Dale Steyn, Lonwabo Tsotsobe.
Zimbabwe: Brendan Taylor (c), Vusi Sibanda, Hamilton Masakadza, Stuart Matsikenyeri, Malcolm Waller, Elton Chigumbura, Craig Ervine, Graeme Cremer, Ray Price, Kyle Jarvis, Chris Mpofu, Richard Muzhange, Brian Vitori, Prosper Utseya, Forster Mutizwa.
Match starts at 7.30 pm (IST).


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A computed tomography (CT) scan uses X-rays to make detailed
pictures of structures inside of the body.
During the test, you will lie on a table that is attached to the CT
scanner, which is a large doughnut-shaped machine. The CT scanner sends X-ray
pulses through the body. Each pulse lasts less than a second and takes a
picture of a thin slice of the organ or area being studied. One part of the
scanning machine can tilt to take pictures from different positions. The
pictures are saved on a computer.
A CT scan can be used to study any body organ, such as the liver,
pancreas, intestines, kidneys, adrenal glands, lungs, and heart. It also can
study blood vessels, bones, and the spinal cord.
An iodine dye (contrast material) is often used to make structures
and organs easier to see on the CT pictures. The dye may be used to check blood
flow, find tumors, and look for other problems. Dye can be put in a vein (IV)
in your arm, or you may drink the dye for some tests. CT pictures may be taken
before and after the dye is used.
Last Revised:
June 13, 2011
Healthwise Staff
Medical Review:
Adam Husney, MD - Family Medicine & Howard Schaff, MD - Diagnostic Radiology
This information does not replace the advice of a doctor. Healthwise, Incorporated disclaims any warranty or liability for your use of this information. Your use of this information means that you agree to the Terms of Use. How this information was developed to help you make better health decisions.
To learn more visit Healthwise.org
© 1995-2012 Healthwise, Incorporated. Healthwise, Healthwise for every health decision, and the Healthwise logo are trademarks of Healthwise, Incorporated.


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Are you ready to start your day with Chip & Dale (along with a few more Disney pals) at Epcot's Garden Grill?!
That's right! Garden Grill, Disney World's only rotating restaurant, has been serving dinner only for a while now. But on November 8th, TWO new meals joined the lineup: Garden Grill now serves up breakfast AND lunch, in addition to dinner! (This, by the way, brings the total of Character Breakfasts in Epcot to two, with the Norway Pavilion's Akershus Royal Banquet Hall offering the other option with Princess Storybook Dining. Characters are now at both restaurants for every meal.)
The menu for the new lunch addition nearly duplicates that of Chip 'N' Dale's Harvest Feast for dinner. But breakfast is all-new, operating each day from 8:00 to 10:30 am.
We can't wait to dig in! And we've got a few friends who would like to say "Good Morning" to you, too…
But let's take a look around first. And, as always with the Garden Grill, I do mean AROUND… [Read more…]


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Privacy Policy
John's Incredible Pizza Company
Effective Date: 11/29/11
John's Incredible Pizza Company (JIPC) is committed to safeguarding your
privacy; we take your privacy seriously. We will not sell, rent or otherwise
distribute your personally identifiable information, which we receive through
our website or from any other source, to third parties except as explained
below. Please read the following policy to understand the care with which JIPC
will treat your information. This policy may change from time to time so please
check back periodically.
If you have concerns, comments or questions concerning this policy, click here to contact us.
What information does JIPC collect from me?
JIPC may collect information about you, such as your name, postal address, email address , zip code, phone number and dining preferences through any of the following: online email address submissions, in-restaurant surveys, research surveys, dining frequency cards, online purchases, guest relations communications and online restaurant location searches or other voluntary activities.
Can I remain anonymous when I provide information to JIPC?
You can visit our Web site without identifying yourself or giving us any personal information. If you give us your email address, purchase online, voluntarily provide feedback to Guest Relations or complete a survey, you will no longer be anonymous to JIPC. We may ask you for additional information from time to time, which you may decide to provide to us or not. If you contact JIPC through the Web site or otherwise, we may keep a record of that correspondence.
How does JIPC use the information?
JIPC's primary goal in collecting information is to improve customer service by understanding your preferences, communicating JIPC promotions and services and providing you with the best possible experience. For example, if you visit our Web site and give us your zip code, we are able to provide the location of the JIPC restaurant closest to you. We may also use your information to notify you of special offers and services available from and its affiliated companies. On a blinded, aggregated basis, we may do research on our guests' and Web site users' demographics and behavior based on the information you, other guests and users provide to us. Personally identifiable information would not be used for this type of research. We may disclose such blinded and aggregated data and user statistics to third parties and for other lawful purposes.
Does JIPC share my information?
We will not sell, rent or otherwise distribute your personally identifiable information to third parties, except when we have your permission or under the following circumstances:
How can I control access to my personal information and its use?
You may contact us if you wish to view, edit or delete your personal information from our database and we will use commercially reasonable efforts to accommodate your request.
How does JIPC protect financial-related information?
Keeping your personal financial information private is vitally important to us. You may provide such information to us when you purchase online. We do not store credit card numbers or bank account numbers. This information will be kept secure and we will transfer your credit card number, bank account number or other personal information only to the third party service provider, which is bound to keep your information confidential, and to the appropriate credit card company or bank only in order to process any online payments.
What security precautions are in place to protect the loss, misuse or
alteration of my information?
We closely guard your personally identifiable information. We use encryption technology for credit card numbers and bank account numbers. Remember to close your browser window when you have finished your order. This is to ensure that others cannot access your information by using your computer when you are away from it. Because of the global nature of the Internet, when you give us information, that information may be sent electronically to servers outside of the country where you originally entered the information. Though no data transmission over the Internet can be guaranteed to be 100% secure, JIPC employs security techniques that are designed to protect the privacy of any information you share with us.
What are cookies and how does JIPC use them?
As part of offering personalized service, we sometimes use cookies and beacon tags or web bugs to store and understand more information about you, such as your nearest JIPC restaurant. A cookie is a small amount of data that is sent to your browser from a Web server and stored on your computer's hard drive. Beacon tags and web bugs allow us to understand what users have viewed a page. We may use cookies, tags or bugs to allow faster and easier access to your information and to monitor traffic on the site and measure traffic patterns to improve functionality.
How do I opt out?
If you no longer wish to receive ongoing marketing communications from us, we will provide you with simple instructions on each marketing email from JIPC to enable you to unsubscribe from future emails from JIPC. You may also contact the Privacy Desk as explained above or opt out here.
What else should I know about my privacy?
Please keep in mind that whenever you voluntarily disclose information online, that information may be accessible to other online users. Ultimately, you are solely responsible for maintaining the secrecy of your passwords and/or any other personal information. Please be careful and responsible whenever you are online.
How is information from children treated?
JIPC does not intend to collect any personally identifiable information from children under the age of 18 without verifiable parental consent. In fact, when we request personal information from users of this Web site, we also ask for their birth date in order to comply with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) which prohibits the collecting of personal information of anyone under the age of 18. If we learn that such a child has provided us with personally identifiable information, we will immediately delete it. If you learn that such a child has provided us with personally identifiable information, the parent or guardian should contact us at the Privacy Desk above and we will immediately delete it.
Terms of Use
PLEASE READ THESE WEB SITE TERMS OF USE CAREFULLY BEFORE USING OUR WEB SITE. Your use of the Web site of JIPC ( John's Incredible Pizza Company ) or any of the products or services offered on the Webs site (Services) is subject to these Terms of Use (Terms). We may change the Terms from time to time, so please check back periodically. When you use our Web site, you accept these Terms, including any changes that we make from time to time.
Some of the Services may be subject to additional posted conditions and your use of those Services is subject to those conditions. In the event of an inconsistency between these Terms and any additional posted conditions, the provisions of the additional conditions will control.
Unless you have greater rights in a separate signed agreement with us, we have the right, but not the obligation, to take any of the following actions in our sole discretion at any time and for any reason without giving you any prior notice:
You understand and agree that our Services may include communications such as service announcements and administrative messages from us or from our affiliates or business partners and that these communications are considered part of the Services. You also understand that our Services may include advertisements.
You are solely responsible for all materials, whether publicly posted or privately transmitted, that you upload, post, e-mail, transmit, or otherwise make available on our Site ("Your Content"). You certify that you own all intellectual property rights in Your Content. You hereby grant JIPC, our affiliates, and our partners a worldwide, irrevocable, royalty-free, nonexclusive, sublicensable license to use, reproduce, create derivative works of, distribute, publicly perform, publicly display, transfer, transmit, distribute, and publish Your Content and subsequent versions of Your Content for the purposes of (i) displaying Your Content on our Site, (ii) distributing Your Content, either electronically or via other media, to users seeking to download or otherwise acquire it, and/or (iii) storing Your Content in a remote database accessible by end users, for a charge. This license shall apply to the distribution and the storage of Your Content in any form, medium, or technology now known or later developed.
Content on our Web site
Our Web site includes a combination of content that we create and that our affiliates or business partners create. All materials published on our Web site, including, but not limited to, written content, photographs, graphics, images, illustrations, marks, logos, sound or video clips, and Flash animation, are the intellectual property of JIPC or our affiliates or business partners. You may not modify, publish, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, reproduce, create derivative works of, distribute, publicly perform, publicly display, or in any way exploit any of the materials or content on our Web site in whole or in part, other than as necessary for your own personal non-commercial use, without our written consent.
Our Web site contains content that we create as well as content provided by third parties. This content may include, among other things, company information, and product or service information or reviews. There may be some inadvertent inaccuracies or typographical errors in the content and we do not guarantee the accuracy, integrity, completeness or quality of the content on our Web site or that located at third party URLs that may be posted on our Web site.
Trademarks and logos
The use of JIPC's trademarks, service marks and logos is prohibited without our written consent and we will strictly exercise and enforce our rights to them to the full extent of the law.
Privacy policy
All of the information that we collect from you, such as your e-mail address and related personal information and credit card information, is subject to our privacy policy. Please see our full privacy policy.
Your conduct on our Web site
Any information that you choose to provide us must be true, accurate, current, and complete. You agree not to copy or imitate the appearance, design or style of our Web site. The technology and the software underlying our Web site and the Services is the property of JIPC, our affiliates and/or our business partners. You agree not to copy, modify, rent, lease, loan, sell, assign, distribute, reverse engineer, grant a security interest in, or otherwise transfer any right to the technology or software underlying our Web site or the Services. You agree not to modify the software underlying our Web site in any manner or form or to use modified versions of such software, including (without limitation) for the purpose of obtaining unauthorized access to our Web site.
You agree that you will not use our Web site or its content to take any of the following actions:
You hereby agree to indemnify, defend and hold JIPC and all of our officers, directors, owners, employees, agents, information providers, affiliates, partners, and licensors (collectively, JIPC's Parties) harmless from and against any and all liability, losses, costs, and expenses, including attorneys' fees, incurred by any JIPC Party in connection with any claim, including, but not limited to, claims for defamation, violation of rights of publicity or privacy, copyright infringement, or trademark infringement arising out of:
Unless you have greater rights in a separate signed agreement with us, we disclaim any service outages that are caused by our maintenance on the servers or the technology that underlies our Web site, failures of our service providers (including telecommunications, hosting, and power providers), computer viruses, natural disasters or other destruction or damage of our facilities, acts of nature, war, civil disturbance, or any other cause beyond our reasonable control.
WE DO NOT WARRANT THAT OUR WEB SITE WILL BE UNINTERRUPTED OR ERROR FREE. IN ADDITION, WE DO NOT MAKE ANY WARRANTY AS TO THE CONTENT ON OUR WEB SITE. OUR WEB SITE AND ITS CONTENT ARE DISTRIBUTED ON AN "AS IS, AS AVAILABLE" BASIS. ANY MATERIAL THAT YOU DOWNLOAD OR OTHERWISE OBTAIN THROUGH OUR WEB SITE IS DONE AT YOUR OWN DISCRETION AND RISK, AND YOU WILL BE SOLELY RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY POTENTIAL DAMAGES TO YOUR COMPUTER SYSTEM OR LOSS OF DATA THAT RESULTS FROM YOUR DOWNLOAD OF ANY SUCH MATERIAL. NEITHER WE NOR ANY OF OUR AFFILIATES OR BUSINESS PARTNERS MAKES ANY WARRANTY THAT (i) OUR WEB SITE WILL MEET YOUR REQUIREMENTS, (ii) OUR WEB SITE WILL BE UNINTERRUPTED, TIMELY, SECURE, OR ERROR FREE, (iii) THE RESULTS THAT MAY BE OBTAINED FROM THE USE OF OUR WEB SITE WILL BE ACCURATE OR RELIABLE, AND (iv) ANY ERRORS WILL BE CORRECTED. NEITHER WE NOR ANY OF OUR AFFILIATES OR BUSINESS PARTNERS MAKE ANY WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, WARRANTIES OF TITLE OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF NON-INFRINGEMENT, MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, WITH RESPECT TO OUR WEB SITE, ANY CONTENT, OR ANY OF OUR SERVICES, TOOLS, PRODUCTS, OR PROPERTIES. YOU EXPRESSLY AGREE THAT YOU WILL ASSUME THE ENTIRE RISK AS TO THE QUALITY AND THE PERFORMANCE OF OUR WEB SITE AND THE ACCURACY OR COMPLETENESS OF ITS CONTENT.
JIPC may elect to resolve any controversy or claim arising out of or relating to these Terms or our Web site by binding arbitration in accordance with the commercial arbitration rules of the American Arbitration Association. Any such controversy or claim will be arbitrated on an individual basis and will not be consolidated in any arbitration with any claim or controversy of any other party. The arbitration will be conducted in Orange County, California, and judgment on the arbitration award may be entered in any court having jurisdiction thereof. Either you or we may seek any interim or preliminary relief from a state or federal court of competent jurisdiction in the state of California, necessary to protect the rights or the property of you or JIPC (or its agents, suppliers, and subcontractors), pending the completion of arbitration.
Our failure to exercise or enforce any right or provision of these Terms will not constitute a waiver of such right or provision.
You agree that regardless of any statute or law to the contrary, any claim or cause of action arising out of or related to use of our Web site or these Terms must be filed within one year after such claim or cause of action arose or be forever barred.
These Terms will be construed in accordance with the laws of the State of California, and the parties irrevocably consent to bring any action to enforce these Terms before an arbitration panel or before a court of competent jurisdiction in California if seeking interim or preliminary relief or enforcement of an arbitration award.
If any part of these Terms is determined to be invalid or unenforceable pursuant to applicable law, then the invalid or unenforceable provision will be deemed superseded by a valid, enforceable provision that most closely matches the intent of the original provision, and the remainder of the Terms shall continue in effect.
Infringement Claims/Copyright Agent
If you believe that any material contained on the Site infringes your copyright or other intellectual property rights, you should notify JIPC of your copyright infringement claim in accordance with the following procedure. JIPC will process notices of alleged infringement which it receives and will take appropriate action as required by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and other applicable intellectual property laws. The DMCA requires that notifications of claimed copyright infringement should be sent to this Site's Designated Agent who is: http://www.loc.gov/copyright/
101 Independence Avenue SE
Washington, DC 20559-6000
Ph#: 202-707-3000
Legal Disclaimers
Price and availability subject to changeJIPC reserves the right to alter the privacy policy at anytime with or without notice. This policy outlines key provisions to our privacy policy, but is in no way intended to be all inclusive of all provisions and restrictions due to the nature of the ever evolving technology platform. For further clarification regarding JIPC's privacy policy, click here to contact us.


text:
New Student Admissions
01273 644644
New Students - start here
Step 1. Activate your username
Follow the on-screen instructions to activate your computer account. You will need to enter your surname and your student number. Write down your new username and password when they are displayed because you will not get an email confirmation.
Go to: https://activate.brighton.ac.uk
If you have any problems getting your username and password
Please WAIT 15 MINUTES for your account to be activated
Step 2. studentcentral
studentcentral provides a personalised home page to help you manage your learning and university administration. You will see information targeted specifically for you and studentcentral will prompt you to enrol on your course as soon as you are entitled to.
Go to: https://studentcentral.brighton.ac.uk
If you still can't log in after 15 minutes, please so that we can help.
Logging in regularly will help you keep up to date with information important for your time at University. If you have questions at any time, please email and we'll get back to you as quickly as possible.
Read the Student Handbook online.
We look
forward to welcoming you to the University of Brighton,
The New Student Admissions Team


text:
Product 10/17
Vibration Alarm + Portable Motion Sensor Vibration Alarm: Detects low and ultra-low frequency vibration and sounds a piercing 110 dB alarm when tripped. Very simple to use: ON/OFF switch to activate the unit. Includes an internal magnet for easy mounting on a steel surface. Can be used vertically or horizontally. Great for alerting you to the presence of movement, vibration, bumping or thumping in the night. Can also be used as an anti-theft alarm or Earthquake alarm. Very sensitive! Powered by 1 x 9V battery (not included). Portable Motion Sensor: PIR technology uses infrared radiation to detect the motion of warm bodies. The Portable Motion Sensor uses advanced technology to detect intruders and activity in a controlled area: 90 horizontal view, 20 vertical view up to 24 feet from unit. Completely self-contained and portable. Can be mounted on a wall, floor, or simply placed on a tabletop. Unit is armed and disarmed from up to 30 feet away with the handheld remote (included). Great for security or paranormal work when you want to monitor an area for activity. Needs 4 AA batteries (not included) or you can power it with a 6 V, 500 mA AC/DC adapter (sold separately). Two modes: Alarm mode - producing a loud (110 dB) alarm with 30 second delay, Chime mode - instant, less intense chime sound Use both devices and get the widest range of detection!
This product was added to our catalog on Monday 30 December, 2013.


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The UMBC (1-2) men's lacrosse team has a challenging week in store with games vs. No. 4 Maryland and No. 2 Johns Hopkins. The Retrievers start the week by hosting the Terrapins on Tuesday evening, March 6, at UMBC Stadium. The opening face-off is set for 7:05 p.m. and the game will be streamed live by www.umbcretrievers.tv.
UMBC (1-2) rallied from four goals down in the final 13 minutes to send Saturday's contest with Fairfield to overtime, but the Stags won OT's opening draw and scored 44 seconds into the extra frame to prevail, 10-9, at UMBC Stadium on March 3.
UMBC junior attackman Scott Jones scored a season-high four goals, including the game-tying goal with 40 seconds left to cap the rally.
UMBC had rallied from an 8-5 fourth quarter deficit to draw even with Robert Morris, but the Colonials prevailed, 10-8, in the opener at home on Feb. 18. Eight days later at Rutgers, the Retrievers never trailed in a 11-7 victory over the Scarlet Knights.
Jones and sophomore midfielder Zach Linkous lead UMBC with seven goals and one assist apiece through three games..
Maryland (3-0, 1-0 ACC) is coming off of a 10-7 victory over then No. 8 Duke in both team's conference opener on March 3. Senior Drew Snider led the Terps by posting his third career hat trick, which included two man-up goals. Junior Billy Gribbin also had three points (1 goal, 2 assists) for Maryland.
Sophomore Niko Amato made nine of his 14 saves in the fourth quarter to secure the victory for the Terrapins.
For the season, the Terps are led offensively by All-Americans Joe Cummings and John Haus, who each have nine points. Overall, 13 different Terrapins have scored goals this season. Defensively, Amato has stopped 63.5 percent of the shots put on goal by opponents and has a 6.49 goals-against average. Junior Curtis Holmes is winning 64.2 percent of his face-offs and is the team leader in groundballs with 19.
Maryland opened with a 12-6 win over America East rival Hartford, then rung up 16 goals in a 16-11 win over host Georgetown.
Maryland leads the series, 26-7. The teams have met every year since 1982 and had two face-offs in 2007. The Retrievers won three straight contests in 2007, 2008 and 2009, but the Terps have captured the last two games. Five of UMBC's seven victories over Maryland have occurred in College Park; the Terrapins are 14-2 at UMBC. Last season,
Last season, Scott Jones scored three goals, but Maryland sprinted out to a 4-0 lead and defeated UMBC, 15-6, in College Park.
UP NEXT: UMBC takes on No. 2 Johns Hopkins at the Konica-Minolta Face-Off Classic on Saturday, March 10. The Retrievers and Blue Jays are the third game of the tripleheader with a 4:00 p.m. start time.


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Romans 13:1-5Let every soul be subject to the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God.Topicalbible.org—AKJV
Psalm 51:5Behold, I was shaped in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me.Topicalbible.org—AKJV
Ezekiel 18:20The soul that sins, it shall die. The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son: the righteousness of the righteous shall be on him, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be on him.Topicalbible.org—AKJV
Children and Death
Children and Heaven
Children and Marriage
Children and Parents
Children and Prayer
Children and Sin
Children are a Gift from God
Children are Capable of Glorifying God
Children As a Blessing
Children Being a Blessing
Children Being Obedient
Children Born out of Wedlock
Children Gods Gift
Children Going to Heaven
Children Going to Hell
Children Growing Up
Children Having Children
Children in Answer to Prayer: Hannah
Children in Answer to Prayer: Isaac
Children in Answer to Prayer: Leah
Children in Answer to Prayer: Rachel
Children in Answer to Prayer: To Abraham
Children in Answer to Prayer: Zacharias
Children Leaving Home
Children Leaving Their Parents
Children Murdering Parents
Children Obeying Their Parents
Children of Eden
Children of God
Children of God's People, Holy
Children of God's People, Interested in the Promises
Children of Israel
Children of Ministers
Children of the Bridechamber
Children of the East
Children of the Righteous, Blessed of God
Children out of Wedlock
Children Responsibility
Children Returning Home
Children Salvation
Children Sinning
Children were Named: After Relatives
Children were Named: from Circumstances Connected With Their Birth
Children were Named: from Remarkable Events
Children were Named: Numerous, Considered an Especial Blessing
Children were Named: Often by God
Children were Named: Often Numerous
Children were Named: Sometimes Born when Parents Were Old
Children were Required: To Attend to Instruction
Children were Required: To Honor Their Parents
Children were Required: To Respect the Aged
Children were Required: To Submit to Discipline
Children Who Murder
Children: A Blessing
Children: Abijah
Children: Alienated, Ishmael, to Gratify Sarah
Children: Amusements of
Children: An Heritage from the Lord
Children: Anxiety of the Jews For
Children: Bastard, Excluded from the Privileges of the Congregation
Children: Blessed by Jesus
Children: Bound by Covenants of Parents
Children: Casting out of Weak Alluded To
Children: Caused to Pass Through Fire
Children: Character of, Known by Conduct
Children: Children in the Temple
Children: Christ Was an Example To
Children: Circumcised on the Eighth Day
Children: Commandments To
Children: Correction of
Children: Could Demand Their Portion During Father's Life
Children: Counsel of Parents To
Children: David
Children: Death of, As a Judgment Upon Parents by Elisha
Children: Death of, As a Judgment Upon Parents by Jesus
Children: Death of, As a Judgment Upon Parents: David's Child by Uriah's Wife
Children: Death of, As a Judgment Upon Parents: Firstborn of Egypt
Children: Death of, As a Judgment Upon Parents: Healing of
Children: Death of, As a Judgment Upon Parents: Raised from the Dead by Elijah
Children: Death of, As a Judgment Upon Parents: Sons of Eli
Children: Death of, As a Judgment Upon Parents: Sons of Saul
Children: Dedicated to God in Infancy: Samson
Children: Dedicated to God in Infancy: Samuel
Children: Destruction of, a Punishment
Children: Difference Made Between Male and Female, in Mosaic Law
Children: Early Piety of Jeremiah
Children: Early Piety of John the Baptist
Children: Early Piety of Samuel
Children: Edict to Murder of Herod
Children: Edict to Murder of Jehu
Children: Edict to Murder of Pharaoh
Children: Elihu
Children: Esau
Children: False Instruction of
Children: Female: Inherited Property in Default of Sons
Children: Female: Taken Care of by Nurses
Children: Female: Usefully Employed
Children: Figurative
Children: Fondness and Care of Mothers For
Children: Frequently Bore the Curse of Parents
Children: Future State of
Children: God's Care of
Children: Good: Attend to Parental Teaching
Children: Good: Character of, Illustrates Conversion
Children: Good: Honor the Aged
Children: Good: Illustrative of a Teachable Spirit
Children: Good: Know the Scriptures
Children: Good: Make Their Parents' Hearts Glad
Children: Good: Obey Parents
Children: Good: Partake of the Promises of God
Children: Good: Shall be Blessed
Children: Good: Show Love to Parents
Children: Good: Take Care of Parents
Children: Good: The Lord is With
Children: Good: Their Obedience to Parents is Well Pleasing to God
Children: Grief Occasioned by Loss of
Children: Illegitimate: Despised by Their Brethren
Children: Illegitimate: Excluded from the Congregation
Children: Illegitimate: had No Inheritance
Children: Illegitimate: Not Cared for by the Father
Children: Illegitimate: Sometimes Sent Away With Gifts
Children: Inhuman Practice of offering to Idols
Children: Instance of, Leah and Rachel
Children: Instruction of
Children: Involved in Guilt of Parents
Children: Isaac
Children: Jehoshaphat
Children: Jephthah's Daughter
Children: Jeremiah
Children: Jesus
Children: Jewish Children
Children: Job
Children: John
Children: Joseph
Children: Josiah
Children: Judah
Children: Love of, for Parents of Ruth
Children: Love of, for Parents: Jesus
Children: Male: Birth of, Announced to the Father by a Messenger
Children: Male: If First Born, Belonged to God and Were Redeemed
Children: Male: Inherited the Possessions of Their Father
Children: Male: Received the Blessing of Their Father Before his Death
Children: Male: Under the Care of Tutors, Till They Came of Age
Children: Male: Usefully Employed
Children: Minors
Children: Mode of Giving Public Instruction To
Children: Moses
Children: Mostly Nursed by the Mothers
Children: Named at Circumcision
Children: Not Punished for Parents' Sake
Children: Not to Have: A Reproach in Israel
Children: Not to Have: Considered an Affliction
Children: Nurses For
Children: Obadiah
Children: Often Given in Answer to Prayer
Children: Often Prayed For
Children: Often Wicked and Rebellious
Children: Partiality Among, Forbidden
Children: Partiality of Parents Among: Jacob for Joseph
Children: Partiality of Parents Among: Rebekah for Jacob
Children: Power of Parents Over, During the Patriarchal Age
Children: Prayer in Behalf of
Children: Promised to the Righteous
Children: Promises and Assurances To
Children: Prosperity of, Greatly Depended on Obedience of Parents
Children: Punishment of
Children: Rebellious, Punished by the Civil Power
Children: Resignation Manifested at Loss of
Children: Ruth
Children: Sacrificed
Children: Samson
Children: Samuel
Children: Saul
Children: Share Benefits of Covenant Privileges Guaranteed to Parents
Children: Shem and Japheth
Children: should Attend to Parental Teaching
Children: should be Brought Early to the House of God
Children: should be Brought to Christ
Children: should be Instructed in the Ways of God
Children: should be Judiciously Trained
Children: should Fear God
Children: should Fear Parents
Children: should Honor Parents
Children: should Honor the Aged
Children: should not Imitate Bad Parents
Children: should Obey God
Children: should Obey Parents
Children: should Remember God
Children: should Take Care of Parents
Children: Sold for Debt
Children: Sold in Marriage, Law Concerning
Children: Solomon
Children: Sometimes Devoted Their Property to Avoid Supporting Parents
Children: Symbolical of the Regenerated
Children: Taught to Walk
Children: The Gift of God
Children: The Israelitish Maid, Captive in Syria
Children: Timothy
Children: Treatment of, After Birth, Noticed
Children: Treatment of, at Birth
Children: Tutors and Governors For
Children: Unclassified Scriptures Relating To
Children: Weaning of
Children: Weaning of, a Time of Joy and Feasting
Children: Wicked
Children: Wicked: Abijam
Children: Wicked: Absalom
Children: Wicked: Adonijah
Children: Wicked: Adrammelech and Sharezer
Children: Wicked: Ahaziah
Children: Wicked: Amon
Children: Wicked: Canaan
Children: Wicked: Children at Beth-El
Children: Wicked: Eli's Sons
Children: Wicked: Ishmael
Children: Wicked: Lot's Daughters
Children: Wicked: Samaritans' Descendants
Children: Wicked: Samuel's Sons
Children: Wicked: Sennacherib's Sons
Children: Worship, Attend Divine
Childrens Ministry
Good Children: Adduced As a Motive for Submission to God
Good Children: Attend to Parental Teaching
Good Children: Children in the Temple
Good Children: Daniel
Good Children: David
Good Children: Esther
Good Children: Honor the Aged
Good Children: Illustrative of a Teachable Spirit
Good Children: Isaac
Good Children: Jephthah's Daughter
Good Children: Job
Good Children: John the Baptist
Good Children: Joseph
Good Children: Josiah
Good Children: Know the Scriptures
Good Children: Make Their Parents' Hearts Glad
Good Children: Obadiah
Good Children: Obey Parents
Good Children: Observe the Law of God
Good Children: Partake of the Promises of God
Good Children: Samson
Good Children: Samuel
Good Children: Shall be Blessed
Good Children: Show Love to Parents
Good Children: Spirit of, a Requisite for the Kingdom of Heaven
Good Children: Take Care of Parents
Good Children: The Lord is With
Good Children: Their Obedience to Parents is Well Pleasing to God
Good Children: Timothy
Minors: Legal Status of
Wicked Children are Proud
Wicked Children are Void of Understanding
Wicked Children with Regard to Parents are a Calamity to Them
Wicked Children with Regard to Parents are a Grief to Them
Wicked Children with Regard to Parents: Bring Reproach on Them
Wicked Children with Regard to Parents: Curse Them
Wicked Children with Regard to Parents: Despise Them
Wicked Children with Regard to Parents: Despised Their Elders
Wicked Children with Regard to Parents: Hearken not to Them
Wicked Children: Absalom
Wicked Children: Adonijah
Wicked Children: Adrammelech and Sharezer
Wicked Children: Children at Bethel
Wicked Children: Esau
Wicked Children: Know not God
Wicked Children: Punishment of, For: Cursing Parents
Wicked Children: Punishment of, For: Disobeying Parents
Wicked Children: Punishment of, For: Gluttony and Drunkenness
Wicked Children: Punishment of, For: Mocking of a Prophet
Wicked Children: Punishment of, For: Mocking Parents
Wicked Children: Punishment of, For: Setting Light by Parents
Wicked Children: Punishment of, For: Smiting Parents
Wicked Children: Sons of Eli
Wicked Children: Sons of Samuel
Wicked Children: Their Guilt in Robbing Parents


text:
I wasn't sure what thread to put this in, but this seems as good a place as any.
Blackwater Founder in Deal to Sell Company
I didn't realize this was happening, admittedly I haven't been paying very much attention to current events politics recently, maybe other people were already up on it. well, I knew Blackwater/Xe was having serious problems, and everyone probably remembers the shootings in Nisour Square back in 2007, but I had no idea that Blackwater execs were under federal indictment for weapons charges and rather bizarre ones too - it seems they illegally bought AK-47s and then gave them to the King of Jordan as gifts in the hopes procuring Jordanian business (I'm wondering, why would King Abdullah be impressed by AK -47s? the most common assault rifle in the world? anyway). I also didn't know about the various allegations of weapons smuggling, though that's no surprise. or Blackwater involvement in secret CIA assassination programs or top AQ players, which is surprising, not that the CIA has secret assassination programs (well, of course) but that they'd outsource them to f**king mercenaries. I mean, of all the thing you wouldn't outsource, that'd have to be at the top of my list.
I don't really know where I'm going with this other than to say that the mercenary business ca. the end of 2010 is a very strange one, now that it's all gone corporate, where you can just rebrand and auction things off to investors and keep right on plugging, like any other Fortune 500 joint, just with guns and helicopters and a bad reputation for itchy trigger fingers. it almost makes one long for the days when mercenaries were crazed Welsh SAS veterans with names like Mad Mike who inspired pulpy novels by hack European writers. I guess it's kinda like the transition from individual robber barons like Vanderbilt or Rockefeller, to the utter impersonality of corporate boardrooms and faceless gray suits, the whole transition from mercenary to "private military company". I mean it's not surprising that mercenaries are on the ascendant, second oldest profession and all that, but all this bid for corporate respectability is just...it leaves a bad taste in the mouth you know?


text:
- 1 1/2 pounds fresh, small and firm organic zucchini
- 1/2 cup extra-virgin olive oil
- 3 tbsps white wine vinegar
- 2 lemons
- 1 tsp sugar
- 1 pinch red pepper flakes, or 2 chili peppers, cut into 3-4 pieces
- 2 garlic cloves
- 4 tsps coarsely chopped fresh basil leaves
- 4 tsps coarsely chopped fresh parsley or mint leaves
- salt and pepper
Using a mandoline or your food processor disc to make them even, cut the zucchini lengthwise into slices ¼-inch thick.
Place the slices in a colander, sprinkle with salt and place at the bottom of your sink to drain for 1 hour.
Drain, rinse, and dry with paper towel. Set aside.
In a bowl, combine the oil, vinegar, lemon juice, sugar, salt and and the chili.
Place the zucchini slices flat in the jar, a few at a time, pouring some of the marinade, garlic slices, basil and mint between each layer.
Cover and marinate for at least 12 hours before serving.


text:
Fallen NSW Labor powerbroker Eddie Obeid says he was motivated by duty, not greed, in requesting ministerial meetings and approaching a premier on behalf of Australian Water Holdings (AWH) and its boss Nick Di Girolamo.
His statement is at odds with the silk leading an Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) probe into the firm, who believes Mr Obeid was motivated by pure greed.
Counsel assisting Geoffrey Watson SC has told the inquiry the Obeid family had a secret stake in AWH and stood to make up to $60 million from a proposed public-private partnership (PPP) with the NSW government.
Mr Obeid took his much-anticipated turn in the ICAC witness box on Wednesday, where he admitted approaching former senior NSW Labor politicians Michael Costa, Phil Costa, Morris Iemma, Kristina Keneally and Nathan Rees on Mr Di Girolamo's behalf.
He conceded he even called Ms Keneally at home during her time as premier, to urge her to consider the AWH proposal on its merits and not let the fact his son Edward was working for the company colour her judgment.
These comments came despite telling the ICAC in a private interview last year he was "positive" he had never mentioned the firm to Ms Keneally.
And although he denied lobbying fellow former MPs Joe Tripodi and Tony Kelly, he conceded he attended one meeting between Mr Di Girolamo and then-treasurer Michael Costa where a long-running dispute between AWH and Sydney Water was discussed.
"That's the way I treated every constituent that wants my help," Mr Obeid told the inquiry.
"I object to (suggestions I was) 'doing favours' – I did what my duty allowed me to do which was solve a problem that could blow up as far as the government's concerned."
But Mr Watson claimed Mr Obeid had attempted to further AWH's aims at every turn.
"You knew at all times that your family was closely involved with Australian Water Holdings, you knew from November 2010 that your family owned one quarter of the company," he said.
"Mr Obeid, at all times, you were motivated by nothing more than just personal greed to try and secure an improper outcome."
Mr Obeid spat back: "That's your version and it's rubbish."
Moments later he was outside the commission, wearing a thin smile and telling reporters: "I never lie."
Anyone found to have wilfully given false or misleading evidence to the commission can be jailed for up to five years.
Mr Obeid echoed the testimony of his sons Paul and Moses, who have each claimed a 2010 agreement recorded a $3 million loan to AWH chief executive Nick Di Girolamo, not a share purchase.
He said he would not have approved of the loan if he had known about it and thought the proposed PPP was "stupid" but never meddled in his sons' affairs.
"I do not go and second guess what they're doing."
Late in the day, former planning minister Tony Kelly denied altering a cabinet minute to favour AWH's PPP bid.
He will return to the witness box on Thursday.


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Ex-boyfriend a person of interest in 2 deaths
Rotterdam police say mother and daughter were strangled
A former boyfriend of a Mohonasen High School graduate appears to be a focus of an intense police investigation into the strangulation deaths Wednesday of a 23-year-old woman and her 52-year-old mother, according to a person with knowledge of the probe into the killings.
It was unclear whether the man was in custody Wednesday night. But the individual, who requested anonymity because of the ongoing probe, said the man became a person of interest after he was allegedly caught trying to put out a fire near the home of Tammy McCormack at 1142 Inner Drive. Police are calling the two women's death suspicious.
McCormack's daughter, whose name had not been released Wednesday night, graduated from Mohonasen High School about five years ago, said authorities.
Tammy McCormack worked for the Schenectady school district as an assistant human resources director.
McCormack's colleagues became concerned when she failed to show up for work Wednesday, Superintendent Lawrence Spring said. He said the district plans to convene a crisis response team.
A moment of silence for McCormack was held during Wednesday night's school board meeting.
There were unconfirmed media reports that McCormack's son discovered the bodies and that police were hunting for a dark-colored vehicle that neighbors reported seeing leave the McCormack residence Wednesday morning.
Police tape surrounded the home, and later two police investigators in white protective suits entered the residence in this quiet part of town with modest homes. A small sport utility vehicle emblazoned with the Green Bay Packers logo was parked in the driveway. Neighbors milled about in shock.
The fire department initially responded to home for a report of a structure fire; the bodies were discovered after the small fire was extinguished, a person familiar with the case said.
Detective Lt. Michael Brown said officers were called to the home at 10:15 a.m.


text:
VSL Associates offers a wide range of services to donor agencies, international and local NGOs and academic institutions that promote community-managed microfinance.
VSL Associates provides support in:
- strategic planning and programme design;
- staff training in the VSL methodology and MIS;
- monitoring and evaluation.
Strategic planning and programme design
- Orientation sessions in the VSL methodology
- Feasibility studies to determine the scope and potential market for VSL
- Project design
- Development of all the materials required to support the implementation of the programme
Training in the VSL methodology and MIS
- Training in the VSL methodology for programme staff
- Introductory training in the VSL MIS for programme and M&E staff
- Advanced training in the VSL MIS and SAVIX posting for Programme Managers and M&E staff
- Exposure visits to model VSL programmes
Monitoring, programme evaluation and impact studies
- Development of programme monitoring and evaluation plans
- Programme monitoring
- Impact evaluation
- MIS data audit
Academic and professional courses in community-managed microfinance
Several members of our team are faculty members of universities and professional institutes that offer courses in community-managed microfinance


text:
When talking about sports, you are supposed to have an opinion, which another person can then agree with or disagree with, so that a conversation may proceed and silence may be averted. The opinion need not be subtle or original, as long as it is arguable. Some people shun pregame predictions, or best-ever lists, or disparagement of referees, but very few of those who pay attention to spectator sports can go long without coming to the conclusion that one player is better than another or that someone ought to be traded, benched, or fired, if not pelted with batteries and coins. You present a hypothesis—Franco's gotta go—and a discussion ensues. It is a useful talent, to be able to sustain a dialogue in this manner, and there are perhaps no two men who are more adept at it than Mike Francesa and Christopher Russo, the hosts of the "Mike and the Mad Dog" show, which airs weekday afternoons on WFAN, a sports radio station in New York. Mike and the Mad Dog have been talking to each other on the air about sports for fifteen years, five days a week, five and a half hours a day, which, if you account for advertisements, adds up to roughly fifteen thousand hours—enough time to read aloud all twenty-nine volumes of the Encyclopædia Britannica more than twice.
It is safe to say, although many would argue the point, that in New York City sports provide the most common ground for routine conversation among friends and strangers—among men, anyway. Mike and the Mad Dog are the hub and the font of it. In the show's time slot (one to six-thirty), only one radio station—the classic-rock Q104.3—attracts more male listeners between the ages of twenty-five and fifty-four. Francesa and Russo are as much a part of the city's soundscape as jackhammers and accelerating buses, and, depending on your cast of mind, they can be as mesmerizing or as odious as the Teletubbies. Though their faces may be made for radio, their voices, by most measures, are not. Francesa, who is from East Atlantic Beach, on Long Island, speaks with a thick Long Island accent, in a deep-timbred head-cold tone that makes words like "Giambi" and "Isiah" sound as though they'd been dunked in onion dip. His is the voice of authority, of donnish pronouncement. Russo, the Mad Dog, is also from Long Island—Syosset—but his voice is otherworldly: loud, shrill, high-pitched, a little hoarse, suggestive of after-school tutoring sessions and Benzedrine. He talks fast and has a savant's memory for pitching sequences, third-down conversions, and obscure statistics from seasons long past. Russo is the ranter. When he gets worked up or speed-reads commercials, the syllables clot like kids swarming the ball on a soccer field, until out of a scrum of misshapen syllables a predicate emerges, or a slogan like "the luxury of Lexus." He has a cartoonish cackle and a knack for malaprop: "analysis of paralysis," "agrarius error," "co-horsed." Many declarations begin with a rapid-fire "bottomlineis," "let'sfaceit," or "nodoubtaboutit." There is never a doubt, anyway, which one of the two men is speaking.
For two years, their show has been simulcast on cable, on the YES Network. Television is not kind to radio; it diffuses its charms and accentuates its limitations. But watching "Mike and the Mad Dog" can be enlightening, because it dispels once and for all the suspicion that they are broadcasting from a Massapequa bar or from adjoining cells. Generally, they are shown on a split screen: two men in golf shirts, two microphones, some stat sheets. Francesa, who is fifty, is a large man, with cropped gray-flecked hair and, when his face is at rest, the fishy frown of an expert on guard against the advance of paltry arguments. His smile suggests handsomer days. Russo, forty-four, is thin, long-faced, ferret-eyed, with boyish brown hair. He moves around a lot in his seat. On the radio, you can occasionally hear the evidence of this in the variations in the volume of his voice as he knocks up against his microphone, and then jerks away, though when a caller is making a long, complicated claim, he sits still, with his lips pursed, like a woman checking her lipstick in the mirror. The men sometimes consult the tabloids or fidget with pens. During a broadcast, Francesa drinks several bottles of Diet Coke.
"We don't do guy talk," Francesa likes to say. "We do sports talk." By this he means that they do not engage in lewd conversation, scatological humor, crude provocation, or any of the brasher methods practiced by many sports talkers who might claim Mike and the Mad Dog as forebears. They do, however, do small talk, in part to establish when and how they found the opportunity to watch all the sports that the job requires:
Russo: First off, good afternoon, Mike. How you doing?
Francesa: What up, Dog? How was your Father's Day?
R: I will go there. I had a very, very good Father's Day. My wife allowed me to go hit golf balls.
F: Yeah, I played yesterday, too. It was nice.
R: Did you play? I just hit balls.
F: Yeah, I played.
R: Good for you!
F: Beautiful weather, beautiful weather.
R: Wow, where'd you play? Garden City Men's?
F: Yes, I did.
R: Nice job! Look at the big guy!
F: It was one of the nicest days you could ever have. Little breeze, seventy-five degrees.
R: What time you get out, seven-thirty?
F: Eleven, and finished at, uh, two-thirty.
R: That's the way to do it.
F: Went home and watched the U.S. Open.
R: Not a bad day. Good boy, good job, Mike. Saturday, I was with family responsibilities. I left my house basically with three kids at 9 a.m. and got back at eight o'clock at night. I did not see one second of the golf on Saturday.
F: Well, I watched a lot of it.
R: Sunday, I was on top of it, but not Saturday.
F: I watched a lot on Saturday. I watched Sunday, I went out to eat, and had a TV in front of me in the restaurant with no sound on holes thirteen through eighteen, but I had TiVo-ed it, so I went back and watched it again, with the crowd noise and everything else. And I watched the highlights last night. . . . We have not talked about this, so I'd like to hear your reaction. I have three or four things myself, but go ahead, you can have the first shot.
Mike and the Mad Dog are not friends, really. They hardly spend any time together outside the studio, beyond appearing at charity events and walking to the parking lot after the show, but on the air they sound as though they were close enough to share gum. During exciting games, Francesa and Russo often talk on the phone; Francesa told me, with some exaggeration, that, on the night of this year's triple-overtime playoff thriller between the New Jersey Nets and the Detroit Pistons, "Dog called me forty-two times."
Francesa and Russo have grown so accustomed to talking to each other about sports that even when they are talking about something else they sound as if they're discussing a faked punt or a quirk in the Yankees' schedule. A few years ago, circumstances (Knicks-Pacers, conference finals in Indianapolis, Francesa's hotel room not ready) placed the two of them for an hour or so in a hotel room together—a rare occurrence. (When they are on the road, they often stay in separate hotels. "I always stay in the best hotel," Francesa told me.) Chris Carlin, their producer at the time, who now has a show of his own on WFAN, walked in to find them watching "The Horse Whisperer." Carlin started to speak, but they shushed him; on the TV screen Robert Redford was breaking up with Kristin Scott Thomas. When the scene was over, Russo said, solemnly, "Mikey, he had to do it, he had to do it."
"It was the right move, Dog," Francesa replied. "The right move."
On the air, Francesa and Russo also conduct interviews with athletes, coaches, executives, broadcasters, and writers. And, of course, they talk to callers—according to the station, between two and five per cent of the audience calls in. Mike and the Mad Dog are not as reliant on callers as other sports-talk-show hosts are, in part because they have each other, and in part because they believe that the callers do not know as much as they do. But they do have regulars with some renown of their own, whom Francesa characterizes as "professional callers"—Bruce from Bayside, Al from White Plains, Richard from Manhattan (who lives in Brooklyn and calls exclusively about the Dodgers and Syracuse University). "Some we use as contributors," Francesa says. "Some we use as foils." Russo mans the call button. Often, he will disconnect the caller after a few moments, and he and Francesa will continue discussing the matter at hand, so that it sounds as though the vigor and precision of their rejoinders had rendered the caller speechless. On other occasions, the conversation evolves, and the caller is forgotten:
Russo: Dustin on the car phone. Dustin?
Dustin: Listen, about half an hour ago, Chris, you said that Derek Jeter is not a great player, that he's a very good player.
R: In my opinion.
D: What is great, Chris? What is it? . . . Derek Jeter is the best player on the best team. Therefore, he is a great player.
R: He's not even the best player on his own team! A-Rod's better than he is!
Francesa: You gotta draw the line. See, here's where you get yourself in trouble. Jeter's a great Yankee. Is he a great player? The problem is if you use A-Rod as the mark of greatness, then the other guys are all gonna be short of him.
R: Well, I don't even wanna do that, 'cause that's not fair, 'cause A-Rod's an immortal.
F: Right. To me, there's immortal players, who are great players. Then, there could be a great player who's not an immortal player, and then you cut it down from there. . . . You know, I would be a guy who'd probably have right now in baseball maybe five great players.
R: And we're gonna be hard markers here?
F: Great players.
R: We're gonna be hard markers here.
F: I mean, Bonds is a great player, A-Rod's a great player, Guerrero's a great player.
R: Sosa?
F: Ahh, yeah, he's a great player.
R: Pujols?
F: Yeah, he's, he's, he's now a great player. Yeah. Lousy fielder, but he is great.
R: Todd Helton?
F: No.
R: Tejada?
F: No.
(Long pause.)
R: Umm, I agree with both.
F: I'd probably stop there.
R: Yeah. Garciaparra? Manny Ramirez?
F: I can't even put Griffey there anymore.
R: Manny Ramirez?
F: He's flawed, so I won't put him there.
R: That's fair, fair, fair, fair. Let's write 'em down. This is a good argument.
F: Great players.
R: A-Rod.
F: The best three players in baseball—in my mind—are Bonds, A-Rod, and Guerrero. To me they're the three best players in baseball.
R: The definition is strong here.
F: Great player.
WFAN is broadcast out of a basement suite at the Kaufman Astoria studios, in Astoria, Queens. Mike and the Mad Dog use the same studio as the "Imus in the Morning" show, though Don Imus, who is something of a germophobe, has his own microphone, which he does not permit Francesa and Russo or other sports-talk hosts to use. Imus, the station's star and its biggest revenue generator, occasionally has Francesa or Russo on the air to talk about sports or to address various intra-station feuds. He calls them "Fatso and Fruit Loops." Others at WFAN call them the Boys.
The airwaves are now full of sports talk; practically every city has at least one all-sports radio station—the Zone, the Deuce, the Ticket, the Jock—as well as billboards along commuter routes advertising the local wacky duo. Credit or blame for this development inevitably goes to WFAN and Mike and the Mad Dog. When Emmis Broadcasting launched WFAN, in 1987, on 1050 AM, there was no such thing as an all-sports radio station. Of course, sports and radio go way back together, as far as Guglielmo Marconi's unlicensed transmission, in 1899, of the America's Cup, from New York Harbor, and sports chatter, as an outgrowth of prizefight and baseball broadcasts, is almost as old as the crack of the bat. The sports-talk call-in show, as we know it, originated in New York forty years ago, with Bill Mazer, who is known as the Amazing, for his ability to answer obscure sports-trivia questions, and it blossomed, in various how-'bout-them-Yanks incarnations, under the care of such leisurely baritones as Art Rust, Jr., and John Sterling.
Still, it remained a primitive, intermittent form. There were many sensible people who were extremely skeptical of WFAN's prospects before the station launched, and they became even more so once it did. Emmis had assembled a roster of recognizable names—TV men such as Jim Lampley and Greg Gumbel. They made for a bankable business plan but lousy radio. The talk was wan, and the ratings were weak. Then, three things happened. First, WFAN moved down the AM dial, to 660, acquiring a stronger signal, one capable of reaching deep into Connecticut and New Jersey. Second, WFAN got Imus, a longtime veteran of WNBC, 660's previous tenant; Imus didn't focus on sports, but he was an expert radio man, and he brought verve and stability, of a kind, to the morning hours, which had proved unaccommodating to pure sports talk. Third, WFAN decided to replace its afternoon host, Pete Franklin, a curmudgeon from Cleveland who had failed to charm New York with his habit of referring to callers as scumbags and schmucks. At a company meeting, Mark Mason, who was WFAN's program director at the time, floated the idea of replacing Franklin with Francesa and Russo, two relative nobodies. "Here we had a skinny Italian kid from Long Island, in Chris, and a less than skinny Italian kid from Long Island, in Mike," Mason recalled recently. "Mike would be viewed as the more knowledgeable one, and Chris would be the über-fan, the foil, the Everyman, the wacko. The owners of the company looked at me like I was from Mars."
At the time, Francesa had a Sunday-morning show on WFAN, but he had been toiling at the furnace of sports analysis and statistics for a while. He had spent six years at College & Pro Football Newsweekly and seven years as a researcher at CBS Sports, where he acquired a reputation as "Brent Musburger's brain." The extent to which such a reputation is desirable depends on one's opinion of Brent Musburger, but Francesa knew his stuff. When WFAN hired him, Francesa recalled, "I said, 'I wanna be on the air.' They said, 'You kidding? We're bringing in the biggest names in the country. No chance.' "
Russo, meanwhile, had been paying his radio dues. He had his own show on weekends on WMCA, a New York City station in decline. Eventually, he attracted the attention of Bob Raissman, the sports-TV-and-radio columnist for the News. "I heard him go into one of his tirades for the first time," Raissman told me. "I was thinking of Mad Dog Vachon, an old pro wrestler. I remember seeing a picture of this guy Vachon chewing on a newspaper or a magazine. That was the impression I got when I heard Chris." Raissman wrote about Russo, and the Mad Dog moniker stuck. Soon Russo was doing bits on Imus.
There was a rationale behind Mason's decision to pair them up—pungent, local voices with uncommon ardor and instinctive expertise—but at the time it was little more than a lark. "I think they were put together for the alliteration," Bob Gelb, their first producer, who is now an ad salesman at WFAN, told me. They débuted on September 5, 1989. Things did not go well at first: neither of them was happy about the arrangement; each felt that he deserved his own show. Sports talk had long been a solo gig. Early on, they bickered on the air, and, according to Mason, there were backstage debates about such matters as whose name would come first (" 'Mike and the Mad Dog' sounded prettier to me grammatically," Mason said) and which of them would get what was known as the power seat—Imus's seat, the one facing the control room ("Mike sat there," Mason said). Each had an entourage of advisers and friends who pushed him to ask for more.
"They hated each other," Gelb recalled. "I was on the phone with each of them on a nightly basis. I would continually lie to each of them about what they were saying about each other. They were kicking the bejesus out of each other. Mike wanted respect, and he felt that this knucklehead sitting next to him was going to take his credibility and throw it out the window. From Dog's side, Mike was just being pompous and trying to impress people."
Their collaboration has often been likened to a marriage, and over the years there have been skirmishes that threatened to tear it asunder. "World War One," as Gelb calls it, occurred in 1992, while Francesa was on vacation at the Breakers, in Palm Beach. In his absence, Russo had Francesa's name removed from the jingle that introduces the show. On another occasion, Francesa returned from a vacation a day early, hoping to rejoin Russo on the air; Russo, savoring the solo airtime, accused Francesa of trying to horn in on his time. There was a great deal of shouting, and during a closed-door cool-down meeting with WFAN executives they nearly started throwing punches. Contract negotiations have been occasions for strain, according to an executive at the company; their contracts expire at different times, but neither would accept a cent less than the other. (They don't talk about their salaries, not even with each other, but the executive said that each makes well over a million dollars a year. WFAN sells as much as eighteen minutes of ad time an hour during "Mike and the Mad Dog.")
It is a testament to the passion and sincerity of Mike and the Mad Dog, and an occasional boon to their listeners, that disagreements over questions of sport have blossomed into real rancor, too. Before the 1991 Super Bowl, Russo predicted that the Buffalo Bills would beat the New York Giants, 49-13. Francesa had picked the Giants. Francesa's objections were both personal and philosophical: Bill Parcells, the Giants' coach at the time, was a close friend of his, so Russo's call seemed to be grounded in animus rather than in analysis. (The Giants won, 20-19.) There have been long-running quarrels over personnel: Jeter versus A-Rod, Don Mattingly versus Will Clark, Parcells versus George Young. Denominationally, Francesa is a Yankees man, reared on Mickey Mantle. Russo is a devotee of the San Francisco Giants.
Still, sports argument is an exercise in finding equilibrium, and, inevitably, Francesa and Russo have found fellowship with each other on the air. These days, they usually agree. They have entered the pantheon of long-running radio duos—Amos 'n' Andy, Burns and Allen, Klavan and Finch. That they have remained more or less a local phenomenon arises from the fact that they focus, with meticulous attention, on the fortunes of the local teams. Their show, unlike Imus's or Howard Stern's, doesn't travel well. They are the sound that New York makes when it is talking to itself.
Among listeners, Russo, as the passionate eccentric, may stir more affection, and Francesa, as the ostensible insider, garners the respect, but it is widely acknowledged—even, to a point, by the principals themselves—that they are better together than alone. (Russo has a show on Saturday mornings; Francesa does Sunday mornings during football season, and he has a Sunday-evening TV show on NBC in New York, called "Mike'd Up.")
"We're clever performers," Francesa told me one evening. "I know how to ride Dog. I know when to let him go, when to rein him in. I know when to play the straight man. I know when to get out of the way. Dog is not an act. He's real. He's unique. But he is a shrewder performer than people understand. He feeds off my intellect. I feed off his energy. I'm biting, I'm incisive, I'm quick. Dog is passionate and brings a unique persona. I don't want to seem immodest, but I've never heard a sports show that's even close."
Francesa's greatest weakness may be his self-regard, which he cops to, under the stipulation that it is justified. "I'm one of those people who would've made money no matter what they did," he told me one afternoon. He imagines that if he hadn't been a radio celebrity he would have been a lawyer or a coach. The foundation of his success, he says, is his work ethic, which he owes, in part, to the fact that when he was eight years old his father, a car dealer, abandoned the family and was never heard from again. "It made me more independent, taught me to go out and make money," Francesa said. As a teen-ager, he worked during the summers as a soda jerk and parking-lot attendant at the Atlantic Beach Club, on the South Shore. He hitchhiked everywhere. In high school, he was an athlete cut low by multiple injuries to his knees. He knew, even then, that he was destined to be involved in sports, and at St. John's University he majored in communications and athletic administration. ("I used to get good marks in writing," he said.)
Travelling around the country with Brent Musburger for CBS, Francesa got to know a generation of assistants who would later become head coaches and general managers. "Jimmy Johnson, Rick Pitino, John Calipari," Francesa said. "They've grown up, and I've grown up. They become friends, they become contacts. That's how it works." He went on, "That's always been the great criticism of me with people, according to some critics, is that I have these relationships that are unholy alliances. Such as Parcells. I don't know how that's an unholy alliance. It's a friendship."
Still, he said, "You get to a point where you break stories because of your relationships." For example, he was the first to report the Knicks' hiring, last winter, of Isiah Thomas as general manager. "I broke the Isiah story," Francesa told me. "I was Christmas shopping with my wife at Rockefeller Center. I got the call, and I called it in to the station. I've got sources. A lot of guys resent that—the beat writers."
Francesa is not warm; he can seem simultaneously blunt and remote. Fourteen years ago, his brother committed suicide, and a few years later his first marriage fell apart. (He remarried four years ago.) He discussed these events on the air at the time but does not much like to talk about them now.
"Mike's one of those guys who internalize stuff," Gelb said. "I hope he goes home and screams sometimes."
Francesa: The Mets screw everything up, we know that. I mean, the Mets could screw up a one-car funeral. I mean, we know that, O.K.? But we're supposed to get to this now: for two years the Mets were beaten up because they wouldn't move Mike Piazza to first, and now they're beaten up because they won't move Mike back to catcher?
Russo: That's not fair. He's played the games. He can't hit. He's had a terrible offensive season.
F: You know, Mike's slowing down. He's never been a great athlete, but he was a great hitter, and Mike is slowing down. I mean, it's obvious, he is slowing down.
R: Ah, one other thing on that subject: forget Matsui. We know he's—
F: No, wait, let's stay there for a second, before we go on.
R: All right, go ahead.
F: How do you compound this by now putting Reyes at shortstop every other day? It's ridiculous! You know, enough!
Last year, Chris Russo, with the writer Allen St. John, published a book, "The Mad Dog 100: The Greatest Sports Arguments of All Time." It features conventional debate (Mays or Mantle), best-ever lists ("greatest vapor locks"), and occasional iconoclasm ("Is Notre Dame football awe-inspiring—or just annoying?"). In a section entitled "Watching the Game, Doggie Style," Russo sets down his regimen for proper home-spectating: Lie on the carpet in front of the TV, alone, without family or friends. No channel surfing. His gametime beverage is Gatorade. "I'm not big into snacks. No beer. Just a little something to sip on and I'm good," he writes. "I like to move around during a game. If there's a huge game where the Giants can be eliminated, I'll pace between pitches, I'll stop during the pitch—put my hand up in front of my face like a catcher's mask. Ball two. Then I'll pace some more. Have a couple of fingers, to keep my eyes open. At 2-0, I like to play it out."
One evening last spring, when the Giants were playing the Mets at Shea Stadium, I met Russo at the radio station and rode home with him to watch the game on TV. Russo lives in New Canaan, Connecticut, about an hour from Queens. He makes the trip each day in his BMW. The game hadn't started yet, so he drove with the radio off, as he usually does. "I'm not a radio listener," he said. "I wanna go on the air fresh." (He does like music, especially that of Bruce Springsteen and Yanni, which he considers "mood-altering.")
"This would have been the last profession in America my parents would've chosen for me," he said. "My father wanted me to be a jeweller, like him. He was not a big sports fan. My mother, though, realized this is what I had to do. You can't do this right unless you have a little kid's appetite for sports. You can't pick it up late in life. It's almost a life in training. Think of it: half of sports is history. DiMaggio, Mantle, Bonds, the '51 Series, Wilt-Russell." His mother, Vera, is English, and particular about language. "She likes grammar and the piano," Russo said. She came to the United States fifty years ago, as a translator for the Spanish government, in what Russo called "some weather-related capacity." His father, Tony, who is from Flushing, worked in the diamond district, dealing in opals and cultured pearls. The Russos met in New York and settled in Syosset, on the North Shore. Mad Dog is their only child.
A man who roots for something other than the home-town team must often account for himself; Russo's explanation for his devotion to the San Francisco Giants involves a trip that he and his parents took to Philadelphia for a jewelry convention in the summer of 1968, when he was eight. The Russo family happened to stay in the same hotel as the Giants, who were in town to play the Phillies. "I got all the Giants' autographs except Willie Mays," Russo told me. "That was the year Bobby Bonds broke in. I became a huge Bobby Bonds fan. It was a little late for Mays. So Bonds was my guy. I loved Bobby Bonds."
Russo went to Darrow, a small boarding school in upstate New York, and Rollins College, in Florida. (He also studied abroad, in England and Australia, and in 1978 took a weeklong van trip through Tasmania—"It's something like the third-southernmost island in the world, so I enjoyed that.") He has even been called preppy, and it is true that he wears polo shirts and loves tennis. Still, his rise through the radio ranks was unglamorous. After coming home from college, he drove back down to Florida in a blue Gremlin and landed an ad-sales job at a small station in Jacksonville. On his first day, the station's sports guy quit, and Russo took his place, doing updates in the morning and a call-in show in the early evening. Eventually, he moved on to a station in Orlando. When it became clear that the people of central Florida were having trouble understanding his accent, the station sent him to see a speech therapist twice a week. "What I learned was the concept of time," Russo said. "Time makes me talk fast."
A few weeks before my visit, Russo, his wife, Jeanne, and their three young children had moved into a new six-thousand-square-foot house on a one-acre lot, in a recently developed cul-de-sac. We pulled up to a three-car garage; the blacktop was strewn with toys. In the window over the garage, his wife and kids were waving to him. "Hi, buddy!" Russo called out to the oldest. "How's my little pal?" He rushed inside, and there was an outbreak of homecoming mayhem in half-furnished rooms, until Russo declared, "Everyone relax!," at which point the kids settled down to watch cartoons in a room off the kitchen, on a giant flat-screen television that had been Francesa's wedding gift to the Russos.
Jeanne Russo, blond and rosy-cheeked, had on khakis, a red V-neck sweater, and a hair band, and bore an expression of weary relief. Russo calls her Snappy, short for Gingersnap. As she reheated buffalo wings in the microwave, her husband wandered off, and she took the opportunity to enumerate his virtues—loyalty, thoughtfulness, the "Rain Man" mind—though she allowed that he was not perfect. "Chris is domestically challenged," she said. "He's not a big help around the house. For Christmas, my mother gave him a toolbox with the Yellow Pages in it."
They met on an airplane, in 1993. He was reading "Jurassic Park," and she asked him his opinion of it. Conversation ensued. On their first date, he picked her up at her parents' home, in Rye, and took her to an Italian restaurant on Long Island Sound. "By the end of dinner," she recalled, "the owner and three waiters were sitting at our table talking sports." She asked her brother if he had heard of Russo, and he told her, "A lot of people in New York hate that guy." Russo proposed to her a year later by sending her on an elaborate scavenger hunt in a limousine (one stage was an encounter with Dennis from Yonkers at an Upper East Side sports bar called the Polo Grounds) which ended with her finding Russo in the Oak Room at the Plaza, dressed in a tuxedo.
Russo came back into the kitchen through another door. "Sorry to interrupt," he said. "Piazza hit a home run, broke the record. Two-one Mets, top five." Apparently, Russo had turned on the ballgame upstairs, in the bedroom. After a moment, he slipped off again, under the pretext of putting the children to bed. Jeanne set out platters of wings and garlic bread and penne.
"I don't know how women whose husbands don't have to do it put up with it," she said, referring to all the sports-watching that Russo does.
Russo reappeared—"Seo's out, two-two, sac fly"—and said, "There are days where I do it as an obligation, I can't dispute that. It's my job."
After the children were in bed and Russo had taken me on a quick tour of the house ("Let me show you my TVs"), he reclaimed the big screen in the room next to the kitchen, in time for the tip-off of a late playoff game between the Lakers and the Spurs—rain had delayed the proceedings at Shea. It occurred to him that he had finished his meal. "Snappy," he declared, "that was a great job on dinner. Good effort. Nice job."
He turned his attention, finally, to the exertions on the screen. "Nice play by Kobe . . . nice play by Shaq. . . . Payton is getting killed. . . . That's painful. . . . Oh, my God, Payton stinks!" Russo sat on the edge of his easy chair, blinking at the screen. "I'm a little into this game right now," he said, sounding surprised.
Occasionally, Mike and the Mad Dog go on the road. Every year, for example, they spend a week in the city that is hosting the Super Bowl. At the first one they attended together, in New Orleans in 1990, there was just one sports-talk-radio outfit besides theirs. Last winter, in Houston, there were about a hundred. Each station had a makeshift booth on what was called radio row, which was basically a flotilla of folding tables that had been set up along a vast tract of mezzanine in the convention center downtown. The Super Bowl, being the closest thing that the sports world has to an annual convention, attracts stars and strivers, has-beens and wannabes, who, on their way to and from the TV studios nearby, happily run the gantlet of radio producers desperate to fill time.
Mike and the Mad Dog occupied a prime corner, away from the riffraff, with extra space for TV cameras and lights. "They separated us out," Francesa explained. "You see, we get all the best guests. It used to be that when we were over there, with everyone else, there'd be a total feeding frenzy. There'd be twenty producers waiting there to pounce on our guests when we were done with them."
For Mike and the Mad Dog, the Super Bowl shows are a bit of a grind; they have to focus on a single, overhyped football game, instead of the usual wide array on offer in a city like New York, where there are a dozen professional teams. "You just gotta churn it," Francesa said, after their last show of the week. "You take it in twenty-minute segments. Today at four, it took off. We pounded the rock till four, then flew home."
Later, they met up at a party for Westwood One, the radio-syndication arm of Viacom, which owns WFAN, then headed out for dinner, along with their producer, Marc Malusis, and two of Francesa's friends. They took separate cabs; I rode with Russo. The destination was a steak house called the State Grille, about ten minutes away, but in no time the driver was lost, while pretending not to be. With mounting frustration, Russo began to perceive that the cabbie was essentially driving in circles. "Do you know where it is?" he yelled. "Yes or no?"
Regular listeners know that in recent years Russo, whether because of fatherhood or advancing age or money and fame, has mellowed a bit, and that the throat-rending spittle-spewing tirades of the early years have become increasingly scarce, a rare gift, like the trumpet-playing of the aging Miles Davis. Nonetheless, from time to time, the Dog cuts loose, and here in the cab, in the dismal smoggy gloom of outer Houston, he lost control: "What are you doing? You don't know where you're going? How can you not know where you're going? You're a cabbie! A cabbie! This is ridiculous! I'm wasting my time!" After a minute of this, the driver pulled over on the side of a wide boulevard, in a dark and barren stretch of bad neighborhood, and ordered Russo and the rest of us out of the car. There arose an argument over the wisdom of this. Malusis attempted to keep Russo from talking. Eventually, calm was restored, and the search for the steak house resumed. After a few moments of quiet, the driver asked, "You O.K., my friend?"
Russo, now spent, said, "I can't take it."
Francesa was already at the steak house, nursing a madras, a fruity vodka drink. Malusis explained the delay, and Francesa smiled and said, "When the Dog gets cranky, watch out."
The waiter asked Russo if he would like a beer, and he replied, "I will not have a beer. I will have a madras." Last summer, Russo got into a dispute with some fellow-members of the New Canaan Field Club. He was in a tight tennis match with a friend, but it was time to yield the court to the next group, a woman and her son. He did so grudgingly, telling the woman, "Your son better be Andre Agassi." A foursome on the next court took exception to this comment and upbraided him. He yelled back at them. An argument developed. The club suspended him and his family for ten months; his four-year-old son was kicked out of summer camp. "It ruined my tennis last summer, let's put it that way," Russo told me.
Gradually, at the State Grille, the Dog cheered up. Conversation flowed. "I like Trump," Russo said.
"Have you seen 'The Apprentice'?" Francesa asked.
"I have not seen 'The Apprentice,' " Russo replied.
"It's a good gimmick, Dog," Francesa said. He explained the premise of the show: men and women competing for a job with Donald Trump.
"Those guys are outmatched," a friend said.
"They're getting killed," Francesa said. Back in his Atlantic Beach Club days, Francesa said, he had often parked a limousine belonging to Fred Trump, Donald's father. He recalled the elder Trump as a big tipper. It was a little-known fact, Francesa explained to everyone at the table, that Donald had started out rich.
"Really?" Russo said. "To me, that hurts him, Mike. I might not be giving him credit, but that's a huge advantage, a huge advantage."
"If I'd started out with three hundred and fifty million dollars, I'd own a country by now," Francesa said.
In time, talk turned, as it often will, to the Kennedys. Francesa considers himself a John F. Kennedy buff. "Whaddaya think, Mike?" Russo said. "One shooter, or multiple shooters?"
"I don't have that figured out right now," Francesa said.
A few days after the San Francisco Giants lost in the playoffs last fall to the Florida Marlins:
Russo: Just put yourself in my shoes. The Florida Marlins have been in existence for ten years. They have done nothing. They had one great year in '97 and now they're having this magical run again, and both times at the expense of the Giants. Think about that for a second.
Francesa: Yep.
R: I have been around for fifty years. Not a thing. This team out of nowhere knocked us off twice. I'll give you one other stat: the Giants have played four post-season games in Joe Robbie Stadium in the last six years, and they have lost every game in the last at-bat.
F: Yep.
R: Every friggin' game in that stupid ballpark. . . . I'll tell you, Saturday, I was sooo upset, and I thought I was beyond it. I thought it wouldn't bother me. . . . And now I gotta deal with the Yankees winning another World Championship, and I'm out in the first round. I mean, why waste my time? Every single friggin' year I get myself juiced up for this stupid team, and at forty-three years of age and three kids, enough already! Let them go hurt somebody else! I mean, how am I ever, when am I ever gonna have a chance to win a lousy friggin' championship? one time! not twenty! one lousy goddam time! gee whiz! ah come on! will you please? . . . they never win! every year i'll be there october 26th with the yankees parading down the canyon of heroes with their twenty-seventh championship, and i'm out again! i don't care how many books i write, how many kids i have, how many marconis i win, i don't care! i don't care! win one! i'll give it all back! i'll leave now! that's all i want! one, uno! i'll leave; i swear i'll leave! i'll quit! i'll leave! one time! once! i'll get out of here forever! you'll never see me again! let me win once! once!
Mike and the Mad Dog's greatest moments are, for the most part, lost to history. The station claims that it does not keep tapes of the broadcasts—it will not provide them, anyway—and there appears to be no trade in "Mike and the Mad Dog" bootlegs, perhaps because a fresh batch of material arrives every day. And so hundreds of felicitous turns of phrase live on only in secondhand reports, or in a scrap that enters the vernacular, like a line of Bob Dylan's or Dirty Harry's, immediately applicable to an array of experience. (Mad Dog on the rape charges against Kobe Bryant: "Sure, the human tragedy, but what about the shooting-guard position?")
What tracks they leave turn up in the New York tabloids. Bob Raissman, of the News, and Phil Mushnick, of the Post, who cover the coverage of sports on television and radio, chronicle noteworthy Mike-and-the-Mad Dog remarks, quarrels, and mistakes. Raissman, who calls them FranDog, is generally more measured and charitable in his assessments of their work. Mushnick, a self-appointed griper about the debasement of sports and the decline of civilization, prefers to find fault. One column, in June, about Mike and the Mad Dog's discussion of Marv Albert's departure as the voice of the Knicks, referred to them as "those two see-through, egocentric, personal agenda and vendetta-driven disinformationists." Mushnick also addressed Francesa directly: "Mikey, you pompous and disingenuous jerk." In Mushnick's view, Francesa and Russo are imperious, condescending, sloppy, and a little corrupt. He sometimes accuses them of giving undue compliments on the air to other sports commentators who happen to have the same agents they do. He also charges them with cowardice: they will rip a coach or an athlete, and then, when that coach or athlete comes on the air to give an interview, they will be very nice to him, knowing that he probably has no idea what they have said about him in the past.
"I listen less and less," Mushnick said. "I find myself listening for forty seconds before I wanna puke." Last February, he tuned in long enough to hear Francesa declare, on the occasion of a Beatles anniversary, that, while John Lennon may have been a better lyricist, Paul McCartney was by far "the better guitar player." McCartney, of course, plays bass. "You don't have to be a Beatles expert or a guitar expert to know that there's little sense in comparing bass players to rhythm and or lead guitarists," Mushnick wrote. "They play different instruments that are mostly played differently and mostly produce different sounds."
Occasionally, Francesa and Russo retaliate. Last year, in the midst of the controversy over whether women should be allowed to join the Augusta National golf club, they mentioned, with some mischief, that Mushnick belongs to an exclusive private golf club. ("That's a lie," Mushnick said, in reference, at least, to the exclusive part. "It's the most open place in the world.") In general, their stated view on Mushnick is that he has a job to do, and they wish he did it better. They also tend to dispute that they said what Mushnick said they said.
"Mushnick should like what we do," Francesa told me. "We're clean—we don't do scatological garbage. Are we brash? Do we have big egos? Yes. But corrupt? Corrupt? How am I corrupt? He is so warped on that."
After the terror attacks of September 11th, according to Mushnick, Francesa and Russo stated on the air that one of the causes of the attacks was American support for Israel, and that American Jews had better declare their allegiance either to the United States or to Israel. Under the headline "mike & mad dog exposed as frauds," Mushnick wrote, "I'm sitting there, a third-generation American, my late father a Naval lieutenant who served in two theaters during WW II, four people I know, including a fireman, are missing and presumed dead, and Francesa and Russo are inviting me to take a loyalty test designed for American Jews to prove their virtue to two sports-talk knowit-alls." "That was not said," Francesa told me months later. The station, as usual, claimed that it had no tape of the show.
Francesa watches games in his basement. He has three high-definition flat-screen televisions—two big ones flanking a bigger one—set in a cherry-panelled cabinet that was designed by his second wife, Roe.
"The little ones are thirties," Francesa told me, when I visited him there one Saturday in May. "The big one is sixty. I put them in last football season, after a flood. But I've had a multiple-TV setup for years." The Francesas live in a gated community in Manhasset, Long Island, in a vast, five-bedroom house on a half acre of land. The house is filled with ornate chandeliers and faux-Impressionist garden scenes in heavy gilt frames. They bought it, decorated, four years ago, after they were married. When I asked how many televisions there were, he replied, "I'll give it to you this way. Here are the rooms that don't have TVs: the dining room, the living room, and the library." As for how often he watched sports on them, he said, "I'm gonna be realistic here and say forty hours a week."
On this particular afternoon, the entertainment on the screens was of the bucolic variety. On the left, a golf tournament in Texas; on the right, the preliminaries to the Preakness Stakes; and in the middle, with the sound up, the Yankees. Francesa reclined in an easy chair, his feet in slippers, and a notepad and a tall glass of diet ginger ale at his side. The carpet was wall-to-wall and batter white. At one end of the basement, in shadow, there was exercise equipment, which, one imagines, does not get much use. With a remote control in each hand and the reflections of double plays and birdie putts flickering across the lenses of his eyeglasses, Francesa personified a kind of contentment that is widespread in America on weekend afternoons.
Roe, in turquoise Capri pants and a white T-shirt, came down the stairs with a platter of crackers she had topped with cheese spread and sliced cherry tomatoes. Dark-haired and petite, she is thirty-four and looks a little bit like Katie Couric. She works part time as an office assistant to a plastic surgeon in Huntington. "Who's the second horse today?" she asked, referring to the field at the Preakness.
"Rock Hard Ten," Francesa said, then explained, "Roe's brother always follows my horses." Francesa, on this day, was picking Imperialism to beat Smarty Jones.
Friends were coming over to watch the big race, so, when the time came, Francesa made his way upstairs, limping a little on account of a chronic bad knee, and met them in a sitting room off the kitchen, where there was another large flat-screen TV. The guests were Dr. Stephen O'Brien, an orthopedic surgeon at the Hospital for Special Surgery, who had performed six operations on that knee, and his fiancée. They looked like soap-opera actors. The doctor had a big pinkie ring and wore a pair of orange tasselled loafers. His fiancée mentioned that they were going the next day to watch a polo match.
"Polo?" Francesa said, with distaste.
"I love polo," she said.
"Come with us," the doctor said.
"It's fabulous," she said. "You'd like polo."
Francesa pronounced the polo term "chukker" in such a way that the subject was soon dropped.
Although Francesa regards the crass commercialization of sports with the appropriate amount of weary disdain, although he does not much like athletes or the way in which they are marketed as stars before they have achieved greatness, he still loves the games, the strategy, the tantalizing absence of a script, the endless cycle of unpredictable outcomes. "There are some parts that are stupid and some that are sleazy," he'd said earlier in the day. "But the games are still the games."
On the TV screen, the horses were making their way to the start. Rock Hard Ten was balky and slick; the stewards were having a hard time getting him into the gate. Francesa said, "See the kidney sweat? You don't like to see that. The horse is too nervous for the race." The stewards pushed at the horse's hindquarters. "He's really acting up now. It impacts the horses in the gate."
"He's a big horse," the fiancée said.
"He's about seventeen hands," Francesa said.
The race was on. The sound of hooves, horses' names, and low-key rooting filled the room. Francesa, sunk deep in his chair, coaxed Imperialism, his pick: "Back off, back off, back off." The horse obliged, fading at the turn. When the race was over and Smarty Jones had won, with Rock Hard Ten placing second and Imperialism a distant fifth, the phone rang, and Francesa picked it up. "It's Dog," Francesa said, smiling. "He wants to know: Is Smarty that good, or is the rest of the field that bad?" ♦


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