Link: http://sports.espn.go.com/nfl/news/story?id=2289987

Well, not many people saw this coming...a week or so after the Bills fired Tom Donahoe, re-hired Marv Levy and dismissed 5 assistant coaches, Mike Mularkey has apparently resigned as head coach.
While Mularkey had endured a lot of criticism at times in the season, he seemed to have weathered the immediate demands for his dismissal. However, the ESPN article suggests that Mularkey concluded that the way that the Bills were being re-structured would make it impossible for him to be successful. There was also a suggestion that part of the resignation was for family reasons.
One wonders whether he has an inside track on another coaching job. His resignation is superficially a highly principled act, and/or one that will free him to rapidly get another coaching job.
By resigning, he may have forfeited the remaining money on his contract, which still had 3 seasons to run. One reason why NFL coaches usually end up being fired is because they usually have the remainder of their contract paid off if they are dismissed (which is different to players' contracts; nearly all players can have their contracts terminated at any time without the club owing the player any more money).
This is why Steve Mariucci is unlikely to coach anywhere next year. He will essentially be paid close to $5m by the Detroit Lions to do nothing. Unless, of course, he wants to coach the Bills...

Link: http://www.cowboysplus.com/topstorync/stories/011805cpcowlede.66b89.html

A year ago, Bill Parcells fired Steve Hoffman from his job as the Cowboys kicking coach. Hoffman was one of the last remaining links to the Jimmie Johnson era, having been hired by Johnson after he became the Cowboys' coach.
Throughout Hoffman's tenure, the Cowboys became known for developing high-performing kickers and punters from undrafted free agents. That led to them not being prepared to pay significant money for those positions, which was OK as long as the production-line continued to turn out good players. Along the way they developed players such as Chris Boniol, Micah Knorr, Toby Gowin, Richie Cunningham and Tim Seder.
This year the Cowboys' kicking game has been a mess. Billy Cundiff was cut after suffering a pre-season injury, leaving Jose Cortez as the kicker. After Cortez began missing "sitters", he was cut, and Shawn Suisham was brought back briefly before Cundiff was re-signed. After Cundiff also began missing easy field goals, he was cut, and Suisham was brought back for the end of the season...In short, this season has been a mess. 5 changes of kicker. I thought that the Jaguars had set some sort of record several seasons ago, when Tom Coughlin seemed to be acting like the proverbial corrupt monarch, signing a kicker only to say "Off with his head!" after 2 weeks. But the Cowboys have topped the Jaguars this year.
You will notice that two of the most stable and consistently competitive teams in the league (Indianapolis Colts, New England Patriots) have a rather different model. They have kickers (Mike Vanderjagt, Adam Vinatieri) who make good money and are signed to long-term contracts. There is also a more significant underlying different. The coaches in question tend not to send out the kicking units when they could do better, and they also don't put their kickers at or beyond their range limits. Both teams are more inclined to go for it on fourth downs, rather than settling for a field goal or punting. As a result, when the coach of those teams sends out the field-goal unit on fourth down, they are pretty sure that 3 points will be the result.
As Gregg Easterbrook never tires of observing, punting or kicking a field goal is a safe, conservative action for a coach. You either give the opposition the ball and challenge your defense to stop them, or you collect 3 points.
I suspect that part of the appeal to coaches is that if the punt or field goal is muffed, you usually get to blame the poor guy who kicked the ball (this applies a lot of the time even if the snap is botched, giving the kicker or punter all sorts of adjustment problems). If an offense fails to convert on fourth down because of a broken play, accountability for that failure is harder to establish. Did the opponents come up with a great play? If not, whose fault was it? Somehow, I think that the lowly status of kickers and punters leads to them being more likely to carry the can than (say) the #1 wide receiver or franchise quarterback.
I thought that the Cowboys were taking the path of signing good players to long-term deals when they re-signed Toby Gowin a couple of seasons ago, giving him a multi-year contract and a decent signing bonus. However, they then dumped him after a season. He was handicapped during that season by a quad injury (a bad injury for any kicker), but quad injuries can be rehabbed, so I still have no idea why he was cut.
The Gowin incident showed me that the Cowboys have a blind spot in their appreciation of the kicking game. They either need to improve their kicking coaching and talent acquisition, or they need to be prepared to sign good kickers and punters to long-term deals and then not dump them after a single season. My guess is that a top-flight free-agent kicker or punter would not want to come and play for the Cowboys right now. They would stand a good chance of being cut at the first sign of perceived issues, being blamed for all of the problems of the known universe, and then replaced by an undrafted rookie.

Link: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,200-1918448,00.html

My favourite is this one:

the winner of the award for least judicious judge is Franklin Jones, of New Hampshire, who resigned after groping five women at a conference on sexual assault and domestic violence.

Link: http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0301001h.html

...is now available online as an EBook courtesy of the Gutenberg Project. This book, which is now in the public domain, is a novel which tells a story of the rise of demagoguery in the United States Of America. It was first published in 1935.

Link: http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2006/1/8/205157/5086

Link: http://www.marginalia.org/dfw_kenyon_commencement.html

I was given "Consider the Lobster" as a Christmas present. This is a collection of essays by David Foster Wallace, written for a variety of magazines about a variety of subjects. Included is a delightful skewering of the adult movie industry awards process, a trip with the McCain presidential campaign in 2000, and a trip report from the Maine Lobster Festival. All written in witty, erudite prose, with some interesting styles (like the expansion of footnotes to become a story within a story).
Here is a graduation address by David Foster Wallace from 2005. I think it contains some interesting points about life, the universe etc.

...was won by the Redskins. This is about as close as one can get to daylight robbery. The Redskins put up less than 130 yards of total offense, could barely move the ball, and yet walked away with a 17-10 victory.
The story of the game was that Tampa Bay dominated the second half, but could not generate enough points to dig themselves out of the hole they had created for themselves in the first half, where an interception and then a fumble return handed Washington 14 points. Without those two crucial mistakes, the Bucs might have won the game by 10-3.
Chris Simms looked very good for the Bucs; he threw the ball well both in the pocket and on the run, showed that he can throw a very accurate deep ball, and even ran for a touchdown (very shrewdly flipping across the line in the air backwards to ensure that the ball was on his inside and crossed the end-zone line). Unfortunately his receivers let him down at crucial moments. He was also handicapped by the fact that Washington schemed to shut down Joey Galloway on deep routes, forcing Simms to use Galloway instead as an underneath short-pass receiver for much of the game.
Ultimately, this was a game decided by Tampa Bay errors in the first quarter. The hole dug by those errors was too deep to climb out of. Tampa Bay beat themselves; the Redskins offense never showed up all game, and several crucial 3rd and 4th down conversion attempts failed, handing the ball back to the Redskins too many times in the fourth quarter.

...has just ended with a one-sided 28-3 scoreline in favour of the Patriots. While there are many factors that make up a team losing, I'm going to point the finger squarely at one major error by the Jaguars; starting Byron Leftwitch at quarterback. He had not played a full game in over 2 months since breaking his ankle, was clearly not physically 100% (otherwise why would he be playing with an ankle joint protector?), and it showed. His passing was inconsistent, and he was clearly lacking in mobility.
The "game over" moment for the Jaguars was a ball thrown by Leftwich which was picked off by Asante Samuel of the Patriots and returned for a touchdown. During Samuel's runback you could see Leftwitch trying in vain to intercept Samuel, and then pulling up and jogging to a stop off the field. He clearly could not run at full speed, and had aggravated his ankle injury. He should have been pulled from the game immediately. Instead, the Jaguars inexplicably left him in the game, which resulted in a by-now-hobbled Leftwitch being beaten up further by the New England defense, who swarmed all over him like a pack of hyenas.
The Jaguars finally replaced him with David Garrard, who immediately looked much better, throwing accurate passes to receivers underneath, and running to gain yardage instead of being locked in the pocket like Leftwitch. Unfortunately by this time it was part-way through the fourth quarter, and the Jaguars were in a 3-28 hole.
The last few minutes of the game were grim if you are a Jaguars fan, with Garrard vainly running around trying to make something happen on the field of play, while a clearly hurting Leftwitch hobbled along the sideline.
Note to aspiring coaches: playing Your Guy in a playoff situation, when he is not physically fit or match-fit, is a really really bad idea. Don't do it.

Link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/1005064.stm

In an ocean far far away called the Indian Ocean...lies an Island archipelago just South of the Equator. This is the Chagos Archipelago. Geographically and geologically, it is a chain of corall atolls, which have in turn grown on the top of submerged volcanic eruptions from the mid-oceanix ridge. The Chagos is one of three archipelagoes located on this ridge, the other two being the Laccadive and Maldives archipelagoes.
The Chagos islands were occupied until the end of the 1960's by an ethnic grouping known as the Chagossais. They were of mixed origin, and spoke a creole based around the French language. They lived (like most archipelago dwellers) by harvesting the sea, and growing fruit and vegetables on the limited land areas of the islands.
The Chagos islands formed part of an administrative unit of the British government called the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT). This included Mauritius, until the mid-1960's, when Mauritius was granted independence, but the British government retained sovereignty over the Chagos Archipelago. The government of Mauritius has recently renewed its claim to sovereignty over the Chagos Archipelago.
However, at the end of the 1960's, the lives of the Chagossais were to change dramatically, and not necessarilty for the better. They were forcibly re-settled by the British government. This constituted a typical high-handed colonial government saga, replete with deception, duplicity and the odd bit of unsubtle racism. Some of the basic facts of the story are summarized here.
One of the main underlying reasons was Cold War geopolitics. The United States needed a forward air base and sea port in the central Indian Ocean. They had determined that the large atoll of Diego Garcia would meet their requirements. The British government was prepared to oblige the USA, and Diego Garcia was leased to the United States for 30 years. The USA took over the atoll and built an air and sea base. This has been used extensively by the USA in several recent conflicts, including the 1991 Gulf War, and the more recent campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. An excellent semi-serious website maintained by former DG military personnel can be found here. This website contains a number of links explaining aspects of the whole "smash and grab" of the archipelago, and the handoff of DG to the USA.
As you might expect, Diego Garcia is off-limits to the public. The island is nominally controlled by the UK, but in practice the USA runs the island. The remainder of the archipelago is not accessible by any public transportation mechanism; there are no air flights or sea traffic to and from Chagos. However, a thriving temporary community of yachties hangs out in the larger atolls for most of the year. The British government administrators on Diego Garcia charge them a mooring fee, collected monthly, and also ensure that trash is properly disposed of so that the islands remain pristine. The rest of the archipelago is one of the last largely unspoilt natural island archipelagoes. If you can get there, you can be Robinson Crusoe and have your own little island for a day.
The Chagos islanders have been trying to return to the archipelago for the last 10 years. They initially won a lawsuit in London against the British government, then lost another in 2003, with the judge in that case handing down a patronizing ruling.
Eventually, the British government tried to remove the possibility of further legal defeats by invoking the Royal Prerogative. Royal Prerogative is an ancient power of the monarch, along the lines of "You'll do this because I said so because I Am The Monarch". It is very rarely used in modern Britain, because it essentially trumps normal processes of law-making; it mostly bypasses both Parliament and the judicial system.
On the request of the government, The Queen approved an "Order in Council" on June 10, 2004, to uphold the 40-year-old eviction of the Chagosians from their homes on the archipelago.
To their credit, the Chagos islanders have not given up. They are currently challenging the Order in Council. The fight continues. In addition, the Chagossais filed a lawsuit in the USA, seeking a declaratory judgment that their eviction was unlawful. Legally, this is a long-shot, as this rather detailed analysis makes clear.
John Pilger has created a video program summarizing the whole story.

...and give Marv Levy a role in football operations. The demise of Donahoe was predicted, and he deserved to be fired based on results alone. The Bills have not been to the playoffs under his management, and the team has been consistently poor for 5 years. Most of the problems stem from poor personnel decisions, especially at the quarterback position (see my previous post). Donahoe did not help his cause by being aloof and condescending to the media and some fans in recent months. This never plays well with the fan base, who, after all, are responsible for a lot of the revenues for the franchise.
Ralph Wilson, the owner of the Bills, may have erred by hiring Donahoe, but at least he is a class act when it comes to accepting accountability. He apologized to the fans today for the poor football that they have been watching. He also said that "the buck stops here" when it comes to the management of the franchise. That does contrast rather starkly (and favourably) with the high-handed invisibility cultivated by William Clay Ford of the Detroit Lions (who seems to think that when the GM fails to hire the right coaches, the right course of action is to allow him to keep firing coaches, instead of firing the GM). No matter, the cynic in me says that if the fans in Detroit are insufficiently "grateful", the Ford family will simply sell the franchise to an ownership team to take it to LA.
Mike Mularkey has survived, but some of the assistant coaches were not so lucky. Mularkey will need help from Levy in building bridges to the players, some of whom (Eric Moulds, Sam Adams) are disgruntled by his leadership style. The Eric Moulds issue still hangs over the team - Moulds may be cut simply for salary cap reasons, but he is a class act, is the Bills' longest serving player (he is just about the only player remaining from the time when Marv Levy coached the Bills) and his departure might make free agents reluctant to come to Buffalo.
Levy is a remarkably energetic 81 years of age, but he has some challenges over the next few months.