Apparently describes bad pitching. From NHL.COM:

[Boston Bruin's goaltender] Tim Thomas grinned when asked how [Dallas Stars Centerman] Mike Modano faired on his ceremonial first pitch just prior to the White Sox playing host to the Kansas City Royals Tuesday at U.S. Cellular Field in Chicago.

It seems Thomas was expecting a little more speed from Modano.

“I was expecting more of a fastball,” Thomas said. “His throw was a little Obama-ish, but at least he made it all the way to the plate.”

Thomas was of course referring to President Barack Obama’s not-so-perfect strike before the All-Star Game in St. Louis last month.

“a little Obama-ish.” Heh.

They’d never say that about President Bush.

There’s a local restaraunt here in Winchester called Venice Italian Restaraunt.  It serves up some mighty scrumptious food.  It’s a close tie for me between Shrimp Fra Diavolo and Chicken Mediterranean.

I found a recipe last week for Shrimp Fra Diavolo in the BellyOff! diet book.  Last night I decided to give it a try.  I finished the sauce and found that it was bland, bland, bland.  No heat.  No depth of flavor.  Nothing exciting.  And certainly no substitute for Venice’s delicious version of the dish.  So I decided to change it up a bit and put my own spin on it.

Here is the finished produce:

Basically, the sauce from the book was crushed tomatoes with onions and a few red pepper flakes.

Here’s how I upgraded the dish:

Bring 1-2 tablespoons of olive oil to heat.  Saute together:

• 1 medium yellow onion (diced, or if you prefer, sliced)
• 2-3 medium sized cloves of garlic
• 2 tablespoons of red-pepper flakes (adjust for your heat level)
• 1/2-3/4 cups sliced white mushrooms
• A few canned jalapenos (thanks mom)
• Salt and pepper to taste

Once the mixture is soft, add the following:

• 1/2 tsp thyme
• 1/2 tsp oregano
• 16 oz can crushed tomatoes (mine were regular, but fire-roasted would be even better)

Bring this to a simmer. Taste and adjust heat and herbs (if too hot, add extra tomatoes.  Not hot enough? Add a splash of hot sauce–that’s what I did!)  Next, add 1 small green pepper sliced into rings.  I added the peppers at this point because I wanted them to still have a crunch to them (that’s how they are at Venice).  Add 12-15 shrimp.  Allow the shrimp to cook through (until they’re orange).  Finally, top with fresh, chopped Italian parsley or basil.

Serve over whole-wheat spaghetti with a small “green salad.”

I have to say that I was pretty impressed.  Next time I will add black olives to the mixture, but I didn’t have any this go-around.

As good as Venice? Nah, but pretty darn close!

Enjoy!

PS – I have a request for anyone who stumbles upon this post: A few months ago I tried Chock full o’nuts ORGANICE coffee and fell in love.  Now, though, it has disappeared from all of the local stores.  I even stopped into a WholeFoods and a Wegman’s during a recent trim to the city in search of it.  I simply can’t find anything I love as much.  The closest I have come has been Folgers BlackSilk coffee, which claims to be “Bold, yet smooth!’ Any suggestions?

From The Charleston Gazette:

Aides to Sen. Robert C. Byrd issued a statement Monday that said Byrd “cannot support” the American Clean Energy and Security Act “in its present form.”

Sen. Jay Rockefeller’s office also issued a statement that said Rockefeller “continues to have serious concerns about the House bill.”

Byrd and Rockefeller are both Democrats, and their party needs 60 votes in the Senate to block a potential Republican filibuster once the legislation reaches the floor. Currently, Democrats hold 59 of the Senate’s 100 seats.

Of course, the Senate now has 60 Democrats thanks to Franken’s victory today.

Given the importance of coal in WV, I can’t see either of the Senators from the Mountain State supporting this bill.  Last week I sent emails to voice my concern in hopes that it would help sway my Senators.

Hat Tip: Lincoln Walks at Midnight

For the few people who might read this blog from time to time — when I bother posting — I found a fascinating, albeit infuriating, audio clip on Youtube today about Cap and Trade.  Don’t know what cap and trade is? Well watch/listen to this clip and learn.

Now, right now, click in your Google search bar and look up ways to contact your Senators.  Email, call and fax them.  I have already contacted mine! Tell them to vote NO on Cap and Trade.  If your House Representative voted NO on the bill (which passed the HOR yesterday), call or email and THANK them. (I already emailed to thank Shelley Moore-Capito, whom I generally do not care for ,but was pleased that she voted the right way.)

…is how Tom Jones dances in this video clip.  Simply amazing:

In other news, Meghan McCain - nobody cares what you think.  And for the record, most of us (myself included) only voted for your father because is was the lesser of two weasels (maybe?). Bush and Cheney had their 8 years, I agree; but your father has had is 108 years and you’ve had your 15 minutes.  Now you, him and the rest of you RINOs– won’t you PLEASE go away?!

PS- The New York Rangers can finish up their series against the Capitals tonight in DC at the Phone Booth.  GO RANGERS!!!!

I bet those are the two words that describe Obama’s feelings about these headlines:

Fidel Scolds Obama: “Don’t Assume.”

Ahmadinejad raps Obama for shunning Racism conference.

Obama’s feel-good foreign policy approach was supposed to change everything.  I mean, he finally admitted that we are arrogant, that we make all the mistakes, and, well, that we pretty much suck on ice.

I can just see him at his desk, shaking his head: “I was NICE to them.  I shook Chavez’s hand.  I took that great book he offered.  I said no prconditions to talk to Iran.”

And yet they still hate us.  Shocking. SHOCKING!!

PS- Do I have to change my internal categories title from “War on Terror” to whatever that BS phrase we’re using now?

Update: More about WV tea parties at Lincoln Walks at Midnight

Tea parties were held across the country last week, as we know, to tell our elected leaders we expect better of them.  Who knew, though, that a small town rally would, accroding to Byron York, set the example:

If you listened to the speeches at the Tax Day tea party held in the courthouse square of this northern Virginia town, population 25,733, you might not have caught the name of the man in the White House.  Among many denunciations of high taxes and out-of-control government spending, there were just a couple of mentions of Barack Obama — one when a local activist criticized the administration’s cap-and-trade energy plan, and the other when a city businessman said he prays for the president.

Actually its not too surprising that small town, common sense values would lead the way.  It is, afterall, a grassroots effort, is it not? Sometimes small town common sense is all it really takes.

Of course, that’s not to say everything was wine and roses.  The protestors were voicing their discontent with spending, an out of control and unrepresentative Congress, and a tax increase that we all know must be coming (how else can we pay for the deficit spending of which began with Bush but has grown exponentially under Obama?)

More from York about the small town, which for the past 9 months or so I have called home:

And thus the tea parties. This rally, which about 300 people braved the rain, wind, and 45-degree temperatures to attend, was a small-town, homemade affair.  There were no Washington activists, no Fox News stars, nobody from outside the local area.  It began with the Pledge of Allegiance and a capella renditions of “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” and “America the Beautiful.”  It ended with “God Bless America.” There were lots flags and patriotism and quotations from the Founding Fathers.

This is not a rich place. According to the census, the median household income in Winchester is $44,808, significantly less than the statewide Virginia median of $59,575, a number that includes the affluent suburbs of Washington.  Less than one in four adults here has a bachelor’s degree or higher.  And with the economic downturn, particularly in the housing business, many are in rough situations.

More coverage from the local paper:

Many said they wouldn’t be directly affected by President Barack Obama’s proposed tax hikes, which are applicable only to businesses and households with income greater than $250,000 a year.

Instead, the protesters were more concerned that increased federal spending will raise the national debt and cause inflation, and that the tax dollars aren’t being spent effectively.

“America is wounded and the government has its finger in the sore!” said city resident Greg Rinard, who took the stage with his family to denounce excessive spending and what he described as a departure from the nation’s Christian roots.

Students from my place of employment also chimed in:

Handley High School senior Stuart Caudill told the crowd that excessive federal deficit spending would be a burden to his generation.

“It’s wrong to steal our future before we have a chance to succeed,” he said

Unfortunately I was unable to attend; I had a job interview in the morning and no substitute to cover my classes during the time of the rally.  Still it’s interesting that a rally that happened not three blocks from my front doorstep was covered by a nationally known analyst.

Similar parties were held nearby in Charles Town and Martinsburg, WV.

A disturbing report in the Washington Post today about a school administrator who was Duke-lacrossed all over again.

Let me provide a synopsis of the story: An administrator at a high school in Loudoun County heard reports of “sexting” at his high school.  He had specific names and incidents.  He did what he needed to do — investigated the reports, gathered evidence, reported to his superiors and worked through the appropriate channels of authority.  He thought that was it.  He left school that day for spring break.  When he returned, the real ordeal began:

When I returned to school two days after break ended, I confronted a new problem: The boy with the photo on his cell was now in trouble for having pulled a girl’s pants down in class (another teen phenomenon known as “flagging”). I informed his mother that I was suspending him, and in the discussion I also told her about the earlier incident. She was outraged that I hadn’t reported it to her at the time. She called me at home that night at 10 p.m. and again at 7 a.m. the next morning, agitated and demanding that the suspension be revoked and threatening to involve an attorney. I told her as calmly as I could that the suspension was for the deliberate act of pulling down the girl’s pants. A couple of days later, after an appeal hearing with the principal and me, she shouted at me, “I’ll see you in court!”

[...]

I wasn’t worried when a few days later, two sheriff’s investigators came to school. They said that they were investigating a parental complaint and asked me whether I knew anything about photos being sent around on cellphones. I told them about our investigation and volunteered to show them the one photo it had turned up. [He had confiscated the file from the student and stored it on his own cell-phone, unable to transfer it to his computer].

He wasn’t worried, but apparently he should have been:

Then, a full month later, in May, I was charged with “failure to report suspected child abuse.” I was stunned.

A deal was offered; if the administrator would resign, the charges would be dropped.  He refused.  The school system reinstated him.  But that’s not the end of the story:

Aug. 20 was the first day for teachers to report back to school. An hour into the morning, the school’s police officer called me out of a meeting. In my office, he told me that he had to arrest me.

For the next 8 months, the administrator was faced with the charges that he had, in essence, failed in his job to protect students because he did not report “suspected child abuse.” Finally, in March, after his career had been destroyed, his relationships had faced severe scrutiny and, in short, his life had been entirely disassembled, he was cleared of all charges:

Although I felt pressure along the way to cave and accept a deal, I absolutely refused to do it. My resolve only strengthened after the prosecutor’s office upped the ante with two additional misdemeanor charges.

On March 31, [2009] I was on the road with my wife when my lawyer called. I pulled, appropriately enough, into a church parking lot to hear the news: A judge had dismissed all the charges. All I could think was, “Hallelujah!”

Read the whole article.  It’s WAPO, so you’ll need to sign into your free account.

Ting-yi Oei has since returned to work, as far as I can tell, but the question remains: will his life ever be the same? I doubt it.

I can only imagine the nightmare of facing such an awful, terrifying ordeal.

Sexting and other forms of cyber-bullying are an increasingly difficult issues for educators to face. In my own, very short, experience, it seems to me that students (administrators and prosecutorial misconduct aside) do not understand the severity of cyberbullying, including the dispicable and degrading practice of “sexting.” They have no understanding that cyberbullying, sexting and other forms of electronic misconduct can have consequences for them at the school level.  They have no comprehension of the fact that this behavior can (and has–just Google it to find a variety of stories on the topic) result in severe depression, anti-social behavior and even suicide from victims.  They can’t grapple with the legal actions that can be taken against them for their behavior.  And lastly they don’t seem to realize that, as was the case with Assistant Principal Ting-yi Oei, often times innocent, non-suspecting victims can have their lives turned to shambles by such thoughtless behavior.

With all this talk about torture “shocking the conscience,” perhaps our administrators should examine the “shocking” nature of the behavior of our students.  Shocking indeed.

From Amazon.com:

With her well-known courage Oriana Fallaci faces the themes unchained by the Islamic terrorism: the contrast and, in her opinion, incompatibility between the Islamic world and the Western world; the global reality of the Jihad and the lack of response, the lenience of the West. With her brutal sincerity she hurls pitiless accusations, vehement invectives, and denounces the uncomfortable truths that all of us know but never dare to express. With her rigorous logic, lucidity of mind, she defends our culture and blames what she calls our blindness, our deafness, our masochism, the conformism and the arrogance of the Politically Correct. With the poetry of a prophet like a modern Cassandra she says it in the form of a letter addressed to all of us.

My mother gave me this book, along with her follow up The Force of Reason (which I haven’t read yet).

I read about 75% of it Saturday night, but was unable to get around to finishing it until tonight.

What a book! Apparently, Fallaci chose to translate it from her native Italian tongue to English herself, rather than allow an editor to do this task.  Here’s what Publisher’s Weekly had to say about this on the Amazon listing of the book:

From Publishers Weekly
Noted Italian journalist Fallaci (Interview with History; etc.) is capable of hard-hitting, trenchant social criticism, but she fails to accomplish that in this impassioned but sloppy post-September 11 critique, which has been a bestseller in Italy and elsewhere in Europe. Fallaci only aggravates her lack of rigorous thinking by translating the work herself, resulting in a clumsy text that appears not to have been edited or proofread by a fluent English speaker. (Whatever resonance “cicada”-her choice term for the “so-called intellectuals” whom she addresses-has in Italian fails to translate into English.) After a melodramatic preface in which Fallaci congratulates herself on her courage in speaking the truth (and in her defense, apparently there have been efforts to ban the book in France), she lights into the European, and especially Italian, “cicadas” who felt that, on September 11, 2001, America got what she had coming to her and who, in the name of political correctness, fail to condemn the “Reverse Crusade” being waged by Islamic zealots like Osama bin Laden. But Fallaci’s love for America, her adopted home, and her critique of European intellectuals’ perverse contempt for it, is laced with a bile that may lead readers to suspect her of anti-Arab bias-a possibility she is all to aware of, repeatedly defending herself against the charge of racism.

While the book is “choppy” (if you want to use that word) because of her self translation, this is one of the most emotionally charged features of her lengthy letter to the world.  She doesn’t attempt to write in a style that is soaring or eloquent; instead she provides a raw, emotional and unapologetic delivery of her views.

I do agree with Publisher Weekly’s charge that she appears “anti-Muslim,” probably because she is, in so much as she sees Islamic culture (as it stands right now) as being incompatible with Western Civilization.  Again and again, Fallaci outlines the flaws in trying to draw some moral equivalency between Western Civilization and Islamic culture — what equivalency can be drawn between a culture that subjugates women and one that sees gender equality as a hallmark of civil rights?

All in all she provides a fantastic wake up call for Europe and, to some extent, to all of the West. She calls for us all to identify this War on Terror not as some isolated event or series of events, but instead as a battle to the death between Western Culture and Islamic culture.  A war that, according to Fallaci, Europe is doing well in defeating itself.

My freshman year of college I wrote a post about the anti-conservative ramblings of a sociology professor of mine.  His views and mine did not ‘play well together,’ but he and I, I think, had a mutual respect for each other and our view points.

While he was not my favorite professor, nor was he, in my opinion, an overly gifted educator, I did appreciate him.

A reader emailed tonight to tell me that he passed away this Sunday, on Easter.

From all of us here at TVP–well, ok, from me–best wishes and heart felt condolences go out to the friends and family of Dr. V.J. Brown and the Shepherd University community.  Surely the entire SU community had a great friend in Dr. Brown.

A sports fan and pround grandfather, I remember Dr. Brown with his sweater vest and SU baseball caps at Ram Stadium on football Saturday’s always supervising his grandchildren more than I really remember him in the classroom.

Dr. Brown was a professor sociology and, for many years the Dean of School of Business and Social Sciences.  Brown was 70 years old.

This has not been confirmed, but I am waiting to hear back.