Category: Updates

by Dish Staff

He snagged a spot on the Cowboys’ practice squad. Sam Laird approves:

Why the Cowboys are an ideal fit for Sam’s quest to build an NFL career is simple: They suck, especially on defense. If Sam is going to work his way from a practice squad to a regular 53-man roster, Dallas is as good a place as any to do so. Their defensive line is full of holes, and the loss of highly touted rookie DeMarcus Lawrence for at least six weeks creates another. Lawrence’s replacement, Jack Crawford, is no great shakes either, having been cut by the lowly Oakland Raiders just last week.

Other reasons to cheer the news:

You don’t get much more #America than Dallas, a red state where the steak is rare, the whiskey’s strong and the dudes sure as hell don’t kiss other dudes. The Cowboys are even nicknamed “America’s Team,” for crying out loud. … [H]aving America’s first gay NFL player in the middle of conservative Texas, on America’s Team, amid the league’s brightest media spotlight is pretty amazing.

Jay Caspian Kang also sees the logic of the move:

In many ways, Dallas is a perfect fit—the team has enough problems to be too worried about a practice-squad player. Aside from the on-field problems—and there are many—owner Jerry Jones has become a big-tent circus unto himself, with an alleged tampering scandal involving Adrian Peterson, of the Vikings, and a set of leaked photos—which are, frankly, bizarre—that showed Jones cavorting with two younger women. The Cowboys are a big-tent show, and if Sam indeed has a circus around him, it shouldn’t be more than a sideshow.

But Scott Shackford points out that Sam could get cut again:

Whether he eventually gets elevated to the roster and actually take to the field of a game, or even lasts on the practice squad, is a whole other question. For those who want to read the technical analysis of how Sam does and doesn’t fit in NFL play with only minor emphasis on Sam’s pioneering identity, ESPN’s Kevin Seifert has some explanations here.

Recent Dish on Sam losing his spot on the Rams here. Update from a reader:

While the Dallas Cowboys marketing team has done a great job of trying to brand them as “America’s Team,” the rest of the country hasn’t seen fit to go along with it. The most recent polling data seems to indicate they are the most hated team in the league.

Another:

In your post, Sam Laird writes, “You don’t get much more #America than Dallas, a red state where the steak is rare, the whiskey’s strong and the dudes sure as hell don’t kiss other dudes.” Gracefully, I would like to protest. As a resident of Dallas I like rare steaks and strong whiskey. But, I sure as hell like to kiss other dudes. There’s a saying of what Texas is really like: “Nothing but steers and queers.”

by Dish Staff

If you’re a female celebrity, #celebgate is your fault for basically having skin http://t.co/gz7gPyiaqN pic.twitter.com/2ASIKPNElt

— Cooper Fleishman (@_Cooper) September 1, 2014

The photo leak scandal wages on. Alyssa Rosenberg raises an eyebrow at some of the advice these celebrities have received:

The theft and release of the photos are callous enough. These periodic violations suggest a sense of extreme entitlement to famous people’s bodies, a contempt for the idea that people in public life have the right to define any zone of privacy and a sense of glee about the possibility of exposing famous individuals as human and vulnerable.

But the response to these sorts of leaks comes with its own sort of cruelty. Rather than casting a jaundiced eye at large corporations that fail to keep their clients’ data safe or railing against the impulse to pry into other people’s intimate lives, we see sentiments such as the one expressed by New York Times technology columnist Nick Bilton. “Put together a list of tips for celebs after latest leaks: 1. Don’t take nude selfies 2. Don’t take nude selfies 3. Don’t take nude selfies,” Bilton tweeted on Monday.

As tech reporter Kashmir Hill pointed out in Forbes, this kind of response is the digital equivalent of abstinence-only sex education, which is divorced from the realities and expectations of contemporary relationships. And it shares a smug moralism with that sort of thinking: Anyone who experiences a bad outcome from bowing to a partner’s request (much less acting for his or her own pleasure) deserves it and ought to be held up as a cautionary lesson for everyone else.

Amanda Hess compares the controversy to one of an earlier era:

…BuzzFeed‘s Anne Helen Petersen has proposed that Lawrence should counter the incident by laughing off the violation and acting as if she’s so devoid of hangups that it’s impossible for anyone to truly embarrass her. Petersen—author of the forthcoming Hollywood history Scandals of Classic Hollywood—advises Lawrence to hew to the example of Marilyn Monroe, who was affronted with a similar “scandal” when topless photographs she had posed for pre-stardom in exchange for a flat $50 fee were later republished without her consent in a 1952 pinup calendar.

Petersen notes that, in the face of the puritanical Hollywood climate of the early 1950s, Monroe was able to overcome the potential stigma of the photos by not “denouncing the images” but instead taking “control” of the narrative by facing them with her trademark sexy giggle and wink. Monroe told the press that she was “not ashamed” of the photos and had “done nothing wrong.” Then, she flipped the incident into a self-deprecating joke: “I’ve only autographed a few copies of it, mostly for sick people,” she told the the Saturday Evening Post. “On one I wrote, ‘This might not be my best angle.’ ” By laughing it off, Monroe contributed to “what came to be known as the ‘Playboy philosophy,’ that sex is only dirty when suppressed,” Petersen writes. …

What Petersen doesn’t mention is that Monroe never agreed to be the face of Playboy’s ostensible revolution—in 1953, Hugh Hefner bought photos of Monroe from that same old nude shoot and published them in his magazine’s first issue without her consent, and without paying her a dime. (With his Playboy fortune, Hefner later bought the funeral plot next to Monroe’s crypt, ensuring that they’d be laid side by side forever—again, not her call.) Similarly, Lawrence never agreed to share these images of her “beautiful body” with the world. Why would anyone want her to shrug that off?

Update from a dissenting reader:

Alyssa Rosenberg calling the advice to “just say no” to sexting the same as abstinence-only education is laughable. A better example is unsafe sex, which (at least in my book) is poor judgement and not the result of some act of shaming by society. Really, nobody is telling these narcissists celebrities to not Instagram, Tweet, etc. Just use some reasonable judgment. Be aware that you’re going to be a target for this kind of thing. I mean, is your life really going to start to suck if you can’t take nude pics on your telephone?  ’80s me is puzzled.

by Dish Staff

The last passenger pigeon died 100 years ago yesterday. Elizabeth Kolbert mulls over the mystery of the bird’s extinction:

In his recent book “Lost Animals: Extinction and the Photographic Record,”Errol Fuller, a British author, argues that an “additional factor” must have been at work in the species’ extinction, because “in a land as vast as the United States there can be no mopping-up hunting for a species as small as a pigeon.” (Fuller’s book contains a grainy and not particularly flattering photo of Martha standing in her cage in Cincinnati.)

Some have argued that the “additional factor” was deforestation; by this account, it’s no coincidence that the passenger pigeon went extinct right about the same time that land clearing in the eastern U.S. reached its maximum extent. Others speculate that the passenger pigeon was one of those animals that require great densities to survive.

She adds that, whatever the answer, “the mystery should give us pause” because “species that seem today to be doing fine may be sensitive to change in ways that are difficult to foresee.” Carl Zimmer is on the same page:

[David Blockstein, a senior scientist at the National Council for Science,] sees many lessons in its disappearance that apply to protecting threatened species today.

It’s a mistake to assume that a species with a big population is immune to extinction, for example. “The endangered species category is really all based on numbers, rather than biology,” he explains. Even a species with billions of members may have a biological Achilles’ heel that makes it vulnerable to human pressure.

To appreciate a species’ true risk, we have to understand not just its biology, but also our own technological advances. In the 1800s, the new technology included the telegraph and trains. Now it includes global positioning systems, cell phones, and huge fishing vessels. “We have factory ships that can vacuum up the ocean,” says Blockstein.

Mark Fischetti highlights efforts to resurrect the species:

The hundredth anniversary of Martha’s death is a sad occasion but it is also marked by an intriguing possibility. Ben Novak, a researcher at the University of California, Santa Cruz, is trying to use genetics to bring them back from the dead. As a recent article by my colleague David Biello explains, Novak has sequenced the genomes of 32 birds that are preserved at various museums and labs and is inserting edited version of those genomes into living band-tailed pigeons, a close relative.

If he succeeds—and that’s a big if—Martha’s newly created kin could one day darken the skies again.

Update from a reader:

Just last week I heard Joel Greenberg, author of A Feathered River Across the Sky, speak about extinction at the Field Museum in Chicago.  I have no idea why anyone would be confused about the factors that combined to lead to the extinction of what was once the most numerous vertebrate on the planet.  Its forests were indeed diminished, but human predation did the species in (as we probably did in prehistoric megafauna across the Americas and Eurasia).  And to relate it to our contemporary world:

The passenger pigeon went extinct in part due to … lack of government regulations for hunting.  They were hunted relentlessly (and hunters used technology like telegraphs to locate the flocks), because they were so numerous.  They laid one egg a year per nesting pair, but were not allowed time off from hunting to breed, and so billions became zero.  Their extinction, along with the near-extinction of the American bison (aka buffalo) was one of the leading causes of laws regulating hunting and habitat in the US.

The Guardian review of Greenberg’s excellent book is here.

(Photo: The last passenger pigeon, Martha, named after George Washington’s wife, died in her cage at the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914. From Wikimedia Commons)

by Dish Staff

Sam was cut from the Rams over the weekend. Eric Edholm examines the situation:

Sam was unclaimed by the other 31 NFL teams and remains a free agent, with no teams offering a practice squad spot — despite those rosters increasing this season from eight to 10 players per team — with nearly every slot around the league believed to be filled. Does this mean Sam’s NFL shot has passed him by? Not necessarily. He had three sacks in the preseason, none of them gifts, and didn’t play poorly otherwise. Sam put some decent tape out there to be considered. But he is what he is: a left defensive end who likely can’t hold up for three downs in the NFL and has little to no special teams value. Still, there are teams that value pass-rush specialists, and it’s surprising that he hasn’t been brought in, even for a look.

Michelle Garcia somewhat blames bigotry:

Did the Rams cut Michael Sam out of sheer homophobia? I doubt it. But it was homophobic reasons that got him to such a precarious position in the first place.

While the Rams were able to at least push this dream of having an out player a little further, and he was given a platform to show the entire league that he has potential for the pros, at the end of the day, the Rams did not have any use for him — they already had a nearly-full slate of defensive linemen, minus the one spot that undrafted rookie Ethan Westbrooks now has. And when 31 other teams had the chance to pick Sam up, it seems none of them needed him (and according to Outsports, at least six teams could probably use his talents right now).

Update from a reader along those lines:

I’ve been an avid football fan for years and I’m also very sympathetic to Michael Sam. I can say with a fairly high degree of certainty that he wasn’t cut because of homophobia. Furthermore, I don’t think his personal situation had much of an impact on his status.

Michael Sam’s biggest problem is that he is best-suited to a 4-3 defensive scheme. Over half the teams in the NFL rely on a 3-4 defense, where Sam really doesn’t have the skill set to perform well. Furthermore, he does not excel in special teams. Players who aren’t stars and aren’t sure-fire starters need to also perform well in special team play. Very few teams can afford the luxury of putting a guy on their roster who doesn’t fit their defensive scheme and who doesn’t play special teams. I suspect when teams start to suffer injuries and start needing bodies on their rosters, then you’ll see Sam picked up by another team.

Another sports fan from the inbox:

This is most keyed-into-the-NFL reality reaction I’ve seen to the Michael Sam story. The writer, Rick Telander, was in an NFL camp after his college days at NU and got cut.  He knows whereof he writes.

Cyd Zeigler is confident that the Rams’ cutting of Sam was “just a hiccup”:

Many in the LGBT community are lashing out at the NFL today, claiming homophobia. It’s understandable. Gay men have been told for decades they’re not good enough to play football, they’re not welcome in the locker rooms. Some of those messages have even reverberated in 2014. While the Rams’ decision wasn’t based on homophobia, it’s hard not to afford gay men a little foot-stomping at this latest rejection.

You know who isn’t lashing out? Michael Sam. He knew this was always a possibility, part of the cold business that is the NFL. A coach is your mentor and father-figure one day. The next afternoon he gives you a pink slip. Sam understands this is not the end, but rather another opportunity to prove his doubters wrong, earn his spot at the very top of his profession and take his rightful place in history.

Regardless of what happens to Sam, Scott Shackford expects a gay NFL player soon:

Even if Sam isn’t ultimately the first out player, I give it a year, tops. The media may have gotten weird about him, but polls and public reaction to Sam show that an athlete’s homosexuality isn’t the big deal it would have been, say, a decade ago.

by Dish Staff

Brian Palmer determined the worst places to drive in the US:

No. 5: Baltimore. Baltimoreans just can’t keep from running into each other. They were outside the top 10 in fatalities, DWI deaths, and pedestrian strikes, but their rate of collision couldn’t keep them out of the top five overall.

No. 4: Tampa, Fla. Tampa doesn’t do any single thing terribly, but it is consistently poor:

18th worst in years between accidents, fifth in traffic fatalities, tied for 11th in DWI fatalities, and 10th in pedestrian strikes. If the city had managed to get outside the bottom half in any individual category, Tampa residents might have avoided this distinction.

No. 3: Hialeah. The drivers of Hialeah [Florida] get into a middling number of accidents, ranking 11th among the 39 candidates. But when they hit someone, they really mean it. The city finished third for fatalities. They also have a terrifying tendency to hit pedestrians.

No. 2: Philadelphia. Drivers in the city of brotherly love enjoy a good love tap behind the wheel. Second-places finishes in collisions and pedestrian strikes overwhelm their semi-respectable 16th-place ranking in DWI deaths.

No. 1: Miami. And it’s not even close. First in automotive fatalities, first in pedestrian strikes, first in the obscenity-laced tirades of their fellow drivers.

So basically avoid Florida. Update from a reader:

Finally an article that supports what I have been saying for years: Miami has the worst drivers. I’ve driven in Thailand, Taiwan and China, to name a few of the most stressful ones in Asia, as well as Paris, Barcelona and Madrid in a right-hand drive car, and Chicago, Philadelphia and Los Angeles. But Miami is by far the worst. How on earth some of the drivers get their licenses I will never know – perhaps they don’t.

Last year I was stopped in a parking, and in the 10 minutes I was there, I witnessed three fender benders and saw two people nearly knocked over. And no, none of them were due to the weather. Seems to me the major element is the combination of laid back island mindset mixed with American hustle and a whole lot of FU.

Another notes:

I am not defending Florida drivers here; I live in the middle of the state, and was surprised not to see Orlando on the list. But this is a reprint of a year-old article based on data from at least the year before that. And if you link to the Allstate survey that prompted the reprint (which we’ll discredit because it doesn’t fit the desired conclusion), it ranks three Massachusetts cities in the top four (the other city being Washington, D.C.). But, hey, nobody ever misses a chance to take a shot at Florida.

At least it’s refreshing to have a city-comparison post on the Dish where Andrew isn’t talking shit about NYC.

(Photo of boat blocking traffic on I-95 in Miami via Flickr user That Hartford Guy)