It will come as no surprise . . .

. . . that the main site is still offline.

Toronto FC still looking for first goal of season

Toronto's newest professional sports team, Toronto FC, is both winless and goal-less after four outings, including last night's 0-1 loss to Kansas City:

A chilly afternoon didn't stop the crowd of 20,158 from welcoming first-class professional soccer to Toronto. The raucous, largely red-clad fans chanted and cheered from the opening whistle to the last, and their club gave them much to celebrate in the early going.

After starting their MLS tenure with three road games, Toronto FC clearly seemed energized by the BMO Field atmosphere and responded with the strongest first half of their brief history. Toronto had three shots on goal to Kansas City's one in the half and dominated the pace of play. It was a far cry from the club's showing in the first half of Wednesday's 3-0 loss at K.C., when the Wizards outshot TFC 9-2.

The first real chance for either squad came in the 10th minute, when some sloppy clearing from the Kansas City defense led to Toronto forward Maurice Edu carrying the ball into the K.C. penalty area. Edu managed to separate himself from his defender, but his hard shot sailed wide right of the net.

The first goal in TFC history was nearly an own goal. An innocuous-looking corner kick in the 14th minute from Toronto's Kevin Goldthwaite was caught, but then dropped by Wizards 'keeper Kevin Hartman. But he managed to grab the ball just before it rolled over the goal line and gave Toronto an unusual debut on the MLS scoresheets.

My kind of science class

H/T again to Roger Henry.

An alternate source of maps

R.J. Henry, through diligent espionage efforts, has found a source of Soviet-era maps, including London, Dublin, Manchester, and Newcastle. Roger writes:

Which makes you wonder what their maps of the US of A looked like. Still, it worked both ways. Working in Moscow in 1980, the only street map of the city came from the US embassy and was obviously prepared from high altitude pictures or, maybe, satellite pics. Even the Russians used it as the attitude of the authorities in those days was "If you don't know where you are/going then you shouldn't be here".

Fiction reader's life-cycle

The Seven Stages of Falling In Love With an Author. Addicted readers will get this one, immediately.

H/T to Laura Gallagher.

Main site still down

This is beginning to be a regularly scheduled post . . . the main site is still out of service.

With the 7th pick, the Vikings draft . . .

. . . Oklahoma running back Adrian Peterson. Access Vikings has the details:

The Vikings had their pick between Peterson and Notre Dame quarterback Brady Quinn and they elected to go with the running back.

UPDATE 3: Just got some more Peterson quotes from an interview he did in New York. Asked about sharing time with Chester Taylor, Peterson said: “I think that will help me a lot playing with a guy like Chester. Just learning the ins and outs and some guidance. You know , you’re never too good to not have advice from other guys. I look forward to that. It’s a team that when I visited, they emphasized that they love to run the ball. I’m just ready to help them and be a big contributor.” Peterson said he would be flying to the Twin Cities today and he should meet the local media on Sunday morning.

UPDATE 2: Peterson just did a conference call with the Twin Cities media. He said he would not need surgery on his collarbone and that he feels good, “really good,” right now. Peterson also said he is working on running lower to the ground to avoid taking a pounding.

From what little I've heard, this sounds like a good pick: the other top choice in that slot was quarterback Brady Quinn, and drafting another QB would have been the next best thing to saying that the Tarvaris Jackson experiment is already a bust.

Chris Taylor hob-nobs with the brass

Chris Taylor reports on the Rev. John Weir Foote, VC, CD Memorial Luncheon.

A different kind of photoblog

This isn't your father's photoblog . . . it's more like your great-grandfather's photoblog.

H/T to Christian Tucker.

Main site still down

Well, the main site is still not responding (unless you count a 404 as a response), so Jon is still doing whatever maintenance may be necessary over at bolditalic.com.

QotD: Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood is the CanLit equivalent of a Waterford crystal chalice filled to the brim with cod-liver oil. No matter how impressive the appearance, you only go near it because it’s supposed to be good for you.

Victor Wong, "Margaret Liver-Oil Harps About Harper — So What?", Phantom Observer, 2007-04-24

Recent military honours

John Donovan has a great post up about the most recent set of military medals awarded by the Governor-General:

Aside from my habit of honoring our allies, what's my point, in that it says something about the Canadian Forces? In this group of honorees at least, there is only one officer. Suggesting that not only are Canadian forces doing good combat planning, that doesn't require the officer leaders on the ground in the fight to do extraordinary things to retrieve a situation, they also are not just patting each other on the back a lot. Nor is there an indication of there being that kind of officer the soldiers dislike - the Glory Hound.

The honors are going to the group most involved in direct combat at the personal level, where ordinary operations can require extraordinary effort: the part of the junior participants and their direct leaders, the non-commissioned officers.

Excellent point, and thanks for bringing this to the attention of our American friends.

Police "culture of corruption" in Atlanta

Radley Balko has the details on a plea bargain agreed by a pair of Atlanta police officers in their trial for the killing of Kathryn Johnston:

We now know that Kathryn Johnston fired only a single bullet, through the door as police were trying to break in. They responded with a storm of bullets, which apparently both wounded Johnston and the officers themselves. When they realized their fatal error, they planted cocaine and marijuana in the woman's home. They then pressured an uninvolved informant to testify to having made controlled buys at Johnston's home to cover their tracks.

The New York Times is now reporting that the officers have told federal investigators that their behavior was not out of the ordinary. That corruption, planting evidence, and giving false testimony are routine at APD. That's not surprising. The only way these officers could think they'd get away with all of this is if they were operating within a system that routinely allows for—or even encourages—such behavior. APD's focus on arrest numbers and professional rewards for the big bust apparently incentivized such short cuts.

It's also important to remember that it's possible we wouldn't know any of this were it not for the uncooperative informant who admirably refused to help the cops cover their asses. Had he gone along with the plan, much of the public may well still think Kathryn Johnston was a geriatric dope pusher, and that her death was unfortunate, but a justifiable use of force by the raiding police. The failure here is not just with these three police officers. It's with their supervisors who failed to provide adequate oversight. It's with the prosecutors who failed to ask the right questions. And it's with the judges who, according to an investigation by the Atlanta Journal, routinely signed off on these types of warrants with no scrutiny at all.

The key part of the "War on Drugs" is the need for police officers to violate the spirit of the law in order to develop cases to the letter of the law. Entrapment, far from being a rare and shameful tactic, becomes daily practice. Once you're committed to breaking some laws to enforce other laws, you're greasing the skids for a plummet down the moral hill to where police officers (and their supervisors and the courts) end up with a brutal rule of the jungle, where cops are only the largest gang on the streets.

Nick Gillespie on Penn & Teller's Bullshit!

Reason's Nick Gillespie will be appearing on one of my favourite TV shows (that I have to wait until it's available on DVD to see . . .) Penn & Teller's Bullshit!

Update, 1 May: You can watch the show (in three chunks) from this page at Hit and Run.

I don't know nothing about draftin' no college football players!

As I mentioned last year (and probably each previous NFL draft weekend, now that I think about it), I don't follow college football, so I have absolutely no idea about who the Vikings should draft tomorrow with their draft picks. They could get the "Steal of the Draft" (TM), and I'd be no happier or sadder than I am today . . . until the newly drafted players actually start playing the game in Vikings uniforms, they could well be stand-ins from central casting. Come to think of it, that's who the Vikings drafted last year, wasn't it?

If you're at all interested, the Minneapolis Star Tribune sports writers will be live-blogging the draft at http://www.startribune.com/blogs/vikings/.

Sorry for the outage at the main site

This is a temporary backup for my main blog, Quotulatiousness. If you're reading this, then the main blog is down (temporarily, I hope).

My virtual landlord is having bandwidth issues, which has forced him to shut down the biggest bandwidth hog on his site: my blog.