A little bit of a redesign tonight — I was getting bored with things, and felt like playing around. Lemme know what you think…

Bart Aronson has a good Writ column on violence in sports, and how we’ve grown to accept it. Clemens throwing a bat at Piazza, Tyson biting off part of Holyfield’s ear, Sprewell choking P.J. Carlissimo… all examples of things that would have been prosecuted if you or I did them to someone on the street, yet all things that are accepted as part of sport.

Dinkism of the day:

“So prescription drugs will be an ingritable part of the plan.”

Spanish fisherman caught a 275-pound, seven-foot-long taningia danae this week, prompting people the world over to ask, “What the hell is a taningia danae?” (It’s a member of the squid family, but it lacks feeding tentacles, instead having bioluminescent organs at the end of two arms.)

My original hometown paper pulled Doonesbury this past Wednesday because the strip repeated the assertion that Dubya has used cocaine. (Check out the strip here, although I don’t know how long they keep their strip archives up.)

More D-Dubya-I news: it turns out that Bush lied about the arrest incident when he told Wayne Slater, reporter for the Dallas Morning News, that he had not been arrested since 1968. This is exactly why the arrest matters — it’s an issue of trust.

I also love that Bush claims he didn’t speak of the arrest publicly because he didn’t want to set a bad example for his kids. What’s a worse example, lying about your past or owning up to being human? As Gary Kamiya puts it, “Just how telling your daughters that you were arrested, booked and humiliated will entice them down a six-for-the-road lifestyle is not clear. Nor is it obvious why allowing the press to inform your daughters of your reckless past is a preferable parenting technique.”