Propaganda

FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES, THIS IS THE WAY TRAVEL SHOULD READ…..

November 30, 2008
Florence, Then and Now

By ADAM BEGLEY

HERE’S what you do first in Florence: Complain about the tourists. It’s a time-honored tradition and there’s no avoiding it — or them, as they squeeze down the narrow streets. They choke the majestic Piazza Signoria; they overwhelm the Uffizi Gallery — so go ahead and get the grumbling over with. Hordes of them! A year-round blight! Why can’t they just stay home! Or, if you’re like E. M. Forster’s “clever” lady novelist in “A Room With a View,” the one who exclaims in dismay over the bovine “Britisher abroad,” admit that you’d like to administer an exam “and turn back every tourist who couldn’t pass it.”

Snobbery is part of the sophisticated traveler’s baggage — that hasn’t changed at all in the 100 years since Forster, in his charming novel, skewered the supercilious “good taste” of those who look down on the “ill-bred people whom one does meet abroad.” Nowadays, when everyone in the ill-bred crowd is snapping photos of the Duomo with a cellphone, or swarming the Ponte Vecchio, plastic water bottle in hand, the urge to override touristic self-loathing by claiming for oneself a spurious superiority is pretty much irresistible; Forster, were he still around, would poke fun at that snobbish impulse with puckish glee. (But don’t let that stop you from grousing about the sheer number of bodies blocking the view of the Arno.)

The next thing to do in Florence, according to Forster, is throw away your guidebook. Chapter II of “A Room With a View” is called “In Santa Croce With No Baedeker,” and it’s a gently comic interlude every honest visitor to that great Franciscan basilica will recognize as a mocking portrait of himself. Or herself, in the case of our young heroine, Lucy Honeychurch, who winds up alone in the vast interior of Santa Croce without her “Handbook to Northern Italy.”

On the way in she noted “the black-and-white facade of surpassing ugliness” (the marble was added in the 19th century — paid for by an Englishman, by the way); now she’s rattling around in the vast nave, wondering which of all the tombs was “the one that was really beautiful,” the one most praised by Ruskin. With no cultural authority to tell her what to think, she thinks for herself: “Of course it must be a wonderful building. But how like a barn! And how very cold!” And then, just like that, her mood changes: “the pernicious charm of Italy worked on her, and, instead of acquiring information, she began to be happy.” We all want to be happy tourists, so here’s the question: Is Forster’s early 20th-century advice — toss the guidebook aside and let the pernicious Florentine charm seduce you — still viable early in the 21st?

ENJOYING “A Room With a View” is easy. A love story that begins and ends in Florence, with complications in England sandwiched in between, it’s short, cheerful and delightfully sly. Besides, there are two excellent and generally faithful film adaptations, the classic 1986 Merchant-Ivory production starring Helena Bonham Carter and Daniel Day-Lewis and a PBS version released just this year with enticing shots of Florence and a weird, unwarranted twist at the end. Once Lucy Honeychurch and George Emerson have kissed in a field of violets in the hills above the city (near Fiesole, about which more later), you know (spoiler alert) you’re going to hear wedding bells at the end, no matter how many plot twists the crafty author engineers.

Enjoying Florence — a hard, forbidding city (“a city of endurance,” Mary McCarthy called it, “a city of stone”), handsome but not pretty, a challenge even if you could siphon off the tourists and replace them with picturesque Italians energetically engaged in producing local color — enjoying Florence takes more time and more effort. But if you have with you your copy of “A Room With a View,” you’ll find it easier to get along. Forster’s supple, forgiving irony, his ability to satirize lovingly, combined with his firm but regretful insistence on not confusing art and life, is exactly what you need if you plan to share this intensely urban town with tens of thousands of sightseers for the five or six days it will take you to do just like them and see the sights.

Forster reminds us that though Florence is a capital of art (is it ever!), it’s not just an overcrowded museum. When Lucy leans out of her window in the Pensione Bertolini and gazes out across the Arno at the marble churches on the hill opposite, and watches with dreamy curiosity as the world trips by, the author notes approvingly, with his usual mild irony, “Over such trivialities as these many a valuable hour may slip away, and the traveler who has gone to Italy to study the tactile values of Giotto, or the corruption of the Papacy, may return remembering nothing but the blue sky and the men and women who live under it.” He’s not suggesting that you ignore Giotto or the magnificence of the city’s turbulent history, but that the hours spent soaking up the dazzling Florentine sunshine with no cultural agenda may be valuable after all.

When Forster himself first came to Florence in October of 1901, he stayed as Lucy did in a pensione on the Lungarno delle Grazie, with a view over the Arno to the Basilica di San Miniato al Monte and the dark hills beyond. He was on a grand tour, traveling with his mother, and was a dutiful sightseer. He wrote to a friend back home, “the orthodox Baedeker-bestarred Italy — which is all I have yet seen — delights me so much that I can well afford to leave Italian Italy for another time.” He was back the following year, at the same pensione, and by the time he’d finished “A Room With a View,” he’d struck a happy balance.

In and around the Basilica di Santa Croce is everything that’s delightful and appalling about Florence today. The neo-Gothic facade is still ugly, the long square in front of it dusty, bland, pigeon-infested and lousy with tourists. The interior is still cavernous, austere and chilly, impressive but somehow dispiriting. Even if you’ve ditched your guidebook, you’re reminded at every step of the city’s vast cultural riches: here are the tombs of Michelangelo and Galileo and Lorenzo Ghiberti, whose bronze baptistery doors opposite the Duomo were so perfect, according to Michelangelo, they could have been the gates of paradise; here are the memorials to Dante and Machiavelli. Crowds are waiting to get into the small, high-ceilinged chapels to the right of the high altar — that’s where you can admire the tactile values of Giotto, whose early 14th-century frescoes grace the walls. Just outside the basilica in the main cloister is the Pazzi Chapel, a perfectly proportioned Renaissance gem designed by the great Florentine architect Filippo Brunelleschi (who gave the Duomo its dome). The chapel, its white walls decorated with glazed terra-cotta medallions by Luca della Robbia (one of young Lucy’s favorite artists), looks best when it’s empty, filled to its noble height with nothing but chalky light from the lantern and the oculi in the dome. In other words, if a tour guide and his flock are in there, wait till they’ve gone.

The nature of those tours has changed dramatically since Forster’s day. In 1901 — and until very recently, in fact — the tour guide pronounced on art and architecture in a booming or piercing voice, mostly in English but possibly also in German or French, while his flock huddled close to catch the echoing words of wisdom. In “A Room With a View,” Forster had fun with the solemn pronouncements of the Rev. Cuthbert Eager, who steered an “earnest congregation” around Santa Croce, lecturing all the while on the fervor of medievalism (“Observe how Giotto is … untroubled by the snares of anatomy and perspective”). Today, technology has shushed the tour guide: he or she whispers into a microphone, which broadcasts the lecture soundlessly, piping the flow of factoids into the earphones of the audience, who can now stray a little (and there are more languages represented: Spanish, Greek, Polish, Russian). Some familiar props remain — the retractable antenna with a ribbon tied at the tip, a rallying sign for the group as it migrates from one artistic treasure to the next — but the new quiet is disconcerting, as though these clumps of tourists with headphones and wireless receivers hung around their necks were part of some sinister silent conspiracy.

IF you stroll a few dozen yards past the Pazzi Chapel, you’ll find yourself in a second cloister, also designed by Brunelleschi, in 1446, the last year of his life. It’s a place of great beauty and calm, usually deserted, and you don’t need to know a thing about it to fall in love. The simple, elegant two-story cloister with its slender columns shelters you from the rigors and confusions of Florence and gives you instead the tranquil harmony of the Renaissance without pomp or grandeur, washed by bright Tuscan sun. I like to imagine, though Forster doesn’t suggest it, that Lucy loitered here without her Baedeker, and that’s why she began to be happy. At the very least, a quiet moment in the cloisters will give you strength to confront the multitudes and the immortal works of art remaining on your list.

And so will loitering over lunch. And dinner. One eats very well in Florence, and in general the simpler the restaurant, the better the food. If you can visit one church and one museum before lunch and one more church or another museum after lunch (whatever you do, don’t miss the wealth of paintings piled higgledy-piggledy in the Palatine Gallery of the Palazzo Pitti), and then take a nap (Tuscan wine is cheap and abundant), and then stroll to dinner, perhaps along the Via de’ Tornabuoni, under the looming, illuminated facades of great, stern palazzos, and stroll some more after dinner when the crowds have thinned and Florence seems gentler and the multicolor Duomo seems less garish but just as huge and astonishing — you’ll find that after a few days of this routine, all your complaints will be forgotten, replaced with amazement and gratitude.

Unless of course you stray into the Piazza Signoria, where the replica of Michelangelo’s giant David attracts a sizable contingent of art lovers with camera phones night and day. This is where Lucy wanders one evening, unaccompanied:

“ ‘Nothing ever happens to me,’ she reflected, as she entered the Piazza Signoria and looked nonchalantly at its marvels, now fairly familiar to her. The great square was in shadow; the sunshine had come too late to strike it. Neptune was already unsubstantial in the twilight, half god, half ghost, and his fountain plashed dreamily to the men and satyrs who idled together on its marge. The Loggia showed as the triple entrance of a cave, wherein dwelt many a deity, shadowy but immortal, looking forth upon the arrivals and departures of mankind. It was the hour of unreality — the hour, that is, when unfamiliar things are real. An older person at such an hour and in such a place might think that sufficient was happening to him, and rest content. Lucy desired more.”

And then something does happen to her: two Italians quarrel, one stabs the other in the chest, and Lucy, who sees the blood come trickling out of the fatally wounded man’s mouth, swoons — into the arms of George Emerson, as luck would have it.

Nothing so dramatic is likely to occur to the 21st-century visitor. But if it does, head for Fiesole, the little hill town no more than a few miles from the Piazza Signoria. Along with the far reaches of the Boboli Gardens, this is the city’s escape hatch, a chance to breathe deeply and see some greenery, plant life being notably absent from the historic center. Forster sends his contingent to Fiesole by horse and carriage (it’s nearby that Lucy and George first kiss); now it’s a 15-minute ride on a boxy orange municipal bus. But once you’ve arrived you realize that the chief virtue of this modest town, aside from the fresh air, is the panoramic view of the Arno Valley and the extraordinary, maddening city you’ve just left, its Duomo vast and proud even at this distance. And the wisdom of the structure of “A Room With a View” is suddenly as clear as the bright Tuscan sky: you will return to Florence, and next time it will be a honeymoon.

BEAUTY, STONES AND HANGING HAMS

GETTING THERE

There are no nonstop flights from New York to Florence. A number of airlines offer daily flights with connections through various European capitals; of those, the easiest is Alitalia, which offers several daily flights via Rome for about $650. The small Florence airport is only a few miles from the city; a bus service runs to the train station in the center of town and there are taxis, too. Once you have reached Florence, everything is within easy walking distance except Fiesole, which can be reached by taxi or bus.

WHERE TO STAY

If you are staying in the center of Florence, what you want is an oasis, and despite the tacky name, Hotel Monna Lisa (Borgo Pinti, 27; 39-055-2479751; www.hotelmonnalisaflorence.com) provides exactly that. A converted 14th-century palazzo five minutes by foot from the Duomo, it’s handsomely decorated and blessedly calm. A double room will currently cost you 125 euros ($160 at $1.28 to the euro).

If you must have a room with a view, go to Fiesole. Pensione Bencistà (Via Benedetto da Maiano, 4; 39-055-59163; www.bencista.com) is shambolic and charming — and affordable, at about 185 euros for a double room with breakfast and dinner included.

Also in Fiesole is the Villa San Michele (Via Doccia, 4, Fiesole; 39-055-59451; www.villasanmichele.com), which will bankrupt you — it’s around 850 euros for a double room, but you will be coddled and cosseted in a gorgeous setting.

WHERE TO EAT

Meals are important in Florence, not just because the food is so good, but also because the rest of the time you’re on your feet. Lunch for two, with wine of course, should cost you about 60 euros; dinner, with more wine, about 100 euros.

For lunch, especially Sunday lunch, Il Latini (Via de Palchetti, 6/r; 39-055-210916; www.illatini.com) is a must. Don’t bother with a menu (the waiters don’t like to give them out, and anyway they know better than you what’s good). Help yourself to the big bottle of red wine you’ll find at your table. Admire the hundreds of hams hanging overhead. Eat!

Quiet, relatively tourist-free, pleasantly traditional and equally delicious is Del Fagioli (Corso Tintori, 47/r; 39-055-244285), just a few blocks from Santa Croce.

If you want a little atmosphere at night and you’re willing to pay a premium for the buzz and the funky décor, try Trattoria Garga (Via del Moro, 48/r; 39-055-2398898; www.garga.it).

And if you’re in Fiesole at night and don’t want to engage in the enforced sociability of the pensione, Trattoria i’ Polpa (Piazza Mino, 21/22; 39-055-59485) is cozy and friendly and inexpensive.

WHAT TO READ

Fifty years after the publication of “A Room With a View,” E. M. Forster wrote a short essay in The New York Times Book Review called “A View Without a Room,” in which he speculated on the fate of the characters in his novel — not quite dessert, more like a tasty petit four. It has been printed as an afterward in the Penguin Modern Classics edition of “A Room With a View.”

P. N. Furbank’s massive two-volume biography of Forster was first published three decades ago; now available in a one-volume Faber paperback, it’s still the best account of a long, remarkable life.

If you want a critic’s perspective on “A Room With a View,” see the chapter on it in Lionel Trilling’s excellent “E. M. Forster: A Study,” first published in 1943 but available in paperback from New Directions.

ADAM BEGLEY is the books editor of The New York Observer.

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

FROM THE GUARDIAN/OBSERVER, WITH THANKS TO ELIZABETH HANSON AND PAT RAE OF THE QUEEN’S ENGLISH DEPARTMENT….

The new Cicero
Barack Obama’s speeches are much admired and endlessly analysed, but, says
Charlotte Higgins, one of their most interesting aspects is the enormous
debt they owe to the oratory of the Romans

Charlotte Higgins
Wednesday November 26 2008
The Guardian

In the run-up to the US presidential election, the online magazine Slate ran
a series of dictionary definitions of “Obamaisms”. One ran thus: “Barocrates
(buh-ROH-cruh-teez) n. An obscure Greek philosopher who pioneered a method
of teaching in which sensitive topics are first posed as questions then
evaded.”

There were other digs at Barack Obama that alluded to ancient Greece and
Rome. When he accepted the Democratic party nomination, he did so before a
stagey backdrop of doric columns. Republicans said this betrayed delusions
of grandeur: this was a temple out of which Obama would emerge like a
self-styled Greek god. (Steve Bell also discerned a Romanness in the image,
and drew Obama for this paper as a toga-ed emperor.) In fact, the resonance
of those pillars was much more complicated than the Republicans would have
it. They recalled the White House, which itself summoned up visual echoes of
the Roman republic, on whose constitution that of the US is based. They
recalled the Lincoln Memorial, before which Martin Luther King delivered his
“I have a dream” speech. They recalled the building on which the Lincoln
Memorial is based - the Parthenon. By drawing us symbolically to Athens, we
were located at the very birthplace of democracy.

Here’s the thing: to understand the next four years of American politics,
you are going to need to understand something of the politics of ancient
Greece and Rome.

There have been many controversial aspects to this presidential election,
but one thing is uncontroversial: that Obama’s skill as an orator has been
one of the most important factors - perhaps the most important factor - in
his victory. The sheer numbers of people who have heard him speak live set
him apart from his rivals - and, indeed, recall the politics of ancient
Athens, where the public speech given to ordinary voters was the motor of
politics, and where the art of rhetoric matured alongside democracy.

Obama has bucked the trend of recent presidents - not excluding Bill Clinton
- for dumbing down speeches. Elvin T Lim’s book The Anti-Intellectual
Presidency: The Decline of Presidential Rhetoric from George Washington to
George W Bush, submits presidential oratory to statistical analysis. He
concludes that 100 years ago speeches were pitched at college reading level.
Now they are at 8th grade. Obama’s speeches, by contrast, flatter their
audience. His best speeches are adroit literary creations, rich, like those
doric columns, with allusion, his turn of phrase consciously evoking lines
by Lincoln and King, by Woody Guthrie and Sam Cooke. Though he has
speechwriters, he does much of the work himself. (Jon Favreau, the
27-year-old who heads Obama’s speechwriting team, has said that his job is
like being “Ted Williams’s batting coach.”) James Wood, professor of the
practice of literary criticism at Harvard, has already performed a
close-reading exercise on the victory speech for the New Yorker. Can you
imagine the same being done of a George Bush speech?

More than once, the adjective that has been deployed to describe Obama’s
oratorical skill is “Ciceronian”. Cicero, the outstanding Roman politician
of the late republic, was certainly the greatest orator of his time, and one
of the greatest in history. A fierce defender of the republican
constitution, his criticism of Mark Antony got him murdered in 43BC.

During the Roman republic (and in ancient Athens) politics was oratory. In
Athens, questions such as whether or not to declare war on an enemy state
were decided by the entire electorate (or however many bothered to turn up)
in open debate. Oratory was the supreme political skill, on whose mastery
power depended. Unsurprisingly, then, oratory was highly organised and
rigorously analysed. The Greeks and Romans, in short, knew all the
rhetorical tricks, and they put a name to most of them.

It turns out that Obama knows them, too. One of the best known of Cicero’s
techniques is his use of series of three to emphasise points: the tricolon.
(The most enduring example of a Latin tricolon is not Cicero’s, but Caesar’s
“Veni, vidi, vici” - I came, I saw, I conquered.) Obama uses tricola freely.
Here’s an example: “Tonight, we gather to affirm the greatness of our
nation, not because of the height of our skyscrapers, or the power of our
military, or the size of our economy …” In this passage, from the 2004
Democratic convention speech, Obama is also using the technique of
“praeteritio” - drawing attention to a subject by not discussing it. (He is
discounting the height of America’s skyscrapers etc, but in so doing reminds
us of their importance.)

One of my favourites among Obama’s tricks was his use of the phrase “a young
preacher from Georgia”, when accepting the Democratic nomination this
August; he did not name Martin Luther King. The term for the technique is
“antonomasia”. One example from Cicero is the way he refers to Phoenix,
Achilles’ mentor in the Iliad, as “senior magister” - “the aged teacher”. In
both cases, it sets up an intimacy between speaker and audience, the
flattering idea that we all know what we are talking about without need for
further exposition. It humanises the character - King was just an ordinary
young man, once. Referring to Georgia by name localises the reference -
Obama likes to use the specifics to American place to ground the winged
sweep of his rhetoric - just as in his November 4 speech: “Our campaign …
began in the backyards of Des Moines and the living rooms of Concord and the
front porches of Charleston”, which, of course, is also another tricolon.

Obama’s favourite tricks of the trade, it appears, are the related anaphora
and epiphora. Anaphora is the repetition of a phrase at the start of a
sentence. Again, from November 4: “It’s the answer told by lines that
stretched around schools … It’s the answer spoken by young and old …
It’s the answer …” Epiphora does the same, but at the end of a sentence.
From the same speech (yet another tricolon): “She lives to see them stand
out and speak up and reach for the ballot. Yes we can.” The phrase “Yes we
can” completes the next five paragraphs.

That “Yes we can” refrain might more readily summon up the call-and-response
preaching of the American church than classical rhetoric. And, of course,
Obama has been influenced by his time in the congregations of powerfully
effective preachers. But James Davidson, reader in ancient history at the
University of Warwick, points out that preaching itself originates in
ancient Greece. “The tradition of classical oratory was central to the early
church, when rhetoric was one of the most important parts of education.
Through sermons, the church captured the rhetorical tradition of the
ancients. America has preserved that, particularly in the black church.”

It is not just in the intricacies of speechifying that Obama recalls Cicero.
Like Cicero, Obama is a lawyer. Like Cicero, Obama is a writer of enormous
accomplishment - Dreams From My Father, Obama’s first book, will surely
enter the American literary canon. Like Cicero, Obama is a “novus homo” -
the Latin phrase means “new man” in the sense of self-made. Like Cicero,
Obama entered politics without family backing (compare Clinton) or a
military record (compare John McCain). Roman tradition dictated you had
both. The compensatory talent Obama shares with Cicero, says Catherine
Steel, professor of classics at the University of Glasgow, is a skill at
“setting up a genealogy of forebears - not biological forebears but
intellectual forebears. For Cicero it was Licinius Crassus, Scipio
Aemilianus and Cato the Elder. For Obama it is Lincoln, Roosevelt and King.”

Steel also points out how Obama’s oratory conforms to the tripartite ideal
laid down by Aristotle, who stated that good rhetoric should consist of
pathos, logos and ethos - emotion, argument and character. It is in the
projection of ethos that Obama particularly excels. Take this resounding
passage: “I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from
Kansas. I was raised with the help of a white grandfather who survived a
Depression to serve in Patton’s army during World War II and a white
grandmother who worked on a bomber assembly line at Fort Leavenworth while
he was overseas. I’ve gone to some of the best schools in America and lived
in one of the world’s poorest nations.” He manages to convey the sense that
not only can he revive the American dream, but that he personally embodies -
actually, in some sense, is - the American dream.

In English, when we use the word “rhetoric”, it is generally preceded by the
word “empty”. Rhetoric has a bad reputation. McCain warned lest an
electorate be “deceived by an eloquent but empty call for change”.
Waspishly, Clinton noted, “You campaign in poetry, you govern in prose.” The
Athenians, too, knew the dangers of a populace’s being swept along by a
persuasive but unscrupulous demagogue (and they invented the word). And it
was the Roman politician Cato - though it could have been McCain - who said
“Rem tene, verba sequentur”. If you hold on to the facts, the words will
follow.

Cicero was well aware of the problem. In his book On The Orator, he argues
that real eloquence can be acquired only if the speaker has attained the
highest state of knowledge - “otherwise what he says is just an empty and
ridiculous swirl of verbiage”. The true orator is one whose practice of
citizenship embodies a civic ideal - whose rhetoric, far from empty, is the
deliberate, rational, careful organiser of ideas and argument that propels
the state forward safely and wisely. This is clearly what Obama, too, is
aiming to embody: his project is to unite rhetoric, thought and action in a
new politics that eschews narrow bipartisanship. Can Obama’s words translate
into deeds? The presidency of George Bush provided plenty of evidence that a
man who has problems with his prepositions may also struggle to govern well.
We can only hope that Obama’s presidency proves that opposite.

? Charlotte Higgins is the author of It’s All Greek To Me: From Homer to the
Hippocratic Oath, How Ancient Greece Has Shaped Our World (Short Books).

Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited 2008

PLAXICO BURRESS OF THE NEW YORK FOOTBALL GIANTS SHOOTS HIMSELF IN THE THIGH….

HERE IS THE NEW YORK TIMES, OVERJOYED AT PLAXICO’S ABILITY WITH A FIREARM…..

BET IS THAT HE IS GONE SHORTLY FROM THE ROSTER……

December 1, 2008
Plaxico Burress Surrenders to Police

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 9:26 a.m. ET

NEW YORK (AP) — Plaxico Burress arrived at a police station early Monday, where he was expected to be charged after accidentally shooting himself in the right thigh at a Manhattan nightclub.

The New York Giants star wide receiver arrived in a black Cadillac Escalade wearing jeans and a black coat. Burress, who was not visibly limping, did not speak to the media.

Burress plans to plead not guilty to a weapon possession charge during a Monday afternoon court appearance, his lawyer, Benjamin Brafman, said outside the police station. Conviction on the charge could result in at least 3 1/2 years in prison.

‘’He is standing tall. He is a mature adult,'’ said Brafman. ‘’I think any professional athlete in this situation would be concerned.'’

Brafman refused to respond to media reports about an alleged coverup, other than to say: ‘’I think a lot of what’s been in the press is not accurate.'’

He said Burress is feeling OK. ‘’If they let him play, he will be able to play. … I think he will be a superstar for the rest of his career.'’

‘’My hope is that it plays out well and he can continue his career, because he’s a good person I think, with a brilliant athletic career. And it would be a terrible sadness if an isolated incident could ruin a life,'’ said Brafman.

Brafman met with Burress for about an hour Sunday at the player’s home in New Jersey.

‘’I would ask that his fans, the Giants and the media withhold judgment in this matter until all of the facts have been disclosed,'’ Brafman said earlier in an e-mail to The Associated Press.

Brafman is a well-known criminal lawyer who has defended mobsters and other high-profile figures, including hip-hop impresario Sean ‘’Diddy'’ Combs on a bribery and gun possession charge in 2001.

Burress shot himself Friday night and was released from a hospital early Saturday, the Giants said.

‘’As far as we know, he’s going to be OK,'’ general manager Jerry Reese said Sunday before the Super Bowl champions’ 23-7 victory at the Washington Redskins.

Giants running back Brandon Jacobs said he spoke to Burress on the phone after the game.

‘’I called him and made a few jokes about the situation and his laugh is what I wanted to hear,'’ Jacobs said, according to Newsday. ‘’If he didn’t laugh I knew he was going to be down, which he shouldn’t be down. It’s a mistake that happened, something that shouldn’t have happened and that’s that.'’

Before the shooting, Burress already had been ruled out of the game because of a leg injury.

New York police and NFL security are investigating what happened Friday. Giants linebacker Antonio Pierce was interviewed by NFL security at the team’s hotel Saturday, Reese said.

The NFL wouldn’t comment on the expected charge, Burress’ plan to plead not guilty or the league’s investigation.

‘’We are cooperating with the police and continuing to monitor the situation,'’ NFL spokesman Greg Aiello said.

Pierce — who started against Washington — reportedly was present for the latest dramatic turn in a tumultuous season of fines and suspension for Burress.

‘’Antonio is working on trying to beat the Redskins right now,'’ Reese said before kickoff. ‘’That’s where his focus is and where it should be right now.'’

Pierce deflected several questions after the game. He wouldn’t say whether he has a lawyer and when asked if he is concerned about his own situation, Pierce replied only: ‘’No. I’m fine where I’m at.'’

Giants coach Tom Coughlin said he spoke to his players about Burress’ situation but wouldn’t get into specifics.

‘’We all are upset about what happened with Plaxico, and hopefully he’s going to be fine and so on and so forth. That’s our first concern,'’ Coughlin said. ‘’Once that was taken care of, we knew that he was OK, then the guys got right back to focusing on the reason we were here.'’

Coughlin wouldn’t address Burress’ future with the Giants, saying only, ‘’Questions of that nature will be discussed going forward, I’m sure.'’

Hours earlier, Reese and Giants president and CEO John Mara also avoided discussing what Burress’ status with the team might be.

‘’I want to wait until we find out all the facts and circumstances before we make any determination,'’ Mara said. ‘’I don’t know what happened there, and until we find out exactly what happened, I’m not going to make any comment or make any decision about what his future is.'’

Reese and Mara said they hadn’t spoken to Burress, who hurt his hamstring two weeks ago and was going to miss the game against the Redskins because of that injury.

‘’I reached out to him,'’ Reese said. ‘’I did not get a return phone call.'’

Mara repeatedly said the Giants would cooperate with the police and the NFL in their investigations.

Burress caught the go-ahead touchdown pass in the Giants’ Super Bowl victory against the New England Patriots in February, following a regular season in which he scored a career-high 12 TDs. He was rewarded with a $35 million, five-year contract, only hours before the current season.

Burress has 35 catches for 454 yards and four touchdowns while constantly drawing double coverage this season.

Off the field, he was suspended for a game against Seattle in October and fined $117,500 for missing a team meeting and failing to notify the Giants of his absence. He said he had a family emergency.

Burress also was fined $45,000 by the NFL for his conduct during a game against San Francisco in which he abused an official and tossed a ball into the stands.

‘’I don’t think people understand how good of a person he really is,'’ fellow receiver Amani Toomer said after catching a 40-yard touchdown pass in the Giants’ victory Sunday. ‘’A good heart. I think he’s a good guy.'’

——

AP Sports Writer Howard Fendrich in Landover, Md. and Football Writer Dave Goldberg contributed to this report.

THE OBSERVER ON OBAMA’S “THE MORE THINGS CHANGE THE MORE THEY STAY THE SAME….

Obama criticised for economic team’s link to failed bank chief
Presidential advisers are protégés of director of Citigroup, the bank accused of reckless sub-prime investments that led to its near-collapse

Edward Helmore in New York

guardian.co.uk, Sunday November 30 2008 00.01 GMT

As Barack Obama prepares to announce the appointment of Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State this week, the first notes of dissent over the President-elect’s choices are being heard across America.

The loudest complaints concern his economic team’s ties to Citigroup, the banking behemoth that all but collapsed last weekend. In particular, criticisms are mounting over the role to be played by Robert Rubin, a director at Citigroup and President Clinton’s former treasury secretary.

Obama, who last week called for a massive stimulus package to prevent the US economy from ‘falling into a deflationary spiral’, has taken several protégés of 70-year-old Rubin as advisers, among them Timothy Geithner as treasury secretary, Lawrence Summers as senior White House economics adviser and Peter Orszag as budget director, even as Rubin himself has been defending his key role in deregulating the financial markets and steering Citigroup towards taking greater trading risks to expand its business and reap higher profits.

‘Nobody was prepared for this,’ Rubin said yesterday. Like several other banking CEOs and former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, he indicated that the current financial crisis was caused by a buckling financial system - not mistakes of leadership or policy-making.

But with criticism of Rubin and loyal ‘Rubinistas’ threatening Obama’s Washington debut, there is increasing concern that the President-elect’s emphasis on appointing Clinton-era officials - a shadow Clinton term, as it has been called - could backfire as the very people who undertook financial deregulation in the Nineties are now directed to re-regulate a decade later.

‘Where’s the diversity on the economic team? It’s not only all from the same small club, but from the club that brought us the deregulation that has a lot to do with the economic collapse,’ said Robert Kuttner, the co-founder of the liberal-leaning American Prospect magazine.

The growing fury over the bailout of Citigroup largely focuses on Rubin’s role. In a damning post-mortem of Citigroup’s rush to risk, the New York Times labelled Rubin ‘an architect of the bank’s strategy’ and described him as having ‘pushed to bulk up the bank’s high-growth fixed-income trading’.

Rubin, the paper said, led the bank into a risky gamble on investments, including securities backed by sub-prime mortgages. With a base Citigroup salary of $115m, excluding stock options and bonuses, Rubin’s defence that he had no ‘operating’ responsibilities at the bank is not widely accepted. ‘He still has a fiduciary responsibility as a board member,’ said William Smith, a New York money manager. ‘He has overseen the entire meltdown, yet been compensated as an operating employee, while bragging about having no operating responsibility.’

Rubin has countered that his pay was justified. ‘I bet there’s not a single year where I couldn’t have gone somewhere else and made more,’ he told the Wall Street Journal. He turned down his bonus last year, telling the board the money could be better spent elsewhere.

For Obama, the selection of Rubin acolytes suggests vulnerability. Yet defenders of the Rubinistas say it is not policy that binds them but their braininess.

But for Obama, who promised ‘change you can believe in’, the selection of Rubin protégés - what one critic called the ‘essence of the Washington-New York finance axis of power’ - has raised eyebrows. While Rubin may be unwilling to accept responsibility for the decisions that led to Citigroup’s downfall, he concedes that he did understand the risky financial decisions it was making. ‘If you look back from now, there’s an enormous amount that needs to be learned,’ he said yesterday.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008

From Salon, sad……..

$6M Illinois tutoring center assists only athletes

Nov 28th, 2008 | CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — At the University of Illinois, being an athlete gets you access to a $6 million facility with oversized leather chairs and Oriental rugs.

But it’s not a fancy country club — it’s a tutoring center.

The Irwin Academic Services Center helps only about 550 of the school’s 37,000 students. And places like this in schools across the country leave critics fuming.

“These athletic tutoring palaces perpetuate resentment and stereotyping on campus,” said Allen Sack, a University of New Haven professor and former football player for the University of Notre Dame. He believes sports can detrimentally affect university life.

“A student who is not an athlete will say, ‘I’m working nights to get through school — why don’t I get free tutoring?’” Sack said.

In addition to the University of Illinois, at least four other schools have multimillion-dollar tutoring centers just for their athletes. Most are funded by athletic departments.

Proponents say the centers prepare athletes for life after sports, but other students want the same help available for everyone. The University of Michigan student newspaper is pushing to have their school’s $12 million athletic tutoring facility open to all students.

But learning specialists like Debby Roberts, who works at the Illinois center, said athletes need more help focusing on education.

“It’s a daily battle,” Roberts said. “They all want to think they’re going to turn pro.”

Sam Carson, a fifth-year senior and linebacker at Illinois, said the program helps by requiring him to put in time to meet the demands of his actuarial science major.

“In high school, parents or teachers keep an eye on you,” Carson said. “Here, I might have been tempted to stay in my room and watch television if I didn’t have to put in those study hours.”

——

CNN CATCHES THE COLD…..

Five ways to avoid germs while traveling

STORY HIGHLIGHTS
Sit toward the front of the airplane, because the air flows better there
Water from airplanes’ water tanks isn’t always clean
Wash or sanitize your hands after leaving an escalator, using ATM

CAN YOU ADD A POINT OR TWO TO THIS LIST OF DOs and DON’Ts?

By Elizabeth Cohen
CNN Medical Correspondent

ATLANTA, Georgia (CNN) — This week while you’re traveling, if you happen to spot a man applying hand sanitizer as he gets off an escalator, there’s a good chance it’s Dr. Mark Gendreau, a senior staff physician at the Lahey Clinic in Burlington, Massachusetts.

Travel season can be a germ fest. Make sure to keep your hands clean.

Gendreau studies germiness while traveling, and he knows just how infectious travel can be.

“The risk of contracting a contagious illness is heightened when we travel within any enclosed space, especially during the winter months, when most of the respiratory viruses thrive,” Gendreau said.

Studies show that germs can travel easily on an airplane, where people are packed together like sardines.

For example, a woman on a 1994 flight from Chicago to Honolulu transmitted drug-resistant tuberculosis to at least six of her fellow passengers, according to a New England Journal of Medicine study.

In 2003, 22 people came down with SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome, from a single fellow passenger who had SARS but didn’t have any symptoms, according to another New England journal study.

But the airplane isn’t the only place along your travel route where germs thrive. Here are five ways to avoid germs while traveling.

1. Sit toward the front of the airplane

“Pick a seat near the front, since ventilation systems on most commercial aircraft provide better air flow in the front of the aircraft,” Gendreau advised. If you can afford it, sit in first class, where people aren’t so squished together.

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2. Don’t drink coffee or tea on an airplane

Monitoring by the Environmental Protection Agency shows that water in airplanes’ water tanks isn’t always clean — and coffee and tea are usually made from that water, not from bottled water, according to Victoria Day, a spokeswoman for the Air Transport Association.

The EPA advises anyone with a suppressed immune system or anyone who’s “concerned” about bacteria to refrain from drinking coffee or tea on an airplane.

“While boiling water for one minute will remove pathogens from drinking water, the water used to prepare coffee and tea aboard a plane is not generally brought to a sufficiently high temperature to guarantee that pathogens are killed,” according to the EPA’s Web site.

According to the EPA, out of 7,812 water samples taken from 2,316 aircraft, 2.8 percent were positive for coliform bacteria. Although that sounds like a small number, this means 222 samples contained coliform bacteria.

3. Sanitize your hands after leaving an airplane bathroom

A toilet on an airplane “is among the germiest that you will encounter almost anywhere,” said Charles Gerba, an environmental microbiologist at the University of Arizona who’s also known as “Dr. Germ.”

“You have 50 people per toilet, unless you are flying a discount airline; then it is 75,” Gerba said. “We always find E. coli on surfaces in airplane restrooms.”

You should wash your hands after using the restroom, but because the water itself might have harmful bacteria (see No. 2 above) and because the door handle on your way out has been touched by all those who went before you, Gendreau also advises sanitizing your hands when you return to your seat.

4. Wash or sanitize your hands after getting off an escalator

Gendreau says tests show that escalators in airports are full of germs.

Health Library
MayoClinic.com: Health Library
To confirm these tests, here’s a fun activity while you wait for your flight this Thanksgiving: Look at your watch, and count how many people get an escalator in a five-minute time period. Multiply that by 12, and you have how many people are on that escalator every hour.

High-volume handrails are why Gendreau sanitizes his hands as soon as he can after he exits an escalator.

5. Wash or sanitize your hands after using an ATM

Gendreau says ATMs, especially in busy places like airports, are full of germs. As with escalators, he sanitizes ASAP after using one.

Gendreau says that keeping healthy while traveling can be summed up in six words: “hand hygiene, hand hygiene, hand hygiene.”

Keeping your hands clean is crucial, he says, when you’re spending the day touching surfaces that have been touched by hundreds or thousands of people before you.

DID YOU KNOW THAT THE UNITED STATES IS THE LARGEST MARKET IN THE WORLD FOR DRUGS, BOTH LEGAL AND ILLEGAL. UNCLE SAM IS ABSOLUTELY HOOKED ON DRUGS…..AND SHOULD WE BE SURPRISED ABOUT THEIR USE BY TEEN ATHLETES? NOT AT ALL?

FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES…..

November 28, 2008
High Schools Take On Doping With No Consensus on Strategy

By JERÉ LONGMAN

OPELOUSAS, La. — The sheriff of St. Landry Parish announced in July that an undercover investigation of area gyms had produced the largest anabolic steroid bust ever in this rural Cajun county.

In an investigation that has identified about 100 suspected steroid users and 15 dealers in the county, 10 people have been arrested, including two former high school football players, the sheriff said. He added that of those 100 suspected users, as many as 20 were high school athletes. That number stunned educators and law enforcement officials who had considered performance-enhancing drugs to be more of a big-city problem.

“I think there’s more steroid use, after talking to my investigators, in sports activities than originally thought,” said Bobby J. Guidroz, the sheriff of St. Landry Parish, population 90,000, about two hours west-northwest of New Orleans.

The use of muscle-building steroids by teenagers is of particular concern because it can prematurely close growth plates, doctors say. But throughout the country, efforts to deter performance-enhancing drug use among high school athletes have had indeterminate success, leaving doping experts and school officials wondering how best to tackle a problem that is not always readily apparent.

Drug testing is expensive, scattered and full of loopholes. Some believe that education is a better preventive measure than testing, but experts question methods frequently used to inform athletes about the health hazards and ethical considerations of doping.

In Cajun country and elsewhere, law enforcement officers and antidoping experts say, the problem can be exacerbated by coaches and parents who allow or even encourage their children to use steroids in hopes of building championship seasons and winning college scholarships.

Sheriff Guidroz said his investigators received tips — never confirmed — that one coach in St. Landry Parish and another coach who had left the county encouraged athletes to use steroids. A former strength and conditioning coach for the girls’ basketball team in Oregon City, Ore., was fired in May as part of an ongoing federal investigation into whether he sold steroids to a police officer in Canby, Ore. No charges have been filed.

Some studies indicate that the use of anabolic steroids is in decline in high schools. A survey by the University of Michigan revealed that 2.2 percent of the nation’s 12th graders admitted in 2007 that they had used steroids at least once, down from 4 percent in 2002. And school districts report more urgent problems with alcohol and recreational drugs like marijuana. Still, many antidoping experts said they believed the numbers on steroid use were significantly underreported, especially in sports like football that put a premium on strength.

“What I’m getting from school districts and from pediatricians who do annual physicals is they’re irate about these kids getting bigger and bigger — 10 or 20 pounds heavier, all buffed up — and they really want something done,” said Don Catlin, the chief executive of Anti-Doping Research, a nonprofit firm in Southern California.

Charles Yesalis, a retired Penn State professor and an expert on performance-enhancing drugs, said: “We could well be past the point — unless something dramatic happens, like 20 kids dying — of doing anything about this. I’m not even sure people want to take care of the problem, in their heart of hearts.”

For decades, high school officials have been “ostriches with their heads in the sand,” Yesalis said, trying to convince themselves that a steroid problem does not exist.

“These drugs are readily available, kids can afford them and they work,” he added. “The few states that have instituted testing systems have set them up to fail. It’s mainly to make coaches and parents feel good. That’s too bad. A decent, rigorous level of testing would work better in high school than in college or the pros.”

Only three states — New Jersey, Texas and Illinois — have mandatory drug testing of high school athletes. Florida halted its program this year after losing $100,000 in funding from its state legislature because of budget cuts related to the economic downturn. Because the tests are so expensive — they can cost up to $200 or $300 each — states generally do not test a large number of athletes or monitor the same range of performance-enhancing drugs as, say, the Olympics.

“The biggest hurdle is the cost,” said Bob Gardner, the chief operating officer of the National Federation of State High School Associations.

Illinois and New Jersey, the first state to begin mandatory testing, in 2006, test athletes only when they reach postseason competition. When athletes know they will be tested, antidoping experts say, a screening becomes more of an I.Q. test than a drug test. Even at the high school level, athletes are sophisticated enough to know when to stop taking a cycle of steroids and how to quickly flush the drugs from their system or mask them, experts say.

New Jersey has reported two positives among 1,000 athletes tested the last two years.

Texas performs random, unannounced testing of athletes, both during the season and out of season. But that system is hardly foolproof, either. Like New Jersey and Illinois, Texas does not test athletes during the summer, when athletes can bulk up illicitly without fear of detection. And its testing system has raised much skepticism. Some 10,000 of Texas’ 700,000 high school athletes were screened as part of a $3 million program during the 2007-8 school year, but only two positive tests were reported.

It can be a mistake to conclude that the program is not working because of the paucity of positive results, experts caution. Perhaps the tests served as a deterrent. But more likely, some antidoping researchers believe, there was a flaw in Texas’ testing protocol, such as testing too few athletes in sports like football, screening for too few drugs or providing too much advance notice for the tests.

The University Interscholastic League, which governs high school sports in Texas, said there was insufficient data after one year to know whether the program was effective at catching or deterring drug users. Another 30,000 to 40,000 athletes will be tested this school year.

“Something’s wrong,” said Dr. Gary I. Wadler, a New York University internist and the chairman of the World Anti-Doping Agency’s committee on prohibited substances. Two positive tests in Texas, a state where high school football is hugely popular, and where a border is shared with Mexico, from which many steroids enter the United States, “seems virtually impossible,” Wadler said.

Dr. Linn Goldberg, the head of the division of health promotion and sports medicine at Oregon Health and Science University, was the co-author of a study last year in the Journal of Adolescent Health that showed testing did not deter high school athletes from using performance-enhancing drugs. Teenagers can feel immortal in taking risks and challenging authority, Goldberg said. And so few athletes were tested, he said, they knew the chances of being caught were “infinitesimally small.”

Instead, Goldberg stresses educational programs that he and associates developed, called Atlas and Athena. But federal funding even for educational programs can be difficult to obtain. For instance, Goldberg said that $15 million had been earmarked for education annually for six years by the 2004 Anabolic Steroid Control Act, yet “not one penny has been put forward.”

So Goldberg has partnered with 16 teams in the N.F.L. A two-year, $2.6 million initiative funded by the league will reach 40,000 kids and 1,500 coaches with the Atlas and Athena programs this year, he said. But Goldberg cautioned that some methods frequently used by schools did not work, including the use of pamphlets, adult lectures and scare tactics.

Effective education, he said, involved children encouraging other children to avoid performance-enhancing drugs, and athletes being provided with alternative ways to gain weight and strength through proper nutrition and training techniques.

“You can’t believe how much coaches don’t know about proper sports nutrition,” Goldberg said.

Some experts remain skeptical about the efficacy of education alone. Without effective testing, they say, education is essentially a folly because performance-enhancing drugs are so seductive and effective. “I don’t think a simple education program works for hard-core athletes,” Catlin of Anti-Doping Research said.

Instead, Catlin proposes for high schools what he has long proposed for Olympic and professional athletes — the creation of so-called biological passports that track chemical markers in athletes over a long period. A successful program would require doctors to track these markers and pass that information into a central data bank, Catlin said.

“You wouldn’t use it to take kids to court, but in high school you don’t want to take kids to court,” Catlin said. “You want to identify them and show that there is another way to go about life.”

Here in St. Landry Parish, the six public high schools can test 10 percent of their athletes three times a year for recreational drugs. During those three testing periods, the schools are allowed to screen one athlete for performance-enhancing drugs. “That’s not much of a deterrent,” said Gardner of the National Federation of State High School Associations.

The cost of wider testing is prohibitive, said Donnie Perron, the athletic director for St. Landry Parish schools, who favors an enhanced education program. So far, the most effective deterrent in the county seems to be the vigilance of coaches.

Tom Andrus, the football coach at St. Edmund’s of Eunice, a power among Louisiana’s small schools, said that he had suspended two players in the last two years after failed drug screens. One came under suspicion because he frequently appeared irritated, Andrus said, while the other player seemed too bulk up too quickly.

Paul Trosclair, the football coach at Eunice High, a Class 4A power, said that sudden weight gain had also made him suspicious of one of his players two or three years ago. The player failed a drug screen and his mother became defensive, Trosclair said. “She kind of knew what was going on,” he said. “I think she might have put her head in the sand.”

For reasons of vanity or gaining a quick advantage, high school athletes can turn to steroids, Trosclair said. In particular, he said, coaches should be careful when they tell players to get bigger.

“They feel pressure,” Trosclair said. “Coach wants me to get bigger. I want to be in the starting lineup. What’s the best way to get there? They go into health clubs and some guy off the street says, ‘We can get you bigger, faster.’ There you go, you have a problem.”

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company