Colts kinda stunk up the joint in their Lucas Oil premiere game, didn't they?
So for a week the Bears, not the Colts, are the Super Bowl contenders. Heck, having beaten Peyton Manning and with Tom Brady injured, maybe the Bears are Super Bowl favorites.
Surely I jest. Yes, surely I do. But the Bears are a week ahead of where they were expected to be in, say, December.
And the band kept playing "Nearer My God To Thee":
In a bombshell announcement in the world of sports journalism, star columnist Jay Mariotti has abruptly resigned from the Chicago Sun-Times.
Only after taping his last ESPN TV from the Sun-Times newsroom today did Mariotti open up.
Mariotti told CBS 2's Dorothy Tucker that he decided to quit after covering the Olympics in Beijing because newspapers are in serious trouble, and he did not want to go down with the ship.
I don't want to alarm anybody, but the International Olympic Committee has already narrowed the host for the 2016 summer games to a short list of four (Chicago, Tokyo, Rio and Madrid), and the list of bidders for the 2020 games is already growing -- India, Peru, Birmingham, Ala., and St. Petersburg, Fla., are definitely in already.
Thank goodness Michael Phelps won his eight gold medals. It would have been a shame to waste all that good hype. This is from the normally un-gushy Christian Science Monitor, under the headline "The Phelps Olympics: An epic fit for ancient Greece":
Almost without question, he is now “the greatest swimmer in history,” says David Wallechinsky, author of “The Complete Book of the Olympics.”
Journal Gazette cartoonist Dan Lynch and I were hang-out-on-break-together buddies, and we even got together a few times to mess around with guitars (he could actually play his). He used to describe one of his co-workers this way: "You know that governor you have in your head that tells you when to stop talking because you're in danger of going too far? And sometimes it even tells you not to speak at all?
Speaking of the Olympics, Indiana was home for a while to the first African American ever to win an Olympic gold medal.
I don't often agree with The Nation, but it's hard to argue with this:
When the International Olympic Committee formally awarded Beijing the privilege of hosting the 2008 Olympic Games seven years ago, they accepted assurances from the historically repressive government of China that the country would dramatically expand its commitment to protecting human rights within its borders.
[. . .]
China has failed.
The IOC has failed.
Let's keep reminding ourselves that, no matter how much Chinese officials polish up the place during the Olympics, China is not really a citizen-friendly nation:
Living in Beijing? The government wants to know your shoe size, blood group, political affiliation and where you get your money from, according to police in at least one corner of the security-obsessed Olympic host city.
[. . .]
The beginning of a story about the Olympics:
Four US Olympic cyclists who caused an outcry when they arrived at Beijing airport wearing smog masks have today apologised to Games organisers.
The four - Mike Friedman, Bobby Lee, Sarah Hammer and Jennie Reed - said that they were wearing the masks because of pollution fears, a touchy subject for the Chinese authorities.
And the beginning of the very next sentence:
