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will overcome youth and skill. That was a favorite saying of the father of one of my best friends, who is very appropriately nicknamed Sly. After re-reading my last post, it occurred to me that another reason why challenging a man on the far side of the half-century does not seem unfair to me is that my sensei just turned 50 this year. He may not have the 17-inch biceps he had when I first met him, but I have no doubt that he can still wipe up the floor with me.

I remember the following exchange very clearly:

Sensei: You are fast. Faster than almost anyone I have ever seen.

Me: Then how come you always get in before I can?

Sensei: (smiles broadly) Because I know what you are going to do before you do it.

The ironic thing about this conversation was that he was paying this backhanded compliment while at the same time extending a hand to help me up from the floor after having dropped me with a rear-hand strike to the solar plexus. He was, and is, a deadly fighter. I once watched him absolutely destroy the 10th-ranked point fighter in the country – he could have easily been a champion if he did not disdain point fighting as a perversion of the art. His teaching was distinctive enough that when a friend and I visited another dojo while he was gone for a time, the instructor, a well-known Tang Soo Do champion, asked us if we were his students after only two rounds of sparring.

The week ends, and still no response from Mr. Franken or his press agent. I suppose he’s having too much fun heaping coals on a drug addict going into recovery to defend the manhood of the Democratic party. I was cranking up Creed on the way to the gym today and that, combined with the thought of going back into training mode, got me fired up to hit the weights hard. Topped out preacher curls with five reps at 120 today, which was the first time I’ve done that in a while. It felt so good that I’m thinking it might be time to get back with the whey protein.

A few people have emailed over the last two weeks to say that they think that it is unfair, or cowardly or somehow otherwise reprehensible to challenge a 51 year-old man. I disagree, as this argument entirely ignores the point that Mr. Franken himself was responsible for introducing the concept of adding a physical element to the political debate. No doubt after reading chapter 38 of Mr. Franken’s new book, Rich Lowry was wishing he had taken Mr. Franken up on his challenge.

Second, I’ll be perfectly happy to accept a challenge from any national media figure interested in a little banging after Mr. Franken responds in the affirmative to mine. What people don’t realize about full-contact fighters – and street brawlers, for that matter – is that they are not confident because of what they can do to you. They are confident because they not only know what to expect if things don’t go well, they know they can take it because they’ve experienced it before. I’ve been knocked out, I’ve had numerous bones broken and I’ve crawled across a concrete floor spitting blood while desperately trying to get air into my lungs. You see, I fully accept the possibility that Mr. Franken or another opponent might do a little damage here and there, but so what? It would hardly be the first time.

Just wondering… first the Los Angeles Times copped to it – before demonstrating it in spades with the timely Schwarzenegger hit – and now NPR is fessing up as well, albeit in a more defensive, mealy-mouthed manner. Don’t hold your breath waiting for anyone from the ABCNNBCBS* cabal to follow suit, though. Or the New York Times for that matter.

*CNN admitted they weren’t doing their job in Iraq; they did not admit to their open left-liberal bias.

Along with Ralph Wiley and the Sports Guy, Tuesday Morning Quarterback is the best thing about ESPN’s Page 2. TMQ, or Gregg Easterbrook, is also an editor of The New Republic, a left-liberal magazine of some regard. Although he did apologize for the way in which he felt he mangled his words, I don’t really see that he had anything for which to do so and I’m glad to see that he’s standing his ground on the substance, if not the style, of his remarks. Jews, no less than Christians, have a responsibility to answer to God for their actions and decisions, and I think it is eminently reasonable to question both Michael Eisner and Harvey Weinstein for their decision to inflict what is apparently a new low in movie-making violence on the American public. No executive – Christian, atheist or Jew – should be permitted to hide behind modern guilt over historical prejudices in an attempt to escape being held responsible for what appears to be another vicious assault on the values of our civilization.

The very notion that one needs to watch one’s tongue about implying that Jews, as opposed to Christians or atheists, are inordinately interested in money several hundred years after the Catholic prohibition on usury was broken is ridiculous. Jews have far more serious problems these days, for example, the fact that the schools in many Muslim countries are teaching another generation of children to believe that one day the trees will cry “O Muslim, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him!” And while the Euro elite sneers in scorn, hoping secretly that someone else will finish the job their grandfathers started.

But that’s just my opinion. As I’ve written before, the Jewish people, in addition to suffering the unwarranted hatred of the nations, have also been remarkably stupid at times with regards to their own self-preservation in the past. Why on earth would they be concerned now with the opinion of a Gregg Easterbrook, while Israeli leaders like Shimon Peres and Binyamin Ben-Eliezer are attempting to lead the Jewish people down the fatal path of Mordechai Rumkowski and Jacob Gens?

Once again, as always, the Sports Guy does not disappoint. I am not a Yankees fan and I hate to revel in schadenfreude, but the Sports Guy without the familiar Red Sox albatross hanging around his neck would be like Abbott without Costello.

As a sports fan, sometimes you know when bad things are about to happen. You recognize the depressing signs because you’ve been there before. So maybe that’s the real “curse,” those moments when you turn into Haley Joel Osment in the Sixth Sense . . . only you aren’t seeing dead people, you’re seeing a dead ballgame. And when it’s happening to thousands of fans all at once, the resulting collective karma kills your team.

(Does any of this make sense? Of course not. I’m completely insane. The Red Sox have driven me insane. It’s official.)

Meanwhile, the Vikings are 5-0 and the governor of Minnesota has ordered guards to the border, with orders to shoot Sports Illustrated photographers on sight. Take no chances, Gov. Pawlenty. Everyone saw what happened when they put Jake Plummer on the cover.

I wrote on the need for Linux migration before reading an interview with Bill Gates which did not change my opinion one little bit. Do you want control over what is going on inside your own computer? Tough cookies, cowboy:

Microsoft is also going to make sure that people install firewalls and updates by default…. From now on, Microsoft will install these patches automatically.

Bill’s claim that Windows gets patched quicker than Linux has also been vigorously contested, as one buglog posted recently showed that it took Microsoft, not the 24 or 40 hours as claimed by Bill, but 2000 hours, to patch a bug that cropped up in August.

So it looks like the government courts, having decided that it’s just fine to murder unborn babies, have now made the long-predicted next step of approving involuntary euthanasia by starving Terry Schiavo to death. And if you don’t think depriving someone who can’t feed herself is murder, then just don’t feed an infant for a few months and see if you’re charged with a crime – not that Dr. Peter Singer thinks there’s anything wrong with that. Apparently it’s been decided that we’re to go the way of Holland, where the doctors of death have been creating their own mini-massacre behind closed doors for almost 20 years now:

Euthanasia in The Netherlands is “beyond effective control”, according to a report which shows that one in five assisted suicides is without explicit consent. British opponents of assisted suicide say that the figures are a warning of the dangers of decriminalising euthanasia, as Holland did in 1984. By 1995 cases of euthanasia and assisted suicide in Holland had risen to almost 3 per cent of all deaths. The Dutch survey, reviewed in the Journal of Medical Ethics, looked at the figures for 1995 and found that as well as 3,600 authorized cases there were 900 others in which doctors had acted without explicit consent. A follow-up survey found that the main reason for not consulting patients was that they had dementia or were otherwise not competent.

Doesn’t anyone else see that there is a connection between these cardinal beliefs of the American left and their globalist counterparts?

1. There are too many people: (environmentalism, overpopulation worries, etc.)

2. Abortion must remain legal. (kill the unborn)

3. Irresponsible homosexual behavior must be indulged. (kill the queers)

4. Suicide and involuntary euthanasia must be made legal. (kill the incompetent and the unfit)

It makes sense, of course. If there are too many people, then why not just kill off the weak, the sick and the unproductive. Think of it as intelligent evolution in action, plus, it would surely keep Social Security solvent for another decade or two. And eventually they’ll get around to those pesky Jews, like they always do.

Joe Farah, as he so often does, hits them hard and hits them where it hurts. He’s absolutely right, too. If you care even a little bit about your kids, if you have any regard for them whatsoever, get them the (insert your favorite noun here) out of the public schools. Or, as they should more properly be called, the soulless, mind-killing, cog-in-the-machine-programming, government-run propaganda factories.

There’s a reason why Hitler, Marx and Lenin were all big fans of the public school concept, after all.

I just turned in next Monday’s column, a passionate screed on OS migration. I considered holding off on it until the column was running in the Dallas Morning News, but then I decided that it was perhaps a bit too technophilic for the poor unsuspecting readers of the Dallas editorial page. At least WND’s readers are used to me and my idiosyncracies by now.

I don’t mean to sound cruel, but I have to admit that despite my near complete disinterest in baseball, I’m kind of glad that the Cubs lost. From an outsider’s perspective, it would seem kind of a shame to cast aside such a long and distinguished record of failure. As for the Red Sox, the only question is whether the Sports Guy – may he live forever – would be more suicidal if they A) lost to the Yankees in Game 7 of the ALCS; or B) went on to the World Series and lost to the Marlins.

I’m going with (B). Florida is still an expansion team in the hearts and minds of baseball’s purists. You’d think, as a Vikings fan who can still remember crying his eyes out when the Vikes lost their fourth Super Bowl to Oakland, I’d have more sympathy. But I don’t.

By the way, did anyone else think it was funny that Tom Clancy matched up the Vikes against the Broncos in The Sum of All Terror? Of course, the joke has lost its punch now that Denver has two wins under their orange-and-blue belts. Tom, you know you should have gone with the Bills! I bet it still annoys him that he didn’t.