Time magazine's Joel Stein recently discovered that wine is now made in all 50 states. Some folks might shrug and move on, but Stein, an adventurous sort, at least wine-wise, decided to try one wine from each state and rate them. His rating system was simple. There was excellent, good, bad and undrinkable.
As anyone even vaguely win-familiar might guess, Washington, California and Oregon wines were all rated excellent. More surprising, to me anyway, Alaska and Montana wines were rated good and the Idaho wine Stein tasted was rated bad (without mention in the article of which wine it was).
I didn't even know Alaska made wine - Stein said Alaska doesn't ship its wine - it is made out of grapes from other states - including Washington. In many trips to Montana, when I lived in Ketchum Idaho, I never saw a bottle of Montana wine anywhere, not even in Missoula.
The only quibble I'd have with Stein's experiment is rating Idaho wine bad after a single bottle. I have had some wonderful, mostly white (it's a short growing season) Idaho wine. But there were some stinkers too and Stein must have picked the wrong vineyard for his test. Five years living with a destination restaurant owner in Sun Valley made me, a beer and shots guy, a red wine lover, and I'm jealous of Stein. A sketchy way to rate wine, maybe, but a great and fun idea.
I have noted here before that I was married for 12 years to an African-American, and that we had three children. I only mention this again because I am going to write about Tyrone Willingham, the lousy black football coach over at U-Dub. The Seattle Times' very good sports columnist, Jerry Brewer, wrote a long involved piece about Willingham the other day which seemed to chastise the folks calling for Ty's greying head. Brewer also seemed to be hinting, without saying it, that other factors (race?) might be at work.
You would never make me say race isn't still America's number one unspoken (not like during Ku Klux days) hot-button issue. It is. Slavery, inequality, gang bangers, affirmative action, it's all one big code word for black-white relations in my mind. That said, I believe Ty is still on the job primarily because he is an African-American. He was a good football coach at Stanford, a much less successful coach at Notre Dame, and he has, to put it bluntly, stunk up the joint at U-Dub. He is 11 and 27 as I type these words (11 and 28 after suffering a thorough 55-17 pounding by the Okalahoma Sooners - the worst showing in Willingham's tenure). I think if Ty was your standard burr-haircutted, ex-jock, white football coach, he'd have been gone last year. But in Seattle, where nobody but nobody wants to be accused of racism, even if their entire life screams decent liberal, the bosses at U-Dub are afraid of the silent accusation: 'They fired him because he's a brother.' Don't worry, cowardly athletic director and cowardly, big-bucks university president. Fire him; black or white, his good coaching days are far behind him, somewhere in Palo Alto.
Finally, news too horrible to make up. A jury in Dayton, Ohio, 60 miles north of my home town, Cincinnati, couldn't agree on a sentence in a murder trial last week. The jury's choice was life in prison or the death penalty. Since the jury couldn't decide, the judge sentenced 28-year-old China Arnold to life in prison without the chance of parole.
I've mentioned here before that after counseling criminals for the state of Washington, I became an advocate of the death penalty in certain horrific cases. I learned there are folks amongst us with no remorse and no feeling for others. This angers my liberal friends and cheers my conservative friends, who expressed some surprise, since in addition to pro-death penalty, I am pro-choice and pro-limited gun control (I favor long weapons for hunters and home protection, but believe pistols and semi-automatic weapons area crime in the hands of anybody other than cops).
China Arnold deserves the death penalty. Her crime? She put her infant daughter in the microwave and cooked the baby to death. I am not an overly bloodthirsty man and I have never killed anyone. But I would stand in for the great state of Ohio as China's executioner for free, as long as they paid my roundtrip airfare. There area folks so ungodly they don't deserve to share the air we breathe. Microwaved her own baby. Inhuman.[[In-content Ad]]
