Why the Celtics should trade the Big 3

It's sad to even write, but sometimes, what is most difficult, is the right decision. The Celtics have not been the same since Ray Allen sex tweeted, and lost the focus to hit open jumpers. Paul Pierce had more fun at the all-star game untying people's shoes and winning the 3point contest than winning playoff games, and Kevin Garnett scored 9 points last night in Sacramento. Something needs to give.

I have this fear that the Celtics, if they do not make smart decisions, will digress into the Celtics from 1994- 2007. The best part of those years was seeing Antoine Walker in the parking lot in Waltham, MA and my friend offering him a cheeseburger from Mcdonalds. It was the one time in his life he turned down Mcdonalds, and then he did the wiggle back to his car.

Now that the Cavs just traded for Antawn Jamison, they are unstoppable. They are the best team in the NBA, and the Celtics will not beat them. If the Celtics trade now, they can get draft picks and players that will get them back to the NBA Finals sooner, rather than fourteen years later. With Rajon Rondo, Big Baby, and Perkins, they will still be an exciting team to watch, with a lot more potential. It is always more fun to think about a brighter future, than to painfully watch as the Celtics over the hill players struggle to beat the Kings.

Danny Ainge, do something crazy, and pull the trigger.

Jerry West to Mark Twain

I got a haircut today on Mass Ave in North Cambridge. The barber was 47, a Laker fan because "Jerry West was the best player ever,"and in 1984 joined the US army and was stationed in Germany.

According to Wikipedia, we have 50 Military Installations in Germany

One is called Mark Twain Village. Mark Twain was a pacifist,

He once wrote,

"Statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception."

So I doubt he would be pleased if he knew a military base was named after him, least of all in Germany. Despite knowing the language, he called it "awful." On February 3, author of the new book about Twain's late chapters in life speaks emphatically about this subject, and many more on NPR.

This post is random and some would say unnecessary. In college, I had to do an exercise in Creative Writing, where you emulate an author's writing style. This writing is based on Dan Shaughnessy's "Picking up where we left off."

What 6/11 teaches us

On September 11th, everyone remembers where they were when they heard planes had (deliberately) crashed into the World Trade Center Towers. First one, then the other, less than an hour later. It changed the course of our country's history. But there may have been a different date that shall remain as Roosevelt would say, "in infamy."

In Lawrence Wright's Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Looming Tower, he tells a story about a meeting on June 11th, 2001 that could have prevented the events on 9/11. The CIA was meeting with the FBI in New York City in order to share information about the U.S.S Cole bombing. At one point a photo was displayed of suspected terrorists. The FBI asked if anyone in the room knew any of these faces. The CIA members did, but did not have clearance to divulge the information. They did not want to turnover their case to the FBI, afraid they would give up their sources, and ruin their investigation. After yelling and shouting, all parties calmed down, and another name was brought up- Khalid al-Mihdhar. Two months later Mihdhar would be one of the five hijackers, but on June 11th, he was a name the CIA would not turnover. As Wright explains this photo presented "the fact that al-Qaeda was inside the US and planning to strike."

Throughout the last hundred pages of the book, Wright painfully details the sparring between the FBI and CIA that prevented a cohesive solution to handling intelligence that could have prevented 9/11. It is almost too much to bear to think of how different our country would be, and how many lives and dollars would not have been spent in two wars, if all the evidence was made transparent. While 9/11 teaches us about the dangers of religious extremity, 6/11 teaches us about the need for government agencies to work together and not let personalities get in the way of making our country safe.