Happy New Year!

Happy new year from the least-trusted name in news! After missing December (finals will do that to you), we're back in action, looking forward to a new year of clogging up the blogosphere. Everyone ought to be in vacation mode for another couple of days at least--I certainly am--so today's issue is going to be relatively polemic-free. I'll also try to take a little vacation from the level of inscrutability I've been hearing that I normally operate at. No sense making all of you work any harder than necessary over the holidays. Without further ado, a couple of quick-hit thoughts and the first Ten Things of '10.

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Coffeenerdness: as if I wasn't caffeinated enough beforehand, I've added to my usual student's caffeine problem by working at a coffee shop on campus. Knowing me, I've gone whole hog and started actually taking an interest in coffee and learning how and why it's "good" or "bad," which was about the depth of criticism I could achieve before this fall. I'll still take a black coffee over a latte any day, but at least I know how to make all that espresso stuff now. Which leads us to the best coffees I've experienced in a long time. I decided I'd put my newfound knowledge to good use and buy some quality coffee for Christmas this year (ostensibly for my parents), and went with holiday blends from Counter Culture and Raven's Brew. I'm nobody's salesman or corporate rep, but those are some damn good brews. Counter Culture is a Carolina-based company that I found in my favorite shop in Washington; Raven's Brew is out in Washington state and was the first cup of coffee I found after wandering out of the woods and onto Main St. of Lander, WY this summer. I remembered it fondly and bought a pound of their Santa Caws holiday blend. Counter Culture's a little darker, Raven's Brew is a little sweeter. Mixed the two one morning and found the combo platter better still. Both are highly recommended if you ever feel the urge to venture beyond the Evil Empire (aka Starbucks).

Goat of the Week: Mike Leach, ex-head coach of Texas Tech football. This speaks to two big issues in the college game today: concussions, and the ridiculousness of coaching these days. In a season in which we've seen one coach already canned for hitting a player (Mark Mangino of Kansas) and another (Florida's Urban Meyer) resign for health reasons and then un-resign less than 24 hours later after watching one "spirited practice," Leach gets the Goat award for the whole shebang. Accused of locking a player in a dark equipment room for hours when the player wouldn't play after being concussed, Leach's camp has trotted out all sorts of legal and medical experts saying he did nothing wrong. First of all, Leach probably should have realized what a boneheaded idea locking James up was, given that his father Craig is an ESPN analyst. No matter what the backstory (Leach claims the younger James was soft and that Craig kept lobbying inappropriately for his son to get more playing time), you don't mess with anyone or anything connected to the Worldwide Leader and win. Concussions are for real, and they're here to stay as an issue. Coaches at all levels are going to have to reset their priorities and expectations, as will players. Additionally, something has got to be going wrong when a coach thinks he can pull some kind of Guantanamo Bay crap with his players for any reason at all. So it didn't medically harm James. So what? This is a college kid we're talking about. Theoretically, he's there to go to school (in spite of the NCAA)--maybe taking care of his brain isn't the worst idea.

Ten Things I Think I Think:

1. I think I got a couple of books for Christmas that are worth passing along. First was Peter King's Monday Morning Quarterback book. MMQB is the home of the original Ten Things, out of which this blog has evolved over the course of several years. If you're interested in NFL football, it's a fun and easy read. At least, it's fun for me to have a signed copy of the book of the column that started it all in hand! Second, John Ed Bradley's It Never Rains in Tiger Stadium is a moving memoir of a former LSU football player trying to come to grips with life beyond the game. "It ends for everyone, sooner or later," Bradley writes, noting how everyone deals with that ending is always different and hardly ever easy. It's been a while since I stepped between the sidelines of a lacrosse field with a helmet on, but that's still something I think about every day. Undeniably a football book, to be sure, but it really speaks to the experience of losing something that's defined a life, with plenty more of that life still to live.

2. I think this is my political thought of the week: Earth to GOP--here's the actual conservative position on health care: OK, we get it; we're the richest country on Earth by a long shot and it's a disgrace that we don't provide basic health care to all citizens. That should be fixed. However, since conservatism is about moving forward at a responsible pace, we (the GOP) refuse to play ball until you (the Democrats) come up with a legitimate tax and expenditure proposal that actually stands a chance of getting this country out of debt. (Note: yes, conservatives historically DO try to move forward. They DON'T simply block everything in sight for the hell of it, a la today's Republican senators.) That's all that needs to be said. No anonymous holding, no porking, no filibustering. It would raise taxes, but it would also demand a realistic budget. Dems get healthcare for all, Reps get responsible fiscal policy. Everyone (and not just on the Hill) wins.

3. I think, when I'm wearing my Patriots-fan hat, that I'm really happy that Indy threw that game against the Jets and put the 19-0 stuff to bed for another year. Ok, so I'm still sore about 18-1 in 2007 and I'm less than thrilled that the '72 Dolphins get to pop more champagne, but I'm always happy to see the Colts lose. However, if I'm pretty much anywhere else in the country, but especially in the League offices in New York, I think I'm pretty concerned. Indy's ticket-holders are pissed, and rightfully so. Season tickets cost thousands, single-games hundreds. Who on Earth wants to throw that kind of money on a game like that that looked like some August sleeper? I understand that starters need rest and I know the Super Bowl is the ultimate goal. Still, paying full freight for that game is like paying regular-season prices for the exhibition games (another absurd policy). Fans won't stand for that long.

4. I think it's time for a college football playoff. Everyone in the country from President Obama to the fans who get screwed every year thinks that's so, except for the BCS people themselves. You're telling me that the "national champion" contenders should be picked by a computer?! Remind me again how that's a sport?

5. I think I'm interested to hear what Vin Ferrara has to say to congress on Monday. Vin is a Harvard grad who's invented a new football helmet called the Xenith that is now making its way into the market at all levels as a supposedly better anti-concussion product than the Riddel that's currently the top dog. I know Vin and the majority of his extended family, and Taylor wore one of his helmets this past football season. Having spoken to his sister-in-law and coworker on Christmas Eve, I learned that he's got five minutes to stand in front of a congressional committee and say whatever he wants to. That's likely to be a long, sweaty five minutes in the life of the NFL.

6. I think that even though I've only seen two movies in recent memory, they were both great, and there are a bunch more I'm dying to see soon. Over Thanksgiving I caught "The Blind Side" in New York, and I just saw "Invictus" here at home. The former is a great personal interest/football story; the latter is an A- human interest/rugby film. Both are held up by their lead actors--Sandra Bullock in "The Blind Side" and Morgan Freeman in an epic turn as Nelson Mandela in "Invictus." I've heard good things about "Avatar," "Up In The Air," and a couple of other new releases. Hope to catch at least one more before I go back to school.

7. I think "Invictus," despite some of its filming flaws (way too much elephantine, super slo-mo rugby shots towards the end) made such a great impression on me because it does a tremendous job of showing the motivational, inspirational, even transcendental qualities of both sports and politics. As anyone who's read this column or who knows me would know, those are the two topics I know best and get most excited about. Seeing a country as fragile as South Africa pull together around a national team is a pretty inspiring message, as is seeing a political leader and an athletic leader compare notes on leadership and come to depend on one another in the way Mandela and Francois Pienaart (the Sprinboks' captain, played by Matt Damon) do in the film. For me, that's a terrific reminder of why I care about both sports and politics, how much I like to see them coexist in such an uplifting way (Patriots winning the first post-9/11 Super Bowl, anyone?), and why they're both such great topics to follow.

8. I think 20 sounded pretty damn old not too long ago, but I'm having to come to grips with it pretty quick. I'll be kicking off my third decade two weeks from Sunday (a Patriots win would be nice...)

9. I think it will be interesting to see how 2009 goes down in the history books once and for all. There's a lot of "most important year ever" talk swirling; I'd certainly say it was an interesting and momentous year. Think about it--we've gone from 01/20/09 (Bush's last day/Obama's first day) to the doorstep of America's first comprehensive health-care plan. That's a lot of water under the bridge, and that's only in the political realm.

10. I think that's as much as I can get away with in what I promised would be a somewhat shorter, lighter, hopefully-not-a-half-hour-commitment commitment, but there's one last thing that needs saying at this point. Namely, I think everyone who's ever read this, thought about it, passed it along to a friend, followed it (all two of you!), emailed a response, or interacted with any Thought, Ruffle, or Flourish in the last year or so (yes, we'll be one year old on January 19!), deserves a big thank-you. Every so often, someone or something reminds me how much fun it is to produce this thing and what a great platform it's been. The sense I've gotten is that people seem to be enjoying what I've got to say almost as much as I've been enjoying the saying of it. Hopefully that's true and both sides continue on that path. It's been a remarkably long road since I decided to rip off an NFL writer's idea to "creatively express" myself on a Yale application sometime in the fall of '07 (yep, I was rejected), incubated the idea through an endless stream of weekly creative writing submissions in senior English class (sorry, Gallagher!), wrote a bunch of obscenely long emails, and then took the almost year-old plunge into blog-land. It's been fun, and I'm pretty satisfied with the way it's turned out. I think--no, I know--that I'm looking forward to another year of this thing, and I'd love to see circulation and interaction increase going forward. Email it around, play with the comment button, drop me an email, whatever. Have fun with it!

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Here's wishing all of you a happy and healthy new year! Hope it's all you're hoping for, whatever that may be. Let's kick the new decade off on an auspicious note! (Bonus points to whoever submits a good name for it--is it "twenty-ten," "ten," "oh-ten," or something else?)