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Danica Patrick: Guts and Glory at the Indy 500

From Fox Sports:

Everywhere Danica Patrick goes at Indy, the crowds follow.

Some might be curious after seeing her red-hot photo shoots in magazines like FHM, but others might be hoping to catch a glimpse of the woman who could make history at the Indianapolis 500 this year as the first female winner of the 94-year-old race.

Just a rookie this year, the 23-year-old Patrick has been among the fastest drivers since practice began for the May 29 race. She qualified fourth and lost her shot at the pole only because of a bobble on the first turn of the first of four qualifying laps.

And the first woman to run in the Indianapolis 500 believes Patrick can be this year's champion.

"All the ingredients are in place," said Janet Guthrie, who caused a wave of interest nationally when she drove in the 500 for the first time in 1977, starting 26th and finishing 29th. "Danica is the first woman to arrive at the Speedway with top-notch equipment and the full backing of a winning team. And she has the talent and determination to make the most of her opportunity. Despite her inexperience at Indianapolis, there's no reason Danica can't win if she gets the right breaks on race day."

UPDATE (30-May-2005 14:00EDT): From the New York Times, here's the outcome of yesterday's riveting Indy 500, in which Danica Patrick electrified audiences with a truly gutsy performance:

Danica Patrick, a 23-year-old rookie who does not drive like one, rocketed into the lead with 10 laps left Sunday in the 89th Indianapolis 500, chasing away earlier misfortune and storming toward a first with each left-hand turn.

No woman had ever led the race, let alone won it. About 300,000 fans at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway clapped, pumped their fists and screamed, urging Patrick to hang on. She would have loved to, she said, but she also had to save fuel merely to finish the race.

Forced to conserve fuel because of a gamble by her team that she could make it to the end without an additional pit stop, Patrick was passed with six laps left by Dan Wheldon, a 26-year-old Briton who held on for his first Indy 500 victory. Patrick faded and finished fourth, behind Vitor Meira and Bryan Herta. [...]

She fell to 16th from 4th when she stalled her engine after a pit stop on the 79th lap of the 200-lap race, then spent the next 70 laps climbing back into the top 10.

"I'm going to be mad at myself for the stall," she said. [...]

Patrick had a close call on Lap 132, clipping wheels with Kosuke Matsuura. Later, as the field reached race speed after a caution period, Patrick made a mistake, abruptly lifting her foot off the gas pedal on the 155th lap to avoid hitting a car driven by Scott Sharp.

Her car went into a spin and had its left front wing knocked off. Her crew replaced the wing.

"I can't believe that my car didn't completely demolish because I got hit, like, twice," she said. "I spun it around, and I can't believe I kept the engine running. Somebody is sitting by my side."

To End the Insurgency, End the Occupation

Here's the executive summary of the Project for Defense Alternatives' recent research report, "Vicious Circle: The Dynamics of Occupation and Resistance in Iraq":

An examination of Iraqi public opinion data and interviews suggests that coalition military activity may be substantially contributing to Iraqi discontent and opposition. A "vicious circle" is indicated, whereby actions to curtail the insurgency feed the insurgency.

Public discontent is the water in which the insurgents swim. Polls show that a large majority of Iraqis have little faith in coalition troops and view them as occupiers, not liberators. There is significant support for attacks on foreign troops and a large majority of Iraqis want them to leave within a year. But attitudes about the occupation vary significantly among communities.

Kurds are uniquely positive about the occupation and postwar order. Sunnis express the strongest opposition. Shiites often represents a midway position. Like the Kurds, Shiites felt very positive about the 2005 election. However, regarding foreign troops: Shiite opinion is closer to Sunni, although it varies in accord with coalition military action.

A mix of nationalism and the desire to avenge some wrong or humiliation is apparent in interviews with Iraqis who oppose the occupation. One relevant factor is the war's death toll. Since March 2003, approximately 30,000 Iraqis have died due to military and terrorist activity. An additional 30,000 may have died due to the war's indirect effects, including increased criminal violence. Twenty-two percent of households report having been "directly affected by violence". The incidence of such reports is three times higher among Sunnis than Kurds and almost twice as high among Shiites as Kurds.

Ten percent of Iraqis report having had "very negative" encounters with coalition forces. Fifty-eight percent claim that US forces behave badly. But US troops face a difficult dilemma. Their mission involves intrusive and coercive measures, which stimulate opposition. Occupation duty, like war, is beset by "fog" and "friction" that contribute to errors. In this circumstance, the goal of "force protection" gains precedence over "winning hearts and minds", which further increases tensions and mishaps.

Overall: there is a correlation between Iraqis' experiences of violence, negative appraisals of US troops, and support for insurgent attacks. The geographic pattern of coalition military activity corresponds with the distribution of these attitudes, which peak in Sunni areas and Baghdad. As much as 80 percent of US military activity during the occupation has focused on Baghdad and Sunni areas.

Initially, postwar military activity aimed to assert US control locally, capture regime personnel, and curtail possible supporters of the former regime, including tribal leaders. But there were significant collateral effects. Support for the coalition subsequently plummeted and insurgent activity surged, increasing three- or four-fold during the first year. Polls in June 2004 showed that the chief reasons for the sharp negative turn in Iraqi opinion were (in order): Abu Ghraib, the Falluja attack, "bad" or violent behavior by troops, and the failure to provide security.

A series of deadly incidents and accidents in spring and summer 2003 may have been pivotal in consolidating anti-coalition sentiment among Sunnis. More important: several incidents involving Sunni tribal leaders and former Iraqi soldiers protesting for back pay may have been key in boosting insurgent activity and organization.

Sophia Stewart: Original Prophetic Author of "The Matrix"?

This is a mind-boggler of outrageously surreal proportions (via Jose): It appears that the Hollywood screenwriters, producers, and studio executives who created "The Matrix" movie trilogy knowingly lifted core story components — premises, characters, metaphysical concepts, aesthetic themes — from a 1981 illustrated manuscript entitled "The Third Eye" by Sophia Stewart [left].

From what I understand, here's how it went down: In 1986, the Wachowski brothers placed an ad in a national magazine, soliciting manuscripts for a sci-fi comic book. In response, Ms. Stewart submitted her dense avant-garde spiritual epic "The Third Eye", which she'd copyrighted in 1983 [below right]. After receiving her manuscript, the Wachowski brothers never got back in touch with Ms. Stewart.

Subsequently, Ms. Stewart's work served as a central basis for both "The Terminator" and "The Matrix" movies, which mesmerized hundreds of millions of film fans around the world and generated several billion dollars in ticket and merchandise sales. Just as significantly, "The Matrix" revolutionized the aesthetic and literary standards of action epics, inspiring a cult-like following and generating tomes of impassioned intellectual debate about its metaphysical and theological symbolism. The Wachowski brothers were universally heralded as geniuses.

Ms. Stewart never saw "The Terminator" and was unaware that her work was being used until she saw "The Matrix" in 1999, after which she filed a lawsuit against the Wachowskis, Joel Silver, and Warner Brothers. The lawsuit triggered an FBI investigation which allegedly found that "The Third Eye" was openly accessed and referenced in creative sessions during the making of "The Matrix" and "The Terminator" movies.  Apparently, witnesses came forward from within Warner Brothers, confirming that writers and lawyers at the studio were fully aware that they were working from material which they'd received no permission to use. Indeed, it appears that studio lawyers made a slew of last-minute changes to the movie, removing some 30 minutes of footage, for the specific purpose of disguising the film's relationship to "The Third Eye".

As tellingly as anything, the Wachowski brothers have always refused to conduct any public interviews about "The Matrix". In a fascinating interview on Playahata.com, Ms. Stewart explains:

This idea that they don’t do interviews is crazy. When have you ever heard of such a thing? This is one of the hottest movies of all time and they just don’t want to talk about it. They can’t talk about what they don’t understand, these high concepts that I have laid out, which came from years of study ... I can duplicate my Matrix concepts. The Wachowski brothers have no other bodies of work like The Matrix. They have Bound and some other assassin movie they did. I have been writing for a long time. I worked on Janet Jackson's first television feature scripts called My Special Love and Blue Short. I received my degree in journalism from City University of New York in 1979. I moved to California to study cinema at USC Film school, the same school that George Lucas and Steven Spielberg went to. I have studied writing under some of the most famous authors and writers in the world such as Max Segall, Emille Capouya, Paul Cherry, etc. To my knowledge the Wachowski brothers did not even go to film school.

Ms. Stewart continues:

The Terminator and The Matrix are actually one book. That’s my Third Eye manuscript ... Terminator starts from the front of my book. Matrix starts from the back ... The Third Eye is an epic, my book spans three time frames: the past, the present, and the future. Those films do the same thing. The child in the first Terminator who is born to the pregnant Sarah Connor grows up to be the same as the grown man character in The Matrix called Neo. It’s that chosen one, savior concept. Matrix starts in the future, when technology has taken over. The Terminator was sent to kill the child who was prophesized to destroy the machines. That intersects directly with Neo as being The One prophesized to bring the machine reign to an end. One critic who is unaware of my lawsuit called the movies cousins, but they are actually one and the same in the original.

And some further wild stuff from Underground News Network:

The Matrix in the Bible means the womb. When you say The Third Eye, it's the eye of God, the eye of Horus, and when you look into The Terminator, it's the end time revelation. The end, that's right; and The Matrix is the womb hidden in the womb, and you come out of the womb into consciousness, truth ... Nebukadnezar is in the book of Daniel. Revelations is Daniel also, it's the last book of Revelation, but the book of Daniel also speaks of end times. Now when they were looking at my work, they were getting certain references, and the only thing they could figure out, 'Well, let's deal with the book of Daniel', because they can understand that a little bit more than the last book, which is Revelations, they can't understand most of the symbolism which is so much deeper than the book of Daniel ... so they understand a little bit, but they didn't understand enough.

Listen to Sophia Stewart being interviewed by Da Ghetto Tymz [.wav].

UPDATE / CORRECTION (23-May-2005 20:12EDT): Turns out I got the timeline a bit twisted up in the 2nd and 3rd paragraphs of my post. As best I can tell, here's how it went...

1979: Stewart begins work on "The Third Eye" while studying at USC film school. She fashions the work as a science fiction rendering of the Book of Revelations.

1981: Stewart submits a treatment for "The Third Eye" to Warner Brothers.

1983: Stewart completes "The Third Eye" (including graphic illustrations, character analysis, special effects, synopsis, and detailed screen treatment) and files a federal copyright to protect the finished work. She submits her manuscript to Warner Brothers and 20th Century Fox.

1984: "The Terminator" is released by Orion Pictures, which was formed in 1978 as a joint venture between Warner Brothers and three former top-level executives of United Artists.

1986: Stewart submits her manuscript to the Wachowskis in response to a magazine ad.

1999: "The Matrix" is released by Warner Brothers.

UPDATE 2 (2006-09-25 01:38EST): From Snopes.com:

Stewart's case was dismissed in June 2005 when she failed to show up for a preliminary hearing of her case. In a 53-page ruling, Judge Margaret Morrow of the Central District Court of California dismissed the suit, saying Stewart and her attorneys had not entered any evidence to bolster its key claims or demonstrated any striking similarity between her work and the accused directors' films. As of this writing, Stewart's case is no longer before the courts. She has announced that she does not plan to let the matter drop, so possibly this case will someday be re-filed and heard, but for now it is over.

Sophia Stewart's Wikipedia page (which didn't exist at the time I originally posted this piece) adds:

Stewart is not the first person to make a claim that the Terminator films lifted their material from other sources: shortly after the release of the first Terminator film, the author Harlan Ellison sued Terminator director and producer James Cameron due to the alleged similarity between the plot of the film and two scripts that Ellison had written for the TV show The Outer Limits. Ellison and Cameron settled out of court, and the video release of the first film now contains a credit to Ellison in the closing credits. Perhaps relevantly, both of the Outer Limits scripts in question ("Soldier" and "Demon with a Glass Hand") were written between 1963 and 1965.

Equally there are numerous other claims surrounding what inspired the Matrix, including Grant Morrison's claims that it was all lifted from his comic book series The Invisibles. In an interview [7] he has stated "The truth of that one is that design staff on The Matrix were given Invisibles collections and told to make the movie look like my books... It's not some baffling 'coincidence' that so much of The Matrix is plot by plot, detail by detail, image by image, lifted from Invisibles so there shouldn't be much controversy. The Wachowskis nicked The Invisibles and everyone in the know is well aware of this fact but of course they're unlikely to come out and say it."

All of which demonstrates how difficult it is pinning down one specific work of fiction as an inspiration for another.

For me, the most convincing evidence that the Wachoskis lifted Ms. Stewart's work lies in the intellectual content of her spoken words in contrast with the Wachowski brothers' apparent silence on the matter. Stewart demonstrates a clear, fluent grasp of the high metaphysical concepts that made The Matrix such a compelling piece of avant-garde film-making. My impression is the Wachowski brothers are brilliant action directors and visual stylists, but not authors of original prophetic symbolism.

Land of Fake News

As usual, the US corporate media is totally missing the boat on the big political story of the day, utterly misframing and misreporting the anti-US protests that have broken out in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The bums and chumps who bring us the fake news on CNN, Fox News, and wherever else they peddle their cheesy wares, are seriously getting just about everything wrong on this one: (1) they think the protests are about one little report in Newsweek magazine, but many Muslims object to a number of aspects of US imperial power; (2) they're characterizing the protests themselves as "violent", when in fact the worst violence (i.e. human deaths) has been caused by police and US soldiers firing on protesters; and (3) they're saying that Newsweek is admitting that its report about US soldiers putting a Koran in a toilet was wrong, but in fact that story is still probably accurate and is easily corroborated from multiple sources.

From the US Department of State:

The chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff says a report from Afghanistan suggests that rioting in Jalalabad on May 11 was not necessarily connected to press reports that the Quran might have been desecrated in the presence of Muslim prisoners held in U.S. custody at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. 

Air Force General Richard Myers told reporters at the Pentagon May 12 that he has been told that the Jalalabad, Afghanistan, rioting was related more to the ongoing political reconciliation process in Afghanistan than anything else.

According to initial reports, the situation in Jalalabad began on May 10 with peaceful student protests reacting to a report in Newsweek magazine that U.S. military interrogators questioning Muslim detainees at the Guantanamo detention center “had placed Quran s on toilets, and in at least one case flushed a holy book.”  By the following day the protests in the city had turned violent with reports of several individuals killed, dozens wounded, and widespread looting of government, diplomatic and nongovernmental assets.

However, Myers said an after-action report provided by U.S. Army Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry, commander of the Combined Forces in Afghanistan, indicated that the political violence was not, in fact, connected to the magazine report.

From Antiwar.com:

Contrary to White House spin, the allegations of religious desecration at Guantanamo published by Newsweek on May 9, 2005, are common among ex-prisoners and have been widely reported outside the United States. Several former detainees at the Guantanamo and Bagram prisons have reported instances of their handlers sitting or standing on the Koran, throwing or kicking it in toilets, and urinating on it. Prior to the Newsweek article, the New York Times reported a Guantanamo insider asserting that the commander of the facility was compelled by prisoner protests to address the problem and issue an apology.

One such incident (during which the Koran was allegedly thrown in a pile and stepped on) prompted a hunger strike among Guantanamo detainees in March 2002. Regarding this, the New York Times in a May 1, 2005, article interviewed a former detainee, Nasser Nijer Naser al-Mutairi, who said the protest ended with a senior officer delivering an apology to the entire camp. [...] (Neil A. Lewis and Eric Schmitt, "Inquiry Finds Abuses at Guantanamo Bay," New York Times, May 1, 2005.) [...]

The toilet incident was reported in the Washington Post in a 2003 interview with a former detainee from Afghanistan:

"Ehsannullah, 29, said American soldiers who initially questioned him in Kandahar before shipping him to Guantanamo hit him and taunted him by dumping the Koran in a toilet. 'It was a very bad situation for us,' said Ehsannullah, who comes from the home region of the Taliban leader, Mohammad Omar. 'We cried so much and shouted, "Please do not do that to the Holy Koran."' (Marc Kaufman and April Witt, "Out of Legal Limbo, Some Tell of Mistreatment," Washington Post, March 26, 2003.)

Also citing the toilet incident is testimony by Asif Iqbal, a former Guantanamo detainee who was released to British custody in March 2004 and subsequently freed without charge:

"The behavior of the guards towards our religious practices as well as the Koran was also, in my view, designed to cause us as much distress as possible. They would kick the Koran, throw it into the toilet, and generally disrespect it." (Center for Constitutional Rights [.pdf], Aug. 4, 2004.) [...]

Desecration of the Koran was also mentioned by former Guantanamo detainee Abdul Rahim Muslim Dost and reported by the BBC in early May 2005. (Haroon Rashid, "Ex-Inmates Share Guantanamo Ordeal," May 2, 2005.)

The Downing Street Memo

Looks like the "Downing Street memo" story, which broke in the Times of London on May 1st, is finally starting to get some attention in the US mainstream media. Now obviously, this story isn't important to the point of being all-consuming national television news in the manner of, say, celebrity trials or missing white girls; but at least it did receive a mention in the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and (finally!) the New York Times; here's an excerpt from Paul Krugman's latest column:

There has been notably little U.S. coverage of the "Downing Street memo" -- actually the minutes of a British prime minister's meeting on July 23, 2002, during which officials reported on talks with the Bush administration about Iraq. But the memo, which was leaked to The Times of London during the British election campaign, confirms what apologists for the war have always denied: the Bush administration cooked up a case for a war it wanted.

Here's a sample: "Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and W.M.D. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." [...]

Why did the administration want to invade Iraq, when, as the memo noted, "the case was thin" and Saddam's "W.M.D. capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea, or Iran"? Iraq was perceived as a soft target; a quick victory there, its domestic political advantages aside, could serve as a demonstration of American military might, one that would shock and awe the world.

But the Iraq war has, instead, demonstrated the limits of American power, and emboldened our potential enemies. Why should Kim Jong Il fear us, when we can't even secure the road from Baghdad to the airport?

From Editor & Publisher:

In a letter to President Bush on May 6, 89 House Democrats expressed shock over the documents. They asked whether they proved that the White House had agreed to invade Iraq months before seeking Congress' approval.

Both Bush and Blair have denied that a decision on war was made in 2002, and maintain that they were preparing for military operations only as an option. A Blair spokesman said the report added nothing significant to the record of the run-up to the war.

A recent Gallup Poll showed that 50% of the American public believe that President Bush "deliberately misled" them on Iraq and WMDs.

Instant Classic: Diego Corrales vs. Jose Luis Castillo

Training for the fight of his life in his home camp in Sacramento, California, Diego Corrales said that he was prepared to "go through hell" in order to prevail over Mexican toughman Jose Luis Castillo in their upcoming championship bout. He said that if Castillo knocked him down, he'd get back up and keep fighting. He said that he was looking forward to showing the world his "warrior spirit".

Turns out the guy wasn't kidding.

In the best fight I've ever seen in my 20-something years as a boxing fan, the two deadliest 135-pound fighters in the world came together on Saturday night in the Mandalay Bay casino in Las Vegas to compete for a place in boxing history as the greatest lightweight of their generation. As Castillo predicted, it was "like two buffaloes colliding".

From the opening bell to the shocking technical knock-out in the 10th round, Corrales (40-2) and Castillo (52-7-1) stood toe-to-toe and ear-to-ear in the center of the ring and waged brutal inside warfare, trading head-snapping hooks and bone-jarring body blows.

According to conventional wisdom, the 5' 11" Corrales had no business engaging in forehead-on-shoulder in-fighting with the 5' 7" Castillo. With his long reach and crisp jab, most analysts assumed that Corrales would try to control Castillo, a notoriously rough in-fighter who cut his teeth sparring with the legendary Mexican champion Julio Cesar Chavez, from a distance. As it turns out, Corrales probably only threw about two dozen jabs the entire night. Apparently, he wasn't interested in showing his marksmanship or footwork on the outside; he wanted to show his gamesmanship and fistwork on the inside.

Jose Luis Castillo, for his part, fought a near-perfect fight. He succeeded in drawing his lanky opponent into his own compact style, nullifying the height and reach differential and emphasizing the kind of grueling physical chess match that he'd honed over the course of 60 pro fights. Castillo is a master at muscular inside tactics and has never been knocked down in his distinguished career. That's not just because he has a granite chin and an iron will, but just as importantly because he knows how to strategically orient his body to minimize his chances of getting hit hard while maximizing his chances of landing solid shots. In boxing as in all sports, good defense flows inseparably into good offense and vice versa. Inside defense may not be as obviously pretty as dancing and gliding and slipping punches on the outside, but its subtle technicality can be as sweet as any science in the sport.

By the time the bell rang to open the 10th round, both men were quickly and fearlessly approaching the brink. The momentum had swung ruthlessly back and forth all night long. Both men had been wobbled. Castillo had a bloody gash above his left eye. Corrales's swollen left eye looked like a boiled egg with a slit in it, and he had a cut under his right eye as well. Less than 30 seconds into the 10th round, Castillo landed a whistling left hook that snapped Corrales's head, buckled his right knee, and dropped him sideways onto the canvas. He was back on his feet by the count of 8, only to be dropped again 30 seconds later by 3 more shots to the chin and temple, this time even more dramatically as he rolled onto his back with his feet in the air.

It looked like the fight was over. But as I watched Corrales struggle back to his feet at the count of 9, I kept thinking about something that my friend Jose had told me before the fight: Jose claimed that Corrales possessed such fundamentally solid punching biomechanics that no matter how badly he was hurt, he could still knock you out. Jose's theory was severely tested in that 10th round as Corrales hobbled into the center of the ring on noodly legs.

That's when the incredible thing happened: Somehow, Corrales managed to land two clean shots to the chin — as Jose had predicted, perfectly aligned punches despite injury and fatigue — that sent Castillo stumbling back on his heels. Drawing strength from reserves too deep to understand, Corrales unleashed a barrage of stone-fisted punches with both hands that slammed Castillo's head backwards, causing his eyes to roll back and his hands to drop to his waist as his body lay limp against the ropes. Referee Tony Weeks jumped in and stopped the fight, at 2:06 in the 10th round.

It was among the most astonishing and exhilarating sports moments I've ever witnessed.

In the end, Jose Luis Castillo deserves just as much credit as Diego Corrales for waging a pugilistic war that will go down in the books as one for the ages. As disappointing and disheartening as the outcome must feel to Castillo, the truth is that both fighters augmented their stature on this night by putting their hearts and careers on the line and showing their unabashed greatness. Anyone lucky enough to catch a glimpse of that greatness can only bow their head in respect.