Quickies

It's less than two weeks until the official start of spring and less than a month to the unofficial start of spring...baseball opening day. So appropriately, today's Quickies post has nothing to do with either spring or baseball....

50 years ago today (March 9th), Barbara Millicent Roberts came onto the American pop culture scene and depsite a few controversies, both here and abroad, she is still going strong. The latest fight Miss Roberts faces is in West Virginia, where State Delegate Jeff Eldridge has introduced legislation to ban her because she supposedly sets a bad example for little girls. Eldridge seems to be following the lead of Saudi Arabia, where Miss Roberts was outlawed in 2003. It's hard to understand why folks would have it in for Miss Roberts just because she once said "math class is tough". Everyone makes mistakes, so let's hope Delegate Eldridge sees his and drops his fight to ban the sale of Barbie dolls in West Virginia.

Remember the trade rumors involving Denver Broncos QB Jay Cutler a couple of weeks back? Remember Cutler's reaction to them? Well, it seems a lot of folks, including Cutler and "credible" sports media types like Peter King and Colin Cowherd, fell for a giant hoax. A message board poster calling himself "The Truth" fabricated the rumor in a post on the message board BroncosFreaks.com. So far, I've had very little success in finding my own "credible" news source verifying what I heard about this hoax on the radio this morning. But, another blogger seems to be upset about it. You know what they say..."if it's on the internet, it's gotta be true".

Finally, and on a serious note, on this day in 1977, a group of Hanafi Muslims entered three buildings in Washington, D.C. and began a 39 hour siege. During the siege, 150 people were held hostage, one person was killed, and several were injured, including then D.C. Council member Marion Barry. Barry was hit in the chest by a pellet from a shotgun shell. Of course, Barry recovered and went on the serve as mayor of D.C. on two different occasions and came close to driving the city into financial ruin. The Washington Post ran this story two years ago marking the 3oth anniversary of the siege.