I've played coy for a while now, but the time has come for me to share what I'll be up to on my upcoming sabbatical from Woodberry Forest School:

In the spring of 2011, I'll be working as an intern at Living Bird Magazine.



As you may already know (especially if you read my last entry), the magazine is a publication of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, which explains my recent trip to Ithaca: I was meeting the editor, Tim Gallagher, in order to see the lab, meet some of the lab and magazine staff, and discuss our plans for next year.

The idea of working at LB came upon me a while back when I was thinking about what I'd like to do with my sabbatical trimester. Two obvious answers were "write" and "bird," but I was also thinking somewhat about my own professional development. I've spent the last three years as a faculty advisor to our school newspaper, including one trimester when my co-advisor was on her own sabbatical, but my actual experience with publications consists of working on the SPEC yearbook at Grey Culbreth Junior High (1978) and the Hillife yearbook at Chapel Hill High School (1980). While I've had plenty of experience writing for publications on a freelance basis, my knowledge of what happens on the other end of the lance is pretty much nil. Thus, as I considered my options, the thought of getting some hands-on experience at a magazine seemed to offer some practical benefits for my future work at Woodberry (and potentially for my future writing career).

Just applying for a trimester-long job didn't look like a workable idea, however, particularly given my dearth of journalistic experience. Luckily, asking to work for free makes you a much more appealing candidate. Unpaid internships are fairly standard at many magazines, and recent college graduates will apparently even fight to get them at major publications like Esquire or Vanity Fair (where one of my former students interned and now edits) in hopes of getting the contacts and experience necessary for kick-starting their careers. Obviously, I'm not in exactly that same position, but the basic idea made some sense to me: with Woodberry willing to provide me with living expenses, I wouldn't need the magazine to pay me, so an internship would be the best thing to pitch to the magazine in question.

But which magazine?

Well, given the abovementioned "write" and "bird" plan, I figured the best option would be a magazine devoted to birds and/or birding, and right there, bookmarked in my Firefox browser, was Cornell's very own magazine of exactly that sort. I had been fortunate enough to come in contact with Tim Gallagher through this 2005 article by Bookslut.com's Colleen Mondor, for which she interviewed each of us about our birding and writing experiences, so I shot Tim a note asking if he needed someone to spend a couple of months editing copy and/or making coffee--for free. (Yes, I said "for free" very clearly in my email's first sentence.) We agreed to meet and work out some of the details, and now that I'm back from that meeting, you can expect to see me posting from Ithaca starting sometime next spring.

In the meantime, all of you who do not already have subscriptions to Living Bird should click here and subscribe. You won't want to miss a single moment of the thrilling conclusion!


4:02 PM

I'm back. You may not have noticed my absence, but I'm back. In the course of trying to set up a little project that I hope to be telling you about shortly, a few days back I took a little spin up to western New York. It had been a long time since I'd been in that part of the world--fall of 1980, as a matter of fact, when my brother and three of our friends (Karen, Celia, and Jack) took my mom's Oldsmobile Omega for a college-research trip. I wanted to see Yale and Dartmouth and Princeton, while Jack wanted to visit the Coast Guard Academy and Karen was interested in a look at Cornell. Our first stop was at the latter, a school about which I knew nothing at the time, but once we piled out of the car in Ithaca, NY, I knew one thing: the place was absolutely beautiful. Cornell sits high on a hill overlooking the town of Ithaca and the waters of Lake Cayuga, and when the fall foliage is in full color, the scenery is pretty close to incomparable. It's not bad even in high summer:

But on that long-ago autumn day, we toured the campus, viewing some of the famous and precipitous gorge(ou)s that cut through the hilltops, and learned a little bit about the school's strong points, including its veterinary school and its hotel management program.

But somehow I never learned about its ornithology program.

If I had, perhaps I'd have applied, but as it was, I ended up applying to only one of the schools we visited--Yale--though we enjoyed our on-campus stay at Dartmouth the most of all. (The availability of beer in the basement of the frat house where we stayed may have influenced our thinking in this regard.) And that was basically all I learned about Cornell until some years later, when I began to get more seriously into my lifelong hobby of birding. Names like Arthur Allen and Louis Agassiz Fuertes (not to mention Carl Sagan and Vladimir Nabokov) gave me good reason to pay more attention to the reputation of the Home of the Big Red.

And that's how I ended up spending seven hours in the car last Tuesday heading up to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. (Yes, it's actually called the "Lab," not "Laboratory.") The Lab itself is an enormous wood-metal-glass structure sitting in the famed 200-acre Sapsucker Woods preserve. There's a small lake, a number of small wetlands, and plenty of forest, with several miles worth of trail cut through so that visitors can wander about and see what might be of ornithological interest. That's not to mention a whole lot of feeders and nestboxes set up near the Lab building, which houses quite a few things: there's a visitors center featuring viewing areas (mainly of the lake and the feeder station), a small auditorium, a gift shop, a library with a bank of computers, and artwork and photography everywhere

(That's the library visible on the second floor, with the big viewing windows beyond it; those run all the way down to the viewing area in the atrium on the first floor, where you can see a few people checking out the pond from the comfort of the bench.)

Beyond the public areas of the lab, however, there are places for actual science (including a sizable bioacoustics lab) and places for publicizing the lab's efforts, including the home of the celebrated online birding guide All About Birds, and the editorial offices of Living Bird Magazine.


11:35 PM

Maybe I should try to get someone to publish it!

Honestly, after a long month of trying to get the idea on paper (a process somewhat elongated by the difficulty of trying to get the butt in the chair), it's something of a relief just to have the thing written. Now I just have to let Kelly read it over and tell me what needs fixing. I think it's still pretty raw.

Oh, yeah: pretty soon I should be having some hard news about a little project I hope to be working on in the next year. So keep your eyes peeled.


8:03 AM

Back in Big Bend, knowing that we'd exhausted most of our spring break travel possibilities, at least as far as finding new life birds in warm-weather areas goes, Dad suggested that we consider summer trips as well. Thus, with a few days free at the end of June/start of July, I suggested a quick trip to a northern state I'd never visited and a bird that is seen only there.

From a birding standpoint, our four-and-a-half day blitz of Michigan was entirely successful, as we logged the bird we were after: the endangered (only about 2000 exist in the whole world) and extremely local (nesting only in the jack pine forests of northern Michigan) Kirtland's Warbler. As a bonus, I also got my first Clay-colored Sparrow.

But from a photographic standpoint... eh, not so great.

Behold my only photo of a Kirtland's Warbler:

And now my slightly (but only slightly) better photograph of a Clay-colored Sparrow:

And this is something out in the jack pines. Your guess is as good as mine:

I've said many times that it's always great traveling with Dad, and it's always great to see new places and new birds, but based on the photos I took on this trip, I think you're going to have to take my word for it.


11:24 AM

This is not a Muppet. No, this is a very young Eastern Phoebe, born to the clan of them (affectionately known as the Renfields for their insect-eating habits) that has occupied the nest atop the light fixture in our carport for the last three summers.

Say hi to the nice people, Baby Renfield. And don't sign anything Disney offers you until we go over the fine print with our lawyers.



This is also not a Muppet. It is a wicked, evil potato of indeterminate age that Kelly discovered during its attempt to roll away under the pantry shelf in an insane bid for freedom.

You have the right to remain silent, Bad Potato.




12:24 AM

I've got the day off--no responsibility for ferrying anyone anywhere, entertaining any guests, running any errands, or getting anything in particular accomplished. I'm nursing a slightly sore right shoulder, either from overdoing the upper-body work at the gym yesterday or just sleeping on the thing badly, but other than that, I'm pretty much free from complaints.

Naturally, this gives me time to consider the issue of coffee.

I'm a coffee drinker. Hell, in any realistic sense I'm a coffee addict. I want/need multiple cups of coffee every day, and I typically put away three or four. I get other caffeine, typically from iced tea (unsweetened) and diet colas (which I'm trying hard to kick), but the vast majority of my caffeine intake comes through coffee. During the work year, I may get a cup at home, but the majority is the industrial-grade stuff supplied by the Woodberry food services department; it's caffeinated, and if you make it right it's a reasonable shade of brown, but that's about all there is to say for it. It's fuel, nothing more, nothing less.

It's not an addiction I worry much about, though, because I know I can kick it. I know this because I had to. Back in 2005, the requirements for the Outward Bound course I took included breaking any addiction to substances that would be unavailable in the woods. These substances included tobacco (no problem) and caffeine (uh-oh). I wasn't stupid enough to go cold turkey, which would have resulted in pounding headaches and a general decline in quality of life, but as soon as exams were over, I started weaning myself. For one week, I limited myself to two cups of coffee a day; for the next week, I was down to ONE cup a day; the week after that I drank only decaf--getting trace amounts of caffeine, I know, but in effect cutting myself off. Once I made it to Asheville, I was ready to face the worst nature could throw at me--forty-five-minute lightning drills, rattlesnakes, three straight days of rain--nothing could be any harder than going without coffee, right?

I'm not a coffee snob, though. I couldn't tell you the difference between a latte and a venti, or even if they're comparable. (I think one is a size.) I'm fond of cappuccino, certainly, and will recommend the Dante Trattoria just across the Arno from downtown Florence as the place to get the best one you'll ever taste, but I've seen no real need to get snooty with labels or roasts or other such games of coffee provenance. I mean, jeez, if I wanted to do that kind of crap, I'd drink wine. The standard brew at our house is totally declasse: Eight O'Clock Blend, cheap and right there on the shelf at Food Lion. Heck, it's usually the hazelnut flavor, too, which totally freaks out the purists.

Oh, I'll experiment. I'll give most sorts of coffees a whirl now and again, just to see if there's anything new and good out there. Free-trade and shade-grown beans are the ones I sample most often, since I do have a long-standing concern about neotropical migrant species. I've tried roasts from Ethiopia, Guatemala, Colombia, you name it. I've sampled the Kona coast's wares, and on several occasions have been the recipient of the legendary Jamaica Blue Mountain coffee. It's nice for a change, but there's nothing I've tried that has made me sit up and say, "Right--that's what I'm drinking from now on."

At least, not until recently.

The loss of our local coffee shop, Not the Same Old Grind, has forced me to travel a few miles to get the same kind of ambience--you know, the one where there are fresh scones, and Putuyamo world music CDs, and copies of the Sunday Post and the NYTBR and a couple of chess boards, but most people seem to be working on their laptops, writing novels about the alienation of the individual in an age of incessant social media intrusion. But that's what I like, at least sometimes, so I'll haul my laptop to Culpeper for a fresh scone and a big ol' mug o' java at the Raven's Brew coffee shop. Raven's Brew offers a variety of coffees under the slogan "The Last Legal High," and the coffees all featuring unusual and amusing names, which is always a good way to get my attention: the exotically unconventional Dharma Beans... the alluringly aboriginal Skookum... the mythically resonant Wicked Wolf... the cheekily irreverent Resurrection Blend... and the uniquely alarming Three Peckered Billy Goat.

But the brew whose beans have me rethinking my allegiance to Eight O'Clock Hazelnut Flavor? It's named for a stretch of water off the Aleutian Islands (not that far from Raven's Brew HQ in southeastern Alaska), and it comes with a slogan guaranteed to appeal to the undercaffeinated: Deadman's Reach.

I'm not saying I'll be giving up the Eight O'Clock, since for one thing Deadman's Reach runs about twice the price, at $12.99 a pound, but I'm giving serious thought to laying up a supply of DMR for those occasions when I've got time to actually enjoy my coffee, as opposed to those when I'm streaking out the door to work.


10:15 AM

No, here at petercashwell.com world headquarters, I don't sit around saying "Cashwell Cashwell Cashwell" a la John Malkovich, but I do think about my name frequently. This may or may not be healthy, I suppose, since it does require a big dish of self-absorption, but what's the point of blogging if not self-absorption?

My first name has of course been the subject of other entries here, and not just because it's a common synonym for "penis." My last name I haven't gotten into as much, partly because it's just a little odd. And I mean that "just a little." It's one letter away from "Caswell," a far more common surname, especially in North Carolina, whose first governor was Richard Caswell, and which today boasts a Caswell County. But "Caswell" is common outside NC as well; Google turns up 2.86 million hits for it, while "Cashwell" produces a much more modest 97,000. (Note: the online journal you're reading is the #6 result for Cashwell, just behind Cashwell Appliance Parts and Elizabeth Cashwell Elementary School, both in Fayetteville, NC.)

Indeed, I realized how common the name "Caswell" was until I picked up a copy of Thunder Bunny #1 and found that the anthropomorphic rabbit's secret identity was young Bobby Caswell.

But "Cashwell" still isn't all that weird a name. It's decidedly simple, in some ways, being a portmanteau of two common words, and it's extremely easy to pronounce, assuming you notice the "h." It's still misunderstood by people on the phone, and people who haven't looked at it carefully will sometimes read it as Caldwell, Carswell, or even Cashman--no "Cartman" yet, thank god--but if you spell it for an English speaker, odds are good that it'll be pronounced correctly thereafter. I'm grateful that I don't spend enormous chunks of my life correcting people, the way my colleagues Jay Gnanadoss and Mike Szydlowski do, but I'm also kind of glad to be my own person, nominally speaking.

It's not necessarily bad to share a name, mind you. Kelly has discovered a number of other Kelly Daltons out there, some of whom are male, and at least one of whom is a bass player in a punk band. On the other hand, I pity my old Chapel Hillian comrade Mike Brown, who's a talented muralist from way back:





The poor guy has all this artistic ability and civic pride, but he has to share a name with not only the fired coach of the Cleveland Cavaliers, but the incompetent GM of the Cincinnati Bengals AND the legendarily incompetent Mike "Heckuva Job, Brownie" Brown of Bush's FEMA. How is that fair?

Anyway, I got to thinking about the whole name business by reading this piece by Ezra Klein, a blogger whose name recognition is a wee bit greater than my own, after coming across the link to it in the blog of Matthew Yglesias, another BWNRIAWBGTMO. The key question was why both Klein and Yglesias blog under their own names, rather than naming the blog something catchy, like Obsidian Wings, or Crooked Timber, or Whatever. I've certainly enjoyed reading all three of those blogs over the years, but I've so far ignored the temptation to provide a snappy title for my own blog. I supposed there are obvious candidates:

Verbing
Wanton Freaks (a line from Keats that I used as a chapter title in TV2B; I still love it)
PC on PC
The Verb 'To Blog'

Or I could get a bit more creative and/or obscure:

84,000 Different Delusions (song title by Shawn Colvin from he wonderful album A Few Small Repairs)
A Fish in the Percolator (a favorite nonsensical line from Twin Peaks)
Just Lines on Paper (R. Crumb's famously dismissive comment about the medium of comics)
This Life Is for Squirrels (a lyric from Pogo's Walt Kelly)


7:03 AM

OK, OK, I haven't done well in keeping up with this thing lately. Mea culpa. But there's been a lot going on, some of which has happened fast enough (or frequently enough) to keep my attention on things other than the interwebs. Among the bits of information in which you might be interested:

1) My application for a sabbatical was approved. I will not be in the classroom during the spring trimester for 2011, allowing me the opportunity to do some writing, some relaxing, some traveling, and (if I'm lucky) a Special Project about which I can't tell you until the details are worked out. But if I get to do it, it'll be COOOOOoooool.

2) Thing Two has decided not to return to Woodberry for his senior year. While we're disappointed that he won't be spending another year honing his dramatic skills in the Walker Fine Arts Center, it's not a decision he arrived at lightly. Speaking as a parent, I want him to be happy and go into his college search on a positive note; speaking as the director of the fall play at WFS, I'm not happy to be losing the best actor* in the class of 2011, but I'll cope.

*This is not just parental pride talking; he was awarded the Underformer Drama Award for his contributions to the drama department this year, which included playing three roles in mainstage plays (Yossarian in Catch-22, Carmen Ghia in The Producers, and Bob Ewell in To Kill a Mockingbird, which shows something of his range), playing two roles in our black box productions (Detective Tupolski in The Pillowman and Milton the Chimp in Words, Words, Words), and directing two OTHER black box productions (Nocturne and Sure Thing). I won't be the only person in the theater missing him next year.

3) It's been a busy week for awards. I had one of my student advisees win the Director's Award for his contributions to the drama department (playing the lead in The Producers, three roles in Catch-22, and Ariel in The Pillowman, directing Words, Words, Words, and designing, hanging, and/or running the lights for just about every show this year), while the other won the Johnny Mercer Medal as the outstanding musician in the senior class. We feel pretty darned artsy at our house this week.

4) Kelly has knocked off two more library school classes.  That leaves her 7/12ths of the way toward her master's degree in Information and Library Science, and that much closer to being able to call herself a Librarian.

5) The indigo bunting I was awaiting finally showed up. He appeared at the feeder a couple of days ago. Today he was sharing it with a male cardinal--always a great color combination.

6) Ian is back from his freshman year at VCU. He loves it, and loves living in Richmond, though next year he'll be living in an apartment, not on dorm. He's declared himself a history major (with a minor in anthropology). He's going back to work on the Woodberry grounds crew starting on Monday, a job which starts early in the morning, but which gets him out in the fresh air, pays pretty well, and lets him work with some really great people. It'll be his third straight summer on Grounds, and it's one of the best educational experiences he's ever had.

7) My honors students liked doing their Literature Circles again. Over the last two weeks I had my junior honors English class do a second Lit Circle assignment, duplicating an activity they did back in December with non-fiction books, only this time with novels. Each boy picked a category of book (science fiction, historical fiction, realistic fiction, etc.) and was assigned to a group of three or four guys who'd picked that category. Then I gave each group a list of ten books from which they picked a title. The books chosen were Larry Niven's Ringworld, Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men, and Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club. I think it went pretty well, and we had several good final presentations on the books.

8) I've been a used CD-buying machine. Recent purchases include: Richard & Linda Thompson's Shoot Out the Lights, the White Stripes' White Blood Cells, Elvis Costello's This Year's Model, the Roches' No Trespassing EP, Paul Simon's There Goes Rhymin' Simon, and Tom Lehrer's That Was the Year That Was. I've also been enjoying a compilation of songs by Cloud Cult that Thing Two pressed on us.

9) I'm looking at a busy time in early June. I give exams on the 1st and 3rd. The year-end faculty party is the night of the 4th. My grades and comments are due on the 6th. We'll have our year-end faculty meeting on the 7th. And my two-day recertification class for my Wilderness First Responder card will be the 9th and 10th. But there's bound to be a summer vacation in there somewhere.


5:18 PM

*I'm just now wrapping up a month of staying off Facebook and other online social forums (or "fora" for those of you in a Roman mood), and I've got to say it was a good idea. In addition to lowering my blood pressure by ignoring online arguments and allowing myself more time for such things as grading papers, I also gave myself more time to read books, which came in handy (see below). I'm starting to believe I have an addictive personality, but I'm not physically capable of getting addicted to the few drugs I've tried--I just don't enjoy vomiting all that much, frankly--while I'm perfectly capable of falling into a pattern of reading/writing online. And because I am a voracious reader, a teacher of rhetoric, an experienced debate coach, a pretty fair typist, and an unrepentant know-it-all, I can easily find myself spending a LOT of time arguing on the web. I suspect, therefore, that periodic sabbaticals from FB and its ilk are going to become necessary for me, especially when I need to get something written.

*Speaking of written things, I've got a short story in the slush pile (or its electronic equivalent) at a magazine and a query (for my maybe'it's-YA/maybe-it's-not novel) on an editor's desk. Prayers, good vibes, and crossed fingers are, as always, entirely welcome.

*I'd forgotten about a further complication to this year's NBA playoffs: the Celtics have acquired former Duke center Shelden Williams, who gets playing time only rarely, but who would earn a ring if the C's were to win the title. Thus, if the Magic or Celtics win, the UNC grad's ring would be matched by a Dookie's ring; if the Suns win, Dookie Grant Hill would earn a ring, but at least he's the Duke grad I hate the least; and if the Lakers win, only L.A. general manager Mitch Kupchak (UNC '76) gets a ring, but I haven't been counting executives in my totals.

*That extra time I gave myself with my moratorium on online social networking was largely filled with reading books, and the books themselves were both large and filled. Back in March, when I was out in Texas with Ian and Dad, the former finished the only book he had with him, and I felt his pain. Ian reads really fast; he started outpacing me when he was about 12, and he was reading faster than Kelly within a year or two after that (and reading faster than Kelly is an accomplishment, let me tell you.) When the fifth Harry Potter book came out, he plowed through the entire thing in something like 36 hours (without bothering to sleep, of course), so I was well aware of his ability to whip through a thick book when he had a plane ride or a long stretch of downtime in a hotel room, both of which he was facing during our last days of vacation. Luckily, we found a Barnes and Noble in Midland and I grabbed a big, thick book for him: A Game of Thrones, the first volume of George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series. He dove in, and I'm happy to report that the book's 800+ pages (not including the appendices) lasted him well past our landing at Dulles. He took it off to VCU, where he finished it in short order, and he returned it to me when he came home for a weekend soon after.

So there I was in early April, having wrapped up Ian McEwan's Saturday, looking for a new reading project, and I flipped open the Martin and was immediately sucked in. There are some things about the series I'm not happy about, mind you. The names, in particular, are often too prosaic for a fantasy world where magic and dragons and decade-long seasons exist; with such enormous differences in geography, physics, climatology, religion, etc., it's a little off-putting to meet characters with mundane names like Jon, Robert, Ned, Catelyn, Jaime, and Brandon. Tolkien managed it with "Sam," but that was the ONLY name he tried to slip into what was otherwise a linguistically consistent universe. Still, the plot is gripping, the created universe intriguing, and the conflicts between characters numerous and engaging.

This is good, because now that I've finished the fourth book, I've discovered to my horror that I was wrong: it's not a five-volume series whose fifth volume is coming out any day now. It's a SEVEN-volume series, and readers have been waiting for the fifth volume since 2005.  And since HBO just bought the rights to the series and is doing the first book (with Sean Bean, Peter Dinklage, and Stargate: Atlantis's Jason Momoa), I worry that GRRM may be a little too busy with television details to devote the necessary time to finishing the next three books. Worse, the fourth book ends with several nasty cliffhangers, so I've set myself up to be drumming my fingers impatiently for some time.

Great.

*The year's first Wood Thrush popped up today, following the arrival of the year's first Blue Grosbeak a week or so back, and the year's first Red-eyed Vireo a few days after that. Now if one of the Indigo Buntings singing out back will show his face at my feeder, it'll really feel like summer.


9:20 PM

I'll admit it outright: I've lost interest in the NBA. I used to watch it religiously, at least during the playoffs, but then the series started to expand until EVERY round was a seven-game job, and the progression from sixteen teams to two became a march not unlike that of Napoleon into Russia (with similar watchability, but less drama).  I've never liked the 24 second clock, which in my opinion stunts the beauty of a basketball team's offense the way thalidomide stunts a healthy limb, and the teams' generally indifferent defense means that most NBA possessions seem to involve two passes and a jump shot, which isn't a whole lot different than watching professional bowling in terms of variability. The announcement that in this year, a player stepping toward the basket for a layup/dunk would be allowed TWO steps was to me just one more admission that the league has perverted the game of basketball to the point where it's hard to watch even with the greatest players on earth.

Now the only thing keeping me interested in the NBA is the presence of former Tar Heels.

Carolina's long and storied success at the college level has been echoed at the professional level, and a great many former Heels have won themselves NBA championship rings. As best I can recall:

6 rings - Michael Jordan ('91-'93, '96-'98 Bulls)
3 - James Worthy ('85, '87, '88 Lakers)
3 - Scott Williams ('91-'93 Bulls)
3 - Rick Fox ('01-'03 Lakers)
2 - Kenny Smith ('94, '95 Rockets)
1 - Billy Cunningham ('67 76ers)
1 - Charles Scott ('76 Celtics)
1 - Bobby Jones ('83 76ers)
1 - Pete Chilcutt ('95 Rockets)
1 - Rasheed Wallace ('04 Pistons)

That's 22 rings. Even if you fold in Williams' 3 rings (won as a reserve on Jordan's Bulls) and Chilcutt's 1 ring (won as a reserve on Smith's Rockets), that's still a solid 18 professional titles won in the last 50 years by former UNC players. (And it doesn't include those won by coaches, such as Billy Cunningham's 1983 Sixers, or by executives such as Mitch Kupchak, whose Lakers have won 4 titles since he took over as general manager, or by ABA teams, such as the 1969 title won by Larry Brown of the Oakland Oaks).

Naturally, every UNC fan is deeply proud of this record, and will note it loudly and publicly, particularly if there are Duke fans within earshot, given that Duke players have won, as a group, exactly two NBA championship rings. One of them was earned by former Blue Devil Jeff Mullins, who averaged 8.2 points per game for the Golden State Warriors back in 1975; the other was claimed by Danny Ferry, who snagged a ring in 2003 as one of the deep bench reserves (1.9 points per game) for the Tim Duncan-led San Antonio Spurs.

In his current role as GM of the Cleveland Cavaliers, however, Ferry has come to see the value of UNC players; this year the Cavs drafted Danny Green, a starter on the Heels' 2009 NCAA title team, signed free agent Jawad Williams, who started for the Heels' 2005 champions, and traded for former ACC Player of the Year Antawn Jamison to give Cleveland more offense during the playoffs. I don't think it's coincidental that the Cavs are the number one seed in the Eastern Conference.

But in fact, ALL the Eastern squads have Tar Heels on the court. Rasheed Wallace is the Boston Celtics' sixth man; Marvin Williams starts for the Atlanta Hawks, now on the edge of elimination at the hands of the Orlando Magic; and starting for the Magic is Vince Carter. In short, if an Eastern Conference team wins the title this year, UNC will be up to 23 rings (at least).

Not all the UNC alumni have had  such success, alas; Wayne Ellington's Timberwolves, Brandan Wright's Warriors, and Sean May's Kings didn't even make the playoffs. Out in the Western Conference, Brendan Haywood's Mavericks and Ty Lawson's Nuggets lost in the the first round, while in the East, Jerry Stackhouse's Bucks lost to the Hawks, while Raymond Felton's Bobcats fell to the Magic. Then again, with so many former Heels playing, they can't ALL win.

Personally, I'm hoping for the Cavs to win it all. For one thing, that would give the Heels a total of 25 rings earned by players, and for another, I don't want a Heel-less Western Conference team to take the title. (Neither the Lakers, the Spurs, the Jazz, nor the Suns have a UNC alum on the roster.) Worse, should the Suns or the Jazz pull off the upset and win it all, a third ring would go to a former Duke player; the former feature Grant Hill and the latter Carlos Boozer.

I wouldn't object to Rasheed winning his second ring, or Marvin picking up his first, but it's not my preference. And though I'd love for Vince Carter to get a championship (and maybe get ESPN.com's Bill Simmons to quit ragging on him in the process), I'll admit there's one thing that may make rooting for the Magic more difficult.

One of their reserves is J.J. Redick.

Oog.


9:30 PM