The dangers of FieldTurf, a minister pulls Glenn Beck's punk card and the opposite of urban sprawl in Detroit

- I’m sensing a problem here and I’m not sure there is an easy answer to it. On the one hand, football teams at every level, especially college and professional, are trending toward FieldTurf, a synthetic, grass-like surface that looks and plays like real grass with the added benefit of not having actual dirt and sod that can be torn up and made a mess of by massive football players trampling all over it for three hours. So it’s more durable, it doesn’t need to be replaced like grass fields do after they are torn up and thus it saves teams a lot of money. However, this week’s revelation that an NFL panel found that certain serious knee and ankle injuries happen more often in games played on FieldTurf complicated things a bit. The league's Injury and Safety Panel presented its study Friday at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons in New Orleans. For the study, the panel looked at the 2002-08 NFL seasons, comparing games played on grass to those on FieldTurf. It found that that the rate of anterior cruciate ligament injuries was 88 percent higher in FieldTurf games. That’s a shocking figure, but at least one source disputes those findings – the makers of FieldTurf. However, the panel appears to have fairly solid credentials, as it was chaired by Dr. Elliott Hershman, a Jets team orthopedist. The panel isn’t recommending any drastic action at this point because there are too many other factors in play that need to be studied, but at the minimum this is something that bears watching moving forward. The panel’s findings have been forwarded to league owners, the NFL Players Association and companies that make artificial turf, so those who need this information certainly have it. "The paper is designed to stimulate further discussion, inquiry, and improvements in playing surfaces," league spokesman Greg Aiello said. "It does not draw any conclusions about the cause of the injuries analyzed. Our panel states in the report that additional analyses, data from future NFL seasons, and studies of injury rates on synthetic turf and natural grass surfaces, including for other athletic populations and levels of football, are needed before any conclusions can be drawn or recommendations made." Nine NFL stadiums currently have FieldTurf (Cincinnati, Detroit, Indianapolis, New England, Atlanta, Minnesota, St. Louis, Seattle and the new Meadowlands Stadium and based on the sorry state of playing surfaces at other venues and the costs and time associated with maintaining them, I wouldn’t be surprised to see more teams make the switch. FieldTurf is also springier because of the bits of ground-up rubber sprinkled into the base of the turf. Somehow, this leads to a higher rate of both ACL injuries and a more serious type of ankle sprain. The rate for the ankle sprains was 32 percent higher on FieldTurf than on grass and MCL injuries and a less serious type of ankle sprain also happened more frequently. In response to the study, FieldTurf president Eric Daliere contends that the panel's methods are faulty and cites research by Montana State professor Michael Meyers that has been published in The American Journal of Sports Medicine. To briefly sum up Meyers’ work, he found that the rate for serious injuries was actually lower on FieldTurf, which is quite the surprising coincidence given the fact that FieldTurf is so fond of his research. In fact, FieldTurf touts the safety benefits of its product on its Web site. It is worth nothing that even the Injury and Safety Panel study estimated that if every stadium with grass were to switch to FieldTurf, that would result in only five additional ACL injuries per season. All in all, it’s an interesting development and something worth keeping an eye on and researching further, but at this point, it’s not yet a cause for alarm……….

- For some reason, when I heard about this next concept, I was riveted and extremely interested even though it has no real effect on me in any way, shape or form. For some time now, Detroit has been the hardest-hit city in America by the ongoing recession. Unemployment has been dishearteningly high in the Motor City and life has been incredibly tough for the city and its residents. With its populace suffering and the city itself taking a hit as well, the powers that be in Detroit are considering an unusual solution to turn their once-thriving metropolis back into a viable, successful city. In a manner of speaking, they are looking to go rural to save their urban living. City officials are drawing up a radical renewal plan that calls for turning large chunks of the blighted, rusted-out city back into the fields and farmland that existed before the automobile. The project is on a far grander scale than anything ever attempted in the United States. Under the plan, the city would demolish houses in some of the most desolate sections of Detroit and move residents into stronger neighborhoods. All told, nearly one-fourth of the 139-square-mile city could go from urban to rural. Residents would see abandoned houses and uneven sidewalks replaced by fruit trees and vegetable farms. Heading into the city would become more like a drive through the country than the gradual descent into urban decay that it currently is. The idea for converting city real estate into rural green space first came up in the 1990s, when blight was spreading. As is so innate in human nature, the city and those running it buried their heads in the sand and kept up a wall of denial until the situation become truly desperate. Now that the city has all but bottomed out, Mayor Dave Bing, who took office last year, is finally looking to implement the plan and is expected to unveil some details in his state-of-the-city address this month. Regardless of what the specifics are, expect an explosion of anger, confusion and disenfranchisement from those potentially affected by the plan. Deciding which neighborhoods should be bulldozed and which should be improved is a very prickly process and the city would also need hundreds of millions of federal dollars to buy land, raze buildings and relocate residents. Oh, and there’s also the racial component. Because many of those whose neighborhoods would be razed and who would be relocated are black, expect the requisite cries of discrimination and bias regardless of which neighborhoods are picked for the wrecking ball. These people don’t give a damn that the city is facing a $300 million budget deficit and a dwindling tax base. They don’t give a crap that factories are closing and massive sections of the city are morphing into depressing urban wastelands or that Detroit has 33,500 empty houses and 91,000 vacant residential lots. Hopefully Bing’s message that the city can't continue to pay for police patrols, fire protection and other services for all areas will get through to these hard-liners. While it might be difficult to see 10,000 houses and empty buildings demolished in the next three years, it might be the only viable way to save the city as a whole. Bing has already secured $40.8 million for renewal work from the federal government and the federally funded Detroit Housing Commission supports Bing's plan. "It takes a true partnership, because we don't want to invest in a neighborhood that the city is not going to invest in," said Eugene E. Jones, executive director of the commission. Others would like to see alternative plans to simply clean up the blighted neighborhoods and turn them into more suburban settings, but that seems both illogical and unfeasible because impoverished Detroit residents still would not be able to afford to live there and people from elsewhere aren’t exactly clamoring to move there. Still, I find this whole plan fascinating and am anxious to see if it is actually put into motion…………

- Oh, how I love enviro-kooks and animal rights kooks. Yes, those freaks from PETA who throw blood on people’s fur coats and get pissed just because some of us enjoy a nice, juicy steak or chicken fingers every now and then. But perhaps no group of kooks is quite as volatile as animal rights kooks who are not only pissed at anyone who wrongs animals in any way – i.e. eating them because they are tasty and God made them to be food – but are willing to go, any time and anywhere, for their cause. These nuts will deface property, they will engage in hand-to-hand combat and they will use weapons if need be. Peter James Bethune would fall into that category and on Friday, the New Zealander was arrested by Japanese authorities for illegal trespassing after he boarded a whaling ship last month in waters off the Antarctic. Bethune is accused of jumping from a Jet Ski onto the Shonan Maru 2, the security ship of a Japanese whaling fleet, after the Ady Gil boat, of which Bethune was captain, sank. Now you might be wondering why a guy is being persecuted for jumping onto a non-sinking boat after his own ship sank, but things become a bit more complicated when you know that Bethune belongs to the activist group Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. Oh, and the SSCS announced that Bethune was looking to make a citizen's arrest of the Shonan Maru 2 skipper for the collision that sank the Ady Gil. The Ady Gil was a futuristic vessel used to intercept and block harpoon ships, so the captain of the Shonan Maru 2 would have had ample motivation to do so. Of course, the Japanese government is doing what The Man always does, namely looking to put Bethune through the ringer. Hirotaka Akamatsu, Japan's minister of agriculture, forestry and fisheries, said Japan would be harsh on Bethune and that Sea Shepherd's acts were not acceptable. "Their violent acts are escalating," Akamatsu said. Bethune was actually taken into custody a month ago aboard the Shonan Maru 2, which arrived from Antarctic waters -- where Japan conducts its annual whale hunt -- back to Japan on Friday. He was kept in lockdown on the ship in the interim and formally arrested when the ship returned to its home port. He already has legal representation in Japan, said Sea Shepherd spokeswoman Traci Walter. The case against Bethune is far from the only dispute between Japanese whaling fleets and conservation agencies, especially the enviro-whackos at Sea Shepherd. A typical tactic used by activists against the whaling fleets is hurling butyric acid -- found in rancid butter and vomit -- at Japanese whaling ships, which return fire with water cannons. Sea Shepherd has been using its vessels to interfere with whaling fleets for decades and two years ago, Sea Shepherd activists boarded a Japanese ship and fastened themselves to the vessel with plastic ties. Because the country's annual hunt kills up to 1,000 whales a year, I wouldn’t expect this battle to die down any time soon. You know the Japanese aren’t giving up an activity that brings in massive amounts of income and you know the enviro-whackos aren’t backing down, so it’s battle on…………

- We all know that Fox News talking head Glenn Beck is an obnoxious tool with skewed views on most everything, a penchant for contradicting himself whenever the situations suits him and a head so far up his own ass that it is currently infringing upon the space normally reserved for one’s spleen. Everyone who’s not a right-wing extremist doesn’t like Beck and even Republicans with half a brain want little or nothing to do with the guy. However, of all the people I expected to see step up to challenge Beck, I did not think I would see a minister, a man of God, be the one to confront the blowhard. Yet it is Rev. Jim Wallis, president of Sojourners, a network of progressive Christians, who has called out Beck while also calling for a boycott of Beck’s television show and challenging the Fox News hot air bag to a public debate after Beck vilified churches that preach economic and social justice. Wallis claims Beck perverted Jesus' message when he encouraged Christians last week to leave churches that preach social and economic justice. Why Beck is attempting to tell people how to practice their own faith, I don’t know. To the best of my knowledge, he’s not a reverend, a pastor or a priest, nor does he have any sort of ministerial degree. Yet he’s counseling people on what church to attend? His exact words were that viewers should leave churches that preach "economic and social justice." According to Wallis, Beck then likened those churches to Communists and Nazis. He also says at least a thousand people have already responded to his call to boycott Beck. And in hus most accurate comments, Wallis points out that Beck is muddling his personal philosophy with the Bible. "He wants us to leave our churches, but we should leave him," Wallis says of Beck. "When your political philosophy is to consistently favor the rich over the poor, you don't want to hear about economic justice." Well said, Reverend, well said. What I like even better is that Wallis also wants to appear on Beck's show to challenge the contention that churches shouldn't preach economic and social justice because those concepts are at the heart of Jesus' message, Wallis says. "He's afraid of being challenged on his silly caricatures," Wallis says. "Glenn Beck talks a lot when he doesn't have someone to dialogue with. Is he willing to talk with someone who he doesn't agree with?" Umm……I don’t know that Glenn Beck believes that anyone out there would dare to not agree with him. He basically is certain that the entire world revolves around he and his ginormous ego, so I’m going with no. But I would definitely welcome an on-air debate between Wallis and Beck and to hear Beck provide actual Biblical documentation to prove that God isn’t concerned with the conditions that create the poor. After all, I do seem to recall Christians who fought against slavery as well as civil rights activists. "The Bible just didn't say take care of the victim -- it talks about justice," says Wallis, who is still waiting for that public debate with Beck. "I'll have it," Wallis says, "anywhere he wants." It’s up to you, G. Beck, do you have the testicular fortitude to take the challenge………

- In the current energy crisis facing the world (and yes, there are a quite a few crises going on right now), I think we all know where to look when in need of solutions for what ails this planet: the smart people. You might like ridiculing the nerds and dorks most every day of the week, but when the sh*t hits the fan, you know that they’re the ones you want trying to figure out an answer. When it comes to the energy crisis, that would mean folks like the scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who have discovered an energy source that you can see only through a microscope. I won't bore you or give you a headache with the details that smart peeps like myself and the MIT scientists often go into, but suffice it to say that these brilliant minds have devised a process for generating electricity using nanotechnology. They eventually hope to refine the process and use it to create a new environmentally friendly battery, among other products. In discovering the power source, researchers used tiny wires, known as carbon nanotubes, to create a powerful wave of energy. Michael Strano, MIT associate professor of chemical engineering and the study’s lead researcher, explained that after coating these tiny wires with a layer of fuel, he said his team generated what is known as a thermopower wave and happened across a reaction that may eventually be used to power electronics, computers and cell phones. "This could lead to batteries that are up to 10 times smaller and still have the same power output. In the portable energy and energy conservation arena, we're trying to find power sources that have a smaller profile but hold more energy," Strano said in a radio interview. The thermopower wave MIT researchers discovered fulfils a vital function in any source, i.e. batteries - moving electrons in a material from one end of the battery to the other, creating an electrical current. The wave accomplishes this by using the class of molecules know as carbon nanotubes. Strano said "some of the advantages of this technology [are] you can generate a lot of power from a very, very small device." Enviro-kooks will also be very happy to know that in stark contrast to the majority of batteries currently on the market, which are made from highly toxic heavy metals, batteries made from this new thermopower technology would be completely nontoxic. "The materials we use to make these thermopower waves are organic. They're not grown naturally, but they're made of carbon. In other words, you could essentially incinerate them, or they would degrade over time, there's no heavy metal residue," Strano said. And not that you needed any other reason to be psyched about this new discovery, but a thermopower battery would also be much more energy-efficient than a traditional battery. Sounds like a win-win-win, all courtesy of the wicked smart researchers at MIT……….