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Chris Assenheimer | The Chronicle-Telegram
CLEVELAND — In what was at the very least an interesting selection Thursday, the Indians chose third baseman Lonnie Chisenhall with the 29th overall pick in the amateur draft.
Chisenhall was not among the top 50 players in the draft, according to Baseball America, which tabbed him 74th after he hit .401 with eight home runs and 61 RBIs in 19 games for Pitt (N.C.) Community College this season.
What made the pick even more peculiar is that the Indians, who strongly value character in their players, chose one with past issues in the department. Chisenhall was at community college this year because he was dismissed from the University of South Carolina after being arrested on burglary and grand larceny charges during his freshman season with the Gamecocks in 2007.
The Indians claim they did their due diligence in investigating Chisenhall’s past. One of their scouts has known the player since his junior year in high school, while assistant general manager John Mirabelli consulted Chisenhall’s coach at Pitt, a friend of the assistant GM’s. The club even contacted South Carolina coach Ray Tanner.
“Every person we spoke to spoke highly of Lonnie’s character,” said director of scouting Brad Grant. “We believe this was a one-time thing, that he made a mistake and was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and we’re confident that it’s not going to happen again.”
As far as talent is concerned, the Indians disagreed with most of the perceived draft experts, feeling as though they got the best player at the spot they were choosing from in Chisenhall, who is described as a below-average fielder with a plus-bat.
“Picking at 29, it’s difficult to know who’s going to be there,” Grant said. “He was the player we felt was the best player at 29. He was the player we were most comfortable with at 29.”

chroniclet.com

If the weather carries on as it has been, the organisers of the French Open might like to consider adapting cricket’s Duckworth/Lewis method. This is a system whereby matches interrupted by rain can be decided over a shortened distance. The great thing about it is that no one really understands it and so is in no position to argue with it.
Tennis has done it before, of course, when it introduced the tie-breaker to stop matches going on interminably. This, in contrast to Duckworth/Lewis, is quite a straightforward system.
Before the rain arrived today - making it four days out of five that the weather has intervened - the first real upsets of the competition took place with the defeats of Amelie Mauresmo, two times a grand-slam winner, and the men’s sixth and seventh seeds, David Nalbandian and James Blake. And what was really surprising was that all three lost to no-hopers.
Even Mauresmo, who has a reputation for being someone who could choke on pureed banana, could not possibly lose to the Spanish qualifier Carla Suarez Navarro. But this is what she did, going out 6-3, 6-4.
In fairness to Mauresmo, who in 2006 won the Australian and Wimbledon titles, this is her first tournament since last month’s Fed Cup tie in Japan. Since then she has been held back by an abdominal injury and today she clearly had trouble with her serve as she lost her second-round match in 72 minutes.
Suarez Navarro, 19, who was playing in her first grand-slam event, was the first to hold serve in the fifth game and broke her opponent again to lead 5-2 before sealing the opening set in 34 minutes. Mauresmo, who has never made it past the quarter-finals in Paris, dropped serve again in the fourth game of the second set and despite managing three games in a row, was broken again in the ninth.

blogs.guardian.co.uk

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nymag.com

At the open-air mass in St. Peter’s on April 2, the third anniversary of the death of John Paul II, Pope Benedict XVI spoke movingly – he brought mist to the eyes of our little group of visiting Americans – of John Paul’s life, and the meaning of his suffering. “Among his many human and supernatural qualities he had an exceptional spiritual and mystical sensitivity,” said the pontiff, who knew John Paul long and intimately. (Those who hope for swift canonization please note: “supernatural.” Benedict the philosopher does not use words lightly.)
He spoke of the distilled message of John Paul’s reign: “Be not afraid,” the words “of the angel of the Resurrection, addressed to the women before the empty tomb.” Which words were themselves a condensed message: Nothing has ended, something beautiful has begun, but you won’t understand for a while.
Benedict was doing something great leaders usually don’t do, which is invite you to dwell on the virtues of his predecessor.
We did. You couldn’t hear Benedict without your eyes going to the small white window in the plain-walled Vatican where John Paul’s private chambers were, and from which he spoke to the world. Quick memory-images: the windows open, the crowd goes wild, and John Paul is waving, or laughingly shooing away a white bird that repeatedly tried to fly in and join him, or, most movingly, at the end, trying to speak and not able to, and trying again and not able to, and how the crowd roared its encouragement.
Oh, you miss that old man when you are here! You feel the presence of his absence. The souvenir shops know. They sell framed pictures and ceramic plates of the pope: John Paul. Is there no Benedict? There is. A photo of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger being embraced by . . . John Paul. It’s now on my desk in New York. They have their hands on each other’s shoulders and look in each other’s eyes. A joyful image. They loved each other and were comrades.

online.wsj.com

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67th Annual Peabody Awards winners announced
Athens, Ga. Thirty-five recipients of the 67th Annual Peabody Awards were announced today by the University of Georgia’s Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication. The winners, chosen by the Peabody board as the best in electronic media for 2007, were named in a ceremony in the Peabody Gallery on the UGA campus.
The latest Peabody recipients reflect great diversity in content, genre and source of origination. Recipients included The Colbert Report, Comedy Central’s cable-news satire, and A Journey Across Afghanistan: Opium and Roses, a documentary from Bulgaria’s Balkan News Corporation (bTV).Whole Lotta Shakin, the Texas Heritage Music Foundation’s rollicking public-radio series chronicling the 1950s heyday of rockabilly music received the award, as did Univision’s Ya Es Hora, a public-service campaign that taught legal aliens how to apply for American citizenship.
Peabodys went to Wounds of War The Long Road Home for Our Nation’s Veterans, a series of moving reports by ABC News correspondent Bob Woodruff, himself a recovering Iraq War casualty, about the struggles of veterans dealing with severe war injuries and stress. CBS News Sunday Morning: The Way Home captured a Peabody for Kimberly Dozier’s powerful piece about two women veterans who lost limbs in Iraq. Like Woodruff, Dozier survived a near-fatal attack while on assignment in Iraq. Another CBS News series, 60 Minutes, was awarded a Peabody for The Killings in Haditha, a Scott Pelley report that questioned the conventional wisdom about the worst single killing of civilians by U.S. soldiers since Vietnam.
Discovery’s Planet Earth, a majestic use of HDTV technology showcasing natural wonders of the world, was honored, as was Independent Lens for Billy Strayhorn: Lush Life, an expansive portrait of Duke Ellington’s musical collaborator. NATURE: Silence of the Bees, an inquiry into the unsettling decline in the world’s honeybee population from Thirteen/WNET, and WGBH-Boston’s Design Squad, an engineering competition for young people, further indicate the variety of this year’s recipients.

thefutoncritic.com

Brian De Palma is facing another rough passage. In a career of storms and tempests, his latest film, Redacted, a multi- format examination of US soldiers’ savage behaviour in Iraq, has inevitably not proved popular back home. “In America, you cannot criticise the troops,” he says. “So now it’s all over the web that I’m a left-wing wacko traitor who should be horsewhipped.” But then what would you expect from a film-maker who has courted controversy right back to the early 1980s when he made the coked-up gangster classic Scarface? “I hardly think of myself as a safe director,” he says, baring his mouldy teeth like a decrepit shark.
Far more raw than other recent Hollywood examinations of the conflict, say Lions For Lambs or Rendition, Redacted is closer in tone to Nick Broomfield’s Battle For Haditha. Shot for just $5m, using a cast of unknowns, Redacted is a fictionalised account of an abhorrent real-life event, concerning the rape of a 15-year-old Iraqi girl and the murder of her family by US troops. “I couldn’t use too much of the real material,” De Palma explains. “I had to fictionalise it, because there are continuing prosecutions. You get a large book of things you can’t do from the lawyers.”
Filmed on High-Definition Video in Amman, and made to look like a “dossier” of internet uploads and camcorder footage, Redacted, says De Palma, is meant to echo the way he found the real-life event on the internet. Much of the material in the film originates from a soldier named Angel Salazar (Izzy Diaz), who is hoping to make a documentary to get him into film school. In part, this consists of conversations with other members of the unit, including the two men who lead the night-time raid on the Iraqi home in question.
According to De Palma, the pent-up anger of the US forces in Iraq is worse than that of the troops who served in Vietnam, there, he says, at least US soldiers had brothels to visit in order to let off steam. “This is not the way the army likes to see itself portrayed,” he adds. “They want to be seen the way the administration portrays them: valiant people over there creating democracy – all that mumbo jumbo.” More importantly, De Palma sees the film as a critique of how American audiences are fed propaganda by the US news media. “They sit there and watch their television screens, and see these embedded reporters and infomercials from Iraq, and how well things are going over there, and they think that’s the truth.”
The end result won the 67 year-old De Palma the Silver Lion at last year’s Venice Film Festival, one of just a handful of awards he’s won across a 40-year career that has frequently irritated the Moral Majority. In content at least, Redacted recalls his 1989 Vietnam film Casualties of War, which starred Michael J Fox as a soldier who looks the other way as his fellow grunts perpetrate a brutal rape. “The similarities are striking,” De Palma notes.
As far as Redacted goes, De Palma claims there’s nothing in the film that you won’t find in cyberspace “if you are curious”. Yet De Palma encountered opposition from an unlikely source. At a heated debate after a New York Film Festival screening of the movie last October, he expressed his dislike of the decision by the film’s production company to edit certain images for legal reasons. Specifically, De Palma is referring to the film’s final montage of “actual” photos from Iraq, many of which now show the faces of war victims blacked out. “I’m very unhappy with the way the photographs have been redacted [altered],” De Palma says, arguing the images are already in the public domain on the internet. “I think it’s a crime to make these people – who are suffering – faceless.”
Watch a clip from ‘Redacted’
Arguably as a result of this spat, the film was given a limited release in the US, where it took a measly $65,000, echoing the other poor box-office showings of recent feature films about Iraq. De Palma sees his problem as a mirror of what US war correspondents face. “If you talk to journalists who have been covering the war you always get their frustration because they can’t tell the story that they see. Nobody really wants to hear it. You can’t take pictures of any fallen GIs. You can’t show funerals. We don’t want to see any of the collateral damage at all. It doesn’t get into the mainstream American media.”
De Palma cites “the effectiveness of the Bush administration” in keeping the true horror of the Iraq war away from the American people. “This is why you haven’t felt this huge surge in anti-war protests,” he says. “The pictures are what got everybody into the streets in Vietnam. There’d be these huge pictures in Life magazine and you’d go, ‘My God, what are we doing over there?’ We don’t have that now.” That said, Redacted is following a well-worn path: Paul Haggis’s In the Valley of Elah also features soldiers capturing brutal acts on a camera-phone.
The film is nevertheless a welcome change of direction for De Palma. For the past decade, he has turned out a series of ineffectual genre films – action-thrillers (Mission: Impossible; Snake Eyes), sci-fi (Mission to Mars) and film noir (Femme Fatale; The Black Dahlia). By contrast, Redacted takes him back to the days of his early low-budget films, such as Greetings – a satire on free love and Vietnam – and Hi, Mom! – about a Vietnam veteran. (A then-unknown Robert De Niro starred in both.)
De Palma himself never served in the military, though his father was a navy surgeon. “He used take the bodies off the beaches and sew them back together. I heard many stories of the horrors of the Pacific.” Born in Newark and raised in Philadelphia, De Palma studied physics in New York, before he switched to read theatre and then cinema. After making a series of shorts, he shot Greetings in 1968, though it was another eight years before he had his first hit, the Stephen King adaptation Carrie.
By this point, the mid-1970s De Palma was one of the so-called movie brats, hanging out with the likes of George Lucas and Martin Scorsese. Like his peers, he’s had a turbulent private life, having been married three times, never for more than four years. De Palma now lives in New York near where the Twin Towers once stood (his birthday is 11 September).
It would be pleasing to think that making Redacted had convinced De Palma to return to his low-budget origins for good. In truth, the film rather feels like a one-off, not least because he hopes his next film will be Capone Rising, a prequel to The Untouchables, his 1987 film about Chicago gangster Al Capone.
Capone Rising sounds like it’s going to need big money. Does De Palma think the disastrous commercial showing of Redacted will harm his ability to raise funds? “Not really,” he sighs. “I’ve made pretty wild movies before. You should have been around for Scarface…” And with that, Brian De Palma battens down the hatches for another squall.
‘Redacted’ opens on 14 March
Five films that landed De Palma in hot water
De Palma’s account of the rise and fall of Cuban refugee Tony Montana took flak from the Cuban community for depicting them as gun-toting gangsters
Body Double (1984)
Cinemas showing this voyeuristic Hitchcock homage were picketed by feminists, and the film was widely condemned for its apparent misogyny
Dressed to Kill (1980)
Psycho gets the De Palma treatment, emerging as a transsexual-murder tale which faced censorship battles in the US
Casualties of War (1989)
Veterans’ groups were up in arms about the veracity of this Vietnam war film and De Palma’s right to criticise the US military
The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990)
Dogged by fights with the studio, at least De Palma didn’t face the wrath of the public over this Tom Wolfe adaptation: nobody went to see it

independent.co.uk