Why the NY Times doesn't cover boxing

An interesting exchange of e-mails between HBO's Larry Merchant and Tom Jolly, the sports editor for the New York Times, on why the New York Times rarely, if ever, covers boxing.

I have to say, though, some of the excuses are good:

Most bouts are on Saturday night and our final edition for the national edition goes to press at 11 p.m. The final local edition closes at 12:30. The most noteworthy of the fights were included in briefs for those last papers, and all of the results appeared in our wire feed on nytimes.com/sports.

And some are bad:

We’re willing to [report on a Saturday match on Monday] if it’s a bout that transcends the core fan base, but there haven’t been many such fights since Mike Tyson, Lennox Lewis and Evander Holyfield passed their prime.

Manny Pacquiao anyone?

An interesting read nevertheless.

French newspapers take a page out of drug dealers' book

French newspapers are trying to get young people hooked on newspapers by offering a year's subscription for free to young consumers.

The government Tuesday detailed plans of a project called “My Free Newspaper,” under which 18- to 24-year-olds will be offered a free, yearlong subscription to a newspaper of their choice.

“Winning back young readers is essential for the financial survival of the press, and for its civic dimension,” the culture minister, Frédéric Mitterrand, said.

As @c_chisolm said, "It's how all dealers operate."

So Mark Sanchez ate a hot dog #NFL

Jets QB Mark Sanchez ate a hot dog on the end of the bench during a 38-0 blowout over the Raiders on Sunday. And, somehow, this exploded into a mini controversy, with the folks on Pardon the Interruption, Around the Horn and various talk radio stations lambasting Sanchez for the sin.

Now, ESPN is reporting, Sanchez donated 500 hot dogs and 500 hamburgers to a local homeless shelter. Which is never a bad idea.

But, seriously? People care about this?

*sigh*

Schwazenegger's "message"

Apparently Arnold Schwarzenegger had a not-so-subtle message for Democratic assemblyman Tom Ammiano. The first letters of the first seven lines were "F-U-C-K-Y-O-U."

A coincidence?

Gary Langer writes the odds are one in ten billion of this happening by coincidence, as Schwazenegger's spokesperson (understandably) said.

Here’s how not to figure it precisely, rather a quick and unsophisticated back-of-the-envelope calculation: If the odds of picking a particular letter at random are one in 26, doing it over seven selections (the number of letters in question) is (1/26)^7, or .0000000001245. Just about one in 10 billion.

Now, the odds are not even to picking each letter. It depends on the amount of words that start with those seven letters -- plus, not as many words start with an "x" or "z" (I think none of of the words in this post do, for example) -- though more will, admittedly, start with a "t" than a "k."

I'd love for someone who actually has knowledge of this sort of thing to tell us the odds of this happening by pure coincidence.

That said, even if it's not coincidence (I am almost 100 percent certain that it did not), I still find it funny that Schwarzenegger 1) did this and 2) thought he could get away with it. Should a sitting governor do these sort of juvenile pranks?

Nope. But it's still funny.