You’ve gotta hear about Bradley Baylor, the back-flipping lemur.

What’s a lemur, you might ask.

PHOTO: Ring-tailed lemur at Primarily Primates Sanctuary, San Antonio, Texas. By Jane Seymour.

Well, a lemur is a prosimian: neither monkey nor ape but a primate who descended from their common ancestors. In other words, lemurs — whose societies are widely described, notably, as matriarchal — hark back to the common origin of all today’s primates including ourselves.

It’s one of the world’s modern wonders that lemurs still grace the planet. They avoided being displaced by monkeys and apes on a unique little pocket of biodiversity off Africa’s eastern coast: the island of Madagascar.

But today, the lemurs who live there are in serious trouble. People hunt them, and they hardly have a home to hide in. Deforestation for timber and agribusiness has wiped out more than 90% of Madagascar’s woodlands.

You might be surprised, given what they’ve already got to cope with, but lemurs are also sought after by pet traders. In fact, they can be purchased over the Internet where the going rate is $1200.

Ring-tailed lemurs are advertised as the hot fashion in pets, thanks to celebrities such as Hollywood’s Kirstie Alley, who has lemurs in a back-yard cage and plans to show them off to a television audience this weekend.

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With word that Rep. Jim Matheson has declared he will vote against the health reform measure before Congress, saying it is complex and doesn’t do enough to curb costs, I can only say I join Utah’s 364,000 uninsured in sincerely thanking Rep. Jim Matheson for absolutely nothing.

Less than nothing. Has worked to improve the bill? Voted to oppose his darling friends in the GOP to keep constant opposition from making the bill too complex?

Or has he simply heeled to the political leanings of the perceived majority of his district where, need one note, a majority of those uninsured live.

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So I talked to WSU head coach Randy Rahe about the basketball season for a season-ending wrap that I’m working on, and after talking about the team’s regular-season conference championship, how the players improved to fill the holes left by Kellen McCoy and Daviin Davis, Damian Lillard’s earning the league’s MVP award and how the team improved every day I asked him if there is anything else I should know about his thoughts on the season.

Then he gave me the longest answer of the interview.

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Unless you’re over 42 or 43, you may not recall Merlin Olsen, who died last week. As a football star, famous in Utah, Olsen, by his own words, was raised in a strict Mormon home. He was a huge star with the Utah State Aggies. He won the Outland Trophy, was an All-American twice and led the Aggies to a couple of bowl games.

He spent 15 seasons with the Rams, never made it to the Super Bowl but never missed a game. He was a Pro-bowler for 14 consecutive years — a feat only matched by one other player. He logged 915 tackles for the Rams, a team record.

Olsen, who was inducted into the NFL Hall of Fame in 1982, was a very intelligent man, and his wisdom showed on the field. He, along with teammates “Deacon” Jones, Lamar Lundy and “Rosey” Grier, were called the Rams’ “Fearsome Foursome” on defense. They modernized the once-staid game of football with defensive stunts and loops that involved diagonal rushes and crossing each other to reach a rusher or quarterback.

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Weber State’s opponent tonight in the first round of the NIT won’t be at full strength.

CIncinnati junior forward Rashad Bishop, who was suspended for all three games the Bearcats played in during the Big East tournament for breaking team rules, remains on suspension according to the Cincinnati Enquirer and will not play tonight.

Bishop averaged 8.4 points and 4.4 rebounds per game this season.

It being St. Paddy’s Day, I thought I’d pass this along.

A friend called and asked “Why do they call it corned beef?” Look around in it, you will not find any corn in there.

I pulled out my copy of “The Joy of Cooking” and found this in the section on preserving meat:  “Corned beef” has nothing to do with corn. The beef is  soaked in a solution of pickling spice, garlic, sugar and salt for about three weeks.  The “corn” part comes because, in England where this method of preserving beef was apparently invented, they used very rough salt whose kernels were the size of grains of wheat. In this country, think “ice cream salt,” that really coarse stuff.

In England, wheat and other such grains are generically called “corn,” and were so called way before the importation of the American version of corn from the New World.

Add corn-size salt to your beef, you get “corned beef.”

What we call corn is, of course, more correctly called “maize.” If you add that to beef, you’d bet “maized beef,” I guess. I’ll stick with the Green Giant Niblets.

Happy St. Paddy’s. Don’t drink too much of that green beer.

When failure is prolonged too long, it eventually turns into farce. The irony of the Democrats’ attempt to shove an unpopular health care reform horse pill down Americans’ throats is that the farcial failure may actually become law. Ever heard of the Slaughter Rule, or Deem and Pass? Its the latest harebrained, despeate, Quixotic maneuver by Democrats to shove ObamaCare into law.

Common sense 101: If the House Democrats had the votes to pass the Senate’s health care reform bill, the vote would have occurred, then maybe reconciliation, and President Obama would sign the bill. But they don’t have the votes. The Democratic majority in Congress is a dysfunctional mess of frightened moderates, petulant progressives and a few anti-abortion activists who are ignored because if their demands were met, three times as many abortion rights supporters would ditch the bill. Read

Enter Deem and Pass, a maneuver designed to pass the Senate bill without having a vote. As the Washington Post reports, “The House would vote on a more popular package of fixes to the Senate bill; under the House rule for that vote, passage would signify that lawmakers “deem” the health-care bill to be passed.” As Speaker Nancy Pelosi said, “I like it because people don’t have to vote on the Senate bill.”

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The Deseret News has a fascinating story about how in 2002 it  received word and verified that former Utah House Majority Leader Kevin Garn’s once hot-tubbed in the nude with a 15-year-old girl, Cheryl Maher, when the politician was about twice her age. Yet, even though Garn was a candidate for U.S. Congress at the time, the Des News decided it wasn’t a story worth reporting. Read

Let’s see, Garn was a candidate for high federal office, thousands of voters were about to make up their minds on whether he should represent them in Congress. The candidate had deliberately thrust himself into the public eye by his political ambition. It’s the responsibility and trust of the press to inform the public. The candidate admits to taking a minor to a public place and hot-tubbing in the nude with her. Of course it’s news. The Deseret News editors reject that bit of information, yet probably published thousands of words that Garn’s campaign team had fed the press for months, as more than one critic has mentioned.

I agree with Allison Barlow Hess, president of Utah SPJ (I am a board member) that the Des News, although making a bad call,  at least followed the right process: Reporter wrote story, it went through the chain of command, and editors killed it. Good reporters argue with editors, but they follow their judgment. I am amazed though, that the two top editors at the Des News don’t even recall the story being discussed. That makes me wonder how seriously it was debated.

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