If you’ve read Prisoner of Trebekistan, you may remember my final nemesis, Michael Daunt, winner of the Jeopardy! 1997 International Tournament of Champions, at one time arguably the best player in the world.

Michael was the last (of several) players to beat me over the years, but he’s a great, funny, brilliant guy, and we’ve stayed in fairly frequent touch ever since. Turns out he and some friends are just in the formative stages of launching a new online magazine called Quiblit, itself host to a series of ten other blogs (roll over "Hosted Blogs" for a list), none of which are nearly so hard to spell.

Worth a look. In a quick glance, "Man Bites Blog" looks particularly promising.

One warning: when Quiblit’s writers all refer to Thanksgiving as something that just happened, they’re not time-warped, they’re Canadian. The only time-warping involved entails living in a country where wars aren’t rushed into, health care and education are truly considered public issues of real import, and the environment is more than just a place to get and put junk.

I’m hoping that’s ten years in America’s future. Not part of some distant imaginary 1970s past.

Go watch some actual footage of a live pudu birth. (Click on "Nacimiento Pudú" and enjoy.)

I have to warn you first, though — there are three stages in witnessing pudu mulitplication:

Now that you’re warned — and maybe putting away whatever you’re eating for a while — go for it.

The footage is the work of Fauna Andina, a private organization that works for the conservation and protection of Chilean wildlife, with reproduction and rescue centers tending to all manner of beasties. I gotta go visit these people someday.

By the way, the cheesy elevator music? Not their fault. All pudus naturally give birth with a soundtrack of cheesy elevator music. It helps keep predators at bay during this vulnerable time. Some big cat wanders up, smelling dinner, and next thing you know, it’s running away, holding its ears.

So every time you see a predator looking a little confused, like it’s trying to get a song out of its head? Somewhere a new pudu has been born.

Hey, some actual good news in international politics.

"Nuclear Deal Reached With North Korea," says an actual NY Times headline today:

As I’ve mentioned, you may not have heard about the deal when it happened, because it came the same day as Anna Nicole Smith’s death. And we all know what the media considers truly important.

Not to be too much I-told-you-so, but here’s a bit of the North Korea chapter in my new book Who Hates Whom, just released last week (and Juche, btw, is the ruling party’s philosophy of absolute national self-reliance, particularly insane in a small, poor country with limited resources):

North Korea is even freakier than I’d realized. Did you know they have their own calendar, placing the beginning of time at Kim Il-Sung’s birth? In Pyongyang, it’s not 2007; it’s 96. And the anthem to Great Leader opens with imagery of blood-soaked hillsides. Ewww.

My favorite tidbit in this chapter: Kim Jong-Il once kidnapped a prominent South Korean actress and her film director husband, hoping to kick-start the North Korean movie industry. The result: a monster movie in which a lizard-shaped rice ball turns into a giant beast that eats iron. He brings peace to a village but then eats the heroine and dies. The end.

I have got to put that in the Netflix queue.

And if that sounds like a fun read, I hope you’ll grab a copy of Who Hates Whom.

The Cleveland Indians won 8 more games than I thought they would, finishing with the Central Division title and tied for the best record in all of baseball.

Nobody remembers that stuff in two years, of course, unless you win the World Series.  But still.  If you’re an Indians fan, it’s kind of a big deal.

Fun season.  The team got off to a seriously hot start, then played only about .500 ball for a couple of months, eventually slacking of to pace that would have bullseyed the 88-win level.  But in late July, they acquired Kenny Lofton, not realizing that his skills have begun to erode significantly with age, and batted him near or at the top of the lineup, thinking this might add some pop.

Umm… no, as became obvious pretty quickly.  When Lofton batted either first or second, the Indians went 6-11, scoring an average of 3.4 runs per game, down a full run and a half from their previous output.  Suddenly this above-average team started looking like they might struggle to break .500 by the end..

Finally, on August 25, the team figured out the problem, dropped Lofton and Casey Blake down in the order, and gave more playing time to promising youngster Franklin Gutierrez.  Boom.  Offense instantly returned, and the team went on an immediate eight-game win streak, going 26-9 the rest of the way.

As to Lofton, I’ve never seen a well-respected player have such a measurable negative statistical impact on a team.  Almost everything about his game has declined.  Steals?  A 40% success rate with the Indians.  Defense?  Range factor numbers show that Lofton doesn’t get to as many balls as even an average-speed player.  (Btw, in August, I guessed that he’d wind up his stretch in Cleveland with a benchwarmer-level OPS of ".720ish."  He ultimately clocked in at .714.)

Also in August, the Indians tried giving the second base job to a poised 21-year-old named Asdrubal Cabrera, who has been a huge upgrade both at the plate and defensively.  His minor league numbers don’t indicate he’s quite the B+ hitter yet that we’ve seen this season — batting between two All-Stars tends to get you some extra hittable fastballs — but his defensive stats indicate that he may well hold second base in Cleveland for several years.  After which, he’ll become an expensive free agent and go play in a big city somewhere.  Yerrrgh.

So what’s next for the Indians?  A five-game playoff series against New York, starting tomorrow.  It’s a short series, and the Indians have the home field and two quality starting pitchers, so they’ve got a shot.

However.

The Indians are 0-6 against the Yankees this year.

And even if they do get a lead, there’s trouble.

The Indians’ closer, Joe Borowski, has a truly bad 5.07 ERA with eight Blown Saves.  Nine more of his 45 Saves would have been Blown Saves if he’s only had a one-run lead.

More to the point: against the Yankees, Borowski is 0-2 with a 15.43 ERA for his career.  This season, the Yankees’ lineup is batting a combined .379 against him.

Uh-oh.

Next year, though, the Indians should have a definite shot at the whole thing.

PS — getting this in before the first pitch in a few hours: the numbers say Boston is by far the best team in the AL.  Not so clear in the NL, which is a weak field.  I’ll pick Colorado, but it’s only by a hair.  Boston should win the World Series this year.

I had to cut four minor chapters of Who Hates Whom to get it down to the pocket size my editors and I were shooting for. One of the things I wanted to do in the book was highlight hotspots that usually get little attention, and I think generally the book manages that, but there are always a few things you’d like to squeeze in.

Thing is, the mainstream press in most countries tends to highlight conflicts that powerful domestic factions have rooting interests in, which leaves out a whole lot of the world. But humans are pretty similar everywhere. And it’s all potentially important. Until 9-11, how many of us honestly imagined that some guys in Afghanistan could so profoundly affect our lives? How many busy regular folks right this minute know the difference between Waziristan, Kurdistan, and Baluchistan (all of which are a pretty big deal)? So that’s why the book exists.

I’ll be posting these extra chapters online, one by one, as I find the time. (Obviously, I can’t have links in the paperback book itself — which is why this notes page is also already under construction.) Consider these something like DVD extras. Although there are no hidden nude scenes, and the characters don’t so much burst into laughter between shots. Far from it.

So, with no further ado, here’s the chapter about the conflict in lower Casamance, the southwesternmost arm of the West African country of Senegal.

If you enjoy it, I hope you’ll grab the book. After all, the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram even grouped it with other books it called “Shocks to the System,” adding (and repeating) that it might “shock some tender sensibilities.” So that’s exciting. It almost sounds like you might want to wear a cup. Depending on your sensibilities.

(Actually, that doesn’t sound like my writing. I can barely even shock a squirrel. The ones that can read, anyway.)

In any case, I’m grateful for the mention, however closely the reviewer actually read. We all have deadlines and space limitations.

That’s why the Casamance chapter is here in the first place.