Occasionally I wake up and think, "Hey, what do Steve Clemons and I have in common?" Then I remember that he's well-connected and apparently knows just about everyone in Washington, whereas I merely called up someone from Brookings once to get a few questions answered. So not a whole lot. Except now we learn that Steve Clemons happened to attend high school in Japan. As did I! My old school's home page appears to be malfunctioning, but I vaguely recall Clemons once talking about his military upbringing, in which case he possibly went to either Yokota or Yokosuka, both of which were mercilessly crushed by our swim team year after year. (Or he might not have lived in Tokyo at all—maybe Okinawa—which would make this whole exercise sadly useless.)

Anyway, maybe it's a bit unfair to expect teenagers growing up on military bases to be finely-tuned athletic machines. But during college, I couldn't help but notice that the Dartmouth crew team, on which I toiled rather vainly and flimsily for a year, would pretty handily beat the Navy boats time and time again. The navy! Boats! Beaten! You'd think those folks would have muscular exertion down to a science, but no. When I asked my brother (now a senior at Annapolis) about all this, he suggested that they all had actual responsibilities and whatnot—learning cool new chokeholds, for instance—and not enough time to practice. So there you go: blogs doing firsthand reporting on the vexing issues of our day. I, for one, plan to bring the mainstream media to its knees any day now.

And oh yes, who among us does not enjoy sumo? This guy was the big boss back when I was a young lad, but he's aged since then and eventually lost top billing to, I think, his younger brother. And while Takanohana's still obviously a large man, he's tiny in comparison to rather dour rival, Akebono. 6'8" and a quarter-ton! Yowza!