Astrodome needs facelift or demolition, voters to decide

HOUSTON — The fate of a plan to renovate the Houston Astrodome, an iconic stadium that's fallen into disrepair since it was shuttered four years ago, will be in the hands of voters this fall.

Harris County commissioners on Tuesday approved placing a measure on the Nov. 5 ballot that will ask voters to authorize up to $217 million in bonds to pay for a plan to turn the stadium into a giant convention center and exhibition space.

County commissioners, who unanimously approved placing the measure on the ballot, said it was important that voters decide the Astrodome's future.

Commissioners stressed Tuesday voters must understand that approval of the measure would lead to a property tax increase of around half a cent per $100 of assessed value. Officials said they will try to make that as clear as possible on the ballot measure. On a house valued at about $200,000 and with a homestead exemption, officials said a person's tax bill would go up about $8 per year if the measure is approved.

View the original article here

Ashes 2013: Joe Root a 'special player' but he still needs to be tested in different conditions, says Graham Gooch

Root confirmed his arrival in Ashes cricket with a man of the match performance in the Lord’s Test which vindicated the decision to promote him to open the batting with Alastair Cook.

Root has now made two centuries in eight Tests since his debut in Nagpur in December and at the age of 22 is set to follow Cook by establishing himself as a Test player at an early age.

In the past English batsman have taken a long time to mature into Test cricketers but Root has taken every challenge in his stride, apart from a small blip in form on the tour to New Zealand in March.

“For every country in the world, sometimes players get thrown up who are not only skillful, have good disciplines and good habits but are very mature characters for young men,” said Gooch.

“I think from the first time we all experienced Joe in India, a few months back, it was quite evident that this lad was very mature mentally, had a good work ethic and was very keen to learn.

"One of the most important ingredients for a sportsman is he was prepared to drive his own career forward. He's not waiting for advice; he's seeking it. He's seeking information, looking for new ideas.

"It was not a surprising decision when he forced his way into the side on merit at Nagpur in that Test, and he's gone on and on.”

A wise old owl such as Gooch is wary of making bold predictions for Root who has been compared by some observers to Michael Vaughan and even Len Hutton.

He has already eclipsed Vaughan by making an Ashes hundred at Lord’s, becoming the first Yorkshireman to do so with his 180 in the second Test since Hutton and Willie Watson both scored centuries in 1953.

“One innings doesn't make you a regular for a long period of time. He's shown good promise. He still needs to be tested in different conditions,” said Gooch.

“He's not a complete player like nobody is a complete player. He's a young player with great promise and great skill and anyone who sees him play would think that he's going to have a fruitful career, but you can't be sure.”

Hours after Australia’s defeat at Lord’s Cricket Australia published an unwisely timed media release bragging of the success of its Big Bash Twenty20 League.

“Cricket Australia's strategy for the BBL is working,” it said. Gooch believes the rise of Twenty20 cricket is now eating away at batting techniques that are exposed by the demands of Test cricket.

“Anyone can concentrate for 15 minutes but to score a Test hundred you need to concentrate for a long period of time and those skills I think worldwide are being chipped away at the edges by the amount of one-day cricket and Twenty20 cricket.

“There's lots of different competitions. If you're a traditionalist and still think Test cricket is the benchmark you can see with the number of competitions that are popping up and the rewards that are available, you can see the possibility of them chipping away at the edges of the traditional game.

"So you’ve got to work hard to try and keep your players on track and try and educate them as well as you can on the mental skills that are necessary to bat long. It is a different kind of skill.”

Gooch’s old foe Allan Border blamed the batsmen admitting it was hard to differentiate between the tail and the top order at Lord’s.

"Our major concern right now is the performance of the top six. I could honestly say the nine, 10 and jack looked more competent than our one, two and three,” he said.

"If that was me in the top three I'd be embarrassed. We need to settle on our best 11 and stay with it. I'm a believer in the pick and stick method, so we need to find our best 11 suited to the conditions and stick with it."

View the original article here

Some Questions That Manti Te’o Needs to Answer Today

Weird time to do the Stayin' Alive dance, sir.

Later on today, Manti Te'o, the Notre Dame linebacker who was revealed to have a fake girlfriend in a wild, riveting story in Deadspin yesterday, is likely to take questions from the media, in what is certain to be the strangest press conference since Andrew Breitbart hijacked the microphone before Anthony Weiner's press conference back in 2011. (If Deadspin were like Breitbart, Tommy Craggs would leap in front of reporters today and scream at them to ask the REAL questions, man. Thank God Deadspin is not like Breitbart.) While Deadspin reported in its piece that a source was "80 percent sure" Te'o was in on the hoax, in the wake of a presser from Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick last night, Te'o defenders are stepping forward, including some who claim evidence that people on Twitter were mocking Te'o for not knowing Lennay Kukua wasn't real two weeks ago.

The narrative is starting to get set: Te'o was the victim of an elaborate hoax. It is worth noting that, still, believing this requires far more faith in Manti Te'o than in logic, reason, and sentient thought. There is some word that Te'o is not going to give a press conference at all, that he'll "do a 1-on-1 interview with a single TV reporter," which makes sense for Te'o, though it's unlikely to get us much closer to understanding any of this. Rather than grab the microphone at a possibly imaginary press conference, we thought we'd go over some of the logical questions it'd make sense to ask Te'o today.

When did this "relationship" actually start?Why did you tell reporters stories of how you had met each other?When your Dad told reporters how Kukua would visit you in Hawaii, was he lying, or was he just blindly reporting information you had told him?If so, why did you tell him that?Do you commonly have relationships with women you have not met?Why did you never go see her when she was so ill and/or recovering from a serious car accident?Your family told Notre Dame about the "hoax" on December 26. Why did you continue to go along with the story after that?Seriously, you never once thought to mention, in all the heartwarming stories you went along with over the last six months, that the girlfriend who was so inspiring and broke your heart was someone you had never actually met? Why did you go along with this so long?Is this why you played so poorly in the BCS Championship Game?Do you fear that if you are this gullible while playing a sport that does not pay you, that you will be perhaps the easiest mark in the history of easy marks once you're at last richly compensated for it?Isn't it weird that you're up here answering questions like this?Like, we're running you — a 22-year-old Mormon kid who has made millions of dollars for network executives and university presidents but has never received a dime for it himself — out there to face the music on all this stuff, like this story is really just about you being a jerk?Shouldn't we be tarring and feathering a compliant media who just went along with the narrative — created by you, or for you, no one knows yet — rather than acting as if you (or Ronaiah Tuiasosopo) somehow did all this and broadcasted it to the world all by your lonesome?Okay, we're definitely curious: How well do you know Tuiasosopo?Still: Isn't this a story about the mythmaking of sports, about the blind acceptance of faux-heartwarming stories for the sake of easy consumption; about how, the day after the bombshell, people within the world of sports are already climbing back into the "this was just a rogue Internet jerk, who would have thought to do a Nexis search to see if she were actually dead, or real" defensive crouch rather than take a hard look at themselves and the way they conduct their business?How do you think this will affect your draft status?Are you gonna go out there and just take it one game at a time?Thank you, Manti. You're a very brave person, and we're all such brave people for talking to you today.

View the original article here