Quotes of the week

- Sid Phillips is one of the World War II vets whose story is being told in the current HBO series, The Pacific. Said Phillips, in an interview with the London Times, "The horror of war to the veteran is the daily life." To depict that, he said, "we'd have to throw you in a mud hole, leave you there all night with no toilet paper and skip breakfast in the morning, with a warship shelling you all night long. That's what war was like...but it does not make for great TV."

- Mike Freeman, writing on CBSsports.com, had this to say about the sports cliche of "white men can't jump." Wrote Freeman about Northern Iowa, Cornell and Saint Mary's, all teams which surprised by advancing far into the NCAA Tournament, "Each of these mostly white teams is athletic as hell. You don't play on, or beat, the nation's top basketball teams if you're not an elite athlete. Yet even players succumb to this backward thinking. I'm convinced that top-seeded Kansas got beaten because its players watched Northern Iowa warm up and thought, 'We can take these guys. Jeez. Look at 'em.' And then Kansas got smoked--by some talented athletes who happen to be white."

- A Florida woman apparently robbed a bank because robbery was on her "bucket list." Patricia Edwards said, from jail, "I think everyone should have a list of things they want to do before they expire." I wonder how many things on Edwards' list were things she can now do from her jail cell?