Docents at DC tourism spots, it tolls for thee!!

Washingtonians, brace yourselves.

In just six days, residents will awaken to find themselves in a changed city. One invaded by Founding Fathers scandal, by fictitious Harvard symbologists, by very short chapters ending in cliffhangers and exclamation points! One to which the tourists will flock, brandishing conspiracy theories.

We want the real story, they’ll say to helpless docents at the Smithsonian, perhaps, or the Scottish Rite Masonic temple. This is the real story, docents will reply. No, the reeeeal story. Wink wink.

Washington is about to be Dan Browned.

The inciting incident is the release of “The Lost Symbol,” the third installment of Brown’s mondo-selling adventure zeitgeist, sequel to “Angels & Demons” and “The Da Vinci Code.” In “Angels,” professor Robert Langdon races through Rome, saving the city from an explosion and uncovering religious secrets that rock Christianity to the core. In “Da Vinci,” he races through Paris and London, solving a mysterious death and uncovering religious secrets that rock Christianity to the core.

In “The Lost Symbol,” Langdon will be back again, this time racing through Washington. What exactly he’ll be doing here is unclear. In the five-plus years Brown has been researching and writing this novel, nary an important plot point has leaked.

This much is known: The initial print run of “The Lost Symbol” is 5 million copies, the largest in Random House history, the publisher claims. Clues found on the novel’s recently released cover, combined with decoded messages from the “Da Vinci” jacket and elsewhere (“Is there no help for the widow’s son?”), suggest that Freemason history will play a central role.

People. Are. Freaking. Out.

There’s ample precedent for this. Brown’s hackish potboilers have driven scads of dimwitted tourists to previously-obscure destinations over the past few years, all of them searching for symbols and codes that he invented out of thin air.

Attention Dan Brown fans! His books are stupid thrillers based purely on his own imagination! There is no such academic discipline as “symbology”!!!

If you look closely at the collar of his turtleneck,
you’ll see ancient symbols spelling out D-O-U-C-H-E.

The Post story tells the tale of the unfortunate Colin Glynne-Percy, whose life was ruined by idiotic Dan Brown fans.

When Dan Brown comes to town, things get a little bit nutty.

Just ask Colin Glynne-Percy, director of the Rosslyn Chapel Trust, the rural Scottish church featured in “The Da Vinci Code,” which Langdon believed to be the location of the Holy Grail.

“Before the book came out, we had about 40,000 visitors a year,” Glynne-Percy says. “It went to 80,000. Then to 120,000. Then to 175,000. We had very small facilities. We had only two restrooms. We could survive on that for 40,000 but . . .” They’ve put in temporary bathrooms and added several new staff members.

Just ask Robin Griffith-Jones, master of the Temple Church in London, which makes the eensiest of cameos in “Da Vinci.” (Langdon pops in to search for clues on the stone effigies’ decorative orbs, then pops out.)

This minor role hasn’t stopped tourists from roaming the circular nave in search of the orbs examined by Langdon.

Small problem: “There is no question of any orb in this church,” Griffith-Jones says. “Knights didn’t have orbs. Only kings had orbs,” and it’s mostly knights depicted at the temple. Griffith-Jones began offering a weekly lecture to dispel the myths of “Da Vinci” and eventually wrote a book on the subject. Still the tourists come. “I feel like King Canute, with the rising ocean tide I cannot stem.”

WHAT KIND OF A LOSER BASES AN INTERNATIONAL VACATION ON A CRAPPY BESTSELLER??!

(Don’t feel too bad for Mr. Percy, though – if he can’t take the stress any more, he can always go back to his former profession, posing for beefcake charity calendars.)

Dan Brown idiocy has also spread to Italy, as the New York Times reported in light of the release of this summer’s “Angels and Demons” film:

Matt Kartchner, of Sacramento, Calif., said that he had two objectives in coming on holiday to Rome: “To see the Colosseum and take an ‘Angels and Demons’ tour.” On a recent morning he took that tour.

Rome experts say the film could correct some of the book’s errors. (For example, it places Santa Maria della Vittoria in the wrong piazza.) “People are constantly saying, ‘Wait a minute, in “Angels and Demons” Dan Brown says this or that,’ and we give a spiel about veracity and then explain that what risks being damaged is the image of Rome,” said Paul Bennett, the founder of Context Travel, an upscale tour operator that does not do “Angels and Demons” tours.

Alberto Artioli, the state official responsible for Leonardo’s “Last Supper,” in the refectory of the Santa Maria delle Grazie church in Milan, has experienced something similar since Mr. Brown turned St. John into Mary Magdalene in “The Da Vinci Code.”

Before “The Da Vinci Code,” Mr. Artioli said, “people would ask us which of the figures is Judas; now people ask which one is the Magdalene. It’s a little discouraging to see that people take the interpretation as truth instead of a game.”

The fact that anyone would cite “Angels and Demons” as a source is quite frankly horrifying. It might not be the stupidest book I’ve ever read, but it’s definitely in the conversation.

As far as Mr. Matt Kartchner is concerned: he came all the way from Sac-town to Rome to see…the places where “Maximus” fought and “Robert Langdon”, uh, symbologized. Euthanasia would not be too harsh for idiocy of this magnitude.

The reason why I am so offended that there is a wave of bleating sheep that washes over every locale that Brown sets his pen to is that HE IS FOR CRAP AS A WRITER.

This post by Geoffrey Pullum on the blog Language Log sums up my feelings perfectly.

I am still trying to come up with a fully convincing account of just what it was about his very first sentence, indeed the very first word, that told me instantly that I was in for a very bad time stylistically.

The Da Vinci Code may well be the only novel ever written that begins with the word renowned. Here is the paragraph with which the book opens. The scene (says a dateline under the chapter heading, ‘Prologue’) is the Louvre, late at night:

Renowned curator Jacques Saunière staggered through the vaulted archway of the museum’s Grand Gallery. He lunged for the nearest painting he could see, a Caravaggio. Grabbing the gilded frame, the seventy-six-year-old man heaved the masterpiece toward himself until it tore from the wall and Saunière collapsed backward in a heap beneath the canvas.

I think what enabled the first word to tip me off that I was about to spend a number of hours in the company of one of the worst prose stylists in the history of literature was this. Putting curriculum vitae details into complex modifiers on proper names or definite descriptions is what you do in journalistic stories about deaths; you just don’t do it in describing an event in a narrative. So this might be reasonable text for the opening of a newspaper report the next day:

Renowned curator Jacques Saunière died last night in the Louvre at the age of 76.

But Brown packs such details into the first two words of an action sequence — details of not only his protagonist’s profession but also his prestige in the field. It doesn’t work here. It has the ring of utter ineptitude. The details have no relevance, of course, to what is being narrated (Saunière is fleeing an attacker and pulls down the painting to trigger the alarm system and the security gates). We could have deduced that he would be fairly well known in the museum trade from the fact that he was curating at the Louvre.

The writing goes on in similar vein, committing style and word choice blunders in almost every paragraph (sometimes every line).

[...]

Brown’s writing is not just bad; it is staggeringly, clumsily, thoughtlessly, almost ingeniously bad. In some passages scarcely a word or phrase seems to have been carefully selected or compared with alternatives. I slogged through 454 pages of this syntactic swill, and it never gets much better. Why did I keep reading? Because London Heathrow is a long way from San Francisco International, and airline magazines are thin, and two-month-old Hollywood drivel on a small screen hanging two seats in front of my row did not appeal, that’s why. And why did I keep the book instead of dropping it into a Heathrow trash bin? Because it seemed to me to be such a fund of lessons in how not to write.

I don’t think I’d want to say these things about a first-time novelist, it would seem a cruel blow to a budding career. But Dan Brown is all over the best-seller lists now. In paperback and hardback, and in many languages, he is a phenomenon. He is up there with the Stephen Kings and the John Grishams and nothing I say can conceivably harm him. He is a huge, blockbuster, worldwide success who can go anywhere he wants and need never work again. And he writes like the kind of freshman student who makes you want to give up the whole idea of teaching. Never mind the ridiculous plot and the stupid anagrams and puzzle clues as the book proceeds, this is a terrible, terrible example of the thriller-writer’s craft.

Which brings us to the question of the blurbs. “Dan Brown has to be one of the best, smartest, and most accomplished writers in the country,” said Nelson DeMille, a bestselling author who has himself hit the #1 spot in the New York Times list. Unbelievable mendacity. And there are four other similar pieces of praise on the back cover. Together those blurbs convinced me to put this piece of garbage on the CostCo cart along with the the 72-pack of toilet rolls. Thriller writers must have a code of honor that requires that they all praise each other’s new novels, a kind of omerta that enjoins them to silence about the fact that some fellow member of the guild has given evidence of total stylistic cluelessness. A fraternal code of silence. We could call it… the Da Vinci code; or the Dan Brown code.

It’s really too bad, because I always found the Scottish Rite Masonic Temple in DC a cool, enigmatic sight.

Now it’s about to be pooped on by Dan Brown and his horde of followers, who have been led to believe that they now “understand” the “secret codes” hidden therein.

I think Christopher Orr of The Plank said it best: “Sounds like an excellent time to leave town, for perhaps ten or fifteen years.”

C. Dave sent us a link to a wonderful piece in SLATE: the top 25 Bushisms of all time.

Jacob Weisberg, the chief collector of these nuggets, prefaces them with some thoughts:

People often assume that because I’ve spent the past nine years collecting Bushisms, I must despise George W. Bush. To the contrary, Bushisms fill me with affection for the man—and not just because of the income stream they’ve generated. I find the Bush who flails with words, unlike the Bush who flails with policy, to be an endearing character. Instead of a villain, he makes himself into an irresistible buffoon, like Mrs. Malaprop, Archie Bunker, or Homer Simpson. Bush treats words the way he treated recalcitrant European leaders: When they won’t do what he wants them to, he tries to bully them into submission. Through his willful, improvisational, and incompetent use of language, he tempers (very slightly) his willful, improvisational, and incompetent use of government. You can’t, in the end, despise someone who regrets that, because of the rising cost of malpractice insurance, “[t]oo many OB/GYNs aren’t able to practice their love with women all across the country.”

[...]

Being able to laugh at yourself is a rare quality in a leader. It’s one thing George W. Bush can do that Bill Clinton couldn’t. Unfortunately, as we bid farewell to Bushisms, we must conclude that the joke was mainly on us.

Some of the quotations are familiar, but here are five we hadn’t heard that are pure gold:

“See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda.”
—Greece, N.Y., May 24, 2005

“It’s important for us to explain to our nation that life is important. It’s not only life of babies, but it’s life of children living in, you know, the dark dungeons of the Internet.”
—Arlington Heights, Ill., Oct. 24, 2000

“People say, ‘How can I help on this war against terror? How can I fight evil?’ You can do so by mentoring a child; by going into a shut-in’s house and say I love you.”
—Washington, D.C., Sept. 19, 2002

“I think it’s really important for this great state of baseball to reach out to people of all walks of life to make sure that the sport is inclusive. The best way to do it is to convince little kids how to—the beauty of playing baseball.”
—Washington, D.C., Feb. 13, 2006

“Families is where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream.”
—LaCrosse, Wis., Oct. 18, 2000

It’s almost over, kids!!

Enjoy these classic Bushisms while they remain relevant and tragically hilarious.

Since the GOP is out of power in the executive branch and both houses of Congress, the post is one of the few true leadership positions available in the party right now.

However, the wrangling has gone non-stop for a couple of months now, with no clear leader emerging…it’s a total shit show!

Option #1 is the current party leader, Mike Duncan, essentially a Karl Rove appointee whose political baseball card features -21 seats in the House, -8 seats in the Senate (assuming Al Franken hangs on in MN), and a net loss of one in governorships. A smelly resume to say the least, but he wants to keep the job.

Duncan: You don’t change horses in midstream, so you DEFINITELY don’t change horses in a horrifying deluge. Right? RIGHT???

Keep in mind however, he is a past winner of the Vic Hellard Award, proving that he is “a values-driven, virtuous gentleman who loves Kentucky“!

Option #2 is Chip Saltsman, Mike Huckabee’s former campaign manager, who made waves by courting delegates with a comedy CD featuring the timeless classic, “Barack the Magic Negro.“

Huckabee and Saltsman, the Magic Crackers

This caused a huge firestorm of controversy in the mainstream media that some say will deep-six Saltsman’s chances, while others say it will boost them, since GOP loyalists hate them some MSM.

NOBODY KNOWS!

Still, tough to see how the guy best known for utilizing Chuck Norris as his main campaign surrogate and distributing a song calling the President a Negro is the right choice for the 21st century GOP.

Option #3 is Michael Steele, the former Lieutenant Governor of Maryland. On the surface, he seems an intriguing choice – an African-American from a “border state”, with the more moderate positions that the pundits consider crucial for a rapid GOP comeback.

Steele: I’m ashamed to be Republican. Let me lead the party to victory!

All that seems nice, until you recall that in 2006 Steele talked all kinds of smack about the Republican Party in an “anonymous” interview with Beltway reporters while in the midst of getting his butt handed to him in a Maryland Senate race. His identity was so thinly veiled that he was unmasked within hours of publication, humiliated, and destroyed in the election.

It’s doubtful that the party faithful will want their new leader to be the guy who said “For me to pretend I’m not a Republican would be a lie. [But running as a proud Republican?] That’s going to be tough, it’s going to be tough to do…If this race is about Republicans and Democrats, I lose.”

Option #4 is Saul Anuzis, the Michigan Republican Party chairman who is best known for saying “WTF?!?!” when John McCain shut down his campaign in the state last fall.

Anuzis: A proven track record….for me to poop on!

Anuzis is big on revitalizing the Republicans through the use of cutting-edge technology, but his love of bits, bytes and binary code hasn’t done him any good when it comes to winning actual elections. Michigan Republicans have been soundly thumped in federal and state elections during his tenure. He’s already at a disadvantage being from a blue state located far from Republican strongholds, and his awful track record doesn’t inspire much confidence.

Option #5 is Ken Blackwell, former Mayor of Cincinnati and Ohio Secretary of State, who is loathed by Democrats for his involvement in the allegedly-controversial 2004 elections. This kind of press can only help him in the race.

Like Steele, he also happens to be African-American, but he’s shown greater devotion to the GOP tenets on a series of key issues like taxes, social conservatism and guns than Steele has.

Blackwell: Will stick to tried-and-true “calling opponents gay” strategy that has served him well since 2nd grade.

He seems to be the most plausible of all the challengers, but Blackwell has a few strikes against him. First, he ran for Ohio Governor and directed a really slimy campaign in which he essentially accused his opponent (now-Governor Strickland) of gaiety. In the swing state of all swing states, he got OBLITERATED and lost by over 20%.

Additionally, he’s not a Southerner, which seems to be a key qualification, since the base skews strongly southwards. He’s not that tight with RNC members, and may not have the pull to get it done.

If you think the GOP losses in 2006 and 2008 were basically a fluke and the country is still center-right, Blackwell would be a fine choice. If you believe, a la Newt Gingrich, that the way back to power is a more moderate, conciliatory angle, Blackwell isn’t the man for you…

Option #6 is the elusive Katon Dawson, the head of the South Carolina GOP, who has infrequently gained notice for things like his only-recently-resigned membership in a whites-only country club. Seriously?? This took place after the year 2000? South Carolina, ladies and gentlemen!

Dawson: Don’t call him a dark horse, he’ll get kicked out of his country club.

Dawson has also racked up a DeLay-esque $75,000 in expenses to the SCGOP budget in recent months, ostensibly making under-the-radar trips to attract support for his bid. Just what the GOP needs, more slush fund spending sprees. It doesn’t seem to be working very well because nobody is hyping the guy.

With this slate of deeply flawed candidates, it’s no wonder that the GOP faithful are up in arms and angry at everybody.

POLITICO reports:

As Republicans struggle to determine the future of their party after a tough election, intraparty tensions have flared over three forums next week that may prove crucial to determining the winner of the six-way race for the chair of the Republican National Committee — a post that will hold considerable sway over the direction of the GOP.

“Some people are pissed off at [Americans for Tax Reform President] Grover [Norquist]. Some people are pissed off at the Conservative Steering Committee. Some people are pissed off at [current RNC chair] Mike Duncan. Some people are pissed off at social conservatives. The social conservatives are pissed at leaders in Congress,” said a Republican consultant who has worked with the RNC. “Everyone is basically pissed.”

It looks like the best option here might be for the GOP to hold its nose and stick with Duncan. Mike Dunk is seemingly a boring loser, but all the other candidates appear to be public relations, electoral or ideological liabilities.

Just as the GOP will have to lie in the weeds and wait for the Obama/Reid/Pelosi triumvirate to make a false move, so too will they potentially have to accept a weak RNC chair until someone exciting like former chair and Mississippi governor Haley Barbour becomes available to take the reins…

UPDATE: We’re now fully behind Mike Duncan after learning of his dramatic, cutting-edge plans to revolutionize the party’s online apparatus. “We have to do it in the Facebook, with the Twittering, the different technology that young people are using today.” Yessss! The Twittering!! You’re going down Obama!

THE ATLANTIC may perhaps be forgiven for abandoning Boston for D.C. after their bloggers performed so admirably this election cycle. Now it’s time to bestow further kudos for the magazine’s excellent coverage of their new home. There’s a terrific article by Clay Risen in the most recent issue that profiles D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee.

Rhee is a hard-charging reformer brought in by Mayor Adrian Fenty to overhaul the troubled D.C. school system. Risen dubs her “The Lightning Rod” because she’s absorbed most of the flak that comes from shaking up long-entrenched structures.

As the article describes, D.C. was once the epicenter of black intellectualism in America, until social shifts and the rise of Marion Barry turned the public school system into a morass of patronage and corruption:

Up to the mid-1960s, Washington had some of the country’s best black public schools, including Dunbar High School, which produced Senator Edward Brooke, the civil-rights lawyer Charles Hamilton Houston, and D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton. The schools were a magnet for middle-class black families who wanted a quality education but were largely shut out of white-majority schools, either by law or by residential segregation. By 1960, Washington was a center of black intellectual and cultural life. “People talk about Harlem, but in terms of a professional class and intelligentsia, Washington was on par,” says NPR’s Juan Williams, who covered education for The Washington Post in the 1970s.

Like many urban districts, Washington thrived because it could rely on a class of educators—in this case, African Americans—who were mostly kept out of other professions. But as barriers eroded in the 1950s and 1960s, experienced black teachers began leaving for better opportunities. At the same time, rising crime and the calamitous 1968 riots reversed the flow of black middle-class families, particularly after the 1968 Fair Housing Act encouraged them to decamp to the suburbs. Combined with the white flight that had by the late 1960s largely run its course, black flight left behind a core of socially isolated, desperately poor families, who suffered as the crime and joblessness rates climbed steeply through the 1970s.

Black flight also left behind a power vacuum, which was eagerly filled by a new generation of activists fronted by the civil-rights leader Marion Barry. Though he later became the butt of late-night-TV jokes, Barry is a political genius, and in the early 1970s he was one of the first in his generation to see the school system’s political potential. Until Congress granted the city limited home rule in 1973, the D.C. school board was the only elected body in Washington, and thus one of the only paths of political ascent for the city’s black leaders. In 1971, Barry won a landslide election for a seat on the board; he was so popular that his fellow members immediately made him president, a position he held until moving to the city council in 1974 and to the mayor’s office four years later.

Barry quickly grasped that the school system could do more than just facilitate his own rise. With its thousands of well-paying jobs, it was an ideal way to rebuild the black middle class—and, not incidentally, it was a limitless source of patronage. Barry’s climb coincided with that of William Simons, the fiery head of the Washington Teachers’ Union. Simons was a sort of black equivalent to Albert Shanker, then the voluble head of New York’s United Federation of Teachers, and he led his union in two lengthy, debilitating strikes during the 1970s. Through it all, Barry played the go-between, working the city and Congress around to Simons’s position. A new political base was emerging, populated by teachers and led by Barry. “It’s no longer about educating the best and brightest of black Washington but about establishing the schools as a place where blacks can get better jobs, higher salaries, and more benefits,” Williams told me.

A generation later, the result was a system that was overstaffed, inefficient, and resistant to change, even as it got worse at its primary role of educating students. Into this mess stepped Adrian Fenty and Michelle Rhee.

The story of Rhee’s recruitment by Fenty is a backroom political moment reminiscent of The Wire.

Rhee had already been approached about the chancellor job by several people in his administration, and she had demurred each time, citing family commitments. But Fenty kept pushing, and eventually she laid out her real concern: she saw herself as a “change agent,” and Washington as a graveyard for careers like hers. The school board was too powerful and too dominated by unions and special interests to give much of a chance to someone intent on closing schools and renegotiating contracts. Then Fenty laid out his vision: he would take control of the schools, and provide whatever political cover Rhee needed to completely overhaul them. The chancellor and the mayor would make the important decisions. The District’s Office of the State Superintendent of Education would continue to manage the kinds of state-federal transactions handled by other state education departments, and would be headed by someone Fenty had already appointed. A few weeks after their meeting, she was scouting houses in Washington.

Mayor Fenty knows how to close the deal.

In the sympathetic profile, Rhee comes across as efficient, sardonic, and effective. There’s no doubt, however, that taking on the entrenched interests in the DC school system is not an easy task. Rhee is constantly glued to computers and BlackBerrys, and makes a point of answering every email she recieves. She doesn’t suffer fools gladly, telling Risen about a previous interviewer who she thought was a dolt.

This also carries over to her management tactics: she’s canned almost a thousand principals, assistant principals, teachers and staff. Rhee’s favorite anecdote compares a young, energetic popular teacher with a grizzled veteran flicking the lights on and off to get her students’ attention.

In a brilliant turn, the article concludes with a City Council showdown between Rhee and Marion Barry, now representing the poorest district in the city:

Listening to Rhee, it’s hard to disagree. But even if she speaks cavalierly about eschewing city politics, that doesn’t make city politics go away. Complaints are bubbling up to the city council. In one particularly testy exchange at an all-day meeting in April, Marion Barry, now the representative for the city’s poorest ward, lectured Rhee on the political realities of her job. “Whether or not you and the mayor want to take it out of the political arena, you cannot, because education all over America has political implications,” he told her. “Parents are also voters.”

Rhee would have none of it. “I think part of the problem of how the district has been run in the past is that decisions have been made for political reasons, and based on what was going to placate and satisfy adults instead of what was in the best interests of children.”

“Let me be succinct, because my time is running out,” Barry retorted. “Talk to other people on this, because I think you’re absolutely wrong … I know you want to do it the right way, but I think that’s causing us more problems than we need to have.”

The comment was a warning, but it was also a reflection of the very political nature of education in the American inner city, and particularly in Washington. In a city largely excluded from national politics, it makes sense that residents would feel particularly slighted by an outsider, installed without their input, who is happy to bypass the few forums left where poor and working-class parents can engage with the political system—the parent-teacher associations, the ward-level education committees, and other unofficial bodies that long wielded influence against the elected school board and suddenly find themselves powerless against a mayorally appointed chancellor. “I’m sympathetic with the need to act decisively and quickly, but at the same time, what does that do to one of our last democratic institutions?” asks Celia Oyler, a professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College. To a reformer, that sounds like a classic plea for putting grown-ups’ interests first.

Provincialism is a particularly nasty defense against reform: we saw this in Boston when State Senator Dianne Wilkerson fought bitterly to hang on to her seat against “outsider” candidate Sonia Chang-Diaz, who Wilkerson’s supporters rejected as being a rich person from Newton (with an astronaut father, no less) come to gentrify their community. The issue became moot when Wilkerson was caught on tape by the FBI stuffing a bribe in her bra.

Who was the real threat to the community there: the reformer who brings a fresh new vision, wherever her place of birth, or the local entrenched politico mouthing platitudes while undermining the system’s effectiveness at every turn?

Wilkerson: She ain’t busty, that’s just her bankroll.

At any rate, the entire article is well worth a read. Also check out this interview transcript with Chancellor Rhee.

Past winners of the award include LeBron James, Kevin Love and Greg Oden…so yeah, this guy can ball.

As the WAPO reports, the Hoyas definitively move on this season from the roster that took them to the Final Four two years ago:

The beauty of college basketball, Georgetown Coach John Thompson III likes to say, is that it constantly evolves.

There is no such thing as a finished product to sit back and admire, but instead a revolving cast of players, perpetually defining and redefining itself.

Thompson’s fondness for that flux — and the notion that his work, as a result, can never be finished — will be tested this season.

That test gets under way tonight at Verizon Center, where Georgetown opens its first season in four years without Roy Hibbert, Jonathan Wallace and Patrick Ewing Jr., who led the Hoyas to consecutive Big East regular season titles and three NCAA tournament appearances.

The opponent is Jacksonville (0-1), a team Georgetown beat by 32 points last season but one Thompson isn’t taking lightly. The Dolphins have all five starters returning and scored 40 second-half points against Florida State in both teams’ opener Saturday before falling, 59-57.

“They’re a significantly different team than when we played them last year,” Thompson said of Jacksonville, picked to finish second in the Atlantic Sun Conference. “With their whole group back, they’re going to be confident, and we’re finding ourselves.”

For the faithful at Verizon Center, where Georgetown was unbeaten last season, the focus will be entirely on the new-look Hoyas.

Will 6-foot-11 freshman Greg Monroe, a McDonald’s all-American, show promise of becoming the Hoyas’ anchor inside?

Thompson cautions against assuming that Monroe will simply step into Hibbert’s role, characterizing him instead as “a facilitator.”

“He’s someone who’ll make his teammates a lot better,” Thompson said of the sought-after recruit. “He has an affinity and a gift for being able to pass the ball.”

Teammates rave about Monroe’s work ethic in practice.

“I love the kid!” gushed junior forward DaJuan Summers, who returns for his third season as a starter. “He works tremendously hard. His skill set is very good. And he’s very aware of what’s going on the game.”

Here’s a YouTube highlight reel of Monroe in action at some major national/international camps. We can’t vouch for the audio on this, but the visuals are banging. Update: Got your voucher right here…Gang Starr – “Full Clip.” Certified awesome.

Circle January 17th on your calendar now: that’s the day when Monroe takes his A-game to Duke and shows them what they lost out on by falling short in the recruiting wars.

Monroe canceled his scheduled visit to Durham and signed on with the Hoyas after witnessing Gtown’s March Madness rally featuring Patrick Ewing Jr. teaching Jerry Rice how to dance like Soulja Boy. (Duke promised to counter with Coach K teaching Reade Seligmann and Collin Finnerty to do the Electric Slide, but apparently that wasn’t enough.)

A few comings and goings for the Hoyas this season: Vernon Macklin, who was never really able to assert himself in the post for Gtown, transferred to Florida to join the Billy Donovan Brigade.

More surprisingly, Jeremiah “Son of Doc” Rivers transferred to Indiana. Maybe he got tired of hearing the sarcastic applause following his infrequent field goals…

Nate Lubick (right): Gtown’s first Ginger Great?

On the recruiting front, the Hoyas are heavily recruiting in Boston-area prep schools: an arid landscape to be sure, but also the same terrain that yielded Patrick Ewing.

GU has already signed up one top player from the tiny Independent School League’s Class of 2010 all-stars – skilled, carrot-topped big man Nate Lubick from St. Mark’s School. His ginger aura will bring a new dimension to the GU team, and his all-around skills aren’t bad either…

Our sources tell us that Coach Thompson has ALSO been spotted at the Middlesex School gym checking out potential role-player Rod Odom. Although he’s a big man in a little man’s league right now, Odom ultimately projects to be a perimeter player with a solid 3-point stroke and excellent defensive skills. Seton Hall is in hot pursuit of Odom, but JTIII wants to see more before he extends an offer. Here’s hoping Odom accompanies his growth spurt with a killer junior season, so the official high school basketball team of ROTI can send a representative to the official college basketball team of ROTI.

You’d think Gtown would be harvesting most of their players from the DC/Baldimore area, instead of tiny New England prep schools.

However, we suppose that on some level this makes a lot of sense: if you like to run the Princeton offense, you probably need players capable of making the grade at Princeton…

UPDATE: Monroe kicked ass against Jacksonville. The AP report drooled, “The arena lights dimmed…and Greg Monroe was the first Georgetown player introduced to the crowd. Then the game against Jacksonville began, and the 6-foot-11 freshman was the first Georgetown player to shoot the ball this season. And the first to score. And the first to grab a rebound. And the first to block a shot.” Final line: 14 points, 7 rebounds, 3 blocks…

According to an AP report, Karl Rove was giving a speech in the City by the Bay when a liberal loon with an amazing name attempted to place him under citizen’s arrest.

SAN FRANCISCO – An anti-war protester confronted former Bush administration aide Karl Rove while he spoke at a San Francisco mortgage bankers’ meeting.

A statement by the group Code Pink identified the woman as 58-year-old Janine Boneparth, who tried to handcuff Rove in what she called a citizen’s arrest for “treason.”

Rove, who was speaking Tuesday at the Mortgage Bankers Association’s annual convention, elbowed Boneparth away as she was escorted off the stage.

BLAOW!! Bitch please!! Rove don’t play.