Weirdest Thing About D.C.? The basketball courts are empty. Even on a Saturday morning.

This here's at maybe 10:30 a.m., right in the middle of town, on the first real day of spring. Growing up where I did, there was no such thing as two empty playground courts on a late Saturday morning. This is a majority black town, and the only black guys I saw on the court were some fancily dressed young gentlemen who seemed to be shooting some some still photography against that mural for a rap video.

I don't know whether it's been reading Kareem's inspirational blog, or perhaps the specter of turning 40 and becoming a father this summer, but it became suddenly urgent to get me some of those newfangled Air Jordans, a super-deluxe indoor/outdoor ball, and start the laborious process of hauling this wrecked body into a position where it at least remembers what it was like from 1979-86, when you could count the number of days I didn't play basketball on one hand, maybe two.

Today the second guy to come onto the courts was a bearded old white dude, possibly homeless, who was wearing glasses, baggy layers of clothing, and had stuffed food in his jacket-pockets to keep it away from a particularly nosy squirrel that was working near his blue plastic bag full of possessions. When I had finished my morning shoot-around, I eventually looked up to notice something remarkable -- he was superbly focused and ritualistic at the free-throw line, doing a repetitive deal where during the rhthym-bounces he'd swing his shooting hand like a windshield wiper, then he'd really concentrate, place the ball naked in his right hand, then nail one one-handed free-throw after another. He'd made like 12 in a row when I finally yelled out: "What's your percentage!"

"Eighty-six percent," he said, without missing a beat. "And that includes the bad days, too."

Hey look -- Eric Neel is writing about the ABA.

03/15/2008 07:29 PM  |  Comment (1)

MattWelch.tv: Were you basically saying that there's not enough video of me talking about John McCain? Let's fix that.

This is a picture of me taken by the funny and talented New York photographer Robin Holland on Friday, just after I taped the Bill Moyers Journal, which aired later that day. Video here, transcript here, mini-profile of me here.

Here's five minutes of me yakking about the New York Times' lousy attempt at scandal-mongering, which nonetheless brought up an interesting (if not very new) point about McCain's figuratively steamy relationship with lobbyists. Note the sweet Reason.tv robot-dance bumper music.

Here's me (in bits) having a bad hair day on Al-Jazeera (in the 3-4 minute area), which certainly was an interesting experience:

Here's me on Bloggingheads with the charming moral philosopher Will Wilkinson, talking for a full hour:

Here's me on Pacifica Radio's Democracy Now with Amy Goodman, in three parts! Transcript here.

This is a condensed version of an hour-plus book forum I did at the behest of the nice folks at Cato; unfortunately I didn't give them my best performance. Full video (including a comical trash-Welch performance by political hack Lance Tarrance, Jr.) available at fora TV; here's a snippet:

And just to break up the tedium, here's a trailer of a documentary movie that I appear in but haven't had the heart to watch yet, about my favorite person in Cuba, an octogenarian independent journalist who in 2003 turned out to be a dissident-condemning spy. Unless he wasn't, of course.

If anyone sees evidence of my talking noggin anywhere else, please do share.

03/09/2008 07:18 PM  |  Comment (5)

Hi! What are you doing down here?