The Final Four is in full swing, hockey and basketball playoffs are virtually moments away, and baseball’s Opening Day is in the air. So let’s talk a little football.

This week the NFL meets to discuss changes in the overtime rules. Specifically, they are meeting because they can no longer ignore the complaints that sudden death just isn’t fair. Or, to put it a bit more precisely, they can’t ignore the complains that sudden death, which has always been a bit unfair, has become, in a day and age when teams kick off from the 30 and when field goal kickers are pretty automatic, almost prohibitively unfair to the team that loses the coin toss in the overtime round. In response to this, the league, which doesn’t want to look like a bunch of damn liberals and just mandate that both teams get to possess the ball, is contemplating looking like a bunch of liberals on a congressional subcommittee, and mandating that both teams get to possess the ball, unless the first team to possess the ball scores a touchdown.

Now what in the name of Kill Bubba Kill Smith is going on here? First of all, having been reared on Butkus, Bednarik, Nitschke, Huff, Lambert, the Fearsome Foursome, the Steel Curtain, the Purple People Eaters and the Steel Curtain, I like football where the teams play a little defense. I hated that Green Bay-Arizona shootout in the playoffs this year, where both teams’ defenses resembled nothing so much as a group of pylons. Football is about offense and defense, and yes, it’s an advantage in sudden death to have the ball first, but that why need the defense needs some big fast mean sumbitches who can stop the other guys on third down.

But, yes, it is true that advances in the kicking game have given offenses tremendous advantage–better field position to start, and a shorter distance to cover to reach field goal range. But the answer to the problem needs to be a football answer, not a non-football answer, like acknowledging that defense is a secondary part of the game or that both sides should possess the ball (hey, in a game, neither side is actually guaranteed a possession!)

My answer is simple: eliminate the overtime kick-off. Treat the overtime period the way we three the second and fourth periods, and just play the game from point where the clock ran out. Obviously this will result in games where one team enjoys better field position than the other, but that position will result from the game action that preceded it, not from clean slate kick-off that gives the coin toss winner an advantage. And think of the quandries this will create for the coaches late in regulation–should they try to drive for the win, or punt the ball and set stick the other team deep in its own end?

Most of the obituaries of Fess Parker, the actor who famously portrayed Davy Crockett on television in the fifties and who died yesterday, placed him at the center of genuine coonskin fad, part of the crazy quilt of crazes of that period that included Elvis, hula hoops, drive-ins and that made up pop culture during that decade. I prefer to think Fess as being one of the key figures in the fifties and sixties who were entertaining children and adults with stories directly taken from or based on American history.

Consider all these influences which appeared between 1955 and 1965: Parker first played Crockett, one of the first national smashes in the young days of television, and then later played frontiersman Daniel Boone on an NBC series ran for six seasons after its 1964 debut. Parker’s show, The Adventures of Davy Crockett, was produced by the Walt Disney Company, which during this period also made a film version of Esther Forbes Revolutionary War novel Johnny Tremain, and created a TV programs based on the adventures of the Revolutionary War hero Frances Marion, the Swamp Fox, starring Leslie Nielsen, of a drummer boy who served at the battle of Shiloh, and of the 7th Cavalry’s only survivor of the Battle of the Little Big Horn (Commanche, a horse.) Disney wasn’t the only television producer that tried to mine history: in 1961, there was a short-lived television series called The Americans about a pair of brothers from Virginia who ended up on the opposite sides of the Civil War, and in 1963, an anthology series on CBS called The Great Adventure, also short-lived, which depicted key moments in the lives of people like Harriet Tubman, Jefferson Davis, Nathan Hale, Sam Houston, John Brown, Jean Lafitte, Boss Tweed and others (one wonders if this approach was inspired by President Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage.) At the same time, Hollywood, whose longstanding interest in historical epics had ebbed, once again began pumping them out in earnest: The Alamo (Crockett again!), The Buccaneer (Charlton Heston as Andrew Jackson), The Horse Soldiers (John Wayne as a Union cavalry officer), The Longest Day, PT 109, The Great Escape, The Bridge Over the River Kwai, and many, many more westerns and World War II adventures (and this wouldn’t include non-American-based films like Cleopatra, Ben Hur, El Cid, Khartoum, Spartacus, Lawrence of Arabia, The Fall of the Roman Empire, Becket, The Lion in Winter, and so on, which fed an interest in history.) On the radio, country singer Johnny Horton had a hit single with “The Battle of New Orleans,” and a hit album that includes songs about the sinking of the Bismarck, Snowshoe Thompson and Jim Bridger. Our bookshelves were filled with Landmark Books, non-fiction biographies and accounts of battles, events and discoveries, and “You Are There. . . ” books, which showed us large historical events through the eyes of child participants. For a lighter read, Topps put out a line of Civil War trading cards, with grisly battle scenes drawn by Woody Gelman, who also drew Topps’ famous Mars Attacks! series. Best of all, we had toys. Toy guns, sure–flintlocks, Winchester repeaters, Colt revolvers, Lugars, .45 caliber automatics, and carbines, but all kinds of playsets full of toy soldiers and accessories that allowed us to imagine for ourselves what the Alamo, Gettysburg, Omaha Beach and the Little Big Horn must have looked like, had they been waged on the colorful linoleum tiles of my mother’s basement.

It’s not that kinds today get no history-based entertainment–American Girl dolls are an obvious example–but kids are far more steeped in fantasy and science fiction. I just think of myself as very fortunate to have been brought up during a very brief period when so much of pop culture enthusiastically communicated and reinforced the idea that the past was place that was exciting, and inspiring, and well worth getting to know.

You don’t have to listen to me; listen, if you prefer, to Karl Rove.

Six weeks ago, I wrote a post that argued that anybody who wants to end the bitter partisanship that has metastasized in Washington shouldn’t direct his or her protests to the White House or to Congress, but should instead address their state capitals. That’s because next year, after the census is complete, the state legislatures will redraw the congressional district lines. If past is prologue, strenuous efforts will be made by whatever party controls any given legislature to create safe Congressional seats–districts where their party enjoys an unbeatable majority. Well, that may be good for them, but it’s terrible for us, and it’s terrible for democracy. It creates districts where the representatives have only to please the hard core of their own party and don’t have to do much if anything to attract voters from the other party. The representatives become hardened in their positions, and strident in their arguments. Compromise evaporates. We end up with a Washington where the parties can’t, don’t and won’t work together, because gaining an edge becomes more important than solving a problem. .

If you don’t believe me, believe Karl Rove, George W. Bush’s resident political genius. Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Rove confirms my point, albeit with a quite a different spin: Republicans are focused on winning the legislatures in this fall’s election in order to control this process. “The political world is fixated on whether this year’s elections will deliver an epic rebuke of President Barack Obama and his party,” he writes. “If that happens, it could end up costing Democrats congressional seats for a decade to come.”

As Rove explains, “control of the state legislature matters whether a state loses or gains seats. Take fast-growing Texas, which is expected to pick up as many as four seats next year. Democrats had a 17-13 edge in the state’s congressional delegation after the 2000 elections. Republicans won control of the Texas House in 2002 and redrew the state’s congressional map. As a result, the GOP now controls 20 congressional seats in Texas while Democrats control 12. Similarly in Georgia, following the 2000 census Democrats redrew district lines to give themselves control of the state’s two new congressional seats. . . .To understand the broader political implications, consider that the GOP gained somewhere between 25 and 30 seats because of the redistricting that followed the 1990 census. Without those seats, Republicans would not have won the House in 1994.”

Rove doesn’t bring it up, but that Texas redistricting was an outrageous bit of gerrymandering engineered by Tom DeLay. And the aftermath of that Republican triumph in 1994, for those who have forgotten, has been an attempt by the GOP to shut down the government, a politically motivated impeachment, and a stymied presidential election that turned into a national embarrassment.

The point is, Rove and his Republican colleagues, along with their Democratic counterparts, are going to invest everything they have into drawing those congressional districts their own advantage. But the answer to Washington’s fundamental problem lies not in having the right band of partisans in control, but in having less partisanship. What we need are fewer political monopolies and more open political markets. What we should be insisting is that the legislatures draw competitive districts. (“The average winner of a competitive House race in 2008 spent $2 million, while a noncompetitive seat can be defended for far less than half that amount, ” writes Rove. “Moving, say, 20 districts from competitive to out-of-reach could save a party $100 million or more over the course of a decade.” Yes! Of course it saves the candidates and the parties money! They don’t have to campaign to win!)

Is nonpartisan redistricting a pipe dream? Not according to the people of Iowa, where a nonpartisan Legislative Services Bureau is charged with developing up to three plans that can be accepted or rejected by the legislature. “The plans are criteria-driven, meaning that the bureau draws districts based on clear, measurable criteria,” reports fairvote.org. “The four criteria, in descending order of importance are: 1) population equality; 2) contiguity; 3) unity of counties and cities (maintaining county lines and house districts within senate districts and senate districts within congressional districts); and 4) compactness.” The next time you see your state legislator, demand to know why your state doesn’t deserve a system as fair and as pro-voter as Iowa’s.

In an article on CNET.com called “Why No One Cares About Privacy Anymore,” Declan McCullagh celebrates (I don’t think that’s too strong a word) the changing mores and advancing technology that seem to be turning the idea of privacy into a quaintly passe concept. Noting that the anticipated storm of privacy objections to Google Buzz have simply not materialized, McCullagh suggests that people, particularly young people, just aren’t all that worked up over the idea that the world knows their business. “Internet users have grown accustomed to informational exhibitionism,” he writes. “Norms are changing, with confidentiality giving way to openness. Participating in YouTube, Loopt, FriendFeed, Flickr, and other elements of modern digital society means giving up some privacy, yet millions of people are willing to make that trade-off every day. Of people with an online profile, nearly 40 percent have disabled privacy settings so anyone may view it, according to a Pew Internet survey released a year ago. The percentage is probably higher today.” McCullagh quotes the Judge Richard Posner, a conservative political theorist, who has written “As a social good, I think privacy is greatly overrated because privacy basically means concealment. People conceal things in order to fool other people about them. They want to appear healthier than they are, smarter, more honest and so forth.” The truth about privacy is counter-intuitive, McCullagh concludes: “Less of it can lead to a more virtuous society.”

In many ways, this is certainly true. It always seemed astonishing that homosexuals were denied security clearances during the Cold War because their secret left them susceptible to blackmail. During my parents’ generation, people kept secrets about all sorts of things because social stigmas were attached: a drinking problem, an out-of-wedlock pregnancy, mental retardation in the following, a marriage outside of one’s race/religion/ethnic group. People have gotten over most of these things. We feel better because because we can lead lives that are more free and more honest.

And yet, there is still much we would resent having put on public display. Who among the exhibitionists would like to have the details of his finances spread across the globe? And while Tiger Woods, Eliot Spitzer, Mark Sanford and others have given infidelity a bad name, do we really feel that people are not entitled to keep their romantic liaisons to themselves, free from community judgment? But what is really important to realize that we are not always in control of the things we need to be private about. Just last week, Liz Cheney, daughter of the Great Scaremonger Dick Cheney, and an odious person in her own right, spearheaded an effort to attack the Department of Justice lawyers who represented accused members of al Qaeda who were in detention. Now, these lawyers were not performing this entirely professional action in secret, so the parallel is not exact, but all of sudden, here they were doing their jobs in relative anonymity, and now a public rabble-rouser is accusing them helping America’s enemies, which certainly sounds like the definition of treason to me. A perfectly normal, yea, even admirable activity has now been spotlighted and stigmatized, and if you think it’s impossible that a right wng nut will one day take a shot at one of these lawyers, then I envy your peace of mind. It may be a better world that doesn’t require so much privacy, but in the meantime, it’s a pretty good protection against hysteria and malevolence.

There was time when people knew a once-promising starlet was about to disappear into obscurity, and that was when she made a last gasp for notoriety by posing nude or nearly so for a men’s magazine. This always seemed like a harsh judgment when I was an editor at Playboy (perhaps because it seemed like such an accurate observation), and we would always point to Kim Basinger as an example of a talented beauty who did indeed revive her career by posing, and who went on to win an Oscar. Others have followed her memorable example, although the results have not been duplicated. This, however, is not to say that things haven’t changed. Although the lovely and talented Lindsay Lohan has apparently run out of failures to foist on moviegoers, and although she has twice posed for magazines nude or nearly so, she nonetheless has managed to pioneered a new bottom in attention-getting behavior: filing a frivolous lawsuit. EW.com reports that Lohan has sued E*Trade for $100 million, arguing “that one of the online brokerage’s recent TV ads featuring a ditzy, “milkaholic” baby girl named Lindsay is modeled after her and improperly invoked her `likeness, name, characterization, and personality’ without permission, violating her right to privacy.” Of course the case is meaningless. One would have to be, well, Lindsay Lohan to think the use of the name “Lindsay” was meant to evoke the underachieving actress, and a mighty egocentric Lindsay Lohan you’d have to be at that. The fact is, the name Lindsay doesn’t make people think of Lindsay Lohan anymore, and the phrase “milkaholic Lindsay” doesn’t make people think of Lindsay Lohan anymore. You’d have to say something like “washed-up Lindsay” or “has-been Lindsay” or “the Lindsay who squandered her talent” to make people think of her. Why, even if you’d mention the name of her greatest triumph, Mean Girls, people would think of Tina Fey. Two questions emerge from this: where did Lohan find a lawyer unscrupulous enough to file this spurious claim (I know, I know: Long Island), and why doesn’t Lindsay just go and get herself cast in something worthwhile?