Cheap Seats

E-mail from some flounders

If you’re a Web surfer, check out the University of Idaho football home page. The guestbook has a couple of what are most likely fradulent entries, but make for fun reading.

From JohnL@usu.edu: “USU will kick some Vandal butt in October.”

And how about this one from Kermit@lsu.com: “See Ya!”

Any day now, look for Liske@toledo.edu: “Suckers.”

Dropping some promises

Qadry Ismail’s mission this season is to show he’s not just a bunch of talk.

The Green Bay Packers’ new receiver-returner says he has deleted the word “drop” from his vocabulary and now he is out to erase it from his game.

“I think the No. 1 key is don’t even think about the word d-r-o-p,” Ismail said, spelling out the forbidden word.

“Let’s refocus this whole thing and call it, ‘Let’s make plays.’ Let’s help the team by making plays,” Ismail persisted. “All you take notes, writers, TV men: ‘Qadry Ismail, don’t worry about the d-r-o-p. Qadry caught the ball when he needed to and he moved the ball down the field. Period.”’

Hey, this guy can write!

Born to be a Raider

Oakland Raiders center Curtis Whitley admits in a new book that he snorted speed while he was with the Carolina Panthers.

“I’m a wild child. I’ve done some bad things,” said Whitley, who was released by the Panthers before training camp and subsequently signed with the Raiders.

Whitley’s comments were published in “Year of the Cat,” a book being released this week by Simon & Schuster. The book is written by Charles Chandler and Scott Fowler, two newspaper reporters who cover the Carolina Panthers, and it details the team’s 1996 season.

Whitley told the authors that he joined a friend last October in the women’s restroom of a Charlotte-area restaurant and snorted crystal methamphetamine. Whitley said his wife was sitting at a table in the restaurant, unaware that he was doing drugs.

“Obviously I’ll never get to the Hall of Fame - maybe the wall of shame,” said Whitley, whose college and pro careers have been repeatedly interrupted by disciplinary sanctions.

Shooting from the hip

North Korea’s supreme leader, Kim Jong Il, has mapped out a strategy to bring his isolated communist nation world supremacy in basketball.

The key is making shots from a longer distance, Kim has instructed.

The state-run newspaper Democratic Korea, which published Kim’s “precious instructions” added that young people throughout the country should heed Kim’s call and “steel themselves” to help raise the level of basketball in a short time.

Based on directives from Kim, North Korean teams “in the near future will set a bold objective of grasping world supremacy in basketball,” the paper said.

North Korea has never won any regional or world events.

The last word …

“There’s not a lot of brainiacs in the (commissioner’s) office making these decisions.”

- St. Louis slugger Mark McGwire, on possible realignment in Major League Baseball.

, DataTimes