Moby Dave

I'm guessing that comparative minority of my readers also read Brookings fellow and football fan Gregg Easterbrook's column on ESPN, "Tuesday Morning Quarterback." And while, yes, most of it is snarky, superior second guessing (hence the name), the column also moves fairly far afield of the gridiron, usually into some other arena where Easterbrook can exercise his trademark know-it-all bluster.

Really, I love reading this column, because alongside ridicule of Washington Redskins owner Dan Snyder, and really quite sincere praise of polite sportsmanlike behavior, you get items like this:

In 1995, yours truly published a book on environmental policy called "A Moment on the Earth." Sen. John Kerry and his wife Teresa Heinz Kerry have just published a book on environmental policy called "This Moment on Earth." OK, titles cannot be copyrighted; anyone is free to sell a book called "Gone With the Wind." (The 2001 legal controversy regarding the book "The Wind Done Gone" concerned not the title but similarities of plot and characters; under some circumstances, plot and characters can be copyrighted.) Seriously, can Sen. Kerry claim never to have heard of my book "A Moment on the Earth"? It was, after all, a New York Times and American Library Association "Notable Book of the Year" in the same topic he's writing about. Anyway, let's assume this was an honest mistake by a United States senator and a rich woman whose names are often attached to material they have barely glanced at. Here are other works of literature being written by John Kerry and Teresa Heinz Kerry:

"The Reasonably Good Gatsby"
"For Whom the Bell Rings"
"To Kill a Magpie"
"Much Ado About Relatively Little"
"The Bridge Over the River Kennebec"
"The DiMaggio Code"
"War and Pizza"
"Moby-Dave"

Also, John and Teresa will record a jazz track titled "Take Six" and a rock-and-roll song titled, "(I Can't Get Nothing) Satisfactory."