It’s been awhile since I’ve heard Sterling Sharpe on the air. He’s doing color commentary for tonight’s Raiders-Chiefs game, paired with Mike Tirico, while the regular ESPN Sunday Night Football crew do tomorrow’s Katrina-rescheduled Saints-Giants game.

Sharpe sounds downright weird tonight. His voice has a pinched, nasally quality to it. I don’t remember him sounding like this during his old ESPN NFL Primetime studio gig.

In fact, I’ll go as far as to characterize Sharpe’s announcing voice tonight as nerdy. It reminds me of a cross between Steve Urkel and the Art Instruction Schools president (who’s top-of-mind, because his commercials are running during tonight’s game).

With an emergent China making more and more news these days, today’s batch of St. Petersburg Times stories on the nascent capitalist powerhouse will give you a good idea of what’s brewing in today’s Middle Kingdom.

Of particular note is a look at southern China’s newest boomtown:

More people live here than New York city.

It has more factories than the Midwest; a skyscraper taller than the Empire State Building; the busiest port in China.

And a premier golf course that has been played by Tiger Woods.

Shenzhen was nothing but a fishing village 25 years ago when it was picked by government officials to become the showplace of China’s economic resurgence. Now this city of 10-million rivals Hong Kong as a mecca of capitalism

Between this, and a tilting military balance of power in the Pacific, China’s looming large in this century’s realpolitik game.

From today’s Los Angeles Times report on young Muslims and their attempts to integrate into European society, a current country-by-country breakdown of Muslim populations in the European Union, as provided by the U.S. State Department:

Handy reference info.

Note that the rough average percentage of Muslims in the EU as a whole — if you disregard Cyprus, which is a unique situation — is around 5 percent. Put into an American context, the African-American population and Hispanic population in the U.S. is roughly 10 percent each (UPDATE: Closer to 13 percent each, according to the latest Census data.) Meaning the social and cultural influences are, as usual, overstated.

And as for the armchair assessments of pundits on this side of the Atlantic about Europe being in a state of “elegant decay”, and using stats like this as proof: Such thinking displays a laughable lack of understanding about Euro sensibilities.

I see that the Online Journalism Review is asking for shout-outs whenever the site is used as a classroom teaching material.

Maybe I should solicit similar feedback. Because I already know that some instructor at Tufts University is pointing students to my side-by-side comparison of the collective bargaining agreements (as of end-of-2004) in the NHL, NBA, NFL and MLB. I’ve been getting a modest amount of hits from that corner of Massachusetts as a result.

Unfortunately, the referring link page from Tufts is login-restricted, so I can’t see just how/why my little ol’ blog is being cited. And the curiosity is killing me! (Well, piquing my interest, anyway.)

As near as I can tell, the course that’s pointing my way is “EXP-9L: The Wide World of Sports Finance”, taught by Erik Johanson and Zachary Smotherman. I wish the online course catalogue was viewable, like the one for Tufts’ NBA-onomics course.

I’m trackbacking this post back to the CBA post, so maybe someone from the university can inform me. Either way, I’m happy to be aiding in student enlightenment, as it were.

There seems to be a rash of scholarly examination into blogs and blogging lately:

• Dan Li’s “Why Do You Blog” master’s thesis (in which I participated);
• Scott Nowson’s Blogademia, an in-progress work out of the University of Edinburgh;
• James Torio’s “Blogs - A Global Conversation” master’s thesis (first chapter excerpted here).

And I’m sure there are others; feel free to clue me in.

I guess this is a natural progression with the emergence of a new media strain: First it’s a cultish phenomenon, then it attracts specialized oldschool media attention, then mainstream media, then academic scrutiny. Next would be wider pop-cultural integration… And then, I guess, familiarity and contempt (if it’s not there already).