Leading Off (3/4/09)

1. Mark Cuban isn’t happy about Monday’s loss to the Thunder. Yesterday he said, “The ball won’t always bounce the way we want it to, but every player can control their level of effort. … I don’t care what their contract is. I would rather turn over the roster 100 percent than subject fans to another game like last night.” Two things about that: 1) We now have a second opinion on the behavior of the basketball. Cuban concurs with Josh Howard, who was the first to tell us that “you can’t control what the ball do.” It is, indeed, crazy, man. 2) I’m not a sports fan, as Eric has pointed out. So maybe I don’t understand how this works. But it would be impossible to fire an entire NBA team, wouldn’t it?

2. Lake Cliff Park has always intrigued me. It seems like the real estate around that lake ought to be more prized. Dallas just doesn’t have that many urban lakes. This particular lake does have some cars parked in it, but whatever. That’s easily fixed.

3. We’ve taken some guff on FrontBurner for paying too much attention lately to Belo’s falling stock prices. So I’d like to mention that Blockbuster’s stock yesterday plunged 77 percent, to 22 cents, on rumors that it was preparing to file for bankruptcy. Trading had to be halted. If you jumped in when trading resumed, congratulations. At the open this morning, BBI was up 140 percent.