New today: things you can expect with really bad credit, courtesy of The Vent.

Russell Wardlow, in his capacity as Mean Mr. Mustard, takes us out to look at the ravers:

I manage eight days a week as a depressed sourpuss, and I've never had so much as a milligram of E. And believe me, you don't want to see me done up as some sort of Mutant Gothboi. But "cohesively sour, bad-tempered and generally unhappy"? I am there, Jack. In fact, I am there so long I should charge these guys rent.

Lynn Sislo, grumbling about that New Jersey hack Amiri Baraka:

Well, we do have one. In fact, we have a new one every two years, appointed by the governor. Through 2002, it's Carl Sennhenn, whose day job is Associate Dean of Humanities at Rose State College in Midwest City.

You're welcome.

As usual, the most sensible commentary on the mess in New Jersey comes from Minnesota. Behold the words of Lileks:

And those are the kindest words he has for the Torch. Why would Lileks care about a Senate race in Jersey, anyway?

Yep.

How you or I might fix a TV dinner:

1. Select TV dinner from freezer, remove from box.
   
2. Set microwave oven to appropriate time.
   
3. Wait.
   
4. Remove TV dinner from microwave oven; bon appetit.
   

How 42nd and Treadmill fixes a TV dinner:

1. Select as many TV dinners from freezer as possible, arrange on tabletop.
   
2. Invert containers to make cooking instructions visible.
   
3. Add up the number of minutes specified for each dinner; call this number X.
   
4. Place as many dinners in the microwave oven as possible and set the timer for X/2 minutes.
   
5. Remove dinners and inspect.
   
6. Announce that there will be mandatory overtime until the dinners are properly cooked.
   
7. Place as many dinners in the microwave oven as possible and set the timer for X/2 minutes.
   
8. Remove dinners and inspect.
   
9. Call a staff meeting to discuss the condition of the dinners.
   
10. Take any still-frozen dinners to a conventional oven and heat.
    
11. Circulate memo regarding microwave management.
    
12. Point out to malcontents that everything is being done exactly as it should be.
    

Lynn Sislo is touched by the Fiskatorial Muse, and the first object of her scorn is one James Crabtree, who came up with this humdinger:

Victims, indeed. I don't see anyone silencing the Guardian or Fisk, and it's probably about damn time Krugman started paying attention to detail.

But Lynn isn't going to let Crabtree and his ilk off that easily:

Ask Townhall's Ben Shapiro, who was slapped down by Right and Left.

Lynn's title is Wanted: Common Sense Lefties. You know they're out there somewhere.

In case you were wondering why I didn't have anything in this week's Carnival of the Vanities, it's because I didn't submit anything. Frankly, I can't think of anything I wrote last week that was all that compelling.

Then again, there are times when I can't think of anything I ever wrote as being all that compelling, and this is turning out to be one such time.

This looks promising: The African and African Descendants World Conference Against Racism, billed as "A Conference for Concerned Black People from Around the Globe".

They're serious about it, too. Delegates to the conference have voted to bar all nonblack participation. Conference chair Jewel Crawford explains:

Someone send this woman two tickets to Barbershop.

With the finding of the New Jersey Supreme Court that there are more important things to an election than mere laws, y'know, you have to wonder what precedents are being set.

Greg Hlatky points out the immediate results; IMAO's Frank (no relation to TV's Frank, so far as I know) takes the longer view.

The Greens sent me an informational packet of sorts today, and I'm not quite sure what to make of it. Then again, I'm not quite sure what to make of them. I'm hardly the "progressive" soul they'd like to have on their rolls and on their donor list. On the other hand, if it is true, as some insist, that the Greens cost Al Gore the 2000 Presidential election, then perhaps I ought to send them some money out of sheer gratitude.

Well, maybe not. They did include a clipping from USA Today, dated 22 July, which tells me something I hadn't heard or had forgotten: someone with connections to the New Mexico Republican party (though not the state GOP itself, apparently) offered the Greens big bucks to run candidates for the House of Representatives, which presumably would draw votes away from Democrats. No dice, said the Greens.

Do the Greens have a future? The United States has always been pretty much a two-party country, but nothing gives either of the current major parties an eternal lease on life. In fact, if one were to judge by present-day bloggage, the Democrats are about this close to imploding; in four years or so, they could join the Whigs on the Former Major Parties roster. I can't say I'd be happy to see them go, but it seems fairly clear that the wounds are largely self-inflicted. And anyway, the Greens have no candidates running for anything in Oklahoma, largely due to the fact that getting a third party recognized in this state is a task worthy of Heracles — lest we forget, Oklahoma politics resemble the Augean stables in all the obvious ways.

I do love snideness, especially when I don't have to come up with it all myself. What follows is a small collection of snarky remarks that have turned up in blogdom this week.

Susanna Cornett, on the possibility that the Green Party's 2004 Presidential Candidate will be that loosest of cannons, Cynthia McKinney:

Bill Quick notes a certain similarity in Microsoft security bulletins:

Frank at IMAO, suggesting an alternate wording for the leaflets being dropped on Iraq this past week:

Finally, James Lileks cashes your reality check:

You gotta love stuff like this.

Microsoft has given the Oklahoma City Public Schools until 14 October to rid themselves of software not complying with Microsoft license agreements, and the district has launched a major software-license audit.

In the first pass, the district found 1700 PCs with questionable licensing, each of which could theoretically generate a $500 fine from Redmond; a second pass is scheduled to begin today. "I think we're in pretty good shape," said Jerry Dimmitt, team leader for the audit, "but we have so many computers it will be difficult to catch everything." The district has a site license from Microsoft for volume purchases, but it doesn't cover software acquired before the license, and most of the offending stuff, as it happens, is installed on PCs donated to the district, many of which will have to be weeded out to pass the audit.

The district is also putting out a list of minimum standards for donated machines, which reads as follows:

So don't even think about bringing over that old 286.

Bigwig has nailed 95 feces (more or less) to the wall, a story which will bring sighs of recognition to any parent who cries "Pee, pee!" but there is no pee.

A few days back, I brought in a few bits from the estimable Dinah Dienstag on the subject of poverty and its correlation to morality. Once again, Cinderella Bloggerfeller (may his tribe increase) has given us more of the Wisdom of Dienstag, this time explaining that strange affinity some people seem to have for really rotten regimes:

And yet, we are told, they're not truly anti-American; they merely yearn for a more perfect world.

Yeah, right. You can wash two, maybe three hogs with that business.

Once again, a handful of Democrats who can't deal with perfectly simple election laws are trying to obtain by legal wrangling what they wouldn't have gotten otherwise.

Cynthia McKinney had managed to stay out of the limelight for almost a whole week, and for that we are grateful. But nothing lasts forever, with the possible exception of temporary taxes, and this week McKinney supporters have filed a lawsuit claiming that crossover voting by Georgia Republicans, permitted under the Peach State's open-primary law, was "malicious" and unconstitutional. "Black Democratic voters," said attorney J. M. Raffauf, who represents the plaintiffs, "had their voting rights interfered with and violated."

The ever-watchful Susanna Cornett boils this down to the crucial stuff:

And, I suggest, it also highlights the apparent belief of the post-2000 Democratic Party, not only in Georgia, but also in New Jersey, that state election laws are just another tool, to be used when they are needed, to be disregarded when they aren't. Any candidate who actually believes this sort of thing, I contend, deserves to lose. Were I a Republican strategist, I'd be pointing fingers at every Democratic candidate from Bangor to Bakersfield: "If So-and-so loses, is he going to sue to overturn the election?"

Ah, this language of ours:

Dear Lynn:

The reason why split infinitives are "wrong" is that for grammatical purposes, the two (or more) words are a single entity, and are treated as such when the sentence is to be diagrammed.

If, however, you're not diagramming a sentence, but writing one, and you think it sounds more forceful or more rhythmic or just "better", feel free to blithely insert anything into the midst of an infinitive that your heart, or your Muse, may desire.

Just the same, I still think prepositions are lousy words to end sentences with.

Most of what gets posted here is ignored, not so much for reasons of quality, or the lack thereof, but the simple fact that this particular site doesn't have the reputation of the better-known blogs. (Of course, since it's been up far longer than most of the better-known blogs, maybe it is reasons of quality, or the lack thereof.) Still, once in a while, something I write resonates in sections of the blogosphere, and this, from 27 June, is one such item:

Contrary positions were staked out, and eventually a consensus was reached, which, I suppose, proves that there's always room for irrelevancy, though it does support Jesse Walker's premise that Coulter fans have much in common with fans of boy bands. And I read enough issues of 16 and Tiger Beat during my, um, formative years to understand the concept of a non-sexual object of desire.

Of course, Mr Walker reminds us, "Coulter's merits or demerits as a writer, thinker, and human being have nothing to do with whether anyone thinks she's cute," and that's true as far as it goes, but after sixty years or so of pervasive, even invasive, television, it must be said that superficial aspects of appearance count for something. Sometimes they even inspire fantasies, and not always pleasant ones, either.

(Disclosure: I am not, to my knowledge, anyone's object of desire, sexual or otherwise.)

I am in no way heartened by the fact that in almost every corner of the nation, there are workplaces every bit as toxic as 42nd and Treadmill, and for much the same reasons; all this means is that there are going to be people just as annoyed as I am.

However, giving them an airing is probably a Good Thing, so I refer you to Caterwauling.com, and recommend that you scroll down to the Part Deux entry under October second. (No individual links that I could find, sorry.)

From Andrea at Ethereal Reflections:

Yea, verily.

Yesterday I muttered something about how the GOP ought to make this New Jersey election debacle into a campaign issue.

John Rosenberg, now in his new Sekimori-designed digs, points out that it's already a campaign issue for Doug Forrester, should he be sensible enough to pick up on it, and offers a speech fragment that's right on the money:

When something doesn't work, I am the first person in line to say "Get rid of it," but no one, I believe, can argue with a straight face that the New Jersey election laws pertinent to this case had in any way failed.

(Oh, and "Sekimori", in case you were wondering, is an ancient Malayan word that means "We can draw this better than you ever could, so don't even think about it." Terse folks, those Malayans.)

The following Incredibly Specific instruction is printed on the back of the one-pound bag of Albertson's Cut Corn I just took out of the freezer:

What happens after that? At midnight, does it turn into pumpkin-pie filling?

When two different Web sites give you the same bogus YOU ARE THE 10,000,000TH VISITOR TO THIS WEBSITE popup, the most generous interpretation possible is that someone can't count worth squat. Zeldman has had over ten million, and probably so has Glenn Reynolds, but neither of them have indicated that they feel compelled to sell me crap.

Being the diligent soul I am, I followed up this link, which goes to something called qualypromos.com (cripes, even Streisand can spell better than that), a front for some Florida vacation spot. The domain is registered to one David Randall; I mention this in case I see some of his handiwork again, in which case I hope to be alert enough to offer a cross-reference.

In the meantime, I'm about two months away from my 200,000th visitor. Legitimately, yet.

Here's a seven-year-old with her own domain, running Movable Type yet.

(Muchas gracias: Jessica Parker.)

I'm sorry I missed this when it happened, but I'm sure its Rankle Quotient still remains fairly high.

Ever since debit cards acquired Visa and MasterCard logos, they've been heavily promoted as the way to make a purchase without going through a whole lot of may-I-see-your-ID stuff. The reality, reports writer Katie Allison Granju, is quite different indeed, and if you've seen those TV spots — no, never mind, I won't spoil it for you.

When Microsoft states up front that the "maximum download" for an operating-system update is 30 MB, you can usually be sure that you're not going to get by with a mere 1.9.

Arts & Letters Daily is dead.

Long live Philosophy & Literature.

And the sky is grey, and where are the blog updates?

Angie Schultz finds four-part harmony on such a winter's day.

General Motors hasn't had any problem moving Chevy trucks lately, and I'm inclined to believe it's because they knew how to sell them. A pickup, even if it's driven by your Aunt Hilda, is still a big ol' bruiser, and advertising for trucks reflects the long-standing American desire for Industrial Strength stuff at home. (Sister GMC's "We Are Professional Grade" nattering is slightly sniffier, but ultimately just as elemental.)

What the General wasn't doing all that well was selling Chevy cars, sales of which have been sinking, well, like a rock. Really, what's the last Chevrolet ad campaign you remember? If you, like me, have to go all the way back to Dinah Shore, the problem becomes obvious: Chevy is simply off most buyers' radar.

Until, perhaps, now. This year the bow-tie boys took a tiny step away from the blandness of "We'll Be There"; Campbell-Ewald, Chevy's ad agency, figured out that scores of popular songs over the years had mentioned Chevrolet and its cars, and decided to run with the idea. The first installment was a shot of a little red Corvette, complete with the appropriate lyric fragment courtesy of The Artist Usually Known As Prince. A verse from AC/DC's "That's The Way I Wanna Rock And Roll" accompanies a new Monte Carlo coupe; a '63 Impala evokes the Beach Boys' "409".

The big question, of course: will these rockin' ads strike a chord with buyers? I think they will; even if you're not considering a Chevy, you'll certainly think about Chevy. And two years ago, the precursor of this campaign, a billboard in Chevrolet's home town of Warren, Michigan, placed just in time for the Woodward Dream Cruise, said succinctly: "They don't write songs about Volvos."

Now to see if Ford fires back with some Mustang sallies.

This time of year, the sun doesn't come up until after seven-thirty, so there are a lot of poor souls wending their way to work, sliding along pavement just wet enough to confuse their tires. Ribbons of roads, seemingly stretched to their limits, shine eerily under the street lights. It's too warm for a jacket, too cool for summer gear. At the bus stop, umbrellas are conspicuous by their absence.

Later today, the rain will pick up, and so will the sense of urgency about it all. Swollen rivers in the northern part of the state will become more so. The sun may make a cameo appearance this afternoon, but no one is counting on it.

A fairly ordinary fall day in Oklahoma, in other words, and perhaps cherishable for its very plainness. Not everything in life has to make your synapses sizzle.

Jason White wrote a song called "Red Rag Top", and Tim McGraw cut it for his upcoming album; it's out now as a single, and it's getting some radio airplay, though some stations are distinctly uncomfortable with it, for lyrics like this:

Later, when they're not so young and wild:

It's not too hard to see how this might make some people squirm.

Of course, there's as much in between the lines as there is within them. It's possible, for instance, to see the latter-day narrator struggling with this "waste of time" stuff while suspecting that he doesn't really believe a word of it; the mere fact that it's being mentioned at all shows clearly that what happened back then is still on his mind after all these years.

Some may see this as encouraging the termination of pregnancies. I'm not buying it. "See? Just go to the clinic, write the check, and all you have to do is remember what you've done for the rest of your life." Yeah, that should encourage 'em, all right. "Red Rag Top" is no more an endorsement of abortion than "Big Bad John" is an endorsement of mine accidents. If your local country station won't play it, that's fine with me — they shouldn't have to if they don't want to — but let's not turn this into the flip side of "Papa Don't Preach".

Kim du Toit wearily points out the obvious:

Then again, if his description of Maryland's politicos is accurate — and I'm inclined to believe that he's got them pegged to the nth detail — it's not at all obvious to them. Yet.

Freshly squeezed through The Vent: If you're going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some ammo in your belt.

Yes, it's time for Cinderella Bloggerfeller (with a new, or at least different, template!) and the latest installment from Dr Dinah Dienstag, on the dodgy subject of equating Israel with the Third Reich:

That's one theory. But there are others:

Dr Dienstag means it, too. But there's more:

"The house is pretty ugly and a little big for its lot." Or something like that.

This level of erudition is far beyond my own, which probably explains why I quoted so much of it: maybe some of it will rub off. I admit to having affected a level of world-weariness for most of the time I've spent in this world, which is either an admission that I don't have the stuff to be a proper nihilist, or a practice session for the actual physical weariness that has set in.

And give Dinah and, um, Cindy due credit: they did all this without once having to trot out Godwin's Law.

Two hundred thirteen million dollars.

That's how much the state of Oklahoma is going to come up short in the FY 2003 budget. Absent some sort of divine intervention, or, say, Eddie Gaylord putting the whole deficit on his MasterCard, spending must be cut — the state Constitution prohibits going into the hole — and each department is expected to pull its own weight.

The Department of Corrections has a budget-cutting plan which involves furloughing (a state term meaning "involuntary unpaid vacation") its staffers for a total of twenty-three days between now and the 30th of June. Upset, a couple of hundred Corrections employees put in an appearance at the steps of the Capitol, hoping to draw attention to themselves and their plight. Corrections is, by some estimates, about 20 percent understaffed already, so the furloughs will exacerbate matters, but there simply isn't any extra money at the moment, the Legislature is not in session and will not likely be called into special session between now and Election Day, and revenue projections continue to decline.

What does the state plan to do? There's little or no support for raising taxes, and enacting new ones is even less likely. Maybe Oklahoma can start buying tickets in the Kansas lottery.

There's a progress report at BlogCritics on over-the-air digital radio, for which the FCC is expected to declare an official standard tomorrow.

I, for one, don't care. Radio in this country has become far more of a vast wasteland than Newton Minow ever imagined for television; the Same Old Crap in crisp digital sound is still, well, the Same Old Crap. And it probably won't be all that crisp, either; the vast majority of FM stations, at least near me, compress their signal beyond all understanding in a desperate attempt to push a couple miles farther into the sticks, and I have no reason to think they're going to mend their ways. And even if you think that digital will bring music back to the AM band, which it very well may, how much Clear Channel-approved music is even worth listening to these days?

So I pass until it's mandatory. I got to my middle twenties without ever owning a color TV; assuming I don't drop dead from overwork and/or boredom in the interim, I can get to my middle fifties without ever owning a digital radio.

Chip Kelley has finally retired from 100000watts.com, perhaps the most extensive guide to AM, FM and TV broadcast stations in the US. I am happy to report that the site is now in the capable hands of Scott Fybush, keeper of NorthEast Radio Watch and publisher of the annual Tower Site Calendar for true radio obsessives. (The change apparently took place during the summer, but Kelley's email box was still taking updates from the field, and the Official Announcement is only just now appearing.) For those of us for whom the minutiae of broadcasting are actually more interesting than the programming, this is good news indeed.

John Scalzi channeling George Michael?

With pictures, yet. (No internal links, sorry; scroll to about the middle, or make the browser find it for you.)

It's not hard to imagine someone surfing over to Dean's World, reading the blurb ("Defending the liberal tradition in history, politics, science and philosophy"), reading the bloggage, and then wondering out loud: "This guy calls himself a liberal?"

The explanation, of course, is that when American leftists aren't chafing under the term "liberal", they're trying their best to redefine it. Michael at Two Blowhards explains the concept:

The "liberal tradition", as understood by Dean Esmay and others, has little or nothing to do with today's putative "liberals". Michael again:

"Libertarian", of course, carries its own baggage these days, hung on it by defenders of the Big Huge State who mock the very idea of smaller government. Political language is nothing if not mutable. Back to Michael:

These days in America, bloggers label this viewpoint "idiotarianism". And Michael cuts it no slack:

The left, curiously, is unsympathetic to Christian fundamentalism; I am inclined to believe that this is because Christian fundamentalism is primarily an American phenomenon, and the American left reflexively opposes anything that reminds them of the United States. Jerry Falwell is denounced, not so much because he comes up with the occasional weird pronouncement, but because he comes from the same culture that gave us Mickey Mouse and McDonald's; if Falwell's pulpit were in Luxembourg rather than Lynchburg, I suspect he'd catch a lot less flak.

I am, I tend to argue, a centrist, not so much because my beliefs tend to cluster around the center of the political spectrum, but because I really don't want to encourage the edges. The left might embrace me for being something of a First Amendment absolutist, but they would certainly spurn me for being just as adamant about the Second. And while on economic issues I tend to the Republican side, I'm not particularly inclined to throw in my lot with the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy. Lacking a more appropriate term, I have settled on "centrist", and given it, well, a liberal sort of definition — in the classical sense, to be sure.

Of course, you've heard about those term-papers-for-sale operations, and certainly you'd never, ever consider buying one of these things and passing it off as your own research.

Jack Schwartz did his own research (which I am blatantly copying) on one of these outfits, and he reports:

And I am envious. Ten bucks a page? And we're sitting here blogging for...uh, yeah, right, never mind. Remember why the good Lord made your eyes, and don't shade your eyes.

We all have had the experience of tunes running through our heads, and often as not they won't go away without serious distraction. This morning, despite being tuned to NPR's Morning Edition, I kept bopping to the proto-metal grunt of Mountain's 1970 single "Mississippi Queen". It was over in two and a half minutes, and suddenly there was my distraction: Whatever happened to the two-minute pop tune?

Works in the classical tradition, I assume, run just about as long as the composer had something to say, subject to minor timing variations by performers. (And sometimes not so minor: I have two recordings of Ravel's Boléro, one running twelve minutes and change, the other pushing past the 17-minute mark.) Some pieces have repeats which may or not be observed — the second movement of Beethoven's 9th comes to mind — but by and large, classical works are presumed to have artistic reasons for their length. Popular singles, on the other hand, have grown from a shade over two minutes when I was younger to twice that today, and surely it's not because contemporary songwriters have more to say. (Yeah, I know, "Who wears short shorts? We wear short shorts" isn't exactly Gershwin.) In 1964, legend has it that Phil Spector, worried about getting airplay for the Righteous Brothers' "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'", which ran 3:50, deliberately ordered a misprint on the labels of DJ copies of the single, claiming a more reasonable 3:05. It's impossible to imagine something like that happening today. And a brisk little 1965 number like Marianne Faithfull's "Summer Nights", which runs about 1:44 (the label says 1:50), would never fit into today's "extended music sets" on the radio.

Were I really disturbed by this, I would blame Paul McCartney, who conceived "Hey Jude" as a three-minute song with a four-minute fade. Then again, I don't know anyone over the age of ten who doesn't sing along with at least some part of that fade, so Sir Paul apparently knew what he was doing.

Zeldman on TrackBack and similar blog innovations:

There were days early on (say, most of 1996) when I thought having two or three people reading my site would be Cloud Nine, or at least Cloud 7.62. And present-day tracking services are quite a bit more detailed, and possibly even more accurate, than the old-style Hit Counters.

And I'm happy to send people elsewhere; after all, I couldn't do that unless they got here first. I'm far more interested in giving my readers something worthwhile to look at, whether it's on-site or off, and I suspect the vast majority of bloggers feel pretty much the same way. Traffic hasn't grown much in the past six months — approximately 2,000 visitors per week, heaviest on Mondays — but I'd like to think I've made some progress from the bottom of the blogosphere, and I'm reasonably certain I've made some friends along the way. If I'm at all embarrassed, it's because of something I've written, not because of something I've linked.

Well, of course, there isn't any hip-hop shortage — basically, I think we're up to our aching ears in the stuff — but Russell Perry, who owns the only "urban"-formatted radio station in this market, a 1000-watt AM daytimer, has been wanting to add an FM facility for ages. There is, however, no room on the dial.

Now OKCityRadio.com reports that Perry has acquired a small string of stations in the southwest part of the state, and that the northernmost of those stations, KRPT-FM in Anadarko, has applied for a power boost from 75kw to 100kw and a tower move to south of Weatherford. This, I don't think, is enough to make much of an improvement in the station's Oklahoma City metro coverage; the existing FM facility in Weatherford, with 69kw, barely makes it in. Extreme audio compression might help, but not much. It should be interesting to see how this develops.

Well, not exactly, but the Oklahoma delegation, five Republicans and one Democrat, went for House Joint Resolution 114 — the resolution that authorized the President to use force against Iraq — six to zip.

I'm curious: did any other state delegation with three or more Representatives vote this way?

It wasn't my drive — Weetabix did this one — but, with the exception of minor geographical discrepancies, I could have:

That's Weet's Wisconsin. The Oklahoma I know is very much like that. The red clay sticks to your shoes, to your wheels, to your very soul. There are things in the land of Central Time that I suspect simply cannot be understood on the coasts.

The Daily Log began on 23 June 2000, and it's entirely possible that you might have missed some of my best stuff, especially the stuff that predates the switch to Movable Type in August 2002. Greatest Hits will repost some of the bloggage I thought was, um, least ineffective.

Of course, The Vent began way back in 1996, and all of them are still available at the same old URLs. I am told that at least two people have tried to read every last one of them.

Originally posted 18 March 2001

I'm getting ready to back out of the parking lot at the BBQ place on the edge of town, a sack half-full of cholesterol-ridden delights at my side, when a three-quarter-ton pickup truck rolls into the lot, and pulls up just far enough to avoid blocking my exit. The truck is pulling a trailer, and on board is a vintage (say, 1960 or so) farm tractor, cleaned up if not exactly concours condition, apparently on its way to a new home. Within seconds, a crowd had gathered to see the old relic, and here and there I picked up snatches of conversations along the following lines:

And it occurred to me as I sped away, if "sped" is the word that applies to a four-cylinder sedan heading up a twelve-percent grade, that there was no way in hell the government and the Greens were going to talk these people into Honda Insights and such. Two-dollar gas, three-dollar gas, five-dollar gas — we'd no more give up our trucks than our guns.

And yes, before you ask, there is a National Motorists Association.

The Loyal Peon is annoyed by questionable weapons speculation in the DC-area sniping epidemic:

Um, they get paid for it?

I yield to the Peon's weapons experience — indeed, to most people's, since I've never owned multiple guns and didn't fire off that many rounds when I wore Uncle Sam's duds — but I do claim some expertise in shooting off my mouth without backup. And in your average newsroom, you're probably not likely to find a whole lot of firearms enthusiasts, so I wouldn't be surprised to find that these on-air conclusions are being pulled out of thin air, made only slightly thicker by thirty seconds of Googling.

Originally posted 1 May 2001

The train goes by.

I don't really hear it, even at two in the morning, but just the same, I know the train goes by. There's an east-west freight line that approaches to within 600 yards of my bedroom window, and it crosses section-line roads half a mile from me in either direction, so the train, as a safety measure, will sound its horn. It doesn't sound quite like anything else. The occasional police siren, the storm-warning horns, the yelp of the ambulance — all these things will rouse me from my fitful semi-slumber, not because they're any louder, but because they announce that something is wrong, something must be done quickly, something will never be the same again.

But when the train goes by, even if I hear it, I don't really hear it; it's part of the aural landscape, part of the regular routine, a reassurance that the world has not come to an end, that shipping and business and life go on. "All is well," as the town crier used to say in places like Woodbury, Connecticut, where the clock in the tower of the First Congregational Church sings the hour, in the middle of the day or in the dead of night, stirring up complaints from people who don't understand — or have forgotten — what it means when the train goes by.

Last time, I was kvetching about the way in which prescription drugs were being handled by our new insurance carrier. A revised version of said kvetch was dispatched by snailmail to the pertinent officials last weekend. They have now responded with a check for the proper 70 percent of the out-of-pocket expense. Apparently the entire group was miscoded, so presumably they've heard from four or five dozen people by now. I am, of course, grateful for the refund, which, all things considered, was pretty damned quick; but I will be even more wary than usual when I actually have to seek outpatient (or, worse, inpatient) services.

The county's so-called Drug Court, which provides an alternate jurisdiction for nonviolent drug offenses — individuals who plead guilty to same are put on treatment programs and report to the Drug Court rather than to the normal (and overcrowded) criminal-justice system — is apparently successful enough to justify a spinoff. The new Mental Health Court will open on the first of November and will provide supervision for offenders who are diagnosed with a recognizable mental illness. Given the sheer number of people who might qualify — county officials estimate that 20 percent of current jail inmates are "severely" mental ill — this court could further reduce the backlog at Criminal Court.

The state authorized this court during the past legislative session, but provided no funding for it, so the county is scrambling for money to operate the court and has asked for $500,000 next fiscal year. Sounds like a bargain to me, if it works.

Originally posted 28 May 2001

The sun comes up early in mid-Missouri on the first of April, but we were already awake. Sort of.

It was 5:02 am, cool and damp getting a head start on its way to becoming warm and sticky, and we were standing outside on the gravel wondering what would happen next. Most of us were eighteen or nineteen, but the adolescent bluster that had sustained us for the last few years had vanished with yesterday's sunset and our arrival at Fort Lost-in-the-Woods.

Not all of us wanted to be there. Our company seemed evenly divided among draftees, Reservists and the so-called "Regular Army". "RA, Drill Sergeant!" I recited as I moved up the line to the mess hall. The Drill Sergeant managed to look both scary and unimpressed at the same time.

Very little in that spring of 1972 made a whole lot of sense to me. "Hurry up and wait" was the order of the day. The story goes — I'll probably never know for sure, and maybe I don't want to — that after we finished training, the Army arbitrarily dispatched everyone in the company whose surname began with A through G to Vietnam. My H and I eventually landed in the Middle East, where there was arguably just as much tension but definitely a lot less live ammo.

If there's a lesson in all of this, it's that sometimes, whether we wear the uniform or not, we have to go through things that don't make a whole lot of sense, on the off-chance that it might do some good somewhere down the line. Many men went through the same things I did, and not all of them got to come home. Perhaps their deaths didn't make a whole lot of sense, either.

Their lives, on the other hand, most certainly did.

A chunk of this weekend was spent rediscovering the band known as Chicago. I had, of course, grabbed their early LPs when they first appeared, and when Columbia Records decided that the take would be better if they pitched the act as a singles band, I started picking up the 45s. It's been about a decade since Chicago made any serious Top 40 noise, but they're still touring and releasing the occasional numbered album. (The recent two-CD Very Best issue from Rhino, Only the Beginning, can be considered Chicago XXVII.)

I ran through much of the band's Web site, and while it suffers from a bit much IEcentricity, it's one of the better band sites out there, and the history section — over a dozen pages, as befits a band in existence for 35 years — is a model of its kind. I did find myself wishing for a separate FAQ file with about, oh, 67 or 68 questions, though two of the three which immediately occurred to me were answered in the history section.

It was Nick Fasciano, I learned, who designed the Chicago logo, which appears on every album and which was once beautifully parodied by Ed Thrasher for Warner Bros.

The second question I had seen answered elsewhere, but it seemed logical that it should be discussed on the band site. Robert Lamm, who wrote the song, explains the meaning of "25 or 6 to 4": "It's just a reference to the time of day. The song is about writing a song. It's nothing mystical." And at 3:35 (or 3:34) am, well, waiting for the break of day makes perfect sense, especially if you can't sleep.

Then again, does anybody really know what time it is?

It was billed as "A plea from a sick little girl," and it went something like this:

Kim Rollins, nowhere nearly as young as her text implied, was arguably sick, though not fatally so, and this little stunt of hers (now 404, alas) won her a place in the heart of every online prankster. Besides, what in the world would anyone do with all those AOL disks?

You could always ask Dani.

(Swiped from FARK)

They're not saying so, but what we have here is a mid-January weather pattern with mid-November temperatures. It's a pattern we all know: high pressure settles nearby, winds remain northerly, and so-called "normal" temperatures are missed by about 10 degrees Fahrenheit, for a week and a half, maybe two weeks in a row. It's not actually freezing — yet — but it's not out of the question either. (Mid-October 2000 brought us three consecutive freezes at night, during a period where the official normal low is around 50, and then the daily highs rebounded into the 80s.)

I'm not actually complaining, though. Given the choice, I'd rather have a semblance of winter than winter itself.

Originally posted 2 November 2001

Already there is a flood of complaints from the usual suspects, unhappy with the settlement between Microsoft and the Justice Department. As usual, they missed the whole point of the exercise, which is simply this:

People, by and large, are lazy. Nobody buys a Windows machine to learn computer science; Windows machines are bought because they appear to do cool stuff without a whole lot of effort. At least from Windows 3.0 on, Microsoft has done its best to cater to user indolence, throwing in all manner of applications — the Web browser is merely the most obvious — on the reasonable assumption that if the customer already has a suitable application for something, he won't go looking elsewhere. Much is made of how Microsoft steers Windows customers to its own, presumably inferior and cranky, programs, though I'm inclined to believe that none of these complainers have ever gone through, say, a RealPlayer installation.

I have, or at least I think I have, enough computer smarts to choose my own tools for my own Windows box. Some of them come from Microsoft; more of them don't. For me, the status quo prevails: I stand to gain essentially nothing by the settlement. Joe and Susan Sixpack will be faced with choices they weren't willing to make before, so it's hard to see how they will be able to work up any enthusiasm for it. The only winners here are the PC manufacturers, who won't have Redmond breathing down their necks quite so heavily; other software manufacturers, who might sell a few more copies of something now; and, of course, two platoons of lawyers. But it is worth noting that had the megacorporation actually been broken up into a number of, um, kilocorporations, the results would be likely much the same — only the volume of paperwork would change. If someone at Justice indeed figured this out, there is hope for the department yet.

Tim Blair reports the following offer, made by a professor of English at Wheaton College:

"Millions," says Blair, and I don't doubt it for a moment.

Ford Motor Company is in bad need of fixing, and, says The Vent, recovery is Job 1.

If you doubted for a moment that Saddam Hussein is Evil Incarnate, consider this:

His campaign theme song for the current coronation — er, election — is Whitney Houston's caterwauling rendition of "I Will Always Love You".

Q.E.D.

I have tended to regard outgoing 1st District Representative Steve Largent, currently running for governor, as the emptiest of empty suits. Apparently, though, he is discerning enough to recognize crapola when he hears it.

Two cheers, maybe 2.2.

Dr Dinah Dienstag makes it four for four with another look inside the mind (for lack of a better word) of the Idiotarian, courtesy of the endlessly-redecorating Cinderella Bloggerfeller.

God forbid anyone should be goofy enough to try to channel me.

And suspicion of those who have putative communications with the supernatural, quite understandably, goes back many centuries, or at least as far back as Henry IV, Part One:

I do hope that no one is calling for terrorists, and that none come if called.

Originally posted 26 January 2002

It began, curiously enough, with shoes.

My sartorial standards are, shall we say, relaxed to the point of being insensate. Indifference accounts for some of this, but the real issue is my inability, for reasons having to do with my failure to conform to the normal size tables, to buy off the rack. (This is less a factor of sheer bulk than you may think; even if I weighed exactly what the anorexiphiles in the insurance industry might desire, I would still be six foot one with a twenty-eight-inch inseam, which is anomalous at any conceivable width.) Confined to catalogs and specialty shops, neither of which is inclined to sell cheaply to their captive customers, I go to as little effort as possible to appear fashionable. The $19.99 pair of shoes, therefore, is an essential ingredient in the wardrobe. However, if you buy these things on a regular basis, you know there are hidden costs beyond twenty dollars and change. There is no real social stigma attached to them except in the snootiest circles, yet somehow you feel as though you have done a disservice to your feet. And three months later, when the shoes seem to be disintegrating with every step, you know it.

Two things you must know about our maintenance guy: he notices things like this and will point them out when no one else is around, and he favors New Balance shoes, not so much for comfort as for their sheer indestructibility. So we had had a discussion earlier this week on the sad state of my sneakers, and unwilling to start the 90-day cycle again with another pair of El Cheapo Grandes, I set out this morning in search of something suitable, and damn the costs. In view of my always-precarious financial situation, this latter was unwise, but damn them anyway.

In general, the farther you get from where I live, the better the shopping — up to a point. And that point is about twenty miles away, at one of several industrial-sized enclosed retail compounds. I have avoided the malls for the last couple of months, what with the holidays and all, but I figured late January would be fairly unstressful.

And somewhere on the second floor of the third mall — or maybe it was the third floor of the second mall, like it matters one way or another — I almost totally went to pieces. It wasn't frustration over the dearth of size 14 EE; I expected that. It was the screaming sensation in the back of my head that I had no business trying to pass myself off as a normal person in shopping mode. I was an impostor, a fraud; I shouldn't be allowed in the same building as Joe and Susan Sixpack and their 2.3 kids churning their way through the pack to the Food Court. I was in tears long before I could get out to the parking lot and blame my condition on the wind.

I've been here before, and I wound up with an ongoing addiction to low-grade tranquilizers in lieu of actual response. And still there is no reasonable response. I was still shaking by the time I made it to the supermarket. (The very gates of hell may be yawning open, but dammit, the chores must be done first.) A sign of creeping agoraphobia? I don't think so. There are symptoms that point elsewhere. For one, I don't sleep well at all; two hours, maybe, and I awake, and the cycle repeats once or twice, three times on weekends. And this pattern exists without the usual bane of the apartment-dweller: the idiot upstairs. It will only get worse when they finish remodeling. There is no comfort zone anywhere, no place where I might find some small semblance of peace.

And I still need a new pair of shoes.

Paul McCartney showed up last night at the Ford Center, the first-ever appearance of any Beatle in the Sooner State. I didn't go, reasoning that I had probably better things to do with $250 — or perhaps rationalizing my failure to pay attention to the ticket-sale schedule — but by all accounts a splendid time was guaranteed for all.

And a tip of the fedora to Gene Triplett (and if it wasn't Gene, it was Sandi Davis — gad, how I hate shared bylines) of The Daily Oklahoman, who quipped: "If they love him this much at 60, he has nothing to worry about four years down the road." Vera, Chuck and Dave are no doubt very much relieved.

Governor Parris Glendening has ordered a ban on outdoor shooting (indoor shooting apparently is unaffected) in four Maryland counties, ostensibly to cut down on false sniper alarms by people reporting hearing gunfire. The likelihood that the resident sniper is actually going to observe this ban is, shall we say, on the low side. And the ban plays hell with some previously-authorized hunting seasons, which means that in exchange for not catching the sniper, suburbanites will have their gardens eaten by deer.

(Muchas gracias: Ravenwood.)

Is the National Junior Honor Society elitist? A Connecticut middle-school principal seems to think so:

And this year, there will be no NJHS chapter at this school, ostensibly because the faculty adviser transferred out, but it seems pretty clear to me that this guy has had too many sips of Berkeley Kool-Aid; he did everything but suggest that students not qualifying for the Honor Society were suffering from impaired self-esteem.

I was sufficiently incredulous to ask an actual teacher for a translation, and here's what I got:

We?

Well, the Sixties are over. The principal in question "acknowledges" that he's taking a "bold step"; I guess sliding right off the edge of the cliff requires a certain level of boldness. Me, I'm suffering a certain level of sickness just thinking about it.

Update, 7:23 pm: Expanded the teacher's remarks to improve clarity.

Susanna Cornett is not keen on these pointy buzz cuts for men:

Surely she doesn't prefer, um, mullets?

(When we met this past summer, I figured she was looking at me askance because she hadn't been expecting the Pillsbury Doughboy in a polo shirt and chinos. Now I must conclude that she was unhappy with my hair, such as it is. Besides, I'm out of her age range, and the list of further disqualifications would eat up the rest of this column and part of the next.)

It's hidden behind the Premium wall, but there's an interesting piece by Suzy Hansen in Salon.com this morning which follows up on the fallout from New Jersey poet laureate Amiri Baraka's blither about how Somebody Blew Up America. The remarks I found most pertinent were those by former United States poet laureate Robert Pinsky, who offered this:

I don't know, really. Inevitably, the Cantos (which I haven't so much as looked at in thirty years, but which now I feel compelled to tackle once again) reflect Pound's personality and his politics, but by no means does this constitute a qualitative judgment; no one (perhaps save Robert Fisk) writes from within a vacuum.

There is, I believe, a romantic notion on the political left to the effect that artists, simply because they are artists, are necessarily more in tune to the ways of the world than the rest of us, and the Baraka debacle is probably not enough to dispel that notion. Baraka's politics, ultimately, are of little interest; only the poetry matters. And Somebody Blew Up America, as it happens, strikes me as not so great a poem; were it a great poem, its positive qualities, I believe, would ultimately outweigh its political posturing. Ezra Pound might have appreciated the situation.

"You would cry, too, if it happened to you," chirped Lesley Gore in "It's My Party".

"Like hell I would," retorts DragonAttack at RockSnobs, because...well, because that's the way boys are.

Originally posted 23 March 2002

Scene: Late Seventies. We're tooling down a very straight, very dull road in rural Oklahoma. Conversation has ground to a halt. What to do? Turn up the radio? No, she hates it loud. Peer down her blouse? Seat angle and fabric arrangement make this difficult, not to mention fairly unsafe. (The same, only more so, for "look up her skirt".) Finally, I glance at this Japanese simulation of a British dashboard and remark, "Why in the hell does the speedo go up to 125 miles per hour? This thing wouldn't do one-twenty-five if you pushed it off the frigging Sears Tower."

She glares — after all, she was the one who picked it out — and says, "And how do you know it wouldn't?"

I pull the stick back into fourth and push the pedal through the floorboard, and we're off: seventy-five, eighty, ninety. Back into fifth, and eventually the needle settles halfway between 100 and 105. The tach flutters just on the far side of 5000 rpm. It is about this point that it occurs to us that the road is becoming both less straight and less rural, and that we're risking a fine of about a week's pay, and I rein in our trusty steed, half grinning, half gasping for breath, mostly the same expression I tend to exhibit after sex, except that I'm not sleepy.

Around noon today, I was on that same road, with the music up loud and the passenger seat occupied by no one, and I wasn't doing anything like 102.5 mph; indeed, there were extended periods of 0 mph while the construction crews repositioned themselves. And it's a good thing that they were there, since this is one of those roads that was apparently originally paved with reclaimed emery boards and then striped randomly with "I Can't Believe It's Not Tar". Forget old memories and such: I was definitely happy to get out of that neck of the woods. The construction zone ended after about ten miles, and a few minutes later I found myself between two Chevy Suburbans, the first of which was making a move to pass up a cement truck doing a modest 58. For some reason, I decided I didn't want the second 'Burb riding me all the way to the city, so I followed the first guy into the left lane. It was only after I'd dropped back into position that I noticed the speedo needle: 94 mph. There must be something about that road.

And one more thing: Why the hell does the speedo go up to 150 miles per hour? This thing wouldn't do one-fifty if you pushed it off the frigging Sears Tower.

The F Scale, designed in the heady days of 1950, is intended to "estimate...fascist receptivity at the personality level." Now we all know about intentions, and my personality is anything but level, but I took the darn thing anyway, and scored a 3.23, which is fairly near the middle of the scale.

(Muchas gracias: AC Douglas.)

Mr Preston at JunkYardBlog, observing that the North Koreans now admit to having nukes, seeks the reason why the Clinton administration would have allowed such a thing in the first place, and comes up with this:

I lean towards #2, myself, since it explains so many other weirdnesses of the Clinton administration. The argument for #3 is contingent on #1; no one this side of Saddam gets out of bed in the morning and thinks "How can I make the world a more dangerous place today?" Of course, if Bill had been truly inept, he might stand a better chance of winning the Nobel Prize for Peace somewhere down the line.

I made some noises to this effect last year:

The buzz on the new Swept Away is, um, not good, which might suggest to the suggestible that Madonna and the Mr. should quit doing films together. The ever-contrarian Wing Chun has other ideas.

Originally posted 22 April 2002

It happens, as reliably as anything that happens in my life, every spring.

So far as I know, she didn't see me. She was about fifteen feet ahead, bearing north by northeast, and she walked with the sort of jauntiness that comes with being fairly young and fairly lovely, and I had no business even being aware of her existence, but it was spring and she was beautiful and I was stupid. And nearing the end of the walkway, she turned to the left, and shamed that my wandering eye might have given me away, I made a quick turn of my own and plowed into an empty kiosk.

And the next day it was a different someone at a different place and I was loaded down with parcels and paying not the slightest attention to where I was going. She spoke, though not to me, and I froze, knowing the game was up, and started off in another direction where I couldn't see a thing, and the thing I couldn't see barked at me with distinct annoyance.

And so I lurch from incident to incident, playing the voyeur, maybe innocently, definitely ineptly, never quite gaining my footing or my equilibrium, tripped up yet again by a brain which has no right to yearn and a heart which has no choice.

It seems to me that the ideal time to conduct audience surveys for commercial radio is right about now, while NPR affiliates are repelling listeners with their semiannual hat-in-hand bit. (I don't know what the PBS pledge schedule is; here in Oklahoma, it seems to run from January to December.) I am aware that it is necessary to take these measures to keep the stations going, and I have a whole shelf of station-branded mugs accumulated over the years, and so far I have never lost a parking space as a result of pledge drives, but there's still something a trifle disquieting about the entire process.

No, I don't know how to replace the pledge drive. I suppose I could slip Diane Rehm a couple of bucks when she comes to town in a couple of weeks, and if anyone is taking contributions to buy Click and/or Clack a Toyota Land Cruiser, I'm in, but I suspect we're stuck with what we have for the time being.

Sean McEntee at GI Party remembers what it was like in the ostensible Good Old Days before Windows of BillG assimilated the desktop, back when all my .BATs were in D:\BELFRY.

(Muchas gracias: Scott Wickstein.)

From The Journal of Doubt, 10 October (no permalinks, sorry), on the results, or lack thereof, of placing a personal ad on the Net:

Speaking as someone who has never had any charm to lose ("hideous" and "unattractive" are somewhat more debatable), I can say only that women as a group are indeed a complete mystery. But I believe, for some reason unknown, and in spite of an almost total lack of supporting evidence, that each and every one of them has a clearly-defined path to her heart, and when this road is not taken, it's more often than not because (1) we simply don't know where the hell to find it, or (2) it's not in her best interest to point it out. Sometimes both.

Of course, I can afford to act detached about this, since I in no way resemble anyone's ideal and therefore am not likely to disappoint on this basis.

The Doubter continues:

I shudder to think how long this man's dry spell has been, and I shudder even more when I contemplate my own, which likely dwarfs it.

But admitting to desperation is absolutely the most useless thing to do under the circumstances. It does nothing to enhance the possibilities; in fact, since women can detect desperation at the parts-per-billion level, it's likely to make matters worse — assuming there exists a condition that can be described as "worse".

So what's the solution? If I knew, do you think I'd be home blogging on a Saturday night? I generally don't recommend giving up except in the direst of circumstances, but the only alternative is to fall back on cliché: "You don't find love. Love finds you."

The irritating thing about cliché, of course, is that too often it contains entirely too much truth.

I truly detest getting out of bed these days. I don't think it has much to do with the onset of colder weather (though I keep this place at a relatively uncozy 71 degrees Fahrenheit), and it's certainly not because I'm having to leave someone behind when I get up. Maybe I'm not getting enough sleep — or, more likely, this is payback for hundreds of sleeping pills.

On the other hand, the nearest supermarket is now a distribution point for Krispy Kreme, which will put this detestation to something of a test: if I stay in bed an extra ten minutes, I won't have time to stop in and grab a handful.

Jamil Sayah, writing in Le Monde, finds that more-militant Muslims are arrogating to themselves the right to speak for all Islam: "[a] ventriloquist Islam which speaks through our mouth so that they make it say [both] one thing and its contrary," he asserts. Most of the proffered excuses for terrorism simply don't wash:

Cinderella Bloggerfeller, who posted the original English translation (and whose title I swiped), points out that this is further evidence that "there are some voices in the Islamic world calling for a long, hard look at what really causes Muslim fundamentalist terror." It's no longer enough to point at the Americans or at the Jews or at McDonald's. The militants will get the bulk of the news coverage because that's part of what militants are trained to do. But in a war on Islamic extremism, we can ask for no better allies than non-extremist Muslims, who care enough about their religion to oppose those who would make it into a weapon. There don't seem to be a lot of them at the moment, but I believe that as we keep the pressure on, their numbers will inevitably grow.

Last weekend I mentioned that local AM-station operator Russell Perry was acquiring a group of stations in the southwest portion of the state, and opined that moving the nearest one closer to the Oklahoma City market, as Perry has requested, would probably not work.

The guys at RadioEmporium.net have developed a coverage map for the proposed new facility, and it looks to me like reception on the east side of Oklahoma City, presumably the target audience for an urban-formatted station (Perry's specialty), will be marginal at best. Then again, it is probably not wise to bet against Russell Perry; he is, after all, making money from a 1,000-watt AM daytimer.

What's the Next Big Thing? Recombinant DNA parlors? Remote-controlled taser guns? Nick Denton says that computer-generated erotica, courtesy of Poser and similar products, "is going to be an industry," and for the life of me, I can't think of a way it can possibly fail; the weak link in so much of the material (apart from plot considerations, which in the age of gonzo are now basically obsolete anyway) is "How in the world do we get someone to do that?" Click, click, and it's done.

As Penn Jillette once observed, "Shopping, sex and shopping for sex propel all new technology." I'm not quite sure where those taser guns would fall.

Members of a class of Joshua Claybourn's were asked to compose their own epitaphs. (I don't know what class, and I didn't ask him.)

I've thought about this myself on and off, and the following have occurred to me:

• "This is worse than a dial-up"
  
• "At least the phone doesn't ring"
  
• "Comments (0)"
  
• "Worms don't really play pinochle"
  
• "27370 days until copyrights expire"
  
• "No updates today"
  
• "I'm surprised the kids spent money on this"
  
• "cgh@rest.finally"
  
• "I suppose I was late for this too"
  

"Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses," said Dorothy Parker. I never believed it, myself; I mean, it wasn't that I actually made passes at girls who wore glasses — scarcely if ever did I make a pass at anyone irrespective of eyewear — but I knew of no instance where a pair of glasses actually made someone less attractive.

Now it turns out that Mrs. Parker may have been correct after all. I refuse, however, to budge.

(Muchas gracias: This link was swiped from Donnaville; Donna's got the looks, she's got the glasses, but alas, she's got no individual item links.)

Apparently The New York Times believes that the National Rifle Association, by no small margin, is the mightiest lobbying group of them all. John Rosenberg of Discriminations demonstrates:

Does this suggest that all the NGOs that serve in, um, an advisory capacity to the Democratic Party would be better served by combining themselves into one humongous National Leftist Association? I imagine it would probably simplify things for writers at The New York Times.

(Note: This was almost called Foyer amusement, but I came to my senses at the last moment.)

If I confined myself to topics clearly within my area of expertise, I'd probably post only one or two paragraphs a month. (Never you mind whether you think that would actually improve the site.) I have, however, steered clear of the speculation regarding the D.C.-area sniper, except to point to an occasional bit of information. What was needed, I felt, was a one-shot, all-inclusive, low-shriek-level overview of the gunman and his possible motivations.

This task was undertaken over the weekend by Susanna Cornett, who is not one to shy away from the Big Jobs. She mentions, in a paragraph on qualifications, that she is not an FBI profiler; it is my opinion that the FBI would be far better off if she were.

(Note: Particularly grievous or exceptionally stupid computer actions will be reported here, since it's demonstrably pointless to report them to anyone in a position to do something about it.)

Offen