The Warrior Poet doesn't quite grasp what leads people to give names to their naughty bits. What does one get out of it?

Perhaps it could be this:

The male of the species being routinely accused of being led around by the thing, I'm not surprised that there might be a tendency to dissociate oneself from it. On the other hand, or perhaps both hands, I seldom hear of women who are, um, overtly rack-directed.

Perhaps there's some significance to the name chosen, but if, for instance, William F. Buckley, Jr. should refer to the resident unit as "The Brobdingnagian Protuberance," well, I'd just as soon not know about it.

If, like me, you've listened to John Kerry rattle off an endless stream of answers that somehow don't mesh with the actual questions being asked, and wondered "What the hell is this man thinking?" — well, Baldilocks has figured it out:

And if he does this badly with stupid, insignificant crap, imagine how he'll stumble if he's asked something important. (One question which occurs to me: "How is cutting taxes for me, a low-paid corporate drone, while simultaneously raising taxes on the guy who owns his own business, going to generate one job, let alone ten million?)

The number of votes he will accrue from this household hovers right around zero. Besides:

At this point, I find myself wishing that Dennis Kucinich (!) had emerged as the Democratic front-runner: he may have barked at the moon once too often, but even when his answers were palpably absurd, you knew he was serious about them, that he believed what he was saying. The only thing John Kerry is serious about is the care and feeding of John Kerry.

(Update, 10 pm: Bruce takes exception to this. In very large print.)

There are no neutral colors in Kentucky. Positioned as it is, adjacent to the somnolent Midwest and the hard-luck Appalachians, yet very much a part of the South, it's a crossroads of cultures, and inevitably a crossroads of conflict: the sun may be — probably is — shining, but just the same, you're standing on dark and bloody ground.

The Shooting Gallery, an alt-country outfit from Louisville, knows all this stuff. Dark and Bloody Ground, the band's independently-released CD, fuses the blackest, bleakest mountain themes to spirited rockin' country backgrounds, tales of people you'd like to know more about, but you probably shouldn't approach too closely if you know what's good for you. "Harlan," set in that coal-mining county in southeastern Kentucky, explains the milieu:

Under conditions like these, the strongest and bravest of us might snap, and those of us who don't think of ourselves as especially strong or remarkably brave, which is most of us, feel for these characters, even as we wait for the retribution, divine or otherwise, we know is coming.

This particular musical river has been fed by many tributaries, some well-known, some less so. I hear traces of Neil Young and the Band, of Merle Haggard and Lefty Frizzell, and, perhaps unexpectedly, U2; while there's no The Edge-like signature guitar sound per se, John Ashley's vocals dance around the periphery of the notes, sometimes hitting them square, sometimes grazing the corners, like Bono soaked in George Dickel. "Northbound Train," written by guitarist Brent Thurman, evokes Jerry Lee Lewis at the end of his rope.

Of course, you should run right out and get this CD, and assume the risks that come with these twelve tracks. I'm not saying that this is a dangerous collection, that you're jeopardizing your immortal soul merely by possessing it. But late at night with the shades drawn and one too many drinks — well, there's a reason that the last name in "Thanks to...", after all the friends and well-wishers and equipment suppliers, is Ed Gein. Dark and bloody, indeed.

Iraq, it goes without saying, is not Vietnam.

Of course, things that go without saying usually end up said anyway, so:

Iraq is not Vietnam.

Note-It Posts, to amplify this point, offers the Top Ten Ways You Can Tell Iraq Is Not Vietnam. A sampling thereof:

Seven more where these came from.

An interesting sidebar in the May/June Mother Jones by Dave Gilson and Jennifer Hahn, who put together a list of the ten largest credit-card issuers and matched it up to the political contributions collected from them by the major parties from 2000 through February 2004. Admittedly, this is an issue to which I give not a whole lot of thought; my major concern with a credit card is trying to reduce the amount of interest and fees collected from me.

Citigroup, the largest card issuer, has forked over $8.8 million in contributions, more or less evenly distributed between Democrats and Republicans, the GOP having a slight edge. For six of the other nine, the GOP has more than a slight edge: #2 MBNA has paid out $6.3 million, over $5 million of which went to the Republicans — which is no surprise, since recently-retired MBNA chairman Charles Cawley is a major Bush fan — and #3 Bank One sent two-thirds of its $3.3 million to the GOP.

In the other direction? Well, there's Providian, probably by no coincidence the issuer of a Democratic Party affinity card, whose contributions total just under a million dollars, 53 percent of which went into Democratic coffers.

And if you're thinking that maybe you'd just as soon have a card company that doesn't spend a lot on political contributions, your best pick among the top ten is Capital One, which peeled off less than $900,000.

Why there will never be a romance novel written about me.

Erin O'Connor sees too many people with the same ideas cluttering up Departments of Humanities:

What to do with all these people? She has one possible solution:

How do we know she's serious? She's taking this step herself, leaving the faculty of an Ivy League university to teach English at just such a school, emboldened by the experiences of those who have gone before her:

Far be it from me to suggest that the turmoil just beyond the tenure track is breeding Bolsheviks or anything like that, but I've always believed that if you're doing something truly worthwhile with your life, you're just a tad less likely to veer off into the Land of the Moonbats. (This belief, of course, is wholly independent of my own experience, but then I've never felt I was doing anything particularly worthwhile; my days in the military impress me a lot more today than they did then, owing to a steady, if insufficiently steep, decline in my level of immaturity.)

And this suggests a path for the public schools as well, inasmuch as their current obsession with credentials is almost certainly keeping them from attracting the best people. They're meeting the needs of the teachers' unions, perhaps, but they're not necessarily meeting the needs of the students.

Things I didn't expect to encounter, but did, this very day:

A shrinking price gap between 87-octane gasoline and the ostensible premium (91) grade. It used to be about a quarter; now it's down around twenty cents. I'm thinking, what with prices increasing, that nobody around here wants to be the first on the corner with two-dollar premium while the "cheap" stuff hovers around $1.759.

Vinyl siding on Dear Old Dad's place. I always thought he hated that stuff. Then again, at seventy-seven (next month), he probably hates the thought of painting even more.

A cover version of Liz Phair's "H.W.C." By a, you should pardon the expression, boy band, yet. (Damned good, too.)

Here in Tornado Alley, there's a tendency to become complacent: we see the warnings on TV and we think, "Oh, well, it's another one." If it's coming our way, we fumble to remember our safety precautions; if it's not, we shrug.

Five years ago today, no one shrugged. No one had time to shrug. It was the first F5-level tornado ever seen in the city, the very top of the Fujita scale, and the damage started at unimaginable and worked its way up from there.

From my notes at the time:

By the time the storm had passed my area, it had dropped below F5 level, so I managed to avoid seeing the worst of it. South and west of me, though, it was a war zone: nearly two thousand homes destroyed, six thousand more damaged. There was speculation that the storm had actually reached F6 levels; subsequent research seemed to establish that it hadn't, but at this point, it was like wondering, after your car had been totaled, if the turn-signal lever still worked.

For the most part, rebuilding has been completed; the former Tanger Outlet Center in Stroud, still in ruins, will be rebuilt as a medical center starting later this year.

Today will be placid, this morning chilly, this afternoon sunny, winds on the light side. Fortunately.

She's fifty today, and has three (almost certainly) lovely girls.

But to me, she will always be fourteen.

Before you ask: Yes, I'm over her. But that first rush of emotion, the first ray of hope in a life mostly distinguished by a general lack of it — that, I miss.

The British magazine Total Guitar, having polled its readers, has released its list of the greatest guitar riffs of all time, and topping the list is Slash's opening to the Guns n' Roses classic "Sweet Child O'Mine".

The lick I thought might have won, from Deep Purple's "Smoke on the Water," placed fourth.

Five years ago, a similar poll picked Led Zeppelin's "Whole Lotta Love," which finished #3 this time.

(Via Fark)

Attorney General John Ashcroft, at the dedication of the new Federal Building:

The new structure is one block from the Oklahoma City National Memorial.

"Even if you're not single," says Men's Journal (June '04), "it's nice to be in a place with some eye candy." Accordingly, they recommend the following communities:

1. Athens, GA
   
2. Santa Barbara, CA
   
3. Columbia, MO
   
4. Gainesville, FL
   
5. Charlottesville, VA
   

To explain:

That's what they said: "best female populations."

I have always assumed that my own criteria were dubious, arbitrary, and generally shameful, and no doubt they are, but I cringe at the thought that there are guys far more shallow than I.

Especially if they have dates.

In terms of terms of opprobrium, one of the most useful is the vernacular term for a certain bodily orifice possessed by all and viewed negatively by most. Use of this term, like the object whose name it borrowed, is pretty universal; George W. Bush once used it to describe a New York Times reporter.

Eventually some people tired of the term — let's face it, the word gets lots of use — and variations were tried; arguably the most successful was "asshat," popularized by, among others, Rachel Lucas and Fark. Not only did it share a substantial number of letters with its parent, but it managed to evoke a chuckle or two even as it vilified the person to whom it was applied.

But now even "asshat" is being gentrified. Laura at Oddly Normal has described certain minions of the Nanny State as "rectal milliners, the lot of them," and just yesterday, Robert Prather at Insults Unpunished said of Ted Koppel: "Add him to the list of those wearing rectal chapeaus."

Who knows where this derrière derby will end?

The national anthem of Switzerland, Alberik Zwyssig's 1841 "Swiss Psalm," text by Leonhard Widmer, is overtly religious, sexist, and generally outdated. Even the Swiss Federal Council says so. But they're not going to change it.

When the Psalm was officially proclaimed to be the national anthem in 1981, after many years of unofficial use and twenty years as the "provisional" anthem, the Council declared that the Psalm was "a purely Swiss song, dignified and ceremonial, the kind of national anthem that the majority of our citizens would like to have." And the Swiss do not undertake change lightly.

There are four verses to the Psalm, though usually only three are translated into English.

(Via Tongue Tied)

Matt Deatherage has been following the strange tale of Brian Robertson, a high-school student from Moore who happened upon a text file containing what purported to be evacuation orders in the event of some unspecified disaster. Robertson read the file, found inspiration therein, and wrote a short story about an armed assault on his school.

In a normal environment, it would have ended there. But we live in the Age of Zero Tolerance, so when the school administration found the story, they called the cops, and Robertson was charged with a felony: under a 2001 let's-make-sure-we-don't-have-another-Columbine bill, it was illegal to "plan, attempt, conspire, or endeavor to perform an act of violence," and Robertson's story, viewed through the eyes of Zero Tolerance, looked like a plan. The charges looked even sillier once the case came before a judge, and were duly dropped, but inasmuch as it took over a year to bring the case to trial, Oklahoma law forbids expunging Robertson's record.

Until now. The Legislature has passed a measure which redefines the law to require malicious intent and provides the authority to clear the records of those charged under the previous version.

Notes Deatherage:

Which is, of course, as it should be.

Andrea Harris contemplates Kent State:

I'm having a little problem imagining brows as prognathous, but otherwise this is much like what I was thinking at the advanced age of Almost Seventeen.

Iraq, of course, is not Vietnam — it's not even "exactly similar" — and I wouldn't expect people who protested the war in Iraq to be strictly comparable to people who protested the war in Vietnam. Certainly some (though by no means all) of today's antiwar types are a rather surly, uncommunicative lot, something I don't remember being characteristic of the flower children. (I, of course, was surly and uncommunicative in those days, but then I have always been such.)

But I have to wonder: was I giving Vietnam protesters in 1970 a pass because I was rapidly closing in on draft age and therefore might have had some reason to identify with them? I can't find much common ground with today's antiwar left; has it changed, or have I?

When George Burns was 85, he said something to the effect that he was expecting to live forever: "Very few people," he said, "die after age eighty-five."

George, alas, is gone, but the Carnival of the Vanities, now in episode #85, is still at it. This week, the Carnival is hosted by Thief's Den, and bloggy goodness shines through every strand. Or something like that.

DoggerelPundit presents: Press' Snide Story.

Mad Magazine hasn't been this good in years.

Points on the curve, as determined at Altered Perceptions:

Now to find a term that fits a random Skittle, a clapped-out Chevy Vega, and the view from the inside of the car wash.

Minus the buzzwords, this seems reasonable enough:

William F. Bacon, PhD, who came up with this, is associate vice president for research and evaluation at Planned Parenthood of New York City, and his statement appears on the Planned Parenthood Web site.

You might assume from this that the organization actually seeks to reduce "risk-taking behavior." A glance at their Web site for teenagers, Teenwire, suggests otherwise. Dawn Eden has done more than glance, and she's appalled:

At the very least, there's a serious disconnect between what Planned Parenthood is telling adults, who write the checks, and what they're telling teenagers.

As the phrase goes, Read The Whole Thing.

Over the past few years, National Public Radio received a fair chunk of change from Archer Daniels Midland, an agribusiness conglomerate which regularly comes in for criticism from the sort of people who listen to National Public Radio. I don't think that ADM was necessarily trying to buy NPR's silence, but their presence in the listing of supporters sounded somehow peculiar, and lately it seems to have disappeared.

In the absence of ADM, Wal-Mart has been kicking in some heavy dollars to NPR, which has run rather a lot of news pieces which could be construed as critical of the retail giant; even Jeffrey Dvorkin, the NPR ombudsman, has felt compelled to justify taking Wal-Mart's money to aggrieved listeners.

Now if we could just get the real story behind Jennifer and Ted Stanley.

Lynn S poses two questions:

On the second question, at least, she's made up her mind: it will be the verdict of history that determines future entries to the Pantheon. And certainly she's right, although one inevitable side-effect will be the eventual neglect of composers who just missed the cut, which is unfortunate but probably unavoidable, and we won't always have Karl Haas to dig up "Rare and Well-Done" works for us.

But that still leaves the first question unanswered: by whose authority does a musical work become worthy of consideration for admission to the Basic Repertoire? What process weeds out pieces A and B in favor of C? In this era, the music that sounds most "classical" is film music, but clearly not everything that makes it into a motion-picture soundtrack isn't classical.

That leaves the field open to gatekeepers, with, says Lynn, mixed results:

She dismisses "trash classical" like Bach for Dummies, which fits with the premise of avoiding contact with that horrid pop stuff. Here I demur. Even if it's pitched at "dummies," it's still Bach and can still be appreciated by someone who knows the name of Schmieder's catalog. I'm not worried that the classical "market," as it were, is going to be overrun by barbarians: classical music will always be a minority taste. But there's no reason it shouldn't be a minority of, say, twenty percent, instead of two or three.

It was never any secret that Terry Nichols' defense, which is scheduled to present its case starting today, would attempt to show that there were other conspirators in the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995, and they got their first courtroom victory very quickly: the presiding judge has ruled that fingerprints found in Timothy McVeigh's car and in his hotel room can be examined. The defense contends that the prints were left by members of a group of white separatists, and that they had a substantial role in planning the bombing.

There was no reported response from John Doe No. 2.

Edward Ocean wants to know:

Examples abound.

Governor Henry signed Senate Joint Resolution 54 today, which calls for the Department of Commerce to work together with Murray State College in Tishomingo — which, coincidentally, offers an Associates degree with gunsmithing specialization — to come up with incentives to attract manufacturers of firearms to the Sooner State.

Senator Jay Paul Gumm (D-Durant) explains the rationale:

The OkiePundit is not particularly impressed:

And Commerce, with its "meager resources," is somehow going to be able to land a semiconductor foundry or a defense plant? (Admittedly, gay marriage gets a lot of press around here, but it's utterly irrelevant to this discussion except to the extent that a cheap shot was needed.)

I doubt much of anything will happen with SJR 54, but I plan to be amused if some gun maker does announce plans to open a facility here and the Usual Suspects chime in with "Well, we need jobs, but not these jobs."

The Professor has pointed out:

As usual, he's accurate and patient. Andrea Harris is just as accurate, but not even slightly patient:

My take on this is simple: We owe apologies, and perhaps damages, to the prisoners who were mistreated. To most of the rest of the world, which has shoved its collective nose into this matter for no other reason than because it can, we owe nothing. To the Arab world, which routinely pulls crap far worse than anything we did, we owe less than nothing.

I hope this doesn't jeopardize my Boomer standing.

If you wandered back to Rachel Lucas' place and noticed that she was sold out of her classic "Imagine No Liberals" coffee cup —

Well, I got two. Nyah.

Of course, what's important is not that she's out of cups, but that she's (almost) back at the blog, just the way we'd always hoped.

This apology appeared on Outside the Beltway and will not be repeated.

[Cue the Trondheim Hammer Dance]

You know, if I'd seen this email, I'd have turned it in to the security folks myself.

I mean, it's not like I've never seen this sort of thing before.

(Courtesy of The Critical 'I'.)

The new fiscal year starts 1 July, and Jim Couch, who twiddles the purse strings down at City Hall, is in a glum mood. In the news flyer that comes with the utility bill, he spells it out in no uncertain terms:

On the upside, this doesn't sound anywhere near as bad as last year's budget.

The City Council will hold two public hearings on the budget before it comes up for a vote.

The bill for restoration of the downtown Skirvin Hotel is now calculated at $46.4 million.

The City Council will consider the package next week. Under the final agreement, the city will lend the Skirvin Partners development team $18.4 million; should the reborn Skirvin Hilton be staggeringly successful, the city stands to turn a tidy profit, and if the hotel is a total flop, the city will be on the hook for only about $4 million.

I doubt seriously it will flop. During the somnolent years, we got by with one downtown hotel; new development is now supporting three, and the two new arrivals in 2006 — not only the Skirvin, but also an Embassy Suites on the eastern edge of Bricktown — fit into the dreams of downtown planners with surprising precision.

The Convention and Visitors Bureau has projected that for Oklahoma City to compete for major regional conventions — and for sporting events like the Big 12 basketball tournament or the NCAA regionals — there should be 1250 to 1500 hotel rooms available near downtown. Right now, there are 931: 395 at the Westin, 311 at the Renaissance, 225 at the Courtyard by Marriott. There will be 245 suites at the Embassy, and the plan for the Skirvin calls for 238 rooms, bringing the total as of mid-2006 to 1414.

You know, this could work.

McGehee reads Das Kapital so you don't have to.

Yet another example of the overwhelming generosity of the Blogosphere™.

The four-campus Connecticut State University system is discontinuing use of the word "freshmen" and replacing it with "first-year students."

"The whole notion of coming in with one class and leaving with that class," said Peter M. Rosa of Student Affairs, "is more historic than actual."

Although course materials will not be immediately revised to reflect the new terminology, blog items referring to this decision will continue to be sophomoric.

Normally, Page Three of The Oklahoma Observer is where Frosty Troy gets snippy.

And once in a great while, he goes way beyond that, as he did in the 10 May issue:

Geez.

"Cyber" bothers Erica:

It's easy to hate. As I once said:

Which I've done rather a lot in the eight years since I posted that.

For those of you who were wondering when Top 40 AM radio officially ended, the answer is "this past Thursday," when WQMA, licensed to Marks, Quitman County, Mississippi, ceased operations on AM and moved its programming to an FM station about 20 miles away in Clarksdale.

According to Scott Fybush, who keeps track of such things, this was the last standalone AM Top 40 outlet in the nation.

"Another evil corporation," quips Baldilocks, "mismanages its money, puts out an inferior product and goes under."

Which is how the system works. Air America Radio isn't quite dead — it won't keep still, anyway — but what's the problem here? Admittedly, these folks evidently couldn't run a roadside fruit stand, but is it all ineptitude, or is there no market for their product in the first place?

Over at coffeegrounds, the Proprietor leans toward the former:

Having been part of a few focus groups in my time, I rather expect that when the Final Judgment is read, I can count on an extended stay at One Brimstone Place.

But not too much speed, evidently.

The previous item linked back to two TypePad blogs; TrackBacks were duly sent to both. Only one got through, and this curt missive appeared in the log:

By "a couple," they mean "four or five," because trying again in two minutes generated the same response.

Of course, weblogs.com will refuse a ping from this entry because it's within half an hour of the last one.

This week in Vent #388: "Wouldn't you really rather be a Republican?"

In a word: no.

Aaron Robinson of Car and Driver (June '04) detects mixed signals from the Mercedes-Benz E55 AMG:

(snort)

I remember when C/D said of some Honda (probably an Accord) that its primary appeal would be to Presbyterians. I'm not a wild and crazy guy myself, but I have no reason to think that either denomination is utterly devoid of wack-job gearheads.

And come to think of it, the E55, besides being about three times beyond any conceivable automotive budget I might have, inverts my own particular desiderata: while I don't want some blindingly-flashy Atari dash, I'd much rather have the bucks spent on spiffing up the interior than on a bunch of obvious Arrest Me parts for the outside.

A Really Large Tree sits on the property line, overhanging my front yard and the one just east of it. If ever it has to be cut down, presumably both owners will have to consult.

Early this morning, the combination of fierce winds and relatively dry wood resulted in the fall of a ten-foot branch, and amazingly, it dropped right along the property line — for about two feet, anyway. The rest of it was blocking the street.

I hauled the debris into my yard for eventual disposal, reasoning that well, I saw it first.

Hardly anyone, even among his most enthusiastic fans, will characterize George W. Bush as an industrial-strength intellectual. And that's fine with W.; he has that distrust for "pointy-headed intellectuals" made famous by, among others, George Wallace.

Which is not to say that Mr Bush doesn't have a point. Dan Lovejoy has looked into the matter, and he sees a philosophical antecedent to the President's thinking:

In the real world, as opposed to the arcane conditions that are examined in the laboratory, we can do just fine with the simpler explanations. As with Isaac Newton, so too with George W. Bush:

Applying Newton's laws of motion to the Middle East:

1. Every object in a state of uniform motion tends to remain in that state of motion unless an external force is applied to it.

Stagnation, of course, is as uniform a motion as you'll find; Bush obviously believes that things aren't going to change on their own.

2. The relationship between an object's mass m, its acceleration a, and the applied force F is F = ma. Acceleration and force are vectors; in this law the direction of the force vector is the same as the direction of the acceleration vector.

Pushing the Middle East in a direction it would rather not go requires a different vector, and more force than it would require otherwise.

3. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

Obviously and fiercely so.

This analysis presumably fails at the quantum level — were you to ask Bush about string theory, he might well suggest that it would be a good idea to string 'em up — but for things that can be measured by ordinary benchmarks, Bush is as Newtonian as they get.

Oh, about that chart floating around the left side of blogdom purporting to show that states that voted for Gore have higher average IQs than states that voted for Bush — I first caught it here — well, forget about it. It pins the Bogosity Meter.

Meanwhile, Kimberly Swygert would like to know:

We shouldn't have to wait too long for a test case; I suspect that political IQ tables are going to be this year's affirmative-action bake sales.

By convention, the Good Stuff goes on the top shelf, and that's where my supermarket of choice has been stocking Laura's Lean Beef, a product which immediately spawned two questions: "Do they really think they can get that kind of money for this?" and "Who the heck is Laura, anyway?"

The latter question, at least, was answerable on the Web. Laura Freeman, who gave up journalism to run the family's central-Kentucky cattle operation, moved into the high-end, low-fat, no-additives beef business in 1985; last year she sold $100 million worth of the stuff, every pound raised without dosing the cattle with antibiotics or growth hormones. The least I could do, I figured, was check it out.

"Lean," it turns out, is an understatement. The burgers I bought claimed a mere 8 percent fat (there's also a 4-percent version), and I'd be surprised if they had that much. My usual ploy of stuffing them side by side on George Foreman's grill and expecting the eventual shrinkage to make them fit on the surface failed miserably. Normally I pull them off the grill and drop them on a plate covered with paper towels to soak up liquids; the towels got damp, but they didn't get the drenching I'm used to.

Laura and company don't raise all those cattle themselves, of course: they buy from outside producers, but they're extremely finicky about what they take. I tend to take "low-fat" claims for meats with a grain of seasoned salt, and indeed there was a dust-up last year between Laura and the Center for Science in the Public Interest; the Center found some samples that didn't match their labeling. Then again, CSPI lives in constant fear that people might actually enjoy eating.

Is all this worth four dollars a pound? And, dear God, what must her steaks cost? For now, though, I'm giving Laura at least one thumb up, and will sample more of her wares next time I pass by the top shelf.

Dean explains why Myers-Briggs INTJs are rare:

Aw, come on, just a little dithering?

On the other hand, Laura (no, not this Laura) isn't buying:

Mental note: Resist temptation to invite Laura to visit Lake Wobegon.

Actually, given the truly godawful amount of introspection in which I've indulged over five decades — okay, maybe I didn't do so much of it before I learned how to walk — with the exception of one severe blind spot, I'm generally pretty accurate.

And, as with an amazing number of memes in blogdom, I was there first, and was duly ignored.

Attached to that piece on Bush as Newtonian strategist — a piece, incidentally, for which Dan deserves more credit than I — is a comment about how we're ignoring the "root causes" of the mess in the Middle East.

Which is true only if you're ideologically disposed toward misidentifying those root causes. To the left, all ills are caused by poverty, all poverty caused by corporate malfeasance, all corporate malfeasance aided and abetted by the likes of George W. Bush, and well, Bush Is Evil, case closed.

Of course, Islamic fundamentalists get not one but two free passes from the American left: after all, your friendly neighborhood jihadi is not only nonwhite (and therefore oppressed), but non-Christian (and therefore not likely to picket an abortion clinic). At worst, they're the Dr Pepper of religious movements: so misunderstood. All that money they raise to support suicide bombers and other terrorists — why, that's charity, and how much did you give last year?

At Exit Zero, Mary boils it down to the crucial stuff:

And why are they our enemies? Explanation courtesy of Francis W. Porretto:

When they say "universal," they mean to include you, Lefty.

There are basically two choices here:

1. Wipe out the lot of them and be done with it;

2. Wipe out the loudest of the bunch and see if the rest have enough sense to cool their jets.

Either way, there will be wiping. Count on it.

Ostensibly inspired by what he read here, Mike in Little Axe has posed the following question:

I point out only that pit bulls, like jihadi, are the way they are only because of the instructions they received from their masters: there's nothing inherent in their genetic code to make them anything more than snarly. As Oscar Hammerstein once noted, "You've got to be carefully taught."

The city of Denver, incidentally, is prone to option 3.

Blogdom is, of course, thrilled that the Democratic National Convention will grant press credentials to bloggers, and indeed this strikes me as a step forward.

But get this: blogger Michael Bates will be at the Republican National Convention — as a delegate.

He'll probably break no hot stories (like you'd expect any from a convention), but the off-camera stuff, the writing of the platform and the adoption of the rules for the next campaign, likely matters more.

Senator James Inhofe (R-OK), at the Senate hearing on the events at and around Abu Ghraib:

That's so like you, Jim. Considering there's a good chance they were arrested in error — Coalition MI types estimate 70 to 90 percent were — we have even less excuse to treat them badly.

A reader, citing the Inhofe quote, writes in:

I try not to. I have enough trouble associating myself with my own.

I have no doubt that some horrible things are going to happen as this war continues. That's the nature of war, after all. It's part of Jim Inhofe's job to keep an eye on these things. If he's not interested in doing his job — and judging by the querulous quote above, he seems offended by the whole idea — he can, and should, be replaced.

Somebody got here — well, here, actually — by Googling songs about love and crap.

Aren't they all?

Susanna Cornett points to this Charley Reese column, ostensibly about Michael Moore, which offers an explanation of the difference between rights we have and rights some of us think we deserve. And that difference?

Reese goes on to provide a definition of a truly free society:

And am I imagining things, or has there been an upsurge in itchy buttheads in recent weeks?

Susanna notes:

I don't think we'll ever get everyone to agree on the location of those boundaries, but the phrase that pays is "competing views": each gets its chance in the marketplace of ideas. If some of them get shot down, well, that's the way the system works. A surprisingly large number of people believe that if their trial balloons don't fly, it's the result of a conspiracy by Those Other People; it can't possibly be because their ideas were laughed off the market.

I fought the lawn, and the lawn won.

Actually, I'd subdued about 94 percent of the area in question when the mower sputtered to a halt. Out of gas. Screw this, I thought, and went back inside to catch my breath and start dinner.

Later, I popped back into the yard, surveyed the scene, and contemplated the possibility of finishing up, when a wandering cloud, obviously tickled at the prospect, dumped a lot of water on the premises and moved on just as fast as possible.

So six percent of the back yard gets ignored this time around. Fortunately, it's not one of the areas that grows most quickly.

A minor sensation in France, perhaps: Le Train de Nulle Part, "The Train to Nowhere," 233 pages without a single verb.

Author "Michel Thaler" (a pseudonym), per a review in Le Nouvel Observateur, perhaps misogynistic, in spite of a statement to the contrary by Thaler's publisher.

No English translation yet, sorry; twenty euros (plus shipping) for the original French not in my present budget.

Closest English equivalent: Gadsby, a 1937 novel by Ernest Vincent Wright, 50,000 words without a single letter E.

(Via Fark)

Confessions of a Political Junkie (now there's a title) is happy to present Carnival of the Vanities #86, this week's summation of all that is good and blogworthy, and so on, and so on, and scooby-dooby-doo. (Different strokes for different folks, as they say.)

Three Republicans in the Oklahoma Senate have put together a counterproposal to Governor Henry's tobacco-tax plan.

The two measures, despite a 44-cent-per-pack difference, are much alike. Henry's package calls for increasing the current 23-cent tax to 78 cents, and using much of the difference to finance health-care initiatives. In addition, the Governor wants to toss out the state's capital-gains tax and eliminate the trigger mechanism that raises the top income-tax rate when revenues fall short.

The GOP pushes the tax all the way to $1.22, supports the health-care measures, and will phase in a reduction of the top income-tax rate.

I'm a nonsmoker the easy way, so the bill which passes — probably a compromise package at the $1 level — will put a few coins in my pocket, since the top income-tax bracket is set so low that even I pay it. But I'm still disturbed by the manifest belief of politicians on both sides that it's okay to stick it to smokers. (Can you say "oppressed minority"? Sure. I knew you could.) And what kind of world is this where Republicans push for a tax increase — and a bigger tax increase than the Democrats seek, yet? The Legislature is evidently smoking something that the state doesn't tax.

Live from New York: Dawn Eden meets Dr James D. Watson, and apparently the good doctor has gotten himself snared in a whole new helix. In answer to a question no one asked, he said:

What's with this outburst? Totally unbidden, sneering all the way — and anyway he thinks those mothers should abort those babies who aren't healthy.

Dr Watson has never been exactly secretive about his views, but there's a difference between merely reading about them and hearing them expressed at high volume on the other side of the room.

Dawn's reaction:

For some reason, I find myself thinking of Ike Turner, unquestionably one of the major architects of rock and roll, and by all accounts someone you definitely didn't want to date.

If there's a Deep Truth here, it's this: doing good things, even great things, doesn't assure you a position on the side of the angels.

Up to now, efforts to quantify physical attractiveness have relied on arbitrary measures like the millihelen, which is defined as that quantity of beauty required to launch one ship.

Obviously something this banal wouldn't do for People's 50 Most Beautiful People: they must have science, and indeed they do. Per Dr Francis Palmer's point system, you get 75% of the points for your cheekbones, 10% for eyes/eyebrows, 7% for lips, and 2% each for jaw, chin, and neck; sleek nose; clear skin; and "general harmony of features."

There are, I think, major problems with this formula. For one thing, it makes me look a lot better than I actually do: the cheekbone/jowl conflict doesn't compute. More to the point, it makes the preposterous assumption that every last bit of visual appeal is located in areas north of the clavicle. A certain consistency is to be desired, I suppose — I'm not all prepared for someone who looks like Sharon Stone from here down and like Broderick Crawford from there up — but as a practical matter, not everyone's best feature is facial. Sometimes it's not even tangible.

Rhode Island blogger Justin Katz isn't the sort to put all his words on the screen; he's a member of the Third Thursday Writers' Group, which meets every second Tuesday (just kidding) at The Redwood Library and Athenæum, the nation's oldest (257 years!) lending library, in legendarily-gorgeous Newport. What's more, Katz' Timshel Literature operation publishes the Group's annual volume, The Redwood Review, a trade-paperback-sized collection of the best the Group has to offer. Beautifully designed and crisply written, this series is definitely worth your time; it's a reminder that however wonderful bloggage can be, there's still no substitute for words on a page.

Like most people, I have a list of Dreams Unfulfilled; once in a blue moon — well, actually, I'm now averaging one every other year, which is better than I had any reason to expect — I manage to cross one off.

The automotive section of this list has been kept deliberately small, mostly to dissuade me from assuming mountains of debt in pursuit of something thereupon. Still, I've gotten back into road-trip mode, something I gave up too many years ago; I've actually driven a Maserati (okay, it was a Quattroporte, but it's a lot more of a Maser than that godawful Chrysler thing); I've seen Duesenbergs in the flesh sheet metal; and one strange week in Los Angeles, I drove both Dead Man's Curve (what's left of it, anyway) and Mulholland Drive.

However, I have never, ever seen a Tucker.

Preston Tucker never managed to get series production started on his rear-engined marvel back in 1948, and only 51 cars were built on the pilot production line. But forty-seven of them are still around, and one of them (serial #1043, if you're keeping score) sold at auction this past January for $495,000. There isn't a chance I'll ever get any seat time in any Tucker, but see one I shall, some day.

(Hmmm. 1948 again. Regular readers will remember that Surlywood was built in that mysterious year, five years before my birth. What other secrets have been waiting for me these five and a half decades?)

Vent #226 (Christmas 2000) begins this way:

Which may or may not explain this phenomenon:

Disraeli Gears was in fact the second Cream album, but the point stands: the calibrations on our individual memory clocks do not necessarily reflect exact chronological time as the scientists know it.

Phil Dennison is similarly amazed:

One of the Office Babes is named Denise, and she was not around when Randy and the Rainbows sang about someone of that name way back in 1963. I ripped the 45 and installed it as an MP3 at work; she was amused by the song, and surprised that it was over with in a brief two minutes. I wonder if her dad remembers it, and whether he'll feel like he was hit with a ton of bricks when he realizes it's 41 years old, most of his lifetime — and twice hers.

Three teenaged boys at the Tecumseh Detention Center last year received breast-reduction surgery at a cost of approximately $14,000. The state Health Care Authority refused to pay for the operations, deeming them not medically necessary, and duly advised the Office of Juvenile System Oversight, which shuffled some personnel in response.

It occurs to me that if these lads were unhappy with their boobage at 15, they're going to be utterly despondent at 50.

The hook for Bob Mondello's review of Troy on NPR's All Things Considered today was reasonable enough: while Hollywood has often dredged up stories from the Roman Empire, tales from the glory that was Greece are few and far between.

Okay, fine. I'd just as soon not remember most of Clash of the Titans just now. Mondello was his usual glib self, and then came the obligatory bumper music: the last few bars of the fourth movement of Gustav Holst's The Planets, the movement titled "Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity." A Roman god. In fact, the Roman god.

I don't think this was the sort of jollity they intended to bring.

Rachel Lucas has done the math:

Obviously I have a long way to go; at worst, I get characterized as grumpy.

Are we living in the age of Cotton Mather? Some people, reports Andrea Harris, seem to think so:

"Twisted" doesn't even begin to approach the sheer anfractuosity of the matter: the assumptions which must be made to characterize our society as sexually repressed require not only the suspension of disbelief but the denial of the obvious and the redefining of the terms. It's perfectly obvious to anyone who's paying attention that people are doing whatever, and screwing whomever, they choose; there is no Department of Copulation Control knock, knock, knocking at your front door demanding that you disengage immediately or face the wrath of John Ashcroft.

The very existence of John Ashcroft, however, enrages these people. Their demand for complete freedom includes a demand for complete freedom from criticism, especially criticism from persons in power: the moment someone says anything that can be construed as unfavorable, why, it's the stomp of a million jackboots in stern synchronization. And it's got to be at least a million, because there's a conspiracy out there to repress us all.

I can't tell you what truly motivated Lynndie England. Maybe it will come out in a court-martial. But I'm not buying the notion that she's simply responding to the pressures of society, or that it's an inevitable consequence of war, especially a war of which the Libertine Elite does not approve.

(Disclosure: Written while unclad.)

Joe South, in one of my favorite songs, said this:

But before you start that hike, Susanna Cornett whispers words of wisdom:

Grayscale would not exist were there neither black nor white.

I come by my pack-rat tendencies naturally. This afternoon my older brother (well, he's not older than I am, but he's older than the other one) and I went through a few cubic feet of Mom's detritus, things she'd piled up for reasons of her own, and apparently there's some kind of gene for this that I picked up and that he either missed out on or worked diligently to suppress.

There were newspapers announcing various events: Kennedy's election and assassination, Gordon Cooper's space flight. There were things that were deemed necessary for future reference: a handwritten promissory note for the purchase of the Chevrolet, the service contract (ten years!) on the piano, various bank statements. There were inexplicable items of infant clothing in varying degrees of disrepair. There were snippets of school-related ephemera, sometimes mine, sometimes sister Brenda's. And there was a lot of personal correspondence, some of it from persons neither of us could name.

At some point, my children are going to have to inventory some of the accumulated debris from my life. I'd like to think I've done a better job of documenting my existence, but you'd never know it by reading this stuff.

Since Movable Type 3.0 is proving to be more controversial than anyone expected, I'm providing, as background information, some of my own site statistics. How you use them is entirely up to you. The first three items include MT database entries only.

Total entries: 2,644
Total comments: 5,206
MySQL disk space used: 6.37 MB
Total disk space used: 72.49 MB
Average visitors per day: 690
Average bandwidth per month: 2.7 GB

Interestingly, I've been on the receiving end of five pings today, which is a record for the site. I have no idea why.

Remember the concept of the Loyal Opposition? Emperor Misha (only his best friends dare to call him Darth) knows what it means, and he's bothered disturbed saddened disgusted by the absence of same:

The handwriting started appearing on the wall, I think, with the wholesale rejection of the Presidential candidacy of Senator Joseph Lieberman, a Democrat not at all out of step with the rest of his party — except that he understood the war effort and the necessity of bringing it to a proper conclusion. And in response, members of his party turned out in droves and voted for people who promised to turn tail and run instead. Joe's war stance wasn't significantly different from the President's, after all, and the current belief in the Democratic power structure is that if George W. Bush says the sky is blue, there's obviously some GOP conspiracy, no doubt engineered by Halliburton, to suppress all those other colors.

I'm not defending everything that's been done in Iraq by any means; in fact, I think the Bush administration made a ghastly error in judgment by disclosing to the American people the fact that the Iraqi people are people who would like to live their lives with some measure of freedom. Had he characterized them instead as, say, organisms which should be protected under the Endangered Species Act, the Left would be lining up to demand the removal, by any means necessary, of Baathists, private militias, disgruntled Shi'a, and all the other Middle Eastern miscreants who are complicating the, you should pardon the expression, peace process.

Meanwhile, John Kerry, a man with exactly one actual conviction — that John Kerry should be President — moves swiftly to assure the corrupt and the corruptible that under his Administration, the International Community, those wonderful folks who were conspiring by Saddam's side all those years, will once again be the Source of All Wisdom and that all their work wasn't in vain, and that the United Nations will be restored to its former glory, as theatre (and occasional paymaster) for the world's despots.

So I wait for the Democrats to come to their senses. Which they will, eventually. I figure one good drubbing at the polls should do the job. And it can't be this "yeah, but we really won" crap that we had to endure in 2000; it's got to be at least 350-188 in the Electoral College, and the GOP has to pick up seats in both houses of Congress. It's got to mean a new entry on Terry McAuliffe's résumé, and a large hole in George Soros' wallet. It's got to be big enough to leave them wondering "Where did we go wrong?"

I just told you. And once you've cleaned up your act, I'll still be here. Because, after all, I am the Loyal Opposition.

Brock Sides would like to see "a Constitutional provision forbidding the use of contrived acronyms in the titles of bills."

He is not alone in this desire.

Quentin Tarantino, having successfully killed Bill, wants a shot at James Bond.

At least he's picked the right Bond story. Casino Royale is one of two Bond tales for which the descendants of Albert B. Broccoli do not control the movie rights — the other is Thunderball — so it should be at least reasonably simple to negotiate the rights. I don't think the Broccoli operation will willingly release Pierce Brosnan to play Bond for Tarantino, though.

Would I go see this? No doubt. The 1967 original was made as a deliberate spy spoof, and a remarkably unfunny one at that; the best thing about it was the Tijuana Brass recording of the Bacharach/David title tune (A&M 850, #27 pop in Billboard). It's about time someone did this story justice.

When I bought this place last year, I was aware that one of the prices paid for the premises, in addition to two-point-something years' salary, was the necessity of doing yard work. And while I don't much enjoy it, it does get me out in the sun once in a while, and it does provide me with some worthwhile (they tell me) exercise.

On the other hand, Velociman sees no such upside with his purchase.

McGehee's comments are broken, owing to a UCV* issue with Movable Type 3.0.

Greg Hlatky would deem this a boon:

Not to mention the people who want to sell you low-cost, misspelled drugs.

*Unprecedentedly Crappy Version

You've undoubtedly already read this from Lileks, but I simply must mention it here, partly because Lileks is always quotable, but mostly because the gentleman in question was a topic of discussion this weekend while my brother and I were deconstructing some of the mental edifices we had built over our formative years.

The gentleman in question is Dr Hunter S. Thompson, and, says Lileks, his influence remains considerable:

The generation that followed, of course, will go "Who?" and will eventually get around to rebuilding what the Boomers tore down for the sake of cool.

At the stroke of midnight, City Hall in Cambridge, Massachusetts began issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

I am seriously torn on this issue. On one level, I'm thinking, "Well, it's about damn time." On another, I'm wondering about all the dire consequences predicted by opponents, and how (if?) they're going to materialize.

I can't say I'm delighted with this development. Still, I'm going to back off. If this is truly The End Of The World As We Know It, we'll know it soon enough. And if it's not, we'll know that too.

In the meantime, congratulations to the happy couples. (I always cry at weddings.)

If you're an Old Media person given to really idiotic statements, you'll get clever, pointed rebukes like this and like this and like this and like this.

Now me, I'm presumably one of those New Media types, if only because I've never made a dime on the dead-tree market, and for my idiotic statements, the best I can get is this. (And what's more, there are lapses in the truth therein; the only time I have a "high, squeaky voice" is during karaoke sessions, and then only when I'm singing outside the three and a half notes that comprise my natural range.)

Oh, well. You can't have everything.

"I'd like to return this, please."

"Certainly. We'll be happy to refund your money. What was wrong with it?"

"It didn't suck enough."

Traditional and Biblical names seem to be the norm these days in Oklahoma; four hundred boys born last year were named Jacob, with Ethan, Michael, Joshua and Caleb rounding out the Top Five.

Meanwhile, 388 girls were named Emily; Madison (can we blame this on Daryl Hannah?) was second, followed by Emma, Hannah and Abigail.

Considering this is the state that produced builder Never Fail, cardiologist Safety First, MD, and one-time Attorney General Larry Derryberry, I'm surprised at the conventional sounds that some of these names seem to make.

Then again, my daughter, born here in the Okay City, came this close to being named Penelope Layne. I'm sure she's grateful for the change of heart.

When Bass Pro Shops announced they were locating a store in Broken Arrow, a southeast Tulsa suburb, there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth down here at the other end of the Turner, inasmuch as Oklahoma City put up $18 million or so to land a Bass Pro location for the east end of Bricktown and apparently the company didn't ask anything from Broken Arrow.

Or did they? Michael Bates has connected the dots and found what looks like a very suspicious trail: Tulsa may have helped Broken Arrow snag the Bass Pro store in exchange for BA support of the Vision 2025 package. Inasmuch as BA, like most Tulsa suburbs, stands to pay more in taxes than it stands to gain in actual V2025 projects, there'd be no real reason for BA to support the package — unless there was a little something to sweeten the deal.

That sound you hear is Kirk Humphreys breathing a sigh of relief.

Two bucks a gallon, reports Debra Galant:

I paid $1.899 this past weekend over at Ollie Octane's; saints be praised that each of those gallons is propelling me just over twenty-five miles.

Contracts between SBC and the Communications Workers of America run three years, and the last four contracts were reached with relatively little grumbling and/or sabre-rattling.

Not this year. The contract expired six weeks ago, and while negotiations have continued on and off, CWA has now announced a 24-hour strike notice. A strike isn't exactly inevitable at this point, but neither side, I think, really wants to avoid it: the union would like to appear just as hard-nosed and militant as possible, and the company would save a few bucks on payroll while the picket lines are up.

One sticky point was health care for pensioners. (Disclosure: I worked for the company long enough to qualify for the minimum retirement benefit.) Around Christmas, SBC sent a letter to retirees informing them that they would have to start paying the premiums for their health insurance. Benefits for retired employees, though, are not a mandatory bargaining issue, and under labor law not sufficient justification for a strike. Much of the negotiation since the April expiration of the contract has been devoted to getting this issue off the table; eventually, SBC agreed to delay the implementation of their plan for at least five years.

But with the pensioners now presumably taken care of, there are still thorny issues to be dealt with. One of these, unsurprisingly, is job security. SBC is moving into other areas — wireless, DSL, satellite — and CWA wants a piece of that action.

I'm guessing, at this point, that there will be a strike of about three weeks, about as long as it lasted in 1983. (Been there, carried that sign.) This enables the union to appear strong and forthright, and saves the company a few bucks before it caves in.

As of this writing, Robert Prather's Site Meter is sitting at 476,658. If at all possible, he'd like to push it to the half-million mark by next Wednesday, the second birthday of his blog. You can help by clicking here.

(Aw, go ahead. You've already given me my increment for the day. Maybe in a couple of months I'll reach 476,658 myself.)

A wastebasket in my office is in serious disrepair, and presumably at some point it will be replaced with a new one.

And then we'll wonder: "What do we do with the old one?"

But not for long.

(Note: This is, or at least comes across as, an attempt to talk out of both sides of my mouth. Really.)

Bruce reports that the vast majority of respondents to a poll conducted by a Tulsa TV station would not be willing to increase their taxes to support the Tulsa Mayfest. What does it mean?

But that's only half the story he has to tell: