Given the sheer quantity of flak stirred up by the BBC's putative "100 best" list of Great Britons, it was inevitable that someone would put together a list of the 100 worst. And it surprises me not at all that a handful of individuals appear on both lists.

Fifty Penn Place in Oklahoma City is not your average mall. For one thing, it's vertical: retail and restaurants occupy the lower levels, office space fills up the tower. What's more, it's mostly devoid of chain stores. Instead of the usual panoply of Bed, Bath and Boredom, 50 Penn Place offers a place for beautiful women (I assume unbeautiful women are turned away at the gate, since I've never seen any there) to see the latest manifestations of, say, Stuart Weitzman's shoe obsession.

And there's Full Circle, a bookstore that sprang from the loins of a drugstore turned nightspot, moved simutaneously uptown and downstairs, and competes very nicely, thank you very much, with Messrs. Barnes and Noble and those other out-of-town guys. I was there today to see an old friend try his best to injure his carpal tunnel by signing as many books as people would be willing to haul away. And since Brian A. Hopkins is now a Known Factor, and an honored one, in the realms of horror and dark fantasy, quite a few of those books made it past his pen and through the door. Apparently I'm not as forgettable as I thought I was, because he spotted me quite a distance from the table, though mercifully he seemed to have forgotten my pseudonym from those days. I filled up the holes in my Hopkins collection, we traded stories, and eventually I got the heck out of the way so the next fan could get a chance and the woman behind the checkout (beautiful, of course) could collect forty bucks or so from me. It's an experience I hope to repeat when — not if, but when — he wins that Nebula award.

The announcement came last month:

And now come the winners. Who knew Bernie Ebbers was just the latter-day incarnation of Holden Caulfield?

Phil Donahue's new MSNBC show is barely outdrawing infomercials these days, and to add to the general level of mirth, now John Bono's Big S Blog ("Migod, what a big S!") has inaugurated the Donahue Show Death Watch. If you'd like to speculate as to just how long America's News Channel (yeah, right) can keep this fossilized specimen of Sixties cluelessness alive, feel free to play along.

Perhaps in answer to DC Comics' Batman: The 10-Cent Adventure, which came out last winter and sold an amazing 700,000 copies, Marvel has shipped Fantastic Four #60 (actually #489, but who's counting?) with a startling cover price of nine cents and a temporary revision of the mag's long-time slogan to "The World's Cheapest Comic Magazine". Even ignoring the effects of four decades' worth of inflation, this is less than the price of issue #1 in 1961, which sold for a dime.

As usual, Canadians suffer from the exchange rate: they have to shell out a whole fifteen cents for this issue. And of course, as an unreconstructed Sue Richards (née Storm) fan, I'm happy to pay even regular retail. But you haven't bought a comic book in years and years, so what you want to know — apart from "Why is this greyhaired hack blogging about this sort of thing when there's a war on, fercrissake?" — is: "Is it a good story?"

I think it is. In fact, I think it's worth 25 times the price. Which is what you'll pay for #61 (#490) next month, if Marvel's promotional mavens have been sufficiently prescient.

It's called Sick Day. Think of it as The Real World with physiological, not just behavioral, toxicity. Will it come to the States? How desperate do you think the networks are? (Two words: Desmond Pfeiffer.)

(Muchas gracias [sort of]: JunkYardBlog.)

The mysterious voice(s) of In Arguendo, with a sentiment we are proud to echo:

This item was titled American Idol Finals!!, and no, I didn't watch that either. Frankly, if I want to see relentlessly-mediocre people who are in way over their heads, I can always tune in C-Span's Congressional coverage.

There is no longer any doubt that small, decentralized terror cells like those of the al-Qaeda network can wreak serious havoc in a short time. But did they win the early battles only to lose the war?

Of course they did. American resolve is famously implacable, and American military might is unequaled. But the third force in this triad — American culture — will prove to be the decisive factor.

Even the late, unlamented Osama bin Laden would have to admit it. However much he may have railed against the evil modern West, he never would have stood a chance using the tools of medieval Islam, and he knew it. And Western mores, which much to the annoyance of European Community types are de facto American mores, have already gotten a foothold in Islamic countries, and no amount of haranguing by the mullahs and the military will dislodge them. The burqa will be just as obsolete as the codpiece, and in retrospect just as silly.

So the larger war is already won. We must still remain on guard while the last of the medievalists empty out their curiously-modern weapons, and the necessity of replacing a few regimes is still on the agenda, but the hearts and minds of millions of Muslims enslaved by the perversity of their leaders are already starting to turn our way. There will probably always be hard-line Islamic fascists, but they will be banished to the margins, not by American forces, but by the insistence of a Muslim people anxious to join the rest of the twenty-first century.

If you think, as I have, that Michael Eisner's tour of duty at the top slot at Disney has been at best sort of Goofy, you'll be pleased to know that Eisner's days are numbered, and the numbers are low.

Aimee Deep, who broke this story, adds this little historical note:

Come to think of it, I don't miss any of those guys either.

Chicago Tribune columnist Bob Greene, famed for his nostalgic looks back at lost youth, apparently had a taste for present-day youth as well. A tipster informed the Tribune that Greene, a few years ago, had met a teenaged girl through his column, and the two subsequently had had an affair. The newspaper confronted Greene with the story, then asked for his resignation.

Evidently I'm not cut out for journalism; I get the chills just talking about vaguely sexual matters with twentysomethings.

(Muchas gracias: Pejman Yousefzadeh.)

Update, 4:40 pm: "Good riddance," says Spoons.

Gregory Hlatky, in praise of the Three Stooges:

I am compelled to point out here that the sole American firm among the Big Five, AOL Time Warner's Warner Music Group, is not mentioned by Mr Hlatky, and with good reason: they do even less for classical music than their four rivals.

I saw Koyaanisqatsi during its first release in 1983, and it scared me, or at least left me decidedly off-center. On the face of it, the film seemed easily dismissable as neo-Luddite Technology Is Evil stuff, but no such conclusion is ever reached; if anything, the incredibly-detailed cinematography of technology both amazing and mundane comes across as equal parts condemnation and glorification. And the score by Philip Glass is a true masterpiece of minimalism, shifting imperceptibly in synchronization with one's brain waves. I left the theatre, made a copy off cable the first time it aired, and duly put it out of my mind for the next couple of decades, managing to miss Powaqqatsi, the sequel.

With the third Qatsi film, Naqoyqatsi, due this fall, MGM has issued the first two films separately on DVD, and bound them together as a promotional two-pack. (I paid $22.99 at Best Buy for the set.) No doubt the DVD would look better than my old Beta tape, but at least part of the motivation for buying this thing, apart from getting to see Powaqqatsi at last, was to see if my interpretation of the film, such as it was, stood up after all these years, or if I was just young and dumb and full of it.

And there are still no answers, nor, says director Godfrey Reggio in an interview tucked into the Special Features section, are there supposed to be. The film is supposed to open the mind, not fill it up with some particular agenda; if there are questions, the film has done its job. On that basis, Koyaanisqatsi must be considered a roaring success. And Glass' score still haunts me. (Yeah, I know, Glass can be repetitive. So is hip-hop. But you don't hear anyone complaining about hip-hop, probably because it's Authentic Ethnic Street Gibberish and therefore cherished by Relentlessly Multicultural types, under penalty of face-loss. Give me Glass any day. Steve Reich, even.)

If you haven't seen the first two films, I urge you to take a look for yourself. If nothing else, you'll get a look at the source material for almost every music-video cliché you've ever seen.

The "Red vs. Blue" stuff invented for the benefit of clueless TV anchordrones has turned into a cultural measuring stick, and too often We the People are using it to beat upon each other.

The ever-thoughtful Geitner Simmons dissects this phenomenon today in Regions of Mind. "This isn’t, or shouldn't be, a caste society based on one's geographical location," says Simmons. "But a lot of people, in the blue-state region as well as the red-state camp, certainly act as if they would like it to be."

Well, maybe. My one remaining chat haunt attracts mostly people in the Tri-State Area. (And what's with that name, anyway? Are the other 47 states forever separate from the Connecticut-New York-New Jersey axis, and separate from each other?) I occasionally catch some flak from newbies, surprised to hear a voice from "deepest Oklahoma, where the wind comes rushing up your shorts," or something like that, but the regulars don't have any problem with me — especially since I've actually visited them in their element and was quickly able to persuade them that yes, we do have running water here, and no, I don't have to remove bison residue from the front yard on a regular basis.

Stephanie Losi gauges the distance between Then and Now:

I didn't go to my tenth, or my twentieth. Or my thirtieth.

But while I'm easily Googleable, the result of six years on the Web and eight or nine on Usenet, the searcher will quickly discover that whatever my putative Internet savvy, I have gone on to do nothing. And what's worse, I'm damned good at it.

The producers of The Riot Show, an amateur video shot in central Connecticut by evidently-bored high-school students, would like you to know that they're not ripping off MTV's Jackass.

They probably don't carry as much insurance as MTV, either.

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.

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.)

From Andrea at Ethereal Reflections:

Yea, verily.

Arts & Letters Daily is dead.

Long live Philosophy & Literature.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

"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.)

Christopher Hitchens, of all people, heads west in a Corvette (what else?) to find the mystique of Route 66, and he tells the tale in the November Vanity Fair. A few pertinent observations, first near St Louis:

Regarding Oklahoma City:

Around Amarillo:

To harp further on radio:

Go read the whole thing. If nothing else, you'll get a glimpse of what it's like to feel superior to an entire region, something I've never been able to manage in forty-nine years and visits to thirty-odd states. I've driven this route a few times myself, at least the western four-fifths of it, and yes, some of it seems a bit dispiriting at times, but I don't believe that civilization ends at the east bank of the Hudson, either.

"Norton Womble, reporting live from the scene of a sniping in suburban Washington. Now back to music, starting with Queen's 'Another One Bites the Dust', right here on 99.7 FM."

Jim Romenesko's Media News is reporting that the late, lamented Arts & Letters Daily can no longer be considered "late". The site, along with other assets of ALD's parent company, has been acquired by The Chronicle of Higher Education, and founder Denis Dutton will return as editor. Debut of the new ALD is scheduled for Friday, 25 October.

Three, maybe four cheers.

People have been sick of the baby-boomer generation for some time now, though few seem quite as annoyed as TeeVee's Philip Michaels, who writes:

I'm not about to give in on the music question — the lamest sub-Spectorian girl-group opus is about three orders of magnitude better than anything you'll ever hear out of Christina Aguilera — but otherwise, I'm shutting the hell up.

Okay, you've got an English class to teach, more literary than grammatical this semester, and one of the books you have to cover is The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. What's first on your list of things you need to make this work? Enough copies to go around? Tom Sawyer as a prerequisite? If you're in Portland, Oregon, at the very top of the list is, of all things, sensitivity training. That whirring sound you hear is Samuel Langhorne Clemens, subterranean pinwheel.

How in the world did we ever get to this sorry state? Erin O'Connor explains:

It's not just Twain's expense, either; to the extent that our children are herded through this "multicultural" charnel-house, they are deprived of the opportunity to make up their own minds, to learn how to decide for themselves what a book like Huckleberry Finn — indeed, any book — really means.

(Muchas gracias: John Rosenberg.)

Those of us who blog swear by, and occasionally at, our templates. Yes, I know, I did this site for years with no content-management system (and, some might say, no content either), and there are still manually-maintained blogs out there, but the point seems relatively inarguable just the same, and I assure you, I didn't spend a great deal of time reinventing the wheel every day. Data-entry types, of course, are hopelessly tethered to various Templates of Doom.

Then again, that's all computer stuff. Do other more-or-less-cultural activities have the same need for ready-made, fill-in-the-blanks packages? Michael at 2 Blowhards is persuaded that there's some sort of PBS Documentary Kit out there, and all you need are the following:

Time to set free the Ken Burns within you, say I.

(Update, 10:26 pm: Reformatted slightly, but no textual changes.)

Apart from the usual Hollywood distortions, I know nothing about bullfighting. I've never been within five hundred kilometers of Pamplona; I skipped Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon; I haven't seen Almodóvar's Matador. I didn't even pick up Herb Alpert's "The Lonely Bull" until three years after its release. Repeat: I know nothing about bullfighting.

Your standard animal-rights types will be more than happy, I'm sure, to tell me that it's nasty and horrid and brutal and such. On the other hand, Jesus Gil, who has actually toiled in this particular vineyard, finds it eminently defensible:

If that's so, why are they almost always killed?

I still don't think I want to see one of these things up close and in person, but it's always nice to hear the other side for a change.

If I remember correctly, the oldest woman ever to appear in a Playboy pictorial was fifty-five. (This would be Nancy Sinatra; how does that grab you, darlin'?) Still, there are names on the magazine's wish list who will never be removed no matter how old they get, and one of those names belongs to Sophia Loren, who reportedly is miffed for being offered only £100,000 for doffing her designer duds. This does not mean that if Hef ups the ante, she'll do the deed, but the sheer thought of it — well, do I actually want to see a 68-year-old Italian woman in a reasonable semblance of her birthday suit?

If you've read this site for more than twenty seconds, you already know the answer.

This is something I've pondered myself once or twice, with results so inconclusive they don't even deserve to be called "results". From Lactose Incompetent:

I can usually distinguish bad writing — give me ten minutes and I'll give you paragraphs full of it — but spotting good writing is a trickier business. Not as tricky, however, as producing it:

I wish I had the temerity to describe what I write as having "style".

But I do understand the "hodge-podge" bit: sometimes I think I'm doing the prose equivalent of Peter Schickele's Quodlibet, in which every single musical phrase is lifted from some other, presumably better work.

Hmmm...

J. Jonah Jameson dumping on Spider-Man again? Well, yeah. But, as Bryan Preston points out, the ol' web-spinner gets about the same sort of press as your average conservative Christian: if it's at all positive, it's probably grudgingly so.

What's a "Culture Representative"? At Tufts University in Medford (pronounced something like "Meffuhd"), Massachusetts, it's a reserved minority slot in the student government, intended to ensure that those who have been historically underrepresented have some sort of voice and some sort of recourse against abuse.

Enter Rob Lichter. Writing in the Tufts Daily, he disclosed the existence of a previously-ignored minority:

Jeff Jacoby, in an op-ed in The Boston Globe, is sympathetic:

Meanwhile, Lichter and other conservatives at Tufts continue to pursue a Culture Representative position, motivated by the not-exactly-unspoken desire to undermine the whole system. There's a faint hint of "We had to destroy the village in order to save it" here, but nobody said the process was going to be either easy or pleasant.

(Muchas gracias: Erin O'Connor.)

Dr. Earl Leathen Warrick, one of the "founding fathers", if you will, of Dow Corning, has died in Orange County, California.

Warrick, born in 1911 in Butler, Pennsylvania, devoted his career to polymers and elastomers; he invented silicone rubber and held, singly or jointly, 44 US patents.

It was a failed experiment, though, that perhaps brought Warrick his greatest fame. During World War II, Warrick and fellow researcher Rob Roy McGregor were trying to work up a synthetic rubber that could serve as a workable substitute in the wake of wartime shortages. "3179 Dilatant Compound" really wasn't suitable for tires or weatherstripping, but it did have quite a bounce to it, and they took it home to the kids. Dow Corning had no particular interest in selling children's playthings, so it was left for some astute marketing type to buy up lots of the stuff, seal it into little plastic eggs, and spread it across the land, where you and I eventually spread it across the Sunday funnies.

You can still buy Silly Putty today; in fact, you can buy Dow Corning's original 3179 Dilatant (call it Sensible Putty) directly from their Midland, Texas facility — if you're prepared to order at least two 50-lb cartons.

It's called Help Us Silence Hollywood, and it's getting some play in blogdom. The crux of this particular biscuit:

Various examples follow. There's little to dispute in the description — for every David Duchovny, just this far from a Ph.D., there are likely dozens of Melanie Griffiths who barely escaped Krispy Kreme — but I'm not signing off on this thing. Hollywood types have the same Constitutional rights to make blithering, idiotic statements as the rest of us. Here in the Land of Blogorrhea, our job is to fact-check their asses, not to silence them.

(Muchas gracias: Rachel Lucas, who reproduces the complete text of the petition.)

For years, I have cherished the delusion that the true bird of love is the swallow. What was I thinking?

How is this possible? "Madison...is now the second most popular name for girls in the United States." So reports Kevin Lauderdale, and by "now" he means "born in the year 2001."

There are, evidently, a lot of parental units out there who really liked Splash, or are hoping their daughters grow up to be Moxie. I mean, what other possible explanation is there?

The quest for Newer and Cooler Stuff isn't doing us a whole lot of good, says Trinity:

[Mental note: This is not the place to mention my nifty little phone that plays "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction". Even at under $20.]

"Anti-anti-lock brakes". I like that. There's something vaguely disquieting about turning a major driving function over to a bunch of microchips; I still get slightly queasy at the thought of cruise control, fercrissake.

I'm not giving up my cupholders, though.

The embattled archdiocese of Boston, having been unable to settle some 450 claims of sexual abuse by its clergy, is now on the verge of filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

There are distinct advantages to a Chapter 11 filing. Existing civil lawsuits will be suspended; no new suits can be filed. But there is also a downside: the filing will be widely construed as an admission of liability by the archdiocese, and their financial records will be opened to the public for the first time. Some church properties — notably, the chancery in Brighton, to include Cardinal Law's residence — are likely to be turned over to the court to pay claims against the church.

Cynics, of course, will scoff. "They're already morally bankrupt; this just takes care of the money."

(Muchas gracias: Bill Peschel.)

In Chicklit's Paper Jam, Anna Carey reports on a small English publishing house with a narrow but clear focus: Persephone Books Ltd, which puts out high-quality editions of "forgotten books by female writers" and distributes them through its own Web site (and its own store in a former betting shop in Bloomsbury).

Given the sheer number of titles published each year — easily a hundred thousand in the United States alone — a lot of good books will inevitably fall through the cracks, and the number of undiscovered classics hiding in the crevices must be fairly huge by now. Persephone so far has retrieved 38 of them, and while this isn't a quantity likely to upset the descendants of Mr Barnes and Mr Noble, it's definitely a worthy effort, especially since, in the words of the founders, the books are "guaranteed to be readable, thought-provoking and impossible to forget." Such a deal.

On the off-chance that some of you aren't reading Cinderella Bloggerfeller, I point you to the latest exposition from Cindi's bloggergänger Dr. Dinah Dienstag, unexpectedly appearing on a Thursday for once. (I doubt there will be a name change to "Donnerstag", but you never know.)

This time, the good Doctor brings us a list of Essential Clichés, bits of cant which simply can't be overlooked by anyone seeking to make his mark in the murk of Post-Modern Criticism. Or something like that. In the midst of all the pseudo-literary bushwa circulating these days, it's kind of hard to tell.

Jerry Springer: The Opera.

Truly, the end is at hand.

As anyone who's used a recent Windows machine knows, certificates aren't necessarily what they're cracked up to be; the presence — or, for that matter, the absence — of digital signatures may turn out to be meaningless.

By no coincidence, something similar is true in one's life away from the computer as well. Alexandra at Out of Lascaux might have the potential to be a truly great teacher, but so long as she's lacking the appropriate signatures, we may never know:

The National Education Association, which aspires to be a Great and Powerful Professional Organization, has the urge that typifies almost every G.P.P.O.: they wish to define the profession in their terms, and their terms only. Included in those terms, of course, is the desire to restrict the profession to those who have had the proper indoctrination.

Not that the indoctrination necessarily does anything to enhance actual teaching. Alexandra continues:

And, of course, how to complete the paperwork before and after you act.

I am neither educated nor trained, but I can certainly tell the difference between the two, despite my complete and utter lack of certification. (Those of you ready to hit the Comments link to tell me that I am indeed certifiable — well, I already knew that.)

Andrea Harris slaps down the tragically hip:

Yeah, all those nonconformists look alike.

(Aside to Ravenwood: Yeah, it's a strange title. Blame Shania.)

If anyone still cares, Azra Akin, Miss Turkey, has become the new Miss World.

I had some thoughts on Oliver Willis' piece on the porn industry, and on Susanna Cornett's comments thereto, and by the time I'd turned them into something vaguely resembling readable text, I had a couple of screens full of screed, which after not enough polishing is now available as The Vent #320.

The Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam is missing two paintings today; thieves gained access from the roof, dropped into the building, and made off with two of Van Gogh's early works, valued at somewhere between millions and priceless.

Swiped were View of the Sea at Scheveningen (1882) and Congregation Leaving the Reformed Church in Nuenen (1884).

"What is it about Southerners and mayonnaise?" asks Kevin McGehee, and he's not kidding:

I estimate that over the past four decades, I have uttered some variation on the theme of "Hold The Mayo, Dammit" literally a thousand times, so I can relate.

And remember: revenge is a dish best served with tangy Miracle Whip^®.

I know from nothing about Encover, Inc., but its name, at least, strikes me as aggressively bland. Floyd McWilliams, who actually saw the name affixed to an office, is a bit blunter:

Is it even English? I keep wanting to give it a French twist (ahnh-ko-VAY). Doesn't help.

Tongue presumably firmly in cheek, the estimable Dr. Weevil proposes a revision of Beethoven's Fidelio suitable for those sensitive souls in the European Union, in which Leonore, horrified when she realizes that she's actually pointing a pistol at Pizarro — "A gun? What are we, crass Americans?" — tosses away the weapon, leaving the way clear for Florestan to be stabbed to death and subsequently venerated as the first martyr of the gun-control cause.

Come to think of it, this might also work at the Berkeley People's Opera.

Unlike some of my fellow infidels, I don't get horribly bent out of shape when someone utters the dreaded C word during Christmas — uh, during the, um, holiday season. Sometimes, though, it takes The Onion to settle the holiday hash. Quoth Jim Anchower in The Cruise:

Yeah.

Have a Happy Ass Day, y'all.

I have always suspected that Departments of Women's Studies have nothing to do with me, except to the extent that I am considered a threat because of my membership in the half of the species with the external genitalia. Okay, fine. Maybe some people need to designate enemies before they can find friends. It never occurred to me, though, that we might be better off without those studies.

It has, however, occurred to James Lileks:

"Here Comes Peter Cottontail" is evidently more menacing than I had imagined.

But belligerent bunnies aside, all this makes me wonder what a "Men's Studies" curriculum might be like. Certainly the three-hour lab for home beer production would be inadequate, and the wisdom of Vince Lombardi can be exhausted in a few paragraphs. I am reasonably certain, however, that at no point will any of the instructors suggest, even for a minute, that women are capital-E Evil.

Have Playboy Playmates become androgynous? Not quite. But there is, apparently, a marked trend away from the hourglass: over nearly half a century of centerfolds, the average bust and hip sizes have dropped somewhat, while waistlines have actually increased. What's more, although the average height has gone up, as it has in the general population, the average weight is essentially unchanged over the study period.

I'm not quite sure what I think about this. I do know that present-day Playmates, however attractive they may be, tend to be about my daughter's age or below, which has the effect of making whatever enjoyment I derive from their photos seem inevitably somewhat creepy, a situation Steely Dan would have understood.

On the other hand, Miss January 2003 is thirty-five (link possibly NSFW), by a slight margin the oldest woman ever to appear in the magazine's signature feature. (Of course, I read the articles first.)

Chapter 12, Section D, Paragraph 5-7b:

Do not attempt to wake a sleeping student by lobbing a Koosh Ball in his/her general direction. If you miss, you look foolish; if you hit, you get sued.

And in either case, you will probably not get your Koosh Ball back.

(Via Fark)

In days of old when knights were bold and tinsel not invented, snow right before the 25th of December was viewed as an annoyance and an impediment to travel. Which, of course, it was.

Nowadays, by which is meant the last sixty years, almost everyone is dreaming of a white Christmas, and entirely too often those dreams come true: we're going to be staring at half a foot of snow before the reindeer make that last pass over the housetops.

Women I know on the East Coast will sneer at the mention of a mere six inches, but there's at least a measurable chance that the car nearest to them on a frozen road will be occupied by an individual who actually might know how to drive on the the damnable stuff. We don't get odds that good here on the Lone Prairie. Come to think of it, hardly anyone here knows how to drive in July, either.

And if you must listen to "White Christmas," Bing is good — Bing is always good — but the Drifters, in this instance, are better.

Tim Cavanaugh at Reason Magazine reports that after all these years, sales of Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung, despite the Chinese switch to Pinyin notation (rendering him "Mao Zedong") and Mao's switch to Death Mode, are still strong. The little (three by five) red book, distributed all over China and occasionally elsewhere, is printed in, um, San Francisco, California. I don't know if it contains pictures, but as John Lennon once (well, twice, actually) pointed out, if you carry such, you ain't gonna make it with anyone anyhow.

Is it my imagination, or is the new Kentucky license plate truly the smarmiest automotive excrescence since fuzzy dice?

George Roy Hill (no relation) is gone. The director of crowd-pleasers like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting, which won eleven Academy Awards between them, he was equally at home with difficult material (say, The World According to Garp).

For me, the best thing he ever did was the gentle comedy A Little Romance, in which an American student in Paris (Diane Lane, all of fourteen years old) and a French kid (Thelonious Bernard) find themselves mad about one another and, courtesy of a romantic fable spun for them by that charming old rogue Laurence Olivier, obsessed with getting themselves to the Bridge of Sighs in Venice, that their love may be forever sealed.

Many years after this 1979 film, I briefly entertained the fantasy of doing likewise with the person not yet (un)known as She Who Is Not To Be Named, despite a gnawing suspicion that at the precise moment when we started to pass beneath the bridge, when according to the legend the Kiss of Eternity must be delivered, she would gaze up at the Palace and holler, "Who let the Doge out?"

Which of course would have sealed the deal anyway, but I didn't realize that at the time.

The first entry (1 January 1660) in the blog-based version of the Diary of Samuel Pepys is up. The adaptation, by Phil Gyford from the 1893 Wheatley edition, manages to be both mind-numbingly obvious and wonderfully audacious at the same time: if you've read Pepys before, well, you're reading him again, but it's a genuine kick to see this seventeenth-century text in a twenty-first-century milieu, and Mr Gyford deserves great heaping volumes of kudos for this undertaking.

The site, incidentally, runs on Movable Type. No, not Gutenberg's.

Rap impresario Russell Simmons puts out a magazine called One World. If you see this title and assume from it that Mr Simmons is contributing to the ongoing homogenization of world culture, you might want to think again: the cover of the December/January issue features rapper Lil' Kim in a burqa, but she's got it bunched up around her shoulders, and underneath — well, already the complaints are coming in from the arbiters of Islamic culture.

In point of fact, this is a lot more than Lil' Kim usually wears, but I doubt that this particular argument will carry much weight at your friendly neighborhood mosque.

There is a marked dearth of home-schooled youngsters — that is to say, zero — in the National Honor Society. Not a reflection on the students; it's just that NHS has chapters in schools, and that's that.

Now there's an honor society for home-schooled kids who excel. In 1999, the first chapter of Eta Sigma Alpha was founded in Houston. Now the organization is going national: it has spread to at least ten states and more than twenty chapters.

Why bother, you ask? Membership in NHS scores points on college applications; membership in Eta Sigma Alpha, which has standards even higher than NHS, will eventually score points for the home-schooled. And it's one more step toward burying that stereotype of home schooling as a tool of fundamentalist Christians to ensure that their spawn grow up pious and dumb.

(Muchas gracias: Mrs. du Toit.)

Penn and Teller live in the deranged metropolis of Lost Wages, Nevada, which means that they don't have to seek out showbiz: showbiz looks for them.

Once a year, Penn puts out a list of films, bands, acts, and whatever he watched during the previous year, not so much because he thinks we should care but because it fits in with his need to document everything. The 2002 list, for some reason, is smaller than 2001's.

Teller? He didn't say a word. Go figure.

I used to throw the Charleston Evening Post into ninety-one yards six days a week. It wasn't much fun, but it did teach me the importance of drudgery as a means of putting coins in my pocket, and besides, I didn't have to get up at three in the morning to throw The News and Courier.

As in many other cities, co-owned morning and evening papers were fused into one. But if this fuzzes up the family tree a bit, well, one thing is clear: the original Charleston Courier put out its first edition on 10 January 1803, and today's Post and Courier is celebrating its 200th birthday. As a former reader and, um, independent contractor, I tip my hat to the paper that did as much as any single publication to teach me to read, both the lines of type and the messages in between.

Composed by Antonio Carlos Jobim with a lyric by Brazilian poet Vinicius de Moraes, "The Girl from Ipanema" was a huge hit (#5 in Billboard) in the States in 1964, in a recording by Stan Getz and João Gilberto for Verve, with Jobim himself at the piano and Gilberto's wife Astrud on the English-language (by Norman Gimbel) vocal. The picture it paints in the mind is vivid indeed, but it never occurred to me to assume that there was a model for it.

Now comes word that The Girl herself, Helo Pinheiro, now 55, will appear on the cover of Playboy's Brazilian edition in March, alongside 24-year-old daughter Triciane. I simply have to get a copy of this — for historical purposes, of course.

Tom Carson's seriously-wacko novel Gilligan's Wake isn't quite as Joycean as the title implies, though the opening section, in which the narrator, claiming to be one Maynard G. Krebs, discovers that he's not hanging with the Beats by the Bay after all but is in the Mayo Clinic's Cleaver Ward, overseen by the stern Dr. Kildare F. Troop, is riddled with enough entendres, double, triple and fourple, to live up to Finnegan's standard.

From then on, it's every storyteller for himself. A Navy man tells tales of WWII-era PT boats with Quinton McHale and Jack Kennedy; a millionaire describes his role in the rise of Alger Hiss and his all-too-loveless marriage; his wife recounts life in West Egg during the Jazz Age and a friend named Daisy; a star of B (and occasionally C) pictures meets up with the Rat Pack; a young woman from Kansas finds fascination at the Sorbonne; and somehow all of their lives are intertwined by the machinations of an evil genius — a professor, in fact.

As a metaphor for 20th-century American history, Gilligan's Wake works better than it has any right to. Audacious and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny, it's a glorious confection, with a high incidence of "What the hell was that?" Lots of brain candy, though the flavoring masks empty calories here and there; I don't see this becoming America's answer to Tristram Shandy or anything, but it's a good way to spend a three-hour tour.

First it was Joe Strummer of the Clash.

Then it was Maurice Gibb of the Bee Gees.

Who's next?

Bigwig knows, and he's truly sorry. Really.

First, the dictionary definition:

Now maybe it's just me, or maybe it's just a sign of the times, but I never hear this word from someone who is actually trying to perform the act described in definition 1. Where I do hear it, mostly, is from people complaining that some religious — um, "faith-based" — organization is doing this, possibly with government money: "Don't look, Ethel! They're proselytizing!"

Now the First Amendment, quite properly, restricts the government from pushing one denomination or another, and if tax money is going into this sort of thing, complaints are in order. But what has happened is that the very word that describes the process, however innocent, has acquired a negative connotation, and those who aren't inclined to think kindly of religious groups in the first place (and I'm discovering that there are more of them than I thought) are more likely to use it, not as a description, but as a bludgeon.

And so the language is further debased, and another thoughtcrime is entered into the dictionary of Newspeak.

Technically, bloggers do not deconstruct: they fisk. And while the technique of fisking owes much to Jacques Derrida's theory of deconstruction, it owes nothing to Derrida's penchant for revisionism: texts are fisked because of what they say, not because of what we think they ought to say.

This week at NRO, Mark Goldblatt, last seen turning out a scathing novel about African-American culture, takes apart both Derrida and Derrida, the hagiographic documentary now playing at a theater near you if you don't live within a thousand miles of me, and he's almost gleeful in his, um, deconstruction:

I've always aspired to some form of post-postmodernism myself, and generally fallen flat.

What would Derrida think about fisking? I don't know, and Goldblatt doesn't say, but I suspect that he'd take exception to it, if only because the fisker bases his interpretation on the assumption that the author of the text being fisked actually intended it to read that way, whereas Derrida, I surmise, would be predisposed to assume that there is some deeper subtext somehow being missed. And I'd take exception to that, since most of the Truly Fiskable seem devoid of depth; indeed, some meet the qualifications for bas-relief.

(Muchas gracias: Cinderella Bloggerfeller.)

In 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave a speech from the Lincoln Memorial, a speech which forever will be designated by its most stirring phrase: "I have a dream."

The speech, which Dean Esmay has thoughtfully reproduced today, is a stark reminder of the way things used to be, a benchmark by which we can measure how far we have come — and how far we still have to go.

There's little more I can say, though I'll point you toward my visit to Selma, Alabama two summers ago, a trip which in retrospect is starting to look like a pilgrimage.

I tend to look askance at all things related to the Super Bowl, if only because they peg the Hype-O-Meter and it's a pain in the neck to have the device recalibrated afterwards. On the other hand, some of the peripheral statistics are occasionally amusing.

For instance: The California Avocado Commission predicts that during the Bucs/Raiders clash, some 40 million pounds of the green stuff, mostly in the form of guacamole, will be polished off by America's couch potatoes. That's gonna take a lot of chips.

For those keeping score: The biggest month for avocado consumption is May, what with both Cinco de Mayo and the Memorial Day weekend to keep us busy.

In a lifetime of fifty years, give or take a few weeks, I have spent maybe a total of six days in New Jersey. And while some fascinating things have happened to me in the Garden State — how many people can say that they've trodden the Boardwalk at Seaside Heights in wing-tips? — its contribution to what I am is necessarily fairly small. (Well, yes, there was that meeting with Susanna Cornett, but she's not really from New Jersey, if you know what I mean, and this is where I got my first real-life glimpse of SWINTBN, but she's not really from New Jersey, if you know what I mean.)

Nick Gillespie, who edits Reason magazine, really is from New Jersey. And this, he says, is what it means:

Come to think of it, it's not all that different from growing up in South Carolina, another state routinely maligned by people who really should know better, or living in Oklahoma, yet another.

Something I noticed:

Cartoonist Bill Mauldin said that in 1947, when he was twenty-five. Of course, he'd been through a lot more than most of us: he'd enlisted in the Army at eighteen, and when he wasn't toting a rifle, he was drawing cartoons for the newspaper of the 45th Infantry Division. When the 45th was dropped into the middle of World War II, Mauldin found himself in Europe, where the Stars and Stripes started carrying his stuff, bringing him high praise from the enlisted men and, at one point, a world-class ass-chewing from General Patton. Back home after the war, he took up editorial cartooning, which he'd probably be doing right now if pneumonia and Alzheimer's hadn't killed him off this morning.

Bill Mauldin was 81 years old. I'd like to think that Willie and Joe, his two WWII dogfaces, lived long and happy lives themselves.

Jerry Springer has been characterized as a sleazeball TV host for so long it's hard to imagine how his public image could possibly get any worse.

Well, it can. Replace, if you will, "sleazeball TV host Jerry Springer" with "Senator Jerry Springer".

That sound you hear is the popping of the third seal.

(Muchas gracias: Kevin McGehee.)

Well, maybe not. But Record Industry Association of America CEO Hilary Rosen, who has done more to destroy the Big Five music firms' relationships with artists and consumers than a whole server farm full of Napsters, is leaving her post at the end of this year, and her replacement, as yet unnamed, is bound to have a better, or at least less pathological, grasp of the situation.

I just wish she was taking Jack Valenti with her.

In 1903, having detected a demand for safe, quality, affordable wax crayons, Binney & Smith Company, 81-83 Fulton Street, New York City, introduces a box of eight for a nickel — Black, Brown, Orange, Violet, Blue, Green, Red, and Yellow — and devises the name "Crayola". The rest, as they say, is history, and if you grew up in the States, it's likely part of your history too.

(Oh, those fat Besco crayons that were flat on one side so they wouldn't roll away? Also a B&S product, hence the name. Hard to chew, though.)

Keith Bradsher, the New York Times hack who spewed out that anti-SUV book last year, is apparently going wider with his campaign: his publisher has kicked in a few bucks' worth of underwriting to Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers, Tom and Ray Magliozzi, hosts of Car Talk, the popular NPR radio show. (I caught the first sponsorship announcement on show #304, this weekend.) By no coincidence, the brothers had been conducting a campaign they call Live Large, Drive Small, which needs (and, frankly, deserves) no explanation.

Much is made of the fact that SUVs, being taller, have a higher center of gravity, and therefore are more likely to roll over than real cars. Now real drivers — "On the road of life there are passengers and there are drivers," explains Volkswagen — are aware of this and conduct themselves accordingly behind the wheel. Your basic leftist, on the other hand, resents the very idea that different people have different skill levels, and seeks to replace it with criteria of a more political nature. Out here in the Real World, we tend to think that if some idiot goes too fast around a curve and rolls his expensive new toy, well, the word "idiot" is pretty much self-explanatory. Proponents of the Nanny State, however, demand that we be solicitous of idiots, and in fact encourage them to employ solicitors when idiocy produces undesired results.

As usual, most of the proffered "solutions" do nothing for the problems they imagine. Changing the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards will have exactly zero effect on the vehicles already on the road. If they seriously wanted people to get into smaller, more fuel-efficient automobiles, they would push for a substantial (at least $1.00 per gallon) increase in the gas tax. But they won't do that, because it would affect everyone with a gas tank, including themselves; what they really want to do, of course, is to punish Those Other People.

In the long run, what does all this mean? Backlash, baby, backlash. When all is said and done, Keith Bradsher may wind up selling more sport-utility vehicles than Cal Worthington ever imagined.

Alexandra, poking her head Out of Lascaux, poses a perfectly reasonable question:

That's some of it, I think; if he did one-hundredth the volume and charged one thousand times as much, he'd probably get more positive reviews from the cognoscenti, who believe with all their sniffy little hearts that anything owned by someone who has a big-screen TV to watch the Green Bay Packers can't possibly have any merit whatsoever.

I snagged a 2002 Kinkade calendar once upon a time, and reported on it as follows:

Yeah, I know, everyone reads Lileks anyway, but I just loved this particular bit:

I'll be sure to ask for it at the Piggly Wiggly.

Sudden flash of insight: Once Iraq is, um, subdued, the most productive thing we can do is open up the society to Western wackiness. Wouldn't you just love to see the first Piggly Wiggly supermarket in Baghdad?

I tell you, this Lileks guy makes you think.

Some rejected TV series, courtesy of Mimi Smartypants:

And, of course, So Much More.

Back in 1991, the Chicago White Sox moved to a new facility. What made this move unusual was that the new ballpark was given the name of the old ballpark: in effect, Comiskey Park moved across the street.

The Sox aren't going anywhere, but this year and the next twenty-two, they're playing in something called "U. S. Cellular Field", in exchange for $68 million. That's the plan, anyway; given the ongoing shakeout in the wireless-telephone industry, the likelihood that there will even be a "U. S. Cellular" in 2025 strikes me as really low.

Of course, there are options even then.

Jason Kottke has decided:

And not just bacon, either.

(Disclosure: I know the guy who wrote the item linked below. He's not a blogger. He doesn't even play one on TV. But he has a genuinely-warped sense of humor, honed by the desperation that befell him after he deserted the front lines during the Peloponnesian War.)

Who has the top basic-cable series? Fox News? Lifetime? MTV? Not even. You want audience, you go to Nickelodeon. Half animated, half might-as-well-be-animated, the Big Orange Blotch dominates the segment like no other.

Of course, this means a lot of audience research, and some shows inevitably don't make it.

The end begins this way:

This is the opening paragraph from Harlan Ellison's 1972 short story Hindsight: 480 Seconds. A planetoid is approaching the solar system; it will not reach Earth, but will graze the Sun, ripping into its corona and spraying radiation for hundreds of millions of miles. As you'll remember from your grade-school science, the Earth lies just within the first hundred million.

And so the cities were melted down and the peoples gathered together and the ships built, and everyone on Earth would be moving to new homes in the galaxy — except for Haddon Brooks, who offered to remain behind and chronicle the eight minutes between the collision with the Sun and the end of all life on Earth.

In Ellison's story, everyone knows that the end is coming — they've had plenty of warning — and the departure from Earth is orderly and organized. But suppose there wasn't plenty of warning. Dr Geoffrey Sommer of the Rand Corporation think-tank opines that it might be better that way, that it might be better if the world did not know what was to come:

This might apply just as well to presumably more concrete threats — or, in the wake of this past week's increased terror threshold, less concrete threats. Are we better off not knowing? I'm not entirely sure what I think about this. Given my standard anxiety levels, which are considerable, I'm inclined to believe that news of certain impending death within X time period (as distinguished from certain impending death, period, which is presumably unscheduled as of now) might be quite enough to push me over the edge, in which case it would be a kindness to put me out of my misery.

Or perhaps I may find the eloquence of Ellison's Haddon Brooks at the very end of his report:

(Muchas gracias: Susanna Cornett.)

I haven't posted anything on the proposed World Trade Center replacements, mostly because everything I know about architecture could be slipped into the corner of a thimble and still leave room for all my good romantic advice and the souls of half a dozen managers at 42nd and Treadmill.

And maybe it's just as well, since according to Nedward, architecture is so riven with jargon and nonsense that hardly anyone, to include its practitioners, understands it anymore:

There's a lot to be said for Mies and "Less is more," but sometimes less just isn't more. And while some contemporary buildings around town seem perhaps a trifle baroque, especially considering the age of said town (114 years doth not an eon make), entirely too many structures look like Stalinist housing for the proletariat. If that's the alternative, I want gargoyles, I want turrets, dammit.

The original twin lights to the heavens that were turned on in the wake of September 11th were far more inspiring, I think, than anything solid so far proposed for WTC replacements. I hope that those lights will inspire someone who can draw, and that the newest additions to the New York City skyline will not only stand tall, but sparkle.

When there is breaking news — real breaking news, as distinguished from the parade of ephemera that is routinely pitched as such on television — the first commandment becomes "Get pictures!" And get pictures they will — even someone else's.

During Columbia's last mission, the first pictures came from WFAA-TV in Dallas, an ABC affiliate which has an agreement with CNN. When CNN went live with the story, they used WFAA's video. At a couple of points, so did Fox News, though Fox had no prior arrangement with WFAA. As an experiment, CNN sneaked a small logo into the far corner of the screen, and watched with bemusement as it appeared on the Fox monitor.

Is this actionable? Probably not. Satellite feeds are all over the place, and keeping them out of "unauthorized" hands is likely more trouble than it's worth. And cooperation is not unheard of: during the unfolding of 9/11, all the major networks agreed to share whatever they had. CNN, in fact, considers the Fox action during the Columbia disaster to fall within the bounds of fair use, but it would have been nice if they'd asked first.

Guys of a certain age and/or a certain mindset have no use for Barbie, except as part of a punchline. "But Daddy, she's so popular!" "Popular? How so? Every friend she has, you have to buy for her!" We don't really relate to Barbie: we pop open a Foster's and throw a couple of shrimp her way, and that's that.

So I'm naturally mystified when a Barbie Collectibles catalog shows up at my mailbox. I think, "Well, yeah, those old dolls with their period outfits, they probably bring a few bucks these days." But I don't throw it away, and after a couple of days I work up the nerve to see what all is being offered.

And holy mother of pearl, will you look at this stuff! Serene enough for Merchant-Ivory, hotter than Beyoncé, seemingly every conceivable fashion idiom of the last thousand years clings to that 39-21-40 shape. And while the cynical side of me thinks, "Yeah, this is a way to get someone to pay ninety-five bucks for a doll, fercrissake," I have a sneaking suspicion that outfitting a workaday Barbie for a seven-year-old girl probably isn't any less expensive.

Maybe I ought to get the Lady Camille. "Champagne-colored jacquard, lace-trimmed chiffon and strands of faux pearls envelope this dainty figure in the absolute splendor of [the Neoclassical] period of art." Okay, she just stands there. But she's got The Look, and I don't argue with The Look. Not now, not ever. I don't care if it's Mattel; it's swell.

Arguably no corporation screams so loudly about the rights of intellectual-property owners as The Walt Disney Company, which is why it is so delicious to see them embroiled in a suit over royalties.

Shirley Slesinger Lasswell and daughter Patricia Slesinger inherited the merchandising rights to A. A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh character. They licensed the characters to Disney many years ago. While Disney pays the bills for stuffed plush and apparel and such, they've never paid any royalties for Pooh videos, computer games and software, on the basis that these items were not specifically mentioned in the Disney-Slesinger contract.

Having been caught once myself by this sort of argument, I suppose I should feel some sympathy for the Mouse House, but at some point in the proceedings, somebody at Disney actually tossed out a bunch of pertinent legal documents, following which the company moved to block the jury from hearing about it. The California Supreme Court has now rejected that motion.

Disney, as a matter of course, doesn't much like paying for things. You may remember their last animated feature, Treasure Planet. (Actually, you probably don't; it was a box-office disaster.) Basically, it's Robert Louis Stevenson in space, just one more Disney effort to wangle something copyrightable out of public-domain material. But God forbid it should ever go in the other direction.

There is a dubious tradition of referring to action movies by some sort of abbreviation: Men in Black was truncated to MIB, Independence Day somehow became ID4 (if the Declaration had been signed on the 23rd, it just wouldn't be the same), and the second X-Men feature, for which Rebecca Romijn-Stamos has only just now scraped off all that blue stuff, is already being referred to as X2.

Knowing all this, I was still caught off-guard by Fox's film version of Alan Moore's graphic novel The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which, for the purpose of marketing to the adolescent boys (ages 11 through, oh, 49 or so) who will want to see it, will be advertised as LXG.

Fred Rogers, always "Mister Rogers" to your kids and mine, lost his battle with stomach cancer this morning. He was 74 years old; his PBS series had run for thirty-two years.

I'll miss the guy. He was one of the few hosts on children's TV who wasn't trying to sell action figures and snacks.

(Update, 1:20 pm: Weetabix, as always, says it beautifully.)

As required under the provisions of Article II, Section 2-B of the Blogger Convention (revised '03), here is a spiffy Lileks riff on "What if Saddam Hussein had appeared, not on 60 Minutes II, but on American Idol?"

Jeebus, I wish I could do that.

Mean Mr. Mustard reports that PETA's chicken farm-equals-Auschwitz promotion is old news, that PETA's spokesvegetable Ingrid Newkirk has been harping on this notion for years. He cites an incident on Dennis Prager's talk show on KABC, Los Angeles, before Prager went national:

I figure PETA is probably only two fund-raisers away from a campaign to improve the public image of Escherichia coli, which is routinely bad-mouthed by government health officials and other misguided souls.

I've never been to Vancleve, Kentucky, but last year's somewhat-unintended slide through a series of small Kentucky towns persuades me that I'd probably like the place. Only two things do I actually know about Vancleve: it has a long-established gospel radio station (WMTC AM/FM, the call letters meaning "Win Men To Christ"), and it's the home of the Kentucky Mountain Bible College, which for some time now has been trying to rid itself of its telephone number, which, like other numbers in Breathitt County, starts with 666.

Telephone companies move slowly, when they move at all, and I don't know if this particular bout of slowness is at all related to the need to conserve phone numbers to keep from adding more and more area codes, but finally the school has won: if you're wanting to call them, you need to call 693-5000.

The Timekeeper is back in the States and up to full fearsome strength. Not that it takes a whole lot of strength to fisk a high-school senior, but in four years or so the recipient will be a college senior and produce even higher cranial durometer readings, so the time to strike is now.

The student in question offers this startling revelation:

Rebuffed by a teacher who pointed out that, hey, this is English class, not a women's studies course, she exploded:

To which the Timekeeper responds:

As she gets bitter, he gets better. Read the whole thing. (Good to have you home, Keep.)

Some people keep "delightful" and "silly" far apart in little mental boxes, lest the two meet and contaminate one another like chocolate and peanut butter.

Not being one of those people, I direct your attention to the Periodic Table of Haiku, a perfectly legitimate scientific tool with a three-line verse attached for each chemical element. (Scansion isn't always perfect, but what the hell; you try writing something about molybdenum in 17 syllables.)

(Via Fark)

All in the Family creator Norman Lear will collaborate with Trey Parker and Matt Stone on several episodes of their Comedy Central series South Park.

[Insert terlet joke here]

This makes a certain amount of sense; Parker and Stone, like Lear, built their reputations by pushing the envelope without rendering it completely unreadable. And Lear's status as a full-fledged Hollywood liberal obviously didn't bother Matt and Trey, though it's unlikely they'd want to work with the likes of, say, Barbra Streisand.

And mister, we could use a man like Eric Cartman again.

Back around the Dawn of Video, Michael Medved and his brother Harry put together an orange-crate-coffee-table book called The Golden Turkey Awards, which purported to list the Worst Movies of All Time, the worst being Edward D. Wood Jr.'s messterpiece Plan 9 from Outer Space. Now anyone who's seen even one episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 knows that there are films out there that make Plan 9 look like Citizen Kane. Did the Medved brothers do any actual research on this book, or did they choose to rely on shtick and snark?

I can't tell you what Harry was thinking, but it seems to me that Michael's career since then has been nothing but shtick and snark. His "Hollywood hates America" premise is all over the place these days. And were I a failed screenwriter with an axe to grind, I suppose I'd keep the wheels spinning as long as possible myself.

Soundbitten's G. Beato has analyzed the situation, and he has reached the following conclusion:

I don't know how extensible this premise is, but I've always wondered how popular Ann Coulter would have been had she looked more like Golda Meir.

From Karen Croft's The Fix column at Salon.com:

And people say (yes, I know you do) I'm paranoid.

I can't wait to see what Rachel Lucas makes of this.

King Kaufman in Salon:

Exactly so. Some people get paid to wail and wring their hands, others choose to do it on a volunteer basis; but most of us have lives to lead, and the process of, um, "regime change" does not occupy center stage in those lives. We are a nation, but we're not all that nationalistic.

And you know what? When the war was being fought on our turf, in the frightening days of September 2001, we took it then, too. We took care of business, we mourned our losses, and we got back to work — and to play. One of the finer aspects of living in the United States of America, I do believe.

Let the games begin.

Weetabix takes on NASCAR:

Okay, I like NASCAR — at least, I like the concept of people racing cars that bear an extraordinarily slight resemblance to vehicles that can be purchased at the local dealership by mere mortals — but dammit, I thought it was funny.

What's more, I once defended Thomas Kinkade, and as Weet says,

(Aside to Kevin McGehee: "Mmmmm...aerosol cheese....")

Andrea Harris explains the thundering cluelessness in and around Tinseltown:

Perhaps this explains why Michelle Pfeiffer hasn't said anything remarkably dumb: she actually worked as a cashier at a suburban grocery store.

Well, it sounded like Adam Sandler:

Britain's Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, reports The Register, is quite aware that the Bonsai Kitten site, "dedicated to preserving the long lost art of body modification in housepets," is a gag. Nonetheless, the RSPCA is going ahead with a campaign to get the site closed down anyway.

Did I miss something here? Did Her Majesty's Government convene a Ministry of Acceptable Humour while Tony Blair was busy with this dust-up in the Middle East?

In an interview conducted by Q magazine, Madonna complained that the world of pop music had become "homogenised" and grumbled about "Svengalis holding talent searches" who dominate said world.

In a related story, Bowling for Columbine writer/director Michael Moore complained about a worldwide surplus of loud, chunky white guys in baseball caps.

All through this RoadSassy piece, one part nostalgia for the Hollywood that was and one part nausea at the Hollywood that is, you can hear the cry of the disillusioned lover, never denying the heartbreak, but not willing to go through that sort of thing ever again. Who knew the stuff our dreams were made of was just, well, stuff?

Why would we? We were on that silver screen, our hopes and our aspirations, larger than life; we were larger than life. Many years passed before it became necessary to cut us down to size.

Read the whole thing. Then drive out toward the local dodecaplex — and then keep driving.

Jessie Rosenberg of the excellent Discriminations blog has weighed in on affirmative action as practiced at American universities — not on the blog, but in the "Main Line Voices" department at The Philadelphia Inquirer. It's a "major fad," she says, and takes it from there:

For the record, I am one-quarter Latino, have trouble with ten digits of pi, and have met only a handful of Germans and no Ghaniffs. :)

I wonder if speakers of Elvish will be present when the Supreme Court hears the Michigan law school preference case today.

Michael Kelly, columnist for The Washington Post and editor-at-large of The Atlantic Monthly, has been killed in a Humvee accident while traveling with the 3rd Infantry Division in Iraq.

Kelly, 46, who stepped down as The Atlantic's editor-in-chief last year to get back to his reportorial roots, was the first casualty among "embedded" American journalists. Under Kelly's guidance, The Atlantic had become less sleepy and more pointed, and pushed toward a centrist, occasionally conservative point of view, reflecting Kelly's own politics, the departure of Mortimer Zuckerman from the publisher's office, and the need to distinguish the magazine from the competition in general and the reliably left-wing Harper's in particular.

I have a feeling I'm going to miss this guy.

Things may have changed since The Lord of the Rings series began, at least for some people, but few things upset me quite as much as seeing that a book of which I am inordinately fond is about to turn into a motion picture — how can they possibly do it justice?

Next month I have to come to grips with the BBC Films/Independent Distribution Partnership's production of Dodie Smith's late-Forties novel I Capture the Castle, a book I first read in high school and dust off every other year or so just to reacquaint myself with the residents of ruined Castle Godsend and to see if I'm still in love with Cassandra Mortmain. (I tend to be, shall we say, frustratingly constant in my devotion, particularly when it is not returned, which is almost always the case.)

I could boycott the movie on general principle, and there's always the chance that it won't play here at all — after all, they may need extra screens for The Matrix Reloaded — but even if I can avoid the theatrical release, I'll still have to contend with the eventual DVD. Fortunately, the canned synopsis floating around seems remarkably true to the storyline, and the Samuel Goldwyn company, which is distributing the film in the US, has a reputation for picking up the Good Stuff.

Then there's that R rating, about which I have some misgivings. Yes, there's some brief nudity in the book, but it's fairly nonsexual in nature. (Cassandra takes a bath; Topaz, the free-spirited stepmother, is wont to "commune with nature," which Cassandra decides to try for herself just once.) This, of course, reflects the collapsed state of my libido: I don't think I can handle seeing an object of my affection in her birthday suit. (I am, of course, amenable to testing this thesis.) And there's something a trifle disquieting about seeing something I read when I was fifteen being turned into an R-rated film. Still, this isn't exactly Disney material. Then again, neither was Smith's 1956 novel The Hundred and One Dalmatians, at least at first.

ABC television is developing a sitcom to star outspoken war critic Janeane Garofalo as — what else? — a TV producer. No pilot script is available, so I have no idea whether Garofalo's character is the sort of person who, say, considers dictators like the late Saddam Hussein to be the moral equivalent of the American President, but at least one prowar group is threatening to boycott the network if Garofalo's show airs: "We do not wish to see the faces of liberal Hollywood," said a statement emailed to ABC.

Actually, her face isn't her best feature, but that's another issue. I have always been a Garofalo fan, but it's been increasingly difficult in recent months as she's sunk further into Hollywood's moral, um, quagmire.

Meanwhile, LGF's Charles Johnson would like to know if Janeane is planning to apologize to Dubya as promised.

Not an editorial comment: a recipe by Amy Langfield. What a friend we have in cheeses.

(Muchas gracias: Matt Welch.)

If you scroll to the bottom of this item, you'll discover that Larry King has a certain fondness for thongs. At least it's not in the Marv Albert sense, thank heaven; still, there's something a trifle disconcerting, at least to me, about the whole septuagenarian-gawking-at-fortysomething-woman scene. (My father is 75, and his wife is 50, but I've never known him to gawk.)

Small voice doing a bad imitation of General Zod: "Is this your way of expiating your guilt for running that Google search for olsen twins fan fiction?"

Um, that was research, dammit, and I made a point of avoiding the more prurient stuff.

How could I possibly miss this?

Oh, wait: I didn't.

(Muchas gracias: greeblie blog.)

News Item:

Hmmm. I wonder if this sort of thing will catch on elsewhere in the cable industry....

Oxygen   Boron

Cable News Network   Credibility Near Nil

Lifetime   Smip! (Soccer Moms In Peril)

Animal Planet   C-SPAN 3

TV Land   The Beaver Channel

Comedy Central   Caddyshack Central

Nick   Shtick

Fox News Channel   Cartoon Network

You know, this could work.

As mentioned here previously, The Nashville Network/The National Network/The New TNN is about to morph into Spike.

TeeVee's Philip Michaels has a better name for it.

The late Waylon Jennings sang of getting "back to the basics of love" in a relentlessly-untrendy place: Luckenbach, Texas. Shortly thereafter, of course, Luckenbach became hip, and eventually succumbed to a disease once described by Zen master Yogi Berra: "It's so crowded, nobody goes there anymore."

Bret Schulte of The Washington Post sees the beginning of another back-to-the-basics movement, this one packaged in bottles and cans:

Sales of Pabst are up 5 percent; package sales (as distinguished from over-the-bar sales) are up 12 percent. You could explain part of this as being simply a reflection of the general lack of health in the economy, but while PBR is cheap, there is no shortage of cheap beers out there. There's another factor at work here:

Of course, this lack of trendiness is itself sort of trendy, and fads die as quickly as they are born, but it does my old blue-collar heart good to see people bellying up to the bar and ordering the sort of beer that the self-proclaimed cognoscenti actively scorn. I'm keeping my fingers crossed for a Falstaff revival.

Update, 6:55 pm, 21 April: Fritz Schranck will have you know that there were beers, even beers produced by Pabst, that didn't come up to the high standards of PBR.

Alexandra thinks we need to pay more attention to the man behind the curtain (9:13 am, 27 April, if Blogspot archives are their usual gassy selves):

I worry that the schools are getting reminders — (dis)courtesy of an effete corps of illiterate snots who are convinced that 90 percent of the curriculum is intended as subliminal indoctrination into the Dark Side. They come from all edges of the political spectrum, but they all spew the same vaguely-veiled threat: "You're not teaching my child that!" Eventually, of course, they teach no one's child anything.

And Fahrenheit 451, I predict, will go over their heads, at an altitude where it will be totally unrecognizable, as Mark Twain might have predicted.

If your eyes glaze over at a title like Media and the social construction of crime and policing: Process and Effect, you're probably not alone; its very flow suggests industrial-strength academic word-crunching. And that's precisely what Susanna Cornett is going to have to be doing: that's the title of the core proposal for her doctorate, which she will submit to her faculty advisor this week.

Sounds serious, right? And of course it is. I do hope she is able to retain some semblance of her sense of humor through it all. She's posted the actual proposal (it's on Blogspot, so archive pages may be flakier than country biscuits) for those of us who keep wanting to know where the heck has she been fercryingoutloud.

And when it's all over and she's torn out far less of her hair than she thought she would, she'll lean back and say, "You know, that was a darn fine job." Count on it.

I yield to no one in my fondness for strappy sandals, but £1 million seems a bit excessive.

(Muchas gracias: Venomous Kate, who presumably could do them justice.)

Bigwig hates Sleeping Beauty.

No, really. I mean, he truly hates it:

Can anything be done about this?

Methinks Bigwig is too fond of Lara Croft for his own good, but I have to admit: of all of Disney's "classic" films in the vault, Sleeping Beauty is probably the one I'm least likely to buy on DVD.

I'll have to ask my daughter (age 25) about this.

Baseball Crank associate The Mad Hibernian has, shall we say, mixed emotions regarding Nurse Bloomberg's antismoking decree. On the plus side:

There are, however, consequences:

Advantage: smokers. Which is worse: a bar that smells like Camels, or a bar that smells like camels?

Someone wandered in here last night searching for the area code for 867-5309, proving that even putative one-hit wonders like Tommy Tutone (who actually charted three records) last forever.

In fact, I think 867-5309 may ultimately supplant those "555" numbers in TV and movies that don't fool anyone. Check out this T-Mobile Roaming FAQ item (scroll to the bottom of item #8), or Call Forwarding on this GSM Features page.

The great stone face of the Old Man on the Mountain has always been the defining symbol of New Hampshire; his not-quite-smile, not-quite-scowl has always seemed to be the ultimate expression of "Been there, seen that."

And yes, the experts say that the collapse of the Old Man was inevitable, that wind and weather and time and trouble would bring down that great stone face — any time you've got this much rock exposed, you've massively increased the risk factors — but still it seems impossible; you no more expect this than you expect Lady Liberty to shorten her skirts and do the Hokey Pokey.

This has not been a great year for New Hampshire, with the fire on Mount Washington back in February and now the Old Man crumbled into dust, but you don't spend four hundred years in New England without acquiring some sort of resilience. And I hope they don't decide to redesign the state highway signs, small reminders of the Old Man at his finest and craggiest.

"Intellectuals," says Cinderella Bloggerfeller, "are simply human beings who should be judged by the same standards as ordinary people." Certainly they're no less capable of blithering idiocy than the rest of us, a point made in La connaissance inutile (English title: The Flight from Truth) by Jean-François Revel (translation by Mr Bloggerfeller):

Which is why I'm not too perturbed that, for instance, national scold William Bennett plays the slots; it may seem inconsistent with Bennett's incessant grousing about the lack of virtue displayed by some of us, but for most of the human race, achieving a level of perfect consistency usually occurs at the moment of death, at which point it really doesn't matter anymore.

Wal-Mart, in one of its periodic spates of piety, has barred the lad mags Stuff, Maxim and FHM from its magazine racks.

The only real surprise here, for me anyway, was "Wal-Mart carried FHM?" I mean, it's not like the place is overrun with copies of The Weekly Standard.

I just can't take any more of Oliver Beene.

I mean, I'm sure there's a place for a TV series that combines the worst of Malcolm in the Middle and The Wonder Years, and most assuredly that place is Fox, but geez, this thing is strained, and not just because half the stars are named Grant.

The last straw was this week, when one scene called for worse disarray than usual on the floor, what with Oliver being dragged across it and all, and just above the center of the shot was a lovely Atlantic 45-rpm record.

With a farging bar code on the right side of the label.

Yes, I know period pieces are prone to anachronism — I could swear I saw Paul Pfeiffer in Wonder Years doing the infamous Marv Albert Yes! — but dammit, there are some things even I won't forgive. Not even the presence of implausible hottie Wendy Makkena, last seen (by me, anyway) in Sister Act as the wimpiest nun ever to wear the wimple, can save this show.

(Dear Vickie: Is this obscure enough for you?)

And if you're still in a good mood, go read this denunciation of the Ed Biz by Cam Edwards.

The money quote:

Is the NEA technically a union? Teachers in the Oklahoma City district are represented by AFT for collective bargaining. The NEA, as I understand it, fancies itself more of a "professional association," along the lines of the AMA. Still, its influence is considerable, and not always salutary.

Update, 11:45 am: See Comments. The NEA may not be the union around here, but it's clearly somebody's union. (Thanks, Cam.)

First they were the Redmen, and that was fine for a while, but by 1972 the forces of political correctness had grown sufficiently strong, or at least loud, to demand a change.

So they became the Minutemen, a name with even more history behind it, and one that wasn't likely to incur the wrath of the Defenders of Ethnicity. (Did you ever notice that actual members of these allegedly-aggrieved ethnic groups complain a lot less than their self-appointed spokespersons?)

Now the University of Massachusetts is changing the name of its athletic teams again, this time to the Gray Wolves. There didn't seem to be any organized objection to the Minuteman — UMass women's teams, competing as "Minutewomen" (!), didn't raise any particular fuss — but the poor old colonial fellow was, after all, a representative of only a single gender, and what's worse, he toted a musket. God forbid anyone should be seen with a gun these days.

Are gray wolves indigenous to Massachusetts? Springfield Republican outdoor writer Frank Sousa has the numbers:

And you just know those weasels from PETA are going to jump all over this.

(Update, 10:30 am: Cam Edwards offers an alternative: "I suggest replacing the name Minutemen with Nancyboys. That's mixed-gender, and it certainly reflects the moral fortitude of the current student population when compared with the original Minutemen." Ow!)

I'm not saying I've never set foot in a sports bar, but were I to make a list of my Favorite Places in All the World, sports bars would probably not rank highly. Apart from the atmosphere, which is usually no more breathable than vichyssoise, there is this built-in cognitive-dissonance generator, as explained on Play One on TV:

I won't even speculate as to which of those groups would be more likely to include me.

Actually, I don't know anybody by that name, but it gives me an opportunity to plug a T-shirt that is, shall we say, somewhat critical of the Mayor of the City of New York, and which incidentally can be had at The Store at NewYorkish.com.

(Via suck-my-big.org)

I don't know if Robert Burrows' The Great American Parade is truly, as WaPo critic Gene Weingarten says, "the worst novel ever published in the English language," but having grown up on both Bulwer-Lytton and Jackie Collins, I simply have to check this out for myself.

Personally, I'd rather have a real live dead-tree book — I am, after all, a creature of habit — but the online publisher Lulu now has TGAP in e-book and printed-on-demand formats, so it appears I'll get my chance. The hard part, of course, will be finding the time to read the darn thing.

He's probably going to get some sort of retrograde facelift, and I fear they'll take his musket away, but the UMass Minuteman is staying, at least for now. An outpouring of support from Massachusetts residents — and, perhaps more persuasively, an upsurge in orders for Minuteman schwag — has led the school to reconsider its decision to replace the fellow with a gray wolf.

(Muchas gracias: Joanne Jacobs.)

The Minuteman may be safe, for now; but what UMass giveth, Ole Miss taketh away.

Colonel Reb, the old Southern (make that Suthun) gentleman who represents the University of Mississippi, may be headed for a makeover; Ole Miss AD Pete Boone says the Colonel is "an 18th-century person," and obviously we can't have such people hanging around in the twenty-first.

Then again, it's not like the Colonel is waving a Confederate flag or anything.

(Via Tongue Tied)

I left Charleston in 1969 and managed to stay gone for thirty-two years, which means that I've never actually seen the Spoleto Festival USA, which was founded in the Holy City by composer Gian-Carlo Menotti in 1977. And that's a shame, since by all accounts this is one of the top arts festivals in the country. (I've never seen its Italian counterpart either, but then about three-quarters of the time I spent in Italy, in the spring of 1974, I was waiting for a Pan Am jet to be checked out after a bomb threat. At least, that's the story they were handing out at the time.)

Spoleto USA begins today. One of these years, I know not when, it will begin with me on the scene.

She was a sailor.

She married twice, she bore five children, she lived a life neither all that happy nor all that long; but if you visit the spot of earth where she was laid to rest, the one thing you will know for certain, the one thing perhaps she most wanted you to know, was that she was a sailor.

The uniform changes people. It always has. It's not an instantaneous change, like the flicking of a light switch; it's a slow and gradual change, like sunrise coming over the horizon. And like that sunrise, once it starts, it's impossible to stop.

It has been many years since a major mobilization, many years since the whole nation was called to arms. Fewer of us wear the uniform. And that's a good thing: fewer of us will be placed in harm's way. But it's not such a good thing in another way: fewer of us remember what it means to wear the uniform, to put one's country ahead of oneself. Today there are those who fear the uniform, who distrust those who wear it. Sometimes we say that they have no regard for their country, but that's not really true; they still live and love and work here, just like the rest of us. They simply believe that the world is supposed to be like the Hundred-Acre Wood, and they cannot accept that parts of it are more like Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. For some of them, a wake-up call came with the toppling of the Towers; others dream on.

And I don't begrudge them their dream; I, too, wish the world were quieter, more peaceful, more like a children's book. But I also know that it won't happen on its own, and that some of the world's self-proclaimed "peacemakers" desire anything but peace. It takes more than the mere absence of war to produce peace; it takes the combined efforts of people dedicated to the proposition that freedom is worth the price.

You'll recognize those people at once. They wear the uniform.

As did I. As did my brother. As did my sister's husband. As did my father.

And as did my mother; she was a sailor.

Michele has a stirring story to tell, as a reminder of what this day is all about.

It's called Sticky Fingers: A Tale of Saks, Lies and Videotape, and it's a musical based on Winona Ryder's 2002 shoplifting trial.

<davebarry>
I am not making this up.
</davebarry>

The production is being staged at Point Loma High School near San Diego; Ryder has reportedly been invited to attend.

Weetabix has grasped another High Truth:

My inner fat girl reminds you that Weet is talking about her comments section.

Where my own brilliance threshold kicks in, I don't know; I haven't reached it yet. And my word count is way into six figures, too.

Andrea Harris, on music-video wardrobe concerns:

Of course, if you put everyone in Armani suits, everyone assumes you're making a statement likely to be even more fatuous than the one you're actually making.

David "Clubbeaux" Sims describes his encounter with the Klan, and while he's not what you'd call enthusiastic about the group, he understands why it's still around, and why it's not just a collection of ignorant, bigoted Klux:

Now social engineering is to engineering what social disease is to disease — toxic and virulent, yet passed on with the best of intentions. And it would be well to remember this:

And if you squawk about it — well, you just might be a redneck. Rednecks, however, are not among the Protected Classes embraced by the occupants of the seats of power.

I am normally unconcerned about how much an actor resembles the person being portrayed — both Alanis Morissette and Morgan Freeman can do God convincingly, I think — but no way am I going to believe that Hillary Rodham Clinton has legs like Sharon Stone's.

The Roman Catholic bishops of Illinois have declared that the Left Behind novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins are seriously anti-Catholic, suggesting their flocks should spurn these big-selling Tales of the Last Days.

Peppermint Patty offers a more compelling reason for avoiding these books: they suck.

Don't hold back, Patty. How do you really feel?

Having survived L. Ron Hubbard's Mission Earth series — ten volumes of steadily-increasing horribleness — I'm inclined to drop Madison County to third, or twelfth, or something, but clearly Left Behind is in august company. Fortunately, August comes but once a year.

You don't need me to tell you to go read Lileks, but this bit is so good it demands to be repeated:

It's that "diversity" thing, y'know; and since we Ward Cleaver types don't rush to embrace it — "What if it sucks?" — the nation must rise as one to shove it down our collective throats and into Wal-Mart's inventory system. I persist in the weird notion that "Wal-Mart doesn't carry something you want? Fine. Go somewhere else."

My subscription copy of Vanity Fair arrived yesterday, its cover liberally festooned with implausibly hot yet relentlessly underage babes. (Yes, Kevin, including both Olsens.) I gawked at this thing for entirely too much time, then started wondering if maybe the squarer retailers (which around here means most of them) were going to put one of those rectangular shields over the rack to prevent in-store gawking. I have nothing in the world against teenage girls — once upon a time I was in love with a teenage girl — but I get queasy when they're presented as Hotties On The Verge, and I don't think it's just because I'm fifty and the, um, commodities in question are younger than my children. God knows what Lileks would make of this.

Veteran newsman David Brinkley has died at his Houston home.

Brinkley, 82, cohosted NBC's Huntley-Brinkley Report from 1956 to 1971; in 1981, he moved to ABC, where he became the host of This Week, a position he held for sixteen seasons.

A personal note: While I mourn Mr Brinkley's passing, it scores me 18 points and $20 in the Amish Tech Support Dead Pool.

The planned unveiling of Viacom's Spike TV, the replacement for The Network Formerly Known As Nashville, has been put on hold; a New York judge has issued an injunction against Viacom at the request of Spike Lee, who believes that the name is an infringement upon his persona.

No word from director Spike Jonze, the late bandleader Spike Jones, or Buffy's erstwhile boyfriend.

After 125 years, apparently it's over.

Today in Pikeville, Kentucky, descendants of the Hatfield and McCoy families signed a truce, ending the feud that is believed to have started in 1878 when Randolph McCoy accused Floyd Hatfield of stealing a pig.

Actual warfare between the families has been sparse in recent years; in fact, in 2000, the Reunion Festival was established as a means of drawing the feuding families together (and, not incidentally, to draw some tourism dollars to the Tug Valley). Still, there had never been a formal end to hostilities until today.

So far, no response from Korea, where the war between North and South now moves into first place on the Formally Unresolved Conflict charts.

Tony Roma, whose little BBQ place in North Miami grew to over 250 upscale rib joints across the country, has died in California at the age of 78.

(Via Fark)

As predicted in this space last month, the University of Mississippi will sideline its mascot this fall. Officials at Ole Miss apparently want something "more intimidating" than the old Southern gentleman known as Colonel Reb.

At least, that's the story. I'd hate to think they bought into this mythology:

"Confederocentricity"? I have to admire any eight-syllable word that takes up only twenty letters, but otherwise, I ain't buying. As they say in the Big East, "I got your post hoc right here, pal."

I don't get Showtime, unless the cable company screws up, but I admit to a certain amount of curiosity about their upcoming feature D.C. 9/11, a dramatization of the first few hours after the planes came crashing into the world as we knew it.

"It's a straightforward docudrama," says producer-scripter Lionel Chetwynd. "I would hope what's presented is a fully colored and nuanced picture of a human being in a difficult situation." It probably won't change any minds among members of the I Hate Bush Club, but then again, what on earth possibly could?

Me, I'm fixated on Penny Johnson Jerald, whom I remember as Kasidy Yates from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and who looks like she could be Condi Rice's kid sister, a useful commodity considering she's playing Condi Rice.

Kim du Toit sets the Wayback machine to the premiere of Spice World.

Old news, yes, certainly. But (1) it's a quality du Toit rant from the archives and (2) it's supplemented by some high-grade eye candy, two factors which I think eminently justify calling attention to it.

Tiger proposes the replacement of the pejorative-sounding "idiotarian" with the perhaps less-accusative "inanitarian".

Personally, I think it lacks punch. On the other hand, it's a hell of a lot better than that "bright" crap.

Found at Bleeding Brain, courtesy of Wild:

It's called the Abstinence Clearinghouse, an umbrella organization for the various groups which cajole/harangue/persuade (pick one) young folks to eschew the wonders of sex until they're properly licensed by the state, and they're holding their convention in Las Vegas. Of course.

It goes without saying that there are very good reasons why teenagers should not have sex — ask any 35-year-old grandparent — and I'm as likely as anyone to buy into the mythology of Waiting For The Right One, but something about this enterprise leaves me cold, and it's not just the tendency of some of the promoters to disseminate misconceptions about condoms, either.

I wrote this back in 1996:

I got married at twenty-four. It didn't last. Maybe it might have if either of us had known what the hell we were doing. Those zealous guardians of home plate wouldn't have helped us in the slightest.

Update, 9:15 pm: Arthur Silber scoffs at their slogan:

Now he tells me.

Update, 7 am, 30 June: On his radio show, Cam Edwards points out that "True Love Waits", as a slogan, belongs to some other group.

Now he tells me.

(I'm starting to see a pattern here.)

About the late Katharine Hepburn, I will say only this:

Never did a woman go so far out of her way to avoid looking "girly", nor did one ever look so beautiful while so doing.

Oh, to have been Spencer Tracy, just for a few hours....

Imagine Philip Michaels' surprise when TiVo's program listings helpfully pointed out a soft-core T&A-fest. On his local PBS channel, yet.

Now imagine his annoyance when it failed to materialize.

(And if Charlie Rose does any skinnydipping next season, I'm sending in a pledge, just so I can cancel it.)

It couldn't happen to a nicer moonbat.

New Jersey poet laureate Amiri Baraka, after coming under fire for a poem which asserted that Jews had advance knowledge of the World Trade Center attacks, had been asked to resign. He refused. In January of this year, the New Jersey Senate considered a bill to abolish the position entirely; it passed 21-0, albeit with 19 abstentions. This week, the Assembly passed that bill on a 69-2 vote, and Governor James McGreevey, one of Baraka's harshest critics, is almost certain to sign it.

I liked the Trenton Times editorial comment:

(Muchas gracias: Timekeeper at Horologium.)

The Kalahari bushman N!xau (the exclamation point represents a sort of click), the unlikely star of The Gods Must Be Crazy, has died in Namibia.

In Jamie Uys' 1980 film, N!xau finds a mysterious item on the ground that can only have been sent by the gods: an empty Coca-Cola bottle. He brings it back to the tribe, observes that it brings only sorrow, and resolves to return it to its creator.

N!xau went on to a film career of sorts, doing a sequel to The Gods in 1989 for Uys and winding up in Pacific Rim features, before returning to the bush. He was believed to be about 59 when he died.

(Via Fark)

If you read half the stuff on my blogroll (which I try to do on a semi-regular basis), you might think Chris Muir's Day by Day, featured at several of those blogs, is the funniest thing since Mary Matalin gave James Carville a wedgie on Meet the Press. (And if she didn't, well, she should have.)

I'm not quite so enthusiastic myself: okay, it's funnier than Doonesbury, but then the bridge column by Omar Sharif and Tannah Hirsch is funnier than Doonesbury.

SurlyPundit, on the other hand, thinks Day by Day sucks, and is prepared to tell you why.

Now this is pithy:

Credited as "found on the internet".

More precisely, it was found here.

Fritz Schranck might be a member of the Rehoboth Beach Film Society, which, judging by its mission statement, is likely a sterling bunch of folks.

Unlike the foreign-film buffs that Donna always seems to encounter:

Donna's Philadelphia is evidently farther from Fritz's Sussex County than I thought.

That would be Bob, as in Bob "Who are you calling a legend?" Hope, who died yesterday, and Susanna Cornett, one of those unpretentious mountain-type persons I was talking about, has a lovely tribute to the man who invented stand-up comedy.

Martin Brest is the man behind Gigli — he directed it from his own script — but so far as I can discern from all the negative buzz, the spiritual father of this film is Arthur Carlson, station manager at Cincinnati radio station WKRP. "As God is my witness," said Brest, evidently channeling Carlson, "I thought this turkey would fly."

Turkeys play a role in the film, or at least in its dialogue, being the central image in the least-convincing sexual come-on since — well, since I used to date. Natalie at Pickle Juice is happy to rewrite the line, with considerably more persuasive results.

I've mostly stayed out of the gay-marriage brouhaha so far. Way back in 1996, I complained about the Defense of Marriage Act, and got a tad hyperbolic in so doing; subsequently I figured it might not be a bad idea to lower my profile on this issue.

But while I haven't exactly recanted, I would rather avoid demonizing the opposition. And along these lines, Moira Breen has precisely the argument I'd been unable to come up with on my own:

Emphasis in the original. Regardless of the hardware possessed by Heather's, um, parental units, marriage is fundamentally about children, about providing them a structure within which they can grow and develop; the partners themselves, like it or not, are secondary players. This is not to say that childless couples don't deserve to have their unions sanctified by church or state or whatever, but the fact remains: marriage is fundamentally about children. Moira again:

Of course, if children did not exist, we would probably not exist either — as the story goes, if your parents didn't have children, neither will you — but since they do, any plan to redefine marriage that doesn't focus primarily on children is going to draw opposition, and, I think, rightfully so. I still don't like DOMA or its preemptive-strike motivation, but proponents of same-sex marriage have yet to offer an alternative that puts the emphasis back where it belongs: on the kids.

(Update, 6 August, 9:30 pm: Bruce at This Is Class Warfare takes exception to this reasoning.)

Most of the time, I can listen to The Diane Rehm Show without so much as cracking a smile; the show is so often deadly earnest that grinning is simply out of the question.

Then there was this morning, when Diane asked guest Jennifer Finney Boylan about the, um, effectiveness of sexual-reassignment surgery, an operation Boylan had undergone and subsequently described in her memoir She's Not There: A Life in Two Genders.

Said Boylan, the surgery was "very good"; she stumbled a bit, then finally quoted Kate Bornstein: "The plumbing works, and so does the electricity."

Well, I thought it was funny.

On this entry yesterday, I posted the following comment:

At the time, I wondered if maybe "desperately" was too strong a word. Now I don't. Here's John McWhorter in the New York Post on the culture so airily dismissed as "urban":

I take issue with McWhorter's negative characterization of "The Message" elsewhere in his article — to me, it's far more an expression of despair than a call to street action, and besides, it's a damned good record — but for the most part, he's nailed it. Replacing "Tha Man hates us 'cause we're black" with "Tha Man hates us 'cause we're assholes" is not my idea of an improvement.

(Muchas gracias: Phillip "delusional duck" Coons.)

It's a month before the anniversary of the date which will live in infamy as "9/11", and I admit to having given the matter little thought.

In the meantime, Michele reminds us:

Just a reminder. It's here because I need it too.

So what would happen if the National Education Association got to run a school?

Seven years ago, the NEA, staked with $1.5 million, decided to get into the admininstrative side of the Ed Biz. The Charter School Initiative, for all its flowery prose, managed to open a total of four schools (out of six planned), and their track record is — well, here's a report from the Education Intelligence Agency. You decide:

Is this the Peter Principle in action? I can already hear Cam Edwards ready to pounce.

(From Education Weak, via Joanne Jacobs.)

Lileks on the various varieties of vodka:

Can't wait until the Rev. Mr. Green gets hold of this.

SurlyPundit would like to visit New York, and a lot of the usual reasons apply, but her reasoning behind those reasons is interesting:

(Internal links added by me.)

Some of our off-jackers will be unimpressed — "So our dead white men are just as good as their dead white men?" — but out here on the prairie, we do our damnedest to preserve the good stuff because, well, that's just the sort of thing we do.

The following item is from 1999. Really. However, since I only found it last night, while following up some of the items in my referrer log, I have no qualms about reprinting it today, especially since my reaction to it is the same today as it would have been four years ago. The source is Breakup Girl's SuperList, a worthy protoblog that unfortunately didn't make it into the current version of the site. (I did update the link.)

All thoughts of Sharon Stone aside — just 70 percent?

Spiffiest quote from the Great North American Blackout, courtesy of Debbye Stratigacos:

There's a lot to be said for having your priorities in order.

I had heard Anne Garrels' All Things Considered report on the Iraqi response to the Northeast blackout Friday afternoon, and inasmuch as it had been a long day at the salt mine, I assumed that what I heard as smugness and snideness was just the effect of fatigue on my remaining brain cells, and thought no more about it. I mean, I'm sort of fond of Garrels: she's been through a hell of a lot as a Baghdad correspondent, and under the circumstances, a little bit of attitude is forgivable.

Well, I'm not the only one who picked up on smug and/or snide. At The Sound and Fury, LAN3 singled out this particular paragraph, matching the italics to Garrels' inflections:

Ain't it awful? This isn't quite as annoying as, say, Palestinians cheering after 9/11, but it does make me wish that I owned the patent on Schadenfreude; I could retire tomorrow without a care in the world.

Public schools in Beaufort County, South Carolina, have implemented a new policy: first-semester grades must be on a scale from 62 to 100.

I thought at first this might be an homage to American Bandstand's Rate-A-Record, which scored current 45s on a scale from 35 to 98, but no, it's a self-esteem thing. Explains Deputy Superintendent Edna Crews:

Some hope that they can pass a class even if they screwed off for half a year? Why stop at 62? Why not just give them 100 right off the bat? Surely they'll feel even better about themselves when they get that automatic A.

(Via Fark)

Susanna Cornett takes exception to an offhand description (on a History Channel program) of Indianapolis as "in the middle of the Bible Belt". Somebody, she concludes, is wearing his belt way too high:

But her objection is less to the geography than to the subtext:

I'm not so sure the producers were deliberately trying to be mean-spirited — I mean, if I really meant to be derogatory, I wouldn't confine myself to a single throwaway line — but I think she's right about this "monolithic entity" stuff. When I relocated to the West Coast in the late 80s, I encountered a surprisingly large number of people who, upon seeing my Oklahoma plates, were surprised that my teeth were my own and my résumé was readable.

And some of this does go in reverse: when I returned, this time with California credentials, some people wondered if I'd "gone Hollywood." Not a chance.

The New York Press has a funny (but not all that safe for work) reminiscence by Paul Krassner, founder (and, originally, entire staff) of The Realist, the Sixties Zeitgeist in magazine form. "Irreverence," said Krassner, "is our only sacred cow," and The Realist managed a sixteen-year cattle drive (1958-74) before running short of capitalist moolah. Krassner revived The Realist as a newsletter in 1985; it lasted, um, sixteen years.

I doubt the Press will get much traffic from this little blurb, but hear me out: if you think everything that's wrong with the world originated in the Sixties, you need to read this, just so you know whom to blame. For those of us who flirted with the counterculture — and as everyone knows, I'm a terrible flirt — it's just as essential.

Oh, please.

Did anybody this side of Fred Phelps actually think that SpongeBob SquarePants is gay?

Now bi, I might believe.

(Via Fark)

I wasn't there when Dr King said he'd been to the mountaintop. And maybe that's just as well, since a sorta-white kid on the cusp of ten with barely a clue about what life was about would have just gotten in the way.

As the parental units started to pay out my leash, I started to notice things. And the explanations never quite sufficed. Why was my water fountain right there in the center and their water fountain over to the side? It's the same water, isn't it? "It's just the way it is." How come I always get a seat near the front of the bus? "It's just the way it is." And maybe it was, but it didn't make a whole lot of sense to me.

Then I was dispatched to this fancy-schmancy preparatory school, where the curriculum was eccentric but difficult, the surroundings were right out of a copy of Southern Living, and the headmistress was distressed at the sort of goings-on that had taken place in Washington in the summer of '63. "They won't make me integrate," she thundered. I knew the word, at least in its general form, but it took a while for me to connect it up to the fountains and the bus and the fact that every one of my classmates had always been white.

The, um, segregation academy ran up to grade eight; for the four years following, I would be in Charleston's Catholic high school. Or, more precisely, one of Charleston's two Catholic high schools; the way it was hadn't changed.

But the status quo had just about run its course. Quietly, with little notice, the diocese announced a change in student assignments: in future, all ninth-graders would be assigned to what was now called the Annex, and all the higher grades would meet at the main campus. There was some wailing, some gnashing of teeth, but the world didn't come to an end.

And up to this point, I had thought that members of the clergy had taken a vow of indifference to all things political. In the spring of 1969, an incident at the Medical College of South Carolina proved otherwise. The doctors and the medical students were all white; there were black nursing assistants and LPNs, but most of the black faces belonged to support staff. Tensions were high and growing higher; twelve black workers were sacked for trying to unionize the support staff, and finally all the support staff walked off the job.

That was the 19th of March. On the 31st, Rev. Ralph David Abernathy preached to a crowd of 1500 downtown. He would return in April to organize a march; Andrew Young and Coretta Scott King would be there too. Governor McNair mobilized the National Guard and set a 9 pm to 5 am curfew. The picket lines kept growing, and if you looked carefully, you'd see the occasional priest, even a nun or two.

Came the 11th of May. Mother's Day. Five thousand people, including much of our faculty and five members of Congress, joined the march. The state would not be moved. It would be late June before the University gave in on most of the workers' demands. And about this time, I left Charleston; the family moved to Oklahoma, and I went off to school in Texas.

So I missed most of the unwinding of this particular story, but the details stuck with me, and as the years passed, I felt growing revulsion for the way it was, and for myself for not doing enough to stop it. I still kick myself now and then for trying to stay out of the line of fire. Okay, I was a sorta-white kid on the cusp of sixteen with barely a clue about what life was about, and I probably would have just gotten in the way, but I made a promise to myself, a promise which proved difficult to keep but which would always remain in the back of my mind: Never again will I try to defend something, or try to overlook something, that is just plain damned wrong.

And in the Eighties, courtesy of some historical documentary, I got to hear Dr King's speech in full. To this day, it gives me goosebumps. I hope it always will.

And once again, said wisdom emanates from Donnaville, now in spiffy new MT digs.

Then again, according to six-foot-six Penn Jillette, one of the sweetest sounds on earth is "Oh, I could wear heels with you."

Michael Blowhard notes that scoping the babes isn't quite what it used to be:

Given my own history in this realm — yes, I look, and yes, I feel just a tad embarrassed for doing so, and yes, I would feel about 0.7 centimeters tall should the object of my gaze raise an objection — I can understand what he's going through, even though women on the Lone Prairie tend to be just a bit more conservative in their garb. It's almost an argument for shopping at the local flea market, where at least there's the theoretical expectation that no one's there to show off, though I'm not inclined to test this hypothesis personally.

Of course, gawking gets to be an ethical handful when the gawkee is underage, something some of us are more easily able to overlook than others, and the trends being what they are — well, let Michael finish the thought:

And if it does, all the pressure will be off. Few areas, I suspect, are quite as sexless as your average nude beach, partly because the proponents want it that way — keeps the complaints from politicians down, doncha know — but mostly because the reality is never (well, almost never) quite as wonderful as the fantasy.

Not that I care that Cameron Diaz gets an occasional zit.

Greg Hlatky raises Borzoi, an honorable breed from the Russian steppes, possessed of dazzling speed, singular beauty, and strength which belies its fragile appearance. Is it any wonder he's not especially fond of toy dogs?

I am minded of Robin Williams' description of the Pekingese: "Look! A dog! Let's hit it in the face with a shovel!"

I don't bear quite so much animus toward the animals, myself, but I have to admit, if you put a gun to my head and ordered "Today, you will go get a dog," and you further prohibited me from running down to the shelter and picking up a nice, sensible mutt, most of the toy breeds would be way down my list; it's all very nice that they've been bred to be companions to mankind and all, but the breeds that actually do things are companions just as worthy, and they have talents which extend beyond occupying lap space and defecating on the rug.

Some of my best friends have owned LFDs — I even briefly dated the owner of a Maltese, and the less said about that, the better — but most of my experiences with toys have struck me as really good arguments for cat ownership.

What the world needs now is love, sweet love; it's the only thing that there's just too little of.

While you're waiting: Madonna™ condoms, which cast a whole new light on the phrase "Material Girl".

I'll be sure to ask for these while I'm at the store picking up my Donner Party Trays.

(Muchas gracias: Anna at Primal Purge.)

A reminder from Doonesbury's Garry Trudeau:

You'd be surprised how many people haven't figured this out yet. Or maybe you wouldn't.

Max Jacobs (he's either Common Sense or Wonder) generally applauds the House vote to approve a school-voucher plan for the District of Columbia, but one thing is bothering him:

A regulation that is unnecessary is a regulation still. Not being in the Ed Biz, I'm enough of a naïf to think that the imprimatur of the regional accreditation organization would be sufficient, but then I'm not sitting at a big desk in Washington trying to think up a way to expand the reach of my department either.

Private schools could opt out, though, couldn't they?

A new slant on the slippery slope. I don't like the sound of this, but dammit, he might just be right.

With the laundry done, I settled back in my chair to perform two concurrent tasks, one sort of painful, one more like hopeful: I grabbed this week's accumulated bills and logged onto the bank site to pay them, and I popped open this week's newest musical acquisitions to play them.

Tucked inside the envelope with the phone bill was a pitch for the telco's own online-payment service, illustrated with an overhead shot of a woman at a notebook presumably using said service. Now Net-based services are no less likely to fall back on Sex Sells than any other commercial endeavor, but the telco's bill-paying model isn't the usual barely-legal refugee from a Skechers ad; you can't see her face, but her slightly-streaked, vaguely-unkempt coif, the slight thickness around her upper arms, the prominent striations on the backs of her hands as she types — all these things indicate that we're looking at, not some twentysomething babe, but her fortyish (fiftyish?) mother. And that's a good thing: not all of us are youngsters anymore, and when we were, we didn't particularly want to be reminded of things like phone bills. Besides, I was pleased to note, Mom had a nice pair of gams.

And precisely at that moment, Fountains of Wayne launched into "Stacy's Mom", a song about a guy who doesn't mind hanging with a classmate, but:

I pulled the booklet from the CD case to verify that yep, that's what I heard.

This probably isn't the sort of synchronicity that would have impressed Carl Jung, or even Sting, but it shook me up for a couple of minutes.

You're behind the counter at the auto-rental facility at the Philadelphia train station on 12 September 2001. You point to the form and you tell your customer, "Miss, I need your employer, work address and work phone number."

And for a work address, she tells you, "Number 2 World Trade Center, 59th Floor, New York, New York, 10014."

Your jaw, of course, hits the linoleum.

As for the customer, how she got out of the WTC and to Philly and beyond is the stuff of nightmares, even today.

It's posted at Little Green Footballs.

I drove all through Delaware this summer and never saw a single field of marshmallows, though Fritz Schranck has a perfectly reasonable explanation:

The leading cash crop in Oklahoma is also hidden from public view, albeit for different reasons entirely.

I wonder how well Rice Krispies sell in Delaware.

As it is on every day that has a D in it.

At Cybergrass, Banjo Bob suggests a model for the music industry, and guess what? It's just down the street:

I'm seldom inclined to defend Jack Valenti's MPAA, but his business model does seem to be less insane.

It started with an observation by J Bowen at No Watermelons Allowed. Noting that Playboy was planning a "Women of Wal-Mart" pictorial, Bowen asserted that "Playboy has really run out of ideas."

I tossed some similar schemes they'd worked up over the years into his comments section, and I figured that would be the end of that — until this popped into my email today:

I have no influence — in fact, I arguably have negative influence — with The House That Hef Built, but Playboy is convinced that Wal-Mart is just jam-packed with "pent-up passion," and who am I to disagree?

Besides, it goes against the grain for me to suggest that a woman keep her clothes on, so if this reader or any other employee of the Bentonville Bastille wishes to see what Playboy has to say, or wants to volunteer for the periodical, the very least I can do is tell her to click here.

Ball count: two.

Susanna Cornett explains why she's moving back down South first chance she gets:

Seems reasonable to me. Of course, that Long Island iced tea will make you ignore car alarms, and probably everything else, but I think it's a fairly safe bet she's referring to something less lethal.

Besides, Alabama, her chosen destination, has charms of its own, although she's going to have to reset her Weather Pixie.

This week, there appeared a long and thoughtful piece by Fusilier Pundit (WeckUpToThees!) on the dodgy subject of telemarketing. He spurns the governmental no-call list, and explains what needs to be done:

I reported on my own experience back in the spring of '96:

And eventually I got rid of the voice-mail system, which makes me about as inaccessible as possible without actually ripping the wires from the walls. I don't pick up anything without a number attached. As is the practice chez Fûz, OUT OF AREA sends up a red flag:

I'd pay a few extra bucks for that myself. The telco here offers some sort of challenge/response system, but I suspect it will discourage legitimate callers (of which I have two or three) just as much as it will Verbal Spammers.

And just because I'm listed in the directory doesn't mean I consent to having my bell rung at odd hours.

(Note: Minor imprecisions of phrasing were changed approximately 20 minutes after the original posting, and the title was unsubtly altered.)

He'd hate like hell for me to say so, I suspect, but no one grasps the Zeitgeist quite as expertly as Lileks:

Of course, this is why we love Lileks.

This meme started floating around a few days ago, and I hadn't given it much thought, mostly due to doubts as to the extent of my qualifications, given the vectors of some of the branches on my family tree. Still, in a nation where racism is off the front burner but still very much a reality, surely it's worth the effort.

In the meantime: What does it mean to be white? Aldahlia answers:

I am almost entirely freckleless, and occasionally entirely feckless, but mostly I'm on the same page here, and of course she's right; being white is not the default, so to speak, and given the current trends in births and immigration, it eventually won't be the majority. (In some areas, it's already happened.) I do have concerns about hyphenates, at least in terms of terminology; those who define themselves as Something-Or-Other-American, inevitably, if perhaps inadvertently, are putting the "American" aspect of themselves last, and I have trouble thinking of that as a Good Thing.

Still, whether you buy the old melting-pot metaphor or the more contemporary salad-bar concept, it's important to remember that we're all in this together, and the lamentations of a few extremists notwithstanding, we're gradually getting closer. And at this point — indeed, at any point — the labels matter less than the lives.

Actor Gordon Jump, most recently the lonely Maytag repairman but perhaps best remembered as Arthur Carlson, manager of the fictional radio station on the TV series WKRP in Cincinnati, has died in Orange County, California at the age of 71.

No turkeys were involved.

The South Texas Independent School District has decided not to drop Robert A. Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land or Aldous Huxley's Brave New World from the tenth-grade Advanced Placement curriculum at the district's Science Academy.

A handful of parents had objected strenuously to the books; the district has responded by requiring principals to offer alternatives upon parental request.

I liked this statement by Beverley Becker, associate director of the American Library Association's Office for Intellectual Freedom, sponsor of Banned Books Week:

Amen to that.

Donald O'Connor, Gene Kelly's sidekick in Singin' in the Rain, the man who raised dancing with a dummy to an art form in that movie's "Make 'em Laugh" sequence, has died in California at 78.

As a clumsy, oafish non-dancer, I couldn't relate so easily to Kelly, and I never could decide whether it was more useful to fixate on the seemingly-accessible Debbie Reynolds or the ethereal, unreachable Cyd Charisse, so O'Connor held this rambling wreck of a film together for me, and I'm glad he did — even if he did wind up in the hospital for a couple of days after the mayhem of "Make 'em Laugh".

"Thanks, R.F. At last I can stop suffering and write that symphony."

No one will ever accuse The Daily Oklahoman of being a great metropolitan newspaper; the kindest thing I can say about it, generally, is that it sticks to its editorial guns.

Then again, it's never occurred to me that the Oklahoman would necessarily benefit from a "readers' representative", an ombudsman, someone whose job it is to critique the paper's coverage and practices; if readers object to the way the paper is doing its job, they can quit paying for it (or, in the case of some of us, kvetch in public about it).

Matt Welch takes a dim view of ombudsmen (ombudspersons?) himself:

If a paper exercises poor editorial judgment, payback, in the marketplace and elsewhere in the press — and, lately, in the Blogosphere™ — is swift and ferocious. And it's unclear how the new "public editor" at The New York Times could have done anything to alleviate, say, the Jayson Blair situation. Every organization should have one person whose function is to point out things that are going wrong, but it's not necessary to invest that person with the trappings of a Representative of the Public; it is only necessary to pay attention to what is said.

It's been said before, many times, many ways, but it always bears repeating, especially when it's said as well as it is by Tobacco Road Fogey:

I would add only that these things also seem to baffle some of our own residents, who can't understand why anyone would willingly embrace Burger King or Costco or Fox News when there's a more enlightened path — theirs — to follow. Nor can they understand why no one seems to be joining them along said path.

Hold the mayo on that Whopper, please.

It's hard to describe an actual aroma without being able to call forth a replica thereof — O Smell-O-Vision, where is thy stink? — but if anyone can pull it off, it's Fred:

In terms of sheer poesy, this perhaps surpasses even Lileks' description of Belvedere vodka last month:

Half of the writers in the world, I presume, are below average; reading these guys always makes me feel like I belong with that half.

Wake Forest University is wondering what to do about Doctor Tom.

Doctor Tom wasn't a real doctor; he didn't even play one on TV. In fact, inasmuch as he died in 1927, he never saw a TV at all.

Tom Jeffries was the maintenance man for the Demon Deacons for forty years, and a plaque to his memory was raised by alumni in 1933. When the new Wake Forest campus was built, a replica of the plaque was created.

None of this would be controversial except that (1) Doctor Tom, as he was known to everyone, administration, faculty and students alike, was of African-American descent, and (2) some in the university community have decided that the plaque "is a daily insult to Mr. Jeffries and every other person of African descent who walks onto this campus," in the words of Rev. Carlson Eversley, an adjunct professor at Wake Forest's school of divinity.

What should the university do? Eversley wants the plaque amended to show Tom's last name and an explanation on another plaque of why and how the omission of same is dehumanizing, complete with references to the practice as it existed in the antebellum South. Oh, and an apology from the administration.

It is, of course, fascinating how unpleasant memories from the pre-Civil War era are so easily evoked in people who weren't born until a century afterwards.

(Via Tongue Tied)

As an actual registered Democrat with a current subscription to Mother Jones — yes, really — I get regular mailings from the activist Left. One operation with which I was unfamiliar is Syracuse Cultural Workers, which bills itself as a "Peace and Justice Publisher Since 1982", and whose catalog arrived here yesterday.

Most of the contents were pretty predictable — T-shirts, posters, buttons, books like How Wal-Mart Is Destroying the World — but one particular poster caught my eye. It's called The Alternative Alphabet Poster For Little And Big People, it appears to be an SCW exclusive, and here's the pitch:

A is for Africa, B is for Bicycle, and so forth. Twenty-five of the twenty-six entries seem at least defensible, and they did come up with a reasonable X word (Xylem), but I'm puzzled by E: Echinacea?

It is a measure of something, surely, that in a 178-page issue of Harper's Bazaar — November '03, to be exact — an issue with both a feature on Meg Ryan and a pictorial with Gisele Bündchen, the only photograph that got more than perfunctory attention from me was a shot of Christine Todd Whitman.

Well, yes, she's expensively-dressed, but everyone in Bazaar is expensively-dressed; it's their raison d'être. So it's probably not the $2680 Carolina Herrera jacket/skirt combo or even the $1100 Salvatore Ferragamo pumps; what I'm seeing, I think, is a woman who is absolutely thrilled to have a private life again, and I do believe it shows.

Not that I have extensive experience observing women being thrilled, mind you.

The late Neil Postman was not a Luddite; while he decried the encroachment of technology, particularly media technology, he believed strongly in the ability of the human mind to deal with the sort of sensory overload which defined the last half-century or so.

Among observers of the media, Postman generally took second place behind Marshall McLuhan. But while McLuhan tended to stay on message (and therefore on the medium), Postman was all over the map. An educator by trade, his first shot across society's bow was Teaching as a Subversive Activity, written with frequent collaborator Charles Weingarten and published in 1969, a book which asks the ultimate question about education: "What's worth knowing?" (An excerpt is posted here.) The Disappearance of Childhood (1982) suggested that mass media were blurring the lines between children and adults, to the benefit of neither; Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985) blasted Hollywood for trivializing the human experience.

Former student Jay Rosen remembers Neil Postman in Salon this morning. It's worth some of your time.

Best of the Web (scroll down to the bottom of "The cognitive elite") is reprinting this paragraph found at DemocraticUnderground.com:

Says James Taranto at BoW of this:

What I find amusing is that these are generally the same sort of people who routinely castigate the GOP for its presumed lapses into voodoo economics. In their world, it's Lake Wobegon in reverse: most everyone is below average.

(Muchas gracias: Kimberly Swygert.)

And they say chemotherapy sucks.

(Via Cruel Site of the Day)

Well, actually, she's not, but she might be the most visible these days.

(Muchas gracias: Steph Mineart.)

David Marcus of the San Jose Marital and Sexuality Centre has done the math:

This does not mean that 10:55 is okay and 11:05 is dangerous; what it does mean is that there is such a thing as a slippery slope, and porn serves as, shall we say, a lubricant for same.

A quote that jumped out at me:

And they probably liked it better than not being sucked at all — at least, at first.

(Muchas gracias: Susanna Cornett, who cheerfully wields the Fiskars™ on the article in question.)

A parent with a child in a Tulsa school got this explanation of what's going on in the classroom:

Um, yeah. Okay. Whatever you say.

Now what, exactly, does all this have to do with teaching French?

I can appreciate the idea of avoiding rote memorization, but in a foreign language for which total immersion is impracticable, there is really no choice but to learn all those irregular verbs and such.

Michael Bates, who brought this to light, comments:

Meanwhile, the school board, having been thwarted at every turn by the presence of trees, has rewritten the curriculum to avoid any mention of the forest.

"Theme for the year," indeed.

The impudent finger, as the Romans called it. (Hint: it's not the thumb.) And, in Texas at least, it does not necessarily constitute a breach of the peace.

Two years ago, Robert Lee Coggin was trapped behind a member of the Anti-Destination League on US 183 in Lockhart. Annoyed at this obvious failure to observe Texas lane discipline, he tailgated the miscreant and flashed his lights. The perp, thinking the police were on his tail — Coggin's Chevy Caprice was, at one time, a police cruiser — duly pulled over, whereupon Coggin flew by and allegedly flipped him the bird. Hackles rose, police were called, and Coggin was charged with making an offensive gesture, drawing a $250 fine.

Coggin was sufficiently pissed off at this to try to get his conviction overturned, and the Texas Third Court of Appeals in Austin has now ruled in his favor.

I'm still not going to drive through Austin with a "Tuck Fexas" bumper sticker, though.

(Via Hit & Run)

The warning labels affixed to cigarette packs may have had little effect upon the actual number of smokers, but they've provided the raw material for probably thousands of parodies over the years, some of them actually amusing. One of my favorites turned up in the National Lampoon, back when they mattered; it was a warning label for prepackaged marijuana that read something like this: "Warning: The Attorney General Has Determined That Reeferette Smoking Is Hazardous To Your Ass."

I don't know if Acidman read that particular piece, but he definitely has the same sort of spirit.

The new house, of course, is new only to me: it was built in 1948, and most of the neighborhood as it exists today was in place by 1953 or so. Inasmuch as it's the city's express desire to keep this place looking like 1953, I find myself contemplating the Fifties as we know them, and as they've been redefined in the half-century since.

Decades, of course, seldom conform to mere chronology, and the Fifties were arguably the longest decade of the twentieth century, beginning 25 June 1950 along the 38th parallel on the Korean peninsula and ending 22 November 1963 in the city of Dallas. In the intervening years, we've been taught that the Fifties were a perfectly dreadful era, riven with paranoia and choked with conformity, the spectres of Jim Crow and Joe McCarthy glaring down upon the landscape, and June Cleaver forever stuck behind her vacuum cleaner.

But a truer picture of the Fifties, I think, emerges when you stand these arguments on their heads. Tailgunner Joe's obsession with communists, however overwrought, was based on fact. Jim Crow was about to be plucked: in 1954, Linda Brown won out over the Topeka Board of Education, and the following year Rosa Parks was arrested, precipitating the Montgomery bus boycott. Innocuous pop tunes were displaced by rhythm and blues and its marginally-legitimate child, rock and roll. And while Ward may have been the nominal head of the Cleaver family, it takes less than half an hour to notice that June actually ran things.

And I think of the American automobile industry, which produced such marvels as the beautifully-understated '53 Studebaker and the wonderfully-overdone '57 Mercury Turnpike Cruiser, reminders that the Fifties were a time when Americans thought they could do just about anything. Then came the misadventure of Vietnam, which persuaded us that we weren't all that omnipotent after all. We haven't been quite the same since.

But in the Fifties, the sky was the limit, the bonds of earth still surly, and while I have no compelling urge to turn back the clock, I'd like to see some vestige of Fifties ebullience, that peculiarly American brand of self-confidence, take root and grow in the 21st century, while I put down roots of my own in a place (and not just a physical place) that remembers.

Over at Spathic, the Arbiter is assembling a fantasy cast for a remake of a movie that needs no remake: The Philadelphia Story.

Téa Leoni as Tracy and David Duchovny as Mike? Insane, or inspired, or maybe some combination thereof. On the other hand, Bruce Willis is Sidney Kidd.

According to a girl in love, Piers Anthony says you probably shouldn't.

In fact, he's said that rather a lot, now that I think about it.

Fox News chief Roger Ailes does seem to cover the same ground a lot, but I suspect it's because everyone asks him the same questions every time.

In a piece for Broadcasting & Cable, Ailes is his usual part genial, part pugnacious self:

Which naturally leads to the question of "objectivity" — does it really exist?

And Ailes describes an encounter with former New York Times editor Howell Raines:

Maybe it is. And Roger, if you're reading this: you might want to impress that idea upon Bill O'Reilly.

(Muchas gracias: Debbye Stratigacos.)

The title here is a slogan from the old Van Raalte company, which during the Forties and Fifties sold upscale lingerie and hosiery and such, moving into pantyhose in the Sixties and disappearing sometime in the Seventies. As commercial appeals go, it cuts straight to the chase; only L'Oreal's "Because I'm worth it" exceeds it for ego massage. But we wouldn't respond to it at all if it weren't true: we do love nice things.

I'm reading Virginia Postrel's The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness, and one paragraph continues to poke at me while I decide how to dress up my new home. It's from the very first chapter, The Aesthetic Imperative:

Target certainly seems kinder to my pocketbook, anyway.

This week I received a catalog from an operation called Design Within Reach, which is presumably aimed at people with homes worthy of coverage in Architectural Digest, with budgets to match. In years gone by, I would have tossed it without a second look. Not today. I pored over the pages, wondered what it might be like to own a chaise longue based on Le Corbusier's 1928 design, or a Ludwig Mies van de Rohe daybed, and, for a few moments anyway, ignored the financial realities.

So maybe it's not quite so imperative, this aesthetic, at least just yet, at least for me; get a knockoff of this chaise into JCPenney, though, and I'm in.

Yahmdallah (30 October) has had it up to here, maybe a trifle farther, with The New Movie Eroticism:

One must go into realms H. P. Lovecraft might shun to exceed Michael Jackson's level of creepiness, I aver, but otherwise this seems fairly close to the mark. I imagine, though I haven't seen it and don't plan to, that the low point will probably be Vincent Gallo's The Brown Bunny, which climaxes, so to speak, with a scene involving Chloe Sevigny playing scales and trills on Gallo's piccolo.

It's not like this never happened before in a more-or-less mainstream film — by most accounts, Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie were not simulating their sex scene in Don't Look Now, thirty years ago — but it never occurred to director Nicolas Roeg to focus the camera on the actual organ-grinding, and I don't think I'd particularly have wanted to see it if he had.

Perhaps this is just a reflection of real life. If you or I walked in on a couple dancing horizontally, the most likely reaction would be "Uh, excuse me," followed by a hasty retreat.

And speaking as a person with a Y chromosome, who is entirely too capable of fleeting thoughts of "I wonder what she looks like naked" when in the presence of any adult female this side of Madeleine Albright, I'd just like to say that I'd prefer my fantasies to remain unsullied by any of that frightful reality stuff.

Maybe more than that, by Fred First's lights:

My credentials as a pessimist are well-established, but this is precisely the spirit in which I undertook the three World Tours. If all that mattered was the destination, I could have subjected myself to the various indignities of air travel and gotten it over with much more quickly. And when I get to do it again, probably in 2005 (I see my '04 budget rapidly being consumed by Stuff For The House), I expect to feel exactly the same way.

Andy Crossett hedges only a little here:

I'm not entirely persuaded, especially since the Spears pose is deliberately styled after one Angie Dickinson did for the same magazine in 1966 (which was reproduced for the cover in 1993).

What say you, loyal readers? Britney or Angie?

And in view of the burgeoning interest in Blogging Babes...no, I'd better not go there.

Lileks has now seen all three films in the Matrix trilogy, and he detects the vacuum at its center:

If this Bleat had had a working permalink, it would have been just about perfect.

My children tend to be scornful of Iowa, which, they patiently explained to me, is an acronym: "Idiots Out Walking Around." I don't know why. Maybe it's a Missouri thing, something like the way Oklahomans are expected to sneer at Texas and vice versa.

And I have to admit that my particular experience in Iowa is limited to a couple of days over a couple of summertimes, and suburban Des Moines strikes me as just as dull as it sounds, but as Dawn points out, I've missed the good stuff:

Mental note: Next time I'm in Iowa, get farther away from I-35 and/or I-80.

The Oklahoman has a number of Veterans' Day-related pieces today, but this is the one to read.

In the military, we are reminded, the living always remember the dead.

And on this day, I hope, everyone remembers both.

Art Carney, Jackie Gleason's best bud and comedic foil on The Honeymooners, died Sunday at his home in Connecticut; the family did not make any announcement until today, after private services.

Carney, who went on to win an Oscar as the first half of Harry and Tonto, was 85.

Do not confuse Ed Norton with Peter Norton, who used to make useful products for your PC.

Then again:





(With thanks to Steve Kremer.)

Not only did John Fitzgerald Kennedy die, but he died awfully close to Thanksgiving, which will make it difficult for people who revere his memory to move for a national holiday to commemorate that day in Dallas.

Which is not to say that American retailers can't rise to the occasion. Michele tells of working in a New York record store in November 1983, when a co-worker hit upon the deeply offensive and incredibly funny idea of putting up a display rack of Dead Kennedys material to, um, capitalize on twentieth-anniversary JFK nostalgia.

This went over about as well as you'd think — Jello Biafra himself could scarcely come up with a more blatant lightning rod for public outrage — but the idea that it actually happened brings me some strange mutant form of glee.

New York's NoRelevance is sort of Lileks East: while you won't find the level of volubility that you love about Lord High Master James, you will find a similarly deranged obsession with cultural ephemera.

The newest exhibit is called Cult of the Goat: Bock Beer Labels and a Homonym Gone Awry, and if ever you've wondered if there was truly a connection between brewskis and Beelzebub — but I'm getting ahead of myself.

Go and enjoy.

Some thoughts while I wait for the assault of the next cold front:

It might be at that. Of course, once up to 30 mph, you should be able to negotiate the ten miles into town in twenty minutes, but what the hell — sometimes it doesn't pay to be in a rush.

(Muchas gracias: Key Monroe.)

Syaffolee complains about one cultural manifestation I admit I hadn't really noticed:

Why haven't I come across this phenomenon myself? I suppose it's because I'm well removed from academia, which means that the most likely places for me to see young Asian women of any description will be at cultural events, where I seldom hear them talking at all, or in a retail context, where there are recognizable advantages to not being rude.

As for the comedienne in question, I've caught some of her shtick on television, and, well, I have to wonder if she'd have attracted any attention at all if she bore a surname like Jones. Of course, this is just me being angry and foul-mouthed.

Mark Pierce takes a dim view of cosmetic surgery for the feet:

Cosmetic surgery in general is perhaps not the brightest thing in the world, though I'd be the last person in the world to tell the Sixpacks (Joe and Susan, not necessarily including their 2.3 kids) that they shouldn't go spending their money (their insurance likely won't cover it) on trying to look better: if it buys you some peace of mind or an occasional wolf whistle, it may be worth the risk that comes with any medical procedure more complicated than popping a couple of Advil.

Still, the foot is a fiendishly-complicated arrangement of hard-to-fix parts, and there's a lot to be said for "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." And is it sexy? Certainly it can be. (Bless you, Jimmy and Manolo and Michelle.)

I mentioned the new announcement for the Academy Awards ("And the Oscar® goes to...." instead of "And the winner is....") in this post, mostly in an effort to deflect attention from my lowly position in the 2003 Weblog Awards.

Now the Proprietor at Coffee Grounds has decided to see how well this no-losers philosophy extends to, among others, professional athletes:

Somehow this reminds me of the old Cold War-era joke about the auto race between an American Chevrolet and a Soviet-built Moskvich. The Chevy won. Pravda duly reported that the Moskvich placed second, while the filthy American capitalistmobile came in next to last.

Seven World Trade Center is coming back.

The first steel beam was raised yesterday, on the way to a height of 1776 feet.

And below the beam fluttered an American flag — crafted in Afghanistan.

You gotta love it. As Michele says:

Amen to that.

Michael Wolff argues that media have become rude because the sight (or hearing, in the case of talk radio) of it strikes a chord deep within us, a desire to be just as overbearing as we've never been allowed to be in a Polite Society.

Kevin Holtsberry takes exception to this idea, complaining that "it makes a vice into a virtue."

I started scribbling on this topic, and it got longer and longer and still I didn't come up with a reasonable conclusion, so I killed the post.

And then, thinking that maybe I'm not the only one who is of two minds on this subject — I mean, I greatly enjoy heaping invective upon the deserving, but there are times when it's counterproductive — I reposted it as a Vent with the same title. (Of course, I hate to waste a good title.)

What to do with Saddam Hussein? Robb Hibbard (Wednesday, 2:16 pm) suggests the Ludovico Technique, as described in A Clockwork Orange:

Not that we're trying to rehabilitate the merzky prestoopnik, mind you:

Choodesny, O my droogies, to viddy such in the gazetta.

If you're thinking that one of the drawbacks to home schooling is the utter lack of memorabilia and/or schwag, think again. Jostens, a name familiar to an awful lot of students approaching baccalaureate, has brought out a line of graduation products, including announcements, diplomas, caps and gowns, and (yes!) class rings — everything the kids at More Science High get, without having to stand in line.

(Muchas gracias: Kimberly Swygert.)

Uzi Gal, who invented the submachine gun that bears his name, died last year, and now, after nearly fifty years, the IDF is replacing its stock of Uzis with more modern weaponry. One potential replacement is the Corner Shot, which, as its name suggests, can actually fire around a corner.

While Israel may not be using the Uzi, they will continue to manufacture it for export. Meanwhile, Costa at The Critical 'I' reminds us that we can still get AK-47s — for now, anyway.

Cam Edwards' post about Lenny Bruce receiving a posthumous pardon from New York Governor George Pataki for some reason reminded me of my favorite Bruce story, and how often do I pass up the chance to tell a favorite story?

It was 1963 and Camelot was still in full swing. JFK had stared the Soviets in the eye, and they blinked; Jackie had remade fashion in her own image; a comedian named Vaughn Meader who did a note-perfect Kennedy impression sold zillions of copies of an LP called The First Family and was readying Volume 2; and all, we thought, was right with the world.

Then came November and that terrible day in Dallas and nothing was ever going to be the same. The national funny bone disappeared, with no sign it might ever be tickled again. A week passed, and Lenny Bruce was booked into a theatre on the Lower East Side, and the audience was more than usually anxious: what would he say? How can he say anything at a time like this?

And Lenny Bruce came out and stared at the audience. He unscrewed the mike and walked away from the spotlight. He stared at the audience, paced up and down the stage, and stared at the audience again. And what he said was this:

"Vaughn Meader is screwed."

Which, as it turned out, was true.

Tomorrow Mike of Fly Over Country is heading to Beirut; he and his wife will be doing some missionary work in Lebanon, and then stopping off in Paris for a couple of days. "Two hostile environments," he quips.

Does the Orange Alert faze him in any way? "What's my faith worth," he says, "if I'm scared?"

Heh. Indeed.™

Godspeed, good fellow.

Bob Moos, in DMN Daily (the blog of The Dallas Morning News), wonders if maybe we're going through these holidays at the wrong speed or something:

DallasNews.com not being fond of permalinks, just scroll down to It's 10 O'clock — Do You Know Where Your Tree Is? (26 December, 8:15 am).

Judge James Alexander had had it up to here with people appearing before the Oakland County (Michigan) Circuit Court in garb more suitable for putting up drywall. The court now has a dress code and some stricter rules of conduct, and violators may be sent home or worse.

This action hasn't built any excitement in Pontiac just yet — so far, Judge Alexander has sent just one person home to change — but things should get interesting as temperatures rise and quantities of clothing diminish.

(Via Dawn at Altered Perceptions)

VibeOK, the section of NewsOK.com that's aimed at young, happenin' kids (pardon me while I hurl), is asking, in the wake of the latest Britney Spears debacle: "If you could marry a pop star for 55 hours, who would it be?"

A dozen choices (six male, six female) are offered, none of them especially inspiring, but if I had two days and change, I suppose the least annoying of the bunch would be Beyoncé Knowles, who is easy on the eyes and generally not known as a pain in the neck.

On the other hand, I could think of a dozen bloggers more worthy of my time, though I am no more likely to win their hearts than Beyoncé's.

Alfred Pugh has died in Bay Pines, Florida. According to the Veterans Administration, he was the oldest American veteran who had been wounded in combat.

Pugh, who spoke both French and English, served in World War I as an infantryman who doubled as interpreter, and was taken out by a mustard-gas blast in the Argonne. "We didn't get gas masks," he said, "until the day after it happened." The French subsequently elected him to the Légion d'Honneur with rank of Chevalier.

The VA says about three hundred American WWI veterans are still alive.

Al Pugh survived the mustard gas, but it was something else that got to his lungs that killed him: pneumonia. He was a week and a half short of his 109th birthday.

I thank him, as I thank all our troops.

Aldahlia says she's "an honest to God movie snob of massive proportions," and maybe it's true:

Having once castigated a radio station for playing a hacked-together edit of Tommy James' "Crimson and Clover" instead of the proper single version or even (heaven help us) that absurd quasi-psychedelic LP mix, I suspect I am in no position to grumble here. And besides, if everything (and everyone) were perfect, we'd be bored out of our skulls.

Mad #438 (February) is hyping its fake letter from Michael Jackson, but the spread you have to see is a six-page satire by Jeff Kruse called "The League of Rejected Superheroes". It's decent enough, but what makes it work is that Mad somehow managed to snag some Big-Name Artists. (Yeah, I know, Mad is a corporate cousin to DC Comics, but still, there's some sort of Wall of Separation between them.)

Frank Miller introduces you to Inebrion, a superhero who has had one or two or a quadrillion too many.

J. Scott Campbell shows you Scantily-Clad Woman, for whom "wonderbra" is more than a mere brand name.

Dave Gibbons presents the Entomologist, who apparently was bitten by a radioactive tortoise at the zoo while he was trying to get the attention of some of the spiffier bugs. (No relation to Dr. Weevil.)

John Byrne illustrates Mediocre Man, so far the only superhero who acquired his powers through a Sally Struthers home-study course.

John Romita, Jr. gives us Sloggtor of Globbzorr, who is apparently fortysomething and divorced.

Michael Allred delineates Vocabulon, to whom sesquipedalianism is just the beginning.

Arthur Adams found time to draw Apathenia, Queen of Not Giving a Damn, who first appeared in BFD Comics back in 1993.

And finally, from the pen of Jim Lee, The Incredible Infringement Man, who...what's that? Any more and I'll have to pay royalties?

(Actually, I just wanted to get something up on this before Four Color Hell found out.)

Erica is irked by the ubiquitous term "bestseller":

And possibly "We shipped so many of these books that it's got to be a hit, and by the time they're remaindered, nobody will remember what we said anyway."

Besides, book quality and book sales have a tangential relationship at best.

In 1977, the two Cincinnati daily newspapers, Gannett's Enquirer and E. W. Scripps' Post, entered a Joint Operating Agreement, under which they would maintain separate news operations but pool their advertising and circulation functions. The agreement was for ten years, and would be automatically renewed unless one of the two parties opted out with three years' notice. The Department of Justice approved the deal in 1979.

Gannett has now officially informed Scripps that they are opting out, that the JOA will end at the end of 2007.

Evening papers in general have been in decline; Post circulation today is one-quarter what it was when the deal with the Enquirer was struck.

What may save the Post is its strength south of the Ohio River, where a separate Kentucky Post edition is circulated for readers in northern Kentucky.

The next two JOAs up for renewal are in Birmingham, Alabama and Tucson, Arizona: both expire in 2015.

The universe of rock and soul contains some truly memorable screams, from James Brown's opening shout in "I Got You (I Feel Good)" to Roger Daltrey's anguished shriek right before "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss" in "Won't Get Fooled Again".

Howard Dean's uncontrolled emission in Iowa, the sound of a man choking on his second Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster, doesn't quite match this lofty standard, but apparently, unlike these examples, it works with a number of different songs, and, well, there's a lot to be said for versatility.

Bob Keeshan, creator and star of the long-running children's TV series Captain Kangaroo, has died at the age of 76.

Keeshan, who made his TV debut on NBC's The Howdy Doody Show as the silent clown Clarabell, signed with CBS in 1955 and demonstrated for the next thirty years how he thought a kids' show ought to be done: gentle, occasional lessons, low commercial load.

Cue up Edward G. White's "Puffin' Billy," a track from an old British production library which became the Captain's first theme song, and watch the ceiling for ping-pong balls.

(Muchas gracias: Laurence Simon, Amish Tech Support.)

Spirulina? Flavonoids? Do I want stuff like this in my beer?

Short answer: No.

Longer answer: Hell, no.

Can't get enough of Howling Howard Dean? Connecticut-based HeroBuilders.com is introducing a 12-inch Dean doll in two flavors: one which pontificates on matters like, say, guys in pickups with Confederate-flag decals, and one which replicates the famous (and now ubiquitous) Yeeeagh! Either one of these characters will set you back $35.95 — a version without the voice saves you $11 — and they'll ship the last week of February; dejected fans of Richard Gephardt should note that these Deanette sets are made right here in the good old USA.

(Via Fark)

Georgie Rasco of the Oklahoma City Literacy Council tosses up this startling statistic:

Given the vast quantities of books being purchased in this country, obviously some of us are taking up the slack — but the sixty percent who don't buy books aren't benefiting in any substantial way from the forty percent who do.

I try to avoid getting worried about this Great Divide, lest I come up with some bizarre notions that involve, say, the government conspiring with the pharmaceutical companies to keep us dumb and drugged.

One of the evergreen pieces from Frosty Troy's The Oklahoma Observer is the "I Am Your Public School" essay. While the Observer has no Web presence, the essay can be read at the site of the Oklahoma Education Association.

Yesterday, Cam Edwards opined that "I Am Your Public School", in his words, is "due a good fisking."

Chris O'Donnell obliges.

Actor and "semiotician" (okay, if you say so) Erik Todd Dellums has a major problem with Anthony Mingella's film of Charles Frazier's novel Cold Mountain: it's not about slavery. It's set during the Civil War Between The States For Southern Independence; therefore, reasons Dellums, it should be telling the story of the plight of black Americans. Never mind that this isn't the story Mingella — or, for that matter, Frazier — was trying to tell. We're talking big-H History here:

Come to think of it, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre really should have contained scenes critical of logging, and there isn't one mention of gas chambers anywhere in The Producers.

Dellums' current project is Camp D.O.A., for which the casting call requested, among other standard-issue characters, a "Caucasian male, 18-25, hip-hop type." How dare they have some white guy stick his nose into black culture?

(Via Ravenwood's Universe)

Eddie Clontz, once (and maybe future — who knows?) editor of the Weekly World News, has died in Salt Springs, Florida.

In 1979, the National Enquirer went legit, so to speak, and ponied up the bucks for color presses and whatnot; the owners wanted to get their money's worth out of the old gear, though, so the Weekly World News was created as a drain for stories not considered good enough for the Enquirer. Clontz, previously a staffer at the St. Petersburg Times, was hired in 1981 to spruce up the old clunker, and he hit upon the notion of printing stuff that no one could possibly believe. (Just in case you thought this was a New York Times innovation.)

The WWN, by any conventional standard, is an anti-newspaper, and Clontz, by all accounts, had a splendid time keeping it that way. His tiny staff of mostly non-journalists — for instance, staff writer R. Neale Lind is perhaps better known for writing a gorgeously sappy love song back in the Sixties — created a series of bogus bylines and recurring characters that moved half a million copies every seven days. And they got paid well for doing it, too: Clontz once observed that "we have to pay them a lot, because we are, in effect, asking them to end their careers. We're the French Foreign Legion of journalism."

Eddie Clontz was fifty-six years old, not quite the same age as Elvis Presley at his passing. (Elvis, according to the WWN, died on 14 May 1993, in Nashville, of complications from diabetes.) His paper, of course, will go on forever, or at least so long as people wonder about Bat Boy.

Hardly the first time you've seen that here, eh?

But this time I speak literally. Wild at Bleeding Brain, back from his trip to Africa, describes a rather distasteful practice of thuglings in an unnamed city (from the context, I assume Nairobi):

Now that's an incentive program.

Two parts of Wild's report from Africa have been posted, and I hope there's more to come, not so much because I want to hear about methods of street crime in Kenya, but because the country — indeed, the whole of Africa — seems as remote to me as Neptune, and more often than not the viewpoints filtering through Big Media strike me as tightly canned and loaded down with axes to be ground.

By contrast, Kim Du Toit's tales of South Africa are always compelling, even when they venture into the scary stuff, and I think Wild's stories will be just as worthwhile.

Apparently we truly can't control where the movies begin or end; the SciFi channel has finally quit showing reruns of the last three seasons (the only ones to which they had the rights) of Mystery Science Theater 3000.

This isn't exactly surprising — when production ended in the late 90s, it should have been perfectly obvious that the reruns would end in the not-too-distant future — but it's still a shock to the system, since MST3k was arguably the last comedy show with any legitimate claim to innovation.

CT points out that there wasn't much chance of a revival anyway:

Which rights, I presume, have to be renegotiated for the video issues as well, which haven't exactly been pouring out of Rhino lately.

Oh, well. Push the button, Frank.

Well, yes, I'm going to forbid my daughter to see Justin Timberlake, which is probably about as difficult as telling her to avoid gargling with bleach, but the most telling comment about yesterday's Bowl (they tell me that there was a football game, of all things, going on in the background) came from Linda Richman, by way of Robb Hibbard:

And that's the end of that.

Update, 9:05 am: Well, almost. Greg Hlatky points out that this was to be expected:

And frankly, Janet — Miss Jackson if you're nasty — has generally been the least annoying member of the family; this may have been a setup, but I'd like to think they didn't warn her in advance.

A regular reader complains about the coverage of the uncoverage of Janet Jackson's frontage:

But of course. They are the very definition of trivial. But trivial, as it happens, is what we do best; if we expended this much energy on dealing with, say, governmental and corporate corruption, or what's going to happen to the Federal budget when all these damn baby-boomers retire at once, we'd run the risk of actually accomplishing something that various groups of people manifestly don't want accomplished and will resist to the bitter end. What's more, it would stretch the national attention span well beyond what's considered to be its upper limit.

Give us something insignificant, however, and our species shines: oh, if we could only ask Robert Jenkins about his ear.

The redoubtable Man from F.U.N.K.L.E. explains how it is that City of God director Fernando Meirelles came to be nominated for a 2003 Academy Award for a picture released in 2002:

On the other hand, nothing winning an Oscar® — not even Oliver! — can possibly rival the embarrassment level of the Grammy for Best New Artist bestowed upon Milli Vanilli.

Eric Scheie, perplexed by the flap over the Philadelphia restaurant Chink's, observes:

And, of course, no teacher dares assign Joseph Conrad's The Person of Color of the Narcissus these days.

Curious to see the extent of this sort of thing, Scheie went looking for a household product that is seldom seen these days: Spic and Span, which was spun off by Procter & Gamble in 2001 but which is still being manufactured.

Thus motivated, I investigated, and verified that the original surname of Manny, Moe and Jack, the Pep Boys, was not, as I had imagined, Pepstein.

Violence, we are told, is caused by many things: venal media, wrenching poverty, societal pressures, and, lest we forget, easy access to guns.

In fact, the connection between any of these and any single violent act is tenuous at best. We make these assumptions because we can't handle the idea that some people, indifferent to the tenets of a civilized society and irrespective of circumstances, are going to do Bad Things; surely there's some way we can reach them, make them see the error of their ways.

Andrea Harris knows better:

I don't believe anyone is entirely beyond redemption, at least in the Scriptural sense, but until Ludovico arrives with his technique, we're going to have to deal with sociopaths in the time-honored fashion: isolate them, put them where they can't do any further damage. Obviously there are degrees of depravity — the Palestinian suicide bomber is more of a menace to society than the suburban shoplifter — but neither is entitled to a free pass, and I don't much care which theory about extenuating circumstances gets trotted out.

What's the worst possible vacation spot for children? An abandoned steel mill? The Michigan caucuses? The back seat of Michael Jackson's car?

Why, it's the Big Rock Candy Mountain!

I mean, lemonade springs might be nice if you don't mind total immersion in something yellow and spewing, and I'd love to see a bulldog with rubber teeth just once, but cigarette trees? Why, John Banzhaf would have a myocardial infarction.

Yeah, I know. Haywire Mac wrote this as an ode to the road, to the hobos who hopped freights and such; he wasn't thinking about the kids at all. But eighty years later, "Big Rock Candy Mountain" has somehow become a song for children, and the youngsters don't seem to be any worse off for it — though I suspect today's vendors of tunes for tots don't bother to do the last couple of stanzas, sparing your grandchildren and mine the scary image of a lake of whiskey. Or worse, of stew.

(Inspired by Dawn Eden, which is getting to be a fairly common occurrence these days.)

Groundhog: The other other white meat.

Don't take my word for it. Ask Fred.

The Amateur Gourmet attempts to make, if not mountains out of molehills, cupcakes out of Janet Jackson.

Google was unable to turn up any Milton Berle kielbasa recipes.

(Muchas gracias: JaxVenus, Days Gone By.)

This year, Lyric Theatre, the mainstay of local musical theatre, decided that there might be some audience for off-Broadway, non-mainstream stuff, and established something called Second Stage to mount productions that you might not think would go over in sanitary central Oklahoma.

Judging by the crowd at the Civic Center's Little Theatre today, they needn't worry. Pageant: The Musical Comedy Beauty Contest, Second Stage's debut offering, satirizes that American institution nine ways from Sunday, mocking insipid talent competitions, brainless "spokesmodels" and vapid production numbers, and throwing in just a hint of backstage backstabbing. It's screamingly (I almost said "hysterically," but that wouldn't do, would it?) funny, and the ending might be different every night, since members of the audience actually pick the winner. (Earning the tiara today was Miss Great Plains, who in her talent spot performed a bit of wayward oratory called "I Am the Land.")

All in all, it was a wonderful two hours of silliness, complete with an actual wardrobe malfunction, made more ironic by the fact that the victim also serves as Lyric's costume designer. (Of course, as a Southern belle, she never lost her sense and sensibility for so much as a second.) I have no idea what the second offering from Second Stage will be, but I'm there, Jack.

Try as I may to be, um, heteroflexible, I have a great deal of trouble keeping up with the new taxonomy of gayness; there are so many groups and subgroups (and subsubgroups, and no domme jokes, please) that it's well-nigh impossible for someone outside the community to get the hang of it, so to speak.

And just when I'd figured out LGBT, too.

(Bubba, of course, considers them all a mass of undifferentiated preverts, but then he'd include peace activists, environmentalists, and about two-thirds of the Democratic party under that label too, so it's not as precise as he'd like to believe.)

(Via Tongue Tied)

Our congratulations to Ch. Darbydale's All Rise Pouchcove — you can call him Josh — the four-year-old Newfoundland who won Best in Show at the Westminster Kennel Club show last night.

This is something Lileks said, but I wanted a copy of it here as a reminder to — well, me.

In view of the above, I believe it is a Good Thing that I was not blogging in the middle Seventies, or even keeping a handwritten journal: much of what I said, what I did, in those days would be unrecognizable at best and indefensible in any case.

There was no way I could pass up David Kent's debut novel Department Thirty. For one thing, Kent lives here in town; for another, it takes a certain amount of chutzpah to put out a novel about shadowy anti-government conspirators. In Oklahoma City. In 1995, yet.

But this isn't some variation on a theme by Timothy McVeigh. Kent's scruffy hero, Ryan Elder, comes home to Oklahoma after being sacked from yet another radio job, and his parents seem strangely distant, even cryptic.

And then they kill themselves.

What all this is about takes a while to unfold. Some of it is sort of predictable, some of it isn't, but all of it moves at decently high speed, and you know there's bound to be a screenplay in there somewhere. (Of course, if they do make a movie out of Department Thirty, they won't film it here; they'll throw in some exterior shots of the Oklahoma City National Memorial and shoot the rest in Vancouver, so this is one of your few chances to tour the Okay City's meaner streets.) It's a good read, and I'm looking forward to Kent's next book.

To know recursion, you must first know recursion.

If that makes sense to you, you'll understand Slice City, a Sims game that is actually played by Sims.

I am not making this up.

UltraTart will honor the tradition of Lent by giving up something very dear to her.

And from the looks of things, it will be effing difficult.

(Not safe for some workplaces)

From Blue Rinse to Blue Jeans is the title of a new British study which asserts that the age of fifty, a number fraught with anxiety for some of us, will become increasingly less traumatic as life expectancy increases — about seven years over the next thirty — and new technologies address the usual health issues.

The fly in this particular ointment, of course, is the fact that said new technologies cost money, and it will take some time for them to become sufficiently entrenched to be affordable by mere mortals. Still, the pace of change is picking up, and recent history suggests that hardly anyone will be left out completely; even in semi-socialist Britain, the life of someone meeting the contemporary definition of poverty scarcely resembles the lives Hobbes once characterized as "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."

I suspect the curve will turn upward even faster once the baby-boomer generation gets out of the way.

(Suggested by Fark)

It is, of course, quite proper for Dickinson's 10-screen theater at Penn Square Mall to show The Passion of the Christ, and quite proper to advertise it on their sign in the mall lot.

I do wish, however, that they hadn't positioned it between Twisted and Club Dread.

Stephen "Brute Force" Friedland cut a lovely little single for Apple (!) in 1969 called "King of Fuh" (Apple 8, U.K.), produced by the Tokens. (Force, in fact, had been a Token for the previous couple of years; I don't know if he played on the infamous Intercourse album.)

This guy who sells sofas in Canada has got to be a spiritual descendant of His Majesty.

Apparently that was Spalding Gray they pulled out of the East River over the weekend.

Gray, who hadn't been seen since January, had a long history of depression, and presumably committed suicide. In an interview in 1997, he had suggested an epitaph for himself: "An American Original: Troubled, Inner-Directed and Cannot Type." I'd swipe that for myself, except that I can type.

Spalding Gray was sixty-two years old. He leaves behind a wife, three children, and an impressive body of work.

I figure, if Robb Hibbard (9 March, 12:25 pm) can get away with a reference to Gregory's Girl, so can I.

In his piece, Hibbard actually describes a scene with Gregory's sister:

Wise beyond her years. And not just wise, as one of the neighborhood boyz who seeks to win Madeline's heart explains to Gregory:

Ah, youth. What a pity to waste it on the young.

Six Flags World of Adventure in Aurora, Ohio was created from the fusion of two amusement parks: the classic Geauga Lake park, founded way back in 1888, and Sea World Ohio, which opened in 1970.

The park has been drawing about 1.5 million visitors a year, but Six Flags has had a couple of rough years, and will now sell the park to Cedar Fair LP, operators of the Cedar Point amusement park near Sandusky, for approximately $145 million.

The first order of business for Cedar Fair likely will be to expunge all Six Flags-related indicia, including Warner Bros. characters used by Six Flags under license, before the park opens in seven weeks.

Six Flags, based in Oklahoma City, retains one Ohio park: the Wyandot Lake water park near Columbus. The firm also is selling off seven of its eight European facilities.

Cam Edwards predicts the Final Four:

I mention this because he mentions this:

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

And besides, if Kentucky wins, Susanna Cornett is happy, which must be considered a desirable outcome.

It is widely reported that Martin Luther was beset by — or, by some accounts, was obsessed with — flatulence and its, um, related phenomena.

If your immediate response to this is "Yeah, it's because of that Diet of Worms," Dawn Eden has a song for you.

Michele notes that the two biggest box-office phenomena so far in 2004 are The Passion of the Christ and the remake of Dawn of the Dead, and that got her thinking:

Here's the poster. I like it, I like it.

And if Mel Gibson likes it, I propose another videosyncrasy: Bring back the Road Warrior and have him plunge off a cliff. Passers-by rush to help, but it's too late. Still, with his dying words, he reveals his most precious secret: the location of a stash of high-tech equipment which, in the right hands, can literally rebuild the world. And the Samaritan wannabes, once united in their goal of saving this man, now turn on each other in an effort to find the equipment first.

They could call it It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad Max.

The original plastic squeeze-to-open coin purse, the Quikoin®, was invented in 1951, but it didn't become truly ubiquitous until the 1960s, when seemingly every girl (and not a few boys) schlepped along one of these ovoid contraptions, branded with some corporate emblem.

Eventually it went the way of all fads, but in the post-ironic 21st century, where "old" is the new "new," the Quikoin® is back. As it was then, so it is now. And if you think this seems a trifle anachronistic in an era when people pay for Tic Tacs with debit cards, you're missing the point.

(Via Dawn Eden, an anachronism in her own right.)

Bruce works in retail, so he knows what shopping entails, but shopping at Target is something else entirely:

Since my usual reaction to happy couples is to (1) puke my guts out and (2) puke my guts out, in that order, I can understand his frustration. But is this inevitable? Do we all act this way?

I don't think I've ever been the "nesting" type, but I don't think I've ever gone into Target with the express intention of buying X items and nothing but X items, either; I browse, and I take up probably more than my fair share of the aisle. Still, shopping doesn't do a lot for me, and it doesn't do much for Bruce either:

I rather suspect that some of the "hobbyists" can't afford it either.

And not approved by Sanrio, either: it's Hello Cthulhu!

(Muchas gracias: Syaffolee.)

Fraters Libertas are asking "Who's hotter?" One person mentioned in their poll is author/pundit Peggy Noonan, and while Saint Paul is justly fond of her, he can't bring himself to consider her hot:

I need hardly point out that Saint Paul is not at all hinting that anyone is going to lop off Peggy Noonan's ear in the hopes of making a purse from it, but True Perfection is not bestowed upon mere mortals, and the distribution of fragments thereof seems random at best. An appearance by sitcom creator Diane English in the new Entertainment Weekly struck me similarly; while Hanes thought enough of her to feature her in a hosiery ad some years ago, the EW head shot reveals the facial expression of a basset hound in pain.

Then again, as a person whose appearance is untidy at best, I am hardly in a position even to pretend to be judgmental.

(Update, 10:25 pm: Accepted twenty lashes and a copy of the Northern Alliance pamphlet "How To Tell Fraters Apart, Dammit".)

It is no secret that the US economy is shifting toward services and away from manufacturing, to the general despair of (mostly) Rust Belt states where industry seems to be in free fall. The most immediate result of this transition is an expansion of political rhetoric, a lot of yammering about saving jobs. But other things seem to be happening in the background, and one of them might be a general improvement in the national morale.

How is this possible? A study by psychologists Leaf van Boven and Thomas Gilovich [link requires Adobe Reader] suggests that spending our money on services — travel, performing arts, even something as seemingly mundane as dining out — enhances our lives, or at least our perception of our lives, more than buying furniture for the house or toys for the den.

This is not some anti-consumption screed, either; it's an acknowledgement of the fact that we are the sum of our experiences. New goods are nice, but then it's time for newer goods; as later possessions displace earlier ones, their relative position in our hierarchy of needs remains more or less constant. Experiences, on the other hand, are cumulative; we'll always have Paris, even after we've gotten back from Iceland. And experiences can be shared in a way products can't: we'd love to hear about your hike up the Appalachian Trail, especially if the alternative is hearing about your new plasma TV.

These findings, of course, seem more relevant the higher you climb on the socioeconomic ladder; down on the lower rungs, there isn't a whole lot of discretionary income to devote to either goods or services. But overall, it's a fairly safe bet that the demand for services will increase faster than the demand for consumer goods, which means that the American economy is doing exactly what you'd expect under the circumstances. The politicians, of course, will be the last ones to figure this out.

(Via Andrew David Chamberlain's The Idea Shop.)

What a visual Donna conjures up here:

Now I'm not a fan of the usual ethereal, wan, almost wussy characterization of Christ that shows up in entirely too much Western art and semi-art, but this adds a whole new, um, dimension to Mark 15:31.

"He saved others, himself he cannot save," indeed.

Addendum: On a scale of 35 to 98, rate the probability that I will burn in hell for this post.

Update, 3 April, 4:20 pm: She went, and she's reevaluated the guy playing the lead:

Still: Meat Loaf? Donna, I'm crazy about you, but you're scaring me.

You follow the news for any length of time, you quickly pick up on Standard Media Qualifiers. Angry Palestinians, for instance, are generally described as "militants," even in circumstances where "terrorists" might be more appropriate. Conservative groups like the Heritage Foundation are usually dubbed "right-wing think tanks." (Left-wing think tanks, of course, are hardly ever identified as such.) And homosexuals who aren't closeted are referred to as "openly gay," a term which, says Laura, rings false:

Actually, I think this particular media term is intended mostly as CYA: "We're not the ones who outed this person, so don't blame us." And there still being a thriving business in opening the doors to closets despite the wishes of the occupants thereof, I'm not surprised that its usage has persisted.

Now when we start seeing people described as "openly straight," I'll know the pendulum has completed its swing.

It was a lovely sunny day outside: what better time to descend into a dark room in an even darker basement?

Well, actually, it was the last chance to see CityRep's production of Neil Simon's Laughter on the 23rd Floor, which ran for four weeks to solid reviews and decent attendance. CitySpace, the Rep's 90-seat (more or less) facility, somewhere between five-eighths and four-fifths round, sits under the Music Hall; as a late buyer, I got what might be considered the worst seat in the house, but the sightlines were still good.

By now, the story is out: everyone, or at least everyone likely to buy tickets, knows that 23rd Floor is a just-barely-fictionalized retelling of Simon's experience as a fledgling writer on Sid Caesar's Golden Age variety series Your Show of Shows, the staff of which, when they went their separate ways, would continue to make great comedy. But trying to match up the individual characters with Woody Allen or Mel Brooks or Carl Reiner or Larry Gelbart is really irrelevant; what matters here is the idea, which I endorse wholeheartedly, that trying to be funny will drive you crazy. And Simon's balancing act, just enough pathos to remind you why these people love what they do, is difficult to describe, let alone express, but director Catrin Parker pulls it off deftly. The cast (with two substitutions for "medical reasons") is obviously having a wonderful time, and the only time I felt slightly out of sorts was when I contrasted Simon's words with Dennis Palumbo's (and, rumor has it, some of Mel Brooks') in the 1982 film My Favorite Year, set in, yes, a just-barely-fictionalized version of Sid Caesar's Golden Age variety series Your Show of Shows. Then again, Dick Benjamin's movie didn't have anyone who grabbed at my heart quite as efficiently as Brenda Williams, who plays Carol, the sole female writer on the 23rd Floor staff.

And speaking of grabbing at my heart, I felt a small twinge driving home. High clouds had moved in, but there was still lots of bright. The city had turned on the sprinklers in the parklike center median of Shartel through Crown Heights, and there was a couple, maybe thirtysomething, dashing through the water jets, soaked to the skin, quite possibly having the time of their lives. Alas, I'm short on dash these days.

In 1944, French author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry took off from Corsica in a Lockheed Lightning P-38, to photograph southern France in anticipation of an Allied landing, and was never heard from again.

Not until 1998, when a fisherman off Marseilles turned up a bracelet inscribed with the names of Saint-Exupéry and his wife, was there any clue as to the fate of the author of The Little Prince. Two years later, a diver found some P-38 fragments; the French Ministry of Culture organized a salvage team last year, and a plate with the plane's serial number has now been found, verifying that this is indeed where Saint-Exupéry went down, though no trace of his body has yet been located.

Still unexplained is what caused the plane to crash in the first place; there was no evidence that the plane had been shot down or otherwise damaged in flight. And it still perhaps stings that Saint-Exupéry's narrator in The Little Prince, published the year before his deadly mission, was a downed pilot.

A logo for the proposed New York City Olympics in 2012:

I like it. But Skip Perry asks, quite reasonably:

First, let's get the terminology under control, with the help of George Carlin:

Not because she needs help or anything, The Girl Formerly Known As Aldahlia has obtained a copy of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, and she is, to put it mildly, not impressed.

So-called "public-service announcements," says Myria, are "a boil on the ass of society paid for mostly by your tax dollars," and it's not hard to see why:

Not a chance. If we discourage people from having sex, the terrorists have won.

And have you ever noticed that there always seems to be a supply of people who will testify in court that they smoked for thirty, forty years and never had the slightest inkling that sticking burning leaves in their mouths might not actually be good for them?

The FCC gives Brownie points to stations for running these things, which is yet another indication of their contempt for the media they regulate and the audiences those media halfassedly attempt to serve.

A perfectly obvious statement by Tim Cavanaugh:

Among other things, Cavanaugh was thinking of Casablanca, where Bogart's Rick is justly revered, but it's Claude Rains' Captain Renault who has proven over the years to be the most quotable.

And when they put together a Caddyshack tribute page, they didn't name it after Ty Webb (the Chevy Chase character); it's CarlSpackler.com, an acknowledgment of the fact that Bill Murray, billed fifth, towers over this movie like the Dalai Lama himself.

The University of the Incarnate Word, a Catholic college in San Antonio, is discontinuing its Crusader mascot and team name in the name of, you guessed it, cultural sensitivity. The aggrieved group this time: Muslims. You'd think they were expecting the Spanish Inquisition or something.

(Via Tongue Tied)

The Queen of All Evil, having researched everywhere from Jellystone National Park to Quick Draw McGraw's kabonger, has determined that Yogi Bear is gay.

Now I knew that when you're with the Flintstones, you'll have a yabba-dabba-doo time, a dabb-a-doo time, you'll have a gay old time, but I never knew anyone else was locked away in Hanna-Barbera's closet.

Well, except for Velma.

(Update, 6:50 pm: I wonder if ol' Yogi has tried these?)

A reasonable question from I Speak of Dreams:

Then again, will anyone vouch for the superiority of California drivers?

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.

Edward Ocean wants to know:

Examples abound.

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.

"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.

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.

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)

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.

Rachel Lucas has done the math:

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

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.

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.

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 I learned anything in my three trips to New Jersey, it's that a really good waiter is worth his weight, if not necessarily in gold, certainly in stacks of currency; the fellow who worked our table those nights definitely earned the $150 or so tip he got from our $700-ish dinner tab. I don't think we ran him ragged, exactly, but we didn't make it especially easy on him either.

The Interested-Participant, meanwhile, has happened upon a survey which refutes the general notion that wait staff are low-skilled, low-wage personnel. At entry level, earnings of $17 per hour are typical; an experienced waiter makes around $22 an hour. These earnings are supplemented by the occasional free meal. Tips, of course, are taxable, and most of them are duly reported to the IRS.

I knew I was in the wrong business, but then I always have been.

Phil Libin's brother Mark just got his B.A. from Columbia, and while this is clearly an Important Milestone, Phil thinks the impact is lessened by the physical appearance of the actual diploma, which, he says, looks like "the university seems to have merely cut-n-pasted his name into nonsense baby-talk stolen from a blogger.com template."

Worse than that: it's in ALL CAPS.

I never was a big fan of those ornate Teutonic fonts in which maybe twelve or thirteen letters out of twenty-six were easily distinguishable, and Columbia deserves credit for going to a more modern typeface, but still it's in ALL CAPS.

And with that more modern typeface, an affectation is revealed: a reversion to the Latin V instead of U, reminding you of those earliest days of Columbia when it was still part of the Roman Empire. The top of the diploma reads CVRATORES VNIVERSITATIS COLVMBIAE, which, as we approach 2800 A.U.C., strikes me as, in the immortal words of Swiftus, "Nuts. N-V-T-S, nuts."

There are lots of reasons for getting a marriage annulled: the discovery of fraud, the failure by one partner to dissolve a previous marriage, the involvement of Britney Spears. One which comes up occasionally is failure to consummate the marriage, which at least is relatively easy to define.

Unless, of course, you're dealing with the new same-sex marriages, in which case the old definition apparently doesn't mean anything. The question is fairly obvious, I think: what specific sexual act must be performed to constitute a consummation? "How could two people," asks Mike Pechar, "get married when the nature of their relationship inherently meets the criteria for nullification?"

The issue, as I said a couple of months ago, "gets more complicated the more you look at it." I'm not saying all the issues are intractable, but there certainly are a lot of them.

Sure enough, it's the twenty-sixth, but there's no new Catherine Bosley news; the last thing I had to report was back in April.

I do hope that wherever she might be, she is having a reasonably good time.

The now-forgotten motion picture Celsius 127 premiered nearly sixty years ago, during a time when the Allies seemed to be hopelessly bogged down in their quest to put an end to the Axis plans for world domination. Billed as a documentary, Celsius 127 was actually more of a polemic, an attempt to whip up anti-American sentiment by suggesting that the President had deliberately misled the public about his desire to keep the nation out of what had started out as a purely European war, and following up that suggestion with edited newsreel footage of the most unfortunate occurrences during that war. The film's regard for truth is exceeded only by... well, just about everything, actually.

Greg Hlatky, not only a wiser man than I but a better film critic as well, has the details of this bilious little artifact. Fortunately, we live in more enlightened times; a blatant propaganda piece like Celsius 127 could never be made today.

All the flapdoodle over The Day After Tomorrow, and I didn't even bother to read the credits.

UML Guy, however, did:

Oh, yeah. Art Bell and Whitley Strieber. Now there's some serious science.

Dear Al Gore: When are you going to do something about global dumbing?

Spring 1868. General John A. Logan, commander of the Grand Army of the Republic, a support organization founded by veterans for veterans, issues the following as General Order No. 11:

This wasn't the first Memorial Day, technically; the townspeople of Waterloo, New York had inaugurated just such an observance two years earlier. But General Logan's call to honor fallen soldiers resounded nationally, and five thousand turned out at Arlington National Cemetery on the thirtieth of May, placing flowers and placards and gifts on the resting places of twenty thousand.

Two years later, General Logan spoke at Arlington, and this is part of what he said:

I come from a family with strong ties to the military. Both my parents were sailors, and my father had served in the Army before joining the Navy. A brother served in the Navy; a sister took on the duties of a soldier's wife. But it took me rather a long time to understand the "noble dead"; I knew nothing of death except that it was a scary prospect, and I didn't see nobility as being part of the package.

The first inkling of what it meant came during Basic Combat Training in 1972. I was eighteen, grossly immature, and generally scared spitless. The guys with the funny hats who dragged us out of bed at 0500, well, they were just an obstacle, to be endured and then to be forgotten.

Except that they knew things. They weren't scholars issuing position papers from ivory towers; they were men who had Been There, who had faced real enemies, and who had come back to show us pathetic slobs how to face real enemies ourselves. There were things you did, and there were things you did not do, if you expected to come back yourself. And since we were all green as hell and totally lacking in life experience, what we wanted more than anything else was to be able to come back.

So we learned. We fired (just as important, we cleaned) our weapons, we studied simple tactics, we got used to sleeping with the rocks and the ticks, we got to the point where we weren't as embarrassingly bad as we had been a couple of months earlier. And the NCOs, who up to then had never been satisfied with our performance, pronounced themselves satisfied: we were going to be all right.

Most of us did come back. But some did not, and we found ourselves grieving for them and for their families, because we knew that it could just have easily have been us. Their sacrifice was received and found worthy. Noble, even.

I thought about this during the dedication of the World War II Memorial this week, especially when that old soldier Bob Dole explained why it was happening:

I hope, as I slide into old-soldier status myself, that I've done my best to live up to those ideals.

This Caren Lissner story can't possibly be excerpted, so:

Now if we could just remind the politically illiterate that Prohibition was the dumbest thing ever.

Robb Hibbard has permalinks at last!

And to commemorate this august (though it be June) moment, a list of his criteria for moviegoing:

Somehow I suspect his DVD shelf has far more diversity than mine.

From CaribPundit comes this story of a movement in Guyana to raise the age of consent, currently twelve, following the attempt of a 37-year-old businessman to marry a 13-year-old girl over the objections of her mother.

This hit me harder than I thought it would, and I know why. About ten years ago, I had a pen pal of 14 or so; we were both fans of Roundhouse, a comedy-plus-music series that aired on Nickelodeon for three years. I still have a photo of her somewhere. But it would never have occurred to me to visit her, let alone try to lure her into the sack. (The show was eventually cancelled, we fell out of touch, and surely she's forgotten me by now.)

This is undoubtedly related to the vaguely-creepy feeling I get these days from the Playmate of the Month, who almost always proves to be younger than either of my children. Maybe I'd feel differently if I'd been brought up in Guyana, but I doubt it.

On the marquee at La Baguette, a French restaurant a couple miles from me:

They didn't need to say anything else.

Bruce works in retail, which gives this observation additional resonance:

I almost always have an explanation for any purchase I make, although sometimes it's as lame as "It made me feel better."

And I wonder if I'd make more such purchases if I had more discretionary income.

Now that Ashley and Mary-Kate Olsen are, um, legal, McGehee thinks the demand for unclad photos of them will be diminishing.

I have my doubts. In the mind of the Average Perv, "twins" trumps "underage"; if anything reduces the demand, it will be their desire to separate themselves into individuals — lately, interviewers have been asked not to refer to them as a unit — rather than their long-awaited post-jailbait status.

Still, Mary-Kate seems awfully insubstantial for serious fantasy material these days.

The "Ask the Critic" sidebar in Entertainment Weekly, like most such features, is highly dependent on the quality of the questions asked, and it's probably a good thing we see only one or two questions a week and not the thousands which were thrown away.

Sometimes, though, they strike gold. Asked about a pop-music figure who might deserve a biopic, Owen Gleiberman suggests exactly the one I'd most want to see: Marvin Gaye, played by the comparably-inspiring Taye Diggs. I'm not sure I'm ready for Beyoncé Knowles as Tammi Terrell, but I'll be doggone if Morgan Freeman isn't perfect for the vengeful Marvin, Senior: the showdown between Gaye and his dad (you know the story) should be enough to qualify for Oscar® bait. How sweet it is, indeed.

No way would I allow this mutant '59 Cadillac / 23rd-century sewage-treatment plant / Gatling gone wild on my shelf.

I mean, I'd feel compelled to don body armor whenever I was in the same room with it.

The Rabid Librarian (14 June, 11:27) lists four dozen bizarre but apparently genuine medical texts which are catalogued in the National Library of Medicine's PubMed database. Some of these just demand your attention:

• Patterson R, Stewart-Patterson C.:  The well-made bed: an unappreciated public health risk.

• Horseman RE.:  Medical treatment that sucks.

• Go K.:  Constipation among operating room nurses: flatulence as evidence.

• Osmun WE, Naugler C.:  The impact of hissy fits in primary care.

• Wilhite M.:  Chronically dead persons.

• Muntz HR.:  The use of silly putty as an ear plug.
  

Collect the whole set.

(Update, 20 June, 8:15 pm: Sya has links to some of the actual documents.)

CT at The Critical 'I' spots something unexpected in the Atkins Diet logo.

Now I'm thoroughly creeped out.

Fahrenheit 9/11 is a marketing phenomenon, says Frances Lee of Case Western Reserve University:

James Joyner has his doubts:

Moore's last film brought in a shade over $21 million domestically, and almost the same amount overseas; I think Fahrenheit 9/11 will exceed these figures comfortably, though Passion's $370 million ($600 million total) is well out of reach.

There's a shot of Kirsten Dunst in a sundress on the cover of Vogue this month, and the import of this didn't hit me until about 0.4 seconds into the usual perfunctory inspection: migod, she's going to grow up to be Susanna Cornett.

Well, I guess she'd have to pick up a couple dozen IQ points first.

Medically approved, as a matter of fact.

Hirudo medicinalis has a long, more-or-less respectable history as an instrument of healing, so to speak, and at least two physicians out here in the not-so-wetlands are putting them to good use.

I leave for someone else the task of writing the joke about how the French firm Ricarimpex has received FDA approval to market leeches in the US.

I actually sort of liked some of the recordings ("tunes" would never do here) by the late Tupac Shakur.

But that doesn't mean I want the guy's thug-life mumblage taught in the schools, fercryingoutloud. If this is poetry, then Little Richard's "Awopbopaloobopawopbamboom" is grand opera.

On the other hand, the Shangri-Las easily qualify as theatre.

Well, maybe. Driving around the country has cut into the time available to calculate my personal Teachout Cultural Concurrence Index, but for those who care, it's 49.5 percent.

Which, historically, begin with one small step for a man.

Says Rand Simberg:

We're at our best, I think, when we're pushing the limits of what we know. On a much smaller scale, I know I'm a lot more focused during the World Tours, which so far have been through unfamiliar territory, than I am during the 49 weeks when I have to work for a living, when the only limit pushed is the threshold of exasperation. There will likely never again be the sort of excitement that John F. Kennedy managed to whip up for that first moon-landing program — for one thing, every special-interest group between here and Betelgeuse will complain that money put into space, be it private or "public," is money that won't go into its pet programs — but I persist in my belief that we were put on this earth to find out stuff.

And, yes, occasionally to fart around.

Dawn Eden writes to Film Forum:

I admit up front that I've seen fewer than a third of Reagan's fifty-odd film appearances, but I'm inclined to think there's enough good stuff to justify a retrospective. Certainly The Girl from Jones Beach, with its pre-Stepford eye on Perfect Womanhood, is relevant today; in Cattle Queen of Montana, Reagan holds his own against the formidable Barbara Stanwyck; and Kings Row demonstrated once and for all that he could play leads that were something other than just affable.

And yes, there are some stinkers in the bunch, but Bedtime for Bonzo isn't one of them.

Eureka College, Reagan's alma mater, scheduled just such a festival this past May. I wonder which films they chose.

(Update, 21 July, 10:25 am: Film Forum responds.)

Who's the Majorest Babe of all?

Some "panel of experts" has put together a list of the most naturally beautiful women of all time, and at the very least, their findings are deeply flawed.

I mean, I really didn't expect to find She Who Is Not To Be Named on the list, and I have no particular quarrel with Audrey Hepburn at the top — she's a bit on the insubstantial side, perhaps — but there's something wrong with a methodology that ranks Liv Tyler above both Monica Bellucci and Halle Berry.

If it's a methodology at all, which I tend to doubt. Surely any rational system would have noticed that a couple of individuals are represented twice on the list (Beyoncé Knowles, at #18 and #29, and Marilyn Monroe, at #27 and #36), and, as Craig Ceely notes, Cleopatra makes the cut (at #86), "although no man alive knows what she looked like." And it was always my understanding that Cleo's appeal was more, um, functional than aesthetic anyway.

As a (generally inactive) member of the male half of the species, I of course applaud research in this area, even though I believe, as Hugh Hefner seemed to believe before the invention of the airbrush, that the natural habitat of the hottie is wherever you may find her.

The Oklahoman doesn't carry Doonesbury, which doesn't bother me much; should I need to read Garry Trudeau's strip, the Oklahoma Gazette carries a week's worth every Wednesday.

Meanwhile in Alabama, The Anniston Star is upset because Continental Features, which produces a prefab color Sunday comic section for the Star and thirty-seven other papers, is dropping Doonesbury. "This is wrong, offensive to First Amendment freedoms," says Star publisher H. Brandt Ayers.

"This is a business decision," replies Continental head Van Wilkerson. "It doesn't have anything to do with personalities or Garry Trudeau or Doonesbury or anything else."

Which is not entirely true, since it was Doonesbury's May cartoon about a university president's head on a silver platter, which arrived about the same time as word of the beheading of Nicholas Berg in Iraq, which prompted complaints from some of Continental's subscribing papers. Continental polled its customers, and twenty-one out of thirty-six (two had no opinion) asked that the strip be discontinued.

Nor is it true, as Ayers insists, that this is some sort of First Amendment issue. No one is blocking the Star from carrying the strip; it simply won't be conveniently packaged with the rest of their Sunday comics. The daily Doonesbury, which was never distributed by Continental in this package, continues to appear in the Star; the paper will strike a deal with Universal Press Syndicate to pick up the Sunday strip, which will appear elsewhere in the Sunday edition — perhaps the op-ed page.

I do, however, agree with Garry Trudeau's assessment of the situation:

(I note that this is the second piece today where I've had something to say about a newspaper named Star.)

In his book The Stories of English, linguist David Crystal says that George Lucas' Jedi Master Yoda speaks in a manner reminiscent of old Anglo-Saxon, and that children studying the English language would find the contrast between old language and new to be interesting.

Crystal also recommends Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings for these students, pointing out that Samwise Gamgee and Gollum spoke non-standard English variants which presumably would be useful for comparison.

Teachers who have despaired of ever imparting standard English to their charges will undoubtedly be delighted at this news.

(Via Dowingba)

Well, actually, I don't; I figure whatever brilliance I have or can acquire will be offset somewhere else, inevitably to my embarrassment. And while I suspect I could qualify for Mensa, I don't have any real desire to do so; even if I am so damned smart, I make a point of not being impressed by being so, and as Dynamo Dave points out, the goals of the organization itself seem a trifle murky:

Or John Lennon, circa 1971. "Imagine there's no heaven...."

In my humble estimation, the organization proved itself most useful when it lent its name, probably involuntarily, to a middle-80s Playboy pictorial titled "The Women of Mensa," which reminded me (as though I needed reminding) that high IQ and drop-dead gorgeousness are not at all incompatible.

The existence of babes at this level of majorness, however, is not sufficient inducement for me to take the Mensa entrance exam.

Are you ready for some football?

Not me. On the other hand, a lot of it goes on during the summer, and the Oklahoma City Lightning of the National Women's Football Association, 8-0 in the regular season and champions of the South Conference, is headed for Louisville for tomorrow's NWFA title game against the fearsome Detroit Demolition, likewise 8-0 and champions of the North.

Okay, it's not just the NWFA title game. It's the Dickens Energy Cider Women's Pro Football Championship Presented by Progressive Medical Rehabilitation Group. Previous editions have drawn over 5000 fans.

And the NWFA has pushed the envelope for team names as well: the league boasts D. C. Divas, Connecticut Crush (now that sounds dangerous), and the ever-delightful Erie Illusion.

It may not be true that everything old is new again, but I was never comfortable with the idea that everything old was destined for the trash heap.

So I was heartened to see that Susanna Cornett's appreciation of all things Victorian reaches even further than she might have imagined.

During World War I, the Service Flag, known more descriptively as the Blue Star Flag, was seen throughout the land, a simple banner with a blue star representing a family member serving overseas, the blue star replaced by a gold star should he be killed in battle. The practice continues to this day; if you haven't seen one lately, well, this Newsday scribe seems to think we've lost interest in such things:

Somehow this doesn't seem plausible. A lot of things have happened since, say, the founding of the Gold Star Moms, and decreasing family size is certainly one of them, but I'd argue that diminishing support for the war is at least partly due to the ongoing efforts by papers such as Newsday to make sure we get a steady dose of bad news from Iraq. Some bad news, of course, is inevitable, and not even the most avid hawks will give this operation a grade of A-plus — myself, I'm inclined to award a "gentleman's C" or thereabouts. And if we are indeed in a "post-heroic" culture these days, I suggest it has something to do with the post-World War II fascination with antiheroes, once literary curiosities, now durable archetypes.

Geitner Simmons inquires:

That, I couldn't tell you. On the other hand, Pinkerton was using this example as an illustration of how our future will be inextricably intertwined with robotics, of all things, so I'm going to assume at least standard fanboy levels of hyperbole.

Red Adair, who started out as a roughneck in an Oklahoma oilfield in the Thirties and wound up the go-to guy when your oil or gas well was on fire, died this weekend in Houston at 89.

After World War II, during which he was part of a bomb-disposal unit, Paul N. Adair went to work for Myron Kinley, who had built a business controlling oilfield fires, and set up his own company in 1959. He stayed with it for thirty-five years, taking on the scariest assignments imaginable and inspiring the 1968 film Hellfighters, starring John Wayne and crediting Adair as technical advisor — though it was the Wayne character's assistant, played by Jim Hutton, who proved to be the real hothead on screen.

In 1991, Adair, then seventy-six, was brought in by the Kuwaiti government to tame the dozens of oil wells set ablaze during the Gulf War, a project predicted to last three to five years, which Adair's team finished in less than nine months.

Red Adair feared no fire, on earth or elsewhere; he quipped in 1991 that he'd struck a deal with the devil "to give me an air-conditioned place when I go down there, if I go there, so I won't put all the fires out." Myself, I rather think he's gone somewhere with better climate.

Grameen ("Rural") Bank is an anomaly among financial institutions: 90 percent of its shares are owned by the poor people of Bangladesh whom it serves. (The government in Dhaka owns the remaining ten percent.)

Grameen's specialty is microcredit, and here's how it works:

And the story of one of these women is at the heart of the motion picture 16 Decisions, named for the philosophies underlying Grameen Bank lending. I haven't seen it yet, but Christine has — it's running on the Sundance Channel, which is outside my cable tier for now — and she was moved:

Words to live by, and not just for women either.

The American Chesterton Society recently made its first-ever pilgrimage to G. K. Chesterton's England, and Dawn Eden was there.

For the most part, she was delighted, though she was dismayed to see a peripheral argument among the pilgrims — whether Shakespeare was a Roman Catholic, of all things — taking center stage. "Somewhere along the way," she says, "the idea of examining and celebrating G. K. Chesterton's life and career got buried." Nonsense in the wrong place? Perhaps.

I rather think she'll have more to say in the next couple of days, but for now, let's welcome her home. (I, of course, followed the other way home: I stayed there.)

(Update, 4:45 pm: Gawker welcomes Dawn home with their infamous Five Questions.)

And I mean first; a British archaeologist, after five years of research, has concluded that a cave on the Israeli Kibbutz Tzuba was the base of operations for John the Baptist.

The cave, about two and a half miles from John's birthplace at Ein Kerem, features a pool of water which would be just perfect for, you guessed it, baptism, and art on the cave walls seems to illustrate a Nazarite, which John was.

None of this is necessarily conclusive, but real-world corroborations of Gospel events have been few and far between, and while a certain skepticism is probably healthy at this point, I have a gut feeling (if that's the term) that this might be the real deal.

Tulsa author S. E. Hinton, who's scarcely been heard from since Taming the Star Runner sixteen years ago, finally has a new novel coming out, and this time it's not aimed at young readers.

Hawkes Harbor, published by New York-based TOR Books, is due 15 September.

Hinton's The Outsiders, published in 1967 while she was still a student at Will Rogers High School in Tulsa, is the best-selling young-adult novel of all time.

People, usually well-meaning, will tell you to your face "it's just a number," but every time the Odometer of Life rolls over another digit I feel something of a twinge. (Heaven help us all when it rolls over two digits at once.)

Still, once you've done enough of these, the presumed panic eventually gives way to — a sort of contentment? Michele has calculated that the answer can be 42:

There's a lower incidence of rose colors in my own spectrum, but this is what I wrote at the moment of fiftyness:

In retrospect, the fears I had didn't do me much good at all, but it took me entirely too long to start clearing them out.

And actually, forty-two is quite a nice age: still young enough to care about things, but old enough to know when not to give a damn. I have a feeling Michele's going to like it. A lot.

"I yam what I yam and that's all what I yam."

Bruce grasps this concept better than most, or at least better than I do sometimes:

When Paramount took over production of the Popeye shorts from the Fleischer studios, they deemphasized his Everyman nature in favor of making him, if not exactly a superhero, certainly larger than life. Even as a kid glued to the television on Saturday morning, I objected to this sort of thing: wasn't life large enough already?

Popeye didn't need to do much. And if he never quite secured the exclusive rights to Olive Oyl, well, he was always able to deal with the occasional spate of Blutality. For him, that was quite enough.

Michael Blowhard reports from the marketplace:

I'm inclined to believe it's just as true at more mundane markets; last Wednesday at the neighborhood store, I was in the checkout line behind a woman who had bought a $1.29 bag of chips and had finished off roughly half of them during the five-aisle trip to the register.

She was profusely apologetic, though the clerk seemed more amused than horrified, and I tossed in a remark to the effect that "If they're that good, I should have bought some of them instead of [holding up bag] this."

More often, though, it's half-empty 20-ounce beverage bottles.

(Update, 21 August, 8 pm: Syaffolee says: "The problem, in my mind, is the reason [Blowhard and yours truly] think women do this. It is not about a woman's attitude toward food. It's about control.")

If you're of a certain age, you hear Jackie Gleason as Joe the Bartender, calling offstage to Frank Fontaine as Crazy Guggenheim, and then going through some of the oldest shtick in the vaudevillian's trunk.

And very likely, you loved it. I did. Larry Miller did. And you were always amazed at how that ancient lush was able to turn off the tics and the popping eyes and the slurred speech just long enough to sing one of the Old Songs exactly the way it was supposed to be sung, only better.

He may have been a lush, perhaps, but he wasn't ancient: in 1962, when Gleason signed him up for his variety show, Frank Fontaine was only forty-two. He sang because he'd always sung; he'd fronted Vaughn Monroe's big band in the Forties before discovering that he could also be funny.

Today, it takes two parts snark, one part misplaced irony, and two parts loudness, blended not especially well, to produce a unit of Standard Comedy Product. Sometimes it's even amusing. But more often than not, I'm wondering just where the change came, and just who it was who decided that the proper place for comedy was right in the audience's face.

Probably the same guy who decided that the Old Songs should be warehoused at the museum, I guess.

(Courtesy of Dawn Eden, who wasn't there, but who understands just the same.)

The Free Speech Film Club at the Norman Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, 1309 West Boyd, has reportedly booked a screening of Robert Greenwald's documentary Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism, tomorrow evening at 7 pm.

So says the Oklahoma Gazette, anyway; neither the Fellowship nor the official screenings list has a Web reference to it. I'd make sure it was really there before driving over to Norman; the Gazette is usually pretty reliable about these things, but things can change in a hurry around here.

Professor Quincy Adams Wagstaff, making a possibly-idle threat:

Laura Riccio thinks that even if we don't have a horse, we have reasons to bring out the whips:

And that's not the only selling point, either:

Easily. I say, let's do it in memory of Groucho.

When I was much younger, I read V. and The Crying of Lot 49, which managed to persuade me that Thomas Pynchon was some kind of weird virtuoso, man; I've got to see what comes next.

What came next was Gravity's Rainbow, which shared the National Book Award in 1974. (A Crown of Feathers and Other Stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer was the other laureate.) Gravity's Rainbow "puts the world of manipulation and paranoia within the perspectives of history," said Ralph Ellison at the NBA ceremony that year, and maybe it does, but it's as thick and impenetrable as the hull of a German V2 rocket.

I was twenty-two when I first tackled this book, and I've made three subsequent tries; I got through it completely only once. I rather think I've discharged any obligation I may have had to this book. Syaffolee, in her twenties, is even less impressed:

On the upside, I did manage to work "Tyrone Slothrop" into my late-Eighties list of suitable noms de screen, though it was never received as well as, for instance, Patty O'Furniture.

I've met the Queen of All Evil, and she in no way resembles the strange denizens of Flatland.

I mention this because the Queen's consort has an interesting piece up about the disconnect between the underfed wraiths who are supposed to be the very model of a modern female beauty queen and the actual women we encounter in Real Life.

Besides, he invokes both ancient Greek sculpture and the neoclassical paintings of William Bouguereau, which proves he's serious.

Costa at Population Statistic meets a cute girl in a bar who may or may not have had Greta Garbo's standoff sighs.

Of such encounters are legends made.

R&B fans may recognize the title as that of a recording by Laura Lee, whose biggest hit (Hot Wax 7105, 1971) was called "Women's Love Rights." It's been a recurrent theme in feminism for many years; starting a lecture tour in Australia, author Germaine Greer said that the high divorce rate was something to be celebrated:

And why might that be?

Oh.

How this connects to Greer's announced topic for the day — "Shakespeare and sexual difference" — I'm not in a position to explain.

I will point out, though, that the very same Laura Lee LP which features "Wedlock Is a Padlock" also contains a mournful version of the standard "Since I Fell For You." All together now:

How, um, empowering.

(Via The Currency Lad)

I worked at Mickey D's in the early Seventies, and, well, I don't remember anything like this: Playboy is putting together a pictorial of women who work at McDonald's.

Hmmm. Maybe I will have fries with that.

John Cole reports that the following look better, or at least as good, on high-definition television:

The following, however, are not improved:

It is, of course, reassuring to know that John Cole has his priorities in order, but this isn't, at least to me, a compelling reason to spend the extra bucks for HDTV.

Yet.

"Save this portion for your tax records," said the subscription offer: "The cost of this subscription may be tax-deductible when used in business/professional purposes. Consult your tax preparer."

Well, I understand the premise here, but I did consult my tax preparer, which is myself, and I told me that there was no way I could justify deducting a subscription to Vogue.

Besides, the Fall Fashion issue (September), which averages over 700 pages, would never fit through my mail slot.

Dawn Eden doesn't have much nice to say about Sex and the City, and given her priorities in life, there's no reason she should.

Still, the former HBO series did have some impact on popular culture, to the extent that it's had some small but measurable effect on women's shoes, pushing them a notch or two in the direction of sheer frivolity. Not that I'm inclined to complain — I get to look, I don't have to wear — but the laws of physics sooner or later will overrule the demands of fashion.

Much later, if you're Syaffolee:

There's a lot to be said for stability.

New York's Algonquin Hotel, hoping to restore its reputation as a gathering place for the literati, has reopened its Oak Room with a brand-new Round Table.

Like the original Round Table around which the likes of Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley traded quips, the new Table is rectangular, and there's an ancient Underwood typewriter on hand in case of inspiration — though there's also a Wi-Fi hotspot, should the inspired be ready to upload on a moment's notice.

Among those attending the opening of the new Round Table were Nat Benchley, grandson of Robert; Kevin Fitzpatrick, president of the Dorothy Parker Society of New York; and Anthony Adams, son of FPA (Franklin Pierce Adams).

I wonder if Dawn Eden will be dropping by for the occasional luncheon.

Courtesy of Always Victoria, some indications you might be from a small town:

• Third Street is on the edge of town.

• You don't signal turns because everyone knows where you're going, anyway.

• Running from the cops consists of hiding in the cornfield.

• Anyone you want can be found at either the Dairy Queen or the feed store.

• The closest McDonald's is 45 miles away.

• So is the closest mall.

• Being able to hit a road sign with a beer bottle while driving down the highway is considered a necessary skill.
  

And, of course, many, many more.

Roger Ebert was, and is, quite unapologetic about having written the screenplay for Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, so you can be sure that the one commentary on the death of Russ Meyer that I wanted to read was Roger Ebert's farewell in the Chicago Sun-Times.

I've seen only a smattering of Meyer's oeuvre, but what I've seen is fascinating; yes, these are skin flicks in the classic sense, but in these skin flicks the women hold all the cards, control all the scenes.

And anyway, you gotta love a director (he deserved, but probably would have shunned, the term "auteur") who, upon being asked where he found all these implausibly bosomy actresses, explained that beyond a certain cup size, they find him.

"Who says so?"

"You know. They say so."

"And who are They?"

[We pause here to allow surly grammarians to pop a Xanax.]

"They" is the Missouri inventor formerly known as Andrew Wilson, who last week was granted permission by a circuit judge to change his name to simply "They."

They is 43, lives near Branson, and holds more than a dozen patents; They's latest product is Shades Eyewear, sunglasses with an integral visor, which should make They a lot of money.

(Via Fark)

"It's an American dream," said Eric Burdon; "includes Indians too."

And many, many more, as Susanna Cornett notes in a lovely tale of a Chinese restaurant in Alabama where the dream is very real.

I'm kind of sorry I missed this; I'm sure I would have had a ball.

(From Good Grief! Does this blog make my butt look big? via deblog)

27 September 1954, New York City. A new television show, and host Steve Allen is warning the audience: "This show will go on forever."

Fifty years later, it looks like Steve was right.

I just wish NBC would do more to celebrate the anniversary of what has been arguably its most influential program.

It was probably inevitable: someone has come up with a study which purports to show that urban sprawl is a health issue, that people who live in the 'burbs are susceptible to varying illnesses because, well, they drive everywhere, befouling the air and depriving themselves of the joys of walking all over the place.

The proponents admit that they weren't able to find any increase in mental illness in suburbia, and they seem almost disappointed about it. But considering the folks who move out there in the first place — they tend to have higher incomes, to distrust city school systems, and worst of all, to be white — it's pretty clear what the real problem is: the suburbs are a breeding ground for Republicans, and obviously this sort of thing must be discouraged by any means necessary.

(Via Jeff Jarvis, who notes: "Yesterday's 'sprawl' is today's 'preservation' project.")

If these apply to you, you just might be a Floridian.

• You exhibit a slight twitch when introduced to anyone with the first names of Charley, Frances, Ivan or Jeanne.

• Your freezer never has more than $20 worth of food in it at any given time.

• You're looking at paint swatches for the plywood on your windows to accent the house color.

• You think of your hall closet/saferoom as "cozy."

• Your pool is more accurately described as "framed in" than "screened in."

• Your freezer in the garage now has only homemade ice in it.

• You no longer worry about relatives visiting during the summer months.

• You, too, haven't heard back from the insurance adjuster.

• You now understand what that little "2% hurricane deductible" phrase really means.

• You're putting together a collage on your driveway of roof shingles from your neighborhood.

• You were once proud of your 16" electric chainsaw.

• You now own 5 large ice chests.

• You recognize people in line at the free ice, gas and plywood locations.

• You stop what you're doing and clap and wave when you see a convoy of power company trucks come down your street.

• You're depressed when they don't stop.

• You have the personal cell phone numbers of the managers for plywood, roofing supplies and generators at Home Depot on your speed dialer.

• You've spent more than $20 on "tall white kitchen bags" to make your own sand bags.

• You're considering upgrading your 16" to a 20" chainsaw.

• You know what "bar chain oil" is.

• You're thinking of getting your wife the hardhat with the ear protector and face shield for your anniversary.

• You now think the $6,000 whole house generator seems reasonable.