Musings from Brian J. Noggle: May 2005

Book Report: N-Space by Larry Niven (1990)

I bought this book last summer for $4.95 because I didn't think I was getting enough science fiction in my diet and because I think Ringworld was one of the best science fiction novels I've read (and Lucifer's Hammer/Footfall wasn't a bad novel, either). So I felt safe buying a collection of Larry Niven short stories. So comfortable, I bought the follow-up collection, Playgrounds of the Mind, at the same time. At $10 for the pair, it was like a penny a page.

The book begins with an introduction by Tom Clancy, who was quite the hot writer at the time. The book collects not only short stories, but also: novel excerpts (which I skipped); introductions to the short stories that provided insight into the science fiction writer's life of conventions, collabaration, and research; and nonfiction detritus including reminisces about colloquia and assorted musings. In short, it's a book I'd like to collect someday.

Unfortunately, I found the collection long and daunting. The nonfiction bits really didn't add much to the stories, and since I bought the book because I am a fan of Larry Niven's writing and not Larry Niven, I thought they watered the pieces down quite a bit. Some of the stories run fairly long, too, so it wasn't like a normal collection of stories which allow for quick bits of reading in short time frames. Granted, that flaw simply fits into what I was looking for and is not inherent within the book.

It's a good enough collection, with evocative, imaginitive riffs with enough hard science to back them up. But I won't read Playgrounds of the Mind immediately.

One interesting note about the colloquium I mentioned above: it took place in 1980-1981, and it involved a number of scientists, space-thinkers, and science fiction writers putting together a policy paper to submit to the Reagan administration. 1980. The Shuttle program was coming online, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century and Battlestar Galactica (okay, BSG1980, which never happened as far as I am concerned) were just going off the air, and man had walked on the moon less than ten years before. It pains me how little we've progressed since then, and if I could go back in time to tell them how little the space program and space exploration would progress in the next quarter century, they would probably think I was an agent of an increasingly desperate Soviet Union determined to sap their morale.

Where has that societal optimism gone?

- posted by Brian J. @ 8:56 PM 0 comments

The Zzzzz Word

Ralph Nader (or is it Nadir? I forget) and a henchman looking for fundraising want to impeach Bush and Cheney:

THE IMPEACHMENT of President Bush and Vice President Cheney, under Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution, should be part of mainstream political discourse.

Minutes from a summer 2002 meeting involving British Prime Minister Tony Blair reveal that the Bush administration was "fixing" the intelligence to justify invading Iraq. US intelligence used to justify the war demonstrates repeatedly the truth of the meeting minutes -- evidence was thin and needed fixing.

President Clinton was impeached for perjury about his sexual relationships. Comparing Clinton's misbehavior to a destructive and costly war occupation launched in March 2003 under false pretenses in violation of domestic and international law certainly merits introduction of an impeachment resolution.

Oh, boy. I don't know how far down the line of succession one must impeach to make a distant presidential candidate president, but we'll never get to the nadir.

Leaving aside Clinton's military actions which coincided an awful lot with disclosures and revelations in the Whitewater investigation, we've got some meeting minutes which offer a secretary's interpretations of a meeting. That, with exit polls showing a different results from the election tallies, is what the left has lef, er, remaining. Perhaps we should call them the left behind.

- posted by Brian J. @ 2:14 PM 0 comments

St. Louis Post-Dispatch Lauds Forgivable Loans to Executives

So let me get out my conceptual transmogrifier:

Forgivable loans to executives to buy stock, houses, and so on, bad.
Forgivable loans to executives to buy condos in the city of St. Louis? Good!

Mandy and Kevin Kozminske wrote out a hefty check recently as a down payment on a loft condominium in downtown St. Louis. But her employer covered their closing costs - $5,000.

Mandy Kozminske, an assistant vice president for U.S. Bank, qualified for the money through the bank's employer-assisted housing program. The $5,000 is a loan; it's forgivable as long as she stays on the job - and in the home - for five years.

Hey, U.S. Bank can do what it wants to retain its employees; however, I hope it offers $5,000 in free cash to every teller, janitor, and maintenance man in its direct employ. Otherwise, the Post-Dispatch displays that its commitment to the Little Man ends where its commitment to championing the movers and shakers in the city of St. Louis government/developer cabal begins.

- posted by Brian J. @ 9:41 AM 0 comments

Musical Interlude

I don't know if Hillary! has a theme song for her presidential campaign or not (but who could top Bill Clinton's use of "Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow" with its prescient lines "I know you don't believe that it's true/I never meant any harm to you"), but I proffer the following (with apologies to Herman's Hermits)

:

- posted by Brian J. @ 2:28 PM 0 comments

Illinois Balances Budgets on Future Pensioners

The state of Illinois is going to stop paying into pension funds because it's strapped for cash:

The Illinois Legislature on Sunday approved Democratic Gov. Rod Blagojevich's plan to withhold about $2 billion in payments over the next two years from the state's public-employee pension systems to balance the state budget.

Can bankruptcy be far behind?

Let this stand as a contrast to our own governor, Matt Blunt, who has not raised taxes by shuffling budget priorities. Rod Blagjavinachek has raised taxes and cut pension funding, but he's managing to continue spending like a drunken sailor with the captain's credit card.

Undoubtedly, there are some people who would only knock the Illinois governor for cutting the pension payments to spend the money on fluff; undoubtedly, those people think that tax money is a renewable resource, and that there'll always be more next year.

- posted by Brian J. @ 9:47 AM 0 comments

Come On, Right Wingers

Admit that this photo from a Yahoo! slideshow fulfills a fantasy of ours:

Bill Clinton led from the courtroom after sentencing.

However, it's not a jail jumpsuit, just a vivid shirt.

- posted by Brian J. @ 9:30 AM 1 comments

True and False Still Partisan

The headline identifies how the St. Louis Post-Dispatch leans: Illinois lawmakers pass bill that could add voters:

The Democrats who control the Illinois Legislature approved a measure Saturday that could spur higher voter registration and turnout - a move that Republicans angrily asserted was designed to stack the deck in future elections.

...

The voting registration bill, sent to Gov. Rod Blagojevich, a Democrat, on a House vote, would require that information about registering to vote be put in college registration documents that incoming college students receive. It would also allow online voter registration and would allow time off work in some circumstances to vote.

The measure, sponsored by Democrats, picked at a traditionally partisan sore spot. Efforts to increase voting registration are generally believed to help Democrats more than Republicans, because many of those who don't currently vote are young, poor or members of a minority group. Republicans historically have claimed that such measures expand the opportunities for voter fraud.

Of course, those of us steeped in logic understand this is a false dilemma, as it will undoubtedly do both. It will add a small number of actual voters to the rolls who will participate in the republican democracy (who will undoubtedly vote Democrat, as do most voters who need to be coaxed out of their stupors into voting booths), but it will also allow for greater and easier fraud (who also will undoubtedly vote Democrat, as do most dead people, dogs, children, and clones).

So the Republicans want to disenfranchise the lazy, the apathetic, and the incompetent?

Well, some do. Those who favor a meritocracy.

- posted by Brian J. @ 10:01 PM 0 comments

San Francisco Hires 55-Year-Old Columnist Who Writes Like Freshman

Wow, I wrote prose like this when I was a freshman and sophomore in college:

After a lifetime voting for and working for Democratic candidates and independents, I'm finally going to make the switch and become a Republican.

The reasons are many, not the least of which is age. I turned 55 recently and, having lived more than half my life, I can't afford to worry anymore about the other guy. It's time for me.

As a Republican, I can now proudly -- indeed, defiantly -- pledge to never again vote for anyone who raises taxes for any reason. To hell with roads, bridges, schools, police and fire protection, Medicare, Social Security and regulation of the airwaves.

President Bush has promised to give me more tax cuts even though our federal government owes trillions of dollars to its creditors. But that's someone else's problem, not mine. Republicans are about the here and now, and I'm here now.

You might think, gentle reader, that I write prose like that some decades after college, and I wouldn't argue with you; however, I'm not a writer paid for my commentary. Which means although we write about the same, I'm not as smart or connected as the new columnist.

He's going in with a bang that's determined to draw attention to his new column by pretending to be a principled reflection upons one political views. Perhaps he can immediately draw notoriety by summoning the wrath of the rightward-leaning blogosphere by mischaracterizing the Republican party and its beliefs. Ha! The joke's on him! I am the only blogger who reads the San Francisco Chronicle, and I cannot summon a blogstorm.

UPDATE: Commenter William Squire points out that this guy has written for the San Francisco Chronicle before.

- posted by Brian J. @ 9:52 PM 1 comments

Minnows More Content, But Some Kill Selves

In a study that will have no impact on human wellness, researchers have discovered....well, regardless of what they'll actually find at the end of numerous, peer-reviewed studies, we need a headline now! Induce panic with this one: WARNING: Side effects can be severe: Common drugs are seeping into our lakes, fish and water supply.

Start the lead with an anecdote to which all of our readers can relate:

It was barely a drop, but the effect of the drug was astonishing.

Pointing to a digital recording of fathead minnows gasping for breath in a milky, murky stew, researcher Rebecca Klaper said: "We had planned to keep them in there for a week, but we had to pull them the next day. They were going to die."

Unfortunately, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel (that is, conceptually, someone who guards diaries) feels its readers will identify with tiny, gasping fish. But if you don't have someone poor or disinfranchised with which you can start an article-as-call-to-action, you must make do.

Brian J. notes that you should probably question any news story about endangered wildlife whose first source had to pull minnows out of an experiment to save their lives, but Brian J. is the callous sort who thought of his own pet cats as an insurance policy against the Y2K bug.

Let's review the experiment:

Klaper, of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's Great Lakes WATER Institute, is investigating the effects of common drugs, such as pain relievers, anti-depressants and lipid regulators, on lake fish and invertebrates. Many of these medications pass through the body, into the sewer system and out to the environment largely unaltered. And because they are designed to affect the biology of a living organism - to reduce headaches, control seizures or suppress coughs - she and other researchers think they could have an impact on fish and other wildlife.

Standing in her lab at the WATER Institute, an old tile warehouse on the banks of the Kinnickinnic River, Klaper reviewed the minnow experiment. She pointed to the fishes' gills, which were straining open and shut in a desperate attempt to filter oxygen in the deadly murk surrounding them.

"The water was cloudy by the time we got in the next morning," said Chris Rees, a research assistant, recalling the day after a lipid regulator was introduced into their tank.

But the milkiness wasn't from the drug itself, Klaper said. It was the physical manifestation of the stressed and dying fish - a cloudy stew of mucous and other piscine secretions.

Minnows exposed to common pharmaceuticals within a small, closed system overwhelmed their environment with mucuous. Instead of publishing the results in a reputable journal, this story breaks in the Journal-Sentinel.

Give me a drop of Lipitor and let me cloud my office with skepticism. Even if the study bears snotty fruit, I'm of the mindset all the minnows in the world can perish if it means saving a number of human lives.

But I have priorities, anthrocentric priorities.

- posted by Brian J. @ 8:50 PM 0 comments

The Makings of a Trivia Champion

Jeez, Louise, ten years later, and I can still name all five original Spice Girls by their spice names and their real names.

Even though I only just today listened all the way through to my first Spice Girls song.

Is it a blessing or a curse?

- posted by Brian J. @ 8:42 PM 0 comments

Wedding Etiquette

For those of you who are planning to miss the Atari Party next weekend for a "wedding," remember that it's traditional to give, as a wedding gift, a case of Guinness and a couple fifths of Jack Daniels.

Correction: In a recent post on wedding etiquette, the staff from Musings from Brian J. Noggle incorrectly identified a bender as a traditional wedding gift; in fact, the traditional wedding gift is a blender. Musings from Brian J. Noggle regrets the error.

- posted by Brian J. @ 9:21 AM 0 comments

Wireless Users to Flock to Saturn's Orbit

A new discovery on Titan, Saturn's largest moon:

At wavelengths shorter than 5 microns, the spot is not unusually bright. The strange spectral character of this enigmatic feature has left the team with four possibilities for its source: the spot could be a surface coloration, a mountain range, a cloud, or a hot spot.

Expect hordes of developers bearing Starbucks and with their instant messanger statuses set to "Out of Office" or "Call My Cell" to arrive shortly.

(Link seen on /..)

- posted by Brian J. @ 9:13 AM 0 comments

The Showdown I'd Like To See

WISN radio, a conservative-leaning talk station in Milwaukee, is holding a reality-show style elimination competition for all comers to try to become its new morning show personality (now that Weber and Dolan are head to head with Charles Sykes).

You know what would be win/win? If it came down to:

Owen of Boots and Sabers vs. Sean of The American Mind

I mean, because I cannot participate. Not because I am out of the Milwaukee area; I have enough ties to the area to make my argument. No, I cannot participate because the auditions are the day of Atari Party 5.2, curse my pipes.

For more information, see Milwaukee Talk Star.com. Of course, if you're like me, you listen to Weber and Dolan every day (for seven years running) via News Talk 1130.com and its streaming audio.

- posted by Brian J. @ 8:57 PM 0 comments

Philip Marlowe, Nigerian Detective

Nigerian scam of the day:

ZONAL CONSULTING AGENCY.
zonalconsultant@netscape.net

ZONAL Consulting:Private Investigators and Security Consultants is conducting a standard process investigation on behalf of Deutsche Bank AG,the international Banking conglomerate, and we will like you to assist with this Independent Enquiry.

My name is MARIO WOLF. I am a senior partner in the firm. This investigation involves a client who shares the same surname with you and also the circumstances surrounding investments made by this client at Deutsche Bank AG.

The Deutsche Bank AG Banking client died intestate and nominated no successor in title over the investments made with the Bank. The essence of this communication with you is to request you provide us information/comments on any or all of the four issues:

1-Are you aware of any relative/relation who shares your same surname whose last known contact address was Hamburg, Germany?

2-Are you aware of any investment of considerable value made by such aperson at the Deutsche Bank AG?

3-Born on the 1st of June 1927

4-Can you establish beyond reasonable doubt your eligibility to assume status of successor in title to the deceased?

It is pertinent that you inform us ASAP whether or not you are familiar with this personality that we may put an end to this communication with you and our inquiries surrounding this personality. You must appreciate that we are constrained from providing you with more detailed information at this point.

Please respond to this mail as soon as possible to afford us the opportunity to close this investigation. Thank you for accommodating our enquiry.

zonalconsultant@netscape.net
Mario Wolf.

Well, that's creative scamming, anyway.

- posted by Brian J. @ 5:11 PM 0 comments

More Punishment for Vaccination

Unrelated to the expert-predicted flu catastrophe and the problems with vaccine availability, another jury penalizes vaccinators: Teen awarded $8.5 million in vaccine case:

St. Louis jury awarded a teen $8.5 million late Thursday for injuries he said were linked to a polio vaccination 18 years ago.

The lawsuit alleged that Cortez Strong, 18, contracted polio after he received an oral vaccine as an infant. Lawyers for Strong, who lives near Tower Grove Park in St. Louis, say he has limited use of his left arm and right hand.

Strong sued American Cyanamid Co., maker of the vaccine, and Dr. Georgia Santo-Jawaid, his former pediatrician in 1999. She formerly worked with a doctors’ group in the 3900 block of South Grand Boulevard, where Strong received the second dose of medicine when he was four months old.

Another tragedy that punishes the medical industry for an unfortunate reaction to a vaccine that protected the majority of recipients. However, as these individual awards accummulate, vaccine producers won't continue to serve the public good by providing a product that protects many and provides a jackpot for a few.

Until they're nationalized, of course, then taxpayers can do both with the bottomless well of tax dollars.

- posted by Brian J. @ 4:37 PM 0 comments

Outlaw Pointy Sticks, and Only Outlaws Will Have Pointy Sticks

Apparently, relegating gun possession to only lawbreakers has not made Britain safe enough. Now, doctors think that pointed kitchen knives should be banned:

A&E doctors are calling for a ban on long pointed kitchen knives to reduce deaths from stabbing.

A team from West Middlesex University Hospital said violent crime is on the increase - and kitchen knives are used in as many as half of all stabbings.

They argued many assaults are committed impulsively, prompted by alcohol and drugs, and a kitchen knife often makes an all too available weapon.

The research is published in the British Medical Journal.

Personally, I favor preemptive amputation of the hands, which will prevent people from strangling or beating each other the death.

- posted by Brian J. @ 8:16 AM 0 comments

The Only Good Pit Bull, According to the Post Dispatch

Thank goodness! It's been a whole week since the St. Louis Post-Dispatch ran a story about a pit bull attack. But the drought has ended: St. Charles police kill attacking pit bull:

A St. Charles police officer shot and killed a pit bull after the dog attacked another officer Wednesday.

The officers had responded to the Travelodge Hotel in the 2700 block of Veterans Memorial Parkway to investigate a stolen car. Police say that when they located the suspect and advised him that he was under arrest, he slammed the door and began barricading himself in his hotel room. The officers were able to force themselves into the room, but the suspect resisted them, police say.

One officer fired a Taser at the suspect when the pit bull lunged at him and bit the Taser, police say. The dog continued trying to get at the officer until the other officer fired four rounds and killed it.

Of course, the officers were arresting a lawbreaker who would have no doubt had a beagle if only pit bulls were illegal.

- posted by Brian J. @ 3:23 PM 0 comments

Today on Draft Matt Blunt 2008

Unfortunately, the governor doesn't seem to have elaborated for whom taxpayers' dollars should be used to purchase sexual performance drugs.

- posted by Brian J. @ 1:34 PM 0 comments

Foam Industry Ramps Up Production; Government to Make Everything Safe

New York City has banned almost everything else, so it's turning to another hazardous substance that is too easily available to its irresponsible, befuddled citizens: candy.

Large mint balls, jawbreakers and other hard sweets — which can choke kids — could soon be banned for sale to children in the city.

City Council Health Committee Chairwoman Christine Quinn yesterday introduced a bill that would outlaw the sale of what she termed "dangerously sized candy" to people under 14.

She defined dangerously sized as between 3/4 of an inch and 13/4 of an inch in diameter.

FROM MY WARM, STICKY MOUTH!

(Submitted to the Outside the Beltway Traffic Jam.)

- posted by Brian J. @ 11:05 AM 1 comments

Free Trivia Answer

Waterbeds.

Because face it, Generations Y, Z, and AA have no idea what they are.

- posted by Brian J. @ 10:44 AM 1 comments

Nature Channels Michael Crichton or Stephen King

Nature magazine, nominally a "science" publication, runs a "news feature" that is a fictional blog account of an avian flu pandemic.

Unfortunately, instead of steamy sex with disciples of the devil or nuclear weapons going off in Vegas or bacteria brought down to earth by a secret government project, we get the payoff of the United States federal government trouncing individual liberties and transnational UN organizations saving the day. A predictable plot.

The message, of course, is that the government is not spending enough money on experts who issue warnings about flu pandemics.

The San Francisco Chronicle has an article that cuts to the chase:

said that federal spending on influenza preparedness has increased to $419 million from $40 million over the past five years but concedes he is not satisfied with the United States' current level of readiness.

Read: he's not satisfied with the current level of federal funding. Furthermore:

For example, even though an experimental H5N1 vaccine is being tested, the system for manufacturing it -- the same system that produces millions of ordinary flu shots -- is failure-prone. "Capacity needs to be built up," Fauci said.

...

Swiss pharmaceuticals maker Roche Inc. produces the entire world supply of the drug at a single European plant. Federal authorities have been negotiating with Roche to build a Tamiflu factory in the United States.

Capacity is down, but I'm sure that's unrelated to the chronic litigation sucking life and lucre out of vaccine makers and pharmaceutical companies and the increasing regulation.

In addition to problems with capacity, the United States has too small--according to experts-- stockpile of the highly-perishable vaccines, but I'm sure that's unrelated to states banning vaccines with the preservative thimerosal (the study of which also requires federal funding, according to experts).

Of course, pay no attention to the Illinois oversupply that occurred last year, when experts and the shrieking media ginned up predictions of a dire flu season. So the governor "did something" and contracted for vaccine--a supply that went unused and undoubtedly has been discarded by now. I'm sure that the lesson is not that "when government acts according to the experts, it wastes money."

Ultimately, I think experts agree, we have a choice: federal funding for research funneled to transnational organizations and international conferences, or we're going to die.

(Link to Nature seen on A Small Victory.)

- posted by Brian J. @ 8:07 AM 0 comments

Book Report: Supercomputer by Edward Packard (1984)

When I saw this Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book at the library for a quarter, I knew I had to have it. I mean, sure, it's a children's book, but what child in 2005 reads anymore, and how can they understand what it meant to the previous generation? I mean, I've got the equivalent of the title character in my closet because it's no longer powerful enough to run the latest operating systems.

No, you damn kids, you've always had computers and game consoles. I remember reading this particular volume as a boy in the housing projects. We couldn't afford an Atari, much less the Tandys displayed in the Sunday paper color inserts. Granted, I had no exposure to real computers or even Ataris at that point, but I read lots of books, and computers seemed cool.

So in that world without video games, we had Choose Your Own Adventures. You get a page or two introductory text and a question of what you would do next. Each question had two or more answers with pointers to other pages, and you would flip to the page of your chosen action and continue with another page or so of action before coming to another decision. CYOA were the FPS of the first Reagan Administration, werd. Each book had numerous paths and 20 or so different endings, some happy and some not, and sometimes the action was recursive, but each book allowed you to read it a couple of different ways and a couple of different times. By the time all was said and done, really you only had a short story sized text, but it was an interesting means of passing time. Choose Your Own Adventures were the most popular line, but other publishers picked up the concept.

This particular adventure begins when you win a computer-programming (note the quaint hyphen!) contest and receive a Genecomp A1 32 sixth generation computer, serial number 2183 and answering to the name Conrad. Conrad's no ordinary computer; his artificial intelligence can make you millions of dollars, make you happy for a brief moment, or help you communicate with the Soviet premier or bottle-nosed dolphons.

Yeah, I bought it, and I read through it a couple of times for old time's sake. Of course, we don't name our computers anymore (HAL, Edgar, Conrad, you were doomed by the 1990s), but these books inspired my imagination. When I finally got access to an old Apple II through school, 20 input "What would you like to do now?" closely followed 10 print "Hello, world!" (DRL! Maybe that's Commodore 64's BASIC 2.0 and not AppleBasic).

So is it worth the quarter? I reckon if you're an old school geek. You might be able to sucker a kid into reading it, but he or she will find this particular book in the series more dated than others.

- posted by Brian J. @ 7:00 PM 1 comments

My Personal Nightmare

The keyboard has no letters on it.

I am the only member of my generation, and the last in human history, who does not touch type and needs to orient himself by looking at the keyboard. Why, once El Guapo swapped a couple of keys on my computer keyboard at work and I could not log in because my password wouldn't work--because it included one of the transposed keys.

(Link seen on /..)

- posted by Brian J. @ 2:49 PM 3 comments

Libertarian Foreign Policy Insight Debunked

Remember, El Guapo, how we spent a portion of my thirtieth birthday party lo, those many years ago, listening to official Libertarians explain why the Afghanistan invasion was really a ploy to make room for an oil pipeline from the Caspian Sea?

Well, son of a buck, the pipeline's complete, but they must have had the wrong Trilateral Commission map, because they completely missed Afghanistan:

Beginning in Azerbaijan a mostly Muslim country and a U.S. ally in the war on terrorism with troops in Iraq the underground pipeline passes through Georgia and Turkey, ending at the Mediterranean port of Ceyhan. It avoids going through Russia, Armenia, Iran, Iraq and Syria on its way to the Mediterranean.

(Link seen on Roger L. Simon. Well, not on him, but on his blog.)

- posted by Brian J. @ 1:43 PM 0 comments

Wisconsin, Minnesota, Upper Penninsula Prepare for Refugees

A Canadian reaches The Tipping Point.

(Link seen on Rocket Jones.)

- posted by Brian J. @ 11:38 AM 0 comments

Book Report: The Action Hero's Handbook by David Borgenicht and Joe Borgenicht (2002)

I bought this book at A Clean, Well Lighted Place for Books for $4.98 because, let's face it, I was binging. But I'm better now, and I've almost finished all the books I bought there on Saturday, so it all balances out sort of.

This book was written by one of the guys behind the Worst Case Scenario Handbook, which is apparently a whole brand now. Since Borgenicht wrote it with his brother and the book's title lacks "Worst Case Scenario," I assume he didn't retain control of the brand he helped create. Still, the book follows along the same format. Situation, and how you should solve it. For example, you want to spy proof your room, interrogate a suspect, rescue someone who's hanging off of a cliff, or climb down the face of Mount Rushmore. You see, unlike the disasters in the WCS books, these doomsdays are man-made, and you're the only one who can save the world.

Amusing and perhaps slightly informative, but sometimes outlandish and fictionesque, particularly the Paranormal section (How to Predict the Future, How to Fend Off A Ghost, and so on). Still, it's a good read when spaced out over the course of a couple of days, with a couple of lessons per sitting. Like information gleaned from the WCS books, I'm glad to know some of these things are possible (How to Escape a Sinking Cruise Ship) so I'll be a little more confident if I encounter the situation; of course, by then, I will have forgotten the details and the book will be on the bookshelf instead of in my pocket, so ultimately it won't be helpful. Just entertaining.

- posted by Brian J. @ 11:30 AM 0 comments

Bandwagon

Store Wars.

I cannot tell by the site whether the organic enthusiasts have put this together earnestly, or if someone is making fun of the organic enthusiasts; all I know is that, with Obi-Wan Cannoli's tutelage, the Farm will surely be with Cuke Skywalker.

- posted by Brian J. @ 8:42 AM 0 comments

Not Quite Eminent Domain

Story: Residents of trailer park are given a year to move out:

Rex Smith tore open the certified letter last weekend, read it then woke his sleeping wife, Angie.

The letter was an eviction notice ordering them and the other families in Collinsville's Crescent Mobile Home Park to move within the year. The site would be swallowed up by a city-backed $78 million commercial development that includes a Wal-Mart Supercenter, a Home Depot and other stores.

Starting off with the anecdote to humanize the tragedy, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch makes this sound like another eminent domain struggle, but it's not:

Collinsville Acquisitions recently bought the site, just off Illinois Route 157. All residents will be forced to move out by May 19 of next year. The city plans to provide up to $19 million of the project's cost with money mainly generated from a tax-increment financing district. In a TIF district, property taxes are frozen, helping increase the land's value and freeing up money that would otherwise be used to pay taxes.

Sounds like the owner of the mobile home park, who rented the pad to the mobile home owners, sold his property to the developers. Capitalism working, albeit marred by the whole TIF and government financing. Still, the story does not indicate it's eminent domain, so I will save my sympathy for those driven off their land by the government, or for those trailer parks whose existence is suddenly made wrong by zoning changes or other chicanery.

On a side note, let's examine the whole mobile home park thing. It's the worst of all possible residence options. You own and have to maintain a domicile, but you still pay rent for location and are subject to eviction. Man, what a poor housing choice. I've lived in apartments, houses, and a mobile home, and I think mobile homes in rental parks surpasses even condos and co-ops because although you "own" a condo but still have to pay maintenance for common areas, the condo owner's association cannot tell you to take your loft somewhere else.

- posted by Brian J. @ 8:14 AM 1 comments

CBS News: Only Slightly Inaccurate

CBS News, in its radio broadcasts and its Web site, mischaracterizes the nature of the Stem Cell bill just passed by the House of Representatives:

Ignoring President Bush's veto threat, the House voted Tuesday to lift limits on embryonic stem cell research, a measure supporters said could accelerate cures for diseases but opponents viewed as akin to abortion.

Here's the text:

`(a) In General- Notwithstanding any other provision of law (including any regulation or guidance), the Secretary shall conduct and support research that utilizes human embryonic stem cells in accordance with this section (regardless of the date on which the stem cells were derived from a human embryo).

`(b) Ethical Requirements- Human embryonic stem cells shall be eligible for use in any research conducted or supported by the Secretary if the cells meet each of the following:

`(1) The stem cells were derived from human embryos that have been donated from in vitro fertilization clinics, were created for the purposes of fertility treatment, and were in excess of the clinical need of the individuals seeking such treatment.

`(2) Prior to the consideration of embryo donation and through consultation with the individuals seeking fertility treatment, it was determined that the embryos would never be implanted in a woman and would otherwise be discarded.

`(3) The individuals seeking fertility treatment donated the embryos with written informed consent and without receiving any financial or other inducements to make the donation.

`(c) Guidelines- Not later than 60 days after the date of the enactment of this section, the Secretary, in consultation with the Director of NIH, shall issue final guidelines to carry out this section.

`(d) Reporting Requirements- The Secretary shall annually prepare and submit to the appropriate committees of the Congress a report describing the activities carried out under this section during the preceding fiscal year, and including a description of whether and to what extent research under subsection (a) has been conducted in accordance with this section.'.

The limits are on government funding of stem cell research, not on stem cell research in and of itself by any party who wants to fund that research on its own--such as universities or pharma companies. However, those programs haven't been eligible for federal government funding.

It's unclear whether the media who report this are intentionally blurring this distinction to make the new bill into a fight for freedom against government oppression of scientific expression instead of what it is, a fight for freedom to spend government money. Perhaps the blurring is unintentional; some people in the media could very well believe there is/should be no action but government action.

Call me unconservative, but I'm not against this bill for the moral reason that groups of human cells are fully living humans who should have representation in the legislature. Instead, I oppose it for the moral reason that it's the Federal government spending money on things the private sector should handle.

(Submitted to the Outside the Beltway Traffic Jam.)

UPDATE: Two other conservatives weigh in:

At INDC Journal, Bill thinks President Bush's veto would put the United States behind other countries. Kind of like how Boeing is falling behind Airbus, if you ask me, but then again, perhaps he's right. Are universities and private sector companies out of the habit of expending their own capital on Research and Development without the government teat at which to suckle?
At Just One Minute, the blogger/narrator agrees that the government should fund this research, but does recognize that the bill expands government programs, not curtails them.

- posted by Brian J. @ 7:02 AM 0 comments

A Love That Dared To Speak Its Name

Alien Loves Predator.

Okay, it sounds dirtier than it is. In this series of comix, Preston the predator and Abraham the alien share apartments in New York City, survive commuting on the subways, and try to score with chix... Well, Abraham tries, and time will tell if Pres actually does.

Should be Safe For Work (SFW); does not contain nude poseable action figures, but it does use some colorful metaphors which are presented as text within jpg images.

(Thanks to Rocket Jones for the pointer.)

- posted by Brian J. @ 9:02 PM 0 comments

Book Report: Star Trek 7 by James Blish (1972)

I read this book mostly during a bus ride through Sonoma. Its familiarity--I'd seen most of these stories as episodes--, its dearth of character development, and its short story format continue to make it easy to read this book in short bursts.

The stories include:

Who Mourns for Adonais?, the Apollo one.
The Changeling

The story with Nomad, the little probe that could destroy--whose plot was recycled as Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
The Paradise Syndrome, where Kirk becomes a shaman named Kirok.
Metamorphosis, which introduces Zefrim Cochrane of Alpha Centauri, who becomes Zefrim Cochrane of Earth in Star Trek: First Contact.
The Deadly Years, where away team visitors get a radiation sickness that abnormally ages the away team, er, landing party. Sorry, I got confused, but this happened to Dr. Pulaski in Star Trek: The Next Generation, too.
Elaan of Troyius, where the attractive barbarian woman with chemically-attractive tears doesn't want to marry the prince on another planet to stop the bloody wars between the two, so she cries all over Kirk.

You see, you old school geeks, you're nodding along because you know which episodes I'm talking about--some of you even know the episode numbers, the air dates, and their star dates.

It's interesting to note, as I often do, about how much younger the protagonists were in the 50s and 60s. Rarely did they breach the dreaded thirty barrier. Now, any protagonist under thirty means you're reading one of those angst-ridden 20 something sleep-around literary novels. In the genres, the characters are typically older and wiser.

- posted by Brian J. @ 11:39 AM 0 comments

Book Report: Area of Suspicion by John D. MacDonald (1961/1988)

I bought this book along with the other MacDonald paperbacks that I have been reading lately at Downtown Books in Milwaukee for $1.95. Good stuff.

It's another business world kind of book, like A Man of Affairs. Gevan Dean hasn't been home in a number of years, not since he walked away from the family business and the family after his brother steals his fiancee. The Florida playboy comes back home after someone murders his brother, and he finds the family business in shambles. When the local attorney comes forward too quickly with a proxy statement so Gevan can sign over control of the company, Gevan becomes suspicious and uncovers corruption and espionage whose discovery led to his brother's death--and might lead to Gevan's.

This book mixes crime fiction and the business maneuvering more than A Man of Affairs. It was a pleasant read and quick, good for an airline trip to San Francisco. Also, since it's a paperback, it fits easily into the backpack.

A note about the dual dates in the title: this edition of the text is a revision of the original, and the revised text is copyright 1961. The particular printing comes from 1988. I don't know that you care, but I do like to include it anyway. Because I am a bibliophile.

- posted by Brian J. @ 11:05 AM 0 comments

Chapman on BRAC

Steve Chapman has perspective on base closings that elected officials lack:

It's officially called the Department of Defense, but to many politicians, the label misstates its function. Judging from their reaction to proposed base closures, they'd like to rename it the Department of Jobs, Pork, Community Uplift and Incumbent Protection. That way, no one would get distracted by the petty business of protecting America.

Recently, the Pentagon released a list of proposed realignments in U.S. military facilities, from Maine to Hawaii. The plan calls for shutting 33 major installations and shrinking 29 others, which would streamline operations and save nearly $50 billion over the next 20 years.

But elected officials representing areas that would be adversely affected showed little interest in whether the changes would reduce costs, improve operations or cure cancer. They preferred to focus on the overriding issue: Their states or districts would lose federal jobs and dollars that they assumed to be a birthright.

Read the rest.

- posted by Brian J. @ 9:14 AM 0 comments

Darth Analogous

Phil Spector : Wall of Sound :: George Lucas : Wall of Sight

- posted by Brian J. @ 7:43 AM 0 comments

City Review: San Francisco

Gentle reader, you might have noticed that I did not post but once over the weekend. Well, you might have, my regular gentle reader; those of you who have stopped by based on a Google search for missouri lottery murder might not have noticed. However, my wife and I took a trip to San Francisco to celebrate our anniversary. I know, I know, good bloggers always warn you that when they're going on a brief hiatus, but I do not, because I want my fellow St. Louis bloggers and blog readers to wonder if I am out of town or am just suffering from writer's block and spending the day cleaning my guns and filing my rottweiler's teeth to razor-sharp points.

Such as it is, I offer this humble review of the city of San Francisco.

San Francisco, dear friends, is a city at the northern tip of the southern penninsula in the pair of penninsulas that almost pinch the San Francisco Bay off from the Pacific Ocean. It's a small, compact city, with about seven square miles of streets amongst which Karl Malden, Michael Douglas, and Richard Hatch earnestly ran, Bullitt sped, and Harry Calahan fired his guns. It's got plenty of pop-culture familiarity, from the Rice-a-Roni street car to The Presidio. Coming to San Francisco, one would almost feel like one had been there before. Well, maybe not, but one knows what one will get. However, going to the city provides the fine grained detail you don't get from The Maltese Falcon. Unfortunately, the movies and television shows airbrush a lot of graffiti and litter, prevalent even in the better blocks of San Francisco.

And let's talk about the better blocks of San Francisco. It's truly an urban environment, which means that the whole city has a lot of foot traffic and a lot of people moving around in it. It has the plethora of little shops at the ground floor level or parking beneath buildings with office space and residential space above. It completely mixes use throughout, and the difference between South Beach and North Beach and Nob Hill and SoMa was not as pronounced as you get in other cities, where the lush environs of Lindell Boulevard dim to the Central West End, which dims to Forest Park Southeast, which really dims to the southwestern corner of St. Louis City. Unfortunately, this doesn't mean that the city's elevated to a nice, middle class or better level like one would expect in the People's Republic of California. Instead, all ground level windows and doors in all parts of the city have iron, albeit decorative wrought iron, bars over the windows and doors.

Still, my beautiful wife and I had a good time. We spent Thursday evening misinterpreting a tourist pamphlet map (and by we, I mean "I") and walking due south from Nob Hill to find the Fisherman's Wharf. Somewhere before the Mission District, we wisened up and turned left (easy to do in San Francisco) and found the San Francisco Bay in South Beach. We had fresh seafood in the first place we found. With a bit of luck and without the map (shredded and discarded as useless somewhere about Fifth and Folsom), we found our way back to our hotel.

We spent Friday on a tour of Sonoma wine country with a tour group and everything. Gentle reader, I shall never again sample chardonnay....well, unless I am really thirsty, or it's all they have, or if I have a bottle of chardonnay. My beautiful wife and I had more wine than can taste good, but oddly enough, the wines from the fourth (or fifth?) winery we visited were so delectable that we ordered somewhere north of a million dollars' worth (or perhaps somewhere south of....I didn't have a good map yet). We're expecting the tanker truck sometime this week. On Friday night, we took a cab to Pier 39 and had seafood because it is supposed to be fresher on the sea than on the plain. Brother, when fried enough, who can tell?

On Saturday, we hit the used bookstores (and A Clean Well Lighted Place for books), walking a number of miles from the Hilton to points on Van Ness, Post, and whatnot. Fortunately, we had a map this time, which eliminated some of the randomness from our wanderings. After noon, we took a streetcar (impression: it's just mass transit, with kitsch overtones) to Fisherman's Wharf, where we had more seafood. Afterwards, we walked along Beach Street, looking into the galleries to see the original art works which are still out of our price range, but close enough that we can dream. Heather wanted to visit the temple of the chocolatier, so we did. We then debated streetcar versus cab, and cab won when we saw lines of tourists waiting for the streetcar. Saturday evening brought a burger and a beer in the Hilton pub, and then we returned.

It was an interesting visit, definitely worth a quarter at a yard sale or the vast sums we spent. Besides, it was our anniversary. While some husbands dole out thousands of dollars of baubles to their wives for their anniversaries, I got on an airplane (which, in retrospect, is no where near as thrilling as a San Francisco cab, which also zooms, twists, and cheats death in three dimensions). Cumulatively, I got onto four airplanes. But I love you, honey, and the following latex tentacle wig thing is a joke. Really. Unless you want to.

- posted by Brian J. @ 10:20 PM 0 comments

Star Wars Episode III.VI: A Weird Hope

C'mon, baby, it was your idea to see the Revenge of the Sith movie. Can't you just this once put on the latex tentacle wig and plead, "Sith Lord, spare me! I will do anything!"

- posted by Brian J. @ 9:45 PM 2 comments

Unfortunate Passive Voice

From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch's Home section story "At home with . . .Debbie Monterrey:

KMOX hired her to fill the co-host role vacated by the popular Nan Wyatt, whose murder by her husband dominated headlines for weeks.

Vacated by Nan Wyatt? Sorry, but Nan Wyatt didn't exactly take direct action to leave the radio station. Her husband sort of vacated the co-host role when he shot Nan Wyatt.

- posted by Brian J. @ 9:11 PM 0 comments

Star Wars Episode III.V: Civil Service of the Sith

Of course it took almost twenty years to build the Death Star. It's a government project, for crying out loud.

- posted by Brian J. @ 9:09 PM 0 comments

Damn Bayonet Lugs

Photo and caption from Saturday, May 21, St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

Click for full size

Note the boy has an assault rifle, an obvious assault weapon. Militants carry assault weapons. Law-abiding citizens wouldn't carry assault weapons. The government should ban them.

I mean, damn, the kid's got a wholly automatic rifle, and the Associated Press or the Post-Dispatch unknowingly or knowingly bestowed the term assault weapon on it. Nothing like calling slavery freedom and war peace to keep the discourse straight.

So do can the caption writer not differentiate, or does he/she merely want you to be unable to, gentle reader?

- posted by Brian J. @ 2:10 PM 0 comments

Sierra Club Promotes Higher Electricity Rates

Well, pardon me, but that is the subtext of this story:

- An environmental group has filed a lawsuit to block construction of a coal-fired power plant in Southern Illinois, alleging that the project lacks a valid air permit.

In the lawsuit filed Thursday in U.S. District Court in Benton, the Sierra Club seeks a court order requiring Houston-based EnviroPower to obtain a new air permit and install modern pollution controls before starting construction.

Might as well make it the headline.

- posted by Brian J. @ 2:03 PM 0 comments

Here's the Outrage

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch has discovered, again, that fund raising companies that work with dubious collective organizations use the donations to pay for their expenses and pass the proceeds onto the organization for whom it's collecting donor money. The story: Police charity renews lopsided deal with firm. The lead:

A foundation run by Missouri police chiefs has renewed its contract with a Texas-based fundraiser despite criticism that the fundraiser takes too big a share of charitable contributions earmarked for the foundation.

"It's the best we can get. It's the best anybody can get right now," said Sheldon Lineback, executive director of the Missouri Police Chiefs Charitable Foundation. The foundation is based in Jefferson City but works with police departments throughout Missouri.

In an interview this year, Lineback said the foundation operated a Web-based police training program, conducted statewide training conferences and offered technical assistance to police departments. Lineback also said the foundation was a clearinghouse for homeland security equipment for police departments throughout the state.

Lineback said the contract extension with United Appeal Inc. was similar to the foundation's past contracts with the telemarketing company. He said it called for the foundation to get about 20 percent of money raised for the charity by United Appeal while the company gets about 80 percent. Most of the money is raised by telephone solicitations.

Actually, 20% is pretty good; when I was working as a telemarketing fundraiser for the Missouri Deputy Sheriffs Association, its cut was 17%.

It sounds outrageous, but it's really not. These fundraising companies are businesses, and they rely on the income from donations--pre-distribution--to pay all of their expenses, including rent, salaries, expensive autodial equipment, terminals for the employees, and so on. All business expenses must come from the money raised; these companies don't have chickens in the back yard whose eggs they can sell to pay the bills.

So after all expenses are paid, the profit, if you will, goes directly to a charitable foundation of dubious merit. The Post Dispatch wouldn't complain if a business that was doing something productive was churning all its profit into charity. Also, the Post-Dispatch favors a coerced setup wherein an entity takes money from all people, keeps a chunk of it, and then redistributes the remainder to dubious good causes--that's government, and the Post-Dispatch wants more of it. But because this is a for-profit business, the Post-Dispatch is on its case.

No, let's look where we should find the outrage:

Records filed with the Internal Revenue Service show that Lineback receives a salary of about $70,000 a year. Half of that comes from his work with the foundation and the other half from his work with a related group, the Missouri Police Chiefs Association.

Other members of the foundation's board of directors include Bellefontaine Neighbors Police Chief Robert Pruett, O'Fallon Police Chief Steve Talbott, Eureka Police Chief Mike Wiegand, Cape Girardeau Police Chief Steven Strong and Columbia Police Chief Randy Boehm.

Despite the fact that the foundation's board is made up of publicly paid officials, Lineback says the foundation meetings are not open to the public.

During the past three months, Lineback has said repeatedly that he is too busy to make public minutes of any board meetings, contracts between the foundation and United Appeal or other documents requested by the Post-Dispatch.

No, the fact that a number of law enforcement officials sit on the boards serves as the red herring. This charity is not unlike any other, paid officials or not. It doesn't have any extra duty to dispense its records or minutes because it's a cop charity.

However, note that it is a charity fighting transparency, and it's a charity whose executive director makes his living by running a number of charities. So these charities take the 20% they get from telemarketing fundraisers, keep their share, and pass on the benefits to their members--not to all police, but only to members.

The telemarketing fundraiser is the tick on the leech as far as I'm concerned. I don't support telemarketing fundraising efforts, and I don't support charities that exist to perpetuate themselves and their fundraising efforts. But then again, I am a small-hearted, small-government kind of fellow who tries to maintain a consistency, no matter who might see that consistency and shout "Hobgoblin!" before running away.

(Added to Outside the Beltway's Traffic Jam.)

- posted by Brian J. @ 8:54 AM 0 comments

Book Report: Jump the Shark by Jon Hein (2002)

I know, I know. I've read a book based on the Darwin Awards, which is a Web phenomenon. I bought Philip Kaplan's book, even though his site right there on the blogroll. I read a complete book of Urban Legends even though Snopes is on the blogroll, too. So it should not shock you, gentle reader, that I bought this book when I found it on the discount rack at A Clean Well Lighted Place for Books in San Francisco this weekend. Face it, I like reading the Internet when someone else prints and binds it for me.

The book Jump the Shark distills the Web site. The author picks a number of classic and recognized television shows and identifies a single moment where the show turned its corner and began its inevitable slide into mediocrity and from thence to DVD releases (although, when the site was created in 1997, who could have known how big those re-releases would be?).

The book devotes about 90 pages to television shows, so it selects from the Web site's extensive catalog. Then the book begins applying the concept to music bands.... and celebrities.... sports teams.... politics....

So I give kudos to the book for going beyond the Web site. The reflections on when bands lost their edges was fun (and prompted my beautiful wife of six years to snatch it from my hands to read on a flight.

However, perhaps the extension of the metaphor to political personages and to political concepts was ill-advised. Communism jumped the shark with the fall of the Berlin Wall? So the purges, the famines, and the deaths of millions didn't register, but the made-for-television images and the pageantry of what might be called the final episode of Soviet Influence did. Hmm, that seems ill-advised. Suddenly, we've tripped from light humor into places where this reader wants to sniff a slight political bias from the author who lives in New York with his wife and two kids. I didn't buy this book to sniff for political biases, nor to consider politics at all within the confines of this book.

So did this book, well, leap the mako? Not really. The short vignettes and page-or-so treatments made it an easy read, perfect for travel time or for those moments you can snatch during the day. It distills the Web site's often nebulous comments into succinct snark, but one should read the throwaway-trivia and asides with some skepticism. I found one blatant error in the book and a couple of asides that don't jog with my memory. But overall, the experience is positive, worth the five dollars I spent so that I could clutch its covers with white-knuckled eagerness instead of the arms of the airplane seat.

- posted by Brian J. @ 9:45 PM 0 comments

The Streisand Manifesto

Not that you needed a reason to vote against Barbra Streisand for any legislative position in government, but let's review some points in her manifesto "Guilty":

Make it a crime to be lonely or sad
(it oughta be illegal)

Ms. Streisand obviously wants the government to legislate what moods an individual experiences. Lonely? Sad? Smile, friend, or you're facing felony charges. Life in a Streisand state would resemble life in the role-playing game Paranoia.
Make it a crime to be out in the cold
(it oughta be illegal)

One wonders if Barbra wants to round up the homeless, but it's not that simple. No, friends, this California resident wants to impose a winter-long curfew. Think about it, friends in Minnesota. Barbra imagines winter as spent in a warm and fuzzy set of evenings in front of the fireplace with warm chocolate. Ergo, they all must be. If you dare run to the store for milk and bread before a big snow storm, you could be shot on sight!

Friends, someone with more stomach for her lyrics should closely examine her work for these indicators in case Barbra determines that she needs to unseat that conservative warmonger Barbara Boxer from her position in the United States Senate in the next election. I only saw this portion of the grand unified Streisand theory of overlegislation in this book and don't really own any of her work, nor would I sacrifice myself for this research. Undoubtedly, other kernels of Streisand's legislative agenda lie within her work, and we must root it out!

- posted by Brian J. @ 8:46 PM 2 comments

Book Report: I Can't Fight This Feeling edited by David Cassidy (2002)

I bought this book at A Clean Well Lighted Place for books in San Francisco. It was on the discount table for $4.98, and I thought I would get enough mockery out of it to make it worth my fin. I was probably wrong.

The full title of the book is I Can't Fight This Feeling: Timeless Poems for Lovers from the Pop Hits of the '70s and '80s. The book collects a bunch of lyrics from 1970s and 1980s pop fare, imposes arbitrary and dare I say "Random?" line breaks upon them, and calls them poetry. When coupled with music, some of these songs are enjoyable, potentially meaningful three minute vignettes into poetry that I laughed at in high school. Ah, high school, when I worked as editor of the school literary magazine, whose mockery would keep bad poets out of print; now that I am an adult, the only person's poems that I can keep out of print are my own and I can only do that by submitting them to every poetry magazine from Poetry to Highlights for Children. What was I talking about?

Oh, yes, this book. The introduction is not from the editor, but from some obscure pilot, Fred Schnieder of the B-52s. He explains that these really are poems. The rest of the book refutes his assertion. Because, folks, let's just face it: poems use images to evoke emotional response. Pop songs like Olivia Newton-John's "Physical" or "I Honestly Love You" or Orleans' "Still the One" or Barry White's "Can't Get Enough of Your Love, Babe" or Bon Jovi's "Bad Medicine" don't rely on images so much as testimony from the poet-narrator. Actually, of all those I listed, "Bad Medicine" comes closest since its very conceit is a metaphor (your love is like bad medicine). Oddly enough, this would mean that Madonna's "Like a Virgin" is one of the poetical highlights of the book.

The only song of the 35 that would stand alone as a poem--that is, it relies on imagery and has a good internal consistency in its dreamlike surrealism--is "Time After Time" by Cyndi Lauper. Perhaps "Brandy (You're a Fine Girl)" by Looking Glass would fall into the poem category, seeing as it's a traditional ballad that tells a story and actually includes images (a braided chain made of finer silver from the north of Spain, etc., etc.). However, unlike other songs in the book I can hear within my head as performed by the original artist, "Brandy (You're a Fine Girl)" comes with a visual. A former co-worker, soon-to-be the head of the Technical Writing department, admitted that she had been a pom-pom girl in high school, and that after a couple of glasses of wine, she'd be likely to re-enact a routine based on the song. So, gentle reader, I must diss Looking Glass simply because the song can make me imagine a drunken Peggy smiling and kicking and waving imaginary or improvised poms. Although the imagery is the most vivid, I don't think Looking Glass intended that particular image.

So, I would certainly not recommend this book for you, gentle reader, unless you can find it at a garage sale for a quarter and you can enjoy the absurdity of sharing these poems, read aloud with full Shatner-inflection, with your loved one (or ones, Utah readers). My beautiful wife has taste for poetry and distaste for cheese, so I don't think I got a full verse of "poetry" out before she told me to stop under threat of bodily injury. I don't the heart, or perhaps other masculine anatomical features, to tell her this was supposed to be her anniversary gift.

Bonus: The only laugh out loud line came from John Waite's "Missing You":

stop this heartbreak overload!

Come on, the line's something best mumbled over when singing the song, which I adore; however, seeing it in print, with an exclamation point, sent me into near hysterics.

- posted by Brian J. @ 8:43 PM 0 comments

Appropriate Sponsorship

Pop-Tarts presents: American Idols Live!

My hat's off to the marketer with the wry sense of humor and, if his employers get wise, with the new weekly unemployment check.

- posted by Brian J. @ 7:51 PM 0 comments

Book Report: A Man of Affairs by John D. MacDonald (1957)

As with a number of my other John D. MacDonald books, such as Judge Me Not and On The Run, I fully acknowledge the jonesing with (or jonsing, if I need to drop the silent e) that drives me to pay $2.00 each for John D. MacDonald paperbacks. I am glad, glad, you hear?

I bought this book at Downtown Books in Milwaukee (the place to go in Milwaukee for used books, werd) for $1.95. John D. MacDonald's other works, including the Travis McGee series, get reprinted ad infinitum so their prices are cheap. All of his works are worthwhile, though, no matter the cost. Please visit my eBay listings after I make this assertion to drive up the prices....wait--I'm not selling my copies, you damn chiselers.

This particular book represents another of MacDonald's forays into Big Business. When a junk bond/leveraged buyout king swoops into a family-run business after the patriarch dies, a self-appointed self-made man (the first person narrator) invites himself onto a Bahamas retreat where high finance and human nature collide. The narrator, Sam Glidden, wants to keep the heirs of the owner from selling the company to a corporate raider. But on the holiday in the sane where the sun and the sex are easy, can he hold to his ideals?

Crikes, this book was written almost fifty years ago. With the easy sex and the high finance, I found it easy to forget--and to follow along.

Were I less loyal to my patron saints (Parker, Frost, and Billy Joel, amen), I would find John D. MacDonald's miracles hard to discount. Each of his books, whether ignored in individual paperbacks or apotheosized in Travis McGee omnibus editions, contains the same ambiguous characters, the same lush descriptions of big business or maritime "salvage," and the same lush descriptions.

If you stumble across this paperback through a "friendly" loan, steal it. If you find it at a garage sale held by an underfed woman and her dozens of underfed children, buy it. If you can inadvertently purchase it from a reputable used boook store, buy it.

When I grow up, I want to be John D. MacDonald. Although, with LASIK surgery, perhaps I could avoid the heavy plastic glasses frames.

- posted by Brian J. @ 9:54 PM 2 comments

You're Not From Around Here, Are You?

From the Post-Dispatch story entitled UM ends suit with $10m scholarship fund:

The University of Missouri has agreed to set aside $10 million for a scholarship fund to settle a class action lawsuit that the school violated state law for 15 years by charging tuition to in-state, undergraduate students.

That's the University of Missouri system, right? Check it out:

Between 1986 when the University's Board of Curators broke a 1939 law by charging educational fees based on credit hours until 2001 when the legislature repealed the 72-year-old statute, Mizzou was breaking the law at its campuses in Columbia, Rolla, St. Louis and Kansas City, Herman alleged and Romines ruled in December 2002. Since then, higher courts upheld the ruling.

Somewhere in that run-on sentence, the author says Mizzou was breaking the law at the four University of Missouri campuses listed. The problem? Mizzou refers specifically to University of Missouri at Columbia. That's a specific nickname that the author applies to all UM campuses.

Word: don't use the hip local lingo if you're unclear on it.

- posted by Brian J. @ 4:45 PM 0 comments

No Dog Bites Man, But Post-Dispatch Covers It Anyway

I predicted yesterday:

So keep an eye on it, gentle reader: when the dog bites man, it will be news in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch if it's a pit bull doing the biting, and it will be one more anecdote to drive bad legislation.

Well, translated as augury, that means watch for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch to grab hold of the pit-bull-attacks story with its teeth and not let go. Kind of like, you know, a pit bull.

The Post-Dispatch does not disappoint. Here's today's entry: Dog attacks: The solution proves elusive

While the family and friends of the victims of two pit bull attacks in St. Charles County try to understand what caused the animals to snap, experts are divided about how to prevent maulings.

Even pit bull advocates admit the dogs have an image problem.

Get that? Even pit bull advocates admit there's a problem. But they're only copping to an image problem. Ironic, ainna, that the admission comes in an article that casts pit bulls in a bad light.

But not to worry, citizens. The government is making its plans for the pit bull purge:

Unlike Missouri, Illinois law makes it illegal to enact breed-specific ordinances that would allow the state's cities to ban certain breeds. A bill currently in the Illinois House, however, would change the law.

Furthermore, we get column inches lauding the bans:

Merritt Clifton, of Clinton, Wash., editor of the newspaper Animal People, disagreed and cited laws banning pit bulls in Denver and one being enacted in Ontario.

He said that dog-related legislation had historically allowed the dog one free bite before it was deemed a dangerous animal.

"The problem with pit bulls and also with Rottweilers is that the first dangerous incident is very often the first fatality or life-threatening injury," he said. "So that one free bite doesn't work when you've got that level of capacity to injure, and the issue is no longer whether the dog bites often but whether the dog bites at all."

He said that pit bulls made up about 5 percent of the dog population in the United States, but that more than 50 percent of the dogs involved in fatal attacks or maimings have been pit bulls.

Delise calculates that pit bulls are involved in 21 percent of fatal attacks, the highest of any breed.

Well, what's a newspaper to do? We don't have sharks in Missouri. But we do have menacing pit bulls. It's a twofer for a paper: it can tell harrowing stories with human victims in the man-versus-nature style, and it can goad the government to further curtailing freedom on behalf of the Little Man and/or The Children.

To be continued, undoubtedly....

- posted by Brian J. @ 4:06 PM 2 comments

Maybe They Had a Lot of Luggage

In a St. Louis Post-Dispatch story entitled Amtrak train hits tractor-trailer, we have an inadvertent argument in favor of ending Amtrak subsidies:

Six people on the westbound train, which had a total of 23 passengers and crew on its engine and three passenger cars, were taken to Barnes-Jewish Hospital with bumps and bruises, said Kim Bacon, a spokeswoman for EMS.

23 passengers and crew scattered among 3 passenger cars in a train that's just left the St. Louis station bound for Kirkwood, Washington, Jefferson City, and Kansas City. Maybe the majority of its passengers get on at Kirkwood. Or maybe our goverments are spending millions of dollars to move dozens of people each day. But in a scenic fashion with historical ties, so that's a bargain!

(Attempted submission, again, for the Outside the Beltway Traffic Jam.)

- posted by Brian J. @ 1:26 PM 0 comments

Protested Innocence

Headline on CNN: Groups suing FBI over monitoring of activities:

Five civil rights, animal rights and environmental groups are joining together to sue the FBI to release records about monitoring of anti-war and other political activities by federal agents assigned to counterterrorism duties.

The FBI might monitor political groups under the trumped-up "counterterrorism" excuse. Wait a minute, which groups are suing?

The American Civil Liberties Union said the decision to file a lawsuit Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Washington came after the FBI ignored Freedom of Information Act requests for the documents. The other organizations involved are the American-Arab Anti-discrimination Committee, Greenpeace, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and United for Peace and Justice.

So we've got Arab groups, animal rights groups, and environmental groups. Groups that might be connected to rogue organizations that actually commit terrorist acts on American soil? Sounds like the groups the FBI should monitor in the name of counterterrorism.

We're not talking about the Boy Scouts of America, the Society of Technical Communications, or the United Auto Workers. And if a group called Prepared Youth of America or Tech Writers for Justice started setting fires to motels or IT companies that have crappy documentation, I wouldn't mind the FBI sniffing around them.

- posted by Brian J. @ 10:21 AM 0 comments

There Ought Not To Be A Law

Apologies to Radley Balko for misappropriating his title.

In Milwaukee, a close reading (and by "close" I mean actually reading) of a city ordinance has uncovered that every tailgate party with alcohol at County Stadium or Miller Park has been illegal and subject to citation. Instead of simply not enforcing the law (and leaving it on the books for arbitrary enforcement), the city of Milwaukee will rewrite the law:

Ordinance 106-2.1, which was passed in 1980, is the one we've been blissfully ignoring out there. It says it shall be unlawful for anyone to drink the strong stuff in public parking lots or parking structures. The fine is $50 to $250, probably depending on how much abuse is heaped on the arresting officer.

Schrimpf remembers reading the ordinance several years back when there was talk of building Miller Park downtown.

It struck him that popping a cold one in a downtown parking structure or doing it in the sprawling lots around the ballpark were no different under the law. But he always thought there must be some exception for tailgating, which he himself has enjoyed.

But there was no exception under the city ordinances, nor is there any county ordinance that says go ahead and imbibe in the shadow of your vehicle.

"The answer is yes. It was illegal," Schrimpf said.

So at Murphy's request, the council recently voted to allow tailgate drinking for this season as a "special event" under the ordinance. And last week the Public Safety Committee recommended to the council to make it permanent.

Granted, they're just making ball games a "special event" not subject to the prohibition, and aren't completely throwing out the "no drinking in public" law, but it's a good step in good governance.

- posted by Brian J. @ 9:59 AM 0 comments

Steinberg Disses Aaron of Free Will Blog

Neil Steinberg, Chicago Sun-Times, today:

Sometimes this job is too easy. That whooshing noise you heard Tuesday was every pundit north of St. Louis lunging for a keyboard to heap ridicule on Gov. Blagojevich for his "testicular virility" quip.

But what about Aaron? He's not north of St. Louis. Perhaps Steinberg doesn't think Aaron is a pundit like he (Steinberg) is.

- posted by Brian J. @ 9:05 AM 0 comments

Please Step Out of the Vehicle, or Zzzzt

Tasers: or else the cops would have to shoot you for not getting out of your car:

The two-mile pursuit ended on west 56th Street, but Martin refused to get out of the car. One deputy broke out a window and used a taser on him.

Cops wouldn't shoot the driver in the case, nor would they clap him with the billy club. Because those leave marks that look bad in photographs. Tasers, though, are nice alternatives to deadly force.

- posted by Brian J. @ 9:01 AM 0 comments

Judicial Pr0n

02-P-381 Appeals Court: JOHN DOE[1] vs. MARY MOE.[2]:

Early in the morning of September 24, 1994, they were engaged in consensual sexual intercourse. The plaintiff was lying on his back while the defendant was on top of him. The defendant's body was secured in this position by the interlocking of her legs and the plaintiff's legs. At some point, the defendant unilaterally....

I forgot from whence I found that particular link, but I have to wonder who will be the first to demand that court cases like this be redacted from the public record to protect the impressionable minds of children.

UPDATE: I was remiss in not pointing out that I saw this story on Overlawyered.

- posted by Brian J. @ 8:53 AM 0 comments

Free Trivia Answer

Today's free answer to an unasked trivia question is:

Roxette

- posted by Brian J. @ 8:54 PM 0 comments

Compare and Contrast Assignment

Your topic, today, gentle reader: Causes for Alarm.

Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails:

Reznor said he began to grow worried about finances when he was told during a meeting with Malm and a lawyer in 2002 that there was "cause for alarm."

The following year, he said, he asked Malm to tell him how much money he had. He said he was sent a financial statement that revealed he had at most $3 million in total assets and as little as $400,000 in cash.

Crew on the International Space Station:

A balky Russian oxygen generator broke down on the International Space Station, but its two-man crew has a reserve air supply that would last about five months, NASA officials said Friday.

The station's primary generator, which has been operating in an on-again, off-again fashion for months, stopped working last week and the station's crew has not been able to fix it.

Mission managers say the unit has failed for good. Consequently, Russian cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev and U.S. astronaut John Phillips will be relying on reserves until replacement parts arrive at the station in late August.

Kylie Clem, a spokeswoman for NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, said the reserves would last well beyond the scheduled mid-June arrival at the station of a Russian space freighter with additional supplies.

As it stands, oxygen supplies in a Progress cargo carrier now at the outpost will last until May 22 or May 23.

The crew also is equipped with oxygen generators that work like drop-down emergency air supplies on commercial airliners. Supplies from those would last until early July. Beyond that, there is a 100-day oxygen supply in tanks attached to the station U.S. Quest airlock.

Total air supply now onboard: About 140 days.

One of these situations is dire, and the other is not. Can you spot the difference?

- posted by Brian J. @ 9:08 AM 0 comments

Lileks Spreads Disinformation to Children

Lileks today:

"You have FOUR STAR WARS?" Gnat asked. "Wow."

There are actually five – well, six. But I sold the first one.

"Why?"

"Because it was an embarrassing piece of tripe."

"What’s tripe?"

"It’s a kind of fish."

Everyone except Lileks, and now his daughter, knows that tripe is cattle guts.

I'm not too proud to LOUDLY CORRECT MISINFORMATION IN THE MAINSTREAMISH MEDIA! I am a BLOGGER! It's what I do to feel better about myself!

- posted by Brian J. @ 7:25 AM 0 comments

Taking the Step Down from Mechanical

Marquette Wild

Hey, it worked for Minnesota.

- posted by Brian J. @ 5:39 PM 0 comments

Book Report: The Dick Tracy Casebook selected by Max Allan Collins and Dick Locher (1990)

I inherited The Dick Tracy Casebook from my aunt, who undoubtedly bought it at a garage sale to sell on eBay. So I got it free, which explains why I got it, since I'm not a particular fan of the comic strip.

This book collects some representative story arcs from the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Each story arc begins with one of the contemporary (for 1990--who knows what they do now) producers of the comic strip. Each one elevates, to the point of comic apotheosis, the forthcoming collection of black and white panels. Chester Gould at his greatest, this period in Dick Tracy, that period in Dick Tracy. It was a cartoon serial, for crying out loud.

As a serial, each story contains a single plotline. Given the daily nature of the serial, though, a large number of the individual panels sum up the action so far; that is, of a day's three or four panels, the panel deals with something that has already happened. Indeed, sometimes whole daily strips catch the reader up on the story so far. It gives the stories a particularly recursive feel.

The nature of the storylines also seemed, at times, a little as though Gould was trying to run the stories a little longer until he could maybe get his next idea. Two of the stories run 50 pages; at about the midpoint of the "Crewy Lou" story, the cops had Crewy Lou, but she escaped and a sudden brother decided to spend over a week trying to kill her for the dishonor to her family. And then she conks Tess Trueheart over the head and steals Dick Tracy's car and spends a week or so driving it through mountains. And so on and on.

Perhaps I'm not the comic connoisseur, but I didn't dwell over the panels. I didn't contrast the styles nor depictions of Dick Tracy at times in his career. Nor did I study the character names to determine their underlying meanings. I just read for the story, much like the book's selectors did when they first read Dick Tracy and quite unlike, so the introductions suggest, the book's selectors do now that they're doing

- posted by Brian J. @ 4:24 PM 0 comments

Get Your Geek On

Over at A Small Victory, Michele has posted a couple of radio spots for the original Star Wars.

- posted by Brian J. @ 4:17 PM 0 comments

Libraries in Jeopardy

Over at Draft Matt Blunt 2008, I dared to commend Matt Blunt for cutting the state's outlays for library information technology infrastructure.

At the University of Texas - Austin, they've gone the other way; they've removed all books from the library to turn it into an Internet cafe:

Students attending the University of Texas at Austin will find something missing from the undergraduate library this fall.

Books.

By mid-July, the university says, almost all of the library's 90,000 volumes will be dispersed to other university collections to clear space for a 24-hour electronic information commons, a fast-spreading phenomenon that is transforming research and study on campuses around the country.

"In this information-seeking America, I can't think of anyone who would elect to build a books-only library," said Fred Heath, vice provost of the University of Texas Libraries in Austin.

Their new version is to include "software suites" - modules with computers where students can work collaboratively at all hours - an expanded center for writing instruction, and a center for computer training, technical assistance and repair.

Libraries are moving from the repositories of information model to an entrance ramp to the information superhighway. As household Internet penetration continues to climb, libraries will make themselves as relevant as public television viewing points. But they get more budget and they get to convince themselves that even though they're librarians, they're not bookish.

Unfortunately, by moving to a service provider business model, so to speak, libraries marry themselves to continual, increasing costs of business. Whereas the library could alter the number of books to accommodate different fiscal realities, buying fewer in years with less revenue or more in periods when the government is flush, the move to the public Internet cafe means that costs will always escalate as the libraries need the latest technologies.

In Milwaukee, libraries are finding a cash crunch even though their budgets have gone up. Unfortunately, expenses are going up faster:

Spending by public libraries in the Milwaukee area increased by 12% from 2000 through 2003, and more than half of the area's libraries raised operating expenditures by more than double the rate of inflation, a new analysis shows.

The spending increases come as municipal governments - the primary source of library funding - are under growing pressure to hold down costs and taxes. But an unusual state law governing the funding of libraries makes it nearly impossible for local officials to make significant cuts in library budgets.

"It is a bone of contention, especially in an environment where the Legislature is talking about things like tax levy freezes and spending limits," said Curt Witynski, assistant director of the League of Wisconsin Municipalities, which has sought to have the law repealed.

This is the future of libraries in America; they're changing their model from performing a valuable service to the public (which most of the public, tragically, doesn't use) to offering an expensive service that most of the public will have in their own homes. Libraries are decreasing their relevance to become "hipper" and "sexier," but it ultimately will look as hip and sexy as 1920s swimwear.

- posted by Brian J. @ 9:25 AM 0 comments

Not Impossible, Just Arbitrary

Both Neil Steinberg and Richard Roeper have weighed in on the new ordnance, whoops, sorry, ordnance is against the law in Illinois, ordinance banning use of cell phones while driving.

Roeper calls the ordinance "impossible to enforce:"

Last Thursday I was in a cab crossing Michigan Avenue. There was a temporary backup because of a truck backing into a garage just east of Michigan, and we found ourselves right next to a traffic cop. She could clearly see that my guy was gabbing away on his hands-free phone, but she didn't say a word to him about it. So I spoke up -- and he reluctantly hung up, just as he was sailing past the address I had given him in the first place.

If cops don't care about the thousands of cabbies using hands-free phones, are they really going to direct their energies toward finding motorists using hand-held phones? Are they going to position themselves at the city limits, just waiting for an unsuspecting motorist to cross 87th Street while still on the phone?

My dear Mr. Roeper, it's not impossible to enforce, but it would take a lot of effort to enforce the new ordinance, taking law enforcement resource committments from more important things. Chicago cops won't enforce this ordinance every time they encounter an infraction, but they will enforce the ordinance when they want to. That is, when they want to stop you for something or take a look in your car, they'll simply pull you over for talking on the cell phone.

Legislation in the twenty-first century doesn't address major crimes against people and property; rape, murder, and assault have been illegal for centuries. Instead, our elected leaders have to search for new things to criminalize. They've got all day to think it up since that's their full time jobs: to examine new technologies and brainstorm about how to criminalize and/or tax it.

- posted by Brian J. @ 7:31 AM 0 comments

Who's Worse, the Fool or the Fool Who Badmouths His Country in France?

Picture this text scrolling up the screen before Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith:

Lucas, speaking to reporters, emphasised that the original "Star Wars" was written at the end of the Vietnam war, when Richard Nixon was U.S. president, but that the issue being explored was still very much alive today.

"The issue was, how does a democracy turn itself into a dictatorship?" he said.

"When I wrote it, Iraq (the U.S.-led war) didn't exist... but the parallels of what we did in Vietnam and Iraq are unbelievable."

He acknowledged an uncomfortable feeling that the United States was in danger of losing its democratic ideals, like in the movie.

"I didn't think it was going to get this close. I hope this doesn't come true in our country."

- posted by Brian J. @ 7:26 AM 0 comments

FCC Commissioners Don't Warn of Efforts to Over-Regulate Media

Story in St. Louis Post-Dispatch: FCC commissioners warn of effort to consolidate media:

Two members of the Federal Communication Commission called upon the public Saturday to help their agency resist new efforts to relax rules allowing big corporations to own more television and radio stations.

Michael Copps and Jonathan Adelstein, the commission members, spoke before an overflow crowd to the National Conference for Media Reform at the Millennium Hotel in downtown St. Louis. More than 2,200 people from across the country are attending the three-day conference.

The federal agency voted to relax its rules on media consolidation two years ago, but Congress and the courts intervened to stop it.

Copps said the three Republican members of the commission, a majority, are ready to try again. He expects big media companies to bring "a lot of pressure" on the commission to allow more consolidation of newspapers and radio and television stations.

With the explosion of new media types such as blogging, podcasting, satellite radio, and coming media forms that are directly consumer-interactive such as streaming movies and Internet video, I think the major media companies will fight for a diminishing share of consumers.

However, certain segments of the FCC want to ensure that it retains the ability to regulate businesses as much as possible. Because as the audience fractures and the broadcast media become less relevant, so too the functionaries and appointees who regulate it. Unless the demonstrate some vision and leadership to intrude upon other, non-airwave media, too.

- posted by Brian J. @ 7:13 PM 0 comments

Rewriting Bush's War Rationale as Being Recast

The latest journalist to revise Bush's rationale for the Iraq War as only Weapons of Mass Destruction: Mark Silva of the Chicago Tribune:

With American dissatisfaction over the conflict in Iraq reaching its highest level since the invasion two years ago--and the initial reasons for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein undermined by the discovery that he possessed no weapons of mass destruction--Bush has set out this year with carefully scripted tours of the recently liberated nations of Europe to cast all of these events as chapters of one great world saga.

But the peaceful, homegrown movements of these nations bear little resemblance to what Bush has dubbed "Purple Revolution" of Iraq--named for ink-stains on the fingers of Iraqis who voted in January for a new government.

Critics contend that the president is masking the original, and later discredited, reasons for invading Iraq with his vow to end world tyranny, a theme Bush voiced in his second-term inaugural address and has repeated across Europe.

Like Sylvester Brown, Jr., before him, Mark Silva and his unnamed critics don't remember this reason as existing prior to the war. They also seem eager to determine that the Iraq War and its democratic aftermath are unrelated to these peaceful revolutions.

Mere coincidence, perhaps, explains why these things are happening now in the age of straightforward, ultimatums-upheld foreign policy instead of in the economically-supercharged and multilateralist-triumphant 1990s where treaties were signed and discussions were held and the status quo remained.

- posted by Brian J. @ 6:52 PM 0 comments

Headline Versus Reality Dissonance

Shrieking headline: Animals in abandoned pet shop are discovered in squalid conditions.

Lead:

The Department of Agriculture is caring for 206 animals living at the Pampered Pets store in Alton Square mall while the shop's ownership is resolved in court.

Management at Alton Square mall learned this week just how messy a business breakdown can be when pets are the merchandise.

Matthew and Jessica Buckingham, the owners of the Pampered Pets store on the mall's second floor, defaulted on a loan and abandoned the store, said Jeff Squibb, a spokesman for the Illinois Department of Agriculture. The agency regulates such businesses.

My dog, man! How long were those animals living in abandoned squalor?

When the store did not open for business on Thursday, mall officials notified Alton authorities.

"We arrived and found horrible conditions," said James Greer, Alton assistant chief of animal control. "When animals are unattended like that, even for a short time, things get filthy fast."

It sounds like the officials were confronted with the same amount of mess that pet store employees confront every morning, and the facts in the story imply that Thursday was the first day the store hadn't opened. The story, on the other hand, uses the appropriate words to imply the opposite.

- posted by Brian J. @ 10:11 AM 0 comments

Reflecting on Life Plus

Story:

Two men each received two life sentences plus 512 years in prison on Friday for robbing a grocery store in St. Charles.

Wow. If Martin Luther had gotten that sentence for his 95 theses, he'd be eligible for release in 2128. Of course, in today's prosecution environment, he'd have gotten a separate count of something for each thesis.

It's good to see perspective and reasonability involved in sentencing. After all, with improvements in medical science, it's important that we as a society sentence offenders to half a milennium in prison.

- posted by Brian J. @ 9:59 AM 0 comments

Good Signs for Great Leaders

Just what we want in relationship of mobs of people to leaders: mass hysteria:

"Everyone was screaming and jumping up and down. It was mass hysteria," claims a graduate of a women's liberal arts college in Decatur, GA, site of Sen. Hillary Clinton's commencement day address this weekend.

Will they do anything for their leader? Because that's the other sign of a too-successful Great Leader.

- posted by Brian J. @ 9:47 AM 2 comments

History Erasure Almost Complete

Professor Bainbridge points to an article that might indicate that the ruling class has almost succeeded in erasing history to its benefit:

Who will be the Greatest American? Political giant Abraham Lincoln or Bill Clinton? Sports legend Babe Ruth or Tiger Woods? Media mogul Oprah Winfrey or Walt Disney? These remarkable people, and many more, have been named by America as some of the top 100 Greatest Americans.

The common man gets to vote for the greatest American from these choices:

Abraham Lincoln
Albert Einstein
Alexander Graham Bell
Alexander Hamilton
Amelia Earhart
Andrew Carnegie
Arnold Schwarzenegger
Audie Murphy
Babe Ruth
Barack Obama
Barbara Bush
Benjamin Franklin
Bill Clinton
Bill Cosby (William Henry Cosby, Jr.)
Bill Gates
Billy Graham
Bob Hope
Brett Favre
Carl Sagan
Cesar Chavez
Charles Lindbergh
Christopher Reeve
Chuck Yeager
Clint Eastwood
Colin Powell
Condoleezza Rice
Donald Trump
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Eleanor Roosevelt (Anna Eleanor Roosevelt)
Ellen DeGeneres
Elvis Presley
Frank Sinatra
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Frederick Douglass
George H. W. Bush
George W. Bush
George Lucas
George Patton
George Washington
George Washington Carver
Harriet Ross Tubman
Harry Truman
Helen Keller
Henry Ford
Hillary Rodham Clinton
Howard Hughes
Hugh Hefner
Jackie Robinson (Jack Roosevelt Robinson)
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
Jesse Owens
Jimmy Carter
Jimmy Stewart
John Edwards
John Glenn
John F. Kennedy
John Wayne
Johnny Carson (John William Carson)
Jonas Edward Salk
Joseph Smith Jr.
Katharine Hepburn
Lance Armstrong
Laura Bush
Lucille Ball
Lyndon B. Johnson
Madonna (Madonna Louise Veronica Ciccone)
Malcolm X (Malcolm Little)
Marilyn Monroe
Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens)
Martha Stewart
Martin Luther King Jr.
Maya Angelou
Mel Gibson
Michael Jackson
Michael Jordan
Michael Moore
Muhammad Ali (Cassius Marcellus Clay, Jr.)
Neil Alden Armstrong
Nikola Tesla
Oprah Winfrey
Pat Tillman
Dr. Phil McGraw
Ray Charles
Richard Nixon
Robert Kennedy
Ronald Reagan
Rosa Parks
Rudolph W. Giuliani
Rush Limbaugh
Sam Walton
Steve Jobs
Steven Spielberg
Susan B. Anthony
Theodore Roosevelt
Thomas Edison
Thomas Jefferson
Tiger Woods
Tom Cruise
Tom Hanks
Walt Disney
Wrights Brothers (Orville & Wilbur Wright)

Excellent! The blurring of historical achievement and current celebrity. Once the process of completely eliminating a sense of history from citizens occurs, the greatest Americans will narrow to contemporary celebrities and political figures. Wirhout a perspective on history, who will we be to challenge the thoughts and views of the Greatest Americans as they tell us what to do and think?

My, aren't I dystopian in the morning?

- posted by Brian J. @ 9:24 AM 0 comments

Prometheus Unhinged

I've been skimming David Greenberg's rather disagreeable posts at Daniel Drezner.com and quietly disagreed them. Little did I realize that Greenberg's excursion into the blogosphere was an anthropoorelitist study where he was Dian Fossey and we were the gorillas. He's published his findings in the peer-reviewed New York Times:

As I checked other sites for ideas, I now realized that I didn't need only new information. I needed a gimmick - a motif or a running joke that would keep the blog rolling all week. All of a sudden, I was reading other blogs, not for what they had to say, but for how they said it.

And:

It's not that the readers were dim. Some forced me to refine or clarify my arguments. But the responses certainly got reductive, very quickly. And for all the individuality that blogs are supposed to offer, there was an amazing amount of groupthink - since some of them were getting their talking points from ... other blogs.

By the end of the week, with other deadlines looming and my patience exhausted, I began to post less and less. There was a piece for Slate due, a book chapter to finish, my baby boy, Leo, to entertain and a piece to write for the Week in Review.

So you see, while he enjoyed his trips to the darkest underbelly of commentary, he had real work to do, and with regret could no longer post to the low quality standards he'd set for himself and the presumably knuckle-dragging readership and commentariat.

Nothing like a little slumming to shore up your liberal cred. Oh, I know, it's under the guise of broadening your horizons or trying something new. If you perform the task with the idea that it will confirm your preconceptions, though, you're probably right--but your horizons are no more broad, and you've really only tried the same old thing.

More at:

- posted by Brian J. @ 8:48 AM 0 comments

Compare and Contrast: IDs in Wisconsin

Gentle reader, compare and contrast the use of the photo ID in Wisconsin:

Buying cold medicine? ID required!

Voting? No ID required because that oppresses someone!

Pardon me whilst I bangst my head upon my laminate desktop even as I thank Sean at The American Mind for the link.

- posted by Brian J. @ 8:40 PM 0 comments

Government and Developers

Over at Boots and Sabers, Owen's done his homework to spell out the beginnings of a land grab wherein shady government officials working with developers and with local neighborhood associations will eventually run the middle class owners out of their neighborhood:

A Den of Thieves

The worst part of the whole story is the sense I get that it's not a vast conspiracy of long-range plans to incrementally drive the homeowners out, but rather that the government officials have nothing else to do but try a variety of approaches to meet their goals of stripping citizens' property rights. Patience and not having to live a freaking life while fighting city hall and its developer overlords tip the balance of power from the citizens to those who live only to rule them.

- posted by Brian J. @ 8:14 PM 0 comments

White House Thinks Your Clothes Are Too Cheap

In a move undoubtedly designed to stimulate the economy, the White House has determined that you should pay more for your clothes:

The Bush administration is re-imposing quotas on three categories of clothing imports from China, responding to complaints from domestic producers that a surge of Chinese imports was threatening thousands of U.S. jobs.

The administration action will impose limits on the amount of cotton trousers, cotton knit shirts and underwear that China can ship to this country. American retailers say that will drive up prices for U.S. consumers.

Higher prices and diminished sales always benefit consumers, retailers, and the economy. Or so this administration thinks when it starts slapping around the tariffs. Perhaps the Bush administration can only replicate the success of Smoot-Hawley in the twenty-first century.

- posted by Brian J. @ 11:57 AM 0 comments

Senator Bond Battles Fiscal Responsibility

Once again, Christopher "Pork" Bond promises to fight fiscal responsibility if it, you know, impacts his voters:

U.S. Sen. Christopher "Kit" Bond, R-Mo., said during a news conference outside the base gate Friday that he was "stunned" by the recommendation

and promised to fight it.

"It has very clear homeland security implications that must be considered and, I do not believe, have been adequately considered by the Pentagon," Bond said.

Because, you know, the Pentagon has overlooked homeland security and military considerations which a senator, whose job involves bloviating on all sorts of unfocused topics, sees immediately. The important homeland security functions provided by the Human Resources Command, you see, which only possible Bond voters can provide adequately.

Perhaps Bond means his homeland job security implications, which puts him in the chorus of local democrats (William Clay, Charles Dooley, and Francis Slay). Excellent company you're keeping, Senator. Those of us who value fiscal conservatism in our federal legislators have taken note.

- posted by Brian J. @ 5:15 AM 0 comments

No MLS for You

Major League Soccer has looked to St. Louis for an expansion team and it doesn't look promising:

Kansas City Wizards midfielder Chris Klein, a St. Louisan, told the Star: "If a city shows it's willing to build a stadium and that there's a viable owner that's there, then the league is going to look at it. So far, St. Louis has shown neither of those two aspects."

Thankfully. After three publicly funded sports venues in St. Louis itself over the last decade, including the new Busch stadium which is still a skeleton fleshing out downtown and the most unpopular spending on sports yet, perhaps Missourians are growing weary of blowing money on sports facilities instead of vital public infrastructure. Particularly venues for the fold-by-night soccer teams.

Probably not. Politicians love getting their pictures taken with athletes. But with upcoming spending on Columbia and Kansas City facilities, perhaps this particular field has had its seed corn eaten already for a couple of years.

- posted by Brian J. @ 5:06 AM 0 comments

Word of the Day: Twee

Today's word: Twee: Overly precious or nice.

I don't normally do words of the day, but I've encountered this word twice already this morning.

Neil Steinberg of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote:

(And why don't men garden in ads? I know lots of guys who garden, who are proud of their tomatoes. I sure am. Is it twee? Come by the office and say that to my face!)

Mark Steyn wrote:

The score gives you a good clue to the main problem: sometimes it’s grand and epic, at others it’s twee and nudging and determined to jolly along the flattest of gags.

Weird, huh?

- posted by Brian J. @ 8:20 AM 0 comments

Fanboy Attack!

In his review of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Mark Steyn makes a gaffe:

The ordinariness of Freeman is just right for the Dent role. To see him on some dusty lunarscape is to see the essence of Douglas Adams’s paradoxical world: a vast corner of a very foreign galaxy that is forever England — or, as one book title put it,

But The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul is a Dirk Gently novel, not one of the five books (and one short story *) in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy trilogy.

* Of course, the short story is "Young Zaphod Plays It Safe" which is available in the anthology editions. You did know that, didn't you?

Mark Steyn, who has a British-sounding accent, should have known better. He's trying to pass as informed but, :: sniff ::, he is obviously not.

- posted by Brian J. @ 8:02 AM 0 comments

Mother Displays Ignorance of 13-Year-Olds

The blame for the 13-year-old who climbed an electrical tower, touched a 19,700 volt transmission line, and fell lies not with the child, for his lack of common sense, nor with parenting that didn't hone his instincts, nor with the friends who had five dollars to bet him he wouldn't do it. Of course not.

Anna Thebeau says her son, 13-year-old Justin Porter, wouldn't be in the hospital recovering from burns and a broken pelvis if the electric tower he scaled on a $5 bet had a warning sign.

It's Illinois Power's fault for not having a sign. Lawsuit countdown begins.

Because teenagers heed all signs and obey all posted rules. Perhaps Justin is an anamoly, but somehow, I doubt it.

- posted by Brian J. @ 7:42 AM 0 comments

But They Still Have Drivers' Licenses

18 Percent Of Florida Seniors Flunk FCAT [Florida's Comprehensive Assessment Test].

Oops, wrong seniors. They meant those damn kids in high school seniors.

- posted by Brian J. @ 9:47 PM 0 comments

Good Thing There Were No Fatalities

Fowl play on highway:

St. Louis police detained seven ducklings Wednesday after they blockedHighway 40 and caused a traffic accident, but later released them to custody of their mother. No charges were filed.

Officers gave this account:

A minor collision occurred about 11 a.m. in the eastbound lanes of the highway, which is also Interstate 64, near Kingshighway. Motorists blamed slowed traffic trying to avoid the feathered pedestrians. No injuries were reported, human or otherwise.

Because once ducks cause a couple of fatalities, the city of Denver will kill them all.

- posted by Brian J. @ 8:58 PM 0 comments

To Be Clear

You know the unnamed capital-O Objectivist in the post below?

A complete and utter fabrication. If blogvestigators hit the streets and the lawns of the Ayn Rand Institute, looking for someone who even heard of Musings from Brian J. Noggle, they would find no one to fit the description. Then they would pressure me to give up my position here for misleading The Public, or just you, gentle reader. I don't want this to happen to me.

So please understand that here at Musings from Brian J. Noggle, we got no truck with reality. We do however, got truck with bad sixties slang that continues to live on into the twenty-first century for some reason or another.

(Link seen on Michelle Malkin.)

- posted by Brian J. @ 4:30 PM 0 comments

The Utter Fallibility of Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand, the father of the Objectivism philosophy, was not infallible. Observe:

He thought of how convincingly he could describe this scene to friends and make them envy the fullness of his contentment. Why couldn't he convince himself? He had everything he ever wanted. He had wanted superiority--and for the last year he had been the undisputed leader of his profession. He had wanted fame--and he had his five thick albums of clippings. He had wanted wealth--and he had enough to insure luxury for the rest of his life. He had everything anyone ever wanted. How many people struggled and suffered to achieve what he had achieved? How many dreamed and bled and died for this, without reaching it? "Peter Keating is the luckiest fellow on earth." How often had he heard that?

The Fountainhead

You see, gentle reader, Ayn Rand used insure, that is to provide or arrange insurance for, instead of ensure, to make sure of. Granted, English was her second language and all, but it's important to note that Ayn Rand could make errors.

UPDATE: A capital-O Objectivist responds:

Dear whim worshipper:

Ayn Rand represents one of the greatest intellects of all time, so it's certain that your interpretation of her usage of "insure" instead of "ensure" in the passage you quote cannot rival her genius nor that of Leonard Peikoff, author of

and the Ayn Rand's Official Intellectual Heir®. Regardless, you parasite to the creators of wealth, I shall seek to educate you even though I suspect you would prefer your blessed collectivist ignorance.

By using "insure" instead of "ensure," Rand was illustrating the essentially bankrupt nature of Peter Keating; although he didn't have enough wealth to "ensure" his lifestyle--that is, he could not repurchase all of his meaningless, unearned belongings nor could he recreate his success from scratch without leeching the production of the successful Howard Roark, he could "insure" his wealth by knowing that in the event of a total loss, the State would steal from the real producers in the world to recreate the fantasy of his opulence.

So you see, you second-hander primitivist, Ayn Rand packed meaning into that passage that you couldn't, with your escapist worldview embracing "equality" and "altruism" instead of "egoism," understand. So stick to writing your silly little sentences on the latest pop-fiction book you've read and regurgitate other peoples' opinions without trusting your own judgment.

Okay, I made it up, but that's how sanctioned Objectivists sound, ainna?

- posted by Brian J. @ 8:29 PM 0 comments

All the News I Can Imagine (I)

Marvel sues two sleepers over dreams

LOS ANGELES — Marvel Enterprises is suing two individuals who've slept because it claims that the individuals had dreams with Marvel characters "Spiderman," "Rogue," "ShadowCat," "She-Hulk," "Dazzler," "The Scarlet Witch," and other heroes and, quite frankly, a lot of heroines.

The lawsuit claims that St. Louis resident Sean Wilson and Cahokia, Illinois, resident Sam Jose violated Marvel's trademark characters in their dreams on the nights of May 4, 2005 and May 6, 2005 respectively. Marvel seeks unspecified damages and an injunction against the two young men to stop using its characters.

REM-sleep enables participants to emulate superheroes' look and abilities and then battle against other dream characters in a virtual city. Like similar so-called personal entertainment media, dream offer a myriad of combinations so that no two dreamers' plots are exactly the same.

But in its lawsuit, filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court, Marvel argues that the dreamers' imaginations easily allows them to portray themselves as its superheroes, including "Cyclops" of the X-Men in that one scenario involving "Dr. Jean Grey" of which the Comics Board would not approve.

The New York-based company also took issue with the ability of dreamers to go so far as to use the names of Marvel comic book characters in their dreams.

Marvel claims the two men are responsible because the the dreams occur in their minds, raising the question of whether a person is responsible for his or subsconscious behavior even while unconscious.

Marvel also claims the men have disrupted its "existing and future" business prospects for licensing its characters in stories similar to the plots of their dreams, as the men might not buy those comic books that pale in comparison to their own nocturnal experience.

Neither of the defendants in the lawsuit would comment.

The Marvel lawsuit appears to be the first to raise this question in the scope of individual dreams. But early copyright infringement lawsuits brought by recording companies against people who hummed tunes successfully argued the hummers were responsible for license fees owed to the music publishers because they performed the songs, often in public venues.

The argument can still be made that the dreams are only empower dreamers to the same degree that an establishment like Kinko's enables customers to make paper copies of copyrighted material, said Lou von Fredericks, senior intellectual property attorney with the Nighttime Frontier Foundation.

"Is it a violation of copyright to make up a character in the dream world or is that fair use?" von Fredericks said. "This is really untested ground in the courts."

- posted by Brian J. @ 7:30 PM 0 comments

Denver Pit Bull Genocide

One more reason not to live in Colorado: Denver has declared all Pit Bulls illegal and is now rounding them up and killing them:

It has to be one of the dumbest laws, ever. And I don't even own or like pit bulls. It's nothing personal, only that I'd never keep any animal that eats as much or more than I do.

Still, I can weep for the pit bulls of Denver, particularly for the puppies that never did anything other than get born into the breed.

Yet here we have the city of Denver, newly sprung from legislative and judicial restraint, rounding up pits over the past couple of days and killing them like rats during The Plague.

A uniformed officer arrives at a home. "I'll get him," she announces to her partner. Rather than fight it all, a distraught man emerges, weighs going to jail and a fine, and in the end hands over his dog.

Well, there you have it again. The government confiscates and destroys things which are abused, mishandled, misbehave, or misused by a few. For the Children, no doubt. Soon, the government will only allow us to have nice foam (not polyurethane, which is flammable, but something more spongebobby). For everything.

(Link seen on The Agitator.)

UPDATE: Wait! I have a sudden bad governance inspiration! Couple your pit bull confiscation with this lunacy, and it's own an illegal pit bull, lose your house!

Vote for me. I am worse than the rest of them.

- posted by Brian J. @ 4:34 PM 6 comments

Book Review: The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand (1943)

I wanted a good reading copy of The Fountainhead, so I cruised eBay for one. I mean, I have the first edition, but I don't want to spill beer and danish toppings on it. I also have my first paperback copy from college, but I'm a hardback snob. So I cruised eBay and found a nice International Collector's Library edition ca 1968, complete with heavy paper, leatheresque binding, and attached ribbon for book marking. Oh, yeah. And for such a low price (shipping and handling extra)!

So once I bought it, I put it on my to read shelf. And now I have read it for the fifth time.

What can I say? I like the book. I read it first, a library copy, before my freshman year of college. I'd been challenged by the startlingly-literate machinist next door to elevate my reading habits if I wanted to be an English major. So I remembered flyers for the ARI's The Fountainhead essay contest scholarship and figured it was Literature. So I consumed it at the most formative time, that summer when a young man leaves his boyhood home and tries to become a man.

The book seemed very long back then when I was used to 175 page crime thrillers, but now that I have graduated to 1000 page Stephen King books, it seems almost like a quick read. I'm surprised every time how approachable the book is; the book avoids the speechifying that sank Atlas Shrugged. Rand also had a better hero in this book, Howard Roark, with whom the reader struggles throughout the years that pass in their epic sweep.

Howard Roark, architect. He's thrown out of architecture school for being a nonconformist and has to strive through a series of setbacks to be the man he is and to be an active architect without compromising his ideals. He won't, of course, because he's a Randian hero, but it continues to inspire me each time I read the book. So I've read it again for the first time in five years, and I'll read it again in another five years, when I need a reminder of the freshness and vitality I felt and feel about my ideals when I read this book.

It's not much of a book review, but let the fact that I paid eBay shipping and handling for a copy of this book so I could read it a fifth time speak for me.

- posted by Brian J. @ 4:15 PM 2 comments

New Revenue Stream in New Jersey

Bill: Seize homes that contain 'illegal' guns:

The legislation, sponsored by Assemblyman Louis Manzo, D-Jersey City, authorizes the forfeiture of "motor vehicle, building or premise" if a firearm is found in it that is not possessed legally per state law – "even if the firearm was not possessed by the owner of the motor vehicle, building or premise," states a summary of the bill, A3998. The legislation was introduced Thursday.

Manzo pointed out his bill extends government power now reserved for targeting those in possession of illegal drugs.

Behold the slippery slope. Hey, asset seizure of this fashion has all but eliminated the scourge of illegal drugs. Why not extend it?

Because I'm eventually looking forward to handing over pinks because a speed camera clocked me at two miles per hour over the speed limit.

(Link seen on Ravenwood's Universe.)

- posted by Brian J. @ 8:42 AM 0 comments

First Hand Second-Handing

From the bizjournals.com: Mastering meetings:

MYTH: Most meetings are a waste of time.

FACT: Every meeting -- whether you're a participant, a presenter, or the chairperson -- represents a golden opportunity to increase your visibility as an effective communicator.

Remember, bureaucrat, meetings are not to do something, nor to reach a decision: they're all about increasing your visibility.

So please pipe up with your eloquent digressions and anecdotes of personal achievement. Because that will serve the real purpose of the meeting.

- posted by Brian J. @ 11:11 PM 0 comments

Comment Policy

All right, have at it, gentle reader, but understand that I can and will arbitrarily remove comments for any reason I want.

Because that's my name at the top of the page.

- posted by Brian J. @ 11:05 AM 2 comments

Otherwise, They Would Have Had To Shoot Her

Police used Taser on pregnant driver:

She was rushing her son to school. She was eight months pregnant. And she was about to get a speeding ticket she didn't think she deserved.

So when a Seattle police officer presented the ticket to Malaika Brooks, she refused to sign it. In the ensuing confrontation, she suffered burns from a police Taser, an electric stun device that delivers 50,000 volts.

"Probably the worst thing that ever happened to me," Brooks said, in describing that morning during her criminal trial last week on charges of refusing to obey an officer and resisting arrest.

She did not attack the officers, so they should not have feared for their safety. We can assume is that the officer who tasered her would not have shot her dead, which is the decision for which the taser provides an alternative. Instead, he used it as a people prod when she resisted.

An attitude adjustment, if you will. But don't worry, citizen, you only have to worry if you ever might have a difference of opinion with a police officer.

- posted by Brian J. @ 9:54 AM 0 comments

MBA Defends Decline of Baseball

In a book review for Slate, Josh Levin takes issue with a book's nostalgia for baseball traditionalists versus number crunchers:

Bissinger challenges Moneyball's analytical argument with unverifiable, splenetic opinions. On-base percentage is the "latest fashion fad." Numbers are less important than human nature. The MBA-carrying thirtysomethings invading baseball's front offices might know their way around Microsoft Excel, but they'll never understand baseball. And so on.

As I have asserted recently, the MBAs in baseball are destroying the tradition of baseball from the front office. So let sportswriters capture the tradition and mystique of baseball without worrying about the detailed statistical analyses. Let managers go by gut sometimes instead of the actuarial charts.

When it comes down to mere statistics, why play the games at all when you can simply do the calculations on an expensive calculator? Or have the MBAs forgotten that statistics capture past behavior and that past behavior might not predict future success or failure? Isn't that what business school teaches them to put on the bottom of financial reports?

- posted by Brian J. @ 7:57 AM 0 comments

If Only The Snakes Were Citizens

Note the double standard that this story reveals:

It took 12 snakes and almost five years for Bill Carity to turn raw land into a subdivision.

The Butler's garter snake, a protected species in Wisconsin, was discovered on his property in Menomonee Falls in 1999, and afterward, he struggled to satisfy the competing demands of the Department of Natural Resources and getting his project off the ground.

"The Butler's took me completely by surprise," said Carity, of Carity Land Corp. of Brookfield. "For a long time, it was a painful process."

If only they were humans who legally owned the property and had constitutional rights; then Menomonee Falls could simply have used eminent domain to remove the squatters from the government's land--and with eminent domain, gentle reader, all land is government land--and could have given the land to developers.

But since the Butler's garter snakes are reptiles with their bellies in the soil, the government will protect them from rapacious developers.

- posted by Brian J. @ 7:48 AM 1 comments

Fun with Headlines

Embrace the imagery of this St. Louis Post-Dispatch headline:

Mo. House panel guts anti-abortion bill

- posted by Brian J. @ 7:24 AM 0 comments

The Root of the Problem: Not Enough Money for My Organization

Horror: Compulsive gambling fuels criminal habits: Mother of 3 stole $520,000 to keep playing, and lost it

On the one-year anniversary of the last time she gambled, Pamela Wick was upbeat. She's five months into a 10-year prison term for stealing more than $520,000, then losing it all - and more - at casinos.

"It's a new beginning for me," Wick, a mother of three, said in an interview last month at the Taycheedah Correctional Institution in Fond du Lac County. "It's a whole new feeling that life can be normal.

"I'm really glad that I came here. It was time for me to accept responsibility."

Accept responsibility after she got caught. Oh, she's saying the right things for the parole board hearings to come.

Stories like this make me angry, because the helpful government wraps us all in stifling protective legislation to keep the few knuckleheads like this safe. People so consumed with stupid pursuits of destructive pleasures that they break the law and inspire new regulation to prevent the impetus the person had for breaking the law.

Let's get to the nutty graph, where science and statistics are cast aside in favor of the almighty anecdote:

While there are no statistics on how many people run afoul of the law for gambling in the state, anecdotal evidence suggests that people such as Wick and Verbunker are becoming increasingly common, said Rose Gruber, executive director of the Wisconsin Council on Problem Gambling. The number of calls to the council's gambling helpline has nearly tripled since 1996, with callers reporting escalating amounts of gambling debt.

"Every time we turn around, we hear about someone else," Gruber said. "I would say that in the last two or three years, we've seen an increase."

Ah, yes, an organization that exists to study and fight the problem tell us that the problem exists and is increasing. "I would say" hardly merits new rules, new funding, and any sympathy for burglars and embezzlers who are really just sick people with an addiction and no adultness to combat it.

- posted by Brian J. @ 2:05 PM 0 comments

Number of Ways the Huffington Post Differs from Salon

Content not locked behind subscription/ads.

- posted by Brian J. @ 10:12 AM 0 comments

Back to the Quarry, Howard

Designing inside the box:

Historic renovations to older buildings and a regional boom in infill construction are fueling new design challenges for local architecture firms.

Many of these projects are construction conundrums, such as designing a smaller building to maximize space or following “green” construction standards that call for energy-efficient design codes.

Such challenges require architects to think about the big picture and the little picture when they design, said Michelle Swatek, executive director of the American Institute of Architects in St. Louis.

You have no choice, Howard. Give in, compromise!

- posted by Brian J. @ 9:24 AM 0 comments

The Rules

At great danger to himself, Chuq at Teal Sunglasses has posted the long-hidden rules for cats.

Now that we know them, though, we can expect the cats to change the rules.

(Link seen on BucciBlog.)

- posted by Brian J. @ 7:12 AM 0 comments

Predicting Next Month's Crisis Today

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch spends a lot of pages in it's A1 section today, including two thirds of the front page, thumping on the desk with this shoe: Lives on the line: Organ donors which tells the horror that can befall live donors. Live donors are people who give blood marrow, kidneys, and whatnot without having a motorcycle accident first.

The gripping lead:

Healthy people who donate organs to those desperate for transplants enter a world of unknowns.

Even the medical community does not know how big a risk they face.

Some get hurt. Some die. Some need transplants later.

The Post-Dispatch spent a year examining living donations. The newspaper interviewed about 200 donors, family members, transplant surgeons, hospital officials, government officials and scholars, and studied medical records and transplant research.

The newspaper's investigation found:
No one knows how many donors have died or suffered serious injuries or complications, because donors are not systematically tracked.

The lack of comprehensive data makes it impossible for donors to assess the risks of what is portrayed as an ultimate altruistic deed.

There is no agreement on who can donate an organ or how to evaluate potential donors. Those approved to donate include children as young as 10, drug addicts, mentally ill people and people who might be selling their organs, which federal law prohibits.

The government does not regulate organ donations from living donors. Each hospital that performs transplants makes its own rules, which vary widely.

Excellent work, Post-Dispatch. As a result of your fearmongering, perhaps we can look forward to you treating us, in a couple months or a year, to a fearmongering expose on the declining number of live donors.

With a clear conscience, of course. Organizations don't have consciences, and some don't even have consistency.

- posted by Brian J. @ 6:29 PM 0 comments

The Unasked Question

Because I'm just crass enough, I'll ask this question: Would Helen Harcombe be alive if she lived in a nation with a free market health system?

Michelle Malkin links to the BBC weepy about a woman who died from cancer and left instructions for her husband on how to raise their daughter. However, amid the tissue-sopping prose, we get this glimpse of her health care decisions:

Mrs Harcombe, who was 28, died shortly after Christmas 2004. She was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2002, nine months after finding a lump in her right breast.

Her family said she had been initially told she was a "low-risk patient" because she was just 26.

She had undergone a mastectomy, but by last year the cancer spread to her liver and she was told she had six months to live.

Nine months from lump to biopsy, friends. Because "she had been initially told"--by her government health care provider, no doubt--that she was low risk.

In America, we can still get that second opinion and get that damn thing checked out in a week or two. Before it gets the opportunity to gestate into a death sentence. Whether you're a "low risk" patient or not.

Well, most of us have that chance for the second opinion. Until the government ensures that all of us get a chance at its provider's opinion. For The Children. The Children of everyone but the Helen Harcombes.

- posted by Brian J. @ 2:16 PM 0 comments

Pocket Change

Rumor has it that the St. Louis Cardinals baseball team will leave the radio station that has broadcast them for over 50 years to purchase, yes, purchase, the other leading AM talk station in the area:

The Cardinals' contract with KMOX (1120 AM) expires after this season, and team officials have talked with KTRS (550 AM) owners about buying that station and moving the broadcasts there.

It's good to see that the impoverished Cardinals, who couldn't build their new baseball stadium without tapping government funds, have enough money in reserve to buy and run a baseball station while fielding a competitive team. I'm also looking forward to public/private "partnerships" in the future to build transmission towers and buy outrageously-painted vehicles with the call letters on the side. Memo: Please just change your name and mascot now to the St. Louis Crony Capitalists. The corporate fans for whom you're building new boxes and clubs into the new stadium at the expense of inexpensive seats for families will enjoy the joke.

Here's my bet: they will buy the other radio station. How am I sure? Because in every instance where the new MBAs running professional sports organizations must choose between tradition and business-school pabulum like:

If the Cardinals bought KTRS, the team would sell its own advertising as opposed to receiving a traditional rights fee. The Cards then could incorporate the broadcasts into a consolidated marketing plan that includes opening their new stadium next season, and placing their top two minor-league affiliates within a four-hour-or-less drive of St. Louis.

Building the brand through a consolidated marketing plan by putting the broadcasts on a small radio station that most Cardinals fans cannot hear? The MBAs love it!

And when the fans in Iowa, Kansas, Tennessee, and Indiana can't get the broadcast on KMOX, don't spend money for satellite radio, and eventually stop making the pilgrimage to Busch stadium, the MBAs won't understand how the loss of tradition in a longstanding sport franchise ultimately hurts more than it makes hip.

- posted by Brian J. @ 7:44 AM 0 comments

Got Nothing

As is often the case, I follow a day featuring an Instalanche with a day of nothing, just so I can sqander those residual hitz on emptiness.

Still, you could always click over to Draft Matt Blunt 2008 to see some of the reasons why Missouri Governor Matt Blunt would make a good president in 2008. Here are two to start:

He's not Rod Blagojevich.
He's not Jim Doyle.

- posted by Brian J. @ 4:22 PM 0 comments

Ironically, It Probably Worked

Forest fire 'biggest in 20 years': Landowner clearing burning site of grass ignited blaze:

A landowner clearing grass from his campfire and debris-burning site to make it safer ignited a massive forest fire that consumed 3,900 acres in central Wisconsin yesterday, the state Department of Natural Resources said today.

Now that he's burned everything around his campsite to the bare earth and has removed the natural diet for herbivores which dangerous predators eat, he's probably got the safest campsite in Wisconsin. But nothing to do there.

- posted by Brian J. @ 3:27 PM 0 comments

Dogmatic

Here's something for your Friday morning mirth: Baby Got Book

It's funny, it's earnest, and it not mockery. Beautiful!

(Link seen on Ace of Spades HQ.)

- posted by Brian J. @ 7:35 AM 0 comments

There's Reality, and There's Administration

Benton Harbor, Michigan, school officials prohibit a marching band from playing "Louie Louie":

A pop culture controversy that has simmered for decades came to a head when a middle school marching band was told not to perform "Louie Louie."

Benton Harbor Superintendent Paula Dawning cited the song's allegedly raunchy lyrics in ordering the McCord Middle School band not to perform it in Saturday's Grand Floral Parade, held as part of the Blossomtime Festival.

In a letter sent home with McCord students, Dawning said "Louie Louie" was not appropriate for Benton Harbor students to play while representing the district - even though the marching band wasn't going to sing it.

That the lyrics aren't really raunchy didn't factor into the decision, apparently.

- posted by Brian J. @ 3:20 PM 0 comments

Another Surveillance Camera Triumph

Small explosions outside the British consulate in New York:

Two "improvised explosive devices" made from "novelty-type grenades" have exploded in front of the building that houses the British Consulate in New York City, police and officials said.

Surveillance cameras, on duty, didn't prevent anything:

Authorities were reviewing video from security cameras in the area, and no arrests have been made, Kelly said.

There, citizen, do you feel safer knowing that governments and other entities are putting cameras throughout public spaces for safety's sake? They didn't prevent this "bombing" and they haven't even provided leads yet.

- posted by Brian J. @ 10:53 AM 0 comments

Marquette's Mascot Symbolizes Its Ideal

My wife hates this mug. I've had it for over ten years, and it's been the workplace mug. You know the one, the one that gets rinsed out some days, but some days that step's overlooked. As a result, the inside bears the stain of thousands of cups of coffee. The outside's fading, too, and some of the images are flaking off. But I won't replace it this year.

I graduated from Marquette in 1994, the last year that Marquette used the Warriors as a mascot. The leaders at Marquette felt that Warriors was demeaning to Native Americans; just remember that when you call a Native American a warrior, it's like calling a black person a, well, one of those names. Or so the leadership of Marquette thought.

So in 1994, Marquette's mascot changed to the Golden Eagles. Because eagles don't sue, I guess. The move angered a number of alumni and certainly didn't impress the students. The controversy had percolated for a number of years, including polls among the students for new names (somehow, suggestions such as Jumpin' Jesuits and Fighting Octopi didn't make the student poll, and the most innocuous mascots did).

So I've held onto this cup, and a t-shirt that no longer fits, because it had the image and mascot which I associated with Marquette. Now that the university has put on a show of considering a new mascot, including a return to the Warriors, it has come up with something more abstract and more inane than Golden Eagles:

Marquette Gold

(story)

I guess it is important that your mascot symbolize and make concrete your ideals. Once, it was tenaciousness, hardiness, and other admirable traits. Then it was, what, freedom? Flight? Now, it's just....gold.

I even wrote a column for the Marquette Tribune in 1992 defending the Warrior:

Through These Eyes #6: The Great Mascot Controversy

In the interest of saving the university some money, I would like to make my contribution to the "Name the Mascot" competition. There's no need for them to go throwing away money to a private consultant, even though I realize they just stuck us for ten percent more for just such academic emergencies. Let that much-needed cash go to making some dean's office more competitively decorated like that of other schools.

Okay, the Native Americans got a little bent out of shape that the university used an image of a Native American for a while there. I know what great strain and emotional upset some of them must have gone through attending basketball games and seeing the mascot, even if it was a descendent of the original Native Americans. This great debate is not limited strictly to the campus. All over the country, groups of Native American are protesting the use of their heritage on athletic teams. I mean, I can understand. I abhor the New York Yankees. How dare they?

So now the university needs a new, non-offensive mascot. Something that can be identified with the Warrior. I humbly submit the following. How about a white man dressed in skins carrying a club? Think about it, a nice barbarian figure for our sporting events. No, wait. That might be deemed too something-ist for our school if we featured a White European Male mascot like that. Besides, it is not a sort of figure easily identifiable with a Warrior. We'd hate to be mistaken for the Marquette Neanderthals.

Okay, idea two. A nice knight figure. In armor. A chivalrous warrior. No, wait. That's still a European figure. Besides, some Arabic or Islamic groups might get angry because every few years a bunch of these guys would get together and try to take over the Middle East, or select parts thereof. Okay, check this out. An African tribesman. With a spear and paint. No, can't do that. The African Americans would have the same objections as the Native Americans.

Well, how about a samurai in his battle robe and armor, helmet adorned with ox horns, quiver, gold-studded sword, his ancestral crest, the whole bit? Maybe a neat little pseudo-seppuku when the sports team is down? Oh, there's that blasted heritage argument again.

How about that lone American warrior, the cowboy? Why not, Rick Fields classifies that historical figure as a warrior in his book The Code of the Warrior. Since I'm running low on ideas, why not? A six-gun and ten gallon hat, idealizing the American spirit of independence and swift justice. Uh-oh, wait a minute. Cowboys tended to shoot Native Americans, didn't they? Maybe this version of our mascot wouldn't placate them so well....

I have to admit, I'm getting a little frustrated here. When I think of a Warrior from history, I tend to think in terms of different heritages like that, and that's already proven to be taboo. Either the Warrior was the member of a distinct ethnic group that can and will be offended, and/or they killed people of an offendable group.

I mean, that's the way I see it. Of course, that is ignoring the common denominator among all Warriors, which is some sort of hardiness and bravery, a willingness to risk their very lives in pursuit of what they thought was right, the skills of life and death intertwined into a person who would kill or die for honor and justice. The Native American Warrior did this. Maybe having a brave as our mascot is not so much a way of spitting on a race of man and saying "Nyah nyah, you injun," as it is a way of showing respect for a gallant breed of our species and the finest their culture produced. Or, I guess we could have Patty Smythe mousse up her hair and paint her face up and start singing, "Shooting out the walls of heartache, bang-bang..." But that might get a bit expensive.

Sorry, honey, the mug will go on for at least another decade. But I won't make you wash it.

Other thoughts:

- posted by Brian J. @ 7:36 AM 1 comments

Dr. Brian Performs a Humor Transplant

Laura Bush at the White House Correspondents' Dinner:

He's learned a lot about ranching since that first year when he tried to milk the horse. What's worse, it was a male horse.

Blogosphere reaction:

But on Saturday night, Laura Bush set a new standard. After interrupting her husband and telling him to sit down, she did a stand-up routine that included what was probably the first joke told in earshot of a president that involved him and a horse's phallus. (John Tierney, New York Times)
The First Lady resorting to cheap horse masturbation jokes is not much better than Whoopi Goldberg trafficking in dumb puns on the Bush family name. Unlike many Beltway and Manhattan commentators, I do not think the Wonkette-ization of the White House is a good thing. (Michelle Malkin)
So, thanks, Laura, for leaving us with that picture of George with a horse's penis in his hand! (Ann Althouse)
(countless others)

Good gravy, people, get a .... well, control of yourselves. Do I need to diagram this humor on the blackboard?

He tried to milk a horse, but grasping the teats of the animal didn't produce milk because it was a horse.
What's more, it was a male horse. You see, even if it had been a cow, Bush's folly would have been for naught!

For crying out loud, the teats and the phallus are at different ends of the beast, and the joke makes no mention of handjobs or masturbation.

JFC, what kinds of things do you have in your DVD players that led you to this conclusion?

Personally, I am outraged enough with the whole concept of milking which requires manually grasping bestial teats. Perhaps this explains the preference I have had for beer over milk ever since elementary school. But do we have to always drag the level of discourse into the gutter when we could leave it, well enough alone, in the udder?

(Unfortunately, I have Wonkettized this post, since hers is the blog where I found the transcript without, surprisingly, added sexual connotations.)

- posted by Brian J. @ 9:29 PM 0 comments

Holiday Greetings

Happy Star Wars Day from Michele Catalano.

- posted by Brian J. @ 9:00 PM 0 comments

That's No Pooch

You know, they say that dogs are pack animals....

- posted by Brian J. @ 2:15 PM 0 comments

Rasputin Lives! Well, Not Quite

The Madison County, Illinois, Coroner is awful quick to call it suicide:

Franklin E. Carver, 67, of the 2700 block of Greenwood Lane, shot himself five times - three times in the head and twice in the chest - inside his home Wednesday, but none of the shots was immediately fatal, authorities said. Carver then got into his customized van and drove 10 minutes to the Clark Bridge, where he parked in the bicycle lane and jumped off the south side of the bridge as a frantic motorist called 911 from a cell phone.

"This is probably the most unusual suicide case I've ever seen in my career," said Lt. David Hayes of the Alton Police Department. "It's a bizarre case; it really is."

The Madison County coroner said Monday that preliminary autopsy results indicate Carver, who had several convictions, died of drowning. During the autopsy, performed Sunday, doctors pulled five small-caliber bullets that had lodged in Carver's body. The three shots to the head did not penetrate the skull, while one shot to the chest missed vital organs and the other struck the liver.

Mystery readers and writers want to hear more about this "frantic motorist" who called 911.

- posted by Brian J. @ 7:18 AM 0 comments

Relative

I am less Republican than Dustbury:

I am:
57%
Republican.
"Congratulations, you're a swing voter. When they say 'Nascar Dad', they mean you. Every Republican ad on the TV set was made just for your viewing pleasure. Don't you feel special?"

Are You A Republican?

- posted by Brian J. @ 7:13 AM 0 comments

The Love Songs of Brian J. Prufrock

I grow old . . . I grow old . . . I shall buy a CD box set of Hall and Oats.

- posted by Brian J. @ 6:54 AM 0 comments

My Geekiness Makes Me Weak

I watch this over and over again: Sith Apprentice on Atom Films.

(Link seen on Ipse Dixit.)

- posted by Brian J. @ 8:40 PM 0 comments

Practical Joke of the Day

The laws of economics have really pulled a good one on the AFL-CIO:

AFL-CIO President John J. Sweeney, who is facing challenges from some of the labor federation's largest member unions, yesterday acknowledged that the organization is financially squeezed and may have to lay off a quarter of its workforce.

If only those employees had a union....

(Link seen on Asymmetrical Info.)

- posted by Brian J. @ 4:15 PM 0 comments

More Brains

Special nod for creative presentation to the folks at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch who chose an unflattering picture of Pope Benedict XVI to accompany this story in Sunday's "News Analysis" section:

Click for full size

Jeez, I would have guessed that as a movie still from a zombie movie. What the heck? Would it have hurt so much to include a dignified photo?

Eh, probably. Akin to sunlight on undead journalist flesh.

- posted by Brian J. @ 12:52 PM 0 comments

Book Report: Paul Harvey's The Rest of the Story by Paul Aurandt (1977)

I inherited this book, but it is marked fifty cents, so my aunt must have gotten a fairly good deal on it at a yard sale. It's probably worth that much, but not more. For those of you who don't know, you damn kids, Paul Harvey is the Internet for radio. His news programs are full of folksy, mostly true eye-twinkling stories of Americana interspersed with drop ins for macular degeneration medicine and expensive bed systems. Sort of like Charles Brennan's show on KMOX, except with wit, charisma, and intelligence. Paul Harvey's The Rest of the Story features longer bits that tell an anecdote or story about a known or unknown historical persona. Once again, the stories Paul Harvey tells are as true as the Internet: probably true, but don't base a doctoral dissertation on the premise or anecdote.

This book captures 81 stories of that nature. Paul Aurandt, Paul Harvey's child (not a love child left behind in Indiana, either; Aurandt is Paul Harvey's last name) collects them, and although I don't know if it's really the case, I suspect he wrote them. Did Paul Harvey read them on the air? Who knows? The style, unfortunately, reflects that tone and pacing, though.

Unfortunately, the pacing of a short radio program doesn't translate well to the page. It's too short and choppy. I've a similar complaint to Charles Osgood for his collections of The Osgood Files. It's odd, though, that radio doesn'tt ranslate well, whereas television vignettes of similar duration--such as Dennis Miller's rants or Andy Rooney's minutes--do. Were I that interested, I would break down and scan the programs for variations in rhythm displayed when the speaker knows he cannot see the audience and they him.

At any rate, the book was a quick read, easy to pick up for a short duration of reading, and engaging in that these stories want you to guess before the conclusion whose story you're reading. So it's a short time waster, brain fodder, and probably eighty percent or more accurate.

- posted by Brian J. @ 12:50 PM 0 comments

Post-Dispatch Beats the Merger Drum Louder

Do it for the jurors!

But perhaps nowhere would such a merger be more welcomed than in the city's courts, where the average juror repeats service every 39 months. That kind of civic burden is unheard of elsewhere in the St. Louis area.

No, wait, who would benefit from a merger?

In his inaugural speech last month, Mayor Francis Slay suggested it might be time for the city and county to reunite. St. Louis split from the county in 1876.

Rejoining the two could save money for both by combining services such as fire and police. It would also go a long way in helping officials share the burden of parks and stadiums enjoyed by residents across the region.

The city wants to "share the burden" of parks and stadiums (and arenas) with neighboring areas. The city could use the money, and undoubtedly is really very sorry about leaving the county in 1876, when it didn't want to waste its money on the surrounding area.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch continues to bang this drum on its own to, well, drum up support for the idea, but I don't think it will (and sincerely hope it won't) convince the more populous county to link up with a carcass whose politicians have sucked it dry and are still hungry.

- posted by Brian J. @ 12:43 PM 0 comments

Well-Informed Journalist

Group Pushes Restricting of Cold Medicine:

An association representing more than 36,000 pharmacies is issuing guidelines for possible federal legislation to restrict sales of cold medications containing a substance often used in the illegal manufacture of methamphetamine — or "speed."

Amphetamines are speed. Methamphetamines are crank.

But that's just the word on the street, as filtered by a blogger who only hears the silence on the cul-de-sac.

Meanwhile, the media gives play to a group espousing more regulation. Shocker. Put out the Drudge siren. Speaking of which, why does everyone call the rotating light image the "Drudge siren"? Sirens make a sound. The Drudge Siren does not. Why does the blogging world insist upon destroying the semantic difference between light and siren.

- posted by Brian J. @ 9:29 AM 0 comments

Brian Sides With Big Business, Again

CNet reports that Cities brace for broadband war. Why a war?

A hundred years ago, when Louisiana was still literally in the dark, residents of Lafayette banded together to build a city-owned electric utility where once there was little more than swampland. Today, at the dawn of the 21st century, it is hatching plans to lay out its own state-of-the-art fiber-optic broadband network.

This time, the city's futuristic ambitions are challenged not by the rigors of geography but by obstacles of business: specifically, telecommunications giant BellSouth and cable provider Cox Communications, which claimed the region as their own years ago. But the historic coastal community, known for its eclectic culture and rhythmic Zydeco music, is not about to abandon the pioneering spirit that begat its visionary reputation.

So who's resisting? Aside from advocates of a limited government, who think that governments shouldn't waste vast sums of money on gee-whiz gimcracks that benefit a limited number of residents, the businesses whose customers the local government is turning into government dependents:

Across the country, acrimonious conflicts have erupted as local governments attempt to create publicly funded broadband services with faster connections and cheaper rates for all citizens, narrowing the so-called digital divide. The Bells and cable companies, for their part, argue that government intervention in their business is not justified and say they are far better equipped to operate complex and far-flung data networks.

You know I agree with the businesses here. Just because the government can provide a service doesn't mean it should. Who on the green, green earth would want all of their Internet traffic going directly through routers and servers managed by the government? I guess those who would get it free and would eventually fight tooth and nail, complete with sob stories about how little Timmy wouldn't get his educational Internet or streaming media, should the government ever need to cut the superfluous expense.

- posted by Brian J. @ 8:56 AM 0 comments

Poor Balance Checkbook on Backs of Missouri Phone Customers

The short item in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch today, bearing the innocuous-sounding title "Additional fee on phones starts Sunday", but it tells a story of the creeping socialism of modern life:

Beginning Sunday, Missouri telephone customers will pay an additional universal service fee to help subsidize telephone service for the poor and disabled.

Not that I am entirely without heart, but when did schnucking telephone service become a right necessitating public subsidy?

Let's take bets....what's the next thing that the government will subsidize or force us to subsidize through service fees?

Cable television?
Cellular phone service?
Cellular phone service for The Children?
Internet connections in every home?
Trips to the doctor and free prescriptions every time you get a sniffle?
Professional landscaping services?

Yes, number 5 is very popular, but watch for the others to sneak in while we're fighting against free health care.

- posted by Brian J. @ 8:22 PM 0 comments

Spot the Spurious Assertion

Gentle reader, I present to you this review of Ntozake Shange's novel Betsey Brown and ask you to spot the spurious assertion within.

Here's a hint:

But even if they had shared temporal as well as physical space, the Smiths wouldn't have invited the middle-class, African-American Browns for a stroll in Forest Park.

Because whites, dear friends, are inherently racist, and if you're presented with a white character from America before 1960 (and beyond, if the white character votes Republican or Libertarian or anything to the right of the middle of the Democrat party, to the present day), you can certainly assume that off-page characterization would include racism.

Perhaps I am speaking out of school, friends, as I have neither seen the movie version of nor have I read the book Meet Me In St. Louis (because, as you long time readers know, I am not a St. Louis partisan who would invite someone to meet me in this metro area; I am more of the We're In St. Louis, Now What? camp). So perhaps the DVD's deleted scenes have the Smith family's participation in the Klan's rites, or maybe the book presents a stark view of how the normal white family in the early 20th century hated and oppressed black people or wouldn't be seen publicly walking with them, for crying out loud.

Or one could assume, as I do, that the author of this piece wants to inject that little poison into the common thought, that all white Americans have always been embarrassed or oppressive of their black fellow citizens. Because once this truth is accepted, we white Americans must guiltily attone until Sisyphus perches his rock.

- posted by Brian J. @ 7:57 PM 0 comments

St. Louis Post-Dispatch: Senseable Spending Could Drive Missouri Further into Mediocrity

STATE SPENDING LIMITS: Trashing our future:

THE HOUSE BUDGET COMMITTEE approved a bill this month that is guaranteed to sink Missouri further into miserly mediocrity, while the rest of the country passes us by.

It would enshrine in the Missouri Constitution the shortchanging of our public schools, the decline of our state universities and the neglect of the poor and sick, abused children and the mentally ill.

Over the long haul, it would undercut the state's economy, kill jobs and make Missouri a poorer, meaner place to live. It might increase crime, too.

The committee approved a proposed constitutional amendment that would limit increases in state general spending to the rise in state population, plus the rise in consumer prices and medical inflation. It would require a vote of the people to spend more than a smidgen over that limit. The effect would be to freeze spending at about today's shriveled levels.

I cannot begin to comment coherently upon this editorial. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch encourages unbridled growth the of state government apparatus and, undoubtedly, of the wealth transfer from everyone who is not dependent on government for basic luxuries to those who are (that is, the "needy" or "state employees").

- posted by Brian J. @ 6:56 PM 0 comments