Today's Jon Carroll column

[Velokid1]

Bravo! Carroll is a genius writer.

[Amskeptic]

Good one on both accounts although I do recall one 5 year old that was allowed to visit unaccompanied who proceeded to slap his way down the trough bongo style. The look on Mom's face was priceless when it was reported little Billy might need to rewash his hands

I didn't see this until just now. (the date you posted it is the answer)
Made me laugh.
Colin

[Velokid1]

Here's a book I'd buy: Carroll columns in chronological order with intros to each that explain the context (current events) in which the pieces were written. That would be cool.

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New airplane fun!

You know, if we really wanted to be safe and secure, we'd shut down airline traffic altogether. Even now, flying is hardly worth it, and with the new super-safe regulations replacing the old super-safe regulations, it's going to become essentially intolerable. Already I shudder at the idea of a plane trip, even if I really want to see who or what is at the other end.

Plus, it would keep all those evil foreigners away from our shores entirely, unless they came by boat or car. More Haitians! More Canadians! Surely our crack team of homeland security experts could handle that. And to ease those long waits at the Mexican and Canadian borders to get back into the country - every car must be checked for exotic inflammables, large bottles of skin cream and threatening shoes - I'm thinking: buskers. We could call it the Full Employment for Street Performers Act.

There is some serious speculation, by the way, that the new new, hastily implemented (and confusing) security measures could make the already marginally profitable domestic airline business become a vestigial part of American commerce. I know several people who already drive if the destination is less than a thousand miles. Plus, the giant strides in videoconferencing have made many f2f "business" meetings essentially pointless.

As the new movie "Up in the Air" suggests, these meetings still exist mostly because executives like to stay in fancy hotels and meet Vera Farmiga, or at least a compliant desk clerk. But we must all make sacrifices for our country. And think of the money we would save on "motivational" or "team building" weekends. Oh, what a blessing for employees everywhere.

I suppose there'd still be international flights, and there must be drug companies right now working on AirComa, a nice drug that you can take just beyond the security checkpoint and forget everything until you're at the baggage carousel. Flight attendants could quickly get used to it - no demanding passengers, no drunks, no crying babies. It would be like the spaceship in 2001.

I assume you've heard the backstory. A Nigerian named Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab set himself on fire on a Northwest Airline flight from Amsterdam to Detroit. He was trying to detonate a bomb, but he had not researched the properties of the explosive device (called PETN) very carefully. He strapped a vial of the stuff to his leg and in the men's room attempted to inject the explosive with some sort of fluid. Alas, PETN, while scary dangerous, takes something like a blasting cap to make it go boom.

So all we had was a guy in his seat with his pants on fire, indicating to trained personnel that he was, in fact, a liar. Brave passengers surrounded the would-be terrorist and snuffed out the flames. He was quickly taken into custody.

Abdulmutallab apparently claimed that he was a member of al Qaeda, and al Qaeda in Yemen claimed responsibility for Abdulmutallab. Is that true? Often, those who know don't say, and those who say may be delusional.

The Transportation Security Administration quickly leaped into action, creating new confusing and contradictory regulations. All passengers would be required to have a full body scan, unless they weren't. Many passengers would not be allowed to leave their seats during the last hour of the flight. Such good news for pregnant women, diabetics and small boys. Also, passengers couldn't have blankets on their laps during the last hour of the flight, apparently because Abdulmutallab used a blanket to cover the last few steps of his overcomplicated bomb plan during the last hour of his flight. Does this make sense?

Remember Richard Reid? He's the reason we all take off our shoes before boarding. Always fighting the last war, these people.

(On one flight, the announcement to stay seated came just after a recorded message telling passengers to avoid deep-vein thrombosis by walking around the cabin.)

There's a distinct Keystone Kops flavor to all this. Actually, based on the number of successful airplane incidents since 9/11, it would seem that the TSA was already doing a pretty good job. On the other hand, I presume that al Qaeda reads the same Western periodicals that other informed citizens do, and thus, if they're going to try it again, it's probably not going to look anything like the prior attempts. If it were me, I'd send in a bunch of people who looked like an Irish rugby team - and drank like one too.

Also, Osama bin Laden sort of has his hands full fighting a war in Afghanistan. It ain't as easy as it was to plan grandiose attacks. By all reports, the violent jihadists are still attracting adherents, and at the level of IEDs and truck bombs, they are still terrifying and lethal. I think the overwhelming concentration on air travel, and the amount of money spent on it, is mostly wasted. Let's stop buying expensive scanners and making fear-mongering speeches; let's start providing more resources for our soldiers on the ground, where the real dying (as opposed to the theoretical threats) is happening.

Epileptic seizures are not permitted during the last hour of the flight. If you plan to seize, see your flight attendant.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/columnists/carroll/

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Football fever

Jon Carroll

Thursday, January 7, 2010

I get the sense that some of my readers may not be aware that tonight is the epic clash between the Alabama Crimson Tide and the University of Texas Longhorns for the national championship of NCAA college football in this great land of ours.

Both contestants are worthy; I have no quarrel with that. Whether they are the most worthy candidates for what is still called, with justice, the "mythical" football championship is not clear. Texas is in the game only because it was awarded the "mystery second" at the end of its game with Nebraska, which it converted into the game-winning score. I'm not sure that a 13-12 victory over the 9-4 Cornhuskers should qualify a team to play for the national championship.

I particularly feel this after Boise State, also undefeated, beat another undefeated team on Monday for its bowl win. But of course they're not the Champions. Why hasn't Boise State ever been given a chance at the national title? Because it's not a member of the committee in charge of the Bowl Championship Series, which was created by the six "major" conferences to make sure that only schools in their conferences get the lion's share of berths in the big-money games, regardless of merit.

Columnist Mike Wilbon of the Washington Post calls the BCS "a cartel," and I think that's right. It wants to promote its own interests - that is, the interests of the six member institutions - at the expense of all other interests. Well, but why should it care? What is Boise State to it or it to Boise State?

Money. The prestigious bowl games, where the official BCS games are played, pay out gigantic sums of money to the schools involved. Obviously, the fewer schools in the pool of possible contestants, the better the chance that any individual school would grab the brass ring. Plus, the conferences themselves get money. A lot of this money comes from television, which has a vested interest in presenting teams it can hype to death - schools with big fan bases, schools with distinguished histories. Well-hyped schools mean big audiences, which mean big ad revenues.

Of course they don't want Boise State! It's in Idaho. Famous football players did not go there. They don't have the Golden Dome, the Touchdown Jesus or even the Old Oaken Bucket. (Paradoxically, Boise State has gotten so much free pub as the Pathetic Loser that it may have been transformed into the ultimately publicizable Feisty Underdog.)

Lots of things go on at colleges and universities in the name of money. People wonder why kids are so materialistic - why, it's being taught at our finest institutions of higher learning. Teachers being pressured to give passing grades to athletes who hardly ever show up in class (and also being pressured to give good grades to children of large donors - that happened to me); surrogate test takers; alumni groups providing cash, cars and swanky dinners to valuable recruits; even, it was intimated this year with regard to the University of Tennessee, female students, in the role of "hospitality escorts," providing sex to promising sporting gentlemen.

Meanwhile, as those of us who still watch college football games on television know, the university flacks produce promotional movies featuring kids staring into test tubes, furiously taking notes as Professor Someone underlines the word "Shakespeare"; walking in freshly tilled earth with wise farmers; sitting around a grassy lawn studying together (and, oh look, every race is represented!), then each turning to the camera and saying, "College of Large Young Men Prepared to Suffer Concussions - Where Learning Lives."

You probably haven't been following the saga of Mike Leach, former football coach at Texas Tech. It has to do with Leach's alleged mistreatment of player Adam James, who had a concussion at the time; university discipline against Leach for his actions; accusations by Leach that ESPN college analyst Craig James had been constantly after him to give his son more playing time; further accusations by Leach that the university was trying to get out of the $800,000 bonus it was obligated to pay him if he were still coach on Jan. 1, 2010; and the firing of Leach by the university on Dec. 30, 2009.

There's lots more, but who cares? I poked through it so you wouldn't have to. Here's the conclusion I reached: Everybody's lying. Yes, the administrators of a fine university, its respected football coach, a prominent television analyst, all of them lying through their teeth. This is only an opinion, and it all may come out in court, but probably not. I foresee a settlement cum gag order a few weeks from now, and everybody will be OK - except maybe Adam James, who apparently can't play football very well.

I understand that the good old days were not as innocent and pure as we like to think. But surely they weren't as horrendous as the Bad New Days.

Hooray for old Boise State, because they're the champs no matter what happens tonight.

I think that you have as much of a chance of having a sexual relationship with her as the Hubble Telescope does of discovering that at the center of every black hole is a little man with a flashlight searching for jcarroll@sfchronicle.com.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f ... 1BE14L.DTL

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Cold calls, cold hearts

They say that the economy is getting better, but the job situation is getting worse, which strikes me as just a wee bit clueless. I guess they mean the economy is getting better for the people who don't need jobs but worse for the people who do. Call it the PI, or Plutocrat Index. I'd love to apply for a place in the plutocracy, but none is listed on Craigslist.

Of course, I do have a job. You're reading it. Oh, and you can't have it.

You can tell that the job market is still terrible by the number of solicitors you meet. I do not mean British lawyers, nor do I mean women of easy virtue. I mean the men (it's usually men) who come to your door or call you on the phone. The ones who call you on the phone at least have a job, in a windowless room staring at phones, hoping for a score. They're sort of like the people at convenience stores who stand in the aisles and look at the Lotto numbers.

It's sad. I know it's sad. I figure my job is to get them away from my door or off the phone as quickly as possible so they can go on to a more likely prospect. I am not a likely prospect. I have no problem saying no. I say no politely, of course, and sometimes I suggest that they have a nice day. Probably they won't, but I've done my bit.

The last guy who rang my doorbell looked so hangdog, I wanted to give him a hug. "I don't suppose you need any painting done," he said, indicating that he had not taken any courses in salesmanship. He made it easy to say no, and I did. But I wished him good luck. I watched him trudge down the sidewalk, and I thought of Willy Loman.

My father was a salesman early in his life. He sold cigarettes and candy to drugstores and bars. I believe he spent more time in the bars than in the drugstores. In 1942 he got a job in the aircraft industry - during the war, jobs in the aircraft industry were plentiful. He never wanted to talk about his salesman days. It must have been hard to keep his enthusiasm up, particularly since (a) it was the Great Depression, and (b) he worked solely on commission. Now the nation is living through my father's nightmare.

Here's another victim of the terrible job market: The do-not-call list. Here's what the Federal Trade Commission Web site says about the do-not-call list: "Placing your number on the National Do Not Call Registry will stop most telemarketing calls, but not all. Because of limitations in the jurisdiction of the FTC and FCC, calls from or on behalf of political organizations, charities, and telephone surveyors would still be permitted, as would calls from companies with which you have an existing business relationship, or those to whom you've provided express agreement in writing to receive their calls."

Well, we are on that list, and it worked for a while, but the economic situation seems to have given lots of companies amnesia. "Oh, gosh, I was sure we had a prior business relationship with him. Must have been a different Jo(h)n Carroll. So sorry." On the other hand, I never report these people because I forget their names so quickly; I want to forget their names.

One organization we do have a prior business relationship with is the National Geographic Society, at least insofar as we subscribe to its magazine. Someone from National Geographic called a few weeks ago.

"Hi, I'm Ed (or Tom or Odin - I wasn't taking notes) from the National Geographic Society, and I just called to tell you about the free map you're going to receive." When they call about a free something, can an expensive something be far behind?

"Also, we'd like to send you a videotape of the greatest moments from the National Geographic television program. Just look at it, and if you're not completely satisfied, send it back. If you decide to keep it, we'll charge you only $9.95." Oh, I hate that opt-out option. Am I likely to get to the post office in time to mail back my video? Maybe, but also maybe not. And I know I don't want it.

I said as much to Ed or Tom or Odin. "But it's the National Geographic," he said, with a little sob in his voice, as though I were betraying five generations of American explorers. I do wish the National Geographic would send an expedition to Wall Street and bring back a few choice specimens, nicely stuffed and mounted. I'd buy a videotape of that, you bet.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/columnists/carroll/#ixzz0hJRdBBX2

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Dust cloud madness

Jon Carroll

Thursday, April 22, 2010

Like all good Americans, I have been fascinated by the gigantic dust cloud caused by the eruption of the Eyjafjallajokull volcano in Iceland. It has all the things you could want in a natural disaster.

1. Great visuals, with more on the way.

2. No human beings were injured in the making of this disaster.

3. Interesting science written by people getting a little bored with explaining earthquakes.

4. Many Europeans inconvenienced for days and days.

Sundry European transportation authorities - but not the EU itself, which has control over the size of farm products but not the very skies above it - have been under fire for what interested parties consider their too-tight restrictions on air travel. "Let's throw unregulated airspace up in the air and see what falls out of the sky," one entirely imaginary airline executive said.

But now here's a real quote, from Siim Kallas, the European Union's transport commissioner: "It is clear that this is not sustainable. We cannot just wait until this ash cloud disappears."

Such wonderful hubris. Suppose the planes start flying at normal altitudes and one of them crashes? Is it still not sustainable? Suppose the magma under Iceland decides to squeeze off another big one? Not sustainable? Nature bats last, as King Canute once remarked, and the volcano will finish when the volcano feels like it. If it still seems like a good idea to fly right now - hey, why not just stay right here with me in Frankfurt and have another sausage.

Bureaucrats and professionals tend to have a rather astonishing sense of entitlement in many matters. They're special, they're different, and, ahem, may I speak to the manager, please? The Manager, alas, is in heaven, handling the real emergencies.

This reminds me of a story from my own personal life. I've told this story once before, about 15 years ago, but I think enough time has passed so that most people will not have read it before, and the rest are having memory problems.

In the late 1970s, I lived in a place called Santa Monica Canyon, the small declivity between Santa Monica and Pacific Palisades, directly downstream from the Riviera Country Club. As happens frequently in Southern California, there was a month of fire followed by a month of flood.

The main street of Santa Monica Canyon met the Pacific Coast Highway at an extremely low spot in the road, and that spot flooded predictably almost every year. Neighbors would get out their slickers - if they had slickers, not a universally owned product in Santa Monica - and instruct drivers, most of whom were trying to get up to the Palisades, to turn around, go back up on San Vicente and go east until they could find a route north.

The main traffic along our little street was BMWs, Jaguars and Mercedes-Benzes, to say nothing of a few American luxury cars. What were we neighbors doing in this neighborhood? We were renting.

At one point, a BMW driver cocked his finger and had me lean into the window. "Mighty bad?" he asked. I agreed that it was mighty bad. "Well, it's OK; you can let me through; I'm a doctor." He was so full of himself, and so convinced that access was a matter of privilege rather than storm conditions, that all he had to do was say the magic word, and the water would part to allow a doctor to get by.

Later the same night, a muscle car came to our roadblock. We explained the situation; he said he didn't care. He had a powerful auto and could just power through the puddle. We tried to dissuade him, but we were, after all, just civilian volunteers. After much waving to make the cars behind him move back, he gunned the car and disappeared into the churning mire.

He made really good progress until the water got to his door handle. Then he slowed. We screamed, "Get out!" and eventually he did, doing a colorful and profane dance on his roof, much more angry with his car than with himself. "I knew this car didn't have balls enough," he said, suggesting the question: "If you knew it wouldn't make it, why did you try it in the first place?"

The answer: Because he's a doctor. Because he's an airline bureaucrat. Because he believes that the rules don't apply to him. Just a tip for today: They apply.

Do you know how important we are? Have you seen our cards, our stickers, our special vouchers?

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.c ... 1D1LLT.DTL

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Terrorism 101

Jon Carroll

Friday, May 7, 2010

When a car bomb explodes, it is never funny. When a car bomb doesn't explode, however, one can derive a measure of amusement from it. Faisal Shahzad, the alleged mastermind of the not-bomb that was placed in a car parked near Times Square, spent five months in Pakistan, maybe (authorities speculate) at one of those camps where they teach Terrorism 101.

I think they need a faculty shakeup.

Here's my favorite part: He left his house key on the ring along with the car key. I wonder how long it took him to realize that after he left the car. Now, I know getting those little keys off those rings is hard, and perhaps Shahzad's fingers were shaking just a bit because of the bomb in the backseat. He should have done it earlier.

Or maybe he didn't realize it at all until he'd gotten a block or so away, and he thought about what his next move would be, and he thought, "Oh, gosh darn it to heck" or the pious Muslim equivalent. Maybe he stood stock still in the middle of the sidewalk and thought, "Should I go back? No, I can't go back; there's a bomb set to go off in two minutes. Well, the landlady will have one."

The key was one of the clues that led police to his house in Connecticut. It seems to me that Advanced Bombing should include a chapter on what to do if the bomb doesn't go off. Among those admonitions would be not to leave your house key dangling from the ignition.

See, he needed a list. I believe fervently in lists. They're like a message from my past self to my current self - current self presumed to be X amount stupider than past self - and I can't see how a bomber could get along without them. Among the items that were not on bomber's list, but should have been:

1. Buy fertilizer (the kind that explodes!!!)

2. Scrape all VIN numbers off truck

3. Check wiring diagram one more time.

4. Take house key off ring before you-know-what.

5. Eat hearty meal.

6. Feed cat.

Of course, he had a ticket to Dubai for less than three days later, so maybe he felt secure. He was assuming the bomb would go off. Never assume - that's what all the books say. Allow for every eventuality. Of course, the bomber apparently was new at the game.

And about the ticket to Dubai - how come he was allowed to get on the plane in the first place? I mean, here we have this nationwide system in which grandmothers and little girls are forced to take off their shoes and open up their laptops and God knows what else, and it's a mere three days after a failed bombing attempt, and this guy has a one-way ticket, and yet it's "Right this way, Mr. First Nighter."

They had Shahzad's name 24 hours before. He had a passport in his name. Surely that name went out to all the airport security personnel. And yet somehow a bell was not rung. Some salesman from Duluth was "answering a few questions," and Shahzad was waiting quietly for the plane. Look, he's getting on the plane. The door is closing. The plane is taxiing to the runway when, oops, finally the law enforcement guys show up.

I guess that should put to rest all rumors of racial profiling. Homeland Security has always maintained it doesn't engage in that practice, and by golly here's proof positive. We owe them an apology.

Now suppose the bomb had gone off, which God forbid, but it didn't. What is Times Square full of? Tourists. And what do tourists have almost inevitably? Cameras. The New York Police Department would of course want to confiscate those cameras, because they might show the bomber.

And then what? Talk about too much information. People at the NYPD would have to sort through all the shots, including 200,000 images of the "Lion King" marquee, and the poor dears who had to do it would get about a zillion hours of overtime, and still - probably nothing.

Unless the bomber was skulking. I'd probably skulk, in his shoes. I suppose they have a class in "Not Skulking," and I hope it's taught by a different guy than the bomb-making class.

Wait, no I don't. I am in favor of incompetent terrorists. I want inept bombers. Shahzad was not dumb - he had a master's degree in business administration - but he couldn't pull this one off. Hooray for incompetence, one of the world's most plentiful naturally occurring elements.

OK, what else, what else? Lock back door, did that; water plant, did that; darn it, there's something else.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f ... 1D9V6G.DTL

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Ritual humiliation ceremonies

And so begins one of the most disgusting spectacles in Washington: the hearings into the suitability of a newly nominated Supreme Court justice. It should be, it could be, a teachable moment about the various strands of current legal thinking, but instead it's a blood sport mixed with generous doses of pomposity and evasiveness. No one comes out looking good, and the cynicism about Washington grows deeper.

Here's the drill:

President announces his nominee for the Supreme Court. Senators and representatives, many of whom had never heard of the nominee two days ago, immediately start criticizing her or praising her based on a talking-points memo that their respective parties sent out within 12 hours of the announcement.

(President Obama made it easy for the opposition by floating Elena Kagan's name so early and so much. The Republicans were ready to dish the dirt they had found, although it's been pretty darned clean dirt so far.)

Some of these senators announce that they will vote for or against the nominee, based on essentially nothing, but that they welcome the forthcoming hearings as a chance for a "free and open exchange of opinions." They know, we all know, that the hearings will be nothing like that; the hearings will instead be a ritual of humiliation. Senators will engage in ad hoc ad hominem attacks because they can, basically, and it makes them feel good to patronize someone who is clearly smarter than they.

Many senators will see the hearings as an opportunity to reach a larger-than-usual audience and make speeches affirming their belief in judicial restraint, adherence to the original intent of the Constitution or, by contrast, a "living" Constitution, and their abhorrence of whatever they think their constituents abhor. Since there is no chance that the senators' remarks will be examined for inconsistencies, unlike the nominee's, the senators get a chance to make things up.

After the self-serving remarks come the "questions," each of which may be longer than the speech that preceded it, so there's still plenty of time to water your plants, do your dishes and wash your clothes. By hand.

Meanwhile, the nominee is sitting there rehearsing whichever one of her planned evasions most fits the question. Since the question is likely to be incoherent and/or based on one of the talking points handed around by the party officials, this act of self-control takes patience more than anything else. She has her own talking points, after all.

The nominee's talking points are, basically, "be as bland as humanly possible" and "repeat, as often as possible, that it would improper for you to discuss anything that may come before the court." The eerie part about Kagan is that she seems to have been practicing for the Senate Judiciary hearings for all of her adult life. She apparently doesn't have any opinions, which many Democrats are saying is a good thing because there are no controversial statements to beat her over the head with.

She is instead a "consensus builder," which is swell, but there are nine justices, five of them allied with the hard right, so the majority has no need (and, clearly, no desire) to compromise with anyone about anything. Ideologues are like that; they perceive compromise as a betrayal of their principles.

Good luck to you, Kagan.

Anyway, back to the hearings. We're now later in the process, after the nominee has said about 20 times, "I believe I answered that when I spoke with your colleague Sen. Jeffries, but I hope I can make my view clearer ..." (wash, rinse, repeat).

About then, the senators up for re-election next year will realize that they haven't thrown enough red meat to their bases. So, the third time around, they come out snarling, purporting to find "troubling inconsistencies" between her testimony and her membership in some campus organization people had hardly ever heard of until then. They say it as if they're dropping a bombshell, although they're not, since someone at Salon got that scoop six weeks ago, and it turned out to be nothing.

But the folks at home don't know that. Snarl, little senator, snarl.

Finally, the bearbaiting ends, and Elena Kagan can go on to be the next Supreme Court justice, and we finally might get to hear what she thinks about things. Barring the always-unforeseeable unforeseen, she's gonna pass the Judiciary Committee and the full Senate with relative ease, as both Republicans and Democrats shrug their shoulders and say, "Oh well, might be OK."

And that's how people get chosen for a lifetime post in one of the highest bodies in the land.

With all respect, Senator, I have no opinion about my perceived lack of opinions.

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Testosterone cascade

A while back, I wrote in this space or one very like it about Kevin L. Hoover, editor and police reporter of the Arcata Eye. His rendering of that small-town newspaper standard, police calls, was so wonderful that I felt it deserved special recognition.

Later, I met Hoover and we saw eye to eye on numerous matters, and I agreed to write the introduction to his next collection of particularly tasty examples of rococo crime reporting. It was called "The Nimrod Imbroglios," and it chronicled a never-ending parade of human error, stupidity and inebriation. I quote from myself here, because it was so easy to get permission:

"Kevin L. Hoover (is) an existential hero, the last moral man in a corrupt universe, walking the semi-corrupt streets of Arcata, observing without judging, until he decides the hell with it, I'm going to judge." There may be just a wee bit of anger involved, too.

Anyway, this week I checked back with Hoover's column, and I found that his storytelling gifts have not withered. Here are two examples from a recent column:

"Thursday, April 15 9:21 a.m. A TransAm's inherent awesomeness was kicked up a significant notch with an impressive burnout demonstration (a symbolic representation of the young buffoon's ever-so-agile sperm motility, though he likely wasn't thinking about that, or much else) at Sunset and Western avenues. But the display of reproductive prowess took a humiliating plummet when the mouth-breathermobile slammed into a fire hydrant, unleashing a prematurely orgasmic fountain of wa-wa. As the dethroned cock-o'-the-block scurried away like a scared kitten in his crumpled chariot, an angered neighbor phoned police with a profanity-peppered report of the incident. As emergency forces sped to the scene, police handily located the slammed TransAm going nowhere fast on Boyd Road. Burnout Boy was returned to the scene to face the music, which took the form of police radios and a witness saying something along the lines of, 'Yeah, that's him.' The on-call Public Works tech responded and turned off the water.

"12:36 a.m. The testosterone cascade continued on Tavern Row, where a small but moronic menagerie of menfolk argued, then found common ground on one point - they should go into the alley out back, which is one of the few places left that doesn't have cameras trained on it (or so they believed), and fight. For whatever reason (possibly the irresistible allure of boiling grease, the aroma of which spans all races, creeds and belief systems as a sort of universal language of acrid stenches) the battling boyos' slugfest migrated to the donut shop alley, attracting yet more combatants. A woman told police she didn't feel safe in the area, so officers responded and arrived seven minutes later. But attention spans being what they are these days, hostilities had trailed off by then. Needless to say, donut production continued unhindered."

Sheer genius.

In other news: We'll be talking about cats and dogs forever in this corner of the universe; here's another log to throw on the fire, courtesy of David Fogarty and the Union Jack News, "America's only national British newspaper":

"A university degree is more likely to be found on a cat owner's wall than a dog owner's, according to a new scientific survey of pet ownership.

"Researchers at the University of Bristol say the superior intelligence of cat owners is unlikely to be caused by their exposure to their pets, reported the Daily Telegraph.

"Rather, more educated people tend to work longer hours and choose a pet to fit their lifestyles. Unlike dogs, cats require no walking and can manage with little human company.

"Dr Jane Murray, cats protection lecturer in feline epidemiology, who led the study, said: 'We don't think it is associated with income because that was one of the variables we looked at, and there was little difference. Cats require less time per day than a dog, so they are more popular with educated people who work late and have long commutes.'

"Homes with degree-holders were 1.36 times more likely to have a cat than other households. The same homes were less likely to have a dog than households where no one went to university. The study of 2,980 people, published in the Veterinary Record journal, also found that cat owners were more likely to be older and female.

"It also revealed that the combined cat and dog population of Britain is more than 20.8 million - 50 percent higher than previously thought. Murray said: 'We are confident that our figures are the most accurate yet. We are not saying there has been a huge spike in the cat and dog populations - we are just getting better at counting them.' "

I'm just so glad to know that there's a cats protection lecturer at the University of Bristol.

Everyone likes a nice fight in the alley behind the doughnut shop. Everything smells so good.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.c ... 1DI392.DTL

For your pleasure:http://www.arcataeye.com/category/police-log/

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Teach your children not so well

I'm not worried about the children of Texas, although maybe I should be. No matter what their Board of Education says, the truth is out there. The wishing-makes-it-so approach of the board is, I hope, futile, a rearguard action fought by frightened people. It's all nostalgia, which comes from a Greek word meaning "homesickness." These school board tea-baggers want to go home again, except home has moved and left no forwarding address.

The America they want to bring back has gone, like so many other things of the past. (Actually, the America they want to bring back never existed; it's just some loopy construct of cowboy movies and Ayn Rand and nice poor people who knew their place.) In the nostalgic America, you learned what your parents wanted you to learn, and not what was actually true. It's ignorance enshrined.

So what did the Texas Board of Education do this year? Well, first it forbade the using of the terms of C.E. and B.C.E., meaning "Christian era" and "before Christian era," on the grounds, well, that we'd be taking Christ out of our dating system. How shocking for true believers. The B of E favors the old-fashioned B.C. and A.D., meaning "before Christ" and "anno Domini," meaning "in the year of our Lord."

Trouble is that historians and archaeologists and others dealing with the past commonly use the newer expression for dates, so when Texas students hit the real world, they'll be using archaic expressions. Not good for grades. It's a secular world out there, which is as it should be; otherwise we'd be living in a theocracy like Saudi Arabia.

In other news, the United States will always be referred to as a "constitutional republic" rather than a democracy, which is sort of half true, and the students will be taught that the problems with the American economy began with the abandonment of the gold standard. Ah, William Jennings Bryan, you have not been forgotten. One could certainly make an argument for that thesis, but to have it taught at face value seems a little much.

The B of E also adopted resolutions requiring the use of the phrase "American exceptionalism" in schoolbooks, as well as blaming government regulation for the problems faced by the free enterprise system. These will be very Rand Paul sort of textbooks, at least Rand Paul before he got into the public arena and encountered the logical consequences of his thinly conceived philosophy.

(Rand Paul is a libertarian who was against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 until he was for it, is against legalization of marijuana - oops, turns out he's for big, bad government when it punishes pot smokers - and for government control of abortion - in other words, the government reaching into a woman's womb for ideological reasons. Shouldn't a libertarian be against that? Yeah, well, there's that pesky real world cropping up again.)

The Texas B of E also decided that hip-hop was not a significant cultural influence, and defeated several resolutions mentioning that Tejanos fought side by side with Jim Bowie and Davy Crockett, noted white men, at the Alamo. Mustn't disturb a carefully constructed myth with the truth.

Oh, here's the best one. The B of E deleted the name of Thomas Jefferson from a list of people (including St. Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin) whose writings influenced the revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries. Conservatives don't much like Jefferson because he wrote favorably about the separation of church and state. So the guy who wrote the Declaration of Independence - insufficiently revolutionary for Texas officials.

I do get it - those who aren't for upstanding Christians are against them. So useful, carrying on the culture war against people who've been dead for 200 years.

So no Jefferson, but a requirement to teach the importance of "the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s, including Phyllis Schlafly, the Contract With America, the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority and the National Rifle Association." The importance of the ACLU is, curiously, not mentioned.

Oh, and they also mandated the replacement of the word "capitalism" with the phrase "free enterprise system." Alas, considering huge government subsidies to oil companies and agribusiness companies, it's not even true. T'aint nothing free about the free market system, as some of us to our sorrow have learned recently.

Pretty disheartening, yes? But, as I say, the Texas kids who test these ideas against the real world may face some mind-altering conversations. I just hope they don't have to wait as long as Rand Paul did.

Did you hear about that old lefty Thomas Jefferson? Well, of course you didn't.

[Cindy]

And then there's this . . .

They will be casting "muckrakers and reformers such as Upton Sinclair, Susan B. Anthony, Ida B. Wells and W.E.B. Dubois as figures espousing negative views of America."

Ida B. Wells? And Dubois? Two noble giants we should be proud to claim as our own. As for Sinclair, I hope they choke on unregulated meat and die of e. coli.

And the separation of church and state was meant to foster voluntary (and therefore inspired) religion, which everyone knows is far more sincere than some national mandate.

Idiots!!

Cindy

[static]

Smooches considered

Thursday, July 15, 2010

Do you know how to kiss? I apparently didn't for the longest time. Every time I'd get a new sweetheart, she told me that I was not kissing properly. My positioning was wrong, or my tongue was doing unpleasant things, or I didn't have the whole inhaling-exhaling thing down.

It gave me quite a complex, until I realized that it was more a matter of preference, stated as established fact. Indeed, some of the advice given contradicted other advice. Girls, as it turned out, did not have the answer to the perfect kiss; they just acted as though they did. This is one of the mysteries of women I have never solved.

Personally, I've never met a kiss I didn't like. Sure, they were different, one from the other, but none of them was unpleasant. (Well, wait, not true. There was a girl in high school who had a serious bad breath problem, but that was just a one-off in the bushes, quite literally, during an after-prom party. She apparently didn't care for me much either; I was not pursued.)

Mostly, though, I don't have strong opinions about kisses. As a heterosexual, I prefer the kisses of women, although I have kissed men too and that was fine. It's a good custom and pretty much universal, but the pedia of Wikis goes on and on about the kiss of respect and the kiss of peace and whatnot. People kiss the earth, some particularly valued tree, holy books and the like. Jimi Hendrix, as we know, kissed the sky. He excused himself before doing it, too.

People say "Peace be with you" and plant a lingering kiss on your cheek, and you can't object to it even if you do. My usual reaction has been something along the lines of "Oh, yeah, right, peace unto your own bad self," which is not entirely canonical.

Anyway, back to the idea of the perfect kiss. Early on, I thought I had been with the perfect kisser, and maybe I had (Hi, Laurie!), but I realized that her buck teeth (well, hardly buck - buckish) gave an appealing firmness early on, followed by a truly seductive softness. But that was not a learned skill, that was a blessing of genetics.

Then where did all these girls and women get the idea of the perfect kiss? Are women's magazines filled with "teaching your mate the ideal smooch" pieces? And if so, where did the authors of the articles get their criteria? OK, I know the answer to the last question - they got it when their credit card bill arrived in the mail. I once wrote a piece about chess strategy for a tiny magazine. There was nothing actually wrong with it - I cited the very best authors and rewrote their sentences - and it did pay PG&E, so what the heck. No bishops were harmed during the writing of that article.

And I assume that the writers of those "Smooching Made Easy" pieces included a great many of their own preferences, and so I ask again: Where did they get their opinions? I like the tight kiss and the loose kiss, the exploratory tongue or the "come and get me" tongue, the head-wobble kiss and the intense-pressure kiss. I would never seek to correct the kissing techniques of my partner. If she's happy, I'm happy.

(It may seem to some that a long-married man musing on kissing is a bit unseemly. First, one was not married before one was married, and I believe my memories of kisses given and received will far outlast my memory of the key plot points of "Romeo and Juliet." Second, this is a kissing kind of town, and many of the married kiss others of the married with enthusiasm, a trend I heartily endorse.)

I must say, though, that when I was a younger person and changing girlfriends fairly often, I was always bewildered when I was told I was doing it wrong - again. One person advocated dry French kissing, which is darned hard. Another mentioned that kissing should always be done while inhaling - although, given the length of the kisses in a standard make-out session, that would have subjected me to unpleasant carbon dioxide buildup. A third felt that her tongue should go in my mouth but not vice versa, which kind of blew the "throes of passion" part of the experience.

Anyway, kids, I just want to say, you really can't do it wrong. Except if some little harridan, one you're intensely devoted to, says you can, then just follow instructions. Small enough price to pay.

There's really not just one good way to do it. If there were, there would be schools.

http://www.sfgate.com/columnists/carroll/#ixzz0tlaD1fLl

[JLT]

the pedia of Wikis goes on and on about the kiss of respect and the kiss of peace and whatnot.

An example of "whatnot:"

I know it was you, Fredo. You broke my heart. You broke my heart!

[Ashtarot]

Kissing is an art form, you must follow your inner voice, a woman can sense if you arnt.