Left of the Dial

Just Do It

No, seriously.

Go do it. Now.

Nothing But Nets
by Rick Reilly

I've never asked for anything before, right? Well, sorry, I'm asking now.

We need nets. Not hoop nets, soccer nets or lacrosse nets. Not New Jersey Nets or dot-nets or clarinets. Mosquito nets.

See, nearly 3,000 kids die every day in Africa from malaria. And according to the World Health Organization, transmission of the disease would be reduced by 60% with the use of mosquito nets and prompt treatment for the infected.

Three thousand kids! That's a 9/11 every day!

Put it this way: Let's say your little Justin's Kickin' Kangaroos have a big youth soccer tournament on Saturday. There are 15 kids on the team, 10 teams in the tourney. And there are 20 of these tournaments going on all over town. Suddenly, every one of these kids gets chills and fever, then starts throwing up and then gets short of breath. And in seven to 10 days, they're all dead of malaria.

We gotta get these nets. They're coated with an insecticide and cost between $4 and $6. You need about $10, all told, to get them shipped and installed. Some nets can cover a family of four. And they last four years. If we can cut the spread of disease, 10 bucks means a kid might get to live. Make it $20 and more kids are saved.

So, here's the ask: If you have ever gotten a thrill by throwing, kicking, knocking, dunking, slamming, putting up, cutting down or jumping over a net, please go to a special site we've set up through the United Nations Foundation. The address is: UNFoundation.org/malaria. Then just look for the big SI's Nothing But Net logo (or call 202-887-9040) and donate $20. Bang. You might have just saved a kid's life.

Or would you rather have the new Beastie Boys CD?

You're a coach, parent, player, gym teacher or even just a fan who likes watching balls fly into nets, send $20. You saved a life. Take the rest of the day off.

You have ever had a net in the driveway, front lawn or on your head at McDonald's, send $20. You ever imagined Angelina Jolie in fishnets, $20. So you stay home and eat on the dinette. You'll live.

Hey, Dick's Sporting Goods. You have 255 stores. How about you kick in a dime every time you sell a net? Hey, NBA players, hockey stars and tennis pros, how about you donate $20 every time one of your shots hits the net? Maria Sharapova, you don't think this applies to you just because you're Russian? Nyet!

I tried to think how many times I have said or written the word "net" in 28 years of sports writing, and I came up with, conservatively, 20,000. So I've already started us off with a $20,000 donation. That's a whole lot of lives. Together, we could come up with $1 million, net. How many lives would that save? More than 50 times the population of Nett Lake, Minn.

I know what you're thinking: Yeah, but bottom line, how much of our $1 million goes to nets? All of it. Thanks to Ted Turner, who donated $1 billion to create the U.N. Foundation, which covers all the overhead, "every cent will go to nets," says Andrea Gay, the U.N. Foundation's Director of Children's Health.

Nets work! Bill and Melinda Gates have just about finished single-handedly covering every bed in Zambia. Maybe we can't cover an entire Zambia, but I bet we could put a serious dent in Malawi.

It's not like we're betting on some scientist somewhere coming up with a cure. And it's not like warlords are going to hijack a truckload of nets. "Theoretically, if every person in Africa slept at night under a net," says Gay, "nobody need ever die of malaria again." You talk about a net profit.

My God, think of all the nets that are taken for granted in sports! Ping-Pong nets. Batting cage nets. Terrell Owens's bassinet. If you sit behind the plate at a baseball game, you watch the action through a net. You download the highlights on Netscape and forward it on the net to your friend Ben-net while eating Raisinets. Sports is nothing but net. So next time you think of a net, go to that website and click yourself happy. Way more fun than your fantasy bowling league, dude.

One last vignette: A few years back, we took the family to Tanzania, which is ravaged by malaria now. We visited a school and played soccer with the kids. Must've been 50 on each team, running and laughing. A taped-up wad of newspapers was the ball and two rocks were the goal. Most fun I ever had getting whupped. When we got home, we sent some balls and nets.

I kick myself now for that. How many of those kids are dead because we sent the wrong nets?

Copyright © 2006 CNN/Sports Illustrated.

Doh!

Remember the kid playing "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" on the ukulele?

Yeah, this is just like that, only different.

Reason #1725842 Why I Love My Wife

So The Boy is napping and all the girls except The Baby are playing at pal Lisa’s. I’m about to come back down here to the office but first I play the dutiful hubband to my still-recuperating wife.

"Can I get you anything before I go?" I ask ever-so-lovingly.

"Some water would be great, please," Top Management answers sweetly.

And then I do one of those annoying things I so enjoy doing: I stare at her, bug-eyed, mouth slack, like she just asked for something completely and totally unreasonable.

This reaction of mine often throws first-time visitors to Chez Peterson. But not Top Management. She’s used to me.

"That’s right," she replies authoritatively, barely glancing in my direction. "I said it and I meant it. Now get me my water…bitch."

Now my mouth really is hanging open and my eyes are popping out of my head. Laughing hysterically, I stumble into the kitchen to get her some water. At which point she suddenly shrieks, then moans, "Oh…ick," before beginning to laugh hysterically herself.

I go in (with her water, of course) and discover that The Baby, undoubtedly out of sympathy for her poor ol’ Dad, has just spit up. Straight down the inside of Top Management’s shirt.

"That’ll learn me," she says, reaching for the water.

I offer to clean her up. For some reason, my generosity is refused this time.

Probe This

So President George W. Bush called for a probe into rising gas prices.

Are you kidding me?

I’ll break it down for you:

1) ExxonMobil posted a record profit of $8.4 billion dollars for the first quarter.

2) George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are oil men, and Condoleezza Rice is an oil woman, as are their family members and best friends.

3) Iraq.

4) Iran.

And there you have it. Now we know why gas prices are going through the roof. Not all that difficult is it?

What’s more, having him announce such a probe is like me announcing a probe into why Top Management keeps getting knocked up. Hmm…poor choice of words there. But the point is, it’s unnecessary—it certainly isn’t going to reveal any previously unknown factors and is simply a waste of time. (Well, okay, to be fair: in my example, it wouldn’t truly be a waste of time. At all. At all at all at all. But it would still be pointless.)

But don’t worry—we’ve stopped putting oil into the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. That’ll help the teeniest-tiniest bit—how teeny-tiny? One-third of one percent of our daily usage.

Not 33% of our daily usage.
Not 3% of our daily usage.
No. A mere 0.3% of our daily usage.

But, hey, at least it’s sorta kinda almost something tangible, right? And…what’s that? Someone has something to say on that matter?

Why, it’s Texas Governor George W. Bush! I wonder what his thoughts on this issue are:

"The strategic reserve should not be used as an attempt to drive down oil prices right before an election. It should not be used for short-term political gain at the cost of long-term national security. It was created for cases of war or a sudden disruption of America's energy supply. That's why it's called the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, not the Strategic Political Reserve."

Huh. Well, that’s weird. That’s what he said back in September 2000 when Clinton proposed doing it. But then why on earth would he go and do exactly that same thing himself now? I mean, sure, there’s an election coming up and his poll numbers are at an all-time low, but…

Oh…it’s because there’s an election coming up and he’s at an all all-time low.

So much for being a man of his word.

Not to fret. Laurence Lindsey, President Bush’s senior economic advisor back in 2002, explained that once we kicked Saddam’s ass, oil prices would fall.

And that’s certainly been the case, now, hasn’t it?

So just think of how we’ll be sittin’ pretty once we nuke Iran.

Snark aside: it really is pretty simple. We’re the greatest nation that has ever existed. We can do anything humanly possible. We’re running out of oil, though, and creating more is not humanly possible.

But we can find and/or create an alternative to gas. We just need to be serious about it. If President George W. Bush, his first week in office, had pulled a Richard-Nixon-goes-to-China and told his oil buddies that within ten years we were going to be completely oil-independent, in a Manhattan Project kinda way, it would have happened.

We put a man on the moon. We could have done it.

But we didn’t.

This is a technological problem. That’s all it is. And there’s no technological problem the United States can’t solve, given sufficient incentive.

But it seems for the oil men/faux-cowboys in the White House, they just can’t quit their friends or their short-term profits. In fact, it’s obvious they have no interest in doing so and every interest in continuing the status quo. The question is, will the rest of us continue to let them? Or will we speak up before it’s too late?

I Want My Internets

Okay, so here’s a story that’s been all over the internets for the past week or two. But I admit, even as someone as NetNutty as I didn’t pay all that much attention.

Now, part of that may be been because The Baby is a mere week and a half old. But it’s also that I didn’t take it seriously.

But when you’ve got my pals the ACLU joining up with the NRA to fight something, well, that gets even my sleep-deprived attention.

I wrote about how great the internets are a while back, and quoted an article from a Duke professor talking about how A Perfect Stahm had to be in place for the internets to have taken off the way they did, and how such a thang could never happen today.

Looks like the good perfesser was more right than he knew. Some folks are trying to turn the clock back and make sure this world wide web thingie works just the way they—and only they—want. Of course, the They in question have hundreds of billions of dollars. And us Left of the Dial folks? Yeah, not so much.

Basically, here’s the dealio: the government is thinking about allowing Internet Service Providers to decide what websites you can or cannot go to, and who can or cannot send you emails. In other words, if this goes through, you may not be able to link to Left of the Dial unless I’ve paid your specific ISP a fee. Otherwise I’ll get blackballed. Kinda like legalized payola.

Apocalyptic? Obviously, being denied your daily dose of The Dial would be pretty damn catastrophic. And yet Big Bidniz might just push this through if we’re not all careful.

Check this out--and you should click through to that link, incidentally, because it backs up its statements with further links for you to explore.

Background on the Issue: The internet is open because private companies haven't been allowed to block content they don't like. Now the telcos want to make it so they can block what you see.

The Threat to You is real: Telcos have already blocked competing services, censored emails, and prevented customers from reading political web sites. Why do you assume they care about your rights?

Come On, This Isn't Really Happening: Fine, don't believe me. Ignore the fact that the CEO of AT&T is on record that this is going to happen.

Explaining the Players in the Fight: It's a corporate cartel with bought and paid lobbyists versus a free market and citizens groups.

Okay. Now check this out:

* In 2004, North Carolina ISP Madison River blocked their DSL customers from using any rival Web-based phone service.

* In 2005, Canada's telephone giant Telus blocked customers from visiting a Web site sympathetic to the Telecommunications Workers Union during a labor dispute.

* Shaw, a big Canadian cable TV company, is charging an extra $10 a month to subscribers who want to use a competing Internet telephone service.

* In April, Time Warner's AOL blocked all emails that mentioned www.dearaol.com -- an advocacy campaign opposing the company's pay-to-send e-mail scheme.

You get that last one? Why on earth wasn’t that huge news? Hmm…maybe because TimeWarner controls so much the media? (He says, speaking from some experience.)

What’s that you say? You’re terrified that your Left of the Dial might just go bye-bye? Well, that’s understandable.

And this won’t make you feel any better:

Still think it's not going to happen? That these companies wouldn't dare to alienate the entire Internet-using community? Well, think about how much fun it is to deal with Comcast for your cable, and how much flexibility they're willing to offer. Also consider this comment from Edward Whiteacre, CEO of SBC Comm., when he was asked about how concerned he was about losing ground to Internet upstarts:

"How do you think they're going to get to customers? Through a broadband pipe. Cable companies have them. We have them. Now what they would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain't going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it. So there's going to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for the portion they're using. Why should they be allowed to use my pipes?

"The Internet can't be free in that sense, because we and the cable companies have made an investment and for a Google or Yahoo! (YHOO) or Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes [for] free is nuts!"

It's not about the customer, you see, it's about their profits. So if a giant retailer like Barnes and Noble wanted to screw the competition, they could pay the right ISPs, the right networks, and make sure that traffic to a site like Powells.com would run much slower. Or they could guarantee one Internet search engine that their engine would run much faster than anothers. If one of the network providers developed a music service, they could slow down your access to iTunes. Non-profits could be squeezed off of the Internet if they couldn't pay for the "fast-lane" of Internet service.

So if this goes through, it’ll be legal for your ISP to cut off service to Left of the Dial because they’re offended by my saying President George W. Bush is a liar. Or maybe they’ll cut off your Left of the Dial because they’re offended by my saying that Hilary Rodham Clinton is a power-mad weasel unwilling to take a stand on principle. [Both statements are correct, incidentally. Just for the record.] Who knows what’ll set ‘em off?

Because it doesn’t matter. If this goes through they can do it. And just think of how that’ll screw us all up. What if you can’t access Amazon anymore? Or Google?

Or Sweet Baby Jesu, what if you can’t get your Left of the Dial?

I’m pretty sure that’s the fourth sign of the apocalypse.

But it don’t have to happen. Call your Congresscritters and say "I want my internets!"

They...They Like Me!

oniomania (O-nee-uh-MAY-nee-uh, -MAYN-yuh) noun
Compulsive shopping; excessive, uncontrollable desire to buy things.

Top Management and I do not have opulent tastes. We are, however, gluttons. Not so much for food (well, not usually), however. Books and CDs, on the other hand…oy. We may indeed have a slight case of oniomania, if it’s, in fact, possible to have a slight case of oniomania. We are slight oniomaniacs. We live in a slightly oniomaniacal fashion. We live slightly oniomaniacally.

We try really hard to buy books and CDs new when we can, in order to support the artists who created the works. When it comes to certain authors—Charles Dickens, say—we don’t worry too much about it because, you know, I think he’s doing just fine financially right now.

We certainly do buy a lot of stuff used and make enormous use of our marvelous local library, and even occasionally the UVa library, since life as freelancers tend to leave finances somewhat…tension-filled, shall we say? We tell ourselves that that’s apropos for writers.

But when we can, we buy stuff new as much as usual, just to show some love to our fellow creators. Oh, sure, it’s a drop in the bucket but if enough people make the effort, right? So with U2, f’r instance, it doesn’t make a lot of difference but, hey, with The Replacements or Dinosaur Jr it just might make a noticeable spike. "Say…why are we doing so well in the Blue Ridge Mountains these days?" I can imagine the fine folks in Minneapolis wondering.

This is also why we’re such sticklers about not making copies of officially released albums or accepting them from well-meaning friends. Neither of us are, alas, in a position where we get much mileage out of royalties, but we get some, as I’ll discuss in a moment, and we very much hope someday to get more. Much, much more. Oh so much more. Oodles and boodles more. [Besides, making copies for others is, well...you know...stealing, even when it’s done by a well-meaning friend. But more on that another time.]

So. I received my bi-annual (or is it semi-annual? I can never remember and I’m way too lazy to look it up right now) royalty statement today from DC Comics and as usual the unexpected windfall allows to us buy…well, not a new house or a Lamborghini, but at least a couple of pizzas. And I’m not complaining, mind you—as my former boss used to put it, you already got paid for the work and you weren't expecting anything more, so it’s basically free money. And, hey, a couple of pizzas, man…that’s a guaranteed good time.

But what makes this particular gift so unexpected and so pleasant is that it’s for foreign publishing. Not that I got nothin’ against good ol’-fashioned ‘Murican publishing, by any means. But here in the States, you pretty much print a comic and it’s done. Unless it’s later collected, it’s basically out-of-print after a few weeks. Such is the transient nature of comics.

I have had several things collected, so it’s not all that unusual to get tiny little royalties for them. Not surprisingly, the story I’ve made far and away the most money on (enough for nearly a dozen pizzas, maybe) is also easily one of the two worst pieces of writing I’ve ever done. Well, and gotten paid for, that is. Just horrible. Horrible, horrible, horrible. Nice artwork, though. And it might have been slightly better if I hadn’t had to write the first half the week before Max was born (when Top Management was already a week past her due date) and then finish it the week after Max was born (when I had even less of a clue about both writing and parenting than I do now). Oh, and if I hadn’t had to toss my original ending because it was too good. Seriously. Long story of interoffice politics and, actually, they made the right call, much though it bummed me at the time. Beautiful art, though. Really gorgeous. Much better’n my writing deserved. But then that’s true of even my best stuff. Tim, Brian, Jim, Phil, Rick and all the rest--thanks, fellas!

But that’s not what was in this latest statement. This statement was pretty entirely made up of the reprinting of some of the Gotham Adventures books I did with pal and brilliant artist Tim.

And where were these little gems reprinted? The usual places: England. India. Russia. China. Egypt. Lebanon. And Indonesia.

Much as our nation’s most brilliant jazz musicians often found more receptive audiences in Europe and Asia, so too must I go abroad to be hailed as the genius I (and, alas, only I) recognize myself to be.

I mean, how cool is that? My Batman is in Russia and China and India. It was already in England and Canada, from being printed the first time, and most of it’s been reprinted in Mexico and Argentina. Sometimes France and Germany and Spain and even, if I recall correctly, South Korea (I may not be remembering correctly, however, since Batman doesn’t actually translate very well into Asian cultures, interestingly).

But Egypt? And Lebanon? I mean, I’ve now had my work printed in virtually every one of the biggest and most important countries in the world.

Or, as Top Management put it:

Germans love David Hasselhoff.

But Indonesians love Scott Peterson.

Love 'Em Lawyers

I know that as an American I’m supposed to dislike lawyers. But I don’t. I love ‘em. Oh, sure, there’re the unscrupulous bastards who’ll give the entire profession a bad name, but of what profession can that not be said?

Besides stay-at-home dad/freelance comic book writers, that is.

I’ve noticed that even the most rabid of tort reformers don’t hesitate to sic a lawyer on someone the minute they think they’ve got a case (hello Rick Santorum, you heinous hypocrite, how are you?), even if that case might seem a tad tenuous to the eyes of an uninvolved party. When it comes to attorneys, it seems our entire nation has a whopping case of "do as I say, not as I do." Or maybe "one set of rules for me and another set for everyone else." Or I guess it’s just "if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em, especially if you can maybe make a buck or two million."

Anyhoo, I don’t know where this here clip falls into all that, except that even though I’ve never actually been to a deposition I suspect they’re not all nearly this interesting. If they were, you’d probably be able to sell tickets. I mean, that’s just a good time, Texas-style.

I love lawyers.

[Note: I’m not just professing my affection for attorneys simply because I know for a fact about 5% of my regular Left of the Dial readers are lawyers, but as a sidenote, please don’t sue me.]

DVDumb

A while back I ranted about something not entirely dissimilar.

Today’s rant is along the same vein, only different.

What is the problem with makers of DVDs? Why do they want to ruin a good surprise? Why do they feel compelled to show the coolest bits of the film during the damn menu?

You know what I’m talking about. You pop the disc in the player and sit back, ready to enjoy the magnificent experience of being told a good story, an experience virtually every human being on the face of the planet deeply craves on a regular basis.

But first you have to watch five or ten or twenty seconds of clips from the movie before you’re given the choice of clicking on "Play Movie" or "Languages" or "Chapters" or "Bonus Features." So now you know that at some point the mild-mannered accountant you’re introduced to in the first minute of the film is going to pick up a gun and shoot somebody while he’s trapped in a burning bus.

Great. So much for that oh-so-carefully-set-up scene the writer and director worked so hard on. Now you know it’s coming. Now somewhere in the back of your mind you’re just wondering when. Some part of you is going to be thinking the entire time, "Okay, great, his wife just got kidnapped…is this when he gets trapped in the burning bus during a gunfight? No? Oh…okay, maybe this is when he gets trapped in a burning bus during a gunfight. Huh. Not then either. Okay…this must be the burning bus gunfight then."

Why? Why? Why do they do this? I mean, I know why—there are people who specialize in creating DVD menus, and this way they can turn in a really cool product to the people paying them a lot of money. And the people hiring those folks, of course, have all seen the film, so they know about the burning bus gunfight and that it’s the coolest part of the film, so there’s no ruining of the surprise there.

The director, of course, might be less than happy about it, but he’s probably off directing not his follow-up movie but the one after that follow-up, so if he’s even consulted, he doesn’t have time to devote to this kind o’ minutiae.

And, dammit, it’s also just not necessarily. This isn’t a trailer, where they’re trying to get to you pay money to see the film. You’ve got the DVD! You’ve already paid money for it! There’s no financial incentive to screwing up plot points, no matter how small, in this way.

But what we’re left with is the majority of DVDs, where no matter how much you’re willing to suspend disbelief, some part of you is likely unable to suspend knowledge of coming story events attained involuntarily. And that’s not fair. It’s not fair to the original creators, it’s not fair to the viewers, and it’s not fair to the story, to Story, itself.

Worse than Prog

So much to my own chagrin, I like prog-rock. I do. I admit it. It’s a guilty pleasure. Years go by when I won’t listen to a single thing that might be considered prog, but then I’ll get on a kick and out’ll come my old Genesis albums.

Pretentious? You bet. Remotely resembling the basic foundations of what I consider great rock and roll? Not at all. Full of ridiculous amounts of overplaying? Without question. Often completely lacking in any taste whatsoever? Oh my goodness, absolutely. Amuse the hell out of me and sometimes still give me goosebumps? Amazingly enough, it does.

Embodying all the above and ever so much more is the band Yes. Featuring a singer whose best lyrics are too awful to be considered sophomoric and whose high notes can paralyze a bat from a half-mile away as well as four instrumentalists who all seem to be constantly vying for Most Egregious Surfeit of Notes Per Second, they are all that is bad about prog. Needless to say, I love ‘em to pieces.

There are really only three Yes albums I dig—The Yes Album, Fragile and Close to the Edge, the three albums after Steve Howe joined and before Bill Bruford left—but I dig ‘em mightily. A big part of that is Bill Bruford. Far and away one of my two favorite drummers, when he left so did most of my interest in Yes.

But I do listen to the post-Bruford stuff occasionally, so when I ran across this here video of the classic post-Bruford line-up (there have been a powerful lot o’ personnel changes over the years) doing "Roundabout," I was interested. Howe on acoustic guitar? Rick Wakeman, grandmaster of synthesizer overkill, on a grand piano? Most intriguing indeed.

And then I heard the first fifteen seconds.

Oy. And I'd thought Clapton's swingin' remake of "Layla" was cheesy. [And I was right.] Seems like the band figgered giving "Roundabout" the same treatment was a sure-fire way to score a smash-hit. Ugh. The lounge lizards at your local Holiday Inn'd be mortified to be caught performing this arrangement. Pseudo lite jazz for and by former rock geezers.

Not to be too harsh or nothin'.

This is nasty, nasty stuff. Steve Howe, most surprisingly, seems completely unable to swing. Wakeman’s little fills don’t quite click and even singer Jon Anderson seems to get lost at least once. Drummer Alan White is no Bruford, but he’s a solid rock drummer (which, actually, is the problem—this kinda music demands a killer drummer), and he seems the most comfortable with this gentle groove. Which tells you right there that you’re in for a most unchallenging performance. Actually, that’s not entirely true—sitting through the entire thing twice is quite the challenge indeed.

A Conspiracy Thwarted

Good friend and brilliant artist Brian—he once drew a cover of Max being rescued by The Dark Knight and has given me a groovy new banner for this here site that I just need to get around to putting up—wrote to me concerning our newest acquisition, aka The Baby:

Scott—

I offer no congratulations or any other platitudes. I assume that you are adrift in a sea of those. My gift, be it just as diaphanous as the fond wishes of others, carries the weight of a tangible hope for all men. Your new daughter could tip the balance of the force and plunge this world into a matriarchal dark age. Can you imagine the horrific tranquility of a world ruled by women? A world where men are subjugated to removing stubborn lids from jars and...sexual slavery.

Scott, you must see to it that this child be trained in the ways of men. A "tomboy" is our only hope. Show her the ways of baseball and football, and the joys of blowing things up. Teach her to enjoy the Three Stooges, but only the ones with Curly.

Please, man, if not for yourself, then for the rest of us.

Pass on to Top Management whatever kind and beautiful words or poetry that she would expect from me. Perhaps something about how well she wears the spring bloom of motherhood, and use the words "fine" and "grace" a few times. Oh yeah, and throw in something about me hoping The Baby inherits a good quality of Top Management's. You know, something nonphysical like kindness or a good heart, or maybe her smile. New mothers like that sort of stuff.

Destroy this e-mail but remember its contents. Keep the cabal alive.

Brian

Little does Brian know that his words, though wise and well-intentioned, come too late. Max was already the cabal’s death knell lo a decade past. Brilliant ("boy, are polynomials fun!" she exclaimed this morning, as I snorked scalding coffee onto the keyboard) and beautiful (she looks just like Top Management), there are few things in life she enjoys more than a good catch with Dad, unless it’s investigating the creepiest and crawliest of bugs.

What’s more, she’s now passed those pleasures onto her little sisters, equally gorgeous and geniuses and groovy with gross stuff. The Baby? Alas for the fate of the world as we know it, she’s pretty much a fait accompli.

[Incidentally, I did try to destroy the email but it turns out computers aren’t nearly as easy to swallow as the notes we used to sneak in school. And now my teeth hurt.]

Reason #1725457 Why I Love My Wife

She's sitting on the couch nursing The Baby, all of six days old, and feeding The Boy while reading out loud to the girls and she actually says to me in all seriousness, "Oh, honey, don’t worry about sweeping the kitchen right now—you’ve been working so hard. You should go take some time for yourself."

Brawny Men

Q: How do you know that you maybe pay just a bit too much attention to politics, if such a thing is possible?
A: You actually kinda sorta care that Scott McClellan resigned as White House Press Secretary.

I know, I know. The question on everyone’s mind is who will they ever been able to get who can lie as often and as poorly as Scott?

What can I say? It’s a trait at which we Scotts excel.

Or so I claim… (Repeatedly.)

But all is not lost. Be of good cheer, my fellow earthlings, for there is hope.

And it is this man.

He is strong. He is talented. He is hard-working. He is oh so sensitive. He is every woman’s dream and every man’s aspiration. In fact, I believe he is the next step in evolution. (For those of us what believe in such tripe, that is, and not The Flying Spaghetti Monster.)

Now, I will admit, I’ve only watched one of the pre-made movies—for the record, I can highly, highly, highly recommend the brilliantly-titled "Your Hair, It’s Perfect"—but I’m willing to bet the others are equally sublime. So if any of you Left of the Dialers (Left of the Dialians?) would like to chime in with your thoughts on other entries, please, I would be most happy about that indeed.

But me, I’ve got a rocking horse for orphans to go build. I better get crackin’ too because I’m pretty sure Top Management’s thinking of leaving me for him. And who can blame her?

Breeds

So things have been going well here at Chez Peterson. Of course they have. Top Management’s mother—(the Chairwoman of the Board? Management Emeritus?)—is here and therefore our chillens have next-to-no interest in us.

Lots of interest in The Baby, however; she still hasn’t lost the novelty factor yet. Even The Boy continues to be most intrigued by this new addition. Not even a hint of sibling rivalry, which is not unexpected, but is nice nonetheless.

In fact, none of our myriad children have ever shown any such signs upon meeting a new sibling for the first time, except for the first time Top Management’s mom met The Rose. Max wasn’t entirely sold on that one. Sharing Mom and Dad? Whatevah. No biggie. Nothin’ but a thang. Sharing Grandma? Yeah, not so good…

But that was fleeting. Now the only trace of any problem is in the time-honored tradition of Big Sisters tormenting Little Brothers—The Bean likes to slyly put her hand on The Boy’s knee when they’re watching television together and then innocently claim she was just being loving, even though experience has taught her that it’s guaranteed to make him shriek, and I’m pretty sure it’s not from a surfeit of storge —and my own experience has made me fairly positive that’s genetic.

No, in general, The Boy enjoys simply watching The Baby sleep, giggling madly when she yawns and stretches, watching skeptically when a big sister holds her (The Rose is particularly great at it), and becoming most distressed indeed when she cries (something which is blessedly infrequent). He doesn’t even seem to mind that, even by newborn standards, she’s pretty goofy-lookin’. I mean, I’m pretty fond of her and all, but come on—she’s brand-new, and brand-new people don’t tend to be all that spiffy. The Baby doesn’t resemble a tiny pink frog the way The Boy himself did when he was first born, before he became the shockingly attractive young mister he is now. No, she looks more like a pink version of the grey aliens from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Oh, but her mouth looks just like a hat, as did The Boy’s when he was just out of the oven. Actually, it doesn’t look so much like a hat as it does the drawing of a hat as seen in The Little Prince—and anyone who’s read that will recall that it wasn’t truly a drawing of a hat, but a drawing of a snake which’d just swallowed an elephant.

Not having those particular pop culture frames of reference, however, The Boy simply accepts her for who she is: an amusing new pet.

I should warn him, though: I’ve heard this breed can turn on you.

Newt Hearts Osama

Well, okay. Gotta admit, I’m pretty shocked by this:

"I think it's quite clear as you point out, Sean, that from this tape, that bin Laden and his lieutenants are monitoring the American news media, they're monitoring public opinion polling, and I suspect they take a great deal of comfort when they see people attacking United States policies."
—Newt Gingrich
January 2006

"Where I fault the administration is, sometimes it would be so easy to just be simple and straight, okay? All they had to do is go to the American people and say, we want to make sure that if the National Security Agency picks up a foreign terrorist calling someone in the U.S., that they can listen to the call."
—Newt Gingrich
April 2006

There’s really only one conclusion that can be drawn.

Newt Gingrich is a concubine of Osama bin Laden.

Well, they say the first step is admitting it.

So Newt is Osama’s ho.

Wow. Interesting times. Interesting times.

And remember: criticism of the president equals treason. Never, ever forget that. After all, that's the American way.

Bath School Disaster

Hokey smokes. Every time I think I’ve come near the limit of my ignance, new stuff pops up. Seems there is, in fact, no end to my ignance. That's just one reason I'm so fond of The Baby--she has no idea (yet) what a bonehead her dad is. I usually have about a year before my kids figure that out. I'm hoping for a year and a half this time. I'm guessing that means about eight months.

Anyhoo, this wikipedia entry is in honor of April 15th. And you thought you hated paying taxes. Jeeze.

The Bath School disaster was a series of bombings in and around Bath Township, Michigan, USA, on May 18, 1927, which killed 45 people and injured 58. Most of the victims were children in second to sixth grades attending the Bath Consolidated School. The bombings comprised the deadliest act of mass murder in a school in U.S. history, claiming more than three times as many victims as the Columbine High School massacre.

The perpetrator was school board member Andrew Kehoe, who was upset by a property tax that had been levied to fund the construction of the school building. He blamed the additional tax for financial hardship which led to foreclosure proceedings against his farm. These events apparently provoked Kehoe to plan his attack.

On the morning of May 18, Kehoe first killed his wife and then set his farm buildings on fire. As fire fighters arrived at the scene outside the town, an explosion rocked the school building, killing most of the people inside. Kehoe used a detonator to ignite dynamite and hundreds of pounds of pyrotol which he had secretly planted inside the school over the course of many months. As rescuers started gathering, Kehoe drove up, stopped, and detonated a bomb inside his shrapnel-filled vehicle, killing himself and the school superintendent and killing and injuring several others. During the rescue efforts, searchers discovered an additional 500 pounds (230 kg) of unexploded dynamite and pyrotol planted throughout the basement of the school's south wing.

And We're Off to the Races

News on this (water) breaking story as it/she develops.

***

UPDATE: Let it be known far and wide (aka to Left of the Dial readers) that henceforth young Britney shall no more be known as young Britney.

From this day forward, the baby formerly known as young Britney--who made her physical debut upon this mortal coil at 9:12am, weighing in at a healthy eight pounds and three ounces and wearing the pink trunks--shall be known instead as...

The Baby.

A nom de blog shall be bestowed upon her on the first anniversary of her birth.

So it has been written. So shall it be done.

And now, as I'm operating on two hours of sleep over the past 36 hours and am therefore even less coherent than usual--no mean feat--I shall to bed.

Alone.

Which is the part I hate most of all this.

Well, you know, apart from the blood and screaming.

Lawn Scare

It was another gorgeous day yesterday. Which, of course, made me feel sick to my stomach.

Each beautiful day brings the sound of another neighbor mowing his lawn for the first time this year. Or in the case of the fastidious Doctor Turkleton, for the seventh time.

And whenever I hear that tell-tale roar, I usually feel quite pleased—it’s a pleasant sound with pleasant connotations normally—but this year I just feel nauseated. Because I know I should be mowing my lawn, and if I don’t soon, that I’ll find myself in a grass hole again, unable to keep up with the green beast. (Note: not the green-eyed monster, nor the beast-with-two-backs, nor even the Green Monster.)

But I can’t. My lawn mower’s broken and because I’m an idiot, I didn’t get it fixed during the winter like I should have and now there’s a month-long wait at the shop. And I can’t afford a new one and I can’t afford a lawn service. And I can’t even borrow a mower because our lawn is just too hard on mowers and that’d be a totally uncool thing to do to someone nice enough to loan their mower to the guy who’s gone through three in four years. So I am, basically, completely and totally screwed.

And it’s not like it goes unnoticed. Pal Sarah axed if we really get comments from neighbors about our yard.

Oh yes. Yes indeed. Yes we do.

Just today Top Management and I were in the drug store looking to score some crack (she settled for a Milky Way Dark) when we saw a really nice lady from the down the street who we hadn’t seen at all over the winter or, more important for the purposes of this story, who hadn’t seen us all winter.

"Oh my!" she said happily, upon spying Top Management’s impossible-to-miss belly. "I had no idea! Wow, has it really been that long?"

Informed that, apparently her eyes were not deceiving her and it had indeed been that long, she smiled and nodded. "Well, that explains it, then. I mean, I knew you weren’t really able to get out in the yard much last summer because of all the health problems with The Boy, but I assumed he was all better by now. But now I see why you haven’t been able to get out this spring either! Oh well!" And she happily touched the lump that is young Britney.

Even The Boy stared at her in disbelief.

So, seriously, I really don’t know what I’m going to do. Apparently some of the neighbors grew so "concerned" last year—and by that I mean unhappy (picture villagers with torches, only make sure the villagers all drive SUVs, or at least their toddlers do)—with the state of our yard that they were thinking of starting up a kinda Lawn Care Charity for us, the way they do with meals, only in this case rather than fixing us dinner, they’d be forcing their husbands to mow our lawn.

Well-intentioned as she knew they were (for the most part), that did not go over so big with Top Management.

So. That’s where we is. Can’t do anything, can’t do nothing.

But that suggestion someone posted last time about getting a sheep? It’s sounding better all the time. There’s a farm at the entrance to our lil’ paradise. Maybe I’ll see if they’ll loan me one.

Somebody’s Watching Me

To all the folks who come here searching for "I Always Feel Like Somebody’s Watching Me":

1) You have a lot of company—I get at least three such hits a week.
2) I feel like that too. Maybe because they are. Oh, yeah, Department of Justice, that's right—I'm talkin' to you. Thought I hadn’t noticed you, didn’t you? Well, I did.

But that's okay. There's room for all (well...most) here under the big top. It's quite all right, bridgekeeper. I am not afraid.

[For the most part.]

Immigration Questions

So I got an email from an anonymous Left of the Dial reader about a month back asking what my position on illegal immigration was, and saying that she was interested in me posting a piece on it.

The gorgeous, brilliant and oh so rotund Top Management and I had to laugh. I mean, the idea that anyone’s really interested in my opinion on just about anything is amusing in and of itself. But something as complex as immigration? That just cracked us up.

Besides—and this is going to be tough for most regular Left of the Dial reader to believe, but it’s true—I don’t have an opinion on absolutely everything and more important, I don’t just spout off at the drop of a hat. Again, against all evidence to the contrary, I actually think long and hard about this stuff and while I may sometimes sit down and let my bile pour forth in one big messy gush, I then take some time to let it marinate for a while to make sure I really mean the stuff I’m saying. And unlike the Leaker-in-Chief, I do.

Also, my mom gets all upset when I post about politics because she hates being faced with the inexorable proof that she’s wrong about pretty much everything, except how wonderful I am. So I don’t post about politics gratuitously just to upset The Bomber. That’s simply a very, very nice bonus.

Finally, not living in a border state, I don’t have a lot of daily contact with illegal immigrants, or even people who have a lot of contact with illegal immigrants, so it’s not an immediately pressing problem for me, the way health care, for instance, is. Yes, it affects each and every American, but the results are currently less obvious to me personally than, say, pollution or voter fraud. Not that I’m suggesting by any stretch that it’s not a serious issue, nor that I don’t care, just that it’s a bit further down on the list of Incredibly Important Things for Me to Rant and Rail About on a Daily Basis.

And yet…just by asking me what I thought about the issue, that reader has had me paying much closer attention to the issue. Of course, given how it’s blown up in the news over the past few weeks, that may have been inevitable. Ne’ertheless, I have given it quite a bit of thought.

My first thought is: I used to like Senator John McCain so much. Even when I disagreed with him, which wasn’t infrequent, he seemed so much the mensch, the real deal, the straight talker. But he’s just bummed the living shit out of me the past few months. It’s not that he’s a conservative Republican. I always knew that. And when he’s loyal to the party line, that’s fine. But when he kisses the ass of the man who called his wife an adulterer, well, that’s a man for whom I can have next to no respect. I still get a kick out of listening to him talk, but for pete’s sake, they called your daughter a bastard and you’re out there literally hugging and kissing (well, being kissed by) the very people behind those awful, awful smears. That’s…that’s inexplicable. Actually, it’s not. And that’s why I can’t respect him anymore.

But what’s more, even when I agree with him, I worry that the good senator’s getting a little too old to compete in the biggest of arenas. Senator McCain said recently that there weren’t Americans who’d be willing to pick lettuce for fifty bucks an hour.

I’m sorry, but is he on crack? I agree with the argument that illegal immigrants do the jobs Americans don’t want. But what an asinine example. Not only are there plenty of Americans who’d be willing to pick lettuce for fifty bucks an hour, I’d personally be overjoyed to pick lettuce for fifty bucks an hour. I mean, jeeze louise. You gotta be kidding me. The problem is that Americans won’t pick lettuce for three bucks an hour. Fifty? I think there’s a college professor in the neighborhood and a local science teacher who would both seriously consider joining me for that kinda cabbage. So to speak.

Next, whatever the validity of their arguments, the vituperative words issuing from some of the folks in this discussion are so heinous as to render moot any legitimate points they might possibly have. For instance, last week a talk radio host in Arizona advocated murdering anyone trying to cross into this country illegally.

"What we’ll do is randomly pick one night - every week - where we will kill whoever crosses the border. Step over there and you die. You get to decide whether it’s your lucky night or not. I think that would be more fun…[I’d be] happy to sit there with my high-powered rifle and my night scope."
— Brian James of KFYI in Arizona

According to a letter sent by Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard and U.S. Attorney Paul Charlton to the FCC:

At no time during this hour did Mr. James disavow violence or indicate he was joking. In fact, when one caller suggested Mr. James did not really mean he wanted to shoot and kill immigrants, Mr. James retorted that in fact he did mean it. Immediately after this exchange, Mr. James engaged the next caller in a discussion about the correct ammunition to use when shooting border crossers to make sure the shots would be fatal.

Then there’s the worry about rank hypocrisy, as always. Currently, rabid congressman Tom Tancredo has been railing against the possibility of amnesty for illegal immigrants, and no matter how often Senator McCain, amongst others, tries to explain that it’s not amnesty, he just keeps barking about amnesty.

And yet President Bush’s current Secretary of Commerce seems to perhaps be a former illegal immigrant who was granted amnesty.

What the--!? Double standards? In politics? What are the damn odds?

Speaking of, much has been made about all the Mexican flags being waved at some of the protests. Since there’s footage of President Bush himself waving a Mexican flag, that seems a little disingenuous, to put it mildly. And as has been pointed out numerous times, no one ever got upset about all the Irish flags at all the St. Patrick’s Day parades. Once again, maybe we’re not quite that color-blind nation that those who oppose affirmative action would like us to think we are.

Finally, this news story gave me incredible pause:

Eighth grader Anthony Soltero shot himself through the head on Thursday, March 30, after the assistant principal at De Anza Middle School told him that he was going to prison for three years because of his involvement as an organizer of the April 28 school walk-outs to protest the anti-immigrant legislation in Washington. The vice principal also forbade Anthony from attending graduation activities and threatened to fine his mother for Anthony’s truancy and participation in the student protests.

Anthony was learning about the importance of civic duties and rights in his eighth grade class. Ironically, he died because the vice principal at his school threatened him for speaking out and exercising those rights, Ms. Corales said today.

Anthony was buried on Monday.

So. Not only do I not have the answer to illegal immigration, I’m not even sure I know what I think. Except for one thing: the rhetoric needs to be dialed way, way back.

---

Tags: immigration, George W. Bush, John McCain

Neighborhood Animals

So we’ve got a bear in our neighborhood.

At least, that’s the rumor going around. I’m a little skeptical myself. I suspect people have seen the local llama
and gotten a bit freaked out and let their imaginations run wild.

But whatever. I could be wrong, I reckon. It’s been known to happen. Hourly.

More, likely, I think, given the plethora of flora in our little paradise, is that the bear is actually a relative of this cute and cuddly lil’ feller:

Monster Rabbit Devours English Veggie Plots

LONDON (AFP) - In a tale reminiscent of the last Wallace and Gromit movie, furious villagers in northeast England have hired armed guards to protect their beloved communal vegetable gardens from a suspected monster rabbit.

Leeks, Japanese onions, parsnips and spring carrots have all been ripped up and devoured by the mystery were-rabbit -- prompting the 12 allotment holders in Felton, north of Newcastle, to hire two marksmen with air rifles and orders to shoot to kill.

"It is a massive thing. It is a monster. The first time I saw it, I said: 'What the hell is that?'" the Northumberland Gazette newspaper quoted local resident Jeff Smith, 63, as saying on its website (www.northumberlandtoday.co.uk).

What and Where Am I?

So you’ve probably seen them little online tests you can take to to determine what kind o’ animal or tree or whatever you are. Here are two of my recent results, just so’s you all know exactly what you’re dealing with.

You are a Black Coffee

At your best, you are: low maintenance, friendly, and adaptable At your worst, you are: cheap and angsty You drink coffee when: you can get your hands on it Your caffeine addiction level: high

What Kind of Coffee Are You?

You Are Austin

A little bit country, a little bit rock and roll. You're totally weird and very proud of it. Artistic and freaky, you still seem to fit in... in your own strange way. Famous Austin residents: Lance Armstrong, Sandra Bullock, Andy Roddick

What American City Are You?

I am a little disturbed by how accurately I can be assessed with only seven questions.

Homeland Insecurity

No, seriously—what the hell is going on at The Department of Homeland Security?

I mean, I know what’s supposed to be going on (but isn’t), but what’s up with having three employees arrested in the past few months for trying to score some underage sex?

Okay. Let me back up a bit. Here’s a piece I wrote about a month and a half ago but never posted—yes, that’s right, hard as it is to believe, I don’t immediately post every noxious morsel that dribbles out of my fetid brain, and yes, I do hope you were drinking your morning coffee and eating a nice apple danish when I slammed that oh so attractive image against your retinas.

Anyhoo, that piece:

***

First, let’s state the obvious:

Trolling for porn on a library computer? Not cool. Not cool at all. Should certainly be against library policy and probably illegal.

Now. Does that sound like something The Department of Homeland Security should be watching out for?

Of course not. They have much, much, much more important things to work on, and there are others to do such jobs.

And yet:

Two uniformed men strolled into the main room of the Little Falls library in Bethesda one day last week and demanded the attention of all patrons using the computers. Then they made their announcement: The viewing of Internet pornography was forbidden.

The men looked stern and wore baseball caps emblazoned with the words "Homeland Security." The bizarre scene unfolded Feb. 9, leaving some residents confused and forcing county officials to explain how employees assigned to protect county buildings against terrorists came to see it as their job to police the viewing of pornography.

After the two men made their announcement, one of them challenged an Internet user's choice of viewing material and asked him to step outside, according to a witness. A librarian intervened, and the two men went into the library's work area to discuss the matter. A police officer arrived. In the end, no one had to step outside except the uniformed men.

They were officers of the security division of Montgomery County's Homeland Security Department, an unarmed force that patrols about 300 county buildings -- but is not responsible for enforcing obscenity laws.

Amazing. They just received a large number of failing grades from a bi-partisan commission charged with investigating whether they’ve done an adequate job of making us safer post-9/11 (they haven’t and it’s actually getting worse) and they were positively shredded by a Republican report on their work (or complete lack thereof) during Hurricane Katrina.

Could it be because they’re doing this stuff instead?

Keeping their eye on the ball? Hell’s bells, they don’t seem to even realize what the ball is, much less where.

***

Okay. So. Pretty weird, right? We don’t check more than five percent of the containers coming into this country, some investigators were recently able to smuggle the necessary ingredients for two small nuclear weapons into the country, oh, that’s right, and they let New Orleans sink.

What’s that you say? You missed the bit about smuggling dirty bombs into the US?

'Dirty' Bomb Material 'Easily' Smuggled Into US in Test
By Sherrie Gossett
CNSNews.com Staff Writer
March 29, 2006

Radioactive material for two 'dirty' bombs was "easily" smuggled across both the northern and southern U.S. borders in December by government investigators testing border security, according to newly released documents.

The five-month undercover operation, conducted by the Government Accountability Office, was detailed in a redacted report and triggered calls by senators for rapid improvement in port security. The full report remains classified.

On Dec. 14, 2005, two teams of investigators driving rental cars made simultaneous border crossings at the Canadian and Mexican borders. In the trunk of each car were two containers of an unnamed radioactive material. If combined with explosives such as dynamite, the result is a 'dirty' bomb, which spreads radioactive contamination when it detonates.

The investigators' two cars passed through radiation detection portals at both borders. While the presence of radioactive material was detected, border officers simply made copies of the drivers' licenses and related documentation that the undercover investigators handed them.

The GAO has recommended that the Secretary of Homeland Security work with other agencies to streamline and expedite the internal review procedures that precede deployment of the portal monitors.

The investigations were undertaken by the GAO at the request of U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman (R-Minn.), who is chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. The panel held a hearing on the findings Tuesday.

"The reality is that it is easier to buy low grade radioactive material for a dirty bomb than it is to buy cold medicine that has been restricted due to the meth epidemic," Coleman said.

Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) said the GAO reports were an "alarming wake-up call."

House and Senate Democrats Wednesday unveiled their plan for U.S. security, called "Real Security."

Commenting on the GAO reports, Jennifer Crider, press secretary for House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), told Cybercast News Service that "the Republican Congress has chosen time and time again to not do the things that we know would work to keep Americans more safe."

"What Democrats want to do is to ensure that we've screened at our ports, that our borders are secure and that we take the actions necessary to keep Americans safe," Crider added.

All original CNSNews.com material, copyright 1998-2006 Cybercast News Service.

So. They can’t keep nuclear bombs out of the United States. But they’re checking for porn on library computers? I mean…what in the hell?! Can you really wrap your head around that on?

Well, seems that now we now why their priorities are what they are:

Check out this winner:

Details Released In Agent's Sex Case
By ELAINE SILVESTRINI

TAMPA - When an Orlando mall security officer responded to a complaint about a man exposing himself to a girl in the food court, the suspect hurried out of the mall and ran through the parking lot.

The suspect was Frank Figueroa, then one of Florida's highest-ranking federal law enforcement officers and the former head of a national program formed to target child sex predators. Since his Oct. 25 arrest at The Mall at Millenia, Figueroa has been suspended from his post as the special agent in charge of the Tampa office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the law enforcement arm of The Department of Homeland Security.

Figueroa is charged with exposure of sexual organs and disorderly conduct, which carry a potential punishment of more than a year in prison. He has pleaded not guilty

In her statement, the girl said Figueroa pulled up a leg of his shorts, exposed himself and masturbated for about 10 minutes. "I glanced once because he seemed very strange, and I caught a look of his penis," she said. "I was shocked, so I sat and thought of what I should do."

Figueroa's attorney has been granted a postponement of the trial to give him time to depose the girl. If he is not removed from his job before August, the suspended agent will become eligible for retirement then when he reaches the age of 50.

©2006 Media General Inc.

So that article didn’t mention it specifically, but you know what Figueroa did specifically when he was at DHS? He was in charge of Operation Predator. That’s right—that’s the branch of DHS that deals with guys looking for kiddie porn and underage sex.

They had the fox in charge of the henhouse.

How bizarre and unbelievable is that?

Oh, but that’s not all. Amazingly, it goes even higher—all the way up to the deputy press secretary:

Homeland Security Press Aide Held, Charged With Internet Sexual Advances on Girl
By LARA JAKES
The Associated Press

WASHINGTON - A Homeland Security Department spokesman was held Wednesday on felony charges of sexually preying on a detective posing as a 14-year-old girl through explicit online conversations. He was quickly suspended without pay from one of the nation's top crime-fighting agencies.

The arrest of Brian J. Doyle, 55, raised doubts about the ability of an agency responsible for safeguarding the country to ensure the security credentials of its own people.

Doyle is accused of 23 felony charges related to sexually graphic conversations with what he thought was a teenage girl, who was in fact an undercover Florida detective. The charges, lodged Tuesday night by the Polk County, Fla., Sheriff's Department, included 16 counts of sending pornographic movie clips to a minor.

The department's inspector general also is investigating the allegations, which say Doyle revealed his name and his employer and offered the numbers of his Homeland Security-issued office and cell phones during the sexual online conversations. Officials were also examining Doyle's office computer for any evidence.

Authorities said Doyle also sent non-sexual photos of himself. They included one of him in Homeland Security headquarters, wearing an agency pin on his lapel and a lanyard that says "TSA," which stands for the Transportation Security Administration, a branch of the department for which he once worked.

Homeland Security also oversees an Operation Predator unit, which investigates child predators and pornographers.

Doyle was arrested at his home Tuesday as he was online with the supposed girl. An undercover detective had called Doyle at work and said she got a Web camera as he had asked and wanted to test it, said Carrie Rodgers, Polk County Sheriff's Office spokeswoman.

"He said he would get on the computer when he got home from work so we knew he would be on," Rodgers said. "When (police) went to his door, he was on the computer in the middle of a conversation with the girl."

The charges accuse Doyle of finding the teenager's profile online and allege that he began having sexually explicit conversations with her on the Internet on March 14.

On several occasions, Doyle instructed her to perform a sexual act while thinking of him and described explicit activities he wanted to have with her, investigators said.

The arrest "raises serious concerns about the department's hiring policies and, more important, its security clearance practices," said House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Peter King, R-N.Y.

Pledging to investigate those practices, King said Doyle may have used a government-issued computer to "provide potentially sensitive information over the Internet to a complete stranger."

"What if the person on the other end had been a member of al-Qaida or a similar terrorist organization and used this information to blackmail Mr. Doyle?" King said.

Doyle's arrest capped a number of other security breaches at Homeland Security, still in its fledgling stages after being created in 2003 in response to the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. Other security problems include inadequately trained guards at the department's headquarters in Washington and vulnerable information-sharing systems that could allow classified intelligence to be accessed without authorization.

Copyright 2006 The Associated Press.

Oh, and then there’s that third guy, a Michael Burks, that actually got caught on camera by NBC’s Dateline trying to nail a 13-year-old girl. He worked at The Department of Homeland Security too, and tried to use that job as a way to get out of being arrested.

Seems to me these days that’s more likely to be seen as a sign of guilt.

Look, I just want The Department of Homeland Security to focus on keeping me and my kids safe—from terrorists, that is, and natural disasters, rather than from employees of The Department of Homeland Security. I don’t think that’s too much to ask. I really don’t. Yet they don’t seem to be able to keep anyone safe from anything or anyone.

Remember those old ads that used to Something was Job Number One? I don’t remember what that Something was—Customer Service? Customer Satisfaction? Quality?

Whatever it was, it seems that at DHS, Competence is Job Number Seventeen (or so). Or maybe even that is being too kind to them.

Ears of a Bean

So I was brushing The Bean’s teeth last night and she got a funny expression on her face. She sorta looked off to the side, clearly thinking the kind of deep thoughts only a five-year-old can think.

After she’d spit, she said, "You know how when you’re brushing my teeth, sometimes I open and close my mouth like this?" and proceeded to demonstrate.

It not being an easy thing to miss, even for one of my dim wit, I had to confess that, yes, indeed, I did know. "Well, when I do it fast like that, it sounds like a train going through a tunnel."

Since I had learned that same thing from brother John not all that many years earlier, I agreed that it did, although I was a little confused as to how The Bean knew that, seeing as how she hadn’t been on a train going through a tunnel since she was about one and a half years old.

"Well," she continued, "if you do it really slow like this," demonstrating, "it sounds like someone in the shower."

There are times when you simply have to kiss someone, even if that someone has toothpaste on her face.

And by the by? Turns out she’s right—it does sound like someone in the shower.

But I still like the choo-choo train effect better.

Music Matters

So this piece bums me out a bit. I’ve often pontificated that music is the greatest of all arts because it’s the least necessary. Arts such as painting are really just more developed versions of cave drawings, and sculpture just takes that into three dimensions. Arts which use language—drama or poetry, for instance—are just more developed versions of "bear come eat."

Ah, but music—what’s the point? There is none. How does it help out species survive? It doesn’t. It just makes that survival way more pleasant. It gives that survival meaning.

Or so I used to spout. Turns out that, as so often happens, I was wrong. I know, big damn surprise.

Caveman Crooners May Have Helped Early Humans Survive
March 31, 2006

In Steven Mithen's imagination, the small band of Neanderthals gathered 50,000 years ago around the caves of Le Moustier, in what is now the Dordogne region of France, were butchering carcasses, scraping skins, shaping ax heads -- and singing.

One of the fur-clad men started it, a rhythmic sound with rising and falling pitch, and others picked it up, indicating their willingness to cooperate both in the moment and in the future, when the group would have to hunt or fend off predators. The music promoted "a sense of we-ness, of being together in the same situation facing the same problems," suggests Prof. Mithen, an archaeologist at England's Reading University. Music, he says, creates "a social rather than a merely individual identity." And that may solve a longstanding mystery.

Music gives biologists fits. Its ubiquity in human cultures, and strong evidence that the brain comes preloaded with musical circuits, suggest that music is as much a product of human evolution as, say, thumbs. But that raises the question of what music is for. Back in 1871, Darwin speculated that human music, like bird songs, attracts mates. Or, as he put it, prelinguistic human ancestors tried "to charm each other with musical notes and rhythm."

Some scientists today share that view. "Music was shaped by sexual selection to function mostly as a courtship display," Geoffrey Miller, of the University of New Mexico, argued in a 2001 paper. But like Darwin, he bases that conclusion on the belief that music has "no identifiable survival benefits." If a trait doesn't help creatures survive, then it can persist generation after generation only if it helps them reproduce.

Studies in neuroscience and anthropology, however, suggest that music did help human ancestors survive, particularly before language. In "The Singing Neanderthals," which Harvard University Press is publishing today, Prof. Mithen weaves those studies into an intriguing argument that "language may have been built on the neural underpinnings of music."

He starts with evidence that music is not merely a side effect of intelligence and language, as some argue. Instead, recent discoveries suggest that music lays sole claim to specific neural real estate. Consider musical savants. Although learning-disabled or retarded, they have astounding musical abilities. One savant could hardly speak or understand words, yet he played flawlessly a simple piano melody from memory despite hearing it only once. In an encore, he added left-hand chords and transposed it into a minor key.

"Music," says Prof. Mithen, "can exist within the brain in the absence of language," a sign that the two evolved independently. And since language impairment does not wipe out musical ability, the latter "must have a longer evolutionary history."

In the opposite of musical savantism, people with "amusia" can't perceive changes in rhythm, identify melodies they've heard before or recognize changes in pitch. Since they have normal hearing and language, the problem must lie in brain circuits that are music-specific.

More evidence that the brain has dedicated, inborn musical circuits is that even babies have musical preferences, finds Sandra Trehub of the University of Toronto. They listen longer to perfect fifths and perfect fourths, and look pained by minor thirds.

If music is indeed an innate, stand-alone adaptation, then evolution could have nursed it along over the eons only if it helped early humans survive. It did so, Prof. Mithen suggests, because "if music is about anything, it is about expressing and inducing emotion."

Particular notes elicit the same emotions from most people, regardless of culture, studies suggest. A major third (prominent in Beethoven's "Ode to Joy") sounds happy; a minor third (as in the gloomy first movements of Mahler's Fifth) provokes feelings of sadness and even doom. A major seventh expresses aspiration. The absence of a third seems unresolved, loose, as if hanging, adds jazz guitarist Michael Rood, 17 years old.

The fact that listeners hear the same emotion in a given musical score is something a Neanderthal crooner might have exploited. Music can manipulate people's emotional states (think of liturgical music, martial music or workplace music). Happy people are more cooperative and creative. By fostering cooperation and creativity among bands of early, prelanguage human ancestors, music would have given them a survival edge.

"If you can manipulate other people's emotions," says Prof. Mithen, "you have an advantage." Music also promotes social bonding, which was crucial when humans were more often hunted than hunter and finding food was no walk on the savannah. Proto-music "became a communication system" for "the expression of emotion and the forging of group identities," argues Prof. Mithen.

Because music has grammar-like qualities such as recursion, it might have served an even greater function. With music in the brain, early humans had the neural foundation for the development of what most distinguishes us from other animals: symbolic thought and language.

Incidentally, there’s no link and no attribution because someone sent it to me. I Googled the piece but couldn’t discover the author’s name. Editorial note: it wasn’t me.

Further notes:

I’ve always wondered if hearing a minor third as sad was a cultural thang. I’m fascinated to know it doesn’t seem to be and am going to try to learn more about that.

The Bean loves minor thirds.
So do I.
I don’t think Max or The Rose can hear the difference.
I don’t think The Boy can hear them at all.
I can’t sing them.
Top Management can.
The jury is still out on young Britney. She can certainly kick, though.

Pat Metheny on Art

This here piece is something like six years old now. It was written by Pat Metheny, one of the nicer and more talented guys in all of music, in response to a question about Kenny G. Although the piece is old, it’s more than worth reprinting.

Question:
Pat, could you tell us your opinion about Kenny G—it appears you were quoted as being less than enthusiastic about him and his music. I would say that most of the serious music listeners in the world would not find your opinion surprising or unlikely—but you were vocal about it for the first time. You are generally supportive of other musicians it seems.

Pat’s Answer:
Kenny G is not a musician I really had much of an opinion about at all until recently. There was not much about the way he played that interested me one way or the other either live or on records. I first heard him a number of years ago playing as a sideman with Jeff Lorber when they opened a concert for my band. My impression was that he was someone who had spent a fair amount of time listening to the more pop oriented sax players of that time, like Grover Washington or David Sanborn, but was not really an advanced player, even in that style. He had major rhythmic problems and his harmonic and melodic vocabulary was extremely limited, mostly to pentatonic based and blues-lick derived patterns, and he basically exhibited only a rudimentary understanding of how to function as a professional soloist in an ensemble—Lorber was basically playing him off the bandstand in terms of actual music. But he did show a knack for connecting to the basest impulses of the large crowd by deploying his two or three most effective licks (holding long notes and playing fast runs—never mind that there were lots of harmonic clams in them) at the keys moments to elicit a powerful crowd reaction (over and over again) . The other main thing I noticed was that he also, as he does to this day, play horribly out of tune—consistently sharp.

Of course, I am aware of what he has played since, the success it has had, and the controversy that has surrounded him among musicians and serious listeners. This controversy seems to be largely fueled by the fact that he sells an enormous amount of records while not being anywhere near a really great player in relation to the standards that have been set on his instrument over the past sixty or seventy years. And honestly, there is no small amount of envy involved from musicians who see one of their fellow players doing so well financially, especially when so many of them who are far superior as improvisers and musicians in general have trouble just making a living. There must be hundreds, if not thousands of sax players around the world who are simply better improvising musicians than Kenny G on his chosen instruments. It would really surprise me if even he disagreed with that statement. Having said that, it has gotten me to thinking lately why so many jazz musicians (myself included, given the right "bait" of a question, as I will explain later) and audiences have gone so far as to say that what he is playing is not even jazz at all.

Stepping back for a minute, if we examine the way he plays, especially if one can remove the actual improvising from the often mundane background environment that it is delivered in, we see that his saxophone style is in fact clearly in the tradition of the kind of playing that most reasonably objective listeners WOULD normally quantify as being jazz. It’s just that as jazz or even as music in a general sense, with these standards in mind, it is simply not up to the level of playing that we historically associate with professional improvising musicians. So, lately I have been advocating that we go ahead and just include it under the word jazz—since pretty much of the rest of the world OUTSIDE of the jazz community does anyway—and let the chips fall where they may.

And after all, why he should be judged by any other standard, why he should be exempt from that that all other serious musicians on his instrument are judged by if they attempt to use their abilities in an improvisational context playing with a rhythm section as he does? He SHOULD be compared to John Coltrane or Wayne Shorter, for instance, on his abilities (or lack thereof) to play the soprano saxophone and his success (or lack thereof) at finding a way to deploy that instrument in an ensemble in order to accurately gauge his abilities and put them in the context of his instrument’s legacy and potential. As a composer of even eighth note based music, he SHOULD be compared to Herbie Hancock, Horace Silver or even Grover Washington. Suffice it to say, on all above counts, at this point in his development, he wouldn’t fare well. But, like I said at the top, this relatively benign view was all "until recently". Not long ago, Kenny G put out a recording where he overdubbed himself on top of a 30+ year old Louis Armstrong record, the track "what a wonderful world". With this single move, Kenny G became one of the few people on earth I can say that I really can’t use at all—as a man, for his incredible arrogance to even consider such a thing, and as a musician, for presuming to share the stage with the single most important figure in our music.

This type of musical necrophilia—the technique of overdubbing on the preexisting tracks of already dead performers—was weird when Natalie Cole did it with her dad on "Unforgettable" a few years ago, but it was her dad. When Tony Bennett did it with Billie Holiday it was bizarre, but we are talking about two of the greatest singers of the 20th century who were on roughly the same level of artistic accomplishment. When Larry Coryell presumed to overdub himself on top of a Wes Montgomery track, I lost a lot of the respect that I ever had for him—and I have to seriously question the fact that I did have respect for someone who could turn out to have such unbelievably bad taste and be that disrespectful to one of my personal heroes.

But when Kenny G decided that it was appropriate for him to defile the music of the man who is probably the greatest jazz musician that has ever lived by spewing his lame-ass, jive, pseudo bluesy, out-of-tune, noodling, wimped out, fucked up playing all over one of the great Louis’s tracks (even one of his lesser ones), he did something that I would not have imagined possible. He, in one move, through his unbelievably pretentious and calloused musical decision to embark on this most cynical of musical paths, shit all over the graves of all the musicians past and present who have risked their lives by going out there on the road for years and years developing their own music inspired by the standards of grace that Louis Armstrong brought to every single note he played over an amazing lifetime as a musician.

By disrespecting Louis, his legacy and by default, everyone who has ever tried to do something positive with improvised music and what it can be, Kenny G has created a new low point in modern culture—something that we all should be totally embarrassed about—and afraid of. We ignore this, "let it slide", at our own peril. His callous disregard for the larger issues of what this crass gesture implies is exacerbated by the fact that the only reason he possibly have for doing something this inherently wrong (on both human and musical terms) was for the record sales and the money it would bring. Since that record came out—in protest, as insignificant as it may be, I encourage everyone to boycott Kenny G recordings, concerts and anything he is associated with. If asked about Kenny G, I will diss him and his music with the same passion that is in evidence in this little essay.

Normally, I feel that musicians all have a hard enough time, regardless of their level, just trying to play good and don’t really benefit from public criticism, particularly from their fellow players. but, this is different. there ARE some things that are sacred—and amongst any musician that has ever attempted to address jazz at even the most basic of levels, Louis Armstrong and his music is hallowed ground. To ignore this trespass is to agree that NOTHING any musician has attempted to do with their life in music has any intrinsic value—and I refuse to do that. (I am also amazed that there HASN’T already been an outcry against this among music critics—where ARE they on this?!?—, magazines, etc.). Everything I said here is exactly the same as what I would say to Gorelick if I ever saw him in person. And if I ever DO see him anywhere, at any function—he WILL get a piece of my mind and (maybe a guitar wrapped around his head.)

NOTE: this post is partially in response to the comments that people have made regarding a short video interview excerpt with me that was posted on the internet taken from a tv show for young people (kind of like MTV) in Poland where I was asked to address 8 to 11 year old kids on terms that they could understand about jazz. while enthusiastically describing the virtues of this great area of music, I was encouraging the kids to find and listen to some of the greats in the music and not to get confused by the sometimes overwhelming volume of music that falls under the jazz umbrella. I went on to say that I think that for instance, "Kenny G plays the dumbest music on the planet"—something that all 8 to 11 year old kids on the planet already intrinsically know, as anyone who has ever spent any time around kids that age could confirm—so it gave us some common ground for the rest of the discussion.

ADDENDUM: the only thing wrong with the statement that I made was that I did not include the rest of the known universe. The fact that this clip was released so far out of the context that it was delivered in is a drag, but it is now done. (its unauthorized release out of context like that is symptomatic of the new electronically interconnected culture that we now live in—where pretty much anything anyone anywhere has ever said or done has the potential to become common public property at any time.) I was surprised by the Polish people putting this clip up so far away from the use that it was intended—really just for the attention—with no explanation of the show it was made for—they (the Polish people in general) used to be so hip and would have been unlikely candidates to do something like that before, but I guess everything is changing there like it is everywhere else. the only other thing that surprised me in the aftermath of the release of this little interview is that ANYONE would be even a little bit surprised that I would say such a thing, given the reality of Mr. G’s music. This makes me want to go practice about 10 times harder, because that suggests to me that I am not getting my own musical message across clearly enough—which to me, in every single way and intention is diametrically opposed to what Kenny G seems to be after.

Money Shot

I am so frightened for my children’s future.

Children? Hell’s bells, I’m frightened for mine own future.

Money Shot
Or, how shooting money down a rat hole became a Republican specialty
by Ben Fulton

Two great mysteries lie at the core of the current presidential administration. The first is how Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld manages to keep his job given repeated blunders in the Iraq war. The second is how on earth President George W. Bush manages to pass himself off as the man of Republican principles he most certainly is not.

Just look at our nation’s finances. If you’re old enough to remember the Reagan administration, you’re old enough remember Republicans whining and moaning about Democratic profligacy, the party of "tax and spend." A big load it was, too.

Here are the facts, folks, as laid out for us by the U.S. Congressional Budget Office:

When he left office in 1989, President Reagan left us with a federal budget deficit just shy of $200 billion.
When President George H. Bush left office in 1992, he gifted us with a budget deficit of $290.3 billion.
When President Clinton left office he left us with a budget surplus of $236.2 billion.

Let’s dwell on that one word for a while—surplus.

What thanks did the American public have for this most unusual legacy? We focused instead on the fact that he lied about cheating on his wife, treating it as some sort of national-security issue in hearing after hearing while Al-Qaeda hatched its heinous plots. Politicians just love a good diversionary tactic, and sexual morality tops the list.

But before firing off a letter about how a Democratic Congress created every budget deficit of the 1980s up until 1996, and that Clinton merely had the good fortune to preside over an unprecedented era of economic expansion, let’s review what happened to our national finances last week. Given a Congress controlled by Republicans to match a Senate controlled by Republicans, President Bush recently signed a bill pushing our national debt to the sky-high limit of $9 trillion.

The big news last week was, of course, the third anniversary of our perpetually mismanaged war in Iraq. But history may prove Bush’s raising of our debt ceiling as the far more ominous event, for with it, he’s pushed our nation further toward collapse.

People complain all the time about what government spends its money on, and how incompetent our elected officials are when it comes to estimating costs. The president’s Medicare-prescription-drug program for seniors is one big blank check to the pharmaceutical industry. Rumsfeld had the audacity to tell us war in Iraq would cost us a mere $50 billion, when it’s now costing us $200 million per day, for a final bill of up to $630 billion or even $1 trillion. Those paying attention know that Bush would rather cut into college loans or heating subsidies to the poor rather than give up $1.3 trillion in tax cuts to the rich.

All this is pertinent, but all we really need know is that our national debt is out of control. And unless we act now this crushing debt threatens to turn us into a second-rate world power.

It’s not as if certain people haven’t raised flags. Former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill refused to give his blessing to Bush’s second—or is that third?—round of tax cuts, and was summarily dismissed in December 2002. Now, under successor John Snow, we’ve watched our government’s estimated fiscal exposures more than double from $20.4 trillion in 2000 to $43.3 trillion in 2004. God only knows what they’ll amount to by the end of this year. But don’t take my word for it. The numbers are there on the U.S. Government Accountability Office Website for everyone to see.

If only enough of us were interested. There are those eternal optimists out there who never fail to point out that the United States still produces some $11 trillion worth of goods and services every year, enough to cover our national debt if we absolutely had to bite the bullet. They also smile at figures showing that even our annual budget deficits are a mere 5 percent or less of our Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

Fact is, Bush raised our debt level this week because if he had not, it would have signaled the first time in our history that we would have defaulted on our U.S. Treasury Notes, which we sell at an increasingly blinding rate to central banks in China and Japan. This worked fine when the U.S. dollar was the reserve currency of international preference. But now we’ve got the Euro to compete with. If foreign investors tire of buying our debt in the form of treasury notes, they can easily go elsewhere, unless we’re prepared to raise interest rates and slowly choke our economy. We certainly won’t have the fortitude to raise taxes. Not even the current "war on terror" scares us enough to actually pay for it. Perhaps the idea of servitude to overseas creditors might do the trick.

As a nation, we are clueless enough to go ballistic when Arabs talk about purchasing our ports, or when a president cheats on his wife. Tragically, we think nothing about borrowing thousands of billions of dollars from foreigners who will one day own us lock, stock and barrel unless we pay our debt.

The media’s full of articles about our renewed interest in all things economic. Bono and Angelina Jolie are regular attractions at the World Economic Forum in Geneva, Switzerland. Freakanomics and other titles about the dismal science are best sellers. Still, we’re blind to the damage being done.

Tax and spend? If only. Under the current set-up, we’re spending money we won’t even collect.

RIAA Sues Itself

Ran across this astonishing story recently. You’d think the RIAA couldn’t still surprise me, or anyone else who’s been following their "business decisions" for years. And yet…

RIAA Sues Itself for Music Distribution
Joe Rasmussen - Entertainment Editor

The Recording Industry Association of America has taken its strongest step yet in its battle to stop music piracy, filing a lawsuit against the nation’s largest distributor of copyrighted music, itself, on March 28.

"Though suing ourselves may seem like an extreme and absurd step to some, we decided that if we are going to go after new mothers for singing lullabies to their infants, we couldn’t in good conscience allow ourselves to go free," said RIAA president Bill Simpson.

The RIAA is the largest distributor of recorded music in America, as it represents all of the major record labels who produce the majority of music released to the public and nearly all of the mainstream records.

"As the largest single distributor of music, it really makes sense that the RIAA would try to stop itself from distributing music," said industry analyst James Griffin.

The move has been well received by artists as well. "I’m really glad the RIAA finally took some serious steps to stop people from hearing and sharing my music. I really don’t think our band could benefit at all from more people hearing our music," said singer of the hot new rock group A Thorn For Every Heart, Mike Wilkinson.

The recent wave of lawsuits against internet users for copyright violations was set off by the growth of peer-to-peer file sharing networks, which many used to share songs with one another for free.

This is just the latest step the RIAA has taken in attempting to stop free music downloading, and is not the first to be viewed as a bit extreme by many. "I thought it was pretty surprising when they sued 6-year old Stephanie Hoffman for downloading music and when they started going after mothers for singing lullabies, but this is a whole new level. I think it may be the first time anyone has ever filed a lawsuit against themselves," said Griffin.

The federal court in Chicago is expected to here the opening arguments of RIAA v. RIAA in the beginning of May. Although legal precedent in the area is unclear, most legal experts predict that the court will rule in favor of the RIAA. The RIAA decided to make the move out of concern for the artists it represents and their interests.

"Really what the move boils down to is protecting the financial interests of our artists, regardless of what it means for our organization," said Simpson. "Nothing could be more detrimental to our artists than more people hearing their music. To protect the true needs of musicians we need to make sure that as few people as possible hear their music."

Joe Rasumussen is a Wisconsin high school student who wrote this for the April 1 issue of his school paper. Is it satire or prophecy?