Puddle of Nothing

Bad Haiku Day

2010-07-14T07:56:00.003-05:00

the vacation not taken:

magical kingdom
tribe wandering desert
unresolved issues

Zen Warrior:

dharma dilletante
mind, body awakening
taekwondo, really?

Could it be?

2010-01-31T07:06:00.004-06:00

I looked at my blog's site meter for the first time in ages this morning and saw that I had been visited by someone from a mythological locale:

Location Continent : North America
Country : United States (Facts)
State : Alaska
City : Wasilla
Lat/Long : 61.5235, -149.5748 (Map)
Distance : 3,373 miles

Could it really be her?

Christmas 2009: Wow, it really worked this time!

2009-12-30T07:51:00.013-06:00

After numerous disasters (Christmas 2007, for example, was the worst day of my entire life), irritations, and disruptions, we finally had a Christmas go right. It went well enough that I no longer officially hate Christmas.

We drove up to Alexandria on the 23rd, set up our tiny hotel tree, and wrapped presents. We took out the boys one at a time on XMAS Eve, Adam first. They opened their presents, then went about their usual Alex routines with us. Next year, we'll take Toby out first. He was very upset when we got to Home Deopt and it was already closed. He took a HD book back to school with him a couple of weeks ago and had me draw a Home Depot, so I suspect he had built up a HD visit in his mind for a while. It crushed him when we couldn't do it. Everything should still be open in the morning next year. We repeated the routines on Christmas Day, though we could only take them to the hotel and not to any of their other places, all of which were closed. After we returned Toby to St. Mary's on XMAS Eve, DW and I bought pizzas for the overnight staff at St. Mary's, delievered the pizzas to the school, then drove to Natchitoches, Louisiana, for that town's spectacular lights display. They've been at it for 83 years, and it's quite a sight--and it's well worth a holiday visit to Louisiana. I'm just saying.

The Boy Tree at our house. I gathered up all of the plush toys we've taken from the claw machines at WalMart and used them as ornaments. The crowning touch is having Bat-Man serve as the star, a suggestion DW made.

The Girl Tree at our house. It's pretty and elegant, and DW added more color to it this year.

DW brought home a little WalMart one day, and shortly thereafter I became attracted to the WalMart Cowboy Christmas village and its saloon, outhouse, and windmill. I'd never put up a village before.

DW and I visited Celebration in the Oaks in New Orleans City Park this year. Major fail. The lights looked like they were purchased at WalMart or Target, and half of them didn't work anyway. Celebration in the Oaks used to be a big deal, with fabulous light displays and other seasonal junk. Now it's like a dinky county fair. So sad. Thankfully, we saw Avatar just before we went there, so the evening was a net gain.

My best seasonal photo of Toby has him choosing the perfect cereal on Christmas Eve. He bought Cookie Crisp, which I had to eat after he left it at the hotel.

Adam opened his own presents this year, for the first time ever. He usually could care less about them, but he kept a few for himself this time around.

Adam and I saw this unattended fire engine outside one of the local WalMarts during his post-holiday home visit. He had some fun with it. No, I didn't open the door and turn on the sirens and lights, but that doesn't mean I didn't want to.

Hey, America, welcome to the dark side!

2009-09-18T08:28:00.000-05:00

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Fools and Their Money

2009-09-15T14:54:00.001-05:00

Fool's Gold: How Unrestrained Greed Corrupted a Dream, Shattered Global Markets and Unleashed a Catastrophe: How an Ingenious Tribe of Bankers Rewrote ... Made a Fortune and Survived a Catastrophe by Gillian Tett

My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I've done a fair amount of reading about the Panic of 2008, and Gillian Tett's "Fools Gold" explains the exotic investment instruments at the heart of the panic better than any other work I've read. A group of derivatives traders at J.P. Morgan created commoditized credit default swaps in the early 1990s as a way to move risk off the company's books, freeing up capital for lending and investment that otherwise would need to be held in reserve. Morgan made payments to AIG, which assumed the risk that Morgan's assets would go into default. Derivatives traders at other firms began assembling securities backed by subprime mortgages, trying to put together instruments that would be just risky enough to obtain returns but safe enough to obtain AAA ratings. They then paid AIG to assume the risk of the mortgages underlying those securities going bad. However, many institutions kept what they thought were the least risky of these mortgages on their own books, as they could not obtain much in the way of returns on the securities that they would back. The whole thing was unregulated by government, and the ratings agencies were easily bamboozled into turning poo into gold (as it turned out). As the cruddy mortgages went bad, AIG began to take on water. When the less risky mortgages went bad, the financial institutions themselves sank.

Interestingly, J.P. Morgan did not get into the business of mortgage backed securities. Morgan's mathematicians could not put together a risk model with the kind of integrity to which they were accustomed. First, they had no data on what could happen if real estate values ever declined. Second, they had no long-term data on default rates for the kinds of subprime mortgages that proliferated in the early and mid 2000s. Moreover, Morgan/Chase chairman Jamie Dimon pushed the concept of a "fortress balance sheet" containing rock-solid assets on which the bank could rely if things went to hell. Dimon pushed Morgan's derivatives traders to investigate getting into the business of mortgage backed securities a couple of times, but, consistent with the notion of a "fortress balance sheet," he accepted the traders' reasons for staying away from that business.

The book contains a brief account of the events leading to the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy that turned a situation into a panic, and concludes with Tett's cultural analysis of U.S. and U.K. investment houses.

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How did Kazakhstan get me to Logan, Utah?

2009-09-07T08:04:00.002-05:00

Your humble correspondent spent a few days last week at a knda, sorta family reunion (my favorite kind of reunion) in Logan, Utah, and the better part of one day in Rexburg, Idaho. This was an entirely people-centric trip, meaning that I did not go hiking in the Bear River Range or any other local adventures in which one cannot participate 'round these parts. Also, one of DW's old friends left open the possibility of getting together for dinner. With such a short turnaround (Friday-Tuesday), I thought it best not to make any meeting arrangements with my own Utah friends. DW's friend crapped out on us, but that may have been for the best, as it gave us a free day.

Present at said reunion were gentle readers Bill and Karen, along with Superbaby Sammy, guests of honor gentle reader KA and her family, DW's other siblings, and DW's parents. KA's DH recently took a position at the Agency for International Development, and he will be posted in Kazakhstan. As we know from one recent motion picture, Kazakhstan is friendly to Americans:

KA's DH is an agricultural economist by profession, so I am looking forward to photos of the Kazakhstan branch of the family, decked out in native costumes, standing amidst amber waves of grain. Anyhow, their imminent move to Kazakstan for a couple of years led us to have a gathering.

The most fun person to observe at this mini-reunion was gentle reader Bill, who came to town and bought two cars in one day. And he and gentle reader Karen signed on a house in Idaho that morning. It was fun to follow Bill's odyssey as he went to the dealership and back a few times until he and Karen obtained the right two cars. Talk about taking a plunge.

On Monday, DW and I drove up to Rexburg, Idaho, where one of DW's sisters had a baby as the rest of us were reunioning in Utah. Rexburg's welcoming sign is just a bit aggressive as to every other town in the United States--"America's Family Community." I'm sure most of the people there are very nice, but I kind of formed the impression that the town itself looks as if it's 1955 and built to stay that way. DW attended college there for one year, and she confirmed that it looked exactly the same as it did 20+ years ago. It might be interesting to set a cultural anthropologist loose there. But not in my SIL's neighborhood, which is jarringly new when compared to the town we drove through to get there. We had a great visit up there and hated to leave.

Anyhow, that's my Utah trip in a nutshell.

iGoogle Experiment

2009-08-17T09:59:00.001-05:00

I discovered iGoogle yesterday, G's customizable home page. There is a gadget for blogger, so I placed one on my page. Also, I may move from hotmail to gmail, but I'm not sure about that one yet. The one advantage to gmail is that it will push e-mails instantaneously to my iPhone, instead of having to have them pulled via a third-party app. Also, I had to replace my Apple Mobile Me calendar with a Google calendar recently in order to sync my laptop and iPhone reliably (Mobile Me for Windows is ridiculously bad). Interestingly, Google uses Microsoft's Exchange servers for sync, while Microsoft itself will not use its own Exchange servers so its Hotmail and Windows Live subscribers can sync to their iPhones. Gotta love companies that don't play nice together.

Mad World

2009-08-13T13:23:00.002-05:00

Season Three of Mad Men commences on Sunday night. We just finished Season Two on DVD. IMHO, the second season put this show on the level of the best television shows in history, right up there with The Sopraons, Seinfeld, and The Real Housewives of New Jersey.

Can I Run for President Now?

2009-07-24T08:12:00.003-05:00

In the interest of full disclosure to my fellow Americans, I have reviewed my copy of my original birth certificate, exactly as it was presented to me, black-outs and all. My middle name at birth is blacked out, so it could be Muhammad or Hussein. Moreover, the certificate doesn't indicate my race or religion, so it could be that I was born a Black Muslim. However, my pasty skin and blue eyes, and the apparent absence of mosques from Somervell County, Texas, in 1962 would seem to call into question these possibilities. But, hey, someone will need to lean on the Denton, Texas, 16th District Court to gain definitive answers to any questions about my middle name, race, or religion. I've given you all that I can. Now, can I run for President when Obama becomes ineligible for reelection in 2016?

Puddle of Evil

2009-07-08T08:00:00.000-05:00

DW and I watched the first two seasons of Damages in marathon sessions stretching over one week. Glenn Close stars as Patty Hewes, New York's most celebrated plaintiffs' lawyer. Hewes is openly ruthless, but few know just how ruthless she really is. The show opens with a seemingly naive new lawyer, Ellen Parsons (Rose Byrne), taking a job with Patty, in order to help common men and women fight for justice against big, evil corporations. In S1, those evil corporations are personified in the character of Arthur Frobisher (Ted Danson). Frobisher has a jolly exterior, but he is utterly ruthless and amoral on the interior, just like Patty. Frobisher's lawyer (played by Zejlko Ivanek) is Patty's nominal adversary, but Frobisher is the real adversary of S1. Patty sues Frobisher on behalf of his former employees after his company collapses in an accounting scandal, a la Enron. As the suit progresses, the main characters drag themselves down deeper and deeper in a puddle of evil. Ellen is compromised with surprising ease, but she rationalizes her actions as a necessary evil in Patty's crusade for the common folks. Patty and Frobisher, meanwhile, will stop at absolutely nothing to come out ahead. Murder and official corruption are not above these two eeeeevil people. Everybody, it seems, has a hidden agenda, and most of the characters are thoroughly rotten.

Damages plays like a kind of 24 for s-m-r-t people, in that there are unexpected plot twists galore. Also, there are three or four storylines moving along simultaneously--some present, some past, some future. The storylines merge nicely towards the end of each season. The production values of this show are first-rate; the tinting and texture of the past and future scenes distinguish them from the present ones, though the producers added temporal subtitles in S2 (e.g., "6 months later"). Some scenes were filmed with handheld cameras, giving them a jumpy, neurotic quality matching the characters' mental state. The writing is excellent, but the quality of the acting really holds the show together, IMHO. Glenn Close and Ted Danson are over-the-top mean and evil, though both appear to be reasonable professionals to those who don't know them. Close and Ivanek took home Emmys for Season 1, and Rose Byrne, Ted Danson, William Hurt, Marcia Gay Harden, and Timothy Olyphant all managed to hold their own.

I like the phone

2009-06-30T10:38:00.000-05:00

I didn't realize there was a person on the other end until I watched the video.

The Good, the Bad, and the Classic

2009-05-27T07:28:00.004-05:00

I've had a few first viewings of movies recently, and I've had recent repeat vieweings of what, IMHO, were the best films of 2007 and 2008 respectively. Rather than write them all up separately, I'm going to take them all in one post.

Slumdog Millionaire is, at its heart, a romantic drama. This made me shy away from it at first; I'm usually not keen on romantic pictures (though one could argue that Casablanca falls into that category, and I certainly dig that one). Also, I wondered whether the movie would ignore the reality of the slums from which the slumdog protagonist came. I'm not one to have my nose rubbed in injustice and inequality, but sugarcoating offends me.

My initial wariness about this film turned out to be unwarranted. Slumdog Millionaire brilliantly and boldly walks a fine line between pathos and fantasy as it tells the story of a boy and a girl who fell in love as children, lost each other, then found each other again after the boy found himself on India's version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire? The protagonists (Jamal Malik, his brother Salim, and their friend Latika) are Indian Muslims who are orphaned after a Hindu mob kills their mothers. Jamal (Dev Patel) falls for Latika (Frida Pinto), who is taken by a local gangster. Jamal rescues Latika, only to have her taken away and, presumably, raped by Salim, who murdered the gangster, and went to work for a second gangster. Jamal gets Latika's attention years later by getting himself on TV. He becomes a national hero as he answers questions correctly and Indians of all stripes make him the vehicle of their individual aspirations. In the end, boy gets girl and there's a fabulous production number at the main Mumbai train station.

The movie does not minimize poverty, violence, or injustice--or, for that matter, enhanced interrogation techniques--nor does it emphasize them to the point of preachiness. Kids grow up in slums all over the world; some get bitter and cynical and go outlaw (Salim); some work legally and hang on to their dreams (Jamal). And everybody roots for the underdog.

Slumdog Millionaire is a nice film to watch on BluRay. It is very colorful and vibrant, and some of the actors are attractive enough to want to see them in hi-def.

My DW is a big Dan Brown fan, so, as a matter of public record, I liked Angels and Demons a whole hell of a lot. That out of the way, it was a pretty average movie, and, like the film version of The Da Vinci Code, shows that some visual images that work in the imagination on the written page do not work particularly well on the silver screen.

IMHO, There Will be Blood was the best film of 2007 and The Dark Knight was the best of 2008. I recently viewed both films for the first time since the Panic of Fall 2008. The last couple of scenes of There Will be Blood, in which a crazed, wealthy oilman self-destructs, now seems an apt metaphor for the end of an era of dangerously self-indulgent, unregulated market capitalism. The Joker's wild anarchy in The Dark Knight, driving the citizens of Gotham into a state of utter panic, doesn't really seem so far-fetched in light of the near-collapse of the financial markets and the the near-panic of the pig flu--and this after the movie raised provocative questions about privacy rights and the lengths to which a civilized society can go against malefactors before we become malefactors ourselves. One point that Hurricane Katrina, the Panic, Al Qaeda's insanity, and some elements of our reaction to terrorism have driven home to me is that the veneer of our open, law-bound, refined, wealthy civilization that we've spent centuries pasting on top of the Hobbesian state of nature is thinner than many of us would like to think. The Dark Knight makes this point without being didactic or obnoxious about it.

Barbarians? On Wall Street?

2009-04-27T09:06:00.002-05:00

Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco by Bryan Burrough

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
I've been on a tear reading about smart people who do stupid things with other peoples' money, so I downloaded this classic to the Kindle and read it very quickly. RJR/Nabisco's President Ross Johnson was obsessed with his company's undervalued stock and with living the high life, and he hit on the idea of arranging a leveraged buyout. He evidently figured that a lowball bid would let him continue running the company as he saw fit. After he announced the idea to RJR's board, all hell broke loose. Johnson's team ended up losing out to Kohlberg, Kravis, and Roberts--in part because the company's board wanted to be rid of Johnson--and Johnson pretty much had run out of enthusiasm for the deal anyway (paying $112/share would mean a lot more cutting back than $75/share would). This book reads like a novel, with egos, ulterior motives, deceipt, grudges, broken friendships, and greed galore. The final sentence of the new edition of the book sums it up nicely: "you couldn't make this stuff up."

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Yet another kid picture post

2009-04-25T07:44:00.004-05:00

I got so bored at a recent school fundraiser at which DW and I were in charge of arranging bowls and mugs that I spelled out the honoree's last name (Greco) with coffee cups.

A loves the penny arcade at the mall.

T is over his fear of the zoo train. Maybe we'll get him to ride it next time we go.

I'm still decompressing from T's recent move crisis. He was moved from his mini-group home "pod" onto a regular dormitory with no advance notice to us. I was furious and immediately went into lawyer mode. It took a couple of weeks to get everybody together and straighten out everything. T's behavior warranted a move, based on the information I got after the fact, but it would have been easier on him had we been able to go up there and help transition him from one place to another. T still sees A on a regular basis, and the direct care workers on the dorm are being trained in Applied Behavior Analysis techniques for working with T (somthing that will help other kids who are not yet in the Autism Center program). Hopefully T's behavior will improve enough that he can move from the dorm into a group home when a new one opens up.

Waterboarding--all the cool kids are doing it!

2009-04-25T07:35:00.004-05:00

Does Shepard Smith think he's on MSNBC now?

I've paroused the John Yoo torture memo--the most important one of the lot--and it's hilariously bad. No wonder the Bushies wouldn't let it be seen by skeptical lawyers in Bush's own administration.

And I thought bridge was an old ladies' game

2009-04-22T08:41:00.000-05:00

House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street by William D. Cohan

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
I began reading financial journalism on a semi-regular basis during the Enron collapse, and began watching CNBC after the panic last fall. I have absolutely no background in business or finance, but the ups-and-downs of the markets fascinate me. Given my lack of any background, I know whether a particular book or article is well-written based on whether I can actually understand it.

William D. Cohan's "House of Cards: A Tale of Wretched Excess on Wall Street" ranks with Bethany McLean's "The Smartest Guys in the Room" as an accessible work of business writing that is so well put-together one doesn't want to put it down. Cohan's book is the tale of the late Bear Stearns & Co., which went from being the fifth largest brokerage house in the U.S. to being flat broke in ten days during March 2008.

The book takes its title from a peculiar aspect of Bear's corporate culture--its long-time CEO Jimmy Cayne was a championship level player of the card game bridge, and Bear entered teams in high-level bridge tournaments. Indeed, Cayne was off at bridge tournaments during key crises in the collapse of his firm and couldn't be bothered to return to New York.

Cohan's book opens with a riveting blow-by-blow account of the ten-day collapse of Bear and its ultimate forced absorbsion by JPMorgan Chase at the behest of Treas. Sec'y Henry Paulson, Fed. Chmn. Ben Bernanke, and N.Y. Fed. Pres. Timothy Geithner. Cohan then provides a history of Bear and its overbearing, colorful leaders, most importantly Cayne and his predecessor Ace Greenberg. Bear was unlike its rival firms in its contempt for family pedigrees, MBAs, and strategic planning. It was the street urchin with a huge chip on its shoulder, and the firm's strategy was simply to make lots of money. Bear's corporate culture was very much like a mens' locker room, and the firm had clients that other Wall Street firms viewed as unsavory. Bear's employees were loyal to a fault, and its leadership team rarely changed, with the dictatorial Greenberg and/or Cayne running the show. Greenberg and Cayne lacked formal educations in finance themselfves and they tended to hire based on instinct rather than credentials. All of these factors led to a firm full of very specialized moneymakers, with nobody really understanding the full scope of the business or the risks inherent in some of Bear's operations.

Bear pretty much originated the infamous mortgage-backed securities, and the firm went heavy into debt obligations backed by subprime loans. Once those became near difficult to value, they could not be sold. Cayne did not understand much of anything about these securities, and he fired the one person in the firm who really did shortly after two of Bear's hedge funds collapsed due to plunging values and outright fraud.

Rumors about Bear having too many illiquid assets and not enough capital began spreading on the Internet in early March 2008. Cayne was off playing cards, and then-CEO Alan Schwartz was off in Florida at Bear's annual media event. Neither understood the gravity of the firm's situation or the likely effect of the rumors in an already jittery market. The rumors turned out to be largely true--although the firm had a large cash cushion, it was nowhere near enough to take a massively leveraged firm (Bear's leverage was usually around 50:1) through any crisis of confidence, which is exactly what followed. Redemption calls were fast and furious; short sellers (some perfectly legit) drove down the company's stock value; other firms (notably Goldman Sachs) refused to stand as counterparties for their own clients against Bear; and the overnight lenders who financed Bear's day-to-day operations stopped lending to the company. A loan from the Fed to Chase (a regular bank with access to Fed funds) to be loaned to Bear (an investiment bank with no access to Fed funds) had exactly the opposite effect it was supposed to have ("oh my God, they're worse off than I thought!" instead of "well, now they've got the money and time to sort things out"), and, one day later, forced negotiations began with JPMorgan Chase.

Cayne and other Bear muckety mucks were interveiwed extensively for the book, as was current Treasury Sec'y Tim Geithner. The book is well-sourced and well-written, and Cohan doesn't pull punches even as to the major contributors to his work.

"House of Cards" shows how thin was America's veneer of hyper-prosperity, much as Hurricane Katrina showed how thin is the veneer of the infrastructure of our advanced society, and much as the release of the torture memos showed how thin is the veneer of our supposedly evolving standards of decency. I seeem to like veneer today; anybody for a patina instead? When it comes down to it, we're never far away from a Hobbesian state of nature, where life is nasty, brutish, and short.

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Boilerplate Husband

2009-03-29T08:04:00.002-05:00

DW saw a number on her caller ID this morning that she thinks is the local LDS bishop's cell number. The LDS Church has policy requiring the permission of a husband for his wife to accept any significant church assignment. IIRC, this is set out in the Church Handbook of Instructions, but it's been a while since I had a copy of that publication, so I could be wrong. Anyhow, I drafted this to take care of any possible consent issues in advance:

I, R, do not accept the premise that my consent or permission is necessary for my spouse, C, to accept any calling or assignment, or to do any action that is not illegal or, though perhaps technically legal, is an action that would shock the conscience of a reasonable citizen of those states of the United States whose public policies are in agreement with my own policy preferences. In the event of any action that is illegal or that would shock the conscience of a reasonable citizen of those states of the United States chosen by me, I disclaim in advance any knowledge of, or consent to, any such action, unless such action would further my own personal interests.

However, in accordance with the policies of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I hereby declare that I agree to C holding any calling in the Slidell Ward of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that she chooses to accept. Should C does not wish to accept a calling but does not wish to declare this wish, then I do not agree to her accepting any such calling. I hereby consent to C invoking this species of non-agreement at her discretion.

I declare under penalty of perjury under the laws of the United States of America that the foregoing is true and correct. Executed on 29 March 2009.

She laughed, then folded it up and put it in her purse. Of course she won't use this document, but maybe she'll show it to some of the women of the ward who possess a sense of humor.

Res Ipsa Loquitur

2009-03-21T07:28:00.002-05:00

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

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IndigNation! Populist Uprising '09 - The Enragening

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Leave it to Fox to have a reporter so naive as to not realize he is suggesting that conservatives want to perform a particular sex act on the White House.

Basic Cable Brouhaha

2009-03-12T13:20:00.004-05:00

Jon Stewart's war with CNBC should reach its apex tonight when Jim Cramer appears on The Daily Show.

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"Fire!" Wait, didn't I just say that?

2009-03-09T09:18:00.003-05:00

Ugh! I guess it's not so bad that I've only planned my upcoming fence project and haven't actually started construction yet. Also, I used the garden hose to build a little lake in the woods behind our house, so we're protected in case this fire gets close enough to be a problem for us.

Airplanes plan to fly over forest fires in St. Tammany today
by The Times-Picayune
Monday March 09, 2009, 8:11 AM

Airplanes will fly over forest fires that have been burning in Slidell and Mandeville as soon as the fog lifts today to make sure the fires remain contained, said state Department of Agriculture and Forestry District Manager Kirk Casanova.

Firefighters worked through the night to bring the fires under control, Casanova said. So far, they have burned about 1,200 acres of timberland in Slidell and about 400 acres in Mandeville, he said. No homes have been affected by the fires, he said.

The first fire broke out near the Slidell Airport and the Bellaire subdivision. Firefighters started fighting that blaze Saturday around 11 a.m. and stayed until about midnight, when it appeared to be under control, according to department spokesman Sam Irwin.

They left the Slidell site to focus on the Mandeville fire, north of Fontainbleau State Park off U.S. 190 and west of Louisiana 1088, Irwin said.

But the winds blew hard and the fire near Slidell jumped the fire-break and continued to spread before it was again contained, he said.

Casanova no arrests have been made in the fires, but the investigation is continuing.

1960s Redux

2009-02-20T17:07:00.003-06:00

NYU student gentle reader Bill informs me that the 1960s have come back to life at that school. These people don't really seem to know what they want, but they can take over a cafeteria. What's next, actual hippies in Haight-Asbury?

Narcissism and the Panic?

2009-02-17T14:48:00.004-06:00

Bloomberg ran an opinion piece today about how narcissistic Ivy League MBAs killed Wall Street because they were too self-confident and trusting in their risk models. There may be something to that; the great book on the Enron collapse is titled The Smartest Guys in the Room, and, IMHO, the recent panic has rather a lot in common with the Enron collapse. However, I've also read that the risk models were adequate for evaluating the risks of individual security products, but did not take into account that CDOs, default swaps, and the like were really a chain of dominoes. All it took was a dip in the real estate market to start the dominoes going.

What I always wonder in the wake of ginormous economic collapses is why so few people seem to want to take a look under the proverbial hood, check out the engine, and ask the question, "how do these people make so much money?" It seems pretty basic. Actually, it is a question that Warren Buffet considers, and he will not put his money into anything he can't understand.

Puddle of years

2009-02-14T16:13:00.002-06:00

Good gracious, gentle readers; this blog turned five years old on Thursday. I suppose I might have a moment of self-doscovery were I to read all my posts from 2004 forward, but I don't really have the time.

Congress on YouTube?

2009-02-05T05:56:00.000-06:00

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ABA in One Week?

2009-02-04T11:41:00.003-06:00

This CNN article gives a pretty decent basic explanation of applied behavioral analysis, which is the most widely used autism intervention methodology. Based on my personal experience, I really have to wonder whether this ABA therapist was able to turn around this girl's behavior in a one week intervention. I vividly remember the day it took five adults to restrain both of my boys during in-home training, and A. still managed to bite a chunk of flesh from the psychiatrist. Moreover, most experts I've read speak in terms of years.

A cheer for the new guys

2009-01-27T11:43:00.002-06:00

I just looked at the summary of the the Obama administration's disabilities plan. Autism is the only disability that is singled out for special attention. I suppose that's a good thing.

DISABILITIES

"We must build a world free of unnecessary barriers, stereotypes, and discrimination.... policies must be developed, attitudes must be shaped, and buildings and organizations must be designed to ensure that everyone has a chance to get the education they need and live independently as full citizens in their communities."

-- Barack Obama, April 11, 2008

Barack Obama and Joe Biden have a comprehensive agenda to empower individuals with disabilities in order to equalize opportunities for all Americans.

In addition to reclaiming America's global leadership on this issue by becoming a signatory to -- and having the Senate ratify -- the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, the plan has four parts, designed to provide lifelong support and resources to Americans with disabilities. They are as follows:

First, provide Americans with disabilities with the educational opportunities they need to succeed by funding the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, supporting early intervention for children with disabilities and universal screening, improving college opportunities for high school graduates with disabilities, and making college more affordable. Obama and Biden will also authorize a comprehensive study of students with disabilities and issues relating to transition to work and higher education.

Second, end discrimination and promote equal opportunity by restoring the Americans with Disabilities Act, increasing funding for enforcement, supporting the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act, ensuring affordable, accessible health care for all and improving mental health care.

Third, increase the employment rate of workers with disabilities by effectively implementing regulations that require the federal government and its contractors to employ people with disabilities, providing private-sector employers with resources to accommodate employees with disabilities, and encouraging those employers to use existing tax benefits to hire more workers with disabilities and supporting small businesses owned by people with disabilities.

And fourth, support independent, community-based living for Americans with disabilities by enforcing the Community Choice Act, which would allow Americans with significant disabilities the choice of living in their community rather than having to live in a nursing home or other institution, creating a voluntary, budget-neutral national insurance program to help adults who have or develop functional disabilities to remain independent and in their communities, and streamline the Social Security approval process .

Autism

President Obama and Vice President Biden are committed to supporting Americans with Autism Spectrum Disorders (“ASD”), their families, and their communities. There are a few key elements to their support, which are as follows:

First, President Obama and Vice President Biden support increased funding for autism research, treatment, screenings, public awareness, and support services. There must be research of the treatments for, and the causes of, ASD.

Second, President Obama and Vice President Biden support improving life-long services for people with ASD for treatments, interventions and services for both children and adults with ASD.

Third, President Obama and Vice President Biden support funding the Combating Autism Act and working with Congress, parents and ASD experts to determine how to further improve federal and state programs for ASD.

Fourth, President Obama and Vice President Biden support universal screening of all infants and re-screening for all two-year-olds, the age at which some conditions, including ASD, begin to appear. These screenings will be safe and secure, and available for every American that wants them. Screening is essential so that disabilities can be identified early enough for those children and families to get the supports and services they need.

Bizarro in Belgium

2009-01-26T14:31:00.003-06:00

I was in an odd mood over the weekend, so I watched the weird, darkly comic In Bruges. The movie is about two Irish, London-based hitmen who are sent to Bruges to hide out and await further instructions. The mood is deceptively light at the outset, as Colin Farrell's character grudgingly follows Brendan Gleeson's character on a tour of a well preserved medieval city. The mood darkens when Farrell's character simultaneously unravels and falls in love. Farrell's undoing has to do with the consequences of his actions in a killing organization that has a moral code. Thus, the film ends as a sort of Catholic morality tale.

Astonishingly, Colin Farrell's acting holds this movie together. He is, by turn, witty, brutal, and vulnerable. He has a knack for comedy that I'd not seen before. Also, the guy can act when he wants to. Keep in mind that the characters in the movie are Irish, and they swear in an Irish fashion. The film may drop as many f-bombs as Scarface.. My impression from years of cussing and observing the cussing of others is that the f-bomb in Ireland is roughly equivalent to "damn" in the U.S. in terms of social acceptability. Whatever. I liked this bizarre, quirky film.

Rough Birthday

2009-01-21T10:58:00.004-06:00

T's 12th birthday was last week. He surprised us by singing all four lines of "Happy Birthday" to us. He picked up a copy of Kung Fu Panda during his last visit home, so we got him a panda cake. It was a hit.

We played games at Chuck E Cheese, as well as the usual beanie crane in the WalMart foyer. T was as interested in the mechanical dancing mouse as he was in the games, but he was terrified of the faux rodent when I took him up to it.

T's obsessive compulsive behaviors have increased sharply, and his ability to self-regulate has decreased proportionately. The newest obsession is La Quinta hotels, based on an ad on the back of Rand McNally. He loves the logo of the Sun, and he demands "Sun, please" whenever we pass a La Quinta. Alas, there is a new LQ close to the house and, worse, next to WalMart. The LQ thing has combined with his ongoing obsessions with elevators, airplanes, and McDonald's French fries. T's tantrums when his obsessions were not indulged were pretty bad, and it was deeply saddening to observe. I'm really not sure exactly how to address these issues--I'm not crazy about upping his meds, and I don't know that a nazi behaviorist crackdown would have much effect--not to mention that I'm constitutionally incapable of such a thing.

Scary Fire

2009-01-20T08:08:00.008-06:00

Shortly before 4 p.m. yesterday, DW yelled that there was a fire I needed to come out and take a look at. Sure enough, there were flames roaring about 25 feet or so back in the woods from our fence. By the time I got our garden hose stretched out to attempt to drench our fence, I noticed that the north wind had driven the flames much closer and that the tops of the trees next door were engulfed in flames. A commander from the St. Tammany FD was already parked in front of our house by the time we ran from the house. A fire engine appeared shortly thereafter, followed later by three more. The firefighters were able to get the flames under control before any houses were damaged, but, damn, it was a close call.

My back fence.

The next-door neighbors had the worst damage on the street; evidently some of their vinyl siding melted.

We were reassured by the sight of this truck parked in front of our house (in the background) when we ran outside.

I went out in the smoky haze this morning and noticed how far into the yard the flames actually spread. My back yard is dinky, and the house juts back into it, so the black spot in the grass isn't terribly far from our back bedroom.

It's still hazy on my block. We need a strong wind or a heavy rain to get rid of the smoke.

Arrested for Aspergers? WTF?

2009-01-14T16:00:00.004-06:00

An 8-year-old girl in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, with Asperger's Syndrome was arrested and taken to juvie after acting out when her teachers would not allow her to wear a cow costume to a party. Yes, they jailed a kid over an effing cow costume! If I were her dad, I would go and bite those teachers myself.

New Age President?

2009-01-14T09:12:00.001-06:00

Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
Early in the presidential campaign, I read Barack Obama's "The Audacity of Hope," which made me like the guy as a potential POTUS. That book contains discussions of policy that are conventionally liberal in tone, but that touches "third rail" issues like faith and race in ways that suggest Obama is more open and thoughtful than the average politician, liberal or conservative.

"Dreams from My Father," first published in 1995, gives us great insight into Barack Obama as a person. The book is about race and inheritance, and it takes Obama from his upbringing in Hawaii (the least race-conscious state in the U.S.) with his white mother and grandparents, through his growing consciousness about race and his discovery of what it means to be black in America, through his community organizer days in Chicago, and to his first trip to Kenya and meetings with his father's African family.

Obama has the perspective of an outsider/insider on the African-American community. He was raised to be proud of his black roots--his grandparents were very open about race for people of their generation--but he had to study black history and associate with other African-Americans before he could really understand black America and become a part of it. It is, perhaps, from this experience of observation and study that Obama developed keen senses of detachment and insight. This guy had more self-awareness at age 33 than most of us can hope to gain in a lifetime--though I have to wonder whether a small child would have the feelings and insights that Obama attributes to his much younger self. Obama also appears to have keen insight into other people and their circumstances. Whether these traits will serve him well as POTUS remains to be seen, but a self-aware President is something we really haven't seen at all in the United States since, perhaps, FDR and Harry Truman.

Obama's absent father--an intellectually brilliant Kenyan civil servant--was built into a legendary figure by his mother's family. Obama as a child felt something of a burden to live up to his father's legend. His Kenyan half-sister Auma shattered the illusion of Barack Senior when she visited Obama in Chicago after their father's death. Obama writes that he would have laughed out loud after discovering that his father wasn't all he was cracked up to be. Now, I know from my own experience that most, if not all, men have a moment when they come to that kind of realization about their fathers--even if it is just the simple realization that our dads are humans and make human mistakes within a reasonable margin of error. But most of us are fortunate enough that our fathers are around to show us their flaws and foibles, and we don't know our fathers only from legends with which we are indoctrinated.

One theme throughout the book is the relationship of people to power. Obama's Indonesian stepfather had his independent spirit beaten out of him by the government of Indonesia; Obama observed political power on a micro level on the South Side of Chicago; and Obama's father simply failed to understand that power in Kenya was derived from connections to that country's then president-for-life, Jomo Kenyatta. According to Obama, it was in Indonesia that his mother had an insight about her then-husband and his relationship to power, and she packed Barack back to Hawaii when she feared that he, too, would be ground under by the powers that be in Indonesia. Obama's insights into the relationship of people to political power should serve him well as President, if only to help him understand and shape his behavior as the most powerful political figure on the planet-and to keep the reigns on the powerful personalities he has placed in powerful positions.

This is one of the best memoirs from a political figure I've ever read, perhaps because it was written before Barack Obama became a political figure. Whether the detachment and insight that are apparent in the book are useful traits in the Obama presidency remain to be seen.

View all my reviews.

A Disappointed Man

2009-01-14T08:24:00.001-06:00

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Six Days Seven Nights

Barack Obama Interview
John McCain Interview

Sarah Palin Video
Funny Election Video

Jon Stewart's definitions of "disappointment" appear to differ from the President's.

Danger, danger! It's the President of the United States!

2009-01-12T15:55:00.003-06:00

I made some comments about autism policy on change.gov, the incoming administration's super-cool interactive website (even people who don't like Obama should look at the site; it's like they took meetup, twitter, and blogger and applied them to national policy issues). Anyhow, now I'm on John Podesta's e-mail list. I noticed this today in my hotmail header:

Video: The President-elect's plan‏
From: John D. Podesta, Obama-Biden Transition Project (info@change.gov)
This message may be dangerous. Learn more
Sent: Mon 1/12/09 4:51 PM

Does somebody at Microsoft not like Obama?

My New Addiction

2009-01-06T14:47:00.002-06:00

I still pretty much suck at it, but this game has dominated the past few evenings. I operate the controller and DW watches intently, looking for things I may be missing. I figure since we have a PS3, I might as well use it for its intended purpose instead of only playing DVDs on it.

New Year and Hoodie of the Apocalypse

2009-01-05T11:22:00.002-06:00

Anno domini 2009 found your humble correspondent with a very nasty sinus infection that very neary slipped into pneumonia. I am somewhat better now, but it's unusual that all the antihistamines, decongestants, steroids, and antibiotics I've taken the past couple of weeks haven't killed the infection. I've bombed this sucker with every medication I can get ahold of, yet it persists.

I don't know how it slipped my mind, but every year my neighbors on both sides employ enough fireworks on New Years Eve to blow up a hypothetical bunker near, say, the Khyber Pass (note to Presidents Bush and Obama--contact my neighbors to follow up; they're solid patriotic Americans). I was bitchy about the pyrotechnics the other night--I felt like crap and, I'll admit, I've never seen the appeal in blasting off explosives to celebrate the opportunity to pretend that I'm going to make major changes to behaviors rooted deeply in my subconscious mind in order to avoid the consequences of those behaviors or to simply hope that I don't get dragged down by the crushing defeats we all suffer in everyday living and by my own character flaws (and there are some, though I don't care to get into that in a New Years blog)--as my plan was to bring A home on New Years Day, requiring an 8-hour round trip in the car. DW did manage to convince me that putting up with occasional fireworks show is a) a small price to pay for having good neighbors and b) a provision of the implicitly agreed upon Social Compact under which the citizens of the United States coexist one with another. Social Compact notwithstanding, I managed to accidentally set off my car alarm four times between 7:30 and 8:00 a.m. on January 1; however, those accidental alarms were kept brief enough to provide plausible deniability in case of an accusation that I was violating the fireworks provision of the Social Compact.

We usually take A a new ballcap when we visit him or bring him home. This time I took him one that I purchased at Walgreens. He chose to wear a New York Yankees hat on our outings in Slidell, so what do I know?

And when he had opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth beast say, Come and see.

And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.

--Revelations 6:7-8.

So A and I go to Walmart on the evening of New Years Day. It's colder than I expected, and my t-shirt isn't providing sufficient warmth given my head cold. A has his jacket, but I have nothing in the car. I take A into the menswear department and grab the cheapest hoodie I can find in the brief amount of time A will tolerate being inside the retail area of the store. It's got the word word "destruction" emblazoned above a tattoo-like image of one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Hilarious, and a perfect match for how physically crummy I was feeling at the moment.

Birthday

2008-12-26T07:51:00.002-06:00

Today is my 46th birthday. I'm just saying.

Christmas 2008

2008-12-25T18:57:00.005-06:00

Last Christmas was one of the worst days of my entire life, for reasons I don't care to revisit. DW and I decided to try something different this year.

We took a hotel room in Alexandria, Louisiana, where we put up a small Christmas tree and laid out the kids' presents underneath it. We brought them over individually on Christmas Eve to open presents and play. That way, T could make his WalMart rounds and A could eat at Subway.

A, as usual, ignored the Christmas tree and the presents underneath.

T got the added bonus of watching DW have a Zen experience with the beanie cranes at WalMart. She became one with the machines and was lifting plush toys left and right--and doing it with her non-dominant hand, to boot. T was jumping up and down with joy.

After we returned T to school, DW and I motored up to Natchitoches, Louisiana (50 miles NW), to view that town's fabulous Christmas lights. When I was a kid, we drove through Natchitoches every year shortly before XMAS on the way to Baton Rouge from our home in Oklahoma, and I could see the lights all set up and ready to go. But it was too far from our grandparents' house for my parents to be bothered with driving us back up to see the lights at night. So I finally got to see them, something I highly recommend.

We went by our kids' mini-group home Christmas morning after they attended mass and opened their Santa Claus presents, which appeared mysteriously while the kids were at church. We had a nice visit, then drove back home. The kids' school provided them with a tasty looking Christmas lunch, but DW and I had our own arrangements fall through. DW made a Christmas dinner of truck stop nachos, and I had a can of Spaghetti-Os with sliced weenies. So much better than a repeat of the same meal we had a month ago.

On the Night's Plutonian Shore

2008-12-20T06:42:00.008-06:00

I dreamt last night that a collaborator--someone I didn't recognize--and I had written a law review article exposing corruption at the highest levels of government. Yeah, yeah, I know, a law review is a most inappropriate venue to break the news of a scandal. But what can I say? It's a dream. Anyway, my coauthor and I were rather proud of ourselves. We must have been members of the law review, as we were showing a small group of professors a completed copy of the article.

Instead of being shocked, dazzled, or impressed, one of the professors completely ignored the text and started looking at footnotes. "Your font is all wrong," she said, and she also helpuflly pointed out numerous perceived Bluebook citation and style errors. I know that book reasonably well, but I don't remember whether or not the professor was correct. I was e little hurt by the criticism, particularly as nobody gave a hoot about the scandal we had uncovered.

Dreaming about the Bluebook. Yikes. I suppose next week I'll have a dream where I tiptoe through the entire Oxford English Dictionary.

Now he's reduced to telling lightbulb jokes?

2008-12-17T07:13:00.007-06:00

Your humble correspondent heard an awesome lightbulb joke on Numbers a few weeks ago. Turns out the joke has been around for a while.

Q. How many existentialists does it take to change a lightbulb?

A. Two. One to screw it in and one to observe how the lightbulb itself symbolizes a single incandescent beacon of subjective reality in a netherworld or endless absurdity reaching out toward a maudlin cosmos of nothingness.

I came across a list of excellent lightbulb jokes online last night, to wit:

Q. How many Christians does it take to change a lightbulb?
A. Three, but they're really one.

Q. How many surrealists does it take to change a lightbulb?
A. Two, one to hold the giraffe, and the other to fill the bathtub with brightly colored machine tools.

Your working boy has never originated a lightbulb joke he can recall, but it's never too late to try:

Q. How many Mormons does it take to change a lightbulb?
A. Nine. One bishop to seek inspiration as to which worthy priesthood holder should be extended the lightbulb calling; two counselors with whom the bishop discusses his lightbulb selection, and who confirm the bishop's inspiration; one quorum leader who must be consulted to determine whether the member in question can be freed up to change the lightbulb at the appropriate time; one ward executive secretary to phone the ward member selected for the lightbulb calling, asking him to meet with the bishop and giving no reason why; one gossipy spouse to speculate with her visiting teaching companion over a lunch of green jello about her husband's qualifications for that open lightbulb installer position, but possibly for that crinkly Victoria's Secret catalogue she found under his side of the bed; one scary, heavily armed ward member who insists to anyone who will listen that he has received direct inspiration that he will be called to change the lightbulb; the newly called and set-apart lightbulb changer who was so nervous on Saturday night about his mysterious Sunday morning meeting with the bishop that he OD'd on Nyquil, causing him to drop the bulb on the floor of the cultural hall, shattering it to bits; and, finally, another church member with vast experience in the construction trades, who mysteriously appears at the base of the ladder, coaxes down the failed and emotionally devastated would-be lightbulb installer, climbs the ladder, and inserts a lightbulb he found in the supply closet.

Boys and Our Toys

2008-12-14T09:55:00.009-06:00

I've been viewing photos of my new nephew, Manhattan Sam, on his gentle parents' blog. I see that gentle reader Bill is introducing his son to the computer at a very early age, albeit to watch television. Good job! I was reminded of one of my favorite baby pictures of Toby. Anyhow, will this:

lead to this:
(yes, I really was that slim)
and to this?

Holy Corruption, Batman!

2008-12-09T13:13:00.005-06:00

Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich has been arrested for, among other things, attempting to sell Barack Obama's seat in the U.S. Senate. Wow, they're as bad as we are! ETA--"we" is Louisiana. Come to think of it, even we're not that bad anymore.

Good Books

2008-12-07T11:04:00.003-06:00

The TLS books-of-the-year edition is out. Alas, mine usually makes it here a couple of weeks late. I suspect that the print edition will have recommendations from many more reviewers than the online edition offers. I used the best books list to pick up a couple of excellent books last year; perhaps I'll do the same this year.

Or maybe I'll just wait for the next Stephanie Meyer vampire novel to come out. Confession--I've actually not read any of Meyer's books, though DW has, and three of them are in the bookcase on my side of the bed. We saw Twilight and Quantum of Solace on successive days last weekend. Surprisingly, I thought Twilight the better of the two. Love Daniel Craig as James Bond, but, man, Quantum is just plain dull.

Hell Freezes Over, Much Like the $90K in Bill Jefferson's Icebox

2008-12-07T07:55:00.006-06:00

I was surprised by this story in this morning's Times-Picayune:

Indicted U.S. Rep. William Jefferson suffered what may be the final blow of his storied political career in the most improbable way Saturday, when an untested Republican opponent took advantage of Louisiana's new federal voting rules -- and an election delay caused by Hurricane Gustav -- to unseat the nine-term Democrat.

With the upset victory, Anh "Joseph" Cao, a eastern New Orleans attorney who fled war-ravaged Saigon as a child, becomes the first Vietnamese-American in Congress. He will represent a district that was specifically drawn to give African-Americans an electoral advantage and one in which two of every three voters are registered Democrats.

Jefferson, the first African-American to represent Louisiana in Congress since Reconstruction and a force on the local political stage for three decades, finished a close second among four general election candidates after beating back stiff challenges from within his own party during earlier rounds of voting.

His defeat came on a day of abysmally low turnout, which political pundits had predicted could be Jefferson's undoing despite his demographic and political advantages.

Ironically, had Gustav not postponed the voting schedule one month, the general election would have been held the same ballot as last month's presidential election, when high turnout among African-American voters likely would have carried Jefferson to a 10th term.

Meanwhile, in Louisiana's 4th Congressional District, Republican John Fleming, a physician from Minden, won the seat being vacated by retiring Congressman Jim McCrery, a Republican from Shreveport.

The two races, both delayed because of Gustav, were this season's last contests for the U.S. House of Representatives. Saturday's results mean Louisiana bucked the national trend and wound up with a congressional delegation of six Republicans and a single Democrat. Three Democrats represent Louisiana in the current Congress.

Speaking to supporters Saturday night at Palace Cafe on Canal Street, Cao, 41, made reference to Jefferson's earlier victories this season -- and to the legal problems that undoubtedly contributed to his downfall.

"I know he went through two previous primaries, and that must have been hard," Cao said. "But tonight, the people of the 2nd District have spoken. We want a new direction. We want accountability, and have it."

Cao made direct reference to his improbable political ascent, seeming as astonished as anyone else.

"Never in my life did I think I could be a future congressman," he said. "The American dream is well and alive."

Though he was a relative unknown before this race, Cao was flanked Saturday night by a number of local political power brokers.

U.S. Rep. Steve Scalise, a Republican from Metairie, introduced him to screaming supporters. City Councilwomen Jackie Clarkson and Stacy Head, both Democrats, were in attendance, along with former TV news anchor Helena Moreno, who was defeated by Jefferson in the Democratic Party runoff. Several GOP party leaders, including former City Councilmen Jay Batt and Bryan Wagner, also joined the crowd.

At Cao's side was his wheelchair-bound father, who spent seven years in a North Vietnamese prison camp during that country's civil war. In his closing, Cao offered thanks to the local immigrant community, and he made a special plea for peace in the country of his birth.

"I'd like to thank my Vietnamese community," he said, "and I'd like to encourage young Vietnamese in this country to work peacefully for a free and democratic Vietnam."

Meanwhile, at an Uptown art gallery, Jefferson, 61, a Harvard-educated attorney and former state Senator who was raised amid dire poverty in Lake Providence, La., said he thought voter fatigue contributed to his loss.

"Over three elections, I think people kind of ran out a little bit at the end of, I guess, the juice it takes to keep on going," he said. "There were three very difficult elections and on Nov. 4, a lot of folks thought we already won.

"I'm sure that if we poll, somewhere out there in the 2nd District is a vast majority of people who support our campaign and who, had they voted today, would have expressed it," he said.

Speaking to about 50 supporters who gave Jefferson a standing ovation when he entered the room, Jefferson thanked his family, labor leaders, local ministers and African-American voters, whom he praised as the "bedrock" of his political base.

"I'm so very grateful to each and every one of you, folks who are here and folks who are out there, for the warm embrace that you have given me over the years," he said.

Jefferson's demise resulted in part from Louisiana's return after 30 years to a closed primary system. As the only Republican to qualify for the general election, Cao spent September and October meeting voters, honing his message and raising money.

Meanwhile, Jefferson had to fight off six well-known challengers who together raised almost $2 million in an effort to unseat him in the Democratic Party primary and runoff, which were open only to registered Democrats and unaffiliated voters.

With his name appearing for the first time on Saturday's ballot, Cao was able to reach out to voters who supported the Democratic also-rans, as well as about 50,000 voters, most of them registered Republicans, who were forced to stay on the sidelines during the Democratic Party races.

As predicted, there was a dramatic drop-off in turnout Saturday compared with the Nov. 4 election that featured Barack Obama, now president-elect.

Last month, nearly 164,000 Democrats and independents in the 2nd District cast ballots. Even with the universe of voters expanded Saturday to include all registered voters, only 66,846 showed up to the polls.

In a rare radio interview in advance of the general election, Jefferson had expressed concerns that his base of African-American supporters might assume that he had won re-election last month and stay home Saturday.

Cao, who came to the United States when he was 8, holds a bachelor's degree in physics from Baylor University and a master's degree in philosophy from Fordham University. After a stint as a Catholic seminarian, he earned a law degree from Loyola University in 2000.

Married with two daughters, he now runs a law practice in Venetian Isles specializing in immigration.

Cao took an interest in local politics after his home and office were swamped during Hurricane Katrina.

His first bid for public office last year, when he sought the open 103rd House District, was inauspicious. Running then as an independent, he finished fifth in a six-candidate field.

Cao said he began eyeing a run for the 2nd District seat shortly after a Virginia grand jury indicted Jefferson last year on charges of bribery and public corruption following revelations in 2005 that FBI agents found $90,000 in marked bills in his freezer and linked him and several relatives to a wide-ranging bribery scheme.

Counting among his backers Gov. Bobby Jindal and Jefferson Parish Sheriff Newell Normand, Cao attracted solid support from local, state and national Republican organizations. He raised almost $90,000 from a slate of party operatives, local executives and members of the Vietnamese community. He also pumped $70,000 of his money into the campaign.

Hoping to pad his war chest further, Cao joined the Republican National Committee and the state GOP last month in filing a lawsuit challenging a decades-old cap on the amount of money the groups can spend on coordinated advertising efforts. As of late last week, the suit had gone nowhere.

Cao maintained a generally cordial tone during the campaign, limiting his criticism of Jefferson to questions about the congressman's effectiveness and ethics and rarely mentioning the criminal charges.

However, as election day neared, the National Republican Congressional Committee stepped in with a series of harsh mail pieces and an automated telephone call to voters that highlighted the allegations of money laundering, racketeering and bribery and labeled Jefferson as "crooked."

Organizers of Cao's campaign denied having a hand in the attack.

On election day, the Cao campaign launched a surprise, last-minute offensive with a pair of automated phone calls urging voters to pull the lever for Cao. The messages were recorded by Moreno and former Orleans Parish District Attorney Harry Connick. It was both supporters' first foray into the general election campaign.

Though Jefferson will pack up his Capitol Hill office, he will remain in the news: Originally scheduled to begin last week, his trial is likely to start in early 2009.

Also in the cross-hairs of federal prosecutors are Jefferson siblings Betty Jefferson, the Orleans Parish 4th District Assessor, and political consultant Mose Jefferson, who were indicted last year on charges that they conspired to loot more than $600,000 in taxpayer money from three charities.

In a separate case, Mose Jefferson was indicted on charges that he bribed the former president of the Orleans Parish School Board.

Those trials are set for early next year.

Jefferson's defeat also marks the latest and most severe blow to the Progressive Democrats, the Central City-based political organization that he founded.

Among Jefferson allies who have been forced from public office since news of the FBI probe into Jefferson's dealings broke are: Renee Gill Pratt, the congressman's former legislative aide who lost her seat on the City Council; close ally Eddie Jordan, who was forced to resign as Orleans Parish district attorney; and Jefferson's daughter, then-state Rep. Jalila Jefferson-Bullock, who lost a bid last year for the state Senate.

Yip yip yahoo! Nephew Sam is a-born in New York City

2008-12-03T08:32:00.003-06:00

A big puddle of congratulations to Gentle Readers Bill and Karen, whose first child was born last night. They named him Samuel, and Manhattan Sam no doubt will be the root-toot-tootin'est hombre east of the Pecos and the Hudson.

Carousel of Nostalgia

2008-11-26T05:57:00.003-06:00

My kids love to view, and print, photographs whenever they are at home. We went through hundreds of pictures with T the past few days, dating all the way back to when he was a baby. His favorites this go-around were photos of him at the Alexandria, Louisiana, Zoo. A caught on to T's fascination with photographs when T began returning to St. Mary's with dozens of prints every time he came home. A now has me printing photos, and A has had me drive past his old school and a few other places he used to love but hasn't cared about more recently.

This clip expresses my kids' nostalgia for photographs and drives past the old places better than I ever could. As I've already written, I just finished the first season of this show on DVD this past week. This is one of the final moments of the season, and it was on my mind when T and I were looking at photos. The kids' nostalgia habits were also on my mind when I was watching the scene, and I almost got a little weepy.

Mad on TV

2008-11-23T10:07:00.005-06:00

I finished watching the first season of Mad Men the other day. I love everything about this show. It is extra-stylish and fabulously written, acted, and produced. On its face, it's a drama about the freewheeling advertising industry on Madison Avenue (hence, "Mad Men") in the early 1960s, with career-obsessed, promiscuous, unfaithful husbands, and emotionally repressed, deliberately ignorant (as the law defines that term), long-suffering, passive-aggressive, pre-feminist wives. Who said the sexual revolution started with the hippies? Thanks to the show being on AMC, the sexual aspects of the storyline are not shown explicitly, though there is one hilarious shadowboxing scene in one episode, where a janitor sees the shadows of two characters going at it through a frosted office window. Also, as DW pointed out, there is very little strong language used in the show. IOW, any gentle readers who are concerned about such things can actually watch this show without waiting for it to be sanitized a la The Sopranos on A&E.

Underneath its glittering surface, Mad Men about how we restless Americans are to a certain extent able to invent and reinvent ourselves however we choose and present ourselves to different people in different ways, sometimes genuine and honest; sometimes cynical and dishonest; sometimes all of those things at once. Don Draper, the main character, has actually invented Don Draper from someone else of very humble origins, and has become very accomplished in the cynical advertising industry. He's an astonishingly complicated and comparmentalized character with massive flaws and hidden insecurities, arguably the most fully realized character in television history. As a viewer, you can't help but love him, even when he's catting around while his terrific wife is depressed, lonely, and isolated at home. There is also a strong theme of longing for approval and validation in the show--particularly men seeking approval from other men--and that theme is played with great subtlety by several of the main characters. I can't wait to get to Season Two to see how these characters develop. I may have to download it from iTunes to tide myself over until the DVD set comes out next July.

You know your show has arrived when it is parodied on The Simpsons.

Shame

2008-11-21T13:38:00.016-06:00

Article 1
1. For the purposes of this Convention, the term "torture" means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.
2. This article is without prejudice to any international instrument or national legislation which does or may contain provisions of wider application.
Article 2
1. Each State Party shall take effective legislative, administrative, judicial or other measures to prevent acts of torture in any territory under its jurisdiction.
2. No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.
3. An order from a superior officer or a public authority may not be invoked as a justification of torture.

--United Nations Convention Against Torture

Each component of the definition emphasizes that torture is not the mere infliction of pain or suffering on another, but is instead a step well removed. The victim must experience intense pain or suffering of the kind that is equivalent to the pain that would be associated with serious physical injury so severe that death, organ failure, or permanent damage resulting in a loss of significant body function will likely result. If that pain or suffering is psychological, that suffering must result from one of the acts set forth in the statute. In addition, these acts must cause long·term mental harm.

--Office of Legal Counsel, United States Department of Justice, John Yoo, author

Jane Mayer, a reporter for the New Yorker, chronicles the Bush Administration's weird obsession with physical forms of interrogation (colloqually known as "torture") in The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Became a War on American Ideals. The story is scary, not only from a humanitarian standpoint but also from the standpoint of an attorney who gives a hoot about the constitutional structure of the U.S. government.

Vice President Cheney initiated the process that resulted in a network of secret prisons and secret torture on September 11, 2001, when he held a videoconference with some of the lawyers who established the dubious legal framework for the Bush Administration's torture program. Cheney's general counsel, David Addington, was the ringleader of the lawyers. He was assisted by John Yoo at DOJ's Office of Legal Counsel and William Haynes, general counsel at the Department of Defense. Yoo in particular was important as the advisory opinions of the Office of Legal Counsel are binding on the Executive Branch. These three lawyers frequently met with then-White House general counsel Alberto Gonzales, who is portrayed as weak-willed and pliable in Mayer's book. Although Cheney was the mastermind of the torture program, he had the enthusiatic support of President Bush, then-CIA Director George Tenet, and then-National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice. Attorney General John Ashcroft was appalled, and he was deliberately kept "out of the loop," even though John Yoo was his employee. Secretary of State Powell was equally appalled. However, neither man resigned over the matter.

Cheney, Addington, Yoo, and Haynes operated from an underlying theory that the President has near-absolute power in his tole as commander in chief, with no oversight by, or interference of, the Legislative or Judicial Branches of government--one memorandum went so fas as to claim that the President may initiate military attacks against terrorists inside the United States, regardless whether innocent third parties may be killed or injured. They also operated from the belief that traditional interrogation tactics were insufficient to extract accurate information from terrorists, and that torture was required to obtain this objective. Everything I've ever read about police techniques suggests that torture results in information that is almost never accurate, and the FBI opposed torture largely for that reason. On the advice of Cheney's group of lawyers, Presidnet Bush nullified the Geneva Conventions as to suspected members of Al Qaeda and the Taliban and redefined torture to exclude most forms of torture. They also worked at coming up with a location where the U.S. could house terror suspects outside the legal jurisdiction of the U.S.

The results were a wide-randing "rendition" program in which the CIA used a fleet of corporate jets to fly suspected terrorists to countries less squeamish about torture than Western democracies are; an in-house CIA torture training program; a network of secret CIA prisons in Eastern Europe; the Guantanamo Bay detention facility; and the supsension of the writ of habeas corpus for terror-suspect detainees. That the United Staes would engage in such a thoroughly reprehensible program is shocking; that members of the bar eagerly provided rationale for this program by subverting the structure, spirit, and letter of the Constitution they are sworn to support and uphold shames the legal profession. Mayer emphasizes just how far outside the mainstream Cheney's group really was by discussing how some CIA officers and conservative Republican DOJ attorneys who opposed the use of torture attempted to reverse some of the extremist policies. Almost as shocking as the program is the complete impotence of the coequal Legislative branch of the U.S. Government; it's as if the Democratic House and Senate were content to let the clock run out on the Bush Administration instead of raising holy hell. The coequal Judicial Branch, however, took a stand and issued three Supreme Court opinions regarding the procedural rights of Guantanamo detainees.

Mayer's book details the treatment of detainees, some of whom were actual terrorists, some of whom were not. The CIA was not trained in torture, so it hired a pscyhologist who, strangely, reverse engineered a North Korean program designed to elicit false confessions and employed it in hopes of obtaining true ones. Mayer references reports from the Red Cross and a retired CIA officer commisioned by the U.S. Government, both of which concluded that the interrogation techniques being used indeed constituted torture--and that this torture constituted war crimes. She also references reports indicating that the majority of Guantanamo detainees had nothing to do with Al Qaeda or terrorism; rather, they were extremist Muslims who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Regardless whether detainees were terrorists or not, IMHO, the United States should never, ever employ torture. It doesn't work, and it puts us on a slippery slope that slides down into the same moral muck and mire where Al Qaeda dwells.

The Obama Administration is likely to end the torture program; whether the new administration also ditches the Bush Administration's aggressive view of Executive Branch power remains to be seen. I seriously doubt that Bush or Cheney are likely to be prosecuted for war crimes--the U.S. is far too powerful for any other countries to risk that, and this country certainly doesn't need the distraction during a recession--but wouldn't it be hilarious for Obama to pardon them on his first day in office, with no further explanation?

Oh, the humanity!

2008-11-21T05:38:00.002-06:00

Tina Fey couldn't have thought this up. Gov. Palin pardons a turkey, then, well, you have to see it to believe it. Tip of the hat to The Cajun Boy.

Don Draper, role model

2008-11-17T15:56:00.001-06:00

Sam Walton's Utopia

2008-11-12T11:11:00.007-06:00

T has become obsessive about getting Incredible Hulk plush toys from the crane machines in Wal-Mart foyers. He generally has an adult manipulate the crane for him, but he has of late insisted on having a go or two at it himself, which is good for his hand/eye coordination and fine motor skills. The quest became personal for DW and I this past Saturday. We became obsessed as we tried to pull an Incredible Hulk away from the glass on the back of the machine, grab ahold of it, move it, and drop it down the chute. T stood beside the machine, jumping up and down and shouting “green! green! green!” and yelling in agony whenever DW had to go into the store to get change for another go-around. A couple of people looked around the corner into the machine nook to make sure I wasn’t abusing my kid. We moved the Incredible Hulk so that his head was lying on the edge of the chute, and T became increasingly excited and agitated. DW finally got the toy on the hook and over the chute--and then it didn’t drop! She had to insert another quarter and push the button immediately, and the Incredible Hulk was T’s. He opened up the baby seat on the Wal-Mart cart and placed the toy there, for a ride through the store. Victory!

A celebrated his 10th birthday on Monday, and he had a very happy time at home. We decided to put up our Christmas tree early this year and create a season for the kids, to compensate for the fact that Christmas Day sucks out loud for them because nothing is open.

Alas, I didn’t get the star up on the tree by the time A got home on Sunday, so I took him to look at the one true star in most North American households this time of year.

A also has a thing for the machines in the Wal-Mart foyer, but he likes to have me read individual letters from the logos. I mimic a mechanical voice as I say “c-o-k-e” and so on. I’m hoping that A may develop enough of an understanding that letters form words and words are powerful that he may learn to read, even if he remains without speech.

We had an odd mens’ room experience on the way back to Alexandria yesterday. I took A into the bathroom at a Wal-Mart, where he generally uses a toilet stall. Both of the stalls in this mens’ room were in use, so I made A stand next to me and wait. And wait. And wait. Finally, I had to take him over to use a urinal, and I changed his pull-up while he stood there (he has a bowel control issue, and it can injure his dignity to be seen wearing pull-ups, which we only use while traveling, so I wasn't happy about changing him in the middle of the mens' room). I wanted to tell the guys in the stall that they should do like everybody else and go log on the Internet if they wanted to spank the monkey, but that this was a most inappropriate venue for that activity. I mean, who takes that long to go, you know?

Where were you when you heard the news?

2008-11-07T09:14:00.005-06:00

A CNN commentator (I can't remember which one) said that Barack Obama's election was one of those moments that people will remember where they were when they heard the news. I've always thought "I remember where I was when I heard that . . ." is hokey, but I was in my living room when Jon Stewart reported the news on Comedy Central. Notice Stephen Colbert's frantic attempt to keep from bursting into tears on the set. At the time, I thought it was part of his act, but, on second viewing, it appears that he was genuinely overcome by the news.

And now for something completely different

2008-11-05T05:50:00.004-06:00

President Obama. Wow! He managed to weave elements of MLK's Mountaintop Speech and Lincoln's Gettysburg Address into a victory speech that showed a sober, serious President-Elect to the American people. I've thought highly of Barack Obama since I heard his 2004 DNC speech casting aside the notion of a polarized, red state/blue state America, then later read The Audacity of Hope.

Obama's race had nothing to do with why I pressed the box next to his name yesterday, and it didn't really dawn on me until I saw enormous lines at African-American precincts and watched the spontaneous reactions to his speech last night that his election is an Historic Event in capital letters. I really don't care how it makes the United States look to the rest of the world, but, as a white Southerner who grew up in a virulently racist family, it sure is nice to know that a candidate with an African-American heritage could be elected President of the United States a relatively brief 40 years after Dr. King saw the proverbial mountaintop.

Judgment Day

2008-11-04T09:47:00.004-06:00

Your humble correspondent arrived at his polling place at 5:30 a.m. The doors opened at 6:00 a.m., and your working boy was done by 6:20. The photo is the line for his precinct, which is one of three that votes at the mall. The line was much longer, and the people at the back probably had about a two hour wait.

Anybody want to play the prediction game? Here's mine:

Obama--52% (338 electoral votes)
McCain--46% (200 electoral votes)
Other--2%

I played with an interactive map this morning, and there is a plausible way to get to a 269-269 Electoral College tie. It looks rather unlikely, but it's something that would be very fun to see.

Dexter, Si se puede!

2008-11-03T05:29:00.007-06:00

I couldn't help but laugh last night when the twisted serial-killer drama Dexter used a presidential campaign slogan as the title of an episode that aired two nights before a presidential election:

Anyhow, in last night's ep., assistant DA Miguel Prado enthusiastically assists Dex in a kill, giving our hero access to a prisoner he has wanted to gut for a very long time. Miguel continually referred to himself and Dexter as "we," making the campaign slogan title appropriate.

The id of the American Male--drill baby drill

2008-11-02T06:38:00.005-06:00

Your humble correspondent gave into temptation last night and picked up American Movie Classics' dramatic series Mad Men on DVD. I'd not seen any of the show, as the first season aired opposite Burn Notice, and we don't have tivo. I suspected that Mad Men would appeal to me, as several members of the production team of The Sopranos are involved in the show. Still, holy crap, this show is great!

Mad Men is all about the Freudian id and ego of the well-off American male, during the early 1960s--a period when the uninhibited desires of men pretty much had free reign--and the fallout that the male id had on the more inhibited women of the same period. The show is set in a glamorous Madison Avenue ad agency, in a time when the advertising industry was viewed as sexy and hip (except maybe when Darren Stevens worked there). The ad industry in Mad Men cynically sold an illusion of happiness, even if the product was toxic (cigarettes in the first episode, which made me think of the movie Thank You For Smoking). There is a ton of overt sexist aggression and a fabulously politically incorrect amount of cigarette smoking. There are glimpses in Season One of some of the social changes that were to come about later in the '60s (the Pill, for one, and a few strong female character), but only glimpses thus far.

One thing that hit home was the deluded version of happiness that the agency was selling. How many of us have looked around at our relative prosperity, good educations, decent careers, and otherwise pretty good circumstances, yet felt somehow empty and unfulfilled? It's like our inner, subconscious selves are out of alignment with what our conscious minds tell us we are, and even more out of alignment with what we show of ourselves to the rest of the world. Classic Jungian neurosis, I suppose.

The central character is advertising artist Don Draper (Jon Hamm), who has a lovely wife and family and a house in the suburbs. Yet, as an artist, he has a bohemian side, so he has an artiste girlfriend in Greenwich Village. He also puts the make on a female department store, to whom he is attracted by her strength and her understanding of his detached, nihilistic worldview.

In terms of intelligence and production values, this show is on the level of The Sopranos and Dexter. DW agrees, and she noticed that the sexual content of the show is PG-13 at worst, even though there is a ton of skirt-chasing going on. I noticed that Season Two of Mad Men will be ending this week. I look forward to picking that up on DVD also.

Hanging by a thread?

2008-11-01T09:39:00.005-05:00

Gov. Sarah Palin offers a singularly unorthodox interpretation of the First Amendment. I don't think Harvard Law School will be calling her in to substitute teach for Laurence Tribe anytime soon. That said, I'll confess to having a degree of sympathy for Gov. Palin, who appears to be in way over her head and doesn't know it. I'm not saying she's stupid (though her First Amendment analysis certainly is); she just isn't ready for the role she's been cynically put into.

Fed up in this country with being sick and tired

2008-10-31T06:07:00.003-05:00

I'm a huge political junkie, but even I'm ready to get this election over with.

Barack the Piemaker?

2008-10-28T13:16:00.004-05:00

The Obama campaign has bought a half-hour of television time tomorrow night at 7:00 p.m. Central time on CBS, NBC, and Fox--but not on ABC. That network offered to sell half an hour to the ridiculously well-funded campaign, but the campaign declined. I can only conclude that Barack Obama would rather watch
Pushing Daisies than his own informercial. I hope so, as Daisies is in danger of being cancelled.

Is someone going to turn into a pumpkin at midnight?

2008-10-23T15:33:00.003-05:00

Japanese Sunday

2008-10-21T17:17:00.004-05:00

Our local Zen group took part in the annual Japan Fest at the New Orleans Museum of Art this past Sunday. It went well, and there were plenty of curious onlookers outside the dojo we had set up in one of the galleries.

This gallery was adjacent to the dojo gallery, and I had this lovely statue to view when I was assigned to keep the curious onlookers from disturbing the dojo during introductory zazen instruction.

The Joker

2008-10-21T16:53:00.003-05:00

I liked The Dark Knight, and A. likes hats. It fits him rather well.

T. obsessed on the crane/hook machines in the WalMart foyer last week. I was in big trouble when I couldn't get the plush-toy Incredible Hulk he just had to have, even if I had pulled one out of the machine the night before (and it was in the car). It wasn't pretty when I had to take him inside the store to get change for a $10 so I could try some more. After that $10 expired, I took him to Target and bought him a Hulk action figure. He was over the Hulk thing by then, but he accepted the toy, I suppose just to be nice to me.

Doesn't this prove he isn't a Muslim? Not that there's anything wrong with that.

2008-10-21T16:36:00.006-05:00

Spotted in San Francisco:

Daisies and Dexter

2008-10-18T07:40:00.002-05:00

The sweet, whimsical Pushing Daisies is the Arrested Development of the past couple of television seasons, the best show that nobody watches. The show is a bit darker this season, to the extent that something so sweet and visually bright can be labeled "dark." Ned the Piemaker and Charlotte "The Lonely Tourist" Charles explore their emotionally formative backstories, which are balanced with the absurd homicide investigations and Olive Snook's hilarious spoof of The Sound of Music. This show might be just plain silly but for brilliant casting. Lee Pace, Anna Friel, Kristen Chenoweth, Chi McBride, Swoozie Kurtz, and Ellen Greene move effortlessly amongst the absudity, sadness, and hilarity of the show.

Season One of Pushing Daisies is out on DVD. Check it out.

Dexter has let go of "the only God [he] ever worshipped," his foster father Harry, and the Code of Harry by which he had lived every moment of his life. Ironically, though, he finds himself needing to follow Harry's code more than ever, thanks to an accidental killing. Jimmy Smits guest stars as a politically ambitions assistant D.A. who befriends Dexter in a most unusual circumstance. Smits's character, Miguel Prado, is becoming increasingly stalker-like as to Dex, and we saw with Doakes what happens to Dexter-stalkers. However, Miguel is a friendly stalker, and one wonders whether he may have dumped a few bags of bodies into the ocean himself.

Home for sale, formerly used as shipping container . . .

2008-10-15T12:57:00.002-05:00

Tyler Durden's Wall Street?

2008-10-06T12:50:00.003-05:00

The Dow Jones Industrial Average is down 576 points thus far today, and it has lost 3,800 points in the past year. I'm afraid to even look at my thrift savings plan, most of which is invested in a S&P 500 fund. The international finance capital meltdown reminds me of Tyler Durden's scheme in Fight Club to force mankind into a primitive state of nature by blowing up the buildings housing major financial institutions simultaneously. Wall Street and its counterparts in London, Paris, Frankfurt, etc. seem to be destroying themselves just fine without the assistance of Brad Pitt, Edward Norton, and their merry band of followers. President-in-waiting Obama and his economic team have their work cut out for them.

I've no idea how far down the food chain this meltdown will go. I heard this morning that my mortgage company has settled a lawsuit by allowing some subprime borrowers to renegotiate. Hopefully they'll let the rest of us do the same thing. One proposal from Academe to stabilize the real estate market would allow all U.S. homeowners to adjust our mortgages to a flat 5.25% for 30 years. That's not such a bad idea; it strikes me as much better than allowing subprime borrowers to have bankruptcy courts adjust their mortgages, which would clog those courts and might adversely affect the credit ratings of those borrowers during a time when credit is scarce. However, the international nature of this collapse makes me wonder whether anything the U.S. Government comes up with will do much good at all.

Cinematic Justice

2008-10-01T16:02:00.004-05:00

I just ordered the newly restored BluRay version of The Godfather trilogy. The previous DVD version was a total piece of junk, so I'm looking forward to seeing the two masterpiece films of that series in all their glory. The studio powers-that-be hired the restorationist who fixed Lawrence of Arabia, and the restored version of that film is stunning. It should be a fun little film festival at my house when the package arrives.

Holy Bailout, Bat-man!

2008-09-30T09:46:00.009-05:00

Well, the Wall Street bailout is dead for now, a massive wreck with mangled, charred bodies dangling from the shattered car windows. Or maybe not. I've been trying to wrap my brain around the disaster for the past few weeks, reading about collateralized debt obligations, stanches (ratings), subprime mortgages, and the like. I know very little about how Wall Street works, but it seems to me that too much faith was placed in the U.S. housing market as a way of making infinite profits, and too little attention was paid to the risk that housing prices might drop. It's like we're a banana republic, only our bananas are our houses. Whatever financial and regulatory structure emerges, there probably should be some checks and balances on overreliance on any particular form of wealth to support exotic securities that are beyond my comprehension.

I'm on the fence as to whether the Government should fix the problem to begin with--I wonder how much a large-ish drop in the stock market would really affect the rest of the economy--but I tend to lean towards whatever will preserve my Thrift Savings Plan and other peoples' 401(k) plans, and whatever might preclude a severe credit crunch that could result in banks owning businesses that rely on short-term credit as a matter of course.

Proud Hypocrite

2008-09-21T19:10:00.012-05:00

Last night, I was put on the spot in a way that resulted in my commission of an act that some might view as hypocritical. I was quite annoyed, but I managed to get through it without incident.

I am a firm believer in socially acceptable hypocrisy, the kind that greases gears that would otherwise shoot off sparks or come to a complete halt due to friction and physics. Not everybody understands the importance of socially acceptable hypocrisy in a culture that has veered dangerously towards brutal honesty in personal matters (brutal honesty does not appear to be the norm in the financial services industry, as we are shocked, shocked to discover). For example, a few years ago, I saw some teenagers smoking pot across the fence from the park where my kids were playing. The teenagers posed no danger to anybody, so I said nothing until we left. It was 5:00 on a Sunday afternoon, with a packed swimming pool to one side across the street and a deputy sheriff's house to the other side across the street. I felt like lecturing them with something like, "look, I don't care what you do, as long as I don't see you smoking it. When I was your age, kids smoked their stinkweed at midnight behind the dumpster at the bowling alley and had sex in their cars at the back of the unfinished subdivision. Everybody knew but didn't know, and their parents were able to be blissfully and deliberately ignorant. That kind of hypocrisy is implicitly understood as part and parcel of the Social Contract, and it helps the world function. So get with it and stop behaving like you're drinking your bong water."

In sum, I'm proud to be a hypocrite.

Memphian Exile

2008-09-01T16:51:00.006-05:00

Well, we survived Hurricane Gustav yesterday, though we remain in Memphis, as our town is officially closed and our house is without power. We kind of saw a couple of the big spots here in Memphis, but really didn't.

seventy bucks
for Elvis' jumpsuits?
went somplace else.

Lorraine Motel
American shrine
copyrights enforced

We went to Graceland yesterday and cut our losses at the $8.00 parking fee. It cost $28 just to see the house, and over $70 to see the fun Elvis stuff like those tacky jumpsuits. Also, DW didn't much like the notion of the Elvis security going through her bag.

Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. And I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.

--Dr. Martin Luther King, April 3, 1968
Early morning, April 4
Shot rings out in the Memphis sky
Free at last, they took your life
They could not take your pride

U2, Pride
After leaving Graceland in a huff, we went to the Lorraine Motel, which is now part of the National Civil Rights Museum. I took several pictures of the exterior of the site of Martin Luther King's martyrdom, but we chose not to go inside when we were asked to deposit any cell phones or cameras at the door. Evidently, someone has copyrighted some of the material inside the museum in order to make a little money. Isn't this a place where cameras and camcorders should be encouraged so that American children can be reminded of both our country's original sin (racism) and of the better angels of our nature?

Panic City

2008-08-29T14:31:00.003-05:00

Damn, this area is jittery today, the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. Hurricane Gustav is forecast to make landfall Tuesday morning down on The Bayou (Bayou Lafourche), in Cajun Boy's territory, yet I had difficulty buying gas this morning in Slidell, which is far removed from there. I don't know why, but that really cheesed me. I think it was just icing on the cake of overkill broadcasting, premature evacuations, and and a general sense of panic. Anyway, I was yelling, slamming my fist on the horn, and punching the steering wheel whenever I encountered the usual rush-hour frustration on the way into work this morning. I rarely get worked up like that.

Here we go again

2008-08-28T12:38:00.002-05:00

Well, this certainly sucks out loud. Fortunately, I reserved a room in Memphis just in case we feel compelled to evacuate. Maybe we'll go to Graceland or something.

The Moviegoers

2008-08-25T05:39:00.007-05:00

DW and I had an opportunity to play Politeness Man yesterday at the local cineplex, during a viewing of the movie about another superhero, Bat Man. Perhaps 30 minutes into the film, the ball cap-wearing philistine two seats over received, and responded to, a text message, shining his cell screen and making clicky noises. I said nothing, assuming that a theater employee would catch him next time around. After all, this theater previously had been a tad militant about its no-cell policy.

Sadly, the theater appears to have accepted the cellular decline of Western civilization, and such militant enforcement is no longer the case. With about 15 or 20 minutes left in the film, the cap-wearing philistine Cellular Man received a telephone call and began to engage in a conversation, no doubt concerning the purchase of whatever controlled substance he planned to use after the movie. "Get off the phone!" I shouted at him, to no avail. DW went to the lobby to summon help from theater employees, who were milling about, no doubt daydreaming about what they would do with that oily gunk to which the motion picture industry refers as "butter." I can only imagine the depraved horrors that go on in that den of celluloid atrocities. John Waters might learn a thing or two from the gunky daydreams I imagine these folks were having. I'm just saying.

Oh yes, back to our story. DW returned with a theater employee, who sat next to the cell phone scofflaw, spoke with him for a few seconds, then got up and left. Cellular Man and his wife placed their feet on their knees and refused to allow DW to pass through to her seat (one gets the feeling that these vile people have done this before). I looked underneath DW's seat and could not ascertain whether she had taken her purse with her, or I would have gathered her up and left the premises. I also worked through the mental calculations of whether it would be worth it to engage in a brawl inside the cineplex. Just then, DW summoned a theater employee, who returned with her, told the Cellular People to allow DW through, then disappeared instantaneously. Cellular Woman let her through, but Cellular Man attempted to trip her before letting her pass. A negligence action against the theater might have been an interesting prospect had DW fallen, but I'm glad she made it back to her seat. As the credits rolled, I shouted, "leave your damn phone home, next time, [expletive deleted]!" This all happened in a half-full theater, and nobody else had a thing to say about it. The Cellular People verbally accosted us in the lobby. DW made a point of loudly telling Cellular Woman not to try and intimidate her, which had the effect of shooing them of. The management provided us with movie passes, and I fired off an irate e-mail to corporate headquarters when we arrived home.

I think that if the cell-phone prohibition is dropped, then I should be allowed to blurt out snarky remarks and spoilers during movies. That is how some people used to watch movies in New Orleans, after all, which could make bad movies very fun.

On the Rollercoaster

2008-08-23T07:40:00.005-05:00

Fortuna's wheel spun low this week for your humble correspondent. Mixing metaphors, I took a steep dive on my emotional rollercoaster, into a significant depressive episode that lasted pretty much all week. Mixing metaphors again, I'm mired in a swampy personal situation in which there is no good outcome, and that was on my mind much of the week. Also, my boys are having a hard time with the beginning of the school year, and that also was on my mind. Yesterday, I had a scorching headache all day long that only got worse whenever I had to read or focus on my computer screen. Pretty much all I do on my job is read and focus on my computer screen, and my head was hurting so bad at one point that my eyes starting watering. Once I got home and watched television for a while, the headache pretty much went away.

On a more positive note, I'm taking this weekend completely off. I haven't done this since early June, as I've either been working, running around town with the kids, or addressing issues raised by my mother's death. None of that this weekend. I may go see Tropic Thunder today, I haven't decided. If the weather were nicer, I'd think about putting my kayak into the water.

A puddle of congratulations to Gentle Readers and parents-to-be Bill and Karen, who moved to New York City this past week for a taxation LLM program at NYU. Living in New York is among the many things I wished I had done way back when. I had thought of referring those two to Gentle Reader The Cajun Boy for tips on living in New York as an outsider and getting invited to A-list parties with other witty, urbane hipsters, but living there as an expatriate Utahn has got to be very different from living there as an expatriate Louisianian.

Oh yeah, the rollercoaster in the photograph is the late, great Texas Cyclone from Astroworld. That was a very fast coaster, and it was made even more fun when you walked underneath it while standing in line and could see loose slats of wood hanging in the breeze. DW smacked me with an umbrella when the guard-bar on our car wouldn't open and I said we would just have to go again.

There's No Place Like Home Depot

2008-08-17T21:38:00.013-05:00

T likes his tool belt. A likes the new piano.

You can do it. We can help.

2008-08-06T21:29:00.001-05:00

Home Depot Honors Fallen Soldiers With Great Prices On Tools
Hats off to The Onion. This is the tackiest thing I've seen in a long time.

Just a couple of pictures

2008-08-03T21:19:00.002-05:00

A dilemma, wrapped in an enigma, shrouded in something or other

2008-07-31T20:41:00.005-05:00

It's been a little over two weeks since my mother died, and it's difficult to articulate exactly how I feel about it. I've had some moments of leaden sadness, but, for the most part, I quite honestly don't feel much at all. The ability to deny appropriate emotions, or at least to suppress them deeply, is something I inherited from my mom, so perhaps it's appropriate that I'm having a hard time feeling as though I'm having a hard time. We were estranged--first partially, then entirely--during the last few years of her life, but the lack of emotional response strikes me as a bit odd.

I have had significant interaction with my sister in the past couple of weeks. She contracted a nasty sinus infection that quickly turned into pneumonia, landing her in the hospital. That was pretty crappy, coming right on the heels of the funeral. She is astonishingly better and more in-control than she was a couple of years ago; I hope she is able to maintain her current frame of mind and keep body and soul together on the scant financial resources she will have. I'm going to do what I can to help her set things up. Beyond that, I'll take things very slowly--much slower than she would like, I'm afraid.

Wow!

2008-07-24T06:21:00.004-05:00

The China Central Television building in Beijing. I saw a story about this the other day on the home page on DW's laptop. This is way cool in my book. The building will be completed in December 2009, and Rem Koolhaas and Ole Scheeren are the architects.

Yes, let's beat up disabled children, shall we?

2008-07-22T16:28:00.004-05:00

Who is this Michael Savage idiot, anyway? Other than someone I'd like to smack upside the head, I mean. What a douche!

My, but that panda is crunchy!

2008-07-21T13:36:00.003-05:00

Gosh, look at what they're making cereal out of these days! How barbaric!

Holy Psycho Anarcho-Nihilist, Batman!

2008-07-19T20:05:00.003-05:00

We saw The Dark Knight this afternoon. We had been looking forward to viewing the film at the local IMAX, but that crummy theater closed its IMAX permanently just in the nick of time. Christopher Nolan actually filmed parts of the film with IMAX cameras, so this film must be particularly sweet on the right screen. I thought about driving to Houston, but the IMAX there is sold out for all features this weekend. Oh well.

All the hoo-haw about Heath Ledger's performance in this movie is justified. His Joker isn't just a gangster in a goofy get-up, but a cynical anarchist and a nihilist who engages in antisocial behavior because he likes to watch the chaos he creates. Ledger looks and sounds wonderfully creepy, though a funny, brainy kind of creepy. The Joker also comes close to seducing Batman out of his job, and the wanted superhero is susceptible to that kind of seduction. Their cat-and-mouse game is wonderfully played by Ledger and Christian Bale. Heath Ledger's performance might land him the Oscar he should have won for Brokeback Mountain.

Greatest legal citation since "The Case of the Man who was Shot in the Buttocks"

2008-07-19T12:21:00.003-05:00

Here, respondents are authorized to bring suit on behalf of the payphone operators, but they have no claim to the recovery. Indeed, their take is not tied to the recovery in any way. Respondents receive their compensation based on the number of payphones and telephone lines operated by their clients, see App. 198, not based on the measure of damages ultimately awarded by a court or paid by petitioners as part of a settlement. Respondents received the assignments only as a result of their willingness to assume the obligation of remitting any recovery to the assignors, the payphone operators. That is, after all, the entire point of the arrangement. The payphone operators assigned their claims to respondents “for purposes of collection,” App. to Pet. for Cert. 114a; respondents never had any share in the amount collected. The absence of any right to the substantive recovery means that respondents cannot benefit from the judgment they seek and thus lack Article III standing. “When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose.” Bob Dylan, Like A Rolling Stone, on Highway 61 Revisited (Columbia Records 1965).

Sprint Comm. Co. L.P. v. APCC Servs, Inc., 128 S. Ct. 2531, 2550 (2008) (Roberts, C.J., dissenting).

Daily Zen, woo-hoo!

2008-07-18T21:26:00.000-05:00

Shall I tell you what it is to know?
To say you know when you know,
And to say you do not, when you do not,
That is knowledge.

- Confucius

Death in the Family

2008-07-17T09:26:00.003-05:00

My mother died early yesterday. I've been estranged from the family for quite some time, but I will be attending the funeral tomorrow. It might be a bit more difficult than most funerals; we'll see.

ETA: I'm in shock. The funeral was very nice, and not at all confrontational.

Don't mess with a missionary man

2008-07-16T11:43:00.013-05:00

In one of the more curious episodes in recent Mormon cultural history, the creator of the Mormons Exposed calendar of bare-chested, recently returned missionaries has been excommunicated from the LDS Church, and some of the models on the calendar also are facing ecclesiastical discipline. I thought this calendar was nothing more or less than just plain silly when I first heard of it. However, I suppose the church would rather not encourage people to imagine what might be underneath those black suits, white shirts, name plaques, and conservative ties--though some LDS teenagers have been known to have active imaginations on that issue. I took a look at the calendar website this morning, and I noticed a couple of T-shirts for sale making light of Utah's polygamist past. Especaially in light of the recent FLDS/Texas fiasco, I would think those T-shirts would be as likely to offend current Mormon sensitivities as would the hardbodies on the calendar. And what's this guy doing standing in front of Buddhist statues, anyway?

Blinding me with science

2008-07-14T15:16:00.004-05:00

Researchers at Harvard have discovered six genes they believe are related to autism causation. However, they noted that pretty much each family with autistic genes has its own unique etiology. Evidently, these genes are responsible for the activation of synapses in the brain in the first few years of life; in autistic kids the activation switches never turn on. The good news is that the medical profession is getting better at formulating medications that flip genetic switches. Also, the result appears to validate applied behavior analysis programs and their intense, repetitive training, which may help develop synapses. My sons' ABA training is hard work for them, but they enjoy learning, and the ABA appears to have improved their intellectual capabilities as well as their overall behavior.

Faux-Bama

2008-07-14T12:55:00.005-05:00

The Obama-leaning New Yorker, to which your humble correspondent subscribes, is in politically incorrect hot water for satirizing some of the nutty rumors that have been spread about the candidate. The first thing I do with that magazine when it arrives is to read through the cartoons.

The Magic Bus, Death Edition

2008-07-12T19:40:00.006-05:00

Wilderness . . . not only offered an escape from society but also was an ideal stage for the Romantic individual to exercise the cult that he made of his own soul.

--Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (quoted by Jon Krakauer)

Christopher McCandless died alone inside an abandoned bus on an Alaskan trail in August 1992, and, if youtube is any indication, the bus has become a shrine--to what, exactly, I don't know. Nothing against McCandless; I've always had a fondness for people who march to the beat of a different drummer, and certainly there are a fair number of people who yearn for what they perceive as a simpler, more primitive life, a life that will provide them with a spiritual epiphany. I say "what they perceive as" based on McCandles's diary entries and what litle I've read about the amount of time and energy hunter/gatherer types spend hunting for game, gathering edible vegetation, warding off disease, and staying warm. Certainly that kind of life is more primitive, but simpler? I'll give my eight hours a day to the U.S. Courts, thank you.

Into the Wild is Jon Krakauer's meticulously researched and brilliantly written account of the last two years of McCandless's life. McCandless graduated from Emory University in 1990, then went on the road. He changed his name to "Alexander Supertramp" and cut off contact with his family. He frequently went days without eating, and lived on rice and whatever he could hunt or gather. Finally, in 1992, he took off for his great Alaskan adventure, a trip he thought would bring about an inner spiritual transformation as he lived off the land. By July 1992, McCandless's diary entries indicated that he was ready to leave the wilderness and return to society. The problem was, McCandless was untrained and unprepared to live in Alaska. The river he had walked across to get to his bus had swollen and become impassible by the time he was ready to leave, and he hadn't bothered to obtain a detailed map that would have directed him to an easy way across the river a few hours from where he was. So he went back to the bus to wait things out. Something went terribly wrong at the end of July--McCandless belived he had eaten toxic potato seeds--and he starved to death by the middle of August. Krakauer opines that a toxic mold or fungus that had grown on the seeds imparied McCandless's ability to metabolize food. Whatever caused him to starve, Christopher McCandless weighed 67 pounds when his corpse was found.

McCandless's death made national news, and Outside magazine assigned Krakauer to write an article. The article led Krakauer to people who had known McCandless in the final two years of his life. His interviews with those people and McCandless's diaries allowed him to piece together a gripping narrative of an adventurous but tortured soul in search of himself. McCandless was obsessed with Tolstoy, Thoreau, and Jack London, and his extensive wilderness adventures somewhat emulated his favorite authors.

McCandless detested his materialistic (by his standards) parents, and he rejected their offers of a new car and a mommy/daddy scholarship to law school (he did what?) Krakauer himself is a wilderness adventurer, having disappointed his own father by rejecting the family's one true path to success, also known as Harvard Medical School. He drew upon his own experience climbing a glacial mountain in Alaska in an attempt to understand McCandless. Krakauer felt vibrant and was intensely focused throughout his climb, as he was in all his adventures. Danger brought him alive. McCandless evidently had the same kind of feelings throughout his adventures. The most obvious difference is that, although Krakauer took huge risks, he was a trained, experienced climber who made appropriate preparations. A less obvious difference is that Krakauer didn't come off as all that interested in using his adventures to gain a complete spiritual transformation.

The most dangerous thing I've ever done in the great outdoors is some mild-mannered open water diving. Diving provided me not with the thrill of danger, but rather a feeling of tranquility, something that was badly needed. I haven't been in a few years, but I'm planning to go down again one of these days. I did go hiking once in the Bear River Range in Utah with no compass and a small supply of water, and I felt terribly stupid when I got lost. However, I was able to see the parking lot from the highest peak and maintain my sense of direction until I got back to the car. One of my fond fantasies is to hike, camp, and run the Rio Grande rapids in the Big Bend region of Texas. If I go, I'll attempt to be properly prepared and provisioned.

Into the Wild brought the movie and novel Fight Club to mind. Chris McCandless and Tyler Durden shared a desire for a return to a primitive lifestyle, and both had inter-generational issues. McCandless tested his body by living in an extreme manner on the edge of society, while Tyler and his followers tested their bodies by having the crap beaten out of themselves. McCandless, however, became an anarchist and withdrew from civilization, while Tyler became a fascist and attempted to create anarchy by destroying civilization. I suppose sons have always had issues with their fathers--Oedipus Rex is rather an old play--and father/son issues have persisted even after Freud has gone out of style.

The book also raised one issue of which I was vaguely aware but had not articulated--the responsibility of an individual to conduct himself or herself in a particular manner to spare the feelings of his or her friends and family members. I have thought some about living my life in comformity with the expectations of others (I agin' it as a general proposition, but I suppose I admire nonconformists far more than I emulate them), but not so much about regulating my actions to spare their feelings. Chris McCandless's relatives wondered aloud how he could bring them so much grief. It's a fair question. However, apart from acting on an actual death wish--something Krakauer didn't see in McCandless--I don't know that one should be responsible for the feelings of anybody beyond his or her spouses and children. Beyond that, one's life is one's own, I suppose.

As for transformative spiritual experiences, I'm dubious about reliance on external stimuli, without something more, though I suppose that some experiences and phenomena are more helpful than others. In the end, however, the actual transformation occurs inside the individual, and can't be borrowed from nature or any person or institution. On second thought, I suppose that intense physical activities requiring complete concentration and perfect coordination of mind and body tend to eradicate the distinction in Western thought between mind and body. Nondualist Eastern thought rejects such a distinction in the first place. Perhaps one can gain a kind of existential, experiential transformative spirituality through adventures like McCandless's.

I can see why people see seomthing admirable in McCandless; I can also see why others see him as a reckless idiot. What I don't get is why people still make pilgrimages to what McCandless called his Magic Bus. Now I've got to see Sean Penn's movie version, which features the bus and other Chris McCandless locales.

Why, it's an article about me.

2008-07-11T13:15:00.004-05:00

The Glen Rose Reporter ran an article this week about my search for my biological parents. The article came about after I asked the newspaper for archival materials, and I'm grateful to the newspaper for publishing it. Hopefully, someone will come forward with some useful information.

Rotten Apples

2008-07-11T11:03:00.004-05:00

I'm stuck in the iPocalypse this morning. I already have an iPhone, and I stupidly clicked "yes" when iTunes asked me if I wanted to upgrade to the 2.0 software. Now my phone is stuck in emergency mode and it won't connect to the iTunes store to do whatever it is needs to be done to complete the update. I can't imagine why Apple and AT&T weren't prepared for this meltdown. It reminds me of the day AOL went to unlimited access pricing and everybody tried to get on simultaneously.

ETA: iPocalypse over, 2:52 p.m.

MacBama? McLear? WTMcF?

2008-07-11T06:13:00.009-05:00

An Internet bulletin board discussion of Barack Obama's brazen reversal on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act made me think of a certain ruthlessly ambitious character, though the character had to undergo a sudden sex change operation to suit my purposes:
Doctor:
What is it he does now? Look how he rubs his hands.

Gentlewoman:
It is an accustom'd action with him, to seem thus
washing his hands. I have known him continue in this a quarter of
an hour.

President Obama (holding up FISA legislation that's too damn long for me to read all the way through and get my work done today):
Yet here's a spot.

Doctor:
Hark, he speaks. I will set down what comes from him, to
satisfy my remembrance the more strongly.

President Obama:
Out, damn'd spot! out, I say!—
One; two: why, then 'tis time to do't.
—Hell is murky.—
Fie, my lord, fie, a soldier, and
afeard? What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our pow'r to accompt?
—Yet who would have thought the old constitution to
have had so much blood in it?

John McCain, too, has his Shakepearian antecedent:

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks!
You sulphurous and Osama-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving "activist judges,"
Singe my white head! And thou, all shock-and-awe,
Strike flat the thick rotundity o' Iraq!
Crack nature's molds, all germens spill at once
That make ingrateful man!

A Child's Nostalgia

2008-07-08T09:19:00.002-05:00

T meets up with Ronald McDonald, the magic maker of McNuggets.

A advertises his mother's alma mater. Surprisingly, the WalMart in Logan, Utah, carries no Utah State hats or t-shirts, and DW and I had to go to a sporting goods store and look around to find one of the few items of USU memorabilia available in the town where that university is located. Around here, you can't avoid LSU stuff in any mercantile establishment.

A had a rough weekend at home. He was having allergy issues and obviously felt under the weather. His TV/VCR went haywire and I had to hide it from him, and he hasn't learned how to push all those fun buttons on the Playstation 3 that we use as a DVD player. He also became nostalgic, something that is unusual for him. He directed me around town by pointing in the direction he wanted me to drive, and we drove past his old school and on some old joyrides that we hadn't done since gas was maybe $1.50 a gallon.

Louisiana High School Biology Class Caught on Video!

2008-07-01T14:36:00.004-05:00

Our Legislature and Governor are so concerned about the state of science education that they have given us this law:

AN ACT

To enact R.S. 17:285.1, relative to curriculum and instruction; to provide relative to the teaching of scientific subjects in public elementary and secondary schools; to promote students' critical thinking skills and open discussion of scientific theories; to provide relative to support and guidance for teachers; to provide relative to textbooks and instructional materials; to provide for rules and regulations; to provide for effectiveness; and to provide for related matters.

Be it enacted by the Legislature of Louisiana:

Section 1. R.S. 17:285.1 is hereby enacted to read as follows:

§285.1. Science education; development of critical thinking skills
A. This Section shall be known and may be cited as the "Louisiana Science Education Act."

B.(1) The State Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, upon request of a city, parish, or other local public school board, shall allow and assist teachers, principals, and other school administrators to create and foster an environment within public elementary and secondary schools that promotes critical thinking skills, logical analysis, and open and objective discussion of scientific theories being studied including, but not limited to, evolution, the origins of life, global warming, and human cloning.

(2) Such assistance shall include support and guidance for teachers regarding effective ways to help students understand, analyze, critique, and objectively review scientific theories being studied, including those enumerated in Paragraph (1) of this Subsection.

C. A teacher shall teach the material presented in the standard textbook supplied by the school system and thereafter may use supplemental textbooks and other instructional materials to help students understand, analyze, critique, and review scientific theories in an objective manner, as permitted by the city, parish, or other local public school board unless otherwise prohibited by the State Board of Elementary and Secondary Education.

D. This Section shall not be construed to promote any religious doctrine, promote discrimination for or against a particular set of religious beliefs, or promote discrimination for or against religion or nonreligion.

E. The State Board of Elementary and Secondary Education and each city, parish, or other local public school board shall adopt and promulgate the rules and regulations necessary to implement the provisions of this Section prior to the beginning of the 2008-2009 school year.

Section 2. This Act shall become effective upon signature by the governor or, if not signed by the governor, upon expiration of the time for bills to become law without signature by the governor, as provided by Article III, Section 18 of the Constitution of Louisiana. If vetoed by the governor and subsequently approved by the legislature, this Act shall become effective on the day following such approval.

Naughty Words

2008-06-30T19:01:00.003-05:00

Everybody associates the late George Carlin with the 7 words you can't say on television. He's known best in my house as the narrator of Thomas the Tank Engine.

There's nothing like the smell of beignets in the morning

2008-06-26T11:21:00.004-05:00

I had breakfast this morning with gentle reader Doug from Calgary. It was nice of his company to send him down here, and it's always nice to meet online acquaintances in person.

Of Families and Frontiers

2008-06-23T20:54:00.007-05:00

DW's family reunion last week was a success, as some of the gentle readers of this space can attest. None of the uncomfortable scenarios I feared materialized, and my blood pressure remained normal the entire time. I would like to send all good karma, positive energy, and prayers to the family of one gentle reader whose grandson was struck by a motorcycle shortly after the family returned home.

This was a reunion of DW's parents and siblings and of my FIL and his siblings. My FIL's family on both sides has been in Utah and Idaho since the 1840s. The earliest of those were genuine frontier settlers--ranchers and farmers, mostly--whether they intended to be (in the case of the Mormons) or not (one ancestor's family stopped in Almo, Idaho, on the way to California and just stayed there). Some of DW's relatives currently work the land, and my FIL is an agricultural economist, but DW and her siblings grew up in urbanized settings, with only occasional exposure to the arduous physical labor of ranchwork. When I was a kid in Oklahoma, our yard bordered on a cattle farm, but I knew absolutely nothing about the work that went on back there. Neither of my parents and none of my grandparents were involved with agriculture of livestock, so I have less of a connection to the land than does my DW.

The mythology of the Old West and the westward-shifting American frontier, of course, have always served as part and parcel of the definition of who and what white Americans are, realizing, of course, the violence and injustice in taking much of that frontier from its native inhabitants. Also, the ideal of the American small farmer has been a part of our politics since Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton disputed the nature of our country. The taciturn dirt farmers; the cattle ranchers; the oilmen; the gunsligners; the pious Mormons; the prospectors; the dreamers; the hustling preachers; the evil railroad and mining companies--these all form a part of our collective national self-image, I think, though clearly not part of the reality in the lives of most Americans of my generation. We are reminded of that past by the mythology of the West and by artifacts like the accordion that DW's grandfather took on the trail to pass the time while he tended sheep.

During the reunion of this family with its own roots in what was once a frontier region, and in the days subsequent to that reunion, I just happened to read two fabulous books that address boundaries and frontiers, albeit in very different ways. I liked Cormac McCarthy's The Road so much that I purchased his Border Trilogy, and I finished reading All The Pretty Horses (1992)yesterday. The plot has teenage ranching Texans running away into Mexico, then returning home, in the 1940s. In the Texas these boys knew, property transfers (in this case, horses) were effected with contracts and lawsuits, while in the Mexico they came to know, such transfers were effected with arms and official corruption. The northern Mexico of McCarthy's story somewhat resembles HBO's Deadwood, an outlaw encampment where might made right and life was cheap. All The Pretty Horses ends with our protagonist riding off into the sunset, into an uncertain future in a disappearing frontier.

At the Salt Lake airport, I spotted a copy of Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air (1997), a firsthand account of the May 1996 Mount Everest disaster. Ironically, perhaps, I began reading the book over the Wasatch Range and the High Uintahs--tall mountains, for sure--and got through about half of it while flying at an altitude only slightly higher than the summit of Everest. Krakauer--an adventure sports journalist--was a member of one of the ill-fated expeditions that climbed to the highest point on the planet on May 10, 1996. As a hypoxic Krakauer descended, an unexpected storm blew in from the South, stranding several climbers at altitudes where human beings are not naturally equipped to be. Krakauer and his fellow climbers found themselves at the frontier of human survival; there were nine deaths, including the leaders of both expeditions. The clouds, viewed from above, appeared innocent enough, but they brought a thunderstorm/blizzard with hurricane-force winds. A series of bad decisions delayed for several hours the final ascent of the two expedition parties at the center of the story, most notably the failure of the leaders of those parties to ensure that ropes were set up at a potential bottleneck very near the summit. The leaders also failed to set a firm turnaround time to ensure that climbers would not run out of supplemental oxygen, whether or not they reached the summit. However, a few climbers assumed a reasonable turnaround time, turned around short of the summit, and survived. The highest peak I've ever hiked is 10,000 feet, and, after reading this book, that may be the highest this lowlander ever hikes.

Notes on a Road Trip

2008-06-20T08:02:00.006-05:00

Your humble correspondent's in-laws are holding a family reunion in Logan, Utah, this week. It's been quite nice thus far, with none of the dueling banjoes or visits from the sheriff's office that would not be surprising in an any meeting of your humble correspondent's own maternal family.

I had a surprise! sneeze Wednesday morning in the airport garage--I'll spare you the gory details, gentle reader--but the end result was that I flew from Baton Rouge to Salt Lake City a la commando.

The flight from BR to Dallas was uneventful and so boring that I composed some bad political haiku.

president barack
springtime for america
allergy season

arizona john
eternal desert summer
sincerely, george bush

Your humble correspondent played golf for the first time in his life yesterday, and actually enjoyed it. Thanks to gentle reader Bill and my other brothers-in-law for talking me into going.

Dixie Dingbats

2008-06-12T08:30:00.000-05:00

Fathers and Sons, Postapocalyptic Version

2008-06-09T21:40:00.006-05:00

On the recomendation of gentle reader Craig, I read Cormac McCarthy's dystopian father/son novel The Road. Civilization as we know it was destroyed by nuclear warfare several years before the story takes place, and few survivors remain. Among the survivors are a father and son who are constantly on the move, seeking warmth, food, and survival. The unnamed father in the story is a jack of all trades, a la McGuyver, who can make use of anything he can scrounge. He protects his son against cold, illness, predatory gangs of survivors, and a dangerous desire to share the duo's limited resources with other desperate survivors. The son is the father's sole reason for living, and the father is the only other person in the son's life.

The son was born shortly after the nuclear winter began, and, therefore, knows nothing of the world as we know it apart from what his father has told him about it. The son also relies on his father for explanations about the harsh ethics created by their dire circumstances. I kind of related to this aspect of the story, especially when the son would say "it's okay" whenever the father would provide explanations. My oldest son frequently says, "it's okay," as he works to calm himself following a disappointment such as me not taking him on an airplane whenever we drive past the airport (not always successfully, as he destroyed the armrest in my car the other day). Much like the father in the story, I worry about my childrens' futures after my own death. They are entirely dependent on the adults in their lives in order to function in the world, and, barring a cure or a miracle, they will always be largely dependent on other people. They are particularly close to me and always have been. I'm sure they'll fare well without me being around, but the concern will always be there.

Additionally, some poignant moments in The Road involved the father either watching the son sleep or putting him to sleep. Our boys are ages 9 and 11, and we have the same bedtime rituals we had when they were infants. Those rituals have always been almost sacred to me.

ETA: I recommend this book to any gentle readers who might be expectant fathers. You know who you are.

T uses anything that looks like luggage to feed his fantasy of driving to the airport and boarding an airplane. He mostly used plastic first aid kit boxes, but brought out my old briefcase once or twice. He's happy as a clam riding around town with those containers in the car, at least until we drive past the airport.

Good, Bad, and Ugly

2008-06-06T08:23:00.004-05:00

The good: I finally finished reading Joseph O'Connor's fabulous novel Redemption Falls a couple of nights ago; I took a hiatus from the book to work on my house. This book took so long for me to get through in part because the writing is so gorgeous I found myself reading some paragraphs three or four times. For example:

There is a place to which he goes when the dread bubbles up. A Republic that exists in the air. A realm of queenly women encountered by lakes, Drovers and cowboys. Redcoats and pikesmen. King John the Conquerer and the Old Woman of Ireland. The Jesus of the hymns, and shipwrecked sailors, and the wild colonial boys. And he wanters this country of inherited song, lifting its rocks of rhyme. Here is the Holy Virgin, sweet Star of the Sea, spinning gold with Black-Eyed Susan. Cotton-Eye Joe strumming a lute for the Trickster, their faces grave as gravestones. John the Baptist in the Jordan, singing "Revenge for Skibbereen"--and he ast his gal for water, but she gev him kerosene.

The novel is set up as a narrative interspersed with primary source documents. The central characters are Irish-Americans, displaced from Ireland, then displaced by the American Civil War. Redemption Falls is a dump of a town in the "Mountain Territory," and a few of the characters find some sort of redemption at the end of the book. The main themes of the book, however, are tragic love, death, war, and belonging. There's also a search for a blood relative that hits a bit close to home.

The bad: DW and I watched CBS's Swingtown last night to see if it was as bad as we thought it would be. The show is in the so-bad-it's-good category, so we may tune in next week out of curiosity. After one commercial block, our screen went black. DW asked whether the show was so bad that it had already been cancelled. The conceit of the series is that a middle-class suburban family in 1976 moves to a wealthier neighborhood, across the street from a couple who happen to be swingers. The parents from the family that just moved in go to a party at the swingers' house and decide to pop quaaludes and swap partners. I've never swung, but I suspect that most people wouldn't engage in swinging just because their new neighbors ask them to. The show reminded me of what a former coworker said about baby boomers: They did too many drugs in the 60s and ruined recreational drug use; had too much sex in the 70s, got too many STDs, and ruined recreational sex; drank too much in the 80s and ruined drunkenness; and made too much money in the 90s and ruined greed--what's left for us?

I was 13 years old in 1976, so bits and pieces of the show wrang true. In one scene, two teenage boys get caught looking at porn, and the dad tells his son just don't let his mother catch him with that. When I was 12 or 13, I found my dad's tiny porn stash behind some bullets in his closet (funny juxtaposition, that) and converted it for my, um, use. I mentioned that to my mom a few years ago, and she said, "so that's what happened to it." It struck me as hilarious that my parents had a son in puberty and didn't think to check my room for the missing stash of naughty stuff.

The ugly: The 1970s clothing on Swingtown. Ew.