"Gabriel is now on a recovery path at the public charter school Sobriety High in Minnesota."
From Lou Dobbs Tonight, Wednesday, March 28, 2007.

Sobriety High? Is that like Abstinence Drunk? Teetotaler Smashed?

For the uninitiated, I assure you, the above sentence is grammatically sound.

For the tale behind the whole, torrid affair, and some new tracks, try their MySpace page, and home page.

If you don't like Priestbird, surely you'll like Museum Pieces. Try their MySpace page here. I love the track "Stayed Too Long."

The vast majority of even subprime borrowers have been making their payments. Indeed, fewer than 15 percent of borrowers in this most risky group have even been delinquent on a payment, much less defaulted.

Stately bow to Marginal Revolution.

My take? Private lenders and private borrowers are finding each other and agreeing on terms. When the borrower defaults, both parties lose. What exactly is the problem here?

Today Lou Dobbs will testify before the House Subcommittee on Terrorism, Nonproliferation, and Trade on "Trade, Foreign Policy and the American Worker."

Anyone who takes subcommittee hearings separately seriously after the MLB steroid hearings is cordially invited to watch.

(Yeah, "separately" instead of "seriously." But separately, folks: that was a weird typo.)

UPDATE: It occurs to me that this may be precisely the reason I have lost interest in 24. Any government that calls a non-journalist to testify as a non-witness to a nonexistent "war on the middle class" is wholly unable to identify, track, find, interrogate, torture, kill, and bury a lead suspect in a terror plot at all, much less in a measly hour or two.

Actually forgot to post yesterday. Not that I didn't have a dispatch ready, I had three ready. I just, plain ... forgot. To the three readers who showed up yesterday looking for snark and circumstance, sorry.

Try Spring Flight to the Land of Fire, by The Cape May. Vaporous by Elsiane. The Fire Theft by Paul Michel. Or try one of these four songs from Alexisonfire.

I'm not quite ready to cry racism on American Idol, but twice in a row now a second-tier black singer has fallen, leaving several third-tier white singers (I won't even mention Sanjaya again). But if Lakisha or Melinda are voted off, I'm calling the EEOC.

Colony Collapse Disorder, referring to bee colonies. From Wikipedia:


Symptoms

A colony which has collapsed from CCD is generally characterized by:

• Complete absence of adult bees in colonies, with no or little build-up of dead bees in or in front of the colonies.
• Presence of capped brood in colonies. Bees normally will not abandon a hive until the capped brood have all hatched.
• Presence of food stores, both honey and bee pollen:
• i. which is not immediately robbed by other bees
• ii. when attacked by hive pests such as wax moth and small hive beetle, the attack is noticeably delayed.
  

Possible causes and research

While the exact mechanisms of CCD are unknown, pathogens, pesticides or mite associations are suspected as causative agents. Whether any single factor is responsible, or a combination of factors (acting independently in different areas affected by CCD, or acting in tandem), is still unknown; it is likewise still uncertain whether this is a genuinely new phenomenon, as opposed to a known phenomenon that previously only had a minor impact.

UPDATE: I've done a bit more work on the subject since the original post. The Wikipedia page has also changed significantly. Bottom line: bees pollinate some 30% of the food produced in this country, but tens of billions of bees have not returned to the hive after foraging. They either went lost or, more likely, were killed by pest or disease. Without bees, there is no pollination, and therefore no food. It is a problem, but not one without solutions, and certainly not one that merits Armageddonspeak.

The poor are unable to enter into contracts voluntarily. Contractual agreements with the poor should be voided outright, and the private entities with which the poor entered into these agreements should absorb all associated costs.
--Robert Reich stops just short of saying this, here

From Wikipedia:

The (now disused) interjection 'Snails is a minced oath whose full form is God's nails, referring perhaps to the Crucifixion nails rather than to fingernails.

That I did not know.

I met with an insurance broker last week, and asked him to explain the high price of health coverage. He barely needed a moment to consider.

1. Over-utilization. A commodity that is higher in demand is more expensive.
   
2. Technological advances. A commodity that requires more expensive machinery -- which in turn requires costly maintenance -- will be more expensive.
   
3. Overly cautious doctors. Needs no explanation.
   
4. Limited or no price shopping on behalf of the end user. Bizarre federal tax law allows businesses to pay for health insurance with pre-tax dollars, but does not allow individuals the same. This way the consumer and the end user are two different entities. Market distortions ensue.
   
5. Indiscriminate pharmaceutical drug use. Again: higher demand, higher price.
   
6. Limited or no emphasis on wellness. Waiting until you are sick sadly limits your options.
   

It's an indictment of market-based health care, to be sure, but # 1, # 3, # 4, # 5 all indict a single-payer system as well. Technological advances could arguably slow under universal health coverage. Emphasis on wellness would arguably increase under universal coverage.

Who is to Blame for the Mortgage Carnage and Coming Financial Disaster? Unregulated Free Market Fundamentalism Zealotry.

And the piece lives up to the promise:

...be ready for a cabal of supply side voodoo ideologues...

...other assorted voodoo religion priests...

...fairy tale spinned by free market supply side voodoo fundamentalism zealots...

...listen for example Larry Kudlow extolling every evening on CNBC the virtue of unregulated wild-west cowboy capitalism...

...Blaming the now too late government crackdown on free market mortgage practices that were utterly reckless for the final bust and crash is like blaming the doctor for imposing bitter medicine to cure the disease of a reckless patient who lived in a bubble and spent the last few years on a diet of booze, drugs and artery clogging junk food. This latest mortgage carnage did not happen because of excessive over-regulation of markets by the government: it happened instead because – blinded by the anti-regulation dogmas of a bunch of priests of a voodoo religion – the government and regulators did nothing to sensibly regulate the housing and mortgage market and thus allowed this cancer to grow and fester.

(I feel like I need a drink.)

Our bold prediction today? Mike Huckabee (R) v. John Edwards (D), with Edwards winning by a handful of electoral votes.

Why did I pass up the rest of the field? One at a time, Democrats first:

• Joseph Biden: Senator jinx, more so than John Edwards, if only by a hair
• Hillary Clinton: Senator jinx, too divisive
• Barack Obama: Seen as a rookie, and frankly the U.S. will probably elect a Hispanic president before a black one
• Al Gore: reached his plateau a year too early and knows it
• Dennis Kucinich: Too far out there

And for the Repubs:

• John McCain: Senator jinx, too old
• Rudy Giuliani: Too moderate for the GOP
• Ron Paul: Ditto, alas
  
• Mitt Romney: Too Mormon
• Tom Tancredo: Too crazy

UPDATE: Apparently Edwards will make some kind of announcement about his wife's health and his campaign at noon EST today. I wrote this before I knew, and I meant it as a viable prediction, not as satire. So please do not write me hate mail for somehow belittling her health problems.

(8) Set a date for banning incandescent light bulbs.

This from former Vice President Al Gore's presentation to Congress yesterday, the eighth of his ten specific policy recommendations to reduce global warming. As the comments section to the linked article reminds us, incandescent light bulbs are not already banned because they are cheap. So, whether the ban would be morally right or wrong at its core, as policy, it would make light less affordable for all.

And when any law makes any product more expensive to all of us, the burden of that law falls disproportionately on the poor. That simple.

My company (no names, no specifics) is working with a new European manufacturer (no names, no specifics). This new vendor is an absolute dream to work with. I have found this of other European manufacturers as well, and I also find it when shopping for a car. European exporters bring:

1. Better promotional literature. Brochures are luxuriously presented, expertly designed, and the photographs are of real people. Of course by "real people" I mean not too real, not as if a focus group was involved in deciding what real really is. Catalogs have fewer typographical errors, and in the rare occasion that there is one, the entire office seems to know which piece incorrectly says what, and they are armed with a response. Which leads me to:
2. Better employees, including those the company has drafted on this side of the pond. It is my understanding that European firms pay better than their U.S. counterparts, and have much better benefits packages: health, dental and vision insurance, life insurance, vacation time, company car -- the list goes on. It isn't a surprise: their personnel are top-notch, and this doesn't come cheap.
   
3. Better message discipline. I don't ever want to hear about Fox News and the GOP again. Disclaimers are clear and loud. Delivery times are etched in granite: you, the customer, find yourself repeating them in your sleep. Company hierarchy is plainly evident and strictly enforced. And don't even get me started on applying for credit or dealership arrangements.
4. Better products, more carefully researched. With this we may be getting into the realm of corporate subsidies and tax write-offs, but no bother. If our customers ultimately choose to buy from American investors or from European governments, our company is indifferent, as long as we are getting paid.

All of this points in one direction: up-front capital. With all apologies to my libertarian brothers and conservative kissing cousins, but if the rise of Muslim intolerance and the collapse of the welfare state are stifling European investment, you wouldn't know it by shopping there.

Life, art nudge ever so closer here.

"A single, specific memory has been wiped from the brains of rats, leaving other recollections intact."

It is doubtful that researchers will ever reach the degree of precision achieved by the characters in the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but, if they do, kudos. My memories are mine, exclusively mine, and I can treat them as would any property, including choosing to destroy them. Not that I would.

Read the whole thing, including a rather dubious comments section. My first, temporary reaction is mirrored in the second comment: "Such a drug would be very useful for criminals too. Imagine being able to wipe out memories from a witness or a victim..."

This is true, but to state the obvious: committing a crime is a criminal act. Not-remembering a crime is not a criminal act, and does not change the facts of the crime.

A fantastic question, one that I wish I had thought of. I found it here (not a permalink.)

Of course the answer is no. Racism is a matter of the human soul, not of the human skin. Besides, as I tried to convince my wife last night, designing blond haired, blue eyed children will make them blonder and bluer, while black haired, brown skinned, brown eyed kids will become blacker and browner. Designing babies by definition strives to underscore our differences, not look beyond them. Racism will more than likely worsen.

(By the way this is not a call for tighter regulation.)

For more on genetic and hormonal baby design, read on Albert Mohler's withering takedown of, well ... on his withering takedown of Albert Mohler here.

American Electric Power, a major electric utility, is planning the largest demonstration yet of capturing carbon dioxide from a coal-fired power plant and pumping it deep underground.

Various experts consider that approach, known as sequestration, essential to reining in climate change by preventing the gas from being added to the atmospheric blanket that promotes global warming.

[...]

Michael G. Morris, the president, chairman and chief executive of the utility, said in a telephone interview that sequestration would be necessary for society but was also enlightened self-interest on the part of his company.

[...]

“You, me and everyone else needs to understand that the government talks big and moves slow,” Mr. Morris said.

Emphasis mine. Read the whole thing here.

If a biological basis is found, and if a prenatal test is then developed, and if a successful treatment to reverse the sexual orientation to heterosexual is ever developed, we would support its use as we should unapologetically support the use of any appropriate means to avoid sexual temptation and the inevitable effects of sin.
--Albert Mohler, here.

Mohler is the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. By "a biological basis" he means "a genetic or hormonal cause for sexual orientation." By "we" he means "Christians who are committed to think in genuinely Christian terms." So now that the terms are defined, his point bears repeating: if expecting parents could know that their child would be born gay, and if medicine developed a prenatal treatment, Christians should stand behind this treatment.

You have to wonder what Mohler would feel about prenatal treatments for autism, slow metabolism, or short torsos. But something tells me you already do.

Useless to me, anyway.

1. Wild birds prefer sunflower seeds to all other foods.
2. Prune juice preserves meat, according to research.
3. Hens not well-partitioned will peck at each other, often spreading disease and mitigating the benefits of free-range chicken ranching.
4. Nearly half of the fruit and vegetables consumed in the U.S. is imported.
5. An acre of crops in California generates $1,000 of local economic activity per year, in addition to the revenue earned by the farmer.
   

Without looking it up first, I can only assume a pescatarian is a vegan who has added fish to his diet. I found the word here, at Marginal Revolution.

To rice, or not to rice? That is the question early in that comments thread. My wife and I traversed much of Madagascar in December 2000, and found the people to be strong, lean, and happy. And there were rice fields absolutely everywhere. Suffice to say that the rice is not exported, it is consumed domestically, but the people are not overweight. Why?

The carbophobe will reply that the Malagasy people are very poor, and therefore cannot afford to consume a glut of calories. But that is precisely my point. The problem in the west is not necessarily an excess of rice, an excess of bread, an excess of potatoes. The problem in the west is excess.

My restaurant will serve rice, but as dessert, with cinnamon and milk.

May I be the first to point out how truly bizarre this statement is?

"The Dow Jones Industrials today quietly lost another 240 points."
-Lou Dobbs, on his Tuesday, March 13 broadcast. Transcript here. The remark, in full context, was:

President Bush and Senator Kennedy are absolute soul-mates who share distorted, even twisted views about their responsibilities to the American people and the laws they've been elected to uphold.

And corporate America is doing its best to roll back all that inconvenient government oversight and regulation tonight with the help of the co-author of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act passed amidst the corporate corruption scandals of just a few years ago.

Corporate America and the Securities and Exchange Commission have been conspicuously quiet on the backdating of stock options and the sub-prime mortgage lenders and their financial structures that are now undermining the stock market.

By the way, the Dow Jones Industrials today quietly lost another 240 points.

Words mean something. And no one is more aware of this than Lou Dobbs, who, while misguided, is one of the most eloquent men on television.

So he knows that the word "quietly" tends to mean underreported. Hidden. Even scandalously so. The genesis and spread of genetically modified crops occurs quietly. You might make the case that influence brokering in Washington D.C. occurs quietly. The Dow Jones does not shed over a percentage point of its worth quietly. Certainly a federal investigation into backdating stock options is not happening quietly. And while the implication that the SEC has oversight into sub-prime mortgages is surreal, certainly corporate mortgage lenders knew the risks up front, which is why these mortgages are referred to as "high risk" to begin with.

Unless Dobbs is somehow implying that "Corporate America" intended for the Dow 30 to fall, the home buying market to dry up, and the prime rate to rise. But it isn't clear what the blue chips would gain if they did.

Bingo. That is the kind of foreign aid that Africans need. Direct, hands-on medical aid.

Read the rest here.

Say I own land, and catch rain in an above-ground reservoir, which I built with my own funding. Say I use the water for private use, and often have excess water, which I sell to nearby farms and ranches. Say even that government inspectors routinely check the water for cleanliness compliance.

I imagine that, incredibly, the scenario I have outlined would be ideologically offensive to most people.

1. Take a live musical performance on YouTube, say, Lukas Rossi's rearrangement of Radiohead's Creep. Spoken word introductions or other non-musical introductions are a plus.
   
2. Pause the video at, say, five seconds in. Make note of what your five-second cue is.
   
3. Open the same YouTube page in a second browser window.
4. Quickly switch back to the first browser window, where the YouTube page is still paused.
5. Un-pause your first YouTube page when you hear the five-second cue on the second page.
6. Enjoy enjoy the the show show.
   

That's Nick Dedina's take on Neon Bible, The Arcade Fire's newly released LP. I find Neon Bible to be terrible. Nothing even close to Funeral. Quite the contrary, it is an early contender for Disappointment of 2007.

Find tracks from Funeral , Neon Bible and more here.

Last week, access to Marginal Revolution was disrupted because of a single occurrence of the phrase "hot stars?" What are we all, twelve?

Of my last nine dispatches, eight have had something to do with books. It's been way too much, and if I ever post on books again, I likely won't do so for months. So now is as good a time as any to define the perfect novel. Start with the following passage:

Once, while playing with my two-year-old, I pretended to drop a chair on my left foot, and then jumped around on my right one, holding my left one, "Ow! Ow! Ow!" One ow! for every jump. He thought it was one of the funniest things he had ever seen. And every parent knows that a child's laugh is one of the world's most precious resources.

This way he came to frequently stomp on my feet, hoping for the ridiculous scene at the end, dad bouncing on one foot, cluching the other, "Ouch! Ewch! Yeetch! Ow! Ouch!" I should have never opened this box, because it isn't easy to close.

My feet hurt anyway from too much running in old shoes. Last night he stomped on both of my bare feet, and then took a frozen corn on the cob and hurled it at the my toes, which are already black. My reaction wasn't even affected this time, and here is my son, doubled over from laughing at me.

It's too specific to be invented. The reader will intuit that some or most of this is taken from actual events. Maybe the boy is the narrator's nephew, maybe the original chair was actually a piano stool, maybe his sport is racketball, not distance running, and maybe the frozen corn on the cob was actually a geometry textbook. Maybe the writer simply heard this story at work, or maybe it came from a dream. But while certain details may be impeachable, the greater truth that they underscore is not: this box, once open, is not easy to close. Children know no temperance. Parents both adore this and combat this in their children. It is the great paradox of child rearing.

This is what is missing from modern fiction, and this is why I have largely abandoned it. Modern writers are too enamored with their research (Dan Brown, Michael Crichton), their intellect (Don Delillo, Thomas Pynchon), their experiment (Mark Z. Danielewski, Samuel Beckett), or their bottom line (and you know who I mean). It is the discovery of truth, not of fact, that causes us to turn the page. It is an excess of research, of intellect, of experiment, or of marketability that causes us to put a book down.

Hardback or trade paperback or mass market paperback?

Trade paperbacks. Somehow they present the illusion of literacy.

Amazon or brick and mortar?

Amazon for book-specific quests and BAM for shopping, including Christmas shopping. I feel strangely unable to browse in a browser window.

Barnes & Noble or Borders?

B&N. And now that I think about it, for whatever reason I associate Borders with better stock. Weird.

Bookmark or dog-ear?

I had a Currencies of the World phase in my previous, bookmarking life. Now I barely take the time to dog-ear. Normally I leave the book open-faced, upside down, wherever.

Alphabetize by author or alphabetize by title or random?

Random.

Keep, throw away, or sell?

Keep. Wife's orders.

Keep dustjacket or toss it?

Between dogs, children and dad, "toss it" doesn't even begin to cover it. No pun intended.

Read with dustjacket or remove it?

Remove it. At which point the carnage begins. See previous answer.

Short story or novel?

I'll have to side with Borges on this one. But the question really ought to read "fiction or non-fiction. " I find I've abandoned the fake-and-honest for the real-and-dishonest anymore.

Collection (short stories by same author) or anthology (short stories by different authors)?

Anthology. It is so rare that I find an author I like, I have to hedge.

Harry Potter or Lemony Snicket?

Heh. Neither. I will likely prefer the Lemony Snicket films to the Harry Potter films, if that counts.

Stop reading when tired or at chapter breaks?

Ladies, skip to the next question. Those of you who are still here, I told you so: I stop reading when I flush.

“It was a dark and stormy night” or “Once upon a time”?

If a book begins with either, I've probably bought it for the kids.

Buy or Borrow?

Buy. I'm an ownership snob.

New or used?

I actually like coming across notes from previous readers. It's the most frank form of literary criticism you can find. But nevertheless: new.

Buying choice: book reviews, recommendation or browse?

I've given you my thoughts on book reviews, and everyone in my circle has stopped recommending books long ago. So it's "browse" by default.

Tidy ending or cliffhanger?

All endings are cliffhangers, by definition. But at least a cursory tying up of all the Obvious Loose Ends is a pre-requisite of good writing. (And good reading.)

Morning reading, afternoon reading or nighttime reading?

Afternoon. I actually read Life of Pi in a single afternoon in Cancun, toes in the sand, coconuts falling all around, waiting for my wife and mom to finish a scuba dive. Morning is for commuting and nighttime is for sleeping. (Note to my kids: nighttime is for sleeping.)

Stand-alone or series?

Just as all endings are cliffhangers, all books are stand-alone publications. I'm just saying.

Favorite series?

See somewhat surly answer above. If I must answer, I'd say the Don Juan series by Carlos Castaneda.

Favorite book of which nobody else has heard?

The Names of Things by Susan Brind Morrow. A friend recently, cruelly deconstructed my favorite passage, but I've forgiven both him and the author.

Favorite books read last year?

That's a huge assumption, although I may have finished Winning by Jack Welch. I'm not sure. Like I said recently, I cannot stand management books, but Winning is excellent. I find myself remembering his advice often.

Favorite books of all time?

I'll name five:

1. The King, by Donald Barthelme. Somehow tragic and riotous at the same time. And yes, it is a postmodern novel set in World War II.
   
2. Pedro Paramo, by Juan Rulfo. Another absurdist tragedy set during wartime. (In this case, the Cristero revolt of 1927.)
   
3. Seek, by Denis Johnson. Money quote: "They had myths instead of heads."
   
4. Age of Iron, by J.M. Coetzee. An elderly white woman meets her delivering angel while South African apartheid dies around her.
5. Men in the Sun by Ghassan Kanafani. "The Falcon" may be my favorite short story.
   

Do not let the order fool you. I cannot rank one above the next, although Kanafani lived the most interesting life. You should read them all.

This phrase was once used to describe Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, which lost me in the opening pages. Too postmodern, too absurdist. Admittedly the World War II setting is the best and only way to establish a postmodern work, what with the bombs falling over Japan, all of those random numbers bouncing around, strings of information popping in and out of existence.

Click here for Tyler Cowen's dispatch on Pynchon. As for me? Not interested.

Anyway, the question is reversed. It should say, why are turgid, overwritten and obscene works celebrated? Maybe this happens the same way that ecletic dining is celebrated. Food critics surely lose the taste for steak pretty quickly. So lobster tamales in tequila cream sauce, chocolate martinis, foie gras, and ice cream with chile powder become four-star fare.

The best book reviews are those that slaughter an otherwise sacred cow. For this you often you have to turn to alternative news sources, like I did for this evisceration of The World is Flat, by Thomas Friedman.

Money quote:

Friedman is such a genius of literary incompetence that even his most innocent passages invite feature-length essays....

I stomped off, went through security, bought a Cinnabon, and glumly sat at the back of the B line, waiting to be herded on board so that I could hunt for space in the overhead bins.

Forget the Cinnabon; name me a herd animal that hunts. Name me one.

Mexican boxer Victor Burgos, who suffered a brutal loss to Australia's Vic Darchinyan on the weekend, is making positive progress in a California hospital. Burgos underwent emergency brain surgery after being carried from the ring on a stretcher and rushed to the Los Angeles County Harbor-UCLA Medical Center on Saturday night.

A spokesperson for Burgos' promoter, Don King, said the fighter awoke from a coma today.

"He woke up and is reacting to doctors," the spokesperson said.

Doctors rated him in a stable condition. Burgos, a 32-year-old veteran of 57 professional bouts, was dominated by Sydney's Darchinyan in their International Boxing Federation flyweight world-title bout at LA's Home Depot Center.

[...]

Burgos, a former IBF light flyweight champion, had a blood clot removed from his head and was placed into a medically induced coma after Saturday night's loss.

Source.




UPDATE (from a barely-decipherable dispatch on Boxeomundial.net:)

Word is that the ex-champ from Tijuana is slipping fast.

Here's hoping that journalistic integrity at BM is as sloppy as it seems.



SECOND UPDATE (March 7, 10:50am CST) from PressTelegram.com:

Burgos has come out of a post-surgery, medically-induced coma and is responding to commands given by doctors at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center in Torrance.

[...]

"Doctors have reported that Burgos successfully answered a few verbal commands, like, `If you can hear me, move your toes,' and, `If you can hear me, move your fingers,"' Hopper said.

Hopper described this news as "very positive."

A full-length novel by Jorge Luis Borges, who has, of course, already died. It is not enough to simply say that the short story was his trademark. He was opposed to writing a novel on moral and aesthetic grounds. Why write in 400 pages what can be summarized in one? Why waste the reader's time? Had he been born in 1970, Borges would have been the quintessential blogger.

But long books allow the reader to fall in love with some characters, out of love with others. Borges held a clinical relationship with the men he created. And I use the masculine in both its inclusive and exclusive forms.

The easy answer? Publish an exact duplicate of Don Quixote and sign his name to it. Easy, but uninteresting. The answer is obliged to be interesting.

Umberto Eco, the most cultured man in the world, may think that he has already written a full-length Borges novel, but he has not. The Name of the Rose is boring. Again, obligations.

Pan's Labyrinth is said to bear the old librarian's mark, and the title alone confirms this. But you take one look at this guy and the matter is finished.

The only solution is to systematically and convincingly disprove that Borges even wrote at all. Find a fictional way to credit Manuel Puig with "Emma Zunz," credit Friedrich Nietzsche with "The Circular Ruins," credit me with "Borges and I." Establish that many of his works are actually posthumous Kafka, Poe, and Chesterton publications. This would not take 400 pages, it would take several thousand. It would begin to represent "The Garden of Forking Paths." It would be pure fiction, a masterpiece, and I think the old man would approve.

The Taco Bueno Presidency: George W. Bush as CEO of America, Inc., from Inauguration to September 10, 2001.

It's easy to forget, but before the terror attacks of September 2001, the current administration was quite ... boring. I distinctly recall hating him for the results of the 2000 election, and kept waiting for some sort of positive reinforcement. But read over the agenda with me: you find remarks on faith-based initiatives. Remarks on tax cuts. Remarks on the new U.S.S. Ronald Reagan. Remarks on estate taxes. Remarks on America's pastime.

Finally an emergency broke out in April when the personnel of a U.S. spy plane were taken by the Chinese. Then there was talk that Bush ran his administration like a fast-food franchise, dressing down staffers who were five minutes late, or who failed to write briefs that were actually brief. He was criticized for taking too much time off -- Clinton didn't preside that way, they said. Jesse Jackson pressed for slavery reparations.

It was an uneventful eight months. Fitting then that the president was doing something totally uneventful when the second plane struck.

Five more book posts to go...

Pick a book at random from your library and read some of it. I have just found Peter McLaughlin's CatchFire: A 7-Step Program to Ignite Energy, Defuse Stress and Power Boost Your Career. Without the hand-written note on the inside cover, I would have had no idea how I came to own this book.

Since each of McLaughlin's seven steps seems as if it could have been written in a single paragraph, this book should have been released as a four-page newsletter, Kiplinger style. This is how management books remind me of "Saturday Night Live" films, where a single, five-minute segment is stretched into the shape of an eighty-minute movie, long past the point of snapping.

Let me write my own 7-step management tome right now:

1. Those who live well tend to manage well.
2. If you have personnel, you have personnel problems, whether you know it or not.
3. Don't close your door to strays. But do watch out for rabies.
4. Make salary parity and annual reviews a top priority, no matter the size of the company.
5. Tell your subordinates the top three ways that your department causes the company to lose money. Astonishingly, most of them will not have been aware of at least two of these ways.
6. Build your department by thinking in terms of job titles, not of individual talents. Fill job titles with talents, not the other way around.
7. Do not let female employees end meetings by crying. Bring tissues in advance if you have to. The tears might be fake, anyway.

So hey? Where is my royalty check?

A good friend and loyal reader writes:

I'm shocked that you still have a ratio of almost 3:1 for political posts compared to most anything else. I'm also shocked that culture posts come in at #2. I would have thought that economic posts would be #2 or #1.

He's right. I should bring all categories to 10 posts each before I post again on politics. (Shannon Elizabeth posts notwithstanding, because that was meant to be tongue-in-cheek all along.)

To wit: eight "books" posts in a row, of which this is the first.

-----

I'm watching A Scanner Darkly, the film adaptation of the novel by Philip K. Dick. I hate his books, but love the films based on his books, Blade Runner, Screamers, Minority Report, parts of Total Recall. I find this to be more common as I get older, preferring movies to novels. Why?

The easy answer is that my life is filling up: family, work, commute, home ownership. A 90-minute film is an easier pill to swallow than a week-long book. But this is almost too easy. Lives are always full. What was my excuse before? And you have to account for the national decline in readership overall.

I think the real answer is that film is improving while books are not. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind would never have worked as a book. In the book version of Jesus' Son -- and this is hard for me to admit, because Denis Johnson is a first-tier writer -- your heart does not break when Michelle gets the abortion. It is still tempting for me to cry when I see Samantha Morton on screen.

Sometimes I watch Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Amores Perros without subtitles. On that latter film, all of the parallels between the characters and their pets would have been pretentious and overwritten in fiction. On screen, it is brilliant.

There are exceptions to every trend. The King by Donald Barthelme is my favorite novel, and would never work as a motion picture. The English Patient was excellent in both media. I am nervous about the upcoming film adaptation of Life of Pi. And on adaptations, Charlie Kaufman's Adaptation of The Orchid Thief was terribly flawed.

New York City symbolically banned use of the word n****r on Wednesday, the latest step in a campaign that hopes to expunge the most vile of racial slurs from hip hop music and television.

The City Council unanimously declared a moratorium that carries no penalty but aims to stop youth from casually using the word, considered by most Americans to be the most offensive in the English language.

Source. Emphasis and editing marks are mine, and not of the original.

Some unassorted thoughts on language:

1. I would have thought the word "motherfucker" was the most offensive in the English language. But look which one I felt compelled to edit, and which one I didn't.
2. In the privacy (and safety) of our home, my wife and I playfully address each other with some of the cleaner racial slurs. (That is to say, cleaner than the N-bomb, and there are several.) Even though we are both white, we do not call usually call each other "cracker," which somehow comes off as too clean. We do not allow each other to refer to the kids this way, and neither will we allow the kids to refer to us -- or to each other -- that way when the time comes. Too disrespectful.
   
3. Liberals often bristle when conservatives call them liberals, but the reverse is never true. Why? Certainly a liberal wields the word "conservative" as an insult, just as a conservative wields the word "liberal." And certainly each side knows this of the other.
4. More on that: I am a libertarian, but am not offended when a liberal calls me conservative. I chafe greatly, though, when a liberal calls me a Republican. (I haven't been called a Democrat in 15 years or so, even though I voted for Al Gore in 2000.)
   
5. It is said that dogs do not really recognize language. A dog cannot distinguish between "sit," "spit," "skit," or "slit." Try any of those tonight, with your otherwise normal non-verbal commands. Quite frankly, to get my dog to sit, I have knock the legs out from under her.
6. At one time or another I have studied Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Romanian, Russian, and Arabic, listed in order of least-perplexing to most-perplexing. Speaking of dogs, Arabic was actually more difficult to learn than the sound of my dog barking was. Over the years, I have been able to sort her barks into categories such as, "we have human company," "we have animal company," "people are walking by," "I'm hurt," and "I'm outside and want inside." In spite of my study, I still can't understand a single word of Arabic. Not one word. At least to the degree that civilization is world view and world view is language, it is impossible to deny that the Arab world and the west are suffering a clash of civilizations.