ABCNEWS.com's Notepad is an oddly compelling assortment of 200-words-or-less statements from each of the Democratic candidates' campaigns ("When there is a Bush campaign, we will welcome their Notepad contributions. Candidates of other parties will also be considered.")

Just in case you were wondering if this country had gone completely nuts or not, here you go: two American Legion posts and two other veterans groups in Pleasanton, CA, recently sponsored classes in dowsing as a way of looking for domestic terrorists. Well, terrorists are made mostly of water...

As a pretty-well satisfied XM customer, the only thing I'm waiting for is a Walkman-style portable version. Well, wait no longer.

(sigh)...maybe you should wait a little longer.

I feel an obligation to post at least once a week, so here's something (and some links): Sunday I went to the LA Times Festival of Books, on the UCLA campus. I saw George Plimpton at the Paris Review booth, and somebody who looked like MTV-and-Premiere-Magazine-somebody Chris Connelly walking around.

As usual, the Autry Museum's booth was one of the best (I picked up the hardcover companion book to LACMA's "Made in California" exhibition of a couple years back for twelve bucks).

You can't always depend on the kindness of strangers. (Sorry, Blanche. Not in America.)

The Israeli Supreme Court has, despicably, denied women the right to pray out loud at the Western Wall, citing the danger that women's voices could provoke ultra-Orthodox men to riot. (Don't forget, of course, the prayer, Baruch Atah Adonai, Eloheinu Melech ha-olam, shelo asani ishah; "Blessed are You, O Lord our God, Ruler of the Universe, Who did not make me a woman.")

I've said it before, and I'll say it again -- religious law, be it sharia, or halakha, or whatever else, is bullshit inherently incompatible with pluralistic societies. (Via Alas, a blog)

It is the easiest thing in the world to do a blog entry about someone saying how great The Daily Show is. I like to do things that are easy. So here.

"The Care Bears are out of hibernation… and sizzling!" American Greetings ("Greeting the Future!") has jumped on the 80's-retro bandwagon. Mike Brown, Vice President of Licensing for American Greetings, obviously has the Care Bear ethos at the core of his being: "The Care Bears helped revolutionize the licensing industry in the '80s....Earlier this year, we commissioned a brand recognition study, and we were astounded to learn that the Care Bears have an 88 percent recognition level among women ages 18 to 49." (Yeah -- Marketing Asshole Bear was always my favorite too, Mike.)

He is a citizen temporarily serving us, living in our house, drawing our pay, spending our money and acting in our name. We have the right and, yes, the duty, to expect him to perform at a high standard. If we don’t do this, we’re performing below the standard that should be expected of us.

NPR's Bob Edwards, on the president (among other things), in the Louisville Courier-Journal

It would seem that what some ladies really find sexy is a lying sack of shit suave, well-dressed, charismatic gentleman.

I urge all Americans, and members of both parties, to join me in condemning Sen. Santorum’s remarks. They are unacceptable, and silence is an unacceptable response. By standing up against such divisive rhetoric—whether one is gay, lesbian, or straight—we can begin to achieve the American ideal of equal rights for all people.

Howard Dean rocks.

GIs get into the spirit of things, try to steal $1 million of the $700M cash recently found in Baghdad.

Too bad they didn't get away with it -- I loved Kelly's Heroes.

Two-parent families, says Santorum, are good. Requiring people to work is good. So is banning late-term abortions and giving religion a greater role in government. Traditional welfare, on the other hand, hurts the family. Homosexuality, feminism, liberalism all undermine the family. Even parts of the Constitution can harm the family.

"Won't somebody think of the children???" Lucky us -- Rick Santorum will.

Why The Anti-War Movement Was Right (Hooray for Ariana Huffington!)

"I don't have a problem with [government surveillance]. I don't have anything to hide," Turner said. "I wish there was more government monitoring. I want to know if somebody on my block is reading a book on how to build a bomb or if there is anyone reading 'Catcher in the Rye.' They say there's a link between that book and many serial killers.

via WWDN

What the hell is "contempt of flag"?!? I have pretty much had it with fools who value a rectangle of colored cloth more than they do the First Amendment.

"There was a time when the Arabs said that their books were written in Cairo, printed in Beirut and read in Baghdad. Now they burn libraries in Baghdad." Robert Fisk, in The Independent

The kook parade.

Damn that Michael Moore backlash! (Dare I hope that some politician can follow his lead and get backlashed right into the White House?)

Sound recordings (oh, so many!) from the American Memory Collection of the Library of Congress. There's something very Jetsons about listening to seventy-year-old recordings, made on an early reel-to-reel recorder, as mp3s downloaded from the internet. And these bits of the past aren't Buddhas the Taliban can destroy, nor looters steal.

The Lunacy of Misguided Patriotism (from the Detroit Free Press)

You know, occasionally I wonder things. Things like, what if famed poet William Butler Yeats had written for the TV show Laverne & Shirley?

INT - LAVERNE AND SHIRLEY'S LIVING ROOM

          LAVERNE:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

THE DOOR BURSTS OPEN.

          LENNY AND SQUIGGY:
Hello!

I'm so sorry...I'm so very sorry...

Now that the Two Towers fake uproar has settled down, one wonders what new outrage might be on the horizon. What, indeed.

It's Picnic Day again, and I'm not there. (Of course, it's just not the same without Lawsuit playing.) Get downtown early enough to stake out some curbside space to watch the parade (one year I actually got to be in it, riding in the anchor seat of a bicycle built for four). Try not to get rained on. Walk around campus afterwards -- see the nematode exhibit, the fistulated cow, listen to the astounding UC Davis/Sac State/Humboldt State/Stanford Battle of the Bands down by Putah Creek, eat an It's-It or two, and then, tired but happy, bike home and have a barbecue.

Good times.

I'm famous! The MRJEFF3000! blog is now the number one Google result for the search term "mrjeff3000"! Quite an accomplishment, doncha think?

If only they'd turned their powers toward playing the stock market, they'd be billionaires by now.

Everybody loves 20th century American classical music (although I am told that a few poor souls are still unwilling to admit it). Minnesota Public Radio brings us American Mavericks, a 13-part radio series, and more importantly, website with two streaming music channels and hours of works performed by the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra.

Worried about someone else making money off your photo of Elvis working at the gas station down the street? The US Copyright Office to the rescue!

You think Doctors Without Borders would let kids ride around on a fuckin' decapitated rusty statue head without a helmet?

Get Your War On: V.I. Day!

Dr. Saleh had begun to weep, and I could hear him catching his breath. He tried to compose himself, and we said goodbye to Ali. Neither of us spoke as we walked down the hall to the sterile room, where the orderlies took off our smocks and masks. Dr. Saleh rubbed his eyes and cleared his throat several times. We went back to his office, and he washed his face in a sink. "So it's untrue what they say about doctors being able to suspend their emotions," I said.

He looked at me. His eyes were pink. "We are human beings," he replied. He explained that Ali knew that he had lost his arms, but that he had not acknowledged it yet: "He is conscious. He can see the stumps." Ali would likely die within three weeks.

Many of us have heard of the plight of Ali Ismail Abbas, whose family was killed and who was himself horribly wounded after a missile hit his home. Although a fund has been set up, his prognosis is, well, not good.

Today I said goodbye to an old friend, who’s supported me and been around me for the past 31 years. He never did get me into the Welsh football squad but even so I hadn’t planned for our parting to be so sudden. Sometimes, though, life takes an unexpected course.

Stuart Hughes doesn't have a lot of snarky links about pop culture in his blog, Northern Iraq Weblog.. The BBC producer, who was injured by a landmine explosion in northern Iraq which killed cameraman Kaveh Golestan, writes instead about the dangers of reporting from the Kurdish front, other reporters who have been killed, and about losing his foot.

"Those who deface a Hummer in words or deed, deface the American flag and what it stands for."

Southern trees bear a strange fruit
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root
Black body swinging in the Southern breeze
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees

I missed the PBS episode of Independent Lens about the song Strange Fruit last night. I hope they show it again. (If you haven't heard it, here's an mp3 of Billie Holliday, who made the song famous. )

Twin Peaks came along a decade too soon: The Secret Blog of Laura Palmer.

Lowry Mays is the Big Daddy of radio. The founder and CEO of Clear Channel, Mays oversees 1,233 radio stations with some 100 million listeners across all 50 states, and runs a company with $8 billion in revenues and a $23 billion market cap. But ask Mays about what he does for a living and you won't hear much about musicians or how to bring up ratings or who's the best DJ. Those things don't interest him much. Truth is, Mays isn't that passionate about what goes out over the airwaves. As long as his broadcasts sell ads, he's happy. "If anyone said we were in the radio business, it wouldn't be someone from our company," says Mays, 67. "We're not in the business of providing news and information. We're not in the business of providing well-researched music. We're simply in the business of selling our customers products."

Fuck you, ClearChannel (Part XVIII)

Six years later, the Jonbenet Ramsey murder case still occasionally burbles to the surface. Well...we don't have Osama yet, either. Here's to another half-decade of accusations and recriminations!

Thin Ice (a parable). Remember -- anyone who's against war in Iraq really wants American soldiers to die.

Vertigo...Then and Now compares screenshots from Hitchcock's 1958 movie with photographs of the same locations taken in 2003. Really cool stuff.

The Hartford Advocate has a wonderful editorial, "I Miss America".

I miss Richard Nixon. What I mean is, I miss the days of Richard Nixon when, even while the Trickster and Spiro Agnew were abusing power, a loyal opposition resided in Washington, D.C. I miss the days when a loyal opposition was bipartisan, well-spoken and independent-minded, when it included people like Daniel Moynihan, who died this week, and Lowell Weicker, then a Republican Senator from this great state. I miss the time when the Republican Party had smart people in it, even if you disagreed with them, people like Mark Hatfield, Barry Goldwater, John Chaffee. I miss the time when even so-called "doves" like William Fulbright, Mike Mansfield, George McGovern and Morris Udall were admired by those who voted differently from them. I miss the checks and balances that were built into our Constitution and worked so well for this nation up until November 2000.

The gates of summer open tonight. Daylight Saving returns!

Today's Question of the Day from Wolf Blitzer is particularly idiotic: "How long do you think it will take coalition forces to take control of Baghdad?"

One, this is a website "poll". Not a scientific poll, where a genuine cross-section of the population is asked the question, and the outcome is a fairly accurate picture of where things stand. But a fucking uncontrolled hey-go-ahead-and-tell-all-your-friends-to-come-over-and-skew-the-results website question which, if we are very lucky, actually requires you to delete the cookie before you go and vote again. Sure, it's been amusing to watch FARK take over some of the Forbes online polls, but I'm still naive enough to think that a purported news organization would have more integrity than this.

Two, if the political and military geniuses who planned this war don't know how long it'll take (and it has become obvious that they don't), then nobody does. And there's no point in asking. There is nothing useful that can be learned from this "poll", except for which faction does a better job of marshalling its forces to click the 'vote' button. Our future: the illusion of participation.