I don't know much about If Americans Knew, but they've produced this video of Palestinian (and one Jewish) women telling their stories of being strip searched by Israeli security forces. Some were strip searched as adults, some as children.

It would be nice if Americans would occasionally ask themselves, "How would I react if I had to watch my mother being strip searched? How would I feel about suicide bombing then?" Or "What would I do if someone invaded my country? Would I be someone who cooperates, or an 'insurgent?'"

From Tom, I'm directed to an analysis of professional wrestling by Roland Barthes. I expected it to be a parody, or a hopelessly out-of-touch analysis, but Barthes' analysis is brilliant and correct. One thing that fascinates a lazy ass like me is that you don't need any particular expertise to do what Barthes has done (his erudition gives him his descriptive vocabulary, but not, I think, his insight), just the proper eyes to see. And yet, analysis like this is so rare.

Praising our folkways, this well-known honky writes:

I grew up the child of a mixed-gender marriage that lasted until death parted them.... Back in the day, that was the standard arrangement. Everyone had a yard, a garage, a female mom, a male dad, and a refrigerator with leftover boiled potatoes in plastic dishes with snap-on lids....

Under the old monogamous system, we didn't have the problem of apportioning Thanksgiving and Christmas among your mother and stepdad, your dad and his third wife, your mother-in-law and her boyfriend Hal, and your father-in-law and his boyfriend Chuck. Today, serial monogamy has stretched the extended family to the breaking point. A child can now grow up with eight or nine or 10 grandparents--Gampa, Gammy, Goopa, Gumby, Papa, Poopsy, Goofy, Gaga and Chuck--and need a program to keep track of the actors.

The country has come to accept stereotypical gay men -- sardonic fellows with fussy hair who live in over-decorated apartments with a striped sofa and a small weird dog and who worship campy performers and go in for flamboyance now and then themselves. If they want to be accepted as couples and daddies, however, the flamboyance may have to be brought under control. Parents are supposed to stand in back and not wear chartreuse pants and black polka-dot shirts. That's for the kids. It's their show.

You're tempted to say that it's James Lileks praising How Things Were, and you're expecting an update on how the Gnat is turning out. Surprise, it's Garrison Keillor instead. Dan Savage gets the job done. Via The Poor Man.

My charming apartment is badly wired: using too many appliances shuts off power until the circuit breaker is reset. Not so bad, but the cut-off point is pretty low and the circuit breaker is in another apartment. Fine, normally, because the people living there are nice about restoring my power, but things look grim on this particular evening because it's the Friday night before Spring Break and I think the neighbors are away. Could be interesting.

UPDATE: by the power of Greyskull! The electricity is back on.

1. Priceless. I promise.

2. There are a couple of good swimming blogs. Timed Finals is more of a professional enterprise, with news and commentary on elite swimmers. (And I wish they would fucking link to the fucking stories they quote from. That's how blogs work, Timed Finals people!) And the SCAQ blog is a good site by a masters swimmer.

3. Yesterday in comments I expressed displeasure with Obama for calling John Edwards "kind of cute," but I need to learn to read, because (emphasis added),

"I want to wait and hear what John Edwards has to say, he's kind of good-looking," Obama envisioned Iowa caucus-goers from the small town of Clinton telling themselves.

We need more context, but clearly he wasn't saying that he thought Edwards was cute, but probably lamenting, as he's done before, the superficiality of political discourse.

4. Fox News, still evil, even at the level of individuals.

Remember Althouse's nonchalance about that autoadmit scandal from a few days ago? (More.) Oddly enough this has the power to prompt reconsideration.

A gaffe.

Reserve center Scot Pollard told the team he regretted looking into a TV camera during a recent game and saying, ``Hey kids, do drugs.''

...

`It was a bad joke,'' Pollard said ... Obviously, I don't believe that.''

Of course he doesn't.

Friday Game!

Find a combination of two items that, when purchased together, would most freak out the cashier. Example: pregnancy test and coat hanger.

Via XKCD.

I like you.

You've got my support.

But that font in your logo makes you look like a pussy.

Don't believe me?

Get somebody on that, m'kay?

You think people can be trusted to rewrite the Constitution? They can't even overhaul the naturalization ceremony without fucking it up!

In this city of immigrants, 50,000 new citizens are naturalized each year at nearly daily citizenship ceremonies conducted at two of New York's federal courthouses.

A move that would bring an end to this longstanding tradition is under way.

A top immigration official, Andrea Quarantillo, told The New York Sun she would ask federal judges here to give her office the authority to naturalize immigrants. Ms. Quarantillo, who is the director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services for New York City, said yesterday that if her request is granted she intends to dramatically alter the naturalization ceremony.

Her suggestions are already rankling several judges, who say the ceremony is in danger of becoming less dignified.

...

Under Ms. Quarantillo's plan, immigrants would no longer flock to courtrooms for naturalization, but to a federal office building. Instead of a speech delivered by a federal judge, new citizens would see a video address by President Bush and a video presentation of the history of immigration in this country.

Some things of course would not change: the Pledge of Allegiance would be recited, the National Anthem would be sung, and the mainstay of the ceremony, the oath of citizenship, would be sworn. To this program, however, Ms. Quarantillo said she does intend to add a Lee Greenwood song.

Via alif sikkiin, who fortunately seems on track to take the oath in the pre-Greenwood era.

Ackerman's going to consolidate himself, so check in here to catch up. He's writing some great stuff from Iraq.

As part of my plan to avoid being as fat and ugly as all of you, I intended to work out before my class. In fact, I was counting on it: I didn't shower before leaving the house, since I don't want dry, unattractive skin. But then an email tells me that the hot water is out at the gym. Hell. I'm hoping that service will be restored in time for a pre-class workout, but it's looking grim. I guess I'll have to forego my luxurious cleansing for a cold Spartan rinse. Perhaps I can talk Victor Davis Hanson into joining me.

UPDATE: That shit was cold.

Look, can we just admit that much of the Constitution doesn't make sense? The electoral college is totally wack, the second amendment is ambiguously worded, Supreme Court Justices are appointed till they drop dead AND somebody notices, etc, etc. What's worse is that I'm fairly sure the Founding Fathers, 250 years later, would agree that it might be time for some changes. But we can't, in practice, touch it. Because a bunch of land-owners sweltering in the summer beneath heavy wigs were gods, and American politics is nothing if not an occasional display of ancestor worship.

I keep on threatening to post something on federalism, and why I think it's stupid (where 'federalism' is taken to mean specifically the idea that the Constitution reserves powers to the state governments, and that it's good and important that it should do so. Local control of some forms of policy I don't have a problem with, and of course the Constitution does reserve some powers to the states, the question is whether it's generally sensible that it should.) and I put it off because doing it properly would involve more research than I've gotten around to. But the core of the argument is that the federal structure of the Constitution is historically explained by the fact that the original states were very much like independent countries with independent national interests, and they entered into the Constitution contingent on their capacity to continue to protect those 'national' interests. And since the Civil War, that's just not true any more -- someone with a meaningful loyalty to Connecticut as against the opposed interests of Vermont has something desperately confused in their thinking. This is really one country.

The Second Amendment makes sense in that context, but not out of it -- it preserves a right for the people of, say, Delaware not to be disarmed so that they will always be able to defend Delaware against the other states and the federal government. And you know? I don't think that's a right I want the people of Delaware or any other state to have, and since the Civil War I don't think it's a right that meaningfully exists any more, regardless of gun-control laws.

Anyone running for office on a 'New Constitutional Convention' platform -- scrapping the whole thing and rewriting it so that it makes sense in today's world? Would have my vote.

Since I don't actually read Unfogged, I wrote a longer post about the decision to make Times Select free for faculty and students, or, de facto, anyone with a .edu address; then I saw Ben had discussed this and that Emerson had quoted the bit I wanted to ridicule:

But the Times said it doesn't believe most alumni will cheat. "It's an honor system," said Vivian Schiller, senior VP-general manager, NYTimes.com. "And we're assuming that the alumni of this nation's colleges and universities have a thorough enough education in ethics to keep them honest."

I know she doesn't believe this, but it's still too stupid to say. Ogged's ex-boyfriend Kaus points out, in the same article, that this is just a convenient way of phasing out Times Select, which I suspect is the real motivation. When the paywall went up, I went through a week of wondering what Paul Krugman was saying, but then all the pangs of withdrawal went away and I realized that I didn't miss the content very much at all. Given the level of blog sophistication right now, Friedman and Dowd are a hard sell.

I had lunch today with a sort of cousin-ish person of mine. Well, ex-step-uncle, I guess; he and my mom were step-siblings for a while, though he's quite a bit younger than she, maybe half-way between me and my mom. On his mom's side he's the grandson of a...titan of industry, I guess you'd say. He used to work at Lazard Freres when I lived in NY and now he's a hedge fund person. I was going to say hedge fund manager, but I'm not actually sure about that. He certainly is a person who tries to talk people into giving large sums of money to his hedge fund, which is what he's up to now, on a five countries in ten days tour. Joining us at lunch was his boss (I inferred from his age and general being in charge of things) and a younger guy, about my age, and clearly subsidiary. We had a nice time eating Thai food on Boat Quay; I'm quite fond of Cousin Z, though I'm fonder of his sister who has remained a life-long best bud of my aunt. The boss man knows my uncles and grandad well, so we had lots to talk about. Here are some of the things: the parties at the Bermuda Yacht Club after the race, and how women used to have to enter through the side door (I can only imagine they've changed that (?)). Playing paddle tennis. What Eleuthera is like now that the club there is closed. My uncle's penny-pinching unwillingness to open up the new wing of his house in Wainscott because the radiant heat is so expensive. The boss's place on Edisto. How they were evil financiers hell-bent on destabilizing the Asian markets (we really did talk about that since apparently they were portrayed as such in some article in FT or something. We all had a laugh, I can tell you.) The B-team guy joined in some of this arcane conversation, but not so much. I found myself wondering what his story was. Was he the smart Harvard MBA they brought along to say numbery stuff while they dazzled with echt-WASP jouissance? Granting that people like this are just the sort of people to become hedge fund guys, how much does the causation run the other way? That is, is it really that advantageous to be this sort of person? In New York, OK, I can pretty much see it. All these people know each other, and there's really not that many of them. But does the hypothetical DBS or Credite Suisse guy really care about whether the guys pitching their hedge fund sailed in the Bermuda Yacht Race? I can't really think why he would, and yet it seems as if he must. Perhaps it's not the specifics but the diamond-hard, unassailable self-confidence?

Yglesias links to an article in which Clinton makes it clear that if she's elected, we're not getting out of Iraq. We'll stop trying "to protect Iraqis from sectarian violence", but we'll still have forces there to "to fight Al Qaeda, deter Iranian aggression, protect the Kurds and possibly support the Iraqi military." And there went any shot I was going to vote for her.

Look, fighting a war in Iraq has become broadly recognized as a bad idea for us, and she seems to be on board with the idea that we should stop. But if we stop fighting and leave troops there, there's either going to be an ongoing civil war, at which point stationing our troops in the middle of it seems like an equally bad idea, or a stable government with control over Iraq is going to emerge. At which point, oh, I don't know, doesn't the Iraqi government get a say as to whether we've got troops there?

P(am)andagon links to reports of a study of the pervasiveness of 'fat talk' -- women talking to each other about how unattractively fat each thinks of themselves as. The line from the article that struck me was:

Fat talk also allows females to appear modest, a prized quality in a culture that shuns egotism.

"We tend to dislike arrogance and especially dislike it in women ('bitches')", Martz explained. "Women are perceived as OK if they fat talk and acknowledge that their bodies are not perfect but they are working on it."

And that snaps right back into the conversation we had the other week about pressures on women to conform to an ideal body image, and the criticism they get for not measuring up. One of the reasons that body criticism is such an effective attack is that (or at least this is my internal reaction, and I'm guessing it's broadly shared) is that ignoring it or waving it off makes you a bad person -- only an arrogant shithead is genuinely confident that she's attractive, so admitting that criticism of your appearance isn't painful is admitting that you're a rotten person. (And the effectiveness of the attack is probably a good explanation for why it happens to so many women -- someone who's trying to get to you is going to go for the vulnerable spots.)

We have body-image conversations here fairly often, and I'm very conscious of this. I've got a tendency to use myself and my experiences as an example, and I put effort into not doing the bonding-over-fat-talk thing, but also into not implying that I think I'm pretty. (I probably actually do both -- it's hard not to snap into 'fat talk', and in a conversation where self-image is relevant it's hard to avoid saying that I do think I'm reasonably attractive. But saying that last makes me wince and cringe, waiting for someone to cut me down to size the way I deserve.)

Obviously, this is an expectation that women internalize (or at least one I have) -- it's not something being consciously imposed by anyone. But it's at the root of a lot of unhappiness, and it'd be awfully nice to find a way to get past it -- is there anyway we could settle down to thinking that there's nothing wrong with for not despising the way you look?

You may have heard that the Times is giving away free Times Select subscriptions to students or professors at institutions of higher education. What you may not have heard is that since all they're asking for is an email address associated with such an institution, their munificence actually extends to, well, anyone with such an email address, meaning staff, for example, are included. And when I say "all they're asking for", I mean really, that's it. You give them the email address, they send you a link, you follow the link, you're in. After noticing how painless it was, I tested a few things further:

First, I deleted all my nytimes.com-related cookies, and followed the link from the email again. It wanted me to log in to the site, which I did with bugmenot, following which I was confronted with a screen saying that I was, according to their records, already registered for Times Select. Thus we see that access to the TS content, achieved by this route, is independent of the account used to sign in to the vanilla site.

Then, I tried logging in from a different computer, since the other common factor between login attempts was the IP from which my request originated. Here, too, following a bugmenot-generated login, I was granted full TS access. Now, in this case, my IP belonged to the university with which I claimed to be affiliated, so I tried again from unfogged's server, and, success.

So, as far as I can tell, the Times has given free TS access to people with college- or university-affiliated email addresses, and everyone they know.

Oh, also, I just saw The Lives of Others and recommend it, though I'm sure I'm the last one ever to have seen it. There did seem to be something odd about the ending, but no matter.

What are all the places that Ackerman is posting his dispatches from Iraq? I'd like to use Yahoo Pipes to make one feed for all his posts.

Good article in this month's Atlantic on Tim Gill, a software millionaire using his fortune to target anti-gay politicians. Go get 'em, Gill:

Gill decided to find out how he could become more effective and enlisted as his political counselor an acerbic lawyer and former tobacco lobbyist named Ted Trimpa, who is Colorado's answer to Karl Rove. Trimpa believes that the gay-rights community directs too much of its money to thoroughly admirable national candidates who don't need it, while neglecting less compelling races that would have a far greater impact on gay rights--a tendency he calls "glamour giving." Trimpa cited the example of Barack Obama: an attractive candidate, solid on gay rights, and viscerally exciting to donors. It feels good to write him a check. An analysis of Obama's 2004 Senate race, which he won by nearly fifty points, had determined that gays contributed more than $500,000. "The temptation is always to swoon for the popular candidate," Trimpa told me, "but a fraction of that money, directed at the right state and local races, could have flipped a few chambers. 'Just because he's cute' isn't a strategy."

Together, Gill and Trimpa decided to eschew national races in favor of state and local ones, which could be influenced in large batches and for much less money. Most antigay measures, they discovered, originate in state legislatures. Operating at that level gave them a chance to "punish the wicked," as Gill puts it--to snuff out rising politicians who were building their careers on antigay policies, before they could achieve national influence. Their chief cautionary example of such a villain is Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, who once compared homosexuality to "man on dog" sex (and was finally defeated last year, at a cost of more than $20 million). Santorum got his start working in the state legislature. As Gill and Trimpa looked at their evolving plan, it seemed realistic. "The strategic piece of the puzzle we'd been missing--consistent across almost every legislature we examined--is that it's often just a handful of people, two or three, who introduce the most outrageous legislation and force the rest of their colleagues to vote on it," Gill explained. "If you could reach these few people or neutralize them by flipping the chamber to leaders who would block bad legislation, you'd have a dramatic effect."

...Another element of this strategy is stealth. Revealing targets only after an election makes it impossible for them to fight back and sends a message to other politicians that attacking gays could put them in the crosshairs.

Michael Lewis takes his daughters to Mardi Gras.

Last year, when she was 6, Quinn draped the beads she caught around her neck. This year she takes what she catches and squirrels it away furtively in a camouflaged Army duffel bag beside her. "If they see you have lots of loot they won't throw you anything," she explains, hurriedly, and then resumes her quest for more beads. Dixie is only 4, but even she seems to be coming along nicely. As I haul home a 50-pound sack full of beads, she says, "Daddy, you want me to tell you why they gave me so many things? 'Cause I was making a sad face." Every small child in America should be flown to New Orleans for Mardi Gras. Those who excel should be offered jobs by Goldman Sachs selling bonds. Those who fail should be taken to the racetrack, to see if they are perhaps better suited to trading.

That's funny, but there's also a serious point in the piece: he takes the kids to a horse race, runs into an old friend who is the trainer for the favorite, the favorite wins, and the kids get to hang out with the horse and jockey before the race and in the winner's circle. That's their one experience of going to the track.

Twenty-two minutes after they strolled into the Fairgrounds, they're back in their car seats, waving $5 bills and looking for something to argue about. The experience has struck neither of them as noteworthy. The problem with lucking out with your children is that your children don't appreciate their luck--and the lucky feeling is more than half of the pleasure. You go to all this trouble to get them an education, and they promptly forget the lessons. On the drive home I explain to them that it isn't common for two little girls to walk into a racetrack in the middle of the day for a single horse race and wind up in the winner's circle, holding winning tickets, with the horse's jockey on one arm and the horse's owner on the other. Not to mention getting serious screen time on every OTB network. It takes some effort, but by the time we arrive home, each little girl has been convinced she has something worth saying about her field trip--only it isn't the same thing. Dixie, running to the back of the house to find her mother, squeals, "Mama, I made $5 at the round field!" Quinn races up the stairs, finds her grandmother, and shouts, "Nana, we were on national TV!"

My sinuses are clogged, I hate my job, I'm missing some people I haven't been able to talk to, and the Internet is refusing to amuse me as I click around in a pathetic and flailing attempt to avoid doing my job. Sunset an hour later isn't doing a lot to cheer me up.

We're only three days into Daylight Saving Time and I've already noticed a definite impact on my mood. Even though my body and bedtime haven't quite adjusted yet, I have more energy and motivation and feel more cheerful. We should have moved DST years ago.

Let me help you with that. Rolling Stone asked a panel of experts (Zbigniew Brzezinski; Richard Clarke; Nir Rosen; Gen. Tony McPeak (retired) (Member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Gulf War); Bob Graham; Chas Freeman (Ambassador to Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War; president of the Middle East Policy Council); Paul Pillar (Former lead counterterrorism analyst for the CIA); Michael Scheuer (Former chief of the CIA's Osama bin Laden unit; author of Imperial Hubris); and Juan Cole) for their best guesses as to a best case, most likely case, and worst case scenario as to how the Iraq war will turn out.

The best case anyone's expecting is ongoing civil war, and a strengthened Al Qaeda -- it goes downhill from there. One odd note was a quote from Scheuer as to the most likely scenario: "There isn't any upper limit to how many people could get killed. Depending on how long the war lasts -- a million casualties." He seems to mean that number to be surprising. Isn't the best estimate of how many Iraqis have died somewhere around 655,000 as of last July? At that rate, a million deaths isn't surprising at all.

(Hat tip to Kevin Drum.)

If you answered the first, you might consider giving Lindsay Beyerstein a couple of bucks. She's trying to stay off the drug money, and keep herself going on just freelance journalism. If you like reading her blog, there's no better way of making sure it'll still be there next week.

On the same note, I just subscribed, two years after I should have, to The American Prospect; they're paying the writers I like to read. If you feel the same way, there are worse things you could do with twenty bucks than subscribe.

This quote is true. That said, I'm still going nowhere near Twitter.

As with all new technologies, social-networking sites must pass through predictable Kübler-Ross-type stages in reaction to them. Think of the cell phone. First came derision, then resistance, reluctant adoption, and finally an inability to function without it.

The Department of Defense's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency wants to make our soldiers more squirrelly.

One of the things that Heller has been trying to figure out for so long is how squirrels and other hibernators manage to regulate their core body temperatures, even as they konk out. Those trials lead to an examination of the human temperature-control system, which lead to a specialized glove-like device, built for the military, that... well, read the article to find out. Let's just say the San Francisco 49ers use the things for a reason. So do soldiers in Iraq.

Heller's partner, Dennis Grahn, leads me down into the basement of the biology center, to check the critters out for myself. He opens up the heavy, metallic doors with a clank. Inside, it's pitch-black. Massive air conditions roar, blowing cold air over the rows and rows of cages. Using a red-tinted flashlight, he opens one up, and pulls out a plastic drawer. Inside, curled in a ball, packed in cotton, is a squirrel. It's cold to the touch, as Grahn picks it up, and places it on my palm. It feels more dead than alive.

That condition interests the military, because if wounded soldiers could somehow be put in a squirrel-like state, their wounds would essentially stop bleeding; even seriously-injured patients could be kept alive for much, much longer. In Darpa-funded tests at the University of Wisconsin, Madison hibernating squirrels are surviving for as long as ten hours, with 60% of their blood drained. Ordinarily, those wounds are enough to kill a rodent in 30 minutes or less.

More at the link, of course, but the real lesson is clear: catapults alone aren't going to save us, people.

Salon is covering yet another story that surprises and appalls, while at the same time leaving me wondering why I'm surprised and appalled given that this war has lead to one thing like this after another. This time it's injured soldiers who are being sent back to Iraq despite medical conditions that make it difficult to wear protective gear like body armor or perform their duties. The best, I think, is the soldier with a back injury who was told to "limit wearing a helmet to 'one hour at a time.'"

"This is not right," said Master Sgt. Ronald Jenkins, who has been ordered to Iraq even though he has a spine problem that doctors say would be damaged further by heavy Army protective gear. "This whole thing is about taking care of soldiers," he said angrily. "If you are fit to fight you are fit to fight. If you are not fit to fight, then you are not fit to fight."

...

One female soldier with psychiatric issues and a spine problem has been in the Army for nearly 20 years. "My [health] is deteriorating," she said over dinner at a restaurant near Fort Benning. "My spine is separating. I can't carry gear." Her medical records include the note "unable to deploy overseas." Her status was also reviewed on Feb. 15. And she has been ordered to Iraq this week.

The captain interviewed by Salon also requested anonymity because he fears retribution. He suffered a back injury during a previous deployment to Iraq as an infantry platoon leader. A Humvee accident "corkscrewed my spine," he explained. Like the female soldier, he is unable to wear his protective gear, and like her he too was ordered to Iraq after his meeting with the division surgeon and brigade surgeon on Feb. 15. He is still at Fort Benning and is fighting the decision to send him to Baghdad. "It is a numbers issue with this whole troop surge," he claimed. "They are just trying to get those numbers."

Lots of bands get sucky when they add a vocalist (eg, Hella); I am pleased, however, to be able to say that not only did Zs not get worse, some of the songs on Arms in which there's singing heretofore unknown on their releases are positively exhilarating. Of course, they didn't add a vocalist; rather, the two guitar players contribute chanty vox. You, dear reader, will be able to hear one such, the best such, track tomorrow morning, sometime between 9am and 11am PST, on KZSU; the playlist, as usual, will be locatable from here. Also to be heard: Fog, Charles Mingus, Stevan Tickmayer; Satoko Fujii; Giacinto Scelsi.

Unrelatedly, I'd like to know if there's a way to get something like the functionality of what's known as reduce in Python and Schemy languages, or fold{l,r} in Haskelly languages, in SQL. The situation: I have a table (call it "foo") with an "id" column, and another ("bar") with "count" and "foo_id" columns. I want, for each id in foo, to have the sum of all the counts in bar where foo_id = id. Obviously (I say "obviously" as if I know anything about SQL) I can do that by selecting id and count from the tables appropriately joined, and then programmatically summing (using, you know, a fold: \(id1, c1) (id2, c2) -> (id1, c1+c2), after dividing the results into id-based equivalence classes), or I guess by first getting all the ids from foo, and then for each such id getting the sum of the counts where the foo_id = id—but that, afaict, would require a select per id in foo (2114). Is there a way to do this all within SQL? Or have I not articulated the problem coherently?

This is how you take care of a squirrel problem.

Andrew Sullivan asks "how gay is '300'?" A reader responds:

But, ah, the men Andrew. All those beautiful, beautiful men dancing around in briefs and capes. It almost brought me to tears. It is perhaps the gayest movie that I've ever seen that wasn't porn.

Those who try to deconstruct the movie into a statement on the current war, or who say that it is racist or (most glaringly wrong) anti-gay are utterly missing the point. Everyone (perhaps excluding the Queen) in the film is gay. You have the butch gym queens of Sparta (I mean can any chisled man run around in speedos and a cape and call himself straight?), and the pierced, shaved, and bejeweled bar queens of Persia. It's gay-on-gay violence, pure and simple. If I were to cast this film in any way (and it really is far too silly for this sort of analysis), I'd say it was portraying the libertarian, buffed and bearded Sullivanistas taking on the effete, decadent elites of the HRC. The movie is clearly on the side of the Sullivanista/Spartans, and so am I.

In sadder news, I recently had some drinks with a friend in the Army. The news is pretty grim, and I was sad to hear that the Army's clever decisionmaking extends only as far as making numbers (e.g. recruiting, stop-loss) appear better than they are via sleight of hand; when it comes to other sorts of management, they're not so good.

Yes, that's what D.C. needs -- more guns. Gun laws are exactly what federalism is for -- what is appropriate for Alabama or Montana is very different for what is appropriate for D.C. Hell, what's appropriate for upstate New York is very different than what is appropriate for NYC. I really think this case is going to go to the Supreme Court and that the new lineup is going to say there's an individual right to gun ownership. I think the best that people who support gun control can hope for is something like an "undue burden" test for storage and purchase restrictions.

Perhaps modesty prevents Ben from posting this, showing, as it does, that he's so hip he inspires the hipsters. Following Ben's post, the band Captain Automatic performed the piece in the video below. Their page is here; MySpace here. Very awesome.

Isn't one of the many tasks set to this humble blog to occasionally see what's up with the actors who portray the main characters in the Harry Potter movies? I read this article a few days ago and thought that Becks or ogged would post it, but evidently not, so here it is for your enjoyment. A sentence: Now 17, Mr. Radcliffe has cast off his wand, his broomstick and everything else to appear in the West End revival of Peter Shaffer's Equus.. His wand and his broomstick? There's such a thing as overdoing it, Sarah.

The fans speak:

"We're all kind of freaked out about seeing his -- well, him naked," Ms. Tobin, 20, said after a recent performance. "I still think of him as an 11-year-old boy."
…
"I was, like, 'I don't want to see him poke the eyes out of horses,' " said Marie Aveni, 22.
Emily Bunch, 21, remarked, "I thought, 'Harry Potter! Where are your glasses?' " Wendy Krekeler, 20, described her first glimpse of the shirtless Mr. Radcliffe this way: "I thought, 'Wow, he must have been working out.' "

Toasters.

The editor's letter in this month's Esquire ("The Rich Don't YouTube", not online yet) asks whether all of the YouTubes and Flickrs and such that are supposed to give power to the average Joe are really just another tool for making the rich even richer:

We've lowered the bar for what kind of unreachable dream we're settling for. It used to be riches. Now we settle for the honor of having our efforts recognized. Doritos got a thousand submissions for its Super Bowl talent contest, and all the winner got was nominal prize money and a trip to Miami. Come on! Where's the million bucks?

Here's the thing: This sense of well-being and possibility that this faux democratization creates causes us to ignore the fact that while we do the work, the rich rake in the fruits of our labor.

...

The new opiate of the masses is the illusion of participation in the culture, even as the underpinnings of a good life - money, mostly - are stripped away and handed to the filthy rich.

It's an interesting question - the media has convinced people that fame is even more important than money. It used to be that companies had to hold contests where they gave away large prizes; now they can get the same (or greater) earnings by just promising someone exposure or the chance to be on TV. And is there is some kind of link between rising feelings of insecurity over people's lives and the attraction of entertainment that provides the illusion of power? In an age where people feel they could be laid off at any time and their government isn't listening to the will of the people, does voting someone off American Idol fulfill a need for control?

It's a warm, beautiful, sunny day! It finally feels like Spring after weeks of cold, bitter Winter! I've been looking forward to this for months!

And yet! Now I'm remembering all of those things I love about winter that I'm going to miss, like coats. I love wearing coats because it means you always have pockets and pockets make life so much easier. Not that I'm willing to give up this lovely weather for them but winter does have some virtues.

Just doing my part to make sure that everyone on earth clicks over to Dylan Hears A Who, with Bob Dylan (the real Bob Dylan? Probably not, but damned if you could tell from the singing) singing the works of Dr. Seuss. So incredibly well done.