What Is The Internet?

No, Senator Stevens, it's actually a gigantic string of fiber optic and copper-wire cables. And it takes up most of a downtown Los Angeles office tower, with the exception of four floors of an insurance defense law firm, all one block away from Pershing Square Park. Sure, I'm republishing it, but come on, the original article was on WIRED so it's not exactly a state secret.

Okay. Our next lesson in our ongoing series of "stuff you were happier not knowing about things you like" will be about the manufacture of sausage and other processed meat products.

Does A Candidate Have To Know Everything?

The other day, John McCain got finagled into weighing in on whether vaccination causes autism, and he got the science wrong. That’s bad.

What I want to know is, why is it that politicians, particularly politicians running for President, seem to feel compelled to have a knowledgeable opinion about everything? Presumably, it’s because the politician wants to speak to the issues that voters think are important. For every voter, something is the most important issue in the world, and the converse is true – for every issue out there, there’s a voter to whom the issue matters immensely.

On significant issues facing the nation, we rightly expect our leaders to be knowledgeable and to demonstrate that they’ve thought about those matters. “What are we going to do about Iraq?” is an appropriate question for a Presidential candidate. “What will your national science policy look like?” Would be another. “What would your national science policy be towards medicine?” might hit on an area where the platform has not been fleshed out fully yet, and the candidate can acceptably respond with something like, “Right now I don’t have a specific plan for medical research, but generally, I intend to push for research funding priority in these areas…” and the voter should be okay with a response like that.

By the time the question gets down to “Will your administration require that all screw threads used in small weapons deployed in the European and Asian theaters be machined to Metric specificiations, so as to allow for better sharing of spare parts with our allies on joint operations?” it ought to be okay for a politician to respond, “You know, I just don’t have the answer to that question; that is one of the things that we’ll get ironed out after we’re in office.”

Which vaccines are right for which kids under what circumstances is a question better addressed to a doctor -- or if to a government official, to the Surgeon General -- than to a candidate for President. The question was unreasonable, whether McCain fumbled the answer or not. With that said, McCain fumbled the answer.

Golden Boy Gets A Pass

A trial started in Chicago today. While neither the prosecution nor the defense will play up the relationship between political corruption defendant Tony Rezko and Barack Obama, the connection was there and at least some tainted money found its way into Obama’s campaign (he gave it to charity when the allegations came to light). Obama has cut his relationship with Rezko loose, and hasn’t done anything to help Rezko out. What’s more, the national media doesn’t seem to want to cover this, apparently because it interferes with the Obama storyline of hope and promise.

I’m sorry; Obama may well be innocent of corruption (with respect to Rezko or anyone else), but if this were happening to a past compatriot of a Republican – or maybe even to a past compatriot of Hillary Clinton – we’d be hearing all about the connection to the candidate in explicit terms. Obama doesn’t get a pass on this because he’s likeable. Or at least, he shouldn’t. Doesn't seem fair.

Fact is, Obama is as tainted by corruption as anyone – he did have all of his early political career in Chicago. That doesn’t mean he’s corrupt himself. It means he was near people who are. That is what should be explored, as aggressively as it would be for any other candidate.

In Praise Of A Strong Dollar

There’s no doubt that Republicans are looking weak on the economy, and the economy is turning into a more important issue in the election than the war. Larry Kudlow convincingly argues that a strong dollar should be a centerpiece of McCain’s economic platform. A strong dollar is anti-inflationary, and inflation is the biggest danger facing us with regards to the upcoming recession – bigger than the foreclosure crisis, which will correct itself in a year or so if the government does nothing about it. A strong dollar makes trade more favorable to the U.S. and therefore makes trade deficits easier to balance. A strong dollar makes Americans richer. And it sounds patriotic.

You Filthy Liars, He Didn't Make That Call

After a lot of investigation, the WaPo pronounces that Obama “parsed” his denial of the call to Canada and awards him two Pinocchios. Turns out that senior Obama advisor Austen Goolsbee “informally” met with (but did not phone) Georges Rioux, the Canadian consul-general in Chicago, and Goolsbee did indeed convey a message significantly downplaying Obama’s anti-NAFTA campaign rhetoric. Since the initial rumor was that Goolsbee made a phone call to someone in the consulate, the denial of such a phone call taking place was technically correct – but not the portion of the denial that everyone was focusing on. While not the same as a CQ Pants on Fire condemnation, the double Pinocchio indicates a substantial obfuscation of the truth.

Can you imagine it? “ABSOLUTELY NOT! You filthy liars, I did NOT call the Canadian government to say that my candidate was pandering for votes in Ohio! NO, NO a thousand times NO!!!” (pause, murmurs) “I said that to them in person.”

Two questions unanswered still: First, Obama has never been an advocate of free trade, so why the Clintonesque obfuscation? Second, why did the Canadians get all coy about this?

A Rose By Another Name

Tomorrow, there will be three hours of argument in California’s consolidated same-sex marriage case before the Supreme Court.

As longtime readers know, I don’t see any reason why gay people should not be able to get married and I do not see any constitutional justification for denying marriage rights to gay people. However, those who have read my musings on the issue also know that I think that the demands of Constitutional equality of treatment would be satisfied by the creation of a legal institution that is the equivalent of marriage but which does not bear the same name. One of the original “gay marriage” cases, Baker v. State (the Vermont case from 1999) led to the Vermont legislature creating an institution called a “civil union,” which is limited to same-sex couples and has since been restricted in availability to cases in which at least one of the two partners to be thus joined is a citizen of Vermont. In the parlance of a later case (Lewis v. Harris, the 2006 New Jersey case), this is called a “parallel structure.”

The only state to recognize actual marriage between same-sex partners is Massachusetts. California already has a parallel structure, an institution called “domestic partnership.” California domestic partners are treated by the state exactly the same as if they were married, including needing a court petition to dissolve the domestic partnership that proceeds under the Family Code. Thus, California is a “full parallel” state, one of five (Connecticut, Vermont, New Jersey, and New Hampshire are the others). Partial parallel states are Hawaii, Maine, Oregon, and Washington, as well as the District of Columbia. New Mexico and Rhode Island have no parallel structures of their own, but they will recognize parallels issued by other states. Aside from that, no other state recognizes same-sex unions (apparently, New York City does as well, but not New York State; the city of New York is, by population, about 40% of the entire state).

Were I to live in a non-parallel state (for instance, Tennessee or Wisconsin) I would urge the creation of a parallel structure. When I did so to even very religious or conservative friends in Tennessee, I met with surprisingly little resistance despite the prevalent conservatism of the area in which we lived. I suspect that was because even for people who do not think that “marriage” is something that same-sex couples should get, the separation of a bundle of legal rights from that word defuses the issue emotionally to the point that they can step back and realize that gay people are going to be gay together whether others disapprove of their arrangements or not, and there is no harm to the rest of the world in creating a convenient legal mechanism for them to jointly own property.

However, because California is a “full parallel” state, I think that the effort to push for judicial lawmaking authorizing gay marriage here lacks substantial legal urgency. Obviously, the Federal government does not recognize a California domestic partnership, but there’s nothing at all that California can do about that other than passing toothless resolutions urging the state’s Federal representatives and other Federal officials to repeal 1 USC § 7 and 28 USC § 1738C. The point is that the Legislature here has already done all it can, other than authorizing the use of the word “marriage,” to treat same-sex couples on an equal legal footing with mixed-sex couples. So my interest in tomorrow’s case is in seeing what importance is attached to the use of the word “marriage.” California already offers “marriage by another name” to gay couples.

So the burden, I think, is properly on the advocates of same-sex marriage to explain why the rose is not as sweet when called by another name.

Another Dead Musician

I remember as a teenager I liked Jeff Healey’s blues-rock album. The kid from Canada, struck with blindness since he was one year old, who taught himself how to play guitar, was such a good story, and the album was so strong, it seemed a wonder to me that it didn’t fly off the charts. That was when I first realized that maybe the audience for blues music was narrower than I had thought. And, he got notoriety as the musician in the famously-awful movie Road House. Apparently he decided to play jazz instead of blues and I don’t follow jazz very much (sorry, Pam; I want to see you excel in your chosen path and support you as much as I can, but you know that I've never made a secret of the fact that I just don’t get jazz). I’d wondered from time to time what happened to him, though – and it was kind of sad to see that he died today. That isn't how I wanted to learn about his career status.

Wind Causes Blackout

We lost power today at about 10:30 and didn't get it back for about two hours. In Tennessee, that would have most likely been because of a rainstorm downing a power line. Alternatively, it would have been caused by some dummy hitting something with his car. Here, the vehicular accident is still a possibility, but considering that we were enduring more gale-force winds, it's possible the wind simply blew down a power line unassisted by the force and weight of water along with the wind.

On a related note, a tree got pushed over in the side yard, probably in the last storm, and when the wind calms down we'll have to figure out how to pull it upright again or it will start growing at an angle and that could hurt our wall and the room of the house. I hope we can save the tree; maybe the way to go is to saturate the ground again before pulling the tree back up. Any suggestions, horticulurists?

Gruesome But Kinda Cool

Famous deaths -- would modern medical technology have been able to save the victims? A doctor in Montana offers his opinion: Archduke Franz Ferdinand, James Garfield and William McKinley would have made it. Robert Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln would probably have lived but been in bad shape and probably never well enough to participate in government again. Martin Luther King, Jr., John F. Kennedy, and Julius Caesar, though, even modern medical technology would have been unable to help and they'd have died anyway.

Just Say No To Elephant Hunting

I understand about hunting and its role in contemporary wildlife management. Really, I do.

Without hunters taking deer, for instance, America's forested and semi-forested lands would soon be absolutely overrun with the creatures, which would within a year or two of breeding without hunting to thin the herd would soon forage themselves into massive starvation. In a state of nature, wolves, panthers, and similar sorts of predators would thin the deer herd and the system would be more or less self-regulating. However, because those predators are dangerous to humans and for sport-hunting reasons, we have all but eliminated those elements from our ecosystems. So hunting is good for the deer as a population because it keeps their overall numbers at a sustainable level. Whether enough permits are issued and used is a subject of debate; poaching is also an issue, but overall, hunting permits are a good way to manage a regions overall herd of deer so that the deer do not actually die out completely. This makes sense to me.

But nevertheless, I am a little horrified to see that South Africa intends to begin issuing permits for the culling of elephants. South Africa's herd of elephants is only about 20,000 head, out of something like 500,000 total in all of Africa. It seems impossible to believe that South Africa, a land blessed by nature with some of the richest and most fertile land on Earth, could sustain only 20,000 head of elephant when smaller, less productive areas of the continent sustain ten times that many animals.

But, South Africa's government claims that the country's resources cannot sustain a larger herd than that. Although an elephant's birth cycle is much slower than a deer's, I can see the argument that a similar process could be at work -- if the herd grows (because it is protected from hunting by humans and an adult elephant generally has no natural predators except for very desperate lions) then eventually some of the animals will starve -- and that could wind up being worse than hunting, because they share food well amongst themselves so entire troops of elephants might starve to death instead of individuals.

Okay, I understand that logic. But coming as it does as demand for ivory worldwide is increasing, it looks decidedly suspicious. (Interestingly, elephants seem to be evolving in response to the pressure of generations of ivory hunting -- tuskless African elephants, considered an anomaly less than a century ago, are now approaching one-third of all elephant births in portions of Africa.) It's very easy to get the idea that South Africa is attempting to capitalize on this demand as a source of revenue.

Now, to a farmer, an elephant is a hazard. It's a wild creature that does a really good job of knocking down his fences, and if he grows the right kind of crop, the elephant will eat it, too. You can see why a farmer might not be so impressed as a suburban American with the beauty, intelligence, and emotional draw of these majestic beasts. And South Africa wants to increase the strength of its agricultural industry. This, too, has nothing to do with sustainable wildlife management.

And getting to the point of sustainable wildlife management -- the African elephant's only predator of any significance is man. An adult elephant is simply too big for a predator to take down. So the elephant hunter in Africa is not filling a void in the ecological chain of life that the deer hunter in America does. South Africa has lions which will, on occasion, take a young elephant or an old one that is enfeebled. Lions face challenges of their own, but they aren't extinct yet, either. The natural process of culling the herd will take place without human intervention. Without man's involvement, most elephants would die of old age or lack of food and water resources in times of drought. And elephants mourn their dead.

I would also think that South Africa would realize that it makes a great deal of money from tourism. People go to Africa from around the world so that they can go on photo-safaris and see the elephants. I would love to do that. (That and to tour the African wineries and go kloofing.) Some friends of mine did and they came back with some really impressive photographs. I don't know whether to think of this policy as enlightened or misguided. I'm tending towards the latter.

It's hard to believe that South Africa has reached its territorial limits of tolerance for elephants at 20,000 head and that management has reached the point where hunting is a necessary control mechanism. I don't pretend to be an expert, but the bulk of the other elephants in Africa seem to be okay living in the central and eastern portions of the continent, in much larger numbers. Granted that South Africa is more industrialized and possesses a slightly more temperate climate than many of its elephant-hosting neighbors. Still, it seems more likely to me that the government is giving in to complaints about elephants by its farming lobby and hoping for big revenue by auctioning off elephant hunting licenses.

With the tremendous tourism draw that the elephants are part of, and the fact that South Africa has relatively few of these majestic creatures, I would think that South Africa would want as many elephants as it could get. At minimum, this seems like an unenlightened policy. And more fell motives than short-sightedness may be at play. I do not want to reward that sort of policy with my tourism dollars -- and a trip to Africa would be quite expensive.

For now, if I were going to consider a safari trip, I might just go somewhere other than South Africa; maybe I'd go to Tanzania; I'd go to Kenya once the civil unrest dies down there. Not as much wine, but those countries both take protecting their elephants very seriously; their people view their elephants as symbols of national pride and identity; surely they are as horrified at South Africa's decision as we Americans would be if Canada issued permits to hunt bald eagles (not that Canada would ever do such a thing, but you get my point).

If elephants ever become extinct, we're really going to miss them. Please consider making a tax-deductible donation to help save the elephants.

For The Time Being, The Mirror Of Your Better Angel

Bill Moyers interviews Shelby Steele about Barack Obama. Steele is not the first to suggest that when Americans look at Obama (at least right now), they see the better angels of their own souls rather than the actual man and political leader who is truly there. What's interesting about Steele's observation is his utter fatalism about an inevitable disillusionment with Obama as his policy positions necessarily come into greater focus than his inspiring messages about "hope" and transcending the problems of our past.

I've had my hopes dashed by politicians whose promises and rhetoric clashed against reality before, but not being African-American, I probably can't really appreciate the kind of standing as a social outsider that has historically come along with dark skin; Steele shares Obama's "double outsider" status because like Obama, his mother was white and his father was black.

I know there are several Obama supporters who regularly stop by and I too am fascinated with the phenomenon of the rise of Barack Obama. Steele, who describes himself as a conservative and associates with other conservative academics, is understandably not as enchanted with Obama as a more liberal black historian would be. Basically, Steele asks, "Why is Obama different than anyone who's come before?" My question, though, is Steele's pessimism really warranted -- haven't Americans as a people matured somewhat from even ten years ago; isn't the Obama campaign itself, win or lose, a process of cross-racial acceptance and integration?

Venus De Milo

An interesting study of the famous sculpture on display in the Louvre. A commercial for the corporate sponsor is mixed in with the work, but it's worth your time anyway.

Phantom Phone Call

Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have unleashed anti-NAFTA rhetoric in their battle for votes in Ohio. Apparently, union workers in Ohio still feel threatened by NAFTA and this is a good way to rally those voters to your banner -- in a way that is not as effective in other states.

Now, for the past two days or so, there have been rumors circulating that Obama's campaign has made quiet calls to the Canadian government assuring officials there that Obama is simply engaging in campaign rhetoric and that an Obama administration would not seek to withdraw or substantially alter NAFTA or the close free trade relationship between the U.S. and Canada. The Obama campaign tepidly dismissed the rumors as "inaccurate."

One apparent source of the rumors, Talking Points Memo, responded to the campaign's dismissal by revealing its sources. It seems the call was made by senior Obama economic advisor Austan Goolsbee, who now denies making the call completely and has clammed up. Canada TV, however, is standing by its claim that Goolsbee did make the call, but has not identified who within the Canadian consulate in Chicago it was that Goolsbee spoke to -- and even says that it got confirmation of the call by sources at "the highest levels of Canadian government". Which is weird; "highest levels" sounds like the Prime Minister's office, and would hardly be the consulate in Chicago, which is where the call was allegedly made. But now, more appropriate Canadian government sources are denying this as well.

So, some have pounced on the story as "proof" that Obama is just another double-talking politician, one who says one thing and will govern in a different way if elected. And part of that is based on the widespread knowledge that it would be extraordinarily difficult and costly for any President to really seek to revise NAFTA, probably to the point that it wouldn't be worth actually pursuing that policy. So it would make sense in a way that Obama might not want to spike his international relations with Canada for a very short-term political advantage.

But wait a minute. Obama has never been an advocate of free trade. He's very much a "fair trader," and has been for most of his political career. In my investigation of Obama's policy platform, I found that he was generally opposed to free trade proposals:

Strongly opposed to CAFTA. Critical of farm subsidies for large corporations but not for "family farmers." Recent rhetoric ("People don't want a cheaper T-shirt if they're losing a job in the process") suggests a strong protectionist streak, and insists that Doha Round of GATT negotiations must produce "tangible benefits" for U.S. workers, but also claims loyalty to existing trade agreements. Would amend NAFTA to allow for labor agreements, and would advocate for greater human rights and opening of trade in China -- but shrinks from a trade war with the PRC.

I gave Obama only one in five available points on this issue, because my take on the issue is that regardless of local or industry-specific shakeouts, international trade is to the overall economic benefit of the U.S. in direct proportion to the freeness of that trade. I disapprove of the crypto-protectionism Obama has been preaching recently. Nevertheless, Obama has hardly changed his political position in Ohio -- if there was double-talk going on, it would have been in the phantom phone call to the Canadian government by Obama's aide.

The Canadian government is neither stupid, ignorant, nor selfless. It will look to its own advantage in responding to this. The Canadians have denied, in a big way that seems to go all the way to the PM's office, that such a call took place. That's a pretty hard line. What, then, is the advantage to the Canadian government in doing that? Prime Minister Harper's Conservative party is the only one of the four major parties in Canada to be publicly pro-NAFTA.* Harper would seem, then, to want to reassure his own constituency that he is protecting Canada's position within NAFTA by actually having this phone call with the likely new President of the U.S. Denying that the phone call took place is saying to Canadian voters that Harper's people are not having these kinds of conversations with American leaders; presumably, Canadian Tories would want that conversation to have taken place, unless they are more ambivalent about NAFTA than I am giving them credit for being.

So I've become skeptical of the report rather than of the denials of the phone call. Obama is sticking to his guns in being critical of free trade agreements. In Texas, a generally more pro-NAFTA state than Ohio, Obama has been sidestepping the issue. He's been consistent. If the phone call was made by this advisor (a guy who would be looking at a high-level economic position in the Obama Administration, like Secretary of Treasury or Director of the OMB), it would have been significantly out of step with the candidate's basic ideas about the issue (however futile they might be in practice). It wouldn't make sense for the call to have been made in the first place, and it wouldn't make sense for the Canadians to deny that it took place after it did.

What I can't figure out is why the denial would have to come from so high a source in the Canadian government. The whole incident doesn't strike me as particularly important enough to have even merited the attention of the Prime Minister (or, more realistically, his top aides within his office). The call was allegedly made to the Chicago consulate, which isn't even the primary embassy in the U.S. Why would someone in Ottawa have even bothered with this sort of thing?


* I don't claim to be fluent in Canadian politics. It's fairly easy to point out that Harper's Conservative Party has a thin plurality in Parliament and seems to have formed a coalition government with the Bloc Québécois. A quick scan of Canadian news sources suggests to me that of the four major parties in Canada, the Tories are the most pro-NAFTA and the opposition Liberal and New Democrat Parties who are generally anti-NAFTA. I have not been able to get any kind of a read at all about what the Bloc Québécois thinks of NAFTA, but if the BQ is the junior partner in the government, it must have found a way to reconcile its own ideology with that of the Tories. Canadians, please comment and tell me if I'm wrong about any of this.

Bad Endorsements

I've nothing more to add to Rick Moran's comments about John Hagee endorsing John McCain, or its near mirror image on the other side of the aisle, Louis Farrakhan's endorsement of Barack Obama. The post is worth it alone for context of Moran's searching aside about Hagee, Bob Jones University, and the rest of that crowd, when he asks "why aren’t these people read out of the conservative movement the same way the Birchers and other extremists were kicked out by Buckley and others in the 1950’s?" If our political leaders truly want to lead us down a path of transcending divisive politics, lukewarm backpedalling when offered this kind of "support" isn't going to help get us there.

Plagiarism And Confabulation

It's getting so you can't believe what anyone says anymore. No one writes their own material, and even when they do, it's nothing but fiction.

A best-seller in Europe has been a story of a woman who describes the Nazis taking her parents away from her when she was a little girl, and then walking nearly 2,000 miles to find them after being literally adopted by a pack of wolves. Turns out -- she made the whole thing up. She's not even Jewish.

A Bush White House aide lifted whole sections of someone else's work to write an op-ed for a newspaper. He got resigned for that today.

Deval Patrick (the Governor of Massachusetts) doesn't think that Barack Obama took more than "two words" of one of his own speeches, but apparently he and Obama share material all the time and don't tell anyone.

Hillary Clinton, she who cast the "plagiarism" stone at Obama, is not above criticism herself:

It's getting so you can't believe what anyone says about anything anymore; how are we supposed to make a decision about anything when no one says anything of their own and on those rare instances when they do it's just plain not true?

Obama Advertising On Rush Limbaugh

In Texas, at least. And why not? Limbuagh and his ilk have done little but to bad-mouth McCain since he took ascendancy, and there are no viable Republican alterantives to him. And Limbaugh listeners will never be convinced to vote for Hillary Clinton, who they've heard demonized on that show for the past sixteen years.

So that leaves them nowhere else to go but to Obama (or to stay home). And despite being unabashedly liberal, Obama's charisma seems to transcend even ideology; even conservatives look at the the guy and think, "Yeah, I kind of like him." So there may be some votes to be got for Obama even amongst the family of Limbaugh listeners, given the bizarre new world emerging from this election.

Today Is Brought To You By Julius Caesar

The Julian calendar had 365 days, with an extra day added to the end of every fourth February. This lighthearted article suggests that Caesar's idea for the Julian calendar was taken from his sojourn in Egypt. That makes sense, given that Egypt had the world's best astronomers at the time, and they had likely figured out that a year was 365 and a quarter days from observing the sun carefully over many years. Caesar was looking to reform Rome's political system, in which the calendar was subject to more or less arbitrary modification by the college of priests and the result was years which lasted more than 400 days followed by years of about 200 days, because the priests favored this consul over that one or the augurs needed to insert an extra month into the year when birds flew into the temple window on a particular day (really).

In fact, it is entirely possible that they figured out that a "year" was the amount of time it took a round earth to orbit the sun, not the other way around. Now in fact, the earth rotates on its axis 365.242374 times as it completes an orbit around the sun, which means that every twenty-fifth leap year, you don't have leap year, except for centennial years that divide equally into 400. So 1900 was not a leap year, 2000 was a leap year, and 2100 will not be. And the rotation of the earth is slowing, at an unknown but detectable rate. It remains to be seen whether the rotation of the earth will slow down enough by the year 4000 to require someone to have to decide to make that year not be a leap year to make up for it. But that's not exactly a problem we need to address today.

Famous people born on Leap Day include singer/golfer Dinah Shore, serial murderer Richard "the Nightstalker" Ramirez, motivational guru Tony Robbins, rapper Ja Rule, and lawblog king Eugene Volokh. Wikipedia claims that people born on February 29 can call themselves "leaplings" but I suspect that someone just made that up because I've never heard that term and it sounds pretty dorky. On February 29, 1504, Christopher Columbus accurately predicted a lunar eclipse and thus awed Native Americans into supplying his men instead of killing them.

A Victory For The Defense

I was wrong to be as anxious as I was for my mock trial kids. They were a little bit unpolished, but obviously far superior to their opponents tonight, and that's what counts in this round. Yes, they could have made better objections than they did. Yes, they could have delivered smoother opening and closing arguments. And yes, they could have been more aggressive with a team of younger kids who didn't really know how to conduct cross-examinations (well, one of them did, and she did a pretty good job). But somehow, they found a new student to come in at the very last minute to play the role of the defendant, and she did a marvelous job. She must be one of the aces of the drama club or something, because she absorbed the role and projected credible emotion on the witness stand. The "not guilty" verdict was a foregone conclusion (I don't think the facts will get to a guilty verdict if there is even a halfway competent defense team in place) but that's not the point -- the point was that to my great relief, the kids stepped up and did what they needed to do. They'd have held their own against even a strong prosecution team. I'm proud of them.

Update: The results were announced Friday, Feb. 29. Not only did my kids win, they wound up seeded #3 overall. That puts them in the championship bracket, and their semi-final round has them again representing the defendant. Their opponent is the Catholic high school from which I graduated twenty years ago. This is going to be fun!

She's Got Us Pegged

Stuff White People Like.

Is it racist? I don't think so because it's generally okay to make fun of white people. And the teasing here is pretty gentle and obviously not written from a place of hatred. The author seems to just think that her white friends are generally kind of odd and amusing, in a harmless, non-patronizing sort of way.

For me, numbers 1, 19, 23, 24, 28, 29, 35, 42, 44, 50, 51, 52, 53, 56, and 76 strike close to home. That's quite a lot of them. I must be really white.

See also Rock Songs Black People Like (a post allegedly written by a real Black person).

How To Be A Better Husband

Ten tips in this article. Here's my self-assessment:

1. Take an interest in something your wife is really passionate about. The Wife's hobby is stamping and I just cannot summon the interest to involve myself in it. She is excited about her education, though, and I've tried to find ways to talk with her about statistics and to engage with her intellectually about that.
2. Put the kids to bed. If by "kids" this means "the pets," I think that duty gets spread around more or less equally between us, and the article seems to assume that she's bearing an unequal weight of a daily domestic task. Jordan's been hiding from me very well in the mornings, though -- I think she's found a way into the box spring.
3. Learn to apologize. I think I'm pretty quick to fall on my sword when I don't think the disagreement is worth it. It seems better, though, to try to figure out what she wants me to do and behave so as to not need to apologize at all.
4. Thank her for putting up with you. Oh, I think this every day! I still can't believe my wild good fortune in finding a woman who can put up with me. But I probably ought to announce this thought out loud to her more often than I do.
5. Clean up after yourself. I'm getting better here, I think. I'm putting her breakfast dishes in the dishwasher as well as my own.
6. Make time for just the two of you. I try to take her out on a date once a week, not just once a month. Maybe for couples with kids that's a bigger challenge.
7. Groom yourself. I think I've got that one figured out.
8. Get away from the family. Maybe I need to do this more. I go to a dinner with friends from the firm and around town once a week, and she doesn't usually go along with that, but aside from that I don't have a lot of "guy" things that I do.
9. Deal with your side of the family. Check. Her side of the family gets equal dignity when we're making plans, and that's making vacation plans complex again. Still, the price is worth it because we are our own family unit now, and the vacation is intended to maintain relationships with our respective families. It would be great if we had enough money and flexibility with our time to visit everyone in their homes, but that's just not possible. So, elaborate negotiations must take place before we can make those arrangements, which feels burdensome but once we get everything figured out, it'll all be good.
10. Don't lose your dating manners. I can brush up on this more; mainly in the arena of opening the car door for her. It feels a little silly doing that while we're out running errands but then again, what I think of as "running an errand" she may think of as "quality time spent as a couple."

Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan, who notes that his husbandly duties may not be co-extensive with my own. Different circumstances, I guess.