The American Pile

• Dan Carpenter, the Star’s aging Vietnam era leftwing hippie editorial page columnist, rarely writes anything I even read, let alone agree with. Today’s column was a striking exception. Therein he dealt rather roughly with four disparate characters in recent news: Gerald Ford, Tim McVeigh, Saddam Hussein, and Bob Knight. I had to smile at much of it. He noted the media’s sentimental stampede to anoint Ford as The Great Healer, a man of Solomonic wisdom and courage in his pardon of President Nixon. Carpenter’s view, which squares with mine, is that the American people were stong enough to have survived the full processing of Richard Nixon by the court and justice system, and that the pardon, in fact, subverted justice. Carpenter believes McVeigh’s quick (by American standards) execution was a mistake because of information he likely could have provided us—specifically about the troubling claim that he and his cohort, Terry Nichols, got help from “others,” a topic most recently addressed by a House subcommittee report last fall. Carpenter recalled a story the late Star columnist Tom Keating told Carpenter years ago about the way Knight, today freshly lionized for becoming the “winningest coach in men’s college basketball history,” bullied and humiliated a student journalist in a post-game press conference.  Knight, Carpenter wrote in closing, “ pretends he doesn’t need us, but he doesn’t exist without our grotesque appetite for entertainment, and there’s nothing there to care about except a bunch of numbers.”  Good job, Dan.  (January 7, 2007)

  The Bridge To Idiocy Is Already Built, However...

• “Consumers are bored, bored, bored. We have to find some new way to get their attention and to build bridges to new forms of loyalty.” –Tom Pirko, president of BevMark LLC, a food and beverage industry consulting company, quoted in the January 12, 2007, issue of the Wall Street Journal, in an article about Pepsico’s new marketing strategy, in which it will change the designs on its cans and other containers every three or four weeks. The Journal noted that consumers are not only bored—the signal pandemic of recent decades—but “increasingly fickle, restless, and distracted” and are “always looking for something new.” Pepsi will debut 35 new designs in 2007 alone and, of course, more are planned for 2008. The Journal did not speculate on how much the big, new plan cost Pepsico, but you can bet it was a pretty penny. Careers are on the line, too, because Pepsi poohbahs know that they “run the risk of confusing or alienating consumers who rely on familiar visual cues to find their favorite brands among a changing seas of products.”  Stormy seas, shaky bridges, indeed! (January 12, 2007)

• The Star brought us thrilling news this morning: Brian Spencer has invented and is marketing a compressed air-powered pogo stick, and the thing—named Vurtego—is flying off store shelves.  Brian says he’s sold 5,000 of these babies already, and that it holds the world record for highest pogo stick hop at six feet. Brian told an eager Lost Angeles Times reporter that he’s already at work on the next generation—a stick equipped with a “gearshift” that lets riders adjust the air pressure as they bounce about. The product liability lawyers have to be rubbing their hands in glee.  (January 26, 2007) 

  Oooooooh. . .Bad News For The ACLU

• An item circulating on the Internet points out that the preambles to the constitutions of all 50 states—count ‘em, 50!—contain an explicit reference to God, or a euphemism for one.  (January 31, 2007)

• Turd Blossom—Dubya’s favorite nickname for his chief of staff, Karl Rove, according to no less an eminence than the Financial Times, in an editorial in its February 3, 2007, Weekend Edition.

• Lefties are sighing with relief today. The Super Bowl is over. Now America doesn’t have to listen any more to the coaches and players talking about God and their Christian faith. (February 5, 2007)

• The New York Times ran a story speculating that the war in Iraq “seemed to lurk just beneath the surface ”of many of the advertisements” in last night’s Super Bowl telecast.  It cited the numerous “images of violence” in the ads, such as a man holding an axe, a person throwing a rock--I-raq—get it?!! get it!!--, people slapping each other, workers in office smackdowns, and other sinister pratfall moments. (February 5, 2007)

• It was rough going for television viewers in February. Anna Nicole Smith’s death quickly shoved everything else offstage, even the deranged female astronaut who drove 900 miles in diapers to confront and pepper spray a female rival. Night after night, any channel pretending to broadcast “news” obsessed over poor Anna.  Why did she die? Who has the carcass? When will it be buried? Where? Why, oh why did she die? What about the autopsy? Who was the father of Anna Nicole’s infant child? (Four or five men angling for access to the estate stepped forward quickly to claim paternity.) Were drugs involved? What about the doomed child—who has custody? Was there a will? Who’s named in it? Images of the Bahamian mansion, the Florida mansion, the parents, the friends, the lawyers, endlessly repeated film clips of Anna Nicole and her gigantic hooters heaving, freshly discovered pictures of Anna Nicole grappling with a Bahamian government official.  Anna Nicole as a child, Anna Nicole as a teenager, Anna Nicole this, Anna Nicole that. Where will the funeral be? Who has custody of the carcass today? What about the DNA tests? Isn’t it awful? What will we do? What will we do? The cable news outlets resemble the freak parade on the Jerry Springer Show. Just last night the doctor in charge of the autopsy appeared on one of them. He warned that Anna’s corpse was “turning,” and that if they didn’t have a funeral soon it wouldn’t even be possible to open the casket. He spoke in a thick Strangelovian accent and his bald skull was grotesquely misshapen.  A film clip emerged which showed Anna Nicole in clown-painted face, apparently stoned on drugs, cooing and babbling. The probate judge, rumored to be a former cab driver, broke down sobbing and blubbering on TV as he read his verdict in a corpse custody dispute.  I scooted through five consecutive cable news channels one evening and all five were roaring Anna Nicole! Anna Nicole! Anna Nicole!  It was that way every night for weeks. What if World War III breaks out? Will MSNBC and the rest be able to break away to cover it?  Apparently upset at being shoved offstage by Anna Nicole, the lovely and talented Britney Spears barged into a Lost Angeles hair salon and shaved herself bald while a bodyguard videotaped it for release to the media. Then Britney re-entered rehab, though there is no cure for what ails her. There is something deeply, deeply pathetic and grotesque about this. What it says about the media—and, equally, the American audience and the wasteland it inhabits--is really quite sad. (February 21, 2007)

• A confederate in the remote northern Indiana town of Deerfly called late in the month with a complaint: somebody was dropping the ball on a golden business opportunity as part of the Anna Nicole Smith-O-Rama still ongoing.  He, like countless of my male friends and acquaintances, had already been to Florida to file patrimony claim papers in the hope of being named the father of Anna Nicole’s infant child. On the way back, he had a brainstorm: why not create a new daily television series modeled after the Jerry Springer Show, but bring in Anna Nicole’s family members, patrimony candidates, and personal advisers, and have them fight over custody of the corpse and where to bury it. The audience could consist of neighbors, friends, fans, all of them highly agitated and quivering. Everyone would be encouraged to hoot and boo and bray and yap and blubber, to flail themselves with branches, even to engage in physical struggles over the casket or Anna Nicole’s personal belongings. Jerry himself might even agree to moderate and provoke the mob. Yes, there were already five or six cable channels covering the proceedings round-the-clock, and large crowds permanently in vigil around courthouses, medical centers, or other places where a glimpse of someone famous might be possible—but this was a fresh, new concept. It sounded boffo to me.  A day or two later, though, some of the edge went off the idea: a “very pink” funeral was finally held for Anna Nicole (closed casket, certainly), but the burial site was still tied up in massive litigation.  The cable channel coverage roared on through each night, though, every night, no end in sight. (March 2, 2007)

• February gave me a new goal in life: to meet the media person who decreed that Anna Nicole Smith should be the most important news story in the entire universe.

• “. . .we’ll be talking about (the Anna Nicole Smith saga) for days, weeks, months—perhaps even years—to come.”—Geraldo Rivera on Fox news February 22, speculating that we’re far from done with this story. (February 22, 2007)

You Really Weren’t Imagining All This. . .

• When a media watchdog organization, The Project for Excellence in Journalism, finally tallied its research on the Anna Nicole Smith-O-Rama, the numbers were pretty appalling. It focused on the roughly three weeks between Smith’s death and burial, February 8 to March 2. During that period:  1) Cable news channels (MSNBC and CNN the prime offenders) devoted 22 percent of their total airtime to the Smith story (twice the time devoted to the second-ranked story—equally dubious when you think about it—the presidential campaign; 2) CNN’s Larry King Show included the story in 16 of 21 shows, Fox News’ On The Record With Greta Van Sustern included Smith in 16 of 17 shows; 3)Fox News led all media outlets by devoting32 percent of its total air time to the story, with MSNBC next at 21 percent and CNN at 14 percent; 4)the first two days were the most absurd—30 percent of all media coverage went to Smith, and cable news channels spent 55 percent of their time on Smith in the opening 48 hours. This was a bombardment we haven’t seen since the like of Operation Rolling Thunder when B-52s carpet-bombed for days in the Vietnam War. (April 1, 2007)

George Carlin Could Have Some Fun With This           

• The national sport of Afghanistan is buzkashi. A beheaded goat is the “ball.” Players on horseback battle for control of the goat carcass. Prizes are awarded for placing the carcass in a circular goal. And now, back to shopping. . . (February 28, 2007)

• Pop-up ads are everywhere. Soon pop-up stores may be. Kraft Foods got some breathless coverage from the Chicago Tribune for its plan to open a retail store in March on Chicago’s “Magnificent Mile, North Michigan Avenue—for three days only! Turns out this has been going on for several years but mostly in Lost Angeles and New York. Target popped up in 2003 at Rockefeller Center in New York to introduce a new line of women’s clothing.  J. C. Penney did the same thing a year later. Fila tried it in L. A. in 2005, and Nike premiered its Lebron James basketball shoe at a pop-up in New York.  Lexus rented a former art gallery space in January in Chicago to show off its new cars. Everybody in the industry—marketers, consultants, those types—seems to be abuzz. Very cool, very chic, very trendy, they’re saying. Behind it is the relentless drive to reach target customers in the face of increasing consumer ability to skip ads, shop on the Internet, tune out the messages, escape the buy! buy! buy! message. The Trib’s lively story bore the clear promise that there’s much more of this trend to come.  One important note overlooked by the Tribune:  “pop-up stores” is an idea pioneered in 1960 by Terry Southern, author of The Magic Christian. That novel’s main character, billionaire Guy Grand, opened stores briefly—often for no more than 24 hours—, sold all his merchandise at mind-boggling low prices, then closed and emptied the building and disappeared. Riots sometimes ensued, amid great public hubbub, but by then Guy had moved on to some new stunt. Down the road, the pressure will have to escalate to sustain our Potemkin village of the soul. I can foresee pop-up stores being opened—at gunpoint, if necessary—inside our homes once all our streets and neighborhoods are clotted to capacity with them and it’s become too costly to send vans to our houses to pick us up—at gunpoint, of course—and drive us to the malls for required shopping. There’ll be federal legislation, perhaps part of the Patriot Act, requiring all citizens to meet certain targeted consumption levels, and universal shopping cards to make it easy for officials to track our spending and gently remind us when we’re falling behind.  (February 28, 2007)

ACLU Asleep At The Switch

• Heedless of danger, Indiana’s Bureau of Motor Vehicles since January 1 has been offering Hoosiers a specialty license plate emblazoned with the dreaded phrase, “In God We Trust” (this is one of 68 “specialty plates the state offers). As of the end of March, over 400,000 citizens have bought one. I’ve personally seen many on Indianapolis Streets.  How long before the ACLU realizes what’s happened on its watch, and unleashes its lawyers to stop this?  (March 31, 2007)

• Word leaked out of England that the Brits are going to drop the teaching of the Holocaust from the school curriculum, and also will no longer be discussing the Crusades in history classes, because these topics offend Muslims.  We snicker at the news, but in suburban Indianapolis this spring an elementary school principal ordered his faculty to stop referring to the Easter bunny as the “Easter” bunny. The use of the word Easter is now politically incorrect. Other examples of such cowardice abound. The poison has spread worldwide. (March 30, 2007)

• The Don Imus Unpleasantness, which erupted after Imus described the Rutgers University women’s basketball players as “nappy-headed hos,” illustrates nothing more than our hypocrisy. Imus is a low-grade sleazeball who’s been saying nasty things publicly for years, and whose syndicated radio show has been wildly popular all that time with glitterati galore. Suddenly everyone’s outraged? This sort of degrading language has long been a staple of America’s black hip-hop subculture, and none of Imus’s billions and billions of guests and admirers have protested. Why shouldn’t Imus get a free pass, when others do?  (April 12, 2007)

• With Don Imus’s scalp nailed up on the wall, lefty screechers led by the ridiculous Al Sharpton informed us that the next agenda item was a national conversation about what kind of talk could be allowed on the nation’s air waves. The big talking heads and opinion leaders seemed to take Al seriously. Except for the occasional conservative cranks, nobody cared to acknowledge the sheer lunacy of a man like Sharpton being appointed our national arbiter of ethics and good taste. (April 20, 2007)

• Dunkin’ Donuts, one of my favorite franchises, is trying to revive itself by taking on Starbucks and other competitors for the growing premium coffee and snack sandwich market. Dunkin’ has been in a long slump that saw it virtually disappear from the Midwest. I’d certainly welcome them back. Their donuts and pastries were superior. (April 28, 2007)

• Meantime, somebody leaked a taped telephone conversation of actor Alec Baldwin calling his 12-year-old daughter a “thoughtless little pig.” Within hours it was announced Baldwin was apologizing and would go on a national forgiveness tour, perhaps even to include appearances with Oprah and Dr. Phil. But what if his daughter is a thoughtless little pig. Isn’t truth a defense? And what is Alec Baldwin doing here, anyway?  Didn’t he promise to leave the country if Dubya was elected?  (April 27, 2007)

• Indiana State University trustees stunned us as April ended, with the announcement that they’ve approved a plan to eliminate some 64 study programs with minimal enrollment. About half the university’s programs account for 90 percent of its enrollment, and more than 400 undergraduate classes attract fewer than 10 students. This is a courageous decision, but the right one. Years ago, when recruiting for Price Waterhouse, I spent ample time strolling the halls of academe. It was my strong impression then that at a typical college campus you could fire half the faculty and administrative staff and no one would even notice and the business of the university would go on without missing a beat. I’ve not seen a shred of evidence this impression was wrong, then or now.  Academe is nearly entirely cut off from the competitive pressures of the real world, which promote efficiency, creativity, intensity, and sharp focus on the tasks at hand.  The next time someone at a university dies of overwork will be the first time. (April 30, 2007)

• The Social Security trustees issued a report in April which said that Social Security costs will exceed revenues (code for: deficit spending) in 2017, according to syndicated columnist Michael Barone.  Did you hear or read anything about this in the drive-by media? I didn’t.  Oh well, back to shopping.  (May 16, 2007)

Three-Headed Nightmare

• Daimler-Benz AG finally sold off its Chrysler Group in mid-May. Fear and unease among Chrysler employees were reflected in headlines about the deal, and for good reason. The buyer was Cerberus Capital Management, a New York-based firm named after the three-headed dog who guarded the gates of hell in Greek mythology. The Wall Street Journal speculated it would move “aggressively to cut labor costs, prune Chrysler’s overpopulated network of U.S. dealers and shift investment to developing markets overseas.” Analysts said there’s a 1 in 5 chance that Chrysler will still be around in 10 years. In the meantime, that three-headed dog will be the workers’ worst nightmare as costs are cut, jobs are eliminated, and plants are closed to make the deal a winner for Cerberus. (May 15, 2007

• “I can’t get away from it. It’s too big. I’m screwed.”—Last words known to have been uttered by Officer Robert Buckman, as a tornado closed in on him as he drove his squad car to warn nearby rural residents of its approach. Buckman died from injuries suffered when the storm, with winds estimated over 200 miles an hour, threw his car 300 yards off the road into a field at Greensburg, Kansas. He was speaking on his car phone when it and his police radio went silent.  (May 19, 2007)

• Ben and Jerry’s ice cream company has a website and on it is a list of flavors consigned to the graveyard—retired, apparently, because they didn’t sell. I counted at least 252 different flavors.  Any chance the boys and girls in marketing ought to be replaced?  (May 21, 2007)

• Reporter Louis Menand, writing in the “Talk of the Town” section of the May 21 New Yorker, notes that there are now more bachelor’s degrees awarded in the United States every year in Parks, Recreation, Leisure and Fitness Studies than in all foreign languages and literatures combined.

• Dennis Miller is back on the air with a three-hour radio talk show (WXNT-1430 AM in Indianapolis, 3-6 p.m. daily) and in my view he’s easily the best of the lot. He’s as close to a Renaissance Man as there is in radio and television (Milt Rosenberg of WGN radio in Chicago is a contender). He has a brilliant intellect, he’s polite to callers and---best of all—seems constantly infused with an inner amusement at things. He covers serious topics and silly ones, but all with a twinkle and a smile.  An utterly amazing public figure. I’m thrilled to have him back.  (May 22, 2007)

• A colleague called me over this morning to ask about a computer problem.
  I was mildly familiar with the program she was trying to use. It became quickly clear that her computer had decided, on its own, overnight—while we were home innocently sleeping, believing that everything was all right—to change some of its settings and default positions, so that now she could only go three or four steps into the normal sequence before a strange, never-before-seen screen popped up. I could take it no further. Her computer was doing this, I told her, out of sheer and malevolent cussedness, because it wanted to. She would have to call someone in the computer services group to fix it.  I then told her I had a better solution, should she be interested and have access to large-bore firearms. She raised an eyebrow, not quite sure.  Come into my office, I said, and she followed. As we peered at my computer screen, I summoned up the photo album file-named Death On Thee Nile, a pictorial record of the execution of a Gateway computer carried out by a friend in remotest rural Washington State in 2004. I provided my own narrative. She seemed taken aback, but amused. It’s The American Dream, I told her, and my friend, Monsieur M. Gohard, has lived it. I pointed to the tree stump which was Ground Zero of the execution site, and told her that I had stood at that very spot. That’s good ground, I said, that’s rich ground. That was my segue phrase, and I then moved seamlessly into a few bars of a song in a Jonathan Winters skit about an off-Broadway musical.  “I wish I could do that,” she enthused, referring to the computer shooting.  Keep believing, I replied, and someday. .  .someday, maybe you’ll get to shoot yours.  (May 31, 2007)

• William F. Buckley Jr. called it a “holy vessel of expiation.”  Peaches and I called it “a stunning film.”  All three of us were deeply moved by what surely is one of the finest films in years, The Lives of Others. This is a German film with English subtitles, set in the mid-1980s in East Berlin near the end of grim decades of Communist rule.  The dreaded secret police, the Stasi, have thousands of agents spying on citizens, and are served by over 200,000 East German citizens recruited to spy on their fellow countrymen. The story focuses on a Stasi officer assigned to spy on a young German playwright suspected of harboring ideas dangerous to the state, and on the playwright himself.  The two men experience a moral awakening—Buckley calls it “a convulsion of the soul”—and the film ends in a riveting combination of “sublime vengeance” (Buckley’s words again), joy (the fall of the Berlin Wall) and redemption. Buckley saw it with a friend and remarked “I think that is the best movie I ever saw.”  We attended with another couple and sat in overwhelmed silence at the film’s end, as the credits scrolled up a dark screen.  The film won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Seeing it is a deeply moving experience, one offering hope for humanity—something often in short supply.  (June 23, 2007)

Idiocy, Googoled

• A correspondent expressed puzzlement at the national obsession with Paris Hilton. Who would watch this stuff? he wondered. The legendary Larry King had Paris on for a full hour shortly after she got out of jail. His viewership for that show tripled his normal ratings. This doesn’t explain who these viewers are, but it illustrates why our national culture is headed down the sewer.  (June 27, 2007)

• The Lost Angeles Times has announced it will begin running front-page advertisements. Its parent, the Chicago Tribune, is expected to soon follow suit, and ditto New York’s Newsday. The Indianapolis Star, hardly a trend-setter, caved in some years ago on this. Ultimately, nothing they do will matter much. Newspaper journalism is increasingly irrelevant–most of them have already joined the Now-Every-Page-Is-A-Whorehouse Club, anyway.  

• A year ago, things looked grim in the pink flamingo department. The manufacturer of the iconic lawn ornaments was bankrupt. But wait! HMC International of Westmoreland, New York, has come to the rescue, bought the copyright and molds, and is promising to get the flamingo assembly lines rolling once again.  (June 30, 2007)

• Things have gotten so bad in the gene pool now that at several central Indiana railroad crossings they’ve put up signs warning us: Do Not Stop On Tracks.  (July 28, 2007)

At Least They Investigated

• A block of brown claylike minerals and pipes, a 9-volt battery, wires (Houston, 11/8/2006); plastic bag containing a block of cheese, taped to another plastic bag containing a cell phone charger (Baltimore, 9/16/2006); carry-on bag containing “items that looked like improvised explosive device components” (Milwaukee, 6/4/2007); checked bag containing two icepacks filled with clay and covered in duct tape (San Diego, 6/5/2007) — “Suspicious items” found in passenger baggage at U.S. airports in the last 10 months. The FBI found “no known connection” between the involved passengers and any terrorist organizations, and a Transportation Security Administration spokesman said citizens should not find these matters “unduly concerning.”  The TSA did issue an alert to airport security workers, though, to be on the lookout for items that could be used to make or detonate bombs--things such as wires, switches, cell phone components, claylike substances, and pipes. (July 29, 2007)

Winning Arab Hearts and Minds

• Rock music comprises 80% of each hour’s broadcasting on Radio Sawa, one of two Voice of America channels beamed into the Arab world—“everyone from Eminem to J. Lo to Britney Spears,” beams Norman Pattiz, a member of the U.S. Broadcasting Board of Governors, which oversees the VOA. Pattiz also famously told the New Yorker magazine that “it was MTV that brought down the Berlin Wall.” –excerpts from an essay by Robert R. Reilly in the Summer 2007 issue of Claremont Review of Books. (August 5, 2007)

What We Call ‘Doing The Heavy Lifting’

• “. . .’the Chatham House Version’—that toxic amalgam of smugness, moral relativism, and cherished feelings of guilt about the achievements of Western civilization—everywhere nourished the catechism of established opinion.”—Roger Kimball, co-editor and co-publisher of The New Criterion magazine, quoted in a review of a new book of essays (Counterpoints: 25 Years of the New Criterion on Culture and the Arts) published this summer. Founded in 1982, the magazine views its mission as relentlessly negative: “the gritty job of intellectual and cultural trash collector.”—what we in the United States call “doing the heavy lifting.” (August 7, 2007)

• A veritable mother-lode of special nicknames appeared in an Indianapolis Star account of a big local cocaine bust featuring about 300 police stampeding 38 locations around the city. A busload of miscreants face hard time in this caper, and something—who knows what—inspired the Star to obtain and print the nicknames of some of them. We rarely see this many in one location. Included were: Mario “Bubba” Adams, Earl “E” Allen, Dawan “Valdez” Calhoun, Jamael “Gar” Carter, Jonathan “Elo” Furr, Jamarr “Omar” Gaines, Demarcus “CoCo” Garner, Eric “Mackbone” Garner, Antonio “Loc” Hardin, Jermaine “Main” Johnson, Roy “Baby Boy” Lampkin, Antwan “Shack” Shackelford, Sheridan “Bossy” Sisk, Christopher “Cool Breeze” Smith, Willie “Meat” Stott, Terrell “Talls” Turnley, Jarvis “Jarhead” Watson, Larry “Elbow” Williams, and Dewon “Cortez” Wilson.  (August 15, 2007)

The Gift That Keeps On Giving. . .

• Conservatives, despairing under the weight of 24-7-365 bad news and bad polls, regained a mid-September spring in their steps when news broke of Dan Rather’s big  $70 million lawsuit against his former employer, CBS Television. This ridiculous man--“one of the 20th Century’s most pompous gasbags,” in the words of columnist Jonah Goldberg—says his bosses made a scapegoat of him following Rather’s famed 2004 “Memogate” scoop claiming to have exposed Dubya’s military service as a gigantic fraud. What could be more delightful that getting Dan and all the rest of these scurrilous rats in court and under oath before the whole world?  Goldberg, whose column quickly following the lawsuit news was an utterly devastating mockery of Rather—he speculated on the likelihood of Rather showing up for trial wearing an Afghan robe, baggy pants, a bright orange wig and an enormous tinfoil hat—will certainly want to attend and take notes for the rest of us. Having Dan Rather still around is a rare comfort in troubling times. (September 24, 2007)

Do Not Call Registry

• To register your phone with the National Do Not Call Registry, dial 1-888-382-1222 from the telephone you wish to register. The process is quick (less than a minute) and simple, and gets your phone number on the Do Not Call list for the next five years. An alternative is to register using the Internet at www.donotcall.gov (October 28, 2007)

Buggin' The ACLU

• The ACLU's address, for those who wish to torment them with Christmas (not holiday. . .Christmas) greetings is:
  

  American Civil Liberties Union
  125 Broad Street
  18th Floor
  New York, New York 10004

  And remember-the more religious references you can make, the crazier it drives them!
  (November 1, 2007)

Kindred Souls

• The Star’s wacko lefty columnist, Dan Carpenter, recently fulminated about the huge (well over 400,000) sales of Indiana license plates bearing an “In God WeTrust” message. This morning’s paper brought us a letter from a delighted reader, James Miller, of Westfield, Indiana.  Miller confessed he bought one for his SUV “just to annoy liberals,” and that few things made him happier than getting Dan and his fellow travelers riled up. Same here.  (October 29, 2007)           

• It’s been a year since the Indianapolis Star announced its bold plan to get more of its content—current era code for news—on the cheap—free from readers. The Star’s editors touted this as a way of giving readers more of what they want, apparently local news prepared by readers themselves. Old-timers in the business have always known the value of local news, which is about the only thing a local newspaper can provide that a reader can’t get elsewhere. My guess is all the bold plans in the world won’t save the Star and most other newspapers from a fate they’re already speeding toward—utter irrelevance.  The Star seems to me just as silly, lazy, and touchy-feely as ever, except now we can increasingly blame it on the readers.  (October 30, 2007)

Life As Popularity Contest

• Viewers of ABC’s popular “Dancing With The Stars” program got a genuine life lesson last night. Sabrina Bryan was eliminated from the show despite being its best dancer and ranking consistently near the top in judges’ points for the first several months of competition. Each week one couple is eliminated and this one had to be the result of the program’s wild card—viewers and fans get to vote each week on who should stay, and their votes often run contrary to the professional judges. Bryan obviously didn’t get sufficient “fan vote” to survive, though several other obviously worse dancers—but more popular with fans—were kept in the competition. The studio audience booed loudly. One judge broke into tears. Two judges made emphatic protests when the decision was announced. Sabrina herself looked utterly stricken. The lesson was that superior skills and merit sometimes aren’t enough in life, and that “popular” but less talented individuals often dominate at the head table. It’s a bitter lesson, one best learned as a child so you can grow up with one less delusion. (October 31, 2007)

• As October slithered to a close, legendary radio dirtbag Don Imus signed a big deal to get back on the airwaves following a short penance for unseemly comments he made about the women’s basketball team at Rutgers University.  And while Don and his legions of supporters were cheering, lefties continued their campaign to destroy Rush Limbaugh by any means possible.  (November 1, 2007)

Still, This Is Better Than Being In The Same Room With Left-Wing Democrats

• Among many treatments and therapies for mental illness practiced in native villages in Somalia is the “hyena cure.” This involves dropping the mentally impaired person into a pit containing one or more hyenas. The animals, it is believed, scare off the evil spirits believed to inhabit the patient.  Another therapy involves beating, forced starvation, and smoking donkey feces. (From an article in the Chicago Tribune November 16 on the chaos in Somalia.  November 16, 2007)

Timmy Learns His Lesson And Marion Confirms The Truth of It

• “Must we hear about it every time this crack addict attempts to rehabilitate himself with some new—and typically half-witted—political grandstanding?  I’d be grateful if you would take me off your mailing list. I cannot think of anything the useless Marion Barry could do that would interest me in the slightest, up to and including overdose.”—Tim Page, music critic of the Washington Post, writing in a November e-mail response to an unsolicited press release Page received touting Barry’s views on a local hospital project. Barry, a former Washington, D.C. mayor, has served prison time on drug charges. Page was soon after marched forth by his Post bosses and made to publicly apologize for what his editor called a “terrible mistake.” Barry celebrated Page’s act of forced contrition by urging the paper, which has truckled to Barry for decades, to send a message to the whole world that it “won’t tolerate this kind of lowlife activity.” (From an account in the November 26, 2007 issue of The Weekly Standard)

We Are Living In An Insane Asylum

• The federal Equal Employment Opportunities Commission (EEOC) has filed a lawsuit against a Salvation Army store which requires its employees to speak English. The EEOC claims this is a “civil rights” violation.  (November 30, 2007)

• A Verizon television ad running this month shows three insipid teen-age girls standing in someone ‘s yard watching a Shetland pony eat the shingles off a dog house. Our popular culture is an insane asylum.  (November 30, 2007)

• There’s precious little justice in this world, but we got a small dose the day before Christmas from—of all places—a United States District Court in Indianapolis. There, until December 24, had landed a lawsuit filed by an Anderson, Indiana couple, Laura and Scott Bell. They sought to block a student dress code adopted by the Anderson public schools. They claimed it violated their children’s rights of free expression and the family’s right to a free public education. The Bells requested and were granted the right to represent themselves in court--after refusing to hire their own lawyer--but then repeatedly missed court deadlines and other requirements.  They lost in lower court, but pressed an appeal. A district judge finally threw out their case, ruling their claims were frivolous, and ordered the Bells to pay for over $40,000 of legal costs the defendants had incurred. The Bells are screaming bloody murder and vowing never to pay. (December 25, 2007)

• Another reason to go on living emerged in American pop culture at year-end—Taser parties! Out of Gilbert, Arizona, comes the inspiring story of Dana Shafman, who’s breaking new entrepreneurial ground by hosting increasingly popular Taser parties in her own home. She sells the new C2 model, a “stun gun” just launched in August by Taser International, a Scottsdale, Arizona-based company.  The C2 is smaller than the version now widely used by law enforcement agencies, but packs the same electric wallop and is aimed at the “personal self-defense” market.  Shafman told Associate Press she’s selling about 30 of these little babies a month at $349.99 each. They’re small enough to fit in a purse, and her parties feature living room demonstrations for the mostly-female attendees, some of whom have been reported “whooping as they take turns blasting at a metallic target.” May her business prosper.  (December 31, 2007)

• Peaches and I encountered three Good Samaritans on a lonely stretch of U.S. 31 north of Kokomo on the last Sunday night of the year, and they provided as nice an end to 2007 as we could have asked for. We were driving home from a family Christmas  in southern Michigan on a wet and chilly, but not brutally cold evening. I was piloting the car of a friend who'd asked us to bring it back to Indianapolis for her to pick up. Peaches followed in our own car.  Hurtling toward Kokomo on a busy four-lane, about two-thirds of the way home, the right rear tire of the friend's car shredded.  Cursing the gods that had dumped this on us, I guided the disabled Ford Escape off the road. I was unfamiliar with the vehicle and had no idea where to look for a spare. It  was muddy and cold, and my mood was foul. Peaches and I drove to a nearby convenience store and slogged inside to ask for the number of a wrecker service we could call to haul away the car. It soon became apparent that we were not to get a wrecker at 7 p.m. on a Sunday night of a long holiday weekend. Three men drinking coffee at a nearby table overheard the conversation. Two of them volunteered to change the tire. The third, an older man, said he lived next door and had a trailer on which he could put the disabled vehicle if we couldn't get a spare tire installed. He offered to store it in his driveway till we could get someone to pick it up and take it to Kokomo for repair. After deliberating, Peaches and I went back to the car with the two younger men, one of whom parked his huge grain-hauling truck behind our parade of vehicles--to keep us all safe from the whizzing traffic.  The Good Samaritans immediately found the spare bolted up and frozen in the undercarriage, and wrestled it loose.  A state trooper arrived, turned on his flashing lights, and joined us, armed with a powerful flashlight. By now, the car had sunk an inch or two into the soft mud on the berm, so that two hefty jacks were needed to raise it sufficiently.  In about 30 minutes, the job was done. The two men urged us to be careful, but assured us the spare was in good shape and should get us safely home.  We had to override their objections to accepting money for their kindness. Heading south again, we arrived home without further incident, and truly grateful. We agreed that the aggravation had been trumped by the wonderful kindness of strangers, angels perhaps:  Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares. Heb. 13:2  (December 30, 2007)

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