WWJD? I'm betting: Join the orgy.

No, not a Christmas post. Maybe later.

This one's about International Orgasm Day (which, until now, I didn't know existed). I know what you're thinking: How does one celebrate such a titillating holiday? Well, with a 250-person-strong mass orgasm in Israel, of course. For world peace. Of course. Organized by Raelians -- you know, the people who believe in aliens and free love, but paradoxically abstain from recreational drugs and alcohol. Of course.

The event was canceled. Of course.

Justice on the cheap.

To save money (not that much money, really, in the scheme of things), the Chief Justice of the New Hampshire Supreme Court plans to suspend all jury trials--civil and criminal--for one month early next year.

Robert J. Lynn, chief justice of the superior courts, which conduct all New Hampshire jury trials, said he fears the delays inevitably will cause damage. "There is some element of 'justice delayed, justice denied,' no doubt about it," he said.

Christopher Keating, executive director of the New Hampshire Public Defender program, said his chief concern now is "people in custody who will endure delays in getting their day in court."

The state Supreme Court threw out two criminal cases this year because trials did not begin within six months of arraignment, the legal limit. Prosecutors fear more cases may be dismissed...

The delays may encourage some defendants to seek plea deals, or litigants to settle out of court...

"You're talking about erosion of our fundamental civic fabric," said Ellen J. Shemitz, executive director of the New Hampshire Assn. for Justice, which represents civil trial attorneys.

James J. Tenn Jr., incoming president of the state's bar association, said that as the crisis has grown, New Hampshire courts have been slow to process orders, respond to lawyers' requests and "do the daily work."

"We've just seen delay after delay after delay," said David Slawsky, a civil lawyer in Manchester. "The court process is breaking down."

Chief Justice Broderick also intends to purposely leave vacant over 10% of the state's trial court judgeships, as well as possibly 1 of the state's 5 Supreme Court slots (notably, the NHSC is the small state's sole appellate court).

Aren't the "tween" years awkward enough?

Now, in Saudi Arabia, tween-age girls can be married off to old men by their fathers, but can't file for divorce until they reach the age of majority.

A Saudi court has rejected a plea to divorce an eight-year-old girl married off by her father to a man who is 58, saying the case should wait until the girl reaches puberty.

The divorce plea was filed in August by the girl's divorced mother with a court at Unayzah, 135 miles north of Riyadh just after the marriage contract was signed by the father and the groom.

Lawyer Abdullar Jtili said:"The judge has dismissed the plea, filed by the mother, because she does not have the right to file such a case, and ordered that the plea should be filed by the girl herself when she reaches puberty."

I suppose it's somehow internally logical that the girl is young enough that she has to follow her father's wishes to get married, and so is not old enough to file for divorce -- and even, though of course sexist, that her father can sign her marriage contract, but her mother cannot file her divorce.

But taking a step out of the rabbithole, and setting aside the "creepy 50-years-her-senior groom" thing: Doesn't it seem like if she's too young to sign the marriage contract, she's too young to get married?

"Shake and Shoot" Coca-Cola douches, and Other weird science.

There are several strange items in this article about funny little scientific studies -- actually makes me want to read an issue of the British Medical Journal.

Highlights:

• "Studies showed that children who consume large amounts of sugar are no more hyperactive than those who don't. But parents who think their kids have eaten sugar, even when they haven't, tend to rate them as being hyperactive.
  
  The ill-mannered behavior, the authors wrote, was 'all in the parents' minds.'"

• "Coca-Cola douches for pregnancy prevention were a part of folklore in the 1950s and 1960s, before the contraceptive pill. People thought that the acidity of the soda would kill sperm and that the classic Coke bottle provided a convenient 'shake and shoot' applicator.
  
  Dr. Deborah Anderson of Boston University School of Medicine had previously reported that Coke can impede the mobility of sperm in a test tube. But further study, she said, shows that sperm get to the cervical canal so quickly that postcoital spritzing is ineffective.
  
  For it to work, she wrote, the soda would have to be put in the vagina before sex, 'but that would undoubtedly be messy.'"

• "Drs. Christopher J. Boos and Howard Marshall, cardiologists at University Hospital Birmingham, treated a 25-year-old woman who suffered repeated fainting episodes, particularly when eating a sandwich or drinking a fizzy drink.
  
  A full medical work-up showed her to be healthy overall, but the team ultimately diagnosed a condition called swallow syncope, which caused her heart to stop beating for as long as three seconds after some types of swallowing -- especially sandwiches, for no clear reason.
  
  The woman was fitted with a pacemaker and has had no fainting episodes since, Boos and Marshall reported in the Lancet. They suspect that many other patients suffer the problem without being diagnosed."

Ok. So sandwich-fainting is weird. But these doctors think there are many other people who faint when they swallow, and don't notice? Really?

Once a juvenile, always a sex offender?

I don't know anything about the details of this particular case, but it seems to me generally good news that a high court somewhere recognizes that an 11-year-old who commits a crime might not be destined to a life of such crimes.

Money quote:

"Hugh Southey, appearing for ['Teenager F'], pointed out that -- because there was no review process -- [F] could still be on the register 'aged 70 or 80,' even if he committed no further offence.
The impact of the notification regulations on young children, who were in the process of change and development, could be 'significant and dispiriting.'

He said: 'Children have to have the chance to mature and change.

'It is important that the state does what it can to encourage the development of children who have committed serious offences in a positive way, rather than a negative way.'"

We can argue about adults another time.

[UPDATED] Bristol Meth.

UPDATE: Apparently the drug was Oxycontin.

Bristol Palin's soon-to-be mother-in-law might not be able to attend the wedding -- 'cause she'll be in jail. Only relatively sketchy info at this point, but it's 6 felony drug counts -- and not just possession.

These people didn't ask to be thrown into the public eye. But still, there they are.


[NOTE: Bristol is not implicated in these charges. Nor have there been any reports (that I've seen) as to what drug was involved, meth or otherwise. But once I came up with it, I was too enchanted by the post title not to use it.]

Bailout University.

Yale joins Harvard.

Finals week wrap-up: animals and religion (and politics and porn).

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Math teacher tests advertising.

A math teacher in a California school district has taken to placing ads on his tests in order to raise money for newly-introduced photocopying fees. This is simultaneously hilarious and troubling.

Not troubling because ads on tests are inherently wrong somehow (though some might argue they are). At least not so simply.

No, it's troubling because teachers in poorer districts have long faced the prospect of shelling out their own cash for photocopies and school supplies. Would a teacher in such a school be able to raise $1000 by asking parents to pay to put inspirational quotes on their kids' exams? Not likely.

Now, I'm not blaming the teacher. He found a creative solution to a difficult problem. But his solution, as he recognizes, simply emphasizes the dismal state of public education funding in this country. And moreover, as might be less apparent, it is a jerry-rigged extension of our public schools' property tax-driven, sociological crisis.

Poor Harvard.

In 4 months, Harvard has lost more money (at least $8 billion) from its endowment than most other universities had to begin with. (Only Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and MIT have endowments over $8 billion.)

Context from about 15 months ago, for those interested: a one-year gain of about $5.5 billion.



(Image: A Harvard University money clip, plated in gold...on sale.)

Ocean power.

I know next to nothing about this sort of thing.

But this seems exciting:

The technology can generate electricity in water flowing at a rate of less than one knot - about one mile an hour - meaning it could operate on most waterways and sea beds around the globe.

Existing technologies which use water power, relying on the action of waves, tides or faster currents created by dams, are far more limited in where they can be used, and also cause greater obstructions when they are built in rivers or the sea. Turbines and water mills need an average current of five or six knots to operate efficiently, while most of the earth's currents are slower than three knots...

A "field" of cylinders built on the sea bed over a 1km by 1.5km area, and the height of a two-storey house, with a flow of just three knots, could generate enough power for around 100,000 homes. Just a few of the cylinders, stacked in a short ladder, could power an anchored ship or a lighthouse.

Rx heroin?

A glimpse of rational drug policy?

In Switzerland:

Dr. Daniele Zullino keeps glass bottles full of white powder in a safe in a locked room of his office.

Patients show up each day to receive their treatment in small doses handed through a small window.

Then they gather around a table to shoot up, part of a pioneering Swiss program to curb drug abuse by providing addicts a clean, safe place to take heroin produced by a government-approved laboratory...

Patients among the nearly 1,300 addicts whom other therapies have failed to help take doses carefully measured to satisfy their cravings but not enough to cause a big high. Four at a time inject themselves as a nurse watches.

In a few minutes most get up and leave. Those who have jobs go back to work.

"Heroin prescription is not an end in itself," said Zullino, adding that the 47 addicts who come to his office receive a series of additional treatments, such as therapy with a psychiatrist and counseling by social workers.

"The aim is that the patients learn how to function in society," he said, adding that after two to three years in the program, one-third of the patients start abstinence-programs and one-third change to methadone treatment...

Crimes committed by heroin addicts have dropped 60 percent since the program began in 1994, according to the Federal Office of Public Health says.

Money spent on the Swiss program annually? 22 million dollars.

Money spent on the U.S. war on drugs annually? About 40 billion dollars.

"They kept shopping."

Well...this was terribly foreseeable, wasn't it?

Bargain-hungry shoppers stepped on a fallen Wal-Mart worker, who died Friday morning, after the crowd knocked down the store's front doors -- and the worker -- during the "utter chaos" of a Black Friday shopping melee, Nassau County police said...

[Nassau Police Det. Lt. Michael] Fleming said an estimated 2,000 people had gathered in line around 5 a.m. as the store was preparing to open...

People in the rear of the line began pushing, cascading the people in the front into the doors, which were knocked off their hinges, Fleming said.

Hundreds of shoppers who then streamed in literally stepped on the worker who later died, Fleming said...

Shoppers who surged past the fallen Wal-Mart worker into the store were asked to leave by other store workers, some of them crying and visibly upset, said one shopper, Kimberly Cribbs, of Far Rockaway.

Though rumors circulated among the shoppers that someone had been badly injured, people ignored the Wal-Mart workers' requests that they stop shopping, move to the front of the store and exit, Cribbs said.

"They kept shopping. It's not right. They're savages," Cribbs said.

What is happening to us?

Young Women of Hollywood: Tabloid Edition

Just some quick updates...a sort of "thanksgiving," as it were:

• Evan Rachel Wood is no longer dating Marilyn Manson (I'm going out now to buy eyeliner and mascara).

• Natalie Portman doesn't understand 'not having sex' (I'm relatively certain she meant something more profound).

• Kristen Stewart smokes pot on her front steps (that's really all there is to that).

Palling around.

Salon has up a good interview with Bill Ayers.

Money quotes:

On Hyde Park in Chicago--

[It] is a very close-knit, very friendly, very politically diverse, very racially diverse. You have all kinds of poles there. You have [conservative] Judge Richard Posner on one pole and Louis Farrakhan on the other. And everything in between. It's an interesting neighborhood, a college town [the University of Chicago]. It's close-knit. It's kind of like Wasilla, Alaska, except that it's different.

On the Weather Underground--

I think we were off the tracks, definitely. And I think we were jacking ourselves to do something that was unthinkable and that none of us could ever imagine ourselves getting into. We were driven, I think, by a combination of hope and despair. And in one chapter [of his memoir, Fugitive Days], I imagine two groups of Americans. One slightly off the tracks and despairing of how to end this war and penetrating the Pentagon and putting a small charge in a bathroom that disables an Air Force computer. An act of extreme vandalism, but hard to call, in my view, terrorism.

Meanwhile, another group of Americans -- also despairing, also off the tracks -- walks into a Vietnamese village and kills everyone there. Children, women, old men. They kill every living thing, even livestock, and burn the place to the ground.

And the question is, What is terrorism? And what is violence?

On election night--

One of the delicious ironies of being in Grant Park on Nov. 4, 2008, was that I was weeping for a lot of reasons. But one of them was that I couldn't help remembering 40 years earlier I was beaten bloody in that same park. And there's something sweet about 40 years later, something unimaginable happening...

We [Ayers and Dohrn] got there around 10:00. We were so glad that we had because it was a moment that we wanted to share. We didn't want to be by ourselves. It was just too sweet. It felt like a page of history was being turned. And, of course, there are going to be challenges, obstacles, setbacks, disappointments, reversals up ahead. But who doesn't want to savor that? Who doesn't want to wish this young man and his beautiful young family all the best in the world because it's their moment. We invest a lot of hope in them. Let's not lose hope in ourselves. But let's wish them all the best.

This is the story of how we begin to remember.

Well. We did it. Yes we did.

I still can't quite believe it.

Last Wednesday, my dad gushed that I'd gotten to cast this vote in my third presidential election. He'd been waiting 40 years, he said.

After (only) eight years, I got to cast an aspirational vote -- and win.

A President who reads newspapers. Who reads poetry.

More.

A President who recognizes the times that try men's souls; a President who seeks new thinking and better angels; a President who trusts democracy. A President who engages the world; who engages ideas; who engages dissenters.

Last week, I was accused--amusingly but seriously--by a colleague of being drunk on Obama Kool-aid when I expressed approval of the Rahm Emanuel pick. I still like the pick. But I don't think I've drunk the Kool-aid...all right, I may have sipped it. But that's not the point.

The point is that my colleague's larger accusation was that I was rationalizing a disappointing decision. I was, in his view, actively avoiding my first disappointment with my preferred (and trumpeted) President-Elect. I wasn't. I couldn't have been.

I'm already disappointed. No praising of Rahmbo will postpone Obama's first failure. He has already failed me.

His stance on same-sex marriage is a deep disappointment and a shameful failure. His stance is, in fact, the same stance ratified by Californians with Prop 8 last Tuesday -- even as they elected him President by the biggest margin since FDR. Ok, so he didn't support Prop 8 because he doesn't support amending the state's constitution to deny a right to same-sex marriage. His stance is for full civil unions, full civil rights -- everything except that word, "marriage." And that's, essentially, what Prop 8 has left for gay Californians. That is to say: not nearly enough.



It's difficult to express how enormously inadequate that answer is. How enormously not enough.

Maybe Obama's opposition to same-sex marriage is more tactical than principled (like his opposition to health insurance mandates might be). Maybe coming out more strongly against Prop 8--doing ads, say--would have lost him votes, in California or elsewhere. It seems all but certain that coming out strongly for same-sex marriage would have lost him votes -- maybe enough to lose him the election.

So if it was tactics, it was understandable; if it was principles, it was wrong. But either way, President-Elect Obama is already, by this measure, a disappointment and a failure.

I, of course, knew that when I voted for him. And I wanted him elected despite it. And I phone-banked for him and canvassed for him and got out his vote. And if someone asked me about his opposition to same-sex marriage--which happened only twice--I rationalized it away (the lesser of possible evils, which I still believe) and worked the vote anyway. And in that way, I disappointed myself. And his failure became my own.

And our failure hurt people I love, even as I (and they) celebrated on November 4. Yes we did.

That night, just as Obama was about to speak to the crowd gathered in Grant Park, I finally got the overwhelmed California Secretary of State website to load. And I announced the percentages to my friends. Disbelief. Holding out hope for remaining precincts (which would not, in the end, help), we settled into silence as our candidate and his family took to the stage.

He told us that night, that he would be the whole country's President. That he needed all of our help.

And we will do our part. Gladly. Proudly. Fired up.

But we needed his help, too. And he let us down.

And so this victory, like too many victories, is bittersweet. Too many of us blackened our neighbors' eyes, as we blackened our historic ovals. Too many of us--our President-Elect, included--shut our ears to the howling, and turned our heads against the wind. In this way, as in so many others, the coming moment on January 20, 2009, is not enough.
But it is where we start. It is where our union grows stronger.

A more perfect union? A just and lasting peace among ourselves? Not yet. But some day, soon I hope, we will, all of us, get there.

The mystic chords of memory will yet swell the chorus of the Union.
And the morning will be breaking.

And don't cry, baby, don't cry. Don't cry.


(Image: David Stubbart, Some rights reserved)

Now...Tomorrow...Forever. Rethought.

My grandparents were George Wallace supporters. Yeah. I know. I know.

But they were. My mom's parents. Standing in the schoolhouse door. Segregation now, tomorrow, forever.

My dad says they had a framed picture of Wallace on their mantle.

And he tells this story. He was very involved in Robert Kennedy's campaign in '68. College campus and youth organizer. RFK's assassination was devastating for him. Sometime around June 7th or 8th, he and my mom went to her parents' house for dinner. They ate in the kitchen. Over the kitchen table, there was a vent that poured cold air down onto whoever was seated at that end of the table. The usual practice was to use Scotch tape to cover the vent with a piece of newspaper. That night, with my dad seated at the opposite head of the table, my grandparents had taped up the front page from a couple days before. Robert Kennedy's face--along with the banner headline announcing his death--stared down at my dad throughout the meal. He could barely eat. He swears they did it on purpose.

I remember eating with my mom, my sister, and my grandparents at a now-closed Chili's in the affluent suburb I grew up in. I couldn't have been more than 6 or 7. My grandmother said something to my mom that I either couldn't hear or couldn't comprehend. I asked what she'd said. She glanced at my mom, who looked away. "I just don't like when people mix coffee and tea," she said, looking over my left shoulder. This didn't make any sense to me either. I looked around -- didn't see anyone doing that. I can't remember if my mom explained it to me afterward, or if I just figured it out for myself: my grandmother wasn't talking about mixed hot beverages, but about mixed race couples.

Several years back--I was about 14, I think--I was at my grandparents' apartment, sifting through a bowl of mixed nuts. "I don't like these ones," I remember saying. "What are they called?" "Brazil nuts," my mom said -- quickly, I remember thinking. "We used to call them something you can't say anymore," my grandmother said. My mom sighed. "What?" I asked. My mom shook her head. "Tell me," I said. "We used to call them nigger toes," my grandmother said.

My dad has claimed for as long as I can remember that my grandparents "mellowed" over the years. That they changed. My grandfather started unbuttoning his collar occasionally. Et cetera. My dad claims it was his influence.

Maybe. I think it may just have been time.

This past month, my grandfather turned 95. My grandmother is 85. I got a voicemail from my mom a couple weeks ago. Between telling me about her most recent lunch with my sister, and reminding me to call her more often, she mentioned this: "Your grandparents voted early yesterday. Absentee. For Obama. Both of them."

I was fairly stunned. I hadn't thought to try to persuade them. I realize now that I had, I'm fairly ashamed to say, written off their votes. But my grandparents voted for Barack Obama. A black man. With a white mother and an African father. Who's running against a white war hero. Barack Obama.

I'm not sure why. They know I've been volunteering for the campaign. Maybe they were thinking of my preference when deciding on theirs. But I hope it was more than that. More than resignation. I hope it was progress.

Something's astir in America. Come Wednesday: Now, Tomorrow, and Forever might just have a whole new meaning.

Win one for Studs.

The inimitable--though forever imitated--Studs Terkel passed away yesterday.

From an interview one week before his death:

Community organizers like Obama know what's going on. If they remember. The important thing is memory. You know in this country, we all have Alzheimer's. Obama has got to remember his days as an organizer. It all comes back to the neighborhood. Well I hope the election is a landslide for Obama.

In the words of David Plouffe:

LET'S GO WIN THIS FUCKING THING.

Yeah, there's still poetry.

6 days to go...

You can vote however you like.



But you ought to vote for Obama-Biden.

Feinstein says No on Prop 8.

Finally, a bigshot politician makes an ad.

A Tale of Three Ashleys.

A great post by Sean Quinn over at 538 -- that is, FiveThirtyEight.com, which you should all check out.

Money quote, actually from Obama's speech on race in America:

"I'm here because of Ashley." By itself, that single moment of recognition between that young white girl and that old black man is not enough. It is not enough to give health care to the sick, or jobs to the jobless, or education to our children.

But it is where we start. It is where our union grows stronger. And as so many generations have come to realize over the course of the two-hundred and twenty one years since a band of patriots signed that document in Philadelphia, that is where the perfection begins.

And the video of that speech, "A More Perfect Union," which is definitely worth watching again:

The liberal media?

Watch Joe Biden handle himself well (I think) during a local Florida TV reporter's ridiculous interview.



Oh, and to answer Biden's question about who wrote the questions: I'm fairly certain it was Stephen Colbert.

Dylan the Evangelical.

This Washington Times article is about a new movie coming out (straight to DVD, it seems) that explores Bob Dylan's "evangelical" years -- 1979-1981. Basically asking: Really? Why?

Money quote:

"Jesus Years" surmises that the inspiration factor was crucial but the conversion was real. Mr. Gilbert unearths broadcast TV footage of Mr. Dylan answering critics befuddled by what appeared, for a time, to be a wholesale abandonment of secular music. "The old songs won't save you," Mr. Dylan said.

Now, I haven't seen the film yet. These are just thoughts off the top of my head. But I rather doubt Dylan meant to imply that his new songs (the evangelical ones) could save people. I expect he was more reacting to other people's confused reactions -- responding, dismissively, to their pleas to keep writing the old songs that had saved and inspired them. But maybe not. Obviously, we need to hear the whole exchange -- though I'll say from the start that even a clear, face-value implication wouldn't convince me of Dylan's sincerity on the point.

Which, I expect, exposes my biases. But I'm inclined to think Dylan was just reinventing himself as completely as he could -- not exactly a concept that has been foreign to his nature during his 4+ decades in the public eye. The Washington Times writer, and presumably the movie-maker, suggests that there is something nefarious in Dylan fans' tendency to puzzle over or ignore or disdain those years and their music. I think he/they might have it backwards -- not that there's something incongruous with paying little attention to those years, but that there's something incongruous about paying special attention to that particular transformation. Why not the transformation from Minnesota fraternity boy to the hillbilly who wrote lines like "That light I never knowed" and "They'll be drownded in the tide"? Knowed? Drownded? Or his recent transformation into a lingerie ad-man and entirely conventional disc jockey on satellite radio?

It seems to me that Dylan's singular magic over almost 50 years now has been his uncanny ability to keep an audience, generally by ignoring what they assume to be their own desires. He was never the voice of a generation. That implies that he spoke the words they wanted to speak. No. When he seemed their voice, it was only by coincidence. He was out in front of them all along, moving on to something new. Not leading them, so much as out-running them. Not a pied piper. Just a song-and-dance man. Puzzlement, ignorance, and disdain are part of the show. To focus on whether Dylan was actually born-again for the 3 years straddling 1980 misses the point. The point was then--as it has always been--reinvention.

(Image: BobDylan.com)

11 more days...

Yes we can.



Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan.

[UPDATED] Either terrorists are dumb, or they aren't very committed to their causes.

I've been saying this, somewhat jokingly, for years.

But apparently the TSA actually thinks it's the former. Or, at least, they've set up security procedures on the assumption of terrorists' inferior intellects.

Not entirely certain that's the right tack, guys.

UPDATE: By the way, Jeffrey Goldberg's Atlantic article about TSA "security theater" is hilarious and-- I almost wrote "frightening," but actually it's really not. And that's sorta the point.

[UPDATED] I know this is old, but...

...how much do you want little kids in the White House? Adorable.



Apologies for the annoying Maria Menounos (especially the veiled Spiderman reference).

Oh, and the video is making the rounds again because of the news about Sarah Palin's rather expensive campaign wardrobe. If you missed Jon Stewart's take on the story tonight--including his brief rendition of "Small Town"--you should find the video. I'll post it when it's up.

UPDATE: Daily Show clip below.

Abandon your kids while you can...

Nebraska's ridiculous safe-haven law--which allows parents to abandon children up to age 18 at hospitals without fear of prosecution--will soon be changed. Gotta keep your teenagers now, folks. No more seventeen-year-olds. In fact, no more seventeen-day-olds. Looks like the new age limit is going to be 3 days.

Talk about switching extremes. I say give 'em a month or so, like most states. Someone should remind those Nebraskans not to throw out the month-old babies with the seventeen-year-old bathwater.

McCain accidentally calls Western Pennsylvania racist...in Western Pennsylvania.

This clip can be summed up as follows: Booo...Oops...Oh god...Huh?



Oh. And how much do I love Cindy McCain's smiling nod as McCain drums up the boos about Obama? Soooooo much.

Poetry from a California September.

Poetry. Making a comeback.

This is what I like to call a 'moody moment poem.' Enjoy.

(Oh. And. I played with the format a bit. Thoughts?)

Written five minutes ago.

Not sure yet if this is really one poem in three parts, or three poems that need their own titles. Thoughts?

Striking a little close to home.

This is basically a short essay I've been meaning to write for some time now. Complete with Gilmore Girls references. Just never got around to it.

Still might write mine though. There's one point in Stevenson's piece that I think I disagree with: that procrastination precludes certain forms of success. I'd like to probe that a bit deeper yet. We'll see. For now, I've got other things not to do.

Philly vs. Filly

Ok. So please understand: I'm not literally equating the fates of these two beings.

But. Hillary Clinton recently drew a line of comparison between herself and Eight Belles, the lone filly in the Kentucky Derby this year.

Today. (Tragically.) Eight Belles finished second place in the Derby. That's not the tragedy. The tragedy is she ran all the way through to the finish line, finished second, then collapsed with two broken ankles, and had to be euthanized right then and there.

So a little quip comes back to bite Hillary in the ass. Someone should point this out to her, though I'd be at least a little surprised if anyone in the MSM did (because of the "literally equating" problem mentioned above). But that's what the blogosphere is for.

(I'm not even gonna mention the name of the stallion that won the race.)

Mentos fountains. Too cool.

I expect this works with Diet Coke, too. And not just Coca-Cola Light.

(Thanks to Andrew Sullivan.)

Get your electric kool-aid while you can.

Salvia needs a Ken Kesey.

Or. You know. Not. Doesn't sound like much fun to me.

Flirting your way to sex offender registration.

Ok. So I admit: Sending naked pictures of yourself to someone you like (like, like-like; not just like) goes a bit beyond an extended hug after class or sitting on someone's lap during study hall.

But it's not felonious. And it's definitely not worthy of sex offender status.

With all the talk in the last decade of pushing various technological boundaries (web 2.0, nanotechnology, genomics, and yes, cell phones) we still rarely get to talking about the secondary boundaries affected by such technological innovation. Unless, of course, a hot-button social issue (read: political wedge issue) is involved, in which case let the ill-informed adventures in spin begin. As in: "Genomics sounds like cloning!" (No. It doesn't. You don't know what you're talking about.) Or, the less common refrain: "Nanotechnology is the birth of Big Brother!" (Well. Yeah. Ok. Mayyyyybe.)

Along these lines, I've recently come across several articles and stories referencing the notion that today's young people are less concerned with privacy than previous generations (privacy is trying so hard to become hot-button, it's cute -- like a puppy trying desperately to climb a staircase), and placing the blame for such lowered fences on Facebook, MySpace, and other such sites. To me, this seems either just plain wrong, or misleadingly incomplete. Facebook, for example, faced an uproar from its "millennial generation" users when it opened the site first to non-college-affiliated users, and then again when it opened the site to anyone. In response, it instituted significant user-directed privacy controls over who can see which elements of your profile. I suppose it's an unanswered (to my knowledge) empirical question to what extent these controls are put to use. But in my anecdotal experience, almost everyone uses them to some extent.

So the younger generation, it seems to me, is not less concerned with privacy than previous generations -- today's youth just have more opportunity to be more open to more people. This doesn't mean they don't value their privacy. Had their parents (who, let's face it, were pretty damn open with their opinions, feelings, and sexuality) been able to share an hour-by-hour "status" accounting with hundreds of friends, I expect they would have. They just couldn't.

But now the constraints of technology have retreated: Hundreds of people now know my favorite books. Boy, do I feel invaded. No. Wait. I don't. But not because I'm not concerned with my privacy. I never cared who knew my favorite books. I'd have gladly told anyone who asked. (People rarely did, for the record -- in fact, I can count on one hand (maybe one finger) the number of people who have commented on my Facebook favorite-books list, which suggests that the level of narcissism involved in maintaining, say, a Facebook profile is disturbingly staggering. But that's another post for another day).

And I fully believe my parents would have too. The difference is not in the level of personal willingness to be open with various aspects of oneself. The difference is in the technological ability to be open. There's no new conception of something-like-the-thing-called-privacy-we-once-cared-so-much-about being cultivated by Facebook. It's the same old conception (the same old ethical bounds) being construed via newly-relaxed technological boundaries.

Which brings me to my point, finally: It's wrong to label naked-picture cell-phone swapping among consenting teenagers as "criminal behavior." It's no more criminal than that "trust me?" game where one person in a group slowly moves a hand up another's thigh while asking the two-word query until the second person responds, if ever, with a "no." (No one else played that? Really? Oh.) You might not want your kids doing either of those things. I get that. All I'm saying is, the cell-phone thing isn't a behavior of a radically different sort than anything we've seen before. It's on the same spectrum. If Polaroids weren't so clumsy and expensive, this would have been happening long ago. (And, really, claiming it's child porn is just silly. I understand why society doesn't want 50-year-olds looking at naked 15-year-olds. But it's not clear to me why other 15-year-olds shouldn't be.)

Whether you, as a parent or school administrator or Congressperson, likes that it's happening, it's just flirtation. Maybe teens shouldn't sit on each other in study hall. Maybe they shouldn't play spin the bottle. And maybe they shouldn't exchange naked pictures of themselves. But criminalizing the first two seems nuts right off the bat. And criminalizing the third is just as insane. It's wrong. And it won't work anyway (see: abstinence-only sex education).

Prose again. Or, Giving the parents equal time.

Pizza, with my mother.

It is a Saturday night, I think, or a Friday, around 6 (which is well toward the night in Chicago’s cold November). I walk downstairs, wondering at the quiet, finding only my mother, in the kitchen. I open the refrigerator, looking for a quick dinner before I have to leave to pick up my friends – who, at 17, were not all lucky enough to have their own cars at their disposal. Finding nothing fresh appealing, I turn to the freezer. I take out a microwave pizza, and my mother—whose apparent sadness had been peripheral until now—says, “Jordan, I have to tell you something.” I say, “Ok,” wondering at her “have to,” and start to open the pizza box as she begins to ramble something or other about not intending to tell me this way, and she’s not really supposed to tell me, and he’ll be angry, but he’s going to do it tomorrow and that’s not right. At this point, though I wasn’t sure at first, I know she’s talking about my father, who had earlier asked me to go to breakfast with him the following morning so we could discuss something he refused to specify to me but apparently had to her. I remove the plastic shrink-wrap and place the pizza on its box, atop its silver paper heating disc, and then reapply the frozen cheese that fell off in the plastic, careful to fill any obvious distribution holes. I set the microwave to 3 minutes and 45 seconds. She’s still talking, and as I hit START, she gets to: “He says he’s not going to, but he won’t say what, and I know he’s going to.” So, I think, apparently he didn’t specify the future conversation with her either. I open the cabinet over the microwave and take out a dinner plate – solid black, except for white painted swirls in a ring around the edge, a choice of my mother’s that I didn’t realize was unusual until college. I search the utensil drawer for the pizza cutter, and say, my profile to her, “Mom, what’s going on?”

She starts to cry as she lets out what, she tells me, has been eating at her for weeks, months, years even. It’s been so hard, she tells me, and—because of the microwave’s timer, and my memory of burning my mouth on the pizza’s first slice—I know it takes her a bit over 3 minutes to tell me, in really no detail at all, just how hard it’s been. I stand, leaning on the counter, my elbows on either side of the pizza cutter resting on the plate, facing her, as she sits at one end of the rounded-corner rectangular table, askew a bit, her left side against the table’s edge, facing me, her left arm resting on the table’s corner and her right forearm resting on her thigh. This position allows only sharp movements as she speaks, jaggedly matching the stops and starts of her words: the motion of her right arm limited, as though by a puppeteer’s rod, to the upturning of her palm by a twist of her wrist as her forearm remains on her thigh, and her left arm, constantly moving, as by the strings of a marionette, in a sort of pulling forth motion as her elbow brings her hand forward toward me and then returns it to her chest or her mouth. The combined effect of her tears and the hum of the microwave forces her voice to a higher register than normal, and that, along with what she is saying and the fact of her crying, somehow makes it hard for me to look at her for more than brief intervals. I intersperse my glances at her with long gazes at the pizza in the microwave, spinning and warming and cooking. She is telling me—in multiple and synonymous and repetitious sets of phrases—that “things” haven’t been right for a long time, that “we” still love “you” and “your sister” very much of course, that “that” will never change, that none of “this” is “your” fault at all. The pizza is making noise in the microwave, drops of sauce spurting from beneath the covering of now melted cheese. Looking at the microwave, I think, I tell her, “It’s ok, Mom,” and, turning to look at her—and lying, really—“I guess I knew something was up.”

The microwave beeps the pizza’s completion, startling us both: I turn too quickly to it and knock the pizza cutter to the ground; my mother lets out a gasp that frees a loud sob. I interrupt the microwave before its third beep and remove the pizza as my mother tries to calm her lungs. She wipes tears, careful not of preserving her makeup but of getting it in her eyes, and says, raising her voice above the sound of the sink as I rinse invisible dirt from the floored cutter, “It’s just gotten too hard, and we all need something to change.” I start to cut the pizza into slices—it’s only an 8-inch circle, but I have a habit of cutting it into 16 bite-size slices, quartering it, and then quartering the quarters—and she gets to the point. It’s difficult (in the way small things are sometimes difficult) to cut a soft-crusted, microwave pizza into so many small pieces—the slices stick to the cutter as it runs back and forth, they curl up and want to somersault over each other, and you need your other hand to keep them in place—and so I’m concentrating mostly on the cutting as my mother says, “Your father’s going to move out soon, I think, as soon as possible.” It must appear as though I don’t react at all—though this is, somehow, amidst what seems now obvious family turmoil, an enormous surprise—because I simply continue to make my cuts, looking down. Then, finished slicing, I bring my fingers to my lips and raise my eyes, as my mother stands and walks toward me, crying still, or again, as she reaches for a hug. Still holding the cutter, with pizza entrails still on its blade, I hug her, careful not to stain the back of her shirt. It’s a brief embrace—though longer than the hellos and goodbyes that would become common in my college years to come—and as we pull away, her wiping her face, and me licking the blade of the cutter before I put it in the sink, I tell her, “It’s going to be ok.” “Yeah,” she says under her breath, still trying to sigh away sobs, and I pick up the plate, grab a paper napkin, and walk to the family room to eat.