"We think we communicated our message."
Imagine, for the moment, that you live in Texas. You've just received a piece of mail on letterhead stationery reading "Tony Sanchez for Texas Gonernor". Do you bother reading further? How much credibility does this campaign have, if they can't spell "Governor"?

The letter was written to the Texas State Teachers Association, thanking them for their endorsement. (No surprise there, teachers' associations always endorse Democrats.) He got the name of the organization wrong: He thought "Teachers" took an apostrophe, and it doesn't.

Unfortunately, the letter doesn't get better after that. Instead, it betrays the fact that the writer didn't get enough attention from those teachers back when it might have helped. Campaign manager Glenn Smith acknowledges the errors, but judges them trivial. "The substance of the letter speaks much louder than the small errors in the writing might," the Chronicle quotes him as saying. "We think we communicated our message."

Yep. You sure did. Grammar don't matter, so long as ya votes fer us.

LATER: Sanchez won the primary: He'll face incumbent Rick Perry (Bush's Lieutenant, er, Gonernor) in Nonember.

Franken-scope
Actually, this is pretty cool. Professor Jeffrey Hillman of the University of Florida may just have eliminated tooth decay.

Tooth decay is caused by bacterium that live in the mouth and feed on the sugar that remains on your teeth when you don't brush. Dr Hillman has genetically altered these bacterium and produced a variant that doesn't produce the acid that causes decay. In animal testing, the mutant bacterium displaces the native form, eliminating a lifetime of tooth decay with a single inexpensive treatment.

Wow.

And I immediately thought of a science-fiction novel, Steel Beach by John Varley, in which the Central Computer that runs the Moon solves this problem essentially the same way. It's a small scene in a 500-plus page book, so of course I can't find it just this minute. But I wonder if Dr Hillman has read it?

LATER: Found it. Early in the book (page 116 in the Ace paperback), Hildy sarcastically asks the CC to do something about "the way my mouth feels when I get up in the morning before I brush my teeth. We're so goddam advanced, you'd think we'd have done something about that by now, wouldn't you?" Well, Hildy's in a Mood, and not expecting anything to come of this.

Some days later (page 205), Hildy wakes up with a mouth that tastes like peppermint. The CC explained:
"You asked me to work on that. I did. ...I synthesized a nanobot that goes after the things that would normally rot in your mouth while you are sleeping, and changes them into things that taste good."
"I'm afraid to ask how you slipped this stuff to me."
"It's in the water supply. You don't need much of it."
"So every Lunarian is waking up today and tasting peppermint?"
"It comes in six delicious flavors."
"...Do me a favor, don't tell anyone this is my fault."

Hide! A Cow's Outside!
You can relax now, they caught the cow.

"The cow escaped from the meatpacking plant by jumping a six-foot fence." It did what? I thought that moon thing was a fairy tale. Cows can jump?

No way can I take this seriously. Especially with offers flowing in from all over the country offering the cow "sanctuary".

"A cow ... managed to elude capture for 10 days..."? There's never a cowboy around when you need one. Quick, where's the nearest rodeo? (Failing that, those cow-tipping high school kids...)

LATER: More on the cow's fate.

Pile on!
Glenn Reynolds didn't warn us what was coming, and I won't warn you either, but you must read this piece by James Lileks.

Is this another GoogleGame?
Is this another inside joke that I'm on the outside of? Why is everyone Googling "What was the name of the first personal computer"? (And why aren't you Asking Jeeves, which can parse a plain English question?) Not that I'm not happy for the page views...

You may be trying to find this page of Personal Computer Milestones, which concludes that... Oh, why spoil their fun. Go there and see for yourself. I'll accept their answer.

Their definition includes this provision: "It must be simple enough to use that it requires no special training beyond an instruction manual." By those standards, I would argue, we haven't built one yet.

(By the way: I asked Jeeves. Nanny nanny.)

When is a private conversation private?
Lengthy quote from Punditwatch follows, then a comment:

Pundit of the Week was David Brooks. He was witty on the subject of campaign finance reform and expressed the pro-administration spin on the GAO suit most eloquently:

We have always assumed when a bill goes up to Congress from the Administration, the question is is that bill, is that piece of legislation good for the country? But now, under the logic of the GAO, the question becomes was it conceived in immaculate conception? Did the aides in the White House have impure thoughts or did they meet with impure people while they were drafting this piece of legislation? And that is like Cotton Mather taking over the government looking for impurities in the drafting of legislation.

It seems to me the fundamental question -- and the lawyers will settle that -- for the rest of us, the fundamental question is who cares? Who cares what they met with? The piece of legislation Cheney came up with and the Administration came up with is out there. The principle should be is the legislation good legislation -- not who did they meet with or what did they eat or talk about.

I can't argue with that. Is it good legislation? That's all that should matter.

However, the open secret that no one dares acknowledge in Washington is that nobody knows what half of these bills say. It's far easier to identify the hands that made them and vote on that basis than to actually read all these laws. Who has time for that?

Goodbye, Daniel Pearl

My degree is in newspaper journalism. Fresh out of college, I had an opportunity -- well, a potential opportunity, an offer to interview -- to actually work in the field, for actual money one presumes. I never found out, because I didn't pursue it. It would have meant a move to a city I didn't know, and I wasn't ready to do that. Little did I know it was the closest I would ever come to a career in journalism.

So, in what way is this about Daniel Pearl?

Because it illustrates a gulf that separates him from me. I wasn't willing to move across the state: He traveled to, and met his fate on, the other side of the planet, in a country that hates the religion he practiced.

Our world is diminished because he is no longer in it.

The killers of a storyteller deserve neither mercy nor negotiation. But in Pakistan, the murder of a Jew is not a capital crime. Some there would say it isn't a crime at all. And these are our allies...?

LATER: As is often the case, Natalija Radic at Libertarian Samizdata said it first and better.

LATER STILL: I'm beginning to regret having written this. Why? Because it's depressing to check my site meter and see how many people are searching for "Daniel Pearl videotape".

Farewell, Chuck, and thanks.

It's still fresh
...and it will seem more so as you read this from the Guardian (UK). It's only been five months since 9-11, too soon for a "where are they now" article not to hurt.

LATER: Dr Frank at The Blogs of War posted an article by Tristin Laughter that was commissioned for, and later rejected by, Punk Planet magazine. Read it.

Then remember the words spoken by Rabbi Marc Gellman at the memorial service at Yankee Stadium: "Six thousand people didn't die that day, one person died six thousand times." Tristin Laughter wrote one story, of one person who died one time, and I cried -- again. There are, at best estimate, 3500 or so stories very much like it.

And Osama laughs.

Cloning cats
Okay, I have no ethical problems with cloning anything, as it is currently being practiced. (There go my conservative friends. Sorry.) But, Holy Bob Barker, does the world really need more cats?

All right, maybe we don't understand them either
Apparently it was all just a game to those fun-loving Afghans.

Many Afghan Taliban and Northern Alliance soldiers were friends who had found themselves drafted into opposing armies. They would communicate over rudimentary radios, sometimes taunting each other in the heat of battle.

"Your bomb missed us," one would say, recalled members of Team 555.

"Where did it land?" a Northern Alliance officer would respond with some coaching from the Americans.

Five hundred meters to the north, would come the answer. Or 1,000 meters to the south. The combat controller would immediately recalculate the coordinates and pass them to the nearest aircraft, which could restrike the target within minutes. Team 555 members said that in a week, they killed many Taliban commanders this way and destroyed much of their communications network.

The full article is in the Washington Post: I saw the reference in the National Review's Corner.

Next on CNN: How to pirate video tapes
Can anyone explain, or even guess, why CNN aired travel tips for Americans wishing to vacation in sunny Cuba?

Media Minded and the Miami Herald are curious, too. It's illegal, you know: The U. S. is maintaining an embargo against Cuba. Not that it has stopped many of our more fatuous celebrities -- and newsmen, occasionally -- from making the trip to congratulate Fidel Castro for his sterling record in human rights. "What you're doing down there is trading with, supposedly, the enemy," offers travel consultant Chris McGinnis, as he warns you not to use your credit cards while you're there (incriminating paper trail, don't you know) -- and CNN helpfully diagrams your route through those necessary intermediate stops in other countries that aren't, supposedly, the enemy, I guess.

I guess Donald Rumsfeld made Guantanamo Bay look too darned inviting, at that.

The Texan and His Rogues
I guess I'll be the hundredth blogger to mention the cover of the new Der Spiegel, but somehow I don't feel as badly as the Germans think I should. Here's an English-language summary of the lead article.

(How can I get a poster of this cover?)

Rand Simberg at Transterrestrial Musings has a great take on it, as well as some nigh-incomprehensible European respondents, the most incredible of which seems to think we're being arrogant by assuming that an article about America is about America. (I said it was incomprehensible.) Maybe we're supposed to pretend we don't notice when the Europeans talk about us behind our back in an internationally-circulated magazine. (It is in German, after all: Perhaps we ignorant rednecks weren't supposed to be able to read it.)

They don't understand us. We keep telling them who we are and what we're about, and still they willfully, deliberately don't understand us.

We've spent the last decade being told we don't pay enough attention to what's going on outside our borders. Now they have our attention, and they complain about that. I guess they expected us to settle for a few sternly-worded words of reprimand in the international press. As if 3,000 people in New York and Washington were pushed off the seesaw at recess.

They were killed.

It's not going to happen again.

Is it that hard to understand?

Those $100 bills over Afghanistan won't go away
I can't believe I forgot that Reuters was also the service that reported that Al Gore misquote, "We have started a family restaurant in Tennessee and we are running it ourselves. It is a low-cost restaurant." The actual quote was "... we stopped at a little family restaurant in Tennessee. We were eating there by ourselves. It was a low-cost restaurant called Shoney's." Aside from the fact that Al seems to attract misquotes, I wonder if Reuters Nigeria (where Al spoke) and Reuters India speak to each other?

Now, more than ever, I wonder if those were real $100 bills. It takes a thousand good stories to make a reputation, and one bad one to break it.

(The best source for the two stories side-by-side is Mark Evanier's POV Online. Of course, you won't find the erroneous story at Reuters any more.)

I think I should answer my mail
..or, at least, draw your attention to some of the marvelous comments I've gotten.

Regarding the World's Fair, Jerry Lawson wrote:

Many years ago I had a 1939 Popular Science magazine, and it showcased the 1939 World's Fair in glowing detail.

That seemed like a marvelous time - and in retrospect, maybe it was. Coming out of the Depression, a message of hope and promise was needed - and that was certainly it.

Nowdays - the future is malleable. It's hard to imagine someplace (like a World's Fair) oriented towards displaying a future - even Disney has a hard time with it. Probably because what looked like 20+ years out is darn near yesterday's fad, and the technological changes are coming so fast that by the time you get a display designed to showcase them the next big thing is already showing up...

Here we are, in the future. Not what we expected, eh?

If I understand the term correctly, it�s what Alvin Toffler called �future shock�: the inability to cope with the ever-increasing speed of change. By the time a new innovation has hit the market, it�s obsolete.

It didn�t used to be that way � though few people now alive can remember living in a house without, say, a refrigerator, the wonder of the age that transformed the way we lived and shopped. Women would not now be concerned with the Glass Ceiling � or jobs at all � if the refrigerator had not come along. Procuring, cooking and serving food before it spoiled was a full-time job in the 1920s.

Computers are neat toys, but we don�t need them the way we need refrigerators.

This passage is from 1939: The Lost World of the Fair, by David Gelernter:

In 1939 technology�was not remote and esoteric. It was down-to-earth. And its achievements were heroic.

��At every turn,� writes a modern historian of the 1933 Century of Progress Exposition, �fairgoers were bombarded with pamphlets urging them to make use of the latest scientific research in industrial laboratories to modernize their kitchens.�

It takes an intellectual to suggest that women had to be brainwashed into wanting electric kitchen appliances.

And this:

�Nowadays technical-minded people over thirty get a certain feeling when they contemplate a computer. They can visualize the vastly weaker machines of the past; when they do they are apt to experience full force, like a faceful of sunshine, the flat-out marvelousness of modern technology. In the fair�s age anyone over thirty might have experienced that same sensation whenever he looked at an electric socket.

I was talking about the campaign finance reform bill when Tom S. asked:

Can you explain why, if Shays-Meehan is nothing but Incumbent Protection, it has taken so long to pass and why it has been so strongly opposed? It seems to me that any bill that is IP would be passed without much effort or passage of time!!!

Well, that�s a good question. (I didn�t say it was �nothing but Incumbent Protection�. The most self-serving clauses are smothered and disguised in other verbage, as with most bills.) My own feeling is that some of our representatives won�t want to be seen to have supported it if it fails.

There�s also the issue that it won't take effect until after the midterm Congressional elections, when the Democrats expect to retake Congress (and they will call in every chit they can to make it happen). If it affected both parties equally, there would be less of a battle over it.

I mean, I�d like to think that some of our representatives are aware of the Constitutional issues involved, and recognize that it is a waste of everyone�s time to pass a law that the Supreme Court will toss out anyway. However, experience tells me that�s entirely too idealistic.

The Wall Street Journal, and John Fund in particular, have been particularly enlightening.

And then there was that flurry of $100 bills over southern Afghanistan. Redsugar wrote:

egads. that's swatting a fly with a hand grenade, isn't it? where is your average afghani going to exchange hundred-freaking-dollar bills? bin laden's the only guy in the country with that much money to trade in one go. "let them eat cake," huh? what happened to 10 fives? in more envelopes?

Oh, I don�t think they�d have any trouble finding anyone to take American money. They probably won�t get a fair exchange rate, but at 4250 Afganis to the dollar, they can afford to get taken by the moneylenders. (That may be why we dropped hundreds and not fives and tens.)

What bothers me is that the people who are confiscating the food we drop and selling it to the people we intended it for, are probably the same people who are going to charge 1000% commission to exchange dollars for Afganis.

I talked about the U.S. flag, and the TV critic who thought its "original meaning" was "I am a conservative Republican, and more American than you". Ron Butler replied:

Why should there be a 'remove by' date on U.S. flag pins if there is no such limit for AIDS ribbons, breast cancer awareness ribbons, violence-against-women ribbons, etc.?
Is love of country less enduring than those other causes?
Or is somebody hoping that -- with its visible symbols removed -- it will just quietly go away?

There do appear to be people in this country who don't love it unless it directly benefits them to do so. A quick world tour might help them learn that it does. Jerry Lawson wrote:

Another thing that saddens me about it, however, are those in the U.S. who insist on seeing the U.S. Flag as a symbol of oppression. I suppose it's how you view things - but if there were some sort of moral balance put on the actions of our country (and somehow symbolized by the flag) I would think that the things we've done wrong (and there's a good number) have been well outweighed by the things we've done right over the years.

There must be a few, the European Union to the contrary. "We really are one country, still, and that which unites us is, as ever, more important than that which divides us." Walkman said:

I couldn't agree with you more.
For me, I'm just glad that now there will be more than just my family saluting the flag when it passes by in a parade. It's about time.

And from the lovely Redsugar:

i was thinking this same thing a few days ago. it seems i'm the only one in my neighborhood with my american flag still up. like it was a pre-christmas decoration. i'm still tickled by the "united we stand" sign on the marquee of the thai restaurant up the street. everywhere else you go in the world, their flags are everywhere. they even have giant billboards with pictures of their leaders. and they have so much less to wave their flags about than we do...

(Emphasis mine.)
Redsugar, you're a girl after my own heart. Now you've made me go all misty-eyed.

Oh, by the way: I'm now a "Commuter blog stop" at Libertarian Samizdata, and proud to be so.

Hurry!
Bookmark me if you ever want to find me again: I'm about to fall off the Blogs of Note list! Aieee! (C'mon, I know from reading my site stats that 96% of you click that link, take a quick look around, and leave forever. I'm OK with that. It's the other 4% I'm talking to...)
LATER: Too late, I just fell off... *thud*

Are you Addicted to the Internet?
Of course not. And I can prove it:

Are you Addicted to the Internet? 42% Average@Internet-User.com (41% - 60%) You seem to have a healthy balance in your life when it comes to the internet and life away from the computer. You know enough to do what you want online without looking like an idiot (most of the time). You even have your own Yahoo club or online journal! But you enjoy seeing your friends and going out to enjoy life away from your computer. The Are you Addicted to the Internet? Quiz at Stvlive.com!

Actually, I do moderate three Yahoo groups...

Friday Five
1. What was the first thing you ever cooked? You can actually remember the first thing you ever cooked? What, did you only start cooking last week? *Ahem* You mean, something more than warming up the contents of a can, I suppose. It would have been a variant on fried rice with Chinese vegetables.
2. What's your signature dish? Chess pie. I make a mean chess pie, if I do say so myself, almost as good as grandmother used to make.
3. Ever had a cooking disaster? (tasted like crap, didn't work, etc.) Describe. Frequently. Helpful tip: When the recipe says "evaporated" milk, don't use "condensed".
4. If skill and money were no object, what would you make for your dream meal? Reservations. (I cook because I must, not because I enjoy it.)
5. What are you doing this weekend? Working, as usual.

Just throw money
Back in early December, I mentioned a story from Gulf-News about afghans deliberately attracting American bombs in order to salvage the shell casings and sell them for scrap. At the time, I said:

Heck, why don't we just drop money? It'd be cheaper to drop a sack full of quarters, and we'd throw the local economy into utter chaos. I mean, more so.

Now Neal Boortz says we're actually doing that (I'm unable to find his source: Can anyone confirm?):

In the latest propaganda move by the US in Afghanistan, C-130 transport planes dropped envelopes over the southern part of the country. Printed on the envelopes was a picture of George W. Bush. Inside the envelopes were two $100 bills...that�s right, two one-hundred dollar bills.

Hundred dollar bills? Back to Bloomberg.com to get the current exchange rate...

Results: 200.00 US DOLLAR (USD) = 950,000.0000 AFGHANISTAN AFGANI (AFA)

Heck, call it a million. Can you imagine the effect this would have? I keep saying that they understand us even less than we understand them. They think that wars are won by the people who yell the loudest. Many of them still don't really comprehend that America is even involved in their country, or that anything we do could possibly matter to them.

And now we're dropping a fortune on them. Well, it's not a fortune to us (I know people who have blown $200 on a single meal), but it is to them. And Mr Boortz thinks this is a bad PR move because there's no message in the envelope? I'd say it's a pretty powerful message.

LATER: The Times of India reports it, crediting the story to Reuters -- but I can't find it at Reuters' web site.
LATER STILL: Who was that anonymous commentor? I don't know, but he left a silver bullet -- that is, a link to Yahoo India News' feed of the same Reuters story.

Hollywood Southerners
There was a time when it really bothered me that Southerners are stereotyped in the mass media, typically portrayed as people whose family tree doesn't fork, if you know what I mean. It took Dave Shiflett, writing for the new American Prowler, to put it in perspective:

Being thought of as backward, shiftless, provincial, conniving, and prone to violence can have its advantages. For instance, it keeps people like Robert Altman from moving into our hood, which is no small advantage. More to the point, being criticized by an industry known as a haven of self-absorbed, intellectually shallow greed-heads is not the most damning thing that can happen to a people or region.

I reckon so.