Barry's rants (someone's gotta say it)

Hey... you wanna get a real nasty look from someone? Here's what you do. Point to a small window in a small house that's up a high hill about a half mile away, and ask a former Marines sniper how many times out of a hundred he might miss a target in that window.

I know because i did it. After uttering the single word "miss?" in a disdainful way that would fill any teenager with envy, my friend Brett explained to me everything from how he'd adjust for the slight breeze to how he'd adjust for the bullet's trajectory change from hitting the window to how his biggest concern would be getting away from the retaliatory white phosphorous that would be heading his way within a second.

With that in mind, tell me you'd have the balls to ask Brett how many times a trained sniper might miss this shot...


Now this is my only experience with guns...


... but i'm betting even i could've hit John F. Kennedy from that window (and i was only 5 at the time). And Lee Oswald was a trained sniper. But not having seen it, i went to Dallas a few years ago convinced there had to be another shooter. And everyone always said how easy a shot from the "grassy knoll" would've been. So i stood on the "grassy knoll", and realized how ridiculous it is to think someone could stand there with a gun shooting at the president and not be noticed. And i came away convinced there's absolutely no evidence to contradict the conclusion that Oswald shot JFK all by himself.

That's why one of my top priorities when visiting Boston a few weeks ago was to get a first-hand look at this bridge...


Just like with Dallas, i went to Chappaquiddick's Dike Bridge expecting to have my gut feeling that it was no "accident" when Ted Kennedy drove off it in 1969 killing Mary Jo Kopechne reinforced. And just like Dallas, i came away realizing there's no evidence that it happened any way other than the official reports said.

Keep in mind.. i'm not saying I know Oswald acted alone, and i'm not saying that Ted wasn't a liar (or worse). We'll never know for sure. All i'm saying is that the "official" stories are consistent with the physical evidence.

About now, like with just about anything else i write, you're probably wondering why i'm writing this. So, like just about everything else i write, i'll tell you. We've come to label people who challenge official stories "conspiracy theorists". Problem is... it's become a label we use to summarily dismiss any challenges - even when there really is evidence.

So are you thinking i'm saying the unthinkable - that the 2001 terrorist attacks were not what we were told they were? Not saying that at all... because how the hell would i know? But here's something i do know. There's a lot of real evidence on this one that at least will make you realize that it's a lot less unthinkable than you think.

Since this is important to you (hell, you rooted for the U.S. to blow Afghanistan back into the stone age and you wore the official cap of the FDNY baseball team even though the biggest fire you ever put out was on your birthday cake), i'm strongly suggesting you take an hour and a half out of your busy life to watch this documentary on your computer for free.

When you watch it, keep in mind that it only scratches the surface of the real evidence. And also keep in mind that i'm not trying to convince you of anything. Only you can form your conclusions based on whatever evidence you know of. Though tell me this. What is it that would let you unquestioningly believe a story put out by an administration already been proven to lie, while summarily dismissing a preponderance of facts that indicate they just might not have told the truth here either?

And hey... you wanna know what's funny about that question? I bet i'm gonna get the most disdainful looks from people who trust their government with guns a whole lot less than they'd trust Brett with one.

So here's your totally random song for the day...

	Click the note to hear Police Truck by The Dead Kennedys.
You can hear the rest and read more about the DK's here.

Hey... guess where i ate this lobsta roll...


Maybe a ouija board will help, because it was directly across the street from Rockafellas.


Why the ouija board? Because it's the only way you're likely to know that Rockafellas was built on the site where some of Salem's witch "interrogations" took place. You wouldn't know by reading the historical plaque on one of its brick walls. I certainly didn't learn it from Sue, the manager of the place where i had the lobsta roll, when i asked her for advice on exploring Salem. I'd be better off going to the maritime museums and stuff like that, she insisted.

"I don't give a shit about that witch stuff," Sue told me. "I got my broom downstairs and my hat's in the closet."

If i wasn't looking closely (and a local historian hadn't told me), i might've missed the only clue Rockafellas seemed willing to offer about its past life...


I'm not surprised Salem's witch hunts have turned into a tourist trap. Even Salem's only authentic structure remaining from the events that took place 80 years before the Declaration of Independence was written is called Witch House...

...though it was only the home of the main judge who presided over the interrogations.

Much of what happened didn't even happen in what now is Salem. It happened in neighboring Danvers. Danvers isn't that excited about its past either. If you drove by 67 Centre St there...

...would you ever guess that its back yard is ground zero? That was the parsonage where the first accusation was made.

Danvers does have a nice memorial...

It's also a site where "interrogations" took place. But mostly what happens there now is kids play soccer.

It's really too bad Salem downplays the real aspects of what happened there in 1692. For one thing, at least 20 innocent people were tortured and murdered. But the "trials" also can teach something. A plaque at the memorial warns that we must forever confront intolerance and witch-hunts with integrity, clear vision, and courage.

So now.. watch this BBC documentary and tell me if we've learned our lesson.

(Note.. this actually is part 3 of a 3-part series. If it makes your eyes fly wide open, you'll want to watch Part 1 and Part 2, which provide some eye-opening background to what you saw.

And while we're on the subject, your song today is by Jim Carroll, a person who died

	Click the note to hear it.
You can watch Jim perform it live (so to speak) here.

Hey... what's the ultimate video game? Space Invaders? Halo? World of Warcraft? Not even close. Know why? Cause no matter how many times you take someone out in it, or they take you out, your dad's still gonna take both of you out for pizza later. Now THIS is the ultimate video game. That's right.. when you blast someone... they stay blasted.

This bothers a friend of mine. I know that because he emailed it to me and wrote "This bothers me". Then he went on to tell me. "Sweet little well-groomed white girl sitting at a computer in air-conditioned comfort stateside snuffing out lives."

Of course i had to write back and ask him what ethnicity or gender would have made sitting at a computer snuffing out lives more palatable to him. And, unless he knows her personally, I can only guess that being white and female is what makes her "sweet" (i doubt it was her button-pushing, human-life-ending action that brought about his use of that particular adjective).

I don't mean to pick on my friend here. In fact, he's one of the most world-traveled and culturally aware people i know. That's what makes this such a good example of how every one of us forms impressions based on someone's appearance - often without any basis other than our own prejudices. It affects everything from who you stop your car for so they can cross the street to how you discuss public policy with them.

But don't feel too guilty. Just like TV tells you who our arch enemy is on any particular week, they also tell you who the sweet people are. People like Sandra Cantu, Lacy Peterson, Samantha Smart. And we listen, so we form search parties to comb the woods for them. But did you hear of any search party for Aarone Thompson? Or Adji Desir? There are thousands of others who never had a search party. Not enough space in newspapers or on TV news. But hey... at least they managed to find enough space to tell us what kind of pets Jaycee Dugard had, even though she's already safe and found.

And speaking of searches... how many of you are following Robert Blake around the golf courses of America while he searches for the real killer? Come on.. admit it.. you had to think for a second what the hell did Robert Blake do. But you know who the other guy i'm talking about is and i didn't even mention him.

"So what?", you say. You might even point me to this study named Ugly Criminals, which basically shows that the less attrative you're perceived to be the more likely you are to commit crimes. So you feel justified saying you cant do anything about it. But maybe you can, because one of the reasons, the study says, is that "ugly" people have harder times finding legit jobs. And - taking one step back - one cause of not getting jobs could be they had fewer opportunities to socialize in school.

Or maybe it just doesn't really affect you since your kids all are cute as hell, so you'll get your search party anyway. But just keep in mind that the big ugly guy you run into in a dark alley one day might be the one who'll save you from the sweet well-groomed killer.

I hope i'm not going overboard with this song...

	Click the note to hear Men by Loudon Wainwright III.
You can get the entire song (and in better quality) here.

In case you're wondering where i am this month.. don't worry.. so am i. In the past week i've been in San Francisco, New York, Connecticut, and Maryland. In a few hours the plane i'm on will land in Puerto Rico. From there it's Florida, Massachusetts, and Louisiana, with few repeat visits to California and Maryland. I have a spreadsheet to keep track of it all. Why am i taking off my shoes in public and getting x-rayed almost 20 times this month? Because Jet Blue let me do it all for a total of $600. Hey... do i know a good deal when i see one or not?

Jet Blue, on the other hand, doesn't seem to know what a good deal is. I don't mean my $600 deal. That just fills seats. The deal i'm talking about involves the unfilled row just a few rows behind me, the guy sitting by the window, and his large friend sitting in the middle seat between us. I told them i'd suggest i move to the empty row once we took off.

Now you're probably thinking to yourself, "Barry, you must have a brain the size of a planet to come up with these brilliant ideas." But what you should be thinking is, "Jet Blue, you must have a brain the size of a small rock to say no." Because that's exactly what they did. Well.. not exactly. The flight attendant told me she'd have to charge me $25 to do it.

The three of us were shocked. Jet Blue had the chance to make three passengers more comfortable and happy, and it would've cost them nothing because, as i look behind me, that row still came along for the flight despite being empty.



So what's the deal? Are they flat out mean? Are their finances so tight that they can't afford to buy goodwill for a total cost to them of... ummm... free?

I have a few ideas as to why it might be the money thing. Remember the time a few years ago they left all those passengers sitting on the ground for more than eight hours? Their response to that was a Customer Bill of Rights that did nothing to assure it wouldn't happen again - but did promise a free flight the next time you're stuck in one of their planes for 5 hours (or more). Marilyn Parver must have a good idea why too. She was taken off of a Jet Blue plane last year in handcuffs after she refused to delete a video she took of an argument between some passengers.

So when Jet Blue came up with the $600 deal, i figured it was their way of asking people to come back - they still love you and didn't really mean it when they smacked you around. And until today the makeup sex has been great. But you won't be likely to find me and my row mates riding Jet Blue once this month is done, since it doesn't take an Einstein to figure out any long-term relationship with this dysfunctional airline likely will only get you fucked in the end.

Now i'm gonna admit something. There are two reasons i'm in Puerto Rico right now. One is to understand a little about it, since it's a weird part of the United States, and you really have to have been someplace to get what it's about. The second is one you'll probably think is crazy. This song has been a huge influence in my life... and i wanted to listen to it while actually in Puerto Rico. And i just did.

	Click the note and you too can listen to Little Feat's Time Loves a Hero from their live album Waiting For Columbus.
But since you're not crazy, you can just listen to it here.

Hey folks.. i have a mission for you. Go to some crowded park, street corner, or national monument. You there? Good. Next, take off all your clothes and scream as loud as you can "DON'T TAKE PICTURES OF ME!".

Now.. let's see a show of hands.... how many of you really don't think you'll end up on at least 100 web sites featuring pictures of people standing naked in crowded parks, on street corners, or at national monuments? OK.. so maybe you're not raising your hand because you're still naked and you're covering up your secret parts that nobody knows you have. But more likely it's because you know that you gave up any control over your little secret the split second your jockey's hit the ground.

So while we're still talking about panties.. a bunch of people on the social networking site Facebook have gotten theirs in a wad lately over the site having information about them that... i'll try to be subtle here... THEY FUCKING GAVE THEM!

Yeah, it's true. Play a game where you hatch vampire dinosaur eggs, and they know your sexual orientation. Answer some canned questions so some algorithm can tell you what dead rock star you most resemble, and they know what kind of books you like to read. Watch some gizmo spell out the letters of your name using corporate logos, and they'll know which one you work for. (Can't figure out how they know? C'mere.. put your ear close to my mouth and i'll tell you).

But so what? What could you possibly be hiding anyway? By the time you've been on Facebook for any more than a few weeks, you have "friends" from work, from your family, from your friends' work, and from your friends' families' work. I'm not only Facebook friends with my ex-wife, but also with her dog. And by now we know your relationship status is complicated Shasta.

And let's be honest anyway. If you're spending so much time searching for your inner cartoon superhero and giving each of your 300 friends a different color virtual balloon every day, what kind of uber meaningful stuff can you have going on in your life that's oh so important to keep secret from a computer program that really doesn't give a flying fuck about you personally anyway?

Look guys... things like Facebook are free and have great value, so i'm not gonna lose sleep if they happen to know stuff that i freely type onto their screens. Besides, isn't that the point of it all anyway? And if i've insulted a few of you out there, i swear that wasn't my intent. In fact, if you realize there's some truth to what i say, and the word "bored" is part of your vocabulary, then i seriously could offer you things to do that you'd find very rewarding.

But i won't be surprised if a few of you just delete me from your friends' list, and then i guess i'll just never know what variety of vegetable you're most likely to be in 10 years. And i'm fine with that. I only hope some "insurance" company won't deny you treatment for your vegetative state because of some real information about you they dug up from your real-life file you ignored because you were too busy raising mutant ninja goats.

So.. have you ever heard Pete Townsend rap? You're seriously gonna love this.

	...click the note to hear Who Are You, by Pete Townsend from his Lifehouse Chronicles collection
Lifehouse Chronicles is a 6-CD set i bought from Pete's direct web site. I'm not sure if the same version is on the subset called Lifehouse Elements that you maybe will find here. I'm not sure the full set still is available, but you're always welcome to stop by my place and i'll happily play it for you.

If you consider yourself an enlightened progressive who's pissed at those anti-government folks on the right who've been disrupting all those town hall meetings on health care, consider this brief conversation i had with a good friend in northern California who happens to be not only smart and progressive, but who also graduated from The Vous just like me.

B: When're you coming down to visit?

D: Down? Aren't you in Portland now?

... so click the note to hear Fare Thee Well, Miss Carousel, by Townes Van Zandt.

This is the complete song, though not in stereo. Van Zandt died years ago, so obviously the only ones who can profit from his work are those who contributed nothing to its writing. You can download the song (and the entire CD) in higher quality here. In fact, you should download not only this but every song he ever did. He was one of the most incredible songwriters there ever was, and i question whether his early death was more of a loss to him or to the rest of us.

I've been talking about moving for a few years now, and the short list eventually came down to two ports.. Portland and Portugal.. depending on who won the last presidential election. It's not that executive experience scares me, mind you. It's more the people who would've thought someone who quits in order to prove they're not a quitter is perfectly capable of being the most influential person on the planet.

OK.. i'm done shuddering.. and yeah.. it's Portland. So why Portland, you ask? Here... i put together this top-10 list just for you...

10. Toilet instructions in Portland's airport actually refer to the bathroom functions as "#1" and "#2"

9. Great 2 bedroom apt for under $900
8. Whole Foods right down the street (take that, Fremont)
7. All kinds of free shit...

6. 15 minute light rail ride to downtown
5. All-day pass for the rail less than a 1-way ticket on the Frisco Area Rapid Transit
4. A state budget
3. No Props 13, 8, and the one that makes me a criminal if i sell horse meat.
2. A Starbucks on virtually every corner (ok.. no difference there)

and the #1 (not that #1) reason..
*She* lives there (a Barry special CD for whoever can tell me who *she* is)

One thing that's really gonna be interesting is what happens to Newbor. It's been a neat experiment... and i've learned tons in the past few years. I've taken it down to take what i've learned and try to take it where i want it to go.. namely to help you get a real picture of what's going on out there, rather than the one painted by artists such as Sarah Palin, John McCain, and the liberal or right-wing media (depending on your ability to discern beef from bullshit). On top of re-writing Newbor virtually from scratch, now i gotta get ready to move about 700 miles north in a month. And though it'll have a more global focus, i still gotta figure out how to make the local aspect useful.

So give it a little time. And i promise, just like Sarah Palin, Richard E. Nixon (a CD also for anyone telling me where the "E" comes from), and yes... even *her*, you'll have Barry Shatzman to kick around again.

Of course today's song just had to be for *her*...

	... so click the note to hear Girl U Want, by Devo.
You can find the CD with the complete song (and in higher quality) here

My son and i stopped at Casa de Fruta last night on our way home from a vacation. It's this wacky place (virtually a city) i hit every time i drive between the Bay Area and southern California, and if you've ever been there you'll know why.

On the two-lane road between there and 101 North, we encountered the classic driving philosophical issue. We were stuck behind a car going well below the speed limit. But he was stuck behind the car in front of him ... also going well below the speed limit. So now, if the front car gets out of the way, but the car in front of you continues to creep along, who's fault was it originally that i was going so slow behind them? I know.. probably mine for stopping at Casa de Fruta when i would've been way ahead of both of them if i hadn't stopped. But seriously.. if you ever go there you gotta get a slab of their western beef jerky.

So anyway... when i got home and went to read some news... i encountered a similar dilemma.. which is do i blame the police for making this ridiculous statement? Or the reporter for writing it without even a thought about what it meant? Or an editor for ever letting it make its way to ink?



Whatever it is... you get music...

	Click the note to hear Buster Poindexter (aka David Johansen from punk original New York Dolls) pounding out the best version of House of the Rising Sun ever.
You can find the CD with the complete song (and in higher quality) here

Did you ever wonder how someone becomes a proctologist? I don't mean logistically. I mean... was that ever YOUR childhood career goal? Or are you getting the willies just thinking about what playing doctor with someone like that would've been like. So let's do a real fast 180 here and talk about something completely different. Male gynecologists.

For a long time i just couldn't imagine why a woman would ever choose one. Like how could he possibly understand things he could never possibly experience? And then there's the issue of why he decided to be one in the first place (like was proctology school full?). So one day a few years ago i asked a female friend about it. And she told me she preferred a male, because everyone experiences things differently, and a female doctor's own feelings actually might actually get in the way.

Ok.. so those things are weird. But just in case you missed the really weird thing here, i'll tell you. It's that she convinced me i was wrong. Oh, you're laughing? So why then did a former girlfriend nickname me YAR? That stands for You Are Right, i'll have you know.

The thing is, i like being shown that i'm wrong. Because on those rare times it happens, i learn something. And that's really what it's all about, isn't it? Because another choice i totally don't get is when someone sticks to some belief even when every thread of evidence points the other way. And yes, i know you have the right to be wrong (though if you ask me, THAT'S the right Californians should've voted away in the last election rather than the other one).

Anyway... what got me writing this is that you'd be rich now if you'd only played the "barry will be wrong" card last week. A friend challenged my criticism of breast cancerthons and told me that other r-rated cancers also get an indecent amount of exposure. I don't think one person's yellow wristbands count. So i told her if she wants me to admit i was wrong, all she had to do was "show me the stamp". And look... she did.

Of course, there are differences. The breast cancer stamp cost more than actual postage so it could raise money, while the prostate cancer stamp didn't. And guess how many of the 7 references to a specific body part were for breasts when i typed "cancer fundraisers" into the google (hint: it was more than 6).

But a deal's a deal. So here i am admitting i was wrong. At least in picking my criteria anyway.

Hey... here's a real treat for those of you who used to listen to The Blasters in the 80s. This is Dave Alvin, who was the heart of The Blasters along with his brother Phil, doing a kickass live version of Marie Marie. I saw Dave Alvin for about the 4th time last week, and if you ever get to see him, you're in for a concert that i guarantee will knock your socks off (assuming you wore socks, of course... i'm not ready to have to admit i was wrong again so soon).

	Click the note to hear it
The full version (and in higher quality) is available here

Sometimes i think i have a pretty good handle on an issue, and then someone comes along who just lays it out in a way that makes me realize that maybe i'm not ready to snatch that pebble from Master Kan's hand just yet. Read what Katha Pollitt had to say in the most recent Nation magazine about the murder of Dr. George Tiller.

And hey... while we're on a related subject....

...click the note to hear the Wet Spots tell you about Texas Annie

If you're in the mood to do a good deed, here's a great suggestion. Why's it great, you ask? It's great because it's not only free to you, but it only takes like a minute and you can do it while sitting on your couch in your pajamas (i promise i won't ask how your couch got into your pajamas). Visit The Hunger Site, and just by clicking on the button you're donating food that someone else is paying for. And wait... it gets better. The tabs at the top of the page let you do the same every day for things like saving rainforests and giving books to kids. No kidding... i've been doing it for years... it's totally legit.

Another tab lets you donate for breast cancer prevention. And breasts do seem to be the big thing these days. A few friends recently have asked me to donate to their assorted breast cancer walks and runs. I'll confess.. i don't bite.

Now don't get me wrong.. i like breasts. But why is breast cancer such the in cause? Don't the other cancers feel left out? Like what about testicular cancer? Sure, testicles aren't as sexy to the general public as breasts, but cancer there is just as hairy (ok, so i'm still learning the limits of tact) and kills lots of testicular-americans.

Is it right for breasts to get all the attention while testicles are left hanging? Even the postal service is in on it with their breast cancer stamp. Why not a sister stamp (so to speak) with an outline of testicles? Maybe with a catchy slogan such as Let's Lick This In Our Lifetime. And.. just like breast cancer has big events like races, testicular cancer oughta have the same. Hows about an annual ball?

Anyway, i hope i'm not being a dick here. i just wanted to bring it up in case you never thought about why breasts are always out in front.

So hey... here's today's song....

	Click the note to hear Bag Ladies Ball by Christine Lavin, from her album Future Fossils
The full version (and in higher quality) is available here

We all have days in our lives when something serendipitous happens that lifts our mood so much it stays with us forever. One of my lasting moments happened while walking along Clement Street in San Francisco, when my son told me he'd let me be his "friend" on Facebook. While i'm sure it had everything to do with me being the coolest dad he has and nothing to do with Village Pizzeria pizza i just bought him, i promised i'd treat him just like any other friend there (including Shasta, who i've mentioned before and who also has his own Facebook page), and not make stupid dadly comments.

But i comment sometimes. Like the other day when he said he was going to an Atheist Club meeting at Berkeley, and i told him i've been praying someone would start such a club. Which brings up a deep argument. It goes like this...

1. I'm convinced there's no deity up there


2. I still pray that someone starts a club for atheists so i can affirm my belief


3. Someone starts one, hence my prayer was answered


4. My prayer was answered, so there must be some deity up there

	Click the note to hear Tonya's Twirls by Loudon Wainwright III
The full version of this song (and in higher quality) is available here

YouTube is amazing. I wanted to look up my favorite TV ad of all time for this column. It was a public service commercial about child abuse and it featured an exceptionally large professional basketball player. Since that's all i remembered, that's what i typed into the googler. I would've been thrilled to just find the player's name. But guess what... YouTube had the actual ad! Here it is...





What made me think of it was this story last week about a game made for Apple IPhones. The game is called "Baby Shaker". What it does is simulate a baby crying. To stop the crying you - yep, you got it - shake the phone. It should come as no surprise that people cried out, and Apple was shaken enough to pull the plug on the game.

So a quick show of hands. Anyone out there think the game is not tacky? No hands? Cool.. we all agree. Tacky as hell. The next question's a bit tougher though. What's wrong with tacky? I have to admit that if i'd seen this t-shirt from T Shirt Hell when my son was a baby, he'd've been wearing it on every single well-baby doctor visit that his mom was too busy to take him to.

Does that make me a child abuser? Or even a bad parent? Riddle me this Batman... how many people are gonna slap that game onto their IPhone and have this sudden epiphany that "hey, I gotta try this on my own kid!"? And do you think a jury would ever acquit a baby shaker who used as their defense that "well, it's a game on my IPhone so i figured it'd be ok"? Get real my friends. Even the infamous Twinkie Defense never actually happened.

Now don't get me wrong. I'm not having a temper tantrum over Apple choking off a game they don't wanna be associated with. What's getting my diaper in a wad is all these people who'll pooh-pooh Apple for what's at worst a tacky decision, but will do absolutely nothing to address the real problem - the abuse they somehow self-righteously think they're preventing.

So here's my solution. Buy the game. Hell, buy it even if you don't own an IPhone. Why? Because except for the occasional sensationalist case, tell me one thing that's done a more effective job of making people aware of Shaken Baby Syndrome? And maybe it could be prevented if parents were educated on it, and more relatives and neighbors knew what to look for.

And, if you really wanna do something tangible that's almost as cheap as buying the game, donate $5 to an organization such as SAVE, that helps prevent domestic violence. Because if enough of us do that, maybe one day most of the damage done by shaking things will just be to people's pricey cell phones.

Current Music: Whole lotta shakin' goin' on

In my former career, Dave was one of the top executives at two companies i worked for. My second time around with him, he introduced me to another 2nd-time colleague like this...

"This is Barry Shatzman, and as far as i'm concerned he designed the only product the other company ever made that actually worked," Dave said.

That said a lot, because Dave is no slouch. A former nuclear engineer for Navy submarines, he's the guy who engineered the cleanup of Three Mile Island after its 1979 meltdown.

And i was no slouch either. In addition to the system Dave was referring to, that helped pharmacies manage their drug inventories, i did lots of cool stuff that companies continued to use long after i had left. I designed the database that the U.S. Postal Service used to maintain their corporate marketing base. And hopefully you stopped getting phone calls or emails from Intuit after asking them not to call or email you, because i wrote the system they were using to "suppress" your name from the final list.

So when i got laid off in 2001, i figured that even in a dot-com bust, between my resume and what i could do for a company, i'd have a few jobs or contracts to choose from within a few months. Instead, it took me more than a year to get something long-term. Oh, i got interviews. And up until then i'd never failed to get an offer after an interview. But this was a different age. And i don't mean the dot-com bust age.. i mean my age.

It took me a few times of hearing they're looking for someone less senior, i'd get bored, or i'd never stay for what they wanted to pay me to start suspecting i was dealing with age discrimination. It wasn't the kind of thing i could prove, of course.

But this story in yesterday's New York Times really laid it out.. including studies that demonstrate it.

By the way, i got lots to say about working for anyone in the first place, but i'll save that for another day.

Current Music: Working Class Hero

If there's one thing my son and i agree on, it's that Jack Link's Original Beef Jerky is the best readily-available beef jerky there is. I say that even though i hate their stupid commercials. If you haven't seen them, they basically consist of dumb males teasing a bigfoot with Jack Links. Maybe they're trying to make a jerk/jerky sort of connection, but i have personal issues with teasing someone who doesn't really have the tools to deal with it.

True, in the end the bigfoot (it's a dude in a costume.. don't believe History Channel's attempts to give "sightings" credibility) gets them back by flipping their golf cart or whatever. But how is rooting for bigfoot here any different than rooting for those you call cowards? (this actually is a deep question... i hope you'll spend some time thinking about it)

I didn't see that commercial when i was hanging out with a friend of mine a few weeks ago, because she had gotten Who Killed The Electric Car? from Netflix, which had been sitting next to her TV almost as long as the Bob Dylan Newport Folk Festival DVD from them has been sitting next to mine.

Now unless you know there were commercially available electric cars on the road about 10 years ago that could top 100 mph and go more than 150 miles before needing to be charged in your garage overnight until oil companies and GM combined forces to cancel all the leases and destroy them, this movie will wake you up to how ridiculously low even 50 mpg seems. But even if you forget the electric car, tell me why you wouldn't want one of these that can average 100 miles per gallon and get you across the country.

I guess it was the alternative transportation theme that made her think of showing me the video of her jumping out of a perfectly good airplane that was 15,000 feet above the earth's surface about a year ago. To me, skydiving is like teasing bigfoot with beef jerky, except the ground is bigfoot, and the jerky you're teasing it with is your body. Most of the time, you'll walk away laughing. But every so often, the ground's gonna win.

So... a few days later we're on the phone.. and she tells me to remind her next time to not lay on the floor, because she's had a bad back for years and it really was hurting. The conversation continued something like this...

Me: So, let me see if i understand. Laying on the floor with a bad back - bad. Jumping out of an airplane with a bad back - no problem.

J: Yes, but keep in mind that statistically speaking, skydiving is safer than driving a car

Me: That's an invalid comparison because you don't do one instead of the other. In fact.. you drive to go skydiving, so if anything the risk is cumulative.

J: Not if you live close enough to the airport to walk there.

Me: Even so, unless you'd be driving around randomly if you weren't jumping out of a perfectly good airplane, you can't compare the two.

J: It could be a practical skill. Like if you're on a plane that's going down.

Me: So tell me... when planes crash, why does the crew die too rather than take a leap? (I did acknowledge that fighter pilots have ejection seats, so i gave her half a point for that one)

J: But skydiving is incredible. I never felt so alive as when i was skydiving.

Me: So do it! But unless you show me statistics that more people are hurt on the ground by skydivers falling on them than skydivers are hurt by landing on the ground, don't tell me you're safer skydiving than i am staying on the ground.

J: Well i'm going to do it again.

Me: You know what this discussion reminds me of? It's like i'm holding my arm straight out with my hand against your forehead, and you're swinging wildly trying to hit me.

Current Music: The Vultures Fly High (Renaissance)

The way i see it, there are 2 kinds of people in the world and you can tell em apart by their reaction to this picture....



There are the elitists, who'll thumb their nose at me because i have a Palm Centro and not an Iphone. There are the investigators, who'll wonder how i got an Amazon Kindle2 electronic book reader in the picture even though i don't own one (Photoshop, duh). And there are the clueless, who'll ask how i took the picture when the camera is on the table. I'm the type that can't count very well.

But that's not why the picture's here. A few weeks ago i got together with a former girlfriend, and we discovered we both had the same dream of being homeless. Now before you say "quit dreaming so big, barry"... i don't mean living-under-a-bridge homeless. I mean spending our lives driving all over the country. Morgtage? Rent? Dusting? Screw that. Motel 6 has comfortable beds, clean showers with good water pressure, and free coffee and wireless. Camp out when it's nice, splurge when you feel the urge for a bath, and with two of you you're not only living a new life virtually every day, you're also living pretty cheap.

If you've ever seen the Grand Canyon and instantly realized that not even this photograph could ever convey how majestic it is, sat at the moving table at Rimsky-Korsacoffee in Portland, Oregon, or ate Black Forest ice cream at Weber's - a small ice cream stand near Portland, Maine - you know what i'm saying. When i took a monthlong cross-country road trip with my son a while back, we happened upon a ribfest in Minneapolis and a neat swedish restaurant off a random exit in Wisconsin. I've driven past Cadillac Ranch in Texas and walked across London Bridge in Arizona. I've watched baseball games at Wrigley and Fenway and dixieland jazz in Preservation Hall. I've had buffalo wings in Buffalo and philly cheese steaks in Philadelphia.

All of that pales in comparison to the stuff i've yet to do. The music side of me wants to see Springsteen in New Jersey and Jimmy Buffett in Florida. The juvenile side of me wants to visit cities such as Intercourse in Pennsylvania, Beaver Lick in Kentucky, Gay Head in Massachusetts, and the towns of Assawoman and Bumpass in Virginia. I mean.. come on.. tell me you aren't wondering if any of em have streets like this one in Connecticut or this one in Maryland.

Maybe that doesn't do it for you, but looking at the same walls and pottery collection every night for several decades - knowing all the stuff that's out there - isn't cutting it for me these days.

And here's the thing.. it's totally doable. And that's the reason for the picture up there. My entire music collection - arguably one of the most unique on the planet - will fit on the Ipod. My photos on the computer. The New York Times and virtually every book i wanna read will fit on an actualized Kindle. So beyond what you see in that picture up there, what would we need in the back of our fossile fuel powered shopping cart? Some clothes, camping equipment, and toiletries because i swore i'd use that word in a column some day.

What else? I looked around my apartment while talking about it on the phone the other night, pondering what i have here that i really need. My Elvis clock with the swinging legs? Nah. I could find absolutely nothing. Zip. And when you consider it all could go up in smoke that one time you forget to open your fireplace flue, you see how these things own you every bit as much as you own them. As for hanging out with my son, how hard could it be to hit SF once a month? Or how cool would it be to have him go to the airport and find out when he gets there whether he has tickets to the Chesapeake Bay or Glacier Bay (with assurances it won't be someplace like Guantanamo Bay, of course).

So.. will i do it? After writing all that, don't i kinda have to at least try it? I've already made the decision to buy nothing that i can't eat or take with me.

Realistically it's at least a year off. And it probably won't be with the friend i mentioned above (private reasons), but i don't think i wanna do it alone. Wanna come with? I know some of you got important accounting, selling, and lawyering things to do that'll keep you at home. But hey.. maybe now you'll actually take that trip that's been in the back of your mind since you bought that home. And if you do, maybe we'll both find ourselves heading here, and we can meet up at the Motel 6. The sky's the limit.

Current Music: Jack & Neal (Tom Waits)

This is my son about 10 years ago when we lived in Pacifica...


If i showed you this picture back then and mentioned that Pacifica is a well-known place for waterboarding, you might've looked at me like i was a square, but your eyes still would've shot to the men in black by the water. That changed a few years ago, when it came to mean the worst kind of torture being inflicted on individuals in the name of our country.

It changed again a few days ago, when a secret report by the International Committee of the Red Cross made waterboarding seem like a walk on the beach.

...I was kept in a standing position, feet flat on the floor, but with my arms above my head and fixed with handcuffs and a chain to a metal bar running across the width of the cell.... During the first two weeks I did not receive any food. I was only given Ensure and water to drink... The toilet consisted of a bucket in the cell.... I was not allowed to clean myself after using the bucket. Loud music was playing twenty-four hours each day...

After some time being held in this position my stump began to hurt so I removed my artificial leg to relieve the pain. Of course my good leg then began to ache and soon started to give way so that I was left hanging with all my weight on my wrists. ...Finally, after about one hour a guard came and my artificial leg was given back to me and I was again placed in the standing position with my hands above my head. After that the interrogators sometimes deliberately removed my artificial leg in order to add extra stress to the position....

Current Music: Whip It

It's easy to be a friend of mine for life. Just buy me a beer. I'll add another way in the case of Argus reporter Matt Artz. He said he'll get me my favorite tea from Berkeley Bowl. I also gotta thank him for referring to my story about the hoops Fremont is making the owner of a prospective nightclub dance through in order to get city approval. Apparently, one of Matt's faithful readers goofed in clicking the link...

"...I could not find that article just some boring ramblings about Bush and calendars..." he rambled in a blog comment.

Hey... cut me some slack rambling man. Unless you're gonna tell me it's part of Obama's stimulus package, how can you justify cutting down a frickin' forest every year just so you can look at a different Family Guy cartoon each month? Admit it, my idea is a damn good one - and could add years to life on this planet. Or did you not like that i was talking about the worst president ever and not meaning Bill Clinton? (if that's the case, allow me to send you a copy of the CD i mention)

I'll cut you some slack too. Maybe you were just saying there are more important things i could be writing about. I gotta be honest though... i'm gonna laugh at you if that's the case, considering you found it by chasing links to some piddly story about a nightclub that doesn't even exist yet (it was a good story actually.. but i'm still sayin...).

I certainly wouldn't wanna waste your time when you could be learning more important stuff.. like 3 days worth of news about an Olympics athlete doing weed. Stop the fucking presses! Or that Congress is so bored out of their skulls that they gotta hold hearings about which baseball players rubbed funny creams into their batter boxes.

That stuff's gotta be important, right? Why else would our elected officials choose to investigate that instead of investigating stuff like what the Bush gang knew about 9/11 or why they invaded Iraq? Even Pete Stark, who once said on the House floor that Bush sent people to Iraq to get their "heads blown off for his amusement", doesn't wanna investigate all that now. He says Congress has more important things to do.

Like this morning. Guess what i saw on C-Span... It was Stark's House of Representatives spending the morning rambling about how wonderful some professional football team is because they beat another team last weekend. How come we don't investigate what THESE guys are smoking?

Current Music: some Allman Brothers song

Being environmentally conscious (ok... cheap), i figure there's no need to buy a new calendar every year. I mean.. look.. there's only 14 possible calendars (one for each starting day of the year, leap year or not), so why shouldn't i just save ones i like and reuse em when the right year comes along?

Turns out there really are 15. Last year i bought the George W. Bush "Out of Office Countdown" calendar. It ran out today, meaning i gotta run out and find myself a new one. I'm fine with that. I think the environment's still gonna be better off with the new guy controlling what gets expelled into it and extracted from it.

I have lots of high hopes for the new guy actually, but my real hope goes beyond any single policy. Policy discussions over the past eight years have been filled with more name-calling than in a third-grade class. Disagree with me and you're an elitist, you're not patriotic and you're just playing politics.

I hope we finally can cut and run from that and start talking intelligently about policies based on their merits. It's still true that, at the end of the day, you can have only one policy. But at least if you don't get your way on one policy, you'll participate at the same level on the next one, because you know you'll be heard.

This common sense will keep us safe, too. While i won't defend acts that kill innocent people, i also know that most people who do stuff like that do it for real reasons. They don't hate us for what we have, they hate us for what we've deprived them of - things like clean drinking water, their homes, their way of life. If we're gonna act as if the world's not big enough for both of us, can you blame em for their choice of who should go?

Sure there's crazies out there. And here too. You'll never win over their minds. The trick is to win over their smarter friends. And that's what Obama sees that Bush doesn't.

Even still, i feel totally justified in compiling my "Saying Goodbye to the Worst President Ever" CD, which has very cool songs about the finally former administration that you've never heard. Not to ridicule them, but to continually remind us what can happen if we ever let our guard down again.

And if you ask me in a mature way, i might even send you a copy.

Oh... and in case you're wondering, i found a 2004 calendar that will hold me over until the end of February (actually, it'll probably hold me over till June since i never seem to get around to flipping the months). And it's even more mature than the one i just took down. It's my 2004 "Outhouses" calendar.

Current Music: The Worst President Ever

When the weather got cold a few weeks ago, my lunches started consisting more and more of Trader Joe's Creamed Corn and Roasted Red Pepper Soup. They have other vegetarian soups too if corn isn't your thing. You just pour some into a mug, add some bacon bits, and give it to mike to heat it up for about 2 minutes.

Good stuff, just make sure you finish it all in 7 to 10 days. Why? Because it says so on the box, and i assume the people who wrote it know something about soup. I'm at least betting they more about soup than about logic.

I mean.. what does "7 to 10 days" mean? It can't mean to toss it in a week, because the soup people wouldn't give you the 10-day option if it did. So if you can keep it for 10 days, what's the point of even bothering to mention the 7 part? How would it be different than telling you to use it in 6, or 8, to 10?

Speaking of silly things to enforce, check out this sign at a Caltrain station.

Now clue me.. what exactly do they enforce from 6 at night till 6 in the morning? Will they give you ticket if you accidentally put money in a meter? (BART apparently would, so hell.. maybe they do as well).

Does it bug you when people don't even consider that what they're saying makes no sense, or could you care less? Sorry, i couldn't pass up the chance to say that. But whether you realize what i'm apologizing for or not, you oughta be aware of similar stuff being tossed at you.

How could you not be amazed when you received an email blaming Barack Obama for things his christian preacher said... right after you got another one calling him a muslim? I bet they both came from the same person, too.

When former Bush Press Secretary Scott McClellan wrote a book describing how administration officials lied to him in order to get us into a war in Iraq, the current press secretary said McClellan was just a disgruntled employee. Well duh! How many happy employees would write an expose like that? Heck.. don't believe me. He spends more than 300 pages telling us why he's disgruntled. Yet you're expected to dismiss his argument because he's disgruntled?

I think my favorite one though is the one where we need to be fighting terrorists in Iraq so we don't have to fight them here. As if they'd rather stay there and fight our super weapons than come here and poison our water or shoot up a shopping mall.

Of course, if you're savvy enough to see through all that stuff, you also gotta be thinking that maybe i'm being just a bit too tough on the soup people. Maybe they're just admitting they can't accurately tell how long the stuff will stay good, you're tempted to tell me. And i might even be tempted to agree with you... except for this one thing the box also says.

"Best if used by November 17, 2009"

Current Music: statistician's blues (todd snider)

Prop 8 - The Musical... i couldn't've sung it better myself...

Knock knock! Who's there?
Formaldehyde. Formaldehyde who?
Formaldehyding places came de indians

You can't wait to see where Barry is going with this one, huh? Well let me tell you a story...

I got angry a while back while watching TV with my son. I came in in the middle of this reality program so i can't tell you what it was about, but all i know is this lady had her clothes taken away and she had to buy a new wardrobe. And all she did was whine about how she missed her old clothes. I screamed to my son they need to put this moron in a reality show where she has no access to clean water, her husband was raped by soldiers, and 15 bombs land within 20 yards of her tent every day before it's even fuckin noon (i really did say something along those lines. I think i freak my son out sometimes).

About a week later, i got angry at myself. I was sitting at my computer and it committed instant suicide. No kidding. The hard drive crashed. It's dead, Jim. Instantly wondering what i had backed up and what i didn't, i could feel my stress go up like a cartoon character where the red keeps rising until it blows out of my head like Mt. St. Cerebellum. Then i remembered that TV show and screamed (silently) to myself that if i'm gonna feel sorry for myself over this then i deserve to be that lady's teammate on that show.

A cup of tea later, i was all calm and once again being thankful for just how good i have it. And this happened a month ago, meaning i knew how to be thankful even though it wasn't the government's day to tell me i should be. But isn't Thanksgiving a weird day for that kind of thing anyway? I mean, it's kinda all about thanking the North American natives for trading us their land for a pile of smallpox-infested blankets. And look... what would you say if Germany gave everyone the day off to officially thank the jews? Now i know Sarah Palin's gonna use that against me if i run against her for president in 20 years, but tell me how the concept is any different.

At least a friend of mine has the right idea. She goes to a casino every Thanksgiving and gives the Indians money.

I just need to straighten out a few loose ends here before i go. For one thing, it's almost for sure that the the government never gave Indians smallpox-infested blankets.. But before you call me a sensationalist and tell me that proves OJ really didn't do it, read about how it did give them formaldehyde-infested trailers.

And now you know who the joke is on. Hope you enjoyed your turkey.

Current Music: Little Cup of Poison (Tom Waits)

Some things people do are so foreign to me i honestly can't even begin to grasp what thoughts must be going through their head. But rather than get repulsed, mostly i just wonder how they can look at themselves in the mirror and not be repulsed by themselves.

I've tried to avoid writing or sharing writings about George W. Bush, because by now it pretty much seems like beating a lame duck when it's down. This one from Truthdig.com is worth reading however, because it uses his own words.

That said, i hope the incoming administration pursues criminal investigations against Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, and others - even if they eventually are pardoned by this or that president. It's not for vengeance. It's because their biggest crime has been using fear and hate to pit half the nation against the other half. And that divide isn't likely to heal until all the facts are out there for all to see - wherever those inconvenient truths might lead.

Current Music: Clinton Got a Blow Job (Eric Schwartz)

I bet y'all didn't know i'm a legally ordained minister. No kidding. When i was in college a friend ordained a few of us friends. He could do it too, since he's a bishop. It only cost him a dollar for each of us (becoming a bishop cost him $5).

Remind me one day and i'll tell you lots of funny being-a-minister stories. But here's the main thing for now. It made me an expert on marriage. At least the government thinks so, because it allows me to perform totally legal marriages.

So.. was i right or not when i wrote about same-sex marriages a while back and said i was scared because people were pushing to ban them in the state's constitution? But when i said that the issue about those marriages really is about us, i was wrong.

It's really about language. While we talk about separating government and religion, both unfortunately use the same word to describe people who are allowed to see each other naked.

But they're really not the same. From a government point of view, "marriage" is related to things like property ownership, tax rules, children, and legal rights to speak for each other. As for religions, the word can mean whatever each one wants it to mean. And anyone who doesn't like it can go find another club.

So the solution's easy. Give the word "marriage" to religion. It's only fair, since their club's rule book used it first. And let's come up with a new word for the legal stuff... maybe something like "corporal merger".

Doesn't that make sense? It actually would let us discuss the issue in terms of civil rights, while making it clear to anyone who tries to interject their personal beliefs when discussing corporal mergers that they're simply off-topic. Let's stick to the agenda, please.

And hey.. if that's not enough to convince you.. it also would keep bozos like me out of government work (though i also can preside over funerals.. and i could use the money if you happen to be in the market for someone)

By the way... in case you're wondering why i titled this column "Bless U".. it's because that was my license plate.

Current Music: Good for God (Harry Nilsson)

The McCain-Palin attacks not only involved guilt by association, they also assumed that one must apply a political litmus test to begin a conversation. (Bill Ayers)

Bill Ayers, whom John McCain vilified, writes about McCain's use of him as a focal point of the campaign. Read his article in In These Times.

Current Music: I Used To Be A Radical (Root Boy Slim)

I don't do sequels, because i can't think of any other than Star Trek or Rush Hour that didn't suck. I mean.. think about what makes a movie great. Usually it's a nifty idea like Star Wars or The Matrix, but once it's been done you're left with coming up with a new nifty concept or just adding special effects and violence to the old idea.

OK.. i know where you think i'm heading with this. But no.. i'm not saying that John McCain would just be a sequel to the horror movie we've been watching for the past eight years. What i'm saying is.. i'm gonna break my own rule and do a sequel to my previous column.

Along with "we just don't know enough about him", another phrase i hear all the time is "executive experience". Tell me... are these things the new "baaa" or what?

I'll give you any experience can be good if you do something with it (though baseball teams often choose managers with more "experience".. even if most of that experience was in losing). But would it make someone a better vice president? Hey.. let's not argue.. let's just take a look at the results together.



Here's a list of people who have been president during my lifetime, along with their vice presidents. The green ones were governors of their states. You can decide for yourself, but it seems to me that you're gonna find good and bad in both groups - no matter who you like.

So... unless you see some pattern that i missed (and you do remember that Spiro Agnew - my Maryland homeboy - was convicted of corruption, don't you?).. why do you keep bleating 'executive experience' as if it means more than diddly?

And... being that this is a sequel... riddle me this Batman... What would the campaign rhetoric on "judgement" be like if McCain had teamed with Biden and Obama picked Palin?

I just hope it's not asking too much to ask you to use your judgement?

Current Music: Yukon Women (Sue Ellenton)

When i say Barack Obama has better arguments than John McCain, i'm not saying Obama would make a better president. Just that he makes a better argument - because he's the only one making one.

From "muslim" to "lipstick" to "women's health" to "terrorist" to "socialist", all i've seem McCain do is take an out-of-context snippet of something Obama says and turn it into a platform. And that's the good stuff. There's also the deluge of internet letters and robo-calls making accusations - all of which have turned out to be bogus.

It also fascinates me how people's arguments rarely offer their own thoughts from their own reading of factual sources. They simply choose a few snacks from a menu offered by their own candidate's campaign (by what criteria did they choose that candidate in the first place?). How else, with the infinite word combinations out there, would so many people use the same phrase "we just don't know who he really is"?

Riddle me this... if you know so little about him, why are you so sure you can't trust him? Something tells me it's coming from the same guy who's scaring people that Obama would soak middle class income while "spreading the wealth" - in the same breath. Sure McCain's lying.. but even if he wasn't.. the two concepts are mutually exclusive. If he really was gonna take money from people who don't have it.. who's left to redistribute it to? But people buy it. And boy is it gonna cost them if McCain wins.

So... now that you're thinking... think about how different the campaign rhetoric might be if a few things were reversed so that...

• Obama finished fifth from the bottom (out of 899 students) in his graduating class, while McCain was a former president of the Harvard Law Review and taught constitutional law, and Biden didn't know what the constitution says... saying the vice president is in charge of the senate. Like this.



• Obama had been involved with Charles Keating, who went to jail for causing the collapse of his bank, costing taxpayers $3 billion and many seniors their life savings



• Biden had been found by his state's legislature to have acted unethically by letting his spouse use state resources to try to get a police officer fired because he divorced his sister, and he charged the government (i.e. taxpayers) for flying his kids to conferences and putting them up in top hotels



• Biden refused to renounce people who bombed medical clinics that perform abortions, and he spoke at an organization fighting for one of the 50 states to secede from the United States (an organization his spouse was a member of).



• Obama had discipline problems in the military and crashed several planes



• McCain had only married once and Obama had met his second wife in a bar and had a long affair while he was still married



• Cindy McCain graduated from Harvard and Michelle Obama's family had made their money from beer



• Obama had inadvertently said in a campaign speech "my fellow prisoners".



• Obama touted as a campaign centerpiece an unlicensed plumber who owes $1,200 in unpaid taxes, and people who came to his rallies shouted things like "kill him" about his opponent.

Current Music: Reason to Believe

People sure get some interesting ideas in their heads when they let their brains run unchecked. Here in Fremont, for example, a lot of people seem to think the police chief likes crime.

They must think that, because they take every opportunity they get to complain about the police department's 4-year-old policy of not responding to unverified home burglar alarms. It's become the city's biggest wedge issue, and the focal point of one candidate's or another's attempt to get elected as mayor or a City Council member every election cycle.

With 99-percent of home burglary alarms turning out to be false, Chief Craig Steckler says his officers would be more effective fighting crime in places where it's actually happening. His policy might be different if he had more officers to work with, but Fremont has the lowest ratio of police officers to residents of any large city in the United States. Ironically, it's a bed that many of those who complain forced him to lay in, by twice voting against a utility tax that would have paid for more officers.

But here's the real thing. I don't care what Steckler says about it. I care more about what you're saying. By rejecting the tax, even if it was less than perfect, you're saying Steckler has enough resources to work with - he's just not using them the same way you would.

(An aside here... if you're that concerned about taxes, you should love this policy, since the previous one used taxes that everyone paid to provide minimal protection for the minority who actually own homes with alarms).

So tell me, what exactly makes you think that you know as much about running a police department for a 90-square-mile city of 200,000 people than a guy with 40 years of law-enforcement experience who has co-authored two college text books on the subject? Think before you answer here.. because you'll need to know more than not one, but two experts. That's because Fremont's mayor also supports the policy. And he was the police chief right before Steckler.

If you can't tell me, the shouldn't you concede that his way might actually be better than yours? Because if his crime-fighting strategy is a bad one, and he knows it, about all that's left to argue is he actually must like crime. So... which is it?

Look.. i'm not saying a healthy policy conversation isn't a good thing. But at least the police chief's giving you a pretty solid rationale for his policy. So if you voted against the tax or if you're running for a city office and you say you want an officer to respond every time a burglar alarm goes off, shouldn't you tell everyone what you'd take that officer away from to do it?

Current Music: police truck

I wrote this column in 2004, almost 4 years ago to the day, and if you saw the Boston Red Sox come back tonight - being down 7-0 in the 7th inning and on the brink of elimination - to win (led by David Ortiz's homer no less), you'll see why this is as good a time as any to recycle it...

I'm really interested in the way people think and make decisions. My favorite political science book talks about how thinking has evolved over the past 50 years from being linear and logical to more of an image processing type thing. Basically, instead of making decisions with logic, people now tend to make them based on a gut feeling, with very limited processing. In other words, if i write any more about this, chances are i'm gonna lose ya.

But stick with me for a sec... The book compares the thinking processes to baseball and football (ok.. got you back now). Baseball used to be the main U.S. sport. It's a slow, linear game, and things progress logically. Now the major sport is football, where the quarterback has to quickly scan the field and throw the ball based on what his gut tells him. He just doesn't have the time to think about it or get all the information he might want.

And face it, football is the American story. You beat people up and take their territory. To a lot of people, baseball is dull. it just doesn't have that rockem-sockem action that people expect from our leaders.. umm.. i mean athletes.

But this about the Red Sox. I've been a fan ever since I went to this game at Fenway Park in 2003...

...and discovered that all the people who go there like to wear stuff with my initial on it. But that excitement aside... there is nothing in football that can match the tension and thrill of how the Red Sox came back twice in a row to beat the Yankees in extra innings. I swear, when David Ortiz hit the winning single tonight in the 14th inning, i actually slapped my hands on the table. Maybe the Yankees will win tomorrow, maybe the Red Sox will be the first team to come back from 3-0 and maybe even break the curse of Ruth, but whatever happens, anyone who saw the last 2 games will tell you that baseball simply rules.

OK.. 7th-inning Stretch time.. so here's a musical treat for you

Matt Artz, my friend and ace reporter for The Argus, can be bit cynical, so i don't get too bothered when he asks me who besides him is the other reader of Newbor (obviously you know who it is). But it did get me thinking that we need to do something really big here. So for starters, we're starting a new award. It's the Don't Piss Down My Back And Tell Me It's Raining Award. And we actually have two winners to get things going (no Matt, you're not one of them)

The first Pissy goes to California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Last month Schwarzenegger vetoed a bill that would have prevented medical insurance companies from dropping someone who suddenly has high bills for the slightest of omissions in their initial application. It's a common practice called "recision". The bill wouldn't've made it OK to lie. The company just would have had to convince a review panel the omission was deliberate. You might have reasons for not liking this bill, but chances are they're not the same as the one the governor gave in his veto statement. He said it didn't have enough consumer protections (ironically, one of those he listed actually was part of another bill).

Steve Lyle is the other co-Pissy winner. Until this week, when you bought a pound of meat in California, you went home with a pound of meat. In other states, you go home with less than a pound, because the weight is allowed to include the liquids that are part of the package. Well Californians.. thanks to a U.S. Department of Agriculture that's always got your back, your state now has to weigh its meat just like the other states. That might make sense to you. After all, you're getting that extra water and salt, shouldn't you be paying for it? But it was Lyle, who works for the state's Department of Food and Agriculture, who came up with the explanation good enough to earn him his Pissy.

"As a consumer, you win by knowing whatever you buy that is governed by measurements...that they're measured uniformly. You're not going to be buying something in California that's measured differently in Oregon or Nevada," Lyle told a reporter.

Thanks Steve. It's nice knowing i can buy meat at my local Trader Joe's now without having to wonder whether i could've gotten a better deal by driving just up the road to Oregon.

Current Music: You've Got a Friend In Me

Let me tell you a little bit about me. I'm an architect. I own several mp3 music players. And i'm under 5 years old. OK, so not really. But that's what i told Apple when i had to register my brand new 120Gb Ipod so the registration screen wouldn't annoy me every time i connected it to my computer. I tried to just ignore the questions, but they were gonna torture me until i answered.

Got a problem with that? Fine, but then please give me a reason why, even though i just gave a company a lot of money for their product, i should have to tell them things about myself to use it.

The government, of course, knows i'm not an architect. To them im a philosopher, because that's what i put in the Occupation box of my tax form every year. Hey.. i do spend a lot of time philosophizing. And the question doesn't ask which of my activities happens to pay me the most amount of dollars, does it?

So excuse my english here, but who the fuck do companies think they are that gives them the right to any personal information of mine they want? When i bought a device to convert my vinyl records and cassettes to digital, I actually called the company to tell them i shouldn't have to give them my address just to use the required software. And the call paid off. They not only gave me a registration number, but also mailed me a free upgrade that I still use all the time. Now it's not like i was gonna yell at them if they didn't. I simply would have given them an address that, if they ever decided to check, would leave them scratching their heads over how someone at the school for the deaf was using their music editing software.

And yes, i know i'm not the only clever one out there. One company i did consulting for keeps what they call their "Vulgar File" - a database of all the snappy answers they get to their stupid questions. What's funny is that i was designing some of their databases, so i had access the file, and i was able to find a few of the tidbits i'd given them. But normally i don't try to be funny. I prefer the passive-aggressive approach of giving them information they think is useful, but in fact is totally incorrect. That'll teach em.

So hey... call me immature if you want. But whadda you expect? I'm not even five yet.

Current Music: Questions 67 & 68

Hey... remember when George Bush was debating John Kerry 4 years ago and he said he wakes up every morning thinking about how he can protect Americans? Didn't it make you feel safe knowing those troops in Iraq were guarding us and the world was fine?

As much as i hate to be the one to tell you this...it seems there's an even bigger threat right here at home. Probably by using the USA PATRIOT act, the Bush administration has uncovered a plot by the Creekstone Farms Premium Beef meat-packing company in Kansas to destroy our way of life by... i hope you're sitting down... testing all of their animals for Mad Cow Disease.

Well... take a deep breath and relax. The president was on the job, and with help from coalition of willing patriotic larger meat-packing companies, got the Agriculture Department to prohibit Creekstone from testing for the deadly disease. (Just to avoid confusion, i should point out that i'm using a less common definition of the word "patriotic".. in this case meaning "afraid of the public relations problem that would come from their companies not testing their own cows")

Just in case you're wondering, i am not making this up. And lest you fear those liberal, "legislate from the bench" judges will let Creekstone get away with this, a federal appeals court ruled Friday that the administration does, in fact, have the right to prohibit Creekstone from testing their cows.

I know we're dealing with the meat food group here, but the only word i can come up with to describe this is "fucking nuts". And that's kind of appropriate considering how it is a total perversion of democracy. Keep in mind, the end product of a democracy is not an election. An election is just the cooking process. The end product of a democracy is a set of elected officials who work in OUR interest. That's all it is folks.

So.. if you can see how prohibiting a meat packer from testing for Mad Cow Disease is in YOUR interest, then please tell me. If you can't, then consider telling your representative and senator that they're not doing what you're paying them to do. Of course, it doesn't have be on this issue. Pick any issue from health care to Iraq to endangered species to automobile fuel standards that you're not happy with. Because the country will become a much better place for you if a few more sheep turn into pissed-off cows.

And hey... listen to Cows With Guns by Dana Lyons, my favorite mad cow song.
(Note: This is an edited version of the song in order to respect the song's copyright. You can listen to the full song for free - and hear how it all ends - by going to www.CowsWithGuns.com

Current Music: Cows with Guns (Dana Lyons)

It's happened. My son moved to San Francisco State University last week. Thinking i was prepared was a mistake. Not only did it feel like 16 tons of bricks hitting me, but it was a surprise attack.

When he was younger we used to watch this cool movie called The Point, about a place where everybody has to have a point. Their "point" in this case was a pointy head, and the one kid who didn't was banished to the magical woods by his parents - and don't return till you have a point. It not only was a really neat movie, but the songs all were by Harry Nilsson. Anyway, the point of the movie, as you might guess, is that he returns and shows everyone that you don't always have to have a point.

And, unlike most of my other columns, there's no point i'm trying to make here. This video just is one of the most beautiful things i've seen, and i think you'll like it. And the music just happens to be one of my favorite songs. So i'll even pass up the obvious tacky comment about what it must've cost to produce this.

Current Music: c'est la vie, of course

If you read Newbor's report on the conflict between Russia and Georgia, you probably understand a few things better now. For example..

• The conflict is about South Ossetia, officially part of Georgia, even though South Ossetians would prefer to unite with North Ossetia, which is part of Russia
• The 2 Ossetias were divided many years ago, when white men in ties drew up political boundaries without regard for the people who actually live there
• South Ossetia declared its independence more than a decade ago, though the western world refused to recognize it, simply labeling it a "breakaway province"
• Things escalated last Thursday, with Georgia shelling South Ossetia to regain control and Russia sending forces in to drive back the Georgians</i>
• Russia's condition for a ceasefire is that Georgia keep its troops out of South Ossetia - for good
• Until recalling its forces from Iraq a few days ago, Georgia was the third-largest member of the "Coalition of the Willing", right behind the U.S. and Britain
• A million barrels of oil flow every day through a US-backed pipeline through Georgia

• George W. Bush said "Russia has invaded a sovereign neighboring state and threatens a democratic government elected by its people. Such an action is unacceptable in the 21st century."

Current Music: Rotten Peaches (Elton John)

You're gonna wanna keep reading this, because in just a bit i'm gonna tell you about the time i sat in a hot tub with two lesbians.

But first, did you read Newbor's report on sexual abuse in the military? If not, let me sum it up for you here. One out of every three female soldiers has been the victim of a sexual assault. A female soldier in Iraq is more likely to be sexually assaulted than killed by enemy fire. And a few females who pursued the matter ended up dead under very suspicious circumstances. Oh, and at a congressional hearing to investigate all this, a top Pentagon official ordered the person who runs the military's program that handles sexual assaults to ignore her subpoena to testify.

Now riddle me this Batman... with this 16-ton-gorilla of a problem the military has with straight people, why are they doing flips and twists to kick out the gay ones who just do their jobs? Especially when you look at the reasons they give... stuff like it would make the straight soldiers uncomfortable in a communal shower. What's funny about that is... just whose problem would that be anyway? So even the problems they have with gay soldiers really are problems with the straight ones. But let's get even more real. The problems with gay soldiers are merely hypothetical ones that popped into the imagination of some general or something. The problems with straight soldiers sexually assaulting females are real.

So, on my Alaskan cruise last month, i found myself sitting in a hot tub with two women. They happened to be a lesbian couple. And even more exciting, they happened to like discussing politics. Score!

It turns out they both had been in the Air Force, and left partly because they got tired of explaining pictures they had of each other as "she's my best friend". So i mentioned the Megan Touma murder case that had recently broken. I assumed with things like that, and the military acknowledging its epidemic of sexual assault, they'd agree with me on the ridiculousity of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell".

Instead, they schooled me, telling me that "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" was the best thing the military did for gays. There's so much rampant homophobia among soldiers, that a soldier forced to reveal he was gay could easily end up mysteriously dead. It's easy to do in combat situations, they said. "Oops, my bad". Read stories like this one, and you'll see they're probably right.

Now let's assume it wasn't just a few bad dudes who assaulted 30 percent of all the female soldiers out there, and there are a bunch more willing to commit a hate crime against a peer. That means there are a staggering number of monsters in our military. Not to mention the people in charge whom i'm supposed to entrust with defending a country when they can't even prioritize their internal problems.

Those sheer numbers also create a dilemma for me. Now, whenever i see a bumper sticker telling me to support our troops, i'm gonna have to wonder just which troops it is that the driver is supporting.

Statistically speaking, California just got a little quieter yesterday. The statistic comes from my son, who tells me that i honk my horn an average of once per trip. But it's not the New York "i'm running dis here red light so yas all bettah stay outta my way" honk. No. Usually it's honking to politely let someone know i've noticed they're driving 30 mph in the relatively fast lane of I-880 or stopping at a green light because their connection to real world stimuli is being blocked by the cell phone they're holding up to their ear.

So obviously I'm down with the new law that makes it illegal to hold a cell phone up to your ear while talking and driving and hope traffic cops enforce it as vigorously as they enforce the almost as dangerous practice of sitting at a red light without a seat belt on, as they did with me a few years ago. Don't get me wrong.. i wear mine any time i'm doing more than driving across the street from one parking lot to another with a motorcycle cop behind me. But i bring it up because, even though seat belts DO save lives, laws requiring them are designed to save insurance companies money more so than to save your life. So it's nice to see one that actually protects me from others rather than just from myself.

In fact, i think the new law doesn't go nearly far enough. It won't stop you from looking at the phone to dial a number or send a text message to your BFF. It won't stop you from using your cell phone to take a picture like this one i took while driving north on I-5 near the Oregon border (now before you jump all over me.. that was like the 3rd sign i tried it at because i just held the phone up and clicked hoping i'd get something decent, so i could remain focused on my driving).



It also won't stop you from holding a cell phone up to your ear while it's not turned on (as if any of you trouble-makers didn't already think of that).

It won't even stop social butterflies from having those meaningful conversations while driving that they'd never be able to find time for when they're doing something less dangerous to others, though now maybe they'll look down at the speakerphone on their lap rather than looking at the car ahead of them. But at least it'll stop them from being so blatantly obvious about their disregard for others. And hey.. maybe it'll stop me from having to honk at them.

I've always found the best way to judge television is by how sharp the picture is. Now, i don't mean LCD vs Blue Ray vs the free portable TV i got free for opening a bank account that i won't have to feel guilty about never using once the airwaves go digital next year. I'm talking about when a network intentionally blurs a picture because it's showing something unnatural like a human nipple or finger.

So let me say - the state of television is good.

It's had it's ups and downs. An up was when we were told we saw Janet Jackson's unblurred nipple during a championship football game (get real, only Superman's x-ray vision was gonna catch that without a replay) and the network was fined a gazillion dollars. I'm calling that an "up", because i figure the fine was for not showing it long enough. I concluded that while watching the game the following year, when a commercial showed a bunch o men running around a car in nothing but tighty-whities, and nobody got fined for the full minute of unblurred nippleage there.

Then it had some downs. Like when this reality TV medical show covered a sex change operation and showed the before and after chest pics side by side. On one side, this person's nipples as a male were shown clear as day. On the other side, THE SAME PERSON'S nipples as a female were all blurry.

Another blurry moment came during a "magic" show by the Amazing Jonathan (you really gotta see him by the way. he's hilarious) when he flashed his middle finger to the audience - and they blurred it! What the $@#%!

(Think about something here. You're saying it's the meaning behind the gesture. But when i said "$@#%", you knew i was saying "fuck". Yet i know at least some of you will have more issues with my emotionless use of the actual word than the symbols that really expressed the expletive)

OK, so what makes me say the state of television is good? I'm watching the Lakers/Spurs game last week, and after the game some vampire movie - like The Matrix only with more violence - comes on. We're talking vampire-fu and dozens of exploding deaths all in the first 10 minutes. In the short track below, you're listening to the end of a raid, where the ugly vampire guy just had lots of his buddies killed and the good guy just escaped his clutches.

Click here to listen. Intense, huh?

Even if you don't speak vampire, you can tell this is as ugly as it gets. But this is where television finally came through - they actually showed a subscript of what he said! Just to be safe, i put it behind the link below. If you can't handle the raw stuff, just don't click it. But if you wanna see what he actually was saying, and what television finally dared to show, click here.

In case you were wondering what my all-time fave West Virginia joke is, this is it...

A 7th grader who just moved from West Virginia comes home from school after his first day in his new school all upset. He asks his dad, "Paw, how come all the kids in my class can count real high, but I can only count to 10?"

His father answers, "That's because you're from West Virginia, son."

The next day, the son comes home from school all upset again, and asks his dad, "Paw, how come all the kids in my class can recite all the alphabet, but I can only recite up to 'H'?"

"That's because you're from West Virginia, son."

The following day, the boy comes home excited, "Paw! I was in the shower after the gym class today, and I noticed all the other boys had tiny penises, but my penis was the biggest! Is that because I'm from West Virginia?"

"No son," his dad replied. "That's because you're 28 years old."

Current Music: If i only had a brain

The following is an update of an editorial i wrote a few years ago...

Things are pretty scary here in California. I don't mean the budget crisis that Arnold "I'll tear up the state's credit card" Schwarzenegger borrowed us into and says he can borrow us out of. No, it has to do with the state's Supreme Court ruling today saying it's perfectly fine for people of the same gender to get married. That's kinda what's got me scared.

Let me try to explain. First of all, the interesting thing about the issue of same-sex marriage is that it's not really about gay people. They're just the ones who are affected by it.

I came to that realization that after listening to people discuss why it's such a bad thing. They usually mention God, of course. I'll assume they mean the Judeo-Christian version of the big guy. The distinction matters, because the U.S. Constitution goes out of its way to make sure the arguments of any particular religion are not the basis for our laws. And with good reason. While one creation theory may say, as i heard someone point out, "God made Eve, not Steve", why should we not base our marriage laws instead on the Ohlone Indian creation theory, which consists of a coyote, a hummingbird and a feather? Kinky.

Even George W. Bush understands this logic. Realizeing that same-sex marriage restrictions could be invalidated by the federal Supreme Court, he has said he wants to change the constitution itself. Now tell me, can you think of a better way to divide a people than to constitutionally give them different rights? Just pray that you're on the right side.

I think what disappoints me the most is the way people judge others based on their personal tastes, as if the feelings of the people actually involved don't count. Ohlone College anthropology instructor Jo Rainie Rodgers pointed that out when discussing how hard it is for single people to even come in contact with potential mates.

"So when two people do actually connect, why would you be so mean to deny them the right of a full relationship simply because they happen to be the same sex?" she wondered.

That's hypothetical. Here's something that's real. An acquaintance, here on a visa, was about to be sent back to her home country because her visa was expiring. But she was in a healthy, long-term relationship and didn't want to leave. No problem, you say. They could just get married. And there's the rub. You see, her partner also happens to be female.

And they're not the only ones. A few years ago, when San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom said same-sex couples could get married there, more than 3,000 of them took their oaths. So tell me, is there a good reason you would be cruel enough to deny 7,000 people the right to pursue happiness with their chosen partner, simply because that partner doesn't meet YOUR ideal? And that was just one city.

OK Barry, so tell us why you're scared already. I'll tell you. Because all the court did today was say that nothing in the state's constitution prevents people of the same gender from getting married. So some people plan to fix that silly omission by placing a proposition on the November ballot that would directly put the ban right into the constitution.

Now i don't care which god created you, this should scare you too. Why? Because if you can take even one arbitrary right from even one arbitrary group, what makes you think someone couldn't just as easily return the favor?

For some reason, most major headlines tomorrow will tell you that Deborah Palfrey, the woman labeled the "DC Madam", took her own life on Thursday.

Whatever reason they or you give, it will be the wrong one.

They'll tell you it's because she ran a prostitution ring that earned her millions, and was facing the possibility of spending the rest of her life in prison for it. So let's just agree that her ride on earth was over regardless of whether she hanged herself in that barn. Call in the bouncers.

The reason for that at least seems pretty obvious. The people we've elected to tell us how to live our lives decided a long time ago that paying for sex is a no-no. I'm sure they had a good reason. In fact, i asked a police officer a few years ago after he bragged about helping bust a massage parlor in Fremont that offered happier endings than Palfrey apparently gave to herself. And he told me that most of the women in places like that are, in a sense, slaves. They often are brought to the U.S. from Asia to pay off debts.

Hopefully we all agree that forced labor is bad. But we confuse that with sex. While you'll happily pay for your pants made with forced labor, you'll just as happily put someone in prison if they pay to take theirs off.

So we seem to agree that it's not the "slavery" part of "sexual slavery" we're having trouble dealing with. That leaves only one part, but this is where i might lose a few of you because i'm gonna deal with something most people have even more trouble dealing with than sex. Facts.

Like the fact that Palfrey supposedly had more than 10,000 clients. Like it or not, there was a real demand for her product. And the fact that some huge percentage of spouses "cheat" on their partner. And what about all those "straight" men who happen to get caught that one time they stick something that's not their hand into something that's not a cookie jar? Again, denying the demand doesn't mean it isn't there. Just the other day, in fact, it was reported that teaching kids abstinence flat out doesn't do squat.

You could, of course, go with Rep. John Duncan of Tennessee. Talking about abstinence, he told Congress this week that "it seems rather elitist to me for people who maybe have degrees in this field to feel that they, because they've studied it, somehow know better than the parents."

Or, you could choose to deal with the facts. And yeah, it'd be uncomfortable. You might have to teach your kids how to prevent babies and disease, rather than pretending they're not doing it. You might have to come to terms with an attraction for someone of the same sex. And even if you don't, quit telling others they don't have an equal role in your society just because they do. You might even have to question the role of monogamous marriages in our culture.

Or at least we could have a real dialogue, and figure out ways to give what we do have enough meaning to make it work for more of us. Because if more of us had the balls to deal with some of that, we know that at least one more human being who harmed nobody would be alive tonight, and not facing spending 50 years in prison.

And we'd know the real reason for the headlines - which is that they give people what they want in the absence of real substance. And isn't that just what she did?

Current Music: Give me one reason

A friend of mine told me a sad story yesterday. She works as a 9-1-1 dispatcher and had to deal with a women whose house was burning to the ground. How sad, my friend said, to have something like that happen on Easter.

I agreed of course, though i also found myself wondering what day this sort of thing might be seen as a happy occurrence. And it brought me back to the time a few years ago that i volunteered to work Christmas day at the Argus here in Fremont. I had left the paper by that time, but they knew Christmas isn't a holiday for me, and this would give the other reporters the day off.

When i got into the office that morning, the first thing i did was to call the various police and fire dispatches to see if anything major was going on. So i get to the one for the Fremont Fire Department, and the dispatcher answers the phone with "Merry Christmas, how can i help you?"

Let's ponder this. Other than this particular call from me, the only other call she's likely to get would be from some family whose Christmas tree is burning down their house while they stand outside wearing nothing but their red and white fuzzy underwear cause that was the first present they couldn't wait for each other to open and of course had to try it on and one of them fell into the tree while putting a leg in because the other one was pulling on the santa beard in the front knocking the tree over and igniting the wrapping paper. And this cheerful person on the other end of the phone hoped their first homeless Christmas is a merry one. I bet even the star of both of these holidays was up there slapping his forehead over that one.

Current Music: Burning down the house

At a recent forum on misconceptions about Islam, a woman asked Tahir Anwar how Muslims feel about suicide bombings. The imam at the South Bay Islamic Association in San Jose responded that mosques all over the world issue strong denouncements after every incident. The problem, he said, is that the media never publishes the denouncements.

No, that's not the problem. The problem is why anyone feels Muslims owe anyone an explanation in the first place.

When Eric Rudolph exploded bombs at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, an abortion clinic, and a gay nightclub - all in the name of Christianity - did we demand accountability from Christians? And think of how different things would be if the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that killed or injured almost 1,000 people - in a U.S. Government building - had been done by a Muslim instead of a Christian dude. 4/19, rather than 9/11, now would be part of our vernacular.

Not enough deaths, you say? "I am convinced that I am acting as the agent of our creator. By fighting off the Jews, I am doing the lord's work," Adolph Hitler - a Catholic - wrote in Mein Kampf. Raise your hand if you thought to ask your neighborhood priest how Catholics feel about mass exterminations. When Israel invaded Lebanon in 2006, we blamed either Hezbollah or the Israeli government, not either's official religion.

And here's the funny thing. You give Muslims a free pass too. In the Darfur region of Sudan, where Muslims have killed hundreds of thousands of people over the past several years, we know better than to blame the religion. And it's not because the victims also happen to be Muslim, because in Sudan's civil war just prior to Darfur, it was Christians getting killed. In both cases, we rightfully blame Sudan's corrupt government.

But come September 11, 2001, where 15 of the 19 hijackers and the head of al-Qaeda came from a single country, do we blame Saudi Arabia? That, for some reason, has gotta be Muslims.

Don't blame yourself. If fact, if i'm going to blame the media for anything, it's for its subtle ways of telling you what to believe. Why do you read that the 9/11 hijackers were radical Muslims, while Eric Rudolph and Tim McVeigh merely are fundamentalist Christians? But just who is this joke on anyway, considering the first acknowledges a deviation from its religion's teachings, while the second implies adherence to its own?

Face it, you know that Osama bin Laden doesn't represent Muslims any more than Ehud Olmert represents Jews or any more than George W. Bush represents Christians. When ordinary German citizens discovered what had been happening in concentration camps, they were as sickened as you and i are. We know they had no say in what took place supposedly in their name. So why aren't 1.6 billion Muslims given the same consideration?

Update: I write about how the media casually accepts information provided as fact, yet i have done that twice here. First, i glibly write that Muslims have gotten a free pass in Sudan. That implies that some association between the religion and the killings exists and is merely forgiven. In fact, there is no such connection in the first place - the key point of this column. More serious is my line about Osama bin Laden representing Muslims, because i write it relation to his role in the 9/11/01 attacks. Have you seen any evidence that he was, in fact, responsible? If you know of any, please share it.

Current Music: God's Hotel (Nick Cave)

I know how my good friend and city editor of the Argus Rob Dennis feels. I don't mean because we both got into journalism as a second career, or that we both work as reporters and editors. I mean because we both have gotten tickets by the lovely and talented BART police for doing absolutely nothing wrong.

Apparently, transportation's finest never got the memo from Mark Twain, warning against picking fights with people who buy ink by the barrel. Since Rob recently wrote about his ordeal, now it's my turn to write about mine. The nice part is, i don't even have to try to be funny. The letter i wrote to BART's police chief does the job nicely. I swear this is word for word what i sent him...

This ticket proves itself wrong…

Look at the time the ticket was issued. In fact, look at the time that the “violation” was observed. That would be 2 something P.M.

Now, look at the sign that is posted at the spot…


According to this sign, which I read before I parked in the spot, a permit is required ONLY until 10 a.m. Since I parked there sometime around 2 p.m., I did nothing wrong (perhaps other than considering BART as a decent transportation option in the first place).

In fact, while I need go no further to prove that this ticket is bogus, note the following 2 receipts…
(i'll spare you the receipts)

Sorry the first is so hard to read.. but it shows that I was having breakfast in Fremont at 12:50 P.M. that day. The second shows I bought gas, also in Fremont, at 1:33 P.M. That was when we headed over to the Colma BART station and parked in that spot – well within the legal times specified by BART and posted on the sign.

I included the receipts in order to make 2 points here…

1. I could not have been at the Colma BART station early enough to park in that spot illegally.
2. Officer Douglass (J-238) either acted maliciously in writing the ticket, or needs to watch more Sesame Street to learn how to tell time. Either way, he deserves a reprimand.

If you have any questions, or would like to hear me call Officer Overachiever some nasty names, feel free to give me a call.

Current Music: Message in a bottle

If Nielsen, that company does television ratings, ever calls me to ask what's what's on my TV, chances are my answer will be "dust". I just don't watch it much (or dust it, apparently). When i do watch it, it's likely to be something like the History Channel. They have great shows on the universe, underground cities, and World War Two battles. Attention Deficit Distraction here... roman numbers were invented for superbowls... not world wars.

So where were we? Oh yeah, distractions. History Channel has lots of those, too. Like shows on Nostradamus and poltergeists, which i wouldn't mind except that they treat those things with the same credibility as the Big Bang. Another thing that creeps into their shows is propaganda.

Like today. Fremont schools are off today, and my son was watching a show on Marines chasing al-Qaedites in Iraq. Predictably, it was very predictable. The marines would go somewhere, "insurgents" would show up in clever hiding places, and the marines would blow them up. Maybe that's why they showed it at 11 in the morning.. it almost was like a Bugs Bunny cartoon. Those wascally webels.

I cringed every time the deep-voiced narrator referred to them as "the enemy". Yes, they were trying to kill U.S. troops - which we all agree is bad, George W. Bush says makes them cowards, and certainly is an inappropriate way to welcome guests to their slice of the planet. But this is not World War Two, where one country made a decision to attack Europe and another to attack Hawaii. Last i checked, it was the United States that started the attackin' in Iraq

No, i'm not trying to bait you here, but bite if you must. And if you're still not convinced the show was all propaganda, here was its closing line. "If the Marines want you, they'll get you".

So, anyone seen this guy?

Current Music: Nellie the Elephant

I tend to take people at face value. I like that about me. I figure i'd rather be wrong about someone by trusting them when i shouldn't've than by not trusting them when i should've.

So some guy knocks on my door a few minutes ago. He says he's from Washington High School and he just got an NCAA football scholarship. He must have worked pretty hard for it, considering he's smaller than me. But unfortunately, not quite hard enough. He explains that NCAA rules require him to have 1,000 hours of community service by the end of February, and he's way short. That's why he knocked on my door.

I got all excited for a minute. I'm thinking.. hey.. this guy needs to do community service.. i need people to write about the community for Newbor... let's have coffee. Turns out he actually did have journalism in mind, but only in the form of selling newspaper subscriptions. You see, if i agreed to having a newspaper delivered, he'd get community service hours.

And hey.. you'd believe him, wouldn't you? So if he knocks on your door, do what i did. Tell him there are more ethical ways to earn community service hours than selling newspaper subscriptions. And if he answers like he did to me - that he needs them in a hurry, repeat one of my favorite sayings that i left him with.. A lack of planning on your part doesn't constitute an emergency on my part.

Then come write for Newbor. Who knows.. maybe it'll get you an NCAA scholarship.

Current Music: Teenage News (Syl Sylvain)

Ask just about anyone who knows me well and they'll tell you there are three ways to classify time. Standard and daylight-savings time everyone knows. The third, a half-hour later than whatever the local time is, is Barry time. It must be real, since several people who never met each other all have used the term over the years.

Whether i'm going someplace 2 miles or 50 miles away, i always seem to end up there exactly 30 minutes later than i said i'd be there. Maybe i'm trying to finish one small thing before leaving. Maybe i can't find my wallet, or i'll get a phone call just as i'm heading out the door. It's better that way, because if i do actually leave on time, there's going to be an overturned big-rig or sinkhole somewhere along the way.

Maybe i'm subconsciously rebelling against my father, who biggest motivation for staying alive might be that he doesn't want anyone calling him "late". Invite him over to your house at 7, and he'll be standing at your front door at 6:59, looking at his watch so he can ring the bell the second that second hand crosses the 12. I've seen him do this.

He'd love this watch i just got. It's not a $6,000 Rolex like my brother bought to celebrate his divorce becoming final, but it's a step up from my usual $40 cheap piece of plastic that does nothing more than tell me how late i am. It has this cool feature that would let him watch a countdown to whatever time he needs to be somewhere.

The feature that sold me, however, was that it automatically sets its time from a government radio signal. If i couldn't fool myself into thinking my watch is fast, maybe i'd force myself to leave earlier. This thing was gonna save me time.

It came Tuesday. Here's what i did once i opened the box (in addition to the few hours i spent learning how to set the 5 alarms - including my dad's likely favorite one).

1. I pushed a button so wrong there was no way i could get it to right time zone. It took me a half hour to get it back to the right mode. I can't tell you how i did it.
   


2. Somehow i'd made it show the wrong date. The instructions said to sit the watch down with the "12" pointing toward a window, push the right button, and wait up to six minutes. Let me repeat that. SIX MINUTES. And after all that it said it couldn't find the signal. So i tried again - about 5 more times. Yes, i spent 30 minutes watching some silly display on my watch flash.

Current Music: After Hours (Velvet Underground)

You know those electronic signs on the freeway that underestimate how long it will take you to get to wherever it is you're not going? So i'm driving home from Thanksgiving dinner at my friends' in Berkeley, and i notice one on I-880 that says "Report Drunk Drivers. Call 9-1-1".

Now before you start to wonder what problem i could possibly have with keeping drunk drivers off the road, i'll tell you right now that very few things on the road scare me as much as drunk drivers. Unfortunately though, one of those things is... DRIVERS DIALING THEIR CELL PHONES!. So now, instead of one suspected drunk driver around me, i'm gonna have one suspected drunk driver and one confirmed good samoron.

Seeing the sign gave me a flashback to the time my son was sitting on the couch eating an apple and watching tv around 7 in the morning. If having to get him to school at 7:30 a.m. was not enough to put me in a great mood to start the day, the smiling faces on the "news" program were saying that the Amber Alert signs, you know.. those signs that alert people of an abducted kid, have been turned off, but the child was still missing.

Why were the signs turned off? Get this - they didn't want to distract drivers. Now tell me, ISN'T THAT THE POINT OF THE WHOLE THING?

So we had this child whose life was in danger, and we turn off the sign made to alert cars when there actually are cars on the road to read it and where the one car they're looking for was likely to be. Is there a clue i forgot to buy?

They did show the car's license plate number on the tv. And i wrote it down, so if a car happened to crash through the wall of my third-story apartment, i would have been totally ready to compare its license plate to my notes.

Current Music: My Baby is the Star of a Drivers' Ed Movie (Blotto)

I just realized the saying "every rule has an exception" makes absolutely no sense. I mean, it can be false if you find one rule that doesn't have one. But if it's true, then it would violate itself by not having one. Be thankful i'll make an exception by not rambling on and on about this.

Speaking of exceptions and giving thanks, i'm changing what i originally was gonna write about for Thanksgiving. I was thinking maybe i'd write about a holiday that teaches children to thank the people we tried to annihilate. Then i thought i'd tell you about one of those people who has been locked in a federal prison for more than 30 years - America's version of Nelson Mandela - who Amnesty International has been fighting to free because of the sham trial used to convict him.

I promise you'll hear more about all of that at some point in the future, but this time i'll go with something that is more likely to hit home (i swear i didn't realize the tacky pun until after i wrote that). I wouldn't normally focus on one organization like this. But hey, i said i'd make an exception didn't i? And i can tell you from personal experience that this one's more than worth it. I've visited the home of someone they helped escape the cycle of domestic violence. I've spoken with residents at the organization's shelter. I've written several articles about them over the years, including this one. And, like just about every one of you, i have too many close friends whose lives have been damaged or ended by abuse. So when i got this email from SAVE earlier today, i instantly decided this was a better message than any one i had. So here it is, word for word. I'll just echo its last sentence.

With Thanksgiving and the holiday season upon us, we at SAVE reflect upon all that we are thankful for.

We are thankful for ...
... the woman kept safe for one more night at our shelter
... the child who can be a child again because his mother is safe
... the family that has started a new life -- safe and free of abuse
... the high schools that invite us to teach their teens about healthy relationships
... the police officers that understand the dynamics of domestic violence and work with SAVE to help the victims
... the community groups that choose SAVE for service projects
... our volunteers who give their heart and precious time to SAVE
... our donors who give their hard-earned money to make someone else's life safer and brighter

... all of you because you believe in us and our mission to provide safe alternatives to domestic violence.

We hope that you also have many things to be thankful for this year.

They say that even Satan will quote scripture if it suits his purpose in an argument. I don't care. Put him in the pro wrestling ring to argue anything with my son, and he can pull out every illegal foreign bible from his red trunks that he wants - my money's still on my son.

He knows the tricks all too well. He knows that empirical evidence doesn't prove a theory. That's why he can claim that playing World of Warcraft for 3 hours a day has no negative impact on his grades, ignoring the fact that his A's are much more likely to come from subjects like Band than from Biology. Yet that doesn't stop him from using such evidence when he feels like it - like at 11 this morning when he argued that i had no reason to interrupt his progression to level 45 by asking him to get off the couch and feed Shasta, the cute dog in the picture here.



"Look, he's not eating it, so he wasn't hungry," he argued. Kid 2, Devil 0.

This is the same kid who argued with me that there had been no reason to call the DMV in advance to find out if he needed to bring his birth certificate. He actually told me this on the way home from the DMV, after they wouldn't let him take his written test because he hadn't brought his birth certificate.

But don't take my word for it. Let Shasta help you decide. Shasta stays with me every so often when my son's mom is out of town. And he must be, if you believe what my son says, the world's least competent dog.

It started when my son was on the couch munching on some Jack Links beef jerky, and i noticed the little moisture-absorbing packet of poisonous stuff they stick in the package sitting on the floor. As expected, my son had no idea how it got there. He agreed with me that the floor isn't the best place for it, being that the dog could get it. That's why he said he put it (are you ready for this?) on top of the 4-sided Rubik's Cube you also see in the picture. And there's no way, he assured me, the dog could possibly reach something that smells like meat as long as it was safely resting on the cube.

Up until recently, if you were to tell me that one day i would be ready for my son to leave home for college, i would've had quite the argument with you about it. I now know that's one argument i would have lost.

Current Music: Lick Myself - Triumph the Insult Comic Dog

I can't stand the Yankees, but my favorite baseball cap has their famous NY insignia on it. I'd take it over my Nationals cap, which i bought for $16 to celebrate baseball returning to where i grew up watching the Senators, and even over my Red Sox cap, which i bought for $25 at Fenway and has my initial on it. I like my Yankees cap because i bought it in lower Manhattan to keep my head cool on a 95-degree day. And because the guy was selling em for 4 bucks, meaning the Yankees weren't making a penny off of it. Maybe you're different, but i didn't see any benefit i'd be getting by paying an extra $15 or so for it to have "official" stamped on it. Big whup.

Speaking of big whups, did you see the other day where Barry Bonds is saying he'll "boycott" baseball's Hall of Fame if they display the ball he blasted out of PacSBC&T Park for his 756th home run. What's making Bonds mad is that the guy who bought the ball is branding an asterisk on it before donating it to Cooperstown. Marc Ecko didn't decide this unilaterally, however. He put it to a vote of anyone who visited his Web site. And voters chose that option over donating it without the scarlet punctuation or having it blasted into space.

Now i'm not saying that Bonds did take steroids, and i'm not saying he didn't. Fact is, he's never tested positive for banned drugs. Fact also is, he had claimed some substance had been rubbed into his butt cheeks unbeknownst to him by his personal trainer. So tell me this, Mr. Wizard... if some sorcerer sneaks some mystery potion into your ass, are you going to just use it as an excuse, or fire his ass? So let's just say someone's sitting on something here.

But regardless of what anyone says, it's not steroids that allowed Bonds to hit more home runs than any human who's ever roamed the planet. But it also isn't his lightning reflexes and arms as thick as my kid's skull. What's allowed him to do it is the millions of baseball fans who pay to see the games.

So when Bonds calls Ecko and "idiot" and says "You cannot give people the freedom, the right to alter history. You can't do it. There's no such thing as an asterisk in baseball", i say he's talking out of his ass.

( Q: What do you call a guy with no arms or legs flying over a fence? )

Current Music: Take Me Out to the Ballgame (Bruce Springstone)