It's kind of stunning, isn't it? This Randy Cohen controversy, I mean. For those who don't take Romenesko's Media News instead of breakfast, Randy Cohen is the "ethics columnist" for the New York Times Magazine. Basically he's Dear Abby with a fancy title. In October 27's column he ran this letter:

Q: The courteous and competent real-estate agent I'd just hired to rent my house shocked and offended me when, after we signed our contract, he refused to shake my hand, saying that as an Orthodox Jew, he did not touch women.
As a feminist, I oppose sex discrimination of all sorts. However, I also support freedom of religious expression.
How do I balance these conflicting values? Should I tear up our contract?

Cohen's advice--and I am shaking my head as I type--was that of course, of course she should tear up the contract. Not even a close call. For an ethicist, this is apparently a hanging curveball.

Though the agent dealt you only a petty slight, without ill intent, you're entitled to work with someone who will treat you with the dignity and respect he shows his male clients.
If this involved only his own person - adherence to laws concerning diet or dress, for example - you should of course be tolerant. But his actions directly affect you. And sexism is sexism, even when motivated by religious convictions.
I believe you should tear up your contract.

Some religions (and some civil societies) that assign men and women distinct spheres argue that while those two spheres are different, neither is inferior to the other. This sort of reasoning was rejected in 1954 in the great school desegregation case, Brown v. Board of Education, when the Supreme Court declared that separate is by its very nature unequal.
That's a pretty good ethical guideline for ordinary life.

You could argue that the cultural "offence" involved in not shaking hands is genuine harm, I suppose. Cohen makes a good deal indeed of the woman's "dignity" while airily proscribing Orthodox Jews from any sort of commerce involving face-to-face contact. Remember, he's an ethicist!

Does Cohen believe that Miss Q would be ethically culpable, acquiescing in an objectionable "sexism", if she failed to tear up the contract? Because I fear my own natural reaction to the situation would be to say "Oh, I had no idea you were Orthodox, I meant no offence", and proceed in my wholly mercantile relationship with the fellow. Are we now to believe that it is our job to impose all our treasured political principles on our fellow man in every transaction we enter upon? Maybe libertarians don't do this often enough.

"With sales tax that will be $6.50, and your change from a ten is $3.50. Have a nice day, sir."

"Hey, BITCH, taxation is theft. Don't tell me to have a nice day while you're seizing booty from me on behalf of Leviathan."

Actually, I have the distinct impression some libertarians do do this.

I've been getting a lot of search-engine hits from requests for the notorious "Calgary Flames streaker". A LOT. More than I've been getting from Instapundit? It's close, damned close. Well, for those who like their stupidity high-octane, sports site Czabe.com has the definitive photo. Don't blame me if you click here.

I think this picture pretty much sums up the Calgary Flames, don't you? A deranged idiot getting his hoo-hoo mashed while a bunch of horrified sluts look on. In other words, it's sharply reminiscent of that time in the '88 playoffs when Marty McSorley got the red mist and speared Mike Bullard in the pubic bone and Bullard had to be taken away on a stretcher. History really does repeat itself as farce!

(I still replay Bullard's Koho vasectomy in my head when I'm feeling low. So sue me, the ref didn't even call it.)

Two interviews that will provide some fibre for your brain. The Chess Café has a long chat with Mig Greengard, the man who changed chess journalism (or tried to anyway). Mig has some real interesting thoughts about the place of chess in American culture, what it's like to work for a moribund dot-com, what books intermediate chessplayers should be reading, what it feels like to be a mere expert playing over the board against a genius... stuff like that. You may like the interview even if you don't know much about chess.

In fact, if you are the human biodiversity scholar Steve Sailer, you definitely should not miss that Mig interview. And if you are not the human biodiversity scholar Steve Sailer, you should go read Steve's interview for UPI with cognitive scientist Steven Pinker. Together the Steves explore the middle ground between nature and nurture--or, to put it in the language Pinker borrows from Thomas Sowell, between the "tragic vision" of human nature and the "utopian vision".

According to the Tragic Vision, humans are inherently limited in virtue, wisdom, and knowledge, and social arrangements must acknowledge those limits. According to the Utopian vision, these limits are "products" of our social arrangements, and we should strive to overcome them in a better society of the future. Out of this distinction come many right-left contrasts that would otherwise have no common denominator. Rightists tend to like tradition (because human nature does not change), small government (because no leader is wise enough to plan society), a strong police and military (because people will always be tempted by crime and conquest), and free markets (because they convert individual selfishness into collective wealth). Leftists believe that these positions are defeatist and cynical, because if we change parenting, education, the media, and social expectations, people could become wiser, nicer, and more peaceable and generous.

Very rarely, in news stories about the health hazards of smoking, do you get any indication that there is a dose-response relationship between the smoking and the hazards. This is also somewhat true of the science behind those stories: studies, since investigative resources are limited, will normally saw off the populace (rather unnaturally) between "smokers" and "non-smokers", or fit it into some equally reductionist schema. But any useful discussion of the current "social costs" or overall morbidity/mortality from smoking needs to take into account the amount people smoke. I believe that the younger "smokers" of today smoke a good deal less than their forebears, many of them using an almost medically negligible number of cigarettes. (I've talked to girls who max out at three or four smokes a day and are nonetheless peeing their panties about their "addiction". Some addiction.) These younger smokers are constantly being attacked using irrelevant statistics and images from an older generation of smokers that saw nothing unusual in a three-pack-a-day habit like the late Peter Gzowski's.

It's pretty simple really: given that you've accepted the risk of smoking at all, your body will help tell you what it can handle, and you should listen to it. I smoke 15 cigarettes on an average day, and my body lets me know it's not especially good for me. If I were to smoke 25 in a day, I probably couldn't get out of bed. But some people are just determined, it seems, to die. Check out this puff piece from the Edmonton Journal on an ex-model with brain cancer who's spreading the gospel to the schools.

She urged the students not to follow in her footsteps, which led to a two-pack-a-day habit.

Two packs a day? Alberta is the land of the flat pack, ladies and gents: two packs is fifty goddamn smokes. The ill and injured deserve our sympathy, but there's such a thing as stretching it too far.

There's more on David Halberstam's column here, in the comment section at Baseball Primer's Clutch Hits. And for some Bonds-bashing that is ethically questionable rather than merely dumb, check out Jonah Keri's legwork at Baseball Prospectus.

I'm in deadline trouble, so posting may be light for the next little while. Or not!

You never know who you'll run into in the newspaper (or on Instapundit). Just in time for Halloween, today's National Post looks at a forthcoming book from Andrew Gow and Lara Apps entitled Male Witches in Early Modern Europe.

Two Canadian academics have set out to overturn the hoary stereotype of the female witch, arguing thousands of men who were executed for witchcraft in the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries have been forgotten amid a tide of feminist research.
In a book to be published in January, historians Andrew Gow and Lara Apps say male witches have been marginalized as researchers focus almost exclusively on the persecution of women accused in Europe's notorious witch trials.

Dr. Gow was hired on at the University of Alberta history department while I was messing around with grad studies there, and I was his assistant for a semester. We were all rather discombobulated at the sudden appearance of a new white male hire, but he was just too brilliant for them to pass up. It's not especially surprising to see him blowing the feminist fog away from the popular imagination in this fashion. Nor is the existence of male witches especially startling to you if you've seen any of the source material.

Unfortunately, the revelation arrives too late for us to plan a new Halloween costume from scratch. Maybe next year...

(Via MeFi) Behold! The United States of America according to Todd Levin's racist aunt. WARNING! May contain racism! Heck, there's no "may" about it, the woman's daffy! She's got a point about California though...

Sasha Castel is using "Coshing" in place of "fisking". (Because of this.) I doubt it will catch on. As I've just told the dear girl, "fisking" isn't really my style, and I have yet to enjoy the honour of being on the wrong end of one.

The generosity of Instantman and dozens of other linkers has pushed this site over 10,000 hits for the month of October. Hooray!

Matt Welch and his commenteers have more on the "best ballplayer never to make the All-Star team" debate--it's now a debate because other people besides me are talking about it. Somehow the filtering system I set up missed Kirk Gibson, and "Basileus" mentions Eric Karros. (Gibson missed the All-Star team in '88 when he ended up as National League MVP...) More recent players are more likely to crop up because of expansion--they have the "advantage" of facing greater difficulty in making a modern All-Star game.

I think we can drop Hal Trosky, if only for this reason (granting that it's tough to edge out Lou Gehrig as an 1930's AL first baseman), and the guy who brought up Karros may want to consider seeing a shrink... With due respect to Kirk Gibson's intensity, let's face it, he's a power hitter who never broke 30 home runs. ("He was gimpy all the time though!" Yeah, he was, wasn't he.)

The serious candidates are Phillips and Salmon. Just in time to help you decide, Baseball Prospectus has brought back its player cards! Phillips is here, Salmon is here. The final verdict of history will probably depend on how Salmon ages; if you prefer "peak value" to "career value" he's got a better case than Tony. On the other hand, if he has a big comeback season, he could make the All-Star Game and thereby remove himself from consideration.

I still like Phillips, who was consistently menacing at the top of the order from 1990-1996. I didn't want to run this into the ground, but here are the positions he logged the most time at in each of those seasons:

1990 - Third base
1991 - Third base
1992 - Second base
1993 - Left field
1994 - Left field
1995 - Third base
1996 - Left field

And then in '97 he was back playing second base for Matt's Angels. (And he still drew a hundred walks.) It is unique for a player to bounce around like that and not have his batting production suffer. Phillips moved in both directions, pinball-fashion, across the Jamesian "defensive spectrum": guys like Rod Carew and Pete Rose played more than one position too, but they always moved from harder to easier, as indeed all players generally do as they age. It's like baseball entropy. Or, put another way, watching Phillips was like seeing water flow uphill.

Granted, Phillips was never a defensive star, but he got the job done at all those positions. The sabermetrically-inclined often speak of a ballplayer's value above "replacement"--how much more valuable is he than the guy you can replace him with? Normally we use some default, conventional replacement setting: I won't bore you with details of how that's derived. But in a real market of ballplayers, the replacement value is the value of the actual replacement you can get your hands on. If you have a good right fielder already, Tim Salmon has zero, or near-zero, value to you: that's about the only place you can use him. The replacement value for Phillips was any weak spot in your roster--he could always replace your very weakest player, unless that was a catcher or a pitcher (and I'm sure he'd have given those jobs a go too).

So as a practical matter, you have to give Phillips a large-ish bonus, above his value as an offensive player (which was considerable) and his value as a pure, run-saving glove in the field. Do keep that in mind. I'll watch Matt's comments section for more candidates.

It is occasionally fun, I think, to behold journalism at its most self-involved and peevish: and if you agree you won't want to miss David Halberstam's takedown of Barry Bonds on ESPN's Page 2.

It's incredible, isn't it, the way you can start out writing about sports and end up blithering on about the grand old days of journalism with Scotty Reston (now there was a man!) and Tom Wicker and Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy and I was in Vietnam you know and BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH. Halberstam's lede begins "I am sitting here at home watching The Great Narcissist at bat," which leads one to wonder if he was looking in the mirror at the time.

Here's a particular highlight:

Back when the communists still had an empire, one of the things they tried to specialize in was the re-education of people, and while I did not like what the communists did and who they did it to, I think the re-education of Bonds, accomplished at the hand of [Bob] Gibson and others like him, would be a very good thing.

Uh... holy shit! Did an editor even look at this? I wonder (pardon the Godwinism) if it would have got through if Halberstam had written "While I did not approve of Nazi methods, it does seem to me that Barry Bonds stands in need of a firm Zyklon B-ing..." And Halberstam wonders why Bonds is surly with journalists? Yes, he does, actually:

So it wasn't really surprising that a man shorn of so much privacy...got a little irritated and suggested they [reporters who were asking him brilliant questions like "How does losing the Series feel?"] find another line of work [which they should -ed.]. I like that, telling them to find other work--it really sums up his value system, and what he's about, and it shows that he understands that what they do, all the free coverage they give baseball, day in and day out, has nothing to do with the size of his paycheck.

One might have thought newspapers cover sports in order to sell newspapers, but no--they do it to ensure that Barry Bonds gets paid. Barry, you owe these boys, dig? It is your moral duty to be infinitely patient with extreme asininity, even after you've lost World Series Game Seven despite an individual performance that would shame the Gods. See, when you don't smile, it calls your "value system" into question. David Halberstam™ is a licensed metaphysician.

Man, is it any wonder Americans hate the media? Reading this stuff make me hate it, and I'm in it.

[UPDATE, October 30: Hello Instapundroids! Go here for links to other sites that have joined the melée.]

Damian Penny has a response to the earlier post in which I used him as an example of the well-intended desire, still general amongst thinking people in the West, to believe the best of Islam.

As I think Damian understands, I didn't really mean to accuse him of consistent intellectual dishonesty. What I was pointing out was that his language, at one point, suggested a determined refusal under any circumstances to think of Islam as "less benevolent than Christianity". Further along in what he was saying, he took a different tack, and it's the vacillation, the wholly creditable uncertainty about the matter, that I wanted to call people's attention to. It's good, if not essential, to leave your generalizations tentative. I think most of us go back and forth like this, and we need to be prepared to. So I'm not saying Damian is a bad guy or an impoverished thinker by any means.

This time around, he clarifies thus:

But I still stand by my main point: that Christianity was able to reform (into a "thankfully neutered form," according to Cosh) despite its bloody history, as have many other faiths, and that I don't see anything inherent in Islam which will prevent it from doing the same. I know the Koran can be interpreted to justify all kinds of atrocities--but so can the Bible.

Now, this, I don't think I agree with. I'll tackle the substance rather than the approach this time, don't worry.

First of all, Damian is making an error I discussed quite a long time ago when John Derbyshire, of all people, made it in a column. The nature of the error is to equate Christianity and Islam with their holy scriptures. A religion is not equivalent to its book. And, as it happens, Islam has a very different attitude to its book than Christianity does.

Muslims believe that the Koran is perfect, an exact copy of the original spoken word of God. It is recited hypnotically and ritualistically by the gently swaying believer at prayer; its very sound is the object of orgiastic praise by exponents of Islam. Westerners may credit the Bible with a certain literary beauty, but by comparison the Muslim fetishizes his holy book, regarding it more the way one might a symphony. The original Arabic version is universally considered the only correct one (though translation is not forbidden). Indeed, all major Muslim sects regard the Koran as being uncreated, and eternal like God himself--almost a sort of co-deity, though, to be sure, God remains its author (perhaps in the same way that the Son proceeds from the Father in the Trinity).

The effects of these beliefs are well known. [An important related belief is the death penalty for apostasy.] It is often said that "Islam had no Reformation." This is one way of putting it, but it would be relevant to add that Islam also never had an Arian heresy or a Great Schism or a Jesus Seminar. Islam is prostrate before the monumental face of its own sacred text; it is the attitude to the book, and not the book itself, which has discouraged critical thinking and religious liberalism in the Islamic world.

You can't just put the Bible and the Koran together on the table and say, "Well, they're both violent nonsense, so these religions must have equal potential for bad and good." Islam's hostility to liberalizing reinterpretation and historical study of the Koran is part of the problem. This would still be a problem even if the Koran consisted of "All work and no play make Jack a dull boy" typed over and over on a ream of paper. In one important sense, the text of the Koran is irrelevant to this sort of discussion of Islam.

Leaving that aside, are the "inherent" differences between the founders of the religions worth considering? Christ was a man of peace who gave himself as a sacrifice for the world's sins--let himself be crucified rather than offer violence. Muhammad? Well, to put it as nicely as possible, Muhammad was a politician and an excellent general. Handy with a sword, the Prophet was. During his reign in Medina he was given to occasional "revelations" about the treachery of the local Jews, with whom he had made an alliance; after his last dream, a part of the city was beseiged and the hundreds of male Jewish occupants put to death in cold blood after their surrender. (The women and children were enslaved instead.) Christians have done this sort of thing often enough, to be sure; but Christians, acting under the influence of Christ, also put an end to it in the Christian world, and at any rate, it is not the sort of thing we can imagine Christ himself doing.

If your neighbour announced credibly that he would be hitherto devoted to the imitation of Christ, would you buy a shotgun? It would be good advice if he told you he'd begun behaving exactly like Muhammad.

I think that counts for something too--as does the fact, which may or may not be related, that the greater part of what we call the "Islamic world" consists of territory overrun, at one time or another, by Islamic armies. The survival of the Christian religion in Europe was decided, in the Roman era, by the victory of Christianity in a purely dialectical struggle (one in which the deck was stacked against the new faith) for the allegiance of the upper classes. There was no mass Christian revolt or terrorism, no Christian invasion; the Galilean conquered Rome by the strange expedient of having generations of his followers fed to the lions and the flames. Later the pagans of the North, despite having overturned Rome in arms, adopted Christianity, seeing in it a tie to the sophistication and order of the Empire.

Twice over, Christianity co-opted an uncontested ruling power bloodlessly, through sheer force of example and teaching. What in the record of Islam is there to compare? The power of Islam in present-day Indonesia is testimony to the fact that Islam has not always spread through force of arms, but it's a damned good approximation. Since Muhammad's conquet of Mecca, Islam has enjoyed, as Christianity never did, the luxury of a secure homeland. How may we suppose it would do if it did not?

I do not mean to paint a simplistic picture of Arabs, Mongols, and Turks terrorizing cowed populations into conversion. The reputation for toleration enjoyed by Old Islam is warranted; it is only the new model that seems to feel the need to render whole countries judenrein. Even so passionate an opponent of Islam as Hilaire Belloc was able to acknowledge that Islam's rapid spread was the result of the efficacy and laissez-faire approach of its political structure, compared to the usual alternatives. Islam could not have dominated the West in science and the useful arts until quite late in history if it were not so. Nonetheless, as a general rule Islam has followed the progress of the sword. As indeed why should it not, given the tumultuous political and military life of its superbly practical, charismatic founder?

Perhaps these differences between Islam and Christianity, however real--and they are real, as far as I know--mean nothing. Damian sees the pair as objects which are alike, or essentially alike, or objects which, perhaps, have a long-term tendency to become alike. He cites a few brave, desperate voices of dissension in the Muslim world, and I will not say they should not be applauded or helped with all our power. But this is only to say what is obvious: that in some respects we cannot hope to eradicate Islam even if that is our desire--that we must negotiate and cajole and encourage liberalizing influences. In other words, there is no sense applying the stick without holding out the carrot. But Islam must in the end do for itself, or to itself, what Christianity did. Our power to assist from without is limited, and we face a constant danger of doing more harm than good. It feels very much like having an enemy, doesn't it?

I'm afraid I couldn't resist. Wondering if Tim Salmon really is the best player to never make an All-Star Team, I did a search for some significant players who belong to the same set. I restricted it to guys who played mostly after 1933, when the first All-Star Game was played. They include:

· migratory National League waterfowl Todd Zeile;
· disappointing Indians phenom Hal Trosky;
· longtime Tigers/A's superscrub Tony Phillips;
· career .293 hitter Luis Polonia;
· knuckleballer Tom Candiotti;
· right-handed Texas Rangers prospect/project Bobby Witt.

Those are about the best of the lot, I think. One could add Orlando "El Duque" Hernandez to the list, but obviously Communism was what kept him out of the All-Star game for most of his career; I don't know how to account for that exactly--it would be like counting Negro Leaguers, which is beside the point of the exercise.

Whom can you make a case for taking over Salmon? Certainly Tony Phillips had an amazing career, amazing abilities. You probably know this if you've read this far, but he was the most versatile player who ever lived. He drew tons of walks, had a little power, ran well, played 100 games or more at five different positions (six if you count DH) and 97 more in center field. He scored 110 runs four times. Offensively he wasn't Tim Salmon, but he gave his managers tremendous roster flexibility, and that's a form of value too. I don't know who I'd take but it would probably be Phillips.

[UPDATE, October 29: More on this at Matt Welch's crib and here.]

Congratulations to the Anaheim Angels and their fans, winners of the 2002 World Series. Congratulations especially to Tim Salmon, who hit 105 RBI for the Edmonton Trappers in 1992. Aaron Cross argues briefly that Salmon is the best major leaguer to never make the All-Star Team (presumably he means "since they started picking 'em".) He could be right! That's an interesting example of a hot stove argument I've never heard.

Angel fans won't let anything dampen their enthusiasm, but for the rest of us, who only had a casual rooting interest in the Series, there's this despair-inducing truth: Barry Bonds may have lost his last reasonable chance to wear a ring, despite having one of the best Series performances in the century-long history of baseball's Mortal Kombat.

Which raises an important question that baseball and other sports need to face before they expand again, willy-nilly: how many teams is too many to leave fans and players outside the coastal metropolises with reasonable hopes of winning a title?

This question is not purely academic: it is absolutely crucial, and never explored at all, to my knowledge. In our own time we've seen it become standard for older free agents in all major pro sports to change teams in hopes of winning a championship. Recall the heartbreaking divorce between Ray Bourque and the Boston Bruins, for example. In the early days of free agency in baseball, to take the sport where there's been actual research on the subject, we have strong evidence that player movement was, by and large, not harmful to competitive balance. But this new attitude, this new trope of "I'm going to New York to get a ring," flies specifically in the face of competitive balance. It is in fact one reason why Barry is playing in high-tech San Francisco and not blue-collar Pittsburgh.

Although changing teams to get a championship is directly, overtly, and specifically subversive of parity, it's treated as a fact of nature already: no one, at least in the media, blamed Ray Bourque for switching towns. That's kind of odd, considering that when competitive balance is discussed, actual facts of nature like market size are often treated as annoying trivialities which can be overcome by digit-fiddling.

But you can't change the soul of an athlete, I suppose: if they didn't want to succeed they wouldn't be in pro sports. When it comes to encouraging anti-parity free-agent transfers, however, the difference between, say, the 21-team NHL I grew up with and the 30-team NHL we have now is significant. For the purposes of waiting out a career in a city, the number of teams in the league has an exponential effect. Your chance of winning a title in a town is basically 1 - (1-n)^p, where 'n' is your chance of winning in any given year and 'p' is the number of years remaining in your career. From an economic standpoint, every expansion reduces 'n', and the expansion is spread out exponentially over 'p'. That would seem to me to imply that even a modest expansion can have big effects in encouraging free-agent movement to organizations that are already good.

In fact, if 'p' is fairly large--that is, if the player is especially young and promising--it will encourage free-agent movement not even to organizations that already happen to be good, but to organizations that happen to enjoy stable advantages which can be expected to survive over a period of years. The only one of these worth considering, really, is the natural revenue level of the club. No one's afraid to jump to the Mets even though the Mets sucked this year (by the way, thanks for noticing that the Expos finished second in the NL East this year, everybody).

So what's the right number of teams for a sports league to have? Well, the difference between 20 and 30 is huge. If you go on the assumption that every team starts every year with an equal shot at the title, you can expect Your Club to win one championship every 'x' years, where 'x' is the number of teams in the competition. A waiting time of 20 or 30 years is not a big deal to a serious fan--but if you know that the organization is basically cursed (like the Chicago Cubs) or the local revenue is small, your wait time might be doubled. Doubling 20 years gives you 40, which is daunting; but doubling 30 years gives you 60, and a lot of us just can't expect to live that long.

A fan has to have some hope. I have to be able to think, reasonably, that there's some kind of a shot, somewhere down the line, for my team. Cranking the number of teams in a pro league to 30 is pushing the limits quite seriously on the lower-revenue teams. My Edmonton Oilers are severely hampered by a smallish, spread-out metro area and by the monetary policy of a head-in-ass federal state. (They are helped, although the ownership and the media never admit to it, by being located in a place where hockey is a savage god commanding near-universal devotion.) All things being equal, the team does not have a 1-in-30 chance of winning the Stanley Cup; it's more like 1 in 60 or 90, and those odds are too long. I stick with the club because it's got a very thorough winning tradition, its scouting apparatus has awakened from a ten-year nap, and the front-office personnel know what they're doing. I'm hoping all that increases the odds to a more reasonable level. But if even one of those factors changes, I'm looking at a pretty desperate proposition. I may have to redirect my emotional investment. It won't be a conscious decision; I'll just lose heart. And this isn't really an issue with my rooting interest in the nine-team Canadian Football League.

So I want sports fans to start thinking in terms of "30 is too many"; it's something we will have to insist upon in the face of respectable but short-sighted greed. Perpetual expansion offers clear advantages to sports leagues; it's not even certain, really, that they can be economically viable without it. But they'll need to find creative solutions to the "1-in-n odds" problem. Professional soccer in the UK gets around this by giving fans many goals to focus their attention on. There is a table of ordered divisions, giving smaller-community fans a rooting interest in relegation and promotion. Clearly this would help baseball, which is selling minor-league cities a fake product right now. Louisville and Portland and Edmonton should have independently competitive ball clubs; the developmental work of baseball can take place anywhere, and it shouldn't pose as real competition. Moreover, soccer treats its regular season and its "playoffs" quite distinctly, according roughly equal status to League and Cup titleists. This is something North American sports fans are not habituated to, and it is hard to see how you could accomplish it--but then again, the idea of the "pennant" was once powerful in baseball, and perhaps it could be again. I'm really just thinking out loud, but I know this is important.

INSTAPOWER! Everybody thinks the amazing thing about Glenn Reynolds is the volume of posting he does, but when you compare it to the amount of reading he must be doing, the actual editing and posting look fairly trivial. My weblog isn't among the top thousand in traffic or hundred in quality, but somehow he finds out about it, fairly quickly, when I write something he thinks people might want to read. Incidentally, I apologize for a couple of jarring editorial infelicities in the post he linked to; I feel like I can't polish up that stuff anymore after several hundred people have crawled over it. Doesn't belong to me anymore.

My "rant" has been paired with this much more concise entry on Nick Denton's site. Try not to notice that, of the two of us, the magazine editor is the one who runs off at the mouth.

Hey... is it just me or is the Onion really starting to go stale? Eighteen months ago it was essential; nine months ago it was solid; now it's showing serious signs of jumping el sharko. Maybe I'm wrong, but the political pieces are starting to show less absurdist detachment than they did before. The Onion's basic approach has always been to run one joke into the ground (the stories are, after all, written around the headlines) but they're losing the vital texture. The tension between the staid AP-stylebook format and the actual material is being lost. Of the long pieces in this issue, only the physics-teacher one has that bam-bam rhythm of body blows (he runs the experiments himself to "save time") going for it.

Compare this gorgeously nasty, can't-believe-they-fucking-wrote-that piece from January 1999 to last week's cover story. Same topic, but the new stuff is agenda-driven and kind of leaden. Are we even supposed to laugh? Where's the joke exactly?--that Bush thinks stopping a dictator who's trying to acquire weapons of mass destruction is more important than the NASDAQ? Since when did the Onion care about the fucking NASDAQ? Since when did the Onion care about anything? Caring--up-front, in-your-face caring--doesn't make a good neighbour for comedy: they're enemies. This paper is turning into one of those really tight punk bands that starts writing songs about El Salvador. Fucking spare me.

Now, on what possible grounds does Forbes magazine claim that Santa Claus is an American? He may have stopped over in New York City during a dozen centuries or so of travel, but I'm afraid he is ordinarily resident at a location over which Canada has made unchallenged claims of sovereignty. Is Santa an illegal alien? I think we should be told. Sure, he has a pretty cozy relationship with the Canadian government, but so do plenty of snakeheads and bombthrowers.

Incidentally, Canadians may wish to note that Newfoundland's postal abbreviation has been changed from NF to NL. This pain in the ass is brought to you by the government of Newfoundland, which changed the official name of the province to "Newfoundland and Labrador" last year. If you want to complain you can go visit the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador web site at www.gov.nf.ca.

What's that you say? Their web site seems to still have "NF" in it? Why, so it does, so it does.

The site's been quiet because I've been watching and listening to sports. Now that I look back on it--wow! Last night the Eskimos stake Saskatchewan to an 18-0 lead in the first quarter... and they come back to win! That means the Western Final's in our crib again, dogg! Today the Oilers go down 3-1 after two periods against the Mighty Ducks... and they come back to win! Rapture! Then I switched over, sort of glumly, to the ball game, having heard that the Angels had fallen behind 5-0... and they come back to win! I'd run out and buy a lottery ticket, if I didn't, y'know, have any shame or common sense.

The Comedian has two funny media screwups on his site. The first one is a CNN graphic of the Tarot Sniper in his Chevy Caprice... notice that the sniper's weapon has the carrying handle bolted on instead of a scope. See, he was a superhuman killing genius after all! The second one is a hilarious, and hopefully harmless, WaPo screwup: on a PDF of one of the sniper communiqués they blocked out the name of the woman who had her credit card stolen, but unfortunately they did this by adding a black stripe to only the top layer of the PDF, with predictable results. Oops!

Found quiz of the day: match the quote to the face. Difficulty rating: high. (Quite a few of these guys look like they've had the adrenaline sucked out of them.)

"Even the sniper turned out to be Muslim. This is getting ridiculous." That's what a Muslim-raised friend of mine told me a little while ago...

If there is a God and his name really is Allah, he must be quite angry about the evening newscasts. If well enough had been left alone from, say, September 10, 2001 on, Islam would have won. In terms of cultural confidence, our own Western civilization is well past its peak. Our countries were, and are, letting Muslims enter and dwell by the busload. Mosques get tax exemptions; Muslim schools get tax funding. Where Christendom's collective religious faith has been reduced to a paltry shadow of its former self, Islam retains the power to capture imaginations which have outrun their allotment of reason. Western welfare states and prison systems give Islam fertile ground in which to flower amidst the alien corn. Islam, we used to be told quite often, was growing by leaps and bounds. Perhaps it still is: they do say there's no such thing as bad publicity.

But the decentralized nature of Islam, which seemed such a strength not so long ago, has proven to be a weakness; it has allowed a transnational class of bored, intense, youngish men to attack the West at precisely the points at which it is least vulnerable. People like the convenience of air travel. They like being able to go to musicals. They like going to the craft store to choose from a couple thousand different colours of yarn. They like being able to visit Bali and hang out on the beach. Islam's true strategy for eventual world conquest was to conceal the fact that it would take these worldly things away from us, and to concentrate on its own strengths (egalitarianism, simplicity, and a magnificent ability to instill the satiated, narcotic feeling of true believerdom). Unfortunately, its followers seem determined to confirm, and then some, every sterotype in the book.

No faith, civic or theological, can compete directly with capitalism in the long run. Islam would have had to wait for capitalism to rot from within, which it was, and probably still is, doing. That wasn't going to be a quick process in any event--I'm thinking in centuries here, not years, in case that's not clear--but my sense is that Islam's self-appointed murder evangelists have slowed it by calling attention to how vulnerable the benefits of capitalism are. Every time blood runs in the street outside a supermarket or a theatre, people suddenly sit up and remember that peace and prosperity aren't unconditional. It takes effort to preserve them, effort and an understanding of the political and social foundations upon which they rely. Why do so many Muslims seem eager to supply that effort?

Admiral Yamamoto, I'm told, didn't really say "We have awakened a sleeping giant" after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. But he should have. The Muslims have gone beyond that: they've awakened a sleeping giant and they keep kicking it in the balls.

And for all that, they still have friends. Here is a telling sample of typical Western opinion from Damian Penny, who, as you probably know, has spent hundreds of hours over the past year acquainting himself and others with the misdeeds of Islam's enfants terribles:

Here's what I say to any Muslims reading this: I want to respect your faith. I refuse to believe it's inherently less benevolent than Christianity, which has certainly had no shortage of atrocities committed in its name. Everyone is entitled to practice his or her faith in peace, and Muslims are certainly no exception.

Now, look carefully at what Damian's saying. He doesn't just happen to believe that Islam, on the evidence, is as "benevolent" as Christianity. (He couldn't, because where's the damn evidence? If "Christianity" is taken to mean its modern, thankfully neutered form, there isn't any.) He, in fact, refuses to believe the contrary. Despite having personally amassed the most powerful practical indictment of Islam you can imagine, he says he will not ever entertain the idea that Islam is incompatible with "peace".

Such a refusal is incompatible with intellectual honesty, but that's OK, because Damian's "refusal" turns out to be entirely conditional. The very next thing he says is

But you're going to have to meet us halfway on this. When Islamic extremists blow up a nightclub in Bali, I don't want to hear excuses about how we have to "understand their rage". When pro-Palestinian demonstrators chant slogans calling for the complete destruction of Israel--while ignoring the shocking human rights violations which occur throughout the Arab world--I don't want to hear some bullshit about being "anti-Zionist" rather than anti-Semitic. Muslims have prospered in the West--but something has gone horribly, terribly wrong in the predominantly Muslim states of the Middle East, and ultimately, Muslims have to take responsibility for what has gone wrong.

So there's really a contradiction there: he wants not to believe that Islam is basically a cheap, shitty, pretext for murder, mistreatment of women, and mob rule. But it's getting hard for him--harder every day, I expect: he wrote the foregoing on the 22nd, before the sniper named Muhammad (PBUH, to be sure) was caught and the Russians stormed the Chechen-held theatre. I cite him not to single him out, but because I believe that this is the standard intellectual position of the average, secular-minded person in Western society now. Nobody in this world wants to lie awake wondering what the hell's really going on in the mosque across the river. Nobody wants to look at a girl wearing a chador in a coffee shop and think that if she got raped, her brothers would probably kick the shit out of her. Nobody wants to wonder if his cab driver thinks that Jews are blood-drinking monkeys and his daughter should have a clitoridectomy.

Pure inertia is the most powerful thing in the world. Until September 11, Islam had the inertia of the West on its side. Not anymore.

[UPDATE, October 28: Damian's reply is here, the re-reply here.]

It's a day of farewells, it appears. First we have Michael Bellesiles, the academic fraudster whose award-winning anti-gun Arming America was exposed as one of the most comprehensive shams in the record of the American historical profession. In arguing that guns were surprisingly scarce in British North America and the early United States, Bellesiles deliberately misinterpreted probate and militia records and in some cases appears to have cited records that no longer exist. (Critics trying to retrace his research on the West Coast found, for example, that Bellesiles had been counting guns in legal papers destroyed in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.)

In the face of a damning report by an academic committee assembled by Emory University, Bellesiles resigned today. "I will continue to research and report on the probate materials while also working on my next book, but cannot continue to teach in what I feel is a hostile environment," the acclaimed bullshitter said in a statement. That about sums it up, doesn't it? Emory will be glad to have it on the record that it is a "hostile environment" for those who fake their research.

Farewell, also, to Sen. Paul Wellstone (D-MN), whose campaign plane has crashed outside Eveleth, killing the senator, his wife and daughter, two pilots, and three of his campaign workers. I joked a while back that Minnesota was just a part of Canada that got lost and wandered south of the 49th parallel; Wellstone, who opposed war in Iraq and was on the extreme far left of American politics, was one of the elements I had in mind. Down there he was a crazy socialist. Up here he would have been a right-honourable Liberal cabinet minister from Manitoba, most likely. I'm thinking agriculture or external affairs.

Wellstone seems to be the last person anyone would pick for a fate like this, not to speak of the wife and daughter. Politics is a rough game, roughest of all for unsafe incumbents in icy northern states. The Republicans targeted Minnesota with plenty of soft money, and Wellstone couldn't afford to leave any of his markers outstanding. There is no suggestion I know of that he was playing the game to impress Daddy, to have his ego stroked constantly, or to build himself a post-political life sitting on corporate boards. He was just a guy with a certain idea of America. Don Quixote struck down by the windmill.

And so we turn to Richard Harris, who has lost out to Hodgkin's Disease, robbing us thereby of another link in the British stage tradition which keeps Hollywood movies lively. Harris, sadly, never had that Lawrence of Arabia role that would define him for American audiences. On the other hand, he did have possibly the most improbable pop music career of the 20th century. We'll never have that recipe again.

Headline: SERIAL SNIPERS CAUGHT, DESPITE POLICE. The best place I know of to keep up with the continuing sniper story is Jim Henley's weblog, but I thought I'd pick out this titbit--taken from a newscast and reported in Jim's words--and let you savour it.

The two men were arrested around 3:30 a.m. at a rest stop near Frederick, sleeping in the blue 1990 Chevy Caprice mentioned in last night's reports. A motorist identified the vehicle by its make and license number at 1 a.m. and called Frederick police on his cell phone. NBC reporter Greg Williams notes an irony: police complained a great deal about leaks in the case. In the event, they did not officially release the license numbers to the public. The motorist knew the license numbers because of a leak.

I'd have thought the Unabomber case would have taught police, I don't know, everywhere that it is better to be liberal than stingy in releasing information to the public. Remember the Unabomber--the serial killer who was caught because his prose style was recognized? Yeah, that guy. If Charles Moose and his merry men had actually succeeded in sitting on the information they wanted sat upon, Muhammad and Malvo might have been popping another D.C.-area shopper's head like a grape while you read this. Keep this in mind as you hear their police work praised in the days to follow.

Why aren't you reading Mike Sugimoto's weblog instead of mine, jackass? Check this out:

In the wake of recent calls to eliminate the use of "fisking" by the blogging community, I'd like to propose a similar moratorium on the use of "sustainability" in public policy discourse, e.g., no more "sustainable development" or "sustainable growth" or "substainably produced products." This is a word that, like "paradigm", doesn't really mean anything -- at least, probably doesn't mean anything in the context that it is employed. I've yet to meet a single person who can tell me what, exactly, a sustainably produced product is and why it's different from any other random product.

...From the CBC this morning: "Consumers want sustainably produced products." I suppose that's true. I might. If I knew what those were.

Read the full entry here. What is perhaps most remarkable about this perceptive political observation is that it has been made by a practicing physician. Normally, when doctors venture upon political opinions, the result is (a) ill-informed, (b) quasi-fascist, or (c) both. But I digress! Mike's weblog is what weblogs should be: like a conversation with a very smart guy who has wide interests.

I wrote an Up Front item for the current Report magazine about a gentleman in Toronto who killed himself--barely--with a butter knife. The original CMAJ article is here for your perusal, although the X-ray photos are even more harrowing in print, I have to say. Kids, don't try this at home.

(Link via Joanne Jacobs) I occasionally express, in private at least, some fairly harsh views about public schoolteachers, so it gives me pleasure to link to a pro-teacher article by Joe Bob Briggs.

We've actually done the same thing to teachers that we long ago did to judges--we took all discretion and creativity out of the process. A judge is no longer allowed to say, "All things considered, we're gonna let this one slide," because he's not expected to JUDGE anymore. He just slaps down mandatory sentences that are set by a legislature that doesn't trust him.
In a similar way, teachers are assaulted daily with policies on diversity, multiculturalism, discipline, structure of teaching time, proper forms of address, all to make the classroom ever more formal and yet ever more "sensitive" at the same time.

This, I think, is unarguably true. Teachers everywhere suffer from having to work in a zero-tolerance environment full of political directives, educational fads, and plain foolish or arbitrary ideas. Unfortunately, there's a question Joe Bob doesn't engage: "Who's responsible for creating and implementing these policies?" I'm afraid the answer is "Teachers are, mostly."

Some of the finest human beings I've known were teachers. So were most of the worst. The public schools, as they exist now, create wonderful opportunities for the bad ones; if you went to a public school you probably had teachers who would have been fired, within a week, from the job you're doing now. They also create incentives for the good ones to keep quiet. If you're a teacher--even a very good teacher--are you really going to complain about the absurd restrictions on competitors entering your profession? Are you going to complain about your powerful union and your lavish benefits? Are you going to complain that public school teachers pretty much have to be caught sodomizing dead goats in the science lab to get fired? Are you going to complain that there's very little accountability involved in your job?

Sad truth: most of the things that could possibly improve public schools--standardized outcome testing, school choice, taking power away from the unions--are a pain in the ass for the teachers. We have to make up our minds whether we're going to run the system in their interests or in those of the children. Teachers have created an elaborate, monolithic intellectual superstructure--a mini-ideology--designed to eliminate or obfuscate that distinction. (Smaller classes good! Testing bad!) It's hard to blame them, but it makes it very hard to trust them, too.

Here's a BBC story that defines and delineates the current crop of Strokes/Hives/Stripes guitar bands/saviours of rock. Still no name for the "movement" though. I don't think we can call them the New New York New Wave, can we?

Personally, although the Beeb's Ian Young has tongue implanted in cheek, I think it's great that all these groups have names of the form The ______s. Friends of mine will remember that in the mid-'90s I got pretty sick of pretentious one-word band handles like "Moist" and "Tool". You could never keep the band name and the song name straight. "Oh, yeah, I know that one, it's 'Soft' by 'Fish'. Or maybe 'Fish' by 'Soft', I dunno." You're a goddamn band, guys, try to work the plural in there somewhere.

My favoured solution was for rock writers and DJs to adopt a convention whereby any group with a one-word name like "Nirvana" would simply be referred to, without their by-your-leave, as "The Nirvanas". This never caught on, but history has vindicated me!

I have some thank-yous for traffic to clear up. The Cato Institute's Julian Sanchez sent some my way. Julian has been noticing white vans with ladder racks ever since the, y'know, murder rampage in his part of the world started. Funnily enough, when I was 17 I had kind of a terrifying close encounter with just such a vehicle. I was en route to a school event with a friend, riding in the passenger seat of his car, when an aluminum ladder slipped out of its bungee cords on a white van just in front of us. The ladder remained attached on the rear, but somehow the front slid off and the ladder whipped around behind the van just like a baseball bat, passing, I don't know, three inches in front of our windshield? WHOOSH. I'm thinking maybe that was the sniper, performing early experiments on cheap killing methods.

Of course, if I start talking about the different ways I was nearly injured or killed in motor vehicles when I was 17, we'll be here all day. I was just reminiscing with a friend of mine about one particularly horrible beer-store run on a country road. He's only just realized, I guess, how close we came to needing to be scraped out of the ditch with spatulas. "OK, which body goes with this head? Looks like a fat guy, you'll have to pick the one that burned most efficiently."

The Weekly James has been sending just tons of hits my way. With a lot of weblogs--I've been studying this issue lately, as best I can--there's a certain spread between their influence, or profile, and their actual readership. The Weekly James appears to be one of those sites that's not talked about a lot but has just loads of readers. And I learn from James that there have been two fresh arrests in the sniper case and police are optimistic that they've got the right guys.

Steve Sailer has me pretty high on his blogroll and has been sending just tons of traffic my way. I suppose it's karmic payback, though, for the various times over the years I've steered people to his articles. Favourites include this one on the paradox of "diversity", this one on the tension between mass immigration and environmentalism, and this one on some astonishing asymmetries in interracial marriage. They all have that Sailerian quality of making you go "Hey, I didn't really think about that before."

Well, Strange Brew is now out on DVD but there's still no sign of the SCTV episodes. There's a petition you could sign for all the good that'll do, I dunno. The fans seem to abandoned hope for that "late fall" release we were promised by the New York Daily News. Son of a bitch.

Those who've been following the matter of Little Green Footballs v. Femia et al. may be interested in the sudden appearance of a distinguished Friend of the Court: Mark Steyn.

I'm on the side of LGF myself, although it's not because I've done some sort of CAT scan of Charles Johnson's motives in running the site. I don't believe in that bullshit: the consequences of the eternal hunt for "hatred" we're all engaged in are much worse than the occasional petit soupçon of the thing itself. It wouldn't be fair to deny that the comments section of the Little Green Footballs contains a smattering of Little Green Nutballs. But so what?

The real fun is in watching the LGF crowd, which has engaged in (partially justified) gang-tacklings of Canada in the past, desperately try to figure out Steyn's national origins. He's British, right? Hey, I heard a weird rumour... Naw, can't be.

Rick Gleason, the Canadian injured in the Bali explosion, has died at the Royal Alfred Hospital in Melbourne. A former naval reservist with four university degrees, Gleason walked out of the blast with his lungs fried, his back carrying shrapnel, his hair burnt off, his scalp lacerated, and his heart physically torn from the shock. His friend Chris Kovacs has been providing updates for Rick's friends and delivered the bad news a few hours ago. The Australians, despite being busy with their own hundreds of dead and wounded, made sure the frightfully injured Gleason was on the first plane to Darwin; they're paying for his medical expenses, and those of other foreign nationals injured in the bombing.

Oh dear. It appears the winner of the 2002 Booker Prize is somebody named Yann Martel. They say he is Canadian, and since he gave his acceptance speech in both French and English, it must be so. Nobody but a Canadian would feel the need to show off in that way after they gave him the cheque. Well, good show, Yann: you've done us proud, I assume, and your comment that "Canada is one of the greatest hotels on earth" really says it all, whatever it might mean.

In the meantime, lest anybody begin to think that literary prizes are either important or good, here is a brief roster of Commonwealth authors who have never won the Booker Prize (though I think all of them have been shortlisted at least once):

Muriel Spark
Alice Munro
Anthony Burgess
Julian Barnes
Martin Amis
Peter Ackroyd
William Trevor
Mordecai Richler
Beryl Bainbridge
J.G. Ballard
Tibor Fischer

William Trevor, who is underappreciated, has been nominated a whole load of times and was on the shortlist this year. But he's just not the Booker Prize's sort of person, I suppose. The judges have sometimes shown foresight, giving awards to Midnight's Children and The Remains of the Day. But then even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

I'm afraid I can't join in the general rejoicing over the acquittal of Michel Houellebecq.

French writer Michel Houellebecq has been cleared of inciting racial hatred by saying Islam was "the stupidest religion".
A panel of three judges in Paris declared that the author was not guilty after he was sued by four Muslim groups.
He made the comments in an interview with the literary magazine Lire in 2001.
The case was seen as an important battle between free speech and religious conservatism.

This is a silly way to "see" the case. It is all to the good, I suppose, that Michel Houellebecq, the human person and literary artist, should not have to face a penalty for having insulted Muslims. (And much as we might like to pretend, as a legal convenience, that he didn't insult Muslims...) But he shouldn't have had to face a trial in the first place. It is not a good day for free speech when a court declares that an artist's intentions were simon-pure and socially harmonious and therefore permissible. It is a bad day for free speech when a magistrate makes any rulings whatsoever on such a matter.

Court-approved speech is, by definition, not free speech. Michel Houellebecq is not free, in France, just because France has chosen not to punish him this time. And Houellebecq, unfortunately, has not stood up for his sacred right to abuse and execrate whomever he likes. He knows only too well that he won't be allowed to exercise it.

A correspondent writes:

i have a recommendation for your web page. take your ugly mug off...you may actually get people to read what you have to write.

Not a bad idea! But it's one I've rejected reluctantly, for reasons discussed here and here. However, if more people vote for a anonymity-driven redesign, I'll definitely have to consider it.

David Sachs, author of the Toronto Star op-ed on the monarchy I discussed the other day, has very kindly sent a note! David insists that the audited circulation of Urban Male is "around 95,000", making his claim of "close to 500,000 readers" accurate if you're willing to assent to a multiplier of about five. I certainly won't quarrel with it, and I happily retract any suggestion of statistical obfuscation on his part.

He also says:

Look again at the Citizen quote. It says 'distance from... events'. [An] umpire certainly would not gain any greater accuracy in his calls with 'distance' from the plate. So I think my point stands.

Can't help you there, David. It's a very long leap from "The Queen is distant from current Canadian events and political factions" to "the Queen probably doesn't keep up with Canadian affairs." If you hadn't specifically put the second assertion in the mouth of the writer of the first ("I grant the point that..."), it could possibly be allowed. If you're going to attribute a belief to someone else, rather than yourself, you had better be prepared to show that it's a logical consequence of something they've said.

And in this case, that's just not so. The Queen is "distant" from Canadian parliamentary politics in the same obvious constitutional sense that she is "distant" from British parliamentary politics. Does that mean she doesn't keep up with Canadian affairs, or with British ones for that matter? Well, she's a constitutional monarch, so "keeping up with Canadian affairs" is part of her job. And if there is one single fact about the Queen that is universally acknowledged by people who have worked with her, it's that she stays on top of her portfolio.

October 21
Police Plead to Sniper: Call Again

October 22
Police to Sniper: Dammit, Why Aren't You Calling Us?

October 23
Sniper Seemed So Nice, Police Can't Understand Why He Doesn't Call

October 24
Sniper Calls Cops: Excitable Desk Sergeant Accidentally Hits '7', Deletes Message

October 25
Unconfirmed Reports Sniper Seen Dirty-Dancing At O'Malley's With That Whore Cyndi Myers: Police Take to Bed, Eat Whole Bag of Oreos

October 26
Sniper Phones Police, Admits to Getting Caught in "Heat of Moment" But Denies Getting Bone On With Local Skank

October 27
After Repeated Calls, Police Reluctantly Forgive Sniper, Make Date for Sunday Night

Now here's a story I missed. For nearly forty years, my alma mater, the University of Alberta, has graded students on a bizarre nine-point scale that no other university in the known world uses. While others have been able to approach employers with easily comprehended four-point GPAs or letter grades, U of A grads have been stuck trying to explain what, say, a 7.8-out-of-9 U of A grade-point average might possibly mean. The system is so outlandish that transcripts are sent out with a little guide to our Martian way of doing things.

Not that I've ever met a private-sector employer who gives a crap what someone's GPA was, you understand. Anyway, I see that the U of A is finally moving to the four-point system in the fall of 2003. And those of us who lived under the old regime will be left awash on the shores of history with our hard-earned 8s and 9s.

There's a lot of excitement over the ossuary recently discovered in Israel which bears the inscription "James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus." But where's the context? The WaPo reports on the finding without even touching on the continuing controversy over whether Jesus had brothers and sisters. A Roman Catholic scholar dismisses the importance of the ossuary:

The Rev. Joseph Fitzmyer, a Bible professor at Catholic University who studied photos of the box, agrees with Lemaire that the writing style "fits perfectly" with other first century examples. The joint appearance of these three famous names is "striking," he said.
"But the big problem is, you have to show me the Jesus in this text is Jesus of Nazareth, and nobody can show that," Fitzmyer said.

In other words, this discovery has the potential to be mildly explosive--or not: Fitzmyer, after all, does have a point. But couldn't the WaPo have fit that angle, which brings up the possibility of theological axe-grinding, into their story either way?

Hey, Marc Weisblott added me to his blogroll. That's excellent. Weisblott, as a lot of you know, is another 31-year-old Canadian media person. But he's sort of the anti-Colby Cosh in a lot of ways too: good-looking, lives in Toronto, has cable TV...

He has no permalinks, at least at the moment, but for a representatively good entry you might go to the Weisblogg and scroll down to his collection of Ray Conniff album covers. I dig that solarized Bitches Brew-looking one about halfway down. The lesson for designers is that you can always be relevant by carefully copying breath-mint ads.

To be honest, I'm always kind of scared to read Weisblott. He has this habit, you see--I hope I'm not offending anybody--of using a whole lot of em-dashes in his writing--which isn't a bad thing necessarily, it makes your writing sound conversational--but it's a tendency I personally have to struggle against, or it does ascend to the level of an outright fault, and I'm such a pathetic absorber of other people's prose styles that--God help me--I have to be slightly careful. You should see me after I finish a David Foster Wallace book: I'm a basket case. Anyway, Marc seems to have turned down the em-dash temperature a little bit.

Don't leave home without the Exile's chart of what Europe's tribes think of one another. Let's face it: the Dutch are offensively tall.

Jeremy Lott has been at the Report for all of two weeks, so naturally Mr. Big Shot thinks he knows how to get the magazine running like clockwork and selling like hot cakes. Here are his ideas, alongside with a newly-won insider view of the magazine and its strange home city.

I kid, but (a) everybody's ideas are welcome and (b) Jeremy's are actually pretty insightful. He's grasped the magazine's main problem immediately--it's trying to do work that, in the U.S., is done by at least a dozen magazines--but he's understated it, because the magazine also has a lingering mandate to provide newsy material for a sizable audience that doesn't read newspapers.

To add some institutional-memory-type background that Jeremy is missing, "embracing culture" is something the magazine has done before. We used to feature reviews of new video releases. These were cut, presumably for being too inexpensive and informative. We also used to run a pop-culture column by Kevin Grace, "Galaxy 500", that was hilarious--conservative and learned without being the slightest bit starchy. Kevin liked doing it, and it was probably the best writing he's done. So it had to go too. I forget why, exactly. Culture always seems to be the first man out of the lifeboat, and it's because we can always think of a reason why we "have to" do some political or legal story, but there are very few books you "have to" review or movies you "have to" discuss. Culture-watching is more subtle and difficult than reacting to political changes. And, frankly, I suspect it's genuinely less urgent in a place like Canada, whose "culture" is largely imported but whose homegrown politics are going to hell faster than a Japanese bullet train. You could change Canadian politics pretty quickly by shooting a few of the right people (list available on request), but you could never move the "culture" an inch that way.

To give a concrete example, you're the editor of the Report and you have a choice between doing an extra page on the Kyoto Protocol or doing 750 words on traditional Celtic bands that spread the gospel throughout Nova Scotia in Gaelic. Which do you choose? It's obvious, isn't it?--the culture story waits while you try to save the country. And it'll wait forever, because with the country in the hands it's in, there's always some new goddamn thing we need saving from.

Razib at the Gene Expression weblog has an entry on who believes in Creationism. The basic answer is "Fewer and fewer people as you move rightward on the great bell curve of human intelligence." One of many highlights of the discussion is this:

I read once that someone contacted geologists who had received their undergraduate education at fundamentalist Christian colleges but now had careers in the oil industry. When asked if they still accepted the Creationist paradigm, they either said no, or refused to talk about it on the record.

Not long ago I took a phone call from a highly educated older reader of our magazine, a geological engineer who had attended Catholic universities long before John Paul II gave the high sign to Darwin. Fascinating guy--I talked to him for nearly an hour. He remains a Roman Catholic and raised his children in the faith. Since both his religion and his profession had come up in the discussion, I asked him whether he believed in Darwinian evolution.

His response was to laugh for about ten seconds. Then he said "Of course I do. It's as obvious at the nose on your face." If we didn't already know about evolution, working geologists and petrochemical engineers would now--with the data we have--be rediscovering it every day.

Well, that's just one data point. Razib offers an interesting caveat:

I know there are many brilliant people that reject evolution. The software that geologists use to model subsurface geological phenomena (magma convection in the mantle for instance) was designed by a geophysicist who rejects evolution and accepts Flood Geology. He is a Christian fundamentalist who freely admits that without guidance from the Bible, he too would be an evolutionist.

There's an old saying about journalism: don't pick a fight with anyone who buys his ink by the barrel. Courtney Love refused to be interviewed for Newsweek's preview of the about-to-be-released Kurt Cobain diaries. Uh oh! When you refuse to cooperate, your publicist doesn't get to pick the art that runs with the story. So you may end up looking like this.

There's a curious sentence in this Newsweek story:

The book is already controversial among some fans, who worry that it's an invasion of Cobain's privacy, his suicide in April 1994 being tragic, irrefutable evidence of his desire to be left alone.

Just goes to show you how bad we are at thinking about "privacy". If Kurt Cobain wanted his personal notebooks to remain private, it was a simple question of him not shooting himself in the head. Failing that, he could have destroyed them, as many artists have. I take his suicide in April 1994 to be tragic, irrefutable evidence that Kurt Cobain didn't give a shit what anyone thought or said or read or knew.

If anyone's rights or social privileges are worth considering here, surely it is those of living people? If you kill yourself, you don't get a damn vote in these matters anymore, get it? I think it's perfectly outrageous that we tiptoe around suicide so much: we profess to care a good deal about it but the only incentives we have in place now are positive. Newspapers won't report a suicide anymore, unless you (a) are a celebrity or (b) jump off a tall building and land on a celebrity. If we really wanted to prevent suicide we'd have a full-colour section every day with pictures and sordid details of cowardly deaths.

It has been a long night of poetry, and I thought I'd share with you some neat things I found, because what else do I have to share just at the moment? Nothing. And going all the way to the opposite pole, notionally, seems like a good strategy for bringing back readers who were driven away by the earlier burst of hockey angst.

This quite thorough selection of A.E. Housman was made by a young English astrophysicist named Martin Hardcastle. It is my experience that scientists are less likely to have bad taste in poetry than students of the arts and humanities. They, hard scientists, are not easily conned. Martin has exceedingly good taste: here is a list of everything he has put on the Web, enough perhaps to keep you up until 7 a.m. some night or other. Note the damage done to the collection by copyright extension.

He has singled out Housman and Yeats and Dorothy Parker, it seems, as modern poets especially worthy of attention. Whew! That's very close to the mark; if I were to choose, say, four, those might be three of them, all right. Housman is my own particular favourite. I know, it is easy to think of him as a poet who painted always in the one gloomy colour. And, indeed, reading too much Housman all at once is not to be recommended to the faint of heart. But he was so perfect--there are so few missed notes in him (few enough, I'm afraid, that they ring all the louder when struck). Housman seems to, all on his own, abduct the English poetic enterprise into a different realm. Beside him, most everyone sounds gaudy or noisy. Even returning to Shakespeare isn't easy after Housman--for those moments, Shakespeare seems more than ever like a gauche, smutty acquaintance who leans in far too close to talk to you.

But then, I always think of Housman's poetry as a very undergraddy sort of thing to like, and I keep expecting not to react to it anymore. He was so much the eternal adolescent himself... One day I'll wake up and I'll have outgrown it. Won't I? Or is it revealing that I haven't already outgrown it?

There is one omission from Martin's selection that is just plain shocking, almost unforgivable. He's left "Is my team ploughing" from A Shropshire Lad out. Notice, after you read it, that this frightfully sad poem--so sad it doesn't even bear thinking about, how sad it is--is a joke. I don't mean that the poem is trivial: I mean that it's got the same structure as a joke, it has a "punchline", it uses irony exactly the same way a joke does, and if you think about it long enough, it can conceivably make you laugh. What we have here, in eight square little quatrains, my friends, is a joke. But it's one that somehow encompasses sex, death, and friendship--human existence itself. Good poetry always makes you go "Now how the hell did he do that?" but I was never at more of a loss to answer the question than I am in the face of "Is my team ploughing".

What can I tell you? The big event of my Saturday night was watching the Bruins-Oilers game. I didn't want to talk about it because I'm afraid of turning off the people who don't like hockey. Also I don't want to talk about it because the game had me hunched over, staring at my hands and screaming incoherent, bile-strangulated screams. It's only been five games, I shouldn't get so upset. The game was actually very encouraging in some respects. The Oilers still have their gift for comebacks (they tied it from being down 2-0 and again from 3-2 before losing 4-3). Mike Comrie's offensive-zone magic gets more magical by the day (I swear I saw him do a Cruyff turn on skates at one point tonight) and Anson Carter played great. This team isn't going to be as bad as everyone had it pegged to be.

But it may not be as good as it should be, either. Tommy Salo, our netminder, stole 10-15 games for us single-handed last year; he hasn't done that yet, and he looked pretty feeble tonight. (Memo to MacTavish: get Markkanen in there, he'll throw up the goose egg we need.) Janne Niinimaa, who was the best defenceman in the division last year, was made to look like the monolith from 2001 by a rookie, Nick Boynton. In fact, all our problems this night were caused by rookies, nobodies, and Bryan "Cyclops" Berard. I mean, we keep Joe Thornton off the scoresheet, and Ivan Huml kills us? Are you kidding me? Who the heck is Ivan Huml? That's a Slovak automobile, right? A brand of smelly Bulgarian cigarette?

I don't like losing to teams coached by Robbie Ftorek. I know it's no longer okay to use "fag" as a term of derision, so I can't really go into any more detail about that: it appears to be an insurmountable semantic stumbling block. But what made it worse is that Ftorek started his third-string goalie against us. OK, I know I complained when the Oilers couldn't beat the Sharks' backup on the Sharks' ice. Forget that. This was a third-stringer, starting a game in our building, who had never played in the NHL before. What was his name--Tim Taylor, Tim Thompson, something like that? The announcers kept getting his name wrong, but they did report that he's been playing in Europe for the last three years. That was nice to know. Some data to savour after the loss.

What the hell, Oilers? Ftorek gives you free points by starting a third-string Euro-refugee in your building--your full-to-capacity building--and you don't take them? HELP ME. HELP ME TO UNDERSTAND YOUR BOUNDLESS PERFIDY.

I was just reading the reviews of Swept Away, which is a cheery exercise (reading the reviews, that is, not watching the movie). It would be a shame if they stopped making movies bad enough to inspire such delightful wolfpack film criticism. Madonna accused the critics of getting personal, and that's certainly fair on one level, as a few examples will show:

Madonna is so spectacularly convincing as a hateful, self-absorbed, nouveau riche ogress that her character's third-act transformation is as preposterous as her overmuscled physique. - Michael Atkinson, Village Voice

To be frank, Madonna looks horrid here; her face is leathery and sour, and when she smiles it comes across as a grimace. - Jeffrey M. Anderson, San Francisco Examiner

Madonna has made herself over so often now, there's apparently nothing left to work with, sort of like Michael Jackson's nose. Here in Swept Away, a remake of Lina Wertmüller's 1974 Marxist, art-house hit comedy, Madonna's presence is like a big black hole. You know something's up there on the screen, but it's not registering as either human or alien, and you actually get afraid that if you get too close to the image, it will swallow you up and spit you out into some not very enticing new world... In one scene, she's riding an exercise bike. At first glance, you believe you're looking at a gym bunny in bad Madonna drag. Much as Angela Bassett's overly muscled body destroyed her believability in the rancid How Stella Got Her Groove Back, Madonna's biceps immediately maim any chance of us submitting to her characterization even her facial muscles moved. - Brandon Judell, PopcornQ

But then again, none of this is unfair at all: no one made Madonna transform herself, over a period of years, into an NFL wide receiver. It is no wonder critics have found evidence of surreptitious embarassment in the way Guy Ritchie handles his wife's naked body. It's become a ridiculous tangle of sinews and it's nobody's fault but hers. I think Madonna had such success leading Middle America into thickets of porn, fetishism, and blasphemous imagery that she actually thought she could snow heterosexuals (male and female) into revising their concepts of body image too. She figured we'd just tag along... We've been told, haven't we, that these things are culturally conditioned? Well, who better to do the cultural conditioning than the Queen of Sex herself?

Alas, the conditioning--the social construction, if you will--turns out to take place only within firm genetic limits. Women can have round, generous figures or slender, fragile ones, but they have to look like women. They have to have some secondary sex characteristics. At this point in her career no one would be terribly surprised if Maddie reached down into the front of her jeans and pulled out a big pink cock. If she's looking for a reason for all the ridicule, she might want to start there.

Humble thanks to Matt Welch for propping up the Friday traffic total hereabouts. Matt is surprised that anyone would praise his design skills, but for me Matt's site was imperative in driving home the "Keep it simple, stupid" design message. Of course, I'd have kept it simple anyway, precisely because I'm stupid (about HTML).

Aaron Haspel has come up with the brilliant idea of Series-Skipping™ Steven Den Beste. (Actually Mark Wickens had the idea, and Mickey Kaus invented Series-Skipping™, but Aaron's implementing it.) If you don't have any idea what I'm talking about, go here to see how "Den Beste Digeste" works (or here).

The Tumbleweed says she went to hear Arthur Kent speak today. That's Arthur Kent, the "Scud Stud", not to be confused with Arthur Dent, the hero of the Hitchhiker's Guide. Since his 15 minutes of Gulf War fame, Kent has settled into an early quiescence, bumming around Canada and doing independent documentary production. He's been popping up on the History Channel, I'm told. Maybe NBC will hire Kent back for Gulf War II: The Reckoning.

You won't know this--possibly even Kent's forgotten it--but he got his early Scud Stud training in the Alberta oilpatch. Anecdote time! Towards the end of 1977 a sour-gas well in Northern Alberta (near a place called Lodgepole) blew out and started venting freely into the air. "Sour gas", for those who don't live in Saudi Alberta, is natural gas that contains sulfur compounds which make it dangerous in high quantities and smelly in low ones. Really smelly. So smelly, in fact, that when the Lodgepole well went wild, the whole northern half of the province began to reek of rotten eggs. And I'm not exaggerating. I was going to school hundreds of miles south of the well and I still remember playing soccer at recess, befogged by the Lodgepole stench.

I suppose we all got used to it after a couple of weeks, and hopefully my children won't have six fingers per hand because of it, but the blowout, and Amoco's handling of it, was still the big story in the news most every day. Today Alberta has a homegrown industry that can deal with wellhead disasters, but back then there was only one guy to call--the legendary Texan Paul "Red" Adair. People my age will remember Adair from "That's Incredible", perhaps. Red flew in, took a look at the site, and put together a variant of his usual plan, which was to blast the crap out of the well with a couple hundred tons of high explosives.

Now this, you would think, was going to be the news picture of the decade in Alberta. Unfortunately the RCMP had cordoned off the well and imposed a "no-go" perimeter around it. They had no intention of lifting the perimeter for the day of the explosion, certainly: the hazardousness of all these goings-on was sort of the point of having the perimeter. But Arthur Kent--then just a punk kid working for the CBC affiliate in Calgary--was determined to get the footage. He pointed out to his bosses that the Mounties hadn't actually specified the limits of the "no-go" zone, so if you could somehow get around the roadblocks, you could reasonably claim that you didn't know you were doing anything wrong.

And that's what he did. On Explosion Day minus 1, he and a cameraman took a truck to within hiking distance of the perimeter, parked it, took as much equipment as they could carry, and set off for a suitable vantage point close to the well, striking through the bush so as to avoid the cops. They spent the night in a camouflaged tent, and in the morning they got themselves a nice duck-hunter's view of Red's (unsuccessful) explosion. CBC Calgary had the exclusive, and the Mounties had a conniption. They talked idly about locking Kent up, but he hadn't broken any laws--just risked his own neck to get the story. Aw, yeah, that's great stuff. That's Alberta, baby!

One for the combinatorically inclined (via Sylloge). When you ask your travel agent or a website like Orbitz to give you the cheapest possible air fare from A to B, how do you know you're really getting the cheapest possible fare? You don't; and in fact, you can't; and in fact, no one can. Not for sure.

If you want to do a simple round-trip from BOS to LAX in two weeks, coming back in three, willing to entertain a 24-hour departure window for both parts, then limiting to "reasonable" routes (at most 3 flights and at most 10 hours or so) you have about 5,000 ways to get there and 5,000 ways to get back. Listing them is a mostly trivial graph-search (there are a few minor complications, but not many), that anybody could do in a fraction of a second.

The real challenge is that a single fixed itinerary (a fixed set of flights from BOS to LAX and a fixed set back) with only two flights in each direction may have more than 10,000 possible combinations of applicable "fares", each fare with complex restrictions that must be checked against the flights and the other fares. That means that the search space for this simple trip is of the order 5000 x 5000 x 10000, and a naive program would need to do a lot of computation just to validate each of these possibilities. Suitably formalized, it's not even clear that the problem of finding the cheapest flight is NP-complete, since it is difficult to put a bound on the size of the solution that will result in the cheapest price. If you're willing to dispense with restrictions on the energy in the universe, then it is actually possible to formalize the cheapest-price problem in a not-too-unreasonable way that leads to a proof of undecidability by reduction to the Post correspondence problem.

[UPDATE, October 22: Be sure to read David Sachs' response and my retraction of suggestions made herein.]

Now here's a pile of horseshit for you. David Sachs makes some ill-informed arguments against the monarchy in today's Star. His take:

To those of us in our 20s and 30s, the gushing reviews and pro-monarchy arguments made lately by pundits and politicians seem so antiquated they make reading the newspapers seem like walking through a museum.
Now, can I claim to speak for all of my generation? Sure, why not? I have at least as great a claim as the Queen does to representing Canada. Greater, as I actually come from that generation. I am senior editor for a Canadian magazine which reaches close to 500,000 readers, most of them men in their 20s and 30s.

Cue an Ellen Foley-style "Stop right naahhwww!"

As so often happens, a single word has set off my warning buzzer, and in this case it's "reaches". Reaches... reaches... hey, if he meant that 500,000 people read his magazine, why didn't he use "reads"?

Because it is unlikely in the extreme that the magazine Urban Male is read by 500,000 people. I for one have never heard of Urban Male, though I have dim memories of seeing, under a similar name, a knockoff of Maxim that looked like it was designed by 14-year-olds.

Let me put forward the best "counterclaim" I can make. I come from the same generation Sachs describes, too (I'm 31). And I'm a senior editor of a magazine, too. My magazine has a paid circulation of around 45,000. How many people read it? We haven't done research on our pass-along rate (the number of extra readers who read each copy) for years, but when we last checked, this rate was insanely high, perhaps above five. (Our readers mostly come from earlier generations which are annoyingly frugal. There are entire towns, I suspect, which share one copy of the Report.) I tend to think, and tell people, that we have about a quarter-million readers. That would be in the ballpark.

So how many people read Urban Male, as opposed to being "reached" by it (which could mean they frequent a 7-11 where it is sold)? I don't have paid-circ figures for Urban Male. I see from the Magazine Fund disbursements, though, that Urban Male receives about one-seventh what the various Report editions get. Sounds to me like they sell six, seven thousand copies of each issue. Combine that with a more usual pass-along rate... well, being very generous, we might calculate, albeit as an unreliable first approximation, that about 35,000 people read Urban Male.

It is unfortunate for Mr. Sachs that he chose to try to imply that his readership was about 14 times larger than it actually is. I don't think it's atypical, though: it's precisely the kind of self-deluded concern with prestige that breeds snotty republicanism. I just think it's a shame--although again, no surprise--that the Star printed an op-ed by an editor, an English-language editor, who doesn't know the difference between the words "disinterested" and "uninterested".

Finally, there is this argument from the Ottawa Citizen's pro-monarchy editorial of Oct. 8: "Queen Elizabeth's very distance from current events and political factions, especially in Canada, gives her a disinterested gravitas in the event of a crisis that also helps make such crises unlikely."
I grant the point that the Queen probably doesn't keep up with Canadian affairs.

Sure. And because baseball umpires are disinterested in the outcome of the game, they obviously don't keep up with the flight of the ball, either. Somebody here needs a good usage guide and a kick in the arse, and it's not Her Maj.

Now, I want to ask you seriously, what kind of country is Canada? How exactly would you describe it to someone who'd never been here? Because I'm looking at the Friday morning National Post and the picture it presents, if you step back from it, is remarkable. Let's just do a quick rundown. I don't want to give you any preconceptions here, and I won't editorialize: let me just throw out a series of stories from today's paper.

· Page A1: An Ontario judge has awarded full custody of a four-year-old boy to his father because his mother was exposing him to second-hand smoke. "In a trial that featured surveillance video and hair samples presented as evidence against the mother, accusations of hypochondria levelled against the father, Stewart Miles, for his concern about the boy's suspected asthma, and a psychologist's failure to decide who is the better parent, the mother's smoking tipped the scales against her."

· A3: A private member's bill to ban motorists from using cell phones while driving passes second reading in the Ontario legislature. "Tory MPP John O'Toole said the goal of his bill... is to 'make drivers think twice before taking their hands off the wheel and arguably their mind off the job.'"

· A12: The Supreme Court of Canada announces it will hear a challenge to the section of the federal Criminal Code that allows parents to spank their children. "The Canadian Foundation for Children, Youth and the Law wants to overturn Section 43... which allows a teacher, parent or someone acting in a parent's place to use force to correct a child."

· A13: "Halifax is a by-law enforcement officer's dream, and a libertarian's nightmare." Describes zealous (some would say Draconian) health laws in the municipality, including perhaps the toughest pesticide regulations in Canada, cutting-edge anti-smoking laws, bike helmet laws, laws against the wearing of scents in schools and libraries, laws about unleashed dogs and open-air fires, etc., etc.

These, of course, are mere islands in a stream. In tomorrow's newspaper you'll see discussion of a whole new set of proscribed behaviours--perhaps a website shut down for "hate" here, an arrest for "improper" storage of a firearm there. The state, in Canada, recognizes no limit whatever on its ability to control an individual's actions. Now, I don't want to make a political argument, here, that this is right or wrong: maybe you think the state should have total freedom of action. I just want to get the point across that there is no limit which the state itself accepts--that unlimited, unconstrained government is, in fact, the true state of affairs.

Because if there is a limit, what is it? Have you ever heard anyone in a meaningful position of power in Canada say, about anything, "We can't do X because it would violate the sacred freedom of the individual"? Do you know of any level of government, any agency or institution, that thinks this way? They are awfully careful about "privacy" these days, and they are getting hip to "accountability", though at a snail's pace. But does the personal freedom of the "client", formerly known as the "subject", occupy a similar place of importance? The question answers itself.

Pursuant to my earlier discussion of the Ayn Rand Institute's position on the Lessig challenge to the Sonny Bono Act, here is what Ayn Rand herself actually said about the subject. This is an unedited excerpt from "Patents and Copyrights", which originally appeared in the Objectivist Newsletter in May 1964. I will highlight a couple of important passages without altering the text.

Since intellectual property rights cannot be exercised in perpetuity, the question of their time limit is an enormously complex issue. If they were restricted to the originator's lifespan, it would destroy their value by making long-term contractual agreements impossible; if an inventor died a month after his invention was placed on the market, it could ruin the manufacturer who may have invested a fortune in its production. Under such conditions, investors would be unable to take a long-range risk; the more revolutionary or important an invention, the less would be its chance of finding financial backers. Therefore, the law has to define a period of time which would protect the rights and interests of all those involved.

In the case of copyrights, the most rational solution is Great Britain's Copyright Act of 1911, which established the copyright of books, paintings, movies, etc., for the lifetime of the author and fifty years thereafter.

In the case of patents, the issue is much more complex. A patented invention often tends to hamper or restrict further research and development in a given area of science. The difficulty lies in defining the inventor's specific rights without including more than he can properly claim, in the form of indirect consequences or yet-undiscovered implications. A lifetime patent could become an unjustifiable barrier to the development of knowledge beyond the inventor's potential power or actual achievement. The legal problem is to set a time limit which would secure for the inventor the fullest possible benefit of his invention without infringing the right of others to pursue independent research. As in many other legal issues, that time limit has to be determined by the principle of defining and protecting all the individual rights involved.

You may now compare Rand's position on copyright with that of institute that bears her name. The woman herself said that life plus 50 was "the most rational solution". The institute's spokesman says--without disclosing her own interest in the issue--that those who are trying to return to that most rational solution are the friends of intellectual vandalism.

Does anyone care to defend ARI's behaviour? I'd be interested to entertain arguments, if you have them.

By now you've probably read the sanitized media report on the streaker at the Bruins-Flames game tonight.

A streaker scaled the glass near the penalty box during a stoppage in play with just over five minutes to play and went onto the ice.
Wearing only a pair of red socks, he slipped when his feet touched down and he landed hard on his back. He was apparently knocked unconscious when he banged his head on the ice and was motionless on his back beside the boards.
After a delay of six minutes, he was removed on a stretcher to a loud ovation from the crowd of 15,346. Having regained consciousness, he pumped his hands in the air, further delighting the other fans.
[Bruin Joe] Thornton was fairly confident that the fan was not rooting for the Bruins.
"He had red socks on. You guys can have him," he said.

How quintessentially Calgarian. Here's a photo of the chastened nudist being borne off the ice. But wait--the real incident is even funnier than all this. ColbyCosh.com has unearthed a first-hand account of the fiasco from the Fanhome.com Calgary Flames forum. It contains an important detail missing from the wire story. On this thread, user "Kryptonite" reports:

I was at the game too and saw the whole thing. Basically, he dropped his pants and attempted to climb the glass. His...manhood...got caught between the glass (from my angle, that's what happened) and when he pulled it loose he fell a good eight feet down to the ice. Ouch.

On the plus side, the "streaker's" "manhood" apparently didn't stay wedged between the panes when he fell. So he's got that going for him.

Maybe I need to arrange my editorial cycle so I don't have the fortnightly nervous breakdown. I swear, if I was a woman you could take a big 2002 Dilbert calendar and sit down in front of my weblog archives and chart my menstrual period with a big red Sharpie. Sorry I didn't post all day but I was laid up with a Charles Whitman headache. The problem is, people really like my column, which is written at the very tail end of the two-week cycle, when the stress, rage, and exhaustion are at their peak.

They're interviewing Craig MacTavish on the radio now and he sounds just like me: enfeebled and owly. I hope he hasn't started drinking again. Oilers lost 4-3 in San Jose tonight. Yeah, it was a road game, but Evgeny Nabokov is holding out and the Sharks had some pimple-faced, Sterno-guzzling Estonian in goal. There's no excuse for giving those points away.

And yes, for those who are wondering, Nabokov is a butterfly-style goaltender. Which is itself kind of Nabokovian.

After you read this, you no longer have any excuse to use the verb "fisking", as in I fisk, you fisk, he/she/it fisks. It is "blogger" jargon, a twee little in-group signifier, for an activity which has many fine Anglo-Saxon names. If you want to take the piss out of some journalistic jackass, go ahead and do it. There is no need to "fisk" him, or to credit someone else with having "fisked" him. Yes, the joke at the expense of the extremely lamentable Robert Fisk was funny enough at first. But it would take a very funny joke indeed to hold up after a year of frontline warblogger deployment. The purpose is no longer to induce even a grin. The purpose is to preach, by means of semiprivate language, to the choir. Well, the choir gets damn sick of it after a while and starts thinking that maybe macramé would be a hobby which doesn't involve so much self-satisfied sniggering. Party lines, right or wrong, become abominable when they are enforced by reflexive phrasing implanted in the reptile brain. This, this, is Why Orwell Matters. Friends don't let friends "fisk", drunk or sober. Pass it on.

Bruce "Flit" Rolston, as I've pointed out before, has a great weblog. In a recent entry he explains why it's wrong to refer to the recent Washington shooting as "sniper attacks." Er, except he doesn't, really.

Just got back from my annual army rifle requalification, which when you boil it right down consists basically of putting 20 5.56 mm rounds through a stationary human-sized target at 200m while peering through a 4x scope.
Then, I yawned.
I'm an average shot, but that's not taxing in the least.

As it happens, I daresay I could hit a human being from 200 metres, given a suitable scope and good visibility, but that wouldn't make it not sniping, would it? I think it's fair to describe shooting human beings with a scoped rifle from a concealed vantage point by exactly that verb. Even if the shots taken are relatively easy for a military man. The only weakness in the description, unless I'm missing something, is that we don't really know if the D.C. shooter is concealing himself; but then, you don't shoot 11 people in a suburban area, and get away clean, without taking some precautions along those lines.

Now, obviously it would be wrong to suggest that this guy must be a trained military sniper by profession just because he can hit a human-shaped profile from a couple hundred yards. I don't think that implication is contained in a phrase like "sniper attacks." Yes, I know the press, on the whole, is as ignorant of guns as I am of conversational Uighur. But let's not get too pedantic.

Never one to shirk my fraternal responsibilities to what passes for a conservative movement in Canada, I'll pass on the heads-up about Ezra Levant's forthcoming quickie book Fight Kyoto. It's just what it sounds like: an arsenal of intellectual ammunition for the Kyoto Protocol debate. It's supposed to be ready in time for Christmas.

Here's your left-wing over-the-top moral equation of the day, courtesy of an Anthony Gancarski piece in Counterpunch about the D.C. sniper:

Yet on the afternoon of Friday, October 11, the culmination of a week of what are being called sniper attacks at gas stations and other repositories of the public trust, I-95 was a route on which the travelers are beset by more than the sclerosis of afternoon traffic. These travelers were beset by state terror in one of the purer senses of the term, as "pro-active" law enforcement search "every white van within 100 miles", as reported by Cliff Van Zandt on MSNBC.

Searches of motor vehicles are rightly deemed delicate things, constitutionally, but... "state terror"? And "in one of the purer senses of the term," at that? Somebody needs to get a grip. And what's with this "what are being called sniper attacks" bullshit? What else would you call them?

I tend to think the last thing people need is another view of the intellectual property wars--particularly one that, like my own, is not especially well-informed. Still, I might as well dive in, since in this post I outed myself as someone who monitors this stuff.

As you'll recall, I had been discussing the Ayn Rand Institute's hysterical op-ed piece against the Lessig challenge to the Sonny Bono Act. The author of the op-ed is Amy Peikoff, wife of Leonard Peikoff, who is the legal heir of Ayn Rand. As Steven Ehrbar has pointed out to me, this would seem to, one way or another, give her a significant financial interest in the matter, one not spelled out in the op-ed. (You can check the official text at ARI's site.) Would it be too strong to describe this as somewhat slimy?

On its own, perhaps not, but what if we take into account that Ayn Rand wrote, in her article on "Patents and Copyrights" in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, that the Berne Convention's copyright duration of life-plus-50-years represented the "fairest possible" handling of works of the imagination? I intend to double-check the quote when I get back to my house Thursday and have some time to rummage through my books. Steven sent the exact quote but I promptly misplaced it.

The Institute has done what I would describe as a lot of good, but this kind of stinks. In the Institute's defence--and here I had better re-declare my own interest in its activities--the op-ed is chiefly concerned with the apparent philosophical pretexts of the Lessig challenge. There is no doubt a lot of knee-jerk anti-big-business sentiment among the "digital liberties" crowd. But Amy Peikoff should actually quote Lessig if she is going to ascribe a philosophical position to him. This is as close as she comes:

Lessig and his allies try to downplay what they are doing by making it an issue of finances. They say things like, "the copyright law used to restrict only big business, which is fine-but now it restricts anyone who has access to the Internet." "Only 2 percent of works protected by copyright," they go on, "create a regular stream of income for their creators."

"Things like"? "Things like"? I understand, having written many op-eds, that they're not footnoted: but "things like" is just not very good. Not unless Lessig is to be held responsible for everything any of his "allies" says, ever. If he said this stuff himself, why can't it be attributed to him?

On other fronts, my Report colleague Rick Hiebert wishes me to put in a word for Internet radio listeners like himself. He recommends SaveInternetRadio.org.

Many radio stations and shows are only available via the Internet. Most of them take no advertising, and charge little, or no fees. The advantage of this is that they can afford to cater to a niche audience and specialize in things that would never make it onto many regular radio stations. If www.antennaradio.com's streams are back online, you will see what I mean.

["See"? He means "hear", surely? -ed.] My own complaint is that the legal battle over the pricing of webcasting royalties has taken most ordinary radio stations' webcasts off the air for the duration. I used to enjoy seeing what they were listening to down in Santa Monica or Cucamonga (although what one came away with, most often, was a sense of depressing uniformity). Losing a free good like this has not been especially heartbreaking, for me; but guys like Rick who like discovering weird shit are depending on non-commercial webcasters to be able to stay in "business". If a webcaster is not receiving a benefit or fee from his activity, it is analogous to playing a record for a roomful of buddies. But maybe the RIAA's against that now too.

And speaking of the RIAA, Dan Bricklin has a great essay on the economics of digital music. Don't know who Dan Bricklin is? Oh, only one of the greatest living benefactors of humanity: he invented the computer spreadsheet. Bricklin asks a particularly beguiling question: are cell phones killing music? Why are Walkmans seemingly so much less prevalent now than they were ten years ago?

People only have so many waking hours a day. Extra talking while you're walking will undoubtedly cut down on time when you can listen to music. With 500-1000 minutes a month to talk, that's enough to listen to 10 CDs. If we say that you listen to each CD you buy 20 times (1480 minutes) that means that the avid CD buyer would probably buy 1-6 fewer CDs per year once they start using a cell phone heavily. In addition, talking on the phone while walking or driving cuts down on time to listen to the radio and be exposed to new music. This could be having a huge effect on CD sales. This is in addition to the moving of limited discretionary spending from music to cell phone fees.

There's something to this, I suspect, though the shift may be more subtle and McLuhanite than he lets on. (Have cell phones and the Internet conditioned our nervous systems to prefer/expect interactivity? If so, this is more than merely a matter of adding up waking hours.) Go read the whole thing.

I'm just listening to the Oilers put on a pretty clumsy display in Dallas vs. the Stars. I suspect it will end 3-0 [it eventually did - ed.], making the Oilers', what, 14th straight winless regular-season game in that city? Something like that. The shots on goal total will be pathetic for the Oilers, but they must have hit about six goalposts tonight, and they've squandered a ton of power plays, including at least two two-man advantages.

Hypothesis: the Oilers are a small, speedy team. Here at home, they play on the best ice surface in the world--which suits their style fine. They're like a Red Sox team structured around Fenway Park. But put them on lousy ice and they fall apart. And the ice in Dallas is always lousy. It was 21 degrees Celsius there during the day today. Of course, they do have the Ice Girls now, maybe that'll help.

It makes sense for the Oilers to tailor their game to the building where they play 41 games a year, so it may be that they will always suck, relatively, on sludgy ice surfaces. Thanks for bringing a bunch of Southern teams into the league, Bettman! Ron Maclean was totally right to tear into you, man.

By the way, what about these Goalie-Fellating Hosebeasts? Er, I mean Ice Girls. Totty-wise, it seems hockey has a long way to go before it catches up with football. Just when I feel ready to choose a favourite, something on the bio page always scares me off. Diana seems quite nice but she lists her f