Signs and portents.

I don't believe that dreams predict the future. But that doesn't mean you should ignore them.

The night before I headed back to Virginia from Florida, I had a dream: In it, I stopped at a rest stop, and the cat jumped out of the car and started to run away, across the parking lot to freedom. I followed her, intending to catch her, and instead was struck in the hip by a car. It breaks my hip, or worse, but I don't know how much worse, because I wake up.

Well. It's not as though either the cat ever tries to get out of the car (even she can figure out that "car=warm, outside=cold, I should stay in the car") or I blindly run across rest area parking lots without looking. But just to be on the safe side, every time I opened the car door on the trip back - rest area or not - I made sure that the cat had no chance to jump out, and I checked each way a couple of extra times before crossing rest stop parking lots.

Sure enough, my trip went safely whenever I stopped. Just not so safely while the car was moving.

I was on a US highway, getting set to get back onto I-95 to continue the trip north. Early in the morning, facing east, directly into the sun, which was hanging right where the traffic lights were supposed to be. Squinting, I was able to see that the light was red, so I slowed down, approaching the intersection. The guy in the pickup behind me slowed down, too. But the girl in the car behind him evidently decided that if she couldn't see the traffic lights or traffic ahead of her, then it wasn't there, and just kept on coming. WHUMMP! I heard something behind me, and looked into the rear view mirror in time to view the look of horror on the face of the driver of the pickup as it was shoved into my car. And a softer WHUMMP!, not hard enough to set off my air bags.

The cat and I are fine. The car is reasonably fine: small dent in the trunk, paint damage and scrapes and stuff on the rear bumper where it deformed from the accident and then went back more or less into place. The driver of the first car was unhurt, and her car had some front-end damage but seemed to still be drivable. The pickup truck had both front and rear damage, and was towed away - and its passengers were taken off by ambulance, I think for evaluation and observation, as their first comments were that they were unhurt but they later complained of neck stiffness.

Predicted by the dream? No, I don't think so.

TMQ returns.

Naturally, things like this happen when I'm away from my computer for an extended period.

Gregg Easterbrook's weekly column, Tuesday Morning Quarterback, has found a new home. It's on the NFL's site, nfl.com, and if you can't find a link to the column on the main page, you should be able to find it under "Features." And yes, it actually showed up there for the first time last Tuesday, not today.

The sound of one hand surfing.

An update to yesterday's posting.

I have become - by default, most likely - the computer "expert" in the family, which means that I'm the one who gets the questions of how to make some software program work right - and it's usually some program I've never seen before (such as my father's genealogy program). And usually I can get away with a response that is some flavor of "I don't know - what does the manual say?"

Over the past three days, I've been involved with moving that genealogy data from my parents' old computer to their new one. It's gone pretty well, except for the biggest database - the one dealing with the Stoner family, which is (not surprisingly) the one my father most wants to transfer. Most of the data transfer consisted of copying files onto floppies and then re-copying them to the new computer. But that big database was too large to get onto one floppy, and there's no other data transfer medium in common: the old computer has a ZIP drive and the new one has a read/write CD burner. And because the old computer is a couple of generations of operating systems old - Windows 95 vs. Windows XP Home - I couldn't get the Backup utility to work properly to take a backup off the old machine and restore it to the new one.

I eventually ended up with a successful, albeit jury-rigged solution: I emailed the file from the old machine to my home account, and accessed that email account from the new machine and downloaded it there. You know how I mentioned yesterday that dial-up is slow? I had further blocked out the memory of old modems and the old computer's 28.8 dial-up speed.

The good news is that the cat is getting more comfortable here, and is hiding under the bed only about a third of the time. Just when she's completely comfortable, we'll leave.

Governor Kinkstah!

The New York Times reports today on an early-announced independent candidate for the 2006 gubernatorial election in Texas: Kinky Friedman. When asked whether his campaign is serious, Friedman says, "Serious is not a word I would use, because I'm never serious." Friedman is a man of many talents: author of a series of mysteries, with the main character being, well, Kinky Friedman; songwriter/performer/musician - with his 70s band The Texas Jewboys, he's responsible for "Homo Erectus," "They Ain't Makin' Jews Like Jesus Anymore," a pro-choice country music song ("Rapid City, South Dakota"), and perhaps the only country music song about the Holocaust, "Ride 'Em, Jewboy."

Friedman's platform includes the outlawing of the practice of declawing cats and turning Austin into a mid-America moviemaking capital.

And he has the perfect campaign slogan: Why the hell not? Indeed.

Surfing the web with one hand tied behind my back.

One downside to going on vacation is that my parents' internet connection is dial-up, and I'm used to a cable modem. Man, is dial-up slow: I'd blocked out the memory of interminable waits for content while sound-filled ads are loading.

Only a couple more days of limping along the web, another 15-hour car ride with a less-than-happy cat, and I can immerse myself with instant information again.

Wishing on the moon.

If you go to eBay within the next week or so, you can bid on what is purported to be a piece of a moon rock. Unless, maybe it isn't. According to the seller, it is a retirement presentation desk set which included a few tiny pieces of moon rock suspended in epoxy. On the other hand, NASA has examined it and isn't willing to vouch for the veracity of the claim. Minimum bid is $50,000, while someone has said it could be worth as much as $1 million.

I don't especially believe it - for something worth up to a million, why would you auction it on eBay instead of through a big, reputable auction house? Unless they've been approched - and passed on the opportunity, because they're not willing to stand behind the claim that it's pieces of moon rock.

Interesting idea, pointless implementation.

Driver gets stopped by the police (for careless driving, improper registration, and expired tags) in Missouri, and is asked for his license. Instead of the license, he happily gives them a computer printout which explains that he has copyrighted his name and that anyone who wrote down his name without his permission would get sued, and that he has determined the damages to be a minimum of $500,000 per instance that his name appeared in official documents. Police officers call for backup and for their shift supervisor, who told the driver that he'd have to contact the city attorney's office.

He must have thought it was a great get-rich scheme: copyright his name, break some sort of traffic offense so the police would write down his name, and then sue and get rich.

Any possible problems? Well, the article points out that while you are free to copyright your name, "fair use" doctrines allow others to write down the name so long as they aren't making money as a result. I'd suggest that he has implicitly given permission for the state to use his name when he got a driver's license with that name. I'd also suggest that he's an idiot, but perhaps that's pretty apparent.

Mia the traveller.

The poor cat isn't having the best of holidays: her choice was to be left alone in the house for a week, with nothing but dried cat food to eat, or to ride in the car with me to my parents' place in Florida, where there are already two cats. She chose the second option.

She had a delightful 15-hour car ride, and once she meowed herself into exhaustion, she settled down for the trip. About a third of it was spent sleeping in my lap as I drove, and the rest of it, she slept near my feet. (Keeping her in a cat carrier is out of the question as she views the cat carrier as the feline equivalent of Death Row, and it is her sworn duty either to escape by gnawing her way free or to drive her jailer insane by constantly meowing.)

Once we got here, she went into aggrieved-visitor mode, which involves alternately slinking around from hiding place to hiding place, hissing at the resident cats (one of whom wants to play with her and one who just wants to ignore her), and growling at me. From previous visits, it'll take her about 36 hours to get through this stage, to the one where she pretty much ignores the cats who live here except for the occasional hiss and swipe.

I think she's already looking forward to getting back home, where she can put into effect plans to exact her revenge.

Driver's license photos.

Went to get a new driver's license last week. Time for a new one, this being a multiple-of-five year for me and all. Probably took about an hour, total. Longer than when I got a new license a year ago because I had a new address, shorter than my memory of getting a renewal ten years ago. Faster than that time because the DMV offices are much better organized to avoid bottlenecks, and because the photo technology is much faster. Slower than a year ago because the revenue shortfall from the abolition of the property tax on cars has caused the DMV to shut down some offices and reduce the number of personnel at others. Oh, well. At least this year's photo won't scare small children. (One year, I had the DMV person take one look at the picture and say, "Let's take this again, okay?" Must have been frightful.) I did have to pause while I figured out what color to describe my hair - brown or, you know, gray. I went with brown. Maybe I'll dye it at some point. Well, maybe not.

I have two favorite experiences from getting new driver's licenses. One was when I came home at Christmas of my sophomore year of college, and I hadn't had my hair cut in about 14 months. I combed it out just before the photo, and it reached my shoulders. Ten seconds after the picture was taken, the curls and waves took over again, and the hair shrank back to its normal position, closer to my head. And when I took a look at my license picture, I went directly to the barber. So my license photo didn't look at all like me for the length of that license.

But my favorite driver's license story was from about four and a half years ago. I was at my bank, transferring money out of savings into a CD. The bank officer opening the new account for me asked for a photo ID, like a driver's license. I gave it to her. She looked at it and asked if I happened to have a current driver's license. "Excuse me?" Since this one had expired eight months earlier. Oops. She accepted the expired license after all, and my next stop was the DMV.

Nothing like steaming coffee to wake you up.

Especially when you pour it down your leg. <sigh>

It was going to be a nice day today. Thanksgiving week in central Virginia; naturally, it was around 70 and I was wearing shorts. (Okay, fine. This time last year, it had already snowed once. Late November and 70 degrees is the way it ought to be, in my book.) So I poured myself a mug of freshly-brewed coffee, and put the mug on the counter while I was fixing breakfast. As I was pulling something out of the cabinet, a box of something fell down and pushed the full mug off the counter, sending the coffee in the general direction of the floor. Some of it, via my leg. The ensuing shrieks and curses caused the cat to hightail it for another room.

Luckily, not that much hit my leg: most of the coffee went with the mug, falling directly into the trash can. Still, enough to bring me to a state of full alert, and a nice reminder that perhaps I should pay more attention to where I'm putting my coffee mug.

Editorial comment on The Passion Of Christ.

You know, Mel Gibson's "controversial" movie, coming out next year, on Ash Wednesday. And it's not my editorial comment - it's from the Editor In The Sky. (And my favorite part? This is the second time this particular editorial input was given to the assistant director during this movie.)

Virginia's "no-choice" elections.

Virginia delegate Brian Moran has a letter in today's Washington Post talking about Virginia's redistricting problems which resulted in 80 of the 140 legislative races in this month's election having incumbents running unopposed. And he knows whereof he speaks, as he was one of the 80 unopposed candidates. He notes: "Voters do not benefit when they cannot hold elected officials accountable. Voters do not benefit when the push of a lever or the stroke of a pen changes nothing."

Well, good. Perhaps the bipartisan commission he's proposed will help create meaningful districts with legitimate, competitive elections. But since the bills he's introduced to set up such a commission have died in committee, I have my cynical doubts that we'll ever see it.

Law school humor.

No, seriously. Here's a collection of what is claimed to be 25 of the funniest law review articles of the past 50 years, including such classics as The Gettysburg Address as Written by Law Students taking an Exam and Suing the Devil: A Guide for Practitioners. And, of course, the one that real people may have actually heard of, The Common Law Origins of the Infield Fly Rule. We can only hope that over the past fifty years, and across all the law reviews published, that there actually are twenty-five funny articles.

Or, I suppose, we could look at the blog of a current law student, and not just any such blog: one that has been determined to be the funniest law student blog around. Well, consider the context and the likely competition. Although I did like portions of the fake Law School Weekly Events Newsletter ("SPORTS. Softball: Too cold. Not here. Should have gone to UVA.").

Well, okay: when I was in law school, it was considered to be the height of wit to issue party invitations in the form of a subpoena, and one classmate eventually sent out birth announcements in the form of a habeas corpus petition. So it's not as though I'm suggesting that the level of humor has gone down any over the years.

So where were you when you heard?

Heard that JFK had been assassinated, of course - one of those events for which they say that everyone who was around then can still remember what they were doing when they heard about it. The fortieth anniversary is tomorrow, and the NY Times has an online section devoted to the anniversary. PDF files reproducing the front section of the paper on the day after, and other historical articles, such as the report on Kennedy's trip to Texas from the paper published on the morning of the day he was shot, and on the funeral. A couple of columns since then - from the 25th and 30th anniversaries of the shooting, and a recent column on Nellie Connally, the last surviving non-Secret-Service occupant of the car carrying the President.

To me, the most interesting columns in the section are the ones from today: Tom Wicker's long column on how little the assassination seems to have affected later events, and Hamilton's and Mallon's columns suggesting that the assassination of the President had a large impact on later events. (Hamilton's is interesting: He posits a Reagan-Bush two-term presidency starting in 1972, no return of Nixon, an RFK-Cuomo ticket winning in 1980, and Colin Powell becoming president in 1992 and Clinton in 2000. Yes, plenty of places where you can suggest that wouldn't happen, such as the invocation of the 25th Amendment between 1969 and 1973 - but the impetus behind the 25th Amendment was JFK's assassination and the office of the Vice President being vacant from November 1963 through January 1965, and without the assassination, the Amendment wouldn't have been adopted. But that's the fun of alternate histories.)

And me? I was in fifth grade, and the class had just come in from Phys Ed. We'd heard some school-wide announcement while we were outside, but it sounded like adults on Peanuts TV specials. When we came in, our teacher - Mrs. Murphy, as I recall - who had clearly been crying, told us what happened, and we watched the TV coverage for the rest of the day.

Wine gimmick of the week.

Here's a new way to separate you from that pesky $49.95 you've got jingling in your pocket: The Wine Clip. It's a magnet (Oooo! A rare earth magnet!) that you clip onto the neck of a wine bottle, and as you pour the wine out, the magnetic field sets up an electrical charge (wine being an electrical conductor, and all, passing through the field) which breaks large molecules into smaller ones. Thus, it breaks up large tannin molecules into small tannin molecules, which makes the wine smoother - or so they claim. They do say that it works equally well with a $10 bottle of merlot and a $300 bottle of cabernet sauvignon, which I can well believe.

It's great fun watching the video of a taste test with this magnet, one of four they supposedly did: "Which of these two glasses of wine we just poured from the same bottle - one with the Wine Clip on the neck of the bottle and one without - tastes better?" and then they turn over the corresponding card. Six of the seven "picked" the glass identified as having been poured through the Clip. The best part is trying to decide whether the individual testers were in on the secret from the beginning, or both glasses had "poured through the Wine Clip" cards so whichever they chose would be the right answer, or this was the only one of the tests they ran where a majority picked the glass poured through the Clip.

Probably the most interesting part of this silly product is that the Strategic Advisor to the Wine Clip is none other than John Sculley, late of Apple and Pepsi.

Why, yes, I do think the Emperor's new clothes are very nice, indeed.

Update (Dec. 11, 2003): Just to be clear, I have not - yet - tried The Wine Clip or done blind taste tests with it. If and when I do, I'll report on what I find - and if I have to eat my words, I'll have better-tasting wine to wash them down with.

The blue pencil.

A couple of weeks ago, a classmate of mine from Fuqua asked me to take a look at her "personal statement" that she's preparing as part of her application to law school, and give her feedback on it. Okay, I'm happy to do it, and it makes a certain amount of sense to have me review it, as I've already been to law school and have since spent a whole lot of time editing things. Still, I can only assume she was appalled to see how thoroughly I had marked up her draft. (Hey! I left at least six sentences untouched, out of a two-page statement.)

We haven't yet had the conversation I feel compelled to have: the "So why do you want to go to law school?" discussion where I'll point out that it'll be three years, three long years, and at the end of it, she'll be a lawyer. Or how she'll get to enjoy the experience I had in business school, of being one of the oldest people in the class.

She's looking at a number of top-tier schools, and definitely has the background to get into most of them. And even though she's already has a list of about 10 schools she's considering, I felt compelled to add one more to her list.

Sixty-two hours of Alien - but is it enough?

The re-release on DVD of the four Alien movies is scheduled for December 2. An article in the NY Times talks about the set and about large DVD packages. This set will have nine discs, and is said to run, beginning-to-end, sixty-two hours. Releases like this one and the four-disk sets of the Lord of the Rings movies (the set for The Two Towers was released this week) are seen as reflecting Hollywood's acceptance of DVDs - because people are willing to spend more for extended versions of films and for supplementary material, the film industry is willing to put more into the DVD packages. Some of the effects shots in the last two Alien movies were never finished (I presume they mean in the scenes that didn't make it into the original movie), and were finished for this DVD release.

There's also some discussion of the longer and re-edited versions of movies that often show up on DVDs (called "director's cuts" although many directors will tell you that the version made for theatrical release was their real director's cut). Ridley Scott has re-edited his Alien, putting in some material and tightening up other scenes, ending up with a version one minute shorter than the original release. James Cameron added some 17 minutes back into his Aliens. Peter Jackson, of course, goes hog-wild and adds 47 minutes to The Two Towers, which was already three hours long in the theater.

When does it get to be too much? Not yet, I'd guess; especially after seeing how well these sets are selling. And I certainly intend to add them to my collection.

Yeah. Blame TV.

A nursing advocacy group is blaming TV - ER, to be precise - for a nationwide shortage of registered nurses. They claim that the show portrays nursing in an inaccurate, negative light, and they single out Maura Tierney's character - who dropped out of med school for financial reasons and became a nurse, and has now returned to med school - as being an especially poor role model.

Someone from the show has the right idea: "Wasn't there a nursing shortage before ER? I mean, this is a television show, not a documentary."

And what TV character does the group think is a good portrayal of nurses? "Hot Lips" Houlihan, of M*A*S*H.

Why worry about Big Brother, when you can worry about being spied on by your razor?

Very funny site, apparently in dead earnest. The site is asking you to boycott Gillette products because they are putting RFID chips into their packaging, and this is somehow allowing Gillette to spy on you: taking a pack of razor blades off the shelf causes a hidden camera to take your picture (which "they" then use to compare with photos taken at the register to see whether you've paid for the razor blades), or Gillette will somehow connect the particular pack of razor blades with your store's loyalty card and "know" that you have purchased the pack. Or, of course, your hair will fall out because you'll be exposed to massive amount of electromagnetic radiation. (Well, okay, probably less than you're exposed to due to the electric wiring in your house.)

Nowhere on this site - or on related sites - do the folks behind this proposed boycott address the benefits of the RFID chip (better inventory control, both at the checkout counter and in the warehouse) other than to wave their hands and vaguely deny them. And most telling, nowhere do they acknowledge that Gillette isn't developing the RFID chips and dropping them into their packaging just to be on the cutting edge - they're doing it because Wal-Mart is requiring all their suppliers to incorporate RFID chips (at least, their 100 top suppliers), and no manufacturer wants to be shut out of Wal-Mart.

These folks really need to get a life. Just think: if they'd redirect their energy in a useful direction, they might achieve something productive.

The Robot Hall of Fame.

No, seriously. Carnegie Mellon has started up a Hall of Fame for Robots. They've got two categories: real robots and fictional ones. The idea is that they'll honor the "highest accomplishments" of robots in science and science fiction, celebrating "landmark scientific achievements" and the creative impact which influence our thinking "about how we want real robots to interact with humans". They've inducted four robots into their Hall: the real ones are the Mars Pathfinder Sojourner Rover and Unimate (the first industrial robot arm on an assembly line), while the fictional ones are R2-D2 and the HAL 9000 (from 2001: A Space Odyssey).

I don't have any problem with the real robots they've chosen, but I'm not so pleased with their choices for the fictional ones. R2-D2 is okay, although I might have picked C3PO instead as having a better interface for interacting with humans. But the HAL 9000 isn't even a robot - it's a computer. Sure, a computer that runs the spacecraft on the Jupiter mission, but just a computer. A better choice would have been any (or all) of Asimov's robots - my pick would have been Andrew, from The Bicentennial Man - or the robots from Capek's R.U.R.

Well, there's always next year.

Favorite wine shops.

It's a sign of something, I suppose, that I have "favorite" wine shops all over the place. Two or three here in Richmond, one or two in the Raleigh-Durham, NC area (discovered when I lived in Durham for a couple of years), one in Charlottesville (where I lived for many, many years, and I even worked part-time at that wine shop), and a couple in Arlington (where I haven't lived since the Carter Administration).

A number of factors need to align before a wine shop makes it onto my Favorites list: a friendly, helpful, approachable staff, who is neither condescending nor obsequious; reasonable prices; frequent tastings (how else to find out whether you might like a wine you've not tried before?); a broad selection of wines. And if I'm just browsing, they'll let me wander around to my heart's content. Bonus points if they also have a good selection of regional microbrewed beers.

Sometimes you have to destroy a town in order to save it.

The small town of Cheshire, Ohio is disappearing as it is being purchased by an Ohio utility company. The town was purchased - and is being slowly dismantled - by the utility in a settlement following long years of complaints and litigation over the ash and pollutants that came from the utility's coal-burning electric plant. This is said to be the first time that a private company had purchased a town or neighborhood for environmental reasons, although the government has occasionally done so (e.g., Love Canal). People sold their property for about a 250 percent markup over fair market value, and most have bought houses within 50 miles of Cheshire. The company has also agreed to let people stay in their houses, if they want to, for the rest of their lives, even though the house was sold through the settlement. And even though it's becoming a ghost town, it's still getting state revenue sharing monies.

TMQ returns!

As promised, Tuesday Morning Quarterback is back, at a temporary location.

Update: It's now at a long-term location, on the NFL's own site.

Larry Flynt is all heart.

He's announced that he has nude photographs of Jessica Lynch, supposedly of her posing with male soldiers, but he says he's not going to publish them in his Hustler magazine because she's a good kid "and a victim of the Bush administration."

I'm betting NBC wishes they'd known about this earlier, so they could have had scenes in their made-for-TV movie they showed last Sunday. Not that it would have been enough to make me want to watch it.

Not guilty.

Juries work in mysterious ways, even in Texas. The murder trial I mentioned in a post on Oct 28 is over: the defendant, who admitted killing the victim, chopping him into pieces, putting those parts into garbage bags, and dumping the bags into Galveston Bay, was found not guilty. The defense theory is that the gun happened to go off in a struggle, and then the defendant panicked and tried to hide the evidence.

Perhaps it's just as well that Muhammed and Malvo aren't being tried in Texas.

"DVD" doesn't necessarily mean a good image.

Tremendous article in the NY Times today on the flaws that appear on DVDs - at least, that can appear when the studios putting out the DVDs don't especially care how the movie actually looks. Sometimes it's color accuracy and consistency: the 2001 DVD release of Lawrence of Arabia had desert battle scenes where the sky is a different color in every shot - magenta, green, red - and none of those colors was in the original print. (Complaints from DVD purchasers has made Columbia come out with a new, improved version this fall - and those purchasers received no discount for having purchased the 2001 version.) Sometimes it's faded colors, blurry images, or odd, shimmering distortions.

Following similar complaints from customers, Warner came out with a remastered, improved version of its 7-movie set called "The Stanley Kubrick Collection", and Paramount is reissuing the Godfather movies next year, with new digital masters.

In a sidebar, there's a list of the 10 best and 10 worst looking DVD versions of great films. The "best" list includes Citizen Kane, The Third Man, and the new release of Casablanca, all of which I have, while the "worst" list includes a few classics where the DVD was clearly taken from the VHS master, and sometimes from a dirty master at that.

Another Tuesday Morning Quarterback update.

Next Tuesday, Nov. 11, TMQ will appear on the Football Outsiders website, although its long-term location hasn't yet been decided upon.

Update: The long-term location is on the NFL's own site.

Who wants to cook aloo gobi?

I finally got around to seeing Bend It Like Beckham, on DVD. Sure, I could have seen it at the theater four miles away from me while it was there for six weeks, but somehow I just never got around to it. What a charming little movie. I happily recommend it.

I recommend it even more highly as a DVD, as this is a movie that takes full advantage of the versatility of a DVD: the director's commentary is both informative and fun (standards not often met by director's commentaries), and the bonus documentaries included an interesting "making of" film and a delightful fifteen-minute cooking show with the director (Gurinder Chada) teaching how to cook aloo gobi, with her mother and aunt giving unwanted suggestions.

I was especially impressed by the leading actress, Parminder K. Nagra, appearing here in her first movie, although everyone in the movie seems well-cast. Nagra has a very expressive face, and carries the movie. She also did a good job of playing younger - about 25 when the movie was filmed, she played a character who was around 18, and did such a good job of it that she came off as younger than co-star Keira Knightly, who was 15 at the time of filming, playing a character who was 18 or 19. Nagra is currently playing a more age-appropriate role on ER.

Here's a bad sign.

If you're a young man, about 18 years old, George Bush has plans for you!

If Bush's wars really were popular, there would be no need for the draft.

Update: Bush has had all traces of his announcement removed from the "defendamerica.mil" website, so here's the gist: He has started a push to fill Selective Service board positions throughout the country. Board members are those who assign draft classifications and review applications for draft deferments, and membership is unpaid.

Yes, it's true that there presently is no statutory authority to draft anyone into the military. But if he decides there's a need for the draft - and he can hardly keep reservists on active duty for much longer - he'll need to have the infrastructure in place to force people into the Army, and this is the logical first step.

Salon has an article on the original announcement and the draft. The article has one misleading point in it: the Vietnam era draft originally allowed for college students to be deferred until they graduated, but that was changed in 1971 to the present deferment policy - you can finish this semester, but at the end of the semester, it's into the Army you go.

It didn't happen while I was there.

Just imagine: a Rice basketball player delivering a backboard-shattering dunk. Well, okay, this was during a pre-season dunk contest, but still.

And yes, one good reason why it didn't happen while I was in school there is that the NCAA rules forbade dunks, either during the game or during warm-ups.

Strictly speaking, I did see one dunk when I was there. It was in February 1974, the day that UCLA lost at Notre Dame to break its consecutive win streak after 88 games. The Rice basketball game was to be the regional second-game in the televised college double-header, although it would pale in comparison to the UCLA-ND game, but by the time I got to Autry Court, there had been a power failure. While they were working to restore the electricity, Rice and its opponent were taken off the main court and were allowed to warm up on side courts. After a half-hour or so, Rice's seven-footer ("Whoosher") threw down a massive two-handed dunk, to the delight of the crowd - and since it didn't take place on the court used for the game, it was okay by NCAA rules. Not that it mattered, as ten minutes later they decided they couldn't get the power fixed in time, so they had to postpone the game - and Rice missed its only opportunity to be on TV that year.

Is it too early for the 2004 Olympics?

Well, I'd have thought so, but all I'm going to do is watch them. So too, apparently, will the U.S. Olympic baseball team, which failed to qualify for the Olympics, by losing to Mexico in a qualifying tournament. As a result, the U.S. team - which had been among the favorites - won't be on hand to defend their gold medal from the 2000 Games.

Pretty odd way to be knocked out: After early rounds of the tournament, which seemed to do nothing but set seeding for the knockout portion of the tournament, wherein the U.S. team won all of its games and outscored its opponents 21-0 while the Mexican team lost all of its games, Mexico advanced in the first-knockout round when its opponents - the Bahamas - failed to show up. And it strikes me as awfully strange to have single-elimination rounds in a tournament that determines qualification to the Olympics. Still, those were the rules, and the U.S. team knew them in advance, so they can't use that as an excuse (and, to their credit, they aren't).

The U.S. team had a good manager (Frank Robinson), and pretty fair players (mostly minor leaguers), and even had prospects of getting Roger Clemens to pitch for them next year. You know, Clemens could have pitched for them in this series.

Still, maybe they'd have been better off just to use the 2003 NCAA champions, whoever that was.

Where'd the moon go?

Total lunar eclipse is coming tomorrow night, Nov. 8, somewhere around 8 p.m. EST. Hope the weather cooperates.

Life in a cube is fun, after all.

A recent study indicates that, contrary to managerial beliefs, personal web surfing at work can be beneficial to employee productivity and morale. Must be why so many of my former colleagues are so happy.

Plugged nickels.

New designs for the nickel are on their way. The front - Thomas Jefferson - stays the same, but next year Monticello is temporarily coming off of the back of the nickel, being replaced by a design commemorating the bicentennial of the Louisiana Purchase. Later next year, that design is being replaced with a view of a keelboat used on the Lewis & Clark expedition. Monticello will return to the nickel in 2006, although its design might be updated.

A tempest in a wineglass.

Michael Franz has an interesting wine column in the Washington Post today, encouraging people to stop their boycott of French wines. He suggests, reasonably, that the only real effect that the boycott has on the French is on the French farmer who grows the grapes, and that farmer is a poor choice to be hurt by this broad response to actions by the French government. And he notes that an awful lot of Americans are hurt by the mis-aimed boycott: importers, distributors, and merchants. So he recommends a number of French wines for Thanksgiving (among them, burgundy, riesling, and pinot blanc). (He'll also recommend some American wines for Thanksgiving in his next column, in two weeks.)

Not surprisingly, his online wine chat today had a lot of discussion on the topic, from surprise that there are still people boycotting French wines to complaining that he spent too much of his "wine" column as an "op-ed" piece. (I don't think it was inappropriate of him to run this column, as it helps the reader have a better understanding of the boycott's potential impact on the wine industry, and Franz has the background to seriously discuss the history and ramifications of the boycott, as he's a political science professor in real life.)

I wonder whether this column is too late, in the sense that most of those who actually boycotted French wines have ended their boycott, or not especially relevant, as the boycott may not have had much lasting impact. It had an impact at the time, to be sure: I recall distributors talking about not selling a single case of French wine to retailers anywhere in the state over a period of a month. But sales appear to have picked back up, and in the 2002-03 sales year (August 1 to July 31, I think), the volume of Bordeaux wine sales to the U.S. rose 20 percent while the value of Bordeaux sales rose by 77 percent and Americans overtook Germans to become the largest purchasers of Bordeaux wines. While a lot of this was due to the increased demand for the 2000 vintage, it would seem to indicate that the boycott isn't having a whole lot of effect.

Carytown Food & Wine Festival.

Interesting little wine festival in Carytown, a neighborhood/shopping district in Richmond, the weekend before last. Closed down the street and put up tents along a five- or six-block length. For a first-time event, they did a pretty good job.

Among the highlights:
Wine and beer tasting seminars on a variety of topics. The wine seminars generally dealt with specific regions (Germany, Italy, Spanish reds) while the beer seminars generally dealt with specific breweries (Legend, Smuttynose, Starr Hill). And for each, your entry fee got you a glass tasting glass.
A wine tasting tent with ten tasting stations and probably fifty wines, and a glass tasting glass. Half of the stations were manned by importer/distributors, representing France, Italy, Australia, and a couple of stations from all over, and the other five were each devoted to wines from a single winery. I appreciated the variety of wines available, and thought the best wines were at the Storybrook Mountain Vineyards station (all zinfandels) and the Mondavi station.

And areas for improvement:
Better floorplan for moving people through the wine tasting tent. I recognize they had severe limitations on the size of tent they could use, but there were bottlenecks that made it take over two hours to go through all the tasting stations, and most of that time was waiting to get through the crowd.
Better involvement from Carytown stores. While many stores were open, taking advantage of the crowds that showed up, a surprising number were closed. And the beer and wine events appear to have been planned and supported by only River City Cellars, as Carytown Wine & Beer declined to assist. (And you know they were hurting for assistance: they even asked me to conduct a beer seminar. Unfortunately, the only seminars they needed someone for were Belgian beers and homebrewing, either of which I could talk about for ten minutes, but not for thirty. So I had to decline.)
Better takeaway information. The wine tasting tent had a great selection of wines to try - but no information about those wines that you could take home with you, or take with you to the store when you wanted to buy any of those wines. There should have been either a single list of all the wines being tasted (or, to be realistic, that they expected the distributors to have available for tasting, as of noon on the day before the festival), or each station should have had a list of the wines being tasted at it - and this shorter list could have more description of the wines. Ideally, both types of lists should have been available - and neither one was. I can sympathise with the festival organizers and am certain they had more important things to worry about (such as whether the distributors were going to show up - near as I could tell, at least one did not). But the distributors and wineries involved had no similar reason to fail to have such information available - and only Stonybrook Mountain Vineyards had flyers listing all the wines you were trying. All the other folks could do was to point at the nearby wine shop and say that you could get it in there.

All told, this festival was a lot of fun, and you can forgive first-time errors. Putting on a festival like this has a steep learning curve, and I'm sure next year's will be even better.

Vote early, vote often.

Okay, I've done my civic duty. I've voted. All in all, a fairly pointless charade. My ballot included 7 separate races, with 9 positions available: State Senate, House of Delegates, commonwealth's attorney, sheriff, board of supervisors, school board, and soil & water conservation district (for which three seats were being voted on). And a grand total of 10 candidates. Only the school board position was contested. And while I know I should care about the school board, I don't especially, as I don't have children in school.

As I didn't really feel like writing my name in on six different races, I wrote myself in only once, for State Senate. My guess is that I won't win.

At least I didn't have to vote for the school board position blindly - the republicans were present, handing out "sample ballots" listing their candidates, so I knew who to vote against.

The only good news is that they've made a little progress in helping you not cast an invalid ballot. In my precinct, they use butterfly ballots, complete with punching out the chad. They've changed their procedure a little bit in light of the 2000 election: when you cast your ballot, the machine checks to see whether you have cast any overvotes (e.g., twice for a single position) and will reject your ballot right then, so you'll have a chance to try again and replace the ballot with one that doesn't have overvotes on it.

Wineries as tourist destinations.

Article in Friday's NY Times about state and regional tourism campaigns to bring people to local wineries. The idea is to lure tourists to wine regions in their areas - Missouri, Virginia, Texas, Michigan - to get them to visit wineries and buy wine (and presumably to spend other tourist dollars as well, at hotels, restaurants, and other tourist locations). And if those tourists think they're in the Napa Valley of Pennsylvania, say, they'll enjoy themselves and support the local wine industry, both admirable goals.

I can't say I'm entirely opposed to the idea, as I always seek out wineries when I'm on trips, and have been to wineries in at least 20 states. And I'm in favor of promotions that bring people out to visit small wineries, and that expose people to the possibility that good wine is made near them, thereby encouraging good wineries to grow and make more good wine.

But I'm concerned when wineries shift their focus from making high quality wine that will be good enough that people will buy the wine for itself and will want to buy more when their initial purchase is consumed, to marketing themselves as entertainment or as a novelty in hopes that enough new people will come through each year and each buy one bottle that they can make their profit on new sales. Wineries should go for quality first, with the repeat business and growth that will follow from that, rather than pushing novelty sales on one-time visitors.

I'm especially concerned by Virginia's Gov. Warner's statements in the article: "You can visit wineries in the morning and Monticello in the afternoon" and "It is clearly not to the California model yet, but we are trying to build wine tours around destination wineries." Instead of promoting wineries located near tourist destinations, it would be better to have wineries making such good wines that the wines themselves are the destinations. (And "Monticello in the morning, wineries in the afternoon," is what I'd suggest. Tasting young cabernet franc at ten in the morning is not an especially comforting thought.)

Yes, I understand that small wineries need all the assistance they can get to have people try their wines - but the goal should be to bring people to the winery to try the wine and not just to get people to the winery as an end in and of itself. And events that are wine-related - barrel tastings and release parties, or vertical tastings, or wine and cheese pairings - ultimately will pull in the right customers, where grape-stomping and open bar destination parties will only bring in the one-time visitors, even if it's by the busload.

Virginia elections. Yawn.

Well, here's why I haven't heard much about this week's state elections: "[R]edistricting has created such safe seats for Democratic and Republican incumbents that there is little competition. Sixty-one of the 100 House of Delegates seats are uncontested, as are 19 of the 40 Senate seats." And it would appear that my precinct has uncontested races for both. Guess I'll be writing my own name in twice. It looks like the only other thing on the ballot will be a school board race, but at least there are two people running for the position.

The squirrels are out in force.

And I don't mean just because it's Election Day next Tuesday. There are a whole lot of squirrels running around these days. I suppose they're enjoying the abundance of acorns and the last of the nice weather before it turns cold. I saw four playing in my front yard this morning, and saw at least a couple more out in back at the same time. And I guess it makes up for the fact that I haven't spotted Roslyn, the neighborhood bunny rabbit, since before the hurricane.

And speaking of the two-legged squirrels and their Election Day, all I can say is that there doesn't seem to be much of any sort of race where I am. I think I've seen only one sign within a couple miles of my home, and that's for a school board position - and I know we're also electing House of Delegates and state Senate positions, too. And I haven't received any mail or phone calls soliciting my vote, either. Not that I especially miss them, but I'm afraid this is going to be another "why bother" election like last year's (with two races and four referenda on the ballot, the closest result was 65-35, and most were 80-20 or even more lopsided). The bright side will be that there should be no standing in line, waiting to vote.

TMQ update.

It appears that the Tuesday Morning Quarterback will soon return, although to a location yet to be announced. And if you can't wait until it's back for real, there's a wonderful imitation of it that will help you make it through the dark days.

Update: Tuesday Morning Quarterback has returned, at a permanent location on the NFL's own site.

Small print.

I enjoy reading the small print in things, to find out who's behind advertising campaigns or the real odds of winning the sweepstakes jackpot or somesuch other information that they're required to tell you but they really don't want you to know. (It's probably the same impulse that forces me to sit through the credits at the end of a movie where you can find out that the production actually had someone with the job title of "roach wrangler.")

Folger's Coffee has a promotion supporting The Statue of Liberty - Ellis Island Foundation, where they're hoping to raise as much as $1 million through donations and the purchase of Folger's Coffee, and the Foundation will use the money raised making improvements which will allow the Staute of Liberty to reopen, having closed on 9-11. A pretty decent promotion, I'd say. To have a purchase count towards the fund, you have to send the inner seal of the coffee to some address, and they'll give $1 for the first 500,000 inner seals sent in.

I received an email from Folger's telling me about the promotion - not spam, as I'd signed up for Procter & Gamble emails - and I was delighted to see this gem towards the bottom of the email (although it's not on the web pages associated with the production): The purchase of coffee is not tax-deductible.

Greek mythology.

Pan, as you've never seen him before. It almost makes one long for the days of The Dancing Baby.

An idea for your next party.

It used to be that all you needed to have a party was a keg. But I guess that's just too pre-Millennium. So here's a hip new idea: Tattoo soirees. Yes, have a tattoo artist come to your house and perform his artwork on your guests - and you get a kickback for each tattoo he does. The guy in this article is in such demand that his Sundays are booked through next January, and his next open Friday or Saturday is next May.

Bobby Knight strikes again.

Bobby Knight skipped the NCAA's mandatory meeting earlier this month to discuss basketball coaching ethics. Knight evidently thinks his ethics are good enough for him, thank you very much, and he doesn't need to listen to his peers. "I would have rather listened to Saddam Hussein speak on civil rights," Knight announced. Takes a thug to know a thug, apparently, although my guess is that Hussein could learn some things about being unpleasant from Knight.

With friends like this.

Wonderful story out of Texas where an eccentric millionaire is on trial for the murder of a friend. The defendant is in the third day of his testimony, and he says that he can't recall the details of cutting up his friend, because he was really, really drunk, although he's pretty sure he used two saws and an ax. And his story is that he and the victim had a struggle after he found the victim in the defendant's apartment, carrying a gun. Somehow, mysteriously, the gun went off, and the defendant was afraid the police wouldn't believe his story, so he cut the victim up and dropped the pieces into Galveston Bay.

And just how eccentric is the defendant? Not only does he live in squalor, despite his millions, but he sometimes poses as a mute woman. They sure grow 'em strange down in Texas.

Cheap at half the price.

I've always wanted a Pulsed Plasma Mobile Hydrogen Generator, and one's up for auction on eBay.

Cow tools.

Possibly too much of a good thing: there is a two-volume set of all of the Far Side cartoons ever published. A bit more than your usual coffee-table book, this set weighs in at 17 pounds and contains all of the more than 4300 cartoons that Larson published. And it costs a mere $135. It's hard to imagine that it's been almost ten years since the series ended, but the cartoons have a timeless humor that makes them as funny today as when they first appeared.

Haunted house. In space.

A restored, "director's cut" of Alien is coming out this week. Ridley Scott's first blockbuster, Sigourney Weaver's breakthrough role. Wonderful movie. And the best place to see it? The Uptown Theater in Washington, D.C., fourth row, center. Worth a trip to town to see it - so I hope it shows there.

Cakebread Cellars.

Nice article on the history of Cakebread Cellars, and a cookbook as well. Really nice folks, and they make good wine, too.

It's not Evita, but what is?

Monday was opening night for a new production: Gilligan's Island: The Musical. Produced by children of Sherwood Schwartz, creator of the original series. Coming soon to Broadway, perhaps.

Glory review.

This week: three Washingtonpost chat questions published, and one published citation on Dave Barry's blog. For a week that started out fast, it sure finished slowly.

Blended wines - a new approach.

Blending wine varietals in an attempt to make a better wine - or a more profitable one - is a traditional tool of the winemaker. Blending cabernet sauvignon with merlot, for instance, adds the tannic structure of the cab to the smooth fruit present in merlot, yielding a wine with the strength of each covering the other's weakness. Here's a variation in New Zealand that's new to me: blending wines from different countries. For cost and supply reasons - the 2003 harvest was fairly low - some of the lower-priced New Zealand wines were made, in part, with juice from Chile, Australia, or France. I don't know whether any of these multi-national blends have been exported to the US market, but I'll keep an eye out for them.

Time to get married.

My mother has occasionally made these vague, subtle suggestions that perhaps it is time that I got married. I'm not entirely sure that this is what she had in mind, however.

What constitutes a dangerous weapon?

In Massachusetts, apparently a pumpkin does. A woman has been charged with assault and battery with a dangerous weapon, that weapon being a pumpkin. And the police have secured that weapon in a police locker until her case is resolved. Hope they've taken lots of photos of the weapon - my guess is that it won't be in quite the same condition after a few months in lockup, and it will no longer be the terrifyingly dangerous weapon it is today.

TV ads. Good TV ads.

It's always fun to watch good ads. Sadly, of course, they usually don't appear on TV - but sometimes you can find them on the Web. Here's a site that has a lot of ads, together with some short animations and films, and music videos. (You may come in through a sign-in page, where you let them know what part of the video business you're in. This is your chance to be a director, because they don't check what you tell them.)

Among the entertaining ads in the top quarter of the page of Commercials are the ones for Alexander Keith's, Barq's, Whiskas, Master Cabbie (especially the Finger ad), Pot Noodles, and the one for the Canadian Football League. And hand-in-hand with these ads being entertaining and well made: I've seen none of them on TV.

Do you identify your wines by location or by varietal?

Interesting article in the NY Times talking about the labelling of wine by location or by varietal: the history of each, and the strengths and drawbacks. As an oversimplification, with Old World wines, the vineyards have been around long enough that decades or centuries of experimentation have shown that pinot noir and chardonnay are the best wines grown in the region of Burgundy, so labelling a red wine as Burgundy also identifies it as pinot noir; New World vineyards are still experimenting to find out what wines they can grow best, so you can't just label a red wine as "Napa" and have much of an idea of what varietal it is.

The late Tuesday Morning Quarterback.

I liked Tuesday Morning Quarterback, a weekly football/entertainment column written by Gregg Easterbrook, and published originally on Slate and starting last season, on ESPN.com. A good mix of decent football analysis and humor, the column would draw me onto the site every week to read it. He was such a good writer in this column that I started noticing his articles on other, non-football topics: NASA, the military, politics. And I found that I agreed with about a third of what he said, disagreed with about a third, and the remaining third got me jumping up-and-down frothing at the mouth. (All things considered, about what a columnist wants if he expects readers to come back.) And about a month and a half ago, he started a blog on The New Republic's website.

A week ago, he had an entry in his blog excoriating the movie Kill Bill and the Hollywood mentality that appears to glorify mindless violence in the desire to make profitable movies. And if he'd said it that way, he'd have been fine. But he made some unfortunate remarks that link the profit desire that overrides any conscience in exhibiting violence with the Jewish heritage of the production companies, Disney and Miramax. Within minutes of the column's posting, people had zoomed in on the offending sentences and labeled him an anti-Semite.

I think he's done the right thing since: he's apologized for his remarks, he's explained the circumstances and what he meant to say (which I think is supported by the remainder of his original column and other posts he's made), he's explalined what he's learned from the situation (among other things, to have an editor read his material before it's posted), and he's done the correct thing of leaving the offending column in his blog archives, where people can read it in its proper context, instead of deleting it and pretending that it never existed.

I think The New Republic has acted appropriately, too. They have distanced themselves from his remarks, but came to his defense as a person they've known for a number of years. And they have put links on their front web page to his apology and to their editorial discussing the situation.

ESPN, on the other hand, has failed to act reasonably. In classic overkill, they terminated the Tuesday Morning Quarterback column, deleted all the old TMQ columns and any mention of Easterbrook's name from their website, and they did it all without contacting Easterbrook or making any public announcement of what they were doing or why. (By Tuesday, a few days later, they finally put this language onto the interior page where TMQ appeared: "To our readers: Tuesday Morning Quarterback will no longer be available on ESPN.com.") A pretty cowardly action, done in secret (as such actions often are). If they think were doing this out of principle, they could at least tell us what principle that was - and how the newly-found principle didn't prevent them from hiring Rush Limbaugh and trying to keep him around for days after his far more offensive remarks (for which Rush has not apologized, by the way).

I hope Easterbrook finds a new home for his TMQ column.

Update: edited to get Easterbrook's blog onto the correct website - The New Republic just isn't The National Review, even if they have similar initials.

Update 2: Easterbrook hopes to bring TMQ back on another website. Soon, I hope.

TV update.

I enjoyed Skin, the new program from Fox. Okay, it's really Romeo and Juliet, set in LA, and the fathers of the respective families are a D.A. up for reelection and the head of a pornography empire. Good acting, very rich production values - the first episode seemed more like a film than a TV show - and executive produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, no stranger to successful TV shows and movies. The first episode was great fun, and I think it will continue to be fun to watch - but only for the length of a mini-series, covering the material in Shakespeare's play. But if the pair of star-cross'd lovers fail to take their lives at the appointed hour, or even if they do, how will they be able to maintain the level of drama and interest over the length of an entire season? Or multiple seasons? I'd suggest that you watch it now, while it's good and while it's on the air - the overnight ratings were awfully low, so it might not be around for long.

I've stopped watching The Lyon's Den. Two episodes were enough. I actually tuned into the third episode, went off to check my email during the opening credits, and never went back. But that was one episode more than I've seen of K Street, which could have been interesting but that first episode was so muddled, I had no great interest in watching more of it.

Fleeting glory update.

Already had 3 questions posted on Washington Post chats so far this week, and the week is still young.

Amelia Earhart's grave?

Someone has claimed to know the site of the grave of Amelia Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan. An American Marine, stationed on Tinian Island during WW II, had the spot pointed out to him in 1944 by a Hawaiian who claims to have helped bury a white man and woman dressed in aviator's suits in 1937, when Earhart went missing. The Marine claims to have tried to tell his story since then, but was taken seriously only within the last six months. He's been flown out to Tinian Island, and pointed out the exact spot. Archaeologists are to begin a dig sometime soon. Even the head of the archaeologist team thinks it's unlikely, but would be delighted if it turns out to be true.

I dunno: it's taken sixty years for the Marine to find someone to listen to his story? I'd have thought a phone call to either National Geographic or the History Channel would have sufficed.

Capitol City Oktoberfest.

Last Saturday was the fifth annual Oktoberfest in Shirlington, although this was the first time I've attended it. Well organized, lots of good breweries represented. You buy a plastic 12-oz. mug to get in, and $2 tickets, each of which gets you a mug of the beer of your choice. (You can also ask for a 1 oz. "taste" of a beer first, although I didn't see all that much of that happening.) Nice weather, prompt service bringing new kegs on line when kegs were emptied. Could have used a lot of dump buckets, instead of making you decide between finishing off the beer you had, or pouring it onto the walkway or into the bushes and flowerpots.

A lot of good beers: among them, Rogue's hazelnut brown ale, which had hints of mocha, was very rich; Dogfish Head's pumpkin ale had great spice flavor (but, like all pumpkin ales I've had, I wouldn't want an entire six-pack of it - so it's lucky that Dogfish Head sells 12-oz. bottles in a four-pack); fest beers from all over. My favorite beer of the day? Once again, hands down, it was the High Desert Imperial Stout made by Sweetwater Tavern of Northern Virginia. Gold medal winner in the "American-style Stout" category at the 2003 Real Ale Festival, and bronze medal in the overall "American Style Ale" category. An absolutely wonderful, thick, rich, gooey imperial stout. Still not quite the right weather to be enjoying it, of course (you need snow on the ground and a big fire in the fireplace), but that didn't stop me from enjoying every drop of it.

All in all, a nice festival. I'd be willing to go back another year. Still, there are a few things I'd do differently. I'd follow Old Dominion's lead in a couple of areas, and have actual glass tasting glasses instead of an opaque plastic mug, so that you can see the beer you're trying, and I'd have $1 tickets, each of which would get you 6 ounces of your chosen brew, so you could try more beers for the same price. (And I'd encourage people to get the 1 ounce taste more often.) But if it were really up to me, I'd do what is done at most beer festivals I've been to outside of Virginia and most wine festivals within Virginia, and charge a higher admission fee and unlimited tastes of all the beers.

Direct TV sucks.

Their services may be okay; I'm not expressing an opinion on that. But their marketing is repulsive (at a minimum, and possibly illegal), and it's entirely reasonable to base an opinion on the entire company on their marketing.

I got a phone call from them this evening. Two of them, actually, as they hung up just after I picked up the phone the first time. Completely unsolicited, of course; just the sort of thing that the National Do-Not-Call Registry is supposed to prevent.

Here's the gist of the phone call:
[Before answering the call, I checked the caller ID, confirming that it was the same "Direct View" that had called and hung up 20 minutes earlier.]
Hello. Hello, this is [fake name] from Direct TV. Is this Mr. Stoner?
Yes, it is. Do you still have cable TV, but not satellite TV?
[Pause] Did I ask you to call me? No, you didn't.
You recognize that you're breaking the law. No, I'm not. You're not on the Do-Not-Call Registry.
Yes, I am. Well, then, your registration doesn't take effect until January 1 of next year.
No, it took effect October 1. Well, then, it doesn't apply when people in Virginia call one another. And since Virginia doesn't have its own do-not-call list, we can still call you.
Okay, but I don't want to talk to you. Good-bye. [click]

Well. Interesting phone call on so many levels. One, of course, is that I have to wonder about the wisdom of cold-calling someone and then repeatedly lying to them. She affirmatively lied to me twice, by telling me that I'm not registered with the national Registry, and then by telling me that if I am registered, it's not yet effective. I know what the truth is, and she wasn't winning herself any points by lying to me.

Mainly, though, I thought that was a huge loophole that she revealed: that the Registry doesn't apply to intrastate phone calls. Well, hmm, that makes a certain amount of sense, as the Constitution gives the federal government the power to regulate interstate commerce, not intrastate. Still, Direct TV is a national company, and this call was probably part of a national campaign, so that might qualify as enough of a connection with interstate commerce that the FTC's jurisdiction attaches. (It would be enough to qualify for federal court jurisdiction, for instance.) And if it's not - if a company or telemarketing firm can get around the Registry just by setting up smaller calling rooms in each state to make in-state phone calls - that is a pretty impressive loophole in the program.

First things first, though. I went to the main Do-Not-Call Registry site, and confirmed that my phone number is, in fact, registered. (I wasn't aware that you could check so easily: just type in your phone number and an email address, and in a couple of minutes, you get an email confirming your registration status - for me, it said "Your phone number ... was registered in the National Do Not Call Registry on 6/27/2003," just as I had recalled, and in plenty of time for the October 1 effective date.) And, in hopes that it would eventually do something, I filed a complaint with the FTC against Direct TV, giving them the company name (and the different name they were using on Caller ID) and the phone number they called from (unfortunately, in my area code).

I then started looking around to find the actual text of the FTC regulation, to see what (if anything) it says about intrastate calls. The main Do-Not-Call website isn't much help - it once refers to interstate calls, and goes into length elsewhere about the types of calls that the Registry won't prohibit (political or charitable calls, or surveys, or calls from companies you have a business relationship with) and specifically tells you that even overseas telemarketing calls are prohibited ("Any telemarketers calling U.S. consumers are covered, regardless of where they are calling from"). Seems to me that it would have been easy enough to have added "or in-state calls" to the list of calls that aren't prohibited.

I ran across an independent site reporting on the national Registry, and while it doesn't directly address in-state calls, it has a lot of good information on the Registry, interaction with state registries, and the like. I've sent off a quick email to them, and I hope I'll hear back on intrastate solicitations.

I have not yet uncovered a firm answer on what the regulation says. I've found the Federal Register that has the "Final Rule" in it, but it's about 125 pages in length, and I don't want to stare at pdf files all evening to read it. I'll keep looking, and will hope to find something shorter to look at.

And whether the phone call I received was part of a national campaign by Direct TV, exploiting a loophole, or something truly being done by a local Direct TV provider, it really seems to me to be short-sighted to call people who have gone out of their way to be listed on a do-not-call registry: it's a waste of time and effort for them, and it just gets the consumers annoyed (and sometimes, really annoyed).

My conclusion: I had no prior interest in getting satellite TV from Direct TV, but I guarantee you I won't ever get it now. And if you're opposed to unsolicited telemarketing, you shouldn't give them your business, either.

Update: As usual, I think of these things after I hang up the phone. But I'll be better prepared for next time. After her telling me that the Registry didn't apply to Virginia-resident-to-Virginia-resident calls, my conversation with her should have continued:
Are you a lawyer? No, I'm not.
Then don't presume to tell me what the law is. [pause] You must have gotten an opinion from your lawyer that what you're doing isn't illegal. I tell you what: I'll hold off making a complaint to the FTC about this call until your lawyer talks to me about that, and I'll give you an hour to have her give me a call. Okay?

Now I'm ready for the next telemarketer who calls.

Another update: One of the folks I'd asked has gotten back to me, and says that while he's not sure about the FTC rules, the FCC rules apply to all calls. This issue apparently has come up, and that was the FCC's response. Might be grounds for a challenge, but they'd consider this to be a violation.

Supreme Court dashes Red Sox pennant hopes.

Hey: It worked three years ago.

Fleeting glory.

The Washington Post website has live web chats on a wide range of topics - sports, advice, breaking news, books, wine, among others - throughout the week. (Usually 8 to 10 chats daily, Monday through Friday. Hardly ever in the evening, and never on holidays or weekends, even though that would allow more people to take part.) The format is fairly standard: submit questions and comments through a web form, before or during the chat, and the moderator/guest will pick and choose which ones to publish and answer (or make fun of, depending on the chat).

Over the past couple of months, I've been able to have one or two questions per week published on various chats: maybe every other Gene Weingarten chat, two out of every three Michael Franz bi-weekly wine chats, and every third Travel chat. One week early in September, I got five questions published; my record. Of late, I've been going through a dry spell, though: only one question made it this week, and no questions made it through last week.

Roger Ebert on raking leaves.

Roger doesn't just review movies. From time to time, he writes columns on things other than movies and actors and directors. Tuesday, he wrote a nostalgic look at raking leaves, lamenting the presence of leaf blowers and the prohibition against homeowners burning leaves. Well worth taking a look at.

Buying wine in Ohio?

Yeah, I know each state has its own bizarre laws regulating the sale of alcohol, and it's all the 23rd Amendment's fault. But here's one I hadn't heard before: Ohio requires a mandatory markup on wine of 135 percent. And only on wine: the mandatory markup on beer and liquor is less than one-sixth of that. Stores that violate this mandatory sales price by charging less are quickly visited by state agents, who don't seem to enforce other regulations quite so vigorously.

Ah, free enterprise.

Frisbee golf.

For when you can't make it out to the local Frisbee golf course.

Light beers.

Normally, a beer-tasting report by a college newspaper isn't worth the time that it takes to read it, but this one - from the student newspaper at Wake Forest had some good quotes. Referring to Coors Light, "Tastes like a monkey crapped in my mouth," and, referring to Southpaw Light, "My urine might even taste better than this." You know, I really can't disagree with this.

Why athletes shouldn't be role models.

Pedro Martinez, a manly man. He can beat up any 72-year-old who comes his way, and he's proud of it. Yessir, give him the chance to throw a 72-year-old man with a plate in head to the ground, and Pedro will step right up. I think Boston deserves its curse.

Honest work is good for you.

It teaches you the value of having a desk job.

Spent much of today - and bits and pieces of the week - clearing out hurricane debris from the back yard and hauling it out to the street, where the county will eventually come by and take it all away. And, of course, they want the long pieces (branches, trunks, what-have-you) cut to be no longer than 5 feet, so they can handle it more easily. So, after carting all the junk from the back to the front (and, as an aside, probably less than 40% came from my own trees; most of it came from trees in the yard behind mine, cut down by the power folks when they came to clear the lines), I then had to saw it into bite sizes. This takes longer when you don't have a chainsaw, and has the bonus of giving you blisters. About the time I was ready to stop, I saw the county's debris truck about 5 houses down from me. While the truck drove away, full, long before they got to me, I figured I had to get all the big stuff ready for them today, and I kept at it, instead of coming back inside to surf the web. (I mean, "work hard on my free-lance editing.")

Oh, well. Guess I'll sleep soundly tonight. Once the aspirin kicks in.

The elements.

I imagine there are more efficient ways to memorize the Periodic Table, but surely there are none that are more fun. Thanks to Tom Lehrer and Sir Arthur Sullivan.

A new clock for my computer.

Speak to me, my regular clock down in the corner of the tray does not.

Hmmph. A Jedi craves not these things.

Help the President.

President Bush told the press on Tuesday that he doesn't "have any idea" whether the senior administration officials who blew a CIA operative's cover will ever be found. But if he just asked his staff to sign a legally binding affidavit confirming that they weren't involved, and referred anyone who wouldn't to the FBI, it's possible he could flush out the perpetrators in a day.

Here's all they'd have to sign:

1. I, __________, do hereby attest that on or about the dates of June 1, 2003, through July 14, 2003, I did not contact, whether by telephone, facsimile, e-mail, in person, or by any other means, any reporter, correspondent, journalist, or any other member of the media, with the intent to or purpose of naming former Ambassador Joseph Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, as an operative for the Central Intelligence Agency.

2. I, __________, further attest that on or about the dates of June 1, 2003, through July 30, 2003, I did not have any conversation, whether by telephone, e-mail, in person, or by any other means, with any reporter, correspondent, journalist, or any other member of the media, during which the employment of Valerie Plame was discussed in any way.

I declare, under penalty of perjury, that the foregoing is true and correct.

[sign and date]

There. That wasn't so hard, now was it? Just xerox up a few and take them to the next Cabinet meeting.

DC appears unlikely to get 2008 Super Bowl.

Hold the presses: NFL sources report that DC and NY appear unlikely to be awarded the 2008 Super Bowl, even though the Commmisioner, Paul Tagliabue, has been pushing those cities since 9-11. As though either would be seriously considered: An outdoor football game at the end of January? And at night, for TV ratings? At the beginning of the game, it'd be below 20, and by the end of the game, down to 10 or less. (And that's at the DC stadium, the one that's farther south.) That's certainly a game I'd like to see, sitting in a metal seat, exposed to the wind.

"Unlikely" indeed. It'll never happen, nor should it.

Too much toast?

Ever have one more slice of toast than you really want to eat, and you just don't know what to do with it? Yeah, well, me neither. But just in case. What you do with the grape jelly is your concern.

Escher's "Relativity" in LEGO.

I am simultaneously impressed and horrified. Someone has recreated Escher's "Relativity" in LEGO blocks. Actually, they've recreated five of Escher's works so far, including "Ascending and Descending". To get the perspective effects, they primarily use precise camera placement, but sometimes resort to in-camera distortion and printing tricks.

Kind of a cool idea, impressive planning and implementation, but I still don't understand why. Perhaps that is the Nature of Art.

Pass Go, Collect $20.

New twenty-dollar-bills today, no longer green. Now they'll also have shades of peach, blue, and yellow. Allegedly being done to cut down on counterfeiting. If it makes you want to go play Monopoly, that's just a bonus.

There's no "i" in "team", either.

Proofreaders, shmoofreaders. Newport News police cars have decals that misspell "Virginia" by leaving out the third "i".

And when did they start putting these erroneous decals onto the police cars? Back in April. (Excuse me, that's Aprl.)

Ah, eternal vigilance.

Guns don't kill people.

Dogs with guns kill people.

Supermarket "savings" cards.

"Loyalty" cards, "frequent shopper" cards, whatever. I've got a pocket (and a key ring) full of them. Nice long article about the concept, describing their legitimate uses and reasonable concerns, and even some of the unreasonable concerns.

I don't really care that Kroger is keeping track of what I buy, or even that they're making assumptions about my life as a result (even if they're wrong, and decide not to eat meat loaf at my house after seeing how I often buy packages of ground turkey and cans of cat food at the same time). I'm more concerned (a) that they'll take their information about me and sell it and my contact information to other companies who will then spam me unmercifully, and (b) that these loyalty card "discounts" often don't seem to be real savings at all, but are just reducing inflated prices to their normal level.

Another concern I have with these programs is that even when they use their collected information the way they intend to, and their data mining leads them to give me "targeted" coupons, they can end up with unintended consequences. When I was in Durham, the nearby Harris Teeter kept spitting out targeted cat food coupons for me with the receipt, when their data mining made them realize that I had stopped buying cat food from them six months earlier. Of course, I didn't stop buying cat food because I'd found a cheaper source - I stopped because my 18-year-old cat passed away six months earlier. All these targeted coupons did was remind me that I no longer enjoyed the pitter-patter (well, "thump-thump") of little paws around the house, and for a while, I shopped elsewhere just to avoid those reminders. Probably not what they really intended.

Utility update.

<sigh> More time without access to the web.

The cable folks came by and disconnected my area yesterday afternoon, and didn't get us back online until this morning. All told, some 20 hours away from surfing the web.

Not as bad as 13 days, of course, but certainly unexpected. It was in a good cause, though: when they brought us back online after the hurricane, a week ago, what they did was madly tack line up on poles to get people hooked up again. This current disconnection was due to the permanent cable installers, going through and making the line placement a bit more permanent. Still, it would have been nice to have been reconnected on the same day they disconnected us.

My cat snores.

Really. She does. And loud enough to wake me.

When she woke me last night, I couldn't figure out why a stevedore had broken into my house, just to go to sleep in the hallway outside my bedroom. But no, it was Mia. Very odd.

Wine festival in Charlottesville.

I went to the annual wine festival at the Boar's Head Inn in Charlottesville this weekend. They've had a festival there each year for 23 years; I've been to 21 of them, and I have good excuses for the other two years.

The festival was okay, although no better than that. They had no idea what they were doing with parking, other than not letting you park in the nearby (and unused) lot where I've parked for the past 10 years. Incredibly disorganized. The awards, as usual, bore no relationship to the actual quality of the wines. A couple of the gold medalling wines were abominable, and the same wines from someone else were wonderful and completely unmedaled.

Barboursville had some new wines out. A malvaxia; first release in 3 years. Pretty good, and I'd realized how much I'd missed it at festivals over the past couple of years. A new cab franc, a new release of Octagon, and a new cabernet sauvignon. The Octagon and cab sauvignon were for sale this weekend only, and then won't be officially released until next spring or summer. I picked some of the cab sauvignon to stick into my cellar for a couple of years.

Cardinal Point's cab franc got a silver medal - one of the deserved medals - and is drinking well. Wintergreen finally released their "Black Rock Red Reserve", a Bordeaux blend. Rich and smooth, in large part because it's had another 10 months aging in the bottle beyond what they were expecting, while the BATF (or whoever they are this month) approved the label.

A new winery - Keswick Vineyards (not yet open for tours, but they were there selling their stuff) - had 5 wines: an unremarkable chardonnay, a viognier, a viognier reserve, and two reds, a touriga and a touriga reserve. (Touriga is the varietal that port is usually made from.) The regular viognier was fine, especially for a new vineyard. The touriga was interesting and the reserve touriga was better; each might have been reasonable at half the price being charged ($20 and $30, respectively). The reserve viognier wasn't being tasted - if you wanted it, you had to buy it, at $5 a glass. More reasonable than the $45/bottle they were charging for it, I suppose. What was especially amazing was their publicity for this wine - they had banners and you could buy T-shirts heralding the reserve viognier, which had been named "Best White Wine in the U.S." by the 2003 Atlanta International Wine Summit. (By the what?) It also got a silver medal in this festival's judging. And the vineyard owner seems to think that pricing his wines high is a strong selling point. Okay, not to me - I think actual quality of the wines would make a better selling point. But maybe that's just me.

And the music was pretty poor. This wine festival is called the "Monticello Wine and Jazz Festival" and it had one guy with an acoustic guitar, singing 60's era hits. Fine for geezers like me, I suppose, but even I know that wasn't jazz. Still, it's a whole lot better than the bad country singers they've had for the past decade.

Beer festival in Charlottesville.

While I was in Charlottesville this weekend, I went to the annual beer festival that's been going on for maybe 5 or 6 years. It's always a poorly-run festival, and this year was no exception. It's clearly organized by the marketing department of a local radio station, and not by anyone who knows or cares about beer. Free admission, and you had to buy a glass at a time ($3 for an 11-ounce plastic glass). Sometimes you could convince them to give you just a taste, sometimes not. And other than the people at Troegs, I didn't see anyone from any of the breweries there - the pouring was done by enthusiastically serious volunteers, who knew nothing about the beer they were pouring other than you had to give up a ticket before they'd let you have any beer.

Surprisingly, the festival had beer from the two Charlottesville brewpub/microbreweries. I don't think they had any from any of the Richmond microbreweries, or any from Harrisonburg or Northern Virginia. However, there was a brewpub from Blacksburg there - the Blacksburg Brewing Co. - and I'd heard good things about them, so I decided to stop by the festival to try their stuff. They *were* there, and had three good beers: a hoppy lager, a red/brown ale, and an IPA, made with rye. Enjoyed the last a lot; almost as good as mine. Then I started hanging out with the people at Troegs Brewing (out of Harrisburg, PA), and they plied me with their beer. Their nut brown ale was very good.

All in all, a better experience than I'd expected. But not as good as a real beer festival.

What do you look for in a university? Climbing walls? Pool slides?

Article in today's NY Times talks about a new trend in colleges and universities, enhancing their recreation and entertainment facilities to attract more (and presumably, "better") students. Jacuzzis, room-sized golf simulators, on-campus nightclubs. To be paid for out of student fees - "chosen" by the students currently enrolled at those schools, but involuntarily imposed on students coming to school for the next few decades.

I suppose that if these schools aren't willing to improve the quality of the education they're imparting to their students, they may as well do a bang-up job of entertaining them.

High schooler kicks 62 yard PAT.

These days, it's unusual enough for a high school team to kick an extra point. Last night, a high school kicker kicked a 62-yard point after. Why so far? Following the touchdown - a 69-yard kickoff return for a touchdown (made by the guy who then kicked the extra point), the team received three 15-yard penalties for excessive celebration, unsportsmanlike conduct, and taunting. The resulting kick was believed to be the longest in DC high school history, and was longer than the Maryland and Virginia field goal records.

The kicker is a senior, and will go to UVA next year. On a soccer scholarship.

Not everyone can run fast and jump high.

But one can still take part in world championships. One such competition is taking place here in the good old U S of A in November. The World Beard and Moustache Championships, to be precise. And all you have to do is not shave.

Personally, I like the style of the fourth and fifth gentlemen on the bottom row, but I fear I'd only have the style of the fourth guy on the top row.

Or, in the alternative:

If you don't like counting sheep, you can always poke them.

Feeling sleepy?

I know that sometimes I can't get to sleep without counting sheep.

Another new mall! Woo-hoo!

Certainly a full Woo, and maybe a Woo and a half. Stony Point Mall (excuse me, "Stony Point Fashion Park") opened a couple of weeks ago, the second new mall to open in the Richmond area in September. They had the misfortune to schedule its opening for the day that Isabel hit - they were actually open for about 2 hours before they shut the place down due to the approaching hurricane - and were without power and water during their entire Grand Opening weekend. Not that this stopped loads of people from checking out the mall then, and watching the Grand Opening entertainment.

Another mall with the new concept of "open air" malls (well, okay, perhaps not so new, after all: When the Seven Corners shopping center opened in Falls Church, Va., in the mid-1950's, it was open air, but covered. Once you got into the area with a roof, you weren't going to be rained on. They enclosed the walkways sometime later, perhaps during the 1970's, to keep up with the newer malls, like Tyson's Corner), this one seems to implement the concept better than Richmond's other new mall, Short Pump. Perhaps it's because the mall is only one level, and perhaps it's because the walkway between the shops looks more like a small town shopping district, with paving stones and park benches, but you do get more of a feeling that this is something other than a shopping mall.

The stores are shopping mall stores, nothing terribly special. Like Short Pump, this mall has some first-time-in-Richmond stores. Also like Short Pump, the restaurants will be the mall's saving grace. P.F. Chang's for chinese food, Fleming's steakhouse and wine bar (which passes my quick-and-dirty wine quality test by having Cakebread on their wine list), a "cheesecake bistro" (which sounds like fun), Champp's, Brio's Tuscan Grill, among others. (Not all of them are open yet.) And there seems to be a good connection between the parking lots and the nearby highway.

On the other hand, the open-air design has flaws, in that you can't walk between stores without exposing yourself to the elements. There's no continuous awning or other covering that would allow you to walk the length of a "block" of stores, let alone the entire length of the mall. Fine, if it's a nice day; lousy, if it's raining, or it's 97 degrees, or 24 degrees. Do mall designers not understand that people would fill in this blank - "It's cold and rainy. I think I'll go ______" - with "to the mall and shop" means "shopping at a mall where I can get out of the elements" and not "shopping at a mall where I can revel in the elements"? Apparently, they don't. And I'll take off points because the mall doesn't have a movie theater, either with it or nearby.

Summary: High points: Actual character in the design and implementation of the shopping center; good restaurants. Low points: Incomplete implementation, such that you wouldn't want to shop there if it's raining, snowing, too hot, or too cold. No movie theaters.

TV, or not TV.

Since my cable has returned after Isabel deprived me of it for almost two weeks, I guess it's time to talk about TV again.

The West Wing. The new-and-really-not-improved Sorkin-less production is a real disappointment. In two episodes, they've resolved virtually all of the pieces of the season-ending cliffhanger (except: where are the members of the missing sleeper cell? Will we ever find out?), and in a boring and suspenseless manner. This show has gone from "tape-and-rewatch" to "Is it on? Oh, I think I'll do a load of laundry, instead" in record time. As one TWOPper put it, "At least TWW didn't jump the shark. The new team flew it over in a chopper. "

The Lyon's Den. Maybe Rob Lowe was prescient and saw in advance that the West Wing was going to take a header. Maybe. I prefer to think that it was his ego and wallet that made him decide to leave. He couldn't stand to be "just" a member of an ensemble cast of terrific actors on a show with then-great writing, when clearly he should be the star. So now he's the star, on a show with an ensemble cast of second-rate actors and extremely muddled writing. (I'm glad to see that the HoloDoctor has expanded his repertoire beyond Italian opera, though.) Hope he enjoys it, while it lasts - I don't really expect it to be around for an entire season.

Nova. This week's season opener, on the rediscovery and translation of Archimedes' "Method of Mechanical Theorems," was good. With elements of a detective thriller and the high-tech tools of C.S.I., it shows the excitement of prying the secrets out of this 11th-Century copy of his book; a copy that was turned into a palimpsest in the 13th Century. Great fun, in a geeky sort of way.

All is right with the world.

Or, at least, relatively so. My cable connection came back on around 10 this morning, and I've been out happily surfing the web ever since. And I'm looking forward to watching real TV again. Buying the indoor antenna seems to have done the trick, much as buying a generator got the power company to restore the electric service.

Flat Stanley.

Flat Stanley is the one on the left.

Slowing stream of new jobs helps to explain slump.

Article in the NY Times talks about the current slow job market, and how businesses are creating fewer and fewer new jobs. "A lack of hiring, rather than a wave of layoffs, appears to be the main problem afflicting the American economy." Well, that certainly seems to be the main problem afflicting my economy.