And now, your moment of zen

I saved this from some random site, but can't remember where. If it's yours, let me know, so I can give you a link.

posted by Tom Tomorrow at 11:23 AM| link

Loose ends on a rainy morning

First, a warm and hearty welcome to those of you who've stumbled into this modest rabbithole via Cake, and thanks to McCrae for the link. As I write these words, I've got Comfort Eagle on the iPod, because you know how it works, you think of a band and then suddenly you've got a song loop running in your head--so you'll be an Austrian nobleman/commissioning a symphony in C/which defies all earthly descriptions/you'll be commissioning a symphony in C--and the only way to expunge it is to put the damn thing on. Anyway, the door's open, come on in, if this is your first time here, please feel free to poke around in the drawers and closets.

Next on the agenda this morning is the Drudge/O'Reilly feud. Drudge is claiming that radio stations are receiving what amounts to payola to pick up Bill O'Reilly's new talk radio program--$300,000 to WOR in New York. O'Reilly responds that Drudge is smoking crack. I have no idea what this whole thing is about, if Drudge is on the level, or if there are just too many 900-pound right wingers trying to squeeze onto the airwaves and they're starting to claw at each other like rats crammed into a cage, or even if this is just some bullshit PR ploy Drudge and O'Reilly have cooked up between them. But hey: we report, you decide.

Speaking of things I don't know what to make of, a reader forwards a link to a really disturbing little piece of animation from Mondo Mini-Shows, the company which financed our own animated series (a quick warning--you need the Flash plug-in to view these things, and if you don't have it and you're running Explorer, your browser may crash): Who is My Baby's Daddy?, featuring Shirley Q. Liquor, a sort of blackface-minstrel-show-welfare-mother character which is apparently the brainchild of this fellow. I suppose this is going to reveal me as a humorless politically correct leftie who just doesn't get it, but, well, I just don't get it. (While you're at Mondo, check out "Hard Drinkin' Lincoln" and "The Israel World." If you can stomach it.)

Moving along with this morning's linkfest, via Cursor--this FAIR piece blasting Newsweek for an article that "expresses moral outrage over the use of child soldiers in Sierra Leone, but fails to mention that the U.S. -- which recruits soldiers as young as 17 -- is one of only two countries that has failed to ratify a U.N. convention that could impede the practice."

And from the article in this morning's Times about the very odd saga of the midwestern pipe bomber, this very odd detail:

State troopers stopped Mr. Helder three times, for speeding, driving without a license and failing to wear a seat belt. Each time, officers said, he seemed agitated, upset, even saying in the middle of the night in Nebraska, "I didn't mean to hurt anybody," the affidavits show.

Granted, this was before Helder was named as a suspect, but still. In these strange times , when average citizens are constantly being told to keep an eye out for anything that seems suspicious, a state trooper who is presumably aware that there's a pipe bomber on the loose in his general region of the country pulls over a guy who "seems agitated" and is muttering to himself, "I didn't mean to hurt anybody"--and he gives the guy a ticket and lets him go.

Jesus H. Christ on a crutch.

posted by Tom Tomorrow at 10:48 AM| link

And now, this morning's wacky links

I'm stealing a couple from Wil this morning. First, this sad tale of the Australian prostitutes who just can't keep up with the needs of our fighting boys:

PERTH prostitutes were reeling from exhaustion following an influx of United States sailors stressed from a stint in a war zone, a well-known madam said today.

Mary-Anne Kenworthy said she was forced to close the doors of her famous Langtrees brothel for only the third time ever yesterday because her prostitutes were so worn out they could no longer provide a quality service.

When she realised the sex workers just couldn't cope any more she closed Langtrees doors for a day rather than risk the brothel's reputation.

"We're the biggest and the best, I'd rather take nothing than offer a poor service," Ms Kenworthy said.

And on a more serious note, this article describes what may be a smoking gun, or at least a gun whose barrel is still warm and from which it may be possible to lift a usable fingerprint, in the Enron case:

Referring to a strategy called "Death Star" by Enron traders, the lawyers wrote, "The net effect of these transactions is that Enron gets paid for moving energy to relieve congestion without actually moving any energy or relieving any congestion."

Another practice, called "ricochet," allowed Enron to send power out of California and then resell it back into the state to avoid price caps that applied only to transactions within California.

We'll see if this goes anywhere, particularly with Joe "Why Send Out Those Unpleasant Subpeonas When a Nice Questionnaire Will Do" Lieberman at the helm of the Governmental Affairs Committee.

* * *

A follow-up to one of yesterday's posts: the article on the Afghanistan food drops is no longer available at the Globe, but a couple of readers found it archived elsewhere.

posted by Tom Tomorrow at 11:09 AM| link

But enough about you, let's talk about me

I have not made it to the Spider-Man movie yet--we tried over the weekend but all the showings within our very loose timeframe were already sold out--but I've read plenty of Spider-Man comic books in my day, which made me a geek back when, but now that the non-comic-reading majority has been introduced to the wisecracking webslinger, it makes me cool before it was cool to be cool. Or so I would like to think, and you will, being polite guests, allow me to maintain the small self-deceptions which make it possible for me to get out of bed in the morning, yes? At any rate, the point is, as terrific as the movie sounds, I don't need no stinkin' movie to be familiar with Peter Parker's immortal words of wisdom: with great power comes great responsibility.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying this: I have tried not to abuse the patting-self-on-back feature of Blogger's software, tried not to turn this inherently narcisstic space into an entirely nonstop Tom-fest. I try to walk a fine line between healthy self-promotion and tedious self-obsession, and I guess it's up the reader to determine my success or failure in walking that line, whether I manage to put one foot carefully in front of the other as the wary police officer judges my sobriety, or if I stumble and fall and end up spending the night on a thin cotton mattress in a small confined space reeking of urine, trying not to attract the attention of the large bald man with all the tattoos.

But a couple of cool things happened yesterday, so I hope you'll forgive me for indulging myself here.

First, I got a mention in a column on blogging by John Leo of US News & World Report. A bit of backstory: a few years ago, Jim Fallows was briefly at the helm of US News, I believe as a response to his book of media criticism, Breaking the News. (All right, Mister Smarty Pants, you think you know so much about what the media should be doing--here's a major newsweekly, let's see what you do with it.) As always, I could be wrong™, but I believe that's how it happened. At any rate, one of Fallow's experiments during his brief tenure was my even briefer run as a contributor to that magazine. (You can read more about that ill-fated marriage here.) When it was over, I vented a bit in this cartoon, in which a reader of US News declares enthusiastically, "I wonder what that trenchant John Leo has to say this week!" Shortly after the cartoon ran, the trenchant John Leo wrote me a very nice email asking for the original, which I believe I gave to him, and despite the fact that we come at most issues from wholly opposite viewpoints, we at least share a curmudgeonly outlook, and have continued to exchange the occasional friendly email over the subsequent years, and even had lunch once last year.

All of which is by way of explanation for readers who may have followed the US News link to this site, as well as to regular readers who may not have expected John Leo to be a particular friend of this space, and of course to thank John for the mention.

The second cool thing was that I won an award yesterday, the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism. I actually found out about this last month, but didn't mention here, for reasons discussed above, and also because I am, to be honest, just the tiniest bit cynical about these kind of awards--as I think Dan Kennedy recently noted (though I can't remember where I read this, so I'm paraphrasing here), these awards don't really mean much until you win one, and then they're the most meaningful thing possible. I hadn't applied for this award, or frankly even ever heard of it, but as it turned out, I had a really great time at yesterday's ceremony at Hunter College. I didn't realize what good company I was in until I got there, and found out that my fellow honorees included William Greider, who is absolutely one of the smartest writers I have ever read, and the legendary Ed Sorel. Greider, unfortunately, had to get back to DC, so we didn't have as much time to talk as I would have liked, but I did get to spend a lot of time with Sorel afterwards at dinner, and it was the sort of evening that you're supposed to have when you're a relatively successful artist living in New York City, but, at least if you're me, rarely actually do.

So, enough onanistic back patting. Regular programming will resume shortly.

posted by Tom Tomorrow at 10:38 AM| link

And a couple more

1. The French election didn't prove that third (and fourth and fifth) parties can never be anything but spoilers. The French election proved the wisdom of a system of run-off voting, which would have certainly been a cleaner way to deal with the last American presidential election, and perhaps ultimately more indicitive of the will of the voters. But August already beat me to this one, and I agree with most of what he says, so go read him. This space has other things on its mind this morning, important and weighty matters such as...

2...this (login required). A comic book shop in Manhattan was robbed this weekend, and among other things, the robber made off with a copy of The Amazing Spider-Man #1, valued at $6,500.

Presumably it doesn't surprise you terribly, in this era of eBay and Antiques Roadshow, that a particular comic book could be highly collectible, or that there are collectors in the world who are willing to spend a great deal of money on their obsessions. Sure, it's a lot of money for a comic book--people also spend a lot of money on old baseball cards and antique radios and first edition beanie babies and tin robot toys and bottle caps and lunch pails and all kinds of goddamn things. This is hardly a revelation.

Except to the New York Times, whose writers are apparently required by the official Times stylebook to adopt a condescending tone whenever comic books are mentioned.

And for the more literary-minded, it also undoubtedly raised the serious question of just how much any book could be worth when its message is conveyed through word balloons.

"You're sitting there in the police station and the form says what was stolen, and you write down `collectible comic books,' yeah, you feel pretty stupid," said Stuart Bowler, 35, the Action Comics clerk.

Bullshit. My guess is, that clerk didn't feel stupid about it at all, until the Times reporter started badgering him. "Come on--$6,500 for a comic book that cost a dime when it was new?" And the clerk got embarassed and said, yeah, shucks, that is an awful lot of money.

And this, of course, is in a paper whose real estate section manages to report that shoebox-sized condominiums are now selling for half a million dollars without editorializing, and whose Style section treats the price of designer shoes and handbags with similar matter-of-factness.

Imagine the line above transposed into some other context: And for the more budget-minded, it also undoubtedly raised the serious question of just how much any handbag could be worth when it's barely large enough for a tube of lipstick and a compact.

Or maybe: And for the more sanity-inclined, it also undoubtedly raised the serious question of just how much any fifth story walkup with no closet space could possibly be worth when you can buy a three story house for the same money in most other parts of the country.

I could go on, but you get the idea. And I have work to do.

posted by Tom Tomorrow at 10:09 AM| link

Pre-emptive strike

This week's cartoon has a couple of references that are sure to raise questions, so here's a bit more background information...

"The newly-liberated women of Afghanistan are still subject to harsh Islamic law." This is true, I'm afraid, Laura Bush's optimism notwithstanding. Here's a story from the Chicago Tribune about an Afghan women's prison in which a thirteen year old girl is being held for running away from the 45-year old husband she was forced to marry. The article also summarizes the current legal thinking in Afghanistan:

In the absence of new laws, the country's high court has gone back to using the old Shariah laws of Islam, those in place before the Taliban. But they say they will apply them more compassionately.

Since the Taliban's departure, there have been no stonings or whippings. Those punishments could occur again some day, legal officials said, for repeat offenders or if the evidence is strong in a case.

For example, under the strict standard set by Shariah law, a married man or woman will be stoned to death for committing adultery if the accusation can be substantiated by four male eyewitnesses.

Under the Taliban, says the head of Afghanistan's high court, Fazal Hadi Shinwari, they didn't wait for four witnesses.

* * *

"Our highly publicized food drops were really a complete failure." The source for this one is a Boston Globe article which appeared on March 26, 2002. It has unfortunately been relegated to their premium section, so I can't link to it, but here are a few relevant excerpts:

The Bush administration's much publicized food ration airdrop in northern Afghanistan - hailed by the Pentagon as a way to feed starving residents while winning their loyalty - achieved neither goal in many targeted areas, military experts, aid workers, and a report by retired US special forces officers now conclude.

The report, recently circulated in the Defense Department and on Capitol Hill, found the airdrops so problematic that it called for an end to the project, saying it was not winning the Afghans' trust and was thus "in direct opposition to US military goals." In their report, obtained by the Globe, the retired officers studied the drops during a two-week period in November in parts of northern Afghanistan. Their findings were echoed by some military officials and aid workers, who said the airdrop last fall of 2.5 million pre-packaged meals, while it brought food to some, was largely ineffective and at times counterproductive.

The bright yellow plastic-wrapped meals ruptured upon impact because they were dropped from too high an altitude and spoiled, endangering the Afghans who ate them, the report by the retired officers said.

Moreover, the meals often were collected by local warlords and sold for a profit at Afghan markets and seldom reached hungry families, according to aid workers. In other cases, Afghans were lured by the bright packages into minefields or confused them with cluster bombs of the same color...

* * *

"We immediately recognized there was something really, really, wrong," said Lieutenant Colonel Greg Long, a retired special forces officer on a civilian mission in Afghanistan last fall who contributed to the critical report by the nonprofit Partners International Foundation.

Long was stunned to find a child grasping one of the yellow food packages - its wrapping ruptured, possibly from impact - with spoiled food inside.

He went on to examine at least 500 food parcels collected from Northern Alliance territory - from Khojabahuddin and Cha-e Ab to Kunduz in the first two weeks of November. He found that nearly 70 percent of the packages ruptured and exposed their contents. About 90 percent of those had spoiled food.

"The majority of them had a gaseous odor and foul smell," said Long. "There were some Afghans that would eat them. But the majority of them would not."

The foundation's report stated: "Food packs that make [Afghanistan's] people sick is just one more reason to hate the United States in an already volatile environment."

posted by Tom Tomorrow at 8:54 AM| link