My best buddy is named Dan. Dan is a big fat sweaty lazy hairy musician, just like me. That is why we hit it off so well. For a day job, Dan learned how to break in to cars. He got himself a cell phone and an ad in the yellow pages . . . instant locksmith career. Now he spends most of the day sitting in front of his computer, surfing EBay for sweet bass guitars. Did I mention that Dan is much smarter than me? He talked his wife into letting them get DSL instead of cable, and then he just stole cable from the neighbors for free.

We came from the same town and I knew who he was, but we did not hang out. When I was in ninth grade my old man gave me a guitar for my birthday. It was just what I had always wanted. After I had exhausted all of Pop’s knowledge I wanted to learn more about pickin’ and grinnin’. I went to the high school band director and said, “Mr. C, where could I get some guitar lessons.” I was expecting him to send me to some college professor, but he replied, “You should talk to Dan the Man!”

I said, “But Dan is into heavy metal. Besides, I thought that he was a bass player.”

You see I was a little bit scared of Dan because (a) I did not really know him and he was older than me (b) He had long hair and wore slayer T-shirts and (c) He hung out with The Great Whoreior – Corey Shepherd.

Mr. C said to me, “Big Nate, He is the pest guitar player around. I know you two will hit it off.”

Turns out Mr. C was damn right, we did hit it off. I gave Dan ten bucks a lesson for three weeks. At that point we had exhausted all of his knowledge also. Then he went back to playing the bass and we started jamming as peers.

Dan lived in a tiny little trailer house with about 27 brothers. His room had two beds in it. We would sit on the beds facing each other and play for hours. All we knew were Cream and Zepplin and AC/DC and Guns N Roses, but we would rock them all night.

With Jody Evans and the Silver Crickets we put the rock in rockabilly.

We joined the music department of various universities and learned something about music.

With The Electric Church we put the funk in dysfunctional.

One time we crashed an open mic coffee house at a college. We played an avant garde improvisation for thirty minutes while two guys we had recruited from the visual art department smeared paint on a huge canvas and we all freaked out. Finally this little black kid in the front row got fed up with all of the weirdness. He jumped on this drum kit that was set up for the next act and started laying down a beat. Daniel and I accepted his challenge and rose to the funk. Another black kid jumped up, grabbed a mic and started freestylin’ some rhymes. We brought the crowd to their feet.

Next we started a jazz quartet with a drummer and a horn player. We could never come up with a name, although we had some good ideas. (Fugitive Squirrel, Clearly Disturbed Beavers, Jesus Chrysler, The Colostomy Bags, My gay uncle, Purple Monkey Discharge, The President's Penis, My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult, The Ed Fuqua Experience, The Underwear Men, Pissing Razors, Spiked Fondue, Jazz Ass) So I told the guy who owned the bar that we were the Daniel Schoultz Quartet. Dan has never forgiven me for this. One day we were playing this reception at one of the colleges and several members of the music faculty came and sat in with us. These guys were world class jazz musicians and we were clearly poseurs along side them, but it was a compliment that they even jammed with us.

With the Mark Currey Band we molded contemporary worship music and alt-country into a polysynthesis that only a Roach could despise.

We have been playing together at church for the last few years and that is where the real music is at; getting to worship the King along side my best friend while using this amazing gift that God has given to us. Jamming with Dan on Wednesdays at church is my most cherished memory.

Last Sunday night we got to rock the Decorative Arts Museum, opening up for a band that was much better than us. Dan booked the gig, so what did he name us . . . The Nathaniel Greer Trio. Vengeance is mine, this saith the Dan.

I love Tony Pierce. I have made no secret of that. I have said on this blog several times that he is my favorite. Last Friday when I reorganized my links I decided to put the blog links at the top and of course I put him at the top of my list of favorite blogs. So I decided to send him a note and tell him. I said,

Hey Tony,
I have been trying to deny it, telling myself over and over that your's is not my favorite web site. Today I finally gave in and linked you right at the top of my list.
God Bless,
Nathaniel

I have written Tony before and expressed my admiration, but he is a busy man. If you read his blog then you know that he has dozens of womens to keep up with. I did not expect a reply, I was just sharing the love. But after a couple of hours I see this in my inbox:

youre the man
have a great weekend!

thanks

tony

Now that was really something special to me. For my money, a personal note from Mr. Pierce is like a phone call from the president. Then I click over to his site, just like I do six or eight times a day, to check and see if he has any new posts, and what to my wondering eyes should appear, but a big fat link to me! Right at the very top left of his site. I have not been that excited since I hit my first homerun in Little League. Finally I will have the chance to write for somebody besides my sweet Ms. J and my best friend Dan. Since he gets one thousand visitors a day, and I get about ten, this was an act of benevolence on his part. I really can not help but feel like it is a new beginning for this simple little blog.

As I walked out to my truck from work on Wednesday, September 11, 2002, I had become completely saturated with 9/11 talk. It sounds calloused and crass, but I had watched it on TV, listened to it on NPR, read it on the opinion sites and the blogs and in the papers, and I was fed up. As Mark Steyn said,

To be honest, I'd had enough of the American networks' 9/11 anniversary coverage after about 10 minutes. I think it was the piano accompaniment to the victim profiles. Also there's the ironclad rule that every news story, no matter how unprecedented, eventually becomes a story about how the media cover the story.

As I started up my truck to head home the radio came on. I am a devoted listener to NPR, but as soon as I realized what I was playing I turned it off. I just could not handle any more 9/11 talk. I dug around in the console and found a CD of a Sunday morning service that I had not listened to. (I play guitar with the band on Sunday mornings, so I get a copy of the recordings mostly for vanity’s sake. Very spiritual, huh?) I plugged it in and cranked it up, just to take my mind off of the obvious. I hit the freeway and headed home, not really thinking about anything.

Little Rock is not a showy town. We are Deep South and we prefer to keep to ourselves, thank you. There are no globalization protests in Arkansas. There are no spontaneous memorials. There are biscuits and gravy and blues festivals, but that is about as emotional as we get in public.

But an amazing scene unfolded. As I passed underneath the Pine Street overpass, there was this guy in an eagle T-shirt, jean shorts, and a baseball cap standing up on the guardrail with a hefty American flag. He had a proud grin on his face and he was waving that damn thing around like he was trying to get somebody’s attention. As all of this was happening, on the stereo I noticed Mark Currey sing these lines:

We've been through fire
We’ve been through rain
We've been refined by the power of his name
We've fallen deeper in love with you
You've burned the truth on our lips

Rise up church with broken wings
Fill this place with songs again
Of our God who reigns on high
By His grace again we'll fly

And we’ll shout to the North and the South
Sing to the East and the West
Jesus is savior to all
He is Lord of heaven and earth

I became overwhelmed and my face was hot as if I was blushing. Martin Smith, who is an Englishman, wrote that song in 1995. It has nothing to do with dealing with the aftermath of terrorism, but it has everything to do with the transforming power of God’s healing. I realized that this thing changed all of us, even if we did not notice it happening. That God took a measure of our cynicism and burned it off. That He was able to take this horrible event and change us into something more like him.

I finally checked my yahoo mail and I had this waiting for me.

Natey,

Just read your blog, man. I am amazed. You do great work! You do
have to change one thing, though. Down the page you said that nobody that
reads this blog loves baseball as much as you do. As of this morning, that
statement is no longer true.

Love you, man.

Barber

Thanks buddy,
Love right back at you.

My grandfather, Minice Butler Huffman (I knew him as Pawdy) was born in Catahoula Parish, Louisiana around 1911. I say around because he was born at home, had no birth certificate, did not celebrate birthdays, and no one really knew how old he was. His father was an obese moonshiner who did not care much for him. The story that Pawdy told me most often was of a time when he was about ten years old and his father sent him out into the bayou after dinner. He gave Pawdy a shotgun and two shells. He said to him, “Minice, our family’s dinner depends on you. You have two shots here; I want you to come home with two ducks. If you don’t get two ducks, don’t come home.” Predictably, he merely wounded the second duck and had to chase it through the swamp until twilight. By the time Pawdy was 12 he had left home and his father’s heart had given out.

He fell in love with Louisiana/French girl Clara Leona Chevallier in the neighboring town of Jonesville and regularly walked the twelve miles to court her. They got married in 1937, (they were old by the standards of the day, at twenty-six and twenty-eight) had nine kids, and scratched out a living farming a small patch of ground. In 1959 they moved to Tulip, Arkansas, and purchased the farm where my mother grew up and left home.

By the time I was old enough to know him, Pawdy was a seventy year old curmudgeon, living near Arkadelphia and helping to farm 360 acres that my uncle Hidle (read: the feddle gummit) owned. He left the house every morning at daylight and worked until after dark. Sometimes Granny could get him to come in for lunch by yelling for him out the back door. She eventually got sick of that and started running a dishtowel up the chimney as a signal flag when lunch was on the table. Every night when he came in from the fields after dark, he would crumble up leftover cornbread in a glass of buttermilk for supper. He called whole milk “sweet milk” and refused to put it in the refrigerator. He left it sitting out on the kitchen table and drank it sour. When we would make disgusted faces at him he would say. “You’d do the same if you knew how healthy it is!”

Granny could cook. I mean she could really cook. Her baked duck would melt in your mouth. There was always a perfect bundt cake sitting on the table. She put the urp in purple-hull peas. She could make squirrel and dumplings that would drive a vegan to carnivorous fits. She could do the fried squirrel and gravy thing too, but don’t reach for the head. Pawdy’s got dibs on the squirrel brains. When we had a holiday meal and Granny and her girls would get in that kitchen, the resulting tablescape was such a vista that someone would have to take pictures before the kids were allowed to dig in.

Pawdy raised hogs, cows, and chickens to eat and sell. When he and Granny would butcher an animal themselves, nothing much got thrown away. I can remember cranking the hand powered meat grinder and feeding sausage into the natural casings they had harvested. When my dad and I came back from fishing or a hunting excursion, Pawdy would watch and shake his head in disapproval as we cleaned our game. When we were finished, he would take our bucket of scraps and use them to make dinner.

When Pawdy went hunting it was because the family needed meat; not for “sport,” which he despised. He always rode his old black mare on these hunting trips and refused to wear the blaze orange vests and hats that the law prescribes. His horse was very skittish and he was the only person that she would let ride her, but Pawdy could shoot a gun from her back without spooking her. This was an effective hunting method, too. It turns out that animals that are keen to a human’s presence don’t even notice a horse coming around. One deer season he rode right up to a monstrous twelve-point buck and blasted it at point blank range.

He walked behind this same horse dragging an ancient spade to plow a garden, just like it was done in the middle ages. This even though Hidle (read: the feddle gummit) had hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of high tech farm equipment that he could have used, and my dad had repeatedly offered him use of his gas powered tiller.

He was part owner of the mineral rights on an oil producing lot back in Louisiana. Every year when my uncle Ronnie came up to Arkansas to visit, he would bring Pawdy a quart jar of crude. Pawdy would hold the jar up to the sun, then screw off the top, dip his index finger in the crude, and take a taste of it. His interest in the mineral rights was a very small percentage and it did not make him any money, but it was worth it to him to get to taste fresh earth every spring.

Around 1990, the feddle gummit finally came to collect the copious amounts of money that my uncle had borrowed. When he could not pay, they took the farm instead and he ran away into a north Arkansas whiskey bottle. Granny’s health was getting pretty bad, and by chance the house next to my parents was empty, so she and Pawdy moved in. Granny continued to deteriorate, and Pawdy spent the last several years of her life as her private nurse. He cooked for her, bathed her, moved her from the bed to the chair and back, and generally kept her out of a nursing home – which was where she would have been otherwise. Neither of them left the house for a long time.

Granny died on a Wednesday afternoon in the hospital in Arkadelphia. She took her last breath with my family standing in a circle around her, holding hands. We got home that night and Pawdy said, “Well I reckun’ I’ll go home and go to bed. I got to go there sometime.” And he did. He just walked home and went on with his life.

The next spring he discovered my dad’s gas powered tiller. He never had used a tiller before, why bother when he had a good horse and plow? But he quickly found out why everyone had embraced the gas powered tiller. Pawdy proceeded to plow up his entire yard and plant it in vegetables. When that was finished he plowed up my parent’s yard. By mid-summer he had the grandest suburban vegetable garden the world had ever seen. There were okra plants twelve feet high. The surplus was more than we could eat and more than we could give away.

It was so good to hear from my old friend John Barber last night. His sweet wife, Jana was in town and stayed the night with Ms. J and I. John called from their place in Baltimore to tell Jana goodnight. I took the phone to say hi (we have not spoken in at least a year, maybe longer) and I think I ended up talking to him longer than Jana did.

The best thing about hearing from John: He loves his job! I mean he said that several times. He like what he does, he likes the people that he works with. Praise God! That is amazing. He used to be just as disillusioned and unhappy at work as me, but things got better. Apparently lots better. That gives me hope that I have not had in months, perhaps years. I think I might have resigned myself to thinking that no one anywhere got to make a living doing something that they could stomach. A very depressing thought indeed.

Also we discovered that we now both work for the same huge defense company. Imagine that, we are coworkers. Colleagues. The difference, he does something enjoyable and I do something banal.

The second best part about hearing from John: While we were catching up, I mentioned this modest little blog. He happened to be sitting at a computer and surfed on over. He immediately said, “Wow, your links on the left hand side there are all of the sites that I have bookmarked and read every day.” He promised to keep an eye on my site too. Hopefully he will be a regular contributor to the comments section. John is one of the best music listeners and true fans that I have ever known. And he has impeccable taste. I am looking forward to John turning us on to some great new artists. He has already blown me away with finds like Vigilantes of Love and Over the Rhine.

This picture is for you, dear friend . . .

The Evolution of the Musician

I realize that I tell you people all the time to read Tony Pierce, but this morning he sets a new standard in blogging. His first post for 9/11 is a letter from President Bush to Osama. I would really like to post the whole thing, but Ill let you click over and read it instead. Here is an excerpt:

hi, my name is george w. bush.

i'm the president of the united states of america.

i have a message to osama bin laden.

osama, im calling you out.

i want to meet with you at an agreed-upon location and i want to beat your ass.

man to man.

face to face.

i'm sick, quite frankly, of this cat and mouse kiddie game of hide and seek and i am giving you one week to stand up to me as a man and take the licking you so deserve.

if you're so badass, why don't you meet me, the american white devil, anywhere you want so i can slap that stupid look off your face.

i know you're probably thinking that this is a trap, that the armed forces of the united states, or the u.n., or the northern alliance will jump out from the bushes and capture your sorry ass, and imprison you.

but i'm hereby giving you temporary immunity. you have no excuse to decline this offer.

i swear upon my word as president, on my word as a Christian, on my word as an American citizen that your safety will be guaranteed up to your meeting with me. and if you survive the single handed texas asskicking that i will deliver on your person, i will assure your safety back into whatever dusty hole you're currently hiding in.

but the only way you'll get home is through me, osama, and only you would call that gopher hole home.

After doing without for a few weeks, Ms. J finally complained enough that I went out and found a new comment hosting service.
Please friends, click the link under whatever post you want to make fun of and comment away!

I have joined this ad exchange service called "blogsnob." I am looking forward to new traffic and I am also excited about the new sites that it will turn me on to. It is a text based ad and you can see it on the left at the top of my links list. They claim to be family friendly and I hope that is the case. I encourage you to click on the site that is advertised if it looks interesting to you. If not, don’t. What do I care?

I have recently discovered that I am addicted to Tony Pierce. I can not explain it. We both like baseball and we both enjoy writing, but that is about all that we have in common. I have found myself going to his site several times a day hoping for new material. If Rolling Stone magazine wanted to save themselves and regain some of that street credibility that they used to have, they should start sending Tony on the road with bands. The articles he sent back would be well worth the cover price.

This week is my first real test of the fall semester. I have two papers to write for school and a gig to prepare for this Sunday. I am going to lose it. Just thinking about it has got me all sleepy.

My hippie brother-in-law called last night and said, “Would you happen to be the leader of some outfit called ‘The Nathaniel Greer Trio?’”
I’m afraid so, I said.
He had seen an ad for Take Five Jazz in the newspaper. He said he was coming to the show. That will be great. He is an ardent supporter of the arts, and hippies are always fun at shows.
Hippie brother-in-law is actually doing pretty well these days, or seems to be. At least he has held a job for several months in a row. That makes me proud. I want to like him and welcome him around. Every little boy should get to have a hippie uncle.
I remember seeing my uncle Pete from New Jersey. He was tall and thin. His hair was receding in the front and pulled into a scraggly ponytail in the back. He smoked cigarettes (and he only knows what else) and was a great auto mechanic. One time he passed through in a big old renovated school bus with this funny hippie lady and a couple of her little hippieletts. He was helping them drive that bus cross country to Arizona, seemingly just because they needed the help. I thought that he was the coolest guy I had ever seen. I wanted to take him to show and tell.
When I was about thirteen or fourteen he came to town for Granny and Pawdy’s fiftieth wedding anniversary. He stuck around longer than everyone else and on his last day he wanted me to go for a ride with him. He wanted me to lead him to some horrible souvenir shops so he could get cheesy gifts for friends back east. Before we left I suggested that we find some good stuff in my cassette collection to listen to. He looked it over and declared Jane’s Addiction as high quality. I could not argue with that. After that one was over I played him some Ice Cube. Pete thought that was hilarious.
He said to me, “Hey man, does your dad every play you any Pink Floyd?”
I confessed that I had never heard of that dude.
He said, “Where is the nearest record store.”
I led him to the mall and he marched straight in and bought me a copy of Floyd’s “Dark Side of The Moon." Also he told me it was a band, not a dude. For that I will be forever grateful. I still have that cassette, even though it has long since worn out. My hippie uncle was the coolest.

---

We moved the boy, Wylie in to a big boy bed last night for the first time. He only fell off once, and that was at 7:00 this morning. Boy did it upset him. Ms. J said that it was all that he talked about all morning. He has my sister’s old daybed and we pulled the trundle out about half way so that he would have something soft to land on if he fell. Well, I heard a dull thud this morning on the hardwood floor (and when I say hardwood floor, what I mean is hard, wood floor) and skedaddled in there. He was sitting up in the floor and crying about half way across the room from his bed. I don’t know if that was where he rolled to or what, perhaps rolled off so hard and fast that he missed the trundle all together.
Ms J. and the boy had to go to the store this afternoon. Wylie fell asleep on the way home and she slipped him out of his seat with that lovin’ momma touch and carried him in the house. As she was easing him down on to the bed she said that he quietly mumbled, “No, not the big boy bed . . .” and went right back to sleep.

I have just spent the better part of the day (in-between phone calls) reading this incredible article in the New Yorker about Saddam's genocide campaign against the Kurds of Northern Iraq, and Iraq's link to al Qaeda. (Linked to by Andrew Sullivan) It is a very long article, but well worth the read. It is sickening that the international community has allowed that creep to stay in power as long as he has. I will offer a few excerpts to give you the idea without having to spend the better part of your day reading it.

Gosden believes it is quite possible that the countries of the West will soon experience chemical- and biological-weapons attacks far more serious and of greater lasting effect than the anthrax incidents of last autumn and the nerve-agent attack on the Tokyo subway system several years ago—that what happened in Kurdistan was only the beginning. "For Saddam's scientists, the Kurds were a test population," she said. "They were the human guinea pigs. It was a way of identifying the most effective chemical agents for use on civilian populations, and the most effective means of delivery."

Increased rates of infertility, he said, are having a profound effect on Kurdish society, which places great importance on large families. "You have men divorcing their wives because they could not give birth, and then marrying again, and then their second wives can't give birth, either," he said. "Still, they don't blame their own problem with spermatogenesis."

Baban told me that the initial results of the Halabja Medical Institute-sponsored survey show abnormally high rates of many diseases. He said that he compared rates of colon cancer in Halabja with those in the city of Chamchamal, which was not attacked with chemical weapons. "We are seeing rates of colon cancer five times higher in Halabja than in Chamchamal," he said.

There are other anomalies as well, Baban said. The rate of miscarriage in Halabja, according to initial survey results, is fourteen times the rate of miscarriage in Chamchamal; rates of infertility among men and women in the affected population are many times higher than normal. "We're finding Hiroshima levels of sterility," he said.

Then, there is the suspicion about snakes. "Have you heard about the snakes?" he asked as we drove. I told him that I had heard rumors. "We don't know if a genetic mutation in the snakes has made them more toxic," Baban went on, "or if the birds that eat the snakes were killed off in the attacks, but there seem to be more snakebites, of greater toxicity, in Halabja now than before."

Baban said that in Halabja "there are more abnormal births than normal ones," and other Kurdish doctors told me that they regularly see children born with neural-tube defects and undescended testes and without anal openings. They are seeing—and they showed me—children born with six or seven toes on each foot, children whose fingers and toes are fused, and children who suffer from leukemia and liver cancer.

Most of the Kurds who were murdered in the Anfal were not killed by poison gas; rather, the genocide was carried out, in large part, in the traditional manner, with roundups at night, mass executions, and anonymous burials. The bodies of most of the victims of the Anfal—mainly men and boys—have never been found.

. . .allegations include charges that Ansar al-Islam (a terrorist group that operates inside Iraq) has received funds directly from Al Qaeda; that the intelligence service of Saddam Hussein has joint control, with Al Qaeda operatives, over Ansar al-Islam; that Saddam Hussein hosted a senior leader of Al Qaeda in Baghdad in 1992; that a number of Al Qaeda members fleeing Afghanistan have been secretly brought into territory controlled by Ansar al-Islam; and that Iraqi intelligence agents smuggled conventional weapons, and possibly even chemical and biological weapons, into Afghanistan. If these charges are true, it would mean that the relationship between Saddam's regime and Al Qaeda is far closer than previously thought.

. . .about ten years ago Saddam underwent something of a battlefield conversion to a fundamentalist brand of Islam. "It was gradual, starting the moment he decided on the invasion of Kuwait," in June of 1990, according to Amatzia Baram, an Iraq expert at the University of Haifa. "His calculation was that he needed people in Iraq and the Arab world—as well as God—to be on his side when he invaded. After he invaded, the Islamic rhetorical style became overwhelming"—so overwhelming, Baram continued, that a radical group in Jordan began calling Saddam "the New Caliph Marching from the East." This conversion, cynical though it may be, has opened doors to Saddam in the fundamentalist world. He is now a prime supporter of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and of Hamas, paying families of suicide bombers ten thousand dollars in exchange for their sons' martyrdom. This is part of Saddam's attempt to harness the power of Islamic extremism and direct it against his enemies.

The man they introduced me to the next afternoon was a twenty-nine-year-old Iranian Arab, a smuggler and bandit from the city of Ahvaz. The intelligence officials told me that his most recent employer was bin Laden. When they arrested him, last year, they said, they found a roll of film in his possession. They had the film developed, and the photographs, which they showed me, depicted their prisoner murdering a man with a knife, slicing his ear off and then plunging the knife into the top of the man's head.

One day in 1999, Othman(Osoma bin Laden contact) got a message to Jawad(Al Qaeda smuggler mentioned in the preceeding paragraph), who was then in Iran. He was to smuggle himself across the Iraqi border at Fao, where a car would meet him and take him to a village near Tikrit, the headquarters of Saddam Hussein's clan. Jawad was then taken to a meeting at the house of a man called Luay, whom he described as the son of Saddam's father-in-law, Khayr Allah Talfah. (Professor Baram, who has long followed Saddam's family, later told me he believes that Luay, who is about forty years old, is close to Saddam's inner circle.) At the meeting, with Othman present, Mukhabarat officials instructed Jawad to go to Baghdad, where he was to retrieve several cannisters filled with explosives. Then, he said, he was to arrange to smuggle the explosives into Iran, where they would be used to kill anti-Iraqi activists. After this assignment was completed, Jawad said, he was given a thousand Kalashnikov rifles by Iraqi intelligence and told to smuggle them into Afghanistan.

A year later, there was a new development: Othman told Jawad to smuggle several dozen refrigerator motors into Afghanistan for the Iraqi Mukhabarat; a cannister filled with liquid was attached to each motor. Jawad said that he asked Othman for more information. "I said, 'Othman, what does this contain?' He said, 'My life and your life.' He said they"—the Iraqi agents—"were going to kill us if we didn't do this. That's all I'll say.

"I was given a book of dollars," Jawad went on, meaning ten thousand dollars—a hundred American hundred-dollar bills. "I was told to arrange to smuggle the motors. Othman told me to kill any of the smugglers who helped us once we got there." Vehicles belonging to the Taliban were waiting at the border, and Jawad said that he turned over the liquid-filled refrigerator motors to the Taliban, and then killed the smugglers who had helped him.

I asked (Kurdish Prime Minister) Salih to respond to the criticism, widely aired in the West, that the sanctions have led to the death of thousands of children. "Sanctions don't kill Iraqi children," he said. "The regime kills children."

The Kurds face an institutional disadvantage at the U.N., where, unlike the Palestinians, they have not even been granted official observer status. Salih grew acerbic: "Compare us to other liberation movements around the world. We are very mature. We don't engage in terror. We don't condone extremist nationalist notions that can only burden our people. Please compare what we have achieved in the Kurdistan national-authority areas to the Palestinian national authority of Mr. Arafat. We have spent the last ten years building a secular, democratic society, a civil society. What has he built?"

There is some debate among arms-control experts about exactly when Saddam will have nuclear capabilities. But there is no disagreement that Iraq, if unchecked, will have them soon, and a nuclear-armed Iraq would alter forever the balance of power in the Middle East. "The first thing that occurs to any military planner is force protection," Charles Duelfer told me. "If your assessment of the threat is chemical or biological, you can get individual protective equipment and warning systems. If you think he's going to use a nuclear weapon, where are you going to concentrate your forces?"

There is little doubt what Saddam might do with an atomic bomb or with his stocks of biological and chemical weapons. When I talked about Saddam's past with the medical geneticist Christine Gosden, she said, "Please understand, the Kurds were for practice."

I was driving Wylie home tonight when he says, "It's Dark!"
"Yeah," I said, "That means that it is almost time to go night-night"
The boy bristles, "No, I not go night-night. I not tired."
I replied, "But Wylie, it is so much fun to go night-night. I love going to bed."
The boy gets a smug look on his face, "But Dadoe . . . you sleep in Momma's bed."

The most amazing coincidence happened yesterday. When I got home from work my mom was there waiting for me with two pairs of brand new slacks. She had not read my post, she just loves me!

James Lileks is amazing today. Really amazing. I am not going to reprint an excerpt because you need to click over and read the whole thing.

Ode to my Favorite Pants

Two sizes too big in the waist, two inches too long in the legs. My favorite pants that I have ever owned came from J.C. Penney’s and were not purchased on sale. There were a gift from my momma for Christmas, but she let me pick them out. They were gray, and I might have preferred olive green, but that did not keep them from becoming my favorite pants of all time.

They were big and wide in the legs and pleated in the front which made plenty of room in the crotch. The pleats also made plenty of room in the butt, which is more important. I am bulky in the moneymaker. These fantastic slacks had cuffs folded over at the bottom of the legs that would collect dirt and lint and perhaps even crumbs while I was eating. If I had on sandals, the back side of the cuffs would tuck under my foot, between heel and sandal. If I had on sneakers or my favorite shoes (which are a whole other story) the cuffs at the bottom of the legs would tuck under the heel of my shoes and get walked on.


These were the very definition of comfort. Sliding my legs into them was like putting on a fresh coat of love. My flesh swam around in them all day and was never constricted. I wore them often – at least twice a week, sometimes more – for they made me feel like a man. I rarely dared to place them in the dirty clothes hamper, for who knew when they might return? These pants had to desperately need a washing to get one. If you love someone set them free, you might say? Not me with these fair slacks.

On Sunday mornings I would stand in front of my closet and contemplate, “How many Sundays in a row have I worn these. Have people started to notice? Does that even matter? There would be plenty of time to wash them from Sunday to Sunday. These people do not know that I wore them to work on Monday and Thursday. They are the most comfortable thing I own. I don’t care, I am wearing them.”

Those were the days, the good ole’ days, the days of the Haggar wrinkle free 40x32’s. When I look back on them my mind sees me as thinner, more handsome, smarter, and happier. When I look back on them I see a simpler, more honest time. A time when I was not so scared, not so alone, not so overwhelmed. When I look back on them, I long for them.

I first noticed them wearing out down where they had been walked on. I knew it would happen eventually, but why so soon? This did not seem like a crisis and I ignored it, continuing to wear the pants as if they were brand new and just as stylish and elegant as ever. Soon I noticed that the fraying went all the way around the pants leg. This was very disheartening, for they might not be easily passed off at work or at church any longer. It did not stop me, though. These were my favorite britches I had ever owned. Wearing them was like going home and I would not soon give it up. Perhaps their life could have been extended if at that point I had put them away for extraordinary occasions, but these were not pants that could be retired. These were not pants that would go gentle into the good night. These were rock-and-freaking-roll slacks and they would rather burn out than fade away. I would maintain my strict pants wearing regimen.

It was not long after that. No fabric can stand up indefinitely to the corrosive powers of crotch sweat. One morning I was dressing for work a little disoriented from the long winters nap. I lost my balance and my foot went right through the crotch of my chinos to the floor. There in the dark bedroom I finally had to accept the demise of these perfect britches. I knew they could never be replaced. I knew there was nothing in my closet that would compare. Bent over and pantsless in the twilight, I was overwhelmed. A bleak and lonesome tear slipped down my cheek.

Five glasses of wine a day 'halves risk of second heart attack'

Men who drink wine every day after suffering a heart attack have the risk of having another one cut by half compared with teetotallers, according to a French study.

The study followed 353 men aged between 40 and 60 for four years after their attack as part of a larger investigation aimed at seeing if the Mediterranean diet could prevent further heart problems and strokes.

All the men had suffered heart attacks of a similar level of severity, were taking similar treatments for their condition and led similar lifestyles.

The researchers monitored how much wine each man drank and divided them into groups - teetotal, drinking less than two glasses of wine a day, drinking about two glasses of wine a day and drinking four to five glasses a day.

The research, in the journal of the American Heart Association, Circulation, said that men who drank more than two glasses of wine a day reduced their risk of having another heart attack, a stroke or heart failure by 50 per cent, compared with the non drinkers.

There were 36 of these complications (ie a second heart attack or stroke) among the teetotallers, 34 among men who drank less than two glasses of wine a day, 18 among those who drank about two glasses a day and 16 among the men who drank four or five glasses of wine a day.

Salon has an article this morning detailing the sad world of Christian end-times movies. A world so sad, in fact, that I lost interest after about half of the article. If anyone makes it all the way to the end, tell me what happened. This is the passage that made me change the channel:

The latest van Heerden release, "Deceived," is described in the press kit as inspired by "Contact" and "Seven," but is really closer to the old "Star Trek" episode "The Naked Time." More playful than the dire "Apocalypse" movies, it's set in a deserted observatory (erroneously referred to in the movie as a "space station") where everyone's worst sin emerges. Then a weary-looking Judd Nelson realizes what's going on: SETI@Home, the distributed-computing project for analyzing signals from space, is functioning as no less than Satan's own peer-to-peer AudioGalaxy network.

When a signal arrives with a suspicious duration of 6.66 seconds, the usual archetypal characters from rapture movies have their own plans for it. Louis Gossett Jr., as a power-mad general, wants to control it. A crackpot New Age radio host -- the kind of comic-relief character only found in Christian entertainment -- begins raving about how the signal will "evolve" humans to a "higher consciousness" (evolution frequently appears in these movies in conjunction with madness.) The eyebrow-cocking "dot-com billionaire" wants to sell it, exclaiming: "It'll be the biggest webcast in history!" And the lusty TV reporter, naturally, wants to corrupt Judd.

But when the foxiest lady around, a chaste space scientist and Christian role model (well-toned Michelle Nolden) persuades Nelson that the signal is evil, and thus shouldn't be studied, good wins out. All the un-Christian players who thought they were sophisticated receive comeuppances. The once-proud anchorwoman asks to borrow the Bible. Carl Sagan rolls in his grave.

Hurrah! They figured it out.

With my former optimism for the baseball strike turning to dismay, today I shall prove myself to be an even older fart than anyone (other than Ms. J.) previously thought by discussing the current state of popular music. I caught the last half of the MTV Video Music Awards last night, and then the first few minutes of the replay. That was all I could take. During Jimmy Fallon’s opening number he fell to the ground and James Brown came out to sing to him, “Get up-ah . . . Get on up-ah . . . you gotta’ start the show.” It was all down hill from there. After reflecting on the depressing quagmire of horrible performances last night I have come to the conclusion that the artist with the most influence over today’s pop music scene would have to be Paula Abdul. She was a dancer and good looking, not a singer. In fact it has been alleged that she did not even sing on her records. I think that it is safe to say that she invented the kind of dancing that you see on MTV now, with the artist in the middle flanked by a co-ed group of dancers – all of them doing synchronized jukes and thrusts.

Most of the performers: Eminem, Justin Timberlake, Puffy Puff-Puff Diddio, were introduced as “great entertainers” and not singers or musicians. I don’t think I would agree that they entertained me, certainly not greatly, but I would heartily agree that they are not singers. In the above list of performances, I never heard a single live sound coming from the stage. Not one. Nothing! No live sound. I remember when I was a kid and I loved MTV; yeah most of the pop singers lip-synced, but the rappers would really rap and the talking at the first of the song would not be lip-synced. Last night, there was not a single sound during most of the performances that was not from tape. It was shameless. They did not even try to fool anyone. I do not know why they even insult us with the prop-mic. It obviously does not work, the performers did not even say, “thank you” at the end of the song. At least we were not forced to watch the spectacle of Britney Spears constantly adjusting her fake headset mic as if she is trying to get better reception.

The new rule is that you can not have a performance at the MTV awards now without elaborate sets, blinding lighting displays, constant pyrotechnic explosions, and 250 people on the stage. Each year they try to outdo the last. I think that Puff the Magic Diddy’s performance was the most obnoxious display of excess I have ever seen, with hundres of dancers, people with pogo shoes doing flips, extras shuffling in and out, people swinging by on trapeze, more rappers and fakers coming out and lip-syncing. They will do anything to try to distract people from the reality that none of these people are singing! They even went so far as to shoot the entire show with some kind of choppy, effected look to further distract the viewers. This is supposedly a show about awarding great musical performances, yet there is not a single bit of music being performed. At least most of them did not have a band up there pantomiming. I think Justin Timberlake was the only one to pull that one.

There were some performances that were live. I did not get to see The Boss perform with the E-Street Band, but I am sure they were live and awesome. He always is. As a matter of fact, he is entirely too classy of a performer for the disgraceful load of garbage that was most of the rest of the show. Sheryl Crow played piano and sang a nice tune. She is always good, especially when you do not have to listen to her live band which is mediocre at best. A band called The Hives played. I have never heard of them, but they looked like they were doing an impression of the Stones from 1964 doing an impression of the Ramones from 1976. They were entertaining and performed their own music live, even if they were not particularly talented. They were immediately followed by a group called The Vines, who sounded like a neo-Nirvana clone; the lead singer had a black eye and they were loud and they smashed their shit at the end of the song.







But the highlight of the night, the moment that will live in infamy, was the surprise performance from Guns and F-ing Roses at the end of the show. When Jimmy Fallon came out in the skull GNR shirt from the 80’s and started whistling Patience, I almost lost it. They played Welcome to the Jungle, they played some crappy new song with lots of synth and a drum loop, and then they played Paradise City. The only original members left in the band are Axl and Izzy, but they are certainly the most important ones as Izzy wrote all of the music and Axl the lyrics. The other musicians are all hired guns; they can all play very well and they all look very disturbing. Axl never sounded better live than he did last night. (But again, in the 80’s he never resorted to lip-syncing, even when he could not even approximate the vocals on the album.) All in all, it rocked, but was not enough to restore my faith in Rock and Roll.













Non-musical highlights include:










Britney Spears gave Michael Jackson a birthday cake and unable to avoid acting like a freak, he gave an acceptance speech from notes as if he had just been awarded the Nobel Weirdo Prize. His speech included the exclamation, “David Blaine, your magic is real and I believe in you!”




























Diamond Dave Lee Roth and Sammy Hagar presented the Best Rock Video award. Dave has a wig that has been fashioned to look just like his hair did in 1980. Sammy looks a whole lot like Mark Currey with blonde hair, but that is just my opinion.























Can you tell that Brandi is a nursing mother of a newborn?



















As depressing as the show was, and it positively moved me to anger, I will watch again next year. I have to. It is the only time all year that I catch up on what is going on in pop. Although I am an old man, I do not want to be out of the loop altogether. But the reason I will always watch the video music awards is that I love to get mad and bitch about the state of the music business. I love to point out how horrible they are and how fake and unholy and without redeeming quality the whole thing is. It makes me feel superior.

A city in Minnesota places a tax on rainwater.

CNN reports that 70,000 Austrailians identified their religion as "Jedi" in the government census last year. Jonah Goldberg points out that it is better than marking "Unitarian"

Master economist Larry Kudlow has an piece on NRO concerning the economics of the baseball strike. While Keith Olbermann reports this morning that the two sides are close to an agreement, Mr. Kudlow makes it very plain who you should be rooting for.

Today's threatened baseball strike is all about the Yankees and their great success. The baseball owners, guilty of class-warfare thinking, would love to take actions that would severely damage the great Yankee franchise. In the process, they would also cripple the standing of the game and the game's players.

Owners want a new revenue-sharing plan that allegedly would take more money from the rich teams and redistribute it to the poor ones. They would also institute an unbelievable 50 percent luxury tax on teams with high payrolls.

Step back a moment and think about this. In today's soft economy, if anyone in Washington proposed a 50 percent tax on luxuries the general public would instantly label them out of their minds. Yet the owners carry on with just such a tax-the-rich campaign. It's a scheme that would make Al Gore blush.

In so doing, the owners would do to the baseball economy what a similar luxury tax would do to the gross domestic product of the United States. They'd cripple it. Don't forget that George Bush the elder raised a luxury tax in 1990 that doomed his presidency and made a mild recession even worse. Instead of sticking it to the rich, the tax threw millions of blue-collar workers — those who produced the goods and services qualifying as luxuries — out of jobs. Major League Baseball players are dead right to oppose this crazy plan and the owners are completely wrong to favor it.

More, if anyone cares to look at the facts, the rich teams they would tax frequently fail. Yes, the New York Yankees and Atlanta Braves have dominated the game in the last decade, but that's a result of good management on the field and in the front office. Plenty of other "rich teams" have fared poorly.

Think of the major-media-market Los Angeles Dodgers. Or the Boston Red Sox. Or the other perennial losers in prime locations like Philadelphia, Baltimore, Detroit, and Chicago. The Cubs and the White Sox fail miserably each year, but it's the owners and management — and not the Yankees — who are to blame. The Cubs, in particular, report poor economic performance. But that's a sham. The team's excess revenues are upstreamed to the Tribune Company, which owns the Cubs, rather than back into the team.

League-wide, teams use phony accounting that would make former Enron executives proud. They depreciate stadium-related assets although the taxpayers financed the stadiums. They use phony accounting for minor-league team expenses. And they never open their books for full disclosure — the exact same sin that has sent many corporate CEOs to jail.

Why should poorly managed teams be subsidized in the first place? When sinking companies in Japan and elsewhere in the Pacific Rim were subsidized the economists labeled it industrial targeting. In baseball, it's nothing more than crony capitalism.

And since when does America punish success? Taxing success will generate less of it, both for the Yankees and the other teams. For example, when the Yankees go on the road they routinely draw crowds much larger than the home team usually brings to their ballpark. In places like Tampa Bay and Chicago, Yankee magic rubs off on all concerned, including local TV viewers and radio listeners. That the poorer franchises don't build on this success is not the fault of the Yankees. Blaming the Yankees in this way is akin to blaming rich Americans for injecting capital in start-up businesses that in turn create new jobs and greater wealth.

A dearth of taxes is not what ails baseball, but the selfishness of owners. They'd prefer to pick the pockets of players and fans than let poorly managed teams go under. If the baseball economy were based on free-market capitalist principles, poorly-run teams would indeed go under — and rightly so.

Salon.com has an interview with Steve Earle this morning. A few excerpts:

Steve Earle on Poetry:

It's like bluegrass. Deciding to be a poet is a hardcore decision. It's saying, "I'm going to do something that's really hard, that I'll never master, and that will never make me a fucking dime." Bluegrass and poetry have a lot in common.

On Spirituality:

I'd be a really bad Buddhist. I really hate to kill things now but I don't mind that other people kill them so I can eat them. I think it would be really hard on me to get that introspective. My spirituality boils down to that there is a God, and it ain't me. That's what's important for me to remember.

Our attempts to be God are where we fuck up. When we start trying to control shit or control the illusion that we control things, it's bad. The vast majority of times I still want to control everything and I wear myself out and then I have these moments where I'm able to literally let it go and those are the best times.

On Baseball:

It sounds weird but ballparks are the most tranquil structures human beings have ever built. For me, more than any church, more than anything else. I'm a huge Yankees fan. I was 6 years old in 1961 and that's what you got on TV in Texas was the Yankees. But I'll go to any ballpark, it doesn't matter. We have a triple-A team in Nashville and I go a lot. I can walk in and it happens almost immediately. As soon as I get to the top of the steps and see the green, I start feeling better. The shape of the fields, the colors, everything about 'em, I love 'em.

On Texas and Patriotism:

It's funny about Texas. I'll always be a Texan because there's no cure for it. Probably if there was, I'd take it. There are a lot of things about Texas that really bother me and more each time I go back. . . . I'll always be a Texan and I'll always be an American. I may not always live in the U.S., but I'll always be an American. The government can't decide whether I'm an American or not.

Keith Olbermann gives a day by day forecast for the baseball strike that is somewhat encouraging. He sees as a worst case scenario about nine days of strike, and seems to think that the strike will likely be avoided. His reasoning, bankers calling in loans to the owners that they can not pay without baseball games to generate revenue. Here is his play by play for Thursday:

Thursday, Aug. 29, 2002: Sometime on this day the owners -- probably still clinging to the $107 million mark for the luxury tax threshold for all four years of the deal -- will suddenly instruct their mouthpieces to push it up in at least the final three years. If their creditors, TV partners and sponsors have scared them enough, the offer will be sufficient for the players to say yes and to announce a tentative settlement in time for Peter Jennings to nod sagely about it.

If the owners present a lukewarm offer that Don Fehr still thinks he can finesse in short order, some kind of public announcement or leakage of "positive signs," will be made by 6 p.m. EDT. This is pure logistics: Players have to know whether to travel to the cities in which their new weekend series will begin the next day. The union has never sent players into the air to get to games unless it expects those games to be played.


There remains a 50-50 chance that despite all the exterior pressure, all the fear of cataclysmic revenue collapse and ownership financial fatalities, management will still be belligerent. In that event, talks will break off by dinnertime or by midevening at the latest, and the strike will begin at the end of the Tampa Bay at Anaheim game, around 12:30 a.m.

Simple rule of thumb here: If they haven't broken off talks and announced a strike by 7 or 8 p.m., they've probably got a deal, or at worst, are about to get one.

Interview with Myself

For RHET 3316


1. In your family or among your friends, whom do you consider to be the most influential person in your life? Why?

The person who has had the most profound effect on my outlook would have to be the boy, Wylie Allman Greer. He has taught me more about patience, respect, and how to deal with other people than anything else I have done. He has shown me a picture of God’s love for us. He amazes me with his capacity for learning and his natural sense of compassion.

2. What is the best advice that you ever received? How did it change your life?

I read in one of my wife’s magazines last week, “If you can’t fix it, forget it.” I thought this to be something I could really use, but I have not put it in to practice enough yet for it to make any difference. The problem that I am going to have is that I will stress myself out trying to prove that there is some way I can fix it.

3. What type of music, movies, or other entertainment do you like best? Who are your favorite performers and why?

I tend to prefer performances where the artists are allowed room to improvise and/or the piece is captured live. This is true for all of the performing arts. I like Jazz, Bluegrass, and Improvisational rock (My son’s middle name is Allman). My favorite movie makers are The Cohen Brothers and David Mammet.

4. If you could have dinner with any three persons, living or dead, who would they be? Why would these be your choices?

It would be impossible to pick just three and it is a lot more fun to make up several dinner parties of people whose conversations you would like to eavesdrop on. I would cook the food and keep the wineglasses full and stand in a corner and listen.
Calvin Coolidge, C.S. Lewis, and William F. Buckley.
Condoleezza Rice, Germaine Greer, and Sojourner Truth.
P.J. O’Rourke, Christopher Buckley, and Dennis Miller.
John Calvin, Billy Graham, and the Apostle Paul.

5. Realistically, what do you think that you’ll be doing – or what would you like to be doing – ten years from now?

I see myself freelance writing for webzines and periodicals from an office in my house. Perhaps I could publish a book here and there. My sweet wife will be running a successful decorating business from an office in our house. I would like another kid or two running around trying to distract us from working. In a dream world I would also have a recording studio in my back yard where I could hang out with my buddy Dan in the evenings and a shack on a river somewhere where my family could spend the weekends.

6. What is the one thing that you would like to change about yourself? Why?

I wish I could go back and talk to myself when I was about fifteen. First I would convince myself to get a GED and go to college as soon as possible. Then I would tell myself what I want to major in and what I enjoy doing in life, because this took me ten years of floundering to figure out. Basically I would cut out all of the wasted time and ensure that I would not find myself with a family and a mortgage, locked into a job that ruins my day and having to both go to school and work full time. Do I have any regrets? Damn right.

Dave Shiflett on the Sex in St. Patrick's scandal.

Most Virginians, at the very least, are taught early on that there are some things you just don't do in church. You can snooze, but you never snore. Your mind can wander, but you must keep your hands to yourself. You can go in drunk, but don't complain if the parson singles you out as the Devil's Spawn and someone picks your pocket.

And you certainly don't go into church for a poke. That's true even if you're married and the place is empty. You might take a tumble in the graveyard but it had better be a very dark night and you'd better leave the place just as you left it. One goes to church on Sunday, as the old saying goes, to beg that Saturday night's wild oats experience a divinely directed crop failure.

Check out this article on faith by Condoleezza Rice in the Washington times. If she is not Bush’s running mate in ’04, it will be a shame. Can you imagine a Rice/Powell ticket in ’08? Wouldn’t that just be pee in the cheerios of the political left!

When I first moved to California in 1981 to join the faculty at Stanford, there were a lot of years when I was not attending church regularly. I was traveling a lot. I was a specialist in international politics, so I was always traveling abroad. I was always in another time zone. One Sunday I was in the Lucky's Supermarket not very far from my house — I will never forget — among the spices and an African-American man walked up to me and said he was buying some things for his church picnic. And he said, "Do you play the piano by any chance?"
I said, "Yes." They said they were looking for someone to play the piano at church. It was a little African-American church right in the center of Palo Alto. A Baptist church. So I started playing for that church. That got me regularly back into churchgoing. I don't play gospel very well — I play Brahms — and you know how black ministers will start a song and the musicians will pick it up? I had no idea what I was doing and so I called my mother, who had played for Baptist churches.
"Mother," I said, "they just start. How am I supposed to do this?" She said, "Honey, play in C and they'll come back to you." And that's true. If you play in C, people will come back. I tell that story because I thought to myself, "My goodness, God has a long reach." I mean, in the Lucky's Supermarket on a Sunday morning.

I noticed that commenting has been unavailable for a few days now. I finally got an opportunity yesterday afternoon to go to the site that I use for this service, netcomments.co.uk, and see what the deal was. Looks like they do not exist any more. This is a real drag. I guess I am going to have to find another hosting service.

I realize that I am going to have to admit that I read a gossip column to share the following. Amy Reiter reports:

I'm actually starting to feel a little sorry for Britney Spears. The pop princess, trying to take a little time away from the spotlight, has nevertheless fallen victim to a couple of Montreal radio pranksters. According to the Canadian Press, a radio duo who call themselves the Masked Avengers dialed up Britney, told her they were Celine Dion and invited her to perform a duet -- "Let's Make a Hole in One" -- with Tiger Woods at a bogus charity event. Spears gushingly accepted.

Now I realize that nobody who reads this blog loves baseball as much as I do, and I further realize that none of my friends and family who love baseball read this blog. That is not going to keep me from discussing the forecast work stoppage and what a dishonest load of bunk that it is. It is so frustrating how none of the fans seems to know what the issues are, and none of the players or owners seem to be honest about what is going on. Once again, Allen Barra seems to have the best take on it. I apologize for quoting so much of the article, but it really is the only sorce that I have been able to locate that tells the dern truth about what is going on.

Though the economics-impaired writers and commentators covering the negotiations don't seem to understand it, so-called revenue sharing is not and never has been Bud Selig's primary motive. If the owners simply wanted to share more revenue, they'd have gone to the players and said: "Let us share X amount of dollars, and we will guarantee you that that money will go to players' salaries instead of into our pockets." But of course they haven't done that.

The fans and so-called small-market cities have been driven to a fever pitch by the commissioner's carefully calculated rhetoric regarding revenue sharing. They honestly believe that the selfishness and greed of a few owners (almost all of them it seems, with the name Steinbrenner) are keeping them from a big nest of golden eggs and that Bud's war against the players is going to get them their share of these golden eggs. They're right about the first part: The big-market owners are greedy and they are sitting on golden eggs. But the small-market owners are dead wrong if they think Commissioner Bud's plan is going to get them some of those eggs.

Apparently what is going on is that Bud the Dud wants to raise the so called “Luxury Tax” to fifty percent. The luxury tax is assessed any time a team exceeds its payroll limit. The Tax is currently twenty percent and is placed in a pool that goes to the teams with the lowest revenue. The problem is, if the tax were raised to fifty percent, no one would be able to afford to go over their payroll limit, and no one would. This would not distribute more money to the poorer teams and it would not distribute better players to the poorer teams, it would only serve to keep player salaries down.

Now I am not going to try to convince anyone that the players are not getting paid enough, but it is obvious that the players are getting paid what the market will bear. If the owners could not afford to pay the players as much as they are paying them they would not offer them such expensive contracts. Back to Mr. Berra:

For instance, there was a photo in the New York Times last Tuesday, Aug. 20, which showed a banner from Pittsburgh Pirates fans: "Better a Strike Than Five More Years of Yankee $tranglehold." One would like to point out that it hasn't been the Yankees oppressing the Pittsburgh Pirates the last two years, but the leading team in their own league, the Arizona Diamondbacks. One would also like to point out the principal reason the Pirates are a small-market team has to do not with the success of the New York Yankees but with the decline of the U.S. steel industry. No, forget all that. What I'd really like to say to the Pittsburgh fans with the banner is: "We're sorry in New York that you suck so much," but let that pass.

This is another example of how uneducated the fans are about this. Just look at your history books. Free agency started in 1976. If you look at the years before that when player salaries were often moderate to low compared to almost any other profession, will you discover that a different team won the World Series every year? Get Real! Baseball is a sport of dynasties. It is one of the things that make it great. The greatest fans in baseball are the ones that eternally root for the Cubs or the Red Sox, two large market teams that have not won a Series in any of their current fan’s lifetimes.

Also can you imagine Major League Baseball in a world where there was no good reason to hate the Yankees and Steinbrenner? Over to you, Allen:

One dummy who is, is San Diego Padres' John Moores. "If the players strike," he says, "I'll be prepared to sit out a season. I'm not going to be part of a crazy system where we have to keep raising ticket prices." Moores is either a dummy or he's blatantly dishonest. He knows very well that the players' salaries don't have a damn thing to do with the price of tickets, a figure that is dictated entirely by supply and demand, and that if the players went back to the salaries of 1976 (the first year of free agency), he wouldn't lower the price of a ticket to a Padres game by so much as one nickel. (They don't pay the players in college football or basketball games, but college ticket prices rival those of the pros.)

Did you hear what he said? ”They don't pay the players in college football or basketball games, but college ticket prices rival those of the pros.” Again, this is simple economics. Ticket prices are what the market will bear. Player salaries are what the market will bear. It cost just as much to go to a Arkansas Razorback football game as it does to go to a Texas Rangers Baseball game, and perhaps even more. Does anyone really think that if all of the Major League players started volunteering their skills and playing for free, the owners would knock ticket prices down to two dollars each?

The reason Moores is a dummy is because he is willing (or at least he says he's willing) to lose a season to support a plan that, if it succeeds, will almost certainly give him less money than the one in place but will greatly benefit the teams who are economically advantaged, such as his giant neighbor slightly to the north, Rupert Murdoch in Los Angeles. When is it going to occur to owners like Moores that their enemies are not the players but the commissioner and the handful of powerful owners who keep leading them down the path of disaster?

Why, in short, don't John Moores and his fellow small-market owners threaten to sit out the season if Ted Turner, Rupert Murdoch and a handful of others don't come up with a fairer system of dividing the revenue before it even reaches the players? In other words, why don't the small-market owners simply strike against the big-market owners? It's the biggest mystery in this whole sordid mess, because if the small-market owners are desperate enough to go to war, why not go to a war they can win? The Players' Association has never been beaten; the commissioner and the big-market owners have been beaten every time out. I know who I'd choose to fight

Major League baseball can be saved, but a strike would kill it.
Three easy moves that would vastly improve the future of baseball:
1) Remove the anti-trust exemption.
2) Immediately remove Bud Selig from the office of the commissioner and put him in prison on trumped up charges. (OK, that last part would not help baseball, but would make a lot of people happy)
3) Make a new rule that the Commissioner of Baseball may not be a current or former owner, and must be a former baseball player, even in the amateur ranks. I don’t think that Bud Selig ever even played Tee Ball. He was too busy dressing up in three piece suits and turning the neighborhood kids against each other.

I got out of bed this morning and as usual, as soon as my feet hit the floor, I heard Wylie calling to me from the other room. I opened the door and he said, "I'm told, Dadoe. I need a shirt. I'm told!" As I got closer to the bed I could see that he had removed every stitch of pajamas that he had had on the night before, including his diaper.

Dick: Greetings Mr. Presley! Welcome to the White House.

King: Thank you, thank you very . . . well you know the rest.

D: So how are things down in Memphis?

K: I wouldn’t know, Mr. Pres. The Colonel has been keeping me on the move these days. When I am not in Vegas, he is traveling me ‘round the rest of the country.

D: So what brings you to Washington?

K: I was looking to get me one of those smooth badges.

D: A badge? Why didn’t you ask a Memphis cop, or even the chief of police? Why go all the way to the president?

K: ‘cause I want one of those dope badges.

D: You mean the DEA?

K: Whatever, Cat. All I know is them dopes is bad, bad stuff! Sunny and Red was telling me about them Dopers and how crazy they are.

D: But Mr. Presley, what are you going to do to fight drug use?

K: I seen those Hippies, Man them is some crazy fellers. All Wild eyed and long haired, I tell you it just ain’t natural. Hippies! Every last one of them. Taking drugs and havin’ matrimonial relations outside of the Lord’s own covenant of Marriage. You know why those hippies think that they can get away with acting like that? I’ll tell you why: Dope. It’s that damn dope. Bad stuff I tell you, Bad stuff.

D: Well in that case, Mr. Presley, I think we can find you a DEA badge. I hate those damn hippies myself. Always protesting and acting like a bunch of communists. I tell you, a bath would do them a world of good.

K: I tell you what else I hate, that is those dang manatees. I tell you those are some fat, lazy, ugly looking creatures.

D: I don’t know what you are talking about.

K: always making those jolly little smiley faces whenever they pop up. Look over there man, there is one of those damn manatees right there. Look at that thing, Man that thing is huge!

D: Sir, are you alright?

K: Back off there real nice and slow there, Dick. I see one of them there manatees headed this way.

D: Now you listen here, Mr. Presley . . .

Sonny and Red: (in unison) Please do not touch The King unless he requests it, sir.

K: Say Dick, you know what I love? Big baggy silk pajamas. That and bacon. Man, when you get up at 3:00 in the afternoon from a long nights sleep and you got on your big baggy floral pattern silk pajamas and no underwear underneath and then that sweet old black lady that lives in the basement brings you a big plate of bacon. Could you rustle me up some bacon, Dick? Bacon with some white gravy. That would be real nice. First lets take us a pretty picture for all my lovin’ fans.

The state of California proves again that they have no respect whatsoever for personal freedom. They are currently warning parents that they have to obtain professional teaching credentials in order to home school their children. This is totalitarian and certainly will spawn a mammoth outcry.

Without the proper credentials, parents no longer can file required paperwork that would authorize them to home school their children, states a memo issued by the state Department of Education. As a result, those children not attending public schools would be considered "truant" by local school districts.
"In California, 'home schooling' — a situation where non-credentialed parents teach their own children, exclusively, at home whether using correspondence courses or other types of courses — is not an authorized exemption from mandatory public school attendance," state Deputy Superintendent Joanne Mendoza wrote in the July 16 memo to all school employees.
"Furthermore, a parent's filing of the affidavit required of a private school does not transform that parent into a private school," the memo continued. "Therefore, those parents who home-school their children are operating outside the law, and there is no reason for them to file an affidavit."

This is obvious ploy by the state to take more freedom and money away from parents is further proof that it is long past time to break up the public school monopoly in this country.

I fell quite certain that this will soon become my Dad's favorite web site.

Follow this link to hear the disturbing story of how two research Psychiatrists at the University of Oklahoma in 1962 killed an elephant with 3000 hits of acid. Another proud moment in the history of science.

In the no duh file, scientists have discovered that alcohol consumption makes people seem more attractive than they actually are to the person consuming the alcohol. Oh, the marvels of modern science. Here is the Reuters report.

British scientists have found even modest amounts of alcohol will make the opposite sex appear better-looking.

"We have carried out experiments which show that what is known in the trade as the 'beer-goggle effect' does actually exist," Barry Jones, professor of psychology at Glasgow University, told Reuters on Monday.

The study of 120 male and female students found drinking up to four units of alcohol - about one litre of beer or four glasses of wine - increased the perceived attractiveness of members of the opposite sex by about 25 percent.

This site has a large selection of Christian Chocolates, which begs the obvious question: were you there for your snack food's salvation experience?

After returning from five days of vacation I had 159 new email messages in my various inboxes.

Surely I will have something more significant to say later. First I wanted to share this headline from my National Lampoon Email newsletter:

Blacks rally for slavery reparations; whites rally for return of missing car stereos

As I mentioned yesterday, I am leaving at noon to go to Gulf Shores for a long weekend. That means that this is likely the last post until I get back. I will take a notebook and try to get some thoughts down to publish when I return. I especially hope to have a really funny story to tell on Pulley.

I hope your weekend looks like this!

If you are a regular reader of this blog then you know that I can not resist stories about breast milk or substance abuse. That is why I had to highlight this article in the Washington Post.

PITTSBURGH –– A judge accused of being drunk on the job and dropping his pants in public has agreed to resign, his attorney said.

Allegheny County Judge H. Patrick McFalls, 59, faced more than three dozen charges filed by the state's Judicial Conduct Board.

"Because much of the attention in this case involves matters fit for late-night comedy shows, the substance of the charges has been obscured by the extensive publicity and ridicule," attorney Robert Lampl said Tuesday. "It has become apparent that, both for the health of our client and out of respect for the judiciary, that it is in Judge McFalls' best interest to retire."

He is accused of being so drunk and disorderly that he was asked to leave a restaurant on Feb. 14. He was also accused of exposing his buttocks in mid-afternoon on a city street March 30 and charged with driving under the influence the same day.

In December, he was placed on paid leave after he was sued by three former staff members who said they were fired after reporting McFalls' alleged drinking problem and saying he had been drunk on the job.

On Feb. 5, McFalls reported his $60,000 Mercedes Benz stolen, but police found he had given it to a parking lot attendant who admired the car.

I have been trying to get registered for school today. That is one of the most frustrating things you can do. Since I am on the fifteen year college plan and I have sampled a smorgasbord of majors, I have completed all of the liberal arts requirements and I have all of the electives that I need. That means that I only need to take classes for my major (tech writing) and minor (history.) Anything else would be extraneous.

Well of the fifteen or so classes that I still have left to take, I was able to find exactly two that were scheduled when I can take them and still have open seats. Every single course number that I punched in would come back as “CLOSED COURSE” Even the telecourses and on-line courses. How do you run out of seats in a telecourse?

The good news is that Wylie and I might be able to graduate together.

So while I had that (and a very busy day at the office) working against me today, there are good things going on. First of all, Mark and I are having a wicked discussion in the comments section below in which we compare members of the two most recent presidential administrations to the characters on Dallas. This is the kind of dialog we need in this country.

Secondly, I am leaving for Gulf Shores tomorrow and I ain’t coming back until Tuesday night. Let me tell you, Ms. J and I are nigh ready for some vacation! We have not been out of town together for more than one night since our honeymoon five and a half years ago. There will be much eating and sleeping and reading, three things that you don’t get to do so much with the boy around the house. This is the perfect vacation for us. We are going to the beach, but neither of us are beach people (as I have noted on this site before, I have a fat hairy belly.) That means we will not have any activity that we feel like we need to do. It’s just going to be sitting on the patio of the condo, facing the Gulf of Mexico, with a stack of Nero Wolfe books and a bottomless glass of the old bee-double-oh-zee-ee!

And then next month, the boys are finally coming back to Memphis!

Norm Peterson and I have known this all along. Now our gut feelings have been corroborated by science. It turns out that beer is good for you.

After more than 20 years of research and scores of studies on the effects of moderate alcohol consumption on health, beer is slowly bubbling to the top as a beverage that not only lifts spirits but delivers protection against major ailments such as heart attacks, stroke, hypertension, diabetes and dementia.

If moderate consumption is healthy, imagine what gluttonous consumption would do for you!

Dave Shiflett writes on NRO about how people have historically feared the sun. He reports that it has been discovered that exposure to the sun can prevent many forms of cancer, but doubts this will change current attitudes about exposure.

A changed perspective won't come easy. Let us be frank: When was the last time anyone in a position of responsibility actually said something nice about the sun? Instead, it's always a warning or a complaint. One senses a fear that sun advocacy might lead to a class-action lawsuit; the shysters can't sue the sun itself, but in today's climate who would be surprised by a suit against suntan-oil companies, beach resorts, and perhaps George Hamilton IV and other prominent sun-worshippers?

Fear of the sun is also part of a larger habit of seeing danger everywhere: hamburgers, cigars, cocktails, salt, ice-cream cones, cellular telephones, coffee, power lines, electric blankets, hairdryers, internal combustion engines, water taps, supersized candy bars, strangers, uncles, priests, artificial sweeteners — don't get me started. Those who fear a Snickers Bar may have a hard time making peace with the sun.

Now a Little Rock based pilot has been fired for showing up to work drunk. I do not understand why anyone would show up drunk for a job that they expected to keep, but pilots are responsible for the lives of hundreds of people. It must take supreme confidence in your ability to hold your liquor to have a few at the bar and then go crank up a jet plane full of trusting rubes and fly to Charlotte.

Mark Currey: Love the Bush Pic. Did you take that yourself?

Nathaniel Greer: I wish. I stole it from the front page of lucianne.com.

MC: It kicks ass. That is precisely why I voted for him. How stupid would Clinton look in a cowboy hat and shades?

NG: I can only agree. I thought it looked very Ewing-esque. The only thing that would have made it any hipper is if he had on a khaki safari shirt with lots of pockets instead of that gray T-shirt.

MC: I don't know, I liked the T-Shirt. Maybe a little Dusty Farlow in there.

MC: Or maybe good ol' Ray?

MC: ...Krebbs

NG: Ray was weak and not a real Ewing.

MC: I understand, it's just that I don't believe JR actually ever sat a horse. Maybe "W" has a bit of Jock in him. It's a tough call.
One thing is sure, though. If Cliff Barnes were as good with women as JR, he'd be Bill Clinton.

MC: . . . Maybe Jeb could be Bobby.

Mr. President,

First of all I hope that you are having a lovely vacation. I know how blistering it can be in Central Texas this time of the year and I hope that you are relaxing and beating the heat. Also allow me to congratulate you on how damn cool you look in a cowboy hat and sunglasses. No one has worn that look so well since J.R. Ewing had a liver transplant.

Now I have been doing some thinking. I have plenty of time to think between dating hot skinny models and waiting for my next movie to come out, and as we know, the opinions of celebrities in this country are learned and vital. I would like to offer a few simple proposals of things that our government could do to make life much happier in the heartland, a place that I have flown over many times while traveling from New York to L.A. or from L.A. to Rio de Janeiro.

The first thing that we have to do is save the environment. Now I live in Los Angeles and let me tell you that sometimes the smog is so bad that I have to forego a couple of cigarettes because I am having trouble breathing. Mr. Wizzard tells us that smog is from all the cars on the road. Just yesterday I loaded up in the back seat of my Lincoln Navigator to have my driver take me to Starbucks. Now my local Starbucks is only about a half a mile away, but it took us like thirty minutes to get there because of all the traffic. I could have walked there faster if I did not have to worry about all of the groupies attacking me. Besides, as I mentioned the air is smoggy and walking would have surely winded me. That is just too many cars. We should have some trains or something like they have over in London and France so that there would not be all those cars blocking out my Navigator. So that is my proposal, the federal government should provide lots of trains.

Another thing that the trains would solve, especially if you made them mandatory for most of the non-important people, would be the scourge of people driving while talking on cell phones. Now I do not have this problem, because as I mentioned I have a driver, but some of those stupid people out there are talking and driving and that is just not right. I have heard that is a very dangerous thing to do. They should be forced to hire a driver or face jail time. Once in prison, they could get the proper therapy that they need to overcome this addiction to endangering innocent celebrities.

Mr. President, now that I have admitted to having a cell phone, don’t think that you can get my digits. They are unlisted and only available to Victoria’s Secret models.

While we are talking about cars, there is something else that the government simply must address. It happens very often that I will be in a hurry to get to a nightclub to meet my posse and I will get stuck at a stop light. Well the light will turn green, but the car in front of me will wait a few seconds before it moves on. What blatant disrespect that is for me, an important movie star that is in a hurry. The government should mandate some kind of buzzer or something that goes off inside your car when a light changes to green. Or maybe these slowpokes should be forced to ride the Federal Trains if they are not going to get out of my way. I think it is so mean to honk at people, but I will sometimes tell my driver to do it if I think I might be late for my meeting at the Whiskey a Go-Go.

Don’t ask me how the government is going to pay for all of this. I am not very good with money myself. Lucky for me, I have more than I can spend so it is not a problem. Maybe you could raise the taxes on big evil corporations like Enron and the Red Cross. Maybe you could transfer some money from the military. Why do we need all those tanks anyway? When was the last time we had to use tanks on somebody? But the money thing will be for you to figure out. That is in your job description, and after all isn’t it the government’s job to take care of everybody?

Your friend and possible supporter,
Leo DiCaprio

This is a serious news report and not from The Onion. A Seattle company is planning to build a space elevator.

A new study shows that apes were able to develop conciousness and eventually evolve into humans through the use of halllucinogenic mushrooms.

There is a hidden factor in the evolution of human beings which is neither a 'missing link' nor a telos imparted from on high. Terence McKenna suggests that this hidden factor in the evolution of human beings, the factor which called human consciousness forth from a bipedal ape with binocular vision, involved a feedback loop with plant hallucinogens. This is not an idea that has been widely explored, though a very conservative form of this notion appears in R. Gordon Wasson's 'Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality' (Wasson, 1971). Wasson does not comment on the emergence of human-ness out of primates, but does suggest hallucinogenic mushrooms as the causal agent in the appearance of spiritually aware human beings and the genesis of religion.


The state of consciousness would provide a reason for foraging humans to return repeatedly to those plants, in order to re-experience their bewitching novelty. The primate gains increased visual acuity and access to the transcendent Other, ever more novel information and sensory input and behaviour, and thus is bootstrapped to higher and higher states of self-reflection.

Hallucinogenic plants may have been the catalysts for everything about us that distinguishes us from other primates except perhaps the loss of body hair. Recall, projective imagination, language, naming, magical speech, dance, and a sense of religion may have emerged out of this interaction.

A song made up of alternating and random couplets from Poison and Skid Row’s first albums:

She was a ballerina on a subway train
Stiletto heels and a candy cane
Remember the nights we sat and talked about all our dreams
They were more distant than they seemed
I made my move with my libido on
She circled once and then she dropped the bomb
Long legs and short skirts
These girls hit me where it hurts

I met a sidewalk preacher on a roller skate
He said he had the key to heaven's gate
Grab my hat and I grab my shoes
Tonight I'm gonna hit the streets and cruise
Life ain't no easy ride at least that's what I'm told
Sometimes the rainbow baby is better than the pot of gold
I'll wait for the movie 'cause I been there before
And learned: life is a battle and love is war

One night I caught her running out the cellar door
There was about a million people lying flat on the floor
I went to bed too late and got up too soon
My poor head still spinnin' from too much booze
Every quittin' time is another disease
Too many cowboys ridin' high shootin' low at the knees
No tell, motel, hotel bed
If it wasn't for the sunlight I'd swear I was dead

I never seen you look so good
You never act the way you should
Good God, bless my soul
I need a fix of rock 'n roll
All my friends are two faced
And I'm a social disgrace
Tequila in his heartbeat, His veins burned gasoline.
It kept his motor running but it never kept him clean.

Mama, please let me go to the show
I dig those bad boys playing that rock and roll
Since I was born they couldn't hold me down
Another misfit kid, another burned-out town
The noose gets tighter around my throat
But I ain't at the end of my rope
I need a chance just to get away
If you could hear me think this is what I'd say

She goes down slow like a shot of gin
She's got an angel's face and the devil's grin
In the heat of the night is when she comes alive
She's gonna push you push you til she's satisfied
I'm on your footsteps and I wait behind your back
I spread like fire upon the streets I'm ready to attack
Only in the evening at night I come alive
So try to keep your passion deep I need it to survive

Baseball fans to doff more than caps for Traficant night

NILES, Ohio (AP) -- Fans who go to the Mahoning Valley Scrappers minor-league baseball game on Wednesday should ditch the glove and take a toupee.

The Class-A affiliate of the Cleveland Indians has made August 14 "Jim Traficant Night," and hairpiece wearers and sons of truck drivers get in free.

The former Ohio congressman, serving an eight-year prison sentence for bribery and racketeering, often calls himself "the son of a truck driver."

His gravity-defying hairstyle caused rampant speculation among journalists and residents on whether it was real or a rug, until he had to doff it for booking.

The baseball event also features a Traficant impersonator, Traficant trading cards and a mock election.

"Former Congressman Traficant played a vital role in attracting the franchise to the Mahoning Valley," general manager Andy Milovich said. "We felt a Jim Traficant Night would show our sincere gratitude for his efforts."

The House expelled Traficant in July, but he says he'll run for a 10th term from jail.

Two bigfoot sightings near my home town.