.:Colter:.

OK maybe it’s not that big, but the New York Times and other major newspapers nationwide are busy ordering additional runs of yesterday’s paper. My friend Margot emailed me this morning to ask me to pick up a copy, so I tried to find out where that could be done. Here is what the line looks like outside the NYT office. The Times is also selling copies online for $14.95, but currently I’m seeing this message:

The website is loading slowly due to high activity.
Please return later to order if the wait is too long.
Don’t worry: We have an abundance of Nov. 5 newspapers!

Score one for traditional media. We’ll miss tangibility when it goes away.

Bill Clinton and Mike Huckabee may both be from Hope, but to the south lies the town of Friendship, not far from where a cross was burned last week in the yard of a mother of biracial children. A week later, her house burned to the ground. From the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette:

Jacob Wingo, 19, is charged with terroristic threatening and aggravated assault, jailers said. Hot Spring County Chief Deputy Richard Tolleson said there could be other suspects in the reported cross burning and it was still under investigation. Tolleson, who refused to release Wingo’s arrest report, also asked that Wingo’s name not be printed as “a courtesy.” Wingo was questioned Friday about the house fire. “He was first,” said detective Barbi Koder with the Hot Spring County sheriff’s office. Yvette Briggs, Wingo’s mother, vehemently defended her son, saying he turned himself in to authorities earlier and “told the truth.” “It was all a joke,” she said about the cross. “He’s got mixed friends. He’s got black friends — he does not hate people. If he knew it was considered a hate crime, he would never have done anything like that.” She said he couldn’t have been involved in the house fire because he was with his father after bonding out of jail.

I can’t find any reports from last week of the cross burning. Maybe it never made it to the papers. If so, I’m very disappointed in the local and state press. I’d hate to think that this sort of thing happens and is kept under wraps. Also, I find it really odd that the paper tells you the kid’s name and then tells you that the chief deputy asked the paper not to print the kid’s name. And I find it amusing that the kid’s mom said it was “all a joke.” Because, really, what’s funnier in Arkansas that a good old fashioned cross burning?

George will be sorely missed, and my fear is that, thanks to email forwards, he will be the most grossly mis-quoted comedian of our time. I wish there were some resource that had a list of things he didn’t say. I’ve tried to find a few, but with the Internet, how can you ever be sure unless it’s listed on georgecarlin.com? The only thing they’ve debunked is the “Bad American” email forward.

Here is one of my all time favorites from George. Caution: “strong” language ahead:

But remember, and this is a little soapbox of mine: words in and of themselves are not magic and cannot hurt you. Context is everything. There are plenty of words that you have no good reason to use in polite society[1], but that does not make them “bad.”[2] Similarly, there is no quantifiable difference between “crap” and “sh*t”[3] aside from the reactions that people cause within themselves. And so the only reason not to use “sh*t” in polite conversation is if you think you are conversing with those whose own perceptions might cause themselves discomfort.

1.) Racial slurs, for example.
2.) Quite the contrary, as my multi-cultural friends will attest to having great fun tossing around ethnic put-downs like so much expired ordnance.
3.) I am using the asterisk here to avoid getting pinged by various systems’ content blockers.

Dennis Kucinich’s wife is a year younger than I am.

When reading or watching the news, beware the phrase “a new study today revealed,” or its myriad variations. One of the many sad things about the news media today is that they will go out of their way to find studies to get you freaked out. What’s particularly sad is not the goofy science they find (studies that only correlate things, which the news media then present in such a way as to assume causality), but the alarmism that the newsfolks want to generate, because that’s what makes them money.

Let this be your mantra: correlation does not equal causality. If a study finds that eating baby seal liver is linked to a longer lifespan, it may only mean that the experiment was conducted using Eskimos, who just happened to be eating a lot of fish oil or something else that gives them a greater life expectancy. You don’t know the methods because the articles often conveniently leave them out.

What I’m noticing even more today is that, as all these studies proliferate and contradict each other over time (1980: margarine is great, butter sucks! 2000: holy crap are you still eating margarine?), people trust science and scientific studies less, when the people they really need to stop trusting are the alarmist/money-grubbing news media who profit by your fear. Scientific studies at an individual level will always produce varying results, and only over long spans of time do we really gain knowledge that we can rely upon with confidence. So the next time you read about a study that links an activity with a particular outcome, don’t assume that one causes the other. They may just be correlated somehow.

As if to underline my “you never know” statement about the Virginia Tech[1] shooter, along comes a story about some weirdness at the Dallas Press Club, where recently departed President Elizabeth Albanese turns out to be the center of a scandal involving potentially nonexistant awards judges, a history of mental illness and an interstate rap sheet.

I have worked with Elizabeth for the last three years on the website for the annual Katie Awards, honoring excellence in regional journalism and media. She was one of the better clients I’ve worked for; she always seemed to keep a lot of plates spinning without complaint or error. She was always pleasant and positive and appreciative. I never would have suspected that she might commit fraud. The article is long and informative, so I’ll leave that up to you to read. Suffice it to say that it looks like she’ll be in a heap of trouble and the Katie Awards may be devalued right out of existence.

You just never know.

1.) Notice I didn’t say “VT,” because I keep reading that as “Vermont” when I see it, and suddenly in my mind the pastoral tranquility of Vermont is shattered by more random violence.

So, another rampage in the US by a heavily armed nerd. Like Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris before him, Cho Seung-hui has been described as an outcast, someone who apparently held a significant grudge against the upper caste of his social environment. The pundits, like the rest of us, are trying to figure out what causes this sort of thing, what are the warning signs, how can we prevent this in the future? Is there a causal connection between the video games and the music and the movies and this aberrant behavior?

I think the truth is, you never really know. You can look at a guy’s life and point to particulars and try to connect the dots and run the numbers, but lots of equations start with nerd + violent games + heavy metal, and thus far only a handful have equaled multiple homicide. From my group of friends, that equation has equaled doctor, lawyer, and cheese specialist/film editor (or whatever the hell Flounder is up to these days).

You can look for outward signs, but our interior lives are our private universes and most people probably have things they’ll never tell another living soul, ever. Even blogs only hint at people’s secrets. If you happened upon a typically nerdy blog entry like this, you’d never guess the author was a confessed rapist, murderer and would-be cannibal.

We’re just going to have to deal with the fact that sometimes there’s nothing you can do. Sometimes there are no signs. Sometimes people just crack.

Russian billionaire Boris Berezovsky has been quoted as saying he intends to finance the overthrow of President Vladimir Putin. He admits to having spent $50 million on the Ukrainian “Orange Revolution” of 2004. He expects the coming revolution will cost him around half a billion dollars.

Pause for a moment to consider that Russia spent much of the early 20th century having to contend with working-class proletariat revolutionaries, and now at the dawn of the 21st century it has to deal with a billionaire. What can we glean from this? The irony runs deep. It tells us that capitalism has worked for some folks in Russia, and while communism is fairly well dead in the former Soviet Republics, the people may yet be freed from the ruling iron fist of Putin by a member of the super-bourgeoisie.

While we’re on the subject of Russian history, check out these amazing propaganda posters from various phases of Russia’s history.

My Pittsburgher bowl cut sister from another mother posted this breath of fresh, fiery air regarding the Don Imus teapot tempest that I have to pass it along. It is a column by Kansas City Star writer Jason Whitlock, and this provides a nice summary of his rant:

“I don’t listen or watch Imus’ show regularly. Has he at any point glorified selling crack cocaine to black women? Has he celebrated black men shooting each other randomly? Has he suggested in any way that it’s cool to be a baby-daddy rather than a husband and a parent? Does he tell his listeners that they’re suckers for pursuing education and that they’re selling out their race if they do?

When Imus does any of that, call me and I’ll get upset. Until then, he is what he is — a washed-up shock jock who is very easy to ignore when you’re not looking to be made a victim.

No. We all know where the real battleground is. We know that the gangsta rappers and their followers in the athletic world have far bigger platforms to negatively define us than some old white man with a bad radio show. There’s no money and lots of danger in that battle, so Jesse and Al are going to sit it out.”

Anna Nicole Smith was offed by the CIA to draw the public’s attention away from the war. I also suspect that Britney Spears had her Red Bull spiked with LSD to continue the diversion.