The Tom Ridge color of the day is baby-puke green: I love the smell of napalm in the morning. It smells like... victory.

Cambridge, Mass. wants to reduce the local voting age to 17. I don’t think I want politicians trying to speak “to the young people” any more than they do now. Today I had an example of a credit card company trying that. When UCB sells my name, it doesn’t distinguish between grad students and the other kind, so in addition to the normal credit card company come-on’s, I get solicitations for “starter” credit cards. This one was instantly recognizable as the latter rather than the former because it offered as one of its benefits, “discounts on cool stuff.”

Along the lines of the Classmates Reunited website have been Bullies Reunited (to reunite bullies with their victims), a satire, and Cell-mates Reunited, which only sounds like a satire, there is now www.geocities.com/talibanreunited.

Saw a clip of Halle Berry’s Oscar speech on McNeil-Lehrer. So how exactly does winning an Oscar (in the same year that she pulled down an extra $500,000 for showing her boobs in another movie, but I don’t think she mentioned that in her speech) make her the new Rosa Parks?

Still, even she wasn’t as self-important as the representatives of the Catholic church on the same program. I was in the kitchen, but did I really hear someone say that the real victims are the good priests whose reputations are now tarnished? As opposed, say, to all the thousands of kids who got diddled. The spokesmonk for one American archdiocese, Denver I thinkk, said that the problem was solved there because priests had to sign a piece of paper saying they wouldn’t punk out the choir boys. And I’m not particularly exaggerating that, either. Reminds me of a Dave Allen joke: a nun asks a priest if he thinks the clergy will ever be allowed to marry. Not in our lifetimes, he replies, nor in our children’s lifetimes, but maybe in our children’s children’s lifetimes...