The Tom Ridge Homeland Security Office (motto: Panicking the American People with Vague Warnings and Arbitrary Colors Since 2001) color of the day is grey: duck and cover!

For tomorrow, Tom Ridge’s color of the day is green: watch out for barfing Irishmen.

Bush on Zimbabwe elections: “The US will not recognize the outcome of the election because we think it’s flawed.” And he should know.

At the same press conference, he castigated Iraq for having weapons of mass destruction, and threatened it with nukes.

Elsewhere, Captain Hypocrite said “I understand that the unrest in the Middle East creates unrest throughout the region.” Quite.

In a remark characterized by the press as a severe criticism of Israel, Bush called Ariel Sharon an evil-doer. No, of course not, he said that his actions (massive military incursions, machine-gunning an Italian reporter, etc etc) were “not helpful.”

In a measure virtually unreported, the House, instead of attempting again to outlaw late-term abortions, voted to define an aborted fetus with a heartbeat or a breath as a person, in the “Born-Alive Infants Protection Act.”

I believe Tom Ridge’s color for the day is still yellow. After the announcement of the color-coding scheme on Tuesday, Chris and I did our part in being alert at a yellow level by carefully searching the Atlantic Casino for Osama bin Laden. He wasn’t there. Jon Stewart suggested that the new system allows one to coordinate the color of one’s clothes with one’s level of panic.

According to the OAU and South African observers, the Zimbabwean elections were perfectly ok. I don’t know if this is better or worse, but the reason for this may be less about what constitutes a fair election than South Africa not wanting to see a civil war that it might have to intervene in when Mugabe refused to give up office peacefully. One problem is that Mugabe might really have won a fair election, not that we’ll ever know.

A German art historian claims to know who the Mona Lisa really was.

Rumor is, Tipper Gore is planning to run for the Senate.

In Saudi Arabia, the religious police beat some girl students for not wearing properly modest garb, and force them back into their school. It was on fire at the time. 15 die.

Missed the big Paula Jones/Tonya Harding fight. I understand that Amy Fischer was originally supposed to participate, but wasn’t allowed to by her parole board. The NY Times commented that this just shows that all celebrities should have parole boards.

Yes, that’s what Yugoslavia really needed: a new name.

The Tom Ridge color of the day is purple: be afraid, be very afraid.

Or the terrorists win.

Yesterday was the six month anniversary of 9/11. Since 1970 I’ve been trying to convince people to celebrate my half birthday as well as my actual birthday, but nope, didn’t get cards, didn’t get presents, didn’t get articles in the NY Times on how the world has changed since my advent...

To commemorate, Chris (who was visiting from Vermont) and I went to Reno. Because if we don’t lose at nickel slots, ogle cocktail waitresses, and pig out at buffets, the terrorists win.

Not too much to report. Saw a place called Nu Yalk Pizza. We also saw a sign for a “Speakeasy Casino,” although as we got closer we could see that the Casino part was less illuminated. It seems to be a decommissioned casino bought by Ramada. When we went inside, there was nothing casino-like, just some pool tables, and someone immediately told us “No casino.” Only a couple of minutes after we left did I realize that that was just what they *wanted* us to think, and that if I’d known the right password, the pool tables would have rotated into the floor and the real secret casino revealed. If that isn’t true, it should be. And the password should be “swordfish” (from the Marx Brothers movie Horsefeathers).

We saw the most pathetic-looking liquor store slash wedding chapel, although we did not go inside. I thought about asking if they did gay weddings.

Of course Chris is already married. As we passed a pawn shop and were looking at the stuff in the windows, I suggested that he buy a really cheap ring, say under $10, replace his wedding ring with it when he went home, and, first, see how long it took for Suzanne to notice, and then tell her that he’d had to hock it in Reno ‘cause the slot machine was about to pay off big, he knew it, and that the new ring was nice and cheap because the previous owner was a jumper. Chris thought not. Wimp.

It’s been maybe 9 years since I’ve set foot in Nevada, and the technology has upgraded, but not in a good way. For a start, a lot of them have themes. Instead of matching up bars or 7's or fruit, there are cartoon sheep and fish and The Munsters, and I was shocked, shocked to see a slot machine with a Casablanca theme. At the nickel machines this is one thing, but you really have to wonder about the people betting a dollar at a time at slot machines with a Mummy or I Dream of Jeannie theme. While there were always machines that imitated poker, now there are ones that replicate Monopoly or, believe it or not, Scrabble.

These new slot machines are all computers, with no moving parts to spin around, all virtual, and most of them don’t even have levers to pull to get them going, just buttons, to facilitate faster money loss. Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but this is just wrong. I think you need to put the money in the slot yourself and pull on a lever. For a start, it’s aerobic, and you need that after the all-you-can-eat buffet. But really, it’s a question of work ethic. You need to pull the lever to feel you’ve actually earned the right to lose that nickel. I’m telling you, these gamblers today, they’re just plain lazy with their player’s cards and their fancy-schmantzy video screens, why in my day we had a sense of tradition, of accomplishment, I’m telling you...

I’m going to lie down now.

In a piece of irony, the BMW design center in Munich had to be evacuated this week when a World War II unexploded bomb was discovered. The bomb had been manufactured in a Rover plant in Oxfordshire, which is now owned by BMW.

An Italian bishop in Tuscany rented out his seminary to the last-ditch Mussolini government as a concentration camp for Jews. And he didn’t even get paid, amazingly enough asking the post-war government for his money. He didn’t get it.

What to say about Bush’s contingency plans to use nukes on any country on his increasingly long enemies list? One can but hope that Congress will do something about preventing him developing battlefield nukes.

This is Bush, the man who recently at a concert tried to wave at Stevie Wonder.

I didn’t make that up.

A blood-buying scheme in China, in which plasma was reinjected into donors, presumably so they could take out more blood (?), but in which the idiots mixed up all the plasma together, has turned Henan province into one big AIDS hospice, with 100,000-500,000 infected. Some of whom have made their way to larger cities and are stabbing people with syringes. The government is covering this story up, of course, but the cities are in a panic.

Ashcroft wants to form neighborhood watch groups to fight terrorism. That’s too silly even to make a joke about.

The Israelis, meanwhile, are passing out guns to everyone, including schoolteachers. Ariel Sharon said, in case you missed it, “If the Palestinians are not being beaten, there will be no negotiations. ... Only after they’ve been battered will we be able to conduct talks.” And then he bombed a school for blind children.

Bush slogan: “A quality teacher in every classroom.”

The Whitewater investigation is over, if anyone cares, Robert (you can call me Ray) Ray’s final report says he could certainly have convicted Clinton if he felt like it. Well that was certainly worth $70 million, or whatever the final figure was (no reporter saw fit to ask).

I understand that some of the Afghans rushing in to support US troops are being paid, that is as mercenaries, by the US.

In yet another creepy story about twins, two 70-year old Finn twins are killed by being hit while driving bicycles on the same day.

Indian bookies have been spreading rumors to promote further violence. They are currently offering between 4:1 and 6:1 that inter-communal violence will spread to Rajasthan.

When the US started rounding up furriners after 9/11, you may remember some very brief mentions of the fact that a bunch of them were Israelis. So what happened to them? I don’t actually know, and have seen only one story in the middling-reliable Daily Telegraph, which suggests that a couple hundred of them were actually spies, possibly shadowing Muslim militants in this country, without the knowledge of the US government. At the very least, a suspiciously large number of them have backgrounds in military intelligence. So why were they arrested in the first place: I think they were pretending to be Arabs.

Although I often say that the real news about how the world works is hidden away in the business pages, I don’t always take my own advice, and missed an interesting issue. A passing reference in the New Statesman sent me to the Web, to look up the Carlyle Group. In retrospect I remember one minor aspect, that there was this major but secretive military company (technically it’s an investment group, and is now somewhat diversified, but it specializes in gentrifying dilapidated defense contractors) in which the bin Laden family was an investor until last Oct. 27, and which employs George Bush the Elder. Carlyle is very hooked up, its chair being Reagan’s defense secretary & ex-head (assistant DCI? I forget) of the CIA Frank Carlucci, who was Donald Rumsfeld’s wrestling partner at Princeton (ie, look for Rumsfeld to join the board when he moves out of government), and others working for it include James Baker and John Major. There’s a self-propelled howitzer project even the Pentagon says is outmoded and it doesn’t need, which was due to be killed by the Clintonites and mysteriously revived by the Bushies. There are issues of Carlyle’s investments in South Korea, possibly responsible for Bush’s u-turn re North Korea after a call from his father. Shrub himself worked for the company before he became governor and, after he appointed a few members to the board of the Texas teachers’ pension fund, $100m of public money was invested in Carlyle. The real problem is the connection with Saudi Arabia, perhaps explaining the administration’s complete inability to criticize the Saudis for anything (his father is over there a lot trying to sell them stuff--Carlyle is responsible for training the guards for the royal family--and gets a lot of money for it). No wonder we’ve heard so little from Bush Senior, he’s out making money, something like $50m, and $100,000 every time he opens his mouth for the company, and no one is screaming conflict of interest.

Speaking of which, Neil Bush is also in Saudi Arabia (I sent something from a Saudi paper a while back), this time promoting educational software. There was an article in the NY Times this week. He thinks it has nothing to do with who all his relatives are; he thinks he’s just a great salesman.

The Guardian reports that when the US blamed the French for the failed attempt to capture Karadizc in leaks to the press, they had absolutely no basis for it.

Advice to Tonya Harding: go for the nose.

How to fry an egg on your computer.

The last Irish World War One veteran has died.

Tony Blair today was talking about the consequences “if” the Zimbabwean elections were unfair. I just want to point out the incredible hypocrisy of that “if.” The elections can be pronounced unfair now, no one needs to wait for the result. Violence and intimidation have been rampant, normal election activities by the opposition have been banned, voting lists have been blatantly rigged, military and police officers ordered to get absentee ballots and vote in front of their commanders, and I could go on and on. Still, by that “if,” Blair was leaving the door open for recognizing a government if the opposition somehow miraculously won despite everything. But such a victory would not make the election fair, or democratic. It would just indicate that people were sick of Mugabe. They could hardly have any idea what the opposition’s policies are, given the absence of election meetings or uncontrolled media. *I* don’t know what those policies might be. That “if” encapsulates and encompasses all the hypocrisy of the West towards the democratic process in the underdeveloped countries.

There’s another interesting piece in the Guardian on racial profiling by the US in immigration and other matters, including noting that an April 2001 report by the anti-terrorism czar focused exclusively on acts of terror against Americans and other white people, like saying that the most significant event in Angola was the kidnapping of 3 Portuguese oil company workers, while ignoring killings of hundreds of black Angolans, etc. You
can read it at www.guardian.co.uk/columnists.

Turkey has been arresting Kurds for giving their children Kurdish names. It also just banned a film that was its entry for Academy Award for Best Foreign Film.

Californians should all go out and vote. And remember, if they have a lot of commercials and lawn signs (which you never see on people’s actual lawns anymore), they must be wise, honest, brave, forthright champions of justice and true statesmen.

Right now I’m listening to the election debates on cable access; a little while ago I heard the sheriff debate, which evidently hinges on whether deputies have to wear baseball caps. No debates for judges, although there’s at least one I’d like to see asked to spell the word “juvinile” (as it appears in his mailer).

The statements in the voters’ pamphlet are fun, especially the
Libertarians. The gubernatorial candidate is a “practicing Druid
Unitarian,” and the lite governor candidate is campaigning on a platform of legalizing ferrets.

US troops who failed to capture Karadzic are putting it about that the operation was betrayed by some local mole. Actually, and this didn’t make the NY Times today, it was because the idiots cut phone lines, cell phones & all other forms of communication, many hours before the attack commenced, which might just have been a tip-off.

Senator Barbara Mikulski is quoted in the NY Times as saying “Mammograms should not be equated with nose jobs.” Damn, have I been doing that again? Well, I don’t get out that much.

Iowa declared English its official language today, just as Bush came to the state. Think they were trying to tell him something?

Daily Variety lists under Film Reviews today, “Cinderella II: Dreams Come True, Sex With Strangers.” That turned out to be two different movies, much to my disappointment.

The Duke of Edinburgh (the Queen’s husband, aka, the Duke of Hazard), displayed his usual cultural sensitivity today in Australia, asking the head of an aboriginal cultural center if they still throw spears at each other.

The chancellor of Germany is suing a news agency for suggesting that his hair color is not natural.

The LA Times says that in many parts of California, esp LA, there are no polling places and mail-in balloting is mandatory. This must stop.

Bush says that there has been a shadow government in place since September 11. The cynics amongst you will already have noticed that he didn’t say of what year.

Website: www.somethingawful.com/features/childrensbooks/index-07.htm

Another week, another country Bush is sending troops to, in this case the-former-soviet-republic-of-Georgia, and how tired they must be of that name. Beyond the fact that it is a barely existing country which, the London Times foreign editor writes, the US persists in seeing the best in, in spite of all the evidence. This war is now following the Chevron trail, that is its route seems mysteriously to be shadowing the planned oil pipeline between the Caspian and Turkey. I’m sure that’s a coincidence.

Some Berkeley frat members were just arrested for kidnapping a goat. (Is that a pun? It wasn’t intentional, unlike a letter Spike Milligan once wrote to the Telegraph, which had reported the escape of a snow leopard from a zoo and said it hadn’t been spotted yet. Spike pointed out that leopards are always spotted).

In the kettle calling the pot black stakes today, it’s a toss-up between the US criticizing the war crimes tribunals as too politicized (as opposed to Camp X-Rated), and Trent Lott calling Tom Daschle divisive.

White House spokesman Ari Fleischer, whose ability to enunciate clearly despite the large number of feet in his mouth at any given time is an example to us all, today both blamed Clinton for the violence in the Middle East, and said that Pakistan existed in 1931. He is the perfect spokesman, standing in exactly for Shrub’s stupidity.

Police in Britain have surprisingly enough decided not to prosecute Prince Harry for drug use.

Speaking of the royals, a DJ said of the Queen Mum, She smells of wee but we love her.

The Israelis go on a rampage through the world’s largest refugee camp, aka the Gaza strip, although this week it looks like small potatoes compared to the violence in India. I suppose it doesn’t matter who started this, but it’s rather suspicious that the BJP just lost state elections, look like losing the next national ones, and suddenly Hindu nationalists are trying again to build a temple at Ayodhya.

It seems that the Cuban Missile Crisis did not mark the first Soviet attempt to base missiles outside the USSR. 3 years earlier, rockets were sited in East Germany, aimed at Britain, France and, amazingly enough, Bonn.

Spiked

Spike Milligan has died at 83, the last Goon. Ying tong iddle i po, laddy, ying tong iddle i po.

Rummy Rumsfeld admits there isn’t enough evidence to charge anyone held at Stalag X-Ray, but doesn’t see why that should stop him detaining them indefinitely.

It’s spring and the political commercials are in the air. Bill Jones, or is it Bill Simon, attacks Riordan for not being Republican enough (just about the only ad to mention political party, even though these are primary elections), and says his (Jones or Simons’) heroes are Reagan, Bush (he doesn’t say which one) and Guiliani--who has over the years also been attacked for not being Republican enough. Someone, I think running for Controller, talks about having experience in business, academia and government. Just can’t hold a job. Most interestingly, Riordan is attacking Simon for not having voted all that often. What’s interesting there is that Simon has never held a government job of any sort, but Riordan doesn’t call him unqualified for that, just for not voting.

I’ve talked about Charles Pickering, Bush’s awful nominee for the 5th Circuit. Incidentally, I did a quickie research job last week and failed to figure out what he testified to in that Klan trial in 1967. Well his son, Chip Pickering, a sitting Congresscritter for Mississippi, just had his district hand-tailored for him by an all-Republican panel of the 5th Circuit, and the appeal of his opponent, another incumbent, one Ronnie Snows, was turned down by Pickering’s friend, Fat Tony Scalia. This after the Justice Dept delayed issuing the legally mandated preclearance for the redistricting in order to hand the job over to the court. This one smells rather bad.

In China, Shrub called for freedom and religious tolerance. The official Chinese transcript edited those parts out. So that would be a no then.

Israeli settlers are taking to detering suicide bombers by defiling their bodies with pigskin and lard.

Evidently the Bush admin has just dumped a 1978 pledge not to use nuclear weapons on non-nuclear states. Didn’t know about this? I only did because a satire website had a link to the for god’s sake Washington Times story reporting this.

For a rather funny obituary of Robin Williams’s recent godawful career, see this.

The Christian Guide to Small Arms, I swear to god.

A site featuring the Kama Sutra as illustrated by Star Wars toys.

Jonas Savimbi is dead. Ding dong, the motherfucker is dead.

Gary Condit says that the only way to ensure proper pressure on the police to solve the Chandra Levy disappearance is to re-elect Gary Condit.

Danny Pearl’s icky murder puts some interesting pressure on Pakistan, which is resisting extraditing those it now has in custody who are connected with it, because they can tell so much about Pakistani intelligence’s connections with that sort of thing. Pakistan, meanwhile, is trying to figure out how to blame India.

The Washington Post points out what I said a couple of months ago, that the US doesn’t now have enough missiles to go to war with Iraq, and won’t for many months. I’m going to make a wild guess that inventories will be back up by around, oh, one month before the November elections.

I’ll make another prediction: there will be a change in leadership in Venezuela by the end of the year. The US might actually invade, but more probably will buy itself a coup.

I know we’re a bit spoiled for choice of Darth Vaders at the moment, but someone might pay some attention to Libya, which has been becoming internationally active again, including in Colombia and in Zimbabwe, where Mugabe just pawned much of the public sector to it in exchange for military supplies so it can beat up opponents and election observers. Speaking of which, the South African election monitors (almost all that’s left after the Europeans were expelled) have refused to admit that it was the government’s stooges who attacked their people yesterday. South Africa wants regional influence, but it isn’t supporting democracy. Rather disappointing, really.

No wonder

There’s a phenomenon with George Bush, where I know that something he’s said is awful but it takes me a couple of days to figure out why. This week in South Korea he commented that in the peace museum in NK was exhibited an ax used to kill 2 American soldiers. “No wonder I think they’re evil,” he said.

I knew there was a problem with that “no wonder,” but wasn’t immediately sure what.

The thing about Bush that I’ve pointed out before is that his stated reasons for supporting a policy or belief are varied--tax cuts because the economy is good, because the economy is bad, because of the California energy crisis, etc etc--almost at random; they are there only to sell the policy. Bush believes what he believes and doesn’t care what he has to say in support of it. I think he’s actually a little contemptuous of people who have to have evidence and logic to support their beliefs; for real men, beliefs derive from their “character.” So the phrase “No wonder I think they’re evil” actually puts the evidence after the belief: I already think they’re evil, but I’ve just now heard why I think they’re that.

Speaking of putting the cart before the horse, enough already, Gray Davis, with the anti-Riordan commercials. We haven’t had the fucking primary yet. This is not about Davis, not having any real primary challenge, getting a jump on the general elections, this is Davis intervening in the Republican primary to weaken his strongest opponent there, in the hope of being able to run against Bill Simon. The man helped wreck the open primary on the grounds that political parties are private entities; so stay the hell out of the Republican primary. Also, with all those ads up here blaming Riordan for the electricity crisis (!), I must remember to ask my mother what he’s saying in LA.

Two black-footed penguins in Coney Island have turned out to be gay (evidently it isn’t that easy to figure out the sex of penguins, so it took the aquarium keepers a while to catch on, and then they had to do blood tests). But then, their names are Wendell and Cass, so come on.

Good article in Wednesday Washington Post on those anti-abortion centers. Also, I knew that 4 states had “Choose Life” license plates, but I didn’t know that Louisiana’s had a picture of a stork carrying a baby.

Rummy Rumsfeld denies that the new Pentagon propaganda unit will actually lie, leaving unanswered (but also unasked, except by me) the question of what an organization aimed at influencing the opinions of foreigners is doing in the Department of Defense to begin with.

The chief justice of Alabama’s Supreme Court wrote in an opinion last week that homosexuality is “abhorrent, immoral, detestable, a crime against nature and a violation of the laws of nature and of nature’s God.” and homosexuals were presumptively unfit to have custody of children. Who new that a man elected because he posted the 10 Commandments illegally in his courtroom would turn out to be a jerk?

Shrub was in South Korea today, I believe to tell the North Koreans to tear down this wall. He gave a speech wearing a camoflage jacket over his suit. For once, it was actually a perfect disguise, because behind him was a solid wall of military people wearing camoflage jackets, so his actually blended in and you just saw his blue tie bobbing up and down. It was kind of hypnotic.

That British civil servant who put the naked picture on the internet evidently doesn’t really want him to marry her, it was some sort of practical joke.

Going to strip clubs for fun and class credit

The Bush administration plans to spend $100 million per year to promote marriage among the poor. Presumably this will come out of all the job training programs that have been axed. I trust no cynic out there is thinking that this exists solely in order to trick people into screwing up their eligibility for welfare.

One plan they could adopt was that put into practice by a British civil servant trying to get her boyfriend, another civil servant, to propose to her. She put his naked picture online and said it wouldn’t come off until he proposed. He doesn’t seem to have, but she did crash her server and got booted.

The war in Afghanistan just mysteriously expanded, with the US now bombing tribal forces opposed to the puppet government, but in no wise connected with the Taliban or Al Qaeda.

Attorney-and-Witchfinder General John Aschcroft, speaking to religious broadcasters, said that this is not a religious war, except for God being on our side. “Civilized people--Muslims, Christians and Jews--all undertand that the source of freedom and human dignity is the Creator.” Not being a civilized person, I can respond to that only in a series of grunts and bellows.

Following is from the Daily Cal. Comments seriatim, in brackets.

Male Sexuality Class Put on Hold Amid National Media Attention
Questionable Group Activities Cited as Cause
By STEVE SEXTON
Tuesday, February 19, 2002

The UC Berkeley male sexuality class that came under fire last week has been suspended by administrators while an investigation into reports of illicit class activities is conducted.

The class’s female counterpart is also under review, but has not been suspended, officials said.

A meeting between the instructors of the student-run classes took place Friday, following an inquiry into the classes by The Daily Californian. But when instructors of the male sexuality class failed to show up, the class was pulled, said George Breslauer, dean of social sciences at UC Berkeley. [Unfortunately, the class rather got off on being pulled.]

Students and instructors of the class told the Daily Cal they took trips to strip clubs and “sex exchanges” and watched an instructor strip. Some also said a party at an instructor’s house included group sex and a “party game” that had students photographing their genitalia and then trying to match the pictures to the correct body. [Pin the tail on the donkey for the frat crowd. Isn’t it weird that the article doesn’t specify that these were gay strip clubs? And the instructor stripped at a strip club--and did rather more than that. Somebody has removed all the homosexual content from this article.]

Those activities came as a surprise to the professor charged with overseeing the course, Caren Kaplan, chair of the women’s studies department. She told the Daily Cal she does not “police the content.” [Although the students did keep asking her to dress up in a policewoman’s uniform.]

But now she is heading the investigation into the reports, which have attracted national media attention, said Breslauer.

Under the policies guiding the classes, dubbed “DE-Cals” for Democratic Education at Cal, the sponsoring professor must sign off on the curriculum and then is “responsible for the content” of the class.

A second system of checks is intended, requiring the head of the sponsoring department to agree “that the course is an appropriate one for his or her department.”

But since Kaplan is both the sponsoring professor and the chair of the department, no secondary approval was needed.

She could not be reached for comment over the weekend.

Breslauer, her immediate supervisor, said it was “too premature” to make a determination of wrongdoing on Kaplan’s part. [I know this is sadly pedantic of me, but I’m torn between making an obvious joke based on the word premature or pointing out that “too premature” is a faulty usage.]

He said DE-Cal classes are “run with very little faculty oversight,” and added, “That will probably change.” [As soon as they hear about the strip clubs.]

The DE-Cal program is currently offering more than 100 courses, the topics of which range from the history of Afghanistan to counting cards in blackjack. The classes are not funded by the university, but are provided use of campus facilities and count for between 1-2 units toward graduation.

The program is regarded as a triumph for liberal, democratic education. But some fear that the activities in the male sexuality class have endangered the entire program.

Aside from indicating more supervision may be on the horizon, administrators have not said there will be drastic changes to the program.

Instructors of the female sexuality class have already begun to
distance themselves from their male counterpart. [Which hasn’t noticed and is lying back smoking a cigarette.]

“The male and female sexuality classes are two separate classes and are in no way affiliated,” said Kim Brodsky, an instructor of a female sexuality class. “We support and defend the curriculum of our course as educational and empowering, and we are looking forward to teaching this class for years to come.” [Would a joke based on “to come” be too crude?]

Instructors of the 2-unit male sexuality class [although it likes to brag that it has 8 units] likewise defended their curriculum. Drew Navarro, one instructor, said the classes “provide a much-needed forum” for discussion “of how students really feel about themselves and their bodies and others.”

The course description on the DE-Cal Web site says the class is
“intended to provide a safe environment in which men may learn about their own bodies and male sexuality. This course aims to create a greater community of men and women who are empathetic, understanding and supportive of each other’s sexuality.”

Some students enrolled in the male sexuality class are now searching for other classes to get their course load above their colleges’ minimum unit requirement for full-time student designation--typically 11-13 units.

“Current students are paying the price for alleged wrongdoings last semester,” Breslauer said.

I trust everyone had a happy Displaced Apostrophe Weekend (aka Presidents’ Day, President’s Day, Presidents Day, Presiden’t’s’ Day...).

British Marines accidentally invaded Spain today. They thought it was Gibraltar.

Shrub is on walkabout in Japan. He praised the Japanese prime minister for having nice hair and accidentally sent the Japanese stock market into a tailspin by using the word devaluation in a speech instead of the word deflation. Oops.

There is a new policy whereby the US might intervene militarily any time an American is taken hostage anywhere in the world. Because there were still some countries left we hadn’t threatened to go to war with.

Fake indicator of the week: greenhouse gas intensity, which is the number that the Bush environmental policy is meant to reduce. It means the amount of greenhouse gases divided by GDP. The upshot is that Bush is proposing to reduce greenhouse emissions less than would happen naturally, and without actually reducing them.

Spreading around the embarrassment, British paratroops open fire in Afghanistan on a cab taking a pregnant woman to the hospital. Take that, unborn terrorist!