Flight out of Detroit has been cancelled so I'm up on the wifi, chatting wif Elia, playing poker, reading itmademyday.com and pirating the hot 100 while watching the sun go down. I hate to admit it but "Party in the U.S.A." is catchy as hell.

"The person of interest in the deaths of four officers in Washington state had his 95-year sentence commuted by then-Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, authorities said."

CNN.com

Huckabee is so f*cked.

Can you say "Dukakis?" I knew that ya could...

My sweat smells like peanuts!!

This hit our back window and died in my hands about five minutes afterward. Suck.

Someone has tentatively identified it as a nighthawk.

[edit: The ID has been adjusted -- correctly, I believe -- to be a roughed grouse.]

"You know, that would have been a whole lot sexier if you'd said it without yawning..."

Remember last week when I had to go into town and I got the driving instructions from mapquest and you made me take the GPS as a back-up but then halfway there the GPS is all “Turn left now” and I’m all “No. Mapquest says to go straight” and it’s like “TURN LEFT NOW” and I’m all “No way, bitch” and then she’s all sighing at me like she’s frustrated and she keeps saying “Recalculating” in this really judgey, condescending way and then she’s all “TURN LEFT NOW!” and then I’m all freaked out so I turn left exactly like she says and then she’s all “Recalculating. Recalculating.” and I’m like “I DID EXACTLY WHAT YOU SAID TO DO. WHAT’S WITH THE TONE, WHORE?”

Found on some blog.

So I'm in Ohio.

Let me tell you something about Cambridge cops...

I've had my property illegally confiscated by Cambridge cops.

I've been refused an officer's ID by Cambridge cops.

I've had Cambridge cops make up law out of thin air.

I've actually had to deescalate several of them at once. I thought that was their job?!

I've had Cambridge cops violate my 1st Amendment rights as well as my rights under the 16th Article of the Massachusetts Constitution.

I've had Boston cops violate those same rights as well, arrest me, then lie through their teeth to justify their actions.

Ella asked me the other day what I thought of the Cambridge professor arrest and I said I didn't know what happened, so I couldn't quite say.

But what I can infer from my not-insignificant experience with officers in this geography is that they do not take kindly to being told they are outside their legal authority, they do not know the law, when they do know the law they willfully choose to disregard it and they are not above lying in sworn testimony.

I proposed. She said yes. =)

Nobody blogs anymore.

SCORE!! Just bought Michael Jackson concert tickets for his London show!

w00t.

I'd like to ask "What is Ahmadinejad thinking?" but the answer is probably "Hey, it only took China 20 years post-Tiananmen to get the fucking Olympics..."

I have an Arlen Specter story.

The year is 1995 (iirc). I'm working the night shift audit/front desk at the Manchester, NH Holiday Inn. The Republicans had their convention the night prior and I'm checking out a jabillion people.

Me, making small-talk:

"Are you with the press pool?"
"No, I'm just one of the pieces of meat."
"Hm?"
"I'm one of the pieces of meat."
[...] "I'm sorry, I'm completely confused."
"I'm a politician."

I looked up and sure enough, Arlen Specter.

I like the guy. I can see why he left his party. He has a long history of holding a lot of feet to a lot of fires but he never seems to drop the hammer so I've got no huge ideas about him being some vote lock.

Still, everyone's fixated on the political expedience but what's more sincere a motive than to be elected by the people with whom you share more views than less?

This is basically what happened to me in Boston.

Well, except I wasn't agreeing to leave. =)

The Army is pressuring doctors to under-diagnose PTSD. Why?

The answer probably has to do with money. "Each diagnosis is an acknowledgment that psychiatric casualties are a huge price tag of this war," said Rudd. "It is easiest to dismiss these casualties because you can't see the wounds. If they change the diagnosis they can dismiss you at a substantially decreased rate."

David Rudd, the chairman of Texas Tech's department of psychology and a former Army psychologist, explaining that every dollar the Army spends on a soldier's benefits is a dollar lost for bullets, bombs or the soldier's incoming replacement.

Oh, but wait -- it gets better! There's tapes! Seems a soldier who had problems remembering things brought along a digital voice recorder. Great stuff.

"OK," McNinch told Sgt. X. "I will tell you something confidentially that I would have to deny if it were ever public. Not only myself, but all the clinicians up here are being pressured to not diagnose PTSD and diagnose anxiety disorder NOS [instead]." McNinch told him that Army medical boards were "kick[ing] back" his diagnoses of PTSD, saying soldiers had not seen enough trauma to have "serious PTSD issues." "Unfortunately," McNinch told Sgt. X, "yours has not been the only case ... I and other [doctors] are under a lot of pressure to not diagnose PTSD. It's not fair. I think it's a horrible way to treat soldiers, but unfortunately, you know, now the V.A. is jumping on board, saying, 'Well, these people don't have PTSD,' and stuff like that."

This will go down like Abu Ghraib, no doubt. Just a few rogues, nothing to see here, move along.

[edit] ...and now the VA "has launched an investigation into whether there is a connection between improperly sterilized endoscopy equipment and a veteran's positive HIV test."

Is it beyond the pale to wonder if cost-cutting wasn't involved here, too?

Hutesium et clamor from Boss Limbaugh if it happened on a Clinton's watch but right now not a peep.

Hm.

Dear newspaper editor; I DON'T GIVE A FUCK ABOUT THE OCTUPLET MOM.

Move on.

Last week a complete stranger walked up to me and gave me an upright piano.

This warrants repeating; someone I didn't know said "Hey, do you want a piano?" Elia and I said "sure." It's about four hundred pounds.

I'm learning the piano.

Obama just recently relaxed US policy toward Cuba.

"Otto Reich, who served presidents Reagan and both Bushes in a number of high-level Latin American posts, also testified Wednesday before the House Foreign Affairs Committee [and said] he did not like the Cuba provisions in the budget because the United States gets nothing in return."

Imagine that! Doing something without the intent of getting something out of it.

I don't know what to call it, geez. Maybe ...Christ-like?

Sounds like the antithesis of Bush policy.

Perhaps our last election should give Mr. Reich not-insignificant pause.

The end of the story.

RIP Paul Harvey

This notepad was found on the street by Elia.

And no, not kidding.

An oldie but a goodie.

The letter Michael Phelps should have written

Dear America,

I take it back. I don’t apologize.

Because you know what? It’s none of your goddamned business. I work my ass off 10 months per year. It’s that hard work that gave you all those gooey feelings of patriotism last summer. If during my brief window of down time I want to relax, enjoy myself, and partake of a substance that’s a hell of a lot less bad for me than alcohol, tobacco, or, frankly, most of the prescription drugs most of you are taking, well, you can spare me the lecture.

I put myself through hell. I make my body do things nature never really intended us to endure. All world-class athletes do. We do it because you love to watch us push ourselves as far as we can possibly go. Some of us get hurt. Sometimes permanently. You’re watching the Super Bowl tonight. You’re watching 300 pound men smash each while running at full speed, in full pads. You know what the average life expectancy of an NFL player is? Fifty-five. That’s about 20 years shorter than your average non-NFL player. Yet you watch. And cheer. And you jump up spill your beer when a linebacker lays out a wide receiver on a crossing route across the middle. The harder he gets hit, the louder and more enthusiastically you scream.

Yet you all get bent out of shape when Ricky Williams, or I, or Josh Howard smoke a little dope to relax. Why? Because the idiots you’ve elected to make your laws have have without a shred of evidence beat it into your head that smoking marijuana is something akin to drinking antifreeze, and done only by dirty hippies and sex offenders.

You’ll have to pardon my cynicism. But I call bullshit. You don’t give a damn about my health. You just get a voyeuristic thrill from watching an elite athlete fall from grace–all the better if you get to exercise a little moral righteousness in the process. And it’s hypocritical righteousness at that, given that 40 percent of you have tried pot at least once in your lives.

Here’s a crazy thought: If I can smoke a little dope and go on to win 14 Olympic gold medals, maybe pot smokers aren’t doomed to lives of couch surfing and video games, as our moronic government would have us believe. In fact, the list of successful pot smokers includes not just world class athletes like me, Howard, Williams, and others, it includes Nobel Prize winners, Pulitzer Prize winners, the last three U.S. presidents, several Supreme Court justices, and luminaries and success stories from all sectors of business and the arts, sciences, and humanities.

So go ahead. Ban me from the next Olympics. Yank my endorsement deals. Stick your collective noses in the air and get all indignant on me. While you’re at it, keep arresting cancer and AIDS patients who dare to smoke the stuff because it deadens their pain, or enables them to eat. Keep sending in goon squads to kick down doors and shoot little old ladies, maim innocent toddlers, handcuff elderly post-polio patients to their beds at gunpoint, and slaughter the family pet.

Tell you what. I’ll make you a deal. I’ll apologize for smoking pot when every politician who ever did drugs and then voted to uphold or strengthen the drug laws marches his ass off to the nearest federal prison to serve out the sentence he wants to impose on everyone else for committing the same crimes he committed. I’ll apologize when the sons, daughters, and nephews of powerful politicians who get caught possessing or dealing drugs in the frat house or prep school get the same treatment as the no-name, probably black kid caught on the corner or the front stoop doing the same thing.

Until then, I for one will have none of it. I smoked pot. I liked it. I’ll probably do it again. I refuse to apologize for it, because by apologizing I help perpetuate this stupid lie, this idea that what someone puts into his own body on his own time is any of the government’s damned business. Or any of yours. I’m not going to bend over and allow myself to be propaganda for this wasteful, ridiculous, immoral war.

Go ahead and tear me down if you like. But let’s see you rationalize in your next lame ONDCP commercial how the greatest motherfucking swimmer the world has ever seen . . . is also a proud pot smoker.

Yours,

Michael Phelps

she is the Janet, her name is Leah, she's pre-med, and oh yeah, most importantly, I AM GOING TO HIT THAT LIKE THE FIST OF AN ANGRY GOD, OH YES

there is no other metaphor for how badly i want to swan dive into her goodies

Ella on her Rocky exploits.