Multiple language barriers.

I speak a little Spanish. Not a lot, but I can usually get basic concepts across.
I do not know sign language, beyond one or two very simple phrases. I can't "get by" in it.


A few months ago, I had a traffic stop in which the driver, a Spanish speaker, was deaf.


My daughter had started drawing in my pocket notebook when she found it on the table while I was doing laundry. I found it in her possession, and confiscated it, because the contents are not her business. (Mostly data without actual connection to specific charges, but still, that's mine.) I found part of the conversation that I had had with the driver when I issued the citation, in the notebook, which I attach here:

It's interesting to me that if I knew sign language, it would cut across that language barrier.
It's handy having access to Google Translate in your patrol car, too.

Without fear.

Because I have a lot of nerdy friends and wanted in on the social references that they made, I bought a graphic novel that came highly recommended. But this post isn't about that.


The adult comic book was originally published by installment in 1986, and was written in 1985, which was set as the present, with a lot of reflection on the previous half century, at which point it had diverged from our real timeline.


What was fascinating, though, was how scared we were of pending war. In this book, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan seemed clearly to indicate that, without some kind of major interference, an invasion of Pakistan would occur. And from the man on the street to the POTUS, World War III seemed inevitable.


But it was just another timeline, in an imagined universe, by a good writer and his illustrator.


Friends, I remember being afraid, as a little kid, of nuclear war. I remember being afraid of something that our nation couldn't control, coming in and taking our lives away from us.


As the 1990's came, and the USSR fell, the nuclear threat (or the fear of it) diminished. I grew into adulthood. I had the opportunity to decide my future.


At no time in my adult life have I felt afraid that our nation would be attacked on a wide scale. Sure, individual attacks can and have happened, but think about how indignant we were to have even those occur.  When you attack our country, there are major consequences. It's not a good idea. We send guys like John Shirley and his mates over to kick your butt.


We don't think a whole lot about our military, because of how effective they are at letting us lead our quiet normal lives. I'm not saying that it's right, but I'm pointing out how well they do their job: we as a nation get to continue to be self-absorbed and silly, without paying attention to what our military really does, because they're just that good.


For about 364 days of the year, it's actually okay to be self-absorbed, and not think of who guards our freedoms.


Today, we think of our soldiers, our marines, our sailors, our airmen, and our guardsmen who gave everything. Because we really don't have to. You can bet that their families think about them a lot.

Thanks.

Summer's end.

--Yesterday was August 31st. Today is Sunday, 1 September, 2013. Yes, the kids have been back in school for a week, but to me, summer goes June through August.

--I hope that you got in a good summer vacation, even if you had to resort to exceptional means, like Freddie Wong's vacation director did, here:

I can't help but notice at 4:56 how expensive Belizian pistol ammunition is. Ah, resort prices.

--Today is the first day of dove season in Texas. I haven't bought my hunting license. I should probably call some local ranchers about getting to hunt on their place after I've bought my license. The dove are thick this year. But it's 105.0 °F out there. I'm not really interested in getting out in the field today.

--My elder daughter turned 15 this weekend. I'm teaching parent-taught driver's education. My wife isn't so sure about this. For a $500 savings, I'm pretty sure.

--According to The Wall Street Journal, our Nobel Peace Prize-winning president is planning to fight with Congress over the right to bomb Syria. Look, I'm all for deploying the "Clearly Needs Killin'" Doctrine, but I'm also a fan of the "Let's Not Go Spending Money That We Don't Have To Piss Off Other Countries In Futile Plans" Doctrine. To quote Jim Wilson: "I'm having trouble following the logic: Syria attacked Syria, so we should attack Syria. Is that about right?"
In our War On Terrorism, don't we have a page on Not Creating New Motives For Future Terrorists?

--And now we've got a little sun shower. Brought the temp down to 100. The dove are flying everywhere. I moved the chickens and unloaded 600 lbs of bagged manure from the back of the Outback, and did some other yard work for a bit.

--My wife has talked for years about putting in an outdoor shower. I'm strongly considering making that my fall project, this year. The hardest part, frankly, will be putting up the screen.

--Great maps: These show the racial segregation in our cities.

--Useful site: Why am I just now learning of this site that crowd-sources the pronunciation of words? 

--The 1972 Blue Marble photo of our planet has been updated. Check out this amazing high resolution photograph featuring North America. Zoom in. It's great.

--The creator of Comic Sans font feels no remorse.

--Sign of the times: Fake NSA pickup lines on Twitter. This followed the LOVEINT story pretty quickly.

--The Onion steps away from satire, and tells some very sobering truth about modern "news" distribution.

--Per Ambulance Driver's suggestion, I wrapped boudin in bacon, and put it on the grill. It is with the same tone of solemnity that I admonish people not to do crack or meth that I tell you: don't do this. Not even once. I myself an ruined. Please remember me as a peacemaker. And while Holmes is best in most ring sausage, we preferred the Zummo's boudin, for its coarser texture in the rice.

--MORE Great maps. (40 of them!)

--

Grimy.

Theo Cottle is a photographer who documents the less glamorous sides of places like Thailand and Germany and the UK. His work is not pornographic, but it's unsavory, and some of it might not be safe for work.

Looking at his documentation of skinheads in the street, I am struck by the common traits among trash in different modern cultures, spanning different races that disdain each other.

Some of these people have less in common with me than the African bushmen, or the Dani of New Guinea.

I am a little defensive of the redneck, at times. There is a popular misconception that the term "redneck" is synonymous with "white trash." That's simply not true. While the terms are not mutually exclusive and there can be some overlap, that's just like saying "plumber" and "Catholic" can overlap.

White trash is world-wide, and even redneck white trash can span continents. Just ask the dwanky zef Boer trash that is Die Antwoord. (Don't watch that. Well, okay, you can watch that, but DON'T watch this. Seriously.)

Trash is universal. Why isn't distaste for it universal?

Maps.

Check out this amazing, zoomable map of all of the roads in the United States, and nothing else. No borders. No topographical features.

No, no. Click on the BIG one.

And supposedly, half the people live in this circle, most of which is water.

And bad research yields poor maps. When you assume that racists are located where words that you call pejoratives are tweeted from, you get a map like this. Note also that in south Texas, for many, the term "wetback" is not used as a pejorative, but rather as a descriptor of a person who illegally migrated across the Rio Grande. I have the utmost respect for Latinos, and of immigrants, but I used the term in a non-derogatory way for years, before being informed that it was being perceived as pejorative. :(

Unwanted email.

I'm sorry about the Captcha on the comments. I hate it, too. But with Comment Moderation on, evaluating the comments was turning into a daily part-time job. I had been throwing the email notifications of spam into a folder in my email, and just now deleted the contents of that box. I had to keep doing it, 200 emails at a time. I deleted over 1200 emails, from a very short period of uninterrupted bot-hosting. Each one of those, I opened, read, denied for my blog, and moved to a folder. Too much work. That's why I have the Turing test, to prove that you breathe and think on your own before you submit a comment. Sorry to make you work for it.

While I was in my email, I looked in the Spam folder for the first time in a LONG time. One was from an email with my own moniker in it, and I idly opened it. This is what popped up:

Good day my new friend!
I for the first time try such a way of dialogue, and I really don't know what to tell right now even though I understand that this first message have greater importance. My name is
Lubov. I look for the friend on the web. I liked your
form. And I decided to write to you. On the Internet I did not
communicate earlier. My friend told to me to communicate on the
Internet. Now I decided to find the friend. I Hope we will
communicate. Then communication can outgrow in that bigger))).
Thanks for time found by you! I am wait your answer!
My mail box l_[redacted]@ymail.com
Your new girlfriend Lubov.

I picture it being spoken in the voice of a female Latka Gravas.  Man, I should write her back, and let her down easy, and tell her that I'm married.

Another opportunity, missed.

Dammit, how often does an opportunity like this present itself? A world-famous Olympic athlete, known specifically for being a contender despite having no lower legs, is charged with murdering his girlfriend, and he fields a lame alibi.

So we get this:

That's what we get when cowards are placed in editorial positions. Clearly, it should have been run thusly:

Kitty eco threat.

There's a fellow in New Zealand that wants to eradicate cats on the island nation. Sounds like a meanie, doesn't he?

But he's not proposing that people kill them. He just wants them all neutered, and no feral cats. His reasoning is that originally, New Zealand was teaming with birds that had no natural predators. Man's introduction of the friendly housecat caused kiwis and penguins and other ground birds to be endangered, but also the song birds, too.

My house regularly has feathers in it, from my rescued semi-feral cat, TC. He is lovable and friendly, and a stone cold bird assassin. I seriously consider having his front claws removed. I will not abide a cat box in my house. I am part of the problem.

Feral cat colonies are a HUGE problem. When we permit them to exist, we permit the devastation to the local ecology.  While the catch-neuter-release programs are good ideas, they cost a lot, and thus rarely get properly implemented. Their proponents put forth the silly assertion that straightforward extermination doesn't work in reducing the problem.

Food for thought, from a cat owner.

Thursday random thoughts.

--When Marty McFly went thirty years into the future, he went to 21 October 2015. That's a little over two and a half years from now.

--I've got a friend turning in his gear to muster out of the US Army in Korea. I actually still can see a point in being there, unlike Afghanistan. But even then, the reason to be in Korea isn't good enough. Let's bring them home. This is less about me being a peacenik and more about me wondering how we're going to pay for this, and wondering what it is that we think we're buying with all those taxpayer's dollars?

--South Korea is mighty industrialized, now, and China has little or no truck with North Korea, now.

--I've been watching old episodes of Barney Miller, lately. As a kid, I remember that show coming on, and wondering why anyone would want to watch it. What kind of a cop show was it, where mostly people just stood around and talked, and a laugh track ran? Why didn't anyone ever fire a gun, or chase somebody?? 

Now, I'm fascinated again at the anthropology of police work. The detectives' squad room, for instance: no computers. Hell, even the typewriters are manual. The cops wear Detective Specials and 2" Model 10's, and maybe the odd Agent or something. Apparently the detectives routinely get called out to hot calls in-progress. Nobody has a portable radio. Very, very rarely is a female cop seen, and it's a big deal. Come to think of it, it's a big deal that one is black, and one is Polish, and one is Chinese, and one is Puerto Rican, too. Then there's the character Deitrich, who's just weird. I like his character the best. Sadly, Steve Landesberg and Jack Soo and Ron Carey and James Gregory are all dead. Ironically, the actor who portrayed the sick and burnt-out Phil Fish (Abe Vigoda) is still quite active as an actor at 91.

It took me a while to realize that Detective Harris is Shepard Book from Firefly.

--Watching the 30 minute cop comedy that spanned from 1974 to 1982, you become very aware of that tendency of television shows from that time period to attempt to grapple with social issues. I've seen ones on Vietnam, and the aftermath of violence, and on racial relations, and civil rights ("In a very special Barney Miller: Deitrich gets arrested, standing up for what he believes in.").  I just watched one about Agent Orange that had an investigation less plausible than that purportedly presented in J.F.K.

--The captain has a couch in his office. I've had a boss with a couch in his office. I want, someday, to have a couch in my office.

--The dicks wore their guns right in the show, though, for the most part-- behind the strong side hip. Modern cop shows are terrible about putting that pistol at 2:00 or even 1:45, just so that you can see it even when a cover garment on. The show's main character carries it too far, with Hal Linden deciding that the good captain would have his snubbie at about 4:30 or even 5:00 o'clock.

--That reminds me: I need a new couch at home. We've shredded the leather. I've stitched it back. My daughter's stitched it. It's time. We got our $1300 out of it. (What? That was 10 years ago. We'd gotten an insurance check, and needed a couch.)

--Remember when you would occasionally see benches in men's rooms? My wife tells me that there's a couch in the lady's room at her office. I seem to recall, as a little kid getting dragged into ladies' rooms, that couches were rife in womens' restrooms.

--I had someone question some point of my manhood recently. I pulled out my pink cell phone, pointed to it and my ring, and said, "I've got almost 15 years of marriage to the woman that I've had two kids with. I quit caring about having to prove my masculinity to anyone a long time ago."

--Apparently, the SCOTUS just heard arguments about whether states can do mandatory blood draws without a warrant. I've been kind of uneasy about our new "If it's a felony, you have to give blood" law, from the outset. I'm absolutely fine taking an involuntary blood draw after having a sworn warrant. I've got a sneaking suspicion that we're going to see a lot of specimens thrown out for violation of 4th Amendment. I can deal with losing the admittedly useful investigative tool.  I'd rather live in a free[r] country, even though I promise you that some intoxicated drivers will walk because of this, and will cause some deaths.

--I've had some felony DWI arrestees voluntarily provide me with a blood sample, so that their license wouldn't be immediately suspended for refusing, stating that they knew that I could take their blood against their will, anyway. Tough break for them if the mandatory blood draw gets thrown out.

--I bought a new dishwasher for Mom for Christmas. I got delivered today. The delivery guy knocked off some insulation, said, "Uh oh," and left it. I tried to stick it back on. Maybe I've got it right? I found that Whirlpool dishwashers need a special adaptor that you have to buy separately, to hook 'em to your water supply. They salesman that us the washer forgot to mention that. The salesman at the store when I went in to get the adaptor was shocked, and said that it should have been mentioned. The manager gave me a $25 gift card, so I'm basically happy. 

--But now I have to finish installing a dishwasher. Which I hate doing. Uninstalling the old one was two tons of fun, too. It's been sitting full of stagnant dirty water for about half a year. Ew. It made a mess.

--I went to a Council of Governments class on grant-writing yesterday. That was kind of a beating. I'm hoping that I win us a grant, and that it becomes worth it. As the coordinator for our city, it's going to be like herding cats.

--This looks like an interesting integrated rifle system. The misuse of the term "bullet" is frustrating, though.

--My elder daughter refused to let me pull her out of AP honors geometry to put her in the regular class. She's been struggling, and feeling some stress. (First B in years.)  I'm really proud of her for not taking the easy way out, when I was giving her that option.

Among that which we applaud.

My old partner and I used to laugh a lot, listening to some Professor Elemental.

I had thought that we'd seen the last of that chap, though, until Jennifer tonight pointed out that the witty gentleman parody retro chap-hopper had just now produced this:

The end is the very best part. Seriously.

Haw.

New Year. 2013

--You get that we can't do this better than they can, right? First we'd have to build a half-mile-tall building....

--I was driving an ambulance when the new year rolled in.

--My 10-year-old was at her best friend's house as the new year turned over. She said that they were dancing non-stop, mostly to Madonna. My wife was certainly glad that they went over to her best friend's house for that.

--We had our annual black eyed peas for New Years Day, in the form of  "Skippin' Jenny."  I've eaten this for years and never called it "Hoppin' John" nor "Skippin' Jenny." We also had cabbage. We didn't do that as a kid.

--I'm not in the least superstitious. But I like black eyed peas stewed with meaty pork bone, served over rice with greens. And I enjoy the tradition. So what harm?

--I ran a lot of calls, and overslept at the fire station.

--I did a lot of laundry, both at the fire house and at home, on New Year's Day.

--While I was on duty at the fire house, my daughter took down the tree and decorations. I had only to put them up into the attic when I got home. It feels very liberating.

--My younger daughter got an art set, which markers smell (respectively) like: honeysuckle, green apple, pine trees, marshmallows, "sea breeze", vanilla, cherry, berry, orange, spices, and lemons. Do we really want to be encouraging kids to be sniffing markers?

--I'm having more trouble than I thought, securing the right tree to put into my father's yard. Apparently 2012 was a bad year for pecans, and everyone bought up the good stock.

--It's been a bumper crop for the pecan nuts, though. Last night my daughters and wife and I shelled enough pecans to fill two and a half gallon bags with pure nut meat. That's about 9 pounds of meat, which we got out of our yard (from our neihbors' trees), all in one night, while watching a movie.

--I was surprised at how into the movie Taken my wife and kids were. Huh. A shoot-em-up, beat-'em-up thriller, with Liam Neeson (a personal favorite of my wife's) in it. There was even a moral in it for my daughters: Do what your Daddy says. Don't lie to your father. We all gave it thumbs up.

--Even with the chartered jet and knowledge of Paris, Liam Neeson's character seems to get a lot done in 96 hours. Apparently, he does so without sleep.  Then, after killing all the Albanians and all the Middle Easterners  in Paris, and after shooting the wife of one of the major deputy chiefs of the French spy syndicate, he takes his daughter and gets onto a flight to come back home. (Charter, again, I suppose.)

--I had half a fruit tart (a spoonfull is in the picture at upper left of the link) at La Madeleine French Bakery and Cafe yesterday. I also had half of blackberry and cream cheese croissant fresh out of the oven. This stuff is bring you to your knees good. Cheap, too, considering that I ate it while getting refills of coffee and complimentary fresh bread and butter. Those guys have a hell of a business model.

--I'm retiring cases from 2012. I had a lot of criminal cases to work on, and did very little traffic last month.

--I'm a complete sucker for those year-in-retrospective shows that come on about this time every year. I may write one for Better And Better.

Mishmash.

--Without going into details, that free iPhone tracker app works. Stick it on your kid's phone, with the settings so that only the account holder can see where it is. Also works for your own phone, if you trust the phone company with that info. Lots do, lots don't.

--My new FD bunker gear came in again, with the proper color striping on it. (It had designated me a captain, before.) It's so clean. It has no odor. No smoke or sweat or mud. It has never been anyone else's before. It has a drag strap on the back. It has my name on the back in 4 inch tall reflective letters. Between that and my professional tag over my locker, I really feel like I am a member of the team. One of the firefighters laughed and said, "Hey, you finally are somebody!" I actually kind of got that feeling, too.

--I worked a house fire recently. The ambient temperature in the shade was 101 degrees when we arrived. We fought mostly to save a portion of the house, which we did. But we lost a lot of it. Wearing an insulated suit with a cowl over your neck really makes you hot before putting on that SCBA and going into a smoke-filled hot burning building. This in turn makes you suck harder on that air. No one much talks about the cooling effect of the gas expansion from that sweet compressed air. The simple desire to get cooler can make you take bigger gasps so that a tank that should give about 30 minutes lasts about 10 minutes. Or less.

--Note to the President: With the recent murder of our US ambassador to Libya, I wonder where our recently-decommissioned FB-111s* went. Are they mothballed? Did we sell them to other countries? What would it take to re-commission them? Oh, I know that there are other planes serving their old role just fine, or better (see: B1B Lancer). But I think that the psychological impact of a Tripoli sky full of Aardvarks again would be worth something. 

With an average speed of 600kmph, it should take a hair less than 9 hours to get a flight of Lancers there. Mr. President, if you want me to believe that you're a tough guy, get off the whole "I gave the order to the guy who gave the order to the guy who told the guys to kill Bin Laden." Instead, put on your game face, pick up the phone, and convince Spanish PM Rajoy that he'll hardly notice a squadron of jets flying 5 miles over the neck of the Iberian Peninsula.

I know that you like to have crib notes, so here's your flight plan, which I made just for you:

Click To Embiggen.

--My suggestion? Drop a few hundred GPS-guided inert practice bombs on our own embassy in Tripoli. It's our soil, after all. The kinetic kill to those who hoisted the black flag over our soil will be just as real, and the message sent just as strong: "We could have made this hit using a conventional bomb, or a fuel-air bomb, or even nucs. And we did it with obsolete planes. Don't piss us off." No collateral damage. Just stack one nose cone into the fins of the previous practice bomb.

--I'm taking PADM 5010 at university this semester. "Wow, graduate Public Administration courses are so exhilarating!" said no one, ever. I'm waiting for my books to arrive. If I hadn't bought them used on Amazon, I'd have been out $250 to $400. As it is, I'm out about $100 for books for one three hour course.

--I took an off-duty job last week guarding a bridge over an interstate highway. It didn't go anywhere. I went up onto it and took a camera phone picture of the traffic going by underneath.

--When I stepped barefoot outside to get the mail this morning, I found some public works guys picking up branches and throwing in the back of a truck, so I helped them. When my shirt rode up while pitching brush, one of them laughed that I had a pistol holstered. Yeah, if I've got on pants, I do. The family of the late former sheriff and police chief Herbert Proffitt undoubtedly wishes that he had done so, to.  Proffitt was 82 and recently retired for the second time, when while checking his mail he was gunned down by a former customer of his, harboring a 40 year grudge.  It is your duty to make it hard for them to kill you, and/or your tribe. Do your duty.  Otherwise, someone else is going to have to clean that mess up, and that involves apprehending the right desperate armed murderer without getting hurt. What's the first step in dealing with a snake bite? Kill the snake.

--I'm about to try to step up for a local citizen that's without much resources. We'll see if I don't screw this up.

--My brother and I talked a bit today about religion. I was surprised at how close we were were on the subject, which we hadn't talked about in some years. But it was one of those conversations where neither one of us would have gotten upset if we had discovered that we were at opposite ends of the spectrum, either. I am happy that he and I are at this easy-going place in our relationship.

--With a high of 75 this weekend, we may have finally made it through the long hot death march of summer. But I don't trust it not to give me triple digit temperatures again, until I'm well into the second half of my second month ending with -er.

_____________________________
* Ask your National Security Advisor to get you Condi Rice's number, and ask her what these are. Don't rely on your party's defense guys to get this one right!

Just let it play.

From friend Rabbit, I get this.

Gorecki Symphony No. 3 "Sorrowful Songs" - Lento e Largo

Open it up, let it start playing, and then surf in another tab for the next nine minutes.

Music from Canada.

While I do not want our nation to be Canada, I can dang sure appreciate some of the cool stuff they make up there.

First, we start with music from a group that is described as a national treasure to the province of Quebec. (And if you don't understand how a province can claim a regional folk band is a national treasure, then you know even less about the Quebeckers' fierce sense of independence than I do.) Play it through, and see if it doesn't stick in your head. It does in mine:

Not speaking any French, I asked my friend Amy, who's a high school French teacher in Texas. She said: "No idea. Some of the words I heard: 'fish (or possibly drink), laugh ha ha, little' .................. crazy Canadians."

While I may not know about French, I'll bet that trying to decipher the Québécois dialect makes the Provençal dialect look like a snap. Kinda like a Texan managing to parse Cockney, but then having to try to parse Scots.

Then I had my friend Jane, a true Canadienne, attempt to decipher it. 

She came up with: "Its a bunch of crazy lyrics like 'I'm going to the fountain to go fishing for fish... his small rusty key chain, all rusty, all rusty... the fountain is deep, deep, deep' :)" Given that Jane serves Poutine in Texas, and her mother has a thick Québécois accent after 25 years in the US, I'll give her the final word on it.
____

Well now that I've planted that earworm in your head, let's try moving to this one, that is not only a great tune, but is a magnificent use of one instrument by five people:

Technically impressive, and just damned good, too.
I wonder if we'll be hearing more of Walk Off Earth. While it's a cover (of this very good song), I think that they made it their own.

No need to jazz it up.

I know that it's cute to have Corduroy Day on the day with all the vertical lines in the date.

But maybe it's better to use today to remember warriors and wars past. That's what we set this day aside for.

If you (like me) never took on the duty, there's certainly nothing to keep you from appreciating the securities provided by those who have done so. If you are a pacifist, then now is the time to reflect on the horror of war, and be glad that it isn't coming to your home. There's a reason for that, you know.

I look forward to the day that we celebrate armistice, yet again.

Until our men and women come home --and even then-- remember.

Project A Kon

And speaking of Larry Correia, that reminds me-- I ran into a guy dressed out as one of his characters out of his excellent series of Monster Hunters International books.

He was very nice, and let me take his picture. I mentioned that I'd been a moderator with Larry at The Firing Line and The High Road for some time, and he asked if I wanted a patch. I've never gotten an MHI patch, so I was excited to get this one. I think that I'm going to sew it onto my patrol bag. I may put velcro on the back, and put it on my department gas mask bag, or on my fast response bag.

I ran into the guy at A-Kon, an anime convention for serious nerds. What was I doing at A-Kon, you may ask? Well, I think that I was being a good daddy. See, my elder daughter and her best friends have gotten deep into reading all manner of Japanese cartoon books called Manga. They watch videos of Japanese anime. They copy hundreds of Japanese pop songs in MP3 format to trade among each other to play on their iPods and phones and convert to CD format to play on my dadgummed car stereo when we go places.

So when my 12 year old daughter, who had just been recognized by Duke TIP as a really bright kid for doing exceptionally well on the SAT in 7th grade, got all A's for the six weeks, the semester, and the school year, she was getting a big reward. And she wanted A-Kon. I took her and her two best friends.

Folks, I've been to a few county fairs, a goat ropin', and I've seen ducks copulate, but I've never seen anything like this.

We drove into downtown Dallas to the hotel. No parking for blocks. We finally drove into a parking garage that was almost full, for $18 to park. We walked into the hotel amidst hundreds-- nay-- thousands of people dressed in various costumes. My daughter was not in costume, but she had dyed her bangs aqua (hey, they grow out). She was so normal-looking, that she was almost invisible. I just wore khakis and comfortable shoes. I was invisible.

We walked in as the conga line of several hundred passed us. The leader was a belly dancer with 8 foot butterfly wings of gold. Following her were all manner of costumed nerds who were in their natural habitat, mostly between the ages of 14 and 30.

It was as if, repressed of their chance to be social during their daily lives, these youngsters had finally found Their People, and took the opportunity to crawl out of their shells. They were jubilant. When they found someone in a similar costume, depicting the same character that they had come dressed as, they didn't get upset. Indeed, they would happily embrace, as would long-lost friends who had finally reunited. I saw this over and over again. They minded not at all if you asked to take a picture of them (or better yet, with them). It was a high compliment, and the most popular had worked on their poses. My daughter was a little jealous of her friend who was repeatedly recognized for the character whose costume she wore.

I paid the registration fee for all four of us. But that was it. (Besides snacks, lunch, supper, and a little help with a pin when a girl came up short.)

We saw furries, cross-dressers, perverts, and robots, both real and imagined. We saw storm troopers. We saw girl storm troopers. We saw video game characters. We saw faux Florentine fencing demonstrations. We saw people dressed as stone angels. We saw browncoats. We saw steampunks. We saw movie heroines. We saw superheroes. We saw strange mixes of culture that defied explanation. It was a throng of nerd-dom, taking up three stories of the hotel.

And next year, if she gets all A's, I'll take her to do it again.

"So now what?"

A suggestion, Mr. Nobel Peace Prize-Winning President.

What do you do, after you announce that the most powerful nation in the world finally just knocked off a third-world-living thug, 9.5 years after he masterminded an effective attack on our nation?

You tell your military to pack up, come home, and stand down. We're in a recession, and we need to save money.

Announce the following, and note the respect that you can engender:

"We just focused the reach of our angry nation on killing one man who attacked our nation. Having killed him, we bring our troops and resources back home. My suggestion: Don't become the next target of our ire."

Then dismiss the TSA.

You might be amazed at the votes you find in the next election.

Whither went your Barbara Walters interviews, Moammar?

I remember when I saw Barbara Walters doing interview with Mu'ammar Qaddafi* back in 1989. I was disgusted with it in a general sort of way. Barbara seemed so sympathetic about the tribulations that Col. Gadafi had gone through when his mansion was bombed by F-111F's back in 1986.

I was disgusted because Gadafi, a terrorist underwriter, had survived the retaliation for a bombing of our troops. I was disgusted that Walters was being so amiable and deferential to this terrorist, who was responsible for the Berlin bombing, the downing of an airliner over Lockerbie, and at least one fatal hijacking. Plus, had anyone actually seen this guy in the same room with Gene Simmons? I had my suspicions.**

Mu'ammar Al-Qadhafi eventually accepted responsibility for the Lockerbie bombing, and made reparations. He was beginning to be accepted back into the international community.

And then came the uprisings in Tunisia, and Egypt. Suddenly, North Africa became a zone of people charged with the idea of liberation. After Egypt's coup, the people in Libya began to look at a ruler of 42 years as not being precisely "democratic."

Remember how some of us were a little ambivalent about Egypt's revolt?

Well, compared to Libya, Egypt looked like Canada. In Egypt, the troops refused to fire on the protestors. In fact, the government was turned over to the military there. In Libya, the troops have been mowing down protestors. Bad idea. We're getting reports of pro-Gadhafi forces gassing the protestors with poison gas. Bad idea.

So it was that yesterday, Libya's deputy ambassador to the U.N. stepped down and declared Muammar Khaddafi to be a "mad man." That's pretty bad.

But then later in the day, during open session on the floor of the U.N., amidst the dry verbage of international negotiation, Ambassador Mohamed Shalgham, Gadhafi's head Ambassador to the U.N. slammed Gadhafi's regime. He threw diplomacy to the wind, and said of his own government:

"They are asking for their rights. They did not throw a single stone and they were
killed. I tell my brother Gaddhafi: Leave the Libyans alone."

Colonel Mister Gadhafi? You're done. The guy whom you hand-picked to represent your government to the world has said that you are not legitimate.

Pack your bags, Muammar Abu Minyar al-Gaddafi. It's time to split.

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* You will notice that I'll be using a variety of spellings for this guy. Why not? Everyone else does.

** Which really isn't fair to the KISS frontman. He's turned out to be a huge supporter of U.S. troops.

Got any pocket change?

I've got five... no, six! dollars, and 37 cents.

Let's all kick in and buy a Type 42 destroyer.

Sure, the engines and the guns are removed, but think of the fun we could have. I'm thinking that, once we've got some Mercury outboards mounted, we go make a run up and down the coast of Somalia.

I know whom I'm asking to captain her.

What, me?!? Are you kidding? Give up a gunport on the rails for a spot on the conn? You're out of your mind.

The damage done by one man.

When you're a parent of a child with severe autism, you may very well find yourself search for a reason why your child was born with this inability to relate to the world. I imagine that it would be very easy to find yourself grasping for something, anything, to make sense of why your child had this handicap.

So when we started hearing about a study in England, relating vaccinations to the uptick in autistic cases, it must have been very seductive indeed for those parents to believe in it, even before the study was validated.

Good science has peer reviews, and has validity questions asked and answered. If your samples are contaminated with poor representations, or your data was not interpretted the same way, or you used biased methods, then you will get junk science, which cannot be replicated when good solid methods are used.

The English study, conducted by Dr. Andrew Wakefield, was worse than junk science; it was fraud.

And that fraud has led to a giant decline in vaccinations throughout the UK and even the US. Consequently, measles is up to the highest level in 13 years. Vaccinations rates fell 80% (can this be true?!?).

Another scientist named Deer says that he has not only found clear fraud, but a clear motive: pounds sterling. Apparently, lawyers were paying Wakefield to find these "facts," Deer says.

The British government have stripped Wakefield of his medical license. He says that it's a witch hunt to get him for saying something unpopular.

But there have always been scientists who were willing to speak out and say something unpopular, in the defense of good science. If Wakefield's notorious conclusions are correct then he'll receive support of his methods by legitimate members of the scientific community.

At this point? We don't have any proof of a link between vaccinations and autism. Even if there were a link, we can't point to Wakefield's study for proof.

But we can point to damage done to many children, but the acts of one bad "scientist."