The Flummery Digest

2008-12-09T08:30:00.029-05:00

The Flummery Digest is a proto-blog I published for 11 years starting in 1992, long before the dawn of blog-time or even Web-time. It came about owing to a difficulty in concisely expressing my concern over "political correctness" and other contemporary leftward allergens. Instead, I thought it best to consolidate a set of illustrative examples, adapted from various periodicals and source materials I consumed at the time. Prompted by a particularly unhinged statement on Oliver Stone's part, I started distributing the Digest in May 1992 as an email blast, then backed it with an archive website by March 1995 — first HERE, then HERE and finally HERE. I ceased publication in 2003, after realizing that the chaotic variety of enthusiasms I had come to appreciate was largely an artifact of that frivolous "inter-war" period of the '90s. The focus narrowed depressingly in the wake of September 11, and it was not quite so amusing anymore.

This site represents a recasting of The Flummery Digest in explicit "blog" format, with items dated roughly according to the referenced material. Some items are thus back-dated to as early as 1990. Citations are available as a footnote link (†) at the bottom of each item. Still, while the Digest's serial format resembles contemporary blogs in many ways, the tone is notably different: relatively impersonal, terse, and droll, despite occasional irate editorial comments seeping through. Some of my more flattering readers went so far as to identify the Digest as the funniest, albeit most alarming, site available on the Web. (A representative sample, with material culled from each month's archive, is available HERE.)

I thank all my readers throughout the years for their many suggestions for inclusions, and for their overall encouragement. After pulling the plug, my greatest regret has been falling out of touch with this wonderful group of oddballs.

I hope you enjoy it.

—Mike "The Original Blogger" Sierra

2008-10-27T19:23:00.000-04:00

Entropy. That's the idea I had in mind when formulating the following introductory text that was long posted on the Flummery Digest's home page:

It has been said that politics is the art of the possible. It is also the art of the silly and the dangerous.
I started collecting offbeat news items early in the '90s for my own amusement and sanity, but it soon became my primary interest to document the multifarious phenomena known as "political correctness." I'm well aware of the tendency to define this term loosely to mean "any closely held view of which I don't approve," and I'm not sure I'm offering anything better here. Yet while I believe both Left and Right entertain all sorts of smelly orthodoxies (to use Orwell's term), self-styled progressives have always had particular trouble recognizing limits to the sort of progress they seek. As a result, traditional liberal expectations of government activity often slip the tethers of plausibility.
The most notable PC enthusiasms—race, gender, sexual "difference"—became popular at roughly the same time the Soviet Union imploded, when talk of class differences became relatively unpopular among leftists. There has been a corresponding de-emphasis of human beings in favor of wildlife and the "environment," neither of which can complain of unwelcome attention the way proletarians are liable to these days. And faced with socialism's manifest failure, many have even chosen to deny the importance of objective reality altogether, adopting faddish nihilistic attitudes to conceal their own strange form of gnosticism.
I aim to document a wide range of these often contradictory threads, both in their speculative stages and once hardened into legal statutes or informal, polite axioms. Astute readers may notice a similar tension between my libertarian and conservative instincts. Yet while PC tends to explore some of the fringe logical questions that are routinely posed within the framework of a free society, I adapt that approach by refocusing attention on the logical extremes of PC itself. I'm optimistic at least that laughing at it may help diminish it.
I must warn you that if you are overly sensitive or if you identify yourself closely with the fortunes of various grievance groups, reading this anthology will not be cause for great joy. Even if that's not the case and if you are as insensitive as I am, reading too much in one sitting may still give you a bad case of the shakes. Medical vaccinations involve a weak dose of a disabled form of a virus; a political vaccination requires quite the opposite.

2008-10-26T19:21:00.006-04:00

Here's a selection of relevant FAQ questions I posted on the old Flummery Digest site in response to repeated email queries.

What's with the word "flummery"?
It's a perfectly acceptable word:
flum-mery \'flem-(e-)re^-\
[W llymru]
(ca. 1623)
1a: a soft jelly or porridge made with flour or meal
1b: any of several sweet desserts
2: MUMMERY, MUMBO JUMBO
Perhaps more to the point:
mum-mery \'mem-e-re^-\ pl -mer-ies
(1530)
1: a performance by mummers
2: a ridiculous, hypocritical, or pretentious ceremony or performance
How about the word "litany"? Is the site supposed to be an inclusive "prayer" or "appeal" or "supplication"?

How about "any long and tedious address or recital"? One of its most popular usages, after all, is "litany of complaints," which is rather what I had in mind. Also, a litany "is usually of a penitential character." I rather like that.

Where does the term "political correctness" come from?

Richard Bernstein of the New York Times (author of Dictatorship of Virtue) is generally credited with popularizing the term in a 1991 article, but he certainly did not coin it.
I have heard—and I'm not sure it's true—that the term "politically correct" (not the later "PC" acronym) originated among American communists during the '30s. It may have arisen from—ahem—"debate" between Stalinists and Trotskyites as to which path was ideologically superior. For all I know, it may have arisen as American shorthand used to track increasingly indefensible gyrations in the Soviet party line around the time of the Nazi/Soviet pact. (Memo to humanity: stop following political philosophies that are closely identified with primary colors. For one thing, "green" is synonymous with "naïve.")
Regardless, I have first-hand experience that the term "politically correct" was originally non-pejorative, and was used way too earnestly before becoming slathered with layers of irony. You might have heard the phrase used to describe the faux pas you just committed by failing to leave the toilet seat down for the next female who chanced along. I clearly remember (from around 1989-1990) the term "un-PC" being directed towards use of chopsticks, since they come from trees, which of course grow in rainforests. In that sense, saying something was "un-PC" was the equivalent of saying "we do not approve" when the person speaking happens to be the Queen of England. In that passive sense, it deflects open discussion and relies on consensus as its authority. After all, it is not so much that we don't do these things, it is that these things simply aren't done.

I am a student, and I am writing a research paper on something having to do with the material on your site. Can you tell me what I should write about and do all my research for me?

The question answers itself.

Has PC affected you personally?

Not all that much, or at least not directly. At one point at O'Reilly, where I made part of my living editing and producing computer books, some staff members once tried to implement a policy of alternating male and female pronouns in different paragraphs to represent the generic third person fairly, but I tried my best to ignore it. It would get plenty absurd, too. I remember proofing one stretch of text that oscillated so wildly between using 'her' and 'his' that what should have been a clear exposition of the layering of graphic interface elements sounded like some poor woman was having carnal relations with an X Windows dialog box handler, with special emphasis on its "widget." (That policy collapsed under its own weight.)
In fact, most people have not been fired, sued, or publicly humiliated as a result of PC. Most people I've spoken with simply regard it as a tax, with much the same grim sense of inevitability. I try to ignore it in my everyday life, despite many provocations.

Where do all the circus graphics come from?

The monochrome images are from the public-domain Dover Pictorial Archive, and may be copied freely. The color images on the September 2001 page, on the other hand, are all ripped off.

You say that you're conflicted, not sure whether you're a libertarian or a conservative. Why?

A little personal history: I was brought up liberal (the Upper West Side's default setting) and went through the usual inchoate radical left-wing stage as a teenager. In the mid-'80s, I had what alcoholics describe as a "moment of clarity" in which some of the basic laws of economics suddenly became apparent, as if by burning bush. Injesting modern-day liberalism was very much like eating bad meat, and while it took a while, believe me, it came up all at once.
I was a big-L "Libertarian" for a little while, but did not find them to be a serious political party. For one thing, they insisted on running the publisher of Screw magazine for political office in Florida. Aside from the unbelievably bad judgement that represented, many Libertarians also confused the issue with one of free speech, as if a (private!) political party were obliged to promulgate any viewpoint whatsoever.
I recall objecting in an e-mail discussion forum that it was not the business of a political party to contradict the sexual moral code of the overwhelming majority of the population, to which a surprising number of Libertarian activists responded Oh Yes It Was, and maybe their personal moral code needs some overturning. I found it surreal that the same bunch of people who constantly invoked Friedrich Hayek on the state's inability to process price information better than free markets ignored his more important insights into the pragmatic, evolutionary nature of informal human custom. Libertarians seemed almost Marxist in their willingness to overturn these long-though-out customs in favor of their own rigid ideological preferences. For the same reason, Libertarians are uncharacteristically utopian and arrogant in thinking that their way is the best, which, come to think of it, is also true of people who read way too much Ayn Rand. I'm convinced that if you encountered the same bunch of people 50 years ago, they'd be Trotskyites.
For a while I called myself a small-l libertarian, but even then I found major problems with the political philosophy. Without getting too long-winded about it, the problem is basically (a) little, if any, reference to moral philosophy or anything that falls outside the narrow realm of simple economic transaction, (b) isolationist foreign policy advice from Hell, and (c) an extreme fetish with individual rights to the exclusion of all other considerations. (For more on the latter point, the book to read is William Donohue's Twilight of Liberty, a strong criticism of the ACLU that happens to apply to libertarians as well.)
Which is not to say I feel completely comfortable calling myself "conservative," but there you have it: a split personality. Intellectually conservative, tempermentally liberal. And as you can tell from the above yammering, my pronounced sense of political identity has also long been something of a character flaw.

Did you leave anything out?
Since I rely mostly on print media, I occasionally miss broadcast commentaries that would otherwise make the cut, but that take too long to reproduce as text, and National Public Radio has been a particularly rich source.
I remember during the Clinton impeachment, hearing an NPR interview with Francine Du Plessix Gray, author of a biography of the Marquis De Sade, in which she compared the "persecution" of the famous... well... sadist to the persecution of President Clinton. There was no trace of irony in her voice whatsoever. I had to pull the car over. The same thing happened more recently when a talk show host commented on air that the poet Pablo Neruda "dabbled in politics."
I once heard another NPR interview with one of the actresses from the TV comedy, "In Living Color," who complained that when she grew up she only had a white doll to play with. At the time, there were a few dolls available that were black like her, but these were clearly the same white dolls, but that had only been painted over to be black. Later in life, she said, other dolls became available that were designed with African-American facial characteristics—no elaboration there. She was gratified, she said, that they were "dolls of color, rather than just colored dolls." (Again, I'm not sure if she was simply fulfilling her role as comedienne.)
In general, I haven't wailed on NPR and PBS enough, though I should say that the quality of their news reporting and choice of documentary subjects has improved, probably as a result of the '94 Republican Congressional takeover, and the inevitable incentive shift that implies. Prior to that, they had very little bad to say about places like Cuba, and very little good to say about Israel. Others argue they are still intensely biased; I leave it to you to evaluate.) NPR managed to inject every conceivable issue with liberal bias. In one story about agricultural policy on "All Things Considered," the only expert source they interviewed was perhaps the only economist in the world who thought that farm subsidies were a good idea. (And surprise!... he worked for the farm lobby.) Another story attacked the Christian Science Monitor for bias because of the religious institution that ran the paper. But NPR would constantly run horrific, three-hankie stories about all the bad things that happen when you cut social programs, but they never stated their own entrenched bias on the subject—that they rely so heavily on government subsidies.

Are you really the "Original Blogger"?

Not really, but it's kind of fun to say so. "Blog" is just a silly term anyway, since it represents a tautology. There's been plenty of blog-like content long before the advent of the Web. Does residence on the Web make it a blog? Likewise, I never specifically used "blog" software [until adapting the archive in 2008], even though my form of Internet-only content represents a kind of proto-blog. As far as I can tell, the only difference is that blog entries are displayed in strict reverse chronological order, while mine are pretty much random for each month. Also, most blogs feature links to readers' comments and trackbacks, whereas I don't care what you think and certainly don't want it on my site.

Okay, that was a bit harsh. The only other FAQ item I'd add...

Is it true you were once plagiarized by Ann Coulter?
Apparently, yes.

Finally, here's one other personal anecdote that somehow never made it into the Digest.

I have a friend who lives with her husband and two sons in a rambling house in one of Boston's most affluent suburbs. Her husband managed software projects at firms like Lotus and IBM, eventually quitting to launch a startup that was quickly acquired by Abobe. At the time, she was an editor at an influential technical publishing firm, a position from which she was able to retire in her mid-thirties because, frankly, they were doing very well.

One of their sons returned from kindergarden one day and expressed great concern to his father about his employment status. "Please, daddy," he would say, "please keep your job. I would be very sad if you lost your job." He told his son that he had a job, a very good job, and that everything was alright. Still, his son expressed ongoing worry, and said something strange to the effect that he liked living in a house and didn't like beans. After a few days of this, they figured out the source of the tension. The boy's kindergarten class had read aloud a book about a family struggling to make it by in some marginal industry. After the father loses his job, they have to cut their expenses dramatically, hence the reference to eating beans. With barely enough left to eat, the family is then evicted from their apartment, and have to live in their car, huddled under blankets while seeking opportunities for migrant labor.

2003-06-30T01:33:00.000-04:00

Writing in the National Review, Jay Nordlinger reports on the resurgence of efforts against the fluoridation of water. Often thought of as a defining characteristic of fringe right-wing groups such as the John Birch Society, opposition to fluoridation has increasingly taken hold among leftist environmentalists.

The founding members of the Fluoride Action Network—a clearinghouse for anti-fluoride efforts—include the founder of Friends of the Earth, the editor of Coyote Nation, the publisher of The Ecologist, the co-founders of GreenWatch, and even a past president of the Secular Franciscan Order. Anti-fluoridation articles have appeared in magazines such as The Progressive and CovertAction Quarterly, the latter of which identified fluoridation as a capitalist plot. The Berkeley-based Environmental News Network has served as a hub of anti-fluoride activity. The National Resources Defense Council is also against it, along with many Sierra Club chapters.

These groups argue that fluoride is a pollutant, that there is currently too much of it in various food products, that fluoride is superfluous in fighting cavities (given that people practice good hygiene and a adopt a good diet), and that it is an undemocratic assault on individual preferences. While some have no objection to the presence of fluoride in toothpaste, others blame fluoridation for cancer, brittle bones, Alzheimer's disease, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, and hypothyroidism, with leads to weight gain, high blood pressure, and heart disease. Supporters of fluoridation include the American Dental Association, the Centers for Disease Control, and the office of Surgeon General. They argue that adding fluoride to drinking water is safe in small amounts, and yields substantial benefits in dental health.

Efforts to discontinue or prevent fluoridation have been successful in both Santa Cruz and Santa Barbara, California; Ithaca, New York; Worcester, Massachusetts; and much of the Pacific Northwest. An anti-fluoridation referendum is to be voted on in Palo Alto, California.

†

2003-06-26T01:35:00.000-04:00

Joel Brinkely of the New York Times reports on the Supreme Court decision on the constitutionality of a Texas state anti-sodomy law, June 26, 2003:

Justice Antonin Scalia wrote the dissent and took the unusual step of reading it aloud from the bench this morning, saying "the court has largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda," while adding that he personally has "nothing against homosexuals."

Here are the words Scalia actually used:

Let me be clear that I have nothing against homosexuals, or any other group, promoting their agenda through normal democratic means.

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2003-06-25T01:37:00.000-04:00

Despite the city's enormous deficit, New York's city council allocated $75,000 to organize city residents in support of rent control, $27,900 of which was used to bus supporters to a rally in Albany.

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2003-06-24T01:32:00.000-04:00

New York Newsday, June 24, 2003:

Snoop Dogg isn't wild about "Girls Gone Wild" anymore.
The rapper, who appeared as the host on one of the raunchy strip videos, told The Associated Press he's done with the series because it doesn't feature women of color.
"If you notice, there hasn't been no girls of [ethnicity] at all on none of those tapes," Snoop Dogg complained during a recent interview. "No black girls, no Spanish girls—all white girls, and that [stuff] ain't cool, because white girls ain't the only ho's that get wild."

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2003-06-24T01:31:00.000-04:00

Along with an accomplice, Deshon Rene Odom was arrested outside a California bank they had just robbed carrying a loaded revolver. The U.S. Ninth Court of Appeals reversed Odom's armed robbery conviction because he "never intentionally displayed the gun." In his ruling, Judge Richard R. Clifton inquires: "Can a bank robber with a concealed gun who never mentions or insinuates having one, but who displays it inadvertently, be convicted of armed bank robbery? We believe the answer is no."

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2003-06-23T01:39:00.001-04:00

Former Vermont governor and current presidential candidate Howard Dean, speaks with Tim Russert on NBC's "Meet the Press" about his position on the death penalty, June 22, 2003:

I think there may be one instance where just possibly it could be [a deterrent] and that's the shooting of a police officer. If you're about to pull a trigger on a guy who's in uniform and you know that you're going to get the death penalty and if you don't pull the trigger something different will happen, maybe that might save the police officer's life.

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2003-06-22T01:37:00.002-04:00

After Florida's Manatee County school district added "sexual preference" to the list of the school's forbidden discrimination targets, gay groups complained that using the word "preference" implies a choice or a potentially curable disorder.

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2003-06-19T01:38:00.000-04:00

Two years after the "CBS Evening News" reported on how Eva Baer-Schenkein couldn't afford to buy drugs for her osteoporosis due to shortcomings of the Medicare program, ABC's "World News Tonight" used the same woman in much the same story, this time suffering from "hypertension and other health problems."

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2003-06-18T01:26:00.000-04:00

Jim Fitzgerald of the Associated Press reports on the 50th anniversary of the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for passing nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union, June 18, 2003:

[T]he 50th anniversary has spiked interest. On Thursday night [Pete] Seeger, Susan Sarandon, Harry Belafonte and other show business activists... will appear at a benefit for the Rosenberg Fund for Children. [The Rosenberg's son Robert] Meeropol runs the fund, which assists the children of people imprisoned, harassed, attacked or fired for taking a public stand.
Meeropol calls the foundation his "constructive revenge."
His memoir, "An Execution in the Family" is being published on the anniversary. In it, he recounts his admittedly vague memories of Rosenberg family life; his and his brother's adoption by Abel and Anne Meeropol; his own studies of his parents' case, which opened him to the possibility they may have been spies; and his difficulty in understanding why parents of small children would engage in such risk.
But Meeropol is also suspicious that recently released evidence may be government "disinformation."
"What a horror story it would be for me to accept it and then later find out that I've spread their propaganda for them," he said. "I couldn't live with myself."

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2003-06-17T22:51:00.000-04:00

The Chicago Tribune reports on the difficulties faced by one of the death row inmates, a double murderer, whose sentence was commuted by Governor George Ryan, June 17, 2003:

Now, [Andre] Jones and the other inmates face the new reality of life in the general prison population.
It is a far different world from a condemned unit and the certainty of a date with execution: a place where increased freedom of movement brings greater danger; where the camaraderie among the condemned is shattered; where creature comforts such as almost-daily showers and easy access to telephones are gone.

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2003-06-17T01:44:00.000-04:00

In the midst of a series of lengthy strikes protesting a French pension reform plan, Marseille city cleaners dealt with the stench from piles of sun-baked garbage by applying lemon grass perfume.

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2003-06-13T23:21:00.000-04:00

The Sacramento Bee reports that, in the midst of a multibillion-dollar deficit, the California legislature wrangled over the wording of a resolution honoring Father's Day. Some legislators pushed for language so expansive as to specify "single fathers, foster fathers, adoptive fathers, biological fathers, stepfathers, families headed by two fathers, grandfathers raising grandchildren, fathers in blended households, and other non-traditional fathers."

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2003-06-12T22:53:00.000-04:00

A group of Louisiana cockfighters have sued to block a federal law banning interstate commerce in fowls because they say it discriminates against Cajuns and Hispanics, for whom they say the sport is integral to their cultures.

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2003-06-12T22:51:00.000-04:00

Two schools in Mill Creek, Washington were locked down after a parent spotted a 14-year-old boy carrying what turned out to be a prop gun used in a Civil War presentation. The Associated Press reports: "What the parent thought was a gun had a barrel made from two broomsticks painted black with foil at the end and a block of wood covered in wood-grain paper to resemble the butt." The boy is facing suspension.

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2003-06-12T01:30:00.000-04:00

Tinamarie Nicolo Dorfner of Moorestown, New Jersey, wrote an op-ed in the Philadelphia Inquirer explaining that during the seven months of her first pregnancy thus far, she has had to change her obstetricians four times. The first decided to stop delivering babies due to soaring malpractice insurance costs. The second had to move his practice to Maine for the same reason. She couldn't even get an appointment with the third because he was forced to see so many patients to pay for his malpractice premiums. The fourth is in a group practice, in which only three of the six physicians continue to deliver babies because they can't afford malpractice premiums for all of them.

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2003-06-11T01:42:00.001-04:00

Fiachra Gibbons reports on the latest artistic forays of Damien Hirst in the Guardian June 11, 2003:

In a series of sculptures inspired by Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper, which will be seen in London this autumn, Hirst will depict Jesus and the apostles as 13 pingpong balls bobbing on spurting fountains of red wine. A washing bowl to bathe Christ's feet will sit beneath their Formica table.
Hirst had wanted the balls to bob on blood but opted for wine, with all its symbolic echoes of the mass, in which Catholics believe wine is turned into the blood of Christ.
If that were not strong enough meat for many Christians, it will sit alongside a cow with six legs called In His Infinite Wisdom.
The fourth major piece in his next show at the White Cube gallery in London in September will be The Death of the Saints and the Ascension of Jesus, a sequence of "metaphorical" cabinets showing how Christ and the disciples met their ends. A pickled bull's head will sit in front of each cabinet.

[Ed.: This exhibit of seemingly more spiritual material represents the return of Hirst after a long bout of drunkedness, during which he admitted to have assembled many of his earlier works. Looking back, said Hirst, "I was a lunatic... there are things I have done which I now think, 'What the hell was I thinking?' ... I remember once I wanted to cover a pig in vibrators like a hedgehog. It was going to be called Pork-u-pine. Thank God, I didn't do it. But some things like that do get made."]

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2003-06-09T01:42:00.000-04:00

Wolf Blitzer on CNN's "Late Edition," June 8, 2003:

A frenzied anticipation about New York Democratic senator and former first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton's new book, "Living History." That's out in bookstores tomorrow.
Some details already have been made public. She recounts how she discovered the truth about her husband's affair with Monica Lewinsky, saying, and I'm quoting now, "I was dumbfounded, heartbroken and outraged that I had believed him at all. As a wife, I wanted to wring Bill's neck."
[I]s this a prelude to a presidential run at 2008?

†

2003-06-08T01:41:00.000-04:00

The New York Times, June 8, 2003:

On a chilly and sodden afternoon last week, Christina Vrachnos braced herself against the wind on Madison Avenue, and cast her eyes toward the skies. "Is it global warming?" she wailed. "What is it? What have we done to deserve this wretched weather?"
Ms. Vrachnos, who works in the marketing department of a financial publishing company, had suited up to brave temperatures that had dipped into the low 50's.

†

2003-06-05T01:36:00.000-04:00

After both Time and Newsweek magazines ran cover photos of Caucasian women in surgical masks to illustrate the threat of SARS, Time's editor admitted he did not use a photo of a Chinese woman in order to avoid stigmatizing Asians unfairly.

†

2003-06-05T01:26:00.000-04:00

The Highlander, student newspaper at the University of California, Riverside, reports on a meeting of the student senate, June 5, 2003:

After some deliberation, and the decision to make it a closed ballot, the senate voted to allocate $3,025 to Que onda Queers.
At the meeting, the senate also voted to approve a mural to be placed in the Commons. There was some concern voiced by the senate about the contents of the mural.
"I see some pilgrim invaders here," said Elisa Haro, academic affairs director. "It kind of reminds me of my colonization, and I don't like that."
The artist of the mural said that the pilgrim invaders were meant to be Shakespearean actors and that he would try to make that more clear.
Other concerns with the mural included the depiction of white cranes, which the senate demanded be changed to color cranes.
They were also concerned with the lack of a same sex couple depicted, which the artist agreed to add. The senate voted to approve the mural in light of the adjustments being made.

[Ed.: At the same meeting, some demanded a safe house and a special security detachment to protect "women of color" from harassment by campus police and members of "the Greek community." The amount demanded exceeded the entire budget available to the student senate.]

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2003-06-03T01:40:00.000-04:00

A New Zealand lesbian who won a gay beauty contest she entered as a way to shatter stereotypes was booed because she looked too straight.

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2003-06-03T01:39:00.000-04:00

After the Interior Department announced a $317,000 grant to help preserve Boston's historic Old North Church, Americans United for the Separation of Church and State objected that since the site is still "an active church," the grant represents a violation of church/state separation.

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2003-05-30T02:08:00.000-04:00

Two student groups at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts were denied permission to roast a pig on campus because it may offend vegetarians.

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2003-05-29T16:05:00.000-04:00

At a school in Inverness, Florida, twelve-year-old Kyle Fredrikson was handcuffed and jailed after he stomped in a puddle and splashed classmates and school officials. He was charged with misdemeanor disruption of school activities.

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2003-05-22T16:04:00.000-04:00

Following an attack that left two girls injured, John Watkins, Police Minister of New South Wales, Australia, called for a national ban on crossbows. "Crossbows are killing machines—nothing else," said Watkins. "Trafficking in these weapons is as deadly as drugs or guns." Crossbows are already banned in New South Wales. Australia also bans many types of firearm, with strict gun registration and licensure laws.

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2003-05-21T02:05:00.000-04:00

A Reuters dispatch, May 7, 2003:

Entertainer Ed McMahon reaped a $7 million settlement from several companies he sued for allowing toxic mold to overrun his Los Angeles home and kill his beloved dog, a national mold litigation magazine reported.

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2003-05-20T02:07:00.000-04:00

A British plan to offer financial incentives for minority police recruit referrals was put on hold following complaints that the practice resembled the "bounties" once offered for escaped slaves.

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2003-05-18T02:05:00.000-04:00

Connecticut's Wesleyan University announced plans to institute a gender-blind dormitory for incoming students who aren't sure what sex they are.

For much the same reason, the term "co-ed" has been falling out of use on campus. "We don't really use the word 'co-ed,' because 'co-ed' implies one of two genders and a lot of people don't identify with either gender," one transgender student told the Hartford Courant.

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2003-05-15T23:24:00.002-04:00

Leo Standora, in the New York Daily News, May 15, 2003, demonstrates the perils of a socially constructed reality:

Here's a new study that's bound to send your blood pressure up—and that's the problem.
Updated federal guidelines mean that 45 million more Americans are now considered at risk for high blood pressure because the longtime standard for a healthy reading—120 over 80—has been lowered.
The new guidelines mean a much larger group has a greater chance of heart attack, stroke, kidney damage, blindness and dementia....

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2003-05-14T16:05:00.000-04:00

The University of Arizona has been warning students that the practice of tossing tortillas into the air at graduation ceremonies might be interpreted as racist.

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2003-05-12T02:03:00.000-04:00

MSNBC's Ashleigh Banfield, in a speech at Kansas State University, quoted by Matt Moline of the Topeka Capital-Journal, April 24, 2003:

It was a grand and glorious picture that had a lot of people watching, and a lot of advertisers excited about cable TV news, but it wasn't journalism, because I'm not sure Americans are hesitant to do this again—to fight another war, because it looked to them like a courageous and terrific endeavor.

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2003-05-12T01:44:00.000-04:00

Amarnath Yadav was removed from office as mayor of Gorakhpur, India, after a court ruled that, as an effeminate male eunuch, he was ineligible to run as a female under a preference system for electoral office seekers. This represents the second time someone has been removed from office in India for this reason.

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2003-05-07T16:04:00.000-04:00

When six-year-old Kevin Long took a plastic butter knife from the lunchroom of Ohio's Struthers Elementary School, officials suspended him for violating the school's weapons ban, and even threatened expulsion. To have the suspension lifted, the boy's parents responded by threatening to have school officials brought up on charges of providing a weapon to a minor.

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2003-05-06T16:02:00.000-04:00

A Pakistani couple who worked around the clock at their Montreal convenience store were ordered to speak better French to their customers as required by Quebec law. An Anglo-Canadian computer consultant was ordered to post a French version of the website advertising his services even though he knows no French. A Greek immigrant had his truck seized because it said "Bill's Plumbing" on the side, an illegal use of language since he pursued his trade only in Quebec. A mason cutting gravestones was also cited because the epitaphs were not bilingual.

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2003-05-06T02:02:00.000-04:00

In the midst of California's multibillion-dollar budget deficit, a state and federal task force offered grief therapy to Riverside poultry farmers whose birds were killed in order to halt the spread of Exotic Newcastle Disease.

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2003-05-04T16:03:00.000-04:00

The Rent Stabilization Board of Berkeley, California, which administers that city's scarce rental housing stock, sponsored a "poetry slam" allowing the city's tenants to rant about their landlords. The winner of the $100 first prize denounced the "platonic master/slave relationship" between landlord and tenant and recalled how his last landlord was so bad that he "chose to be homeless for nine months just to escape the memory."

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2003-05-02T16:02:00.000-04:00

A workshop organized by the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN, pronounced "glisten") focused on injecting Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) issues into math and science courses in the nation's public schools—not just English, history, and health education courses. As an example of how to "queer" geometry, GLSEN recommends using gay symbols such as the pink triangle to study shapes.

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2003-05-02T02:01:00.000-04:00

All-female Smith College is removing the words "she" and "her" from its constitution to avoid offending transgendered students.

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2003-05-02T01:59:00.000-04:00

In her new book, The Language Police, education historian Diane Ravitch examines the process by which potentially offensive ideas are removed from school books and test questions in a process largely determined by a few committees in the disproportionately influential states of California and Texas.

A "bias and sensitivity" panel removed a test essay about patchwork quilts made by 19th-century frontier women because they "objected to the portrayal of women as people who stitch and sew, and who were concerned about preparing for marriage."

A story that featured two young African-American girls—one an athlete and the other a math whiz, who help each other learn new skills—was cited for stereotyping blacks as athletic.

A story about a heroic blind youth who climbed to the top of Mt. McKinley was rejected, both for the implication that blindness is a disability that would that feat more difficult, and because some students from non-mountainous areas might not be able to comprehend a story about the dangers involved. For the same reason, stories with dolphins have been rejected because most students don't live near the sea.

An essay about the varieties of life dwelling in a rotting tree stump was rejected because it compared the stump to an apartment building, which might cause special offense to residents of public housing.

Jews are not depicted as diamond cutters, jewelers, doctors, dentists, lawyers, classical musicians, tailors, or shopkeepers, but perhaps as baseball players.

A story about an Asian-American girl, whose mother is a professor, who plays checkers with her grandfather and brings him pizza was also rejected for three reasons: making the mother a professor perpetuates the "model minority" myth that stereotypes Asians; older people may not be depicted playing checkers; and pizza is junk food.

A passage on the uses and nutritional values of peanuts was removed because some students are allergic to peanuts. Mentions of cakes, candy, doughnuts, french fries, and coffee are replaced with references to more healthful foods such as whole-grain breads, yogurt, and beans.

Even owls are frowned on because Navajos don't like them. Mt. Rushmore doesn't make the cut either, because Lakotas might be offended. While often symbols of pride among African Americans, mentioning the palaces of ancient Egypt is frowned on because they suggest elitism. And of course dinosaurs imply evolution, which offends creationists.

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2003-05-01T16:01:00.000-04:00

Accepting his Academy Award for best documentary, Michael Moore—director of Bowling for Columbine, an examination of American gun culture using the Littleton, Colorado, school massacre as a launching point—invited his fellow nominees to join him onstage.

"They are here in solidarity with me because we like nonfiction," Moore explained, "and we live in fictitious times. We live in a time where we have fictitious election results that elect a fictitious president. We live in a time where we have a man sending us to war for fictitious reasons, whether it's the fictition [sic] of duct tape or the fictitious [sic] of orange alerts. We are against this war, Mr. Bush. Shame on you, Mr. Bush, shame on you." By the end of Moore's presentation, the audience was loudly booing.

Despite Moore's professed fondness for nonfiction, Daniel Lyons of Forbes notes numerous errors and misrepresentations in the film for which he won the best documentary award:

The film depicts Moore walking out of a bank in Traverse City, Michigan, with a gun supposedly provided as a gift for opening an account there. Moore jokes as he walks out, "Here's my first question: do you think it's a little dangerous handing out guns at a bank?" But the entire scene must have been staged, because it's only by purchasing a long-term CD that the gift applies, and even then customers must go to a gun store to pick out the weapon following a required background check conducted through the local sheriff's office.

Moore suggests that the two teenagers who perpetuated the Columbine massacre in Littleton, Colorado, were partly influenced by the manufacture of "weapons of mass destruction" at a nearby Lockheed Martin plant. The plant actually makes space-launch vehicles for television satellites.

In a survey of American foreign policy, Moore claims the U.S. gave $245 million in aid to Afghanistan's Taliban regime in 2000 and 2001. But the aid actually consisted of food assistance programs administered by the United Nations and non-governmental organizations to relieve an impending famine.

Moore recounts a 2000 school shooting in which a six-year old boy found a gun in his uncle's house, brought it to a Flint, Michigan school, and shot and killed a six-year-old girl. Moore surmises that the shooting happened because the boy's mother, Tamarla Owens, had to work 40 miles away at two minimum wage jobs, and had to leave her son in the care of her brother. That is, if it were not for the stringency of the state's welfare-to-work laws, she would have been able to adequately supervise her son and thus prevent the shooting.
But in fact, the uncle's house at which Owens dropped off her son was a crack house, filled with guns that were often traded for drugs. Tamarla herself was a drug addict who admitted she held down her oldest son so he could be beaten with a belt by two male friends. She also admitted she beat the boy with a belt while sitting on him, after first duct-taping his hands, feet and mouth. So it's unclear what benefit her parental supervision would have provided the boy.

Even the film's title, Bowling for Columbine, represents an error. According to initial news reports, the two teenagers who perpetrated the attack had gone to a bowling class the morning of the massacre. But Littleton police say the two students skipped the class the day of their rampage.

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2003-05-01T01:57:00.000-04:00

A notice that appeared in Massachusetts' Concord Journal, May 1, 2003:

The Musketaquid Earth Day Celebration this Saturday, May 3 is a day to raise our voices for the Earth. The celebration begins at 10 a.m. with the River Ceremony at the Lowell Road Bridge. Music, dance, voice and visual delights introduce the theme Make Way for Wildness and launch the riverbound sculptures called Earth Floats.
Again this year, Turtle, an eight-foot floating sculpture, will speak through the voice of artist C.C. King. Joining King will be a liturgical singer, dancer and actor Ellen Oak. Choreographer Alice Heller will lead a group of dancers representing Musketaquid—the place where the water flows through the grasses—with rhythms by Morwen and Jimi Two Feathers of Earth Drum Council.
King and Oak will offer the words of River and Shore, Water and Land. Musical participants include Dillon Bustin and Voices for the Earth chorus. All are invited to come to the Concord River at 10 a.m., to get grounded with song, performance and water and air, and then bring the spirit of the river up to the boisterous Parade through Concord Center to the Festival at the Emerson Umbrella.
Following the river ceremony join the Giant Puppets Parade. The participatory procession steps off from Lowell Road. Hundreds of giant critters, colorful banners, musicians, and dancers take to the streets of Concord Center to celebrate our place on the planet.
After the parade the festivities continue at the Emerson Umbrella Center for the Arts.... During the Arts & Environment Festival enjoy good food, earthy entertainment and express yourself through art activities....

[Ed.: Amazingly, the piece doesn't mention Henry David Thoreau even once.]

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2003-04-25T16:07:00.000-04:00

In a ruling that angered some Marvel Comics fans, the U.S. Court of International Trade declared the X-Men characters to be "nonhuman creatures" rather than humans with special mutant powers. The classification was sought by a Marvel affiliate that imported X-Men action figures. Customs law specifies that imports of human "dolls" are taxed at 12 percent while nonhuman "toys" are taxed at 6.8 percent.

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2003-04-25T01:56:00.000-04:00

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education is challenging the speech code of Pennsylvania's Shippensburg University as overly broad and vague. The code restricts "unconscious attitudes toward individuals which surface through the use of discriminatory semantics" as well as "presumptive statements" that may "annoy" others.

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2003-04-25T01:46:00.000-04:00

Comments by Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum on the constitutionality of anti-sodomy laws aroused outrage among gays and lesbians, who saw them as equating homosexuality with polygamy and other practices still considered taboo. "If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual [gay] sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything," said Santorum.

It turns out even polygamists are angry at Santorum. "I think he's an insult to Christianity," said 89-year-old Owen Allred, head of the United Apostolic Brethren in Bluffdale, Utah, the nation's largest pro-polygamy sect. "It makes me so mad I want to swear." Followers of the sect believe that Abraham and other biblical figures engaged in polygamy, and that the practice is blessed by God as a way to multiply the human race, not, as Allred says, "for satisfying the lust of the flesh." Allred said he believes that homosexuality is immoral. "The United States is fast becoming another Sodom and Gomorrah," he said.

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2003-04-24T16:08:00.001-04:00

A message printed on boxes of Green Tea manufactured by the Republic of Tea:

A simple cup of green tea is imbued with a wisdom beyond wisdom, capable of enlightening both mind and body. We invite you to heat the water, brew the tea and sip its greatness, taking in its teachings.

A similar message on the box of a British Breakfast blend:

Life is impossible and so what? It is in its very impossibility that we find our joy. Tea Mind allows life to live us. It frees us from the hubris of trying to control what cannot be controlled. The life of tea is the life of the moment. We have only Now, and we each sip it in our own cups.

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2003-04-24T01:47:00.000-04:00

After the city of Boston eliminated free golfing privileges for "duly ordained ministers" at a city-owned golf course, some interpreted the move as racist. "The majority of the people [affected] are black, and we do feel it's unfair," the Rev. James Allen told the Boston Globe. "I don't want to use the race card, but let's be honest. I don't want to make it a racial thing, but it seemed like that's what it was."

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2003-04-22T16:08:00.000-04:00

To celebrate the 30-year anniversary of Roe v. Wade, a Johns Hopkins organization called Medical Students for Choice threw a party. The invitation read: "Come learn about what's being done to train new providers and ensure that a woman's right to choose is both safe and accessible! Come and eat birthday cake!"

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2003-04-22T01:54:00.002-04:00

The last time Laci Peterson was seen alive was Christmas 2002, when she was eight months pregnant. Her husband, Scott, was arrested after her body washed up onto the shore of San Francisco Bay in April, along with a separate body, with umbilical cord still attached, that the Associated Press at various points referred to as her "infant son," her "fetus," her "biological child," a "male fetus," and "the couple's baby."

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2003-04-18T16:08:00.000-04:00

Troubled by the unsafe appearance of parts of the city of Oakland, a city council committee advocated a plan that would prohibit barbed wire fences around commercial establishments. Aside from unsightliness, "It gives a sense that our community is not a very safe city," said City Manager Robert Bobb. The committee also considered a ban on burglar bars, roll-down doors, and retractable security gates.

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2003-04-18T01:53:00.000-04:00

The New Haven Register reports on a disability-discrimination lawsuit against McDonald's by Joseph Connor, who applied for a job as a cook there at a job fair. When asked by the franchises' manager what his measurements were so that he could have a uniform fit for him, he replied that he had a 54-inch waist and a 22-inch neck. In fact, he weighs 420 pounds. Management did not call him again, and did not return his phone calls.

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2003-04-18T01:52:00.000-04:00

ABC's Terry Moran, in a question to White House spokesman Ari Fleischer, March 21, 2003:

Have you heard [Bush] talk about the other responsibility which may weigh on him heavily today, and that is the death of innocents, for Iraqi moms and dads and children who may, despite our best efforts, be killed?

Four days later, Moran questions Fleischer about the administration's decision to bypass populated areas to prevent civilian casualties:

Obviously, the Iraqi regime has mined [Basra's] harbor, and that is a wicked thing to do, but the coalition battle plan was to bypass Basra and leave the more than half million citizens there essentially to fend for themselves. Does the administration take any responsibility for the plight of the people of Basra?

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2003-04-18T01:51:00.001-04:00

The Tallahassee Democrat reports that graphic references to women's body parts that were plastered all over an inside wall of the Women's Center at Florida State University and intended to provide a feeling of empowerment among women, were instead widely found offensive. Fearing lawsuits over a hostile work environment, university officials said they would remove the posters.

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2003-04-18T01:51:00.000-04:00

While much of the world's attention was drawn to the war in Iraq, the Castro regime rounded up over 75 dissidents responsible for circulating a petition demanding human rights in Cuba, a crime for which many received 27-year prison sentences. Also, three men who attempted to hijack a ferry to the United States were executed immediately following summary trials. (The men were given several days to appeal their sentences, but they were executed first.)

In response to these affronts, HBO decided to remove "Comandante," Oliver Stone's adulatory "documentary" about Fidel Castro, from its May schedule. "In light of recent alarming events in Cuba," an HBO spokesman explained, the network decided "not to air Oliver Stone's film in May as scheduled. Had we aired the film in March, I don't think we would have had an issue with it. But now, the arrests and trials are an important piece of what's going on in Cuba, and the film's incomplete."

[Ed.: And what do you know? Cuba just won another three-year term on the United Nations Human Rights Commission, which appears to value alternative viewpoints.]

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2003-04-17T23:25:00.000-04:00

In Massachusetts, thousands of fourth-graders will retake the state's standardized assessment test because it asked students to write a story about a snow day spent away from school, which put those from warmer climates at a particular disadvantage.

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2003-04-15T01:48:00.000-04:00

On April 15, the Seattle City Council issued a statement of support for U.S. troops fighting in Iraq. This came just as U.S. Marines, encountering unexpectedly light resistance, entered the city of Tikrit, their last major military objective in the war. The Seattle Times reports that "it took the council over a month to craft the resolution," somewhat longer than it took the armed forces to defeat Iraq's military forces.

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2003-04-14T01:45:00.000-04:00

The Des Moines Register, April 14, 2003:

"It looks now like this was just a Third World country—there were people fighting with tennis shoes on, on the Iraqi side," [Iowa Senator Tom] Harkin told reporters. "I don't know what else we're going to find, but they didn't fly even one airplane in the air. They had almost nothing."
"So if they were that weak, where we could just roll over them like that, tell me again how [Hussein] was such a big threat in the past?" the senator added.

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2003-04-09T16:10:00.000-04:00

Robert Fisk reports from Iraq in the Independent, April 9, 2003:

On my way back past the Ahrar Bridge, I found a crowd of spectators standing on the parapet, watching the American tanks with a mixture of amusement and fear. Did they not know what was happening in their city, or—an idea that has possessed me in recent days—are the poor of Baghdad kept in such ignorance of events that they simply do not realise that the Americans are about to occupy their city? Could it be that the cigarette sellers and the bakery queues and the bus drivers just don't know what lies down on the banks of the Tigris?

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2003-04-09T01:43:00.000-04:00

From an editorial in the New York Times, April 9, 2003:

When violent crime rates were higher, many politicians were afraid to be seen as soft on crime. But now that crime has receded and the public is more worried about taxes and budget deficits, it would not require extraordinary courage for elected officials to do the right thing and scale back our overuse of jails and prison cells.

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2003-04-07T02:15:00.000-04:00

The National Park Service complained about a television advertisement in which an actor dressed as a park ranger is asked how Old Faithful's eruptions are kept so regular, and he is shown pouring Metamucil into the geyser. A Park Service spokesman warned of the dangers of approaching hot springs and geysers and said the ad "suggests that it's okay to pour some substance into a thermal feature." As a result, the ad will henceforth appear with the following caption: "Dramatization—please obey Park Service rules."

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2003-04-04T16:09:00.001-05:00

According to various complaints, Larry Jester, principal of Clarkston High School in DeKalb County, Georgia, threatened to kill staffers and himself, blared gospel music and sermons from his office, spoke about ridding the school of demons, and bragged of having a cache of stolen weapons. Jester was fired, but only after being allowed to stay on the job while undergoing a psychological evaluation. Teachers note that if the allegations had been made against a student, that student would have been removed from school immediately.

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2003-04-01T02:15:00.000-05:00

The El Paso Times reports that twelve-year-old Sal Santana II was suspended from Magoffin Middle School for three days after he "stuck his tongue out at a girl who declined his invitation to be his girlfriend," a gesture that school officials viewed as sexual harassment.

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2003-03-27T21:23:00.000-05:00

Partly because he feels unwelcome under the new Afghanistan government, Former Taliban member Wali Khan Ahmadzai applied for asylum in the United Kingdom. "I wanted to come to Britain because I knew that it was a good place to be, that here I would have a good life," he adds. Still, he tells the Daily Telegraph that he "still think[s] America and Britain are enemies of the Afghanistan people and Muslim people."

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2003-03-27T01:40:00.000-05:00

Nolan Thompson, community and employee outreach coordinator at the University of Southern Maine, in the Portland Press-Herald, March 27, 2003:

There are differences in how other people live and how they want to live. There are differences in how people see work and their workday. Between noon and 3 p.m., most shops are closed in Venice. That just fits the Italian way of living their day.
There is not an edict from the Supreme Being that one must work a full day every day, Monday through Friday, from 8 until 4:30. However, many people feel OK living life and working that way. True multiculturalism, though, is about accommodating lives that do not fit that way of living. True multiculturalism is about adopting other ways of living and being....
The workplace, as it has been essentially developed by straight white men in this country, has to change if it is to be multicultural.
It was designed to fit how they live in the world. It is not a place that was originally "designed" for people, especially African-Americans or other people of color, who value family and who have a somewhat different perspective on time than the originators of the workplace have.

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2003-03-27T01:39:00.000-05:00

A correction in the Los Angeles Times, March 27, 2003:

A "Counter Intelligence" review in the Food section March 19 quoted the owner of Mr. Pickles Deli in Los Angeles recalling a radio comment by talk show host Laura Schlessinger about the restaurant's brisket. Schlessinger said that the brisket does not need to be adulterated by ketchup, not that the brisket is the first step before adultery.

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2003-03-21T21:23:00.000-05:00

An Australian netball star won a an award of $6,750 after she was banned from playing because she was pregnant, a measure instituted due to fears of legal action over injuries to mothers and unborn children.

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2003-03-21T01:38:00.000-05:00

British Conservative Parliament member Boris Johnson writes in the London Spectator of his odd experience being solicited for a New York Times op-ed piece on the subject of British-American relations in the period leading up to the Iraq war.

After being told by the op-ed editor of several unobjectionable copy edits that represented minor variations between British and American terminology, Johnson writes that he started to get a "floaty, out-of-body sensation" when asked to change a sentence criticizing diplomatic maneuvering in the United Nations Security Council. "I had said something to the effect that you don't make international law by giving new squash courts to the President of Guinea," says Johnson. Instead, "Guinea" was changed to "Chile," another country currently occupying one of the rotating chairs in the Security Council. Johnson was told it would be "easier in principle if we don't say anything deprecatory about a black African country" if it didn't affect his overall point. Fine, Johnson said, South America it is.

Next, the editor insisted on removing a passage asserting that many people influenced by the anti-war cause had developed a psychological need for a disastrous outcome. "To illustrate the point, I noted that the last Gulf war had been so amazingly free of casualties that Gulf war syndrome (a stochastically unexceptional ragbag of symptoms) had been invented to fill the void, and to satisfy the yearning of the anti-war brigade for catastrophe." The editor said the passage would have to be removed because the Times took Gulf war syndrome very seriously. Johnson was incredulous. While he conceded it was a bit provocative, wasn't that the point of journalism? And since it was in an op-ed, could anyone mistake it for an opinion of the editorial board? But the editor was inflexible on this point, and the passage came out.

Finally, after an hour on the phone discussing the article, the editor took issue with the first sentence: "Gee, thanks, guys," a sarcastic reference to U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's undiplomatic offer to proceed with the war without Britain's help should Prime Minister Tony Blair's support suddenly collapse. "All right, it was a bit colloquial," admits Johnson, but the sentence was also snappy and "for the life of me, I couldn't see why" it would have to be removed. Eventually, he got his answer: "Gee" is supposedly an abbreviation for Jesus. Johnson paraphrases the editor: "For a century this has been a Jewish-owned paper, and we have to be extremely sensitive about anything that might offend Christian sensibilities. We can say God, God is fine, but we have to be very careful about anything that involves the name of the Lord and Saviour."

Johnson describes his reaction: "Jesus H. Christ... this is insane. This is utterly insane. I really think we ought to try to get that one in...." Later, after consulting with his superiors, the editor allowed the word "Gee" to stay in the article.

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2003-03-17T01:37:00.000-05:00

Asked by an "Access Hollywood" television reporter what he thought of the Iraq war, actor Peter Boyle demurred. "I've made a commitment not to make any anti-war statements," said Boyle, "because I'm afraid of ... Bush."

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2003-03-16T23:26:00.000-05:00

A nursery school teacher in Yorkshire, England, banned her students from singing "Three Little Pigs" out of a concern that it might offend Muslims. Local Muslims responded that while the Koran clearly prohibits them from eating a pig's meat, they have no problem reading or talking about them. Indeed, the Koran itself mentions pigs, and Muslims are often obliged to read and recite the Koran.

And, following criticism over its decision to serve pancakes on Shrove Tuesday, one London school district removed hot cross buns from menus this Easter season because of the characteristic white cross on top. While the change was enacted to avoid offending Muslims, among others, one Muslim group calls the decision "very, very bizarre." "I wish they would leave us alone," said a spokesman for the Muslim Council of Britain. "We are quite capable of articulating our own concerns and if we find something offensive, we will say so. We do not need to rely on other people to do it for us."

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2003-03-14T21:24:00.000-05:00

Autoweek magazine reports on controversy over an advertising campaign by Nissan. The ad shows the words "Black History Month," with "History" crossed out and replaced by "Future." "Replacing history with future sometimes can rest in the philosophy of those opposing the leveling of the playing field for African-Americans," said Glenda Gill, a representative of Jesse Jackson's Rainbow/PUSH coalition. "I would have felt better had it said 'Black History is our past and our future.' "

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2003-03-14T01:37:00.000-05:00

Lawyers for 18-year-old beltway sniper suspect Lee Malvo challenged a recent change in the jury selection process of Fairfax County, Virginia, where he will be tried for murder in November. The county's new system selects potential jurors from voter registration lists only and not from motor vehicle records, a change intended to reduce the number of felons and non-citizens in the jury pool. This, Malvo's lawyers argue, is likely to result in a pool of jurors with higher levels of income and education than Malvo.

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2003-03-12T02:21:00.003-05:00

New York's Landmarks Preservation Commission gave the Guggenheim Museum permission to build a temporary wooden enclosure on its roof to store a ton of frozen Vaseline used by artist Matthew Barney. The New York Times reports that the Vaseline "will be seen running down the interior of the Guggenheim's rotunda in specially designed troughs. Frozen Vaseline will cover the front of an Art Deco bar.... [A] hidden hose, fed from the roof enclosure through the museum's lighting system, would keep the Vaseline on the bar at 17 degrees so it holds its shape."

Barney was the subject of a long, thoughtful profile in The New Yorker. The Times' chief art critic Michael Kimmelman describes Barney as "the greatest American artist of his generation." In one of the artist's videos, he is depicted "climbing naked up a pole and cables and applying dollops of Vaseline to his orifices." Barney's Guggenheim exhibit, running through June 11, will also feature daily screenings of "Cremaster," a five-part film cycle inspired by the muscle that raises and lowers the testicles.

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2003-03-12T01:35:00.000-05:00

In London, Ontario, a lesbian couple asked a court to recognize a group consisting of the biological mother, her partner, and the biological father as legal parents of a young boy.

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2003-03-09T21:27:00.000-05:00

In Bradenton, Florida, the apartment of Grant Griffin has been taken over by a colony of bats. During the day, bats can often be found in his sink or other areas throughout his home. At night, the bats make so much noise that he is often kept awake. Griffin and his girlfriend have even awoken to discover small bites on their bodies.

"I'm about as freaked out as I can get," Griffin told the Sarasota Herald Tribune. "I feel like there are things crawling all over me." But since the state of Florida considers the bats "native wildlife" and since they have not been found to be rabid, Griffin is forbidden from having them exterminated.

Griffin's landlord offered to put screens over the holes where the bats enter and exit the house to collect food, but during the summer mating season this would cause an unbearable stench from babies who died for lack of food.

After spending many nights at friends' homes to avoid the bats, Griffin has made plans to move.

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2003-03-09T01:34:00.000-05:00

The New York Daily News reports that the U.S. Postal Service spent at least $3.6 million on conferences featuring therapeutic exercises designed to improve job performance and work environments. These exercises included wrapping each other in toilet paper and aluminum foil, building sand castles at the beach, making animal noises, dressing in cat costumes, and asking make-believe wizards for advice.

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2003-03-05T01:33:00.000-05:00

A pamphlet distributed by the Student Health Service of the University of California at Berkeley advises students upset at the prospect of war in Iraq to "allow for emotions—crying, frustration, verbal expressions of anger. Avoid potentially trite remarks like 'everything will be OK.' Make room for people to have their feelings, even as you try to reassure them. Simply acknowledging feelings is important, as is being together."

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2003-03-05T01:23:00.001-05:00

From a set of guidelines provided by The Princeton Review to writers preparing practice versions of standardized tests:

Topics to Avoid in Passages, Items, and Art

Violence (including guns, other weapons, and graphic animal violence)
Natural disasters
National tragedies (terrorist attacks, death of a president, etc.)
War, dying, death, disease
Drugs (including prescription drugs)
Alcohol
Tobacco and smoking
Individuals who may be associated with drug use or with advertising of substances such as cigarettes and alcohol
Name brands, trademarked names
Junk food
Fad diets
Abuse, poverty, running away
Divorce
Socioeconomic advantages (e.g., video games, swimming pools, computers in the home, expensive vacations)
Sex, including age-inappropriate stories about marriage, engagement, and having children
Belching/burping, farting, spitting, etc.
Religion
Slavery (We can include slavery in history/social-studies material if the state curriculum standards cover slavery. Avoid it in reading passages. The term "enslaved people" is preferable to "slaves.")
Rap music, rock concerts
Complex discussions of esoteric topics
Extrasensory perception, witchcraft
Fortune-telling, superstition
Dice and games involving dice (For math questions, use the term "number cubes" instead of "dice.")
Halloween, religious holidays
Aliens and UFOs
Anything disrespectful, demeaning, moralistic, chauvinistic
Anything depicting racial or cultural stereotypes (e.g., Native American in headdress and war paint)
Anything depicting sexual stereotypes (e.g., girls shopping, a mother cooking dinner for a working father, girls overly concerned with dating or what boys think of them, anything accepting of a boy's aggressive behavior)
Children coping with adult situations or decisions; young people challenging or questioning authority
Losing a job, being fired
Rats, roaches, lice, spiders
Dieting, other concerns with self-image
Evolution, prehistoric times, age of solar system, dinosaurs (We can include these topics in history and science materials if the state curriculum standards cover them. Avoid them in reading passages.)
Any topic that is likely to upset students and affect their performance on the rest of the test

Topics to Avoid Because of Overuse
People:

Johnny Appleseed
James Smithson (Smithsonian Institution)
John Muir
John James Audubon
Phillis Wheatley
Roberto Clemente
Alexander Graham Bell
Helen Keller
Harriet Tubman
Louis Armstrong
Jane Goodall
Marie Curie
Jacques Cousteau
Amelia Earhart
Places and Things:

cardiovascular exercise
sports
fad or extreme diets
Galápagos Islands
Inca civilization, Machu Picchu
NASA
Themes:

Child moves to new town
Child starts a new school
Child gets new pet
Child ends story by saying, "That wasn't so bad after all!"

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2003-02-24T01:25:00.000-05:00

Elementary schools in Nashville, Tennessee, are considering a grading plan in which the minimum possible grade would be a 50.

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2003-02-21T21:29:00.000-05:00

In El Dorado Hills, California, the El Dorado Hills Design Review Committee ruled that the house of Joe and Melinda Bula, which was painted yellow when they bought it six years ago, does not comply with regulations that only allow beige and tan houses. The Bulas appealed the committee's decision to the city board, which assigned a "task force" to review the rules. City manager Wayne Lowery told the New York Times, "If you allow yellow, then when a guy comes in and says he likes purple, where do you draw the line?"

The Bulas may also have another fight on their hands. The committee also cited their white picket fence, which is made of plastic rather than wood.

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2003-02-21T01:24:00.000-05:00

The London Times, February 21, 2002:

A government-backed course is encouraging pupils under 16 to experiment with oral sex, as part of a drive to cut rates of teenage pregnancy....
The scheme, which has been pioneered by Exeter University and is backed by the Departments of Health and Education, trains teachers to discuss various pre-sex "stopping points" with under-age teenagers.
It aims to reduce promiscuity by encouraging pupils to discover "levels of intimacy," including oral sex, instead of full sexual intercourse.
More than 100,000 children are now taking the course at one in every thirty secondary schools. It forms part of efforts to tackle Britain's teenage pregnancy rate, which is the highest in Western Europe.

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2003-02-21T01:23:00.000-05:00

North Miami City Councilman Jacques Despinosse asked the police department to eliminate its swimming requirement for recruits because, he alleged, it eliminated many black candidates. "We can't swim," said Despinosse, a Haitian American. "Most of us didn't come on the Mayflower. We came on slave ships."

[Ed.: As someone with some Cuban blood in him, I find this unfathomable. If anybody could swim, it would be a Haitian.]

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2003-02-19T21:30:00.000-05:00

Men who marched naked in Toronto's Gay Pride Day were cleared of public nudity charges because they were wearing shoes.

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2003-02-19T01:22:00.000-05:00

The New York Times, February 19, 2003:

It began as a modest idea: a series of small seminars by Democratic Party lawyers for elected officials, political consultants and Congressional aides on the intricacies of the new McCain-Feingold campaign finance law....
"We sometimes leave our audiences in a state of complete shock" at what they hear, said Robert F. Bauer, a lawyer for the Democrats' House and Senate campaign committees. "A sort of slack-jawed amazement at how far this thing reached" is not uncommon at the seminars, Mr. Bauer said. Nor are "a lot of very anxious questions."
Benjamin L. Ginsberg, a Republican Party lawyer who has conducted seminars for the other side of the aisle, said lawmakers were startled to hear that once-standard practices like acting as host at a fund-raiser for a home-state governor might now be illegal. "There's an initial stage where the reaction is, 'This can't be true,' " Mr. Ginsberg said. "And then there's the actual anger stage."...
The new chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Representative Robert T. Matsui of California, who voted for McCain-Feingold, says he has been surprised by its fine print.
"I didn't realize what all was in it," Mr. Matsui said....
"I think it was a total surprise to people who don't read C.Q. with a yellow pen," said Bill Knapp, a Democratic media consultant, referring to Congressional Quarterly, which keeps close tabs on legislative maneuverings here....
Finally, members of both parties have been startled to learn the law's penalties. A violation of McCain-Feingold—be it a national party official's soft-money raising, or a senator's acting as a host at a fund-raiser on behalf of a governor—is a felony carrying a prison sentence of as much as five years....

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2003-02-17T01:17:00.000-05:00

From a letter sent by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals to Yasir Arafat, in response to a January 26 attack in which a donkey that had been strapped with explosives detonated prematurely before wandering into a crowd, resulting in no human injuries:

All nations behave abominably in many ways when they are fighting their enemies, and animals are always caught in the crossfire.... We watched on television as stray cats in your own compound fled as best they could from the Israeli bulldozers.... If you have the opportunity, will you please add to your burdens my request that you appeal to all those who listen to you to leave the animals out of this conflict?

[Ed.: In another apparent effort to arouse the hostility of Jews, PETA initiated an advertising campaign juxtaposing images of chicken farms with images of the Holocaust.]

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2003-02-16T21:31:00.000-05:00

A New York appeals court ruled that the state agriculture department's Kosher Law Enforcement Division constitutes an unconstitutional establishment of religion.

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2003-02-16T01:15:00.000-05:00

The Spanish newspaper El Pais reports on the findings of art historian Jose Milicua, that avant-garde architectural and painting techniques were used by leftist forces during the Spanish Civil War as a deliberate form of torture. In the midst of the conflict, the French painter Alphonse Laurencic accepted a commission from an anarchist group to create prison cells with steeply slanted benches and curved walls with painted patterns designed to disorient the prisoner's perspective and cause mental distress.

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2003-02-11T21:31:00.000-05:00

After a 50-year-old Australian Aborigine named Jackie Pascoe Jamilmira traded a portion of his government checks to a couple for their 14-year-old daughter, the girl resisted his advances. He punched her, put his foot on her neck, raped her, and fired a gun into the air when she complained about it.

Following his arrest, the man received a nominal 24-hour sentence. The judge ruled that the girl "knew what was expected of her" and that the rape was part of a 40,000-year-old aboriginal custom. An anthropologist submitted expert testimony calling the arranged marriage "traditional" and therefore "morally correct."

The man was later revealed to have been convicted of slaughtering his former wife.

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2003-02-11T01:20:00.000-05:00

Wired News, February 11, 2003:

Taking an aggressive stance on the issue of the digital divide, the Kentucky Housing Corporation, or KHC, has listed broadband Internet access among the inalienable rights of its low-income housing residents.

And the Associated Press reports on a program offering free high-speed Internet access to residents of a low-income housing project in Boston, February 24, 2003:

[The program] has given residents free computers to connect to the Internet using high-speed cable lines wired into every home....
Residents can buy wireless cards for their desktops or laptops. The cards, which can cost up to $100 retail, will be given away to the elderly and sold for $60 to others. After that, residents will be able to log on—for free—from anywhere within Camfield [Estates].

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2003-02-10T21:30:00.000-05:00

A set of slogans collected at an October 26 peace rally in San Francisco by Josh Harkinson, a journalist in Berkeley, California:

Puppies for Peace
Smoke Iraqi Pot, Not Iraqi People
Beat L.A., Not Iraq! Go Giants!
SOCCER MOMS FOR PEACE
Make Doughnuts Not War
This Quaker Says No War
ANOTHER QUEER YOGIC JEW AGAINST WAR
ENGINEERS FOR PEACE
Unreasonable Women for Peace
Make sticks not war!
Real Men Work for Peace
Bombshells Not Bombs
Telluride, Colorado, 8,750 feet—2,400 miles for Peace
FUTURE LIBRARIAN AGAINST WAR—INFORMATION NOT DECIMATION
Baseball Not War
PRETZELS FOR PEACE
Transsexual Lesbian Vegan Epidemiologist Punk for Peace
Republicans for Peace
Eat Bush, Not Crawfish
Tango for Protest
Make Cookies Not War
Grannies Against Dead Children

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2003-02-10T01:20:00.000-05:00

In a Kansas City federal court, two African American women filed a discrimination lawsuit against Southwest Airlines after one of its flight attendants, trying to get passengers to sit down, recited over the intercom a version of a rhyme with a racist history: "Eenie, meenie, minie, moe; pick a seat, we gotta go."

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2003-02-10T01:18:00.000-05:00

According to boundary 2 editor William V. Spanos, not only is it necessary to call attention to "America's tenacious historical privileging of the imperial metaphysic perspective as the agent of knowledge production, that perspective, synchronous with the founding of the idea and practices of Europe, which, in perceiving time from after or above its disseminations, enables the spacialization of being and subjugation or accommodation of the differences it disseminates to the identical, self-present, and plenary (global/planetary) whole," it is also necessary to consider "America's obsessive and systematic refinement and fulfillment of the panoptic logic of this old world perspective in an indissolubly related array of worldly imperial practices, the intrinsic goal of which is not simply the domination of global space but also of thinking itself."

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2003-02-07T02:24:00.000-05:00

The European Commission issued a directive requiring farmers to label—with a costly ink-jet printing process—every egg they produce with their home address, the egg's method of production, the code for the producer-packer, a sell-by date, and details on the hen that laid the egg. A delegation of farmers from the southwest of England, concerned about the costs of the requirement to small producers, was told by a Brussels official that the task of labelling the eggs "would be a nice job for farmers' wives."

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2003-02-05T21:31:00.000-05:00

After nearly 100 people died and many others were seriously injured in a nightclub fire in Warwick, Rhode Island, the Paris edition of the New York Times ran an article with the following headline: "U.S. Is Behind European Nations on Crowd Safety, Experts Say."

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2003-02-05T00:05:00.000-05:00

Columbia University rescinded the Bancroft Prize it had awarded to Michael Bellesiles, author of Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture, and asked Bellesiles to return its $4,000 cash award. In the book, Bellesiles claimed that private gun ownership was rare at the time of America's founding, that most firearms were in a state of disrepair, and that few people were skilled in their use, suggesting a radically more restrictive interpretation of the Second Amendment.

The prestigious prize, for outstanding works of original historical research, was awarded in April 2001, before the author's sources were properly verified. Other scholars soon discovered that much of the data cited in the book was fabricated or otherwise could not be reproduced. In one instance, Bellesiles claimed to have consulted public records that had actually been destroyed in the San Francisco earthquake of 1903. In another, he claimed that an office flood had wiped out a vital legal pad of research notes.

Bellesiles earlier lost his tenured position at Emory University. An investigative panel there found "evidence of falsification" and "serious failures of and carelessness in the gathering and presentation of archival records and the use of quantitative analysis." In withdrawing its prize, Columbia declared that Bellesiles "had violated basic norms of acceptable scholarly conduct."

For its part, Knopf announced plans to continue publishing the book, but later reversed the decision.

[Ed.: The gun issue appears to attract all types. Economist John Lott, author of More Guns, Less Crime, was unable to reproduce details of a national survey he says he conducted, which concluded that 98 percent of defensive gun use involved the mere brandishing of a weapon. Lott claims he lost all the raw data due to a computer crash, kept no financial record of the study's costs, and forgot the names of the students who conducted telephone interviews. Lott also invented a female persona with which to defend his work in Internet discussions.]

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2003-02-04T01:14:00.000-05:00

People sending e-mail to the Centers for Disease Control to protest the questionable content of a "Great Sex" AIDS prevention workshop discovered that their messages were never received. CDC computers blocked the messages because they contained obscene materials that violated government decency standards.

A similar e-mail filter prevented members of the British Parliament from discussing a bill on sexual offenses. The software marked parts of the bill itself as pornography, along with a Liberal Democrat consultation paper on censorship.

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2003-02-04T01:12:00.001-05:00

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that efforts by campus police at various universities to crack down on non-students who use public restrooms for random gay sex encounters is being called homophobic by members of the "Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender and Questioning (GLBTQ)" community.

"Heterosexual couples exploring sex on lovers' lane is romanticized, but same-sex sex is treated differently," says Luke Jensen of the University of Maryland. "The question of public versus private can be a shifting paradigm. Why is a bathroom stall considered a private space except when it comes to sex?"

Some say bathroom sex is an integral part of gay identity and the coming-out process. "For some men, their whole connection with gay life stemmed from their experiences in bathrooms," says William L. Leap, American University anthropology professor and editor of Public Sex/Gay Space. "Tearooms became the basis for social interactions, a way of getting into a friendship network."

The California Patriot reports that the university-sponsored website of the UC Berkeley Queer Alliance/Queer Resource Center publishes the best locations for anonymous bathroom sex. One solicitation reads, "Find that special someone (or three)!" along with a picture of three naked men embracing. Many partitions between stalls are vandalized with "glory holes" that are used "to peer into the stall next door to see if it is occupied by a man interested in sex. If it is, the student will cross into the stall and engage with him sexually, usually without any mutual acquaintance." Indeed, the holes themselves often figure into the sex act.

[Ed.: A UC police spokesman commented that they usually respond to reported glory holes by "trying to deconstruct" them, apparently unaware of what that word has come to mean.

Some years back I went into Harvard's science building to go to the bathroom, and noticed that all the stall doors had been removed, unfortunately eliminating any hope of privacy. Upon leaving, I complained to a staff member, who replied that the doors had been removed as an "AIDS-prevention" measure. I must have had a puzzled look on my face, because he simply repeated what he had just told me—no doubt what he was told to pass along to anyone who asked—with no elaboration possible. There was a weariness in his voice.]

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2003-02-01T23:23:00.000-05:00

The latest application form for Miss Universe contestants asks aspiring beauty queens to indicate their "gender."

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2003-02-01T21:29:00.000-05:00

In Norwich, England, officials at Fairway Middle School banned students from throwing snowballs at anyone without permission of the target.

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