What the heck is this about?

Michelle Malkin is gonna be all over this story from the Houston Chronicle:

Residue of Texas City fatal blast detonated

TEXAS CITY -- Authorities ordered two apartment complexes evacuated and set off a small explosion inside a unit today in an attempt to remove a substance believed to have caused a fatal blast Wednesday.

In a news conference today, federal and local officials said they believe the substance was peroxide-based.

The explosion Wednesday at the Lakeview complex in the 8000 block of the Emmett F. Lowry Expressway killed a man officials identified as Matthew Rugo, 21.

A second man who survived the blast, Curtis Jetton, has been charged with making a false police report and is being held on $10,000 bond, according to Texas City Police Chief Robert Burby.

....

Members of the Galveston County Sheriff's Office were assisting in the evacuations. As authorities prepared to detonate the substances inside the apartment , FBI Special Agent Kasey Salway said he expected the blast would cause cause a minimum amount of damage.

But he added: 'This stuff is extremely sensitive to heat, shock and friction...We can't identify exactly what this stuff is.' He declined comment on the nature of the investigation.

The FBI refused to say whether it believes the men were preparing some kind of attack.

But Texas City Mayor Matt Doyle said: 'If we thought this was a terrorist act, the action would be a lot different than we've seen here today. Certainly, the FBI would have raised the level of security inside the city.''

Any time I see a headline involving an explosion in Texas City I inevitably think of the famous explosion there almost sixty years ago. [Wikipedia] I wasn't around yet, but the explosion was still fresh in the minds of many when I was a kid growing up in Houston, and my mother—a native Houstonian—had a couple of stories about friends and relatives of hers who happened to be nearby at the time.

It's telling that the FBI won't talk about what lines they're pursuing in the investigation, but for right now my guess is that these guys are/were just a couple of dumbasses.

On the big small screen

Ron likes to rent movies, but he often falls asleep during them, and so I found myself last night watching Aeon Flux, the soundtrack accompanied by his loud snoring. The movie's based on an MTV sci-fi cartoon series that was more about style than plot; same here, only with less style.

This forgettable piece of um, fluff wastes the talents of not one but two Best Actress Oscar winners (Charlize Theron, in constant motion, in the title role; Frances McDormand, hardly moving at all, as a hallucination). Spoilers are odious, but the resolution of the plot won't surprise anyone who's ever seen The Island or The Village.

Snow apologizes for mixing up African American Congresswomen

From The Raw Story, a snippet of an apology made by White House Press Secretary Tony Snow after he'd made remarks that confused Representative Sheila Jackson-Lee of Texas with Representative Cynthia McKinney of Georgia: "Also, one important note: On this podium last week--on June 8th--I misidentified Representative Sheila Jackson-Lee as Cynthia McKinney. That prompted a phone call from Representative Jackson-Lee, who was absolutely charming, and we had a wonderful little conversation."

Golly, do you think if Snow had put a bit more effort into it he could have been a bit more patronizing? Yeesh.

Hill Country Gay Association

Cool: there actually are other gay people around here. Hill Country Gay Association.

Roundabout methods

One of Ron's clients recorded a two-sentence message on his computer and e-mailed the resulting WAV file to him. Trying to show off his tech savvy, I guess.

The whole world changed in two weeks

My new favorite blogger, Glenn Greenwald, hits the nail squarely on the head:

For months and months, polls have showed that solid majorities of Americans believe the war was a mistake. That consensus didn't arise as a result of a single event, or a report of a car bomb, or because one bad thing happened. It was because the war itself has been failing fundamentally. Nothing that we wanted to accomplish was actually being accomplished. Everything we said before the war about why we needed to wage it turned out to be false and has been discredited. Far from winning 'hearts and minds' in the Muslim world, few things have harmed how we are perceived in that part of the world (supposedly the current aim of our war effort) more than our occupation has.

This statement comes in the context of a much longer post about how remarkable it is that the media have encouraged us to think that events like killing Zarqawi--dramatic as they are--have changed little on the ground, day to day, in Iraq. It should be tattooed on the palm of the hand of everyone who promoted this useless war and especially those who promoted it but won't fight it to win.

Remember, she's a drag queen!

"She's not a social or political commentator. She's a drag queen impersonating a fascist."

Andrew Sullivan, reducing Ann Coulter and the incivility she embodies to the simplest terms.

Done at last—or maybe not

Two years after moving to Texas, I’ve finally got my CDs unpacked, shelved, and alphabetized appropriately.

Of course, I’m enjoying being able to find and play anything I want to, for the first time since we moved. I can also see where the gaps are in my collection and fill them. (Not that I have money to do so, of course.)

However, I’m missing stuff I definitely remember having: several albums by Jefferson Airplane, 2 or 3 early Yes albums, a smattering of Floyd and Stones and Kinks, and probably quite a few other things of lesser importance. (I don't remember which albums by Devo or Wire or 10,000 Maniacs I used to have--I need those brain cells to remember Paul McCartney’s birthday and the name of Madonna's brother-in-law.)*

(These CDs I’m missing aren’t the 400 stolen with our changer in 2003. I know exactly which ones were stolen because the burglars considerately left their jewel boxes. Aside from those CDs, it appears no others were taken.)

Evidently at least one of the 32 boxes I haven’t unpacked yet has more CDs in it.

Durn. I’d been hoping not to touch those boxes until we get the built-in bookcases built in, sometime around summer 2008.

(*Paul was born on June 18, 1942; the producer and performer Joe Henry is married to Madonna's sister.)

Harper's publishing Mohammed cartoons?

I'm hearing that Harper's magazine is publishing the cartoons of Mohammed that caused such strife a few months back. Good for them. Commentary is provided by Art Spiegelman of the New Yorker--that's gonna be worth reading.

McCartney's split, alas

Paul and Heather McCartney are splitting up; the AP reportsays the couple is "blaming intrusion from the media and insisting their split is amicable."

McCartney, of course, was born on June 18, 1942. (Fun fact: McCartney is two days older than Brian Wilson.) So apparently she won't still need him when he's sixty-four.

And even more on marriage

Ooh, yay!

Amanda at Pandagon has posted on how egalitarian marriage is a threat to male-dominated marriage:

But where I agree with Wildmon is that gay marriage is a threat to traditional marriage. Wildmon and I both know that if there are a lot of marriages around where there’s not a matched man/wife set, people are going to start saying, “But how do they know who’s the boss of the house?” and then they might start realizing that you don’t actually need a boss of the house and that marriages can be partnerships instead of exercises in male domination and then, boom! Traditional marriage is over and men are finding themselves doing the goddamn dishes.

Where Wildmon and I disagree, of course, is on the subject of whether or not men should be doing the goddamn dishes.

Ron and I, of course, have no choice.

Immigration, illegal and otherwise

Obsidian Wings' hilzoy on illegal immigration:

I think it should go without saying that it would be better if no one was in this country illegally. For one thing, it's generally better for laws to be obeyed and not broken ('generally' here is to allow for cases like Nazi Germany.) For another, the fact that there are people who are not protected by our laws, and who cannot complain about miserable wages, unsafe working conditions, or horrible labor practices without fear of deportation harms workers everywhere, either directly or by depressing the cost of legal workers.

It seems to me that any workable solution to this problem has to involve altering the incentives facing poor people in central America (and any other countries from which large numbers of people come to the US illegally.) The ideal long-term solution would be for ordinary people in central America to be well enough off that they did not feel that they had to leave their own countries in order to have a decent future. In the more immediate future, however, I see no alternative to serious enforcement against employers who hire illegal immigrants.

Yeah, what she said.

Hilzoy also comments intelligently on border security, here, taking Bush & Co. for their utter cluelessness: she describes sending the National Guard to the border as a "ridiculous stunt" and quotes Josh Marshall's assessment of the plan--""But all I can make of this plan to help guard the border with soldiers is that it's one more example that there is simply no gambit too craven or silly for this president not to resort to it"--with approval.

My dad--he's 85 years old, but not much gets past him--asked me about this plan Saturday when it first entered the news. I hadn't seen the news yet and was flabbergasted. We're pretty much agreed that Bush makes things up as he goes along, scrambling to get his approval ratings above 30. I doubt it'll work: Bush has done everything possible to conflate the issue of workers illegally crossing the border with the related but separate issue of terrorists illegally crossing the border.

Hilzoy concludes:

I think we should do what we need to do to secure the border as soon as possible. But I don't see why we need to use the National Guard as a "stopgap". It's not as though there is a short-term crisis on the border, a crisis so urgent that it would be worth taking men and women who have just returned from Iraq, and whose equipment is antiquated if it exists at all, and send them off to do a job they are not trained to do. Moreover, if there is a crisis that's this urgent, I have to ask why the Bush administration is only now getting around to dealing with it. They have, after all, been in office for over five years now, and if the security of our borders is in fact at a crisis point, that surely reflects their own bad planning.

Go read both of her posts. They're fairly long, but well worth the time.

More on marriage

Over at Pandagon, Amanda Marcotte, in the course of a long and illuminating post, says:

I would suggest that the institution of marriage doesn’t just have a nasty side effect of eating away at women’s identities and energies but that in fact that’s the whole purpose of the institution.

I'll stipulate that that's one of the purposes--but the whole purpose? Nah.

Having said that, I agree that to many--especially to folks whose religion is the only politics they've got--inequality is built into marriage the way righthandedness is built into polo. And surely to these people one of the objections to same-sex marriage (yeah, you knew I'd find a way to work that in) is that having two gals or guys involved rather than one of each eliminates one ground where inequality in the relationship can take root.

By the way, to those who think x is the whole purpose of marriage, where x = inequality, or childbearing, or obtaining advantageous in-laws, I recommend Stephanie Coontz's Marriage, a History : How Love Conquered Marriage, which illustrates how many different purposes marriage has served over the course of human history.

Theory of Relativity

Mark Evanier has a question: "John is Jerry's uncle. Marsha is Tom's sister. John marries Marsha. What relationship then is Tom to Jerry? He's not his uncle. Is there such a thing as an uncle-in-law? Or does this make him some kind of cousin? Is there any tidy term to describe this relationship? I'm an unmarried only-child so this stuff is alien to me."

Evanier's obfuscatory description doesn't help, but after drawing a quick chart I came to the conclusion that "uncle's brother-in-law" is reasonably tidy and clear.

English doesn't really have tidy terms for extended family: is my spouse's sister's husband my brother-in-law? (I say not.)

While I'm on this, a sister-in-law might be either the sister of a spouse, or a brother's wife. (Or both. Don't try it at home.) I sure don't know what you're supposed to call the relationship of a sister-in-law of the former kind to one of the latter kind.

Today's repetitive redundancy

From the e-mail box, John writes:

Today I heard an NPR reporter use the phrase: "carefully delineated guidelines."

It will appear in the box score as the reporter being credited with a double but thrown out trying to stretch it to a triple.

And our mutual buddy Warren responded:

In the past week, I heard this classic "past history," and the ever popular "voting begins Saturday at 7 a.m. in the morning."

Well, I had no choice; I had to respond:

And then there's "portable navigation system." Those are so much handier than the stationary kind.

I should also mention Rex King's favorite group: Stellastarr*.



*I can't help but look for the footnote, either.

Apple Corps challenges Apple Computer

A court in the UK has ruled that Apple Computer's use of its trademark in connection with the iTunes Music Store does not infringe upon the trademark of the Beatles' Apple Corps. Details here.

Probably this isn't much of a surprise to either side. Lawsuits of this nature, which may seem pointless, actually serve the purpose of showing that Apple Corps consistently defends its trademark, and this may be very important down the line if Apple Corps ever seeks relief against genuine infringement.

Puerile, but funny

I know somebody who got fired from his job at an ad agency for presenting a concept much like this one. The package wasn't so phallic, though.

Via Adrants.

Hard to believe

From the Washington Post: "Career appointees at the Department of Agriculture were stunned last week to receive e-mailed instructions that include Bush administration 'talking points' -- saying things such as 'President Bush has a clear strategy for victory in Iraq' -- in every speech they give for the department."

Over and over again, I find myself thinking the administration just can't do anything sillier, and they invariably prove me wrong. They've scraped the bottom of the barrel and are now down to splinters. If this weren't so damn deadly serious it'd be funny.

Law to Segregate Omaha Schools Divides Nebraska

Jaw-dropping article in tomorrow's NYTimes:

Ernie Chambers is Nebraska's only African-American state senator, a man who has fought for causes including the abolition of capital punishment and the end of apartheid in South Africa. A magazine writer once described him as the 'angriest black man in Nebraska.'

He was also a driving force behind a measure passed by the Legislature on Thursday and signed into law by the governor that calls for dividing the Omaha public schools into three racially identifiable districts, one largely black, one white and one mostly Hispanic. The law, which opponents are calling state-sponsored segregation, has thrown Nebraska into an uproar, prompting fierce debate about the value of integration versus what Mr. Chambers calls a desire by blacks to control a school district in which their children are a majority.

Imagine my surprise to read, further on in the article, that legal challenges are expected.

The impelling force behind this measure is the perfectly valid desire of some Omahans to have neighborhood schools that reflect values widely held in those neighborhoods. Also, it seems that parents have given up on school integration as practiced up to now as an utter failure, which, you know, isn't unreasonable after 20-30 years during which, if their experience has been like the experience of most every community I'm aware of, hasn't improved anybody's schools and hasn't brought assorted racial communities together, either.

Alas, the adoption of this measure makes it look as if Omahans think it's desirable to keep racial communities apart. I assume that's not the case, but maybe I'm naive or something. It'll be interesting to see what happens when it's challanged, which seems inevitable.

Those damned cartoons

I've been following the controversy over the 12 drawings of Mohammed that have caused such a ruckus in Europe and the Muslim world.

A look at the cartoons themselves shows that the fuss over them is far out of proportion to the artwork itself: A few are unquestionably inflammatory; a couple are neutral or complimentary; at least one is intentionally ambuguous; and a few convey their message so poorly that no point is made or are just asinine.

It's hard to believe that so few media outlets in this country have shown the drawings.

Here, Eugene Volokh gets a lot right. Excerpts won't do it justice; go and read the whole thing.