It's 2010, and America has finally started dragging itself into the 20th century's world of social responsibility. We have a health-care reform bill, and that's a thing to celebrated. Meanwhile, as you will have heard, a few opponents of progress are doing their best to drag us back to the worst parts of the 19th century*, as in these incidents (as reported in the New York Times) against House members who voted for the reform bill:

At least two Congressional district offices were vandalized and Representative Louise M. Slaughter, a senior Democrat from New York, received a phone message threatening sniper attacks against lawmakers and their families.

Ms. Slaughter also reported that a brick was thrown through a window of her office in Niagara Falls, and Representative Gabrielle Giffords, Democrat of Arizona, said Monday that her Tucson office was vandalized after the vote.

The Associated Press reported that the authorities in Virginia were investigating a cut propane line to an outdoor grill at the home of a brother of Representative Tom Perriello of Virginia, after the address was mistakenly listed on a Tea Party Web site as the residence of the congressman. Representative Bart Stupak, Democrat of Michigan and a central figure in the measure's abortion provisions, reported receiving threatening phone calls.

Representative James E. Clyburn of South Carolina, the highest-ranking black lawmaker in the House, said he received an anonymous fax showing the image of a noose....

The reports of threats, coming after a tense weekend when protesters hurled racial and homophobic slurs at Democrats and spit on one congressman, left many Democrats shaken.  [full article]

So when John Boehner says that "violence and threats are unacceptable," I have a hard time taking him seriously. Without the constant patronizing GOP appeal to fear, there would likely not now be people so terrified that we're on the road to totalitarianism that they'd be faxing nooses to congresspeople.

You reap what you sow, Mr. Boehner. You want the violence and the threats to stop? Then stop using the language of fear. Stop appealing to the lowest common denominator. Rely on rational argument to make your point. If your point is valid, that ought to be sufficient. If not, then you're only in politics for the power, and not for the people.

Earlier from the second-story deck
I caught a glimpse of the gate
slamming shut as Ella chased
someone out of the yard.
Her wild barking was
what had summoned me.
The thunk of something landing
solidly on the wooden deck below
brought me down the stairs
to find a package for my wife,
too big to fit through the mail slot.
The gate latch was still vibrating
at a high B or C.

If you talked to them, you'd find out that I could be a real bastard in the workplace. Some people at my last job were apparently afraid to talk to me when I thought they'd messed up, or at all. I made at least one producer at the Sesame Street website cry. Mind you, I'm not proud of this. No, wait, actually I am.

Over the past week or so, I've watched the recent film In the Loop three times on DVD. Besides its scathing, cynical view of the political process that lubricated our way into Iraq, I can't get enough of Malcolm Tucker, the angry, profane press secretary who never encountered a functionary he couldn't intimidate or a problem he couldn't spin his way out of. I want to be Malcolm Tucker, or at least be that articulate when I'm enraged.

Tucker, as played by Peter Capaldi, is also a character on the BBC comedy series The Thick of It. That's the source of the short video clip below (decidedly NSFW in its language), which pretty well sums up the Tucker philosophy.

I think you'll agree, there's a little bit of Malcolm Tucker in all of us.

Hey, look! There really is a tea towel with that embroidered on it:

Fuckity bye.

Sometimes as I glance through my website's server logs, I see the anonymous messages people have sent through my little Scrabble-izer. Here's one of the sweetest I've seen, which just caught my eye:

If you were a Scrabble tile, you'd be a Z - one of a kind and worth more than everyone else

This morning in the back window of the car
I found a ladybug
bleached bone-white and fragile under the glass,
like a tiny skull.

With eyespots faded almost to nothing,
blinded by the sun,
it was as if the creature had only slowly,
and jealously,

let go of the urge to outwit its predators.

Via the PS Publishing newsroom, here are excerpts from Peter Tennant's recent Black Static review of my collaboration with Derryl Murphy, Cast a Cold Eye:

This short novella does many things right. For starters, its setting is immaculately captured on the page, with a real sense of rural Nebraska in 1921 coming over thanks to a wealth of tiny details, such as the ins and outs of photography or a look inside the house of a wealthy widow. There's a strong emotional grounding too, for both Luke and the society in which he is placed, an aching sense of despair undercut with a feeling that perhaps the worst is past, so people can look to the future with hope, an optimism confirmed in its denouement. Characterisation is spot on, with no-one who can be considered either evil or a criminal, just ordinary men and woman with all the flaws and virtues that implies....

The supernatural side of the story is suitably understated, so that we believe but also take on board the possibility that the ghosts could only exist inside the hearts and minds of the people who see them. With a subtext suggesting that the spectral world is just another aspect of life, wishing us neither good nor evil, but just there, a case could be made for Luke as the 'I see ghosts' boy from Sixth Sense picked up, rather like a reverse Dorothy, and put down in rural Nebraska, but that might be stretching things. In any event, I thoroughly enjoyed this book and recommend it without reservation.

This morning is Plant a Tree day on WBEZ. If you pledge any amount today, they will plant a tree in your name anywhere in the world.

"Anywhere?" said Laura. (We often talk back to the radio in the morning.). "I want them to plant a tree in my back yard."

"I want them to plant a tree in Antarctica," I said. "It's pretty barren down there."

Does this make us jerks?

In the March 8 New Yorker, Hendrik Hertzberg makes an interesting throwaway observation in the course of discussing the Republican disinformation campaign that has labeled Obama's health-care effort as "socialist":

The Democrats' bill more closely resembles Richard Nixon's health-care proposal—the one that Ted Kennedy went to his grave regretting he hadn't embraced—than it does Bill Clinton's, to say nothing of Harry Truman's.  [full article]

No, they're not ignorant. What they're doing is putting Orwell to use in a different way—deploying careful buzzwords—socialism, totalitarianism, 1984, Big Brother—that have become freighted with decades of fear-inducing associations, words that slice through rational processing and detonate like smart bombs in the reptile brain.

The worst indictment of socialist ideas I can think of is that our equitable, cooperative, socialist education system has so completely failed to instill in us the ability to see through all this doublespeak.

And the links to other complaints about Shamrock Shakes just keep pouring in! Here's an oldie but goodie from The Onion:

Sinn Fein Leaders Demand Year-Round Shamrock Shake Availability

Okay, I have to come clean somewhere, so you just got voted my confessor. Lucky you.

So Laura and I started playing Wednesday nights in a pub trivia league late last spring. It's a uniform game that takes place in different bars not just all over Chicago but in several cities around the country. Our first few outings were dismal, but gradually we improved to the point where we took several firsts at our home bar, and we regularly place near the top of the pack. During this past season, our team—then known as The Reigning Cats and Dogs—did well enough to get invited to the city league championship match on February 13th. We placed 15th out of about 25 teams.

Using cell phones to look up answers is strictly forbidden, and we never cheat on that score. Sometimes, though, if we're nervous about a question, we'll look up the answer after we've already turned in our response. We're there to have fun, but we also love winning, and we can get pretty competitive with the other regular teams. It's a friendly competition, though.

Besides Laura and me, we have a few regulars on the team, most consistently Diane and Chuck. On a normal night, we have three or four players. There is no real limit on team size, though. We've had as many as six and as few as two. Everyone has categories they're strong and weak in. Laura does great at business and advertising and celebrity questions. Diane has TV and politics. I'm good at music and science and geography. Chuck has history, and he's pretty good at sports too. We generally dread sports questions, though, and there are usually a lot of them, so we recently recruited a new player, Randy, to help shore up that weak area.

Also, we have a regular waitress at the bar who's taken a liking to our team. I'll call her Devin. She likes to get in on the act too, so sometimes when we're stuck on a question she'll drop by, under cover of taking our beer order, and brainstorm with us on the answer. She has saved our bacon on more than one occasion.

Last Wednesday night, for the first time, I was the only team member able to attend. I considered blowing it off, but I wanted to get out of the house and have a few beers, and playing alone sounded like an epic challenge. For the new season we've changed our team name to Question Authority, but as long as our assigned league number is on our answer slips, we can call ourselves whatever we like on any given evening, so that night I called my team of one the Lone Punman. Nervously, and not without a great deal of self-consciousness, I settled in at our regular table to wait for the game to start.

I usually send a few Twitter updates from the matches, and much has been made there and on Facebook about my performance that evening. But I'm here to semi-publicly confess something that my teammates already know—I'm not as amazing as I've led people to think I am. Here is a detailed recap of the evening's match, from my perspective, that I wrote up the next day for my fellow Question Authorities.

(I've inserted some annotations along the way on how gameplay proceeds.)

[Our trivia game is played in six rounds of three questions each. At the start of each round, the quizmaster announces the three categories that will be used. Teams have three different point values they can assign to the questions in the round—5, 3 and 1. Each can only be used once. For example, if a team uses their 5-point value for the first question, they have 3 points and 1 point left to use on the two remaining questions. The quizmaster reads each question, then plays a four-minute song. Teams write their answers down on slips of paper, together with their point value, team name and league number, and turn their slips in to the quizmaster before the end of the song. Questions start easy and get harder as the round proceed. In addition, the answer to one question for the night, but not the question itself, has been revealed that day on the league's web site—if you've played before and know to look.]

ROUND 1
American History
Classic TV
Music Lineup

1. What was first recited in unison by American schoolchildren on October 11, 1892?

2. On the television series "Green Acres," what big city did Oliver and Lisa Douglas leave to move to the old Haney place?

3. Which of the following Gibb brothers was not a member of the Bee Gees? Is it Andy, Barry, Robin or Maurice?

ROUND 2
Money
Opera
U.S. Geography

1. The back of what U.S. state's commemorative quarter features an ear of corn, a wheel of cheese, and a cow?

2. What insect appears in the title of a popular opera by Giacomo Puccini?

3. The Canadian provinces of British Columbia, Alberta and Saskatchewan all border what U.S. state?

ROUND 3
The Olympics
Business
Music

1. What was the last U.S. city to host the Winter Olympics?

2. What international restaurant chain's slogan is "Love all, serve all"?

3. What alternative rock band's forthcoming album Teargarden by Kaleidoscope will consist of 44 tracks released one at a time as digital downloads? Is it Coldplay, My Chemical Romance, Smashing Pumpkins or the White Stripes?

[The halftime bonus round, also known as the "shots round," consists of one four-part question. A correct answer for each part is worth 2 points, for a total of up to 8 points. The team with the most points on the halftime bonus question is awarded a round of free shots, courtesy of Freddy. Teams have the length of two songs to turn in their answers.]

HALFTIME BONUS QUESTION
Geography

For each of the following, name the island nation by its capital city:

• Manila
• Reykjavik
• Santo Domingo
• Suva

[In the case of a tie for first place on the bonus question, one representative from each contending team is sent to the front of the room with an answer slip and a pencil. The tiebreaker question has a numerical answer. The team to come closest to the actual value wins the free shots.]

HALFTIME BONUS QUESTION TIE-BREAKER
Theme Parks

In what year did the Black Widow roller coaster make its debut at Six Flags New England?

[Going into the second half of play, the quizmaster reports the current standings.]

SCORES AT THE HALF
8th - 29 points - Flavor Stripe
7th - 31 points - Dangling Participles
5th - 32 points - Succotash My Balzac, Pound Puppies
3rd - 34 points - DB(?), LeVar Burton Love Explosion
1st - 35 points - Old Song, Lone Punman

[In the second half, the available point values for each round of questions increase to 6, 4 and 2 points.]

ROUND 4
Actors
Movie Plots
Nicknames

1. Who is the only actor from any television series in the Star Trek franchise to have been knighted?

2. What Clint Eastwood movie was loosely based on the real-life Zodiac killings?

3. What nickname is shared by both billiards champion Jeanette Lee and competitive eater Sonya Thomas?

ROUND 5
Shakespeare
Vocabulary
Science Fiction

1. What is the name of the king that Macbeth killed?

2. What word for a solution of water and salt can be applied to seawater or the liquid in a jar of pickles?

3. What 1979 sci-fi/horror movie featured a spaceship called the Nostromo?

ROUND 6
Cars
Baseball
Mythology

1. In 2007, what international car maker became the first company to sell a million vehicles in one year in China?

2. What is the only current National League team to never win a pennant or NLCS?

3. In Greek mythology, what kind of creature was Polyphemus?

[At the end of regular play, the quizmaster reports the current standings again.]

SCORES AT THE END OF REGULAR PLAY
8th - 49 points - Dangling Participles
6th - 60 points - DB(?), Succotash My Balzac
5th - 61 points - Flavor Stripe
4th - 62 points - LeVar Burton Love Explosion
3rd - 63 points - Old Song
2nd - 66 points - Pound Puppies
1st - 69 points - Lone Punman

[Teams are allowed to wager anywhere from 0 to 15 points on the final question. If they turn in a correct answer, the point wager is added to their score. But if they turn in an incorrect answer, that wager is deducted from their score.]

FINAL QUESTION Games

Place the following in order from greatest to least:

• Number of pawns a player starts with in chess.
• Highest possible value of a hand in baccarat.
• Number of $20 bills a player starts with in Monopoly.
• Numerical value assigned to the left fielder position in baseball stats.

The song ends. Hank prolongs the agony with thanks and so forth before slowly reading off the right answers in order. My first answer is right. My second answer is right. My knuckles are white. Third answer is right! Cheers start going up all around the room, but it doesn't matter. With the wager I made, no one can touch me. I slump back in my seat. It's over. I'm a rock star. I'm a legend.

FINAL SCORES
8th - 45 points - DB(?) (was tied for 6th, down 15 points)
7th - 46 points - Flavor Stripe (was 5th, down 15 points)
6th - 48 points - Old Song (was 3rd, down 15 points)
5th - 60 points - LeVar Burton Love Explosion (was 4th, down 2 points)
4th - 64 points - Dangling Participles (was 8th, up 15 points)
3rd - 75 points - Succotash My Balzac (was tied for 6th, up 15 points)
2nd - 81 points - Pound Puppies (place unchanged, up 15 points)
1st - 82 points - Lone Punman (place unchanged, up 13 points)

Well, tomorrow it will be, anyway. Last Wednesday night was awesome. I don't regret a bit of it.