Expect Delay

The past few weeks have been a season of construction delays along my commute on Interstate 81. We began with "emergency bridge repairs" several weeks ago and have now carried on to "sign inspection", which caused this morning's commute to be about 75 minutes long instead of the usual 40-45 minutes. (It took me 40 minutes to make my way through a traffic backup to the point where I could get off the highway to begin a secondary-road detour.)

Worse delays are probably coming on Thursday, when the hugely unpopular lame-duck occupant of the office of the President of the United States will be in the area to lend his support to the hugely unpopular incumbent Congressional Representive for the 10th Congressional district of Prennsylvania*, Don "The Strangler" Sherwood. I doubt this visit will do much good for either the Congressman or the President involved. But it will probably mean even more traffic aggravation for me, and tens of thousands of other commuters, come Thursday.

*For a good example of what a Gerrymander looks like, see this image of Pennsylvania's 10th Congressional district.

And now for something completely different

Adam Felber's Talkshow with Spike Feresten is still going strong. It's nominally on FOX at midnight on Saturdays, but baseball playoffs have been kicking it into the wee hours of Sunday morning.

A few weeks ago I convinced some friends to watch it with me. It didn't go over too well, though I think it had a sort of car-crash fascination for them, and it did elicit a few genuine laughs. This bit actually got them engaged, since several of them had experience with mobile hydraulic platforms. (You'll have to watch the clip to understand!)

This week's episode had me laughing all the way through. It featured Slo-Mo Humanimal Races, a piece of which Adam was justifiably proud. (He's the panda.) In addition to the linked sketches listed in my earlier post, you can also find several other Spike Feresten sketches on YouTube, including the Mexican Space Lizard (at the Felberpalooza Adam could not stop raving about the giant iguana in a cowboy hat with a guitar, especially once he had quite a bit of Maker's Mark in him) and the ad for the album "B.B. King Sings About His Other Ailments" (why stop with diabetes?) Go take a look, have a laugh, and then watch the show this coming Saturday!

Death and the blogger

Death sucks. But I may have mentioned that already.

Blogs are more than what a lot of people in the non-blogging world think they are. When people on TV speak of blogs they are often referring to political blogs. "Bloggers are essentially parasitic", one of them said on the Sunday Squabble Shows today, referring to bloggers who seize on things reported in the mainstream media, repeat them, and give elaborate partisan analysis. I wonder if she realizes that these people aren't the only sort of "bloggers" out there?

Someday I'll write something on the diverse nature of blogging. But not right now.

I just wanted to say that for those of us whose blogs are not simply partisan parasitic political puffery, our blogs can often be read in a way that gives outsiders a glimpse into our lives. And quite often, the story of those lives is told at times through the stories of others' deaths.

How blogs commemorate those who die is up to the individual blogger. But if you read enough blogs, you will gradually assemble an idea of the transient nature of life and the relentlessness of death. It's not just me. Look around at a few blogs and see for yourself.

Adding Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy

Despite its title, Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy is actually full of very good astronomy. My sister knows Phil Plait and got me an autographed copy of his book Bad Astronomy a few years ago. It wasn't long before I headed over to his website, which is chock-full of fun stuff, like a thorough deconstruction of the "Moon Hoax" hoax, the Face on Mars, and even movie reviews (in defense of the movie The Core: "...as long as there are copies of "Armageddon" intact, no worse scifi movie will ever be made..")

It's not just an anti-bad astronomy website, though; check out these pictures of Saturn and Mars from the blog. Also, his links make this a great jumping-off point for anyone interested in science, or even just looking for a daily dose of "Wow!" Check it out!

Going to a party

It looks to be a beautiful day today. Crisp, cold, clear. I had been hoping for rain, so I could go to my friend's son's birthday party in New Jersey without any guilt, but the cold would have limited my ability to paint today, anyway. Maybe. Possibly. I don't know. Besides, I could use a long, pleasant drive and a party to clear my head.

One year later and no apology from Chris Pirillo

It's been almost a year since ubergeek Chris Pirillo made his declaration that "Blogspot has become nothing but a crapfarm" in his "Kill Blogspot already!" rant. By his calculations, 99% of the blogs on Blogspot were not "legitimate", and the entire Blospot community should be shut down, or at the very least all Blogspot blogs (like mine) should be ostracized.

I've been thinking about this lately. Not too much, because I don't really give a runny crap what Chris Pirillo thinks or says. But unfortunately, a lot of undergeeks do, and many of them simply dittoed his words in an effort to bask in his reflected geek glory...and possibly garner a few more hits to their sites, which was the strategy being used by "splogs" (fake blogs, usually designed with nefarious intent) that attracted Pirillo's attention in the first place.

It was a visit to another blog that stirred my memory. Phil Plait over at Bad Astronomy is a friend of my sister. His site is informative and fun and a hell of a good time, and is definitely getting added to my sidebar links the next time I futz with my template. In a recent post that escaped my attention until today he invoked the "Pirillo Effect", a rule derived from observation that states that you can summon Chris Pirillo to your website by mentioning his name three times. (So far that's four and two half-mentions. Hello, little man. Remember me?) I probably overstepped the bounds of blog etiquette by posting a comment on Phil's post that challenged Chris to apologize for his earlier remarks, something that, to the knowledge of this Blogspot blogger, he has not yet done.

To make it clear what I would consider an apology from him, I will reprint a comment I made to my own post about this issue, a comment that was in response to a comment left by Chris Pirillo:

Maybe "Dick" is a little strong. And I suppose I could have simply checked the Wikipedia to answer the question "Who the hell is Chris Pirillo anyway?" It was interesting to see the Pirillo Effect in action. (Candyman, Candyman, Candyman...)

I would like to extend my congratulations, however. Yes, thanks to Chris Pirillo's call to "Kill Blogspot Already!", Google has decided to take countermeasures against fake blogs. Clearly they hadn't been working on this up until now. Obviously Chris gets the credit for this.

But I think I'll stand by my conclusion that Chris Pirillo is a dick. I'll let his own words explain why:

"Kill Blogspot Already!!! "
OK, when you've got as much exposure as this guy does - and he has a lot - any call to action is going to be echoed by a lot of folks. In later posts Chris will claim that he was trying to encourage Google to address the problem of what he calls "spam blogs". But that's not what this title says.

"Blogspot has become nothing but a crapfarm."
If nothing else had been said, this alone would have earned him the title of Dick. I blog on Blogspot. So do a lot of other people, including many of the people I link to. "Nothing but a crapfarm"? There's not much wiggle room there, boy. You've declared all of our blogs crap. Screw you.

"(T)he 1% "legitimate" minority."
OK, someone as plugged in as Chris Pirillo must have some data to back this claim up. 99% of the blogs on Blogspot (which, remember, is "nothing but a crapfarm") are illegitimate. And how do you define legitimacy? Show us your data, show us your judgement criteria.

Or is this just hyperbole, just spouting off, shooting from the hip? If so - if this is, as he later tries to cast it, a biting satire in the manner of Swift's "Modest Proposal" - well, it falls flat. It comes across as a call to "Kill Blogspot Already!" That's the way I read it, and I'm sure that's the way many of Chris Pirillo's propellerhead minions read it. And maybe everything that he has written should be taken with a grain of salt - it might also be hyperbole.

Chris, you owe us an apology. Me. Lauren. Rima. Anne. Siobhan. Katie. SuperG. Lisa. Puppetdude. Dee. Teigra. All the others whose blogs are hosted by a service you've declared to be "nothing but a crapfarm". There can't be that many of us - "1% legitimate" can't amount to that many blogs.

Now, I don't expect an apology to me. Frankly, I don't care. But you owe the others an apology, many of whom don't even know that you insulted them. I check their blogs ever day. Post it in the comments of their latest entry. If I see you doing this, you'll be a little bit along the way to not being a dick.

Then use the "Next Blog" button for an hour. If you find fake blogs, flag them. If you find real ones, apologize to them, too.

And post the apology on your site. You reach a lot of people. You've insulted a lot of people. You need to let them know that you're not really a dick.

He never has. I didn't expect he would. So the initial judgment still stands.

And so do I.

The story of Minnie the Church Cat

Minnie came into our lives on Sunday, February 22, 1998. I don't know this date through some amazing feat of memory acrobatics, or because I have it engraved somewhere. I know it because there is a site out there that lists every Third Eye Blind concert by location and date, including the one they played at the Scranton Cultural Center that day.

I didn't go to church with my mom that Sunday. Maybe I had gone the night before as part of a pre-Tink's warmup. Maybe I had gone to mass with my grandmother at the nursing home. Whatever the case, I was home when my mom came back from church.

"Can we take another cat?" she asked. "There's a little cat pacing and crying outside of the church."

This was about six months after our dog Kitty had died. We had Haley the dog, and Josie and Ashes the cats. It was cold outside. The cat was looking for something. It had approached humans and cried for help.

"Yeah," I said. "I hope it's still there."

The cat was still there. It was a Tabby, like Ashes, but not the same color. Where Ashes was the color of coal ashes - gray and silver with touches of pinkish-white and bands of black - this cat was the color of nicotine stains: a yellow-brown with black bands when seen from a distance, but a much more complex color when seen up close. Its coat seemed to have a black base with brown bands and bright hairs that stood out in almost electric contrast with the black. The cat also had what I called a "King Cheetah Stripe" - a line of black that ran along the spine from the top of the head to the base of the tail. The new cat was also much, much smaller than Ashes.

My sister was in town that weekend. She had come up to see the Third Eye Blind concert with me. As we fed and cared for the cat, the question of what to call it came up. Because it was found near the St. John Neumann school, we briefly considered calling it Neuman, with all the unfortunate Seinfeldian connotations that were involved there. A few other names got kicked around. In the end my mom liked Mickey, which seemed like as good a name as any.

I fed Mickey throughout the day, as much as the cat wanted. A morsel here, a morsel there. Not forcing the food, just letting Mickey decide to eat. The poor cat was emaciated and covered with scabs from a hard life on the streets, and was also a bit suspicious of the people who had adopted it. My hands were clawed up pretty severely that day, but as anyone who knows me probably realizes, I have fairly thick skin.

Eventually it was time to head to the concert. My sister and I drove up to the Scranton Cultural Center in my car - the same car I am still driving - and talked about the cat on the way up. On the way back we talked about the concert and didn't think to phone home.

When we got home, well after midnight, my mother was frantic. "I went in the room, and there were little bloody things all over the towel on the bed," she said. "They looked like little fishes. They must be kitten fetuses. Mickey is actually Minnie, and she just spontaneously aborted a litter of kittens."

My mom and my sister ran the cat - whose sex had just been quite positively determined - up to the emergency veterinary clinic about 20 miles away. I stayed to tend to the other animals and to my father, who had been felled by a stroke several years before.

At the emergency vet's things looked pretty good for Minnie. She was not in any immediate danger and was quite healthy. She was also no longer pregnant. There was only one thing that really concerned the vet - a large mass he could feel in her abdomen. He took her away to take X-Rays to try to determine what it was.

A while later he came back. "What in the world have you been feeding her?" he asked. The large mass was actually a solid clump of food that Minnie had been eating all day. She was given a clean bill of health and sent home.

Since that time Minnie took her place in the hierarchy of animals and the feline pecking order. She was Junior Animal, and had no aspirations to be anything more. She was also Junior Feline and deferred to Josie and Ashes. Josie was not especially friendly to her, but was not openly antagonistic. Both Ashes and Haley loved her and played with her as much as they could - which wasn't all that much. Minnie was aloof and highly independent. Where Josie would demand attention and Ashes wanted as much physical contact as he could get, even wrestling with Haley at times, Minnie was content to stay in the background. Her favorite spot was in a corner of the room where I'm writing this, a stack of boxes with some blankets on top.

But she was a Tabby, and she had the Tabby tendency to clear off surfaces. Sometimes, in the middle of the night or even the middle of the day, the sound of toiletries being thrown off the bathroom vanity would echo through the house. We always knew that it was Minnie, "cleaning house."

Even after Nikki joined the group in 1999, Minnie didn't lord her status over the new Junior Animal. Nor did she change her behavior when she moved up two spots in one weekend, the Thanksgiving weekend of 2000 (I believe) when Joey came into the family and Josie died in my arms. She mourned, I think, when Haley died last year, leaving her as Second Animal. When Ashes died six months ago, making Minnie the Senior Animal, her behavior changed only a little. She still played chasing games with Nikki and Joey, but she would also sometimes stay near me while I worked on the computer, in the same spot where Ashes used to lay. But unlike Ashes, she did not want to be brushed, or scratched, or rubbed, or even stroked. She was near me; that was enough.

She didn't have a favorite toy, like Nikki with his beloved stuffed dog Dolly, or a favorite activity like Ashes with his brushing, or even a bundle of personality quirks like Joey. Her one luxury in life was her morning bowl of milk, which she would ask for by name - crying "Meeewk, meeewk" even as she saw me remove the jug from the refrigerator and begin to fill her bowl.

A few months ago she began to sleep with me in bed - not in direct contact, just near me, curled up by my head. That was where I would find her, every morning, right up until this past Monday.

Now it is Thursday, and she is dead.

I miss you, Minnie.

Gone

Minnie was euthanized at 11:05 this morning

Her kidneys had completley failed. Short of spending the rest of her life in a hospital hooked to a dialysis machine, there was nothing that could be done

She yowled when we got there this morning. After we opened her cage and took her out she seemed to perk up, but her eyes were still unblinking and did not seem to track on anything. When we put her on the table where we had her last night she simply lay flat. The vet brought out her charts and went over her numbers with us, to settle any doubts we might have about what we were about to do. We said our goodbyes, asked her to say hi to Ashes and Haley for us, and let the doctor give her the lethal injection. She died within a minute.

Goodbye, Minnie. You were a good cat. I wish you could have stuck around longer.

Hell of a time for Blogger to crash

(This is being posted from Hotmail, so it may look weird.)*

Minnie was still alive as of 10:30 last night, and much more awake and aware
than she had been three hours earlier. But she hadn't urinated yet. We'll
find out in a little bit if she's still alive this morning

My electrician called yesterday morning to tell me he wants to do the
estimate today. We're supposed to meet over at the house in a few minutes.
I'm waiting for him to call.

I'll try to visit Minnie on my way in to work after I'm done with the
electrician.

Thanks to everybody for your continued wishes, thoughts, and prayers.

*I fixed the formatting issues.

Quick Minnie update

I stopped to see Minnie on my way home from work, and she wasn't good. Her eyes were fixed and unblinking, her mouth was partly open - from the neck up, she looked dead. She was breathing all right, and the veterinary assistant told me that her heart was strong, but she was mostly unresponsive. Just the fact that she let me hold her for over a half-hour was weird - she would never have allowed that without complaint.

She did rouse three times to close her mouth and look around the room, but she quickly settled back into her semi-comatose state. This was in marked contrast to her appearance when my mom visited her six hours earlier: while she had been initially unresponsive, she rallied while my mother was holding her and became very alert.

We are heading back up in a little bit to see her together. I'll update if I can. Thank you to everyone who has once again sent such kind thoughts and wishes.

I realized when I was trying to find a link to a biographical sketch for Minnie last night that I have never done one. Minnie, the Church Cat, definitely has a story that should be told. I'll tell it as soon as I have time.

Here we go again

Minnie, currently our oldest cat, is in the veterinary hospital in critical condition.

I noticed some behavioral changes in her these last few days. I thought she was sulking because we have begun to let Babusz interact with the other cats. For the last two months or so Minnie has been sleeping in bed next to me, curled up near my head. Part of my wake-up ritual involves reaching over and stroking her and wishing her good morning. Yesterday morning I reached out and she wasn't there. That was odd, but not unprecedented, and as a cat she has the prerogative to change her mind about things whenever she wants. I thought it was even odder when I got out of bed and found her curled up on the carpet by the side of my bed.

Last night Minnie was acting even more strangely. She wouldn't jump into bed at all and was lying listlessly on the floor. When I picked her up she was limp like a ragdoll, and her eyes seemed extra-large. She also seemed to have very suddenly lost a lot of weight. She vomited, which is not at all unusual for her - she has always preferred milk to solid food and will sometimes vomit up solid, unchewed, undigested food in a clump shortly after eating it - but she vomited several times more than her norm. We agreed that we would get her to the vet in the morning.

This morning Minnie was again weak and listless, and was not at all interested in the morning bowl of milk that she on any other morning would ask for by name.

My mom ran Minnie up to the vet while I got an extra-late start on the day. When I heard the weather forecast confirming that today would be beautiful while the rest of the week would be rainy, I decided to exercise my "floating holiday" to take the day off to work on the house. As soon as I was out of the shower and dressed I loaded up the car with my painting clothes and headed up to meet my mom at the vet's.

The news was not good, at all. Minnie was severly diabetic, something that came as a surprise to us. Her blood sugar was way high, she was dehydrated, and her kidneys were beginning to fail. The vet checked her in to his hospital and began a rehdyrating IV, but was not completely optimistic about her chances of recovery.

Keep in mind that two days ago Minnie was her normal active self, climbing on top of the enertainment center and knocking things off the top that got in her way. She has always been very aloof, nowhere near as cuddly as Ashes, which may be why we never noticed her weight loss - we never got to hold her or pick her up or do anything else that would have clued us in, since she always ran away as we approached.

So Minnie is getting the best care possible. I threw myself at the task of scraping and repainting the rest of my wrought-iron porch railings, a task I worked on from about 11:00 in the morning until nearly 7:00 at night (which is when I finished washing off the mops I had just used to clean off the filthy porch.) I got everything but the banisters on the steps. I look like I got caught in a tar pit - some of the railings could only be accessed by reaching through other railings, sometimes freshly-painted railings.

I wrapped things up and drove from my "new" house to my "old" house. As I pulled up, filthy, tired, and hungry, I thought: There's no one to give Minnie her bowl of milk tomorrow morning.

And I cried.

Tomorrow it will be six months since Ashes died.

North Korea and the Nuclear Genie

The genie's been out of the bottle for 61 years. And more recently A.Q. Khan saw to it that anybody with the cash could have their own personal genie. What did we expect?

Here's an old joke:

A man is searching all over his kitchen for his glasses. "I can't find them anywhere!" he laments to his wife.

"Well, where did you last have them?" she asks.

"In the basement," he replies.

"Then why are you looking for them in the kitchen?"

Without looking up, he says "Because the light is better here!"

Tired

I managed to do a little more wrought-iron painting today. I have half of the railing done now, not counting the banisters and the uprights.

It was a beautiful day today. If I had managed to dedicate a few more hours to the work I would have gotten twice as much accomplished. If the weather holds, I may take a day off just to work on the railing. Maybe I'll be able to get an electrician in at the same time to give me an estimate on rewiring half the house.

Now I am tired. I can't wait to go back to work to relax.

Progress report

Today I repainted a part of the wrought-iron railing on my new house.

That wasn't the plan. The plan was to paint all of the wrought-iron railing, except maybe the banisters on the steps, and the only reason I would skip them is because I was planning on putting another coat of paint on the central part of the porch, including the steps. (I didn't.)

The reality was that I was very comfortable in my bed this morning (flannel sheets, gotta love 'em) and didn't want to get out. And I was trying to call a friend who I can only talk to on weekends. And my stove took an hour to boil water for tea (I need to get that taken care of, or get the antique stove replaced.) And I decided to follow-through on the part of the plan that involved cleaning the front windows - inside and out, both sides of the house - and hanging up some Autumn gel window cling decorations that I bought the other day. (What? What are you lookin' at? They give the house a lived-in appearance, OK? So I don't wanna hear none o' your lip. What? You wanna take this offline? OK, pal...) And in the end, it was about noon when I finally gathered up my wire brushes and went out into the cold to begin scraping off the loose rust.

I quickly reformulated my plan. I would focus on the lower parts of the wrought iron, the parts where the rust was the worst. The rest I would deal with later.

My mother, aunt, cousin, and a friend all went to 4:00 mass just up the street from me. I suggested that after church they could come over and have a pizza party - as long as they picked up the pizza.

At 4:00 I had finished brushing, sanding, and masking-off and was just beginning to put brush to railing. I didn't finish even my reduced-scope task until about 5:30, a half-hour after everyone had shown up.

We ate the pizza. It was good.

I came back here around 8:00 tonight.

Now I'm tired.

First night

Tonight I will be spending my first night in the house that I bought more than four months ago.

It's not that I'm moving in yet. That's still a while off. Right now I'm undergoing a household reclamation effort that will be familiar to anyone who has read Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. It's a purely practical matter: days are growing shorter and colder, there is much work that must be completed by next May 31 (at the risk of losing my homeowner's insurance), and it takes me an eternity to get myself out of bed and across town to work on the house on a Saturday. It will be much easier (in theory) to simply roll out of bed, roll down the steps, and roll out the front door to begin this weekend's task, wire-brushing and repainting the wrought-iron railing around the porch. (This is one of the tasks specified by my insurance company; for some reason, they were untroubled by the rusty wrought-iron fence that runs along the front of the house. I would rather work on that, but as far as the insurance company is concerned, the porch railing is the higher priority.)

That's the plan, anyway. The practical consideration of breakfast just hit me. Maybe some cold Pop-Tarts and an apple - I don't want to tax the electrical system with a toaster just yet. I may make some tea, too, which means I may blow the house up by using the antique gas stove. I sure hope that doesn't happen.

What not to do when you're about to be struck by lightning

Yesterday some titanic electrical storms blew through the area.

We've been having some big ones lately, with bright, almost continuous flashes of cloud-to-cloud lightning and short, intense shots of cloud-to-ground (or, more accurately, ground-to-cloud) lightning. A line of powerful storms stretched diagonally across the northeastern part of Pennsylvania yesterday afternoon, but I thought the worst was over by the time I headed home. I was wrong.

As a result of making some stops, I didn't get to my new house until almost 8:00 last night. I had things I needed to unpack - a set of pots and pans, a big box full of kitchen odds and ends. I needed the space in my car today, so leaving the stuff in my car wasn't an option.

It was still storming when I pulled up. The rain was pounding a little less insistently, though, so it seemed like a good time to hustle the stuff into the house. I parked the car, unlocked the passenger's side doors (no automatic locks for me, baby!), turned off the ignition, took the keys in my left hand, grabbed an umbrella in my right, opened the door, stepped out onto the road.

My car keys began to tingle. My, that's peculiar, I thought, in exactly the same voice that Eddie Murphy used when he said those words on his Comedian album. Car keys usually don't tingle and squirm like there's electricity running through them.

I hunched over and ran around to the passenger's side of the car and began to unpack, shielding the boxes with my umbrella. When I touched the metal shaft I noticed that it, too, was tingling and crawling.

I'm gonna die, aren't I? I thought.

Well, needless to say, I didn't. But I could have. Vast fingers of electropotential were reaching out of the street around me, trying to shake hands with oppositely-charged fingers in the clouds above. Had they met, the resulting lightning bolt would have taken the shortest possible path, possibly through the top of my head. The safest place would have been inside the metal shell of my car, since all the electrical current from a lightning strike would have washed over the outer metallic skin and left everything inside unharmed.

That's what I should have done: retreated to the safety of the car's interior, maybe even gotten the hell out of the area. Instead, I walked around my car and unpacked it, tingling keys and umbrella in my hands. I could have been killed. I wasn't. I was stupid, and I was lucky. And I'm still alive.

Kids, don't try that at home.

Voter registration deadline fast approaching!

This is from MoveOn.org:

In many states, this Sunday will be your last chance to register to vote. In some, you have to get your registration in the mail as soon as Thursday.

You already know how important voting is—you wouldn't be a MoveOn member if you didn't. But that doesn't necessarily mean you're properly registered. Thousands of names are mistakenly purged from the voting rolls every year.

So, our friends at Working Assets have created a website to make registering (and re-registering) very, very simple. The whole process takes under 5 minutes. Just click here to get started:

https://www.govote.org/

Even if you think you might be registered, there's no harm in re-registering. Better to re-register than be denied your right to vote on Election Day. (And there are no legal problems with doing so, as long as you only vote in one place.)

On the page above, you can also send emails to your friends and family to make it easy for them to register. You can even send registration text messages for free to your friends' cell phones.

The more progressives vote, the more representatives will pay attention to us. It's that simple. So take a moment today—before the deadline this Sunday—to make sure you're registered. And please pass this note on to others who would find it useful.

Thanks for all you do,

–Eli, Justin, Karin, Wes and the MoveOn.org Political Action Team
Wednesday, October 4th, 2006

Tragedies

Last week an armed man managed to walk into a Colorado high school not far from Columbine, site of the worst mass killing in U.S. educational history. Undeterred by guards, metal detectors, or any other sort of system designed to keep armed strangers from walking into schools, he seized several young girls and reportedly molested them. In a final confrontation he allegedly* shot and killed one of the girls before killing himself.

Yesterday a heavily armed 32-year-old milk truck driver walked into an Amish school near his house in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and in what may have been a copy of the Colorado incident, selectively seized the school's girls and killed or tried to kill them. According to reports, among the many items he took with him into the school was what amounted to a bondage-and-rape kit, which he apparently never had an opportunity to use. He too allegedly killed himself.

This morning the Country Junction in Lehighton, a sprawling wonderland of retail items that calls itself "The World's Largest General Store", burned to the ground. Millions of dollars in inventory were lost, as well as all the buildings located on the three-acre facility. While all but one of the animals in the petting zoo escaped (one llama was too terrified to flee), all of the animals in the pet department died.

Why does the last incident affect me more strongly than the first two? Is it because I have been to the Country Junction many times, have played with the animals, have seen the petting zoo? Is it because this is someplace real to me, while the other two incidents are very nearly abstractions? Or have I just become so numb to human suffering that the accidental deaths of animals affect me more than the brutal murder of children?

*Please God, let this be true. I hope there isn't a forensics report buried at the bottom of a locked cabinet somewhere that shows that the girl was killed by friendly fire during the attempted rescue.

You must read this book

The Truth (with jokes) by Al Franken

I should have read this book long ago. I waited too long. I waited until it was in trade paperback, and offered by the Quality Paperback Book Club, and until several fellow Felbernauts recommended it to me at the Felberpalooza.

I was a little disappointed with Franken's last book, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them (A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right). I thought it was too jokey, too silly. There was plenty of important stuff in there, but it was wrapped in a marshmallow coating of humor that prevented some people from taking it seriously, and allowed others to dismiss it outright. Not this time.

The jokes in The Truth (with jokes) are actually few and far between, and are generally told through gritted teeth. The book is incredibly information-dense and has twenty pages of references at the end, enough for considerable follow-up and self-study. Franken covers many of the topics I have tried to address myself, but covers them with a thoroughness beyond my capabilities. Every person in America should read this book - it's that good, it's that thorough, it's that important. Depending on which side of the political divide you're on, you'll either find much fuel for your cause, or many questions that you must address before you carry on. Franken so thoroughly deconstructs the hypocrisy of the Bush Administration and its fellow travelers that supporters will find themselves realizing that they are in an ethically, morally, and logically untenable position.

Franken ends (well, nearly ends) the book with a summation of his criticisms of the Bush administration, its policies and supporters, and a call to political action for everyone else - starting now, with the November 2006 elections, the elections that will determine whether Republicans will continue to control all three branches of government for the next two years.

He truly ends the book with an imagined letter to his grandchildren written in the year 2015, a letter which outlines the course of action that (Franken hopes) the country will follow between now and then. And in a very clever passage, he assuages the Republican fears that a Democratic-majority Congress will tie up the business of the nation in an endless gridlock of impeachement hearings, while at the same time he assures those seeking justice that justice will be done. I will not give away the trick, but rest assured that it is very satisfying, minimally disruptive, and very doable.

This is not an easy book to read. Every few minutes I found myself flinging it across the room in anger. But because my anger was directed not at Franken, but at the political criminals who he exposes on every page, I was compelled to pick it back up and continue reading. I hope that you do the same before the November elections.

Read this book. Get angry. Do something about it.

Register to vote NOW!

The deadline for voter registration in Pennsylvania is October 10. In your state it may be different - check here to find out.

This is the most important election since the last one. We will not be able to correct the great national tragedy of November 2004, but this election is important for another reason: it will determine whether the Bush Administration will be held accountable for any of its actions, or whether it will continue to be allowed to carry on for the next two years as it has from the moment George Bush took the oath of office for the position he was granted by a 5-4 Supreme Court decision in December of 2000.

Time to take back our country.