The 3 things you don't discuss in parties and bars.

Sex:

Clear Channel, which owns 1200, or 1600, or 1800 radio stations, whatever it is this week, finally threw Howard Stern off 6 of them for "indecency."

It's interesting timing, coming right after the election year hubbub in shock and awe of that sudden terrorist attack by The Boob From Hell at that football game. Clear Channel is, of course, just about the most yahoo company since those fake cargo-kicker airlines that ran guns down to Central America and crack back up. 6 stations is pretty piddly and kind of a non-story, but perhaps in post-modern media it's the thought that counts.

Stern didn't seem to be much of a liability when his act was only costing CC tens of thousands of dollars in FCC fines. Now, though, maybe the various Congre$$ional threats to raise this to millions had something of a chilling effect. Or maybe CC considers some kinds of on-air speech, such as Stern's saying bad things about Boobs serving in high public office, to be more indecent than other kinds, such as merely cracking sexist tittie jokes about Boobs falling out of "malfunctioning" costumes.

Meanwhile print and billboard advertising continues on its merry way, in the full public eye, 24 hours a day, and far outside anything ever broadcast. It's basically teenage soft porn, with a few inside heroin references thrown in, done right out in the street. Given this background, how can we take the broadcast-standards flap seriously?

 

Religion:

What are we to make of Mel Gibson's version of the Passion? I didn't join the initial debate, because debate is meaningless in the movie business. Any lunk who's ever worked in This Town knows that publicity is publicity, no matter what you say about a movie. Over the long run, the only comments that mean anything happen at the box office.

It's now moot, though, because this thing has become one of the largest financial explosions in motion picture history. There's never been a ticket gross this big this fast, and the overseas hasn't even kicked in yet. We're watching a good shot at the biggest gross ever done by any movie, ever.

However statistically dubious they are*, these breathlessly-quoted dollar totals are the only reviews taken seriously by The Industry. Trust me on this one. People around here talk about The Art Of Cinema, then turn straight to the week's figures in Variety.

But movies don't cause history. History causes movies. They're part of a greater causal texture just like anything else. People in This Town get a few bucks ahead and go off and make their personal epics every year. Most drop dead. What's different this time?

Perhaps a semiotic asteroid has hit the Earth. Perhaps not. Perhaps cinematic Gospel epics will spread a memetic virus that ultimately affects every living thing on the planet, in a process best demonstrated by the Rambo movie phenomenon. Perhaps Gibson's flick is just another doctrinaire use of the medieval Passion Play, with better special effects, that will cause a spike in anti-Semitism and not much else.

The rest is faith, and there are plenty of other blogs for that.

 

Politics:

Let me get this straight. Condoleezza Rice knew that the USA was in big doodoo, but she couldn't do anything about it. A month before 9/11, she had a Presidential Daily Briefing titled "Bin Laden Determined To Strike in US," but she couldn't do anything about it. The FBI was checking out flight schools in Florida, but she couldn't do anything about it.

Ashcroft and a couple of corporate types had been told not to fly. Huge blocks of airline shares were being shorted on the stock exchange. Foreign intelligence services were all warning the US via diplomatic back channels. A former US military intelligence spook hung out to dry in Canada scribbled, "Let one happen, stop the rest," on a sheet of scratch paper and handed it to his prison guards.

But Condoleezza couldn't do anything about it.

She says, under oath, that if the intelligence had only specified airplanes, hijacking, knives, Logan Airport, World Trade Center, Pentagon, September 11, morning, nice day, she could have done something about it.

Can we do something about this government?

______

*Box office grosses are uncorrected for inflated ticket prices. Over the history of big-time movies, these have gone from a quarter to thirteen bucks. I believe the all-time highest corrected gross is still Gone With The Wind. [back]

We're in the locker room behind in the game, 3-7. We made all the big plays, and only gave up one touchdown when the quarterback fumbled the ball and the other side scored with it. However, we're not scoring touchdowns, and we're not going to. If the other team improves its read of our tendencies, which it will, we face a blowout here.

The problem is with the quarterback. He's popular with the fans, and sells a lot of tickets, but he's never been able to move the ball. He only listens to one of the assistant coaches, the one he agrees with. This assistant is a shrewd play caller, but badly limited by his narrow understanding of the different ways to gain yardage in a football game. He's convinced that sheer physical size and control of the line of scrimmage will win any game any time.

The quarterback also insists on calling the plays himself. He's got the huddles drilled pretty well, so the team gets its instructions and knows what to do, then they break clean and hit the line with their game faces on.

The problem is that he doesn't read alignments well, nor does he wish to learn. He believes that he knows all there is to know about football, and when he picks a play, he is dead certain that it's the right one. He refuses to audiblize on the line of scrimmage.

He'll even lie to the other coaches if he has to, but he rarely has to, because they know they must remain silent to keep their jobs. And so no matter what he sees the other team come out in, he'll stick to the play call he made. This is popular with fans, but it means he eats the ball a lot, killing drives on the 30 yard line.

If we're going to avoid a very bad second half, we need to substitute in another quarterback.

 

9/11 always makes me feel like Lt. Colombo (the Peter Falk LAPD character on TV). I realize it's not going to win me any friends, but sometimes I just have to pop up at the worst possible moment, and say, "Just one little thing is still bothering me, Sir..."

Of course, this week's actually been the best possible moment, since the Congress 9/11 faux-investigation is having its only public session. Even better, the power structure has been forced into damage control mode by the Clarke book that just happened to burst into the news at the same time.

Everyone's saying this book must have been timed to hit when it did. This current news background has more hooks than you'd see at the Retired Pirates' Convention. Ordinarily I'd agree, except that the major-publisher book business doesn't work this way.

I know because I'm peripherally involved in a book deal at another division of the same mega-conglomerate that published Clarke. I can testify from direct knowledge that changing the scheduling of a book more than a few weeks on the spur of the moment is about as easy as asking an earthquake if it can come back Tuesday at one. Both processes, one of nature and one of corporate man, are about equally geological in nature. Anyway, we have a pretty firm time line on this book because it had to be submitted last October for a security review.

With this opening statement out the way, let's start the questions:

 

Who REALLY didn't know airplanes could be used as weapons in a coordinated strike, and why has such a feeling become the dominant folklore on the attack?

I mean, seriously, folks. WHERE did this come from? [Update -- it came from Condoleeza Rice.] The Columbine kids had written about hijacking a plane and flying it into the World Trade Center. WW II Japanese flew whole waves of aircraft loaded with fuel and explosive into US warships. Movie heroes foiled plots like this every summer.

I'm wondering if a certain shock value isn't being exploited for political purposes here. [Update -- Given the above mentioned source, we probably just answered this question too.] Is this not a very subliminal and useful manipulation by those wishing to justify their standard-procedure evil by underhandedly comparing it favorably to someone else's more imaginative evil?

Does evil really deconstruct this way? When the bodies are counted, is there any real difference between "our" traditional homespun bad, and "their" scary new bad? When it comes to terrorizing populations and killing masses of the innocent to serve abstract political and religious notions, isn't it really all just plain old bad bad?

 

Why aren't ordinary people being given something positive and humane to do?

L.A. has a lot of disasters, and they teach you things. One thing you learn fast is that the way to keep from going absolutely bananas is to do something, anything, no matter how useless. It can be as simple as turning on a radio, or as heroic as helping get a tree off someone's car. It can even appear silly until one thinks about it later. I know someone who found good in a serious emergency situation by setting up a telescope to see the Orion nebula, in a city sky rendered country dark by a post-earthquake power failure. The neighbors got to see it too. Sure beat sitting around outside in the dark just being scared.

After 9/11, a nation had to do the grief process, and plenty of help and support were available to those who needed it. Where the culture broke down was in encouraging the shocked to get involved over the long pull. Oh, there were months of Red Cross fund drives and such, and my understanding is that the money thus raised is finally doing some good. But this is short term stuff.

Where's the long term? Where are the well thought out and highly publicized programs that would enable the grass roots to get involved in meaningful work to secure the infrastructure around here, and to address "why they hate us" abroad? Where's the post-9/11 version of the WPA, or the Peace Corps, or some more politically palatable private-sector initiative, that would get large masses of real people working on real problems?

Lacking this kind of meaningful way to work off fear and anger while actually confronting the problems that cause them, are we not left with a forever damaged, uneasy, impotent, malleable, easily panicked, and even more easily controlled public? Did I just answer my own question?

 

Just what the f-ck happened to the Pentagon?

Asking 9/11 questions will probably become something of a cottage industry, and some of the best ones I've heard so far concern the attack on the Pentagon.

Like the Warren Report on the JFK assassination, the official story may obey the laws of physics, but it puts a considerable strain on the laws of reason.

The official account goes like this: the Pentagon was hit by a hijacked airliner, flown by a student pilot with a few hours in small planes, even fewer hours on the simulator, and not much else. This novice flyer executed a fast, tight, descending, very low, 270-degree turn in a large aircraft. Then he either struck or grazed the ground. Then, while fighting ground effect and the impending breakup of his airframe, he managed to straighten out, get everything perfect, and finally stick himself practically in the window of the US Navy special ops office.

Isn't that one hell of a flying job? What about the suggested missile? Where would such a missile have come from? Is any of this a satisfactory explanation of the Pentagon attack? Does the sun rise in the west?

Questions questions questions.

 

  

 

I have a book somewhere called The Black Jacobins. It describes Haiti's epic 13-year rebellion under Toussaint L'Ouverture, around the time of the French Revolution. It's one of the few even acceptable narratives of this country's revolutionary history. Haiti was the first modern nation to abolish slavery, in 1793, and the first to be led by an African, Jean-Jaques Dessalines, in 1804. It became a scrappy little republic, clinging to independence and giving European colonial powers fits. Sort of an early day western hemisphere Viet Nam, you might say.

For its penance, Haiti was made a pariah among nations, forced to pay reparations, and still denied loans and aid even today. It became the world's 5th poorest country, and where there is serious poverty there will be always be serious instability. From the start, Haiti was no exception.

The United States finally occupied Haiti in 1915, and did not leave it to its fate until 1934, when there were more pressing matters going on in Europe. This led to another long series of military rulers and US-approved dictators, assuring a steady stream of dead bodies to show in TIME Magazine.

They won't tell you any of this background on the open-ended docu-drama we call news, even as Dubbya makes his latest regime change, appropriately enough on Oscar Night^®. Yes, as the world watches the Glitterati riding up to the Kodak Theatre in their stretch SUVs, frightened Haitians watch their president ride out of the country to an uncertain fate in an unknown location.

Right now, there's a lot of the usual memory-hole job going on. Aristide, a good guy in 1994, when Clinton sent the Marines to RESTORE him, is now a bad guy. Boo, hiss. The Marines have been sent yet again, to GET RID of him. Yay. Kick ass, America.

While the Nooz minutely chronicles every real or trumped-up mistake Aristide has made since 2000, you'll never get a word about the real nature of his paramilitary (and now successful) opposition. It's been passed off as a spontaneous rising, which it is not, or a predictable consequence of bad government, which it is not either. In reality, of course, it's largely been encouraged by the usual CIA stooges, black-baggers, gun-runners, cargo-kickers, and PSYOPS types. Oh, right, that's just business as usual. Nothing newsworthy there.

Neither are Americans allowed to see how profoundly racist all of this is. It's also classist, exploitative, neo-colonial, shortsighted, counterproductive, sordid, inhuman, and illegal, but given Haiti's abolitionist history, African Diaspora population, and brutal exploitation, it's mostly just a good old-fashioned Mississippi necktie party. Only difference is that this particular lynching has lasted 200 years.

Some ask, "Why do they [the rest of the people in the world] hate us?"

I think we have another answer.

Breathe there anyone with soul so dead as to never have gotten silly with Google?

The easiest and best thing, of course, is to stream-of-consciousness your way in and just search for whatever pops into your silly little head. Sometimes this means trying to break the record for hits. For example, "online" gets you 429 million, nearly twice the count from "sex."

Other times, though, it just means getting weird.

I was doing the weird thing, and a vision that was planted in my brain still remained. It was of this grey corporate building downtown, directly above the beautiful 110 Freeway, that gets right in your face and says "WEDBUSH" on top.

And so, into Google went "wed Bush." Back came a paltry 1.2 million hits, and a helpful little link in case I'd made a typo and really wanted to search for the name on the building. It's an investment company, Wedbush Morgan Securities. Since it has what the business types like to call "signage rights" on such a prominent structure, it's presumably a fairly big one. Even so, it only gets you a paltry 17,000 hits. But knowing Google's well-conceived logic, it's probably the quality that counts.

On this particular Bush wedding day, the first hit was Davis, Neil Bush to wed; California coast saved. It's a humor piece by John Robert Boynton. It's a bit dated now. As everyone this side of Mars probably knows, a governor whose first name was Grey, and whose major sin was to get completely screwed over by Enron, was terminated by a killer robot from the future. California can now proudly boast that it's run by a movie star who campaigned in a Hummer.

None of the other Google hits were all that terrific, probably due to "Wed" also meaning "Wednesday." Search engines certainly make one aware of homonyms in a hurry, and they never allow any logic as fuzzy as, "Wed Bush, but not on the middle day of the work week."

Adding a "minus Wednesday" to the search had an indiscriminate and rather useless effect. Mostly it dropped the hit count to 800,000, and moved Bush to shoot for moon, and Mars - Wed Jan 21 22:20:43 2004 up to third.

This link is an even bigger dud than Dubbya's space "vision," and the PR types are getting so desperate to save THAT particular turkey that they've now resorted to Disney flicks. They're promising "infinity and beyond." No jive.

What you get here, though, is an html form for an Australian paper. It lets you e-mail the story to "a friend." No, you do not get to actually see the story. All you can do is send it to someone else. Huh? How do you know you didn't just send the Pakistani nuclear bomb plans to North Korea?

Pretty bogus.

This was all getting boring. It was time to go to the whip. That's right. I got another cup of coffee, and hit the magic "Images" button, guaranteed to weird you out or your money back.

I wasn't disappointed.

In an otherwise extremely mundane lot, brightly shone this completely incoherent gem:

No, I don't know what it is. My best guess is a boat race between a kayak and a '66 Lincoln. Nor do I know why it's so badly composed. In fact, I don't know very much of anything, really. If ambiguity is art, we have Picasso here.

Game over.

i don't have a frame grabber so i can't show you any of nasa's latest movie, where happy ray traced republicans are exploring the moon with a home entertainment center

Hey, guess what? NASA reads this blog!

They must, because Mars was on NASA TV this morning. Yes, they succumbed. Someone decided to air something relevant to what's happening right now with the exploration of another planet, rather than endless loops of George II's buddy promising soldiers on the moon. Oops, there I go again, of course I mean George II's buddy promising endless exploration of infinity and beyond.

Like exploring Dubbya's brain, but that's another blog.

Well, guess what? There was a Mars Rover on NASA TV this morning. Well, not exactly. There was a nerdy guy promoting a P.E.R. - PERSONAL Exploration Rover - this morning. It looked a bit like Sojourner, that first little one they sent a few years ago. It's kind of Yorkie terrier size, with six wheels where the paws would be, and a camera where the floppy ears would be. However, the pooch would be a lot smarter.

Little Sojourner got its modem from Radio Shack, and it worked like a champ. The PER, like Dubbya, seemed to have gotten its entire brain from Radio Shack, and it didn't work very well at all. At least it didn't in this clip. Mostly it looked frantically around like a spooked bunny rabbit and bumped into rocks, where it got stuck until rescued by bad video editing. (See below for what real bunny rabbits do on Mars.)

This guy seems to think it would make a great toy, or even a companion, for kids.

I think NASA's PR department has finally lost it.

Government Cover-Up #1

Did you know that NASA is conspiring to hide the discovery that Mars is just like the Earth?

No, I didn't either, but it's the latest of those cottage-industry conspiracies that make the Internet so entertaining.

Is this the Mars they won't let you see?

Actually, I thought the "official" conspiracy theory was that the government simulated the whole space program in one of those nondescript warehouses east of Culver City. You know the ones. The company names painted on the walls change monthly, but nothing else ever does. The same huge TV trucks run their generators 24/7/52, and the same heavy-set guys in Mole-Richardson shirts run to the donut table.

But that's not what's happening at all. No, the real poop is that NASA's pictures are from Mars, all right, but they're all deliberately being made the wrong colors. The pink sky we see is actually blue. The pukey orange ground is actually the color of rich, dark, river mud. One guy, tongue very far into cheek, even blew up a fuzzy Pancam image and found a bunny rabbit!

This image has been processed further here, to center the histograms and crispen everything up, and it sure looks like a bunny in the road to me. The fuzzy warm critter is looking around, preparatory to getting the hell out of that creepy crater with all those weird new machines suddenly in it. And rest assured that bunny rabbits can outrun Mars Exploration Rovers any time, name "Rover" notwithstanding. Here's one dog that really won't hunt.

Seriously, NASA has never claimed that their pictures are the exact colors you'd see with your eyes, even through a space suit. That's asking way too much of little monochrome CCD cameras with filter wheels. At 1024x1024 the resolution can be pretty good at full file quality, but the filters are more for geology than photography, and nobody's pretending they are getting a proper RGB image. Their red, especially, is a little orangy, and their blue lacks the kind of indigo-ethereal UV pickup we're all used to from Kodak film. Half the time they run the red with a different filter that gets mostly IR anyway.

Some of the colors are a bear to get right. I've done the same Photoshop experiments as everyone else. One just loads up the appropriate filters into the appropriate channels, and then gasps in horror at the result.

The main problem with Spirit's weird desert spot is that, indeed, things like blue wires have a nasty habit of turning pink. The main problem with Opportunity's crater is that, on first pass, the soil nearly always comes out bright blue.

Soil is not blue. Not on Mars, not on Planet Claire, not on Star Trek's first season, not anywhere, and that's all there is to it.

And so let's get back to looking at funny shapes for bunnies and horsies and duckies. What about THIS one, taken on February 5? Huh? Huh? That sure looks like a peace dove to me. No wonder the government isn't talking.

 

Government Cover-Up #2

Actually, we're gathered here today to expose a far worse cover-up than some icky poo colors.

The whole Mars program has gone covert. It's a black op.

It wasn't at first. Just as when Sojourner and Pathfinder did their little thing, NASA was again dutifully televising all the Mars press briefings from JPL. They were the best thing on TV then, when Matt Golombek's bunch let us share their gosh-wow wonder at landing on another planet. They were the best thing on TV now, with that surfy new guy and all his cool friends happily explaining what goes on inside flash ROMs and extraterrestrial rocks.

But they're gone. Your satellite dish is useless. None of your toys will work. It's a real pain in the cottontail, and here's why.

Started out when George II put one of his family's cronies in charge of NASA to militarize it, oops that's a slip, I meant streamline it, honest I did, please don't come for me. His name's Sean O'Keefe. He just happened to be George I's Secretary of the Navy, and he did about a million of those nice lucrative national security think tank gigs.

You know the kind of jobs I'm talking about. It's when you go to the right white-boy university, and join the right secret fraternity, and join the right national-security cabal, and in 15 years or so you're finally so dangerous that the overprivileged white Bonesmen who really run it have to let you come up onto their level. You get to spend the rest of your life being a director of this or a poobah of that, happily putting together teams that churn out papers on globally globalizing US global globality.

After the first Martian landing drew good poll numbers, someone told George II that he ought to apply his ever-popular, single-minded, don't-bother-me-there's-a-war-on, groove thang to space. After all, hadn't Cheney and Rumsfeld been going full speed ahead to militarize it anyway? And so it came to pass that George II gave a speech about some vision he'd had, or that Karl Rove had had, or that some other neocon speech writer had had, about how if we were sending robots to Mars, we could certainly learn how to send Republicans to Mars.

Now, this dumbass plan bombed in the polls, and neither is it doing all that well in Congress. It starts to get the feeling of another election year warm fuzzy. Vote for me and there'll be soldiers on the moon, oops, slipped again, sorry, I meant explorers. Then, a few decades and a few trillion dollars later, we'll really show those terrorists who they messed with. Yup, there will be nothing less than an American flag, waving proudly, if rather slowly, in that thin Martian atmosphere, right there beneath those skies of blue, or pink, or whatever they turn out to be.

SUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUURE there will.

But, for now, in the pre-election 2004, the push is on. New marching orders for all. Fall in, soldier, ten-HUT!!!!! It's NASA's version of pre-Iraq.

Mr. O'Keefe's ugly mug has been half of NASA TV ever since. We see him addressing halls full of worried-looking employees. We see him addressing Senate committees. We see him everywhere, never far from his own American flag, telling us about the 20/20 vision of his Astronaut-In-Chief.

And Mars has set. You'll see it in the sky at night, right next to Venus where it's supposed to be, but you won't see it on NASA TV. They've gone to an endless loop: all guts and glory, all the time. Just add the martial music, and we'll have exactly what happens to state TV in small military dictatorships when there's a coup in progress.

But then, perhaps, there is.

I just got back from Forest Lawn, the famous old Hollywood-eclectic "memorial park" which nightly floats a 12-foot flaming Cross above the hills of Glendale. Along with about 800 other people overflowing a loose copy of Rudyard Kipling's old British country church, I said goodbye to a friend.

At least I think he was a friend. We hadn't talked in something like a year. Either our interests had diverged, or he was just too bogged down in that legal boot camp phase, where the firm gives the new guy all the research and he barely goes home at all. I dare not mention which firm. They're that big. A few clients are of that corporate class which divides up the planet at island retreats, telling George Bush who to bomb first. Safer to rat on the Mafia.

I'd kind of forgotten about my friend until last week, when he downed a whole bottle of (no doubt old single-malt) Scotch, smoked a whole joint of (no doubt fine Maui Wowee) pot, slit both wrists, and, when that was too slow, finally finished the job with a gun. Gone, for good, at age 44, leaving a loving wife, a confused dog, a bloody mess all over the house, a closed coffin, and a lot of people wondering why the hell he did it.

For a week, phone wires buzzed with the usual post-suicide tragic-hero recitation. He had friends. He was loved. He had a Good Income. He had the American Dream. He had the occasional pro-bono law case to further social justice. He even had truly remarkable hair (this IS Los Angeles). So what was the problem?

We'll never know. He did leave a note, and bleed all over it, but it was one of those you-figure-it-out things.

Whoever really knows anyway?

I don't have an "A" theory, and probably never will. My "B" theory is that the contradictions finally got him. He'd grown up in one of those semi-tribal Midwestern church groups, the son of a preacher man and being groomed for same. It was the real, Bible-beating, bedrock stuff, where God Almighty still thunders and smites, all the time sporting a white beard and the beginning of male pattern baldness.

But he wasn't the type to accept anything as Ultimate Truth just because some guy with a lousy sound system on Sunday said it was. As a young man, he'd questioned, doubted, gone autodidactic, and quite literally read just about every great recorded thought of the human race, much of it in the original Greek and Hebrew. This incredible quest, almost monastic in itself, only left everything that much more irreconcilable. Dad drummed him out of the True Faith, with maximum ceremony and drama, though I think they had a partial reconciliation later.

He spent years attending grad schools, working in restaurants, and adopting something of a James Dean rebel existence. He finally got a good teaching gig, philosophy of course. Unfortunately, it was in the Midwest, while his equally intelligent wife had gotten an even better gig teaching English in Los Angeles. Finally he came west, and decided to try and apply linguistic analysis and a trained philosophical mind to the craft of law.

Now, I know learned jurists are as rare as learned anything else these days, but if anyone could ever have pulled this off, he'd have been the one. He'd have wound up on the US Supreme Court, writing learned opinions about deconstructive analysis of the spirit of the Constitution and the Founders, and maybe helping to cut through even a tiny amount of the boilerplated BS that passes for law most of the time. Then he'd have turned on the other justices to what good kitchen cutlery can do.

But he wound up in training for the L.A. Establishment, that self-satisfied class of provincial robber barons and the women who marry them, that auto-replicating Anglo-Saxon old-boy club that first talked Ronald Reagan into trying his hand at politics. Now, there are rumors that the Establishment didn't prize my friend's turn of mind as much as the rest of us did. There's an unverifiable feeling that the contradictions finally became way tougher than a missionary father in a one-church town had ever been. Then, out of nowhere, act three and curtain.

And so there we were, hundreds of us, mostly prosperous white people in well-made black suits, deep inside the Ashcroftian purgatory famous locally for its Last Supper Window, its Freedom Mausoleum, and its Declaration Of Independence Signing Mosaic (3X the size of the original, says the guide). We spent several hours mostly listening to people eulogize a rebel with a brain, a guy who prized bulldogs and old American cars as much as opera and epic poems, by tepidly reciting Shakespeare.

His widow, however, got to one of life's rare moments where the truth comes out all by itself. Surrounded by walls of 1 Corinthians and bad war poetry, she said, sobbing, that he'd hated blind acceptance of Evangelical historical baggage. She said that he didn't believe in very much of the faux-spiritual semiology surrounding us, and that she really didn't either. At that point I realized I wasn't the only one getting a nagging idea that, at the end, when it was all said and done forever, his parents were the winners. They were the ones who had finally gotten in the last Word.

And that's one more reason why you never, EVER, kill yourself. Don't destroy the space that is you. Never let a bunch of hypocrites invade it in your absence, lie, and occupy it for the oil. You're worth more than that, and so is the future.

His wife has specified that donations can be made to Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, Washington, DC, www.au.org.

So there.