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Browsing in Borders down in Orange, I checked out the humor section, which, as it usually is in the major chains, is split between the comics section and the written-word section. The former is where you find "Get Fuzzy" and "Fox Trot" books; the latter is where you'll find Dave Barry, P.J. O'Rourke, and those "Weird News" compendia. But lately, that area's been overrun by another kind of book: the Bush-is-Stupid book. Whereas the category used to be isolated to Al Franken and Michael Moore books, now there's a rash of 'em, "Global Village Idiot," by a British newspaper columnist, is one, and there are a lot more. The gist of all of them is simple- we disagree with the President, ergo he is an "idiot," "moron," "stupid." The discourse has sunk to that level- playground name calling. "Flip-flopper!" "Oh, yeah? Idiot! Coward! Hitler!"

You know what? Someone who can make his way to the Presidency isn't stupid, CAN'T be stupid. Machiavellian, venal, brilliant, crafty, sly, evil, saintly, sure, one can make it being any of those. Stupid? "Idiot"? Nope.

But that's not even the main thing that bothers me about this. No, it's that there's so much REAL stupidity out there, I think we've lost sight of what stupidity means. Try this: I was on the bench under the bar on the Smith machine at the gym (see how quickly I went from totally ignorant neophyte weightlifter to knowing what the machines are called? Call me Arnold) and a couple of the more serious guys were conversing behind me. And I couldn't help but overhear this part, which came after a discussion of the difficulty of parking and exiting various concert venues in the Los Angeles area:

"Hey, you know who I'm gonna go see? Ozomatli."

"Ozomatli..."

"Yeah."

"Um... is that without Vince and Tommy Lee?"

(long pause) "Um, Ozomatli."

"Yeah, is that with all the original members?"

(longer pause) "Uh..."

"Oh. Not the Crue."

"No."

Meanwhile, I'm trying hard not to drop the weights and burst into uncontrollable laughter.

And I was still contemplating that the next day, when we were in that Borders and I was taking note of the "Bush is stupid" books, and then when we went to dinner in the same mall, at the seafood place, where Fran decided she wanted the crab-stuffed salmon but asked for it without the mashed potatoes.

"Oh, well, that might be difficult," the waiter said, his voice dropping to a lower register as he crouched beside our table. "You know, our chef... he doesn't like to make substitutions."

Your what?

"The chef, he gets a little, you know, he doesn't... I'll see what I can do."

Your "chef" is temperamental?

It's a CHAIN RESTAURANT, damn it! In ORANGE COUNTY! At the MALL! It's not Sushi Nozawa where the guy behind the counter makes what he damn well pleases and makes you eat it and pay however many hundreds of dollars he wants you to fork over for the privilege of saying you were abused by the famous master sushi chef. Not that this isn't stupid, too, but it's like the guys in the kitchen at TGI Fridays getting agitated because you asked for extra tomatoes on your Angus Burger.

She got the fish without potatoes, by the way. Turns out that it's not that big a deal, especially since the menu touts the availability of "protein-style" preparations. But the waiter's stupid. The chef's stupid.

Everyone's stupid.

Well, OK, not everyone's stupid. You're not. (cough) But stupidity is rampant in society right now; perhaps the one guy who can say his achievements prove he's not stupid is the one everyone calls the "village idiot."

Unless... unless the fact that he got elected is because everyone else is a moron, and... and...

...aah, my brain hurts.

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Here's what I want: you buy something, you install it, it works, the end.

Here's how it goes: you pick up the software package, you read the system requirements and all the other details, you see that your system complies. You buy it, you bring it home, you install it. It doesn't work. Then you try it again. It doesn't work. Then you go Google it and discover that the software has "issues" that the manufacturer isn't publicaly disclosing, and that the company won't say whether they're trying to fix the problem or not. And you see that they make suggestions- uninstall Service Pack 2, make this registry change, run that command line entry. You do all that. It still won't work. You do more research and see that the company has no answers, and seemingly no plans to answer- and they have limited, you-pay-for-the-call customer service.

Five hours of my long weekend, wasted.

I haven't given up, and I'm lucky I bought the thing at Costco, which WILL take back opened software for a refund, but, right now, do NOT mention Roxio Easy Media Creator 7 to me. (And I hear Nero has similar issues- is there ANY CD burning package that will do PAL-to-NTSC conversions and doesn't have fatal installation issues with Service Pack 2?)

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Live, local, late-breaking news:

The replacement Treo showed up late today. It's lovely, I tell ya. Sync went fine, activation was quick, I'm back up and running, cleared off the old one and it'll go back via UPS tomorrow.

I'd better not break THIS one.

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You can't really see the details in this picture, but that car to the left ahead of me on the 110 just before the Dodger Stadium exit has a bumper sticker on the left side.

Nothing says "I am, unquestionably, the biggest loser of all the people you may encounter today" than a Ford Focus with a "Dennis Kucinich for President" bumper sticker.

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Picked up some more cheap old TV Guides on eBay, and when they arrived today, I opened up one from March 1962 and immediately saw this:

That's Benny "Kid" Paret, welterweight champ, on the left. He fought Emile Griffith at the Garden on March 24, 1962, live on ABC. It was the third bout between the two- Griffith won the title away from Paret, then Paret won a controversial decision to get the belt back. This was going to be the deciding match. In the sixth, Paret almost put Griffith away for good, but the bell saved Griffith. Then, in the 12th, Griffith had Paret on the ropes, and Paret seemed to be hurt, but the ref (Ruby Goldstein) let Griffith go on a little longer, because Paret was known to fake injury at times.

This time, he wasn't faking. He fell into a coma while tangled in the ropes, getting pummeled by Griffith.

Ten days later, he was dead.

I was too young to see the fight, but a few years later, when I really started to follow sports, I remember this fight being brought up again and again- Griffith was still fighting, later winning the middleweight crown, and they would always bring up the Paret fight. Norman Mailer wrote a well-regarded article about it, and it became one of those cultural touchstones for a while, trotted out by those who thought boxing had to go, too barbaric. But it was a footnote. When Ali showed up and, especially, when he upset Liston, Benny Paret, while not exactly forgotten, took a back burner. He only mattered to the people who didn't approve of boxing in the first place, and to Griffith, whose career became defined by the phrase "he killed a guy in the ring." Today, you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who remembers, or cares- so few people even care about boxing at all.

Yeah, a guy was killed live on national TV in front of millions of viewers. And nobody remembers. Just thought it was interesting.

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Coulda written something about the Killian memo/alleged forgery, but football's back.

Coulda written about Ivan, or al Zawahiri, but football's back.

There are many more important matters, but on a hot, breezeless night, I couldn't motivate myself off the couch to deal with them, and therefore paid rapt attention as Willie McGinest blasted around the left side and steamrolled Manning to back the Colts up, leading to Vanderjagt's miss and the start of another NFL season.

Feels good, and it'll feel good until the realization kicks in that the Eagles aren't gonna win the Super Bowl this year, or perhaps any other year in my lifetime. (Actually, they won the NFL championship, pre-Super Bowl, on December 26, 1960, when I was less than six months old. My luck, they peaked when I was too young to comprehend it) But football's back.

Now, what was that about a memo and IBM Selectrics? Aah, it's too late. Talk to me tomorrow.

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Part 2 of the Roxio Easy Media Creator 7 saga: I finally got a reply from their support staff suggesting I create a new Windows login with admin powers, then try the program that way. And it works- sloooooowly, but it works.

But I didn't WANT a new login. I want it to work on the one I had, with all my settings and icons and bookmarks and set up the way I want it set up. Is that too much to ask?

Well, I asked. Let's see how long THIS answer takes.

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This morning, Chris Rock was on Howard Stern's show. Rock, apropos of Howard's usual Bush-bashing, piped up with something like this:

"bin Laden killed, what, 3,000 people and he's Satan. Bush killed 1,000 and he's a hero. What am I missing?"

He's missing the same as a liberal friend of mine who e-mailed me today, asking for me to explain the difference between the Muslim call for murdering children (as in Beslan) and "collateral damage" killing kids in Iraq.

Do I have to explain this? Do I really? Because if I do, we're in worse shape than I thought.

If people- intelligent, reasonable people- cannot understand the difference between intentional, targeted murder of innocents and death as a byproduct of war, if these people aren't familiar with the fact that death has always been subject to differing characterization- murder, degrees of murder, manslaughter, self-defense, accident...

Greater minds than mine have explained the evils of drawing moral equivalence as a way of either excusing true evil or painting someone as evil who may not be. I'm just so tired of this. And if Chris Rock thinks sending planes into buildings to kill innocent people is the same as soldiers dying in a war, or someone else thinks there's no difference between accidental civilian casualties in a war and terrorists taking a school full of children hostage and killing hundreds of them in cold blood, there's nothing more to say. Some people are so dead set on their political objectives, there's no point in discussing anything with them anymore.

So I won't. Sorry.

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This is what CBS News is saying in defending its story on Bush's Guard service:

"This report was not based solely on recovered documents, but rather on a preponderance of evidence, including documents that were provided by unimpeachable sources, interviews with former Texas National Guard officials and individuals who worked closely back in the early 1970s with Colonel Jerry Killian and were well acquainted with his procedures, his character and his thinking."

Here's the problem: the only documents they've produced, the ones they clearly used as the linchpin of the story, were quite likely faked. Remove them and what do you have? Interviews with unnamed people. He said, she said. And, as we've learned since, Killian's son and wife were contacted, but when they didn't corroborate CBS' spin, they were ignored.

Worse, CBS goes on to focus on a minor point- the existence of superscript for the "th" on typewriters "as early as" 1968, and the "th" superscript on some Bush-related military memos- without addressing the facts that a) Killian is known not to have written many, if any, memos, period, b) he didn't use a typewriter, and c) the likelihood that the Texas Air National Guard had that kind of typewriter is ultra-remote. (And the "th"s in the Bush docs are different from the one in the Killian memo) Plus, they ignore the font issues (sure, Times New Roman existed, but who had a typewriter using it in the early 70's?), use one handwriting expert to "prove" a signature match when most outside experts say there's a problem there, and with all of this, they're not even going to bother to investigate the situation. (More evidence that CBS is blowing smoke is building- check Hugh Hewitt for a good explanation by a professor of computer science of kerning and how it contradicts the CBS typewriter claims, and Charles Johnson teaches Atrios a lesson about the difference between IBM Selectrics and modern MS Word computers in line spacing and auto-centering. The spin ain't working)

Contrast CBS' defensiveness regarding the memos with the caption to an AP picture they're running with the same story:

"A decorated Vietnam combat veteran, John Kerry recently has faced questions over his record as a Navy officer and an anti-war protester."

Under Bush's picture, it says:

"A respected pilot and Air National Guard veteran, President Bush recently has faced questions over his record of service."

Just kidding. It doesn't say anything. It doesn't have to. The article covers everything.

All of this comes down to something very simple: they got caught. They got caught running with a story based on hearsay and faked documents, caught running with the story before they checked it out, caught running with a story because, deep down, they WANT it to be true. And now that it appears more likely that it ISN'T true, they're scrambling to the bow of the ship as the rest of the boat goes under, water lapping at their ankles, then their knees...

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The sign on the Starbucks kiosk inside the Redondo Beach Albertsons says this:

Starbucks Hours
6 AM-7 PM

At 6:30 this evening, this is what the grinning barista behind the counter said:

"We're closed."

What? But the sign says...

"Oh, well, we leave at 7."

It's 6:30.

"We leave at 7."

But...

Ah, forget it.

That's the Starbucks inside Albertson's in Redondo Beach. Add it to the list.

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