Posted 8:38 AM by Floyd

Colby Cosh smacks New York Governor Pataki around for his "pardon" of Lenny Bruce:

I feel all the more like I must have dreamed that news story. What on earth was the point of "pardoning" a man whose entire creative corpus has been effectively proscribed? If someone tried to do one of Lenny's routines on a New York stage tonight, that asshole Pataki would be at the front of the torch-bearing mob chasing the unwise fellow headlong through the streets.

The posthumous "pardon" is a modern inanity. A person from a more humble age might contemplate our present-day freedom of speech, and feel quietly grateful. The contemporary man comes to the realization that advancements today mean superiority over denizens of the past, that said past individuals are not around to defend themselves, and finally that time spent apologizing for wrongs done by dead person A to dead person B is time that need not be spent apologizing for recent wrongs done to living persons.

Furthermore a posthumous apology can backfire. The Vatican recently made a ridiculous "apology" to Galileo for persecution of his heliocentric theory back in the 17th century. Did this make the world respect the Vatican's tolerance and humility? Of course not; it merely caused some nasty chuckles about how the pope really was infallible, but you had to wait 370 years for the right answer. Then followed by a rush to find other individuals still under a Catholic blacklist. The speculation can easily be imagined: "Maybe in the year 2330, Catholics will be allowed to use the birth control pill!"

Posted 9:36 PM by Floyd

So the anti-affirmative action college bake sales -- where the organizers charge minorities less for cookies than what whites pay -- has appeared on the radar of Yahoo news:

Campus bake sales by conservatives who oppose affirmative-action are cooking up discord — and complaints about restrictions on free speech.

Organizers charge white students $1 for a cookie, while blacks and other minorities pay 25 to 95 cents. Doughnuts are available for 50 cents to everyone except Asian Americans and whites, who cannot purchase them.

Unfair? So is affirmative action, organizers contend.

"It's a good example of what affirmative action does, judging people based on race," said Jason Chambers, president of the University of Washington College Republicans, which held a sale in October that shut down when some students began attacking the booth.

"People were upset. People did feel offended," said Anthony Rose, president of the UW Black Student Union. "You see something like that, you feel itemized."

I feel itemized. I feel deducted. I feel Schedule 34 C'd!

(Note to people who know me personally: I promise not to use the phrase "I feel itemized" more than, say, one thousand times.)

In September, Southern Methodist University shut down a similar event by the Young Conservatives of Texas.

SMU is politically correct? I had no idea. My idea of SMU, formed in my youth, was that just as Prussia was an army with a state attached to it, so Southern Methodist was a football team with a university attached to it.

...

The UW College Republicans' Oct. 8 bake sale took place about the same time as a step performance by a traditionally black fraternity and drew plenty of attention.

Chambers said students engaged in a couple hours of good, heated discussion, until some began yelling and tearing down signs, even throwing cookies at members of the conservative group.

"I really thought that everyone on campus could maintain their composure and have a civil discussion without getting violent. I was really surprised that it went that far," Chambers said.

Don't throw Chambers into that briar patch! Honest to God, if you're going to make a fool of yourself by rejecting the ideals of higher education, shouldn't you do something less ridiculous than throwing cookies at your ideological opponents?

We have come a remarkable distance in the story without meeting a hypocritical, flatulent university administrator. That is about to change:

In a letter responding to the melee, Board of Regents President Jerry Grinstein expressed disappointment with the sale.

"The statements of the UW College Republicans in putting on a bake sale about affirmative action were tasteless, divisive and hurtful to many members of the university community," he wrote.

Translation: I don't have a leg to stand on, but I have to criticize the Republicans somehow or every minority student group will have my ass. So I'll pretend that the bake sale was one of the tragedies of the modern era, ranking just below the firebombing of Tokyo and just above the sack of Smyrna.

Back to SMU for several more paragraphs in which the words "football," "NCAA", "violations" and "probation" do not appear. Are there two Southern Methodist Universities?

In the incident at Southern Methodist University, organizers described the event as a bake sale — not an anti-affirmative-action protest — in their application for event space, said Jim Caswell, vice president for student affairs.

Had the university known it was a demonstration, a more appropriate location would have been chosen, Caswell said. A staff member thought the friction was likely to escalate, and stopped the event, he said.

"I think it's important to note that freedom of expression was not the issue, it was the hostile environment created by the Young Conservatives' failure to fully disclose their intentions," Caswell said.

Wasn't the hostile environment created by people who weren't able to respect opinions different from theirs? By people who couldn't keep their hands to themselves? Apparently at SMU, "sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me" is a graduate-level class.

(Link via Drudge's wacked-out red page.)

Posted 3:42 PM by Floyd

The World Bridge Federation holds a world championship every year. There are three different world championship tournaments, which are scheduled in a four-year cycle. On odd years the Bermuda Bowl is held. This is a tournament contested by a small number of teams representing various Zones of the Federation.

The Bridge World, America's premiere bridge magazine, complains that the Bermuda Bowl invites too many teams. Many hands must be played to select a winner, and as a result the players become exhausted and the play late in the tournament is not of championship quality. The Bridge World points out that the even-year events, the Olympiad (in years divisible by four) and the Rosenblum (in other even years) are open to all countries. The Bermuda Bowl should select a handful of teams, with more elimination occuring in the zonal trials.

Today I was reading a report on the 2003 Bermuda Bowl, and you couldn't ask for better support of the Bridge World's arguments. 22 teams were invited, including two from the US, and the initial phase, to select an eight-team field, consisted of a full round robin against every other team. Each match consisted of 16 hands, so the teams played 336 hands before the quarterfinals even started!

The final pitted the American powerhouse of Nickell against Italy's best team. The Americans won by one imp, gaining 22 imps on the last two hands. The last hand was a heartbreaker for the Italians: Lorenzo Lauria, playing both hands because his partner had left the table, pulled the wrong card from the dummy and went down two instead of one for a 12-imp loss. This was a mistake heard round the world, but this final hand had been subjected to no fewer than four errors at the two tables. (And I'm not talking about subtle, "no world class player should play the seven of spades when the nine is correct" type of mistakes. These were howlers. If any of my regular partners pulled one of these boners, I would have to bite down hard on my tongue to keep from saying anything.) Lauria's error was actually the least expensive mistake, costing only one imp, and his error was prompted by Soloway's own blunder. (Lauria assumed that Soloway would cash his good ten of hearts. Soloway actually exited a spade; dummy had a high spade and Lauria could have pitched his heart loser on it, but Lauria had dummy's low spade ready for Soloway's ten of hearts, and touched the card before he realized Soloway's mistake.)

Lauria, Soloway, and the rest are fantastic players. It's good for bridge when players of this caliber square off against each other, but it is not good when they are forced to play some 700 hands until their brains are fried. The WBF should limit the number of entrants in future Bermuda Bowls.

Posted 12:11 AM by Floyd

The Exchange Rate is One Hit per Puce Imitation

Evan Kirchhoff told me that there is a version of SiteMeter blog code which tracks referrals. I added it to my blog and now I can't imagine how I got along without it. I now get to see the strange Google searches that bring users to my site:

http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=lang_en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=exchange+rates+for+iraq+currency+to+canadien&btnG=Goog

"Exchange rates," "iraq," and "currency" are on my blog because I quoted from the blog of an American soldier in Iraq. But "Canadien" is here only because I channelled Puce for one post, which required misspelling a lot of words.

What will happen when someone spells "Saxon" as "Saxan"? Oooooo-oooh ... take another hit!

Posted 11:24 AM by Floyd

Neighbors to avoid, from the Mercury News' "Mr. Roadshow" column:

I have had the same neighbor for four years and have questioned him several times on the fact that his vehicle continues to carry Utah license plates. He just laughs, and says it's cheaper. I've never been a snitch, but this just isn't fair. I have called police, but they brush me off. What can I do to turn him in?

G.M.

"G.M." is not a snitch, but he's "questioned" his neighbor "several times"? I'm surprised he didn't use the word "interrogated."

Posted 8:48 AM by Floyd

This Module Coded By John Hughes

I use Eudora as my email client. Eudora presents my incoming email in the usual table format; each message is displayed as a row, with the columns being fields like the sender, the subject, and the size of the message.

One column is labelled "Mood Status." It displays one, two or three red chili pepper icons depending on the amount of profanity used in the message. If a message contains the "f" word it is labelled with three peppers, while milder language such as "crap" results in one icon.

So when I received a Merry Christmas mass mailing from my wife's sweet little cousin Mimi, and it was labelled with one chili pepper, I raised an eyebrow. Mimi is not given to swearing, and how profane could a "Merry Christmas" email be? I didn't see anything in the message body, but I understood when I saw the recipient list. Mimi sent her message to all her Chinese friends as well as me, and two of the recipients were relatives of a character in Sixteen Candles:

...
"Cheng Louisa (E-mail)"
<loxxx@yyy.com>,
"Dong Yun Jiang (E-mail)"
<dexxx@yyy.com>,
"Dong, Qing (E-mail)"
<doxxx@yyy.com>,
"Fei Xiang (E-mail)" <xfxxx@yyy.com>,
...

Posted 7:13 PM by Floyd

InstaPundit.Com was uncharacteristically quiet today. The reason for this turned out to be a Glenn Reynolds road trip:

WENT TO BIRMINGHAM to pick up my grandmother, then drove her back to Knoxville. Kind of tired from the round-trip. Back later.

(Note that it takes Reynolds a whole nineteen minutes to rest up for his next post.)

I didn't have a good feel for the distance involved, so I did a quick Yahoo Maps query and found that the Knoxville-Birmingham distance is 257 miles one-way. Birmingham is pretty much dead southwest of Knoxville; interestingly enough, you can form a square using those two cities, Nashville as the northwest corner, and Atlanta as the southeast.

The symmetry is somewhat spoiled because there is no direct road from Atlanta to Knoxville. Interstate 40 links Nashville and Knoxville east and west, I-65 connects Knoxville and Birmingham from north to south, and I-20 can be used to travel between Birmingham and Atlanta. The diagonals are covered by I-24 and I-75 (Nashville and Atlanta) and I-59 and I-75 (Reynolds' route from Knoxville to Birmingham). But there is no north-south interstate from Knoxville to Atlanta; there is one road, labelled I-75, but it goes southwest halfway to Birmingham and then tacks back to the southeast.

Posted 11:17 AM by Floyd

One of USS Clueless blogger Steven Den Beste's consistent themes is that Americans are "Jacksonians," and Europeans are not:

I think that Europeans don't realize that Americans are a plain speaking people, not given to easy hypocrisy. And in particular, for the Jacksonian core the idea of honor is a strong one. Jacksonians do not abide trash-talk. Mead says:

Jacksonian honor must be acknowledged by the outside world. One is entitled to, and demands, the appropriate respect: recognition of rights and just claims, acknowledgment of one’s personal dignity. Many Americans will still fight, sometimes with weapons, when they feel they have not been treated with the proper respect. But even among the less violent, Americans stand on their dignity and rights.

Yesterday I was wandering around with Evan Kirchhoff in his San Francisco neighborhood of Pacific Heights.
How interesting it was to discover that the official residence of the French consul is on Jackson Street!

(Update: And how interesting it was to discover, by email from Evan, that the consulate is on Bush Street!)