Yesterday, Wisconsin state senator Russell Decker was arrested for drunken driving. Not too long ago, outgoing Wisconsin state representative Shirley Krug was cited for drunken driving. In an effort to track down a list of was arrested for drunken driving after the annual Monster Truck Nationals at the Dane County Coliseum when he nearly ran down a police officer who was directing traffic. Wiessinger was charged with a felony for this arrest because he had an unsecured two year-old child in the car with him. While he was out on bail for this charge, Wiessinger was pulled over for speeding. Not only was Wiessinger drunk, but this time was driving a stolen car.

Wiessinger spent four years in jail for his two arrests in early 1998. Seven months after his release in 2002, Wiessinger was ticketed for driving after the revocation of his driver's license. In 2003, he was arrested for his involvement in a hit and run accident. After another arrest for drunken driving on February 3, 2004, the Wisconsin State Journal called Wiessinger "a pathetic human being."

Wiessinger, however, didn't take that insult lying down. He shot back with his side of the story.

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Yesterday, I ran into my friend Rachel at the Weary Traveler. Rachel is a fourth and fifth grade teacher at Lowell Elementary and, when I joined her, she was reading Harriet the Spy. Lowell has a large number of minority students and students who come from poorer backgrounds, so Rachel was working on ways to help her students understand Harriet's life on the upper east side in the 1960s. I mentioned that one thing that I always wondered about when I was a kid was Harriet's favorite drink: the egg cream.

This morning, TMN pointed me toward a site that told me all about the egg cream.

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Starting tomorrow, I'm outta here for two weeks to work out of our Hong Kong office. Then Dr. No joins me, and we spend the two weeks after that touring Honkeytown and visiting Bangkok, where we've been promised to be introduced to some "ladyboys." Expect frequent updates.

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This article describes the festivities at Washburn University to celebrate its NCAA Division II Women's Basketball championship. A pep rally is planned as part of the celebration and, "[a]t the pep rally, 1,000 Ichadogs -- hotdogs Washburn Ichabod style -- and beverages will be handed out." How the hell do you make hotdogs "Washburn Ichabod style"?

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It's not everyday that you get invited to the Rare Fruit Conference 2005 by the Friends of Fruit and Spice Park. If I weren't already commited to being at a wedding that weekend, or if prairie turnips were a fruit, I'm sure I'd be there.

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You...yeah, you...
You like beer?
Well me too,
but put em' down
and jump around
the Pons are going to rock your body!

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Having no car and the subways inexplicably stopping short of LaGuardia, I often use Seventh Avenue Car Service to begin my journeys. The last fews times my driver has been Gus. Gus is a beefy white guy in his 40s who's been around the block -- he's told loved ones who have also ended up with his services about various times he's ended up in jail -- and likes to talk philosophy. Like this morning's bit of enlightenment:

"I can't believe in religion. I mean, how can you? Some people look up at the clouds in the sky and they see the Virgin Mary. I look up and I see a bunny gettin' it up the ass. What are you going to do?"

In that simple statement, he's summed up a lot of the ideas that separate people.

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Ohio's fear of gay marriage may mean that beating your live-in girlfriend in Cleveland is no longer domestic abuse.

via Mefi

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My family likes to do crossword puzzles. When my grandmother was in the ICU a couple of weeks ago, my sister and I picked up a couple of Sunday Tribs to do the crosswords. The waiting room was packed and everybody was talking. In spite of all the noise, though, I could still hear my mother and sister talking on the other side of the room about the answers to clues that I hadn't reached yet.

I kept growing more and more annoyed until I finally reached my breaking point and let out a piercing "SHHHHH!" Immediately the entire room fell silent and everybody looked at me. As my face grew red with embarassment, I was like, "um...sorry about that. I was just trying to get those two to stop talking about the answers to the crossword."

Everybody there had a loved one in the ICU, but they were able to take a break from the cares and laugh at my idiosyncracies.

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The NYT has an article about hydroparks in the Wisconsin Dells today. I love the Dells. After I moved to Wisconsin, I started going up to the Dells every Columbus Day weekend with my Aunt Peggy, her friend Joan, and Joan's granddaughter, Alex. We'd stay at the Great Wolf Lodge and play in the waterpark, then ride the Original Wisconsin Ducks, followed by go-karts on the Trojan Horse track at the Mt. Olympus Theme Park and ending with dinner at the Del-Bar.

It was fun, but, alas, Alex has grown up and she's now in Japan. At my grandmother's funeral, she asked me if I had any advice for her since I'd lived abroad in high school. I said, "yeah, don't let it fuck you up."

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When this Bruger King ad came on during a tournament game, I turned to the guy next to me and said, "boy, looks like Hootie's doing great things these days," but I really didn't think it was Hootie. You can imagine my surprise, then, when I picked up the newspaper today and found out that it is Hootie in the ad.

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...and now I want one of these.

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Bill Nye is coming out with a new science show. It will supposedly deal with adult themes like sex and addictions. Will the show be cool or will it be disturbing, like Bob Saget talking about sucking dick for coke?

via Fark

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I've always felt that somebody who was involved in the bland schmaltz of a show like AccessHollywood had to be a little weird. Now I have proof. Pat O'Brien, one of the co-hosts of AccessHollywood, has entered rehab for alcohol abuse just as alleged dirty voicemails from O'Brien have popped up on the Internet.

I feel so dirty.

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Harriet McBryde Johnson weighs in on the Terri Schiavo situation over at Slate. My introduction to Johnson was this article she wrote for the New York Times Magazine about a debate she had with Peter Singer.

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For Jean-Luc Godard's re-released Masculine Feminine. See it here, and watch for the trademark note at the end. A hug to the first person who can tell me who's singing.

I've watched exactly one Godard movie, but I'm a lot more passionate about the trailers to his stuff. The trailer for "Contempt" was amazing --I can't describe it, but if you've seen it you remember one thing: "The Greek statuary!" It's parodied here.

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My grandmother spent the last week of her life in a persistently vegetative state. That week was both emotionally and physically draining for my family. I couldn't imagine having that emotional and physical anguish drag on for fifteen years. That's why I'm happy for Michael Schiavo that a federal judge has decided not to require the re-insertion of Terri Schiavo's feeding tube. Not to mention that I find it galling that Congress would dare to involve itself in what is, at its heart, a family dispute.

When I saw my grandmother in the neurological intermediate and intensive care unit at OSF Saint Francis Medical Center, my first thought was about how fragile my grandmother looked. My second thought, upon looking around, was, "this has to be costing a fortune." Maybe it's just being a budget analsyt, but one of my first thoughts about the Schiavo case was, "how much is it costing to keep her 'alive'?"

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The Boston Globe today has an article about a website that lets people post suspected police informants. In the article, it says that "[t]he Globe is not naming the website because it is impossible to verify whether all the people listed there are informants, and because publicizing access to their identities could jeopardize their safety."

While the article may not have named the website, it does mention the name of the site's owner. One Google search is all it takes to turn up the website: Who's a rat? I hate it when newspapers don't share all of the information they have with the public, but it's especially galling when it's so easy to find out what the newspaper censored. It's lily-livered journalism.

The only way that the Globe could prevent people from finding the website would have been to not publish an article on it. Simply publishing a story on the existence of such a website lets one easily track it down. The Globe's ridiculous self-censorship accomplishes nothing.

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Our thoughts are with Brian: His father passed away Friday.

These are always good times to share fun stories about the people we knew, so I'd like to share Mr. Aikins' quiet and subtle blow against terrorism. Back during our sophomore year at KU Brian gave me one of his mugs for use with coffee and Captain 'n' cokes. The mug moved with me from Kansas to Dallas to New York, keeping my coffee warm and my desk personalized. I dropped it a few times, but the hardy little guy survived: Mr. Aikins' work was both striking and uncommonly durable.

But its swan song was Sept. 11. It disappeared when my office was damaged and no matter where I looked it refused to be found. More than a year later I mentioned the loss of the mug to Brian, who mentioned it to his father. Brian later told me Mr. Aikins was miffed and more that his gift to me all those years ago was destroyed by Osama bin Laden. A few weeks later, a box appeared with 11 more mugs, different from my trusty first mug but with the same distinctive pattern. I took the prettiest to work, where it sits next to my phone and near a window overlooking Lower Manattan and the Hudson River.

I'm sorry that I never thanked him in person.

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Answer: The Dirty Dozen Brass Band
Where to start? Put on the funk with a tuba bass line. Mix with Preservation Hall Jazz Band. Add a little country with Clifton Chenier (accordian) and Johnny Cash (steel guitar). Toss in a little rock and roll with, I swear, a little John Cale and even, heaven help me, some Weezer from El Scorcho vintage. Ease in a little avant-garde with John Zorn. Add gospel choir, a splash of the Godfather of Soul, and maybe even some Cab Calloway. Then march down the street to celebrate the life of a guy named "Tuba Fats".

I'm not much of a flag-waver, but American music rules and I've never heard such an awesome mix of it in one funky mess.

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This op-ed piece that recently ran in the New York Times got me to thinking. Rather eloquently, the writer explains that the idea of Intelligent Design comes from our ability to discern nature from design in the world around us. He says that many aspects of the structure of life, like the mechanisms inside a cell, resemble designed machinery. (Actually, he takes one unproved step farther and argues that when scientists compare biological phenomena to design that's a strong argument that they literally see the hand of design, even though they turn it aside in scientific denial. But let's cut the guy some slack for a moment.) Therefore, there's an argument to be made that an unseen intelligence has directed the manifestation of life here in its current form.

He says:

...in the absence of any convincing non-design explanation, we are justified in thinking that real intelligent design was involved in life.

To evaluate this claim, it's important to keep in mind that it is the profound appearance of design in life that everyone is laboring to explain, not the appearance of natural selection or the appearance of self-organization.

The strong appearance of design allows a disarmingly simple argument: if it looks, walks and quacks like a duck, then, absent compelling evidence to the contrary, we have warrant to conclude it's a duck. Design should not be overlooked simply because it's so obvious.

So that makes proponents of Intelligent Design something like N!xau and the other cute African bushmen in "The Gods Must Be Crazy." You might remember that the film's zany hijinks are set off by the appearance from the sky of a Coca-Cola bottle. Nobody in that peaceful community had ever before seen anything like it. Smooth, hard, shiny and clear. Its lines, of course, are like nothing they see in the natural world. Plus, it came from the sky. All that points to one disarmingly simple argument: The Coke bottle came from the gods.

I plan to point out this similarity next time I discussion Intelligent Design with a proponent. I can't wait! At last we'll have a common reference point.

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On the positive side, last night's performance should keep sports pretty much off the blog until November.

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The NCAA tournament has started.

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Some people have been agonizing over what to call this decade. Not me. I take my cue from FM radio and have started calling this decade "Today," as in, "The Lake 93.1 FM: the best music from the 70s, 80s, 90s, and Today."

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The WSJ has a front page story today on the origins of yelling Freebird at rock concerts:

It's possible "Freebird" began as a rallying cry for Skynyrd Nation and a sincere request from guitar lovers, was made famous by the live cut, taken up by ironic clubgoers, given new life by Mr. Matthews, and eventually lost all meaning and became something people holler when there's a band onstage.

I have had one moment of triumph yelling Freebird. It was a Friday night at O'Cayz Corral in the late 90s or early Today. A crappy no-name local band was playing their last show ever, before they hung up their axes for good (thank god!) and resigned themselves to the fact that they would never be rock stars. One of the bands in the lineup cancelled, so the soon-to-be-ex band decided to play two sets.

By the start of the second set, the crowd consisted of the bartender, three girlfriends of people in the band, myself and two other regulars. The girlfriends were sitting up front and swaying to the music while the rest of us were huddled at the end of the bar mocking the band. The band wasn't bad like the Podunk Willies; they were bland and uninteresting in the sort of way band that would put them on an Onion list of the least essential live bands ever.

Due to a limited catalog of original songs, the entire second set consisted of covers, and not good ones at that. After a particularly uninspired version of "Smells Like Teen Spirit," I yelled out "Freebird!" The band members looked each other, squinted at the back of the bar, and launched into "Freebird."

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Slate's review of salsas not only namechecks the 2002 Maryland-Kansas game, but it also mentions Milwaukee's Secret Stadium Sauce. It's a hellx bifecta!

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Trust the New York Times' Boldface Names to suss out the negative vibe at a manufactured, feel-good event. Think of Boldface Names as a post-modern gossip column, in which the behind-the-scenes celebrity machine and the readers of the column themselves are gently made fun of. This morning's column involves the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame inductions over the weekend. Amid all the preening and self-congratulations involving people like U2 and Percy Sledge, Boldface names found a real story: the O'Jays ain't gettin' paid.

You know the O'Jays for the song Love Train. But there's another song I've never heard called For the Love of Money, which also apparently the theme song to the Apprentice. Or so the story says -- who has time to watch "The Apprentice?" The O'Jays claim they aren't being paid for use of the song and filing suit against its label. But that didn't stop Gamble & Huff, the label guys, from attending the O'Jays Hall of Fame induction.

In cases like this, is it really stealing to illegally download the music, when a label is already stealing the profits from the musicians?

The O'Jays also weren't happy about being inducted by Justin Timberlake.

Want the O'Jays for your corporate function?

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RetroCrush.com is featuring a top 100 list of TV theme songs, a most excellent web endeavor. As with any arbitrary ranking system, there will be plenty there for people to argue about. Just glancing at the first page, I'm already unhappy that Underdog only rated #90. The bottom of the page has a links reference for sites where you can listen to audio files of this stuff.

(link courtesy of Fark.com)

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I so want Colorado to win the Big XII tournament.

Mind you, I want KU to win it all. Still I really like the underdog, I am a Buff, I dislike Oklahoma and Tech, and, as I write, CU is shocking everybody at Kemper outscoring OSU. I doubt that will last long, but I wanted to voice my dream while it still has a chance of being reality.

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I got my first one this morning. I can now play blues chord progressions in triplets without going up and down the keyboard. This is something like learning to dribble in place in basketball. Next, I'm gonna learn how to play the above song.

It's a bit humbling to be learning from the same book a seven-year-old might also be learning from. Still, I decided the other day that I don't want to be one of these people who stops learning as he grows older.

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"Under cross-examination from defense attorney Thomas Mesereau Jr., the brother [of the boy accusing Michael Jackson] also admitted Tuesday that he lied in a deposition given in a civil suit.

"In a dramatic exchange, Mesereau told the jury that the magazine that the brother testified Jackson showed them at the singer's Neverland Ranch was dated August 2003 -- months after the boys stopped going to the Jackson estate." -CNN.com

Regardless of the merits of the case, two things about this "dramatic exchange" entertain me:

a) Most porn magazines are published & distributed several months before the date on the cover.

b) At least one man in that courtroom is aware of this.

Edit: half-an-hour's research and a cup of coffee later...

"Shown the picture again on Tuesday, James confirmed that the photograph in evidence depicted what he saw: a young blond woman exposing her breasts on the cover of a magazine entitled "Barely Legal."

"Mesereau noted that the date on the magazine in the photo was August 2003, at least five months after James and his family stopped visiting Neverland Ranch." -CourtTV.com

Ok, that weakens my original theory & corresponding bit of mirth. Because the industry buys old photosets, it's still possible the boy saw and remembers a specific cover image which appeared on a similar magazine, but that's a long shot.

So, in the words of Emily Litella, "Oh. I'm sorry. Never mind."

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I usually run the pool in my office, but I've won it three years straight and that's kinda embarrassing. So I'm out of the running this year.

I promise not to do too well, at least initially...

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Our friends at the Milk Processor Education Program have announced the latest spokesperson in their award winning "got milk?" advertising campaign: the new U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, John R. Bolton.

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Norlos has been down with Korea since the Truce Village of Panmunjon. Lately, the discovery of a North Korean flash movie for tourists has occupied the denizens of BoingBoing.

Is Axl Rose the music industry's Kim Jong Il?

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The eighth president of the United States has his own weblog. At last! Here's my favorite entry.

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Timothy Noah of Slate delves into the nature of bullshit. He notes:

Although Frankfurt doesn't point this out, it immediately occurred to me upon closing his book that the word "bullshit" is both noun and verb, and that this duality distinguishes bullshit not only from the aforementioned Menckenesque antecedents, but also from its contemporary near-relative, horseshit. It is possible to bullshit somebody, but it is not possible to poppycock, or to twaddle, or to horseshit anyone. When we speak of bullshit, then, we speak, implicitly, of the action that brought the bullshit into being: Somebody bullshitted.

I prefer "bullshat" to "bullshitted."

Link courtesy The Morning News.

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There are all kinds of space holders out there. Libby Copeland looks at people who stand in line for a living.

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Watching the vastly entertaining Bernie Ebbers trial, I'm struggling to figure out what his defense is.

It's seems like a classical wadn't me defense, but it has aspects of the Chewbacca defense. And, as the New York Post noted, it has a healthy helping of Sgt. Schultz. You can't see it online, but the Post's illustration of Bernie with a German officer's helmet on was priceless.

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...are having a snowball fight near my office. Must be an indicator that crime is down.

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