The Arbitrary ChuckJerry

Let's recap:

1) 2,000 American soldiers are dead in Iraq, 99% of whom died after Dubya's speech on the aircraft carrier talking about "Mission Accomplished".

2) Harriet Miers withdrew her nomination from the Supreme Court. The consensus is not that she wasn't conservative enough, but rather she was incompetent and incapable of the position. Incompetent not in the sense that she's stupid, but rather in the sense that she's maybe the least smart person in the honors class.

3) I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby was indicted on perjury charges. That's a hell of a name there, Scoots. Let's point out that he wasn't indicted on actually outing a covert CIA agent, but rather just trying to cover up whatever it was he did or didn't do. Martha Stewart style.

An interesting point here on these issues. All of the discussion on Meet The Press this morning was about how presidents get arrogant in their second terms and have invariably gotten into some sort of hole they've had to dig out of. Most recently there's been Watergate, Iran-Contra, and that woman....Ms. Lewinsky.

One of the gies, I think David Brooks, made another point on Bush's brush with ridiculousness. All of these other presidents go into trouble because of corruption of either a political or moral nature. The information we have from the special prosecutor so far is that no crime was committed regarding outing Valerie Plame Wilson, but rather only the cover up. So far then, there's no evidence of corruption, and all of the trouble that Bush is in is therefore because of his incompetence. He's out of step with America, out of step with his base, and out of step with perhaps just reality in general.

Also something that doesn't quite make sense is the media's infatuation with pursuing this story. Perhaps this has just become clearer in retrospect, but there's no way this investigation could have taken place without a thorough challenge to the rights between reporters and their sources. From day one it was clear that Bobby Novak and any other folks with that same information, Judith Miller and Tim Russert as it turns out, were going to be questioned about their sources. At some point we have to step from behind the first amendment, especially if we're involved in crimes. Perhaps future sources will be more reticent to give up the goods if it may lead to things like this. Now obviously this was an extenuating circumstance, but I'm sure Scooter didn't know that at the time.

Anyhow, Bush has almost exactly a year to get himself in good standing again before these midterm elections. Reagan did it, Clinton did it, and it seems that people are willing to forgive provided that those ho made mistakes are willing to admit them. At the same time, Bush is in the position of having to apologize for his incompetence, rather than his moral turpitude. Maybe for Rove's or Cheney's turpitude at some point, but it doesn't seem like it right now.

Congrats, White Sox, for winning the world series. About a week before the regular season ended, I predicted that the White Sox would collapse before the end of the season and not even make the playoffs. Immediately after I wrote that post, the White Sox went on to win 17 of their last 18 games, and sweep the World Series.

I guess I was wrong. 2004, Red Sox were victorious. 2005, White Sox were the champs. Can a 2006 Chicago Cubs victory be out of the question? It's conceivable that the Cubs would be a force if Prior and Wood are healthy and Zambrano continues to deliver. Their offense is not as good as it has been in recent years, but maybe they can pick up some gies.

Civil rights pioneeer, Rosa Parks, died last night at the age of 92. There's no need to recount the bus story and the subsequent boycott, but it is worth mentioning that Rosa Parks, simply for what she represents, should be considered an American hero. In many ways, she was the inspiration for the civil rights movement and her arrest represented a turning point in American history. So rest in peace, Rosa. Stay black, y'all.

Ghettoest story of the week, month, maybe the year: Six people got stabbed at a birthday party for a 1 year old. Not only were they at a 1 year old's birthday party, but they were there at 12:45am. I hope they didn't have the damn kid up at 12:45am. This was in East Hartford, Connecticut, which we all know is way harder core than just regular Hartford.

I guess I didn't need to make this post, but I just really wanted to use that title for a blog post.

There's a New York Times editorial today about increasing the gas tax. First of all, this editorial doesn't say it explicitly, but I'm under the impression that oil prices in the US are kept artificially low somehow. I can't think of a mechanism between Saudi Arabia and the US that would keep prices artificially low, so I'm wondering how that's possible. Someone help me out here.

Secondly, the article says that, "A bolstered gas tax would raise huge amounts of revenue, roughly $1 billion for every penny of additional tax." If that's true, that seems like a no brainer. Especially since we're at a time where the prices are temporarily higher than normal. If the tax is implemented while the general cost is coming down, then it won't hurt consumers much or even at all. In a different article I read, someone suggested raising the tax one or two cents for every ten cent decrease in average cost per gallon. This editorial is suggesting keeping the prices at their current artificially high rate, which would probably be a mistake, in my opinion.

This gas tax thing goes right to the top of the list of taxes that absolutely need to be raised. The other one on the top of the list is the social security tax. The social security tax needn't be increased, per se, only extended to apply to salaries higher than like $90,000, which I believe is the current limit, but don't quote me. These two taxes really seem like things that will pay for themselves if and when they are enacted.

I'm not in favor of simply increasing taxes across the board, and probably some of them should be lowered or even eliminated, the estate tax for example, but let's put some thought into these two ideas that goes beyond the "I won't raise taxes" political jargon.

The starting pitchers for game 1 of the World Series are Roger Clemens and Jose Contreras. Both of these guys pitched for the Yankees as little as 2 seasons ago. Houston's starter for game 2 is Andy Pettitte, also a starting pitcher for the Yankees 2 years ago. The White Sox secret weapon out of the bullpen is Orlando 'El Duque' Hernandez, who won 8-10 games for the Yankees in half a season last year.

Let's call Clemens a wash because he actually retired and then unretired. They let Pettitte go through free agency, though they could have signed him if they pushed for it. They let El Duque go through free agency because they thought he was too old, despite the fact that he's the one who held them in the race towards the end of last season. They traded Contreras away because they just lost faith in him after over hyping him and building up huge expectations that he couldn't meet.

Well George, all eyes are on these guys now and I'm sure you're just broken up about it. Meanwhile thank Yanks are stuck with 100 year old Randy Johnson, the injured Carl Pavano and Jaret Wright, and let's not even mention the Kevin Brown debacle. I think Chacon and Wang will end up being great additions to the staff, and who knows what Aaron Small will bring to the table in the future, but these three guys were basically afterthoughts. If they had nailed down Pettitte and reinforced Contreras, they wouldn't be in this position now.

Well, the series in certainly gonna be interesting, anyway. It will be a(n) historic victory for whichever team pulls it out.

A web site somehow affiliated with Court TV, the smoking gun, takes pride in posting all the mug shots they can find of famous or infamous people. Usually the people look really messed up or at least upset at being booked and they have the sign held up that says they're in the so and so police department so you know it's a mug shot.

Tom DeLay's mug shot is none of these things. This looks like a fucking head shot that he would put on his web site so people would know how great he is. He's not even holding the sign up that says he's being booked. This is a sorry excuse for a mug shot.

He's got his suit and tie on and he's all happy to be there. This isn't a partisan issue. Mug shots just need to deliver a shot of someone at their most embarrassed, most drugged out, or most intense moment. This isn't any of that. The Houston police should be ashamed of themselves.

Reading the New York Times this morning. Scientists have developed a new way to harvest stem cells that doesn't kill the embryo. They somehow remove one of the cells after it has replicated itself a couple times and the part that's remaining is still a viable zygote.

So far they've only developed this in mice, but they say that mouse and human embryos are very similar at that early stage of development and a human version of this procedure could be viable in as little as a few months. In theory, this is a workaround of the killing embryos to harvest stem cells argument.

If they can make this a viable procedure, I think this will stand as a huge step forward for the curing people of sickness industry.

Here's a quote from Ron Artest:

"I'm going to continue playing hard and out of control, like a wild animal that needs to be caged in. I'll let the referees handle it."

I love Ron Artest. I still wish the Knicks had drafted him. When they asked him if he thought an incident similar to the one from last year could happen again, he said:

"I don't think anybody's going to throw anything at me, and I don't see me reacting how I reacted."

I know I certainly won't be throwing anything at Ron Ron.

This post was inspired by a discussion on Joe's Blog.

Some movies just aren't as good the first time around, in my opinion. You have to know the general plot before you can really appreciate the good things about it. Other movies are good the first time and are completely different the second time once you know the outcome. In the second category we'll put The Usual Suspects and The Sixth Sense type of movies. I'm not really concerned about those, because they're obviously different on second viewing. I mean movies that I didn't necessarily enjoy the first time, but have grown to appreciate.

Pulp Fiction - It is safe to say that I hated this movie the first time I saw it. I did not like it at all, and I knew exactly why I didn't like it immediately. I didn't know when it was going to end, and all I wanted was to know the resolution. The flip flopping in time makes it impossible to know when it will end and I spent the last 45 minutes of the movie just wishing it was the last scene. I wasn't concentrating on the story so much as the ending.

When people asked me about it I would say that I hated the movie, but that I loved this part and this part and this part and I realized that I probably liked it more than I thought. The second time around when I knew what was going to happen I got to calm down and appreciate the characters and writing.

The Big Lebowski - The issue with this one the first time around is that I felt like I didn't understand the deeper meaning. I thought it was funny, but I couldn't definitively say that I liked it. After I had seen it again I came to understand that there isn't really anything to get. There's not necessarily a deeper meaning, nor is there really a need for the plot to be cohesive. The movie is just about all the characters being weird. There are no two more disparate characters than The Dude and Walter and the fact that they are best friends is just funny.

Donnie Darko - This one I enjoyed the first time, but felt like it was just way over my head, to the point where I felt like I was enjoying it for the wrong reason since I thought I had misinterpreted it. Again, the plot contrivances are really kindof secondary here. I think with this movie especially you can disagree with that last statement and be in the right, but I feel like the movie operates outside of its own convolution. If you really try and put it together and if you look through the special features on the DVD and listen to the director commentary, all of which I did, then even then it still doesn't all fit together as well as you would like it to.

Incidentally, there is a Roger Ebert essay out there relating to Donnie Darko with an interesting Freudian interpretation that is worth reading if you liked the movie. If I can find it, then I'll link to it later.

Napoleon Dynamite - This weekend I say Evan, Max, MMG, and a whole bunch of other fools too. I mention those three by name because they all told me they were mad at me in particular for recommending Napoleon Dynamite. I'm not exaggerating when I say I've seen this movie 15 times. I loved it the first time, but can see why one might not. This movie is sortof the opposite of The Big Lebowski in that the plot seems like it should be secondary, but it's not. The plot actually holds together really well and is particularly nuanced. You could miss that and still enjoy it, but if you notice things like Napoleon wearing parachute pants after going to the Rex Kwon Do demonstration and him asking Pedro if he had his back, then you will appreciate it more I think.

But how could you not like that movie even after the line about having computer hacking skills, numchuck skills, and bowhunting skills?

American Beauty - This actually isn't true. I certainly appreciated this movie the first time I saw it, I just wanted to relay a story.

I had a fringe friend, or friend of a friend, who was known by us as Fun Bobby, because he was fun to hang out with. He was also known as 15 Watt Bobby because he was really dumb. Anyway, we were all sitting around talking about movies one day and he goes, "Hey, you know I really liked American Beauty." All of us agreed and we talked about how we all liked it a lot. Then fun Bobby goes "You know what, though? I saw it twice and it was totally different the second time. You know what I realized that you might not have noticed? That dude was gay. You know, Ricky's father. He was gay." That statement was followed by a blank-stare-a-thon from me and Dave and Chris and Luke.

You may remember the cruise I took over the summer. I booked the cruise on Expedia and part of the promotion was that I got six free months of the Netflix service, which I just started last week. My feeling is that unless you are willing to really cut into your free time to watch all of these movies as soon as you get them, then paying for the service is probably not prudent. I don't know if I'll be saying the same thing after these first six months, but I can't imagine paying $18 a month to go out of my own way to watch these movies. Also in six months, I'll probably have already seen all the movies I've always meant to see, so I won't have too much use for it. Anyway, this is all beside the point.

One movie that I have always meant to see is Annie Hall. I had never seen a Woody Allen movie before last night, and I figured that was a good place to start. It was pretty great. If all of his movies are the same, then I feel like his style might be grating after a while, but this one movie was very entertaining. Like I say, I had never seen a Woody Allen movie before, but even though I've only seen this one film, I can see that tons of movie makers have been influenced by him and many have simply stolen from him, somewhat unsuccessfully.

What came to my mind throughout watching this movie is that Kevin Smith wishes he was what Woody Allen is. Annie Hall is not about movie making so much as it is about espousing a philosophy of life. There's not much that goes into the cinematography or set dressing or anything like that, but rather the movie is really just about the exposition of the characters. There are at least 4 or 5 scenes that last for minutes at time that consist of one camera shot of two people having a conversation. There aren't any edits or tennis match type one shots, just pure conversation. These scenes aren't stagnant because, first and foremost, the conversations are entertaining and interesting, and secondly because usually the characters are walking somewhere or he brings people from the background into the conversation, so he keeps you guessing.

Kevin Smith has tried to recreate this style, it seems, with much less success. His films are also all about conversation. A lot of the pivotal scenes in his movies have a stationary camera and two or three people just talking for a few minutes. Smith is less successful in pulling this off for a few reasons, I feel. First is that Smith's scenes are just still. No movement, no action, just conversation. That's not necessarily bad, but if the conversation doesn't hold up, then the whole thing falls apart. The second thing is that Smith's characters don't talk like real people. The whole point of his movie is often just laid out in a monologue or an overly one-sided conversation. His characters speak with an eloquence that goes against what's been established for them, to the point that it's almost unreal.

That being said, I like Kevin Smith's movies. In particular I love Clerks and Chasing Amy, but both of those movies fall into the traps I mentioned. In Clerks, Dante and Randal just talk for the whole movie. There are basically two sets, with the majority of the action taking place in the convenience store. I'm not saying that people don't think deep thoughts, but the conversations in Clerks border on the inane, especially given that they are coming from two guys who work at a convenience store and a video store, respectively.

Chasing Amy hinges on one scene in which Silent Bob breaks his silence and tells the story of his relationship with a girl named Amy. Without that speech the movie loses a lot of its impact, but again, this is not a true life situation.

I guess what I mean to say is that Kevin Smith's movies are all a bit contrived. They are clearly written with the ending in mind and the rest just sortof filled in to take up the rest of the time. As I say, I do really like those two Kevin Smith movies, but his other movies all really leave something to be desired, and some of them, like Mallrats and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, just downright suck. Dogma seems to be split between Catholics and non-Catholics in terms of liking it, so maybe there's just some inside jokes I'm missing there. Didn't see Jersey Girl. My main feeling after watching his movies is that his screenplays in the hands of a good director would make for some phenomenal movies. As it turns out his great screenplays left to his mediocre directing makes for a real hit and miss proposition.

Back to the point. What's great about Annie Hall is that the conversations are real. Woody manages to keep the real life stuff true to actual human behavior and step out of the situation to give his philosophy without adversely affecting the flow of the story.

On another note, there was one part that was just directly lifted from Annie Hall and plopped down into Good Will Hunting. At one point, Woody Allen and Diane Keaton are on their first date and Woody says something like "OK, well just kiss me now and then let's go to dinner. That way we won't have to worry about it later and we can digest our food." Matt Damon and Minnie Driver have essentially the same conversation on their first date. The conversation in Good Will Hunting, as per imdb.com goes:

Skylar: You were hoping for a goodnight kiss.
Will: No, you know. I'll tell ya, I was hoping for a goodnight lay, but I'd settle for a good night kiss.
Skylar: How very noble of you.
Will: Thank you. But I was, you know, hoping for a good night kiss.
Skylar: Well, let's just get it over with. Come on, come on.

Anyway, that's all I have to say about that.

Max has been mentioning his memories from Sports and Arts in a recent post and I figured I'd share the things I remember most vividly from Sports and Arts as well.

As Max mentioned, you had to choose at least two arts to fill in your schedule. I always chose Industrial Arts, which was actually just wood shop. The reason was that you would get to use tools and crap, and also you would have something to take home with you at the end of the session. One time I had the great idea to make the Batman logo and paint it to take home and then realized that every other kid also had the same idea so we all ended up making like 15 Batman logos that year. Until very recently I had both a napkin holder and a birdhouse that I made in wood shop when I was like 12.

The most popular sport by far was floor hockey. For some reason they either didn't have basketball, or we all sucked at it at that point, or something. I feel like basketball should have been the most popular, but it wasn't. Anyway, I was a decent floor hockey player, but I wasn't nearly as good as some other gies, like Mike Gray or Matt Guiney, who I remember were particularly good. One year Mike Gray was only going to go for one week of the two week session because he was going either to a different camp or on vacation, so he was going to score as many goals as possible in the one week and he ended up with like 25, which averaged to 5 a day. In that same time I had like 6 or 7.

I also remember that I was far and away the best goalie at floor hockey, so they always tried to make me play there. The thing is that I didn't want to be the goalie because I wanted to run around. Incidentally, the same thing happened to me in college when I played indoor soccer one semester. I was the best goalie by a long shot, but I hated playing it because the only reason I took the class was to run around the gym for a while. They would only make my play goalie if the game was on the line. I'm not sure why I'm such a good goalie, as I've never played an organized sport where goalie was a position.

The most vivid memory I have of Sports and Arts also involved Matt Guiney, for some reason. Unrelated to this story, but point of interest: Matt Guiney is best known as being the only 9th grader in the history of Sports and Arts. You had to stop going in 8th grade, but Matt and Brian's mom somehow got the rules changed so that Matt could go for one more year. Anyway, one year a popular game to play was called Initial Baseball. The rules were that you would think of a baseball player and give his initials to your opponent. If your opponent knew the guy right away, then he would get a home run. If he didn't know it he would ask you which league he was in, National or American. If he got it at that point, then he got a triple, If he still didn't know it he would ask what position he played. If he answered then it was a double. Finally you would ask which team he was on, and then you'd get a single. If I was thinking of Derek Jeter, for example, I would say D.J. and if you didn't know it then I would say "American League", and then I would say "Shortstop", and then I would say "Yankees". If you didn't get it at all, then you got an out.

This is probably the most random memory in history, by the way. Matt Guiney was playing some kid in Initial Baseball and was winning by a huge margin. Then Matt gives the kid the initials "W.W." and says it in such a way where Matt knew this kid would never get the answer. It was almost like Neil Guiney telling a story in that slow, deliberate tone. Picture Matt going "Double U....Double U." Anyway, the kid thinks for like half a second and says, "Walt Weiss. Home run. Yeah." Matt was a little bit stunned that the kid got it, and the kid was all proud of himself, but the score was still like 10-2 or something.

Another Sports and Arts memory is of Nock Hockey. At lunch you could borrow a Nock Hockey board and play tournaments. They only had a limited number, though, so they had a lottery every day. At the beginning of the day, every kid who you were even remotely friends with would write their names down and if you knew a kid with a little sister who didn't play Nock Hockey, then you would put their name down too. If anyone who you knew won the lottery, then everyone got to play that day. The one caveat was that whoever won the lottery got to play the first game against someone else, I guess as a reward for winning. Sometimes two or three people would win the lottery and you'd get two or three boards at lunch time.

When we were 10 and thought we were smart asses we decided not just to put our names down on the lottery list, but random names of famous or infamous people. We would put like Ronald Reagan, or the Zodiac Killer, who was notorious at the time around NYC. We did that for a few days before the people in charge said that they were going to start an inquiry regarding the inappropriate names on the lottery list. I think we just stopped right away at that point.

The only other thing I remember well from Sports and Arts was that I would always try to cut my second arts class to go and play floor hockey with whoever was in the gym at the moment. I liked Industrial Arts so I never cut that, but I don't even remember the other types of arts I even registered for. I feel like they had a computer class where you got to play computer games. I know they had calligraphy, but I never took it. They had drama, and at the end of the session they would put on a play or something for the whole camp. They also had dance, which only girls took, and was taught by this woman who we called "Wendy the Musical Midget" because she was probably about 4'11".

Also I remember that one summer my dad worked at the camp, leading one of the sports classes, but I don't recall which one. All the counselors and everyone got called by their first name except for my dad and a couple of other people who were in charge. This was probably because most of the counselors were his former or present students at the high school. On a tangential note, a lot of my dad's students kept in touch with him long after they graduated high school and even when they would come by our house when they were in their 30s or 40s they all still called him Mr. G., almost without exception.

Anyway, that's all I can remember clearly about Sports and Arts. I really did enjoy it, though. I basically hung out with every single one of my friends and played floor hockey and basketball all day during the summer.

I use addiction in the loosest possible sense here. At various stages in my life I tend to get fixated on a certain drink that I have to have. For some reason I only get fixated on drinks and other foods or anything.

My freshman year in college I was addicted to Sprite. I drank more Sprite in that year than really should be legal.

My junior year I had an early class every day and I would get a hot chocolate to bring before those early classes. The thing is that to make the perfect hot chocolate you really need to use two of those pouches of powder, especially if you want a large size. They let you make them yourselves and so I did that for a while. Then one day towards the end of the semester the lady one day charged me for two hot chocolates since she said I used two packages every day and despite the flawless logic I laid before her dealing the the relative water to powder ratio in a small versus a large hot chocolate, she wouldn't budge. That meant I had to go to the other cafeteria to make my hot chocolate before going to class which was at least 45 seconds and a staircase out of my way. Dirty bitch.

In my senior year I was addicted to Snapple Iced Tea. I would buy one before every single class I went to. That's enormously unhealthy. Tons of sugar in Snapple iced tea, but in this case I really felt as if I had to have one every few hours. One day near graduation I had to just stop drinking them entirely for a while. It was easier after I graduated and had to pay real money for them instead of just campus credit. Snapple is way overpriced, in my opinion.

I've gone back to Sprite a couple times since I graduated college, but my new obession was last year when I bought an Arizona Iced Tea every day during lunch. Those things also have tons of sugar, but I really have a thing for iced tea. Also you get 23.5 ounces for $1.00. It's certainly not too expensive just unhealthy. I would take about half a day to drink a whole can of it, so in my afternoon classes my students would make fun of me for drinking it every day. A couple of them even bought me some for Christmas.

Just recently I've gone back to a hot chocolate obsession. I've been buying one from the Dunkin' Donuts every day after work recently. I've also been drinking too much voffee in the mornings over the last year or so. This past summer I decided to quit coffee since I didn't have to wake up early just to see if I felt any better. I didn't have any coffee from July through about half of August, so it worked out pretty well, but now I have it every morning again. Too much sugar in that, too. Especially the way I make it.

I guess my vices are better than being addicted to vodka or something. Also I can be honest when I say I can stop at any time.

I was reading an article in the New York Times Magazine about Eliot Spitzer and his upcoming run for governor of New York. In the same magazine was an article about how liberalism as we know it today was invented in New York. Anyway, I was thinking about both of these two articles, along with watching the Sunday political shows and I had a thought.

Democrats are essentially credited with inventing the middle class. I guess starting with FDR through Kennedy and the rise of the suburbs and what not. There's probably someone who can give better evidence than I can, but I'm not going to give you any at the moment, partly because I don't feel like going back to read the articles again. Anyhow, let's take that as a given unless you vehemently disagree.

My point is that Democrats were so successful at inventing this middle class that now their efforts are taken for granted. Those in the middle class are firmly entrenched in it and don't see themselves slipping out of it barring a move upward in class. It's also not a huge leap to take someone from the lower to the middle class nowadays given certain opportunities. The middle class is now therefore a starting point, rather than an end in itself. As this is such, middle class voters don't see the need to vote Democratic just so they can hold on to their middle class lifestyles.

The Democrats did such a good job at inventing their own voting base that they've, in essence, rendered themselves obsolete. Middle class voters are now more comfortable voting for someone who's promising them more money in their pockets or who will espouse their religious values.

The one article was saying how Eliot Spitzer is trying to tear down that perception, since it's not as true as the middle class thinks it is. Spitzer feels that they are still being exploited and has made his career out of exposing upper class corruption and corporate fraud. He's fighting to take back the middle class.

Here's an alarming statistic. In 1996 when Clinton got reelected the threshold salary at which people were more likely to vote Democratically was about $49,000. Anyone making more than that was more likely to vote Republican. In the most recent election the threshold Democratic salary was roughly $23,000. That's an enormous drop. Somehow a majority of the people making $30,000 a year have decided that the Republicans best represent their economic and social needs within the last ten years. That's really astounding to me. Plus more middle class Americans have become investors thanks to the tech boom and the advent of online research and trading. Investors are predominantly Republican, apparently.

On top of all of this the Republicans have done an outstanding job of hijacking the Democratic base, namely middle class white guys. They only run on 2 or 3 issues at a time and pound the hell out of them until people actually start to believe them. By far the worst political promise of the last 25 years was Dubya saying that he wanted to be a "uniter and not a divider", but he said that shit so much that people just believed him. The second time around his rhetoric was entirely different.

I think even the Democrats are complacent at the moment with the Republicans in control. They're still not fighting to put out one message, nor are they adequately pouncing on the Republican turmoil from DeLay to Frist, Rove to Cheney, and all the little people under them. Not to mention the huge messes in Iraq and N'awlins.

Anyway, my feeling is that the Democrats, to a certain extent, were too successful in entrenching middle class values to the American suburbanites, obviously culminating with Bill Clinton around 1999 or so. Now they're fighting to find a new message.

The preface of this story is that just this week I started to subscribe to the New York Times. It is awesome. I had always tried to read it every day, especially in the last couple of years because they used to give them away free at my school, provided you were there early enough or the delivery was late enough so that you could get one of the copies. This year for some reason they don't deliver it anymore. In fact, I think they're now delivering USA Today. What a downgrade. Anyway, Today I got my first Saturday Times and I read a bunch of the magazine and the Maureen Dowd column, and I was thoroughly pleased with myself for being an elitist liberal.

Anyhow, that's not the purpose of my post. Today on the cover of the Arts section they had a picture of the Bottle Man and it said to read a story about him on page whatever. Anyone who has ever gone roller blading in Central Park knows who the Bottle Man is. If you haven't, then I'll explain. Incidentally, before I explain I think that they're gonna tell this same story on 60 Minutes tomorrow night, so if you're reading this before Monday morning, you can check it out for yourself.

In the middle of Central Park there is a bandshell right near that big ass fountain and all of the paths around the park sortof converge there. There's a lot of blacktop to maneuver in instead of just going on the straight path that comprises most of the park. On even a semi-warm day it is always crowded with people on roller blades and skateboards doing tricks or just skating around or whatever. Every time I've ever been to Central Park roller blading there has been this old dude with sports gear on who's usually the center of attention because not only does he skate really well and do all sorts of pirouettes and jumps and what not, but also because while he does those things he has a water bottle balanced on his head. Sometimes he even has two or three on his head.

Like I say, if you've ever been there, then you know exactly who I mean. So I see his picture on the front of this section and I think this will be an interesting piece about this old dude who loves to roller blade. The story is actually a hundred times more interesting. This Bottle Man is a dude named Robert Oxnam who used to be a college professor and was considered an authority on China, and also was a writer. A while back he started to black out and lose time and just seem really frustrated with like so he saw a therapist. This is where it really gets interesting.

At his therapy sessions he discovered that he was blacking out because he suffers from multiple personality disorder. When he would lose time it was because one of his other personalities had come to the surface and done whatever it is that alternate personalities do. MPD is something I studied with enormous interest when I was a psychology major. I mean, that's the type of shit that draws people to be psychology majors in the first place.

The only reason people ever develop this disorder is when they've experienced terrible trauma as a child, usually chronic abuse, and this also came out during Oxnam's therapy sessions, in the form of one of his personalities who took the form of a little scared child who apparently gave details of the abuse he suffered. The general wisdom is that the personalities develop to shield the child from the trauma that's taking place. Wholly new personalities allow the individual to essentially siphon off the memories and they invariably end up suppressed into one of the other personalities. The various other personalities develop as further protection and often take on extreme versions of traits the child wishes to have to be able to stop the trauma.

Anyhow, I won't give you my amateur explanation of the disorder, except to say that the disorder itself is a hotly debated topic. Many psychologists don't even believe that it actually exists. That's sortof beside the point, and, from what little I know about it, I'm inclined to believe that there is at least some merit to the disorder and its extreme symptoms.

Anyway, this guy at the park is one of the alternate personalities of this Robert guy. He's known as Bobby and has adopted an apparent perpetual 19 or 20 year old persona. So when you've seen the guy at the park with the water bottles on his head, you've been watching Bobby, who's one of the alternate personalities of Mr. Oxnam, scholar and writer. That's pretty fascinating, especially since I've seen that guy a hundred times at the park. Apparently through therapy this guy has merged all but three of his personalities back into his one self, so that's good.

The reason that he's getting this attention now in the Times and on 60 Minutes is because he has a book coming out about his life. It's probably worth a read.