“This episode contains discussions of same sex marriage. Parental discretion is advised.” Can you fucking believe that Fox ran that warning before tonight’s Simpsons? I mean, didn’t they feature two teenage girls tongueing each other last week on The OC?

Good for Zach

One bit I forgot to mention last night, being sleepy and all, was the amazing number of comments Zach Braff’s blog gets, 1368 in the linked entry and 1878, 3068 and 1231 in the next most recent entries (as of this moment, of course) and quick perusals don’t show any obvious comment spam unfairly bulking up the totals. That’s not to say some comments don’t link to people’s own sites, just no Viagra, Cialis, penis enlargers or cheap mortgage pitches. I don’t surf around looking for this so other celebrity bloggers may get similar or higher totals but wow, you could spend your life just reading all of them though I’m sure Braff doesn’t. Just looking at the quantities from time to time does seem like a nice ego booster in reward for doing the blog.

Beckhams’ Girlie Name Choice Is Plain Stupid, according to allegedly intelligent people quoted in a British newspaper. The world’s most famous couple, David and Victoria Beckham, named their newborn son Cruz–cross in Spanish–and somehow people who’ve never met them feel comfortable and qualified to judge their choice. Wow, must suck to be Lola Oria, a university tutor who gave the article it’s title with her qords, and authors Rachel Williams and Louise Barnett; their lives must be really miserable to get kicks from this.

Writers, writer’s blogs and some other stuff

Lee Goldberg in his blog A Writer’s Life semi-mocks the latest batch of who do they think they’re kidding misguided parents in The Lit Nazis. Goldberg, a novelist and TV series writer, whose blog happened to fall on the same page at A9 as mine, has a terrific blogroll from which I extracted the following:

Finally, from The New York Review of Books, ‘I Is Someone Else’ is a lengthy essay on Dylan’s recent autobiography and related literature which I’m too tired to start with this late. Poor me.

CD Review: Michael Buble: It’s Time. But not really. I mean, I saw this kid on Las Vegas a few months back and so what if his debut album sold three million copies, Daniel Sterdan’s review is spot on without even hearing one track just for the bull’s eye quip about producer “soulless svengali David Foster.” Lennie Kravitz, whose Stand By Your Woman, is covered here, is certainly happy in the pocketbook but miserable in his soul if he had to listen to this version even once. Taste is subjective but damn, this is not possibly worth the cost of a blank CD to burn a copy dowloaded off a torrent!

Prestige gasoline

Gas prices are getting out of whack again, earlier this year than has been the case, but Shell must think they got some serious shizznit in their V-Power high test blend. Usually a gallon of regular costs some base amount, $X.xx9, with the middle grade 10 cents higher and the top an additional ten cents per gallon. The nine-tenths of a cent is a marketing hangover that’s supposed to trick us into believing the price is lower than it is but since every single gas station does it the practice is stupid (though I bet people inside the industry know the reason it hasn’t gone away).

Back to Shell and V-Power, which is formulated to clean your engine while you drive. I pulled up at a stop light this morning and one of the stations was on my right; out of habit I checked their prices. Regular was $2.019, higher than two weeks ago though in line for the area, but the mid-grade blend was $2.199 and high test $2.499. Very strange.

Then I thought about the method in their apparent madness. Sneaky, very cynical but props for thinking of it. Most cars today do not require us to spend extra for higher than 87 octane gas; the few that do are almost exclusively expensive sports cars like Porsches and Ferraris. So if someone’s willing to pay the cost of those cars they probably don’t care about a few cents a gallon on gas and Shell will not piss off the majority of customers with a higher price for 91 octane.

The cynical aspect of this strategy is that some people, either arrogant, ignorant or both, believe that more expensive means better and so buy the top grade gas. Even though it’s a waste of money that does nothing for their car I guess it boosts their ego and their willing to pay a premium for that.

Emotional journalism and illiegal immigration

(This might as well have been a Letter to the Editor but since they never publish mine…)

The New York Times, in Nina Bernstein’s article Caught Between Parents and the Law, looks at National Fugitive Operations Program and seems barely able to keep the bile from spewing out. NFOP, a growing program in the Department of Homeland Security, is tasked with enforcing deportation orders on foreign nationals who refuse to voluntarily obey them. Bernstein’s piece focuses on one family, the Thakurs originally from Bangladesh. The father is in America legally but the mother was ordered to leave in 1997 (though appeals kept on through 2003) and she was detained by one the agency’s teams last fall and put on a plane home.

The article’s hook is that the couple’s two children (two and ten years old) were sent with the mother to her homeland but due to a paperwork snafu arrived in Bangladesh ten days before her with no adults to receive or care for them. The kids could have stayed in America–both are American citizens as they were born on US soil–but the father chose to send them since he didn’t feel capable of caring for them. I am not in any way suggesting this isn’t a sad situation which may potentially cause significant emotional harm to the Thakur children and family.

Contrary to the Times’ posturing, this is not our fault. Did the mother stay in the United States illegally, after having applied for legal residency and being denied, including a lengthy appeals process? Yes, and Mrs. Thakur does not dispute this. In a perfect, or slightly better, world the deportation arrangements would have been smoother but sadly we do not live in such a world and the federal government agents were not responsible for the children; if anything the kids should have stayed in New York an extra week or two, surely Dad could have managed them for 10 days, to allow Mom to arrive in Bangladesh and make living arrangements.

But, as I often repeat, there are people who benefit by promoting the interests of people in America illegally. So Ms. Bernstein devotes most of her limited print space to putting a human face on the issue through this family’s story, along with quotes from “an immigration lawyer with the Legal Aid Society” and “a law student and a recent intern with American Friends Service Committee, a charitable and advocacy group that has addressed the issue of immigrant detainees.” Only an unenthusiastic defense from a DHS official presents the other perspective and less than a sentence from the director of a group which favors restricting immigration. The author apparently could not find a single other person deported through this program to tell us about. Particularly not a person who meets the main criteria for the program’s targets, sexual predators and drug dealers.

Poor journalism, especially from a publication which prides itself on rising above charges of liberal media.

“The Power of the Blogosphere” my ass. The Charlie Rose Show had on Glenn Reynolds, Anna Marie Cox, Andrew Sullivan and Joe Trippi last night for a conversation about blogging and I was soooooooooo bored I deleted it off TiVo before the discussion was half over. All four of these people, while well-known, are all about the politics. How could they not have on someone like Dave Winer (okay not my favorite person but still…), Matt Haughey (plus MetaFilter), or even, yes I’ll go there, Scoble. The show would even have been better if they’d just left one or two of the guests off, they were all talking on top of each other and Rose couldn’t control things.

Chinese military posture

Interesting change in the CIA’s depiction of the Chinese military capability [via Garret]. Fits together with a chart I tore out of the Mercury News last week which shows national quantities of nuclear weapons superimposed on a world map; I was saving it to use in a post but really haven’t had the correct hook. The bit that got my attention were the numbers for China, 300 strategic and 120 tactical, which are probably correct as far as is known outside their top military and political leadership but seem awfully low to me. Since the graphic was attached to stories about the recent North Korean announcements of their possession of such weapons, the other nations’ numbers weren’t discussed. But do any of you really believe that China, having had nukes for 40 years or so, really have so few weapons?

New Springsteen in April!

Yes! New Bruce is coming April 26, a 12 song collection titled Devils & Dust that will be followed by a small venue tour. The songs are more in the generally folk/acoustic vein of The Ghost of Tom Joad and Nebraska and were recorded without the E Street Band; Springsteen played most of the instruments with help on bass from producer Brendan O’Brien (who also worked with Bruce on The Rising) and drumming by Steve Jordan. Suh-weet!

Bob Lutz of GM makes another first in the blogging world by publishing the first formal availability announcement of a new autombile in a blog: The Promise of Solstice. Looks like a potential success for Pontiac if the car delivers in terms of quality, as the stats are very good. A sporty convertible with a sticker under $20k (barely, but including destination charge), 177 HP, 18-inch wheels, glass rear window and a CD player.

Racing to the bottom

Are you living in California? Did you receive a letter last week from a company called ChoicePoint? If you did, I hope you paid attention and didn’t toss it as just another piece of junk mail. MSNBC reports in Database giant gives access to fake firms that more than 30,000 people in this state may be identity theft victims after some smart asses posing as a real company bought personal dossiers from ChoicePoint. Of course the company is hardly saying anything, nor is it taking any responsibility, hiding for months behind the skirts of an “ongoing law enforcement investigation” excuse.

Letter to the Editor: Immigrant advocates criticize jail policy

The Mercury News had another misguided article on illegal immigrants Saturday, Immigrant advocates criticize jail policy by Jessie Mangaliman, which reported on some recent agreements between several county jails (most recently LA County, the first one in California) and the Department of Homeland Security’s Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. I was unhappy with the article’s posture and wrote in the following (unpublished) letter:

Margaret Zaknoen and Renee Saucedo are advocating for a cause which they support, and any good fighter will use the strongest possible language, but I find their rhetoric seriously wrong (“Immigrant advocates criticize jail policy”, 2/12/05). Local police forces properly work with federal agencies every day and there is no good reason why immigration laws should be exempt from such cooperation. Nor is this situation a step towards requiring hospitals or schools to report residency status, as Saucedo exaggerates, because this screening is directly connected to the primary mission of our law enforcement agencies. One can appreciate the reluctance of other illegal immigrants to cooperate with police in most circumstances but that’s hardly a reason to compound a big problem by allowing convicted criminals to remain in the United States needlessly.

Reasonable people may campaign for changes in American immigration law or for programs which reduce the incentives that drive people here illegally; however, that’s an entirely different discussion.

Further, we have more than enough homegrown criminals straining California jails and prisons today without covering the cost for people who’ve shown contempt for our society twice over. Would Zaknoen, Saucedo and members of their organizations prefer to spend already scarce tax dollars on the cost of imprisoning convicted criminals and–given the apparent political impossibility of raising taxes–cut education or healthcare spending instead?