The Journal's Celebration of the FISA Review Court Ruling: "Unwarranted"

PHUTATORIUS
An August 2008 decision of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, disclosed only yesterday, held that the Bush Administration's warrantless-wiretapping program does not violate the Fourth Amendment.

Cue editorial triumphalism from the Wall Street Journal:
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Ever since the Bush Administration's warrantless wiretapping program was exposed in 2005, critics have denounced it as illegal and unconstitutional. Those allegations rested solely on the fact that the Administration did not first get permission from the special court created by the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Well, as it happens, the same FISA court would beg to differ.

* * *

For all the political hysteria and media dishonesty about George W. Bush "spying on Americans," this fight was never about anything other than staging an ideological raid on the President's war powers. Barack Obama ought to be thankful that the FISA court has knocked the bottom out of this gambit, just in time for him to take office.

But all this hoo-hah from the Journal is unwarranted (ba-dum-bum). Here's the thing: there are two warrantless-wiretapping programs. There's the first program, which the Administration took up in secret after 9/11 without approval from Congress and concealed from all of us until word of it was leaked in 2005. And there's the program to which Congress gave temporary assent in 2007's Protect America Act, and its final approval last July.

The FISA Review Court's ruling had to do with the second program, and it only held that the Fourth Amendment did not require warrants in these circumstances, and that any constitutional privacy concerns were alleviated by the Administration's scrupulous compliance with certain safeguards that Congress, and the Administration itself by executive order (to its credit), had impressed upon the process — including a requirement that the Administration "reasonably believe" that the surveillance targets are "located outside the United States."

The FISA Review Court had nothing to say about the first program, which I think we can assume contained none of the procedural safeguards that made the difference to the court here (I say "assume" because the Administration refused to tell us how the program worked). At a minimum, the first program was undertaken in clear violation of the wiretap and FISA laws, which required individual approval of each and every wiretap.

And I'd venture to say it was exactly the uproar over the secrecy and intrusiveness of the first program — as the Journal puts it, the "political hysteria and media dishonesty about George W. Bush 'spying on Americans'" — that resulted in Congress and the Administration writing the program-saving safeguards into law.

Hate on the "liberal media" all you want, Wall Street Journal, but this is democracy at its finest: the press ferrets out secret abuses of power, and the law corrects them.

Steve Jobs Isn't Lying About His Health

PHUTATORIUS
Why should we believe what Apple CEO Steve Jobs says about his health? One reason I can think of is that if he lies, he and anyone else who is in on it is likely committing securities fraud.

Not so long ago Jobs tried to put an end to rampant speculation about his health. He looked pale, gaunt, and sickly; he was pulling out of public appearances. Folks were concerned. Jobs finally addressed the rumors just after the New Year, explaining in a letter to the Apple community, that doctors had identified a hormone imbalance, easily treatable, that was causing his weight loss.

Now we have a second letter from Jobs, this time to Apple's employees, announcing a leave of absence and reporting that his "health-related issues are more complex than [he] originally thought." Rumors are flying that the cancer is back, and it's not just the "Apple community" that wants to know now: what isn't Jobs telling us?
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Whatever is going on, I think it's safe to say Jobs isn't lying. Or if he is, he's not getting sound legal advice. History shows that any statements Jobs (or anyone else) makes about his health are "material" information for investors. Jobs is widely and singularly credited for transforming Apple, Inc. from insular, moribund business into unlikely worldwide entertainment power. Investors identify Apple's fortunes so closely with Jobs that Apple's stock prices rise and fall on rumors about Jobs's status with the company. A blogger announces (wrongly) that Jobs suffered a heart attack, and the stock price falls 11% in ten minutes. When Jobs disclosed the nature of his illness — along with the upbeat prognosis — last week, Apple's stock surged 4% against a flagging NASDAQ index.

I'll leave alone the question whether, in a case like this, the securities laws ought to require a guy like Jobs to make regular disclosures about his health — that's a tough question that involves weighing the rights of investors against a right to privacy that is already enshrined in federal law. But a material misstatement, even if it reflects a benign motivation like "reassuring the public," is unlawful. It therefore should be pretty clear to anyone that if Jobs is talking about his health, he has an obligation under the securities laws to tell the truth. And I don't doubt that's what he's doing. (Query, though, whether the "more complicated" employees-only letter adequately discharges a duty to correct the public statements on what he "originally thought.")

Phutatoricon

India IV: Driver's Education

MITHRIDATES
Our car came to a sudden (by American standards — it was par for the course in India) stop in the middle of the highway about halfway from Delhi to Agra. Traffic had come to a complete standstill and we all got out to see what was happening. Apparently some car had broken down and the northbound drivers tried to swerve around it only to be stared down by southbound vehicles. Now this sort of thing happens all the time in India, but usually the traffic finds a way. But not this time. Traffic in both directions came to a standstill. Well, that was fine by us. We had been in the car for a couple of hours and could use a leg-stretch.

A man was standing on the side of the road with a monkey, so of course I paid my rupees and got to shake the monkey's hand. Then I realized that probably the last thing that monkey had done with that hand was throw feces at the previous tourist who came by. Eventually everything sorted itself out and the car got going again, but it was another three hours before I found a place to wash my hand, and so I spent the rest of the car ride holding my hand out in front of me, making sure it didn't come in contact with anything I might ever touch again.

But that was twelve years ago. Had things changed? Some of the major roads are a in a bit better repair, but it's still the same old hold-on-for-dear-life chaos as autorickshaws, cars, cows, chickens, dogs, pedestrians, beggars, lorries, and scooters all fight through on the same laneless roads. The Law of the Jungle is the only apparent rule of the road, as small things just make sure to get out of the way of bigger things.

The fascinating thing I learned this time around was the class distinction between the different types of drivers-for-hire. Of course, like anywhere else, the car you own has some status attached to it. My Gujarati host was beaming proud that the Ambassador he was driven to work in every day was the same car used by the top government officials. But as far as I could tell there was status attached to the drivers as well. The taxi drivers, for example, had visible contempt for the rickshaw drivers, who were far more interesting. So we'll start with them.


Perhaps it's the openness of the rickshaw itself, but their drivers tended to be chatterboxes. Even the guy in Ahmedabad who didn't speak a word of English was contantly gabbing away. Early in the day I'd point out places on the map for him to take us. Who needs a common language when you can just point to the intersection? Well, apparently map-reading isn't part of the standard public-school curriculum. It soon became clear that he couldn't decipher the map, and so we'd say the name of a place — Gandhi's Ashram, IMM — until he recognized it. He'd then pull over and chat with another driver or random person, who might have one direction for him, and when that direction exhausted itself he consulted someone else. Taking one direction-piece of the itinerary at a time, we'd inch closer to our destination and usually make it there (one particular aborted cafe trip excepted). This disinterest in navigation by map seemed pretty standard. One driver in Mumbai clearly only knew the names of the neighborhoods. You could say "Fort," but good luck trying to specify a building or a street.

But this lack of basic skills one might associate with a driver-for-hire was made up for by the friendliness and casual nature with which they seemed to perform their duties. Our Ahmedabad driver would often stop off at his favorite local pit-stop for Masala Chai (no, not as good as Mom's). He'd bring us a cup and chat with his buddies while locals would come gawk at the white guys and some would practice a bit of English.

Local: Where from?
M: Chicago
L: [Blank stare]
M: US? United States?
L: [Blanker stare]
M: America
L: Ah-May-REEK-uh!
M: Yeah, Ahmayreekuh . . .

But these were some of the best bits of the India trip. None of the sites in Ahmedabad were particularly spectacular. OK, Gandhi's Ashram was very cool and the Indian Institute of Management designed by Louis Kahn was impressive, mostly because it felt like Stanford on the inside, but surrounded by high wall and barbed wire with the poverty of the city creeping right up to the walls. But chilling with the driver on the corner you could sit back, hang out, drink some tea, and watch the locals go about their business. In Udaipur, our rickshaw driver made two stops (to and from the Monsoon Palace — the worst-kept tourist site on the planet) at his local tobacconist to pick up some of Paan — the Betel leaf/nut mixture that Wikipedia describes as a "palate cleanser and breath freshener" — not sure about that, but it certainly turns your teeth red and makes you spit nasty red juice. The detour into his neighborhood was clearly the best part of that excursion. Kids played in the street, donkeys and cows strolled around, locals came by the water pump to wash their feet. Good stuff.

The taxi drivers weren't nearly as much fun. Sure, it was a more comfortable ride, but not much character, not much conversation and a guaranteed stop at the "best restaurant on the way" for mediocre food and a nice kickback to the driver. The driver from Osian to Jodhpur was kind enough to offer me what he called "opium" before he popped some sort of narcotic into his mouth to get him through the rest of the drive. At least he washed it down with some chai to keep him awake. The taxis did seal you off from the beggars and choking pollution, but they also sealed you off from the side streets, local tea-stops, conversation and all the sights and sounds that make it worth going to India in the first place . . .

Today's Stupid Law

PHUTATORIUS
This one comes to us courtesy of hard-working Wobegoners in the Minnesota Legislature:

325E.65 SALE OF AMERICAN FLAGS.
No person in the business of offering goods at retail may sell or offer for sale in this state an American flag unless the flag was manufactured in the United States of America.

Take that, you impoverished 9-year-old Bangladeshi flag-weavers! You'll just have to find some other way to earn your $.009 per hour.

Oh, no wait — you can just sell them to Twin City wholesalers. Never mind. You're good.

UPDATE: In case you wanted to put a face on this law, here it is.

That's State Rep. Dennis Rukavina, the bill's sponsor. And really, if this law were a person, I think this is about what you would expect it to look like. Am I right?

On the Twitterization of, Well, Everything (Briefly)

PHUTATORIUS
I’ve resolved to be less pedantic and verbose — in short (since that’s what I’m after), to be less of an insufferable ass. But it’s two weeks into the New Year, and I’m probably losing that battle already. I’m finding all sorts of things I won’t cave on. I won’t, for example, take short-cuts in text-messaging: I refuse to enter the characters “c u l8er” into my phone. And whatever burdens Motorola imposes on me, I will punctuate my sentences, even if it takes me all day to get a message out.

It’s my natural tendency to run long, in pretty much everything I do. My showers are too long. My posts here are too long. I’m told length is one reason my books will never be published. I gave a talk on Monday, and the moderator had to elbow me several times and point at his watch. This is what I do, and I get that there’s a problem here. But here’s the thing: it’s not my problem — it’s everyone else’s.

Everything’s got to be short, snappy, and punchy these days. You’ve got a web article of more than 50 words? We’ll have to scatter it across 10 pages, so there never appear more than three paragraphs at once: we don’t want to scare anybody away. Oh, sure — we’ve got plenty of time to watch Paris Hilton’s My New BFF marathons on MTV, but no time to read the news, except in 45-second spurts.

Consider Obama’s Cabinet appointments. What do we really know about any of these people? The truth is we know very little. The news reduces their characters and careers to blurbs of a half-dozen words, and we draw our conclusions from the blurbs. Or worse, they present the conclusions for us. Eric Holder? Black guy. Clintonite. Mark Rich pardon. Timothy Geithner? Technocrat. Didn’t pay the payroll tax. Arne Duncan? Reformer. Stands up to teacher’s unions. The Cabinet? "Team of Rivals." The sad thing about this is we have 150 24-hour news channels now. Rather than give us an hour’s in-depth coverage about each of these important appointments, we get the same facile two-minute analysis, repeated thirty times.

The thing is, we’ve seen what happens when people don’t pay attention to complexity:

“Look: I don’t know what he’s gonna do when he’s President. But they say he’s a ‘compassionate conservative.’ Sounds like the best of both worlds to me!”

“This paper discloses the bank’s policies on your adjustable rate and prepayment penalties. You need to initial each page and sign and date the last one. I say just sign now and read it later. You’ll want to hurry, if you don't want to miss Paris Hilton’s My New BFF.”

“Look: they all hate the guy and want him out. We’ll be treated as liberators.”

“‘Collateralized debt obligation,’ you call it. Hm. How does it work? Wait — no, never mind — I’ve got a 4:30. I trust you. We’ll take a thousand of ’em.”

And now everyone’s all a-twitter about, well, Twitter. You can see how it would come to this. I get that it can be useful if the Egyptian authorities are hauling you away in chains, and you want to get out a blast-message to the Internet calling for help. Hooray for Twitter. Let’s all hack apart our life’s rich narratives to accommodate some hipster startup’s arbitrary, Procrustean word limits.

No. No no no. There is virtue in exploring complexity, just as there is in the discipline one shows in self-editing. I’m not calling for everyone to go on and on and on ad nauseam. I'll do my best to stick with my resolution. But there is an ideal point of equilibrium here. Somewhere between insufferable asses and ADHD casualties is where we need to be, culturally, to save ourselves. To get there, someone needs to stand up for prolixity, for substance over soundbite, because things are getting way out of whack.

End lecture. Word count: 654. Not bad . . .

Enough Already about Hillary and the Clinton Foundation

PHUTATORIUS
The Wall Street Journal's editors want to know why more hasn't been made of the potential conflicts of interest between Hillary's business as Secretary of State and Bill's as fundraiser for the Clinton Foundation:
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Here is the spectacle of a former President circling the globe to raise at least $492 million over 10 years for his foundation — much of it from assorted rogues, dictators and favor-seekers. We are supposed to believe that none of this — and none of his future fund-raising — will have any influence on Mrs. Clinton's conduct as Secretary of State.

The silence over this is . . . remarkable.

Oh, Wall Street Journalists — is this the best you can do? Think through the problem here, people. The Clinton Foundation isn't a for-profit operation. It's a voluntary, charitable undertaking by Bill Clinton. I might be concerned if the tens of millions of dollars from the Saudis (among others) were going directly into Bill's pocket, but he doesn't keep the money.

The conflicts question reduces to this: is it at all likely that Hillary Clinton will trade U.S. foreign policy favors to foreign interests as gratuity/in exchange for past/future contributions they have made to her husband's charitable foundation? There is a short answer to this. It's no. And as to even "the appearance of impropriety" that is so often the preoccupation of lawyers — again, no.

Think, Journal, think! You're coming off like a bunch of AM radio hacks.

MITHRIDATES
Of course I went to the first mainstream media source I could find and found The Boston Globe's silence on the matter to be "remarkable" as the front page of their website screamed:

CLINTON FOUNDATION DONATIONS QUESTIONED

PHUTATORIUS
There's that, and there's the fact that no less a left-wing media sop than The New York Times complained on Saturday that the proposed annual disclosure of Clinton Foundation donors would be too infrequent to protect the American People against these apocalyptic conflicts. Whatever.

I know these newspapers have to find whatever controversies they can, and the Obama-Blagojevich connection has pretty much tapped out. So they set up their base camps around molehills like this. I suppose it says something about the relative calm we're experiencing in our national politics.

Still, you half-wish the papers would do what we do when there's nothing to write about: go buy some LPs, chill out, maybe slap something together about Duran Duran.

Great (and Lame) Moments in Music Video; Some Thoughts on Duran Duran

PHUTATORIUS
Thank you, VH1 Classic — and you, too, TiVo, for the time-shifting — for serving up All-Time Top Ten's Duran Duran episode two nights ago. This is the province of the 35-year-old father of two: he's home on a Saturday night in front of the TV, and if he's lucky, he's found some nostalgia channel through which he might relive his youth. Shoot — VH1 has even arranged for the release of Original Six Veejay Mark Goodman from his climate-controlled storage facility to host the show.

And so, Duran Duran. My sister and I talked on the phone while I watched this — she was supporting "Hungry like the Wolf" for the #1 spot, whereas I favored "Rio." "Rio" won, but I'm not one for point-scoring. VH1 served up some terrific Double Duran nostalgia on the way up the ladder to The Song I Picked and My Sister Didn't. Some highlights:
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*Though it never occurred to me at the time, the video for "Wild Boys" was obviously a Road Warrior ripoff — they even dressed Simon LeBon up as Mad Max. That said, this one was clearly a costly, complicated undertaking, and I think the bit where Simon LeBon is strapped to the windmill that periodically turns him underwater, then past an open flame, has to qualify as a Great Music Video Moment.

*Likewise in "Hungry like the Wolf," when LeBon stands up in the café and throws the table over. "They show it twice," My HLTW-loving sister recalled to me over the phone, without the benefit of the programming in front of her. "It's so good they show it twice." Another Moment, surely. I remember a Saturday morning in Columbus, just before a Buckeyes game, when a friend of mine ended a heated game of euchre by throwing the kitchen table over. This might have started a fight, had he not rationalized away his rash action by declaring it was something he'd always wanted to do, since he saw it in "Hungry like the Wolf." This was an acceptable excuse. Some of us even admired the guy for it.

But the winner here is "Rio," and so it's the one we'll embed in the post.



"Rio" probably best captures what is so "on one hand/on the other" maddening about Duran Duran. Consider the head-on shot of the band on the yacht at 1:04. Few segments of music video are as simple and iconic. A shame, then, that this footage had to follow on the heels of that godawful bit where a crab clamps its claw down on one Duraner's toe.

In the end, I don't know what to make of Duran Duran. So many of these once-laughingstock early 80s bands have been rehabilitated in recent years. Indeed, some — like Bow Wow Wow — I will fight to the death to defend. Others simply retained their cool, perhaps because they weren't 100% made and destroyed by music video — they had street cred, and they only used MTV to take that last, awkward step into living rooms in the Midwest. Not so Duran Duran: video didn't supplement the band's career — it was an integral part of it. And maybe this is why I haven't made a priority of listening to them, even as I've gone through Adam Ant phases and Psych Furs phases and God knows what else: just listening to Duran Duran doesn't give you the complete picture.

It doesn't help that MTV itself has gone into the shitter over the past fifteen years. If you're going to put Duran Duran into the category of bands that flourished principally because of video, it's hard not to condemn them for the sins of the network, years later. It's hard not to see them as more Britney than Bow Wow Wow. It's not a fair knock, this guilt by MTV-association. But it's a knock that sticks.

Watch the videos. See if they don't deserve more credit than they get — and then see if you don't flinch at the prospect of personally extending them that credit. That's about where I am on Duran Duran.

MITHRIDATES
I have Duran^2 Rio on vinyl. That's right, English major, "Duran Duran" is not "Double Duran", it's "Duran Squared". Didn't they teach you any math in public school?

But to the point. Without the video, "Hungry Like the Wolf" is hands down the superior song. It's no contest at all. The moaning at the end is priceless.

And VH1 is internally inconsistent on the matter. On their 100 Greatest Videos list, Hungry Like the Wolf comes in at #31; Rio at #60. So score a point for Big Sister.

Gotta love these guys, though. From the Hungry Like the Wolf Wikipedia article:

According to the band, the Burger King company has repeatedly asked to use the song in its advertising since the year it came out, but Duran Duran has consistently refused.

PHUTATORIUS
Yes — I'd like to see VH1 pull itself together and show some consistency here. Their All-Time Top Ten "80s videos" episode included Hungry like the Wolf, which came in at #3 in the Duran Duran-only episode an hour earlier. By rights there should have been two other Duran Duran videos in the Top Ten. They need someone like Deloitte & Touche to certify these rankings.

I always thought Pizza Hut should have paid off Depeche Mode for the rights to lay down a "Your own . . . personal . . . pizza" vocal over "Personal Jesus." Never happened, though — and I can't imagine it was a question of "selling out." Think of all the heroin David Gahan could have bought with that money.

India III: Land of the Free

MITHRIDATES

I'm sitting in the living room of my Gujarati host, thoroughly enjoying the kind hospitality he's offered to a complete stranger.

Host: Would you like some more Chai?
M: Oh, no thanks. It was great, but I've had plenty. Thank you.
H: But really, it's no problem at all . . .

And it wasn't. One quick nod in the direction of his wife and a couple of words in Gujarati (or was it Hindi?) was all it took. My host's mom went back in the kitchen and brewed up another pot of — truly delicious, no exaggeration here — Masala Chai. (I'm not much of a caffeinator, but I think I'm addicted to Mom's Masala Chai. Have to figure out how to get the right ingredients and make the stuff back home).

It seems like a great, traditional family life. Host works seven days a week while Wife and Mom stay at home every day and cook every meal, scrub every pot, and clean every room. I got to experience that home life for just a couple of days and it was delightful. Wife and Mom got up early every morning and made us Chai and breakfast; then they went shopping for fresh ingredients for the delicious dinner they cooked at night. Mom would be personally offended if you only had three servings, and so I ate until near-bursting. Host, as you might imagine, appeared to be struggling a bit with the "diet" he claimed to be on. I'd come home from sightseeing and watch some cricket with Host's dad, who seemed to live a life of complete leisure at this point and liked practicing English with his guest.

Host was married (by arrangement, of course) at 21; he's had the same career for ~25 years. As far as I can tell both parties seem happy with the, er, "arrangement" and I make no judgment on the process. Hell, it might have saved me a lot of trouble over the past 15 years if my parents had given me a bride at 21 instead of a sweater and a fancy dinner. And this was definitely par for the course in these parts. I talked to as many locals as I could on train rides and such, and by my accounts every one of them had their marriage arranged. And, like Host, they had all been working seven days a week in the same profession their whole adult lives. I had one memorable discussion with a pyschiatrist and a civil engineer in a sleeper class (no AC) cabin on a train from Bera to Abu Road.

Psychiatrist: So you're traveling on your own? Isn't it lonely?
M: Yeah, traveling alone. And it's not lonely. You meet people on the trains and in hostels. It's lots of fun. You meet more people this way.
P: In India we always travel with our families. Today I'm just coming back from a public hospital where I work once a week for extra money. We don't have time to travel alone. In India, if you leave your job to go travel it won't be there for you when you get back. We dream of traveling to other countries, but we can't afford it.
Engineer: In India we don't have personal freedom like in America. We have our job and we work every day. We don't travel around by ourselves. We live for our children and for our parents. We don't have choices in whom we marry, but we like it this way. Americans live for themselves, not their families.

Perhaps slightly exaggerating the state of affairs in America . . .

P: I had an arranged marriage at 22. Are you married?
M: No I'm still single.
P: How old are you?
M: 36.

I wish I had photographed the look of shock on my companions' faces.

E: Why aren't you married?!
P: He doesn't need to marry. He gets all the benefits of marriage without the costs. [laughter]

Well, not all the benefits. I have to figure out how to make my own Masala Chai.

P: How many girlfriends have you had? [girlish giggle]
M: Uh . . . more than one . . .
P: Ha. Political answer. In India, we like our lives, but we dream of promiscuity — of having lots of girlfriends.

Yeah, me too. I haven't had a date* worth the time in months . . .

P: Will you get married?
M: Yeah, sure, when I find the right girl.
P: Ha. In India everyone gets married at 21, 22. People don't even think if they can afford to raise a family. But everyone has to get married.
E: Are you worried about getting a job when you graduate?
M: No. The market's not great right now, but there are still more jobs than graduates in my field.
E: But unemployment is huge in America! Much worse than in India, I think.

A quick look out the window seemed to tell a different story about employment in the Indian countryside . . .

This was the Indian middle class. (OK, sure, just a tiny slice of it upon which I'm basing my whole assessment). Apparently genuinely happy with their lives, but working all the time just to get their families by. No girlfriends, but an arranged marriage at an early (by my reckoning) age. Happy with India, but a desperate longing on their faces when talking about traveling to other countries. Happy with their marriages, but clearly wondering what it would be like to have had a girlfriend or two at some point in their lives. Content with the direction their lives went, but by their own admission they never really had much say in choosing that path.

India was a free country as far as the government was concerned. No one was restricting their movement or speech. And clearly the government wasn't restricting how many children they had (attempts at forced sterilization in the 1970s aside). But family life and culture (and let's face it, relative lack of wealth) had certainly put a clamp down on individual freedom.

Hey, maybe choice is overrated. Who cares if you get to pick your path as long as the path turns out OK?

(I do . . .)

*For the record that was not a date. And it certainly didn't lead to any promiscuity. But yes, it was worth the time. Wait, is everyone else reading this? Sorry about that . . .

PHUTATORIUS
First off, it cracks me up that you ended a post about marriage and freedom with "I do." Second: I dunno — sometimes I think I'd feel a lot freer if my parents lived in our house. They could look after the kids now and then, and I'd get out a lot more.

But you make some good points about freedom. There are all sorts of pressures and compulsions out there that make us less free — and they don't all come from government. I think some of the New Deal theorists made this point back in the day. We're fortunate in America that we (most of us, anyway) are in a position to care about freedom from government — for a lot of people, that's an abstraction and a luxury you don't have time for if you're living in grinding poverty. The state doesn't own you; your boss does.

Economic and social pressures don't carry the same weight as the whim of a sovereign state backed by a monopoly of force: in theory you can always tell your boss or your husband to take a hike. But as a practical matter, sometimes the consequences of asserting these freedoms are as severe and painful as facing the state and its guns. Try telling the Afghan woman the law says she can step out of her burqa into a pair of jeans.

It's a shame that so often we (broadly, meaning everyone) fight hard and win battles that confer a slice of freedom, only to find that there's some other Trope of Authority — God, family, the Man, Dr. Phil, the Invisible Hand — telling us what to do or say. To me it all reduces to two truths — you can call 'em laws if you want:

(1) No one can ever be completely free.
(2) The fact that we all have to live together on a big round rock with a scarcity of resources means there's an outer limit to the total amount of freedom we have to parse out.

Chicken Feed

PHUTATORIUS
The national media are reporting that Alabama county sheriff Greg Bartlett supplemented his salary to the tune of $212,000+ over the last three years, by skimping on a state food allowance for prisoners and pocketing the difference.

What's more surprising — and disturbing — is that, as the Times reported yesterday, Alabama state law apparently allows county sheriffs to take home whatever portion of the $1.75 (!) per-prisoner-per-day allowance they don't spend on the prisoners. It's hard to see what legitimate government interest that sort of scheme serves. Taxpayers don't even get a cut of the "savings."

Oh, sure — I suppose I come off like a bleeding-heart liberal, calling as I do for prisoners to get their full seven quarters' worth of daily victuals:

“You’re never going to satisfy any incarcerated individual,” grumbled the head of the Alabama Sheriffs Association, Bobby Timmons. Besides, Mr. Timmons said, “an inmate is not in jail for singing too loud in choir on Sunday.”

I can't say why, but when I try to picture Bobby Timmons in my mind, he looks like a forty-year-old Wilford Brimley, and he's wearing a baseball hat with a bald eagle and the words DON'T RUFFLE THESE FEATHERS on it. Maybe it's the elite liberal media's gratuitous use of the word "grumbled" in conjunction with his testimonial. But Grumbling Bobbby Timmons aside, we don't starve prisoners in this country, and I'd like to know more about a budget provision that seems to serve no other purpose except to incentivize that practice.

As it turns out, there's nothing in the pertinent Alabama statute that allows sheriffs to supplement their salaries with their prisoners' leftover food money:

Food for prisoners in the county jail shall be paid for by the state as follows: There shall be allowed such amount as is actually necessary for food for each prisoner daily, and said amount so allowed shall be $1.75 per capita. In addition to the above amount, there is hereby conditionally appropriated from the General Fund an amount of $1.25 per capita.

If anything, the law reflects the legislature's determination that $1.75 per prisoner is "actually necessary"; you could make an argument that a sheriff can't go below that amount for any reason, much less pocket the savings. Nor are there any regulations on the books that say a sheriff gets the "leftovers" — although § 810-6-3-.67 of the Alabama Administrative Code exempts sheriffs' food purchases from sales tax (every little bit helps, I suppose).

If nothing in the law authorizes sheriffs to underspend and pocket the difference, why are Bartlett's lawyers claiming their client was complying with the law — and why is the New York Times reporting that "Alabama law allowed it?"

India II: Animal Kingdom

MITHRIDATES
India may have a democracy for its people, but the animals don't appear to recognize it. They are the undisputed kings of this country. That's an elephant walking down the street in Udaipur. Happens all the time. Taxi, rickshaw, scooter? Sorry, you'll just have to wait for Babar to make his way up the hill — and he ain't in no hurry. Even the cow gets out of the way. You think cows are messy? What happens when our big gray friend feels the need to relieve himself? There's no alternate week street cleaning service — it just becomes part of the permanent living landscape. Man can pave the roads, but the cows, dogs and elephants spend the next several decades reclaiming it for themselves.

And what of those sacred cows? In most states in India it is illegal to kill a cow. As a result, not only does one have to settle for a bowel-disturbing Chicken Maharaja King at the McDonald's at Mumbai Central, but once a cow stops giving milk its owner releases it into the wild. "Wild" in India meaning everything from backcountry to the side of the highway to the middle of town. I stayed for a couple of days with a family in Gandhinagar, Gujarat, and one such noble creature had made his retirement home in a small field in a packed residential area. No cricket to be played there. And wherever we went cows ate from the dumpster, crowded the streets, and created fertilizer. If cows are sacred and god is in the cow, then is that godshit I just stepped in?

But they're not alone. Wild (again, rabid?) dogs abound. The good news is that Indian dogs — unlike their Ecuadorian counterparts — seem pretty chill. You might have to step over several each block, but they're so used to the multitude and have nothing to guard that they leave passers by alone. Petting one might lead to a few trips to the clinic, but other than that they seemed harmless. One lucky mongrel got to ride in the lap of his scooter-riding master down the highway. Quite a remarkable training feat if you ask me — or maybe its just instinct to curl up in a ball and stay put.

I grew quite fond of the neighborhood monkeys. Two of them made the rounds every morning and one liked to stop right in the open doorway. Never came in the living room though, just took a peek in, watched a bit of the cricket, and went on his merry way.

But the leopards were the highlight. In southern Rajasthan, in the Mt Abu-Udaipur-Jodhpur triangle is a giant wildlife refuge filled with Panthera Pardi. I'm not sure what "refuge" means in India — other than the government owns the land — but it did look like development was pretty limited. I went on a leopard "safari" out of Bera and in the late afternoon hopped in a jeep with the owner, Sunil, his son, and an employee, Debashish, to go looking for leopards as they came down from the hills to hunt. On the way to the refuge we picked up a goat — what's the goat for? — and Debashish tied the poor bugger to a stake at the bottom of the hill and got out of the jeep to wait in the bushes. We drove around for a while until we got a call from Sunil's brother that the leopard had made a "kill". Apparently, Sunil's brother hadn't left anyone with his goat and while he walked to his jeep our spotted friend took advantage and claimed her dinner. We spent the next several hours watching the feast — after rescuing our own had gadya — and catching glimpses of the two cubs safe up in the hills occasionally taking peeks to make sure some scraps were left for them. We were standing outside the jeep, probably fifteen feet from the big cat, who knew we were there, but didn't seem to care.

She ate everything but the hind hooves that were still attached to the post. Too bad about the goat and all, but the girl's gotta eat something. As it turns out, that something is often a goat stolen from the local village. This isn't Africa, where wide open spaces and plentiful wildlife allow the big cats to feast on wild gazelles. There's always a village nearby and the leopards survive in part by sneaking into a local's house and taking his livestock. The villagers don't like this, naturally, and sometimes resort to poisoning the carcass. When the leopard comes back to finish off his dinner, she eats the poison. In a case of local businesses looking out for their future where the central government is ill-equipped to regulate, Sunil decided to pay the local villagers for their losses in return for not poisoning the leopards. A small cost to the businessman, but a huge gain perhaps for the local leopard population.

Such a long post and I haven't got to boars, camels, crocodiles, donkeys, or the giant lizard who shared a cabin with me. Oh well, maybe in a future post.

Just Guess

PHUTATORIUS
I found this photo alongside an article on the Harvard website about leptin research and obesity.


See if you can guess this guy's profession. Go on: give it a try.

2009 To-Do List: Write Ramones Musical

PHUTATORIUS
Ever since Mamma Mia! BLEW UP (y'all), everyone's making these one-band "jukebox musicals". This is can't-miss business, and easy money — the songs are already written. I want in on the action, and I've decided I'm going to write the Ramones jukebox musical. It's going to be titled Gabba Gabba Hey!, and I've already sketched out the plot and picked the songs (most of 'em, anyway). Check it out:

ACT I
Jackie works the freak show at a traveling "Bonzo" circus, which has just arrived in Bitburg ("Bonzo Goes to Bitburg"). He meets Judy there. She's a punk ("Judy Is a Punk").

Judy takes Jackie to the Ice Capades up the road in Berlin. They fall in love at the Ice Capades ("I Believe in Miracles"), and Jackie decides to quit the circus to be with her ("(I Am Not an) Animal Boy"). Then they want to sniff some glue ("Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue"). They go do that, but they're bored afterward ("I Just Wanna Have Something To Do"), so they go out to eat.

Their waiter is that guy from Hellraiser ("Pinhead"). He falls for Judy, too, and he doesn't want to be Pinhead anymore. He just met a girl he could go for. But it looks like Judy loves Jackie, and she's not really into Pinhead, probably because of his needles and pins ("Needles and Pins"). So he hatches a plan to mickey up Jackie's Orangina and steal Judy away. He puts a white tablecloth over his head to cover the pins.

Jackie wakes up alone on the floor of the restaurant. He figures out somebody put something in his drink ("Somebody Put Something in My Drink"). Judy's gone. A bystander says she left with a guy in a white sheet. Jackie's convinced that the Ku Klux Klan kidnapped Judy ("The KKK Took My Baby Away"), and he runs off to find her.

INTERMISSION

ACT II
Pinhead wants to take Judy down to his basement, but she doesn't want to go ("I Don't Wanna Go Down to the Basement"). He makes her go, anyway, and it turns out there's a wart hog down there ("Wart Hog"). In the basement, Pinhead lays it all on the line ("I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend"). Judy says she would never want to be seen in public with a guy who looks like Pinhead ("I Don't Wanna Walk Around with You"; Reprise: "Needles and Pins").

Jackie pays a retired commando to help him track down Judy ("Commando"). They go around looking. By nightfall Jackie is morose and reverting to his Animal Boy behaviors ("Howling at the Moon (Sha La La)"). Commando wants to know why he acts that way. Jackie tells him he had a lobotomy as a teenager ("Teenage Lobotomy"). He doesn't remember much of anything that happened before that. Commando asks Jackie if he remembers rock 'n' roll radio ("Do You Remember Rock 'n' Roll Radio?"). Jackie doesn't.

Commando tracks Judy to Pinhead's house. They storm the house ("Blitkrieg Bop"), Pinhead talks a lot of smack to them ("You Should Never Have Opened That Door"), and there's a fight ("Beat on the Brat"). Commando and Jackie defeat Pinhead and his wart hog, and Jackie and Judy are reunited (Reprise: "I Believe in Miracles," "The Return of Jackie and Judy").

Pinhead apologizes, and the cast all goes off together to Rockaway Beach ("Rockaway Beach").

Well? What do you think?

MITHRIDATES
I like it, but there are a few unanswered questions. At the end, where do they bury the warthog? Do Jackie and Judy have a happy family life? Is Sheena a punk rocker?

Antony and Cleopatra

MITHRIDATES
I wanted to like this book. The whole Masters of Rome series is genius. Before you get discouraged by this review, go read The First Man in Rome and get to know Gaius Marius and a young Lucius Cornelius Sulla. The series maintains its relevance — even as the history becomes more familiar with the arrival of Pompey Magnus and Julius Caesar — because her characters are brilliant. McCullough does a masterful job of detailing Sulla's depravity, Pompey's arrogance, and Caesar's Johnson as a political weapon. But her enemies are great, too. You couldn't help but like Jugurtha, and Mithridates the Great (Holy gratuitous self-referencing, Batman!) won me over with his favorite punishment for incompetent subordinates:

Tongue out, eyes out, hands off, balls off, begging bowl!

But the best character of all is Marcus Antonius. This isn't the Antony of Shakespeare:

Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend me your ears!
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them,
The good is oft interred with their bones;
So let it be with Caesar.

That Antony is noble, brave, brilliant, better than Caesar even, but of course with a fatal flaw.

But McCullough's Antony isn't even that of HBO's Rome series. Their Antony is still brilliant, and might have made the speech above, but he's almost completely amoral, and of course with the same fatal flaw. James Purefoy almost made us believe he was Antony himself. It was only HBO's obsession with gratuitous male full frontal nudity that confirmed he had one very un-Antonian feature.

No, McCullough's Antony is (was) my favorite of all. Completely amoral, sometimes brilliant, sometimes a buffoon, undeniably brave, as debaucherous as Sulla, and as vain as Pompey. This Antony wanted to kill Caesar himself so he could inherit his fortune, but was still indispensable to Caesar, who kept him at his side. He had lions pull his chariot, had as many women as he wanted, and routinely drank himself into week long stupors. He went to costume parties in tight fitting clothes to show off his legendary organ. I mean, what's not to like. This guys was everything — everything but dull.

That is, until Antony and Cleopatra. The guy's just pathetic through the entire book. Look, McCullough's limited with what she can do here. She can't make him beat the Parthians or triumph over Octavian — but at least she could have given the man his due and made this seem remotely plausible. Antony might not have been the general Caesar was, fair enough, but the campaign against the Parthians was a joke from the beginning. He whines the whole time and cries like a little girl afterwards. Sure he fell in love with Cleopatra — fine — but does he have to whimper and do nothing while she slowly drives away ally after ally?

The bravado, the charm, the occasional brilliance, the charisma — all gone right from the beginning. Instead of a tragic ending to a brilliant career, we get 500 pages of a pathetic driveling man standing by while a stupid woman slowly destroys him. It's not just sad, it's kind of boring. The same meeting — Cleopatra insults Antony's legates, Antony lets her, legates desert — happens over and over.

A brilliant series ends on a dull note. And Antony's sudden change from best character in the series to pathetic loser is neither entertaining nor plausible.

PHUTATORIUS
I haven't read this one yet, though I plan to. I keep finding other books to read first, and I think that's pretty telling.

I've felt for a while now that this series was heading downhill, and I've wondered why. I think a big part of it is that the historical and cultural record is thick with material that covers this period (say, from Caesar's career onward), and so McCullough not only has to contend with competing — sometimes Shakespearean — narratives, she's also telling stories most of us already know. Rome buff that I am, I couldn't have foretold the plot twists and turns in the earlier books on Marius, Sulla, and Pompey. But we all know what's coming here, for the most part.

Since she can't rely on a suspenseful plot, McCullough has to rely on other qualities to sustain our interest — principally, her detail work and her character development. It sounds to me like you feel she had a pretty good character in Antony, and she betrayed him.

I will say from my own experience failing at literature that I've written supporting characters that I like a heck of a lot — in some cases much more than the principals — but if I ever had to turn them into principal characters, I'd probably end up hanging myself. I think this is because the more peripheral a character is, the more he can get away with being a character, a work of artifice, rather than a more complete, developed person. With distance, a statue without detail can still look good. Up close it doesn't work. So when McCullough bids to make Antony her protagonist, she has to give him more depth and complexity — this undercuts the sharp and static elements that make him stand out, and he loses much of his appeal.

There's a bit of art imitating life here, too. I'd venture to say that Antony was the sort of person who did his best work as a supporting actor. When events wrenched Caesar away and the spotlight finally turned to him, he showed an astonishing lack of depth and standalone character — and that's what ultimately did him in.

MITHRIDATES
I'll agree with most of that. And I acknowledge that she had a difficult task. But I think Antony became more cardboard in this book. He still had plenty of depth in The October Horse — and he was already a principal character at that point — but he's just boring, pathetic and obvious in this last book.

You say the real Antony wasn't much without Caesar? Yet somehow he managed to orchestrate the defeat of the conspirators and carve up half the world for himself — all this from a pretty precarious situation immediately following Caesar's death. The real (and in every telling I've heard/read/seen, also the fictional) Antony is pretty damn remarkable from Caesar's death to Philippi. The real one eventually falls — we know that — but tell me how. Don't just remove everything useful and interesting from the guy and let him wallow until it's all over . . .

Siriusly?

MITHRIDATES
As a sports fan, the XM-Sirius merger was a must. Choosing between XM/MLB and Sirius/NFL was no choice at all, but woe was the poor consumer who had to make that choice in the first place. But now all is well. I've enjoyed three seasons of every MLB game — half of the Sox games brought to me by Joe Castiglione and Jerry Trupiano/Jerry Trupiano replacement, the other half by dim-witted morons ignorant of the game of baseball. And now I get to listen to my beat you if they cheat/ beat you if they don't cheat/can't beat you without their quarterback Patriots.

Except that I don't. Mostly because they didn't make the playoffs, but partly because I need to buy an extra package to hear them. Now, it's not the extra $4 a month that bothers me, it's that the extra package automatically comes with Martha Stewart Living Radio. It's just not worth it to me to have all the football games every week for that one time when I'm flipping through and have to listen momentarily to that jailbird drone on about the joy of oranges. "Oh, why not just keep on flipping through the channels, you say?" Sure, but the problem is I wouldn't. She'd ask a question about oranges and I'd have to wait for the answer. And then I'd be hooked. And there goes my whole Sunday.

But for music lovers, the merger is a killer. What happened to Fred? And Ethel? And Lucy? I'd become good friends with my three alt. rock alt. personas. Where are they now? Siruis will have you believe they're still there, under the aliases First Wave, Alt. Nation, and Lithium. Oh sure the music's the same, but my hip, cutting edge pals are gone forever.

PHUTATORIUS
She's only talking up oranges because she bought stock in Sunkist and Tropicana.

Keillor on Self-Esteem

PHUTATORIUS
Garrison Keillor is warning us not to "yearn for the bright lights."

Easy for you to say, Keillor. You have your gigs on NPR and Salon.

But otherwise I'm generally in agreement with what Keillor says here (and chuckling over how he writes it). In fact, on the one point he couldn't be more right: the drooling masses don't deserve us.

As to you, Brothers and Sisters, loyal readers — could we ask for anything more from you than your loyal readership and effervescent commentary? We don't toil in obscurity, M'dates and I. No, Sir/Ma'am — this is intimacy. Ask any stadium rock band if they wouldn't rather be back playing clubs, to patrons of discriminating taste. The Pontic Scourge and I love our readers — all five of you — and we wouldn't trade you for the whole of The Huffington Post (which we expect to take by force down the road, anyway).

Now go forth and multiply.

Why Do Secret Service Agents Dress Up?

PHUTATORIUS
I was checking out this slideshow on Obama's Secret Service detail the other day, and I came to wonder why the agents are always wearing suits and dress shoes.

I understand that there's a certain kind of G-man chic out there, and everyone dresses to impress these days, but it seems to me that these are hardly the duds anyone would choose to have on while running down bad guys — or even if the situation called for a sudden, catlike spring-into-action to take a bullet for Renegade.

This question has been sitting in the back of my mind for years, and it finally washed into my full consciousness when I came upon this "protective booty" photograph. As best I can gather from the shot and the caption, the agents are wearing New York Times newspaper bags over their feet so the cow dung won't mess up their suit pants and shoes. The dress shoes are non-functional enough — with the "booties" on, these agents' agility/mobility factors have got to be even more reduced.

I'm not asking for Spandex superhero costumes (Michael Chabon tells us — and rightly, to my mind — that these outfits are "preposterous" and impossible to render in the physical world, which fact probably explains the godawful pleather onesies Hollywood inflicted on The X-Men), but wouldn't something in a lightweight cotton or twill be a better bet? And more importantly, why not boots, or cross-trainers?

I'm sure I'm not the first person to consider this — classified white papers have been drafted on the subject, no doubt. Has the Secret Service concluded that the intimidation factor of having the big guys in suits outweighs what you lose in mobility? Is form function in this case? I might buy that argument. But if the rationale for the suits is simply that it undercuts the dignity of the President's office to have his elite bodyguards wearing Nikes and sweats — well, I'll refer you again to the "booty" photo.

MITHRIDATES
Those are just the secret service agents you see. The secret secret service agents never get photographed. Of course, that's not even the real Obama — just a scrawny imitation. The real Obama has pecs of steel.



PHUTATORIUS
Why is everybody on this blog suddenly in water? Is there some big pool party I haven't been invited to?

Worth noting, too, that with this photo we've achieved a 1:1 blogwide ratio of nipples to Google Map embeds. That should be a good figure to flog around in our promo materials.

He Plays One on TV . . .

Dr. Sanjay Gupta for Surgeon General? You've got to be kidding.

Who's next? Nancy Grace to head the FBI?

Plus I'm not sure the standing-waist-deep-in-the-water shot quite conveys the gravitas I associate with this position:

What do you know about cigarettes, Gupta? You can't even work your sump pump!

MITHRIDATES
He plays one on TV. Oh yeah, and he is one. Why does this bother you? I mean, I see all the bonehead comments on the article you link to damning Obama for picking someone from the liberal media that got him elected. But whatever. You don't just want some dude who's been practicing medicine all his life and has never thought about policy. Do you have an actual complaint? Or does appearing on television disqualify candidates automatically?

The post is a joke by default — usually just a mouthpiece for administration health policy. There's only upside in picking someone who might have something thoughtful to say on the subject . . .

PHUTATORIUS
Yeah, OK — you make some good points ("Great, kid! Don't get COCKY!"). I just have a hard time treating these cable TV news personalities as serious people. Maybe I watch The Daily Show too much.

Turns out The Weekly Standard likes Gupta a lot, principally because he took on Michael Moore over health care reform. Score this as one point against and one point for him, in my book.

The Singapore Grip

PHUTATORIUS
This is the second of J.G. Farrell's three "Empire" books that I've read. The first was The Siege of Krishnapur, which I finished this summer. The Singapore Grip and Krishnapur follow the same action arc: British imperials realize their danger just a bit too late to avoid getting routed out of their colonial homes-away-from-home. Grip, which followed on the heels of Farrell's prize-winning Krishnapur, is just a bit more ambitious.

Where the entirety of the action in Krishnapur was contained within the (increasingly) harried and cramped quarters of a British magistrate's Residence in rural India (where mutinous sepoys have the English contingent cornered), Farrell gives his readers the run of 1940s Singapore — and, indeed, in some passages a peek into "upstate" Malaysia, where the fumbling British Army engages the advancing Japanese.

The book starts slowly — excruciatingly slowly, as Farrell introduces us to his characters and spins forth their petty preoccupations. Walter Blackett is the middle-aged, self-satisfied entrepreneur planning the 50th jubilee of his company, Blackett and Webb. He's trying to marry off his feisty daughter, Joan. Matthew Webb is newly arrived in Singapore. His father, Blackett's partner, has just died, and Matthew stands to inherit the business, notwithstanding his grave concerns about the workings of colonial capitalism. Might Matthew be a suitor for Joan, or does the American military attaché, Ehrendorf, have a monopoly on her affections? Matthew moves in with "The Major," a restless ex-pat who only dimly remembers his days on the Continent, and the cynical, world-wise Frenchman hanger-on Dupigny (The Cynical Frenchman is always a useful character type).

If you got through that last paragraph, you did better than I did. It took me months to push through the first 150 pages of this book. This is, I think, a difficulty with Farrell's work, as I had the same trouble with Krishnapur. That said, right about the time you're begging for something to break the tropical tedium, the Japanese military swoops in, sinks two British battleships, lands on the Malay peninsula, and commences air raids on Singapore. And the book takes off.

It was a kind of cluelessness that brought Singapore to its knees — and Farrell tells just how with wry humor and pointed commentary. His characters seem like stock characters at first: each one is vested with a particular point of view, and he seems to arrange for them to encounter one another simply so that they might debate the big questions of empire. Blackett's notion is that what's good for his company is good for Singapore — even as his business maneuvers undermine the Allied defense. We're introduced to Singapore through Matthew, fresh off a stint volunteering for the hopeless League of Nations. He's the self-interested Blackett's foil, arguing constantly for a kind of responsible communalism, if not communism outright. Dupigny can't miss an opportunity to roll his eyes at Matthew's idealism. The Major is the stiff-upper-lip Briton who stays above the argumentative fray and, against all odds, pulls a ragged multiracial bunch of dilettantes together into an effective volunteer firefighting corps. Joan, it turns out, is just a bitch (that's not my word: it's Matthew's).

In the end, it's the war that turns these cardboard cutouts into characters, and it's good work on Farrell's part. Farrell describes the particulars of the Japanese invasion and the British withdrawal/defense in considerable detail. You don't need to review the bibliography in the back of the book to know that it's been exhaustively researched. Somehow the history never burdens the plot. Once or twice Farrell's narrative turns away from the Singapore cast to consider the attack from the perspective of a Japanese infantryman. I'm not the biggest fan of these passages. Farrell's shtick is to tell these stories (Grip and Krishnapur) completely from the warped perspective of the hapless colonials, and these brief interludes seem like a bit of a cheat. But I get what he's driving at: while the British generals dither over internal military politics, while Walter Blackett machinates against his business rivals and diverts materials needed for the war effort into his jubilee floats, while Matthew makes and repeats his impassioned pleas for the world's people to come together and care for one another — the Japanese press southward, indefatigably, on a mission, and without distraction.

And that's really how this story goes. If you can survive the brutal build-up to the invasion, this is a worthy read, with some priceless moments (training day for the firefighting volunteers and General Percival and the sound of sawing wood leap to mind). I learned much that I did not know about this theater of the war, and I laughed quite a bit.

UPDATE: I forgot to add, as I intended to do, that I came across the word tarmacadam in this book. That'll be the Word of the Week.

Vinyl Soundtracks

MITHRIDATES
So, yeah — I went vinyl six months ago and bought a turntable for the first time since, well, ever. And yes, of course the first record played was Thriller. My collection's growing pretty quickly with used record stores still going strong in the Windy City. And I tell you, after all those years in overly bright and sterile Virgin and Tower "Record" stores, a genuine used record store is a thing of beauty.

Last night I walked into Reckless Records and stopped briefly at the Soundtracks section, just for kicks. Forty five minutes and $72 (including tax) later I walked out with:

• A Clockwork Orange, condition: very good, $12 — Alex et al beat up Billy Boy's crew to "The Thieving Magpie"
  
• Music from the Man with no Name trilogy, very good, $4 — The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly — best soundtrack ever?
• Thirteen James Bond Themes, very good, $6
• Blues Brothers, very good, $3 — The Cook County Assessor's Office is on the 3rd floor
• Television's Greatest Hits, near mint, $7 — includes Captain Kangaroo, Magilla Gorilla, Get Smart, Superman, and even a test of the emergency broadcast system
• This is Spinal Tap, very good, $8 — This record could be none more black. See right.

• Miami Vice, very good, $2
• Pretty in Pink, very good, $5 — Don't laugh, it's got OMD, INXS, Psychedelic Furs, Echo and the Bunnymen, Joe Jackson, New Order, and yes, Phutatorius, it's got the Smiths
• Life of Brian, near mint, $3 — Not so bad once you're up
• Amadeus, near mint, $5
• On Her Majesty's Secret Service, very good, $5
• Saturday Night Fever, very good, $3
• The Big Chill, very good, $1
• An Officer and a Gentlemen, near mint, $1 — Toe the line, you slimy worms!
  
• Smokey and the Bandit, good, $1
  

OK, so I overpaid for Smokey and the Bandit, but watching the checkout dude try to suppress his laughter was worth at least 75 cents, so I figure I'm only out about fifteen cents or so.

PHUTATORIUS
"I wanna marry a lighthouse keeper and keep him company . . ."

I loved that Pretty in Pink soundtrack. Had it on cassette: "Do Wot You Do," "Shell Shock," "Please Please Please" by THE SMITHS (contrast Ferris Bueller's Day Off, with the Dream Academy cover), "Wouldn't It Be Good" — this was great stuff. The Psych Furs re-recorded "Pretty in Pink" for the movie: the original is better. Still, though . . .