Piss? Christ!

Matt Welch, a contributing editor at libertarian magazine Reason, is now assistant editorial page editor at the LATimes. The paper required him to give a urine sample to help keep the LATimes a “drug-free workplace”. Those of you who know anytihng about libertarianism know how funny this is.

Yet it’s been company policy for at least 18 years that every new hire excrete on command while a rubber-gloved nurse waits outside with her ear plastered to the door. Those who test positive for illegal drugs don’t get their promised job, on grounds that someone who can’t stay off the stuff long enough to pass a one-time, advance-notice screening might have a problem. (And yes, it has happened in the newsroom a handful of times.) This despite the fact that we generally don’t operate machinery heavier than a coffee pot, aren’t likely to sell our secrets to blackmailing Russkies and are supposed to be at least theoretically representative of typical Americans.

Because guess what? The typical American — and just about every journalist I’ve ever asked — has already tried marijuana at least once before the age of 25, according to the government’s National Survey on Drug Use and Health. What’s more, despite 35 years and billions of dollars’ worth of taxpayer-financed propaganda to the contrary, most of those who’ve inhaled didn’t collapse through the “gateway” into desperate heroin addiction or “Traffic”-style sex slavery. George W. Bush turned out all right (at least on paper), as did Al Gore, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bill Walton, Michael Bloomberg and millions more.

Welch’s plight reminds me of a great comic strip by Evan Dorkin, called (something like) “Ayn Rand in Hollywood.”

It’s a 3-panel strip. In panel 1, Rand is typing away at her desk. A production manager runs in and says, “The director says we need to cut 2 pages from the last scene.”

Panel 2 is wordless, with Rand staring into the distance.

In panel 3, she says, “Sure thing!”

More on Hamas

Richard Posner’s take jibes with mine (but is much more informed).

Christopher Hitchens’ take does not jibe with mine (but is much more informed).

Meanwhile, the best thing about this Washington Post opinion piece by Mousa Abu Marzook is the author’s byline:

The writer is deputy political bureau chief of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas). He has a U.S. doctorate in engineering and was indicted in the United States in 2004 as a co-conspirator on racketeering and money-laundering charges in connection with activities on behalf of Hamas dating to the early 1990s, before the organization was placed on the list of terrorist groups. He was deported to Jordan in 1997.

My aforementioned take is over here.

The juniper berry has a very deadly kiss

In my ongoing mission to find a good gin, I’ve had some ups and downs.

Up? Why, Tanqueray No. 10, which was the first premium brand of gin I tried out. It taught me that there is a difference betwen the cheap(ish) stuff and the higher price stuff.

Down? Well, maybe I got a bad bottle, but Hendricks was a massive disappointment. It taught me that, even though you have a high price (around $27 for a 750 ml bottle), you might taste like crap.

So I had no great expectations when I tried the humorously named Wet by Beefeater this week (note: “this week” does not necessarily mean that I go through a bottle of this stuff every week). I bought it on a whim, while Amy was picking up some Rieslings at the Wine Library.

It was a mid-price point brand ($18 for 750ml), and had classier packaging than the regular brand. And that was enough to sway me. I’m easy.

So how does it stack up? It’s awfully darn good in my standard gin & tonic combo. It has a really interesting “high note” that I couldn’t place. I checked out the label and realized that it’s infused with pear. Amy liked it in the martini I made for her, so we’re willing to Nick-and-Nora it up with a gin called Wet by Beefeater for a while.

If you come by for the Superbowl next week, I promise to make one of my un-American drinks for you. It’ll go well with Amy’s Frito-pie.

Get Smart

I attended the Graduate Institute at St. John’s College in Annapolis, MD from 1993-1995. At the end of that period, I was awarded a Master of Arts, Liberal Arts degree (we nicknamed it the evil Spanish woman degree, or M.A.L.A.).

During four different job interviews (between 1995 and 1997), the person on the other side of the desk would look at my résumé, get a furrowed brow, and ask, “Why did you get a liberal arts graduate degree?”

There were a couple of responses to this, none of them particularly useful (nor indeed adequate). The best I could come up with was, “It taught me how to learn.”

I used that phrase when I had to give a speech at my undergrad alma mater, Hampshire College, in 2002. I don’t think the kids got what I was saying, but I tried.

This morning, I was reading an interview in The Comics Journal with Eddie Campbell, one of our age’s finest cartoonists (excerpts here). His 4-page Little Italy comic strip (collected in Three Piece Suit) is my all-time favorite. Here’s a snippet from the interview:

I think on the education front, the world focuses too much on the idea of education as a means to a job. Imagine learning all the great wisdom of the world so that you can get a job. What an absurdity. We should be learning all the great wisdom of the world in order to become wise.

All of which is to say, nothing at St. John’s explicitly prepared me to be the editor of a pharmaceutical contract services business-to-business magazine, but I wouldn’t trade those two years for anything (now, the four years at Hampshire, on the other hand. . .).

Police County

The Fairfax (VA) County police shot an unarmed optometrist to death because he was a bookie.

Okay, that’s a little misleading. Here’s a more refined version: Fairfax County police sent a SWAT team to serve a search warrant on an unarmed optometrist, for suspicion of gambling. As the team descended on the optometrist, one member’s handgun went off, killing the unarmed man.

The Agitator is all over this story, here and here

“When you draw the weapon, you always try to assess what the potential threat is going to be,” [Lt. Richard] Perez said. He said the officers in the tactical squad are “highly trained officers. Do unintentional shootings occur? Absolutely. We’re humans, and these kind of things do occur.”

Actually, they don’t occur when SWAT teams aren’t deployed for ‘routine’ warrants!

Brotherly Love

Read Charles Krauthammer’s column about his brother. It makes me wish I’d sat down and wrote about Chris Penn’s death a few days ago.

I thought about it, and brotherhood. I’m a much bigger fan of Michael Penn than I am of Sean Penn, even if Jeff Spicoli is one of the greatest film characters ever. I tried digging up an e-mail address for MP, out of some misguided notion that he’d appreciate reading condolences from an anonymous fan of his music, but that went nowhere.

And then comes Charles Krauthammer’s lovely and sad tribute to his brother Marcel.

My brother’s going to be standing at my side in a month and a half, ready to catch me if I faint during the wedding ceremony (I hope his back’s stronger than mine).

Hello Hamas, Goodbye Fatah, Here I am in Camp Grenade(a)

Yesterday, the Palestinian populace had parliamentary elections, and the Hamas party won a ton of seats. The NYPost cover today screams, “HAMASTAN,” and predicts a Taliban-like state of religious oppression will take over the Palestinian territories.

I don’t think that’s going to happen, mainly because I don’t think the vote was an overwhelming endorsement of Hamas so much as it was an overwhelming condemnation of Fatah. In addition, I think Hamas will have its hands full trying to actually administer the government. If branches of it actively try to launch attacks on Israel, reprisals can be much fiercer, now that its leaders have to be politically accountable.

There’s a good post at the Volokh Conspiracy that mirrors some of my sentiments about the vote. It reminds me of the post I wrote a while ago about Hezbollah condemning the first video’d-beheading in Iraq; Hezbollah’s still a terrorist organization, but it’s also tied into the social structure of Lebanon in a way that demands it do respectable things. The party got a good number of votes in the Lebanese elections, but that also means that it can be voted out (provided the government doesn’t suspend elections and revert to strong-arm tactics).

Now, one of my simplistic takes on Arafat was that he benefited from not having peace, because it’s a lot easier to be a warrior-hero than it is to administer a state. It’s like hot-button topics in politics (think abortion): if the issues were reconciled, then fundraisers wouldn’t be able to scare up contributions.

Similarly, now that Hamas has to take responsibility for running things, they’re going to have to deal with issues of unemployment and infrastructure without making a first resort of suicide bombing (admittedly, that would cut down unemployment numbers. . .)

Upgrading

This is all geek-talk, so feel free to go onto the next item.

I’ve updated a bunch of computer-stuff in the past week. First, I decided to double the amount of RAM in my desktop iMac to 2gb. The immediate upshot of this is that I can boot Photoshop in about 3.5 seconds. Quark, of course, still takes 15-30 seconds to boot up.

I also picked up a scanner: the Canon CanoScan LiDE 500F. It has a built in “wedge” so it takes up little space on my desktop. Thanks to the scanner, I was able to subject myself to the humiliation of that picture I posted a few days ago.

Then, I was forced to admit that the 160gb hard drive in my iMac is going to run out of space, after I integrated yet another music library into my iTunes folder. So I just picked up an external 300gb hard drive that’s awfully darn quiet: the LaCie 300GB d2. I’m in the process of moving all the music onto it, so I can let iTunes store and play music there instead of my desktop’s internal drive.

Yes, it’s embarrassing that I have more than 28,000 songs in the library. It’s more embarrassing that I have two backups of it, “just in case.”

Anyway, since Apple is moving away from the chipset employed in my computer, I imagine that I’ll have to replace the desktop computer in another 2 years or so. For the moment, though, it’s a nice setup. I promise to scan and post more embarrassing pictures, and to keep accumulating music files.