Jonathan asks us who our Law and Order dream team would be.

Hmmmmm.

This is a toughie for me mainly because I quit watching a while back, so my choices are bound to seem dated. I stopped watching because if I had to listen to the phrase "Ripped From the Headlines!!!!" one more time I was going to gag. It was one thing for the writers to use real cases as an inspiration for their plotlines and to examine them from that angle, but it was another thing entirely to advertise it. It was like going from subtle tap on the head that asked us, politely, to pay attention, to being knocked over with a sledgehammer. Highly annoying. One of my all-time favorite Law and Order episodes was the one where they fictionalized the Tawana Brawley incident. Richard Brooks' assistant AD Paul Robinette was stuck between the proverbial rock of being a black man and the hard place of defending the law. It was a brilliant performance and one that sticks out clearly in my mind, all these years later. Even thought the writers were fictionalizing a real-life case, they did it with class and grace and no viewpoint was left untended. But at no point did they advertise this episode as "Ripped From the Headlines!" It was what it was, and it was brilliant.

The urge to make a Law and Order franchise struck down the integrity of this show, in my humble opinion. That's why I stopped watching. Bringing on a Baywatch babe only sealed the deal for me.

That said, however, here's my dream team.

The law side:

Chris Noth (with Benjamin Bratt a close second)

Jerry Orbach

S. Epatha Merkerson

The order side:

Steven Hill (Dianne Wiest or Fred Thompson? Ha! I think not!)

Michael Moriarty (Sam Waterson is great. Don't get me wrong. I just get the feeling if I ever had to be around McCoy on the show, I'd be showered in spittle every time he decided to get righteous. Bleh.)

Jill Hennessy (With Richard Brooks a very close second. A very close second. In fact, I'd love to see them bring him back and put him in the Waterson/Moriarty slot. Claire's dead. (or so they say! I never saw a body!) I can't say the same for her.)

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Well, not so much me lecturing you on anything, but rather Fausta attended a lecture given by Professor Viet Dinh, who helped to draft the Patriot Act. I've heard mention that Professor Dinh is on the short list for potential Supreme Court nominees.

Fausta's reporting is well worth a read.

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I saw this one yesterday, but was too gobsmacked to comment on it.

Fortunately Michele saved me from my angst and said it all perfectly.

Whichever eedjit came up with this harebrained scheme deserves to be struck down by a Wagnerian lightning bolt.

But I'm pretty damn sure Elmer wouldn't weep over his/her remains.

Posted by: Kathy at 11:29 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Which Family Guy character are you?

"I say! Fetch me some clean linen to throw on before I call child services!"

{Hat tip: Doug at Bogus Gold}

Posted by: Kathy at 01:26 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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.... "You can bend over and kiss my lily white, Kappa Alpha Theta ass," is what I have to say to the Crack Young Staff of "The Hatemonger's Quarterly."

Your generalizations have dumped you neck-deep into the soup this time, Chip.

Posted by: Kathy at 01:04 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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Blaque Jacques has actually done something right for a change.

I feel a case of the vapors coming on.

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Peggy Noonan on Blogging in today's Opinion Journal. {registration required}

{...}When you hear name-calling like what we've been hearing from the elite media this week, you know someone must be doing something right. The hysterical edge makes you wonder if writers for newspapers and magazines and professors in J-schools don't have a serious case of freedom envy.

The bloggers have that freedom. They have the still pent-up energy of a liberated citizenry, too. The MSM doesn't. It has lost its old monopoly on information. It is angry.

But MSM criticism of the blogosphere misses the point, or rather points.

Blogging changes how business is done in American journalism. The MSM isn't over. It just can no longer pose as if it is The Guardian of Established Truth. The MSM is just another player now. A big one, but a player. {...}

Amen!

The information wants to be free. We're simply allowing for it.

Read also: Robbo.

{...}I'm glad she didn't focus exclusively on those bloggers going toe to toe with the MSM in the fields of news and politics, but also mentioned folks like Lileks and Terry Teachout. For every INDCent Bill or Dr. Rusty out there scalping Dan Rather or posting Jihadi snuff films, there's also someone blogging about their favorite music, changing the baby's diapers or when they ought to plant the spring bulbs. This is one of the major beauties of writing in the 'Sphere as opposed to the MSM. Not only do I not have to ask an editor if I can run another Eason Jordan story, I also don't have to ask if I can post about the daily harassment I suffer at the hands of my cat who, as soon as I get home, starts demanding loudly that I sit down in the library so he can jump into my lap.

Likewise, and equally importantly, readers of blogs aren't confined by the MSM's gatekeeping. If someone stumbles across our site, likes my cat-blogging for instance and is sufficiently impressed with the quality of our writing, why, they're free to come back any time. And to request more of the same. (We're always open to suggestions. That's what the TastyBits (TM) Mail Sack is all about.)

That, by the way, is why we Llamas like to think we have something pretty special going on around here. We get into the political debate now and again, but we also opine about whatever else crosses our crazed minds. As Steve-O likes to say, we cover the waterfront, gathering rats and toasting them on sticks so you don't have to. {...}

Interests vary from person to person. When you remove the control that says only this should be interesting, everyone wins. I'll say it again: the information wants to be free. If I can do someone a service by pointing them to an article that interests them, I will have served my purpose as a blogger. From there on in, no matter what I say about it, it's up to you, my devoted Cake Eater Reader, to, in the words of the Oracle, make up your own damn minds.

I, for one, think you're capable of it.

Posted by: Kathy at 10:22 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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Poor Howie Kurtz.

Subjected to keeping track of what the blogosphere is saying for Judy Woodruff.
(scroll down on the transcript: about a third of the way)

A bona fide watchdog of a journalist watching the blogs watch journalists. And on and on. And this looks like it's going to be a daily Inside Politics feature, too.

It's like one big multimedia circle jerk.

Dear Howie,

Please end your association with CNN at once. The career you save might be your own. At the very least tell Judy to read the blogs on her own. You're a bit above this sort of thing.

Thanks!

Kathy Nelson
Cake Eater Chronicles

Posted by: Kathy at 10:48 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Bastards.

Complete, utter and incredibly greedy bastards.

When these people do get their acts together and there's a season in the offing, I would ask my fellow hockey fans to make them pay for their behavior. Don't buy your season tickets. Don't pay gobs of money to go to a game. Don't watch them on TV and deprive them of ratings-driven payola.

Both sides have shown they're all about the money---so much so that they're willing to completely abdicate their livelihoods to make a point about salary caps. Let's show them we're all about the hockey. They will undoubtedly get their acts together sometime before the next season is to begin. Sometime in late September/early October 2005 would be my bet. One season they could take. Two? I don't think so. Major League Baseball learned its lesson after its players strike: don't piss off the fans as they pay for all this largesse. Can we teach the NHL and its players the same thing? Yep. It could be even more satisfying than ignoring MLB, if you ask me, given the attendance levels at games, which would whoop MLB game attendance each and every time. Which says nothing of the ratings. Particularly during the playoffs. But attendance is the key, because I know the Wild has a sweetheart deal with the Xcel Energy Center and derives almost half of their revenue from ticket sales. How many other teams are the same, I wonder. Cut that off and you've got them.

I can go another year without hockey. What say you?

UPDATE Courtesy o' Michele: FREE STANLEY!

This is a great idea. The cup should be awarded this year---NHL or no NHL. Lord Stanley did hockey a great service by presenting the sport with this cup. And he never played hockey!. He was, however, a hockey parent. It was because of his sons' love of the sport that he commissioned the cup to present to the best amateur team in Canada. It was never meant to be held hostage by those greedy bastards in the NHL. The NHL doesn't deserve it.

FREE LORD STANLEY'S CUP!

Posted by: Kathy at 12:41 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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So, I had to call the cops this morning.

This really isn't my favorite thing to do, but living on a busy street, where accidents have been known to happen, my fingers have done the walking more than a few times. I learned this morning that I can dial '911" without looking at the phone keypad. Woohoo for me, eh?

Fortunately, there hasn't been an accident, but rather some truck driver has decided to park his eighteen wheeler/semi/tractor trailer out on the main drag we live on. His engine is still running and he walked away from it.

Now, I don't know about you, but this makes me nervous. We live in a residential neighborhood. A residential neighborhood with a lot of traffic, I'll grant you, but eighteen wheelers generally do not use the streets around here as a truck stop. Which I'm pretty sure is what this guy is doing. I saw him get out of the truck and walk toward our little downtown area a little over a half hour ago and he hasn't returned.

Neither have the cops shown up. Which is irking me.

If I haven't explained the weirdness of our locality before, let me explain. We live in Cake Eater Land. Directly across the street, however, is the Minneapolis Province of the People's Republic of Minnesota. The boundary line between the two cities, apparently, is the divider line in the middle of the street. I call 911 and I am routed directly to Cake Eater City's Emergency Response Line. They listen to my schpiel and when they find out the truck is on the east side of the street, they immediately transfer me to Minneapolis. Where I have to repeat my story to a woman who, surprisingly, takes me more seriously than the Cake Eater City woman did, and promises to send a car out. (The Cake Eater City chick seemed disappointed when I told her there wasn't an accident involved.)

Forty-five minutes later....no cops.

And great, the truck just drove off. Fantastic.

This is the second time this guy has done this. It's the same rig. The first time was a week or two ago. The guy just parked his rig, left it running, and walked away. He's not delivering anything. He's just parking there for whatever reason. I'm high-strung, I know, but this makes me nervous. While I'm sure it's probably nothing, that the guy just wanted to get some breakfast or something, even if it's harmless, I don't want eighteen wheelers parking across the street from my house! They're stinky and they're loud. Besides, it's tacky as all get out.

The Cake Eater neighborhood has undergone a tremendous renovation since we moved here. A couple of blocks away, in the little suburban downtown area, there used to be a gas station and a little tobacco shop on one of the four main corners. They bulldozed these buildings and put in a little mini-mall/office building and ever since construction was completed, traffic has gone through the roof. It's jampacked every day during rush hour and during lunch. Backups galore. And that's when it's not snowing. It used to be quiet around here in the evenings. You could count on it. But no longer. It's noisy all day long and doesn't quiet down until well after ten p.m. Add to this the problem we have with speeders, because once they get through the nightmare that is the little downtown area, they jam on the gas and blow through this residential neighborhood at anywhere between forty and fifty miles per hour. Ever since that damn mini mall went up, well, traffic has become a bitch---including a huge increase in truck traffic---and because of our lovely little jurisdiction problem, there apparently isn't anything anyone can do about it, either.

I called the cops about the speeders this summer. Of course, I talked with someone over at the Cake Eater Cop Shop and he said there wasn't anything they could do about the speeders on the east side of the street. Because that's Minneapolis, and they've protested before, claiming the Cake Eater City Cops were poaching on their jurisdiction. The Cake Eater City cops, accordingly, don't bother with that side of the street. If I wanted to do something about that, he said, I had to call the Minneapolis Police Department. I also chatted with him about huge increase in truck traffic, and he said there wasn't anything he could do about that, either, because, technically speaking, the road is owned by Hennepin County and that's their jurisdiction.

AIEEEEEEEEEEE! It's turning into a nightmare. This used to be a quiet neighborhood. Now it's a throughway for commerce! While I'm a free trade kind of girl, this is annoying me. Furthermore, it seems as if I'm going to have to become one of those City Council meeting cranks if I want someone to do something about this, because, currently, no one cares.

Posted by: Kathy at 10:35 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Courtesy o' Martini Boy, there's new DVD copy protection on the loose.

Macrovision announced new technology today that it hopes will stop users from illegally copying DVD movies. The technology is called RipGuard DVD and it's going to make its way into DVDs starting with the new High Definition DVD films later this year.

The idea behind RipGuard is that it plugs the original security hole that was exposed by the DeCSS software back in 1999, which bypassed the CSS encryption program. This allowed even the average consumer to copy a complete DVD to their computer and distribute the DVD on file sharing networks.{...}

Now, this may seem like the logical choice for the Hollywood higher-ups, but it's not, particularly when there was a better encryption option out there. According to Forbes {registration required}, a gentleman by the name of Paul Kocher, who wrote part of the SSL (Secure Sockets Layer), had a better and cheaper solution to the problem. One, I daresay, which might have actually worked. For a time, anyway.

{...}What Kocher is pushing is the concept of renewable security. Any attempt to erect a one-time, rigid barrier between thieves and content, he says, is useless, including the current method pushed through by the Japanese consumer electronics companies. "With very few exceptions, all the major security systems being used by the studios today are either broken and can't be fixed, or they're not deployed widely enough to be worth hacking," says Kocher.

Under the existing Content Scrambling System, electronics makers install the exact same encryption code into nearly every DVD player. But that was broken by European hackers in 1999 and the trick disseminated widely on the Internet. Even the least sophisticated user can now download a program that easily copies protected movies.

Kocher's alternative is to allow for constant change. His system, called self-protecting digital content, places the security on the disc instead of in the player. A software "recipe" running into the millions of steps is burned onto every new movie disc. Each DVD player would contain a small chip costing only a few extra cents that would follow the recipe faithfully. If the DVD player decides the disc is secure, it will decode it and play the movie. But each film could have a different recipe. So if a pirate breaks the code on Spider-Man 2, he wouldn't necessarily be able to break the code on Elf. The studios would always be one step ahead of the thieves; at the very least it would take pirates more time to break each film. Not a big deal: Studios make most of their money from DVDs in the first three months, anyway. {...}

Well, Hollywood didn't go for that option, which actually makes sense and would provide a relatively small wall against hackers and ther P2P-using ilk. But they didn't go for it. They went for the exceedingly dumb option instead.

At some point in time Hollywood has to realize that technology isn't only good for producing the latest and greatest special effects or the newest blockbuster from Pixar. It's not like I want them to get with the program. {cough, cough} I also derive a great deal of amusement from their idiotic efforts. It would, however, be nice to not have to hear them whine anymore.

Maybe if they weren't all using Macs, they might get an idea.

Ya think?

Posted by: Kathy at 05:31 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Was just perusing the TV listings for this evening's episode of House and am suddenly edgy.

If, at any point, during this very special detox episode, Dr. House finds his way to a twelve step meeting, I will give up this show. For good. And I won't watch again.

I might have more to say about this later on tonight. I sincerely hope I don't, though.

UPDATE: Yay! Good episode, too. more...

Posted by: Kathy at 03:38 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Terry Teachout is not so much speaking ill of the dead, but rather gives an honest obituary when it comes to Arthur Miller.

Personally, the fact I went to an all-girl Catholic school saved me from much of Miller's work. We never read or presented "A Death of a Salesman" in high school because we didn't have any boys attending our school. Would have been a bit hard to cast, eh? We had enough trouble trying to find a Tevye and three suitors when we presented Fiddler on the Roof. But mainly I believe we were spared Miller not because we were a provincial school in Omaha, but rather because our English Department thought his work was overrated crap. (This is also the same English Department who made us read Macbeth instead of Romeo and Juliet because they didn't want to focus too much on Shakespeare. We spent more time on Chaucer and Beowulf in Brit Lit than we ever did on good ol' Will. Take what you will from that observation.)

So, having never been educated in the "joys" of Arthur Miller, but having heard quite a bit about him and his work, I was a bit surprised one night when I sat down and watched The Crucible. For someone who had been heralded as the playwright of our time, I was a wee bit surprised at how quickly and easily Miller pressed the "mass hysteria" button. It's his play and he was entitled to do whatever he wanted, but it seemed a cheap trick for one who was supposedly so talented. There was untouched ground in that play that could have been much more interesting and insightful, but Miller focused instead on slamming home his message about the dangers of witchhunts.

Ugh.

I came to the conclusion that the English Department at my old high school knew what they were talking about.

Posted by: Kathy at 10:22 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Bleech.

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Wellstone Syndrome has gone national.

Posted by: Kathy at 03:13 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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As a blog junkie, I read a lot of posts from day to day. I like to see how people will argue a point. The style of the debates that ensue are just as interesting to me as the debate topic itself. For me, it's not only about what Picasso painted, but how he did it, what brushes and paints did he use, etc.

If this sort of thing interests you, first go here.

Then go here for one exceedingly well-argued point of view.

This is what the blogosphere is all about. This is why I love it so.

{hat tip: The Naked Villains}

Posted by: Kathy at 02:58 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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{If bigger is your thing, click to enlarge}

I swear to God, if this yet another attempt to get me to read Penthouse Forum I will go and get the cast iron frying pan and I will smack you upside the head with it.

Posted by: Kathy at 02:32 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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Courtesy of Cake Eater Pal, J., my newest (and probably my only) reader in Basel, Switzerland, we have this New York Times op-ed about Iowa's brain drain.

Lately the Iowa Legislature has been trying to find a way to solve a basic problem: how to keep young people from leaving the state. Right now, Iowa's "brain drain" is second only to North Dakota's. The Legislature is toying with a simple idea, getting rid of state income tax for everyone under 30. This proposal was front-page news in California, where most of Iowa moved in the 1960's.

Let me translate the economics of this plan. The State Legislature proposes to offer every young tax-paying Iowan a large delivery pizza - or its cash equivalent, about $12 - every week of the year. But smart young Iowans know this is only an average figure. The more you earn, the more state income tax you save. {...}

Iowans are resolutely practical about such proposals. One state legislator, quoted in The Minneapolis Star Tribune, said: "Let's face it. Des Moines will never be Minneapolis." He might have added that Council Bluffs would never be Kansas City. Another Iowan, when asked what the state needed to keep its young people, said, "An ocean would help." This is the kind of big thinking Iowa has always been famous for.

But $600, the average yearly state income tax for Iowan 20-somethings, is not enough to undo decades of social erosion. The problems Iowa faces are the very solutions it chose two and three generations ago. The state's demographic dilemma wasn't caused by bad weather or high income taxes or the lack of a body of water larger than Rathbun Lake - an Army Corps of Engineers reservoir sometimes known as "Iowa's ocean." It was caused by the state's wholehearted, uncritical embrace of industrial agriculture, which has depopulated the countryside, destroyed the economic and social texture of small towns, and made certain that ordinary Iowans are defenseless against the pollution of factory farming.

These days, all the entry-level jobs in agriculture - the state's biggest industry - happen to be down at the local slaughterhouse, and most of those jobs were filled by the governor's incentive, a few years ago, to bring 100,000 immigrant workers into the state.

Business leaders all across Iowa have been racking their brains to think of ways to spur economic development. But nearly every idea leaves industrial agriculture intact. That means a few families living amid vast tracts of genetically modified soybeans and corn, with here and there a hog confinement site or a cattle feedlot to break the monotony. {...}

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Iowa's brain drain is all big agriculture's fault. If you're failing to follow the logic on this one because you don't come from an ag state, well, it goes something like this: family farms go belly up because of one crisis or another. Agribusiness (seed, pesticide, fertilizer companies, just to name a few) moves in, provides jobs and paychecks in a part of the country where no one else wants to live or do business because they think it's a backwater type of place where they can't get Guinness on tap. Because of Agribusiness' decision to do business in a place where, ahem, people know something about agriculture, of course it's responsible for shutting every other type of opportunity out. Hence there's a brain drain in the state. Because young graduates who did not graduate with a B.S. in AgBus go elsewhere. And it's all because of the loss of the family farm!

Pffft. more...

Posted by: Kathy at 02:09 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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...in the future, I will be in New York, attending a book launch party held in a swanky hotel ballroom. It will be somewhere Dorothy Parker and her Algonquin Round Table slurped many martinis once upon a time, when the Art Deco theme of the ballroom was considered so yesterday. I will be dressed in a sensible, yet low-cut black cocktail dress, and will be chatting with some earnest young student, who's crashed the party and who has been cheeky enough to wonder aloud at my reasoning for being in attendance.

And I will be able to tell them that I knew Rich way back when.

Posted by: Kathy at 11:43 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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I suppose that's the sort of thing that happens when you give your husband password access to your blog.

Sigh.

But, for once, I'm sighing in a good, moony grade-school girl sort of way. As In, if I had a notebook, I'd be scribbling Michael all over it right now as a sign of pure and true infatuation.

Posted by: Kathy at 09:05 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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