The governor of New Jersey injured in a car crash—rushed to hospital with a broken leg, broken ribs, cuts, chest pain. And where was he going?

Mr. Corzine was on his way to Drumthwacket, the governor’s mansion in Princeton, for a meeting between the Rutgers women’s basketball team and Don Imus, the talk-show host who was fired on Thursday for making a racist and sexist remark about the players.

I’ve written elsewhere about American Airlines’ misguided attempt to market themselves to women by creating special dumbed-down search page for the ladies. (The search box is pink! And it doesn’t have all those icky “tools”! Tools are for guys.) BUT, I’m extremely excited that American is now offering a once-a-day direct flight from Seattle to Austin. (Or from Austin to Seattle, actually, since the flights are timed for Austin commuters to get here in the morning). I would go to Austin much more if it wasn’t such a hassle (even Texas-based companies like Southwest and Continental make you stop in Dallas or Houston, and don’t even get me started on Delta and United), so this is a really exciting development. Seattle, Austin, you’ve arrived.

There’s a little stir up in Vancouver right now over an artwork by Chinese artist Huang Yong Ping at Vancouver Art Gallery. The piece is a container shaped like a turtle’s shell. In it are tarantulas, scorpions, crickets, millipedes, and lizards. The environment is bare, and the intervention nil. The animals are fed, but otherwise left to their own devices in their little microcosm. It’s called Theater of the World (1993).

This is far from the first time an animal has been seen in an art gallery. Just recently, the Vancouver Art Gallery itself showed Brian Jungen’s closed-off room containing birds resting on products from IKEA. Probably the most famous example is from 1974, when German artist Joseph Beuys sat in a gallery for three days with a coyote. Theater of the World is not Huang’s only piece with a live animal; another one involves a lone tarantula.

There’s something necessarily unsettling about animals in a gallery or a museum. They’re serving at the pleasure of humans. But the artists who use this device purposefully invoke its taboos.

I couldn’t find an image of Huang’s Theater of the World on the Vancouver Art Gallery’s web site, but here’s what the piece looked like when it was installed previously at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, which organized the traveling Huang retrospective:

In Vancouver, The Globe and Mail reports that animal activists have complained about Theater of the World on principle. But to me their view sounds like a prognostication based more on the bloodshed and devastation happening in the human world, rather than an understanding of the artist’s intent or the actual conditions in the gallery.

“It’s pretty clear that the intention is that the observer is intended to witness potential conflict between the animals, which frankly I think is kind of sick,” Mr. Fricker [of the Humane Society] said.

(The Globe and Mail also calls Vancouver “an animal-loving city”—is the implication that residents of other cities are coldhearted bastards?)

I haven’t seen the piece yet. To test Fricker’s hypothesis that it is nothing but a voyeuristic bloodbath, I called the Walker to find out exactly what happened inside the cage in Minneapolis. Did the animals kill each other? Was it like a Shakespeare play in the end, with no one left standing? When an animal was killed, was it removed for reasons of decorum or left as a tough testament to the authenticity of the artificial ecosystem? Did people torch the place? If the microcosm was a symbol for the world, which animal came closest to behaving like the United States?

Doryun Chong helped to organize the show at the Walker and is curating the international tour. (The 40-work show closes in Vancouver Sept. 16 and goes after that to Beijing.) He admitted that while the show has many works, Theater of the World was transfixing for viewers. “It’s kind of a showstopper,” he said. “You would see people going around the exhibition and they would just stop and congregate around it. And we had people coming back to see the exhibition because they were interested in seeing what was going on in Theater of the World.”

Hearing about Chong’s experience with the piece is fascinating. He learned that crickets are very resourceful—some mysteriously escaped from the piece, probably when the snakes were being removed to be fed or when water was refilled. He learned that hissing cockroaches and African millipedes are antisocial. They congregated in their own corners and hardly moved. Scorpions were the Americans of the bunch. They went after tarantulas. Most of the aggression was limited to the early part of the exhibition, when the animals were acclimating.

Chong saw a scorpion molting, its exoskeleton splitting open. It didn’t survive the process.

When the animals got killed or died, they were left alone, not removed. Some disappeared, having been eaten. Some died naturally, “and I couldn’t exactly tell what happened,” Chong said. “There were a lot of things that happened in there that I couldn’t understand how it happened.”

Chong said the fights were fascinating, but also a little scary. It sounded like the same could be said of the entire installation, of not knowing what would happen, of the mixture of artificiality and human control with alien animal instincts and natural orders.

The Walker got a complaint on its blog, and that blog commenter contacted the Humane Society and Animal Control shortly before the show closed; representatives from those organizations visited the show and approved the conditions. “On the one hand, I can understand the outrage, but human interventions are always interrupting ecological systems, and always creating new ecological balances, disruptions, and microcosms. We put animals to human use all the time,” Chong said.

Before the show began, curators met with Bruce, the owner of the local exotic pet store, in order to procure the animals. The artist based his list of animals on an ancient recipe from southern China for a magical potion—created by putting five venomous creatures (centipede, snake, scorpion, toad, and lizard) into a pot and leaving them there for a year. Huang also wanted locusts and spiders; he ended up with crickets and tarantulas.

The museum asked Bruce to be on-call constantly during the exhibition and to check in twice a week. For his part, he told the museum that he’d only feel comfortable providing animals if they all came from the same ecological region so that they weren’t entirely alien to one another. All the animals at the Walker came from Africa.

On the Walker’s blog (unfortunately, the Vancouver Art Gallery does not have a blog), Bruce issued a call for people to resist anthropomorphizing so much: “It gives people who go there and look at [Huang’s work] with an open mind the realization that, yes, they are predator and prey and they can cohabitate together—the lion sleeping with the lamb. Most animals don’t kill for the sheer pleasure of killing. It’s either defense or obtaining prey.”

Theater of the World just opened a week ago in Vancouver. The Vancouver Province reported Sunday that the museum was missing two toads. I called the museum, and spokesman Andrew Riley was cagey as hell (pun intended), probably tired of dealing with dim accusations regarding animal rights but coming off as defensive. He couldn’t say what was going on with any of the animals. For that I’d need to speak with chief curator Daina Augaitis. I waited all day. Unfortunately, she never called. At the very least, I can’t wait to hear more, and to see the show. Huang is one of the most radical artists to come out of China in recent years, and the Vancouver Art Gallery was smart to take the show.

Paul Collins, novelist, memoirist, lives in Portland: “I was signing on and saw it on the Gmail ticker, and I just sat there stunned for a minute, because it was Kurt Vonnegut who single-handedly made me want to become a writer in the first place. I’ve always been glad that I was later able to tell him this in person. But to your question: yes, I was staring at my computer. This is how I hear of most deaths. In fact, I don’t think I’d even be convinced of my own unless I got an e-mail about it.”

John Hodgman, writer, emcee, TV guy: “I was at Green-Wood cemetery in Brooklyn. I was doing a little cameo in the Flight of the Conchords show (if you do not know their work, I hope you will look into it). I felt very sad, obviously, but he leaves behind such a large and good body of work—not forgetting, of course, his cameo in Back to School—that I felt more of a kind of melancholy appreciation than shocked grief.”

Frances McCue, poet, essayist, lives in Seattle: “Well, I’ve just gotten in from my stepdad’s funeral on Cape Cod. It was in the same town where Vonnegut had lived for many years, the same town where I’d lived, as a child growing up with my grandparents. I remember that reading Slaughterhouse Five, my recollections of that town—a place where a drunk cop directed traffic and old barns turned into clothing stores—became smeared into one illusion. I swear that I can see him walking into the newsstand and I’m about seven years old, eating an ice cream on the bench outside. Hearing that he died, just this morning after coming back from that place, was really jarring. I loved how Vonegut never said the cliched thing, the ordinary thing—and yet he was so full of common sense. He reminded me of Jim Harrison.”

Bruce Bawer, political and cultural critic, lives in Norway: “I was at my computer, doing my daily round of newspaper websites and blogs. I saw the headline at the New York Times website, and immediately read Dinitia Smith’s article. Her line about how in the 1960s and ’70s “Dog-eared paperback copies of his books could be found in the back pockets of blue jeans and in dorm rooms on campuses throughout the United States” choked me up a bit, for mine was one of those dorm rooms. During my freshman year of college (1974-5) I devoured all of Vonnegut’s then seven novels, plus the collection Welcome to the Monkey House, and for months thereafter everything I wrote sounded like Vonnegut. Though his later books left me cold, and though in recent years I was reminded of his existence mainly by his occasional, cringe-worthy political comments, I still warmly recall the enthusiasm with which I gobbled up those early books in my now even more distant-seeming youth.”

Adrianne Harun, fiction writer, lives in Port Townsend: “Feelings? Shoot. When I was a little kid, we had those massive boxes of crayolas with a zillion colors and that lovely, absolutely ineffective sharpener in the side of the box. As I’ve grown older, I’ve seen a lot less variety of color in my life, and as these old guys like Vonnegut go, it’s as if another row has been extinguished. Vonnegut was one of those writers who seemed as if he’d always been here as a writer—and always would be. It’s always something of a shock to realize that one is gone—and then to realize too all over again the impact of the work left behind.”

John Olson, poet, lives in Seattle: “I had just gone to bed and turned the radio on to 1090 am to listen to Mike Malloy. I felt a jolt, a feeling that one of our last truly wise men was gone, and that the surrounding landscape of venal cowards and rapacious imbeciles had one less critic around to point out their foibles. Then I reminded myself that Vonnegut was 84 years old, a heavy smoker who wanted to sue the tobacco companies for not killing him sooner, and that his time was coming; that there’s a special providence in the fall of a Vonnegut. If it be now, it is not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come. Mortality is a bitch. The readiness is all.”

Paul Constant, Stranger critic, fiction writer, bookstore employee: “I was at work, at the bookstore, and so it was a good place to find out, I think. Everyone else seemed pretty sad about it, too. I feel very sad about it—he was the first adult author I’d ever read who was, you know, good. I didn’t want to Slog about it because I knew that everyone would either write ‘God bless you, Mr. Vonnegut’ or ‘So it goes.’ (‘So it goes’ is winning by a landslide, according to Google Blog Search.)”

The earlier responses today—from Jonathan Safran Foer, Miranda July, Deborah Jacobs, and lots of others—are here. I have been unable to think about anything else today.

I agree with Eli when it comes to writing about HIV/AIDS:

Writing about gay men’s health is one of the most repetitive and least rewarding types of writing I do. It’s repetitive because the fundamental dynamics affecting gay men’s health have not changed since long before I ever started in on the subject. And it’s unrewarding for the same reason: No matter what anyone writes, little seems to change.

Writing about HIV/AIDS is like banging your head against a brick wall—you get bloodied, the wall gets wet. And what’s left to say at this point? We need single-payer, national health insurance in the United States now; gay men need to grow the fuck up and stop whining (lesbians don’t run around claiming that homophobia drives them to use meth); African-American churches and communities have to choose between their hatred of homosexuality and the lives African-American women; if you’re HIV-negative condoms are a fact of life until you’re in a stable relationship with someone who is also HIV-negative (and trustworthy); it’s immoral—very wrong, super bad, really evil—to knowingly, maliciously, carelessly expose someone to HIV. End of discussion.

But for years HIV prevention organizations refused to tell gay men anything they didn’t want to hear—you couldn’t even get them to say that it was wrong to knowingly expose someone to HIV, or that they might not want to smoke crystal, or that it was possible to have too much sex, or that lesbians can’t get married either and you don’t see them jumping into slings at Club Z.

When you wrote about how, you know, fucked up it was that HIV prevention organizations seemed so unconcerned with actually preventing HIV infections—which required telling some gay men what they didn’t want to hear—people tended to yell at you, the writer, for being the bearer of bad news, the hanger-outer of dirty laundry, etc. Crystal-abusing, sexually-out-of-control gay men were the victims! We must attack the root causes—the homophobia, the culture, the church. Blah blah blah. We can’t talk about what we’re doing, or not doing, or our personal responsibility as gay men—to ourselves, to each other.

Eventually I stopped writing about HIV/AIDS. I figured that I had my say, made my points, and I was done. Oh, I have lots of friends with the disease, so I still thrill to every bit of progress made against the damn virus. I’m still hopeful that one day there will be a vaccine or a cure. And I’m still worried about what might happen when that vaccine or cure arrives (it can never be 1978 again, guys). And, of course, I still worry that I might one day contract the virus myself. So I’m only done writing about HIV/AIDS, not worrying about it.

As I long ago wrote off the efforts of our local HIV-prevention orgs (particularly the utterly useless Gay City, which limps along now in the form of a coffee shop), I stopped paying attention to the messages they pump out. The last time I looked at anything Lifelong AIDS Alliance’s prevention squad put out it was an absolutely idiotic campaign that made crystal meth addiction look somehow heroic, like a blow you could strike—or snort, smoke, or booty-bump—for gay rights.

So I was shocked when I stopped in Purr last night—a gay bar across the street from our offices—and found an actual HIV prevention put out by an actual HIV prevention organization. Here’s the front of the card…

Here’s the back…

The fortune cookie thing is a bit… odd. But the messages on the back—particularly the messages about sero-sorting and reducing your number of partners—are kick-ass, honest-to-God HIV prevention messages. Again, put out there by an HIV prevention organization. How long has this been going on?

When I suggest sero-sorting in my “Savage Love”—a.k.a. positive-positive and negative-negative partners—I get a lot of angry letters. Sero-sorting is a blunt instrument and it’s not always reliable, as not all positive men know that they’re positive. But it’s also been shown to be very effective. No HIV org came up with sero-sorting; gay men in SF and other cities started sero-sorting all on their own. It’s controversial because you can’t back sero-sorting without backing suggesting that HIV-negative men can or should “discriminate” against HIV-positive men. (Oddly no one objects when poz men discriminate against negative men; some negative men are willing to assume the risk of being with a poz partner; poz sero-sorters discriminate against these neg men.) Nice to see Lifelong backing sero-sorting equally, for positives and negatives. That’s brave.

Also praiseworthy is the advice to “reduce your number of sex partners.” For too long HIV prevention orgs told gay men that it didn’t matter how many men they had sex with, it only mattered how they had sex. But the more people you fuck—the more random, anonymous, or one-night hook-ups you have—the greater your risk of exposure. Period. Condoms break, condoms fall off, assholes that don’t care about you—the pool you’re drawing partners from if you’re having tons of sex (a pool that also has higher rates of HIV-infection to begin with)—tend to be careless about condoms. Some are just evil and remove condoms mid-fuck. So the more partners, the higher your risk of exposure—gay men need to be told that, again and again.

Discriminate against poz or neg partners; have fewer sex partners. These used to be controversial things to say. I know because I caused a lot of controversy when i said them. Hell, sometimes I still get shit for saying them. I’m pleased to see Lifelong saying them. Finally.

Welcome to our new video series, Rock ‘N’ Roll Olympics! In these videos we take “rock stars” that you may or may not have heard of and make ‘em do silly sports in an epic battle of the mind and spirit. Then we declare an arbitrary winner (in the endgame, there is no real winner).

Enjoy our first episode featuring Leslie & the Lys vs. Scream Club!

The next episode is coming soon! Stay Tuned!

From The King and The Beast (of HUMP! infamy):

EDITOR: The Happy Lucky Place [home of The King and The Beast] has been harassed by Seattle police for almost a year and a half. Is there no one who will speak out for us? Is there no one to protect us?

It all started on new years day 2006. We found a crack head camped out in our basement. We asked him to leave. He refused. The police became involved. When they first arrived they began yelling at us. They told us they didn’t Like coming to this house. They apparently were upset about something that happen here 2 years before we moved in. They did remove the crack head, but they “Warned Us” (more like threatened) that if they ever had to come back to the house, They would “Make our Lives Miserable.”

The second time they came to our house we were having a small party in our back yard. They police informed us that we were being “too loud”. mind you, we could still hear the I-5 freeway next to us just fine. So I guess it was the level of the “noise” that was the problem, but the type of noise, which in this case was MUSIC. I guess the cops don’t like MUSIC. The police officer of course could do NOTHING, Because we weren’t violating any laws, and we never do. But that doesn’t stop them from coming over and yelling at us.

Since then, the police make regular drive by at the HLP. Scanning with there search lights. They come over and poke through our garbage. Look into our cars with flashlights. park in front of house and walk around our yard, when ever they have some free time.

On April 11, 2007, a street punk (or “ave-rat” as the are called) going by the name of “chase” trespassed into our house. He has been a problem before and told to stay way unless there was a party. He snuck into the house when everyone was asleep. Went into Ken “the King“‘s room (who wasn’t home) and took King’s paint ball gun and started firing at cars from the bedroom window. He took off soon afterwards with the gun.
Police burst into the house that day with out a warrant. Woke up the sleeping residents, interrogated them while they were still in there underwear. they then proceeded to “toss” the entire house.

For those of you unfamiliar with the word “toss”, It is a police term for “search”. But, when they “toss” they don’t just search the house, they empty all the draw throw the clothes and personal items all over the room, flip over beds, cut into mattresses, smash glass items. One of their favorites rummaging through women’s underwear. In addition to all of that, they opened up sealed boxes (including funeral ashes), attempted to open the safe, broke into locked briefcases, broke into roommates rooms who weren’t home, and searched through all the personal files on our computers. Please explain this to me. If you are looking for a “paint ball gun” why do you need to look at computer files?

We explained to the police about the trespassing and gave a description of “chase”. They refused to make a trespassing or burglary report. They then went next door to where our land lord was working and told him that he “HAD to evict us immediately or they would press charges against him”.

We have done nothing wrong. We have committed no Crime. Our rights and liberties are in no Way protected by the Seattle police. If a crime is committed against us we have no protection. Most of the crimes committed against us are committed by the Seattle police department.

On Friday May 4, we will be holding a protest against the Seattle police department at the HLP (414 NE 50th St.). The rally starts at 3pm and ends at 9:30pm. If you come please bring a sign and noise maker to show your support. Bring a camera and document the police response. We need all the news and media coverage we can get, so please inform your favorite paper or TV station. Please do not bring drugs and alcohol as the police will be there; we don’t need to give them any excuses. This is a peaceful protest. There will be LOTS OF MUSIC.

Happy Lucky Place: 414 NE 50th ST

Here’s what you’ll find today in Line Out:

Sweet Water Reunion: Dreams do come true.

Rock & Roll Olympics: Episode One!

The Score: Additions to this week’s column.

Portland vs. Seattle: Modest Mouse doesn’t know the difference.

Making Friends: The Cave Singers haven’t signed to Matador, but Matador sure does think they’re swell.

Roof!: The memorable Moondoggies.

Banging the Band: Which band do you wanna have sex with?

Guitar Geek Out: Which stringed baby is your favorite and why?

Missing Mustaches: Muchtache rock without the mustaches? We Wrote the Book on Connectors say yes.

Kurt Vonnegut, the Doors: The Doors, Kurt Vonnegut.

Have You Tried Wilco?: Eric Grandy needs to chill out.

And now, at the request of Charles Mudede (who is currently singing Gwen Stefani’s “Holla Back Girl”), a picture of a baby baboon:

Except, perhaps, that today is the 45th anniversary of the death of Sir Mokshagundam Visvesvaraya.

First: Some photographs, sent by a friend in Calcutta, India. As I scrolled past this one and this one and this one…

… I thought “yeah, yeah, Hindu swastikas, everyone knows about those.” But then, for the punch line, he included this one, which actually surprised me.

Second: This, sent by a friend in Bloomington, Indiana. Its pleasures can only be experienced, not explained:

Today’s morning headlines announced the legislature passed a law making it illegal to talk on your cell phone while driving.

This afternoon, the Senate is hearing a companion bill that already passed the House 73-23, outlawing texting while driving.

Texting while driving? I can’t believe anyone has ever done that. But ECB tells me I’m an old fogey and people do it all the time. Hmmm.

I do know that ECB has texted me while biking!! Legislators?

Wonk extraordinaire Clark Williams-Derry has crunched the numbers on last month’s viaduct vote. I can’t really explain it, so instead of pretending to do math, I’m going to cut and paste Clark’s post and send you over to Sightline.

Unfortunately, the King County recorded the votes, there’s no way to tell exactly how many people voted in any particular combination (yes-yes, no-no, yes-no, blank-blank, and so forth). The best I could do was to figure out the maximum and minumum number of people in each precinct who could have voted in any particular combination. Here’s what I learned:

* At most 24 percent of the electorate — and possibly as low as 0 percent — voted “yes” on both measures.
* Somewhere between 21 percent and 51 percent of the electorate voted “no” to both options.
*At most 4,624 voters, or 3 percent of the electorate, followed the Municipal League’s advice, and handed in blank ballots.
* Opposition to the tunnel was pretty close to universal: out of 984 precincts across the city, only 16 precincts reported a majority in favor of the tunnel. (Ouch.)
* About 30 percent of the precincts voted in favor of the elevated.

Now, as I was playing with the numbers, I noticed something kinda neat — if you average the minimum and the maximum in each vote category, you come pretty darn close to the total votes cast for each option. And that suggests that the average of the minimum and maximum gives a pretty good approximation for how people actually voted. The score:

* No to both: 36%
* No to the tunnel, yes to the elevated: 31%
* No to the elevated, yes to the tunnel: 16%
* Yes to both: 12%

(The remainder left at least one ballot blank — e.g., “yes” to the tunnel, abstained on the elevated.)

Read more sharp analysis here.

Stranger Music Editor Jonathan Zwickel slipped me the new Bright Eyes album, and I was listening to it while blogging when something caused my homo ears to perk up. In the song “Hot Knives,” indie heartthrob Conor Oberst sings:

Give me black lights

Give me hot nights

On a dance floor

No one tells time

Yeah I’ve made love

Yeah I’ve been fucked

So what?

One more sign that black lights, hot nights on the dance floor, and butt sex are not just for the gays anymore.

Last summer, I was pretty freaked out about the state pharmacy board.

What a difference a few new board members make: Good news today.

Sen. Margarita Prentice is holding an executive session in her Senate Ways and Means Committee on her Sonics bill tomorrow morning in Olympia, 8:30am.

To help subsidize the Sonics’ $500 million stadium proposal (new digs in Renton), Sen. Prentice’s plan would shift expiring Qwest/Safco taxes (a hotel/motel tax, an admissions tax, a car rental tax, a restaurant tax) and extend them to float owner Clay Bennett’s plan.

The Seattle Times reported yesterday that another portion of the tax—the sales tax, was taken out of the package.

It’s not clear how’d they’d make up for that money, though.

Apparently, Sen. Prentice has the votes on her Committee and in the Senate to send the bill over to the House. The word from Speaker Frank Chopp is that he will not move the bill.

If, weirdly, something actually does come out of the legislature this session, it will ultimately be up to the King County Council, who have pledged that they will not okay a subsidy without sending the question to the voters.

Senate Bill 1811—the legislation that pushes back for two years a requirement that all bars over a certain occupancy and size install costly sprinkler systems—passed the Senate last night and is moving on to the House, where it already passed in a different form. (A business and occupation tax credit for businesses that install the systems was cut from the Senate version.) Gov. Gregoire is expected to sign the bill.

If you’ve been following the strange saga of Pastor Ken Hutcherson’s travels abroad as a “Special Envoy” for the White House, you’ll remember that when this whole thing started, Hutcherson promised to produce a video tape that would prove the White House had given him the “Special Envoy” status he was claiming.

That was more than three weeks ago.

Since then, the White House has repeatedly denied that it gave Hutcherson any titles, “Special Envoy” or otherwise, in advance of his trip to Latvia.

There have been numerous accounts, however, of Hutcherson suggesting or outright stating that he was representing the White House as he lobbied against efforts to promote gay rights in Latvia. A local lawyer, Dave Coffman, has suggested that these claims by Hutcherson could have violated federal laws against posing as an official U.S. representative while abroad. Coffman filed a complaint with the FBI in late March, and said he received a follow-up call from the bureau on April 2. (The FBI will not comment on investigations unless charges are brought.)

Hutcherson, for his part, has maintained that he did indeed have support from the White House for his trip, and he has bridled at being called, in his words, “a liar.” As a German press agency reported in late March:

White House officials contacted by Deutsche Presse-Agentur denied that Hutcherson had any link with [the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives].

Hutcherson “was not appointed ‘special envoy’ by [the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives],” said White House spokeswoman Alyssa McClenning.

He has no official status or links with the body which would legitimately allow him to claim to represent the White House on a foreign visit, she added.

Hutcherson responded angrily to the comment, saying that he “did not appreciate being called a flat liar” and that the White House press office were unaware of his role.

Because Hutcherson himself set up the viewing of this alleged video as the proof that his version of events is true, I’ve been trying for weeks to get a look at the tape. I’m not the only one.

Hutcherson has been a hard man to get in touch with. However, I finally managed to reach him on his cell phone yesterday.

When we spoke, Hutcherson reversed course and said he had the video, but would not be showing it to me.

“Oh yeah, I have it,” he told me. But, he added: “My relationship with the White House is much more important than my relationship with you.”

Hutcherson said he believes that if he produces the video, it will be used to embarrass the White House.

“I’m not going to give you information so you can go and attack the White House,” he told me. “Either way you win.”

If he doesn’t show the video, he remains vulnerable to charges that it doesn’t exist and that he was exaggerating or outright fabricating his “Special Envoy” status. If he does produce it, he risks further eroding his relationship with the White House.

Hutcherson told me that he believes the director of the White House Office of Faith Based and Community Initiatives recently put out a statement supporting Hutcherson’s version of events. I can find no evidence of this, and it seems unlikely that such a statement would have been missed by the reporters who are interested in this story. A phone call (today) and an email (yesterday) to the Office of Faith Based and Community Initiatives requesting clarification on this point have not been returned.

That’s fine with Hutcherson.

“You tell the White House, if they’re not going to say anymore, that’s fine,” Hutcherson told me.

Hutcherson seems to hope this story will stop here, with him claiming the White House version of events is wrong and the White House declining to comment further.

Perhaps it will. Or perhaps he’ll be willing to show his alleged tape to a reporter for a paper that he isn’t so upset with.

Hutcherson certainly sounded fed up with The Stranger in our conversation yesterday, which was a dramatic change of tone. After calling me his “brother” in phone and email messages over the past weeks, he angrily told me yesterday not to call him anymore, said The Stranger had “attacked” him, and said he would be happy to show his video in a court fight against The Stranger—which I interpreted as a thinly-veiled threat of legal action against the paper.

I told him I was simply trying to follow up on a test he himself had set up: The alleged video.

“Brother, I’m not giving you nothing,” Hutcherson said to me. “Don’t call me. Bye.” And then he hung up.

This is the Chris Crocker video features his grandmother, mentioned in the “Your Daily Chris Crocker” comments thread yesterday.

Gawker has the memo from Les Moonves himself.

There’s a flattering story in today’s P-I about local blogs and how Slog leads the pack.

Sure, it was built on the success of Seattle’s popular alternative weekly, but Slog, chatty little sister to The Stranger, stands on its own as one of the most popular blogs in the city, with 3,000 RSS subscribers and 725,000 page views in March alone. Thirty-five regular contributors cover political scandals, nuggets of neighborhood silliness and what went down on “The Colbert Report” last night in the snarky, racy tone that has made parents steer tykes away from The Stranger’s newsstands since 1991. Always good for a smirk, the two-year-old Slog picked up street cred among local news outlets with its insider coverage of last year’s Capitol Hill massacre. The diversity of topics and seemingly incessant posting—five per hour is not unheard of—gets readers checking back.

I gave the reporter our readership numbers and hoped to get a peek at the same stats from other local blogs in return (finally! a hard indicator of how we’re doing versus our peers), but Slog’s were the only numbers that made it into the piece.

Slog’s birth and healthy adolescence resulted from relentless efforts by dozens of brave and prolific writers. Self-congratulation is frowned upon here (thank Savage and his Catholic upbringing), but dammit, I’m proud of us.

And of course, a blog with no readers is pretty much impotent—it’s you all that have made this blog such a success. Thank you for reading, for adding your comments, and for tolerating the disgusting stuff, the softcore porn, the petty whining, the narcissism, and that Donnie Davies period. We’re grateful for every one of you (except Shoshana).

From the New York Post:

One of them was “slightly pretty,” so the freelance film director decided to say hi.
Next thing he knew, he was encircled, beaten and knifed in the gut right there on a Greenwich Village sidewalk - by seven bloodthirsty young lesbians.

“The girls started coming out of nowhere,” Dwayne Buckle told a Manhattan jury yesterday, describing the bizarre beat-down he suffered last summer, allegedly at the hands of a seething sapphic septet from Newark, N.J.

“I felt like I was going to die.”

Buckle, 29, of Queens, took the stand in Manhattan Supreme Court yesterday to admit he was defenseless and terrified after his simple “hello” spurred a predawn melee on Sixth Avenue at West 4th Street.

Later in the report:

The women, in turn, claim they were defending themselves against a violent, anti-gay bigot, and counter that Buckle provoked them as he sat outside the IFC Center movie theater trying to talk pedestrians into buying his latest movie.

When they rebuffed his advances - telling him he wasn’t their type - he began calling them “f- - -ing dykes,” they say. He then spat on them, threw a cigarette at them, and even grabbed on e of them by the throat - which, like much of the melee, was caught on an IFC video security camera.

“I’ll f- - - you straight, sweetheart,” he told defendant Venice Brown, 19, before choking her, her lawyer, Michael Mays, told jurors.

Buckle told a different story on the stand, assigning many of his alleged attackers monikers.

There was Brown, the one he admittedly called an “elephant.” Then there was the one with the “low haircut,” do-rag and wife-beater T-shirt, whom he admittedly called “a man,” and the “slightly pretty” one to whom he first said hello.

It all started, he said, when the first two walked by. “They looked effeminate [sic] and one of them was slightly pretty, so I said ‘hi’ to them,” he said.

But the “heavier girl, she started to dog me out,” Buckle said.

“What does that, perchance, mean,” asked the judge, Justice Edward McLaughlin. “Just disrespect me,” Buckle explained. Then “more girls started coming out of nowhere.”

Buckle admitted he retaliated, telling the one with the “low haircut” that “she looks like a man.” He felt spit on the back of his neck, and spat back.

That’s when the women’s fists began flying. “I had my hands in the air in defense of their blows,” he said. Then “I felt like a nick in my abdomen. I didn’t know what happened.

“Everybody just jumped me,” he added…

Despite the provocation:

Three of the original seven women are currently serving six-month jail sentences for attempted assault. But four others are on trial on first-degree gang-assault charges that could get them anywhere from three to 25 years in prison.

The accused ringleader - Patreese Johnson, 20, whom Buckle called the “slightly pretty one” - is additionally charged with attempted murder for allegedly pulling a knife from her purse and slashing Buckle repeatedly, lacerating his liver and stomach.

Even from this report, which favors the filmmaker, it is clear that he deserved the beat-down. Instead displaying his emotional wounds in public, he should thank the gods he lived through the punishment and move on.

Attention talented freaks and those who love to gawk at them: Tonight at the Crocodile Cafe, The Stranger will be presenting its first-ever Gong Show, hosted by yours truly.

If you’ve got a unique and entertaining act—be it juggling, yodeling, clog-dancing, or really-fast-hot-dog-eating—it’s not too late to get in on the act. Just show up tonight at the Crocodile (2200 2nd Ave) anytime after 7pm to sign up. (All acts must run between 45 seconds and 4 minutes, and require less than two minutes to set-up. Also, no fire, and no kids—the Croc is a bar.) For full performance info, go here. Prizes include an array of Sasquatch, Bumbershoot, and Capitol Hill Block Party privileges and $100 cash!

If you just want to come watch, show up anytime after 7pm with your ID. The show is free and starts at 9pm.

In the meantime, please enjoy this archival Gong Show footage of a loony crooner. Also, host Chuck Barris is higher than anyone’s ever been. See you tonight!

Golf-pants Ian wanted to know if I had “heard about the book.”
“What’s the book?” I slurred.

Last night at a bar, after many beers, a man I refer to as Golf-pants Ian told in hushed tones about “the book.”

Ian had seen a Craigslist post advertising a communal notebook tucked away on a park bench along Greenlake’s paved pathway.
The book, he said, was for people to write down their thoughts and observances as they watched ducks, joggers, and strollers pass by the bench.

I had to see this “book.”

I ventured out into the night, several friends in tow, wandering up the long concrete path that makes a wobbly circle around the lake.
There they were.
Two yellow all-weather notepads, secured by several feet of fishing line.
My quest had succeeded.
So I stole them.

I opened the first steno pad:

The Greenlake Preservation Society, in association with The Brown Eyed Handsome Man Corporation

presents

THE NOTEBOOK
(at Bench #1)

Addressing the intent of the books, the GRPS continues:

WHAT IS THIS?
The short answer:
A place to write stuff down while sitting in this exact spot.
Then, a place to read what people have written while sitting here. It’s anonymous and fun!
Like the Internet, but less hi-tech.
Like a bathhouse, but less touchy-feely.

But we’re not really sure what this notebook is for.
The society and The Corporation have just noticed tons of people sitting on this bench, looking like maybe they needed a pen and some paper.
Other people have looked like that wanted something to read or some wisdom.

It could be all those people were just looking at girls, boys and/or dogs, but we thought we’d provide paper and a pen anyway.

What’s in the book?

Glad you asked:

I have a ass ake from riding a hard ass bike with my friend on the back

and

I can see a skeleton tree that reminds me of fall. When will it be warm and sunny! Lame Seattle…lame, P.S. Don’t drink water from Greenlake or you’ll get rabies and locust will devour your soul.

My personal favorite:

EASTER CONFESSION Yesterday I took my dog for an Easter morning walk from my house in Fremont to the U-District Big 5. On the way, my dog pooped so I cleaned it up and desposed of it in my neighbors garbage can left out for the garbage man. Big 5 was closed for Easter. Damn, I really wanted a carribeaner. On the way back my dog pooped again! This poo was of equal size or greater than the original. My pradinkadink was that I only brought one plastic bag with me on my Easter conquest. So I look left, I look right, shit! There are people who may have seen my dogs stinky loafs dropping. Think quick. I lean over the pile, pretending to grab something from my pocket, and pretend to be picking up the poo until the pedestrians pass. Phew. Then I walked home. To any readers in search of some vigilante justice, the poop at hand is located on the sidewalk grass on the north side of 43rd between 11th and Brooklyn.

Ian M.

I am a sucker for scatological humor.

I am also a total dick.
I shouldn’t have taken the books and I wanted to post an open letter that goes a little something like this:

Dear Greenlake Preservation Society,

I’m sorry I took your books.
I regret it and would like to profusely apologize.
If it is of any consolation, my hangover has been a truly punishing experience.

The least that I can do is link your website and promise that your books will be returned today.

Apologies,

Jonah

Thanks to Golf-Pants Ian for the tip

Jonathan Safran Foer, novelist, lives in New York: “I was writing, actually. Needed to look something up on the Internet, and my computer opens to GoogleNews. Made me sad.”

Deborah Jacobs, Seattle’s city librarian: “It was 5:15 am and the papers finally arrived. Coffee had finished dripping. As I took the New York Times out of the blue bag I saw his face upside down and knew why he was on the front page. I immediately poured myself coffee and sat down and read page one and went on to the C section. Didn’t feel like reading any more of the paper; thought about how I wanted to read him again, thought about Saul Bellow’s death two years ago, just about this time; thought about how when Jews and immigrants die their obituaries always include mention of libraries…”

Miranda July, artist, fiction writer, lives in LA: “I was driving from my boyfriend’s house to my house and I got teary-eyed.”

Stephen Elliott, fiction writer, essayist, lives in San Francisco: “I was in a coffeeshop (Ritual on Valencia Street) and I saw it on the front page of the New York Times. It continued in a full page spread in section C. I read the whole thing. I thought a lot about Slaughterhouse Five and what that book meant to me and a lot of people my age and older. I’m pretty sure I’ve read all of Vonnegut’s books. It’s devastating to think about, really.”

Nancy Pearl, action figure, former Seattle librarian, author: “I was driving to the U Book Store this morning and heard it on the radio, and I thought, oh no, another symbol of the 1960s is gone. And I remembered when I first read Welcome to the Monkey House and the rhyme in the first story—I think it’s the first story, I haven’t read it in years: ‘Cover yourself with Jurgen’s Lotion, here comes the one man population explosion.’ Funny what sticks in your head.”

Matt Briggs, fiction writer, lives in Seattle: “I was about to do my morning writing. I have to write for a living as a technical writer, so I try to do not-technical writing in the morning before I wreck myself on technical writing. Vonnegut worked as technical writer. I try not to check my email because then I find myself squandering my time reading obituaries or speculation about new Apple products. So I wasn’t really doing much of anything at all.”

Michael Wells, owner of Seattle bookstore Bailey/Coy Books: “I was in bed. I heard it on NPR when my alarm went off. I feel an affection for Vonnegut that I could never feel for other writers of his generation, even though it’s probably been 20 years since I’ve read one of his books. When Philip Roth goes down I suppose I’ll shrug and go on about my day. Susan Sontag, whatever. But Vonnegut… I’m a child of the ’70s so his weird black comedy sci-fi paranoia mixture really defined the world I was looking at. Reading his books in Normal, Illinois in 1978 made me feel subversive and strange, off-kilter and dangerous. A little crazy. Also, I went to school in Iowa City, where his presence was still felt in the Writers Workshop. Mostly for the famous Kurt Vonnegut Halloween Party which happened every year (at what was supposedly the house where he wrote Breakfast of Champions). It was a rite of passage for us corn-fed Midwestern undergraduate English students and it was a booze-filled, drug-fueled bacchanalia with bonfires and dark shadows and very loud music. It was a blast.”

Stacey Levine, fiction writer, lives in Seattle: “I was in the bathroom. I thought so fondly about Dr. Paul Proteus from Player Piano! It’s like he was an old friend. To read Vonnegut’s books was the raddest thing you could do, a long time ago. I didn’t know anything then and tried to adopt his downer but crazily-creative-in-the-midst-of-all-hell worldview. It was a solid 20th century philosophy.”

Scott Lawrimore, owner of Seattle art gallery Lawrimore Project: “I read it in the P.I. this morning at around 8:00. I was eating a cereal cocktail of Raisin Bran and Special K with Berries, while watching Saved By The Bell with KEXP on in the background playing something from the new Low album. My first instinct was to equate his death with the recent death of Sol Le Witt. I was trying to decide what role each has had in the development of my psyche—what they each contributed to my *personality.* I determined Kurt beat Sol hands down. Since they say death comes in threes, I was also wondering who’s next and how this little triad could possibly be built into some juicy conceptual framework. I’m hoping for Stephen Hawking. Should I feel wrong for saying that?”

Cienna Madrid, Our Worst Enemy^TM at The Stranger: “Sitting at my computer in my pajamas trying to write something funny, but instead dwelling on the fact that my dad was diagnosed with MS yesterday. It seems that everyone I admire will soon be tap dancing with Jesus. I should never read the news for cheering up. On the bright side, I’ve been noshing on a giant Sees chocolate-butter egg for breakfast, and it’s fucking delicious.”

David Rakoff, essayist, lives in New York: “Dreaming of Dresden, oddly enough.”

I had a terrifying dream last night.

I think it was somehow related to this:

And watching this:

Today’s New York Times brings us a chilling snapshot of the US Army’s program to dole out cold hard cash to compensate for Iraqi civilians’ cold hard bodies.

Of the 500 cases released, 204, or about 40 percent, were apparently rejected because the injury, death or property damage was deemed to have been “directly or indirectly” related to combat.

In the case of the fisherman in Tikrit, he and his companion desperately tried to appear unthreatening to an American helicopter overhead.

“They held up the fish in the air and shouted ‘Fish! Fish!’ to show they meant no harm,” said the Army report attached to the claim filed by the fisherman’s family. The Army refused to compensate for the killing, ruling that it was “combat activity,” but approved $3,500 for his boat, net and cellphone, which drifted away and were stolen.

And if that doesn’t shit on your day enough, you can use this searchable database, created by the ACLU, who requested the data, to read about each of the 500 persons’ undeserved injury or demise and the pittance their family received in exchange.

All the film blogs are doing Grindhouse post-mortems (it earned only a “pokey” $11.6 million over Easter weekend), but if you’re a normal person, it probably does not surprise you that our aggravatingly religious nation was not about to plunk down ten bucks on Good Friday for 3+ hours (!) of Rose McGowan clomping around with a machine gun for a leg.

However, if you have any heart thumping in your chest, you will want to know how to stop the Weinstein brothers from inflicting their rotting vision (Miss Potter, Factory Girl) on the world. This New York Times article has hints. I have another: Avoid the 2008 meerkats doc like the plague. Meerkats are cuter than penguins. Meerkats are too cute for the big screen. You will go into cardiac arrest.

This is the Robertson Tunnel on the MAX Blue Line in Portlandia:
The train enters the 3-mile tunnel after the Goose Hollow stop and exits it shortly before the Sunset Transit Center. What is significant about this tunnel, what constitutes its monstrous power, is that it transports the riders from the city above to the city below.

The train leaves the sunshine of the city’s center and takes passengers down to its underworld, its suburb. Indeed, while in the rushing train, which has one stop in the tunnel (Washington Park Station), you can hear a thousand witches screaming from, and scratching with metal nails the concrete walls of, hell.

The haunting experience brings to mind a passage in Diana George’s short story Park and Ride Home: Greater Redmond 2099:

Formed in horror of the city, the suburb carries the city’s ghostly imprint… The word suburb, meaning “there where there is no place else,” is often thought to derive from the name for “lesser city.” In truth, the suburb was never the lesser city but that which had always slumbered or festered or shimmered beneath the city. This underside of the city retains its hold on us today, in the suburban buildings we drift in and out of in a state of inattention.

The basic and mythical movement from city to “lesser city” is, nevertheless, powerfully felt in the Robertson Tunnel, and it will take years, a new generation of city beings, a Copernican revolution of experiencing urban space, to weaken or eradicate the structure of this feeling. A Copernican revolution of urban space is precisely Mathew Stadler’s present mission. And it’s curious that the city he picked for this revolution has such a stable and convincing distinction between above-city, Portland, and below-city, Beaverton.

The Senate passed the House bill calling for a Constitutional amendment to lower the threshold (from 60 percent to a simple majority) to pass local school levies.

Now, the measure goes to voters where it only needs a simple majority to pass. To send a Constitutional amendment to voters the bill had to pass both houses with a two-thirds vote.

The House did so last month, easily clearing the two-thirds requirement with a 79-19 vote.

And the Senate just passed it this morning. Although, they just made it, with 3 Republicans voting yea, for a 33-16 vote. (Specifically, the bill needed 33 to pass.) Two Dems voted against it, including “Democratic” Sen. Tim Sheldon (“D”-35, Potlatch).

One of the Rs who voted for the Democratic priority bill was Sen. Cheryl Pflug (R-5, Maple Valley), who I had criticized earlier this session for her allegiance to the pharmaceutical lobby.

I was only able to watch some of the hearing on TVW leading up to the vote, and the part that I actually caught was Pflug’s speech. To my surprise, indeed, she was hammering away at how poorly our public schools are funded, recounting how her local HS footaball team had to play 20 miles away in a rented field.

She also credited Seattle for suing the state for failing to fund education. She concluded by dissing her fellow GOPers for pontificating about high property taxes, saying: “Enough pretty speeches. Let’s do our job.”

Evidence:

1. This morning, I did a Slog post at 9 am. I hit “publish,” assumed it went up, and went about my business. Two hours later, all evidence that my post had ever existed had vanished.

2. On my way to work, I saw the bus approaching. I made eye contact with the driver, waved at him, and ran the three blocks to my stop alongside the bus. Upon arriving at the stop, the driver took one passenger and drove away. I was fewer than 20 feet from the bus. I yelled, “Wait! Please!” He did not stop.

3. Afterward, I went to the coffee place by the stop. I stood in line for about 10 minutes while two 12-year-olds dithered about whether they had enough change to buy a grande frappuccino or a venti. I tried to get the attention of the World’s Slowest Starbucks Barista (isn’t the point of going to Starbucks that they’re fast?) but she didn’t appear to hear me. The super-slow non-express bus came. I left.

Conclusion: I do not exist.

Most of the news about climate change is bad.

On Saturday, there’s an opportunity to do something good.

Step It Up—a project spearheaded by The End of Nature author Bill McKibben—is holding more than 1,300 events in all 50 states on Saturday, April 14. The goal is to hold the largest global-warming action in US history and push elected officials to commit to an 80 percent reduction in greenhouse gases by 2050.

I don’t often recommend rallies—too often, they’re ineffectual groups of activists preaching to the choir—but this is one event you should attend. Our leaders are listening. Be heard.

(Not convinced? More info here .)

Today’s million-dollar question: If you had to “do it” with a band—every single member of a band—which band would it be?

Do the math (it’s gonna hurt—for every Robert Plant there’s a John Bonham, for every Carrie Brownstein, a Janet Weiss) then weigh in on Line Out.

You’ve seen this, of course.

No?

You don’t want no drama. No, no, no.

The fabulous Friday farmers’ market that has been providing locally grown delicacies at 20th Avenue and Madison Street during spring/summer is moving eastward. The new location is the corner of Martin Luther King Jr. Way and Union Street, in the parking lot of the Grocery Outlet.
A giant sign announces the opening on Friday, May 4, from 3:00 to 7:00 p.m. Buen provecho!

So the Duke lacrosse players didn’t do it—that’s today’s big news.

Well, it was until a bomb exploded inside the building that houses the Iraqi parliament, killing at least three lawmakers—a building that is inside “the heavily fortified green zone. So it looks like there’s one less neighborhood in Baghdad that John McCain can freely stroll through.

Back to those falsely-accused Duke lacrosse players:

There was no credible evidence of an attack—there was no DNA evidence and no witnesses at the party who could corroborate the accuser’s account, Cooper said. The accusation also was not consistent with time-stamped photographs and phone records, he said.

A written summary of the factual findings that investigators relied on to conclude that no attack occurred will be released next week. Cooper added that perjury charges against the accuser were considered but rejected, because she appears to believe in her uncorroborated and sometimes contradictory accounts of a sexual assault.”

Prosecutors may, however, go after the prosecutor that brought the charges against the Duke lacrosse players—here’s hoping they do.

And at the risk of incurring ECB’s wrath, I gotta say that I think the stripper ought to be prosecuted too. Back in the bad ol’ days a woman who claimed to have been raped was not believed or blamed. That was wrong. Now accusations of rape are taken seriously, as well they should be. But the pendulum has swung so wildly that the presumption of innocence no longer exists for a man accused of rape. He’s guilty until proven innocent—that’s what the Duke lacrosse players were put through.

False charges of rape are so damaging, so potentially life-destroying, that they have to be regarded as criminal themselves. They are criminal—filing a false police report is a crime. I don’t think women should be in legal trouble when an accusation of rape can’t be proved—when it boils down to a he said/she said dispute—but when there is evidence that the charge was entirely false, when the issue isn’t murky consent but malicious fabrication, charges should be brought.

We don’t want to discourage women from reporting crimes, which was the case in the bad ol’ days. But we should discourage women—and men and children and pets and houseplants—from making false rape accusations.

This story is now a day old, but I don’t think it got enough local attention (or any, as far as I can tell).

Yesterday, The New York Times announced that it had crunched the numbers and found that over the last two years, renting was a better bet than buying.

In a stark reversal, it’s now clear that people who chose renting over buying in the last two years made the right move. In much of the country, including large parts of the Northeast, California, Florida and the Southwest, recent home buyers have faced higher monthly costs than renters and have lost money on their investment in the meantime. It’s almost as if they have thrown money away, an insult once reserved for renters.

Granted, this finding represents a nation-wide view, and the Seattle real estate market, as everyone is always pointing out, is a bit anomalous. I don’t have time today to parse all the nuances of this story or figure out how well it applies to Seattle (if at all), but I bet our commenters do.

At the very least, I bet a lot of people will enjoy this fascinating online calculator, set up The Times to help you figure out if it’s better to rent or buy at your price range in your particular locale.

First of all, I love this story about JoAnna’s Soul Cafe by Angela Garbes that is in today’s paper. I have a huuuuge hankering for catfish now, which will hopefully be sated this weekend.

Secondly, I haven’t been to a county fair in years, and I was thinking about it yesterday. Magically, this morning, this email arrived in my inbox:

The King County Fair will celebrate 145 years of family fun in July 2007! Mark your calendars for July 18-22, and set your sights on the King County Fair at the Enumclaw Expo Center (formerly the King County Fairgrounds), where you will find five days of non-stop entertainment, a brand new carnival, fair food, games, animals, exhibits, vendors and more! General admission prices are $8 for adults, $6 for children ages 6-12, and $6 for seniors 62 and over. Access to all of the stage entertainment is included with the price of admission.

What a glorious day!

…shady bookkeeping…

In a move filled with admonishments and anger, a federal judge overseeing the bankruptcy proceedings of the Roman Catholic Diocese here on Wednesday ordered an outside accounting expert to sort through what she called “the most Byzantine accounting system I have ever seen,” and to report directly to her.

The order was issued in a contempt hearing in which diocese lawyers and priests were ordered to explain why they should not be sanctioned for trying to move church money without court authorization.

The judge, Louise DeCarl Adler of Federal Bankruptcy Court, also said that she had not “foreclosed” on the idea of appointing a trustee in the case, an extraordinary move if executed. Judge Adler said that the diocese would have to resubmit documents describing its assets, and have them signed by Bishop Robert H. Brom under penalty of perjury.

…and the fact that it’s regarded as newsworthy when our priests rape children at less brisk a clip…

Claims of Sexual Abuse by Priests Fall, Report Says

Bishop Gregory M. Aymond of Austin, Tex., who heads the bishops’ Committee for the Protection of Children and Young People, said he was encouraged by the trend in numbers: 1,092 abuse claims in 2004, 783 in 2005 and 714 in 2006.

Still, Bishop Aymond called the findings “sobering” and added, “The fact that there are any recent cases at all is very disconcerting.” … More than 13,000 molestation claims have been filed against clergy members since 1950, and the bishops say abuse-related costs have exceeded $1.5 billion.

Does this guy have it?

NSFW, NSFH, NSFA.

By gettin’ et.

Yesterday, I crossed my fingers that the Democratic bill that lowers the hurdle to pass local school levies (from a 60 percent vote to a simple majority vote) would come to the Senate floor.

The bill is on for this morning. It needs 33 votes (two-thirds) to pass because it is a Constitutional amendment.

My morning stroll down Towleroad turned me on to this beguiling YouTube treat, featuring Jimmy Kimmel, guest host of Larry King Live, grilling a Gawker editor into giggly submission.

Is she really the most eloquent representative Gawker could find? Does she still have a job?

Surge Meeting Surge: Two dead, at least 10 wounded after a bombing in the cafeteria of Iraq’s parliament building; at least 10 more dead after the bombing of a bridge in Baghdad.

Kurt Vonnegut Dead at 84.

People aren’t supposed to look back. I’m certainly not going to do it anymore.

I’ve finished my war book now. The next one I write is going to be fun.

This one is a failure, and had to be, since it was written by a pillar of salt. It begins like this:

Listen:

Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.

It ends like this:

Poo-tee-weet?

Tour of Duty: Now three months longer.

Duke Lacrosse Players: After 13 months, all charges dropped.

Stem Cells: President Bush set to veto latest effort to ease federal restrictions.

Boob Off Boob Tube: Don Imus’s simulcast on MSNBC has been dropped.

Al Qaida, Ohio: Man from Columbus charged with aiding the enemy.

Sex Ed: Soon to be medically accurate in Washington State schools.

$101: How much using your cellphone while driving may soon cost you in Washington State.

Sexy Presidential Fact of the Day: From The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris:

The young couple [Theodore and Alice Roosevelt] took their departure around four o’clock, and traveled to Springfield, where Theodore had reserved a suite of rooms at the old Massasoit House. Later that evening he noted tersely in his diary: “Our intense happiness is too sacred to be written about.”

(Unfortunately that’s about as sexy as Teddy Roosevelt gets. Thankfully, Bill Clinton is tomorrow.)