Look out, world — my Mom & Dad and Jen now have blogs.

This should be interesting.

UPDATE: In her first post, Jen notes, “I do consider Brendan one of my best friends, yet I do not look at his website often. Maybe once every few months.” She explains, “If I read the site, I would not have a reason to actually talk to Brendan.” LOL. This is very true. I swear, I never have any news to tell my friends anymore, even friends I haven’t seen or talked to in months, because every tidbit of interest from my life that I can possibly think of to talk about, they’ve already read about on my blog!

Jen adds, “I do not have a wealth of knowledge about the site, but I can tell you anything you want to know about Brendan.” Uh-oh. Is that a threat? :)

Meanwhile, my Mom has only blogging for barely 12 hours and she’s already getting into high dudgeon about Christian politicians. Again: uh-oh. I can only imagine the blog-comment wars that will develop if she starts getting political and Andrew reads it…

Heh. Now, I just have to get my Dad to post. He’s always threatening to write letters to the editor of the Hartford Courant about various issues, and then deciding not to do it after all (something I, too, have been known to do on occasion), so I’m hoping maybe the blog will be a good outlet for his creative energy.

I got my wireless Internet card working! YAY!!!

The Jeanie Johnston heads out to sea.

The Jeanie Johnston in port. It will be sailing away shortly.

Nearing Lower Manhattan.

My mom and dad on the Staten Island Ferry.

The Statue of Liberty, seen from the Staten Island Ferry.

Only in New York. :)

The Hartford Courant has published a massive front-page story detailing an analysis of traffic-accident records showing that 18-year-old are responsible for more traffic accidents (3.9% of the total) than any other single age group. The headline is “18, Age Of Accidents.”

No doubt, this will be used to justify various new forms of legal age discrimination. As always, it will not occur to anyone in the legislature that the argument about whether to restrict any given group of citizens’ freedom of movement does not begin and end with statistics showing they are marginally more likely to cause trouble than any other given group.

No, nobody will think to point out that, based on the same simplistic “statistically, it will reduce accidents” argument that’s used to justify oppressive driving restrictions on young people (not to mention curfews and other restrictions of liberty), it follows that we should simply ban driving altogether except for government-approved purposes, like going to work or school. I mean, think about it! Statistically, that would probably reduce accidents by like 75%! Let’s do it!

Seriously, imagine the outrage if the same logic that’s applied to age groups were applied to racial or ethnic groups, or genders! After all, male drivers are statistically more likely to get into accidents than female ones, right? So, why don’t we pass a law saying that men are not allowed to drive unless accompanied by a woman? That will reduce the number of accidents! And, hey, black kids in the inner city are statistically more likely to commit crime than white kids in the suburbs, so why don’t we make it illegal for black kids in the inner cities to go out of their homes after midnight? Sure it’s racist, but who cares, it will reduce crime!

Sheesh. I hate this sort of thing.

(Andrew, I await your gun-control analogy. :)

UPDATE: I just got far enough in the article to find this hilarious quote from State Senator William Aniskovich, explaining why restrictions on 18-year-olds are unlikely: “Legislators are preternaturally disposed to avoid class warfare and age warfare.” Oh, sure they are — when the people whose ages are involved actually have the right to vote! But nobody minds “age warfare” when they aren’t dealing with people (16- and 17-year-olds) who could vote them out of office!

From a quick skim (I’ll read it more thoroughly on the way to New York), the article appears to be extremely slanted. The only quotes that I found suggesting anything other than an 18-year-olds-are-terrible-drivers-who-should-be-shot thesis are very short, not terribly substantive (one is “If you want a job, you have to have a car”), and buried fairly deep in the article. They also come from — guess who? — 18-year-olds; apparently the Courant was unable to dig up any “experts” who disagree with the paper’s anti-youth agenda.

Thirteen posts since yesterday evening, yet no comments. What happened? Did you all suddenly get lives or something? :)

Don’t expect much substantive blogging during the day tomorrow (possibly some cell-phone Moblogging, but that’s probably it), since I’ll be travelling down to New York City, then going with my parents to see the Jeanie Johnston, an Irish famine ship presently docked in New York Harbor.

I meant to post this last week, as soon as I saw it in The Onion, but I forgot. It’s great:

Wisconsin Has Crush On Minnesota
MADISON, WI—After years of silent ardor, Wisconsin finally admitted Monday to having a serious crush on its neighbor Minnesota. “Dear Minnesota, I’ve been wanting to say this for a long time, but I’ve been too shy—I think you’re cute,” the Badger State wrote in a three-page letter it slipped under the door of the Minnesota State Capitol in St. Paul. “I think your Glacial Ridge Trail is so pretty. I’ll be sitting between Illinois and Michigan if you want to talk to me.” Minnesota, which harbors no romantic feelings for Wisconsin, is reportedly trying to figure out a polite way to let the state down easy.

Hee hee hee. Only in The Onion.

A geomagnetic storm tonight produced some lovely aurora borealis displays in Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Canada. As usual, SpaceWeather.com has the goods:

Meanwhile, Tropical Storm Claudette is managing to survive in the Gulf of Mexico despite strong shear, and the Tropical Prediction Center — which believed Claudette would become a hurricane a couple of days ago, something she never did because of the shear — is again saying, “If Claudette survives the next 24 hours, some slight strengthening is possible and the cyclone could be at or near hurricane strength at the time of landfall.”

Landfall will probably happen sometime late Monday or early Tuesday, and the present forecast track calls for a hit near Brownsville, Texas, right along the Texas-Mexico border.

For the latest on Claudette and the rest of the tropics, go here.

There has been a notable increase in blogging by Becky and Toby over the last few days. Hooray!

Becky is, first and foremost, psyched about last night’s Great Big Sea concert. I certainly can’t blame her — Great Big Sea rocks! I’m so jealous, I wish I could have been there. (I’m heading up to Buffalo on Wednesday. It’s not fair — Becky and her friends always do all sorts of fun things right before I come visit!)

And the fun goes on: she’s going to a big old SHA-girl party tonight (”SHA girls” being alumni of Sacred Heart Academy — in other words, former Catholic schoolgirls), so perhaps we’ll eventually hear about that on her blog, too.

Anyway, Becky also blogged yesterday about something less pleasant: an odd confrontation she’s been having with someone regarding an earlier (now somewhat edited) blog post.

Becky used these recent events as a jumping-off point to recall old memories of an incident in which she was censured for a Daily Trojan column criticizing USC’s Thematic Option program. On her blog, Becky didn’t go into detail about precisely what it was that she got in trouble for, because the details weren’t relevant to her particular point. I, however, can’t resist. Three years later, the details still make my blood boil.

Becky’s column criticized Thematic Option, USC’s honors program, on a range of issues. The controversy, however, focused on this statement:

[The] program’s supervisors are refusing to release their course evaluations for last semester, presumably because one science CORE had a very negative reaction from the students.

Now, this sentence definitely was not as well-researched as it should have been — Becky “presumed” a reason for T.O.’s actions rather than asking someone — and it’s possible that the word “refusing” was therefore incorrect. But the basic underlying fact on which her statement was based, that T.O. evaluations were not online when virtually all other course evaluations were, was true at the time of publication.

Unfortunately for Becky, at some point between the time when the newspaper went to press and the time when it appeared on campus the next morning, the T.O. course evaluations magically appeared online. Whether this was coincidence or conspiracy (the DT is put online hours before it’s printed, so anything is possible), we’ll never know, but that’s what happened.

As Becky wrote in her post, the T.O. director, Robin Romans, promptly stormed down to the DT office to complain about the article. Naturally, what he was really upset about was the whole content of the article — how dare the DT criticize his department so harshly? — but he focused on the evaluation issue in particular, because he thought he “had” Becky there. She had written something that was apparently untrue. (Nevermind that it was true at the time of publication; it was untrue by the time the article appeared.)

The editor-in-chief, in keeping with a long tradition of Daily Trojan spinelessness, caved in to Romans’s demands. She reprimanded Becky, suspended her from her column for a week, told her to apologize to Romans personally, and issued an “editor’s note” that amounted to a retraction of Becky’s statement about the evaluations.

That last part is what really gets me. Whereas Becky’s point about the evaluations was arguably misleading and poorly researched — and therefore you could make a case for the reprimand and the suspension (though not, I think, the apology, since her error was not daring to criticize T.O. but rather doing so sloppily) — it was still based on a fundamentally true fact that should not have been retracted. But the editor’s note — which, unlike one columnist’s opinion, is the official position of the newspaper — stated flatly that the evaluations had never been missing at all, which was factually false. And the editor-in-chief knew it (or else she blindly took Romans’s word at face value*, all evidence to the contrary).

The editor’s note stated:

An opinion column in the Monday, Nov. 13 Daily Trojan incorrectly stated that Thematic Option administrators did not release course evaluations for the program. In fact, the evaluations have been available since the Student Senate’s Course Guide went online Oct. 27. The Daily Trojan regrets the error.

As I said, the fact of the matter is that the course evaluations were not online until sometime on the late evening of Nov. 12 or early morning of Nov. 13. I know this for a fact, because I personally checked. Several other people also knew this, because they’d checked too, and they told the editor-in-chief this. Some of these people weren’t even newspaper staffers, just concerned parties — T.O. students — who heard about the controversy and e-mailed the editor-in-chief to tell her that Becky’s statement about the evaluations had been correct.

I was the DT City (news) section’s Assignment Editor at the time — and because there was no City Editor that semester, I basically shared City Editor duties with the editor-in-chief — and I objected vociferously and repeatedly to the publication of this false editor’s note. I even presented the editor-in-chief with electronic documentary evidence that her retraction was false — I showed her a copy of a PDF file of the evaluations, e-mailed to me by a friend, that contained all the evaluations except T.O.’s. Although this didn’t prove anything about exact timing, it certainly proved (unless my friend was going to the trouble of editing PDF files) that the T.O. evaluations had not been online “since the Student Senate’s Course Guide went online Oct. 27.” The PDF file clearly showed that there had been some time period when the Senate Course Guide was online without the T.O. evaluations.

Unfortunately, my objections were basically ignored because Becky was my girlfriend (a rather insulting presumption that I have no integrity, I thought at the time), and everybody else who bothered to object was also ignored because the editor-in-chief was too concerned with making nice to the T.O. director to listen. So, the Daily Trojan, a student-run newspaper that is not supposed to be beholden to the administration in any way, knowingly published a factually false editor’s note in order to make nice to a USC administrator.

It’s been almost three years, and I’ve graduated from USC, but this still makes me angry, to this day. More angry, in fact, than any of the other DT controversies I’ve lived through, including the one over which I was unjustly forced to resign. At least that was a judgment call, albeit a very poor one in my view. This was not a judgment call; this was an outright lie, published as the official position of the paper. I wish I had resigned in protest; I clearly should have. I hope that, if something similar happens at some other place I’m working in the future, I’ll have the fortitude to resign in protest.

(By the way, in case you’re wondering, I’m not naming the editor-in-chief here because I’d rather not have people, including her prospective employers, stumble upon this post using a Google search for her name. She made a mistake — no doubt about that — but she was only a college student, after all, and college is the time when you’re supposed to make mistakes and learn from them, right? Hopefully she has learned, and wouldn’t make such a decision again in the future. Overall, she is a good journalist, and I have no desire to harm her reputation by rehashing three-year-old events.)

(*While we’re on the topic of upholding people’s reputations, I should point out that I have no direct knowledge that Robin Romans himself lied to anyone about anything. The only statement that I know to be a falsehood is the “editor’s note” published by the DT after Romans spoke to the editor-in-chief. But I do not know whether Romans specifically requested that the editor’s note contain the precise language that it did. Romans’s own letter to the editor, published simultaneously with the editor’s note, did not specifically make the same false claim that the editor’s note did: namely, that the course evaluations had been online since Oct. 27. Romans said only, “our course evaluations…are already public. All T.O. course evaluations for last spring are included in the Student Senate Course Guide (available online).” That was true at the time it was published. So Romans did not lie in print. Whether he lied verbally to the editor-in-chief, I have no idea. For all I know, he might have told her that the course evaluations had been online all along because he honestly believed that they were, thanks to a technical screw-up in his department or something. Or he might have said nothing of the sort, and the editor-in-chief might have simply printed an even more thorough retraction than Romans asked for, in an attempt to please him. I just don’t know. All I know for sure is, the editor-in-chief had, and ignored, clear evidence that her editor’s note was false on its face. I cast no aspersions whatsoever upon anyone else’s character or honesty.)

Anyway, Becky’s musings really have nothing to do with all that, but I couldn’t resist a bit of reminiscing.

Toby has been blogging, too, as I mentioned. On Tuesday, she commented on invasions of “her” garage by assorted bric-a-brac, which was brought in by Dr. Zak for the purpose of being carried away by “a veternarian called AMVET” the next day. Heh.

And then today, our favorite Psychokitty complained about being imprisoned in the garage by a group of nasty humans (potential buyers touring the Zaks’ for-sale house, I presume). Poor Toby!

An article from the Adollyan Associated Press:

President’s tail goes missing
Apparently disappeared Monday or earlier;
Mr. Bun said to be unfazed; Rue furious

DELL CITY, Dining Room, July 12 (AAP) — President Bun’s bushy tail has mysteriously vanished, the Blue House confirmed Saturday. Rumors of the tail’s disappearance had been widely circulating since Friday afternoon.

The tail has been missing since at least Monday, when Mr. Bun traveled to the Dolyan Heights, said Blue House spokesrabbit Pat the Bunny. “The president is not sure when or where he lost it, but he recalls noticing on Monday that it was missing,” Bunny said.

Mr. Bun with tail (File photo)


Mr. Bun without tail (Blue House Press Office)

The spokesrabbit, drawing from his own experience, explained how the president could have misplaced a piece of his anatomy without immediately noticing.

“It’s a vestigial tail, really,” Bunny said. “Evolutionarily, stuffed bunnies do not need their tails for any functional purpose, indeed we barely even feel them. You could pull really hard on my tail, and all I would feel would be a slight tug, and maybe a minor itch.”

Bunny declined a reporter’s request to demonstrate this phenomenon.

Experts said the tail’s absence had not been noticed by any member of the press or the public before Friday because Mr. Bun normally faces forward when making public appearances. “The president does not normally show the public his rear end,” said Refrigerator University political science professor Moldy McGraw.

It was not immediately clear to what extent the Blue House staff was aware of the tail’s disappearance before Friday. Bunny sidestepped that question, saying only, “I just found out about this yesterday. That’s all I can tell you.”

Bunny said Mr. Bun “believes” he noticed the tail’s absence during the car ride down to New York, so it “most probably is not in the Dolyan.” But it could be “in the car, in the house, anywhere,” he said.

The president is relatively unconcerned about his tail’s disappearance, Bunny added.

“The worst part of this for him was releasing that picture,” the spokesrabbit said, referring to a photo of the tail-less president that was taken by a Blue House photographer on Friday and released to the press Saturday morning. “That was kind of embarassing for him. I mean, who would honestly want to have the whole country starting at your butt? But the public has a right to know, and that’s why the president chose to release the photo.”

“But aside from that,” Bunny added, “it doesn’t really affect him personally, and it certainly doesn’t affect his ability to do his job.”

Others, however, are less sanguine.

Madereine Rue, Mr. Bun’s chief of staff and bodyguard, is reportedly furious with himself and his security staff for allowing the tail to disappear right under their noses. This brings back memories, one source said, of the far more serious incident nearly three years ago when, mere hours after being apparently elected president, the would-be president-elect himself vanished. Rue and his security staff were caught totally unawares — they did not observe Mr. Bun’s disappearance, and had no idea where he had gone — and they were unable to locate him; Mr. Bun simply turned up on his own on Christmas Eve, apparently suffering from amnesia. (By that time, his apparent election victory had been invalidated due to an unrelated vote recount, and Oliver became president. Mr. Bun defeated Oliver last year in a rematch of the 2000 election.)

Joe Loy, Mr. Bun’s human advisor and closest human friend, was also is high dudgeon upon learning of the situation. “This is a very serious matter!” Joe bellowed. Later, speaking to the press, Joe pledged to “worry extensively about Mr. Bun’s tail until someone finds it.”

Leanna Loomer, human art consultant to the Adollyan government, observed that Mr. Bun’s official portrait — which Leanna herself painted — shows him with a tail.

“If this is going to be a permanent change in President Mr. Bun’s appearance, we might need to think about modifying the presidential portrait, or painting him a new one,” Leanna said. “But, uh, I’m kinda busy. Maybe Napoleon Piggywig can paint it — he’s a budding artist, you know.”

Some dollies have suggested an alternate solution: giving Mr. Bun a new tail, if his old one is not found. Indeed, at least two dollies have already offered to sever their own tails and have them attached to the president, Bunny said.

“The president greatly apprecaites their generosity, but has declined their kind offers,” Bunny said.

Not everyone is taking the incident so seriously. The tale of the tail has already become fodder for late-night comics.

“You’ve heard of the emperor who has no clothes?” said Jay Lame-o, host of the “Last Night Show With Jay Lame-o,” Friday night. “Well, we’ve got a president with no feet, no nose, and now — this just in — no tail!”

“Not so beady-eyed and bushy-tailed anymore, eh, Mr. President?” Lame-o added.

David Letterfish, host of the “Late Show With David Letterfish,” had a more politically tinged comment on Bun’s plight. “Well, I’ve got some good news — President Bun’s missing tail has been found,” Letterfish said. “Yes, apparently it was found right next to his missing anti-terrorism policy and his missing tax-cut plan.”

Notwithstanding such barbs, McGraw, the political science professor, said the tail’s disappearance should not hurt Bun politically, so long as it is “handled properly” by his political staff.

“Unless they present the image of bumbling around confusedly or frantically, or of covering up the truth, which thus far they haven’t, I think Bun will get through this fine,” McGraw said. “Right now, they’re projecting calm and forthrightness, basically saying, ‘Here’s what we know, here’s what we don’t know, but listen, this isn’t really a big deal.’ That’s exactly what they need to do.”