Sometimes, we nerds win.

I’m referring of course to the tale of
Steuard Jensen, Prom King.
As it turns out, Steuard was a physics major at HMC,
just one year behind me. I stumbled across his page by accident.
Of course, his story is still not quite as good as the one about
the
straight-A clarinet player who took Miss December 1989 to his Winter Formal,
but all in all, not bad.

In other news, Linda Lay is
bemoaning
her husband’s fate. The spin is that the family is facing bankruptcy, and that Ken Lay
is an “honest, decent, moral human being who would do absolutely nothing wrong.”

It’s funny how bankruptcy just kinda creeps up on you like that. I mean, I
haven’t cashed out $101 million dollars in stock, and I don’t
own several multimillion dollar
homes in Aspen, and yet somehow I manage to pay most of my creditors on time.
Maybe his teenagers have, like, huge phone bills or something.

Heck, forget about Lay. I’m still having trouble feeling sorry for
those poor Enron employees. I mean, if you’re a white-collar worker
at a big company, you know what’s going on. Sure, you probably
don’t know enough to be prosecuted for anything. But… you hear rumors.
You pick up on things at meetings, on email aliases, in casual conversations.
You just kind of know things you’re not supposed to know, unless you’re
socially blind, deaf, and dumb.

Here’s who I do feel sorry for: the janitors. And the landscapers, and the cafeteria
people, and the workers who built and maintained Enron’s plants and pipelines.
And possibly the admins. But as for the energy traders and the IT department?
Let’s see… you earned your living screwing over helpless people for money, but
it didn’t occur to you that perhaps your bosses viewed you in the same light.
Well, tough luck and good riddance.

So it looks like Iran
is working actively to undermine Karzai, while his new government is still
weak and uncertain. Just when there was hope that maybe, just maybe, Musharraf
was reining in the ISI and the extremist madrasas… a new threat
appears in the west. Terrific.

Closer to home, the
Republicans
had themselves a gubernatorial debate. I read this article in the physical SF Chronicle…
unfortunately the web version lacks the cute little table comparing Bill, Bill, and Richard on
the issues. That’s too bad, because in the cute little table’s “Energy Policy” column there
was a short, simple sentence for all three, “Favors full deregulation and a free market solution”
or something along those lines. Well, no shockers there. Although it makes me wonder…

Jones and Riordan clashed most strongly over energy, with the Jones accusing Riordan of
overcharging the state when Los Angeles sold electricity at the height of last winter’s
energy crisis.

“You were busy trying to make sure that Los Angeles made as much money as it could off
California,” Jones argued, adding that Riordan’s expert on energy, S. David Freeman, later
joined the governor’s staff and contributed to the administration’s problems wrestling
the energy issue.”

Riordan vigorously defended his actions, saying it was his job to protect the interests
of residents in Los Angeles, whose electricity rates stayed constant during his tenure.

Strange that Jones, the stalwart free marketeer, would castigate Riordan for
simply charging California what the market would bear. (Or possibly less —
according to the SJ
Mercury’s article, Riordan claimed that the Los Angeles
DWP sold the state electricity at cost.) Guess those free market principles are harder
to stick to when it’s the other guy that holds all the cards.

Well, since I am not one to let Jones, Riordan, and Simon be pigeonholed by
our mean nasty rotten inaccurate liberal Bay Area media, I went to each candidate’s
website to see what their solutions were for the energy crisis. No filtering,
no soundbites, no cute little SF Chronicle tables. The straight stuff. Here’s what
I found as of Jan. 23, 2002:

Bill Jones simply
provides a list of op-ed articles by the Mercury, the LA Times, and the Sacramento Bee
that criticize Davis. (Pssst, Bill: every link you provided is broken.
Neither the Mercury, the Sac Bee, or the LA Times perma-links their articles. Just FYI.)
All righty then, moving on to…

Bill Simon. Who, under
his “Issues” section, provides… nothing on energy policy whatsoever! Looks like
our last hope is…

Richard Riordan.
It turns out that Riordan’s energy policy consists of a short press release calling for
the dissolution of the newly-formed Power Authority. Well, I suppose that’s
something, anyway. Better than recycling other people’s editorials.
And definitely better than providing nothing at all.

Now, certainly it’s fair to criticize Davis. He was
slow to react to the mess he inherited from Wilson. And he might have gotten snookered
in those long term power contracts. On the other hand, he was under tremendous pressure
to simply keep the lights on… and despite all that the Bush administration and
Enron threw at him, he managed to do it.

Davis’s challengers have had a year to plan since the height of the crisis.
They have the full benefit of 20-20 hindsight — and then some. So do they have
any new ideas? Anything besides attacking the governor
and spouting clichés? No. Nothing at all.

Pathetic.

Just read about today’s
Bat
Mitzvah Massacre. The killer murdered the security guard and
then charged into the main hall armed with guns and grenades. He ended up killing
five more civilians, including the little girl’s grandfather. This heroic act of
resistance was apparently in retaliation for the assassination of Raed al-Karmi.
Karmi was the leader of a terrorist cell associated with
Arafat’s Fatah faction — he was wanted by Israel for, among other things,
kidnapping and murdering two Jewish restaurant owners.

I don’t see what Fatah hopes to accomplish with this — other than
making it increasingly obvious that, as Yossi
Klein Halevi states in this week’s
TNR, “to demand that Arafat dismantle
Palestine’s terrorist infrastructure is absurd… the biggest terrorist
infrastructure in the PA is the PA itself.”

For many years, I believed that if only things would quiet down long enough to
establish a Palestinian state, peace would take hold. But after these last
few months… what evidence is there that a full-fledged
Palestinian nation would do anything other than simply kill more Israelis, faster?
How is Israel supposed to keep Katushya rockets out of terrorist hands once
it loses control of the borders? No, I’ve realized that I was wrong, and that
Hamas is right:
there will never be peace in Israel. Not this century.

Something awful happened today. I read
George
Will’s column and found my head nodding vigorously at several points. Ewwww.

I had pretty much written Will off long
ago, with the possible exception of his baseball columns. But here’s what he
says about the Enron collapse:

It will remind everyone — some conservatives, painfully — that a mature capitalist
economy is a government project. A properly functioning free market system does not
spring spontaneously from society’s soil as dandelions spring from suburban lawns.
Rather, it is a complex creation of laws and mores that guarantee, among much else,
transparency, meaning a sufficient stream — torrent, really — of reliable information
about the condition and conduct of corporations.

Poor Will. That pretty much makes him a Stalinist, as far as his crowd
is concerned. I don’t envy him going through his hate mail bag tomorrow.

One interesting thing Will adds is that “a few capitalists have done more to delegitimize
capitalism than America’s impotent socialist critics ever did or today’s moribund left
could hope to. It is the Republicans’ special responsibility to punish such capitalists.”
(Emphasis mine.) Hmmmm… if I buy that philosophy, then that means we liberals have a special
responsibility to punish those who delegitimize our side.

Well! I am not one to shirk my duty. May I direct your attention to
today’s little
gem from our old friend Charlotte Raven? You might
remember her as the lovely
young lady who, seven days after the Sep. 11 atrocity, informed us primly that
a bully with
a bloody nose is still a bully.

In her latest column, Raven claims that had Charles Bishop been raised in the UK,
he would not have committed suicide by crashing his small plane into a
tall building.

For boys like him, school will always be a nightmare, but there is far more chance
over here that he would meet a like-minded compadre with whom he could share jokes
and swap notes about the monstrous pain of the universe. At some point, they’d discover
the Smiths and both would be delighted by how perfectly Morrissey captures that
feeling of being invisible to the people whose attention you most want to attract.

The… “Smiths”? “Morrissey”…? Why, Ms. Raven, what are these… strange, exotic
bands you speak of? They… confuse and frighten me.

No, I couldn’t agree more. If only we here in the United States had any
kind of outlet at all for our kids with Goth angst. But none exist.
No, Britain is far better at absorbing its misfits in a healthy manner, given
its far more easy-going culture and complete absence of class structure.
I mean, young British misfits
never
do
anything
wrong, do they?

The really amusing part is Raven’s comments on Marilyn Manson — that if
“Marilyn Manson were British he could have had a nice career singing songs
about how it felt to be a sickly, spotty but highly intelligent young man
with a wicked sense of humour and a perfectly comprehensible horror of
the banality and hypocrisy of late-capitalist society.” Could it be…? The
high-and-mighty Charlotte Raven, scourge of warlike capitalist American dullards
everywhere, doesn’t get Marilyn Manson? Any American with any
knowledge of pop culture understands
that Manson is nothing more than an off-color over-the-top 24/7
marketing campaign. Could it be that we get the joke and Raven doesn’t?
It’s almost too much.

As an added bonus, Raven
hated
the Lord of the Rings movie (of course!) — but if I understand her
correctly, the movie would have been a success had the special effects been
cheesy. She is quite disappointed with the movie’s seamless CGI:
“The minute Middle Earth is as real to us as Battersea or Burma,
it is no longer Tolkien’s creation… (Jackson’s) literal-minded insistence
on shining a spotlight into every crevice makes the whole thing seem completely
banal. If Hobbits are real, they are laughable.” Oh, dear, dear.

I know, I know. I resolved this year: no more po-mo lefty silliness. But I just
ran across this one. I wasn’t actively trolling through the Guardian
website looking for trouble, I swear. Scout’s Honor.

All right, I’ll end on a positive note. Kathleen Parker pretty much
nails
the CNN-Paula Zahn-zipper promo “controversy” in today’s Merc:

Still, for a nanosecond of offensive flattery, Zahn got the attention the
ad was intended to get, she got to decry the “insult” that she’s an appealing
woman, and she gets weeks of coverage in which her professionalism is praised
amid apologetic admissions that, well, she is a little bit sexy. And
you thought you were having a bad day.

Parker also notes that the zipper sound was inaccurate: “I personally visited
every closet in my house this morning and couldn’t find a single zipper that
made any noise. With little ado, we’ve entered the era of the noiseless zipper.”

The Era of the Noiseless Zipper. What will our nation’s scientific geniuses
think of next?