Author: Aaron Weber

Slate coverage of the “Bong Hits for Jesus” case is full of the kinds of weird and funny moments you’d expect from a case about disruptive, but meaningless, free speech.

The Explainer on dog food. Ew.

Hot Document on the Chiquita Banana of Mass Destruction case. Local experts will point out that everyone who works in that part of Colombia pays off the AUC, who are really more like freelance police than terrorists. You also have to pay bribes to FARC and ELN to work in rebel territory, and those guys are worse.

WSJ Informed Reader: “Focus on the Family’s chairman, James Dobson, and 22 other evangelical leaders sent a letter to the NAE in early March calling Mr. Cizik’s campaign ‘divisive.’”

James Dobson is one of the most hate-filled and divisive religious leaders of recent times, and he’s calling someone divisive– over a suggestion that humans have a duty not to screw up the earth? Hubris and irony are deeply entertaining.

Go ahead. Make Alabama look bad:

It’s been a long time since I’ve thought about regular expressions, but MySpace has made me do it again, and I’ll never forgive them. They’ve gone and implemented another security measure so poorly designed and poorly implemented it could have come from the TSA.

It’s an attempt to get stop people from screwing with CSS by replacing the string “style” with <myspace>style</myspace>.

On most of the boards, you can say “style” but you can’t link to any URL with “style” in it– such as, oh, StyleFeeder.com. And then in some places, you can’t even say “style.” The phrase “I prefer freestyle to slalom” became “I prefer free<myspace>style</myspace> to slalom” in one instance. But not in every instance– it’s not even consistent.

Next thing you know they’ll be asking us to take off our shoes and limiting us to three ounces of toothpaste.

Iraq is gloomy, inequality is looming, and our republic being undermined by overzealous ideologues. The economy, as always, is in danger of collapse.

This weekend, while I was visiting my parents, I asked my dad if he thought that our society was more just than it was 40 years ago. I don’t know why I picked 40 years, but it seemed like a reasonable number.

He responded immediately that it was. Forty years ago, the University of Virginia was all-male and all-white, and the public school system was still recovering from that episode when it shut down entirely rather than accept integration. True, our republic is in danger now, but it is not really in any greater danger than it has been in the past. And the conditions of equality and justice before the law, while far from perfect, are better than they have been. Jose Padilla is the exception now, not the rule.

The rich may be getting richer, and the middle may have greater income volatility, and the gap between rich and poor may be greater… but we are as a nation better off and generally fairer than we were forty years ago. Not everyone has done equally well, and our progress is probably not enough, and it may be that we’re about to slide backwards, but it consoles me to remember that it’s better than it was.

MONROE, La. – Chicken fat clogged a major traffic artery Tuesday, a day after a leaky truck left a stinky, slippery trail along a one-mile stretch of Interstate 20.

Friday morning I had a 10:30 flight to Virginia to visit my parents, but got bumped twice due to a faulty oil pump and then faulty computer systems. Then, several gloriously internet-free days. Today: catching up.

Scooter Libby was found guilty on four of five counts– lying to a grand jury and to congress about how he learned Valerie Plame’s identity, how he spread that news, and why. Sadly, he’s held his line and not rolled over on Cheney, who passed him the secret in order to falsify intelligence, spin data, and drag the nation into a war of aggression.

Four years and thousands of deaths later, Libby’s getting a slap on the wrist and Cheney’s getting away with it. I imagine that once he’s done a few months in a minimum-security prison, Libby will get some sort of reward for his service– a suitcase full of cash, a sweet consulting or lobbying gig, whatever.

Just another day undermining human decency in the capitol.

For once, I’m not talking about Britney and Paris– instead, it’s the a talentless blonde that people actually take seriously: Ann Coulter.

Oh, I know, I know, it’s supposed to be a joke, like that classic Michael Richards act about lynching.

It’s funny– until this, I hadn’t really taken Edwards seriously as a threat, but now that he’s getting so much attention from Ann, maybe he’ll get more notice among human beings with actual souls.

On further reflection, the problem with Fast Company is not the silliness of pretending it’s not about Ducatis, or the unfortunate title (the same as the much-parodied business magazine) but that it’s simply a mediocre story, ill-structured and ill-told. I’ll accept less-than-stellar writing to read a really compelling story like Ultramarathon Man, and great writing can make anything seem interesting, like Paul Theroux’s account of being bored and drunk on the Trans-Siberian railway. But Gross manages neither. His memoir meanders through the moderately successful relaunch of the company and his frustrating relationship with a closeted boyfriend, then stops without ending: the boyfriend is still closeted, the company is muddling through, and Italy is still charmingly different from the US. The only things Gross learns are how to ride a bike and how to buy expensive custom shoes. His readers are even less well served: we don’t learn anything at all from his experience and are barely even entertained.

Bookdwarf brought home a motorcycle-related galley for me. Scheduled for publication in May 2007, Fast Company: A Memoir of Life, Love, and Motorcycles in Italy is the story of a man who goes to Bologna to do marketing for a struggling motorcycle manufacturer in the mid-90s. This manufacturer is carefully unnamed, but it’s obviously Ducati. Ducati is known among motorcyclists for several things, all of which are described in the book: making high-performance motorcycles that are expensive to maintain, the mid-90s meltdown and turnaround led by brash Americans, the “naked bike” craze being led by the Monster series, and the unconventional desmodromic valves in its engines. Changing the trademarked words to “Beast” and “cosmodromic” doesn’t make it less obvious. Nor does putting the silhouette of a 1980s-style Japanese cruiser on the cover– not when the author is shown on the back page posing next to a Ducati 996 and wearing Ducati-branded leathers. Least effective at hiding the identity of the company is the Library of Congress cataloging in publication data, where the entry “1. Ducati (company)” has been carefully crossed out with a black magic marker.

The book itself is OK. Gross goes to Italy, gets some fancy clothes, a hot skinhead boyfriend, and drinks coffee in a colorfully stereotypical Italian town. He’s a reasonably good writer, but I’m still unsure why they’re pretending the book isn’t about Ducati.