YOU CAN LOOK BUT -- WELL, YOU CAN'T LOOK EITHER. At work I can't read Matthew Yglesias, or CalPundit, or a lot of other inspirational bloggers because my company employs Websense to prevent us peasants from -- well, let me quote the Websense website: "Websense can be used to promote employee productivity. For a quick illustration of how much casual surfing of the Internet could be costing your organization, choose your currency and complete the form on the next page."

Dollars and cents vs. quality of life. The judges are all wearing expensive suits. Guess who wins?

Websense cites a category -- "gambling," "sex," "personal web site," etc. -- when one of its constituents attempts to enter a verboten site. Sometimes it's overzealous -- I can't go to Neal Pollack's site, for example, because Websense thinks it's "tasteless" -- a fair cop in any case, but Websense seems to be thinking about Polish jokes.

For a while I was actually able to get around these computer cops by adding the "www" I'd been omitting from the filtered URLs. But they caught on to that. That's the creepy thing (well, one of them) about these services -- they observe, they learn, and they adapt.

I state here for the record that I am no slacker, and I generally approve everything my company does, in spades & believe you me. But these internet handcuffs send, I believe, an unhelpful message: that any time spending goofing around with general-interest reading is stolen from the company, and locking out certain sites is like locking down the computers themselves -- a rudimentary precaution against the natural depravity of human beings.

I object. Any intellectual labor, like physical labor, requires timely breaks to keep the laboring apparatus fresh. Even Republicans will agree with that, I think. If they don't trust us to choose our own means of refreshment, maybe they should just send Party functionaries around at intervals to lead us in jumping-jacks and songs of praise to our Leader.

Well, this doesn't bear too much fretting over -- and I do have work to do. Look, Boss! I'm refreshed!

BACK IN THE DAY. Friend'o'mine gave me a mix CD. It has the Ramones doing "Street Fighting Man." Shit! So so so cool.

Following is the Donnas, doing "Dirty Denim." Reminds me of something Chuck D once said about the Knicks: "Yeah, you good, but you ain't winning no World Championships."

I miss Joey.

IT'S RIGHT WHEN WE DO IT, BUT WRONG WHEN YOU DO IT, and there ain't no more to it than that, all internal tergiversations aside.

THE REBA'ATHIFICATION OF SALAM PAX is near complete. He is gone from the Blogger blogroll. Matt Welch and James Lileks speak no more in his defense. And all because, anti-Saddam as he has been, he did not entirely appreciate (in the flag-waving manner of recent TV Iraqis) the takeover of his country. He reports, firsthand, on the devastation of his surroundings. He works for a group calling itself Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict -- "Who is paying them? And the organization itself appears shady," says NRO. ("He praises the local Communists, who did nothing to liberate Iraq," the NRO operative adds. No shit. Who got the money for that, Dimmy?)

The postwar does not entirely fit the millenarian scenario proposed by the erstwhile warbloggers. "There is absolutely no distribution method. The aid that is coming in gets taken by whomever and sold on the market. You could buy the whole box for 16.000 dinars (a bit more than 16 US dollars by today’s rate)," reports SP. This can't be encouraging news to the many Americans who have been inclined to wonder when the largesse lavished on the official administrators of the world's newest democracy will run off in the form of Democracy! Whiskey! Sexy! approbation unto its oldest. Some might even question the wisdom of this multimillion-dollar expedition. No surprise, then, that conservatives have put him on their shitlist.

Only those of us cursed with an inclination to follow these internecine struggles will notice, probably. But what about the bigger, more domestic propaganda efforts, like the 2004 Republican Convention, slated to be held near September 11 right here, where the planes hit and most of us despise the President? How many web sites will it take to make that work?

A BRIEF REPRIEVE FROM A LITANY OF FAILURES. Alicublog has been receiving props of late, some from longtime favorites and web machers like CalPundit, Tapped, and Ted Barlow, some from guys who are new to me but who obviously know something about pushing words together.

I am flattered, certainly, especially considering the sources. But you can be sure this momentary frisson will not go to my head. Indeed, in this long malaise my life I have many times seen opportunity come and go like a local train suddenly and inconveniently running express, with the conductor thumbing his nose at me as he speeds past. The angels that the Lord sends daily unto me, dressed like the ones in Wings of Desire but less inclined to touch my scalp sympathetically than to beat me with softball bats, will not suddenly change their style of ministration, and neither will my creditors grow less attentive.

And it's only blogging, after all -- not like the sure-fire career path that is rawkn roll!

But I will take my bow and be content.

ANOTHER THING THAT MAKES US GREAT IS OUR AWESOME MODESTY. "Anyway, I think the realism of conservative writing has grown to be more valued in part because realism itself is more valued... You could also say, as many do, that it's not realism so much as ideas that makes for good writing. Since liberalism doesn't have good ideas anymore their writing often seems to be cranky defenses of the status quo or continuation of old discredited policies." -- Jonah Goldberg, NRO's The Corner.

Elsewhere Goldberg and other members of his ass-patting society talk about how stuck up Cornel West is. Apparently West allows words of praise directed toward himself to appear on his website. Why, they must wonder, doesn't he just say them about himself, like real intellectuals do?

I CRIED TILL I LAUGHED. This is classic, and I would know, because I was, like, there, man.

HOUSING SCHLOCK. I've been seeing a lot of this kind of anti-rent-stabilization article lately. I think their point would be better expressed by colloquy:

PROFESSOR: So you see, Citizen, if we allow your landlord to charge you anything he wants, your rents will actually go down!

CITIZEN: Gosh, Professor! It sure sounds counterintuitive. How d'ya figure?

PROFESSOR: Without this socialist and stultifying rent stabilization, the market will be free to create new housing units, and when these units compete for your rental dollar, that'll drive prices down -- just like it did Cambridge, MA!

CITIZEN: Are you sure about that, Professor? My buddy lives up in Cambridge, and he says the rents are pretty steep --

PROFESSOR: I'm sure your friend is just a disgruntled hippie, Citizen, grown soft from years on the dole.

CITIZEN: Why, so he is, Prof! But that ain't me! I'll sign that bill for you now.

LANDLORD: (reading bill) Mamma mia! So I can-a charge anything I want? The rent, she a-goin' up!

CITIZEN: But, Professor, you said --

PROFESSOR: Well, you can't expect these things to work overnight. Patience, my friend!

(Two years later, they meet again on the street.)

PROFESSOR: Good to see you again, Citizen. Still living on Gunplay Terrace?

CITIZEN: Yeah. (Yawns) Sorry, Professor -- between the scuttling of the rats in my walls and the nightly artillery barrage, I hardly get any sleep. There's good news, though -- next month they're putting in a Starbucks!

PROFESSOR: It appears the genius of the market has placed us each in domiciles appropriate to our social worth.

CITIZEN: You still living in my old apartment?

PROFESSOR: Of course.

LANDLORD: And dey all live-a happily ever after! Ciao!

RENT-A-RESISTER. Andrea Peyser writes in today's NY Post of "two lefty activists, teachers with advanced degrees in civil disobedience" instructing "stroller-pushing moms and doting dads... proudly American, politically conservative" in Cobble Hill how to conduct themselves during a planned sit-in at a local firehouse. (Engine Co. 204 is one of those slated by our depraved Mayor Richie Rich to close.)

Peyser's tone throughout is sympathetic, and she even tugs at our sleeves, if not our heartstrings (from my experience of her writing, I don't think she knows where those are, either on us or on her), suggesting that these "proudly American" worthies were heroically placing themselves in harm's way for the good of their children. "Folks here in the most populous outer borough feel as if Bloomberg has taken out a contract on their lives," she writes. "The budding domestic protesters were told to arrange for someone to pick up their children to prevent them from being placed in foster care. These dedicated moms deserve better, Mr. Mayor."

Compare and contrast, class! Here's the selfsame Peyser covering an anti-war demo back in March:

Despite the valiant efforts of a few high school hooky players, college class-cutters, trust-funded artists and vintage radicals -- all graced with enough tongue- and nose-piercings to decorate a season of "Survivor" -- yesterday's so-called "die-in" was dead on arrival... the hundreds of cops who were diverted from real emergencies handled the idiot protesters with grace... Not that they liked it. "They took us away from the neighborhoods for this," complained one plainclothes officer. "Don't they know that it's the people who will suffer?"

"Don't they know that it's the people who will suffer?" I wonder if Mayor Rich will roll this out as a talking point, should the firehouse protest materialize. I wonder also if any of the "vintage radicals" from the earlier story were among the "teachers with advanced degrees in civil disobedience" instructing the Cobble Hill group. And I wonder if Peyser would have been nicer about the anti-war protestors if they were dressed more "proudly America" (e.g., in relaxed-fit jeans, shapeless sweatshirts, expensive name-brand athletic shoes, etc).

I do not, though, wonder how Andrea Peyser got a job at the Post. Despite their gleeful, near-daily pounding of the Times, standards at Rupert's Rag are a limbo stick, and it's really just a matter of how low you can go.

HOWARD BEACH. HOWARD BEACH. I was required to attend an employee testimonial out in Howard Beach. All I knew about the neighborhood prior to this evening was that a group of young white guys had chased a black kid onto the Belt Parkway there in 1986. The kid, Michael Griffith, was struck by traffic and killed. Things were ugly in New York for a while after. I remember heading home late one night around that time on the Lower East Side, and noticing some young black guys coming out of a club. As I walked on, I heard someone behind me say, "Let's get the cracker. Howard Beach. Howard Beach." Nothing happened to me, though there were a couple of incidents in that period that probably began the same way.

As Lou Reed said, those were different times.

Tonight's event was at a big old hall called Russo's By The Bay. It's one of those parkway palaces -- a large, filigreed block of stone with thin red carpet and jacketed valets out front, and ornate rooms inside -- good place for your stereotypical Queens wedding reception. As we drove to the place (the company generously spotted me to a car service), I scoped the streets of the neighborhood. Its boundary was announced by gold lettering on a wooden sign painted sky blue, like you'd expect to see at a yacht club. Strolling the streets were young Italian men, and young black men, and young Hispanic men, all in casual clothes and looking comfortable and happy. When I stepped out of the car onto the red carpet, I could smell the sea.

I was seated at a circular table (#9), surrounded mostly by women who sold goods for the company. They were nearly all black, all very well-behaved, happy to be there but not overly demonstrative. I endeavored to draw them out. I drank the wine that flowed. We chatted, had some laughs. I sat next to a very ample middle-aged woman who'd had trouble with her leg, she explained, and this had caused her weight to increase, though she did a lot of walking in her business. She was cheerful and friendly and I was glad to sit with her and hear her deep laughter, though I occasionally turned my attention to an older white woman, very compact in stature and gesture, who announced forthrightly that she had been in the Holocaust, and her son, a chubby fellow wearing a filthy striped shirt and a straw cowboy hat, who seemed primarily interested in the food.

I stepped out to the red carpet every so often to have a smoke. Other guests of the event came out there, all black women. We conversed mildly, except when they were occupied with the company of their friends. One woman sheathed in several layers of diaphonous black fabric laughed uproariously, standing barefoot and sometimes stamping with glee on the thin carpet. One woman with many, many jewel-like encrustations on her black eyeglass frames complained to me, in a good-humored way, that she had been at the job 19 years and had hardly won any of the prizes given out at these events. I wished her luck. Across the street was an Italian restaurant with its roof peaked and striped to look like a circus tent, and a circular passage inside the doorway inscribed with the words FOOD, FAMILY, and FUN.

The event was MC'd by a local bigwig with a Spanish name who looked and acted like a cross between Kevin Spacey and Tim Allen. He energetically announced a series of awards and gifts from the shallow stage, each punctuated by audio stings from a DJ at the other side of the room. The guests were only mildly attentive. They had to work the next day. So did I, but I clapped and attended very attentively, being in the communications business. I noticed that the woman with the jewel-like encrustations had been called up to receive a small box of something or other. I waved and hollered to her; she waved back with a small smile.

I got in the car somewhere between 10:30 and 11 to ride back to my apartment. The car radio played old hits, some of them from the Michael Griffith era. I watched the city roll by, its lights large and bright and imperturbable.

A PLEA FOR SLACK. I studied this Salon article by Steven E. Landsburg several minutes, hoping there was some Modest-Proposal satirical angle I was missing. But there was not: he really thinks we should "punish" juries that hand down verdicts that turn out to be "wrong" (more on the second set of quote marks in a bit).

The goal, says Landsburg, is to give jurors "incentive to get their verdicts right in the first place." Good verdicts win you a check; bad ones get you a fine (!).

This is wrong is so many ways it makes the head spin, but I will focus only on two:

First, the idea of a "wrong" verdict. Landsburg uses the Lemrick Nelson case to add punch to his argument -- he got away with murder! -- and another involving a wrongly-convicted, DNA-liberated guy, just to show that he's not just bloodthirsty, I guess. The injustices in both these cases would seem clear to any reader. But has Landsburg never heard of jury nullification? Supposing the jury decided to decide "wrongly" -- that is, contrary to the instructions of the court and even of the law -- in the interests of what they perceive to be justice. Fine 'em, I expect Landsberg would say, maybe twice for being bad sports.

But it's not that simple. Say a bank, acting as plaintiff, wants to attach the pay of a guy whose wife is fighting cancer. The law might be on the bank's side, but the jury might say, fuck this, we're cutting the guy a break. If you're Landsburg, this is an easy call, but If you believe, as I do, the jury retains the right to pronounce however it sees fit for whatever reason, then the idea of reward/punishment for juries is an onerous, indeed unconstitutional, imposition on their franchise -- and, in cases like this one, on justice itself.

The second point is bigger. Landsberg's threatened-jury-is-a-motivated jury concept is very close to a depressing trend of our times -- that is, bullying as an acceptable means of "improving behavior." Quite apart from our government's unconscionable behavior at the international level, there is a tendency for the powerful to leverage their advantage over the less powerful, and Landsberg even acknowledges this in his reasoning: "The way to make workers diligent, as every manager knows, is to reward them when they succeed and punish them when they fail... Every assembly line worker in America, every cab driver, every doctor and lawyer and magazine columnist, reaps financial rewards and punishments that depend on his performance." I like the conflation of line workers and doctors -- but we all know which category of worker is more likely to get canned for being a little slow on a given morning.

God dammit, why do we all have to be so efficient anyway? Our society is lousy with efficiency experts, ergonometricians, etc., but it seems to me a much less happy place than it was before these pests came onto the scene.

That may be my wider reason for disliking this idea so much. I don't think we should be looking to regulate more aspects of our lives. I think we should be doing the opposite.

THESE KIDS TODAY. Teen sex is, now and always, news at the Times. According to this report by Tamar Lewin on findings by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, "About 20 percent of adolescents have had sexual intercourse before their 15th birthday."

Given the subject and the source, my instinct is to take the figures less than seriously. But even so, they are shocking.

I mean, I thought the kids had to be getting laid more than that.

When I was 15, if you'd told me that my chances of imminent sex were 1 in 5, I would have jumped off a bridge. I always had to believe they were at least 2 to 1 in my favor, or I never would have got out of my semen-encrusted bed.

But the story gets worse. An AP story in the same paper says this: "One in three boys ages 15-17 say they feel pressure to have sex."

Pressure? 33 percent of these boys actually think that someone is pushing them into sex? At their age, I mostly felt resistance to the idea, especially from the maidens I woo'd.

Of course, among my fellow adolescent males, sex was always discussed, and accounted a great thing -- both by those who professed to be getting it on a regular basis, and by those of us who did not (indeed, could not with any hope of being believed) make such claims. But that wasn't pressure -- that was, to us, mercy. For even the Lotharios among us were not getting nearly enough sex to satiate the great, slavering beast that was -- in my day, anyway -- male teenage lust, and the rest of us were practically shaking with need, ready to explode like cum-bombs.

The only relief we knew from this pressure was the ribald tales, knowing winks, and coarse laughter with which we acknowledged and sympathized with each other's howling horn-dogliness. We were not spurring each other on to reckless sexual behavior, we were coping with the fact that we had no partners with whom to be reckless. (I suppose we could have beat each other off -- and, as I went to a prep school, I assume some of us did -- but, as Lou Reed said, those were different times.)

The article gives the impression that our current crop of youngbloods feel their male bonding rituals constitute some sort of emotional "bad touch." I pray this is a misapprehension by clueless social workers. That's always a good bet.

But what if it isn't? What if the boys are, in fact, such abject pussies? What if kids aren't living in sexual Valhalla as we've all assumed? What if all those movies about precocious libertines, all those rumors about rampant schoolgirl-on-schoolboy blowjobs, were bullshit?

Any opportunity to feel less jealous of the young is welcome. But it would be depressing to believe that the picture of their generation coming out of the paper is at all accurate. I prefer to think that the intensity of adult scrutiny has Heisenberged teenage behavior -- rendered it unreadably sketchy, perhaps with some help from the kids themselves who must be sick of all the poking and prodding.

I mean, people can't have changed that much. Can they?

AS IF MY SELF-ESTEEM weren't bedraggled enough, along comes this.

EQUILIBRIUM. Hey, how ya doin'? Okay? Me? Oh, can't complain. Earlier, I was briefly made angry by this guy, who has figured out on his digital slide rule that conservatives are better writers than liberals (he also says, if I'm reading him right, that conservatives are more fun, more intelligent, and more polite; have better breath, whiter teeth, and stronger erections; and their shit don't smell). Elsewhere, usual suspect Jonah Goldberg wrote, "I believe that in the far-flung future we will live in houses full of woods (real or synthetic) and greens and eat increasingly luxurious meals." Yeah, I thought, if by "we" he means himself and his fellow tenured conservatives; the rest of us will probably only see trees if our concentration camps happen to be located on National Park land.

But I was too busy to keep up my anger over things like this. I am struggling to keep many balls in the air (some of them weighing thirty pounds and studded with razor blades), and that prevents me from paying too much mind to the hoots and gibberings coming from the fever swamps. In fact, these days my best moments come when I am perfectly poised between anger at an unjust fate and anger at morons with modems. At such moments I briefly forget who to be mad at, and am content.

THEIR ARGUMENT. Kathryn Jean Lopez explains it all for you, publishing with approval this NRO reader quote:

I was just watching "The Great Muppet Caper" (last day of the semester) and discovered an overlooked moment of Muppet insight. The gang have just caught jewel thief Charles Grodin red-handed and sweet, earnest Kermit asks, "Why did you do it?" Grodin shrugs and says, "Because I'm a villain." Plain and simple, no "root cause" nonsense. I'll remember that line every time someone tries to tell me we should be more concerned about why "they" hate us.

Let us not forget, as we endeavor to wrest control of the country back from the bellicose idiots that currently misguide her, that we are in fact dealing with bellicose idiots. The bowtied clowns who act all erudite on TV are merely a sideshow for the opinion epicures. The Republican arguments are in the main yahoo bullshit. Whichever one of the Dems picks up the fallen standard in 2004 had better be able to talk to Beavis and Butthead.

I miss Bill Clinton.

UES, US, ME. I took my usual Saturday afternoon walk through the Upper East Side today and had all sorts of thoughts about the neighborhood. One of my first jobs in the City was as a waiter in a now-defunct UES bistro called Daly's Daffodil. That place is a story or twelve in itself (ask me sometime about our three-hundred pound night manager, who would get drunk on Bushmill's every night; we used to pop Irish songs on the jukebox at about 10 pm just to get him roaring along with "Danny Boy," and to get the customers to complain about him). I loathed the district then. I hated its obnoxious wealth. (I was poor.) Moreover, I hated the style of that wealth -- still blow-dried and flair-legged, even in the late 70s, a redoubt of Farrah Fawcett-Majors gloss and cocaine-burnished insouciance in the middle of a City that was still sweatily thrashing its way out of financial default.

In later years, still poor, I took a perverse liking to the Upper East Side, mainly because it was out of style. The mass exodus of otherwise sober youngsters to the hipper precincts downtown (and the more spacious digs to the west) left the place in the custody of dowagers with thick makeup, dazed middle-agers in minks and $500 sport jackets who had not fucked off to the suburbs (or were fucking mistresses or rent boys during the gaps in their appointment books), and young preppies who aped their style and got vomiting drunk each weekend in frat bars along First Avenue. I began also to visually appreciate the queer mix of scrubbed brick townhouses and the blank-faced, modernist architectural abortions that tycoons had placed among them in the 60s and 70s, when they thought the zeitgeist would roll like river branches through their canyons for eternity. Everything was just a little stale and out of mode, though washed each morning with money and daubed with Floris cologne. That, in my jaundiced eye, gave it character. And if that wasn't character enough, you could always go to the Germantown enclave and get some boiled meat, liver dumpling soup, and glass boots full of Weiss beer

Now the Upper East Side is still rich, and its residents still strive to present themselves accordingly. Even their goth granddaughters spend a ton on their dour threads. But what has changed is this: so does everyone else. Even the hippest of hipsters in the hippest of hip nabes drops a wad on his or her dishabbile. Style points vary from geography to geography, but the instinct is the same: if I buy this, I will fit. Which was also true back when, in some places, it cost twenty bucks to fit. But when there's a serious investment at stake, fashion becomes desperation. And that sort of desperation is more far-ranging than once it was.

So of course I don't hate the Upper East Side anymore. How could I? It's just like everywhere else, even though it may be easier for its people to be that way than it is for most.

And, as it happens, the City is still sweatily thrashing its way out of financial default. And, as it happens, so am I.

And Germantown is gone.

Sometimes people ask me if I have soured on our City beause it is so changed. Again, how could I? I carry it inside me, with every increasingly heavy step I take.

THEY LOOKED SO ORDERLY IN THE PUBLICITY SHOTS. Seems like only yesterday that happy Iraqis were smiling for the cameras and waving their brand-new American flags. Back then, OpinionJournal's Daniel Henninger overtly compared the post-Saddam citizens to the liberated East Berliners of 1989.

Funny, I don't recall the conservatives calling for a wave of American soldiers to restore order among newly-freed East Germans. Yet today OpinionJournal says that, in Iraq, "something close to chaos reigns. The lack of security is disrupting the most basic aspects of postwar reconstruction... Rampant lawlessness is the No. 1 complaint of ordinary Iraqis, who are grateful for the new U.S. crackdown on crime."

I love that last sentence. We are so grateful, Mr. Democracy Whiskey Sexy Bush People, for our rampantly lawless crackdown!

"We're not -- repeat, not -- longing for a return to 19th-century colonialism," pledges OJ. (Yeah, and I'm not, repeat not, longing for a thick steak and a good bottle of Chateau Haut-Brion, but put them in front of me and watch them disappear.) OJ reenforces its un-longing for 19th-century colonialism by referring casually to Iraqi administrator L. Paul Bremer as "Lord Bremer" and comparing him to Kitchener.

OJ's editorials have taken on a weird, muzzy, almost drunken feeling since it stopped mattering at all whether what they said made sense or not (approximately late March, I think it was). Check out also the aforementioned Henninger as he writes, joshingly, about how "dull" the economy is -- not "dull" as in listless, which was what I at first thought he meant, but dull as in no fun to talk about.

Well, given how that economy is going, and his own comrades' part in making it so, I shouldn't wonder he would find such conversations tiresome. Henninger's own piece is far from dull, though -- in fact, it proceeds with depraved indifference to human life on a rollicking trip through the economic catastrophes of our age -- such as the dot-com bubble, dismissed here with a hearty "so what if much of it failed?" He then pretends that Olympia Snowe is holding up the economic recovery by being a "downer." No, I'm not kidding. Go see for yourself.

Recently we were all talking about the end of this and that -- History, Ideology, whatever. Reason appears to have taken its place at the egress. The rest of us are next.

NOEL REDDING. As a man, as a fan, and most importantly as a guitarist turned bass player, I regret to inform you that Noel Redding, bottom-end guy for the Jimi Hendrix Experience, has passed away.

Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell comprised a splendid rhythm section. It's hard to play that fussy and drive that hard all at the same time. Rhythm players leave space between notes so they'll have room to syncopate their parts -- which can give the illusion that a song is hurtling forward even if it's being played in strict time. Ornate players tend to fill up these musical spaces so much that the song actually bogs down and seems to drag. But some guys can be real hyper on the bass and still push the music. Redding managed that. He had a lot of energy, a great feel for the tunes (and the instrument -- hear how he pits the low, sweet, fat notes against the higher, thinner ones on "Fire"), and a freshness-seal hookup with Mitchell. The last bit is crucial. If you isolated Redding's parts, or Mitchell's, you might think, "Manic, but what's it mean, where's it going?" You would never ask that about the Experience, because everyone was up in everyone else's musical business -- I say "tick," you say "tock" etc. -- only their vocabulary was a great deal more advanced, and manifested more like the overlapping dialogue in an Altman movie.

I could go on all day. But I have rehearsal tonight and a show tomorrow. I'll pay my tributes then.

HUH WHAT? #342,099. "Put aside whether race should be used as a hiring criterion. Even people who support affirmative action don't have to support Raines' approach of refusing to hold blacks responsible for anything, from fake reporting to gang-raping a jogger in Central Park. What Raines did to Blair was cruel." -- Ann Coulter. [emphasis mine]

RUN, RUN, RUN. Wishing to show common cause with my new employers, I participated in the Corporate Challenge in Central Park this evening. It's a three-and-a-half mile run (or walk, as the new rules allow) that somehow generates bucks for charity, and corporate pride -- you turn up with your colleagues in logo-identifying T-shirts and convey your time to a captain, to be posted in some dark corner of the web. I'd last done this years ago, when all were expected to run for an easier 3.5 kilometers (why is everything easier for the Europeans?); I had never so much as stepped on a treadmill before, I drank heavily the night before (and the night before, and the night before...), and ran in high-tops and surfer jams, breaking the tape at 30 minutes flat.

This evening's field was much more crammed than the last one I'd joined; it took those of us proceeding from the "non-competitive area" (the default gathering spot -- I guess you had to demonstrate a subscription to Runner's World or pass a hamstring-to-beer-belly ratio examination to start further up) four or five minutes to even reach the official starting line.

Thereafter the field was still crowded but navigable. I noticed a lot of different and distinct breathing patterns around me: steady pants, wheezes, grunts, and sharp, horror-movie gasps. To further remove my mind of numbing boredom and intimations of death, I checked out chicks' butts. The Corporate Challenge is a feast for ass-men; I wonder if this isn't a large, undisclosed come-on for events like this. Maybe all the strain and sweat is a turn-on too for some -- the TV ads for health clubs, with their crypto-pornographic close-ups of straining torsos, certainly suggest this.

The clock said 36:32 when I hauled myself across the finish. My captain allowed two minutes for starting-line congestion, which I didn't dispute. Even by this conservative estimate I'm in no worse shape than I was back in the day, at least physically, which amazes me, given the time I spend parked on my keister, crunching verbiage.

The real test will be whether I can get my pants on tomorrow.