apparently the washington post has problems with berkeley breathed’s brand of humor, and pulled last week’s opus strip. salon has full story, including the post’s reluctance to run an installment featuring lola granola’s conversion from amish nudist to radical islamist. they really shouldn’t be so pc about the amish… i hear they don’t use the interwebs much.

in other news, the nyt magazine apparently thinks $40 for a wifebeater is a good bargain (the link to it from the front page reads “Cheap Find: Cotton Tank Top”); the Great Arlington Coffee War has made it to the usnews website (sans the customer’s side of the story); and lacking for a third interesting thing, i give you this: a texas school district that is trying to force a five-year-old boy to get a haircut. i might as well throw in a mention that my uncle made the front page of the wapo on february 15, 1967, for the same thing - the headline ran, “youth fights order to cut long locks.” *sigh*

what can i say? he was jks’ film TA. and then there’s that small matter of absolutely amazing everything.

oh, yeah. and neil patrick harris.

so, SCOTUS struck down dc’s ban on handguns last week, in an opinion likely to create ripples across the country as more gun laws are challenged. an interesting article in the wsj law blog discussed the practical implications of the decision in terms of gun-buying in the city, the upshot of which seemed to be “nothing is going to change quickly.” the immediate reaction in the dc metro area seems to have been a flurry of interest among wannabe hand gun owners who are trying to buy guns in md and va.

given this backdrop (and the wsj interview particularly), a new development in the district caught my eye. the wapo reports that a new gun bill is being introduced by phil mendelson today. the liberalization of the city’s gun laws seems to be happening more quickly than i’d expected, but apparently not quickly (or liberally) enough for some.

alan gura, the attorney who argued against the gun ban before the supreme court, is apparently of the opinion that mendelson’s legislation doesn’t go far enough:

After looking at the draft yesterday, Gura said in an e-mail, “It’s a good start, but there are other issues with the code.”

In particular, he is concerned about the city’s decision to continue a ban on semiautomatic weapons, which he said is unconstitutional.

if i were a writer of very bad puns, i’d say gura was setting himself up for a heller ironic ending.

• “pharmacists for life international” has a handy list of boycott-worthy pharmacies around the country (thankfully few, at least for now). these are places that value “life” over women’s health, and refuse to stock plan B, hormonal contraceptives, and in some cases, even condoms.

  it’s an ugly site, but the list is below the fold on the linked page.

• japan threatens “re-education” for overweight adults who don’t lose weight within six months. on a related note, they’re also improving the manners of their smokers!
• and non-ironically, a theologian working to save quechua.

“Bringing Baitullah Mehsud, the head of this extremist group in South Waziristan — capturing him and bringing him to justice, which is what should happen to him,” is what the United States wants from Pakistan, Deputy Secretary of State John D. Negroponte said last month in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

i’m hideously uninformed on this one, but hopefully negroponte won’t drag u.s. troops into this. it seems to me capturing and bringing to justice isn’t something the u.s. gov’t is doing so well in that part of the world. consider OBL, wanted dead or alive;¹ and then saddam hussein, whose receipt of justice seems to have solved… absolutely nothing.

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¹ c’mon, you didn’t really think i’d link to this, did you?

this morning’s random bits:

• it’s apparently difficult to get rid of all the personal data on an iphone.
• xkcd introduces geohashing. geekier geocaching for the investment-inclined.
• sometimes i think people would be easier to understand if their speech had html markups.
• nick has photos from istanbul up - quite neat, even if he didn’t take his SLR. apparently his main site is down, tho. is this the end of defenestrate.org?
• bad political news: kennedy’s malignant glioma. good political news: va’s abortion law gets overturned. again.
• and a quasi-art project.

that is all for now.

following my not-quite-diatribe about the ridiculous ondcp report, i began to wonder if the problem (politicized research) was being exacerbated by poor reporting skills. and while an n=2 doesn’t make for a very good sample (at least where N=the universe of washington post reports on surveys or studies), evidence for the poor reporting skills hypothesis is mounting.

take today’s wapo article covering the findings of the third annual autovantage road rage survey: for two years in a row, washington region drivers have been found to be the fifth-rudest in the nation. staff writer jonathan mummolo takes this to mean “we aren’t getting any ruder.”

wrongo, jonathan. what it means is that our relative ranking hasn’t changed. it doesn’t say squat about our actual level of rudeness. we may indeed be getting ruder, or (unlikely) we may be getting more polite. don’t you idiot uneducated moronic journalists know anything about basic research?

*sigh* at least there’s free iced coffee at dunkin’ d tomorrow. and no, they’re not related.

i really need to stop reading the washington post in the morning. every time i do, it seems i find reason to blog.

take this report being released today by the ondcp, finding that “teenagers who smoke marijuana put themselves at risk for future mental illness and higher rates of depression.” sounds scary! but the report also states that “too often teens do not seek treatment for their depression, choosing instead to seek relief by smoking marijuana. they do not realize that pot can make their problems worse and can set them up for serious health consequences.”

that’s right. the white house report says that depressed teenagers who don’t get treated have a higher likelihood of growing up to be depressed adults. i call that one for the file marked “duh.”

or take this gem:

The report also found that teenagers who smoke marijuana at least once a month are three times more likely to have suicidal thoughts than non-users. It said that even though the percentage of teens who are depressed is equal to the percentage of adults who say they are depressed, teenagers are more likely to seek solace in marijuana or other illicit drugs.

add that to the previous information and what you have is the following: teens who aren’t treated for depression are likely to have suicidal thoughts. the causality of marijuana just isn’t borne out in the analysis presented in the washington post article. by their logic, i can safely assert that home schooling leads to smoking pot from corpses’ heads. (and thanks, james, for that link. i was eating lunch.)

*sigh*

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in other news, also reported by the wapo, it seems the u.s. commission of fine arts has its nose out of joint because the working model of the new mlk jr. memorial features “a stiffly frontal image, static in pose, confrontational in character.”

heaven forbid a man who led marches, who packed the mall, and who - yes - confronted the racism in america be depicted in full frontal suitedness, arms crossed.

but what the commission is really bent about, apparently, is the artistic style of the proposed piece: the commission sec’y, thomas leubke, wrote that “the colossal scale and Social Realist style of the proposed statue recalls a genre of political sculpture that has recently been pulled down in other countries.”

call me crazy, but i don’t think the sculptures to which he’s referring (saddam, anyone?) were removed out of aesthetic concerns. and in demanding that the dr. king sculpture be altered to evoke the “works of sculptors such as michelangelo and rodin,” leubke is completely missing the appropriateness of depicting dr. king in the social realist style: art that “belongs to the people and to the land and not to the exclusionary cliques of art world elites.” it almost seems that despite being sec’y of the fine arts commission, leubke is unfamiliar with the wpa.

ed dwight, a denver sculptor, has said the sculpture doesn’t look like dr. king. now that seems to be a more valid criticism.

dc is so bent on prohibiting its residents from owning handguns¹ it took the issue all the way to the supreme court.

now the city is going to arm its patrol officers with assault rifles.

while it’s arguably safer to have handguns in the hands of police officers than criminals, i don’t think that necessarily extends to the average law-abiding citizen. i’m left with the thought that this move must be in reaction to a concern (i’d say likelihood, but i haven’t read the transcript of the oral arguments or paid much attention to legal commentators’ opinions on the subject) that the lower court ruling on the dc gun control ordinance will be upheld by the supreme court or remanded to the lower court for a narrower review. “hey! let’s throw MORE high-powered guns at the problem!”

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¹ D.C. CODE §§ 7-2502.02(a)(4), 22-4504(a), AND 7-2507.02

on april 17, william morrison, an attorney whose clients have included members of numerous polygamous sects, pointed out on the diane rehm show that according to court documents, “sarah barlow” claimed to have been beaten so badly by her husband that she was hospitalized with broken ribs. “we’ve got a search warrant based on an anonymous telephone call, that can be independently verified, and we haven’t seen the verification yet. … we don’t know that any of this has happened, because the person has not been proven to be a reliable informant.”

now, according to this cnn article, a pre-paid cell phone that was used by “sarah barlow” in one of the calls that precipitated the raid on the FLDS ranch has been linked to a woman recently arrested for making false reports of sexual abuse to the police.

coincidence?