Oscar-blogging.

The BBC has a reporter live-blogging behind the scenes at the Oscars. Are you better off blogging the Oscars from inside Hollywood or in front of the TV (as I will be doing tonight)? These bloggers with special access tend to blog too much about their access hassles:

It was elbows out all the way to try to wrestle my way into the Razzies worst film awards, which were held last night at a small theatre near the Oscars venue.

Despite having my name booked there in advance, I was herded outside onto the street along with about 30 others, including journalists from Sky News.

The box office staff apologised profusely, saying there weren't enough seats, and fire regulations prevented them from over-filling the theatre.

Not one to give up easily, I persisted at the door several times and was stunned when I managed to persuade one of the staff to give up her seat, just before the curtain went up.

Her husband looked a bit surprised when I sat in the place he'd saved for his wife, but she explained it was more important that the BBC see the show than her.

There's much more material like that over there! Well, I will not be wasting your time tonight describing my access hassles. There are no obstacles in the way of my armchair.

Who's emigrating for political reasons?

The NYT reports on the large number of Dutch citizens who are eager to emigrate:

Many Dutch also seem bewildered that their country, run for decades on a cozy, political consensus, now seems so tense and prickly and bent on confrontation. Those leaving have been mostly lured by large English-speaking nations like Australia, New Zealand and Canada, where they say they hope to feel less constricted.

In interviews, emigrants rarely cited a fear of militant Islam as their main reason for packing their bags. But the killing of the filmmaker Theo van Gogh, a fierce critic of fundamentalist Muslims, seems to have been a catalyst.

"Our Web site got 13,000 hits in the weeks after the van Gogh killing," said Frans Buysse, who runs an agency that handles paperwork for departing Dutch. "That's four times the normal rate."

Mr. van Gogh's killing is the only one the police have attributed to an Islamic militant, but since then they have reported finding death lists by local Islamic militants with the names of six prominent politicians. The effects still reverberate. In a recent opinion poll, 35 percent of the native Dutch questioned had negative views about Islam.

There are no precise figures on the numbers now leaving. But Canadian, Australian and New Zealand diplomats here said that while immigration papers were processed in their home capitals, embassy officials here had been swamped by inquiries in recent months.

One man who is leaving is quoted saying, "I'm a great optimist, but we're now caught in a downward spiral, economically and socially." The article notes that those who are leaving are affluent and successful: "urban professionals, managers, physiotherapists, computer specialists." There is also a lot of talk about the lack of "living space" in the country, and the antipathy toward nonnatives seems generic and not limited to violent factions. This is truly sad and frightening.

Don't romanticize Thompson's suicide -- redux.

Here's a long piece by Hog on Ice about the Hunter S. Thompson suicide. ("I guess that if there's anything more ignominious than scrambling your own brain because you wasted your life and you can't write any more, it's having your dead body used by your own wife and son, as a grisly prop in a pretentious 'counterculture' celebration.")

My "Don't romanticize Thompson's suicide" is here.

The other day, Tim Russert reran his old interview with Hunter S. Thompson from February 2003.

RUSSERT: Tell me why you oppose the war against Iraq?

THOMPSON: Well, it seems like not just dangerous but insanely dangerous for us, for me. I don't even think it's our war. I think it's Mr. Bush's war. And I think it's just like they say about the Civil War, that's Mr. Lincoln's war. But it just seems incredibly stupid to go off--here's a man who's taken the country in two years from a prosperous nation of peace to a broken nation of war. You know, that's kind of hard to--to vote for him it would seem when--the people keep voting for him. And that's what baffles me about the American people now.

RUSSERT: You said it appears our nation is having a national nervous breakdown.

THOMPSON: That's what I--I recognize it as.

RUSSERT: Explain that.

THOMPSON: Oh, God, explain that. Well, it seems that I think in a n--in a nervous breakdown, I believe, you kind of seize up and go sideways, more or less paralyzed. I wouldn't want to get into psychetry--psychiatric research here, but that's how it seems. I--the--the utter torpor of the American people in voting for a person who makes them broke, takes away their education and their libraries and tax refun--you know, you got--tax refunds--seem to be wrong with these things, but I live out in the mountains and the woods and that's the way it seems to me. And I've--I've done this for a long time, you know, governed a lot of elections and seen a lot of politicians. But I've disagreed with a lot of them. But I haven't been appalled. Nixon--yeah, Nixon--well, he was fun compared to Bush. He was a liberal.

RUSSERT: Nixon was a liberal.

THOMPSON: Compared to Bush.

"[H]ere's a man who's taken the country in two years from a prosperous nation of peace..." -- it wasn't as if anything other than Bush knocked our prosperous nation off the path of peace. "[T]he people keep voting for him" -- he said that in 2003, so that referred to nothing. "I've ... governed a lot of elections" -- well, we all misspeak sometimes. But all of this was said in horrendous muddle-mouthed speech. I turned it off after a few minutes.

Podcasting.

I'm not saying I'll ever podcast, but I'm trying to figure out how I would do it with my iBook. I've got a decent microphone, which came with ViaVoice. (ViaVoice -- a dictation to typing program -- made me imagine it would make work wondrously easier. It did not. It just introduced a weird new world of tasks, along with a certain amount of found humor, similar to spellcheck humor, as it heard what you said and guessed what word you meant. It didn't know any of the proper nouns in the cases I was writing about, so the writing was full of ridiculous substitutions. You spend a lot of time correcting errors and trying to get it to understand you. Trying to get an inanimate thing to understand you is a chump's game. It's not going to fall in love with you. My ViaVoice relationship was doomed to remain forever at the dictation-to-typing level.)

I've read you can do the basic recording for podcasting in Garage Band, which is a fancy program designed to do so much more than voice recording. It becomes an effort to get the fancy stuff out of your way just to record. I couldn't figure out how to pause. And then I got distracted by the fancy stuff that was easy to figure out and recorded multiple voice tracks in the manner of Glenn Gould's "Solitude Trilogy" (remember "The Idea of North" in "32 Short Films About Glenn Gould"?).

So I need to be able to pause. Voice activation would be better. And Garage Band doesn't take you from recording to a file you can put up on the blog. I like how easy it is to use iPhoto to get the photos up on the blog (though I must admit it took me a long time to figure out how to do it). Shouldn't podcasting be part of iLife? But iBlog wasn't even an Apple product.

Any advice? I mean simple, Macintosh advice.

UPDATE: A very nice emailer has helped me up to the point where I can record in Garage Band -- the space bar works to pause -- and make an MP3 file by importing it into iTunes and converting it. After that, I'm stymied. I was going to put it onto my Mac.com homepage, but the file is 2 MB and that will use up too much space too quickly. Then there's the whole RSS aspect to it all that I don't even want to think about yet. I hit the wall, tech-wise, for the day just getting this far.

MORE: It troubles me to see how much memory an audio file uses, even saved at a low quality level. A text file of the entire novel "Moby Dick" is less than my little 10 minute blabber. Isn't that just wrong?

Mr. Moderato.

A new trend?

"Scissors count, but the knife does not."

Now that we've defined what a gadget is, let's identify the top 100 gadgets of all time. Or, let the fighting begin by having one magazine -- Mobile PC -- identify the top 100 gadgets of all time. Most of them are either electronic or goofy novelties (like the Ronco egg-scrambler): the list is dripping with bias toward things the listmakers remember from their own lives. So, lest you get steamed at the absence of the catapult -- or whatever -- you might want to read "all time" as all the time that youngish guys have personally experienced. But they do throw in some old stuff to try to make it look a little "all time": the sextant and the abacus get slotted in at 59 and 60. Yet somehow Etch-a-Sketch and Speak-and-Spell are greater! Numerous different laptops make the list -- I lost count -- and the Apple Powerbook 100 comes in at first place.

The taser is number 79. (No other guns make the list!) Did you know a University of Wisconsin professor is testing tasers on pigs?

Over the past three years, more than 70 people in North America have died after being shocked by Tasers, according to the human rights group Amnesty International. But John Webster questions whether Tasers were really the cause of death.

Many of those people were high on drugs, namely cocaine, argued the emeritus professor of biomedical engineering.

"If you Taser someone with a cocaine overdose, and they die, did they die of the Taser?" Webster said. "I know that many people make it to the emergency room and then die. In my opinion, they were not electrocuted by the Taser. They were high on drugs."

He'll use about 10 anesthetized pigs to help settle the question of whether Tasers alone can send a subject into the deadly state of ventricular fibrillation. A Taser gun ejects darts with a 50,000-volt electrical charge that is designed to briefly immobilize people.

Some of the pigs will be shot with the Taser. Some will get cocaine or another drug. And some will get both the drug and the Taser shot. Webster and his students will measure the effect on the pig's heart.

"The question I'm trying to answer is, can Tasers electrocute subjects?" Webster said. "My hypothesis is, no." He did leave open the possibility that an "emaciated person" who is hit by a Taser whose darts hit directly on and around the heart could die of the shot.

The study is funded with a two-year, $500,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Justice.

It seems to me that people high on cocaine are especially likely to get into the kind of situation where they do get shot with Tasers. If you know the Taser-cocaine combination is deadly, isn't there still a problem?

The Oscars!

Yes, I will be simulblogging the Oscars tomorrow night. Will I be playing the Oscars Drinking Game while simulblogging? Better not! But great list: "Drink if you can't figure out a damn thing Prince says when presenting an award." Prince is presenting an award? Yes. And well he should. He won an Oscar once. I wish I could find a picture of him in that purple-hooded cape he wore when he accepted the award.

Why does Road Kill candy send the wrong message?

A rash of criticism has already bullied Kraft into getting rid of its Road Kill candy, a Gummi-style candy in the shape of various animals with a tire-tread mark. But why is this considered offensive? The complaint was that it encouraged cruelty to animals. It seems to me an ordinary Gummi animal -- sans tread mark -- has the kid biting into a living animal, which would indeed be cruel. The road kill animal has died an accidental death. To eat road kill is to dispose of flesh in an environmentally sound way -- to recycle. It would seem to me that even those who oppose meat-eating out of deference to animals should accept the eating of road kill. So what's wrong with candy that presents road kill as the acceptably edible form of an animal? I really think Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals went after the wrong product. They should complain about ordinary Gummi bears and worms and the like. And what about Animal Crackers? I bit off the head! I bit off the legs! Why have we been tolerating that all these years?

Power and image.

My post about Condoleezza Rice on GlennReynolds.com brought a lot of email, some of which I reprint here, but one email really stood out. Reader Edward Tabakin makes a brilliant association between Rice's new look and the new image devised by Queen Elizabeth I as she rose to power:

Ms. Givhan wrote in her article that "Rice's coat and boots speak of sex and power . . . . the mind searches for ways to put it all into context. It turns to fiction, to caricature." Well, maybe her mind. My mind went to historical movies and history. The scene that came to mind was the one at the end in the movie "Elizabeth," with Cate Blanchett in the leading role. Elizabeth has foiled the Pope's plot to kill her and ordered the deaths of the conspirators, including the man she might have married had her life turned out a little differently. In the last scene, she makes herself up in a new look: she cuts her hair short, applies makeup almost like pancake makeup to whiten her face; she creates the image of Elizabeth R.



Elizabeth is famous for one particular speech, which she gave to the troops, the soldiers, sailors and marines, who were about to go out to fight the Spanish Armada. Spain was the great military power at the time, and England was a second or third rate upstart. Elizabeth was about 55 years old at the time 1588, roughly the same age the Dr. Rice is now. The photo of Dr. Rice before the troops also made me think of Elizabeth's Armada speech. Here it is:

My loving people, we have been persuaded by some, that are careful of our safety, to take heed how we commit ourselves to armed multitudes, for fear of treachery; but I assure you, I do not desire to live to distrust my faithful and loving people. Let tyrants fear; I have always so behaved myself that, under God, I have placed my chiefest strength and safeguard in the loyal hearts and good will of my subjects. And therefore I am come amongst you at this time, not as for my recreation or sport, but being resolved, in the midst and heat of the battle, to live or die amongst you all; to lay down, for my God, and for my kingdom, and for my people, my honor and my blood, even the dust. I know I have but the body of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart of a king, and of a king of England, too; and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my realms: to which, rather than any dishonor should grow by me, I myself will take up arms; I myself will be your general, judge, and rewarder of every one of your virtues in the field. I know already, by your forwardness, that you have deserved rewards and crowns; and we do assure you, on the word of a prince, they shall be duly paid you. In the mean my lieutenant general shall be in my stead, than whom never prince commanded a more noble and worthy subject; not doubting by your obedience to my general, by your concord in the camp, and by your valor in the field, we shall shortly have a famous victory over the enemies of my God, of my kingdom, and of my people.

"I know I have but the body of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart of a king, and of a king of England, too." Wow, who wrote that, Shakespeare? Cutting through the 16th century english, it's an amazing and inspiring speech. As every school child once knew, the English won that battle, defeated the Armada, and because the great island empire. Nineteen years later, the first settlers landed in Jamestown.

When I think about image and political power, the first movie that springs to my mind is this one. Too much focus on image ought to alarm us. We should worry that a political figure means to reach down past our reason to some primal level where we cannot defend against manipulation.

But Rice's new look does not consist of very much. Surely, it is not the sort of extreme and shocking transformation chosen by Elizabeth. But like Elizabeth, Rice must convince the world that she has the "heart of a king." We should not pretend woman are judged in the same way as men. Saying that you believe it is wrong to judge us differently does not make it stop. Even if you sincerely want to believe and even do believe that a woman can be a great world leader, something involuntary, underneath your conscious reason, may still say: but no, not her, she cannot be the one, this does not feel right. Whoever does overcome that prejudice and become the first woman President will need to be able to reach into that part of our mind and turn it around.

It may seem bizarre that thin, three-inch heels could dislodge that last grip of prejudice. How many times have feminists written that high heels symbolize sexual vulnerability by making a show of the woman's inability to run away? That is too rational. Something much less accessible to the rational mind occurred when people gazed on that photograph of the Secretary of State. Something in that image -- the heels, the black, the brass buttons? -- had a very strong effect.

If there were some way to figure out exactly how to devise an image that would make people accept the exercise of power, we would be in trouble. Or perhaps not: all who seek power would simply adopt that image and that would cancel out image as a factor, leveling the playing field. To a great extent, men have hit upon an answer: the dark suit, the white shirt, the red tie. But a woman who just adopts the power-seeking man's look would set off a whole different set of associations. Women need to find some other way, something similar perhaps, but also different.

In the historic movement of women into power, how women look matters, and Condoleezza Rice played a role. Those high-heeled boots belong in the Smithsonian, do they not?

ADDED: Even the men's power look is complicated, as a reader points out the recent shift to blue ties. Another reader asks whether Condi Rice is Galadriel and quotes this, from "The Fellowship of the Rings":

"In place of a Dark Lord you would set up a Queen. And I shall not be dark, but beautiful and terrible as the Morning and the Night! Fair as the Sea and the Sun and the Snow upon the Mountain! Dreadful as the Storm and the Lightning! Stronger than the foundations of the earth. All shall love me and despair!"

MORE: Several people have emailed to say that running is not much of a sign of strength -- especially if you're talking about commanding the military. Standing your ground is the stronger position.

Another thing about those thin high heels: not only are they named after a weapon -- the stiletto -- but they exert a heavy force by concentrating your weight on a small point. Stiletto heels are quite damaging to floors for this reason. You could really hurt someone stepping on their toes with a stiletto heel: that's a power image.

And, of course, heels make you taller.

"These boots are made for running for President."

So you want to know what I thought about that Washington Post article about the sexuality of Condoleezza Rice's new clothes? I put my opinion up over on GlennReynolds.com -- where somehow writing under a male name provoked me to fem it up all week!

UPDATE: I'm getting an avalanche of pro-Condi email from that post. A sampling:

I agree with you about those boots - made for walking right into the Oval Office. What struck me about the picture is her comfort with herself and the situation. She's a woman, and dresses with style and femininity, which is wonderful to see. She's a world leader, and she strides out in command of the setting, just as she should.

them boots are for kickin' ass. . . now, and in '08! run, condi, run!

IT'S GREAT TO BE AN AMERICAN, WHEN YOU SEE YOUR SEC. OF STATE DRESSED LIKE THIS...SHE IS A SMART WOMAN AND WHY NOT, SEXY TOO!

You GO Condi!

So Dr. Rice enjoys and understands fashion. She is fortunate in having the face and figure to look good in very fashionable clothes. She comes across as elegant and graceful - also very comfortable in her choices. So analyzing her wardrobe as if it all has some Freudian deep meaning is just too silly and awful.

I certainly hope Condi runs! I'll come out of polical campaigning retirement (since Reagan left office) if she does!

I liked her before and I like her more now that I know she can look like the first female president. I say more presidents should wear black leather. Well, maybe not Taft.

Ann, I agree 100 percent. She looks good and I don't think she detracts from her position at all. Miss Condi is attractive, smart and witty and brings some fresh air to the President's foriegn policy. I would vote for her in '08 without hesitation.

Is it all pro-Condi? No, I got this too:

Is it wrong to talk about powerful women this way? How about this way? Condoleeza Rice must have been conceived in a testtube and raised in a laboratory. Where else in world history can you find a black woman so devotely facist. Who else claims religious principle and has an oil tanker named after her. Condoleeza is a liar, a hypocrit, a coward, and severely overrated. She is basically a rightwing whore like you.

"distinctly attractive"???? Who the heck are we talking abut here cuz it sure ain't Condoleeza (even her name is damn ugly!!!). You must be some sick weirdo, that gets off on satirical humiliation of others.

Attractive - are you kidding! Rice is one of the least attractive women I've ever seen! Her hair dooo - for one - is pretty ridiculous. She has an over-bite and looks angry and mean most of the time. Her smile is devilish. That outfit was pure EGO - all bark - no bite! Probably trying to attrack the attention of her "husband" - Bush. Probably will grab it - next we'll see Laura in black with high heels. She is already trying to slim down and dress up - Rice is tough competition!

God help us if this obfuscating Shrub puppet ever became another pResident. She's worse than the lying hypocrite who has been installed as pResident. The problem as I see it: The so-called "religious moral values" voters are so sexually repressed that when they see a woman in black and wearing, oh my, black high heeled boots they get so hot and bothered that they want to run her for president. These sexually repressed "values" voters need to get into a normal healthy sexual relationship;perhaps, then, they can see past the, oh my, black coat and back high heeled boots as articles of clothing and not as a sex object for their repressed fantasies. Rice failed miserably as security advisor! Black boots and coat may turn on the sexually repressed, but thinking individuals know that the only reason she got where she is is because she will mouth whatever she's told to mouth. Get a normal healthy sex life for God's sake before you sexually repressed "values voters" attempt to sieg this obfuscating puppet on America as another pResident.

A "normal healthy sex life"? Does being a right wing whore count?

Don't romanticize Thompson's suicide.

Under big red block letters that say "ENTERTAINMENT" over on CNN.com:

Thompson shot self while talking with wife

'He set the receiver down and he did it'

...She said her husband had asked her to come home from a health club so they could work on his weekly ESPN column -- but instead of saying goodbye, he set the telephone down and shot himself.

Thompson said she heard a loud, muffled noise, but didn't know what had happened. "I was waiting for him to get back on the phone," she said.

I have a hard time thinking of this suicide as a rational act, like that of a person in the advanced stage of a painful, fatal disease. He kills himself while he's in the middle of talking to his wife and trying to get her to come home and help him do his work. He doesn't say goodbye. And he shoots himself in the head, leaving the gory remains to be cleaned out of the kitchen. And meanwhile, his son, daughter-in-law, and 6-year grandson are in the house, doomed to come upon the scene before the wife comes home from the health club. That seems like a sudden, impulsive act that expressed some strong feelings toward the wife. The wife characterizes things this way:

"He wanted to leave on top of his game. I wish I could have been more supportive of his decision," she said. "It was a problem for us."

The wife is 32. He was 67.

UPDATE: Ambivablog adds her thoughts. And here's news of family and friends sitting at around the kitchen table with the hours-old corpse, drinking Chivas Regal and exchanging stories.

"It was very loving. It was not a panic, or ugly, or freaky," Thompson's wife, Anita Thompson, said Thursday night in her first spoken comments since the icon's death Sunday. "It was just like Hunter wanted. He was in control here."

Anita Thompson also echoes the comments that have been made by Hunter Thompson's son and daughter-in-law: That her husband's suicide did not come from the bottom of the well, but was a gesture of strength and ultimate control made as his life was at a high-water mark.

"This is a triumph of his, not a desperate, tragic failure," Anita Thompson said by phone, recounting that she was sitting in her husband's chair he called his catbird seat in the Rockies.

She added: "He lived a beautiful life and he lived it on his own terms, all the way from the very beginning to the very end."

And so begins a new legend, a story spun by the survivors. I repeat the point from my title: do not romanticize a suicide. I'm sure the family needs to find ways to deal with their own loss and their own sense of responsibility and, less sympathetically, has an interest in preserving and promoting the reputation of the author, but statements like this are reckless and dangerous. How many young (and older) people read and admire Hunter S. Thompson and sometimes have thoughts of suicide? Portraying it as a beautiful thing, a triumph, and an act of sublime control over destiny is profoundly wrong!

ANOTHER UPDATE: Bebere joins the plea not to romanticize suicide and reminds us of the Werther effect.

Lips.

Like the new lips festooning my sidebar? I do!

Blog game ironies.

A ridiculous irony in the game of blogging is that you can score a lot of links by saying something that people disagree with vehemently. It's particularly ironic that Kevin Drum has hit the link jackpot by pissing a lot of women off about how men are better at playing the blogging game. I've played into his hand more than once already, and I do it one more time in my role as guest-blogger over at GlennReynolds.com, where I score an Instapundit link every time I post, but don't win any points in the blogging game because the links go there not here. Which just goes to show how badly women play the blogging game!

Let me thuddingly say that I'm kidding, and I greatly appreciate the opportunity to blog on GlennReynolds.com and all the Instapundit links I've gotten over the months, and I'm not jealous of all the links Drum has attracted by being unattractive to women.

And, quite seriously, the real way to win at blogging is to create a place for yourself that you find energizing and intrinsically rewarding, which is probably going to be at odds with the goal of getting the most traffic and the most links. It's the readers that you get and keep by writing in a way that you find intrinsically valuable that matter the most, sort of like the way your best friends are the people who like you when you're being yourself. So those traffic and link rankings do not show who is really winning. You'll have to look into your own heart to find out if you're winning.

And yeah, yeah: go ahead and mock me, guys, for being like those school teachers who ban dodgeball and insist on games where everyone can win. I mean it: mock me! Mock me and link, because I find it intrinsically rewarding to gaze at Site Meter and the Truth Laid Bear Ecosystem!

UPDATE: I like this Drum slam over on the RLC blog:

Why don't people who are pretty sure that what they have to say is stupid just keep it to themselves? Why the "my blog can kick your blog's ass," anyway?

I hope some readers are getting a little mixed up and thinking, I thought Drum was the liberal blogger and Althouse was the right wing blogger. Think, people! Is the left feminist? Is it?

ANOTHER UPDATE: Kesher Talk wisecracks:

I think Ann has the goods on Kevin. He's playing dumb to get links. How feminine of him. Bat your eyelashes, too, Kevin baby.

Confronting terrorist plane hijackers -- circa 1985.

Goodbye to Uli Derickson, whose story appears on the obituary page today:

On June 14, 1985, when a pair of Lebanese gunmen commandeered a T.W.A. flight from Athens to Rome, Ms. Derickson took the lead in protecting the 152 passengers and crew members.

Though the two hijackers spoke almost no English, Ms. Derickson was able to speak with one of them in German and occasionally calm him by singing a German ballad he requested. She won the hijackers' pity for one passenger by explaining that his daughter had been delivered by a Lebanese doctor.

She also intervened during beatings, often putting herself in harm's way.

"Don't you hit that person," she would shout, a passenger later told The New York Times. "Why do you have to hit those people?"

When a ground crew in Algiers refused to refuel the plane without payment, even when faced with the terrorists' threat to kill passengers, it occurred to Ms. Derickson to offer her Shell credit card. The ground crew charged about $5,500 for 6,000 gallons of fuel.

The most terrifying moment for her, she later told Glamour Magazine, was when the crueler of the two hijackers asked her to marry him.

At one point they asked Ms. Derickson to sort through the passengers' passports to single out people with Jewish-sounding names. Although various news organizations initially reported that she had followed their orders, she in fact hid the passports, her son said. "Everybody looked to her for courage and guidance," Tom Cullins, an architect in Burlington, Vt., who was a hostage on the plane, said in an interview yesterday. "She was clearly in control. She even made demands of the hijackers."

Mr. Cullins added, "We have nothing but the utmost respect for her and a debt of gratitude for really heroic acts."

After about 36 hours, the terrorists released a second wave of hostages, including Ms. Derickson and 65 others, in Algiers. They had already killed a Navy diver, Robert D. Stethem, but his was to be the only death. The hijackers released other hostages over the next 15 days, with the ordeal ending for the last 39 on June 30. It ended after Israel's release of 31 Lebanese prisoners, a fraction of the 766 the hijackers had demanded.

What a story! If only we could all keep our wits about us in times of crisis as she did.

What the heavy metal musician is really thinking.

Citing his Christian beliefs, guitarist Brian 'Head' Welch leaves his heavy metal band, Korn:

Welch told The Bakersfield Californian that his decision might be surprising to some. "A lot of people think I'm crazy. I don't care."

Welch said he'd become increasingly disenchanted with producing heavy metal music that invokes dark and morbid images.

"Those guys in the band, they're not bad guys. They're just a bunch of kids getting marketed how these guys in the big corporate firms want to do," Welch said. "It makes us look like bad people, but we're really just a bunch of kids who never had a chance to grow up."

Of course, dark and disenchanted teenage angst has been packaged and marketed for decades. The bands convey a sense that in expressing such feelings they are finding liberation from the terrible oppression of [???]. But perhaps they are nice young people -- hardworking, earnest musicians who are feeling oppressed by the obligation to pretend to be dark and disenchanted and becoming horrified at looking out on an audience of even younger people who are merging with and mirroring that ersatz negativity.

UPDATE: More from MTV:

On February 8, he had apparently written a "letter of resignation" to the band's management. In the note, Welch detailed a long list of reasons for leaving the band, including increased moral objections to Korn's music and videos. In particular, he was upset by how he was portrayed in the clip for their cover of Cameo's "Word Up," off their recently released Greatest Hits, Vol. 1 album. In the video, Welch's face was superimposed on a dog patrolling a strip club.

"I can go up there and play those songs and those solos but ... I distanced myself from Korn for probably a year and a half, two years. I just wanted to fade away, it was crazy. I was so gone," Welch told Bakersfield, California, radio station KRAB on Sunday. "But I found my way out and I want to help anyone that wants to see the light at the end of the tunnel. I had to go through the lows to appreciate the highs and it's not perfect but it's damn near."

The good teacher's nightmare.

Richard Lawrence Cohen reports this true story from Austin, Texas:

In an Austin elementary school known for its diversity, a second–grade class was learning about Texas’ segregationist past. Their textbook taught them a slogan segregationists used to chant: “Two four six eight/ We don’t want to integrate.”

At recess, the teacher found a group of her girls chanting that slogan on the playground. A beautifully mixed bagful of kids—white, black, brown, yellow—clapping hands and chanting together loudly and happily, just because it was such a fun rhyme.

Read the rest of the story at the link.