Disturbing behavior

Explanation below. Photo taken by BlackBerry, Aug. 3.

I don't like scooters. Just ask me, and I'll tell you how they remind me of cargo shorts ("should I go with hemp, or puka shells, bro?"), men in tank tops, and fake blonds in knee-length khaki colored shorts. Could I have spent too much time in scooter-friendly Provo? Probably. I'll be the first to admit that my time there could very possibly have ruined any hope of embracing this [admittedly] efficient, euro-file form of transport. But aside from any of this, I just don't think they're safe. Given the choice, if I have to subject myself to the poor driving and delayed reaction times of my fellow motorists, I would rather do so encased in steel, hard plastic, and other industrial materials--basically, anything more than the air around me.

If you want to ride a scooter, fine. I lost the scooter battle with a close friend a long time ago, and I'm totally okay with that. Her scooter has been extremely protective of her well-being this summer, sitting idle and unregistered in her parking lot--just where I'd like it to be. However, she's a committed helmet-wearer, she's safe and more reactive than most people I know, and she hates nothing more than when I nag her about anything. But the other day I ran into a fairly sticky situation involving one forgivable act - riding a scooter - and one not so forgivable.

I drove the 40 or so miles south from Salt Lake City to Provo. I had some errands to attend to, and had friends to see. I ended up in south Provo; the part of town with all the new stucco houses for sale by overextended 20-somethings, I took the dog for a walk. In no less than 10 minutes, it happened.

The couple pictured above, biding their time on a nice summer evening with a quick ride on the scoot-scoots, drove past. I looked once, twice, and a third time bewildered. They then turned around and did me the favor of allowing time to ready my obviously dated, camera-equipped BlackBerry device. I snapped a picture.

At this point, husband swung around and confronted me. It went something like this...

Man: Why are you taking a picture of us?
Me: Because you're holding a baby... while you're driving a scooter.
Man: (Inaudible) Gruff, uhh... I don't think that's any of your business.
Me: Well, you kind of made it my business when you drove past holding a baby like a football in one arm, driving a scooter with the other.
Man: We weren't even going that fast...

I walked away, not wanting to provoke a strange man in a strange place, doing a very strange thing. No helmets, his wife silent on the other scooter, the man had nothing intelligible to say. The infant, held by one arm and sitting on his father's left leg, looked to be around 6 months old. The party of three drove off. And to make things even more bizarre, he came back on a much larger motorcycle 5 minutes later, dismounted, and took a picture of me with a digital camera while saying, "See... I can take a picture of you too."

I'm not a nosy neighbor, but I felt justified in calling the non-emergency line of the Provo Police Department. I reported the plate number of the motorcycle (in the heat of the moment, I was too shocked to write down the tag number from the scooter), and reported what had happened. About fifteen minutes later, an Officer Sorensen called to say that he would put his full attention to getting to the bottom of this and "having some serious words" with the scooter enthusiast father.

So if you're wondering what that little pink blur is in the picture above... that would be a baby.

Liberals.

Next Sunday

Fate - Nike Commercial - Amazing videos are here

Go Navy

Navy man JFK at the Army Navy Game, 1961.

Air Travel

These people were seated next to me yesterday, flying from Chicago to Salt Lake City. I sat on her right, squeezed next to the window. (Picture taken from Apple laptop).


To Delta Airlines: You should not have allowed this to happen. I spent three and a half hours trying to figure out a way to divert her odor from my obviously limited personal space--imagine a port-a-jon in the middle of July. Next time, give them their own row or send them to Greyhound. It's the least you could do.

Colin Powell: The story of Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan

Was this man, a Muslim, not American enough?

The anti-Muslim rhetoric touted by right-wingers against Obama has been troubling. What's worse may actually be the Obama campaign's pandering to it, putting "Barack Obama is not a Muslim" on campaign literature. This is astounding in this day and age.

Colin Powell, when he endorsed, weighed in on the subject and was cited by Maureen Dowd (not my favorite) in the New York Times. Powell mentioned the compelling story of Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan, an American soldier - and a Muslim - awarded the Purple Heart and Bronze Star after being killed in Iraq.

From Dowd:

Moved by a Crescent

By MAUREEN DOWD

Published: October 21, 2008

Colin Powell had been bugged by many things in his party’s campaign this fall: the insidious merging of rumors that Barack Obama was Muslim with intimations that he was a terrorist sympathizer; the assertion that Sarah Palin was ready to be president; the uniformed sheriff who introduced Governor Palin by sneering about Barack Hussein Obama; the scorn with which Republicans spit out the words “community organizer”; the Republicans’ argument that using taxes to “spread the wealth” was socialist when the purpose of taxes is to spread the wealth; Palin’s insidious notion that small towns in states that went for W. were “the real America.”

But what sent him over the edge and made him realize he had to speak out was when he opened his New Yorker three weeks ago and saw a picture of a mother pressing her head against the gravestone of her son, a 20-year-old soldier who had been killed in Iraq. On the headstone were engraved his name, Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan, his awards — the Purple Heart, the Bronze Star — and a crescent and a star to denote his Islamic faith.

“I stared at it for an hour,” he told me. “Who could debate that this kid lying in Arlington with Christian and Jewish and nondenominational buddies was not a fine American?”

Khan was an all-American kid. A 2005 graduate of Southern Regional High School in Manahawkin, N.J., he loved the Dallas Cowboys and playing video games with his 12-year-old stepsister, Aliya.

His obituary in The Star-Ledger of Newark said that he had sent his family back pictures of himself playing soccer with Iraqi children and hugging a smiling young Iraqi boy.

His father said Kareem had been eager to enlist since he was 14 and was outraged by the 9/11 attacks. “His Muslim faith did not make him not want to go,” Feroze Khan, told The Gannett News Service after his son died. “He looked at it that he’s American and he has a job to do.”

In a gratifying “have you no sense of decency, Sir and Madam?” moment, Colin Powell went on “Meet the Press” on Sunday and talked about Khan, and the unseemly ways John McCain and Palin have been polarizing the country to try to get elected. It was a tonic to hear someone push back so clearly on ugly innuendo.

Even the Obama campaign has shied away from Muslims. The candidate has gone to synagogues but no mosques, and the campaign was embarrassed when it turned out that two young women in headscarves had not been allowed to stand behind Obama during a speech in Detroit because aides did not want them in the TV shot.

The former secretary of state has dealt with prejudice in his life, in and out of the Army, and he is keenly aware of how many millions of Muslims around the world are being offended by the slimy tenor of the race against Obama.

He told Tom Brokaw that he was troubled by what other Republicans, not McCain, had said: “ ‘Well, you know that Mr. Obama is a Muslim.’ Well, the correct answer is, he is not a Muslim. He’s a Christian. He’s always been a Christian. But the really right answer is, what if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer’s no. That’s not America. Is something wrong with some 7-year-old Muslim-American kid believing that he or she could be president?”

Powell got a note from Feroze Khan this week thanking him for telling the world that Muslim-Americans are as good as any others. But he also received more e-mails insisting that Obama is a Muslim and one calling him “unconstitutional and unbiblical” for daring to support a socialist. He got a mass e-mail from a man wanting to spread the word that Obama was reading a book about the end of America written by a fellow Muslim.

“Holy cow!” Powell thought. Upon checking Amazon.com, he saw that it was a reference to Fareed Zakaria, a Muslim who writes a Newsweek column and hosts a CNN foreign affairs show. His latest book is “The Post-American World.”

Frank Fairfield

The opening act for Fleet Foxes last night was a man named Frank Fairfield. As you'll see beow, we couldn't figure out if he was acting or if he really was that cool. After meeting him later, he couldn't tell me if his music was on iTunes (it is), but did say he was "sellin' a 45 in there." Yes, he really is the man you see below. Humble, incredibly talented, and in touch with a simpler time.



Frank Fairfield on the web: MySpace

Achilles Heal

ConSource | Bringing the Constitution to light

Matt Berry, a good friend of mine, started the Constitutional Sources Project (ConSource) a few years ago. It is the only organized, public database for the source documents - notes, conversations, etc. - that went into the construction of the Constitution. It is very, very cool, and completely free. It is found at Consource.org, linked to the right.

I want to forward this note and encourage you all to donate, and/or forward to anyone who may be interested in doing the same. This is a great project, with a lot of corporate and public support--including three U.S. Supreme Court Justices. Not bad. Please provide what you may.

"It has been the misfortune of history that a personal knowledge and an impartial judgment of things rarely meet in the historian. The best history of our Country, therefore, must be the fruit of contributions bequeathed by contemporary actors and witnesses to successors who will make the unbiased use of them. And if the abundance and authenticity of the materials which still exist in the private as well as public repositories among us should descent into hands capable of doing justice to them, the American History may be expected to contain more truth, and lessons, certainly not less valuable, than those of any Country or age."

-- James Madison in 1823

Friends,

As many of you know, for the past couple of years I have been actively involved with the Constitutional Sources Project—now known across the country as ConSource.

A registered 501c3 non-profit organization, ConSource was founded with the singular goal of created an online, searchable database of all original source documents used by the Founders of this country in drafting our Constitution. And after three years of research, the project is now getting closer and closer to its ultimate goal of containing every constitutional source from antiquity to the 27th Amendment.

With the help of other donors and countless volunteers, ConSource has become an innovation all its own. It offers the only source for searchable text transcripts, high-resolution original images, advanced searching, and scholarly certification standards for its documents. Moreover, no other database in American Constitutional history has allowed for real-time cross-referencing of individual documents within the Constitution.

In offering what it does, ConSource has gained a reputation across the legal community. In the case of District of Columbia v. Heller, the US Supreme Court used the ConSource legal database in their decision—see related article on law.com here: http://www.law.com/jsp/nlj/PubArticleNLJ.jsp?id=1202423267162

ConSource was proud to receive official endorsements from former US Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, and current Justices Stephen Breyer and Antonin Scalia—all three of whom have participated in events held on the project's behalf. On the political side, ConSource recently received a bipartisan show of support signed by Senators Harry Reid, Orrin Hatch, Samuel Brownback, and Edward Kennedy.

The project is now housed in Washington, DC on K Street at the renowned international law firm Winston & Strawn, and has close to 200 student volunteers from BYU and Yale working on new source documents. As always, ConSource is forever grateful for the support it receives from the generous donors, supporters, and volunteers. Preserving these documents is vital to the relevance of our Constitution for generations to come.

With the unexpected attention and growth ConSource is proud to announce the preparation for the launch of ConSource 2.0. Along with many aesthetic and user-friendly upgrades, version 2.0 will also include a number of new data search options as well as hundreds of recently added digital papers, including the notes of Benjamin Franklin.

Three years ago we could not have anticipated the amount of attention ConSource has received, and we would have been shocked at the amount of traffic the site would attract—over 200,000 unique visitors each month and growing. It is because of this success that we set out to develop a stronger web platform to handle the volume of users now taking advantage of ConSource.

We need your help in facilitating these upgrades, and introducing more people to the thoughts that built this great nation.

This project would not have happened without the help of our many generous donors, volunteers, and public advocates. As the influence of ConSource has broadened, so has the understanding of our founding principals. We ask that you help us continue this effort in any way you can. To contribute to this vital cause please go to:
https://secure48.easycgi.com/consource/donate.asp

Sincerely,

Matt M. Berry

Let music save our mortal souls

It's almost November 4th, and the contention between us is building. And since so many people out there are starting to hate each other, I will share the following. Two Swedes, the woods, epic flannel, and beautiful harmony. Makes me proud of my Nordic heritage--and no, you can't call me a socialist because I said that.

Once again, I will reiterate my firm belief in the pacifying effect of good tunes. So if there's someone out there that you absolutely cannot stand, maybe it'd work to go sing in the woods? Probably not, but please enjoy.




Thanks to Carolyn for this.