¡El Che Vive!

"The Motorcycle Diaries," the film adaptation of a young Ernesto Guevara's journey through South America with his chum Alberto Granado, won an Oscar for Best Original Song tonight, for "Al Otro Lado del Rio."

By contrast, "The Passion of the Christ" got shut out in the three minor, technical categories in which it was nominated.

All of which is proof positive that despite the sad state of the world today, Che is bigger than Jesus.

Red states be damned!

Vlad 1, Dubya 0

A highlight from Bush's summit with Putin in Bratislava:

He [Putin] also compared his move to end direct popular election of regional governors to the American Electoral College process of electing presidents.

"It's not considered undemocratic, is it?" Putin said.

Shameless plug

Credit UW President Mark Emmert for paying no mind to proper use of the campuswide listserv to boost his own ego.

The following is from an actual e-mail he sent to the entire UW community this evening:

This message is being sent to all Faculty, Staff, and Students by
pres@u.washington.edu, with approval President Mark A. Emmert.

To: The Campus Community

Dear Colleagues:

Unfortunately, the Seattle P.I. printed an erroneous headline in the paper
version of this morning's edition. This erroneous headline reads:
"Everyone Benefits from I-200." The paper has corrected this error in the
on-line version, which you will find below. The correct headline now
reads: "Changing Initiative 200 is a worthy cause."

Sincerely,

Mark Emmert
President

And then he appended the entire text of his op-ed piece. I won't bother to link to it here. It was basically arguing in favor of affirmative action at the UW, which is a good thing, and at least makes me confident Emmert isn't as big a jackass as Harvard Prez Lawrence Summers, but still.

Blatant misuse of the listserv, especially when you consider Emmert's ego shouldn't need too much stroking, given that he's already the highest paid president at a public university, earning $762,000 this year.

You'll note that his compensation includes a "car allowance" of $12,000, which is, sadly, as much as the UW sees fit to pay its entry-level TAs.

Alas.

Is this Yurp?

This is rich. Dubya lecturing Putin on democracy,as he called on Russia to "renew a commitment to democracy and the rule of law."

Because it's far better to try to subvert democracy, whether that of your own country or of another, subtly, say with the connivance of a brother who governs a province of considerable electoral weight, than to just make naked grabs for authoritarian power. No, wait, Dubya's done that, too.

And certainly appointing a defender of extralegal methods of interrogation to the top law enforcement position shows profound respect for the rule of law. Maybe America isn't as arbitrary as Russia, but that doesn't mean it isn't still arbitrary.

[Also note the author of this piece incorrectly cited the last name of Timothy Garton Ash, an illustrious, influential and insightful historian and sometimes journalist of contemporary Europe and the former Eastern bloc as "Mr. Ash" when it properly should've been "Mr. Garton Ash." Quibbles, perhaps, but it's still inexcusable.]

Anyway, this bodes well for Bush's scheduled meeting with Putin in Bratislava on Thursday. As a U.S. citizen, I must regretfully and profusely apologize to the great Slovak nation for being subjected to such an American nincompoop so disrespectful of Slovakia and its people. If it's any consolation, I'm sure the meeting won't happen because Bush will end up in Ljubljana and meet a most hostile reception from the people of Slovenia for having once more affronted their national pride.

Or perhaps he'll cause a major international incident by mistaking Slovenia for Slavonia.

At least the official stamp for the summit appropriately looks like a poster for a pro wrestling-style smackdown.

Such a tease

In the latest chapter of the on-again, off-again 2005-06 NHL season, it's off again.

I gotta get out of this place

Today officially kicks off the three-day President's Day weekend (hooray for attending a public university) for me. These long weekends are a rare but extremely important luxury for me here in grad school, given that I have a lot more work and no Reading Week. But this quarter the Fates have been exceedingly kind by having the holidays in question fall on Monday, otherwise known as the day I would have to get up early and work seven hours. Instead, I can sleep late and have all that time to myself and my work this Monday. Not having to get up earlier Monday, I can also sleep exceedingly late this weekend without worrying about it wrecking my sleep patterns or cutting into my work time. Nope, just lots of guilt-free mornings that don't begin till midday.

Naturally, I've been looking forward to this for quite a while. About five weeks (the time since the MLK holiday), to be exact. I went to bed a little earlier than usual last night, mainly because I was feeling tired and knew the last couple of pages of my paper could wait. But I was also looking forward to trying to sleep till about noon, and then feeling fabulous about it.

Naturally, I got a wakeup call at 10:30 when the trumpet lesson my landlord/roommate was giving downstairs commenced.

Now, I'm a reasonable person. I realize 10:30 is on the late side to be sleeping, especially for all those working types. But it's also not atypical for even working professionals to sleep pretty late on the weekend since, after all, it's the only chance they get. Furthermore, my landlord should be well aware by now that I routinely sleep at least that late on the weekends. Even during the week, I'm never up before 10 (save for Monday). And I've lived her more than five months now, so you'd think this might have become noticed. It's a longstanding, regular, predictable pattern.

All of which begs two questions: Did he have to schedule his lesson at that hour on a Saturday? And if he did, would it have killed him to let me know, say, last night, that such a cacophony of dissonant sounds would be giving me a fine top o' the morn today so I could expect it?

Alas, it seems such courtesy is too much to ask. I'd say this pretty well epitomizes my living situation, except that I didn't also get accused (indirectly, of course) by my landlord of also running up some utility bill or not abiding by some stupid rule of his that he never follows himself. Par for the course, though.

Here's hoping

Maybe it's too late for this season, Hall-of-Fame heroics notwithstanding. But the NHL can still salvage something by coming up with an agreement that will ensure the 2005-06 season goes off without so much as a labor hiccup.

I can't speculate exactly at what the NHL and players union have in store for their meeting tomorrow, but an agreement is still an agreement and the first step in trying to repair the damage already done to the game. It won't take away the sting of losing an entire season (I still can't use those words without grimacing), but it will help restore my faith that the principals aren't trying to kill the NHL but in fact still care about hockey and want to see it thrive.

What's wrong with this picture

The Times has piece on the Brothers Schieffer, Bob, the designated interim successor for Dan Rather's seat as CBS anchor, and Tom, friend and former business of President Bush and newly appointed ambassador to Japan. The brothers are eminently confident their brotherly bond won't infringe upon their professional obligations.

Bob in particular is confident he can main the appearance of objectivity, no conflict of interest, etc., pointing to his deft maneuvering as a journalist on the issue of personal politics and partisanship:

"I like to tease people," he said. "I'll say, 'Do you think I'm a Democrat or a Republican?' I'll say, 'I believe in the death penalty, so that makes me a conservative, right?' Then I say, 'Yeah, but I'm also pro-choice. I guess that makes me a Democrat.' "

This is supposed to be encouraging? Since when does objectivity equates neutrality only on the issue of partisan membership. I guess being a registered independent covers all. Or not.

Honestly, what an idiot. He'll evidently take his party preference to the grave but has no qualms about volunteering his opinions on two hot button issues for one of the country's biggest newspapers. How is that any better?

Needless to say, I don't foresee CBS News getting past that whole credibility problem any time soon.

Why, why must they torture me?!

Rumor has it NHL legends-turned-ownersWayne Gretzky and Mario Lemieux have tried to restart talks to resurrect the season.

Game off

It shouldn't be this way. I keep compulsively checking the headlines to see if the story that the NHL canceled its season today was somehow a major and cruel hoax. But it's not.

The reality of it is, there's no NHL this season, and already next season isn't looking terribly promising. And while this affects my day-to-day existence minimally, no longer living in an NHL city and not having cable TV, it saddens me all the same.

No box scores to check nightly. No scouring for stories about my beloved Kings. No anticipation of the NHL playoffs, the greatest tournament in all sport and the embodiment of why hockey blows every other sport out of the water. No veteran pushing 40 hoisting Lord Stanley's Cup for the first time. No power plays and penalty kills. No five minutes for fighting. No one-timers, glass-shattering hip checks or contortionist saves. No Zamboni.

Much of the post-mortem has focused on assigning guilt, and there's plenty to go around.

It's hard not to point the finger at a collection of millionaires unwilling to sacrifice a few million that, in the grand scheme of a $2 billion industry, amount to very little. It's hard to feel very sympathetic toward a few hundred grown men who make more to play a game two-thirds of the year than most of us will make in a decade of our professional lives. It's hard to fathom how players turning down the opportunity to live out the fantasies of everyone who ever laced up a pair of skates, donned a stick and imagined stepping onto the ice at the Forum, the Garden, the Joee, the Stadium.

But then it's even harder to feel sympathic for a select group of multimillionaires who refused to sleep in the bed they made. The owners decided to expand wildly, rapidly and perhaps unwisely into too many untested markets. It's not that the NHL could never support 30 healthy teams, or that hockey can never survive in such non-traditional Sun Belt markets as Atlanta, Nashville and Raleigh, just that it couldn't do it so quickly. But the owners cared less about long-term viability than they did about short term expansion fees and other quick windfalls.

Furthermore, no one ever put a gun to an owner's head to sign off on a contract. Many players are grossly overpaid (paging the New York Rangers), but it's difficult to fault a player for taking the bloated contract if some owner is offering. The owners lacked the restraint to keep salaries at a reasonable level, so they have to look squarely in the mirror to figure out who created the financial mess the league is in. In that light, it's difficult to pity the owners for asking to be saved from themselves.

All of this underscores how asinine it was that the two sides couldn't get a deal worked out. Blame it in large part for having no sense of urgency, no apparent concern that huge chunks of games were being lost and time was running out to salvage the season.

To their credit, both sides seemed to get inspired at the 11th hour, though it proved too little, too late.

But what really gets me is what ultimately cost us the season. $6.5 million. The difference between the league's salary cap number of $42.5 million and the union's counterproposal of $49 million. This is relative pocket change, and furthermore, it's a real concern for less than half the teams in the league that actual spend in this ballpark. Never mind that the two sides managed to get on the same page in terms of de-linking salaries with revenues and having a cap at all, or that the players agreed to roll back all current salaries by 24 percent. The two sides started compromising only to have a deal fall apart when they couldn't agree on a number of little importance or consequence, especially in the grand scheme of things. The league rejected the union's counterproposal last night and there were no more negotiations. No more offers from either side. It ended with a whimper.

So there's plenty of blame to go around. Unfortunately, dispensing it won't make NHL games magically materialize.

The question becomes: has anyone learned enough to try to save next season?

For the fans, for the blue-collar team employees losing paychecks, for the game, I hope they have. However, the events of the last 24 hours (and five months) give me little reason for hope.

Greed

NHL Cancels Season

I'm not saying Wal-Mart is satanic ... wait, that's exactly what I'm saying

This is impressive. Wal-Mart pays $135,540 to settle 24 federal charges that it violated child labor laws. While it's pretty despicable that Wal-Mart treats the minors in its employ with no more respect than it normally accords employees (one violation pertained to a youth who injured his thumb while using a chain saw to cut some Christmas trees), this kind of settlement doesn't strike one as out of the ordinary. Except for one extremely broad and generous concession.

Seems one provision of the agreement gives Wal-Mart 15 days' advance notice before the Labor Department investigates any other "wage and hour" accusations. You know, trifling matters, like failure to pay minimum wage or overtime. Things that don't even pertain to child labor practices, the area the agreement ostensibly covers.

I'm sure there are plenty of businesses that would love to get that kind of latitude from the government agencies that would otherwise regulate them. So this isn't even a slap on the wrist. It's a major windfall for Wal-Mart, which now has more than two weeks to sweep the dirt under the rug before the Labor Department investigates reports of forced overtime, locked emergency exits for the night shift and militant refusal to tolerate unionization. Nice, huh?

Further proof Al Jazeera runs circles around CNN

Eason Jordan, CNN news chief executive, resigned today amid the controversy surrounding remarks he made regarding journalists killed in Iraq.

During a panel discussion at the World Economic Forum last month, Jordan said he believed that several journalists who were killed by coalition forces in Iraq had been targeted.

He quickly backed off the remarks, explaining that he meant to distinguish between journalists killed because they were in the wrong place where a bomb fell, for example, and those killed because they were shot at by American forces who mistook them for the enemy.

No transcript of his remarks has been uncovered, so we'll never know whether his words have been taken out of context or otherwise misconstrued.

On one level, the controversy seems justified. It was a fairly impolitic thing for him to say, and given that he ostensibly represented CNN at the time, it's easy to see how his personal opinions would get projected on the news division he heads. In short, it's the kind of no-no for which Daniel Okrent would take a New York Times exec to task in a similar scenario.

But if you remove Jordan from his hat as CNN news head, you have to wonder if his remarks were actually out of line. I'm sure not every U.S. soldier wants to kill any and all reporters. But by the same token, the military doesn't much care for non-"embedded" journalists in Iraq or Afghanistan or any other theater of combat. It's not so much fun when you can't strictly regulate not only the information journalists can access, but also their ability to disseminate it to the outside world.

Let's face it, how many scathing indictments of the war have you seen from journalists reporting from "somewhere in Iraq with the 153rd Division"? Not many.

And it's not like the military has never bombed the offices of a news organization. Certainly not in November 2001, when a U.S. missile destroyed the Kabul offices of Al Jazeera. Because surely the military had no idea where the offices of an independent Arab news network broadcasting exclusive tapes of Osama bin Laden was. In an example Jordan would've done well to follow, Al Jazeera Managing Director Mohammed Jasim al-Ali didn't speculate on whether the attack was intentional. He simply noted, "This office has been known by everybody, the American airplanes know the location of the office, they know we are broadcasting from there."

Does it seem plausible that some overzealous U.S. troops would intentionally take aim at a reporter or two under cover of mistaking them as the "enemy"? Draw your own conclusions.

Giving new meaning to "It ain't over 'til it's over"

Yogi Berra sues TBS over 'Sex and the City' ads

Evidently he didn't much care for the ads TBS put on buses hyping its reruns of "Sex and the City."

The offending ad, Berra's court papers say, queried readers about the definition of "yogasm." Possible definitions: (a) a type of yo-yo trick, (b) sex with Yogi Berra and (c) what Samantha has with a guy from yoga class. The answer is (c).

Personally, I think that at Yogi's age he has to consider it a boost to his character if he's amorously linked to Kim Cattrall, but then I'm not the one shilling for life insurance.