The World's Largest Prarie Dog

wasn't all that impressive. It was made of chipped concrete and looked like an ill-informed attempt at an art deco prarie dog. The real prarie dogs, that kept popping out of their holes all around us, were much better looking although not nearly so cooperative for photographs. The highlights of Prarie Dog Town, somewhere near Hays, Kansas, were the snakepit - 55 to 60 rattlers that the guy who ran the place startled into rattling for us - and the postcard selection, which was the usual middle of nowhere traditional fare: jackalopes, cowboys herding cattle while riding enormous rabbits, oversized trout and corn and a very fine selection of monstrous prarie dogs. Once I get to my own computer and a scanner, I can post some of the photographic evidence.

The drive, as it always is across the Great Plains, was all about weather. Most people hate driving across the middle of the country because they seem to think it's featureless. I guess they're looking for mountains, or big lakes, or forests or cities or something - so of course they're disappointed. What they fail to take account of is that the weather is the primary geographic feature of the Great Plains. The roiling clouds, the puffy big clouds, the huge expanse of blue sky, lightning, thunder, rain, hail - all of it is every bit as much a part of the terrain as any mountain or river or lake ever is. I love driving through eastern Colorado, Kansas and Missouri. To me it seems as if I'm driving through a landscape that is in constant turmoil, that is undergoing far more change far more rapidly than almost any other I can think of.

We stopped for the night in Salina where I took Colin to the Vientiane Market - a small but surprisingly well stocked Lao-Thai market just about where you'd least expect one. The woman who ran it was Lao - not Hmong - which was unexpected as most of the people from Laos who have come to the U.S. are Hmong - they often fought with the U.S. side during the war, so they got out quick when the other side won. She said that they got customers from all over the area - pretty much any Asian family that needs groceries in Kansas or Western Missouri shows up there from time to time. Other than that, there wasn't much going on in Salina.

Heading east, we stopped in Abilene for breakfast. It was at the northern end of the Chisholm cattle drive trail and I figured it would be a well preserved wild west town. It isn't, not much at least. It's sort of a well preserved 1910 to 1935 town with a whole lot of Dwight David Eisenhower stuff there, since he was from there. Colin attempted to eat a healthy breakfast at the diner we found there - HAH! I know better and opted for eggs and biscuits with gravy. They did, oddly enough, have a bottle of Thai Sriracha hot sauce. They must have got it from the market in Salina. It doesn't really go well with eggs and hash browns, but I felt obligated to drench everything with it on general principle. We also dropped by the most modern, impressive, and largest if you don't count the grain silos, building in town: the Greyhound Hall of Fame. It wasn't open yet so we didn't go in.

We stopped in Mission, Kansas to visit I Love A Mystery bookstore. It has recently moved into new digs and is one of the biggest, most comfortable, really pleasant specialty bookshops either of us have ever been in. They were very pleased to see us - especially Colin as he is one of their current big sellers and their reading groups have been consuming his books. But, they remembered my books from last year and might now order some more. We spent a while in there chatting with Karen, the owner and the other people who work there. I highly recommend it if you are near Kansas City.

Afterwards we dropped by Rainy Day Books, the major independent general interest bookshop in town. It's also a grand place to meet and chat with people and get information on all sorts of things. I gossiped plenty about the book business with one of the managers. It's a nasty business, what more can one sayA?

Then it was off to the Negro Baseball Leagues Museum and Hall of Fame, which is conveniently located in the same building as the National Jazz Museum. I wish I'd had the time to go to both, as from what Colin tells me the jazz museum was excellent. But, I had my priorities, and communing with the spirits of Satchell Paige, Josh Gibson, Oscar Charleston, Buck Leonard and Cool Papa Bell, has long been high on the list. It's a very well done museum, an in depth look at black baseball from a social, cultural and historic perspective. I sat for a while in front of a film loop of the amazing feats of Willie Mays and reminisced with a guy who was maybe ten years older than me, about the times we'd seen Mays play - when I was a kid and he was a teenager.

I'd been looking forward to Stroud's Fried Chicken ("We Choke Our Own Chickens") for lunch, but they've closed down their funky old, roadhouse location and reopened in some distant neighborhood in what used to be a mansion. I was fearful of disappointment, so instead we walked down the block from the museum to the Peachtree soul food restaurant, where I had fried chicken that was nearly as good as Stroud's, along with utterly perfect collards and a dish of okra stewed with tomatoes. So lunch was not at all a disappointment.

Finally it was off to St. Louis where we were greeted by a blinding display of lightning that went off with near strobelight frequency as we drove into town. The rain, luckily was elsewhere. We arrived at Helen Simpson's big, beautiful rambling house near the big, beautiful rambling park in the center of the city. Visiting authors could hardly hope for nicer accomodations - our own guest rooms, comfortable beds, beer and wine in the refrigerator, a Cardinals game on TV and best of all Helen who is funny, smart, charming, welcoming and one of the best people anywhere to talk baseball, mystery books and politics with.

So a good time was had by all, although the turnout at the store was somewhat disappointing: as for strangers, there were three of them - two of them brought their kids so I don't know if I should count them or not; Susan McBride, a good friend, and a good local St. Louis writer, came along with her newish sweetie Ed - they've just bought a house together and seem near disgustingly happy. In any event, we had a nice time, although no one was going to have to call out the riot squad to beat back our legions of crazed fans. It was a mostly skinny crowd too, so it didn't do a whole lot for our pound counting, still, if I count the kids I can pretty safely estimate about 1,015 lbs. Bringing our event total thus far to: 7,910 lbs, just a runway model shy of four tons!

Helen was disappointed as we left after the event and headed north. We were determined to take the remnants of Highway 66 all the way from St. Louis to Chicago. Getting out of town on it proved a problem due to bridge construction, so we had to take the freeway far enough into Illinois to hook up with it later. The old highway is surprisingly well marked, with signs pointing the way to different segments from different decades. Unfortunately a lot of it is frontage road along Interstate 55, so it wasn't exactly as quaint and scenic as we had hoped. Although it did have moments when it veered into small farm towns along the way.

As we approached Springfield we started looking for a motel, hoping for an old-fashioned roadside courtyard place. But none were to be found. We drove into Springfield and still couldn't find any. We finally had to stop and ask at a cocktail lounge where they kept the motels. They were south of town on I-55 and that's where we ended up for the night, drinking too much and shooting bad pool (well, me, Colin was reasonably good) for a long while in a nearby collegiate sports bar that we'd walked to. College kids, even white ones, sure do listen to a lot of hip hop these days. I can't say that I've developed much of a taste for it myself.

We'd had a tough time getting our hotel rooms. They might have been the last two in the area, as the home of Abe Lincoln was hosting the annual Route 66 Car Show and the whole county was loud and proud with highly polished jalopies and classics. I guess no one ever simply trundled down 66 in a regular old car or a beater. The mystique has far outstripped the reality of the thing. I do wonder though, why there doesn't seem to be a highway that actually ran all the way from the East Coast to the West Coast that has the same sort of cache? Maybe it's the song. I was trying to think of all the people I could who have covered it over the years and it's just too many.

Yesterday, Sunday, we continued our slow crawl up toward Chicago, through endless fields of dry brown looking corn and soybeans, past tiny little towns with little to recommend them - although we did come across a giant man holding a giant hot dog not too far past Normal, Illinois. What could be more normal than that? Unfortunately Normal seems a little shy about its name, we were hoping for a lot of pictures of things like the Normal Bakery and the Normal Gun Shop, but most business don't seem to be using it in their name.

We also stopped at the St. Anne Pumpkin Festival, but it seemed as though we missed the parade, which is apparently the highlight. By the time we got there the whole town was reverberating to the torrent of decibels emerging from the town dump where they seemed to be holding a tractor pull or some sort of automotive event. We needed to continue on to Chicago so we didn't stick around to watch.

Driving into Chicago from the south - we took old Highway 1 which turns into Halsted and runs north all the way through the city - Colin was astounded and shocked, and I was somewhat surprised, by the lack of racial mix along the way. For something around 75 blocks we didn't see one person who wasn't black. Not even in other cars. Colin had heard about the defacto segregation that still exists in American cities, but wasn't prepared for how overwhelmingly obvious it can be. I was a bit surprised since Watts and Compton, the black parts of Los Angeles, are also home these days to a lot of Latinos, some Asians and some working class whites as well.

We talked for a little about why that might be - beats me in this day and age - and why the U.S. is so willing to spend billions and billions of dollars and thousands of lives trying to solve both real and imaginary problems overseas when there are still such massive inequities here at home. I figure it's because it's easier psychologically when you can fight an external enemy. Here in the U.S. we are our own enemy and few people, or countries, are much good at constructively fighting themselves.

Tons of Readers

Denver, CO

I hadn’t really forgot what book tours are like, but I guess I’d forgot enough to embark on this one with the usual stupid optimism.

It helps to think about the "crowds" differently. Colin and I have talked about buying a scale and weighing everyone who comes to our events. The number of pounds would certainly be a lot more impressive than the number of people.

In Tucson, at Clues Unlimited, we had six, five of them friends of mine or friends of their’s. Somehow people you know and who know people you know, just don’t seem to count as much as total strangers when it comes to book events. Still, add all six up and that was probably in the vicinity of 845 lbs. Not a bad start. (It’s good that we’re in the U.S. rather than Asia where people tend to be a lot lighter.)

After the event Colin went back to the hotel and I went out to drinks and dinner with some of the friends who were there and some friends who weren’t there but showed up later. We went to the Congress Hotel in downtown Tucson, a fun venue with several bars, good outdoor places to sit, mediocre trendy food and okay cocktails. It was a mostly nice time, although the two couples I was with both have young children and so, at least 75% of the conversation was about children; a subject that is of little or no interest to me. I sucked back some whisky and returned to the hotel where the internet didn’t work very well, despite the hotel’s assurances.

It is nearly impossible to pass a motel these days that doesn't advertise high-speed internet. I had pretty good luck with it last year. This year it's proving to be a problem. I'm writing this in a motel lobby - as the internet in the room doesn't work - and evesdropping on the desk clerk's conversation with a friend about how she can't live on a thousand bucks a month and certainly can't afford to go to college on that. Makes me feel pretty good about even the underpaid writing biz.

In Phoenix, at the Poisoned Pen (Scottsdale really), we had ten, count them, ten actual strangers. That is a very good turnout on a Saturday afternoon. Although I would have thought Colin would have roped in more – his books sell very well and are very well reviewed. It’s a great store though, and the staff there really liked our “soundtrack album” and played it often - much to the chagrin of one or two patrons who mistook it for "noise." So, let’s see, ten people, averaging about 165 lbs per person; that’s 1,650 lbs.

That evening we went to a baseball game. Colin is something of a total sports fan. Throw a ball into the middle of a bunch of people and have them do something with it leading to one group winning, and you can get his attention. He likes baseball, something which pleases me no end. We had fantastic seats thanks to the Diamondbacks; right behind the third base dugout in the second row. Shame it wasn’t much of a game. There was plenty of sloppy play, not much of elegance to be seen on the field, and we ended up leaving after twelve innings when it seemed as though neither team was capable of winning. (Eventually, I heard, the Diamondbacks won in the bottom of the 16th on a sacrifice fly.)

Then it was off to Sedona and The Well Red Coyote; a charming little bookshop, near as I can tell the only one in town that doesn't specialize in new age books. It's run by Kris Neri - a fine and fun writer on her own - and her husband Joe, who used to play in a blues band in L.A. We had two people for that event. One for each of us. And they weren't fat. The woman might have weighed in somewhere around 125 or so; the man at, perhaps, 170. So I'll be optimistic and give them each two and a half more pounds bringing their total to 300.

After the event we drove from Sedona to Bluff, Utah; probably the only town in the whole state without a Mormon majority. Some 300 people live there, six of them making their living as writers. It's very near Monument Valley and on the edge of the Navajo reservation. There are rock paintings on the cliffs by the river, plenty of hidden away cliff dwellings, rock so red it could parade on May Day; and we stayed with Win and Meredith Blevins, two old and close pals of mine and excellent writers. (I've known Meredith since 8th grade; and Win since she took up with him a number of years ago.) We drank, we ate, we walked around, we watched baseball (Win is a St. Louis Cardinals fanatic) and had a good, relaxing time.

Then yesterday we drove north. We stopped for breakfast in Cortez, Colorado. I recommended huevos rancheros to Colin - he's a vegetarian - and for the first time in my experience they came with meat. America outside the big cities is not an easy place for non-omnivores.

We continued on to Durango, Colorado which is a splendid town. If I were looking for a mountain community to live in, it would definitely be in the running. Part of what makes it good is Maria's books, which is an excellent bookshop where you wouldn't expect one.

But then we turned north on Highway 550, rising into passes above ten thousand feet, surrounded by snow covered craggy peaks and bright yellow aspen trees accenting the green trees. It was one of the more beautiful drives I've ever been on. We took nine and a half hours to drive what would normally be a five or so hour drive. All the stopping was well worth it. We ended up in Gunnison, Colorado for the night where I had an excellent, very reasonably priced steak - it is the middle of cattle country - and Colin had nothing other than a bite of my baked potato and a beer. Afterwards we went to the rather rundown Alamo Bar, where we were greeted warmly by locals, one of them, Claire, an englishwoman who had settled in Gunnison a few years ago and was delighted to be encountering Colin, an englishman. Her boyfriend didn't seem overly pleased, but he warmed up when we posed him with a pool cue for a picture at the pool table.

Something, however, didn't agree with Colin and he spent the morning in the very same medical clinic where a woman died a couple of days ago from eating spinach. Vegetables kill, apparently. He had food poisoning of his own, although not fatal, but very uncomfortable. He managed to sleep somewhat on the drive today to Denver, and he rallied to do a good job at tonight's event at Murder By the Book in Denver.

It was an excellent event: nine strangers and Heidi Mack - my truly splendid webmistress. The store presented us with a cake decorated with our book covers. The baker had done a great job with the dragon on Living Room of the Dead. The people there were interested, friendly, interesting and bought a bunch of books. I think they bought a dozen or more of Living Room - which is pretty unusual for a book that is a year old. So, let's see though, it was a pretty wide range of sizes, maybe averaging out around 150. 1500 more lbs of people.

Where do we stand so far:

The Mystery Bookstore - Los Angeles - 20 people, a very rough estimate of perhaps 2,600 lbs.

Clues Unlimited - Tucson - 845 lbs.
Poisoned Pen - Scottsdale - 1,650.
The Well Red Coyote - Sedona - 300
Murder By the Book - Denver - 1,500

Total approximate pounds of people so far = 6,895

More than three tons of fans! Now that's impressive.

DisOriented Express on the Road

The naked bookseller has been one of the highlights so far.

We left L.A. a little after eight this morning and encountered no traffic to speak of. I wasn't even sideswiped by a truck this time like I was in my first attempt to leave town on the last book tour. The radar detector did the job and we made very good time to Quartzite, Arizona where we stopped for lunch.

Colin, being English and a fishetarian, ordered the daily special at the small diner in the very small desert community - fish and chips. It didn't, apparently live up to its counterparts in the UK, although he implied that he's had similar served in his native land. He was, as is the usual case with foreigners in America, flummoxed by the enormous portion that was put before him. Quite sensibly he didn't eat it all. I ate all of my club sandwich, but it was smaller and not fried.

Then we went to visit the naked bookseller. I first heard of him on Lee Goldberg's blog and had been awaiting my next opportunity to pass through Quartzite to visit his store. There isn't a whole lot to say beyond this picture of Colin and Paul Winer the naked bookseller:

Next time you're passing through Quartzite, I suggest a visit. The store has an eclectic and interesting mix of books as well.

We did finally make it to Tucson. I always forget what a long drive it is. Our event at Clues Unlimited was fun. We enjoyed putting it on, Chris Acevedo the bookstore owner enjoyed it, and the crowd (okay, six people - what do we authors have to do to get more people to book events? Maybe if we were naked? Nah!), anyhow, the crowd enjoyed it too and they also enjoyed scarfing up all the Asian snacks that we'd brought along - as well as drinking up some Beer Lao - quite possibly the best beer in Asia.

Earlier in the week we kicked off the DisOriented Express with an event at The Mystery Bookstore in Los Angeles - sort of my headquarters mystery bookstore. We had about 20 people who also seemed to enjoy our extravaganza. It was our first show and we had a few minor kinks that we worked out. Good to do that at home before hitting the road.

Tomorrow - later today I guess - it's on to Scottsdale to Poisoned Pen, then a baseball game at night. Sunday to Sedona - The Well Red Coyote - where we will present a workshop on researching exotic locales. Basically - go there, have fun, be observant. Well, there is more to it than that, sort of.

Eventually we will make it to Madison, Wisconsin for Bouchercon, where among other events, Colin will be presented with his Dilys Award - for having written the favorite book to sell of the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association last year. He doesn't know it - and unless he reads this I probably won't tell him - but I was handed the award in a box and asked to deliver it to Bouchercon. It's currently sitting on the floor of the backseat of my car, right behind where he has been sitting.

I'm tired and tired of fixing my typos - even in blogging, neatness counts - so I'm afraid I will have to shut down for now and come up with pithy statements and fascinating observations some other time.

The Ugly Stupid Season Kicks Off

Here we go again, it's 62 days of idiocy until the mid-term elections, then it will be at least another 62 of recriminations and chest thumping afterwards. The Republicans are getting nervous and that's going to make things even worse than usual. You don't corner a rattlesnake and expect it not to strike.

It burns my ass to say this - because I tend to agree more often with Democrats than Republicans - especially these days - but Republicans are better at playing politics than Democrats. That's because they're more ruthless, better organized and more unified.

The big push started yesterday. They are going to force a congressional vote on establishing legal military tribunals of the sort that President Bush already had shot down by the Supreme Court. Nevermind that the proposed tribunals stomp all over many of the very same rights that we're supposedly protecting from the bad guys. Nevermind that even a lot of Republican congressmen and senators get queasy feelings in their guts when they think about giving the President what he wants.

It's an election year. If dumbing down the debate over how to deal with terrorism to the President's level of, "you're either with us or you're against us," and hammering away at the Constitution helps the Republicans to keep control of Congress, well, that's all that really counts. Isn't it? Republicans stick together better than Democrats do when it comes to the really important things; like getting re-elected.

Keep in mind that this is a mid-term election; one in which voter turnout is traditionally very low. The party that wins this election is going to be the party that gets the most bodies to the polls. There's been an awful lot of speculation that GW Bush won Ohio - and thus the 2004 Presidential Election - because Republicans cheated. I don't know if that's true or not, but I do know that the Ohio vote would not have been close enough to steal if it hadn't have been for the Republicans mobilizing voters to come out in droves to ban gay marriage.

The Republican Party has perfected the art of confusing the important issues in elections with hot button, emotional issues that rally their natural supporters. People flock to the polls to vote against gay marriage or medical marijuana (or civil rights ballot measures in the South in the 1960s and '70s; which is when and how the South started voting Republican). Since those people are in the voting booth anyway, they might as well punch another couple of holes for Republican candidates.

The problem is, how do the Democrats combat that? Fear, negativity and simplicity almost always have greater emotional resonance than anything positive or complicated or intellectual.

Unfortunately politics in the U.S. isn't so much a battleground of ideas as it is of personalities. The Republicans have succeeded in recent years because they've managed to scare people shitless; over taxes, over terrorists, over drug-crazed homosexuals coming for their kids. They've managed to pass themselves off as the nation's protectors from these terrible scourges.

The only way to fight that is with reassuring charisma. FDR talked Americans into believing that the only thing they had "to fear, was fear itself." JFK oozed charm and smarts and strength (which was a pretty neat trick for a guy with all his medical problems.) Jimmy Carter was comfortingly honest and fatherly and his timing was good; any Democrat could have defeated Gerald Ford, the guy who was appointed by and then pardoned Nixon. Bill Clinton wanted to hug everybody, and there was something about him that made people want to hug him back. LBJ was the exception. He rode in on the coattails of the even-more-popular-after-his-assassination Kennedy and he also played the fear card nearly as well as the Republicans do today. He cast his opponent, Goldwater, as the crazy guy who was going to blow us all up.

I don't know what's going to happen in this mid-term election campaign other than that it will be gruesome and stupid and brutal and by the end of it anyone with a lick of sense will be even more fed up with politics in this country than they are already. Two years from now though, it's going to be even uglier. And the Democrats either need a candidate with charisma, a lot of it; or they need to find a way to scare the pants off voters about four more years of a Republican president.

My First Special Guest Blog

I've got a friend who's a writer and a cop. She works for the CSU division - CSI for you TV viewers. She's been working the graveyard (bad joke in that) shift and sending me the occasional email about her night at work when she gets home in the morning. It's interesting, sometimes gruesome, sometimes funny, sometimes sick-funny stuff. She's given me permission to occasionally use some of her emails here if I want.

I want. I'm going to put them here verbatim. Keep in mind that my friend is a very careful, good, polished writer, but when she sends me these emails it is after a long, hard overnight shift at work. Here's the first one, from yesterday:


Nobility & Nitwits
It was a busy night. We had 5 calls last night, four deaths and one aggravated sexual assault suspect. I had no sooner arrived at the office than the phone rang and we were rolling out on a suicide. This was a stark contrast to the idiot from last week who shot himself after an argument with his wife. Last night's call was about dignity. The gentleman was a 74 year old cancer patient who had just signed up for hospice help. He was on morphine and had asked his wife when he would get his next treatment. She told him that it would be 15 minutes and she went back to clipping coupons. Then she heard the shot. I guess he was tired of waiting.

When we arrived the first thing I noticed was that except for the gaping hole in his head, our complainant was immaculate. There was no nursing home smell, and the house spoke of a lifetime of care. The walls bore evidence of better days, and I couldn't help but note the proud smiles that gazed down at me from old photographs. Yet it was the single item on his dresser that said the most. Dated August 8, of this year, a card was propped open so that our old gentlemen could still read it. Happy Anniversary, 50 years. The oxygen tank stood like silent sentry beside the bed, a necessary, but unwelcome visitor. A partially filled urine container whispered a reminder of the cruel injustices that come with aging. His room told a story, but a bit of gentle probing yielded even more.

I offered to call someone for his wife, but she said that even though she had a daughter, she didn't want her to see him like this, and so she patiently waited until we were through. The bullet blew a gigantic hole through his fragile temple and went out the back to lodge in the pillow behind him. The blood spray on his hand left little doubt that he had fired the gun he still clutched.

Although hidden in the dark, on a trip back through his front yard for my camera, I discovered three of the largest lemon trees I had ever seen. Lemons as large as grapefruits dragged against the branches. Later, a talk with his wife revealed that our gentleman had smuggled the seeds for these trees back from a trip to Mexico. She told me the story, and then grimaced and begged forgiveness when she realized that she'd just spilled the beans, or in this case, the lemons, to the police. Despite the somber circumstances, I had to laugh at her. This earned me a smile.

Every time I walk into someone's home, it speaks for them. This home spoke of a life well lived, with love, care, and dignity.


My next call was to the jail to process a suspect in a high profile aggravated sexual assault case. We had to take DNA cheek swabs and hair samples. This is where your suspect stands naked on a sheet of white butcher paper and you inform him that either he can pluck the samples or you will. This is more effective if you're holding a pair of pliers. The samples must be taken from 5 different spots on the scalp and groin. Lovely mental picture....... And this guy was a real winner. Fortunately, no one had bothered to tell him that he was staring at a life sentence, so he wasn't too much of a problem. Just nasty, and stupid. A class A nitwit...... such a stark contrast from our first call. I wonder what his home looks like.

Guns and More Guns

Yesterday I went to the Glendale Gun Show. I am not what anyone would call a "gun nut." I don't own any guns, although there was a time when I did. But, I don't have any tattoos either and sometimes I go to tattoo shows. Then again, I find some tattoos kind of sexy. There is nothing sexy about guns. People who think there is, well, they scare me.

There were some scary people at the Glendale Gun Show. But mostly there were a lot of misguided regular folk like my kindly neighbors. The kind of people who think that if they have a gun in their house, they are going to be safer. They think this in defiance of every single statistic that shows they are way more likely to shoot a fellow family member, or the meter reader, or the UPS guy than they are to actually blow away a bad guy trying to break in and do them any harm.

There is that famous slogan: "When guns are banned, only criminals will have guns." It sounds okay at first, but the fact is that criminals kill and wound a whole lot more innocent people with their guns than the other way around. And "innocent" people kill and wound a whole lot more other innocent people with their guns than they do criminals.

I'm sorry, but people without a very specific reason to, and the training to back it up - like, for instance, "a well regulated Militia", as stipulated in the Second Amendment to the Constitution - should not be allowed to own guns. In most "civilized" nations, they aren't. There would be a whole lot fewer dead spouses, children, parents, meter readers and UPS dudes if there were fewer guns in the hands of the public. Cops, just trying to do their job, would be safer. This is particularly true of handguns.

Okay, so in a rural area let people own rifles - not, however, assault rifles. They might need to take out a marauding bear or something, or even fell a buck to fill the freezer with venison. (There oughta be a law though that makes them eat what they kill.)

But pistols just plain make it too plain easy to kill the wrong person. They should be banned for possession by the general public. The ones that are already out there ought to be confiscated.

There was a target for sale at the gun show.


If I'm ever the hostage in this situation, I'm going to feel a whole lot better about it if there's a highly trained cop with a gun trained on the bad guy, than my sweet, well-intentioned, shaky-handed but well-armed neighbors.

As a matter of fact, I worry about where my neighbor's bullets are going to end up if they ever wake up in the middle of the night scared and decide to start shooting. Luckily my bedroom is at the opposite end of my house from theirs. I'm hoping the walls in between will prevent any mistakes.

Most gunshows also have a lot of other stuff for sale. Russian nesting dolls, for some inexplicable reason, seem to be popular; as are a great many little geegaws and doodads. My friend who went with me bought a telescoping, stainless steel dentist's mirror. The guy who sold it to him for two bucks cautioned him, with a wink, to not use it for the purpose of peeking up women's skirts.

There was a table selling an astounding array of right wing bumperstickers. Those people do seem to be afraid of an awful lot of different things. And for "Christians" they don't seem very charitable toward anyone who isn't white, straight, christian and American. It was horrifying to see how many of the bumperstickers longed for the "good old days" of the Confederacy. There were black people in attendance. Some of them were buying guns. Some of them were probably christians. Wonder what they made of that? I was pleased to see that, at least in the time I was there, no one seemed to be buying any of the bumperstickers.

There was some good stuff too. I bought several different types of jerky. I imagine the elk jerky was the product of a hunter with a gun. I don't suppose the beef jerky was. I also bought, I couldn't resist, "The Official Axis of Evil Currency Collection." It was a bargain at twelve bucks. (It came with a bonus Taliban-era Afghani and a current Iraqi Dinar, but they aren't so impressive looking.) Here it is:



SILENT? GUNS
So now the guns in Lebanon are supposedly silent. What's been accomplished?
1. The stablilizing, relatively peaceful, increasingly democratic country of Lebanon has been pulverized yet again and set back many years in its development.
2. The democratic, independent government of Lebanon has been severely weakened.
3. Hezbollah has been made to look heroic to people all over the Muslim world and has been strengthened politically in Lebanon.
4. Syria, which had mostly been booted out of Lebanon, has probably regained a great deal of influence.
5. Iran, through Hezbollah, has probably gained more influence in Lebanon and more allies throughout the Middle East.
6. A largely peace loving population that was increasingly showing signs of a willingness to live and let live with Israel has been radicalized. (Having your neighborhood flattened and your children killed will do that to you.)
7. Well over a thousand Lebanese - more than 90 percent of them non-combatants, the majority of them children - have been killed; and over a hundred Israelis.
8. The kidnapped Israeli soldiers haven't been returned. Even if they had, was all the carnage worth it?
9. Gaza has also been pulverized - although that doesn't seem to be getting much attention. That's strengthened the radicals in Hamas and undermined the moderates in the Palestinian authority.
10. Israel is less, not more, secure than it was before because it is now surrounded by people who are even more pissed off and determined to destroy it than they were before, and they're living in less stable places with governments that are less able to function diplomatically or control militant groups within their borders.

What is there to be said about Israel? Can anyone say: Their own worst enemy. (And, of course, the U.S. is happy to assist in Israel's self-destructive actions and policies.)

The Fallacy of "Corporate" Taxes and What That Has to Do With Campaign Finance Reform

On paper, taxing corporate profits sounds like a good idea. We, individuals, get taxed on our income, why shouldn't companies pay tax on their's? The problem is that in the real world the corporate profits tax is just another sneaky way of taxing us - you and me.

Who do you think pays corporate taxes? We all do. Like every other cost of doing business they are simply factored into the prices that companies charge for their goods and services. And, thanks to simple mathematics, we pay corporate taxes - on behalf of companies - at a higher rate than the companies are charged.

Here's how it works: Acme Widgets makes a pretty good premium DooDad. It costs them one thousand dollars to make, distribute and sell the gizmo. Included in that cost is the physical cost of the materials, worker's salaries, rent, utilities, advertising, insurance, delivery, etc. - and taxes. You don't think they're going to leave out taxes as part of the cost of making their premium DooDad do you? Now Acme's management has decided it wants to make ten percent profit on its premium DooDad, so they charge $1,100 for it.

But now someone comes along and thinks it's a good idea to raise Acme's taxes to pay for something worthwhile. And the great thing is that they'd be raising taxes on a company, not on voters like you and me. So they raise the corporate profit tax rate, say, 0.2 percent. What that means is that Acme now has to pay twenty cents more (0.2% of its $100 profit) to make and sell its premium DooDad. If it wants to maintain its ten percent profit per DooDad, it has to raise the price by 0.22 percent.

But wait, it doesn't stop there. Acme makes its premium DooDad out of aluminium, plastic, oyster shells and polyester thread. It buys the machinery it uses from eight other companies. It buys packaging materials from three different companies. It ships via two different trucking companies and one airline. It pays rent to a company. It uses a law firm and an accounting firm. All of those companies are now paying twenty cents more for each hundred bucks of profit. If they all want to make ten percent - which is not an unreasonable profit margin - they've all got to raise their prices to Acme.

And guess what? Acme passes all those price hikes along to its customers. By the time the smoke clears it is now costing Acme $1,020 to make its DooDads and to maintain its ten percent profit margin it has raised the price to $1,122 per DooDad - a price rise of 0.22 percent to the consumer, caused by a tax hike of 0.2 percent to the company.

Acme's biggest customer buys 10,000 DooDads a year, so that raises their cost of doing business $220,000 per year. What it really raises is your cost of buying from them.

What This Has to Do With Campaign Finance Reform
Here in California there is a proposition (#89) on the November election ballot. It is yet another attempt at campaign finance reform. I'm all for campaign finance reform. I think it's one of the most vital issues in any democracy - especially ours. I'm even willing to pay a little more in taxes to pay for the reforms.

One of the big selling points of the bill is that it will finance its reforms by a 0.2 percent increase in corporate taxes. The supporters of the bill are trying to make voters believe it won't cost them anything because companies are going to pay for it, not them. That's utter bullshit. (See above.)

I support much of what the bill is trying to do and even some of how it's trying to do it. I'll probably vote in favor of it. But I'd appreciate some honesty from time to time. I know there's no free lunch. I can take it. If you want me to help pay for something worthwhile, just ask. Don't try to disguise it as something else.

Lunatics, They're All Lunatics!

There will not be peace in the Middle East in my lifetime. And probably not in yours either. There are so many reasons for this that it really doesn't make any sense to analyze them. It's "whack-a-mole." You bang one of the reasons on the head and push it back into its hole, and another one pops right up. None of the principals involved in the region - not one of them - is reasonable. So, there's no understanding their reasons and there's no reasoning with them.

I can make some observations though about the most recent round of carnage. Why not? Everyone else is.

1. There's a difference, or at least there ought to be, between soldiers and civilians. If, during a raid in an area where hostilities exist, soldiers are captured, kidnapped, whatever you want to call it, that's a shame, but it's part of their job. Being a soldier in an area of hostilities puts you at risk. When you signed up, or were drafted and didn't resist, you signed up to take that risk. That doesn't mean that your government, in this case Israel, shouldn't try to protect or defend you, or respond to the provocation in a manner that might prevent the same thing from happening again. But it does mean that your status as a soldier, and the inherent risk in that, must be part of the equation in figuring out what the response should be. In any event, the response must be measured so as to avoid making the situation worse.

2. Israel's response is making the situation worse. This is in part due to internal Israeli politics, which is a terrible reason to go to war. The Olmert government does not have a military track record to call its own. Unlike the Sharon government, which responded to nearly identical provocations in a far more measured fashion - because with Sharon's reputation it had nothing to prove - the current Israeli government feels the need to show how tough it can be. Hundreds, possibly thousands by the time the smoke clears, of civilians are paying the price for the Olmert government to make itself look manly.

It seems to me that if you're killing non-combatants over combatants at a ratio greater than 10 to 1 - which is what Israel is currently doing - I don't care what the rationale is, you're undermining the legitimacy of those actions.

3. Israel's response is also destroying any progress that had been made toward a more stable Lebanon, something that Israel was benefitting from and would have benefitted further from in the future. Hezbollah was launching its attacks on Israel from a small area near the border, a long way from Beirut. Yet Israel has attacked Beirut, stopping its recovery in its tracks, destabilizing and undermining the weak, but strengthening, Lebanese government and wrecking the fast recovering Lebanese economy.

So now, rather than an increasingly prosperous, politically stabilizing Lebanon on its border, Israel is going to have a basket case for a neighbor. Since Hezbollah is apparently better organized, and possibly even better funded, than the actual Lebanese government, who do you think is going to benefit most from all this chaos?

On the one hand I can understand what has long made Israel so touchy. It's a tiny little nation, surrounded on three sides by people who for the most part hate it, and a strong defence is seen as a matter of life and death. So, with its back against the wall, Israel needs to be as strong as it can militarily. But as a long term survival strategy, that isn't nearly enough. Sooner or later someone who hates it is going to find new, more devastating ways to attack it. Sooner or later its few allies, for their own internal reasons, might abandon it. Masada was seen as nearly impregnable. It was as strong a defensive position as the Jews ever held. That didn't end so well.

Israel also needs to be as strong diplomatically as it possibly can. And first and foremost that means trying to make friends and partners with its neighbors. And to do that, the neighbors need to be at peace within their own borders, their governments need to be stable and their economies need to be at least providing hope for their people. Trade, economic ties, cultural exchanges, cooperation on all fronts is the only long term defensive strategy that is really going to protect Israel. The current ruckus is hurting, rather than helping that effort.

And One More Thing - The Free Market Solution to the Problem of Jerusalem
Jerusalem is one of the world's major bones of contention. Take it out of contention. Take it away from all those snarling brutes. Declare it an international open city. Move the U.N., the World Court, the WTO, all the international groups there. Contract out the running of all the religious sites to Disney. Let them build "Religion World." Use the proceeds to help fund the international groups there and to give good paying, secure employment to the religious nuts who will provide the local color in the same way that employees in Donald Duck and Mickey and Minnie Mouse suits do at other Disney theme parks.

Whatever Happened to Hollywood?

When I first moved back to L.A. after an absence of 14 years, there was an after hours club I'd hang out in near the rather insalubrious intersection of Western and Santa Monica. It provided nearly everything anyone could possibly want. Patrons could order cocaine, pot, ecstasy and occasionally some other drugs, from the waitress. They were all high quality and came with the necessary accoutrement for indulging in them. There was a good selection of booze, at very reasonable prices, available long after bars were supposed to be legally closed. There was poker and blackjack and a couple of slot machines. There was a craps table, although I never saw it in use.

My fellow customers were a diverse crowd. I recall sitting around one of the large low-lying tables one night with a nuclear physicist from CalTech, a stripper, an elderly bartender from a big name hotel, a young guy from the Israeli consulate, a wannabe rock star and his silent girlfriend, a grip (I've never quite known what they actually do), a high-priced "escort," a cook and me, an ex-financial journalist just then turning to writing books. The physicist was buying us all lines of coke and the more lines he bought the closer the escort sat to him.

Across the room, at another table, there were a couple of lower level - low B or C list - celebrities, sitting with a fairly well known local musician and a minor celebrity chef. Someone said that they'd seen - I'm not dumb enough to insert any names here - a very A-list celeb in the company of an even higher A-list rock star there a few nights back. It's good to be back in L.A., I thought to myself.

Not long after that night the place closed down. I never got the whole story. Either it was raided, or the operators decided it was getting hot and moved to avoid a raid. In any event I wasn't enough in the loop to find out where it moved to. (If anyone out there knows...be discreet.)

This morning I was hit by a small wave of nostalgia for the after hours club. That was thanks to a regular column in Thursday's L.A. Times: "My Favorite Weekend." (This nostalgia has absolutely nothing to do with the specific content of today's column or the person it is about.) I skimmed the column. I usually do. I don't know why. I think it's little more than a dull P.R. excercise on behalf of B or C-list celebrities, almost none of which I ever recognize.

As usual, today's subject's favorite weekend seems to be engaging in a variety of wholesome - or mostly wholesome - and healthy activities that are guaranteed to give offense to no one. I have the impression that fully 90% of the people profiled spend part of their weekends at Urth Cafe drinking some sort of hideous, organic soy-milk faux coffee concoction on their way to or from the gym, or some sort of vegetarian, organic (or often overpriced and undergood Westside Italian) meal. They also shop a lot. I guess even low-level celebs have more money than they know what to do with. (At least today's celeb - Russell Mael of the band Sparks - goes to the track to bet on horses. I'll try to ignore the fact that he picks up a salad on the way.)

For some reason this morning's column irritated me more than usual. The guy's in a rock band! Soy cappuccino? "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg?" Play-reading at the Getty? Salad?

Whatever happened to the Hollywood that so warmly welcomed me back home after 11 years in the hinterlands of Asia, a year spent bouncing back and forth between the Old World, isolated small towns of Chicago and New York, and two years surrounded by the young ravening dot com hordes of San Francisco?

Just once I want to read a "My Favorite Weekend" column that is admirably, cheerfully, gloriously, unrepentently unwholesome. That would be refreshing. Not that I ever had any real faith in Hollywood, but I could use a little something to help crack through the unrelentingly dull and flavorless image it's trying to foist off on us.

I know that the sleaze is going on out there, unabated, ugly, illegal.....human! Having aged a few years since returning to Los Angeles I'm not even certain that I still want to be a part of it. But I want to be comforted by knowledge of its accessibility. The L.A. Times isn't helping. Can't someone?

Thrills and Chills at Thrillerfest

I'm safely home in L.A. where it is merely in the mid-90s. One day in Phoenix I passed a bank thermometer that read 116 and that seemed about right, if not erring on the cool side. In all I liked Thrillerfest well enough. It was the first one and I imagine it will improve with age.

It was mostly authors, wannabe authors and fans, which is not a bad crowd to spend some time with. But, one of the things I particularly appreciate about, say, Bouchercon (the big mystery event every year) is the wide range of people from the entire industry: publishers, editors, agents, booksellers, publicists, reviewers, fans and authors. While I don't believe that I already know everything there is to know about writing, I do know a lot more about it than the other parts of my chosen field. So I like spending time with people who do other things; especially booksellers who I think of as being on the front lines.

The panels were entertaining and even interesting, but by and large not all that useful. Sure, I love seeing someone demonstrate fighting techniques or a gory video about forensic medicine; but it's not as if I'm going to take notes then file them away on the off chance that I might need them some day. I know how to look that stuff up, if and when I need it, or who to call to find out.

I did spend a lot of time at the bar, which is where the real action tends to be at any conference anyhow. Not having an office with colleagues and a water cooler that I go to every day, conferences like this are as close as I get to that, and it's very welcome.

What wasn't welcome was the appearance of an old foe on Saturday night. I spent my 40th birthday in the jungles of Central Borneo. Among the gifts I received, was malaria. It wasn't a particularly horrible case. I spent about a week in bed in Jakarta, feverish and miserable, but I got over it. Still, every two or three years it decides to pay me a one or two day visit. It's the gift that keeps on giving. Saturday night I was with some friends at a very pleasant blues bar in Phoenix - the Rhythm Room should you ever happen to be in town - when I started to feel something coming on. I got back to my hotel room in time to be overcome by near convulsive chills, followed by someone sticking my body into a pre-heated oven, followed by every last drop of liquid in my body oozing out of my pores. This process was repeated several times through the night.

Sometimes my bouts of recurrent malaria come complete with hallucinations and vivid dreams. That at least makes it more interesting. This time it didn't. It was simply nasty.

The next morning, thanks to aspirin the wonder drug and espresso, another wonder drug, I managed to shiver and sweat through the panel I was on at Thrillerfest - "Killer Settings." It seemed to go pretty well, thanks to the moderating of Sarah Weinman - who runs the excellent blog: Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind. Then I drove home in a chilled one moment, sweating the next daze. My car has a thermostat on its air conditioner / heater. For a bit it was turned up to 85, then down to Cool, then back again. It was one of those sorts of drives.

Thrills at Thrillerfest

I'm in Phoenix, Arizona for Thrillerfest, the annual jamboree of the International Thriller Writers, of which I'm a member.

What is a "thriller" anyhow? Let's start there. I'm told that I write them, as opposed to "mysteries." That seems reasonable to me, there isn't much real mystery in my books. They are more "don't do its" than there are "who done its." I guess that's as close as I can get to describing a thriller. In a mystery something happens early in the book and the rest of the book is spent trying to get to the bottom of it. In a thriller, something is going to happen and the book is spent trying to prevent it, or alter it or fix it. It's the difference between a bomb going off in the first chapter and then the detective trying to find and bring down the culprit. And someone finding out that a bomb is going to go off and spending the book trying to find the bomb and stop it before it explodes.

So, that's why I drove from L.A. to Phoenix yesterday. It takes about 5-1/2 hours, or would if it wasn't for the bottleneck that is built into Highway 10 just as you start entering Phoenix. On the way I passed the truckstop restaurant near Palm Springs that for years has featured lifesize statues of dinosaurs. Now it features statues of humans running around with those dinosaurs. That might seem entertainingly silly until you find out it's because the truckstop has been bought by Christians. The sort of Christians who believe that the world is no more than 6,000 years old and that dinosaurs and people used to wander around together. It is now a truckstop with a mission; an idiotic, science-denying mission. I couldn't bring myself to stop there and give them my business.

So I got to Phoenix where it was 109 degrees and threatening thundershowers. I checked into the Arizona Biltmore - an architectural masterpiece by Frank Lloyd Wright. It is great to look at, but it demonstrates a lot of the all too typical arrogance of big architects. Here, in the middle of the desert, it is an oasis of manicured lawns, non-native trees and bushes and low-lying, low-ceilinged buildings that don't take much advantage of the views, the desert light or the occasional evening breeze. My room would be fine if it were in a Motel 6 where I was paying $49.95 per night. As is I'm paying $130 per night, or something like that, because it's off-season and I'm part of the conference. Usually it's somewhere in the $400 per night range - which would be an utter outrage.

It is certainly a popular conference locale. There is a gigantic group of women here who belong to some national sorority. They are all carrying pink carnations and wearing a lot of makeup. There are Avon ladies. There are us thriller writers and readers.

And best of all there are the Christian fundamentalists who have taken over the ballroom next to the lobby. They are yelling and screaming and flailing and falling on the floor and talking in tongues. The background noise in the lobby is: "Praise Jesus, praise him, hallelujah, praise God, praise Jesus, oh lord..." It does seem something of a mistake on the part of the hotel to have put the bible thumpers right next to the lobby. Maybe they'll take a field trip to the dinosaur truckstop. They haven't brought out any snakes to handle yet, but I'm hoping they will.

It's likely to be 109 or so again today and unfortunately there is no air-conditioned path from the lobby to the conference center.

Cracks in the Pot With Age - This Morning's Reading of the Paper

Okay, so maybe that headline is a bit of a stretch, but I'm beginning to see why becoming something of a crackpot seems to be one of the perogatives, if not requisites, of age. I turned 54 a week ago and have already written two letters to public officials. Emails really, is that somehow less crackpotish than snail mail?

With the years has come some knowledge, experience and an apparent increasing level of crankiness. All that turns many a morning into a roller coaster ride, prodded along by reading the newspaper. Here's what this morning's L.A. Times did to me emotionally:

Column One: "Fond Computer Memories." Ah, a bit of nostalgia. I never had a Commodore computer of my own, but I used one. I remember the very primitive computer in the basement of the library at my college and then my first computer, the one with two 5-1/2 inch floppy drives and no hard drive. I fondly recall XyWrite, my all time favorite word processing program, now long gone.

Just below it: "Study Links Male Gays, Birth of Older Brothers." Yet another study linking biology and sexual preference. On the one hand that's always welcome; it's a whole lot harder to discriminate against someone because of their biology than their choices. On the other, why should anybody care whether it's nature or nurture? Who someone has consensual sex with, and how, ought to be a mere personal matter and of no interest to anyone else than the people having sex. So this story has some ups and downs for me. I'm pleased this study might make it harder to discriminate against gay people. I'm displeased that it should matter in the first place.

"Private Philanthropy Shifts Outlook of Governments." Ah, that Warren Buffett, what a mensch. Those Gates'. It makes me proud to be using a PC. It's a shame that governments would rather spend their money killing people or giving their pals big, unnecessary development contracts while leaving so much of the good guy stuff up to private foundations, but it's very nice to see some rich people doing some very good things. I wish I was rich enough to give a bunch of it away.

"Gov. Calls for New Spending on Prisons." I'm sorry, but FUCK YOU ARNIE! Go back to making movies. I liked the Terminator flicks. Hell, I even have a soft spot for Kindergarten Cop. (I don't know what's wrong with me.)

Don't worry, I'm not going to go through the paper story by story. Those were my highlights on the front page. There were a few other thrills elsewhere:

Page A8, "Coffee May Cut Diabetes Risk." Oh boy, I love coffee. Think I'll make another double espresso.

A14, "Supreme Court Rejects Campaign Finance Limits." I don't know enough about this particular law to know enough about the decision, but these days I'm skeptical of nearly anything the court does. And campaign financing is one of the most important issues we've got and something needs to be done about it and soon. I can see the argument that says people ought to be able to donate as much as they want to a campaign. Then again, who was it that said something along the lines of "Freedom of the press is for those who own the presses." Well, it ought to be for the rest of us too.

Poor Bruno the Rambling Wild Bear. I'm always comforted, just a little, when I read about Europeans doing stupid things too. It isn't just us Yanks! I feel less alone.

"Insurgents Planted Bomb With Bodies." Of course they did. Why wouldn't they? It's a war isn't it? I feel terrible for the soldiers who were killed, for their families, for the other soldiers - on both sides, they're all just pawns in someone else's fucked up game - for the Iraqis and for us in the U.S. who are having a big chunk of our country's future hocked to pay for all this bullshit.

Dodgers lost, stockmarket was sort of up, sort of down, I didn't bother reading about the new Superman movie, I probably won't go see it anyhow.

Okay, so now let's skip over the rest of my newspaper reading for the morning and get to the part that got me all riled up, caused me to write a letter to a public official and set off this blog entry.

The middle edtitorial, "The case for flag-burning." Yet again, what the hell is wrong with California Senator Diane Feinstein? Is she trying to make it so that I can't even hold my nose long enough to vote for her in November. She supports the constitutional amendment that would, in effect, ban flag burning. Is she insane? This is another good example of why it makes no sense to simply support one party or the other no matter what. There are plenty of fucked up Democrats out there too. (The governor of Louisiana for example.) The L.A. Times editorial made the case against the amendment very well. Here's what I've got to say:

IT ISN'T THE FLAG THAT MAKES THIS COUNTRY GREAT, IT'S THE RIGHT TO BURN IT!

Here's what I wrote to that cretin Diane Feinstein. I don't know how I managed to remain polite.

Dear Senator Feinstein,

I implore you to reconsider your suppoort of the so-called Flag Burning Amendment. The idea that burning the national symbol in protest is tolerated, speaks far louder to what makes this country great than the symbol itself. At a time when so much of what America stands for is under threat by its own administration, amending the constitution in a manner that will even slightly open the door wider to those threats is a very grave mistake.


Earlier in the week, my other letter went to Tom LaBonge, the city councilman for my district. That letter was in opposition to the new city law that will force catering trucks - mostly taco trucks - to move every hour to a new location at least a half mile away. Here's what that letter had to say:

Hi Tom,

As your neighbor, a second-generation native of Los Angeles and a long time afficianado of eating at taco trucks, (a habit I learned from my mother), I am displeased with the city ordinance regarding food trucks that is scheduled to become law in July. I have long felt that taco trucks provide a real service to working class communities around town - as well as to their fans such as myself. The people who enjoy eating at them need to know where to find them and when, or they can't adequately provide that service. I have seldom, if ever, seen taco trucks parked in residential areas or any other sort of place where they were causing any nuisance. The only objections I have ever heard to them have been voiced by brick and mortar restaurants who were unhappy with the competition.

But then, isn't competition what business here is supposed to be all about? Making the trucks move every hour strikes me as unfair restraint of trade, and likely to put a lot of the trucks out of business. If that happens, where are Eva and I and our friends going to find good al pastor? Tijuana is a long way to drive for a good taco.

So, here's an email from at least one constituent asking you to help stop the impending ordinance.


That's this morning's roller coaster. I think I'll have to make another cup of espresso and settle down. At least that will help stave off diabetes.

Update at 4pm Pacific Time
The onerous flag burning amendment lost by one vote, no thanks to the equally onerous Senator Diane Feinstein (Democrat - California) who voted in favor of it. Mitch McConnell, the Republican senator from Kentucky and the senate deputy majority leader, who I normally have little truck with, was one of three Republicans who voted against the amendment on the grounds that protecting the first amendment was more important than protecting the flag. Good for him. So at least this stupidity is tabled for another year or two until the next election year.

Disoriented Express

Colin Cotterill and I both write books set in Asia. His are set in Laos in the mid-1970s. This September we'll be going on a short book tour together, stopping off at points along the way as we drive from L.A. to Madison, WI for Bouchercon. We're planning a multimedia presentation with quirky Asian pop music and either a digital or slide show (depending on what sort of projector we can come up with.) It ought to be a lot of fun. Check the Appearances page of my website for where we're going to show up. Here's the poster for it:

Disoriented Media
I guess Ann Coulter sells papers, and attracts viewers and sells books, but I find that very depressing. She is not particularly smart. She is not funny. She isn't even really all that pretty, she just wears short skirts and has limp looking long blonde hair. What she is, is an ignorant, arrogant, vituperative boor.

I suppose I can't blame her too much for her cretinous beastly persona. Like anyone else, she's just trying to make a buck. I blame the press for her. If she said exactly the same stuff, in exactly the same way and was a dull, rumple-suited, balding white guy, would anyone pay any attention to her moronic blather? I doubt it.

I can't say that her latest nonsense about the widows of men killed in the 9-11 attacks is a new low, even for her. Near as I can tell she broke the vileness meter a while ago and so there's no way of measuring how low she can go.

I'm happy to listen to people I don't agree with, even caustic ones just so long as they employ some wit and intelligence in their arguments. Ann Coulter isn't one of them. Can't the media just boycott her? Can't we make her go away?

Reoriented Bookstore
In some good news, for a change, Aliens & Alibis, the bookstore in Columbia, South Carolina that I bade a fond farewell to a couple of blogs ago, has found some new funding and a new and much better location, and is reopening. Congratulations! As they said in the email announcing the resurrection: You can't keep a good bookstore down. Well, unfortunately there are too many examples of the fact that you actually can, but I'm delighted to see that Aliens & Alibis has popped back up again.

Discombobulated Voting
With regards to the last post on this blog, I did end up voting. It was a struggle. First, I went to my usual polling place only to be informed that my precinct had been split up into several new polling places. This in spite of the fact that the lowest ever turnout was expected for the election and the election commission was worried that it didn't have nearly enough poll workers to go around.

So, from my usual polling place they sent me to a different place. I went there, only to be told that I needed to go to another place. So I went there, walked up to the first table and was told, "oh, you're not here." At that point I was about to give up on voting, but they pointed across the room to another table and told me to go there. Finally I was in the right place.

They gave me my ballot and I went grumpily to vote. There was virtually nothing and no one on the ballot that I cared the slightest bit about. One of the most idiotic things about the California ballot is that I was asked to vote for a bunch of judges that I, and 99.9999999 percent of the rest of the electorate knew nothing whatsoever about. I left those votes blank.

I was cheered by one of my votes, although it was purely symbolic. I voted for a woman running against Diane Feinstein, the incumbant Democrat Senator from California. With her opportunistic support of such things as California's loathesome three-strikes law, the death penalty and the Iraq War, I do not at all like Senator Feinstein. In November, unless the Republicans put up someone I like better than her - which is doubtful - I will no doubt hold my nose and vote for her anyhow. But at least in the primary election I had a feeble chance to voice my disgust with her.

I was also somewhat cheered by the fact that it was indeed the lowest voter turnout ever - 28 percent. There has been, of course, a lot of hair pulling and chest beating over that, although unfortunately nothing will come of it. I'm hoping that one of these elections there will be a specific "Don't Vote!" campaign to keep home an even larger percentage of the vote. Maybe then someone will be forced to figure out ways to get people more interested in elections.

But, probably not.

To Vote or Not to Vote, That is the Question

It's election day in California and I'm trying to figure out whether or not I want to bother voting.

For one thing, I'm too irritated to want to vote. Sunday is a good example of why. I left the house at about noon to go to an author's event in El Segundo. When I returned four hours later there were nine phone messages. One was from a friend, the other eight were recordings from Jerry Brown, Billy Crystal and others, pestering me to vote this way or that. I deleted them all without listening to them, then I lay down to take a nap - I was running on about four hours of sleep. For several reasons I couldn't turn off the phone. During the next hour I got five more calls, all of them recorded campaign messages. So much for my nap.

Does anyone actually listen to these things? Once they realize that it is a recorded message, don't 99% of people simply smash the phone back down or angrily push the off button? The messages that really astound me are the ones that don't quickly shout out the name of the candidate or the vote on the proposition they want. At least then there's a chance of getting the name into the brain of the person you are pissing off.

Then there's the negative campaigning. I don't really care if candidates tear each other up, but I would like to get some sense of what they actually want to do and how they plan to do it. Simply showcasing themselves as the lesser of two evils is not a very good way to get me enthusiastic.

Yesterday, in a fit of pique at the garbage I've been hearing from Angelides and Westly, I described the choice between them as no different than deciding whether or not I wanted snot flowing out of my left or right nostril. Then I thought, that's a bit extreme, isn't it? Then I thought about it some more and decided: no, that's about right.

So far as I can tell, they both claim to want to do the same things that they probably won't really have the power to do anything about. They've both taken money from suspicious donors. Neither of them have any new, bright or interesting ideas. And the only chance they have of beating the Governator is if the electorate hates Arnold even worse than either of them.

All down the line there just aren't any candidates in the Democratic Primary who I care all that much about one way or the other. There's no inspiration to be found anywhere on the ballot.

As for the propositions, as usual they are poorly written, confusing boondoggles that won't accomplish much.

Proposition 81 is a bond issue to raise funds for construction and renovation of libraries. Who could be against that? I love libraries. I think they're one of the most important services that government can provide. But, I just looked at the Los Angeles Public Library website to see how many libraries there are within five miles of my house in Silverlake - 18.

I've been in about six of those libraries and in every single one the librarians complain that they don't have enough money to hire staff or to stock the shelves. Problem is, this bond issue won't help that. It specifically raises money to build more understaffed and understocked libraries. Something about this proposition smells fishy, well, porky really. Like if it passes it will have the construction industry chuckling happily all the way to the bank.

Proposition 82 sets up a whole new, poorly mandated and structured, no doubt inadequately funded bureaucracy to allow any child whose parents want it to, to go to preschool. I'm all for preschool. But this bill isn't going to help more than five to ten percent (at most) of the population and is going to give us just one more horribly run government agency that we will all learn to hate and complain about the lousy job it's doing. Meanwhile, the existing school system is widely regarded as an utter fiasco.

I'm also a little uncomfortable with the idea that it will be funded by an added tax on only one segment of society, even if it is the segment that can afford it the most. (Although, it is the group of people who need it the least.) Sure there's an argument to be made that since the rich benefit the most from society they should pay the most toward its operating expenses. But the whole point of so-called "civilization" is that we all do better by chipping in what we can and contributing to the greater, common good. It's a bad precedent. Today we're hitting up people making in excess of $400,000 per year to fund something; there's not too many of them so why not? But tomorrow, maybe it will be people making over $120,000 a year and there's a lot more of them. For that matter, why not anybody making anything over the California state average of about $35,000?

It seems likely that this will be the lowest voter turnout ever - or very close to it - for an election in California. The lower the turnout is, the more hand wringing there is likely to be over how to get voters more interested in elections. And maybe something good will come of that angst. So the little devil on one of my shoulders says: "Don't vote, hope that it will help teach these assholes a lesson."

But then the little devil on the other shoulder says: "You might as well vote, it gives you a stronger leg to stand on when you gripe about the morons running the government."

I'm still undecided.

Another One Bites the Dust

Deb Andolino and her son Gary always wanted to open a bookstore. Deb's the mystery fanatic, Gary's into science fiction. Last year they opened Aliens & Alibis in Columbia, South Carolina. I had a book event at their store last June. I was one of the first authors they hosted. They couldn't have been more welcoming.

The store was small, but well-lit, nicely laid out, comfortable and Deb and Gary are smart, funny and very nice to spend time with. Which is a good thing since only one person showed up for my event. It was one of those events that if I ever become a well known author, I'll tell young authors about to encourage them: "I can remember when I didn't have lines out the door of people waiting to have me sign my books, and my signature was still legible." Currently, it's a tale I trot out when talking with my other author friends and we're swapping horror stories.

At the time of the event, I worried about the ability of Aliens & Alibis to survive. It was located in a far corner of the sort of shopping center that begged the question: "is the mall half-empty or is it half-full?" Looking around, it was hard to imagine it was half-full.

Well, now the mall is even emptier. Aliens & Alibis is going out of business. I don't know if it was brave or foolish for Deb and Gary to open their store in a time when independent bookstores are dropping like flies, but I admire them for having tried. And I thank them for having hosted me on my first ever book tour. There's a new Barnes and Noble about five miles from their store. I don't know how much that has to do with their going out of business or not, but I suspect it isn't nearly so convivial place to hang out.

Elections and Bureaucrats

Here in California we are about to have an election and I'm having an even harder than usual time giving a damn. Two uninspired and uninspiring Democrats are running for the right to battle the Governator in the Fall. I don't know much about either of them. I've got the sense that they're both dull hacks with the sort of modestly corrupt political backgrounds that seem impossible to avoid these days, who will make little or no real difference if they're eventually elected.

One of the reasons they are unlikely to make any real difference is that the state government of California has its hands firmly tied behind its back by years of initiatives and referendums (that seemed like good ideas at the time) that have mandated both spending and tax relief. Every year there are even more deceptively written initiatives and referendums that in the long term do little other than further inhibit the ability of California's government to get anything done - for good or bad. This time around I'm thinking about voting No on all of them. Except that I'm going to have to be careful, because all too often they are written in a way that a No vote means you're supporting the idiotic thing they're in favor of. In which case you have to vote Yes to vote No. Aaaaarrrrrggggghhhhhh!

As for governor, I will most likely vote for whoever runs against Arnold in November. So the only criteria I'm interested in is which of the two Democratic Party Bozos has the best chance of beating him. Somehow democracy seemed to make a lot more sense when I studied it in school.

But, the other day I took heart in the fact that dim witted bureaucrats are not merely an American phenomenon. A friend of mine works for CARE in Indonesia, mostly on reconstruction projects in the areas that were wiped out by the tsunami. He has to deal with a lot of bureaucrats from all over the world. He recently received an email from a European Commission program officer that included the following:

“Please consider however then [sic] considering changes in project activities that an amendement [sic] to the contract is to be considered an exception, to be justified on the basis that a non-amendment of the action would result in the non attainement [sic] of project objectives.”

My friend Tim describes that as: "one of the loftiest achievements of bureaucratese I have encountered." And he's encountered more than his fair share.

My Two Cents on Immigration

Immigration, and the diversity that comes with it, is the single most important factor in what has made the United States a global superpower. Relatively free immigration from all over the world is what sets this country apart from and, historically at least, above nearly every other nation on Earth. Simply put, if the U.S. wasn't a mish-mash of races, ethnicities and cultures, it would be a second rate country.

The fresh ideas and hard work of immigrants has been the driving force behind this country's success at every level. The reason that people all over the world - no matter how much they hate us lately - watch our movies and TV, listen to our music, read our books and magazines, click onto our websites, want our products and inventions; and why so many of them still, in spite of everything that's gone on in the past few years, want to come here; is our diversity. There is no other country that even comes close to the diverse makeup of population that we enjoy here in the U.S.

Immigration makes us strong. Unfortunately, illegal immigration also helps make us strong. If everyone who works in, or for America got paid a fair, living wage, we'd all be paying a lot more for the relatively cheap products we buy. We get mad about outsourcing t-shirt manufacture to China and Bangladesh, but we're still happy to go to Wal-Mart and buy cheap t-shirts. We get incensed about illegal immigrants picking our crops and working on construction sites; but we already complain about the high price of construction and if we had to pay twice as much for a head of lettuce at the market, we'd be ready to take up arms.

The ugly truth is that all of us benefit from the exploitation of labor, whether it's in China, Mexico or on California's and Texas' farms. It gets complicated by the fact that some of us are also hurt by it. How do you strike a balance between the loss of jobs when you shut down a shoe factory in South Carolina that makes shoes that sell for a hundred bucks a pair that not many people can afford; and importing the same shoes from China at forty five bucks a pair that a lot more people can buy? Sure, farmers could probably find plenty of legal workers to pick their crops at ten bucks an hour. The only problem is, how much are Americans willing to pay for a tomato?

This being an election year, illegal immigrants are being exploited in more than the usual variety of ways. What the politicians, business people and even most consumers really want is to quietly maintain the status quo. Most people benefit from it. But every election year it becomes necessary for the politicians to pander to the noisy people, the true believers, the activists; the people who can raise money for your campaign or make it tougher to raise money for your campaign, the people who are actually willing to go door to door on your behalf or against you.

It's an easy, if really dumb, rallying cry: "They're breaking the law, they're taking our jobs, protect our borders!" Most of the politicians carrying on about it don't really give a shit. They just have to sound like they do in an election year.

There is one, and only one, reason why we have illegal immigration: we're a rich country with available jobs. The reason most of our illegal immigrants come from Mexico is that it is a poor country that is next door. (Mexico gets its own share of illegals from Guatemala - an even poorer country next door to it.) We don't get much, if any, illegal immigration from Canada. When a person can get a decent job at a decent wage at home, they rarely want to go somewhere else to find work.

So, what's to be done? Let's pretend for a little that politicians and business people and American consumers really do want to do something about illegal immigration. Which they don't, but let's pretend.

Sealing the border isn't realistic. It's too long, it's too underdeveloped and people will find a way around it anyhow. (We do get illegal immigration from places like China. What are the chances of shutting out our determined neighbors?)

Opening the border and just allowing everybody and anybody to come in isn't realistic either. (There are actually people who advocate this. I think they must believe in Santa Claus too.) Then we really would be swamped and all the countries that started losing most of their educated elites and huge numbers of their labor force would not be happy. (If we wanted to start another war with Mexico - it has been over 150 years after all - this might be a good way to do it.)

Amnesty for current illegals sounds humane, but what next? If it becomes an ongoing policy we might as well just throw open the border.

A guest worker program sounds okay until you start looking at other countries, like Germany, that have one. It creates a permanent, authorized underclass. It doesn't really do much to stop the exploitation of workers.

The only real solution is long term and needs to happen in Mexico, not in the U.S. Our neighbor to the south needs to economically develop. It needs to become a first world nation that can offer plenty of good jobs to its own people. It needs our help to accomplish this. If we could stop our idiotic and expensive overseas adventures, such as in Iraq, we could easily afford the modern day equivalent of a Marshall Plan (the rebuilding of Europe after the Second World War) for Mexico.

The U.S. would benefit tremendously from assisting the economic development of Mexico. U.S. companies would get a lot of contracts to build everything from infrastructure to factories to shopping centers to housing. There would also be a lot of new jobs created in Mexico, so there would be a lot of people staying home to work, rather than illegally immigrating.

And, once Mexico achieved developed world status, we would benefit even more. Compare Mexico with Canada and you can see the possibilities. Despite having a population smaller than California, Canada is our largest trading partner. Mexico has more than three times the population of Canada and it is already our number two trading partner. Provide better and better paying jobs at home for Mexicans, and just imagine the potential Mexico has as an easily accessible market for U.S. products and services.

Okay, you might say, that's the long term, what do we do in the meantime?

If the U.S. were to announce a big, economic development assistance program for Mexico, it would immediately boost investment in that country. As the program got underway it would create a lot of jobs and very quickly fewer Mexicans would need to leave home to find work.

But, there would still be illegals in the U.S., so what to do about them?

Unfortunately, my solution is to, with a few changes, maintain the status quo for the time being. (After all, despite all the political posturing, it really is working reasonably well for most of the people involved.) The few changes I propose will hurt some businesses, but if they're going to hire illegals, that's a risk they will have to take.

Apply the federal minimum wage and health and safety laws to all workers, regardless of their visa status. If illegal workers are found in a factory or on a farm, treat them the way we have been treating them - send them back home. They took that risk when they came here illegally. But, also fine their employer and if they were being paid less than minimum wage or there were violations of health and safety laws, fine their employer more - a lot more. The money from the fines can be thrown into the Develop Mexico program.

Require employers to pay the appropriate taxes and fees - workers comp, etc. - for every worker they employ - illegal or not. If they don't pay, collect the back taxes and fine them some extra when they're caught.

Retain the law that grants citizenship to anyone born within our borders, but change it to exclude people who show up here only for that purpose. If, for instance, a woman has a child while she is here working - whether legally or not - her child should be eligible for citizenship. On the other hand, if she shows up in her last trimester of pregnancy just to wait it out and give birth; toss her and the kid out.

What we don't want to do is greatly tighten up our immigration laws and policies. A liberal, open, mostly welcoming attitude toward immigrants is one of the greatest strengths of our country. It is what has created the strong, powerful, affluent and creative nation we live in. And it will continue to do so if we let it.

Some Not So Random Musings: Book, War, Drugs & Barry Bonds

I don't have any particular bones to pick at the moment, but when you've got a blog you need to update it every so often, so I'll just fill this one with a bit of blather about a variety of things.

Rising Up and Rising Down by William T. Vollmann is one of, perhaps THE, most remarkable, fascinating, thought-provoking, difficult books I've ever read. It is about what is probably the most important single philosophical question there is: when, if ever, is violence justified? It is a remarkable achievement that mixes up history, politics, philosophy, literature and just about everything else you can think of. It is fantastically researched and beautifully written. It is self-indulgent, but so important, and so astounding in its scope and range, that it's worthy of the self-indulgence.

I'm about 50 pages into volume three. There are seven volumes. It will probably take me a year or two to finish reading it. I keep it by the side of my bed and pick it up for 20 to 50 pages at a time between my reading of other things - currently Walter Mosley's latest: Fortunate Son.

So far, volume three deals with justifications for war. The book attempts to come up with a "moral calculus" to determine when violence is justifiable, or to what extent it is. In the case of war, the first consideration, of several, in the calculation is: "Military violence should be employed only by and against participants." In other words, the more civilians you kill, the harder it is to justify your side in a war. Vollmann points out that: "At the close of the nineteenth century, ten to fifteen percent of all war casualties were inflicted on civilians. At the close of the twentieth, that figure had risen to seventy-five percent." I guess wars are getting harder to justify than ever. I wish our politicians understood that.

Regarding another type of war, the "war on drugs," Mexico has legalized drugs. Well, sort of, not really, only a little. But I wish they would. (I wish everyone would legalize drugs.) There are all kinds of good reasons to legalize drugs and hardly any reasonable ones to prohibit them.

From a legal point of view - the richest, most powerful, most violent, most corrupting criminal enterprises anywhere on Earth are financed by the illegal trade in drugs. Like it or not, enough people want to take heroin, cocaine, pot, X, you name it, that other people are always going to make a ton of money selling them. Making those drugs illegal means giving a monopoly on one of the world's largest and most profitable businesses to bad guys. Legalizing drugs would almost instantly put the current crop of drug lords and terrorists who finance their operations with illegal drug dealing, out of business. It would also, as Mexico's law is intended (although only in a very minor way), allow governments to redirect limited law enforcement resources to other, more serious, violent crimes. Violent crime itself would be reduced as prices came down and addicts no longer needed to commit crimes to get the money to satisfy their addiction. Courts would be a lot less clogged than they are now, allowing them to do a better job. And, it would instantly put an end to the massive amounts of drug-related political corruption that is a worldwide problem.

Economically there would also be a number of benefits. The illegal trade in drugs creates a huge, untaxed, underground economy. In some countries it has actually destabilized the legitimate economy. The new source of tax revenue, even at the reduced prices that would be the result of legalization, would be a tremendous help to the economies of poor nations such as Afghanistan, Laos, Bolivia, Colombia and Mexico. Taxing the sale of drugs would add plenty to the coffers of the government here in the U.S. And not having to futilely spend billions of dollars a year trying to stop the unstoppable trade in illegal drugs, and to incarcerate people arrested and convicted of possession and dealing, would save the U.S. enormous amounts of money at every governmental level.

But, people say, won't more people use drugs if they're legal? Maybe. But whatever happened to the old-fashioned notion of "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." If even half the money the government saved on enforcement and interdiction would be used for education, healthcare and rehabilitation, it would do a great deal more to solve the problem than anything else governments have tried so far. From a healthcare point of view; legal, regulated drugs would have fewer impurities and more accurate dosing. That would greatly cut down on overdoses and other ill-effects from drugs. Easy, cheap access to drug paraphernalia would cut down on the transmission of diseases such as AIDS and Hepatitis B.

There's also a civil liberties issue at play here. Why should it be the government's business what you do to yourself in the privacy of your own home? Why should taking drugs be legally any different than, say, masturbating? Sure, take drugs and go out driving - the police ought to bring you down just as they would any drunk driver. Give or sell drugs to a minor - also a police matter. Shoot some heroin, snort some coke, smoke some pot, pop an X with some friends or by yourself at home or in the privacy of a club or bar or whatever place that offers that sort of thing - well, that ought to be your own business.

The "war on drugs" certainly isn't working. It has only succeeded in making criminals richer, more powerful and more ruthless; politics more corrupt; and drug users (and there are millions of them) less safe and more desperate. Mexico isn't going far enough.

Speaking of drugs, Barry Bonds is about to pass Babe Ruth on the lifetime homerun total list. While not yet proven, there is enough evidence that he has done so by taking steroids, that I, and most baseball lovers, accept it as fact. And, there seems to be plenty of evidence that taking steroids does actually give someone an unfair athletic advantage over someone who doesn't take them. (I'm not personally convinced that all that acne and impotence is worth it, but then no one's offered me tens of millions of dollars to hit a ball with a bat.)

While I am not thrilled to see the juiced Barry bypass the also juiced (although with performance decreasing alcohol) Babe, I'm not agonizing too much over it either. Babe Ruth probably had the the most individual impact on any sport ever. No matter how many of his records are broken, there is a strong argument to be made that he is, and probably always will be, the greatest.

Barry Bonds is a great player too. There is no denying that. Even if he hadn't hit 73 dubious homeruns in a season, even if he wasn't about to beat the Babe's total, he would still have been one of the best ever. Last night Bonds hit his fifth homerun of the season - and it's still early May. A monster 450 foot blast to right field. It seems unlikely that he's on steroids this year. He can't be that nuts - can he? He's been hitting his homeruns this year while playing on a terrible pair of knees, at the age of 41, suffering enormous amounts of abuse and pressure from fans and the press. Sure he's a schmuck, and possibly a cheat. But he's a damn good one.

And, I hate to say it since I'm a lifelong baseball lover, baseball is just a game. It's not curing malaria. It's not bringing peace to the Middle East. And it's a game in which a lot of fans - I am not among them - like to see big huge guys hit big huge homeruns with regularity. (I prefer teams that squeeze out runs with a lot of smart, small ball, and defend their meager leads with great pitching.) The ridiculous emphasis on power is at least partly responsible for the use of steroids. It's like any sort of drug - like heroin or coke - if there wasn't a market for this stuff, no one would be dealing it.

There's an equation in all of this. (This is where I tie together Vollmann's "moral calculus" and my legalize drugs notion):

Fans like seeing homeruns. 1
Barry Bonds hits alot of homeruns. + 2
Steroids make it easier for him to hit homeruns. + 3
Baseball is just a game, an entertainment, not really so important in the worldwide scheme of things. + 4

What does that add up to? You tell me.

I Still Say: Tear It Down!

I just got back, with a miraculous lack of traffic for 3:30-4pm on a Tuesday, from an Angels game in Anaheim. Before I embark on making some comparisons between today's experience and going to a game at Dodger Stadium, I want to state my qualifications, as such, for commenting on these weighty matters. (The people who have lambasted me for my previous blog entry should know that I am no neophyte.)

I have attended ballgames in 19 different major league stadiums and a couple dozen minor league stadiums. I have been a Dodger fan since going to my first games, at the age of six, in 1958 - the year the Dodgers first played in Los Angeles. I average somewhere around 15 games a season, not just at Dodger Stadium, but in a variety of places. At Dodger Stadium I have sat in nearly every single section of the ballpark at one time or another. I usually sit in the reserve section, as close to directly behind homeplate as I can get - $20 seats.

Today, at the Angels game I sat in the view section - that stadium's equivalent of the reserve section at Dodger Stadium. The tickets were $24. I went with a friend who often goes to Dodger games with me. We both agreed that today's seats kicked butt over our usual seats at Dodger Stadium, for the reason that the stands at the Angels ballpark are much steeper. We felt a great deal closer to the action during today's game than we did when we went a couple of weeks ago and sat in the loge section ($50 per ticket) at Dodger Stadium. The upper stands at Dodger Stadium are just too far back from the playing field. It lacks any sense of intimacy - which is something that I appreciate when at a ballgame.

We also both commented on how we liked the non-symmetrical outfield, with different distances to and a couple of odd turns in the fences. That's just personal preference. I like quirky outfields. The rock jumble and ejaculating waterfall are pretty awful. Not to mention - now it's my turn to anger Angels fans - what's with the Rally Monkey? Doesn't anyone realize that when a monkey bares its teeth like that and jumps up and down it's a sign of fear and/or aggression?

One of my critics mentioned the view of the mountains from the stands at Dodger Stadium. Huh? I go to baseball games to watch baseball. I'm interested in the view of the playing field. Sure, the view of the freeway and ugly building from our seats today was hideous, but I didn't spend much time looking at it.

As for food, what we sampled at the Angels stadium was no better than what I've eaten at Dodger Stadium; which is to say it was pretty lousy. The only difference being that at the Angels stadium every single thing we ate and drank was about a dollar to a dollar-and-a-half cheaper. And there were more choices and more choices as to the size: both a $2.50 and a $4.00 bag of peanuts, for example, rather than Dodger Stadium's one giant, $5.00 bag.

Parking, at eight bucks, was two dollars cheaper than at Dodger Stadium. And, while it was not a hugely attended mid-week day game, I did get the distinct impression that even when it is crowded it is easier to get out of the parking lot than at Dodger Stadium.

In all, I preferred Angel Stadium to Dodger Stadium, at least with regard to seating and concession pricing. (I prefer National League games to American League games though.) Both stadiums are rather more sterile than I like. While Dodger Stadium may be representative of a distinct style and era of architecture, it's not a particularly distinguished style and era. Frankly, I think they're both pretty ugly. Perhaps Dodger Stadium is a little bit more attractive from outside the stadium or from the air or something. Both stadiums sit in the midst of a huge parking lot. I find it hard to believe that anyone is very fond of that site feature.

In my experience, the best, most fun stadiums are the ones that are within neighborhoods, rather than sitting out on their own divorced from any surrounding community. When I go with friends to ballgames in Boston, Chicago, New York (Yankee Stadium, not Shea), St. Louis, San Francisco, even Phoenix, part of the joy of the experience is after the game when we walk to some nearby bar or restaurant and sit around to talk about the game. At Dodger Stadium, and Angel Stadium for that matter, you can sit in your car for a long while trying not to get clobbered by someone in their car while you talk it over between close calls. Is there anyone out there reading this who actually prefers that? If there is: you're nuts!

Okay, so don't try to recreate Brooklyn at Chavez Ravine. I just meant that as a "for instance" in any event. Make it a Los Angeles-style neighborhood (whatever you decide that is), surrounding some sort of West Coast Moderne Architectural Gem of a ballpark. You could do worse than to base the design on the old semi-art deco Gilmore Stadium where the Hollywood Stars used to play. For those of you who for some strange reason would rather look at the mountain view than the ballgame, there's no reason why a new stadium can't be designed with that in mind.

Tearing down Dodger Stadium and re-developing Chavez Ravine is one of the best things that could happen to the Dodgers, Dodger fans and the city of Los Angeles.