My daily trivia game e-mail (also mentioned in this post about a month ago) arrived this morning with following question:

Besides being famous, what do Katharine Hepburn, Ted Williams, Isaac Asimov, Penn Jillette, Eddie Vedder and Ricky Gervais have in common?

I thought about it for a minute. They represent different generations, so it isn't age. They chose different professions, so it isn't occupation. Ted Williams was from California and Katharine Hepburn was from Connecticut, so it isn't geography. Isaac Asimov is dead and Eddie Vedder is alive, so it isn't life/health status. They are all white, but that's too easy.

In the absence of a better idea, I responded this way:

To quote Cheers' Cliff Clavin when he was on Jeopardy:
"They are all people who have never been in my kitchen."
But I suspect that isn't the answer you're looking for :)

Having sent my response, I googled all six names at once and came up with this.

For the last many summers, my entire apartment has been cooled (and I use the term loosely) by an old, small, window air conditioning unit that's designed for a single room about 10x10 feet. I called it "the little air conditioner that could" because it would chug along, compressor running non-stop, in a valiant effort to keep up with the rising temperature and humidity. It didn't do a very good job and it more than doubled my monthly electric bill.

About a year ago, I bought a new air conditioner on sale at the Christmas Tree Shop. For reasons too ridiculous to mention, it sat in the carton in a corner of my living room until I finally installed it last night. The exercise was like a comedy routine featuring little ol' me wielding an assortment of screwdrivers, screws, and brackets along with jury-rigged wood supports, trying to strike a compromise between the instructions for proper installation and a window that an air conditioner isn't really designed to go into. Let's just say that I have several screws and brackets left over, but I'm reasonably confident that the air conditioner isn't going anywhere until I remove it in the fall.

The new appliance ran for about 90 minutes. Then the compressor went off, not because it wasn't working properly, but because it had actually reduced the temperature in the room from 81°F to 74°. The old unit couldn't have done that in 90 hours.

I slept in cool, dry, air-conditioned comfort last night. I showered and dressed this morning without sweating like a stuffed pig. Of course, my back, neck, and shoulders hurt from lifting the damn thing into the window all by myself. But believe me, it was worth it.

Congress has passed a law prohibiting demonstrations at military funerals. The law targets a group of fanatics from a so-called church in Kansas who travel to funerals of fallen service members and hold signs that say such brilliant things as, "Thank God for dead soldiers."

The sponsor of the House bill, Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., said he took up the issue after attending a military funeral in his home state, where mourners were greeted by "chants and taunting and some of the most vile things I have ever heard."

"Families deserve the time to bury their American heroes with dignity and in peace," Rogers said Wednesday before the Hosue [sic] vote.

The demonstrators are led by the Rev. Fred Phelps of Topeka, Kan., who has previously organized protests against those who died of AIDS and gay murder victim Matthew Shepard.

By way of background, Phelps and his merry band of maggots believe that God is killing soldiers in Iraq to punish the United States for accepting homosexuality. These people are vile hatemongers who are to Christianity what Osama bin Laden and that fruit loop who runs Iran are to Islam.

That's why it nauseates me to write what I'm about to write. I can't support a law like this. As much as I support the military, collectively and individually, I believe strongly what they fight to uphold—freedom and our Constitution, including the first amendment—should protect even the most reprehensible speech and non-violent protest. As long as the wing nuts from Kansas don't cross that line, what they're doing shouldn't be banned.

Ironically, the same people vowing to argue the unconstitutionality of this law are the same people who supported buffer zones at abortion clinics.

1997
Schenck v. Pro-Choice Network of Western New York
519 U.S. 357
In this case, the ACLU filed a friend-of-the-court brief defending the constitutionality of two provisions of an injunction obtained by abortion clinics in western New York as a remedy against blockades and other disruptive forms of protest. The Supreme Court upheld a fixed 15-foot buffer zone around clinic doorways, driveways, and parking lot entrances. It struck down a floating 15-foot buffer zone around people or vehicles entering or leaving a clinic.

That's the kind of hypocrisy you get when your real motivation is ideology instead of constitutionality. But I digress.

For those of us interested in constitutional rights and sympathy for grieving families, there are plenty of legal ways to keep these yahoos away besides resorting to unconstitutional laws. Requiring permits for demonstrations on federal property would allow for controls. Even in locations this law doesn't cover, such as churches and funeral homes, private property owners can prohibit protests on their own grounds. Municipalities can place requirements on gatherings that block traffic, sidewalks, and funeral processions. Such restrictions, as long as they are enforced uniformly, would blunt the effect of a lot of these spectacles. As for the rest, well, perhaps that is the price we have to pay for the freedoms our military is charged with defending.

Like millions of people, I read Dan Brown's suspense novel, The Da Vinci Code, with only a vague awareness that any controversy surrounded it. I had heard it was an interesting read, so when I saw it marked down at Borders one day, I picked it up. I read it rather quickly and enjoyed it very much.

Also like millions of people, I am a practicing Roman Catholic Christian. It is with amusement and a little frustration that I have become alert to the furor that has accompanied the run up to Ron Howard's movie version of Brown's best-selling book. These critics are almost exclusively conservative/traditionalist Christians who, it seems, don't realize that their squawking serves only to amplify the attention to what it is they're trying to get everyone to ignore. It's what leftists did with Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ. And if the first weekend box office numbers are any indication, it will have the same effect: to increase interest and viewership.

The reactions, frankly, are embarrassing. Can you imagine if NASA had acted so foolishly over the conspiracy theorists who have proclaimed, in glaring orange text, that the Apollo moon landings were an elaborate governmental hoax? Or if the family of President Kennedy had given any credence to every outrageous assassination theory to have come out in the last 40 years?

Let me draw another analogy. I loved W.P. Kinsella's novel Shoeless Joe, and its movie version, Field of Dreams, but that doesn't mean that I believe the late ballplayers Joe Jackson, Mel Ott, and Archibald Graham—all real people who were used as characters in the story—are living in the corn. Nor do I remember their descendents or their fans leading protests outside the multiplexes claiming the movie disrespected the men's memories.

But back to Da Vinci and the real reason I find the uproar ridiculous. In comes down to one question: if Jesus and Mary Magdalene were really married and had children, SO WHAT? The contention isn't biblical, to be sure. The bible also never mentions Jesus, um, expelling waste products from his body, but the prospect that his digestive and urinary tracts functioned just like yours and mine doesn't shake my faith. The idea, supported by so-called secret documents or not, that Jesus may have been a husband and father is no more threatening to me. Scripture tells us that Jesus experienced many human emotions, including anger (John 2:13-17), sorrow (John 11:30-37), fear (Matthew 26: 36-41), and despair (Mark 15: 33-34). Are the emotions that scripture doesn't mention, including romantic love, really so far-fetched?

That said, I am well aware that many people will swallow Dan Brown's fiction hook, line, and sinker. It isn't that they're stupid, though some undoubtedly are. It's just that some people look for "evidence", however flimsy or fabricated, to debunk something they don't like. Just think about all the far-leftists who claim, in all seriousness, that George W. Bush knew about the September 11 attacks and blew up the levees in New Orleans.

I can't guarantee you that a few people, grasping at straws, won't be duped, perhaps quite willingly, by this movie. But I can guarantee this: Christianity will survive The Da Vinci Code. So please, everybody, relax.

I work for a company whose policy it is for employees to change their outgoing voice mail messages every day. "This is So-and-so, today is Monday, May 15, and I will be in the office until 5:00." That sort of thing. Because we're on the east coast and many of our clients are in different time zones, most of us include "Eastern time" in our outgoing messages so that someone in, say, Oregon will know when they leave a message whether or not they're likely to get a call back the same day.

My current peeve is people who insist on saying "Eastern standard time" now that we are in daylight saving time. Granted, this isn't a big issue here in the Eastern U.S. time zone because the whole zone goes on daylight saving time. It used to be that the part of Indiana that was in the Eastern zone stayed on standard time, effectively putting them in Central daylight time for half the year, just as most of Arizona essentially joins Pacific time for half the year. That that is no longer the case here. If you're in the Eastern time zone, you're on daylight saving time today. Why, then, do people insist on saying "standard time"?

It's likely that most people don't realize what the "standard" in "Eastern standard time" means. What it doesn't mean is that it's the time that most or all of the zone is using at that moment. It also doesn't mean that we vary from Greenwich Mean Time by whole hours, though we do, as opposed to a few places offset their time by 30 minutes (Afghanistan, Iran, India, and parts of Australia, to name a few, plus the Canadian province of Newfoundland, according to this site). "Standard" means that the time zone is based upon the true solar time at the prime meridian, the line of longitude that passes through Greenwich, England. If it's noon in Greenwich, then the time in most areas of the world will be on the whole hour. The Eastern time zone is five hours earlier than Greenwich Mean Time, which means that when it's high noon in Greenwich, it's 7:00am Eastern standard time or 8:00am Eastern daylight time, depending on the time of year.

My outgoing message says "Eastern daylight time" or sometimes just "Eastern time". Someone who doesn't get the distinction between standard and daylight time won't think twice about it, but to the rest, however few they may be, it will be clear that I don't work in some renegade city that passed a resolution to eschew daylight saving time.

For more information, see Wikipedia's pages about standard time and daylight time.

The usual suspects are making much of the fact that Tony Snow, George Bush's choice to replace Scott McClellan as White House Press Secretary, comes from Fox News. Surely, says the conventional wisdom, this is proof that (1) the White House is beholden to Fox News, and/or (2) Fox News is beholden to the White House. After all, the Press Secretary should be independent, shouldn't s/he?

Maybe so, but that certainly hasn't been the case in the past. There is a long tradition of selecting Press Secretaries from among the media with whom they are to interact, as the following information found on Wikipedia shows. Because I'm all about being helpful, I even color-coded the presidents using the readily identifiable red/blue so you can tell their party at a glance.

• Larry Speakes (Ronald Reagan) — B.A. in journalism, editor of the Oxford Eagle, managing editor of the Bolivar Commercial, general manager and editor of Progress Publishers
• Ron Nessen (Gerald Ford) — NBC reporter
• Jerald terHorst (Ford) — newspaper reporter
• George Christian (Lyndon Johnson) — degree in journalism, reporter for International News Service
• Bill Moyers (Johnson) — degree in journalism, assistant to the news editor for KTBC Radio and Television
• George Reedy (Johnson) — reporter for United Press International
• Pierre Salinger (John Kennedy) — reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, contributing editor to Collier's
• Roger Tubby (Harry Truman) — reporter and editor of the Bennington Banner
• Joseph Short (Truman) — reporter in Mississippi and Louisiana, correspondent for the Associated Press, correspondent for the Chicago Sun, correspondent for the Baltimore Sun
• Stephen Early (Truman and Franklin Roosevelt) — reporter for the United Press, correspondent for the Associated Press, reporter for Stars and Stripes, representative of Paramount News
• Charles Griffin Ross (Truman) — journalist
• Jonathan Worth Daniels (Truman and Roosevelt) — reporter, associate editor, and editor for the Raleigh News and Observer, writer for Fortune magazine, column for The Nation
• J. Leonard Reinsch (Roosevelt) — worked at radio station WLS, developed WHIO, worked for the Atlanta Journal and Georgian, managed WSB radio, in charge of radio stations WIOD, WSB, and WHIG

But, but, but... those people weren't employed by media organizations as closely allied with their subsequent presidential bosses as Fox News is with Bush, right? Um, wrong. KTBC, which employed Moyers before Johnson selected him as Press Secretary, was owned by Lady Bird Johnson. Prior to his selection, Daniels was an active editorial supporter of Franklin Roosevelt's "New Deal" policies. Reinsch worked predominantly for media entities controlled by Ohio Governor and close Roosevelt associate James Cox.

But that was alright. Tony Snow is different. He was appointed by a Republican.