Silflay Hraka

Some of what 20 years working at a newspaper can teach you.

Feces wash out.
Blood does too. Sometimes.
A story can be factually accurate and still wildly off the mark.
Competence isn’t quite a myth, but it’s a helluva lot less common than most people like to pretend.
Some journalists who are generally well thought of by the public actually have significant performance problems.
Very few journalists can accurate assess their own performance problems.
Never ascribe to conspiracy what can be adequately explained by incompetence.
Most politicians, at least at the local/state level, really do lie pretty shamelessly at times.
And they expect you to act like it’s part of the game.
True objectivity is rarer than true love. The most you can/should hope for is to be fair and accurate.
If you’re any good at your job, you work for the reader. No one else. Despite what your editor might think.
Sharpies work better than anything else for taking notes when it’s raining.
Even Sharpies don’t work that well when it’s raining.

Snow day. UNC is closed down even though the roads were perfectly drivable by nine in the morning. No skin off my nose–I took the unexpected vacation with no guilt as to the wasted tax dollars of my fellow Carolinians. Ngnat and I created a cold white replica of Cleopatra’s needle in the backyard, then came in, her to play at Nickjr, and I to vacuum at the bidding of the Sainted Wife.

I also read to Scotty–his first books ever. Yes, we’re horrible parents, waiting nearly nine months (nine months!) after the child was born to begin his intellectual development. We’d probably have done so earlier, but our experience with Ngnat when she was an infant argued against it. She did her damndest either to rip the pages to shreds or gnaw them into little wet lumps during every storytime. We basically gave up trying to read to Ngnat until almost her first birthday. It doesn’t seem to have done much harm. Her favorite books were Olivia, Hand, Hand, Fingers, Thumb and Elmo’s Balls, as I remember.

“Elmo loves to play with his great big balls!

So I hadn’t expected to be reading to Scotty for another few months, though he’s sat with Ngnat and I while I’ve read to her on occasion. Today he had other plans, apparently, pulling one of the twenty or Ngnat hand-me-down board books from the shelf while I watched him play in his room this morning. He grabbed as best he could in one fist, then dragged himself and it across the floor, flipping it neatly into my lap once he reached me.

He seemed very pleased with himself, gurgling happily after his attempt to slam a Waggy Tales book into my crotch.

“Alrighty then, little man,” I said, sitting him in the crook of my legs.

We read The Waggy Tales story of Ginger, a gripping narrative of a starving kitten and her ultimately unsuccessful quest for a fish, two Boynton books–My Oh My Dinosaurs!, a comparative study of the biological and emotional differences among the terrible lizards, But Not The Hippopotamus, in which the eponymous title character deals with social isolation from a peer group–and Goodnight Moon, beloved by toddlers with a yen for the classic strategies in bed-time avoidance technique. Scotty sat mostly still through all of them, occasionally smacking a particularly exciting page with his open palm.

“Nice high-five,” I told him.

Then I put him down for his nap. He rolled over, pulled himself by the bars on the crib and screamed bloody murder as I left the room. Five minutes later he was asleep.

Faced with the rest of the day, I decided to make frozen custard.

The first thing I thought of when I read this article about the U.S. sabotaging the Soviet economy using Trojan Horse software was “Oh my God. Chernobyl.”

Keep in mind that I am just thinking out loud here. The accident at the Chernobyl nuclear facility seems to have been thoroughly researched and the root causes of the accident seem to have been human in nature, rather than software related, but it isn’t hard to imagine that the Soviets would have been pursuing Western nuclear technology. That would have made their nuclear facilities incredibly vulnerable to trojan horse software designed to cause an eventual meltdown.

And it is one thing to admit that a covert CIA operation caused a pipeline explosion that did mostly economic damage. It would be quite another to admit that the same operation caused one of the most frightening human catastrophes of the last century. It’s not something you would expect the U.S. government would ever allow to come to light.

And if the goal of the U.S. administration at the time was to hasten the end of the Soviet Union, it could easily be argued that the Chernobyl disaster was the final nail in the coffin of that particular entity. It could at least be argued that the Chernobyl meltdown was the beginning of the end.

Admittedly, the natural gas pipeline explosion took place in 1982, and Chernobyl four years later in 1986. Maybe Chernobyl took place outside of the timeline of the CIA operation. But the Soviet Union was still in place and the cold war was still on, so it’s conceivable that the two incidents were part of the same program.

Certainly something upon which to reflect. Which brings to mind the question “other than the pipeline explosion, what were some of the other direct effects of the program”?

Rep. Corrine Brown has apologized for saying that Whites and Hispanics “all looked alike to her,” though she was hardly gracious about it.

“I sincerely did not mean to offend Secretary Noriega or anyone in the room. Rather, my comments, as they relate to ‘white men,’ were aimed at the policies of the Bush administration as they pertain to Haiti, which I do consider to be racist,” Brown said in a statement on Thursday.

“The State Department delegation that came to meet with us did not include any females or people of color. Given the racial makeup of the people of Haiti, who are 95 percent of African descent, I felt the delegation and the delegation’s position were callous and out of touch with the needs (cultural and otherwise) of the Haitian people,” she wrote.

That’s a nice principal to govern by: When discussing any issue where race might possibly be a factor, if evidence of affirmative action as defined by the issue at hand is not obvious to all present, then the group discussing it is by definition racist in composition.

To hell with judging people by the content of their character, in other words. By that logic a committee investigating National Socialism should include a representative number of Nazis in its makeup.

You know, I get the feeling Phillippe’s campaign is about to hit a pothole in the road to the White House