Thanks to The Blast Furnace for the heads up on this weekend’s America@Work event at the I-X Center. The show features 100 percent American, union-made products with plenty of giveaways to educate the public about trade unionism and the role unions play in the economic and political life of the community. Admission is free but parking is $8.

Yet another of Joesph Kennedy’s descendents has a substance abuse problem. While no one, sadly, is surprised, I’m really curious as to how Rush Limbaugh handled this news on his radio program. Did he call for Rep. Patrick Kennedy’s (D-R.I.) impeachment? Imprisonment? Or did Limbaugh suggest compassion and understanding?

In its continuing quest for high-tech/high-touch service, Mac’s Backs now has an expanded website with a searchable data base and live events calendar. My picks this month are the Hessler Street Fair (19-20 May), Letters From Young Activists (27 May) and the Rachel Carson Homestead Trip (2 June).

Much of what I learned about living with other people came from my experiences of living with 525 sailors on board the Billy B. Humor was often rough, but I can honestly say I never witnessed an overt act of racism. When your life depends upon the sailor next to you, there’s little time to get all prissy about the color of skin.

A U.S. Navy cruiser anchored in Mississippi for a week’s shore leave. The first evening, the ship’s Captain received the following note from the wife of a wealthy plantation owner:

“Dear Captain, Thursday will be my daughter Melinda’s Debutante Ball. I would like you to send four well mannered, handsome, unmarried officers in their formal dress uniforms to attend the dance. They should arrive promptly at 8:00 PM prepared for an evening of polite Southern conversation.

They should be excellent dancers, as they will be the escorts of lovely refined young ladies. One last point: No Jews Please.”

At precisely 8 bells on the second dog watch on Thursday, Melinda’s mother heard a polite rap at the door which she opened to find, in full dress uniform, four handsome, smiling black officers. Her mouth fell open, but pulling herself together, she stammered, “There must be some mistake.”

“No, Madam,” said the first officer. “Captain Goldberg never makes mistakes.”

Specially Cruiser Captains.

Thank you reader Cailin.

My Soundtrack: Space Monkey by Placebo on WOXY.

Between 1990 and 2000, our teen pregnancy rate dropped from 117 to 84 per 1000 women aged 15 -19. Both the Left and Wrong want to claim responsibility, but Liza Mundy has an interesting twist: low sperm counts among teenagers. (Obligatory old fart caveat: guys, this does NOT mean you can toss the rubbers.) Mundy writes:

The great sperm-count debate began in 1992, when a group of Danish scientist published a study suggesting that sperm counts declined globally by about 1 percent a year between 1938 and 1990. This study postulated that environmental influences, particularly widely used chemical compounds with an impact like that of the female hormone estrogen, might be contributing to a drop in fertility among males. If true, this was obviously an alarming development, particularly given that human sperm counts are already strikingly low compared to almost any other species.

I remember in the late ’80s early ’90s when environmentalists were talking about how organochlorines, the core of many pesticides, were causing die-off among amphibians because the males had undeveloped or even missing testicles. The implication was that since amphibians reproduced at a much fast rate than humans, this was a harbringer of things to come.

We thought that because it was males being effected, that finally the World might sit up and take notice. I don’t thing we expected it to happen this quickly. But a late ’90s study indicates this is just the case.

…American reproductive epidemiologist named Shanna Swan published work confirming the Danish findings. In a well-respected study published in Environmental Health Perspectives, Swan, now at the University of Rochester Medical Center, found that sperm counts are dropping by about 1.5 percent a year in the United States and 3 percent in Europe and Australia, though they do not appear to be falling in the less-developed world.

This may not sound like a lot, but cumulatively-like compound interest-a drop of 1 percent has a big effect. Swan showed, further, that in the United States there appears to be a regional variation in sperm counts: They tend to be lower in rural sectors and higher in cities, suggesting the possible impact of chemicals (such as pesticides) particular to one locality.

So, do you have a nice, dandilion-free lawn?

My Soundtrack: Spanish Teeth by Robbers On High Street on WOXY.

Anthony Fossaceca worked (works?) for the Brian Flannery campaign. He shares a nightmare with George’s readers that should make any American citizen far angrier than Peter Finch could have ever dreamed. Would you believe lazy-ass poll workers locking the doors because they’re tired and want to go home? No. Really. In America.

Writers are a whinny lot at times and it seems that the Lutheranesque Garrison Keillor opines that we should all just be quiet and do our work. After all, it’s not like we’re teaching high school English to five classes of 35-students each five days a week from September to June. We should all show some backbone.

OK, let me say this once and get it off my chest and never mention it again. I have had it with writers who talk about how painful and harrowing and exhausting and almost impossible it is for them to put words on paper and how they pace a hole in the carpet, anguish writ large on their marshmallow faces, and feel lucky to have written an entire sentence or two by the end of the day.

[snip]

The fact of the matter is that the people who struggle most with writing are drunks. They get hammered at night and in the morning their heads are full of pain and adverbs. Writing is hard for them, but so would golf be, or planting alfalfa, or assembling parts in a factory.

Yes. Life is hard, but it has its benefits as well.

The truth, young people, is that writing is no more difficult than building a house, and the only good reason to complain is to discourage younger and more talented writers from climbing on the gravy train and pushing you off.

Young people are pessimistic enough these days without their elders complaining about things. Shut up. Life is pretty good when you grow up. You own your own car, you go where you like, and you sing along with the radio or talk to yourself or chat on your cellphone. You pull into the drive-up window and order the Oreo Blizzard. What’s not to like?

I’m off to East Coast Custard for a Whitehouse Concrete.

My Soundtrack: Jackson by Brakes on WOXY.

Click to watch the video. I love the way mine works.

And hello, grandfather, the rest of your life
Coiled around you like a rope, while one by
One, we strange relatives lean to be recognized.

From At Summerford’s Nursing Home by Rodney Jones.

That’s not a statement, that’s a prediction, as in Kenneth Blackwell wins the governor’s mansion and Mike DeWine is returned to the Senate in the fall. I’ve made a point of not reading any morning-after stories yet because I didn’t want anyone’s spin before I wrote this. I just went straight to the statewide numbers and looked at the totals.

For Governor of Ohio:

Republicans — 784,104
Democrats — 723,304

For Senator from Ohio:

Democrats — 672,320
Republicans — 747,850

I’ll leave it to the wonks to nuance the numbers and talk about low Democratic and high Republican voter turn outs and the myriad of other factors that I’m oblivious to. I’m going with my gut.

Democrats in Cuyahoga County suffer from bubble syndrome. We’re like a Pilgrim standing on that rock, looking around and declaring, this is a land of White people.

Why is Bob Taft still governor of Ohio? Because he can be.

Why did Bob Ney (Ohio-18) not only run for re-election but win his primary yesterday? Because he could.

There is an arrogance and swagger in Ohio’s Republican party that goes beyond hubris. It is so great because every Republican knows that nothing matters when their god is on their side.

It is the same delusion that sent hundreds of thousands of Europeans pouring south and east to the Holy Land to defeat the infidels. It is the same sense of superiority that caused Napoleon Bonaparte to place the crown of France on his own head. When your president tells you that he regularly speaks with God, how can anything else seem impossible?

And that is why in the fall, hundreds of thousands — I’ll go so far as to predict a record number — of Ohioans will cast their vote for Blackwell in the fall and that DeWine will ride that curl to his own victory beneath the banner of God, State and Brother Blackwell.

My Soundtrack: Pale Blue Eyes by The Velvet Underground on WOXY.

Before I read this collection of essays I thought I knew Ray Bradbury. After all, I’d read all of his books and dozens of his short stories over the years. But I found many surprises here. A man fascinated with movies in a way I didn’t know. This, my favorite line, says it all. Because. Which is the best reason for writers to go a-journeying

I don’t care much for Jimmy Demora for reasons I need not go into here, but this little gem from the Pee Dee’s Michael K. McIntyre just makes me want to smack someone. I agree with Jimmy. Voting by absentee ballot in the age of iffy-at-best electronic machines made by a company with very deep GOP ties makes good sense.

But you don’t say this the day before a feckin’ primary election:

This ought to inspire confidence in voters who will encounter new electronic voting machines at the polls tomorrow: Cuyahoga County Commissioner Jimmy Dimora, who also is boss of the county Democratic party, refuses to go to the polls. I’m leery, he said.

So Dimora and his wife voted absentee, even though he wasn’t out of town. The commissioners are so concerned about the machines they’re paying $246,000 to Election Science Institute of San Francisco to conduct an independent review of primary election results to see how well the machines worked and, hopefully, to reassure the public.

But even if the machines perform perfectly, Dimora may never return to the polls.

If Tim’s mother wasn’t concerned enough as it is, she’s going to be feeling really good after she reads the news.

My Soundtrack: Wet Work by Q And Not U on WOXY.

That’s the current pace of blog creation according to David Sifry. Sixty blogs a minute. Three-thousand-six-hundred blogs an hour. Eight-six-thousand-four-hundred blogs a day. Technorati is tracking 37.3 million blogs. The really big news is that less than one-third, and falling, of blogs are written in English.

This may be the nova moment in the blogosphere.

Sifry adds two caveats to his analysis that indicates the percentage of English blogs may be even smaller. He writes:

[W]e are using automated language analysis software (based on languid), and it may have bugs, thus over or undercounting a particular language or group of languages. We’re going to be continually improving the capabilities of this software, but we are pretty confident in its ability to work reliably, especially over the large data sets that Technorati tracks (over 35 million blogs at this time, and over 1.2 million posts each day).

Second, we believe that we are grossly undercounting the Korean blogosphere, mostly due to the fact that the largest Korean blog and hompy services (like Cyworld or Planet Weblog) are not being indexed by Technorati at this time. In addition, we believe that we’re somewhat undercounting the French blogosphere, in particular because our indexing of skyblog is poor.

And Congress wants to make access to the Internet even more restrictive? At what point will politicians decide that they crippled the U.S. economy enough?

My Soundtrack: Robert Onion by Frank Black & The Catholics on WOXY.

Fewer than 15,000 people made it to Washington for the Save Darfur Rally yesterday. I am tremendously proud of each and every individual who made the trek and deeply saddened that so few of us joined them to stop the first genocide of the 21st century. I want to write much more about this, but I’m too sad right now.

One of my conservative readers took me to task last week and asked several insightful questions concerning some positions I have taken here in general and in this post in particular. I have made several attempts at responding and have finally reached a draft with which I am at least comfortable with sharing with him and you, my readers.

My response begins:

Shalom Dan,

Let me address your last point first. In writing my blog I do my best to be as honest as I can in what I say. It would be impossible to do that without opening myself to personal comments. Nothing you”ve said is offensive or off base…

Please keep reading…

My Soundtrack: Blue Skies by The Young Republic on WOXY.

The Japanese invent nothing and perfect everything.

We all got rightiously out of joint yesterday over the attack ad for Betty Sutton in Ohio’s 13th and now we get to do it all over again. A second attack ad has popped up featuring yet another stolen photograph of Capri Cafaro. I agree with Tim, there’s going to be at least one more of these in the pipeline. And if Betty wins, this will haunt her.

Here’s yet another nail in the higher-ground coffin. I remarked to John Ettorre more than a year ago that the touted splits among reporters, bloggers and journalists are all artificial. Those are all just names for the same thing: writers. Some are better than others. Some have better ethics. And credentials have nothing to do with any of it.

The only book of Erica Jong’s that I’ve read before now is her Sappho’s Leap. But I’ve heard her interviewed at least twice on the Diane Rehm Show and found her interesting. I’ve just finished her most recent work Seducing The Demon: Writing For My Life and now posted my notes from the book to my Chapbook. What do you think?

My friend Molly periodically asks me why I don’t feature iCasualties on my blog. After all, she argues, I daily post the official Pentagon report of the names of the dead. My answer is that I’m not keeping score. I’m showing respect for those who made the supreme sacrifice to preserve our rights to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.

So why do I post the iCasualties graph this morning?

Because some of my conservative friends of late have been asking why we who oppose the war in Iraq aren’t admitting that casualty rates are dropping and that we’re obviously turning yet another corner (we’ve been around the block how many times now?) in the war.

This is not a baseball game. Just because we had a good inning (month) doesn’t mean we’ve won the game. The win will not be determined by who killed the most members of the other team. Yes, there is good news from Iraq and Afghanistan. But to celebrate that good news would be like FEMA popping the champagne corks because New Orleans”s French Quarter wasn’t leveled by Hurricane Katrina.

The World will stand in judgment of the United States for the nation we build in Iraq.

My Soundtrack: Change In The Weather by The Concretes on WOXY.