Riding past Arabica On Lee this morning I saw two of my friends – Molly and LJ – pounding away on their lap tops and I ducked inside to see what was up. It’s been a while since I’ve been to Arabica because of the ownership-change thing. My friends were glad to see that news of my passing was exaggerated and gave me a bit of good news: Tom, the franchisee who opened this particular Arabica a year-ago last November is coming back.

But when I went up to the counter to talk with Katie, one of my favorite baristas, the news was mixed. Yes, Tom is coming back, but Arabica On Lee will no longer be Arabica On Lee. Starting next Tuesday, 26 April, Arabica On Lee will become Cafe Chameleon, a bistro with servers and an expanded sandwich, light-fare menu. (There are going to be physical changes in the kitchen too, that will allow for an even larger menu, but for now, it’s the light route.)

The wifi is staying, but most of the comfy chairs are going. It will still be coffee in the mornings until 11 a.m., but then the seating for the coffee crowd will be limited to make room for the more profitable lunch and supper crowds.

I can’t blame Tom. Like all good business people he doesn’t do what he does so a Case student (or itinerant blogger) can buy a coffee and sit for six hours. And Tom is good at what he does. It sounds to me like he’s got a solid plan and while I won’t be able to afford to spend as much time there as I did before, he’s always had a loyal customer in me.

My Soundtrack: Das Lied von der Erde by Gustav Mahler, Wiencer Philharmoniker

Daily Kos this morning in They Get Letters posts a copy of a communication from Senate Minor Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) to Senat Majority Whip Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) Before Senate Democrats raised Reid to his current post, I knew nothing about him. And, I’ll admit, he’s still something of a mystery to me. But I like this letter.

Dear Mitch:

Harry Reid
Democratic Leader

It makes me wonder if the the Republicans are really prepared to re-establish gridlock for seven judges.

My Soundtrack: Pronounced Leh Nerd Skin Nerd by Lynyrd Skynyrd

In My Backpack… Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir In Books by Azar Nafisi; On My Nightstand… The Last Hero by Terry Pratchett; On My Computer… Wherever We Travel by Linda Pastan; On My Screen… Statement (*) directed by Norman Jewison, written by Ronald Harwood and Brian Moore.

My Soundtrack: Skynyd’s Innyrds by Lynyrd Skynyrd.

First, a bit of full-disclosure. Technically, as I understand it, I’m Roman Catholic. But, I’ve only been inside a Catholic church twice in my life-once for my christening and once when I was having thoughts of getting married to a beautiful Polish Catholic woman-and I’ve never practiced the religion in any way.

So why do I use the phrase: We have a Pope? Because forget about any connections with holiness or divinity, the Pope is, and has always been, a political appointment. The politics may be dressed up with a more than usual amount of glitter, but they remain as Machiavellian as ever. And now the German Joseph Ratzinger has received the approval of his fellow cardinals and become Pope Benedict XVI.

While his rein is very unlikely to last as long as his predecessors, my first reaction was to belive that he is likely to change the lives of a great number of people, both Roman Catholic and otherwise, for a number of years. But Jack Miles disagrees with me. I read this morning an essay by Miles, a former Roman Catholic priest turned Episcopalian, and I defer to his understanding. I once took a class based greatly on Miles’ Pulitzer Prize winning God: A Biography, and I respect what he has to say.

The telling lines from the essay read:

And here I come, at last, to the political point. When the allegiance of First World Catholics to the pope is steadily hollowed from the inside, when brilliant and loyal priests like moral theologian Charles Curran of the Catholic University of America or Jesuit Congressman Robert Drinan of Boston College are cast aside without ceremony or apology (I mention just two American examples, but no Catholic country is without a few comparably dismaying cases), papal authority silently loses some of the strength that huge Catholic numbers once seemed to lend it. The world, after all, will never defer to the pope more than Catholics themselves do.

Maybe this is one men’s club that is finally losing its grip.

[Update: Andrew Sullivan has some insights on Pope Benedict XVI.]

My Soundtrack: A Faust Symphony by Franz List.

In My Backpack… Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir In Books by Azar Nafisi; On My Nightstand… The Last Hero by Terry Pratchett; On My Computer… Concord Hymn by Ralph Waldo Emerson; On My Screen… Statement (*) directed by Norman Jewison, written by Ronald Harwood and Brian Moore.

My Soundtrack: All-Time Greatest Hits by Lynyrd Skynyrd.

[Update: I get these in my email every morning. Timing is all.]

There is a business-management fable that goes like this. A young executive discovers that he has made a mistake that will cost his company more than a million dollars and there is no way to correct the mistake. The money is gone. When the call comes from the boss’ office, the executive knows that he’s about to pack up his things.

He enters the office and the boss lays out the situation as they both understand it and then asks: “If you were me, what would you do?”

The executive’s answer is short and to the point: “I’d tell me to clean out my desk.”

“That would be a very stupid thing to do,” the boss says.

Confused, the executive doesn’t know what to say, but the boss continues.

“This company just spent more than a million dollars so that you could learn some very important business lessons. Why in the world would we want to fire you and have some other company have the benefit of that very expensive education? Now, get out of here and get back to work.”

The most the young executive could do was stutter his thanks and promise to take the lessons he had learned very seriously.

As he was opening the door the boss spoke again, “And, remember. You only get one pass. We won’t have this conversation again.”

The reason I relate that story is because of an entry that Stephanie over at It’s The End Of The World As We Know It posted last Friday. My initial reaction to her piece was laughter. Stephanie manages to twist life just the right amount to make you smile. I think that’s a good thing in a lawyer, at least I hope it is.

The gist of it is that she’s looking at John Kerry like a potential lover that just didn’t pan out. Here’s how she wraps it up:

That’s how I now feel about John Kerry. He keeps emailing me. He just won’t stop. I regret giving him my email address. I just want to tell him, “John, give it up. It’s over. It’s been over for months now. Go on with your life. Forget about me.”

I think that would be a stupid thing to do. This is not an episode of The Apprentice we’re watching here.

We spent nearly half a billion dollars last year training John Kerry how to run for president. Is it smart to throw that investment away because he fucked up and lost? (I know, I know, questions remain, but for now, that’s going to have to wend its way through the courts). Kerry is not a stupid man. He lost by the smallest margin of any presidential candidate running against an incumbant in our nation’s short history. He learns from his mistakes. Can anyone doubt that he would do things different next time around?

Now, someone dynamic may emerge in 2007, or even 2008, who will blow us all away and change everying. But don’t hold your breath. Let’s not throw away our investment.

My Soundtrack: Gord’s Gold by Gordon Lightfoot.

In My Backpack… Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir In Books by Azar Nafisi; On My Nightstand… The Last Hero by Terry Pratchett; On My Computer… The Advice by Charles Sackville, Earl of Dorset; On My Screen… Statement (*) directed by Norman Jewison, written by Ronald Harwood and Brian Moore.

My Soundtrack… Zabuca by Johannes Linstead.

Questions of crime and abortion and eugenics (be sure to visit the websites suggested by Terry Kanago of I See Invisible People in her comments) have held my attention most of this day. This evening a posting on National Review Online entitled Abortion And Crime, CTD by Ramesh Ponnuru caught my eye. He links to a Florida State University College of Law Working Paper by Jonathan Click entitled: Econometric Analyses of U.S. Abortion Policy: A Critical Review.

Published in March, 2004, Section II, Abortion And Crime (pages 12-21) of the paper refers repeatedly to John Donohue’s and Steven Levitt’s The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime. This paper was written in 1999 and published in a 2001 issue of the Quarterly Journal of Economics. I recommend reading the earlier paper first.

My Soundtrack: Pontiac by Lyle Lovett.

In My Backpack… Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir In Books by Azar Nafisi; On My Nightstand… The Last Hero by Terry Pratchett; On My Computer… Fix by Alicia Suskin Ostriker; On My Screen… Statement (*) directed by Norman Jewison, written by Ronald Harwood and Brian Moore.

My Soundtrack… 5 by Lenny Kravitz.

At BuzzMachine Jeff Jarvis, in Around The World In 80 Blogs, has posted a link to the wiki Bridge Blog Index. What is a Bridge Blogger? It is someone who writes: for an audience outside their everyday reality. for instance, when Ory Okolloh writes about corruption in Kenya, reaching family at home and readers at Harvard, she is bridge blogging. Who are our Bridge Bloggers?

My Soundtrack: Ten Year Night by Lucy Kaplansky.

Earlier today I posted a comment to my friend Tish’s Of Faith And Religion over at Love And Hope And Sex And Dreams. It’s a longish comment, possibly the longest I’ve ever written, but it’s on a theme I keep coming back to again and again: the critical nature of Reason. I close the comment with a quote from The Demon-Haunted World: Science As A Candle In The Dark, Carl Sagan’s final work. (Read Tish’s post and my comment if you want to know what Sagan said.)

The book is one of my 18 Books That Shaped My World. After I posted the comment, I took the time to flip through the book and refresh my memory why I think our World is a sadder place for Sagan’s absence. In the middle of the book (page 207) I had underlined this:

When man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime.

Sagan reaches back more than 200 years to Thomas Paine writing in The Age Of Reason for the quote. Can anyone suggest, with a straight face, that it rings any less true today when we are surrounded by politicians of every stripe who are twisted by the cognitive dissonance of their pronouncements?

My Soundtrack: Best Of, by Kansas.

The inestimable Bluegrass Poet Sherry Chandler emailed me The Miracle That Wasn’t from this morning’s New York Times and I’ve been scratching my head all day trying to figure out what to do with it. Take the time to read the whole thing, of course, but the gist of this deeply disturbing piece is that economist and author Steven Levitt believes that:

the single most important cause [for the decline in New York City’s crime rate in the ’90s was] an event two decades earlier: the legalization of abortion in New York State in 1970, three years before it was legalized nationally by the Supreme Court.

Op-Ed Columnist John Tierny goes on to write:

The result, [Levitt] maintains, was a huge reduction in the number of children who would have been at greater than average risk of becoming criminals during the 1990’s. Growing up as an unwanted child is itself a risk factor, he says, and the women who had abortions were disproportionately likely to be unmarried teenagers with low incomes and poor education – factors that also increase the risk.

There are so many very, very scary ways that can be used, I’m nearly speechless. I don’t care if you’re Pro-Life, Pro-Choice, Conservative or Liberal, I think the sane reaction is to nod and change the subject; to anything.

But we can’t, can we.

So how do we talk about this?

From a Liberal perspective I want to talk about the roots of crime being found in disempowerment and hopelessness. I imagine one Conservative perspective might be to point to the need for personal moral responsibility on the part of the people making the babies that grow up to become criminals. I don’t know.

I’m going to ask my friend John Pike and the voices at M.A.W.B. to more correctly comment on what might be a Conservative response to Levitt’s assertion.

This could be a very interesting conversation.

As an aside, I’ve ordered Levitt’s book – Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores The Hidden Side Of Everything.

My Soundtrack: Greatest Hits by Janis Joplin.

I stumbled across loumuenz.com while enjoying one of my favorite local reads: Organic Mechanic. Adam is right: this guy has ridiculously awesome pictures of Cleveland, like the thumbnail at the left. The more than 3,000 photos on his website are for sale at very reasonable prices. Be sure to check out the animation as well. Thanks Adam.

My Soundtrack: Cold Hard Truth by George Jones.

This morning I was sitting in Phoenix and ran into my friend George Miller. George is of my father’s generation and quite conservative in his political views, but because he is intelligent, articulate and appreciative of reasonable discourse we have enjoyed many hours together in various coffee houses. Today he mentioned that he was going to spend some time over on Coventry because he enjoys the Coventry Yard Park.

I haven’t been over there in some time and decided that his idea was a good one. And, since the Caribou at La Place now offers free wifi, I made the erroneous assumption that the Coventry Caribou, one of my pre-Arabica-on-Lee haunts, must also.

It doesn’t. But as I was sitting at the table the woman next to me asked me a question about wifi. Her interest, it turns out, stems from a desire to locate hotspots so that she can blog about the road trip she and her husband intend to embark on this Monday.

Claire is of an age somewhere between my own and my father’s and a little skittish when it comes to Internet security. As a result, she has her website behind a password that you can only get by sending her an email and making a request. She gave me the address on her card and my intent is to post it here as soon as she gives me permission.

Reading about Claire and Chuck’s exploits will be a good way to welcome them to the NEO Blogosphere.

My Soundtrack: Greatest Hits by Elton John

In My Backpack… Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir In Books by Azar Nafisi; On My Nightstand… The Last Hero by Terry Pratchett; On My Computer… Waiting for Icarus by Muriel Rukeyser; On My Screen… Statement (*) directed by Norman Jewison, written by Ronald Harwood and Brian Moore.

My Soundtrack… Goodbye Yellow Brick Road by Elton John.