I think, perhaps, the strangest category of products currently on the market are USB warming devices.  You know, those gizmos that use USB as a power source to keep your lunch warm or acts as a hot plate.  There are really a lot of these things out there.  Today, however, I've seen one that trumps them all.  USB Breast Warmers.

I mean, it's nice to see that the Japanese are always focused on helping out the ladies, 'cuz there is nothing worse than wandering around our wonderful world with a cold set of cans ….

Robert Ford is an ignorant censorious dick.

Between offering the title and saying that, I could be on the hook for two felonies in South Carolina, if state senator Robert Ford, a Democrat, has his way.

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In denying a group called the Christian Defense Fund permission to hold an anti-abortion demonstration on Pennsylvania Avenue next week, the commander of the Special Operations Division of the DC Police warns that anyone who places "chalk art" on the sidewalks of Pennsylvania Avenue will be prosecuted for defacing public property.  The commander describes the DC ordinance prohibiting defacement of public property as one that extends to putting chalk on a sidewalk, and moreover as a "narrowly tailored" "content-neutral criminal proscription of general application."

This is my question:  Has DC ever prosecuted children for placing chalk hopskotch squares on a public sidewalk?  In fact, has the federal government ever prosecuted anyone at all for placing chalk on a sidewalk?

Or is the DC Police Department just a gang of thugs?

A collection of haiku, from readers of various political beliefs, concerning the great event:

Hooray Bill Clinton!
Finally gets a reprieve
From all of the blame

"Shit" says the great man
Remind me again, will you
Why I wanted this?

Jesse Jackson steams,
As the men in black impound
Jackson's ball cutters.

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As if today couldn't get any worse. There are 6 helicopters floating over the hopefully not a riot this time demonstration a few blocks from my work. My job is trying to decide if it will fire me before I quit (or toying with me like a Tabby with a wounded mouse, I can't decide…) My personal life is returning to it's regularly scheduled shambles. And now to top it all off, Ricardo Montalban is dead.

I think I am going to ignore everything tonight, and curl up with Star Trek II.

On February 10, the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008 goes into effect.   Written in reaction to a 2007 scare about lead paint in Chinese manufactured toys, such as Thomas the Tank Engine, the law is designed to protect American children from further scares involving lead paint and dangerous chemicals.  Unfortunately, like the toy that inspired it, the law is a trainwreck, a case study in good intentions doing harm through short-sighted legislation.

If this law is not amended, or better still repealed, you won't be able to buy handmade toys for children, backpacks, books aimed at the kid's market, or cotton diapers.  The people who make wooden tops, print books like "The Great Brain" or "A Wrinkle In Time" or make cotton diapers, you see, simply cannot afford third party lab testing (estimated at $4000 a lot, often higher) to prove  that their products do not contain lead.  So they'll go out of business.

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Patrick McGoohan passes away at the age of 80.  Rest in peace.  If television had an Orson Welles, it was McGoohan, whose best work included but was by no means limited to The Prisoner.

1. Cake Wrecks: Mankind's hopes, dreams, foibles, and severe spelling and design deficits, in frosting form.
2. My Right Wing Dad: Is your father computer-illiterate? Have you no officious great-aunt? Is your grandmother politically apathetic? Never mind, this site will hook you up with all the email-forwarded propaganda and glurge you're missing.
3. Passive-Aggressive Notes: So much simmering rage, so few post-it notes.
4. Not Always Right: If you don't know an insufferable consumer, you ARE the insufferable consumer.
5. Regret the Error: You rely on newspapers for news. How reliable are they? Well . . . .
6. Comics Curmudgeon: Do comics have subtexts in which all our failures are longings are laid bare? Josh thinks so. Well, at least in "Mark Trail."
7. FAILBLOG: Yes, it's a shopworn internet meme. But it's still an uncannily funny one.
8. The "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks: The illiteracy and uncertainty you can observe here are banal. It's far more interesting for you to observe me and wonder what it is about these that make me twitch and get all stabby. c.f.: Literally, A Weblog.

Remember the little boy who got no cake?  The story would have made a good after school special, about cruelty to those who are different, if the little boy hadn't been named Adolf Hitler Campbell.

Now comes news that little Adolf, and his sisters AryanNation and Honszlynn Hinler Campbell, have been removed from their parents' care by the New Jersey Division of Youth and Family Services.  Why?  The Division isn't saying, but the local sheriff confirms that there are no reports that the children have been neglected or abused.

I assume that Adolf was not removed because his welfare was endangered by an absence of cake.  While I have little sympathy for the parents, I do get a little exercised when bureaucrats step beyond their powers, or step on the rights of the unpopular, even the loathsome, to score a political point.  If there is no evidence that these children have been abused or mistreated, they should be handed back immediately.  As much as it galls me to say this, the Campbells should file a suit under 42 U.S.C. 1983 for civil rights abuses, and they should be paid handsomely.

Neo-Nazis are so marginalized that they pose no serious threat to national safety or liberty.  A government official who feels entitled to step beyond his powers in the absence of emergency, whether a President or a children's social worker, is a constant threat.

Of course, some assume that because children cannot legally be removed from homes for their parents' political beliefs, "it's very likely the Campbell children were removed for some other additional misfortune, like malnourishment or abuse".  This amounts to an assumption that government actors generally try to follow the law, an assumption I'm unwilling to make.  I find the lack of a criminal report suspicious.  Police are typically involved immediately if there is credible evidence of child abuse or neglect.  Unlike some, I don't trust my government.

Busy day, so light blogging. So waste some time with Spin the Black Circle, a deviously simple browser game. Hint: shouting at the computer actually doesn't help.

The wife and I have agreed to go on the Jenny Craig diet, because we are extremely susceptible to advertisements featuring the former cast of Cheers. If Woody Harrelson told me to buy a new Hummer I'd be smashing up Priuses in the parking lot and enraging people with hemp shoes with it by the end of the week. I'm extremely dubious that Katrina requires this diet; if she does, she needs it several orders of magnitude less than I do. I've sailed past late Elvis and late Marlon Brando and am fast approaching Dom Deluise/Oprah/Hutt.

Anyway, she's already had her first appointment and picked up her week's supply of ludicrously expensive, sodium-and-preservative rich food-analogue-products. (As near as I can tell, Jenny is flirting with the hypothesis that cell death from sodium poisoning will cause weight loss. You could set some of this stuff out for deer to lick.) She showed me one of the dishes the other night. "It's nice they give you an amuse bouche to start with" I say. No, that was the entire dinner. Since I'm in a different weight class, the one good J.C. classifies as "planetoid," I'll get to eat more every day. But unless I get to line up nine or ten of those entrees like tequila shots on a bar, I'm going to be gnawing the pillows by the weekend.

This is a roundabout way of mentioning that I'm fat. I'm a fat adoptive parent. In some places, as recent news shows, this is an anaomly, as adoption agencies and authorities have health restrictions for adoptive parents that include weight restrictions. Yet somehow our busy friend Matt Drudge saw fit to announce breathlessly on his front page that a family had been excluded from adoption because the husband was too fat.

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A series of unfortunate cover letters, submitted by aspiring employees of the advertising firm Killian and Company.  Not to be missed:  the writer whose application was rejected (with constructive feedback) due to poor grammar, and his berserk reply.

Via Nancy Friedman, whose site I'm raiding rather aggressively this week.

Dateline: Foggy Bottom. The State Department is staffed by a large number of trained and well-educated professionals, a vast number of whom went to Yale, not that there's necessarily always definitely inherently something wrong with that. This is America's team, the men and women who will carry forward soon-to-be-confirmed SecState Clinton's "Smart Diplomacy" policy and go toe to toe, diplomatically speaking, with Iran and North Korea and China.

They'll need your help and support. Uh . . . . better send a letter. Or maybe call, I think the phones are still up. Just don't email. Their email is … they've managed to . . . look, can't you just send a letter instead?

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Texas A & M professors are protesting a plan to award merit bonuses for teaching based on, gasp, student evaluations.  Because it's not as though their students are in a position to know who's a good teacher and who's not:

Martha Loudder, an accounting professor and a former speaker of the faculty senate at College Station, questioned the fairness of basing the awards “solely on student evaluation.” Ms. Loudder, who has received the university’s most prestigious teaching award, said she feared that “some very good teachers will be left out.”

Since the pilot program limits bonuses to the top fifteen percent, of course some good teachers will be left out:  every professor who fails to make the eighty-fifth percentile.  But I think Ms. Loudder doesn't give her students enough credit.  At a top flight university like Texas A & M, most students are there to learn, and may be best situated to determine who is doing a good job in that category.  Moreover, most good American universities follow the "publish or perish" model, where tenure, to say nothing of pay, is a question of scholarly citation rather than whether a given professor's students are learning, that is when the students aren't being taught by a doctoral candidate TA to whom the task has been delegated.

The Texas A & M professors complain that it would encourage some to "pander" but I can't tell what that means.  When I was a student I appreciated a good comedian, but if I wasn't learning something from the class, I was a heckler when the time came to give anonymous feedback.  I could also tell who was in the university because he was a scholar who disliked teaching (Hello, Professor "My passion is the law of the sea, and I really don't enjoy having to teach this Civil Procedure small section") and who was there to teach (Best wishes, Professor "I would probably be facing a Senate confirmation hearing right now, but when I left the DOJ I decided to go academic because I enjoy teaching").  If the concern is grade inflation, well that appears to be a nationwide problem with or without merit teaching bonuses.

Could it be that some Texas A & M professors don't want any feedback at all?  Good-looking people don't dread mirrors.

Via TaxProf Blog.

Stung by invidious stereotyping of Asian Americans as the "model minority," people who study and work hard to get ahead where other Americans loaf or look for the quick buck, a group of 1,020 Korean Americans has taken a bold step to erase that misconception.  They've filed one of the silliest lawsuits I've ever read about:

More than 1,000 South Korean-Americans filed a group lawsuit on Monday against a South Korean broadcaster, claiming its coverage on the supposed health risks of U.S. beef humiliated them and subjected them to mockery in the United States….

A total of 1,020 Korean-Americans collectively filed the lawsuit against MBC with the Seoul Southern District Court, seeking compensation of 1 billion won (US$735,000) for alleged humiliation and psychological stress.

"We demand that MBC and the chief producer of PD Notebook pay for the psychological damages and broadcast a correction report and an apology," said Lee Heon, legal representative of the group.

It's indelicate of me to say this, but one would think that Korean Americans might be more used than most to mockery based on a food associated with their place of origin.  I refer of course, to kimchee.