THE OLD EXPLODING SCOREBOARD at the Astrodome. I had forgotten that the home run display lasted 45 seconds.

EUGENE VOLOKH has been having fun occasionally with the lame Bushisms that Slate sometimes runs, but it doesn't really change the underlying principle of how inarticulate Bush can be.

There's a lot of talk about Iraq on our TV screens, and there should be, because we're trying to figure out how best to make the world a peaceful place. There's an old saying in Tennessee -- I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee -- that says, fool me once, shame on -- shame on you. Fool me -- you can't get fooled again.

(via Zilber)

FOR LAN3, a WSJ A-hed on school restrooms. (also via Jacobs)

SOMEONE ELSE IS fed up with San Francisco. (via Jacobs)

THE AMERICAN PROSPECT suggests that no one has actually read William Langewiesche's three-part series on the clean-up of the WTC site. Which is perhaps true: I haven't seen anyone comment on his revelation deep in the third part that one of the firetrucks retrieved from the rubble was staffed by firemen who were clearly in the midst of looting jeans from a Gap store in the Center when the truck was suddenly buried by the collapse of the South Tower, with piles of pants still in the drivers' compartment, where they were retrieved, months later, still neatly folded.

THE MIRACLE OF Canadian health care.

IT WAS VERY KIND of the Washington Post to endorse a Virginia sales tax increase to pay for transportation improvements. If they made it a gas tax, I'd vote for it. When it's a sales or income tax, heck no: tax the people who use the roads the most, rather than those of us who have made the investment to live close to the city to avoid putting stress on the road system with a lengthy commute.

HARVARD PRESIDENT LAWRENCE SUMMERS'S speech on campus anti-Semitism.

FURTHER EVIDENCE OF the Big Bang.

"THE MINUTEMAN" SUMMARIZES blogging on the Central Park Jogger case. One thing I haven't seen anyone focus on is the execrable way in which the rape-defendants handled their trial: I have never seen anyone innocent engage in the sort of ludicrous and offensive blame-the-victim tactics that these defendants did, and that, as much as anything, keeps me skeptical of their renewed claims of innocence.

I do want to comment on this innumerate post:

As Jeralyn points out, false confessions account for 20 percent of wrongful convictions. That's an unconscionable number.

Uh, no, it's not. For example, if there were a million accurate confessions, and five wrongful convictions, and one of those five was a false confession, that would hardly be unconscionable, even though it's 20 percent of the faulty convictions. The appropriate number to consider is the ratio of accurate confessions to coerced confessions. "Twenty pecent of wrongful convictions involve coerced confessions" tells me nothing, and certainly doesn't imply a 20% error rate for confessions.

Most importantly: why is everyone assuming that the Central Park Jogger confessions are coerced? The confessions were videotaped with the parents present. Five separate times for five separate people, who corroborated each other's stories in detail, one of whom led police to the crime scene where the jogger was found. I have yet to hear what additional safeguards the police should have pursued in the Central Park wilding case that they didn't, and how those objecting to those results want to handle future confessions.

What still appalls me is that any of the wilding perpetrators are out on the street. Only by the happenstance that they didn't actually kill anybody (though they sure came close) did they get five-year sentences. So I'm disgusted when I hear people moaning that the rapists lost a few years of their life. Even if they were over-punished for the rape (and I'm far from convinced that they were), they were compensated more than enough for the lack of punishment for their felony assaults.

SPEAKING OF NEW BLOGS, Neal Pollack has been doing a hilarious Andrew Sullivan impersonation. Alas, I can't permalink his take on the Bob Greene case, but it's worth reading.

SPEAKING OF REASON, they have a quasi-blog.

NICE REASON PIECE taking down the Carl Bogus book defending plaintiffs' lawyers. Bogus has apparently written a book about the good plaintiffs' lawyers do without once mentioning the American Trial Lawyers Association.

I'M NOT A BIG Janet Reno fan, but VodkaPundit's characterization of her as a "killer of religious minorities" is appalling. There's something known as proximate cause, and if the Branch Davidians hadn't decided to immolate themselves, they'd be alive today -- as is the case with every single one of the child hostages David Koresh released before he sent his compound up in flames. I'm not going to blame Janet Reno for that.

WASHINGTON'S LEGISLATURE FAILED to amend its voyeurism laws when California learned the hard way that its laws failed to cover perverts who surreptitiously videotape up women's skirts, and was forced to reverse some convictions as a result. The talk show hosts are in an uproar, but the statute is pretty clear that a woman in a geographically public place isn't covered by the law. That four women signed on to the unanimous opinion (and that the prosecutor admitted he wasn't surprised) shows that this really isn't a controversial question.

THIS GUATEMALAN FRIED CHICKEN chain has had small successes in the United States catering directly to the Latin American immigrant market. I'd be curious what makes their chicken so different from American fast-food chicken that one woman could cover her plane fare from Guatemala to the US by taking along a couple of duffle bags of chicken and reselling it. (Indeed, they get their chicken in the U.S. from Sysco.)

There's clearly a pricing problem if the American stores have two-hour lines and rationing, though.

WE HAVE ADDED A COMMENTS feature to make it easier for readers to leave feedback.

COMPARE "TUMBLING WOMAN" to Kahlo's The Suicide of Dorothy Hale.

What the "Tumbling Woman" controversy tells me is that I best not be hearing any New Yorkers giving my flyover-country peeps attitude over their Philistine reactions to Mapplethorpe et al. New Yorkers can be as reactionary as the rest of us, my favorite example of which is the 1973 Carnegie Hall riot over Steve Reich's "Four Organs."

WHEN IN JAPAN, do not use your business card as a toothpick.

TACO PATTY.

SPANISH CHEESE REVIEW. I like Campo de Montalban, but found the Drunken Goat cheese unexceptional. Would you believe that the attached link is perhaps the best on the Web for both cheeses? Where's cheese.com when you need it? Okay, there's cheesebymail.com, which has a nice discussion of the German cheese Bruder Basil, which I broke the fast with and enjoyed. The Iberico there looks similar to Campo de Montalban, but I couldn't tell you if it's the same thing.

SPECIAL INSOMNIA POST: Odds are you weren't reading this blog back when it was any good, but a ways back, I posted about the Jollibee's invasion. Alas, this story of globalization isn't going so well, and Americans just aren't buying into the concept of a burger-and-spaghetti fast-food chain that beat McDonald's in the Phillippines. (Thanks to Captain Spaulding for e-mailing me the link.)

THE FALLIBILITY OF MEMORY: 76% of New Yorkers say that they remember seeing on September 11 footage of both planes hitting the World Trade Center, even though there was no footage of the attack on the North Tower broadcast until the next day.

WHILE I WAS pulling one of my patented all-nighters, followed by my Atonement fast, Bob Greene got railroaded out of the Tribune for sleeping with a teenage woman (above the age of consent) who he had profiled, and the blogosphere is already commenting. I tend to agree with John Scalzi's position: Greene was a dreary columnist, and this is a dumb reason to get rid of him.

I wouldn't quite say that this is no breach of journalistic ethics, as Eugene Volokh does, though; if Greene had an explicit quid pro quo with the subject (no one appears to be accusing him of this), that would be bad. At worst, we see Greene writing about someone to impress them into his bed and, hypothetically, the Tribune could be aggrieved that they're being used as a journalist's seduction tool. (UPDATE: apparently so:)

The Tribune's code of ethics forbids staff members to "write about, photograph, edit or make news judgments about any individual related by blood or marriage or others with whom they have a close personal or financial relationship."

It's surprising to see it rise to this level, though: I've seen many journalists pull strings for friends and slant their coverage accordingly. (I love Cathy Seipp to pieces, but it's clear that her choice of storylines is influenced by her not-always-disclosed social circles.) I find it hard to believe that there isn't a single Tribune or LA Times columnist who isn't editing their first-person column in a way to make their personal lives easier--I forget the name of the LA Times political columnist who wrote a page 3 paean to his deceased father-in-law. Is the difference because Greene didn't explicitly disclose "I'm hoping to nail the protagonist of this particular piece"? I think the real problem is the self-importance of the journalistic profession thinking that it's important that they be perceived above the fray, when in reality they're so often not. The Tribune has to make a sacrifice of Greene on the altar of the imaginary standard of journalistic objectivity, as if to say, see? we journalists are held to a higher standard than we hold the president.

NEW DATA SUGGEST that the Vinland map, purporting to show Norse exploration of North America, was forged by a Jesuit priest as a political protest against the Nazis.

ANOTHER STUNNING ACCOUNT of the Rwandan genocides in today's New York Times. Revelations include the use of HIV-infected men as an army of rapists.

Did you know that Abraham Lincoln was the first leader to implement laws condemning the widespread practice of rape by conquering armies? I didn't. Here is the text of the 1863 Lieber code, which was apparently revolutionary in its day. Francis Lieber's other claim to fame, other than being a Southerner opposed to secession, is that, using a Benjamin Franklin treatise, he opened the first swimming school in the United States.

That's a hell of a resume, so it's humbling to realize that he's essentially forgotten 125 years after his death.