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.