Fiat Lux

By way of PVP Online, I found this completely depressing news item: Sesame Street’s Cookie Monster will not be singing “C is for Cookie” anymore.

How thoroughly depressing. Yes, I know, American kids are fatter than ever and need to learn healthy eathing habits, Blah blah blah. I don’t care. I loved the Cookie Monster exactly the way that he was and I’m sad that the next generation won’t get to grow up with great, catchy kid’s songs like this:

C Is For Cookie

“C” is for cookie
That’s good enough for me
“C” is for cookie
That’s good enough for me
“C” is for cookie
That’s good enough for me
Oh………cookie, cookie, cookie starts with “C”.

“C” is for cookie
That’s good enough for me
“C” is for cookie
That’s good enough for me
“C” is for cookie
That’s good enough for me
Oh….cookie,cookie,cookie starts with “C”.

Hey,you know what?
A round cookie with one bit out of it looks like a “C”,
A round donut with one bit out of it also looks like a “C”,
but it’s it not as good as a cookie!
And oh the moon sometimes looks like a “C” but you can’t eat that

Sooooooooooooo………

“C” is for cookie
That’s good enough for me…Yeah!
“C” is for cookie
That’s good enough for me
“C” is for cookie
That’s good enough for me
Oh….cookie, cookie, cookie starts with “C”
Yeah!
Cookie, cookie, cookie starts with “C”
Cookie, cookie, cookie starts with “C”

MmMmMmMmMmMmMmMmMmMmMmM…

I haven’t blogged on this issue yet and I should have. Fortunately the good folks over at the All Spin Zone kicked me in the butt and reminded me that I need to.

The recent rise in rhetoric about bad things happening to judges who don’t make the “Right” decisions (and I use that in both senses of the word) is very troubling. Without a fair and honest judiciary, one that can make decisions without fear that they’ll be second-guessed by someone with a gun, this country is in big trouble (if it isn’t already).

Here’s a key point, from a WaPo piece on a recent gathering of conservative leaders in Washington DC:

…lawyer-author Edwin Vieira told the gathering that [SCOTUS Justice] Kennedy should be impeached because his philosophy, evidenced in his opinion striking down an anti-sodomy statute, “upholds Marxist, Leninist, satanic principles drawn from foreign law.”

Ominously, Vieira continued by saying his “bottom line” for dealing with the Supreme Court comes from Joseph Stalin. “He had a slogan, and it worked very well for him, whenever he ran into difficulty: ‘no man, no problem,’ ” Vieira said.

The full Stalin quote, for those who don’t recognize it, is “Death solves all problems: no man, no problem.” Presumably, Vieira had in mind something less extreme than Stalin did and was not actually advocating violence. But then, these are scary times for the judiciary.

Indeed.

San Francisco’s mass transit system, MUNI, announced a triple whammy today: driver layoffs, service cutbacks, AND a fare increase. Suckage all around. Scott and I rely on MUNI to get both to work and to school, so now we get to wait and see if the lines we ride will be affected, plus pay more for less service.

What a stupid, short-sighted move this is. There are not many cities that have the geography and urban density to make living without a car a real option, and San Francisco is one of them. SF should be increasing, not decreasing, the amount of mass transit coverage it has. Otherwise you’re just making it harder for people to get around and encouraging more car use.

Yes, I know that budgets have to be balanced, yadda yadda, but there’s got be be better ways to do it than this.

My ongoing neck pain is really slowing down my productivity this week. However, here’s more on the US gov’t and passport silliness. As if the RFID chip proposal wasn’t bad enough, this one is, pun intended, a real pain in the neck.

THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION’S announcement that U.S. citizens are soon going to need passports to get back into their country from Mexico and Canada, is being played as a way to keep Americans safer. But like most everything else this president has done in the name of security, the only things there will be more of if this measure goes through are bureaucracy, hassles for Americans who don’t have passports and never needed them before to travel to Mexico or Canada, and bad feeling between the United States and its neighbors.