My current Sprint phone (a Sanyo 8100) is dying. My S.O. and I want to consolidate our phone plans, and she's interested enough in an iPhone that moving to GSM phones seems like a good idea.

Features I need are really simple: a 100-place phonebook and a calendar that does weekly repeating events. (I'd be thrilled if it could import an iCal-format calendar.) All else is negotiable.

Anybody have a recommendation?

"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

This is the dietary advice of Michael Pollan, who has an interesting essay on the ideology of Nutritionism and its perils.

(Among other virtues, this article displays the author's gift for witty turns of phrase, such as the title of this JE.)

Compare two of today's quotes:

U.S. 'pursuing a new strategy in Iraq and I ask you to give it time to work' - Bush.

and

'Chill out, guys. I'm picking up the crayons already' - My three-year old, at about 6:30 PM PST, after several timeouts for not doing what we asked.

Apparently, the psychic reverberations of an internationally watched speech are quite powerful. We didn't even listen to it and she picked up the essential spirit of the President's message. Uncanny.

(She actually did pick up all the crayons after that, too. Maybe that's a hopeful omen.)

A number of people have tried to patch up George Lucas' leaky storyline into something coherent.

Here's an alternate backstory that - in addition to being hilarious - seems to work.

We had some snow and ice in Salem [Oregon] earlier this week, but I wasn't really paying attention to how things were in Portland. Judging by this video, things were much worse up there.

No one was hurt, BTW.

Whoops:

Consumer Reports is retracting its car seat report after the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said it had found flaws in its side-impact testing methods.

A quick recap: Consumer Reports tried to raise the bar on child safety seat testing by putting 12 popular car seats through 35 mph frontal and 38 mph side-impact crash tests. CR chose those speeds because they are the government standard for crash testing vehicles. Currently, federal standards require car seats be tested only in 30 mph frontal crash tests.

CR found that 10 seats failed and flew off their bases. One seat, the Evenflo Discovery, failed even at 30 mph. CR demanded NHTSA immediately recall it. Evenflo strongly disputed CR's findings.

After CR came out with its report earlier this month, NHTSA asked to review its data. Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, the agency apparently relayed its preliminary conclusions to CR, which promptly pulled the report pending further testing.

NHTSA administrator Nicole Nason said its initial review of the Consumer Reports testing procedures "showed a significant error in the manner in which it conducted and reported on its side-impact tests. The organization's data show its side-impact tests were actually conducted under conditions that would represent being struck in excess of 70 mph, twice as fast as the group claimed. When NHTSA tested the same child seats in conditions representing the 38.5 mph conditions claimed by Consumer Reports, the seats stayed in their bases as they should, instead of failing dramatically."

Consumer Reports put out a statement saying, "Our tests were intended to simulate side crashes at the NCAP speed of 38 mph. The new information raises a question about whether the tests accurately simulated that speed, however, so we are now reviewing our tests and the resulting article.

Boo on them for screwing up, good on them for admitting the error promptly.

Until they get their studies straight, remember that it's still true that small kids in car seats are much safer than small kids with just seat belts.

From a lecture given at West Point:

"[...] We were warned of this by our founders. They had put themselves in jeopardy by signing the Declaration of Independence; if they had lost, that parchment could have been their death warrant, for they were traitors to the Crown and likely to be hanged. In the fight for freedom they had put themselves on the line--not just their fortunes and sacred honor but their very persons, their lives. After the war, forming a government and understanding both the nature of war and human nature, they determined to make it hard to go to war except to defend freedom; war for reasons save preserving the lives and liberty of your citizens should be made difficult to achieve, they argued....

I want to be clear on this: Vietnam did not make me a dove. Nor has Iraq; I am no pacifist. But they have made me study the Constitution more rigorously, both as journalist and citizen. Again, James Madison:

In no part of the Constitution is more wisdom to be found, than in the clause which confides the question of war and peace to the legislature, and not to the executive department. Beside the objection to such a mixture to heterogeneous powers, the trust and the temptation would be too great for any one man.

Twice in 40 years we have now gone to war paying only lip service to those warnings;[*] the first war we lost, the second is a bloody debacle, and both rank among the great blunders in our history. It is impossible for soldiers to sustain in the field what cannot be justified in the Constitution; asking them to do so puts America at war with itself. So when the Vice President of the United States says it doesn't matter what the people think, he and the President intend to prosecute the war anyway, he is committing heresy against the fundamental tenets of the American political order.

[...]

I want to contend that the American military systems that evolved in the early days of this republic rested on a bargain between the civilian authorities and the armed services, and that the army has, for the most part, kept its part of the bargain and that, at this moment, the civilian authorities whom you loyally obey, are shirking theirs. And before you assume that I am calling for an insurrection against the civilian deciders of your destinies, hear me out, for that is the last thing on my mind.

You have kept your end of the bargain by fighting well when called upon, by refusing to become a praetorian guard for a reigning administration at any time, and for respecting civil control at all times. For the most part, our military leaders have made no serious efforts to meddle in politics. The two most notable cases were General George McClellan, who endorsed a pro-Southern and pro-slavery policy in the first year of the war and was openly contemptuous of Lincoln. But Lincoln fired him in 1862, and when McClellan ran for President two years later, the voting public handed him his hat. Douglas MacArthur's attempt to dictate his own China policy in 1951 ran head-on into the resolve of Harry Truman, who, surviving a firestorm of hostility, happily watched a MacArthur boomlet for the Republican nomination for the Presidency fizzle out in 1952.

On the other side of the ledger, however, I believe that the bargain has not been kept. The last time Congress declared war was in 1941. Since then presidents of the United States, including the one I served, have gotten Congress, occasionally under demonstrably false pretenses, to suspend Constitutional provisions that required them to get the consent of the people's representatives in order to conduct a war. They have been handed a blank check to send the armed forces into action at their personal discretion and on dubious Constitutional grounds. [...]"

Follow the link for a larger excerpt of the address and to discover the identity of the speaker.

The civil war in Iraq is not due to a military failing; they have done what has been asked of them, and for the most part have done it honorably and well. The debacle can hardly even be blamed on any particular President or administraton, no matter how comforting many people find it to lay blame on a scapegoat.

The crucial failure took place in Congress, which has failed to uphold its duties with regards to "war powers" for at least these last thirty years. And, ultimately, the responsibility for this failure (and for many others) rests with us. We, the people. And if we want the problems fixed, we'd better take some responsibility for them and find a way to get Congress to uphold its duties.

Government is not the problem. We are the problem.

[*: More than twice in 40 years, I'd argue, but aside from that nitpick I think it's well said.]

ANDREW WAKEFIELD, the former surgeon whose campaign linking the MMR vaccine with autism caused a collapse in immunisation rates, was paid more than £400,000 by lawyers trying to prove that the vaccine was unsafe.

The payments, unearthed by The Sunday Times, were part of £3.4m distributed from the legal aid fund to doctors and scientists who had been recruited to support a now failed lawsuit against vaccine manufacturers.

[...]

Wakefield's work for the lawyers began two years before he published his now notorious report in The Lancet medical journal in February 1998, proposing a link between the vaccine and autism.

This suggestion, followed by a campaign led by Wakefield, caused immunisation rates to slump from 92% to 78.9%, although they have since partly recovered. In March this year the first British child in 14 years died from measles.

Please let me know if any mobs form to give Dr. Andrew Wakefield a good old fashioned tar-and-featherin'. Think you've had enough? Wait. It gets more sordid still:

Later The Lancet retracted Wakefield's claim and apologised after a Sunday Times investigation showed that his research had been backed with £55,000 from lawyers, and that the children in the study used as evidence against the vaccine were also claimants in the lawsuit.

[...]

Also among those named as being paid from the legal aid fund was a referee for one of Wakefield's papers, who was allowed £40,000.

Patients in his study were plaintiffs in the lawsuits? Ya think his study might have a little selection bias? Crap of a stick.

He's already been scientifically refuted. Now, hopefully, his credibility is entirely destroyed. So if there's any of y'all that have been avoiding MMR for your kids, it looks like this would be a good moment to re-evaluate.

A brilliant bit of self-directed sarcasm:

French marchers say 'non' to 2007

Hundreds of protesters in France have rung in the New Year by holding a light-hearted march against it.
Parodying the French readiness to say "non", the demonstrators in the western city of Nantes waved banners reading: "No to 2007" and "Now is better!"

The marchers called on governments and the UN to stop time's "mad race" and declare a moratorium on the future.

The protest was held in the rain and organisers joked that even the weather was against the New Year.

The tension mounted as the minutes ticked away towards midnight - but the arrival of 2007 did nothing to dampen their enthusiasm.

The protesters began to chant: "No to 2008!"

They vowed to stage a similar protest on 31 December 2007 on the Champs-Elysees avenue in Paris.

This isn't, strictly speaking, a SO story. This is actually a story about my father-in-law's truck and my ex-roomate's refigerator.

See, my ex-roomate split with her SO about a year ago. She had just purchased a shiny new french-door fridge for them, and when they split he agreed to keep it and buy it from her at full price. Last month she asked him when he planned on paying for it, and he said something to the effect of "I never said that I would." So my ex-roomate called me for help moving it. We'd been shopping for just such a fridge, and offered to buy it from her. Turned into a good deal all around. But we had to haul it home ourselves.

Neither of us have a vehicle capable of moving a fridge. Therefore we asked to borrow my father-in-law's truck. Her parents live on a farm out in the boonies, the truck was out of gas, and her sister had used the last of the emergency gas can without replacing it. We had a fun time trying to siphon gas from my Subaru, and eventually we got enough in the truck to (probably) get it to the nearest gas station, 15 road miles away. (Did I mention the truck gets about 10 MPG?)

At last we're all ready to pile in the truck and go, when my FIL drops the line which demands its place in history: "Oh, hey. Let me get the scrotums off of that first." We looked puzzled, while he walked around in front of the truck. There on the hood were two fuzzy sheep scrotums lying on the hood. Apparently he had recently butchered a couple ram-lambs and needed a place to dry their scrotums before curing them into sacks..

I suggested that we should bring one for my ex-roomate as a symbol of what she'd like to do to her ex, but my SO suggested that we wait until after the scrotums were cured.

Sensible suggestion, I thought.

Updated to remove accidental apostrophe abuse. The horror!

Al Jazeera English is having trouble making it in the United States. The Daily Show's Samantha Bee does her best to help.

Most amusing. A sample:

Will Stebbins, AJ-E: "We're looking to produce a... a journalistically quality product."
Samantha Bee, skeptically: "Aren't you trying to appeal to an American audience?"

I read something this morning that has made my day. One of the local Portland weekly newspapers, the Portland Mercury, is holding a charity auction. And this year the beneficiary is the organization that taught me how to be a mediator and (indirectly) gave me my slashdot name.

May I please introduce Resolutions Northwest:

You may not have heard of RNW and their successes, because all their cases are kept strictly confidential. But I can share with you their success rate: Over 90 percent of RNW's mediations have been successful in solving the conflicts in question. Plus, 97 percent of clients would recommend the services. Here's another stat that should pique the interest of most taxpayers (even those who don't believe in conflict resolution): Mediation has been shown to be 10 TIMES less expensive and four times better in reducing future crime than the court system.

1. What is your occupation?

Network Administrator for a medical clinic.

2. What color are you socks right now?

About A0A0A0.

3. What are you listening to right now?

The bookkeeping department's new Tanzanian employee ask questions, the Medical Records department discuss a chart request, and the building HVAC system trying to warm the place up too much for my tastes.

4. What was the last thing that you ate?

A clementine.

5. Can you drive a stick shift?

Tolerably well. I have some trouble switching between my SO's Honda hotrod and my neighbor's Dodge Ram with a Cummins turbo diesel, but I haven't killed any clutches yet.

6. If you were a crayon, what color would you be?

One the baby has drooled all over.

7. Last person you spoke to on the phone?

Ummm. I dunno, it's been a few days.

8. Do you like the person who sent this to you?

Mr. Slashdot is a member of the OSTG, so who wouldn't?!

9. How old are you today?

39. No, really. 39 for the first time.

10. Favorite drinks?

Carrot juice. No, really.

11. What is your favorite sport to watch?

City youth soccer. Or maybe "Everyone pile on [stepson] and tickle him!"

12. Have you ever dyed your hair?

Not yet.

13. Pets?

Six cats: Crier, May-bell, Cole (he sees dead people), Phobia (called Phober; this cat has half a brain), and Phober's two kittens Chip and Looty (with half a brain between them.)

14. Favorite food?

Trinidadian Curried Goat from Sweetwater's Jam House in Portland. Sadly, the restaurant has been defunct for years so I'll never get more.

15. What was the last movie you watched?

The Fifth Element on DVD, Flushed Away in the theater. Flushed Away is excellent.

16. Favorite holiday?

St. Crispin's Day!

17. What do you do to vent anger?

Flame.

18. What were your favorite toys as a kid?

Legos.

19. What is your favorite: fall or spring?

Fall.

20. Hugs or kisses?

Yes, please.

21. Cherry or blueberry?

Blueberry.

22. Do you want your friends to send this back?

23. Who is the most likely to respond?

24. Who is least likely to respond?

The three above are not really relevant here.

25. Living arrangements?

A large 1910 house, rented (gonna buy it) with SO, two stepkids, six cats, and a surprising lack of fleas.

26. When was the last time you cried?

About two weeks ago.

27. What is on the floor of your closet?

someone else's cruft.

28. Who is the friend you have had the longest that you're sending this to?

My long-time offline friends have already done this one, or something very much like it, so I'll spare them.

29. What did you do last night?

Saw the young cousins who had stayed with us over the weekend off, then collapsed in a twitching heap while enjoying blessed quiet.

Bonus item!

I listened today to a very interesting interview on the radio: Jimmy Carter on Fresh Air.

Two things struck me as interesting about this interview. For starters, Terry Gross gives what is for her a very confronational interview. It is still pretty polite, since she is not exactly a hard-hitting interviewer, but I could clearly hear what seemed to be deep skepticism and annoyance in her voice. Haven't heard that since Bill O'Reilly was on.

Second, I think what Mr. Carter has to say is something many Americans need to hear. If you're concerned about the violence in the region, I think this interview (and presumably Carter's book) contains information that provides valuable perspective on the conflict. Give it a listen if you can.

(I know this is a difficult subject to discuss in a civil manner, but sometimes I just can't resist playing my role no matter how foolhardy it seems.)

A list of the top ten cities for beer lovers, according to MSNBC puts Stumptown at number 8. Ahead of Prague.

If, as Franklin said, "Beer is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy" then we're truly blessed around here.