Random

It is six days to the bar exam, I am now officially employed and I can honestly say that I still don't care about Federal Income Tax. Isn't that what H&R Block is for or did I miss a memo?

When I was a kid, you couldn't step outside after the end of May without seeing lightening bugs. This is the first year in recent memory that there have been as many as my childhood memories seem to recall. But I will say that they make me laugh and giggle when I see them again because when I was kid I knew they were twinkling and blinking just for me.

Recently I got bit by a dog. My father has waged a lenghty battle against dogs for many years because of the dogs that roam and howl and generally disrupt the quiet place he lives. And I've told him for years that there are no bad dogs, just bad owners. And I stand by that with this one coda: There are also bad consumers of dogs. After being bitten, I tried to figure out where I got it in my head that all animals were safe, understood what I was thinking and saying and just generally could be trusted. Here's your answer: http://youtube.com/watch?v=adYbFQFXG0U.

Now the truth is, I knew about Christian and had forgotten. When I was young and apparently impressionable, I read Born Free, a moving memoir of Joy and George Adamson's committment to saving the big cats of Kenya. That story taught me it was okay to love and to believe you were being loved in return. George Adamson, by the way, is the old guy in green shorts near the end of the video. But I forgot one of George's other lessons. As much as George did this

He also carried this

George had a healthy respect for what these animals were physically capable of and still held, too, a deep and abiding love for them. I missed that part of the book and have 16 stiches to prove it. But I don't blame the dog that bit me: I leaned over him putting him by instinct into a subservient and scary position. Which is why George carried a gun when he was with his big cats and people who were strangers to them: He knew an animal will attack if provoked, no matter how well intentioned the human.

Liar, liar, liar

John Ashcroft is a big fat stinky liar.

Ass-croft got up in front a House committee yesterday and defended waterboarding. Fine, fine. It is logical (if creepy) that when you're trying to torture information out of a guy (who may or may not have any) you need a full panoply of tricks in the torture toolbag. This statement, of course, is predicated on the idea that torture is morally acceptable in any circumstance and that you actually get right or good or accurate information when you're twisting a guy's jibbly parts or forcing water down his throat "to create the sensation of drowning."

(For a personal perspective, read Christopher Hitchen's experience - he actually paid someone to do this to him: http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/08/hitchens200808)

Now Ass-croft tried to soften up everyone in the room with the Bushian plea of "national security" and "terrorists are coming" and then delivered the punchline: only three people ever got waterboarded and the infliction in his officious little voice was "Only three got it so what are all you weak kneed namby pambies whining about? Only three, man. It's not like we've choked out the entire Iraqi population here. Beside you cannot handle the truth."

Anyone who has seen A Few Good Men knows the last line. But here is the truth: Bush, Ass-croft, Cheney are worse than Jack Nicholson's Col. Nathan R. Jessep. Not only don't they think we can handle the truth - that they've created a war, a torture center and killed thousands of Americans for a religious war - they don't want us to ever know the truth - Ibid. So they lie and prevaricate and pay lots of money to protect their sleazy truth.

The voters in the State of Missouri got it right and the rest of the country should have known what they were getting in their former Attorney General. Ass-croft is so utterly bereft of humanity that Missouri voted him out of the Senate by voting in a dead man. We should have listened to the Great State of Missouri and never trusted Ashcroft when Bush and his corrupt cronies entrusted Ashcroft with the role of being the nation's top law enforcement officer.

He was okay with torturing foreigners, denying them access to the best court system in the world and keeping them locked up in Cuba. He has master mined the deepest erosion into civil rights and civil liberties this country has ever seen. He was defeated by a dead man.

Are we done? Crawl back into whatever hole you slithered out of yesterday and darken my airwaves no more for you have nothing to say that I will believe and children die today because of you.

Piss off, Mate

Okay, I'll admit to being a sports geek. (Although I am still not as bad my husband. Case in point: he refused to pay $5 a month for hi-def until the Golf Channel made the technological leap. I ask you - are the dimples on the ball that important?)

Anyway.

I have been known to get up at 2 a.m. to watch America's Cup live. And don't ever bug me the second Monday and Tuesday of February 'cuz I'm going to be busy watching the Pooch Parade that is Westminster. And I am a devotee of epic proportion to the Tour de France. It started when Testicle Boy made his recovery and I've been addicted (pardon the pun) ever since. Even law school couldn't detour me from the Tour: the laptop went to class so that I could watch the lifetime racing feed. I am a tool, I know.

Which is way I want Riccardo Ricco's head (both of them) on a platter. This little bastard boy had won my heart with dashing victories in climbing stages. He blew past another rider on his way up a Category 1 climb like the other guy's wheels had melted to the French roadway. That should have been my tip-off. Last year, my heart was broken by Vino, who dusted off his road-rashed ass after a nasty crash to decimate the field the next day. (But, in my defense, I always thought Floyd Landis was a lying sneak cheat. It was something about his close-set beady little rat eyes. But I digress.)

I want to know when someone soars above the peloton, when someone rides on the wings of the wind in a sprint or crunches out a climb to touch the face of the gods that it's all him. Not steroids. Not EPO. Not someone else's blood.

I want to believe that once in a generation, Fate gives to us a god in every sport, a man or woman who will change the way the game is played and make the next generation strive to achieve even greater feats.

But mostly, right now, I want to remind Ricco that he is a pezzo di merda and that he has shaken the faith of all who love the sport he used to claim as his own.

Of domestiques

Domestique: a road bicycle racer who works solely for the benefit of his team and it's leader.

George Hincapie is the man, even though he isn't the man in the Tour de France. He is in 12th Tour and he has one exactly one stage - the first stage of the 2006 Tour. That was the first year he rode without Lance Armstrong, who retired after winning his seventh Tour in a row in 2005.

George powers up hills for his lead rider. George breaks wind (not in that way or at least, not that we know of) in the front of the peloton on the straight aways. George guards his lead rider in the two-wheeled scrums as the race 120 kms or more to some picturesque place in France. Surrounded by classic chateaus, towering mountains and bucolic fields, the riders breeze by on a mission to claim a yellow jersey. Seems to me that George Hincapie would be more at home with a finish in an industrial park or near a rail yard. In a sport that has been brought nearly to its knees by year after year after year of doping scandals, on rides George.

Never a hint of scandal, never a scent of doping, never a murmur of discontent. George remains the paragon of a domestique: Never selfish in desire for the malliot jaune, never selfish enough to dope, never selfish in riding kilometer after kilometer for the glory of someone else.

All hail Big George Hincapie.