Northbound

The NYT on Republican efforts — that’s right — to get more condoms to Africa:

EUFAULA, Alabama — Here in this courtly, antebellum town, Alabama’s condom production has survived an onslaught of Asian competition, thanks to the patronage of straitlaced congressmen from this Bible Belt state.

Behind the scenes, the politicians have ensured that companies in Alabama won federal contracts to make billions of condoms over the years for AIDS prevention and family planning programs overseas, though Asian factories could do the job at less than half the cost.

So much for the Religious Right only pushing for abstinence as a means to AIDS prevention in Africa. (Although you ought to see what the South African government has been pushing as an AIDS cure.)

But that’s not really my point. Here’s what the NYT is upset about:

The history of the federal government’s condom purchases embodies the tradeoffs that characterize foreign aid American-style. Alabama’s congressmen have long preserved several hundred factory jobs here by insisting that the United States Agency for International Development buy condoms made here, though, probably in a nod to their conservative constituencies, most have typically done so discreetly.

And:

The United States government, the world’s largest donor of condoms, has bought more than nine billion condoms over the past two decades. Under President Bush’s global AIDS plan, which dedicates billions of dollars to fight the epidemic, a third of the money for prevention must go to promoting abstinence. But that leaves two-thirds for other programs, so the federal government’s distribution of condoms has risen, to over 400 million a year.

Over the years, Usaid could have afforded even more condoms — among the most effective methods for slowing the spread of AIDS — if it had it bought them from the lowest bidders on the world market, as have the United Nations Population Fund and many other donors.

Well, what if they hadn’t done so? I bet you dollars to Trojans that if the Alabama congressmen (Republicans, mind you) hadn’t been fighting to keep the condom plant open, and if the feds had to buy condoms on the open market, the NYT would be calling it outsourcing. They would be in the overseas condom plants, complaining that the workers there weren’t paying minimum wage and didn’t have full FMLA benefits. They really would. They’d be interviewing the people at the Alabama condom plant, too — most of them single parents who made $7 an hour, barely scraping by — complaining that they lost their job to foreign competition.

As it is, the NYT is criticizing GOP congressmen for protecting rural manufacturing jobs, which goes to show that in the eyes of the NYT, Republicans can’t do a damned thing right, not one single damned thing — because you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. Just being a Republican is enough for all your actions to be considered sinful and wicked, even if you’re working to protect the manufacturing jobs of single mothers.

In fact, despite the best efforts of the Alabama delegation, it hasn’t been enough:

Usaid has asked Alatech to make 201 million condoms next year, less than half of this year’s order, and ordered another 100 million made in Korea and China.

Come Nov. 15, Alatech will lay off more than half its work force. Those jobs fell victim to Usaid’s smaller orders for condoms, foreign competition and automation.

The reactions of these workers ranged from philosophical to panicked.

One, Garry Appling, a 41-year-old single mother, has worked before as a $6-an-hour cashier at Krystal, the fast food restaurant, and another at $7.15 an hour in a chicken processing plant. She said her 10-year-old daughter, Anterria, worries that she will have to go back to the chicken plant, a place so cold and wet Ms. Appling often fell ill.

Liberalism, P.J. O’Rourke once wrote, has chased its tail so long that it has finally caught it, and is now chewing on itself, almost to the ears.

This could be the week where the Completely Awful Rodomantande Picks (CARP, because they smell) get something right, which would be bizarre. I mean, let’s say I get the Dallas-Carolina game right? Remember, I picked this in August. If on August first, you had told me at this point that the Cowboys would be 3-3, Terrell Owens would have been in the hospital for a painkiller overdose, and Tony Romo would be the starting quarterback, well, who’s going to predict something like that?

OK, bad example. Here’s the picks:

WEEK 8

Green Bay 29, Arizona 10
Atlanta 26, Cincinnati 3
New Orleans 20, Baltimore 13
Tennessee 17, Houston 3
Jacksonville 27, Philadelphia 3
Kansas City 27, Seattle 14
San Francisco 36, Chicago 13
N.Y. Giants 20, Tampa Bay 16
San Diego 34, St. Louis 20
Denver 30, Indianapolis 27
Cleveland 20, N.Y. Jets 7
Oakland 28, Pittsburgh 21
Carolina 33, Dallas 21
New England 37, Minnesota 28

CNN reports that al-Qaeda baddie Muhsin Musa Matwalli Atwah got in the way of a Pakistani airstrike in North Waziristan back in April. He was responsible, according to the FBI, for the embassy bombings in Africa, and was on their most-wanted terrorists list.

Excellent news, and one wonders why there isn’t more stuff like this being used in the various Congressional campaigns. “My opponent says we must provide ACLU lawyers to people like Mr. Atwah. I say we must provide him with a Hellfire missile from a Predator drone, right up his tailpipe. You decide.”

CNN:

LOS ANGELES, California (Reuters) — Socialite Nicole Richie, whose rail-thin appearance in recent photos has stoked tabloid speculation of an eating disorder, has checked into a treatment facility to address her inability to gain weight, her publicist said Thursday.

“She is working with a team of doctors and specialists whose focus is nutrition,” spokeswoman Nicole Perna said in a statement. “It is important to Nicole that she achieves this goal in a healthy way as this is not a treatment for an eating disorder.”

Richie, the 25-year-old daughter of singer Lionel Richie, has publicly acknowledged her obvious loss of weight in recent months, telling Vanity Fair magazine: “I know I’m too thin right now. … I’m not happy with the way I look.”

Welcome to the Curtis Douglas Edmonds Institute For the Prevention of Thinness. Our proven ten-week diet and zero exercise regimen is the ultimate cure for thinness. Our burrito-based procedures will soon have you on the road to svelte beauty. We start with fresh flour tortillas, taco sauce, refried beans and cheese. Once you complete the arduous burrito orientation process, we then move on to fillings — rice, jalapenos, salsa — and then to hard-core items like fried chicken tenders and guacamole. You will learn how to prepare and consume larger and larger burritos until graduation. If the program is not a complete success, you get an extra two weeks at chimichanga school for no additional charge. Iced tea is also available for $1.50, and comes with free refills.

Before too long, you’ll be wondering where your previously thin body went to, and impressing the heirs of Greek shipping lines with your Tex-Mex prowess. It’s never too late to start.

That’s what the NYT is calling it — they said the words. “Season treason.” Last three paragraphs:

As soon as Halloween is over, Madison Avenue will turn its full attention to another, even more important shopping season: Christmas.

In recent years, retailers and other advertisers have committed what Mr. Smith at Yankelovich described as “season treason” — moving up the starting date for holiday campaigns from the day after Thanksgiving to the day after Halloween.

Now that’s scary.

Ha! The NYT and Mr. Smith don’t know the half of it. At my suburban Jersey grocery stores, they already have the first of the Christmas stuff up. There’s ornaments for sale in the freezer section of Shop-Rite, and there’s Christmas trees in the foyer of Wegmans. Wegmans has some signage up that says something like, “hey, some people like seeing Christmas ornaments up this time of year, so we’re putting them up, and you can make your own decision about it.”

“Season treason”. I like it. But it’s not going to work, long-term. Why? Because no matter what you and I think about it, pre-Thanksgiving (and pre-Halloween) Christmas decorations make money for retailers. They really do. You could ask Sir John Harington about that.

Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason?
For if it prosper, none dare call it treason.

Slate points out an amazing accomplishment, then ruins it:

On Oct. 12, in the basement of a Unitarian church on the town green in Lexington, Mass., a carpenter named Michael Cresta scored 830 points in a game of Scrabble. His opponent, Wayne Yorra, who works at a supermarket deli counter, totaled 490 points. The two men set three records for sanctioned Scrabble in North America: the most points in a game by one player (830), the most total points in a game (1,320), and the most points on a single turn (365, for Cresta’s play of QUIXOTRY).

In the community of competitive Scrabble, of which I am a tile-carrying member, the game has been heralded as the anagrammatic equivalent of Wilt Chamberlain’s 100-point game in 1962 or Don Larsen’s perfect game in the 1956 World Series: a remarkable, wildly aberrational event with potential staying power. Cresta’s 830 shattered a 13-year-old record, 770 points, which had been threatened only infrequently.

Cool! Not that I play Scrabble, or am all that interested in Scrabble, or really care. But that’s neat, and name-checking Don Larsen is cool, too. So that’s a nice human-interest story there. But, of course, we have to overanalyze things, don’t we? Yes, we do. So let’s start with the ad-hominem attacks:

Let’s begin with the fact that Cresta and Yorra aren’t expert-level players. They know the basics—like the 101 two-letter and most of the 1,015 three-letter words—but they’re both rated in the bottom third of tournament players. In Lexington, where the record was set during the club’s regular Thursday-night session, Yorra is known for trying implausible words and hoping they’re in the Official Tournament and Club Word List. Cresta has memorized thousands of obscure words (like those ending in WOOD or starting with OVEN) by reading, writing down, and tape-recording pages from the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary. But he doesn’t study the highly probable words that are essential for climbing the competitive ranks. “These are not guys who have low ratings because they haven’t played in many tournaments,” Mike Wolfberg, the Lexington club’s statistician, told me. “They have low ratings because they aren’t very good.”

Aren’t very good? This Cresta guy’s memorized thousands of obscure words and know all the two-letter words and most of the three-letter words? I wouldn’t care to play against either of them, because I’d get creamed. But then I’d get creamed playing pepper with Tony Womack, or H-O-R-S-E with Isiah Thomas. So there’s that. But still, why run these guys down just because they’re third-rate Scrabble players? They set a record! Didn’t they?

So, how did they break the all-time Scrabble scoring record, set during a tournament by two experts, one of whom has been known ever since as Mr. 770? The simple answer is that Cresta-Yorra was a fluke.

Oh.

More than that, it was a fluke that was caused because Mr. Yorra wasn’t a good Scrabble player:

Looking at the game as a whole, it’s clear that a lack of expertise created the conditions for the record. The play that enabled QUIXOTRY, for one, was a clear mistake. When Yorra played SCAMsTER, which scored 65 points, there were eight other bingos available worth 72 points or more that wouldn’t have dangled a letter in a triple-triple alley. Among them were several common words, including the 94-point dEMOCRAT. Most players would have taken a few extra moments to search for one of those moves.

I just don’t get this. The guy played all his tiles, got 65 points, and Slate is dinging him for a) not getting enough points on the play and b) making it possible for the other guy to score 365 points on a triple-triple word score with a word with a Q and and X in it. First of all, if I have a seven-word “bingo” that I see on the board, I’m taking it, and computer-assisted poindexters who go around pointing out how I could have played better can shove it. Second, how could this guy have forseen that his opponent would score 365 points on the next hand? (Slate even admits that picking the tiles that the winner did to get QUIXOTRY was a 532-to-1 shot.)

Well, that’s what the loser did wrong. But what about the winner?

Technically, Cresta’s strategy was unsound. Fishing for a once-in-a-lifetime play might be understandable in a casual game, where winning is less urgent. But in competitive play—even in a club setting, where there’s less on the line than in a rated tournament—exchanging letters three times, as Cresta did, to enhance some combination of Q, U, I, and X is unorthodox at best, suicidal at worst. (The strategically correct move was to dump the cumbersome Q and move on.) In Scrabble, the player who waits for the miracle word usually loses. The implication: Cresta wasn’t terribly worried about whether he won or lost.

Dude. It’s Scrabble. If you’re terribly worried about who wins and loses at Scrabble, you need to find a nice safe hole to hide in. I don’t get terribly worried over football, which is ten thousand times more important than Scrabble, unless I have money on the Cowboys and they’re getting ready to hork it up like they did on Monday. (“Hork” may not be a legal Scrabble word, in case you’re interested.)

If you’re going to Monday morning quarterback a Scrabble game, that’s fine. It’s a free country. But does Slate really have to spend this much energy tearing down a regular guy who set a once-in-a-lifetime record?

As a struggling novelist, I hate stories like this:

“Les Bienveillantes,” which translates as “The Kindly Ones,” is a 903-page novel written in French by an American author with a defiant Nazi SS officer as its hero. It captivated the publishing industry this month at the Frankfurt Book Fair, where publishers speculated that the American and British rights could fetch as much as $1 million. In the first six weeks after it was published in France, 280,000 copies were sold.

Jonathan Burnham, the senior vice president and publisher of HarperCollins, declined to disclose what the publisher paid for the book but said it was a substantial sum.

If I sent in a letter to a literary agent saying I’d written a 903-page novel in French about the Nazis and asked for representation, I’d get a rejection letter in the mail faster than you can say hasenpfeffer. You would, too. This guy gets a million dollars. I will now rake all the skin off my back with a carpet knife.

Not that I’m jealous or bitter or anything.

But this — this! — is the crowning touch:

Bids for the book had to be submitted by Oct. 17, along with what Mr. Nurnberg described to publishers as a “love letter,” or a description of their feelings about the book, how they interpreted its themes and how they would present it to the buying public.

Oh, vomit. If I went to a publisher and told them they had to write me a love letter about what they thought about my novel, or Vietnamese ex-goth schoolteacher protagonists in general, they’d look at me like I was wearing a hot buttered weasel on my head, and then call security. They really would.

how bout me not blaming you for everything
how bout me enjoying the moment for once
how bout how good it feels to finally forgive you
how bout grieving it all one at a time

thank you india
thank you terror
thank you disillusionment
thank you frailty
thank you consequence
thank you thank you silence

As you may know, I’m a Dallas Cowboys fan living in New Jersey. This is the kind of thing that can drive you to drinking, or listening to Alanis Morissette, whatever you like. But it occurs to me that there are a lot of Cowboys games on national TV this year — a lot. I’ve lived outside Texas for almost five years now, and I’ve gotten somewhat used to not having the Cowboys on every weekend — but this year, they’ve been on a ton. That’s unusual, especially since I’m in the New York viewing area, which has two NFL teams that eat up a lot of the coverage.

So why are the Cowboys on a lot this year — more than they have the last five years? I think it’s because of T.O., He Who Must Not Be Named, and I hadn’t realized that before. So:

thank you t.o.
thank you jerry jones
thank you bledsoe’s immobility
thank you nfl
thank you romo
thank you thank you tv networks

Having said that, I’m getting the DirecTV package for next year, no matter what some people think.

Did you ever think of a line that was so funny that you had to say it, no matter what? Me neither. But stay with me.

The most convenient place for me to go to the grocery store in the middle of the week is the big store in a little town between where I work in Trenton and my home. I was tooling down the far-left aisle, trying to get some of those ready-made Pillsbury biscuits, the kind that make any self-respecting Southerner feel guilty for having to rely on. (I could make biscuits by scratch. I know how. But that’s not the point of the story.)

Anyway, someone was parked in front of the biscuit section of the aisle, trying to figure out the difference between the buttermilk biscuits and the rest, so I went down to the other end of the aisle to grab a pint of sour cream. It was a long aisle, and I passed a young family — mother and two kids — parked by the ice cream, trying to decide on what kind to get. Someone else was walking towards me, and this is what I heard.

“Is that your dinner?”

The speaker was a tall woman, and the remark was directed at the family over by the ice cream. But they weren’t listening. So she said it louder.

“Is that what you’re having for dinner?”

Still no response. Again, this time louder.

“Hey, is that what you’re having for dinner?”

Finally, the light dawns on the family that they’re being addressed. “Hey, kids, look who it is,” the mother says.

“I just wanted to know if you were going to have that ice cream for dinner,” the woman said.

By this time, I had retrieved my sour cream and was working my way back down the aisle — the woman camped out in front of the biscuits was still there, puzzling over a coupon, but she had moved over enough that I could grab a can and be on my way. But I spent the whole time wondering how many times that woman was going to tell that lame joke before someone laughed. I imagined that every time she saw those particular children, she would ask them about eating ice cream — that ten years from now, she would run into these kids at the outlet mall, and ask them if they were still eating ice cream for dinner, and they would ask themselves, what is this person talking about?

Of course, I know what posting this means; random people will be coming up to me now and asking me if I still eat store-bought biscuits. But that’s the price you pay.

The good news:

• I won the overall championship in my survival league; the first time I’ve ever won any kind of fantasy championship. I changed my pick from the Jaguars to the Jets late Saturday night, and then changed it to the Patriots early Sunday morning. My two remaining opponents both took the Jags, who got stomped by the Texans. What was remarkable about this was that I knew, I just knew, the moment I woke up Sunday morning, that the Jaguars were toast and that I should take New England. I can’t explain it. I just knew.
• Won my fantasy league game, too, although I didn’t deserve to. Basically, I don’t have anyone good on my roster other than Peyton Manning. The only other guy on my team who scored a touchdown was this Furrey guy for Detroit that I picked up, and he just barely got his foot over the line on the TD for the score. If his foot is another half-inch on the other side of the chalk, I lose that game.
• Baylor won its game, meaning that it can clinch bowl eligibility with a win over Okie State and an upset in one of its other three games against A&M, Tech, or OU. Difficult but not impossible.
• Outstanding — just outstanding — week for the Completely Repulsive Algorithmic Picks, going 10-3 this week, predicting the Oakland, Green Bay and Houston upsets. Would have been 11-2 if not for the 62-yarder against the Eagles. And got within one ragged little measly point of predicting the final score of the Raiders-Cardinals game accurately. This doesn’t get me level with the world — I’m 47-52 for the year — but it’s close.

The bad news:

• I had money on the Cowboys. What a revoltin’ development.