A new poll shows that seven out of every five of Americans don't bother to do the math. "When asked, 53% percent said that, when reading or hearing anything that involves two or more numbers, they don't even try to do the math," said lead pollster Bradley Noel. "Another 49% said they will often think about doing the math but ultimately decide against it. Only 19% said they will actually add things up to see if the report makes sense." The results were greeted with elation from the 47 Republicans and 38 Democrats in the 100-member Senate. "This is great news," said Senate Majority Leader Pam Crader(D). "When discussing budgets or taxes, we can pretty much make stuff up: millions, trillions, deficits, surpluses -- it's all the same to them." Advertisers were equally enthusiastic. "This will allow us to offer consumers 1500 free hours of service during their first month of membership," said AOL marketer Ted Rawlins. Only the Department of Education has expressed misgivings about the findings. "Mathematical apathy is one of the top three educational problems this nation faces," DOE Chairman David Kahn warned. "The other one is illiteracy."

It’s not often that I disagree with Joshua Micah Marshall, but this whole “Trent Lott has got to go!” thing is a total crock.

Let me preface all this by pointing out that I rank Trent Lott right up there with athlete’s foot on the list of admirable organisms. And no one would be happier than I to see him resign in disgrace. But what’s this donnybrook about, anyway? It’s about a single sentence, muttered at a birthday party, filtered through the reinterpretation engine of the nation’s pundits.

For the record, here’s exactly what Lott said. He observed that, when Strom Thurman ran for president in 1948, Lott’s home state, Mississippi, voted for him. “We’re proud of it,” Lott continued. “And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over the years.”

God alone know what he meant by “these problems,” but note that there no mention of race. Pundits, though, have been quick to point out that Thurmond ran on a platform of segregation. Some have therefore concluded that Lott’s remarks were tantamount to an endorsement of the segregationist policies of the 40′s.

That’s quite a stretch, if you ask me. What’s much more likely is that Lott was engaging in a little bit of birthday hyperbole, stating that Thurmond is a good guy and therefore he would have made a good president. You and I and the American constituency of 1948 all agree that Thurmond would have been a terrible president, but lionizing a birthday boy is hardly unusual for any of us. Apparently Lott made a statement almost identical to this (“if we had elected this man 30 years ago, we wouldn’t be in the mess we are today.”) at a 1980 Thurmond rally. Some have seized on this a proof that Lott meant what he said this time. I’d argue just the opposite. I’d say it proves that he was just pulling stock phrases out of a hat and tossing them at the Senator willy-nilly.

But, okay, for the sake of argument, let’s say that Lott does support segregation, and chose to reveal this in a cryptic, off-the-cuff remark made at a birthday party. Where does that leave you? Does the revelation that Lott is a Good Ol’ Boy shock anyone? Are there people saying “Jeeze, up until last week I though Trent Lott was a tireless crusader for racial equality and civil rights, but this utterance has completely turned me around!” No, of course not. Democrats aren’t seizing on this because it changes their opinion of Lott one iota, but simply because they can.

And that’s exactly what happened to Clinton, you’ll recall. I bunch of people disliked him, they caught him making ambiguous statements, and they raked him over the coals. Remember, Clinton wasn’t impeached because he had sex with that woman, but because he lied about it. There, as here, the issue wasn’t what he’d done, or what he believed, but simply what he had said.

Few people are criticing Lott for actually embracing segregation policies; they are instead criticing him for saying something that could be construed as approbation for segregation. “Any suggestion that a segregated past was acceptable or positive is offensive and it is wrong,” Bush said today. That’s right: Lott’s suggestion is wrong, but no comment on whether it would be wrong for Lott to actually believe that a segregated past was acceptable. The same goes for the Democrats. Lieberman said “Senator Lott’s recent comments about Strom Thurmond’s 1948 presidential campaign were hurtful, divisive, and fundamentally un-American.” The comments, the comments.

At what point did we all become more concerned about what people accidentally say than what they actually believe or do? Lott says something stupid and folks want to run him out on a rail; meanwhile, not a single person in the government has lost their job over the intelligence failures which culminated in the WTC attacks, despite the fact that 9/11 was a very real event (as opposed to mere words) and that some people are clearly culpable, of negligence if nothing more.

Besides, if Lott supports segregation, I’d rather he tell us outright that keep it secret. Furthermore, we have no shortage of idiots in office, and they are as free to express their opinions, no matter how asinine, as the rest of us are. It’s odd how liberals drop their stalwart defense of the first amendment whenever race becomes a factor.

The Republican National Committee and George Bush have every right to can Lott if they feel that he has become a political liability. But the rest of us can’t just demand he be unseated because of a jumble of words that may or may not express some view we find reprehensible. If you believe in democracy — and I do — then you have to face the fact that sometimes people you don’t like wind up in office, and it’s not your place to overturn the will of the voters, no matter how wrongheaded you think those voters might be.

As The Queen and I watched Solaris, we couldn’t help but notice that the teenage couple sitting behind us was in dire need of a garroting. The girl yammered through pretty much the entire thing. Occasionally someone would glare at her and she’d say “oops, sorry!” and then remain silent for the shortest possible length of human-perceptable time before launching into a verbatium account of the great AIM session she’d enjoyed that afternoon.

The guy was quiet throughout most of the movie, except during the three or four scenes which prominently featured George Clooney’s ass. The kid apparently had some sort of logorrheic post-hypnotic suggestion that the sight of Clooney’s ass would trigger.

[Scene prominently featuring George Clooney's ass begins] Uh, whoa, uh, hah hah, man, this is a long movie. I know it’s long because I, uh, I am looking at my watch right now, and notice what a long movie this is. I mean long as in uninteresting. There’s a lot of stuff in this, uh, movie that I’m not interested in, like, uh, the dialog, and George Clooney’s ass, and other things that I’m totally not interested in looking at, like George Clooney’s ass, which I don’t even know is in this movie because I am looking at my watch at the moment, but I’m just giving that as an example as something which may or may not be in this movie that I, personally, would have no interest in looking at. Have you ever been to SeaWorld? My favorite part of SeaWorld is [Scene prominently featuring George Clooney's ass ends] the, uh … hah hah, uh, hmmmm, penguins, hm.

I was quite the Sci-Fi buff in high school. Not to the point of learning Klingon or memorizing the serial number on the Star Wars trash compactor (3263827), but I would rent any video that had anything remotely futuristic or astronomical on i’s box. It was this lack of discrimination that led me to one day rent the original Solaris, a film hailed by critics as “Russia’s answer to 2001″ and hailed by me as “unbelievably boring”. No lasers, no acid-blooded aliens, no Carrie Fisher in a bikini — what’s to like?

Now, as an adult, 2001: A Space Odyssey is my favorite movie of all time. So I was eager to give the film another chance, especially since this new version was by one of my favorite directors (Steven Soderbergh) and starring one of my favorite actors (George Clooney). And what’s the verdict? Solaris is a beautiful film, full of interesting characters, engaging ideas, and philosophical quandaries around every turn. And it’s a little boring.

As the film opens, it’s unclear when the film is set — it certainly doesn’t look like the far future. But just as the viewer gets comfortable watching Clooney live his early-21st-century life, a couple of guys show up and ask him to go visit a space station. Something screwy is going on up yonder, and Dr. Chris Kelvin, as a profession psychologist, has been chosen to go straighten things out.

So the next thing you know, Clooney is in a space suit, tramping around space station Prometheus, and discovering things to be in complete disarray. One guy has committed suicide, another was killed by security; the remaining crewmen are loopy, paranoid, and unwilling to explain what’s going on; there’s even a kid running around the ship, a kid who shouldn’t be there at all. It becomes immediately clear that whatever is causing the mayhem is as much physical as it is psychological. Worse still, Clooney becomes another victim of the — whatever — even before his first day is through.

Solaris is a ponderous film: every event and speech is pregnant with meaning, and Soderbergh gives you plenty of long, quiet pauses to mull things over. It’s also, thankfully, a movie devoid of Good Guys and easy solutions: Clooney, for example, rapidly becomes as screwed up as everyone else on board, and even ups the ante a bit. This isn’t one of those stories where the characters know what’s going on but the audience doesn’t, or vice versa; everyone seems to be stumbling around in the same fog. At no point does a scientist in a white lab coat announce “we’ve figured out the source of the problem, and I shall now explain it in layman’s terms”. If you like your films cryptic — and I do — Solaris is a must-see.

And Clooney is terrific, of course. Can we all just agree that he’s a fine, fine actor? Yes, I know all about E.R. and that godawful Batman movie, but look at Three Kings, look at Out of Sight, look at Thin Red Line. And if you remain unconvinced, look at this film, which he (and along with co-star Natascha McElhone) pretty much carries. When Clooney acts confused and terrified in Solaris, the entire audience feels confused and terrified.

Solaris is a riveting film, mostly. I must admit that the final fourth of the film (that’s secret code for “The Ending”) left me cold, although I can’t put my finger on why. Perhaps simply because the director had to provide resolution to a story that was so aggressively open-ended. As Soderbergh chose some threads to tie up and left others dangling, it was if I could hear the grinding as he tried to downshift the movie to the point where he could put it in park. But even so, this is one of the finest science-fiction flicks to come down the pike in a while, and I recommend it to anyone in the mood for goregous special effects and some deep, deep thoughts.

The lobby of my work building contains a small cafe, and for several hours yesterday a barbershop quartet stood outside its entrance and belted out holiday tunes. People entering the lobby reacted to the singers as they would to a cloud of chlorine gas.

This morning I ducked into the cafe to get coffee, and couldn’t help but notice that the young lady behind the till looked exhausted. I’m not one to make small talk with strangers, but this woman looked so wretched that my sympathy was aroused. “Jeeze, ” I remarked, “Rough night?”

“Couldn’t sleep,” she mumbled. “Nightmares. Christmas carols.”

Thing That I am Sure Exists Even Before I Conduct a Google Search To Try and Find It

Freeway Karaoke Machine: A microphone / headphones / headset device that you can plug into your car radio and sing into while you drive. It strips the vocal track out of songs and puts your own voice in it’s place.

Google says …?

…

Still searching …

…

Holy shit, that’s a million dollar idea! I thought of it first!

Links

Advert Calendar.

Finally, the exciting and challenging sport of curling has been faithfully ported to the PC home computer!

A brief history of Hoax Photographs.

Browbeaten

The Queen announced yesterday that I am getting “old man eyebrows.” Oh great — more hallmarks of my own mortality, that’s what I need. Like I wasn’t already freaked out about the fact that I now know the words to each and every song played over my local grocery store’s “Shopping Music Network”.

Actually, I can kinda shrug this one off. If you ask me, this sounds like one of those things that companies make up and then insist you have and then try and sell you a cure for, like halitosis and panty lines and cholera.

Guy: What’s wrong, Other Guy?

Other Guy: I didn’t get that promotion — again! And my wife is having an affair with you.

Guy: It must be your O.M.E.

Other Guy: My what?

Guy: Your Old Man Eyebrows, Chet. Why aren’t you using The Brow Plow?

Cthulhu T’yota!!

Dear Toyota,

Please stop making cars in colors that don't exist. They are driving (ha!) me crazy. I am specifically referring to that new ECHO in the shade of goldish silvery blueish brownish yellow. I'm pretty sure that color isn't even on the spectrum. It's like somewhere between ultraviolet and Channel 7. It's like some intelligent color from an H. P. Lovecraft story that slowly takes over your mind until your main hobbies become chanting and being eldritch. I wouldn't mind so much, but trying to figure out why someone would buy a car in this alleged "color" makes my head hurt. Haven't they noticed that their vehicle is covered in paint from Dimension G? It like those days in college when you would get really stoned and start wondering how you could know for sure that what you saw as "red" is also what everyone else saw as "red". I am like that all the time now.

Three Cliches That Never Really Caught On

• Making mountains out of mashed potatoes.
• I’m so hungry I could eat a sandwich.
• Cutting off Michael Jackson’s nose to spite his face.

The FBI issued a strongly worded bulletin today, warning Americans that one or more Rob Schneider films could be released in the next few weeks. "We're seeing a significant uptick in Rob Schneider 'chatter' similar to what we saw just prior to June 3," FBI Coordinator Jean McCloskey said, referring to the date in 2001 when "The Animal" was released. "We'retherefore asking all citizens to be extra vigilent." Earlier this morning the White House raised the Rob Schneider Alert System to Code Orange -- the second highest threat level possible -- and tightened security around theaters nationwide. The Justice Department, meanwhile, announced that they would be freezing the assets of "Touchstone Pictures" and other organizations suspected of funding Rob Schneider-related operations. Touchstone is believed to be behind the series of video spots recently broadcast on network television that ominously promise that a new Rob Schneider film will soon open "everywhere".