Nobody's Business

The Autoba(h)n Follies

According to Deutsche Welle,

Several [German] politicians want to ban listening to music behind the wheel, saying it’s a distraction and increases the risk of having an accident. "The dangers of causing an accident rise drastically when you play music and drive," Peter Danckert of the Social Democrats (SPD) told the best-selling newspaper Bild. "I want a complete ban on music for drivers." Danckert was joined in his push for tunes-free driving by several politicians on the other side of the political spectrum. Katherina Reiche of the opposition Christian Democrats (CDU) also told Bild she wanted to put an end to music behind the wheel. She noted that parliament had already passed a law outlawing the use of cell phones for drivers, and that she and others want to push for similar legislation regarding music. "Music is just as much of a distraction as cell phones," she said. "We urgently need a ban on it along with fines."

Crazy, huh?

Now, I'll come clean and confess that I changed something in the paragraph above. I switched the word smoke for the word music. The politicians quoted aren't advocating an automotive ban on playing music, but on smoking.

If you just felt your immediate, instinctual opposition to a music ban dissipate when you learned that it's really a tobacco ban we're talking about, then tell me how a prohibition on music is fundamentally different.

Every day untold millions of drivers fiddle with the controls of their car stereos — or try to find just the right CD in the pile of stuff on the backseat — while doing sixty, seventy miles an hour. In full-throttle traffic, and with Led Zeppelin's When the Levee Breaks blaring from my speakers, I've been known to bang out the drum part on my steering wheel in an unintentionally comical homage to John Bonham. I've noticed that high-energy tracks — anything from Fountains of Wayne to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan — make me drive faster, and I doubt I'm the only one.

And that's just music. Many other activities are no doubt just as potentially distracting and dangerous when you're driving, from eating a burger (hey, let's ban drive-throughs!) to getting busy with Divine Brown yelling at your toddler he'd better stop kicking your seat now.

The only reason politicians can declare smoking in cars verboten is that smokers have somehow become everyone's favorite punching bag — to be mocked, vilified, and persecuted with neither reason nor consequence.

It's worth remembering that on Germany's famed Autobahn, there's no speed limit. So you can tweak your turbo, stomp on the gas, and pass non-daredevils at a blistering 180 miles per hour if you wish.

But lighting a cigarette — whaddayanuts? That stuff will kill you.

Legalize It! (Catfishing, That Is)

Noodlers are people who like to go fishing for 'cat.' Catfish, to be precise. They lower themselves into shallow rivers and get their fishing gear ready — that's their bare hands, in this case. Take Howard Ramsey, a noodler from Paris, Missouri.

Once he locates a hole in the [river] bank, he will hold his breath and go underwater. Then, while a friend holds his ankles, he will swim into the hole headfirst. The catfish often meets him at the door, as he puts it. That's when things can get interesting. "When I grab that catfish by the jaw, I'll kick my legs to tell my buddy that it's time to pull me out," Ramsey said. "I've caught catfish as big as 62 pounds that way." Ramsey takes pride in the fact that he comes from a long line of noodlers. His dad was a noodler, and his grandfather was, too.

Problem is, in Missouri and Kansas, boasting that you're from a long line of noodlers is like saying your family has been in the moonshine business for generations. While no one will probably go running to the cops, it's been a vaguely disreputable activity since Missouri lawmakers made noodling illegal back in 1919.

If the legislators were trying to outlaw risky behavior, the measure missed any effect on Ramsey, who's been fined as much as 500 dollars for his brand of catfish-catching.

"I have a lot of scars from where big flatheads have bit me," Ramsey said. "When you swim into one of their holes, they aren't too happy to see you. I've had them clamp down so tight on my arm that I didn't know if they'd ever let go. They have rows of tiny teeth, and when you try to pull your arm out of their mouth, they'll just skin you. I even had one fish that tore my tennis shoe right off my foot. I couldn't walk for a couple days. But that's all part of it. It can be a dangerous sport, but it's worth it. When you pull a 50-, 60-pound flathead out of a hole by hand and your heart starts thumping, you know it's worth it."

Thanks to Ramsey and other enthusiasts who united under the 'Noodlers Anonymous' banner, the Missouri law is now undergoing some changes.

In December, the Missouri Conservation Commission approved an experimental season that will allow noodling in stretches of three Missouri rivers — the Mississippi, the St. Francis and the Fabius — for a limited time this summer. But fishermen such as Ramsey and the 200 men and women who belong to his Noodlers Anonymous group aren't satisfied. They think it's time for Missouri to have a statewide season. They have brought their fight to the General Assembly, lobbying state legislators for their help. In the process, noodling has become an unusual issue in this year's session.

If you want to see with your own eyes how these guys wrestle huge ugly fish to the surface, check out the "Okie Noodling" DVD.

Too Sexy For Her Pompoms

DVDs of American Beauty and Bring It On are going to be very, very popular in Texas. You see, Texas politicians have finally begun doing something about the local cheerleader problem, as they're way too ribald and sexy. The cheerleaders, people, not the politicians — try to stay with me here, OK?

So, after voting to install big-screen televisions in the legislature and watching 1,769 hours of gyrating-girls footage, the Texas House approved a bill banning "sexually suggestive" cheerleading routines.

"Girls can get out and do all of these overly sexually performances and we applaud them and that's not right," said Democratic Rep. Al Edwards of Houston, who filed the legislation. Edwards argued that lascivious exhibitions are a distraction for high school students that result in pregnancies, high school dropouts, contraction of AIDS and herpes and "cutting off their youthful life at an early age."

Jimmy Patterson of Sticky Doorknobs was good enough to get a response from the cheering squads and their fans.

Cheerleaders from across the state issued a statement that read simply, "Ohmigod, like, ohmigod!" Cheerleader supporters say the only options left for their girls will be to either stand perfectly still during the game, or text message their routines to fans who bring cell phones.

30,000 Pot Users To Die Annually, UK Docs Say

According to this article in the Guardian, which quotes an editorial in the British Medical Journal,

Thirty thousand Britons a year might eventually die from cannabis smoking, doctors claimed.

In other news, the physicians insisted that the sky might eventually turn green with purple polka dots, and also that they'll soon achieve cold fusion using only an umbrella and a two-pound bratwurst.

That 30,000 Brits could die from pot every year year flies in the face of everything that's known about cannabis. The correct number is more likely close to zero, if the U.S. is any guide. And no, my source isn't Tommy Chong; it's the Centers for Disease Control. In a study that categorizes and tallies every single death in the United States over a twenty-year period (1979-1998), the CDC found a grand total of 23 fatalities attributable to cannabis — that's 1.15 deaths a year.

Never one to paint too rosy a picture, I must confess that 2001 saw a scary spike of some 260 percent. You see, that was the year U.S. health authorities had to deal with an almost epidemic three marijuana deaths — although upon closer inspection, one turned out to be misclassified, and the other two fatalities were blamed on pot because there was nothing else to blame them on.

Even the 23 pot victims the CDC found over the 20-year period seem iffy, cause-of-death-wise. After all, marijuana itself is so supremely non-toxic you'd have to smoke tens of thousands of joints in a few hours to get a fatal overdose. But I'll be charitable for a change and accept the CDC finding of a little over one marijuana-induced death per year (although I can't help pointing out that every year, 300 times that many Americans drown in their tubs; oddly, I have yet to hear a single politician declare a War on Bathtubs).

Anyway, how did the British physicians come up with 30,000 annual pot deaths, a number that exceeds even the wildest, most reckless fabulations of America's drug czars? Simple: It's a lame extrapolation of tobacco data.

The authors, from Imperial College London and St Mary's hospital, London, argued that 120,000 deaths are caused among 13 million tobacco smokers each year, from cancers, respiratory disorders and heart and lung disease. If the health effects were the same, the corresponding figure from 3.2 million cannabis smokers would be 30,000.

It's true that smoking a joint means inhaling tobacco — and that unlike cannabis, tobacco is undeniably bad for your health. The solution is simple. I'm waiting for the good doctors to recommend that from now on, cannabis users only inhale hashish through a little pipe, which cuts out the need for tobacco. There: Deaths down to zero, everybody happy. (Well, maybe not everybody. These very same concerned docs, who are obviously very creative, will then point out that pot use causes the munchies; ergo, cookie-dough consumption by hungry pot smokers might lead to as many as 2.8 million fat, bloated corpses a year. But time and space dictate that I deal with only one neo-prohibitionist crackpot theory at a time.)

The most amusing quote in the Guardian article comes from prof. John Henry, one of the editorial's co-authors:

"Even if the number of deaths attributable to cannabis smoking turned out to be a fraction of the 30,000 we believe could be possible, cannabis smoking would still be described as a major health hazard."

You follow? Even if what these medical mercenaries say is blatantly ridiculous (which it is), by their own admission they'll still insist that they're right, no matter what. They've made up their minds, and that's that, and damn the facts.

In war, truth is usually the first casualty. Drug wars, clearly, are no exception.

Italian Mouse Foils Pentagon Censor

Via BBC News comes word that you really don't have to be a rocket scientist to work for the Pentagon:

A few hours after the Pentagon published the report [about the death of secret agent Nicola Calipari] on its website, a few Italian readers found they could make the blacked-out paragraphs reappear by cutting and pasting them from the site into a Word document. Salvatore Schifani, a 30-year-old IT worker ... said he had just come home from a night out and wanted to check the latest news before going to sleep. "I played around on my computer by highlighting the text, I found out the words were still there under the blacked-out bits," he told web-based Repubblica radio.

The military, having lost a trillion dollars to careless accounting and employee malfeasance, now apparently lacks the funds — or merely the competence — to keep secret stuff secret. Amazing.

Steve Jobs: From Prince to Prick

In an image-obsessed fit of pique, Apple Computer has banished books published by John Wiley & Sons from the shelves of Apple's 105 retail stores — all because of Wiley's plans to publish an unauthorized biography of Mr. Jobs, Apple's chief executive.

I was going to blog about what an unpleasant, self-destructive prick Steve Jobs turns out to be. Here's a guy who is such a totalitarian control freak that he sues journalists for publishing news that Apple hasn't sanctioned. Here's a titan of technology whose idea of serving customers is to remove at least two dozen books from Apple stores — including The OS X Files, GarageBand for Dummies, and Macs for Dummies — because their publisher has the temerity to also print a biography of Mr. Jobs that he hasn't vetted. I was going to write about how Mr. Jobs is squandering untold millions of dollars' worth of goodwill that Apple painstakingly built up over the years thanks to a brilliant integrated PR / marketing / advertising campaign that pits the Mac as a nimble David against the slow-witted, lumbering Goliath that is Microsoft. I was going to point out the hilarious hypocrisy of Mr. Jobs exhorting Apple customers to "think different" while seeking to crush the ones who dare color outside the lines he has arbitrarily drawn. I was going to do all that despite being a diehard fan of the company's products who has bought 30,000-plus dollars of Apple stuff over the past 15 years.

But then I thought, nah, looks like Geekculture.com already nailed it pretty good with this comic.

Is That a Giant Burrito In Your Pocket, Or...?

Nothing on Reno 911 could possibly top this. With thanks to Reason:

CLOVIS, N.M. Apr 29, 2005 — A call about a possible weapon at a middle school prompted police to put armed officers on rooftops, close nearby streets and lock down the school. All over a giant burrito. Someone called authorities Thursday after seeing a boy carrying something long and wrapped into Marshall Junior High. The drama ended two hours later when the suspicious item was identified as a 30-inch burrito filled with steak, guacamole, lettuce, salsa and jalapenos and wrapped inside tin foil and a white T-shirt.

Whole story here. I'm starting to get curious about Clovis, New Mexico. Its police force seems to have a real penchant for doing stupid and unnecessary things.