VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN Today's Washington Post had an opinion piece by editor/columnist Colbert I. King that left me cold. The piece is not posted online for some reason, but I'm going to quote liberally from it. If you want to track it down, follow the link, click on "columnists" on the left and click on "Colbert I. King" on the list that's generated; it will bring you to a page with his archived work, which presumably will include this story. It's titled, "Chandra Levy: The Bigger Story," and I almost passed it by because I've been largely disinterested in the entire event.

But I read it this morning. And I read it again. And it's more than disturbing. Here's King:

Chandra Levy's story is an older and more familiar one. And it is a reality that we would just as soon pretend does not exist... At bottom, it's about violence against women.

Forget all that talk about this being a new day for women, that in 2002 women in the District of Columbia are no longer treated differently or looked down on because of their sex. Don't believe for one second that the era of abusive partners working overtime on the minds -- and bodies -- of women is over...

Guess how many reports of violence against women were made to D.C. police in 2000. I'm talking about domestic violence, sexual assaults, desperate calls for civil protective orders. Ready? More than 22,500.

That's right. Violence against women made up about 50 percent of all reported crimes to the D.C. police in that year.

Bottom line: Less than 10 percent of calls for domestic violence in the District result in a conviction.

Count the victims. Count the homes that have been violated. Count the trusted relationships broken. Count the children who have seen the slapping and biting and kicking and cursing and who are more than likely to grow up and do the same damn thing.

Count the police officers who have said, as one domestic crime victim reports: "There are too many real crimes being committed to be dealing with stuff like this."

CAFFEINE DEUX Now you can find the explanatory essay on Caffeine and the contents for the entire run online. I should find a few moments to get the first few issues completely posted over the weekend. Maybe. Minus the groovy artwork.

RICHMOND'S DRUG OF CHOICE The slow march of time. I've posted the main page for the Caffeine archives, along with an unpublished 1997 article that was to relaunch the magazine, but never materialized. I'm pretending that the article tells a bit of the story behind our foray into madness. It's a good read, if nothing else. I'll be working on getting everything else up before the June bugs arrive.

UNFORTUNATE. BUT LEMONY. My friend Liz sent me an email recently asking if I had read any of the Lemony Snicket books. (Lemony Snicket being the author of a series of books about three orphans, and the books themselves being collected under the banner of "A Series of Unfortunate Events," which apparently is how publisher HarperCollins views the entire venture, despite its overhwleming financial and critical success.) I had not. But I will now, thanks to a visit to the Lemony Snicket website and my gift certificate to Amazon.com that AT&T sent me. I have now mentioned more corporations than I am honestly comfortable with. This morning, I heard that Lemony would be interviewed on NPR's "Fresh Air." Now I wonder if I should take the afternoon off work.

Lemony Snicket was born before you were, and is likely to die before you as well. His family has roots in a part of the country which is now underwater, and his childhood was spent in the relative splendor of the Snicket Villa which has since become a factory, a fortress and a pharmacy and is now, alas, someone else's villa.

Though his formal training was chiefly in rhetorical analysis, he has spent the last several eras researching the travails of the Baudelaire orphans. This project, being published serially by HarperCollins, takes him to the scenes of numerous crimes, often during the offseason. Eternally pursued and insatiably inquisitive, a hermit and a nomad, Mr. Snicket wishes you nothing but the best.

MERGER MANIA I hate to do it again, but I start the morning off with a link to the newest SatireWire feature about the religious merger between Hinduism and Judaism.

Hinjew leaders today conceded the merger of Hinduism and Judaism has not worked out as planned, as instead of forming a super-religion to fight off the common Islamic enemy, they had instead created a race of 900 million people who, no matter how many times they are reincarnated, can never please their mothers.

"On paper, this was a textbook alliance — two smaller competitors join forces to take on a larger adversary," said New Delhi resident Chandra Gopan. "But the synergies are just not there. For instance, I still believe I must pursue my own dharmic path to ultimate happiness, but when I get there, I just know my mother will find something wrong with it."

ODD TODD Okay, so my friend Angie just emailed me with this link, and I decided to dash past it before I headed to a meeting (I'm NOT at work). It's hilarious. Well, it's actually depressingly hilarious. It's probably more funny if you have a job. If you don't, it might help with your esteem issues. Unless you're dealing with unemployment with unease and a fair amount of residual anti-social behavior. Anyway, make sure you turn your computer's sound on. I'll explore the rest of the site later, but for now, consider Odd Todd to be my whimsical link of the day.

WHAT INDIA AND PAKISTAN ARE THINKING A nice summary from the UK's Guardian newspaper of what various news agencies and publications are saying about the rising tensions and threat of war on the subcontinent. Nice, as in comprehensive. There's actually not a lot of reassurance to be found. By all appearances, the popular line in both Pakistan and India mirrors that of the more strident military and political leaders. It involves pretty complete absolution of one party coupled with harsh indictments of the other. Here's a quick sampling:

The Pioneer carries an equally passionate argument for war, by columnist Sandhya Jain. She argues that India should not only strike back at Kashmiri militants, but that it should seize back the vast swathe of territory known in Pakistan as Azad (free) Kashmir: "The goals are self-evident - the decimation of terrorist camps across the border, and the recovery of Occupied Kashmir [sic]."

The mood in the Pakistani press is similarly fevered. The daily Dawn echoes the official view that the current crisis is entirely down to Indian aggression, and the refusal of Delhi to negotiate.

KNIT FOR CHANGE Yah. I thought it was a joke, too. And then I stumbled across a call for action from the Revolutionary Knitting Circle. Their tie-in to the upcoming G8 Summit in Alberta, Canada, is a Global Knit-In on June 26.

On that day, we ask you to organize a group of knitters and learners to knit (or some other subsistence-related productive activity) at one of the seats of corporate power in your communities. Transform those spaces through knitting. Create 'soft' barriers of knitted yarn to reclaim spaces from the elite to the common good. As the community is knitted together, corporate commerce is slowed or halted and the community can prosper.

FROM THE BOWELS OF THE PENTAGON SatireWire strikes again with it's take on the spate of warnings about the potential for future terrorist strikes on U.S. soil.

While praising the Bush administration for its sudden willingness to share information on terror warnings, critics today suggested the White House had volunteered too much after Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told a Senate panel the danger was so great that he had soiled himself... "I have the greatest respect for Don Rumsfeld... but the penultimate head of the armed forces cannot go around telling people he's no longer in control of his bowels," said Sen. Pete Domenici, R-NM.

REVISITING EINSTEIN The Atlantic Monthly offers up this article originally published in 1947 and written by Albert Einstein, in which he begins "Since the completion of the first atomic bomb nothing has been accomplished to make the world more safe from war, while much has been done to increase the destructiveness of war." He goes on to outline what he perceived to be a growing passivity about the then-increasing likelihood of armed nuclear conflict, and then to suggest ways in which such conflict might best be averted. Not all of his thoughts have withstood the passage of five decades, nor do I find myself nodding along in earnest agreement at all of his suggestions. But as India and Pakistan continue to scuff the dirt in southeast Asia, and more nations and independent players gain access to increasingly destructive weapons, there could be a worse time than today to begin to honestly rethink and possibly reshape the way the world dialogues about security and conflict. Einstein started a conversation in 1947 that may well be worth resuming.

THE SURREALIST COMPLIMENT GENERATOR Thanks to Andrew Sullivan's site for pointing me in the direction of one of the better random comment generators on the web. With randomly spawned compliments like "Flies dance operas to your wisdom" and "Hermaphrodites around the galaxy desire that you turn your rock and crochet bowl to its loudest setting," I just can't imagine dating ever being the same.

PLAYING DEFENSE AGAINST MICROSOFT Sometimes, it's easy to look at mega-functions within the government and paint a clean, general picture of them as being bureaucratic monstrosities with no ability to make smart, rational and honest decisions. Like, for instance, the Department of Defense. But recent reports are showing the DoD has some brains and some guts, at least when it comes to the acquisition and development of useable software applications. This Post article looks at the scrap being played out over "open source" software in the military. Open source are applications that are non-proprietary and allow their development, or source, code to be viewed and modified; Microsoft (surprise, right?) hates open source.

In what one military source called a "barrage" of contacts with officials at the Defense Information Systems Agency and the office of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld over the past few months, the company [Microsfot] said "open source" software threatens security and its intellectual property. But the effort may have backfired. A May 10 report prepared for the Defense Department concluded that open source often results in more secure, less expensive applications and that, if anything, its use should be expanded.

Jonathan Shapiro, who teaches computer science at Johns Hopkins University, said: "There is data that when the customer can inspect the code the vendor is more responsive. . . . Microsoft is in a very weak position to make this argument. Whose software is the largest, most consistent source of security flaws? It's Microsoft."

WELL. TICKLE ME PINK. I am too easily impressed by things like Colorgenics, which presents you with 8 colored boxes and asks you to select them in order of preference. It then generates a brief report that supposedly gives insight into who you are and where you are at the moment (where you are, as in in your life). It was pretty on-target, so I did it a second time and totally mucked with my color preferences by choosing colors I hated first. That was pretty spot-on, too. Like the esteemed Magic 8-Ball, Colorgenics is a fun-filled romp through the Land of Made-Up Answers To Life. In other words, I don't think it's gonna change your life. Now, getting colored contacts might change your life...

START MAKING SENSE This Washington Post online chat with a former CIA/State analyst now teaching at the National War College is a breath of fresh air. Dr. Melvin Goodman calls it pretty straight, and cuts through a lot of the crap that's blasting the networks and front pages this week. Here's some outtakes (follow the link for more):

... this talk of inevitable attacks is hysterical and mindless and very political. And we should be very careful in simply pouring an additional $5 billion into the intelligence community. Most of the corrections to be made would cost nothing. For example, we need better strategic analysis at FBI and CIA, but that takes time and patience and better organization. Money will not fix that one. Money would be better spent on computers for INS and the FBI (Freeh, by the way, hated computers and refused to use one), more technology for the Coast Guard (which plays an essential role), etc. Simply cancel national missile defense (Rumsfeld's dream program) and we will have the money we need. Build NMD [national missile defense] and the opportunity cost will dictate that we will never have the money we need for the necessary programs.

My basic thought is that Rumsfeld is out of control. He spends too much time in front of the camera and the media treat him as if he is some kind of philosopher king dispensing arcane knowledge. He should not even be addressing such as issues as the tactics and objectives of terrorist groups or so-called terrorist states. That is not why we have a secretary of defense. A TV camera and a mike does not add up to a license to spout universal knowledge.

INSTANT EXPERTS Howard Kurtz hits the nail once again this morning with his summation of the news of the day. He kicks it off by pointing out that much of the latest media chatter about threat assessments and the like is pretty damn similar to the way they babble on about politics: they take a thread and try to make a rope. None of which is to say that the current rising tensions won't prove to be valid (Saturn and Pluto meet again Sunday for the first time since September 11, if you're looking for less-than-concrete reasons to be nervous), but the reality is that no one knows, yet everyone is pretending to know. Here's Kurtz:

The problem is, as any reporter who's covered intelligence knows, this stuff is inherently murky, with unreliable sources making unproven claims from the shadows (or in intercepted communications). So all the righteous indignation about how Clinton should have done this and Bush should have known that should be taken with a sackful of salt. It would be nice, of course, if the FBI and the CIA would talk to each other. But divining the significance of their intelligence is tough, even for career professionals.

CRAP TOWN Oh my. I feel so useless, in the sense that I should have thought of this idea a long, long time ago. The Idler is running an online competition to select The Crappiest Town in the UK. The submissions, as The Idler staff note, are well-written and clever. And the towns, well... the towns sound positively dreadful. I've almost been convinced never to visit England.

Meanwhile, we continue to be impressed by the high quality of your writing, and surprised at the dreadful quality of British life. Please keep them coming in - we know they're out there, and we'd like to here about them. We would not like, however, to hear this joke anymore: "the best thing in this town is the road out". It is not funny. Neither is it clever, or original to tell a towns detractor to 'get a life' if you don't agree with them.

BREAKING DOWN THE BREAKDOWN "Bitter Lemons" is a website that periodically features essays and interviews with or by Israeli and Palestinians, usually presented in a point-counterpoint fashion. Smart stuff, a little better thought out than what you'll read in the newspapers, and sometimes helpful for getting at the heart of some complex issues surrounding the conflict. This week, a piece by Ghassan Khatib, a political commentator, caught my eye. Khatib notes that internal power struggles in Israel and Palestine stand the chance of ruining any peaceful settlement -- perhaps more so than continued bombings or Israeli incursions.

Khatib's point is that the tension between, for instance, Sharon and Netanyahu in Likud, or between Labor Party rivals, has changed the Israeli dialogue from one of peaceful solutions that benefit both parties (Israel and Palestine) to one where the focus is almost exclusively on who can be more rigid or extreme when it comes to protecting Israel. The same tension exists on the Palestinian side, where Arafat, far from emerging from his compound as a hero, has emerged politically weakened and more vulnerable to the whims and influences of his "defense" commanders in Gaza and the West Bank, and to emerging leaders in Fatah and elsewhere.

These power struggles appeal to extremist fad politics and do not address the vital interests of both sides in returning the Palestinian-Israeli relationship to one of negotiations, rather than confrontation. In deed, they seem to multiply the tension between Palestinians and Israelis by nurturing the argument for and encouragement of extremist politics on the opposing side.

SMART KIDS PLAY TO THINK The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, that haven for brainy kids, publishes a sexy little magazine called the Technology Review. This month, the magazine unveiled the TR100: one hundred innovators under 35 whose ideas they say will revolutionize science and the world. There was an article in TIME this week about two of them: Stephen Wolfram, who is trying to rock the science world by rethinking how all of science works, and Dean Kamen, recently celebrated for creating his dorky self-propelled pedestrian machine known as "It." From transportation to nanotechnology, there are some smart people out there making me wonder why my brain feels so damn small.

SUV SEX SCANDALS A friend reminded me a few months ago off the postering of Richmond and Charlottsville we did back in the 90s. We printed a series of 11x17 flyers mocking then-Senatorial candidate Oliver North, and proceeded to post them wherever we could. He reminded me of this because he wanted to do something similar about sports utility vehicles. It seems that advice columnist Amy Alkon was a step ahead of him, or at least that's what the Detroit Metro Times reports:

What she did was print up little cards that read: "Road-Hogging, Air-Fouling, Gas-Guzzling Vulgarian! Clearly you have an extremely small penis, or you wouldn't drive such a monstrosity. For the adequately endowed, there are hybrids or electrics." The message concluded with a phone number, which led to her answering machine, on which callers received further abuse ... and were invited to leave a message. Then she ran around her hometown of Venice, Calif., sticking the cards on the windshield of SUVs. Makes those of us who just roll our eyes at the steely mammoths look like passive-aggressive little wusses.

GET READY FOR THE BLAME GAME The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz has become one of my favored sources for candid snapshots of the media mood. Today, he turns his sights on what he's calling the "long, heated summer" ahead, chockful of public hearings and investigations into September 11. Here's a snippet:

While the rhetoric has cooled a bit, we are in the midst of a mudball fight that goes something like this:

White House: The warnings were non-specific and there was no need to release them.

Democrats: We need a full investigation to ensure that this never happens again.

WH: They're raising unpatriotic questions in a blatant attempt to damage the president!

Dems: They're refusing to allow a legitimate inquiry into protecting this great nation!

WH: Hillary is dividing the country!

Dems: Cheney is dividing the country!

Public: Yawn.

ESCAPE FROM BILL GATES The Post's Rob Pegoraro, the paper's technology guru, held an online chat of interest to any techgeek looking to get out from beneath the thumb of Microsoft. He naturally calls Mac OSX "elegant," but points PC users toward OpenOffice, a free alternative to Microsoft Office. That's cheaper than $795. He also delves into Linux as a way to live in a Gates-free OS world, and there is a link to his lengthy article on living in a Microsoft-free world for two weeks (it's like being a vegetarian for a month).

EVERYTHING YOU WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT THE MIDDLE EAST IN 49 LARGE-TYPE PAGES Anthony Cordesman sums it up again in this PDF document that tells you why the Middle East is important (one clue: 2/3 of the world's oil reserves are there), why it's importance is growing (see previous clue and remember that Alaskan reserves are a drop in a large bucket), why it is likely to get worse before it gets better (take 3,000 tankers passing through the Suez Canal each month, pass out a surface-to-ship missile launcher, BOOM), what are the other bad news items (population bulge, Palestine/Israel, chemical and nuclear weapons, water shortages) and how the military dynamic is changing. Cordesman flies high and can be vague at times, but he's a reasonably good writer and usually makes sense. Best of all, he doesn't get lost in the weeds.

QUIZ ME, KISS ME The Brunching Shuttlecocks bring us The Stupidity Quiz, apparently developed last week after standardized test scores revealed that the average American is about as dumb as a dry sack of cement and doesn't know who our allies were in World War Two. Or something.

TALES FROM THE GRIPS If it's Monday, it must be time for Jerry Williams to update his website with the latest news and gossip from Richmond's film production community. Plus, he has his weekly film reviews -- short, concise and direct. Everything you don't expect from a critic these days.

DEATH TO THE WEST SatireWire brightens my morning with an uneasy chuckle. Today's article: "Al-Qaeda Liberals Demand 'Life In Prison To The West;' Citing High Recidivism Rates, However, Conservatives Still Call For Death." A cheap laugh with my Odwalla drink is a good way to start a busy day.

ON A PERSONAL NOTE I went to my mom's this morning (a command performance) to go through some old boxes in the attic in preparation for a yard sale she's having. She was mortified because I was discarding those sorts of things you're apparently not supposed to toss -- a sheet of paper with what seems to be my first attempt at writing my name; an old model car that my father had as a child and passed on to me to construct minus the key parts (I spent countless hours on it before I realized it could never be built; the obvious curse would be to toss a few more pieces and give it to my nephew). I'm not completely without sentiment: I found a little mouse that reminded me of my best childhood friend Julie Mayo, my official "just born" hospital photo, a lock of hair from when I was a baby (I was very Icelandic as an infant; blonde and chinless) and the following letter, written to Prince Charles in 1981 after my grandmother and I sat and watched he and Diana marry:

Prince Charles: I am just a commoner and just 13 at that, but I wanted to write and say that London looked magnificient today. I always admired England's monarchy and the British accent. When I heard that the wedding was to be on television, I planned to watch it all the way through from 5:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m. Thank you for taking the time to read this letter.