• Jimmy Dean Sausage King has died: "You gotta try your luck at least once a day-you could be going around lucky all day and not even know it" #
• Methinks that somewhere in Peru a certain amount of money is quietly changing hands. Nat Holloway's body WILL be found.. #
• I ran this morning for the 2nd day today. Feel good. #

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• Recently overheard thru the bathroom door:"Come on, let's go watch Daddy pee!" Ah, the joys of parenting a two-year old boy. #

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• Didn't run or walk yesterday. Back is about 75 percent today. Going today no matter what. Rainy & wet. Car trouble too NOT a good weekend #
• Dang. Go out today to walk. But I ate something that made me feel sick. Started drizzling. I was undeterred. Then it poured. I was deterred. #
• Sitting in my car sipping coffee and sulking during a pouring rain. Reminds me of hiding from my family as a kid- Nowhwere else to go! LOL! #
• One of my fav fictional characters was killed in a car crash in the novel I just finished. All good things… #

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• Was very sore, so I walked my route yesterday.So hot today that I didn't run til 1030. Decided to walk again. Lakefront packed and very hot #
• Forgot to make coffee. Man, McDonald's coffee sucks… #
• ran tonight at 10:00–still hot. But after two days of barely running, my legs were good. making iced coffee tonight–screw McDonalds! #
• @ben_sila Yes, we have McCafe but not in my neighborhood. Is the coffee different? in reply to ben_sila #
• @ToyRobinson Hey, Toy! I'm trying to tweet regularly now. follow me! in reply to ToyRobinson #
• And so begins Week 2 of the world's slowest running. The good news is that my legs aren't hurting anymore. And I have a plan… #
• Don't you hate when stores set a minimum order to use credit cards? #
• Tired today. Forced to fit my runs in at 10pm every night… #
• Walked my route today. Didn't hydrate, ate late (and badly) and I'm tired. But I got out there–the real goal. #
• 13 min into run tweaked muscle high in my back. Weak core & strong legs are apparrently a bad combination… #
• Saw a helicopter spotlighting the shore on the lakefront tonight. Damn crimewave is making us L.A.! #
• Strikes me that one diff bt hi crime area & low crime area is enforcement of minor laws. U move to suburbs bc low litter leads to low crime #
• Currently Browsing: http://is.gd/cuycT #
• What I tought was a "tweak" Friday, laid me low all day yesterday. Could barely move. Important back muscle. Couldn't run. Will try monday. #

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• Suprem Court rules that “Sexually Dangerous” can be held in prison indefinitely. http://bit.ly/9QHJPX via @AddToAny #
• Why in the hell is Disney's The Princess & The Frog so scary! #
• Wife spent the day contacting grade schools about our son. He'll be 2 in August! Managed not to laugh. Old parents are a trip! #
• Ran 2day. So slow. So many stops and starts. So much jiggling flesh. But the first honest sweat I've had in a long time. I'll run tomorrow. #
• Sometimes fast food is not fast. 10 min in McDonald's line w 2 people taday. There's a difference between action and progress. #
• Ran today in the rain. Legs hurt, but cut a few minutes off my time. #
• Ran tonight. Legs like stone. Could barely walk all day. Feels good to run tho. Kid to baby swim class tomorrow. Then run again. #
• Why do so many recipes call for infinitesimal amounts of obscure ingredients? #
• 3 mos ago I saw a big dead deer just south of 95th & Stony. 2day I saw a huge dead beaver. Is there an Avatar-like wood I don't know about? #
• At Wolf Lake lounging in my hammock. Perfect day: sunny, light breeze, 70's. #

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Haven’t read much about this decision yet, involving several convicted sexual deviants that have so far spent more than two years in prison beyond their original sentence. SCOTUS has upheld a law that federal prisoners can be detained indefinitely if it is determined that they continue to be ’sexually dangerous”. It appears that in the cases at hand , the men are being held until someone decides that they are somehow no longer a risk. I’m unclear on who makes that decision or how.

In the past, I have suggested to a friend that it is time to, at least, have a serious discussion about just such a law. I say this because it seems clear to me that there is no currently no “cure” for, say, pedophilia. So why pretend that a freed pedophile won’t strike again? Yes, I’m familiar with the high recidivism rate among most types of criminals, but i suggest that some crimes, such as those specifically aimed at children, might be a special case. Should there be a “two strikes” rule? If so, what should be the sentence? It seems to me that there should at least be a sentence–it should be something more defined than “X years plus whenever we decide to let you out”. Maybe “life with possibility of parole”? And on what is it contingent? A future therapeutic cure, consent to chemical castration, what?

Do you think this is a legally-defensible ruling? A morally-defensible one?

h/t to Talking Points Memo

• Just declared Twitter bankruptcy. Following 1,880 people is ridiculous. #
• Release the Kagen! #
• I love this album. Saw Whitley here in Chicago a few years before he died. ♫ http://blip.fm/~qaa42 #
• Had a pint of Strongbow Cider with my wife today. Took me back to my drunken semester in London! #
• Dead 10 foot limb, thicker round than my not insubstantial calf, has crashed onto our sidewalk. Time for this tree to come down! #

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Looking forward to seeing how this garbage plays out. The Atlantic notes that more than half (HALF!) of America’s 2.5 million farm workers are undocumented. And a big chunk of our lettuce crop comes from Arizona. Now these workers, workers helping to make it possible for me to get lettuce on my 99-cent hamburger, may choose not to risk arrest in Arizona. And that ain’t good for Arizona since lettuce is “a $1 billion dollar business…and the state’s highest-value crop”.

And what of the argument that undocumented workers are taking these labor-intensive jobs from Americans? Tom Church, the president of Church Brothers, a large lettuce grower, says that American workers is the last thing his company wants. “If we had to rely on American workers, it would never get done…,” he says.”

Damn, Tom. That’s cold.

Arizona, you bastards deserve everything you get.

Professor Melissa Harris-Lacewell in The Nation has an interesting article on the meaning of President Obama’s choice to identify as “black” on the census. On the form, you have the option to identify with more than one race, but the president did not. Professor Harris-Lacewell points out that Obama really does not fit the stereotypes of a black man and that his very existence creates a kind of “definitional crisis for whiteness”.

Imagine for a moment that a young American falls into a Rip Van Winkle sleep in 1960. He awakens suddenly in 2008 and learns that we are in the midst of a historic presidential election between a white and a black candidate. He learns that one candidate is a Democrat, a Harvard Law School graduate, a lecturer at the conservative University of Chicago Law School. He also discovers that this candidate is married to his first wife, and they have two children who attend an exclusive private school. His running mate is an Irish Catholic. The other candidate is a Republican. He was an average student who made his mark in the military. This candidate has been married twice, and his running mate is a woman whose teenage daughter is pregnant out of wedlock.

Now ask our recently awakened American to guess which candidate is white and which is black. Remember, his understanding of race and politics was frozen in 1960, when a significant number of blacks still identified themselves as Republican, an Ivy League education was a marker of whiteness and military service a common career path for young black men. Remember that he would expect marriage stability among whites and sexual immorality to mark black life. It’s entirely possible that our Rip would guess that Obama was the white candidate and McCain the black one.

20 years ago, this black man, fresh out of the Army, spent the summer of 1990 reviewing questionnaires for the U.S. Census. I lived on the North Side of Chicago,in Edgewater, a true melting pot with people not only of every race, but immigrants from every part of the world. We received a fair number of forms with multiple races checked off and hand-written explanations of why various choices were made that more resembled the answers to an essay question than a multiple choice questionnaire.

This caused no end of debate in the office as we went back and forth about how to properly log in the responses. There was no code for “Black/Asian/Hungarian,with a touch of Cherokee”.

Of course, race and ethnicity are complicated matters for many people. I wouldn’t pass anyone’s paper bag test, but there is surely white blood in my family. Should I check “black” and “white” on the form? What about my Nashville relatives, several of whom are light-skinned with freckles? What of my wife’s cousins,the children of a half-black, half-Hispanic mother and white father?

To me, the answer is simple:the census form is really about the federal government trying to figure out how to allocate resources. As the billboard near my home argues, how can the feds know that your community needs more teachers if it doesn’t know that there are more kids?  But for many of us, the census form raises questions of identity that are hard to ignore. That the president has placed a stake in the ground of his blackness is gratifying to some and irritating to others. The professor has a theory as to why. You owe it to yourself to read the whole thing. 

Submitted without comment…(WTF?!)