Radio Galaxy

The other night I went to the movies. Before the show started, they screened an ad for the National Guard, which they have been doing, at this theater, for years now. Some of them have been pretty good. Emotionally affecting. Putting a human face on the people in uniform, and all that.

But this one was different, an absurd stew of some of the clumsiest propaganda to hit the screen since the 1950s. Kid Rock screams a song about being a hero. Dale Earnhardt Jr. races for the finish line. And a Guardsman in the Middle East kicks a soccer ball back to a little boy instead of running him over with a tank.

I think Ronald Reagan scripted that last bit from whatever puffy cloud he’s perched on right now.

I interviewed a Mississippi economist yesterday who told me my home state’s labor force has grown all of .1 percent since 2000 — .1 percent. This economics gig is still foreign territory to me, but even I can see it’s hard to prosper that way. The economist said people just aren’t moving to Mississippi the way they are to other Southern states, including tough ones like Alabama. He said they’ve got no reason to go to Mississippi, or at least very little reason.

Though I see friends of mine hanging on back in Rankin County, I’ll likely never join them. That’s a bittersweet fact of life for me, and I suspect for any number of people who now live and work far from where they grew up.

Anyway. Sarah Goodyear sent over this account by someone fleeing Hurricane Gustav this week. Loki followed the unraveling Katrina situation three years ago. This time he says his family met with troopers blocking the highway exits in my state — the universal code for “keep moving, partner.” We might ought to find a way to say welcome, y’all.

Bonus:
Katrina: An Unnatural Disaster
The Gambit’s wonderful New Orleans blog

Sarah Palin, meet Cliff Clavin, (from Wikipedia)

For a guy who spawned the meme of the moment, Michael Turk sounds surprisingly cool.

Turk’s the one who tweeted the very first Little Known Fact About Sarah Palin. He followed his first post, on Firday, about John McCain’s V.P pick wrestling bears with ones about the Alaska governor guiding Santa’s sleigh and strong-arming salmon. On the fly, a friend of his registered Palin Facts and set it to catch tweets containing the words “little known facts about Sarah Palin.”

Cue a small Internet phenomenon, complete with a Facebook app. Turk says he’s gotten new followers on Twitter and lots of e-mail, some from people he’d lost touch with long ago. He says one old friend wrote to tell him, “Man, I wasted my whole afternoon watching this thing of yours.”

Turk describes himself as a registered Republican, from the party’s libertarian wing. He’s 38, and he has worked in politics for 15 years. His took his inspiration from the media, as commentators kept saying no one knew anything about Palin.

“Literally, my whole thought was, ‘Well, nobody knows anything about her, so you could say whatever you want,’ ” he recalls. Some of what people wanted to say wasn’t all that complimentary of Palin. “It’s such an open-ended thing that it actually became something you could use either way. You could use it for or against her. It’s not something I actually intended. It’s just sort of interesting to see it take off.”

Turk traces his hit to the Chuck Norris Legend meme. He drew the phrase “little known fact” from the fictional mail carrier on “Cheers,” Cliff Clavin, who so often chimed in with “It’s a little-known fact ….”

Most of the Sarah Palin tweets are too big to fit on a bumper sticker or t-shirt, Turk says. It’s not clear what the next step for the meme might be, if there is one. He has noticed a little coverage of the Sarah Palin wave in the mainstream press, but not much. For now, it’s mostly tucked behind the Twitter wall. “You would think that they would be kind of watching what people are chattering about,” he says. “It’s surprising the media don’t use it as kind of an early-warning tool.”

In one second, John McCain announced he’d picked a running mate. In the second, the Internet coughed up a meme for the occasion, Little Known Facts About Sarah Palin.

When I first blogged this, I thought Virginian Michael Turk of Kung Fu Quip started the meme and a site for it, Palin Facts. As you can see from his comment below, the story’s cooler than that.

Turk says he started tweeting silly “facts” about the way-small print of the Alaska governor’s bio. Then someone else, Ben Domenech, was so taken with them that he created Palin Facts and surprised him with a link to it. Fed by Twitter, it’s filling up fast.

Turk writes on his Twitter feed that it’s cool to see his idea take off. The first of his tweets on the theme appears to have been “Little known fact: Sarah Palin used to wrestle kodiak bears in Alaskan bare knuckles fight clubs.” On Friday night, he replied to a couple of people: “purely organic, and outrageously goofy. Just the way the Internet should be.”

A pair of notes here: One, good grief but that was fast. Two, some of the comments — not all of them, just some — make me think about Hillary Clinton supporters saying people used her gender against her. The Internet has a way of telling us a lot about ourselves.

I mean, “Little Known Fact: Sarah Palin knows how old the Chinese gymnasts are” — that’s funny. But “Three of Sarah Palin’s five kids came out sideways - she never flinched” — that’s, I dunno. You figure it out.

P.S. I’m hoping to interview Turk later this morning.

Del Martin, left, married Phyllis Lyon in 2008, after 55 years together.

Some stories you cover, and others you live.

At my house, we often talk about whether and when to get married, and how. That’s because I’m a woman, and so’s my partner. We were married by our Episcopal priest eight years ago. Under the law, we’re single. We’re in our final months of waiting to see whether New York lawmakers will grant us the right to marry. Already, the state recognizes same-sex marriages performed elsewhere. We want to marry here, at Brooklyn Borough Hall.

Del Martin lived this story, too. She had married Phyllis Lyon back in 2004, the first couple in San Francisco’s protest of California state law. In the ongoing legal fight, the court threw that marriage out. But on June 16, Martin and Lyon married again, this time with the state’s full force and blessing. And thus comes this news:

Martin died at a San Francisco hospital Wednesday morning with her wife by her side.

She was 87 years old.

Californians will vote in November on a measure to ban gay marriages again. Whatever happens, Martin made it all the way to hers.

Call me an outlier, but this commercial is just the kind of thing that makes me want to run screaming from our great nation. I’ll give you the short version, spied in my house during our every-four-years bout of television watching. (You know the one I’m talking about.)

Today's wow: Dr. Frances Lucas

Because, you know, no one in their right mind would dare to support that. Sure, we can say it’s silly to send 18-year-olds into battle overseas but deny their classmates back home a beer. We can prattle on about the European ease with wine. But actually sign on for rolling the drinking age back to 18?

Not my college president.

Wrong — there she was, Dr. Frances Lucas of Millsaps College, right on the list of signatories. She joined the Amethyst Initiative, a group of college presidents who say the current drinking limit of 21 has sent the future leaders of America scurrying underground with their beer bongs. “I’ve learned it’s much easier to teach moderation and safe party practices if you can supervise (alcohol consumption),” Lucas told our hometown Clarion-Ledger.

Lucas presides over a Methodist college in Jackson, Mississippi. For her to take that kind of stand takes guts. I’m impressed — with her and the others, but especially with her.

This must be the kind of thing city people do that drives the rest of the world nuts. Twitter pal @electricrider sends this clip from last year’s Brompton folding bicycle world championship.

I’m about to hop on mine and head into work. The next championships take place Sept. 28, in the U.K. So really, I’m not commuting. I’m training. See?

Bonus: The Brompton World Championship

Taser gun/Star Tribune/AP/File

A former police officer in Louisiana has been indicted on charges of manslaughter in connection with the Taser death of a man he was arresting. The Christian Science Monitor had a full account of the case earlier this week:

After Winnfield Parish police took Mr. Pikes, who is black, into custody one January morning, a white police officer fired a Taser, jolting Pikes nine times in the span of 14 minutes. Pikes never woke up.

Police said the 21-year-old Pikes was on drugs and uncooperative, but coroner Randolph Williams took a different view. In a report last month, he said he found no signs of a physical struggle, of drugs, or of any medical condition that could have exacerbated the jolts’ effect.

According to Amnesty International, taser guns have played a role in close to 300 deaths in the US and Canada since their introduction in 1998. But so far, no US jury has ever convicted a police officer in connection with a death related to use of the weapon.

Stun guns got some negative press last year when a University of Florida student was tasered and arrested at a John Kerry event, and lately more people seem to be turning against them — seven states have banned their use. Yet for many law enforcement officers, they remain a vital tool for keeping dangerous situations under control.

The future of electic shock weapons is unclear, making this case one to watch.