Domino’s admits their pizza is crap, tries something new

After years of people telling them that their pizza is awful, Domino’s is apparently listening and actually doing something about it.

I remember eating my share of crappy Domino’s pizza in college – it was cheap and they delivered fast. But I hadn’t had it in years when a friend’s Facebook update alerted me to the fact that they’d thrown out the old recipe and started from scratch.

So my wife and I tried it …strictly in the interest of science.

First let me say that Domino’s has a pretty slick online operation going. It was quick and easy (and optional) to register at their site, create my pizzas (Hawiian and Pepperoni and Mushroom) using their animated pizza-creation interface and send my order to the closest Domino’s without having to look it up.

When the pizza arrived we were…pleasantly surprised, but not overwhelmed.

It is true that the cheese — which is now actual cheese — is much better. It’s true that the sauce is spicier and more flavorful. It is true that the crust tasted buttery and (maybe a bit too) garlicky. It was, in short, a huge improvement over the old Domino’s pizza.

Not sure I’d go so far as to say that it’s as good as Papa John’s — though I will say that it seemed to hang together a little better than Papa John’s, which I find arrives piping hot but often has a cheese and ingredients sliding off problem.

But it’s better (in taste and experience) than making a DiGiorno’s pizza in your home oven, about as cheap and they’ll get it to you in 30 minutes. That’s huge.

Whatever you might think of its founder’s politics (he sold 93 percent of the company in 1998 and now has nothing to do with its day-to-day operations), I think you’ve got to give the company a hand for finally doing what we all wish corporations would do a little more: listening to their customers and trying to improve their product.

Next step: those slimy, awful wings.

So which of you have tried the new pizza? What’d you think? If you haven’t – they’re guaranteeing you’ll like it, or your money back. You’ve got nothing to lose but your waistline.

Pocket Change

Should I be amusingly heartened or gut-achingly sick over the fact that even as we try to claw our way out of the worst economic train wreck since the Great Depression there are still people gathering together to slug it out to pay $3 million for a nickel?

The nickel in question is the 1913 Liberty Head nickel, which will go on auction in Orlando Florida January 6.

Says Greg Rohan, President of the Auction firm handling the sale:

“It’s always exciting for collectors when a 1913 Liberty nickel comes on the market, and this one should bring $3 million or higher.”

From a press release today:

“The 1913-dated Liberty nickels are among the greatest mysteries of American coinage,” said Rohan. “James Earle Fraser’s famous ‘Buffalo nickel’ design should have appeared on every coin dated 1913. Yet there are five 1913 nickels that have the old Liberty design instead.”

Of the five Liberty nickels, two are in museum collections, leaving just three available to collectors. In the past decade auction appearances of 1913 Liberty nickels have been rarer than the coins themselves. Like the other 1913 Liberty nickels, the example offered by Heritage has become individually famous. It is known as the “Olsen specimen” after an early owner, but his is hardly the only notable name in its provenance.

Colonel E.H.R. Green, son of Hetty Green (“The Witch of Wall Street”), owned all five 1913 Liberty nickels, as did the numismatist-scholar Eric P. Newman. King Farouk of Egypt held the Olsen specimen for several years in the 1940s, and from the late 1970s to the mid-1980s, it belonged to Dr. Jerry Buss, owner of the Los Angeles Lakers.

A coin such as the Olsen specimen is often in the limelight, and this was never truer than in 1972 and 1973, when it sold for a record-setting price and became part of TV history.

“In 1972, World Wide Coin Investments paid $100,000 for this 1913 Liberty nickel, the first time a collectible U.S. coin was bought for a six-figure sum,” said Rohan. “The newsmaking nickel went on-location to film scenes for an episode of the famous police drama Hawaii Five-O.”

Millions of viewers were watching on Dec. 11, 1973, as a thief and the police sought the precious coin. In the space of an hour, the Olsen specimen became the single most famous coin in the world.

Eulogy for Kenneth Martin Rose Sr. and Kenneth Martin Rose. Jr.

My grandfather and uncle, career commercial fishermen, were lost at sea 20 miles off the coast of Cape May, New Jersey on November 11, 2009. This is the eulogy I gave at their memorial service at the Broad Creek Church of God in Broad Creek, North Carolina on November 18, 2009.

Hello, I’m Joseph. Kenneth Sr. was my grandfather, Kenneth Jr. my Uncle.

When my wife Amanda and I heard the sad news last week we came down from Greensboro. We wanted to be here with our family, to experience the loss together. And when we arrived we felt what I know everyone here tonight has felt in the last few days: utter powerlessness. There was nothing we could do to bring these men back.

So we did those small things we could – cooking, making phone calls, comforting loved ones.

I volunteered to go to the house my grandfather and uncle shared, to put things in order. All the women here tonight can imagine what sort of task this was simply by picturing, just for a moment, how their men might live without women.

But don’t pity me too much. It was really selfish of me. I did it because it needed to be done – but also because I needed to do it. I needed to sort through the lives of these men I loved, to follow the trails of their daily lives – mostly crumbs and crumpled magazines. I wanted to remember, maybe even to discover things I’d never known about them.

The first revelation was that there is apparently some kind of family gene for never, ever throwing anything away. Daily newspaper from three years ago? We might need that. Grocery receipt from 1989? We’ll put that right here.

My uncle, a voracious reader, kept literally hundreds of old magazines. Sorting through them I found a lot of what I expected – Guns & Ammo, Deer & Deer Hunting, Guns of the Old West, American Handgunner. You sense a theme. They were manly magazines with fish-eye lens pictures of trigger men scowling from the end of steel barrels that looked as long as battle ships.

And then, in among all this, I found dozens of issues of something called Mother Earth News. This appeared to be a magazine all about organic gardening, cruelty free pest control and how solar power can save the Earth from Global Warming.

I put two magazine covers side by side – one featured a story about killing carjackers before they get to your car, the other a pony-tailed hippie showing off his organic kumquats.

My uncle was a complicated man.

But Mother Earth News shouldn’t have surprised me.

If you knew my uncle, you know that he did not just love nature. It was his natural element.

On the ocean, in the trees, in the mountains – that’s where he found himself, where he felt at peace. He made his living far from land, in the wide arms of the ocean. When he was home, he would disappear into the trees – a hunter who never enjoyed killing things so much as simply being out among them.

But it was always my impression that off the ocean, out of the trees, down from the mountains – he was not so at ease. He seemed to yearn to get away, feeling that civilization was closing in on him, anxious to be far from the things of man. In his restlessness he grew angry. In his anger, he frustrated and hurt a lot of us – and himself.

And then his life changed.

And this church, the people of this church, made that happen.

When my uncle gave himself to Christ, it brought him closer to his family. It made him ache to repair everything he’d broken, to reach out again to those he kept at such a distance. You, his church family, helped him to find the peace among men he knew in the solitude of nature. Anyone who doubts the transformative power of faith never met my uncle. I – and my family – have that faith, and all of you, to thank for bringing him back to us before it was his time to go.

On my uncle’s bedside table I found a Bible. The kind of Bible you don’t just keep for show. It was dog-eared, with bookmarks and colored tabs and wedged between two pages, a laminated sheet entitled “My Never Again List.”

Among the things my uncle felt his Bible had taught him:

Never again will I confess Fear, for “God hath not given us the spirit of fear, but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.”

Never again will I confess Discontent because “…I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content.”

Never again will I confess Troubles because Jesus said “…In the world shall ye have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.”

My mother said something last week that I think everyone here knows is true. We have to be thankful these two men went together. Because if it had been just one of them, the other would never have been able to go on.

They loved each other as only a father and son can. No one who ever watched them fight with one another could deny that.

But it was not just that love that made my grandfather go with my uncle on this trip when he needed him.

Why did my grandfather, at 73, with one kidney and one-and-a-half lungs, continue to go out on the sea to do a job that can break men my age? Because that’s the sort of man he was. He would not be conquered by age, by illness, by circumstance. There was simply nothing that he couldn’t do.

As Kenneth Sr. grew older, his body was far weaker than his spirit. He battled cancer, he had extended hospital stays. But after a recent surgery he was released from the hospital and my mother begged him to come to her home, to let her care for him. Instead, with fresh stitches and still wearing a catheter, my grandfather went to shoot a pool tournament – and won.

My grandfather’s home was littered with awards and trophies – truck racing, billiards, honors from fraternal orders. He was so fierce a competitor that around the kitchen table, teaching his daughters and his granddaughter to play cards, he would never let them win. Consequently – and I warn you all in advance – you never want to play these women for money.

My grandfather, a Navy man and fisherman, had a warrior spirit – a work ethic that he passed on to us all. But he also had a softer side – a gentleness with his wife and daughters, an almost childlike mischievousness and, like his son, a love of nature.

I heard the following story a few times this week, from a few different people:

My grandfather was captaining a fishing boat. A mangy, smelly stray cat came aboard while they were docked. One of the men on the boat got tired of the cat skulking around and grabbed him up and tossed him in the water. My grandfather watched this poor animal swim to the dock, turned to the man and faced him down.

“You’re going to go and fetch me that cat,” he said. “or you’re fired.”

The man spent all of that night searching for the cat. In the morning he brought back a cat – whether it was the same one is anybody’s guess. My grandfather fired him anyway.

I will miss my grandfather for the rest of my life. I am so sad that he will never get to hold my children, that they will never lose to him at cards or pool again and again, until he turns them into hustlers.

But I am comforted, we should all be comforted, that when it was his time, my grandfather was still strong, still determined, still doing all the things he loved. He was still unconquered.

Both of these strong, loving, complicated men left this world unconquered. The storm, the ocean – it did not take them from us. It just called them home.

Two memorials

Some days this is a very strange job.

I began my Sunday shift at the News & Record by going to a memorial for two Army reservists from a Civil Affairs Battalion killed in an Afghan suicide bombing.

These things are never easy to cover — and in a way I think it used to be worse when my father was an active duty Marine stationed in Iraq. But next month he’s headed back there in his civilian job with the Marine Corps and my family has been slowly putting itself back into a the sort of headspace you need to find when your loved one is doing something so incredibly noble but so incredibly dangerous.

We are, of course, proud of him. After spending a career in the Marine Corps during which he fought two wars in Iraq he really doesn’t need to do this again. No one could blame him if he wanted to kick back, settle into civilian life, tend his lawn and work on his house. But he’s going back. And he’s doing it because he wants to. As a Marine he’s never really felt right about trying to carve out a civilian niche for himself while the country is still fighting two wars.

We are also, quite naturally, quietly terrified that this may be the time he doesn’t come back.

And the memorial Sunday sort of threw light on the dark place inside me that fear calls home. The stories of these determined men — one younger than me — and their senseless deaths, they really did a number on me.

Captain Benjamin Sklaver was 32. He had been on a yearlong deployment with Combined Joint Task Force – Horn of Africa from 2006-2007. He was a civil affairs officer, so he wasn’t killing people – he was working to make the lives of the people there better. Noticing the high rates of child mortality directly attributable to dirty drinking water, he set up a non-profit charity to do something about it.

When he came back home his unit was scheduled for another long deployment – this time to Afghanistan. He could have gotten a transfer to avoid the deployment, but he chose not to. His commanding officer said he was the best team leader, and best friend, that he had – and so he chose to stick it out. He went where he believed his men — and the people — needed him.

This is the guy who is killed by a suicide bomber — a civil affairs officer with a fiance back home whose passion in life became getting dying children clean drinking water.

Private First Class Alan Newton Jr. of Asheboro was just 26 years old. He loved playing video games, riding motorcycles and four wheelers. His buddies called him “Hubble” because of his thick eyeglasses. His commanding officer said he fought to get on the battle roster for Afghanistan although he’d had a serious knee injury that would have left him at home. In the field he had to take cortisone shots and have fluid painfully drained from his knee. He never complained.

He leaves behind a wife and a two-year-old daughter.

Watching the memorial – looking up at those empty boots, those upturned rifles holding up helmets and dog tags, hearing the silence after these soldiers’ names were called in the roll…it was one of a handful of times I’ve actually cried on the job.

Your skin thickens a bit after you’ve done this for a while. I don’t say that to sound like a tough guy – it’s just an unavoidable consequence of the job. Report on enough murders, talk to enough grieving parents, attend enough wakes or funerals, question enough people after disasters — eventually you just end up turning off that part of you that aches in these circumstances, that makes your stomach go cold and your eyes well up with hot tears.

And then, sometimes, a story like this makes you feel that way again and, in a perverse way, you’re glad you still can.

When I left the memorial I felt like someone had gut-punched me. I was so stricken by the whole thing I couldn’t work up the energy to get into a fight about it when an Army public affairs guy forbade me from speaking to any of the families for my story. And that’s the kind of fight I live for.

Instead I just sort of hobbled back to my car thinking:

“How much space, time and access would I need to actually do these men justice, to really tell this story? I’m simply not writer enough for the task.”

When I got back to the office I got to work – slowly, starting and stopping, feeling helpless.

Then the Sunday editor told me that Charles “Charlie” Hagan Jr. had died on Friday at the age of 96. We’d somehow missed putting together a news obit for the Sunday paper. Could I get on it right away?

Charlie Hagan is the patriarch of the Hagan family – which includes his daughter in law, U.S. Senator Kay Hagan. The family is one of the rocks on which modern Greensboro is built.

Charlie’s father, Charles Sr., founded the city’s Chamber of Commerce in 1888. Charlie himself served as District Attorney for Guilford and Davidson Counties before setting up a very successful private law practice, serving as President of the Chamber of Commerce and Chairman of the Greensboro Coliseum Commission for more than 20 years.

Oh, and this was all after he fought with the 4th Marine Division in WWII, seeing action at Roi Namur, Saipan, Tinian and Iwo Jima.

He earned, among a laundry list of awards, medals, citations, ribbons and commendations: the Bronze Star with Combat V (for valor in direct combat), a presidential Unit Citation with bronze star and the Legion of Merit. After the war he stayed active with the USMC Reserves, even serving in Vietnam, and eventually retired as a Major General – the highest ranking USMC reservist in the nation when he hung it up in 1973.

All this and he also managed to raise a large and loving family full of accomplished children who now have accomplished children of their own.

It sounded like a full life — but the thought of going to another memorial was frankly crushing. I was already peeling myself off the floor to write the story I had…and now I was going to have to interview a prominent grieving family about their departed patriarch. Ouch.

Our obit said that the family would be receiving friends and family at the home of son Chip and daughter in Law Kay Hagan that evening. I decided I had to go and see them in person, even if it meant being face to face with their grief and possibly getting (perhaps justifiably) tossed out of an event for family and friends who’ve just suffered a great loss. This has actually happened to me before. It is incredibly unpleasant.

Imagine my surprise then, when I arrived at the Hagan home to find people laughing, hugging, drinking and generally celebrating the life rather than mourning the death of their loved one. I was not only not tossed out — I was welcomed with real smiles, handshakes, even hugs. No one seemed put off by my pen and notebook — in fact, everyone wanted to share their Charlie stories with me.

Senator Hagan, who I’d interviewed previously but who I was sure would not remember nor want to be bothered by me, took me into a quiet room with her son, Tilden, and suggested I have a drink with them while they shared family stories with me and encouraged me to talk with everyone there.

I got so many good things that didn’t make it into the piece for reasons of space and time, but some of my favorite unused gems:

“Charlie was the kind of guy who treated everyone the same, whether he was talking to a judge, a CEO or a janitor. And to tell you the truth, he’d probably rather be talking to the janitor.”

“Charlie always said what he meant. You knew you were going to get an honest answer out of him. That might sometimes mean you didn’t ask him — but you knew if you did, he was going to be honest.”

“As busy as he was and everything that he accomplished, it’s amazing he spent as much time with us as he did. But family was important to him, so he always did.” (from one of his sons)

I cannot explain to you what this did not only for my spirits on that particular day, but for my general outlook on life.

Here’s a guy who had it all — a remarkable military career, a successful civilian professional life, a close family and a life filled throughout with public service.

And now here, after his death, his family and friends gathered raising glasses to him and knowing he really lived his life.

How about that?

Two memorials — one for soldiers taken before their time, one for an old Marine who lived his life and then some. One crushed me and the other built me up again.

Some days this is a very strange job.

My newspaper’s front page this morning

President-Elect Barack Obama

GOP on QVC (on SNL)

Who would have predicted the McCains would be funnier than Ben Affleck?

Makes up for Palin’s just-sort-of-showing-up appearance, I’d say.

Punking Palin

The Canadian comedy duo known as “The Masked Avengers” somehow cracked the impenetrable security of the McCain/Palin campaign and got in a prank call to Gov. Sarah Palin.

Pretending to be French President Nicolas Sarkozy, they get Palin to discuss hunting from a helicopter (and promise she’ll be a better shot than Dick Cheney), how hot Sarkozy’s supermodel wife is in bed and even the infamous Nailin’ Paylin porn movie produced by Hustler.

Listen below…

Nice computer, too.

Feeling even better about my recent MacBook purchase now.

Bat-Manga!

Over at BoingBoing Cory Doctorow is taking a look at a new book about Bat-Manga – the explosion of Batman comic books created for the Japanese market during the 1960s, when the classic Adam West TV series was being marketed there.

The best part of the story? Apparently the Japanese man tasked with selling Batman to his countrymen thought the stories weren’t strange and outlandish enough to go over there and made Batman even weirder — adding robots, dinosaurs and villains that rise from the dead.

My thing is…the American Batman was never weirder than he was in the 1960s. He was already traveling in time, going to different worlds, fighting aliens and magical villains, disguising himself as other super-heroes and…you know, regularly battling one of the weirdest rouges galleries of villains in comic book history with some of the strangest gadgetry imaginable. And the Japanese thought that wasn’t enough? You’d have to seriously look at their manga and anime to truly wrap your head around that one.

The book, Bat-Manga!: The Secret History of Batman in Japan, is available now.

Check out more photos from the book (including weird Japanese Batman toys) here.

Christian Science Monitor to drop print edition

BOSTON (AP) — The Christian Science Monitor said Tuesday it will become the first national newspaper to drop its daily print edition and focus on publishing online, succumbing to the financial pressure squeezing its industry harder than ever.

Come April, the Boston-based general-interest paper — founded in 1908 and the winner of seven Pulitzer Prizes — will print only a weekend edition after struggling financially for decades, its editor announced Tuesday.

The Monitor’s circulation has fallen from a peak of 223,000 in 1970 to about 50,000 now, while its online traffic has soared. The newspaper gets about 5 million page-views per month, compared with about 4 million five years ago and 1 million a decade ago.

—

I frankly don’t know whether to be relieved (this is where the industry has to go if it wants to survive and one of our best papers is leading the way) or horrified (the move from print is going to cost a lot of jobs and be an incredibly painful transition for the industry).

The return of Dualism?

New Scientist has an interesting piece about the resurrection of Cartesian Dualism as a weapon in the fight over creationism.

From the story:

“Schwartz and Beauregard are part of a growing “non-material neuroscience” movement. They are attempting to resurrect Cartesian dualism – the idea that brain and mind are two fundamentally different kinds of things, material and immaterial – in the hope that it will make room in science both for supernatural forces and for a soul. The two have signed the “Scientific dissent from Darwinism” petition, spearheaded by the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, headquarters of the intelligent design movement. ID argues that biological life is too complex to have arisen through evolution.

In August, the Discovery Institute ran its 2008 Insider’s Briefing on Intelligent Design, at which Schwartz and Michael Egnor, a neurosurgeon at Stony Brook University in New York, were invited to speak. When two of the five main speakers at an ID meeting are neuroscientists, something is up. Could the next battleground in the ID movement’s war on science be the brain? “

Andy, Opie, Ritchie and Fonz for Obama

See more Ron Howard videos at Funny or Die

So it IS possible to be amused, to have your heart warmed and to throw up a little in your mouth all at once…

Great review of the first Android phone

BoingBoing Gadgets has the best review I’ve read yet of T-Mobile’s G1 Android phone.

For those coming late: Android is Google’s new, open source operating system for mobile phones. It is being offered first on the G1 model smartphone and has been hyped in some corners of the Net as a possible “iPhone Killer.”

Reviewer Joel Johnson says not so fast on that one, but found much to like about the phone.

From the review…

On beauty vs. utilitarianism:

“Call me shallow if you must, but I’d call myself human: we respond to physical elegance in people and in objects and the G1 is a lumpen, crooked, creaking slab. (That creaking comes from hinges on the flip-up screen that reveals the keyboard, which makes an altogether more appealingly solid clack.) And the ugliness extends into the operating system itself, which at a minimum needs to update its icon set. The colorful, rounded icon have never been Google’s most attractive corporate hallmark, but at least on the web they indicated a down-to-businessness that had a certain charm. On the phone, however, they just look chintzy.”

On websurfing:

“The web browser, while marred by the inexplicable lack of multitouch support in the touchscreen, is very good, rending most web pages like its real, grown-up desktop counterparts.”

On Google integration:

Integration with Google services, of which I am a heavy user, is excellent, as was instant messaging. (Although the G1’s IM experience still does not match that of the years-old Sidekick, it’s getting close.)

On the much hyped “Compass Mode”:

“My most anticipated feature, the “Compass Mode” that makes Google Maps’ Street View into a sort of augmented reality, did not work very well at all, operating too slowly and too imprecisely to serve as even a demonstration of the phone’s whizbanginess to friends.”

Overall:

“For now, the T-Mobile G1 is a solid, utilitarian phone, which I can recommend without question to those looking for a basic modern smartphone.”

We’ve all had our hearts broken by gadget hype — and Johnson does actually address the continuum of gadget love in the review itself:

“Products are not simply loved or hated, but appreciated over time on a scale which terminates with perfection at one extreme, failure to operate at the other. That scale can be broken down in any number of metrics, all of which are useless: what matters to the owner of a product is not where a reviewer, a single sample, has chosen to mark his opinion at an arbitrary point in time on the scale, but in what direction that point is heading. (And to a lesser and murkier degree, for how long that trend will continue.)

What’s lost in the review — the direction of love — is critical. Like romantic love, a slide towards increasing love helps us overlook flaws, remember only the best aspects of our products’ features, and gives the relationship between a product and its owner time to flourish and grow. Hidden delights will show themselves after a time, reinforcing the relationship, even as unaddressed incompatibilities might, after a measure, begin to tilt affection towards declination.”

Talking with McCain-Palin folks

Some video that Michael McQueen and I did at the Elon rally last week. The folks in the video are much more representative of the crowd than the guy who ended up kicking me.

And you even get a bit of the Hank Williams Jr. song “McCain-Palin Tradition” there at the end.

Hey, he got free gum

In light of last week, a couple of people have sent me this now:

WOODBRIDGE, Va. — As Republican congressional candidate Keith Fimian warmed up the crowd at an afternoon rally with Sen. John McCain, CNN’s Ed Henry was co-anchoring his network’s weekend political coverage live from the press risers. Fimian was speaking about his personal accomplishments as Henry quizzed Bill Schneider, who was standing at another camera position at the rally.

A woman towards the back of the crowd angrily turned back and started yelling at Henry, asking him to stop talking during Fimian’s speech. The woman grew so angry that she threw a pack of Dentyne Ice gum at Henry, which hit his back as he wrapped up his conversation with Schneider.

Full story here.

How I Became Joe Sixpack

Was at the Sarah Palin rally at Elon University today.

It was an interesting day and I’m glad to have had the experience. But now here I sit, sunburned and sore with a throbbing headache and an aching leg.

Why? Because a McCain-Palin supporter tried to kick my ass.

I know what you’re thinking.

But no, I didn’t have it coming.

What happened, briefly, is this:

After Hank Williams Jr. had finished his set of country standards (“I Walk The Line”) Country pandering (the theme from The Dukes of Hazard) and re-arranged original hits with new lyrics (“McCain-Palin Tradition”), Sarah Palin arrived to cheers, screams and adoration that rivaled Greensboro’s Obama rally.

“GOD BLESS YOU SARAH PALIN!” one man shouted.

But not everyone was overjoyed to see her.

Weaved in amongst the crowd were a what looked like a few dozen Obama supporters – some wearing Obama shirts, others in street clothes. As Palin got into her speech they began chants of “Obama” and screamed out rebuttals to the points in her speech. This angered some in the crowd — some responding with cursing, others chanting “U.S.A.” and “NObama” to drown them out. Eventually the cops came and escorted them off of the baseball field.

Then it happened again, elsewhere in the crowd.

N&R political reporter Mark Binker and I were on different sides of the crowd – but we both got the same reaction from Palin fans as we craned our necks to see what the disturbance was.

“That’s not the story, the story’s up there on the stage!” someone yelled at Binker.

“Ain’t nothing to look at and don’t you write about it!” I was told.

To her credit: Palin stopped the speech to suggest that maybe the security shouldn’t escort the protesters off — maybe they should “stay and learn something.”

Not so very to her credit: she did not actually instruct security to let them stay.

After the speech was over I was walking around getting peoples’ reactions to it when I wandered into several clusters of sign waving Obama supporters outside the stadium area. They were surrounded by McCain-Palin folks and both sides were yelling at each other.

I sidled up to one of the Obama supporters and asked why they were there, what they were trying to accomplish.

As he was telling me a large, bearded man in full McCain-Palin campaign regalia got in his face to yell at him.

“Hey, hey,” I said. “I’m trying to interview him. Just a minute, okay?”

The man began to say something about how of course I was interviewing the Obama people when suddenly, from behind us, the sound of a pro-Obama rap song came blaring out of the windows of a dorm building. We all turned our heads to see Obama signs in the windows.

This was met with curses, screams and chants of “U.S.A” by McCain-Palin folks who crowded under the windows trying to drown it out and yell at the person playing the stereo.

It was a moment of levity in an otherwise very tense situation and so I let out a gentle chuckle and shook my head.

“Oh, you think that’s funny?!” the large bearded man said. His face was turning red. “Yeah, that’s real funny…” he said.

And then he kicked the back of my leg, buckling my right knee and sending me sprawling onto the ground.

From my position there I saw the bottoms of a number of feet almost accidentally stomping me to death as the two political camps screamed back and forth, the music continued to blare and some of the Obama crowd moved the large bearded man and his friends away. When I was helped to my feet the bearded man was walking away quickly.

For a moment I considered running the bloated, twelve-sandwich eating prick down and beating the living hell out of him…and then I remembered that I’m a reporter, how much I enjoy being gainfully employed and how hard it would be to keep my job if I got into a fistfight with a guy at a political rally.

So instead I limped off to try to find a security guard or cop.

When I did the guy was nowhere to be found.

“He’s this big fat guy with a brown beard and he’s wearing a McCain-Palin shirt and hat,” I said.

And then felt like an idiot. I was surrounded by people who fit that description.

So I simply limped to my car fuming.

On the way I passed comedian D.L. Hughley, who I’d interviewed a little earlier.

He’s got a new CNN show premiering at the end of the month and was there to tape a segment.

He was standing on the corner with a camera crew as the crowd passed him, saying: “Hey…are you Joe Sixpack? Joe? Joe Sixpack? I’m looking for Joe Sixpack. Joe? How about Joe the Plumber? Joe? I’m looking for some Joes…”

He gave me a wave and said: “Hey, Joe! Are YOU Joe Sixpack?”

I waved, shook my head and smiled.

But I was thinking: “Well, I may be tonight…”

When I get home I’ll start with one and we’ll see how it goes.

Designer Condoms?

Proper Attire condoms are, apparently, a new brand of condom catering to people who don’t feel traditional condoms are “stylish” enough.

The brand’s slogan: “Proper Attire: Required for Entry”

From their website:

Old stereotypes about who should buy condoms are so last season! PROPER ATTIRE® condoms are the “must-have” accessory and were designed with sexually active, stylish women in mind.

The fashionably chic PROPER ATTIRE design helps ensure that now you can feel completely comfortable buying condoms and carrying them with you. With 5 trendy styles — Basic (regular); Color (colored); Dots (studded); XL (extra large); and Proper Attire’s Yigal Azrouël Sheer (ultra thin) — PROPER ATTIRE condoms are a safe yet fun way to protect yourself and your partner and do it with style!

While I’m populist in many ways I’m not the kind of guy who shakes his head at brand preference and tells you that it’s all the same stuff. There are a number of brands (including condom brands) to which I’m loyal. But the idea that prophylactics just aren’t stylish enough is pushing it a little far, isn’t it?

It’s hard enough being a young guy buying condoms for the first time without worrying that your date is going to think your condoms are “so last season.”

Berkley Breathed ending “Opus” comic strip

Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist Berkley Breathed is ending his popular Sunday comic Opus, which often swings from weird and whimsical to bitingly satirical.

He says he’s “destroying the village in order to save it.”

Breathed tells the L.A. Times: “30 years of cartooning to end. I’m destroying the village to save it. Opus would inevitably become a ranting mouthpiece in the coming wicked days, and I respect the other parts of him too much to see that happen. The Michael Moore part of me would kill the part of him that was important to his fans.”

Breathed seems at once eaten alive by cynicism and playfully hopeful.

“With the crisis in Wall Street and Washington, I’m suspending my comic strip to assist the nation,” he told the L.A. Times. “The best way I can help is to leave politics permanently and write funny stories for America’s kids. I call on John McCain to join me.”

Liz Phair does “Exile in Guyville” live

NPR has posted one of the concerts in which Liz Phair performs her breakthrough album Exile in Guyville in its entirety.

You can listen here.

Contains strong language, of course — cause, you know, it’s Liz Phair.