Mystery Tourist:

Oh so that's who this is (thanks Justin).

Color Me Learning:

I woke early today and spent the last two hours participating in Dollarshort.org's Coloring Contest. I'll never in my wildest fantasies have my picture submitted by the November 1 deadline but I don't care. I'm using this as an opportunity to learn Photoshop, a skill I should probably have in my quiver by now.

So I getting smarter, one pixel at a time.

Your "Issue" Movie:

I went to the monthly dinner of ex-employees of the Film Yard Video store, my first job in San Francisco and heard perhaps the greatest movie question ever: What movie did you see, know was a great film, but hated because of your own issues? My answer: Diner.

What's yours?

Oprah v. Franken, More:

I wrote about Oprah v. Franzen in my column this week, digging a bit deeper into their childish behavior and why his getting yanked from the show was probably inevitable.

Frowning Franzen:

Jonathan Franzen, whose novel The Corrections is Oprah's Pick this month has been uninvited from the show, after making some nasty remarks about O and her brethren. I think they're both acting like children.

Learning Dreamweaver:

I really need to learn learning how this Dreamweaver thing works. It's depressing to read so many well designed blogs each day and think of how similar mine looks to so many others. I know it's supposed to be about the content. I'm just having envy.

Member of the Media:

Now that I'm, like, a member of the media and all that, I suppose I'm entitled to attend events thrown by Media Bisto, which I did this evening. Ran into one of my officemates from the Grotto (Connie, thanks for being you) and saw the back of Alan Deutchman's head. Even though I could say truthfully that, yes, I write book reviews for the Chronicle and yes, I publish a content-heavy Web site that's still alive, a little lesion on my confidence makes me wait for some goateed fellow named Kirk who started writing for Vanity Fair at 13, to say "Hey, kid, go home. This is for real writers."

Insecurity, what would I be without you?

Road Trip Yearning:

I need to take more road trips. There's too much cool stuff out there.

R.I.P My Mattress:

It's been six years since I've bought a mattress and the sack of newspaper I'm sleeping on now has had its day. If I drift too close to the center, it buckles and I end up like the filling in a taco shell. "When you sleep like guacamole," my friend Laura said this morning, "it's no good."

So off I went to European Sleep Works in Berkeley yesterday. The store underwrites several programs on KQED and in their spots, recite a bunch of scientific who-ha about "coil depth" and "independencing sides." I planned to gather some expert opinions and then shop around. I left with a rediculously expensive mattress and an elaborate justification: I'm investing in good sleep over the next 15-20 years and avoiding taco rest forever. If it means raman noodles for the next 8 months then, eh, it means raman noodles. With pepper if I can afford it.

They're very good salespeople.

Attica:

Last month marked the the 30th anniversary of the Attica Prison Rebellion. On September 9, 1971, the inmates of Attica prison near Buffalo, New York seized the facility with demands for better living conditions and vocational training. At the time, the Attica Correctional Faciltiy gave inmates one bucket of water a week for "showering" and one roll of toilet paper per month.

After a four day standoff, Governor Nelson Rockafeller refused negotiation and sent a strike force of 1,500 state police and national guardsman to the prison yard. In all, 42 people were killed including 10 correctional officers. In the years that followed, the State of New York would send bulldozers into the prison yard to wipe out any evidence of wrongdoing.

At the time, Attica was the worst case of one-day violence between Americans since the civil war. It remains one of the most shameful incidents in the history of American law enforcement.

I think of this now, in this very scray time, in this country I love. I see us giving virtually unchecked powers to law enforcement officials to question, arrest and detain those "suspected" of illegal activity. I see us willing to look at whole swaths of Americans as potential criminals and I'm reminded of Dostoyevsky, a prisoner himself, who said that "The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering the prisons."

I look at how we treat those we suspect of wrongdoing in America, the power we give to those appointed to protect us. And it scares the hell out of me.