Goodbye Columbus.

So yesterday we celebrated that faux holiday, Columbus Day, by visiting the zoo. I say faux holiday not to cast aspersions on that explorer who never once set foot in what has become the United States of America, but rather to note that while DCPS and some other organizations apparently observe the holiday, my workplace does not and so I had to take a vacation day.

The zoo visit was fun except for one creepy event: outside the invertabrate house we ran into a family of right-wing survivalists who will most likely in ten years be holed up in their rural West Virginia "compound" awaiting the coming race war. Or the black helicopters from the UN. All the women in the group -- from the wife (or wives, who knows) on down to the littlest one -- wore those singularly frumpy blouses with long dull skirts that immediately identifies the group as fucked up right wing wackos.

The father was either military or wanted to be. Survivalist is more like it. Freaky military, not like normal but rather the kind of look that gets you cast as the sadistic drill sergeant or uptight recruit who goes crazy and shoots everyone up (think the end of Taps). Speaking of crazy, his sons, ranging in age from about 12 to maybe 6, were all dressed in camoflage. One was carrying a canteen. Maybe his dad had told him he might run into some "coloreds" down in DC and they'd better be prepared.

Anyway, I let them go their way before we decided on ours because god knows I didn't feel like touring the zoo with the travelling troupe of "Ruby Ridge Revisited." As far as the animal exhibits go, I can say I was quite disappointed in the butterfly house, because it seemed to me that only about five butterflies were in there, and the high point of the day was that my son got to examine the shell from a lobster that had recently moulted and then to watch closely as the zoo staffer fed the lobster a shrimp.

That and the two kids both climbing around through the giant habitrail beside the prairie dog exhibit.

Recap on the quick picks and then some.

So I ended up 11-5 on my college picks. I was happy to get the Auburn v. Arkansas game wrong; it's always good to see a loudmouth coach getting trounced by an unranked team. Florida made me look very very bad, as did Texas. I guess that's what I get for talking shit about them.

As for the pros, the only game I even cared about -- and that's stretching the definition of caring -- was the deadskins game, and it turned out as I wished. The best part about having the foreskins lose is listening to talk radio afterwards, because you'd think the seventh seal had just been broken and the apocalypse was upon us. Moreover, these fools talk like the toughskins are somehow Washington's team. Hello, they play in Laurel, Maryland. Laurel. It might as well be Baltimore, except Baltimore actually has a team.

Today was a beautiful day to get out of the house and check out the world, which I tried to do, but first I wanted to buy a new camera to replace the one that got broken a few weeks ago. I went to the Best Buy in Tenleytown and they were all out of the one and only model I wanted. I went to the Best Buy in Potomac Yard (aka Alexandria), and they were also sold out of it. I walked down the box store row to Target and guess what -- their selection of digital cameras has shrunk to about a third of their former stock and they didn't have a single camera I was interested in. So after wasting around one and a half hours, the kids and I dragged ourselves to the National Gallery, where last week sippy cups for babies were welcome. This week they weren't.

Tomorrow I hope will go better.

The Friday post about college football.

Sure, Penn State is having a mediocre year, having lost a very good game to Ohio State and played miserably against Notre Dame. However, we have beaten powerhouses Akron, Youngstown State, and Northwestern. Now we head to Minneapolis to take on Minnesota.

But enough about Penn State. Let's talk about things I don't like. Like Texas. And Texas A & M. Seriously, who the hell is A & M and why are they still in Division I-A? Apparently their big tradition is to light everything on fire the night before a big game in a symbolic representation of conspicuous consumption. Such staged displays of "spirit" pale in comparison to the more spontaneous displays that were a Morgantown tradition in the 1980's and 1990's (and who knows, maybe still today): setting fire to old sofas after they managed to beat a decent team.

As for Texas, well, they had their year and now we can all go back to ignoring them as also-rans. They're an impressive 4-1, beating the mighty teams from North Texas, Rice, Iowa State, and Sam Houston State (which I think is a correspondence school), but they were walloped by the only good team they played. Luckily for them, they play in the Big 12, which means they won't have to face another quality opponent until a bowl game, if then.

For kicks, I'm going to tell everyone the outcomes of tomorrow's games in the top #25:
1. OSU v. Bowling Green. I think OSU's 1st quarter points will be enough to ensure the victory.
2. Auburn v. Arkansas. Auburn. Auburn has one quality win; Arkansas has none. Still, it'd be nice to see Arkansas beat Auburn just to shut Tuberville up.
3. USC v. Washington. USC. If it were in Washington, I'd pick Washington.
4. WVU does not play.
5. Florida v (9) LSU. LSU will beat this vastly overrated Florida team.
6. Michigan v. Michigan State. No one chokes like Michigan State. Michigan wins.
7. Texas v. (14) Oklahoma. OK really should be 4-0; Oklahoma in a rout.
8. Louisville v. Middle Tennessee State. Louisville.
10. Georgia v. (13) Tennessee. Who really cares, but Georgia will win.
11. Oregon v. (16) California. Cal beats the Ducks.
12. Notre Dame v. Stanford. I'd love to see winless Stanford beat Notre Dame, but it won't happen.
15. Clemson v. Wake Forest. Clemson.
17. Florida State v. NC State. NC State. OK that actually happened already.
18. Georgia Tech v. Maryland. G-Tech. Friedgen's 15 minutes are long past.
19. Iowa v. Purdue. Iowa.
20. Boise State v. Louisiana Tech. Boise State.
21. Virginia Tech doesn't play. Beamer, see note on Friedgen.
22. Nebraska v. Iowa State. Nebraska rolls over this team.
23. Missouri v. Texas Tech. Texas Tech.
24. Rutgers does not play.
25. Boston College does not play.

Mr. Speaker, the Getaway Plane is fueled and ready.

Anyone out there laying odds that Hastert resigns as Speaker of the House?

Is there an over-under on a "Before or After Election" pick?

This dirtbag apparently was playing the part of Cardinal to Foley's Wayward Priest.

Hell, even the Washington Times is calling for his resignation.

Only partially explored and not entirely an explanation.

There are some sick f*cks in this world, and I'm not talking about the war criminal currently sitting in the Oval Office. What sort of loser motherf*cker takes schoolchildren hostage to enact "revenge" for something he himself did twenty years ago? If only I believed in hell I could take comfort knowing there's a special corner for child killers. Unfortunately, all we get is a shithead piled under six feet of dirt or scattered to the winds.

We've had a rash of school shootings recently and the similarities between this one in Pennsylvania and the recent one in Colorado are too eerie for words. In both cases, the killers were not fellow students, but rather older men choosing a school as a target. In both cases the killers took female hostages and in both cases attempted to or did molest the hostages.

I would submit that these sick fucks are symptoms of a culture that on the one hand sexualizes children and on the other hand values purity or virginity; a culture that still maintains on many levels (although not officially) the primacy of the male and a patriarchal structure that inherently treats women as objects for male consumption. I am reminded very much of the movie American Beauty, in which Kevin Spacey's character sexualizes and seduces his daughter's friend (played by Mena Suvari) up until the point at which he's going to consummate the seduction -- and then he realizes that she's actually innocent whereas he had believed she was active sexually.

Spacey's character, Lester Burnham, stops at that moment. He pulls back from the situation and of course later meets his death at the hands of a closeted military careerist neighbor, but the point is that Burnham had been consumed with the popular imagination of teenagers in general and the teenage female in particular (see for example MTV...) and it was not until he encountered the Other in her specificity that he understood the difference between the stereotype of the whole and the specificity of the one. He is to that extent a success story (as are most people), whereas the school hostage takers are not. They are failures. It's just terribly unfortunate that they couldn't have made the decisions to kill themselves before they had to inflict so much pain on their victims and their victims' families.

Slouching toward November.

The Republicans have been tripping over themselves so hard, only a dead idea party like the Democrats could make this election close. First you had Abramoff; then Cunningham; then George Allen's racist ass comes out (and George, when your base consists of racists like yourself, it's not good to be forced to acknowledge your Jewish heritage); and then Foley's Follies and Hastert's attempted cover-up come out. And behind all of that lurks the miserable failure that is Bush's vanity project: the Iraq misadventure.

You'd think the Dems would be killing these guys. Unfortunately, they don't have any real vision for America except to say that they would not be the Republicans. It used to be that you could count on the Democrats to be behind grand plans, but my friends, the New Deal is 70 years ago.

The last big idea the Democrats had was Bill Clinton's abortive attempt at health care reform. How many people remember when Clinton held up a little card that symbolized the idea of a national health insurance card and then hung Hillary out to dry after it turned out some very vocal big spenders were against it (hello insurance industry shills)? That debacle enforced the notion that Democrats were fearful, directionless, shitheads.

So I don't look to the Dems as the saviors of the nation. However, while the Dems are directionless, the Republicans are pure evil, and at the very least a Democratic resurgence in the House and/or the Senate will stem the tide of idiocy emanating from a Party that has had no check on its power since 2000.

Who knows, if a President can be impeached for getting a blow job maybe a Democratic Congress might try to impeach a President for war crimes.

I have my doubts.

It was a tremendous early fall weekend in the District.

OK. This place has been open for a few months now, but I finally got down there yesterday and I was amazed. The Smithsonian's American Art Museum and Portrait Gallery are really worth the trip, and they'll be even better once the special exhibitions open up so you can actually enjoy the museum as it was designed, in a square that allows you to go from end to end without having to double-back.

I was very impressed with the contemporary art layout -- a nice open space that doesn't seem like a warehouse (sorry, but that's how both the Baltimore Museum's contemporary area and the L.A.'s MOCA felt to me -- as much as both of those are still amazing museums). My son particularly enjoyed the folk art area, especially "Devil in a Casket with She Devil and Evangelist," pictured below:

My daughter was most impressed with the echo that her voice could make in the halls, especially if she shrieked at her highest pitch.

They've combined sculpture, painting, and furnishings in several sections that provides a very different feel from, say the National Gallery of Art's West Wing, where sculpture is mainly confined to the basement. Walking through the gilded age section, for example, provides the visitor with a chance to see several components of the aesthetic movement all at once so as to get a real sense of the "lifestyle" desired by the practitioners and patrons of the movement.

We followed that up by a trip to the fountain at the National Gallery of Art Sculpture Garden, which to my mind is the closest I've come to feeling that I'm not in DC but rather in a foreign city. It's hard to explain that sense, but perhaps it's the trees cutting off the view of the massive buildings surrounding the garden or the couples and families and friends sitting together on the benches talking or reading or just in contemplation, but there's a cloistered yet friendly feel to the place.