Run for the Borders.

What a short, strange trip it's been.

When I was a young lad, oh let's say 19 or 20, I had never heard of this bookstore called Borders. I was from a little town in Pennsylvania, went to a not so little school in the middle of nowhere Pennsylvania, and was pretty happy with the little bookshop that had recently expanded in the downtown area.

However, visiting friends in Washington, DC, one year in either the late 1980's or early 1990's, sometime between 1989 and 1991 let's say, my one friend told me I had to visit this place called Borders.

There was only one in the area, I think. If I recall correctly it was out in Bethesda or Friendship Heights. Back then, my knowledge of DC geography was very spotty.

I was amazed that a supermarket of books existed.

I think the largest bookstore I'd ever been in to that date was the Ollsson's on Wisconsin Avenue in Georgetown, one of the first casualties in that ill-fated local chain's demise.

Fast forward a few years, and I've moved to DC. I was a graduate student at a school in Foggy Bottom and a Borders opened up on 19th and L. It was a great place to go to kill time before or after class, and of course to buy books, although once I discovered the great local bookstores, I spent less and less time buying books at Borders.

Many of those local bookstores were done in not so much by Borders -- although they played a part -- as by Barnes and Noble, which aggressively moved into DC, and the pressures everyone faced from online retailers like Amazon. Vertigo Books in Dupont Circle was one of my favorites.

I'm pleased that Bridge Street Books in Georgetown -- my personal favorite -- continues.

So now all the Borders will be shuttered. What do we do with these hulking beasts on the periphery of our cities and towns?

The dominoes are falling...

On Friday it was Rebekah Brooks.

Shortly afterward, down went Les Hinton.

Over the weekend, the head of Scotland Yard, Paul Stephenson resigned.

This morning, Scotland Yard's John Yates resigned.

And if you parse Paul Stephenson's resignation statement, we're talking about issues that could touch the Prime Minister.

However, in the US, the Murdoch-controlled media refuses to acknowledge that anything important has happened or is happening.

We're beyond talking about Murdoch's minions resigning from their media perches. We're talking about top law officials in a relatively respected foreign country having to relinquish their posts. Although analogies always limp, Stephenson's resignation would be akin to the head of the FBI stepping down in the U.S.

Still, the Murdoch lie machine churns on Stateside, with the Wall Street Journal, a relatively recent Murdoch acquisition trying to deflect attention from their owner's criminal activity and instead arguing that this event -- the event that has caused two top law officials to step down, been the subject of hearings in Parliament, and has even caused an ostensibly contrite Murdoch to apologize to some of his victims -- is really about circulation numbers and ideological distaste for Murdoch's right wing media conglomerate.

Americans by and large will probably pay little attention to this mess. Fox News is hardly covering it, and when they do, it's mainly to dismiss it as overblown media hype, a minor incident that isn't really important, which is much how they would likely have reported on Watergate had they been around then: a minor burglary, committed by a few rogue operatives, who are being punished...what's the fuss?

NewsCorp's most damaging problem in the US will most likely be the bribing of foreign officials. It's not good enough for the WSJ, whose editorial team has always been ideological hacks whose ethical brain zones either never developed properly or were killed off years ago, to argue that "everyone pays for stories...so who cares" when that argument won't even get you out of a speeding ticket. Besides, we aren't talking about paying some celebrity for a scoop (or better yet paying a friend of the celebrity for a scoop); we're talking about paying bribes to the police. We're talking about official corruption.

We're talking, in short, of criminal activities and criminals.

Fox News, predictably carrying water for Murdoch, Inc.

Fox News, Murdoch's heavy hitter, has come out swinging in defense of the embattled criminal who heads their parent corporation. This coverage from the Guardian:

On the Fox and Friends show[*], Fox journalist Steve Doocy wondered just what the fuss was all about: "The company has come forward and said: 'look, this happened a long time ago, at a tabloid, in London, somebody did something really bad,' and the company reacted. They closed that newspaper, all the people got fired, even though 99 percent of them had nothing to do with it."

Doocy's guest, public relations consultant Robert Dilenschneider, was in agreement:
"If I am not mistaken, Murdoch, who owns it, has apologised but for some reason, the public, the media keeps on going over this, again and again. It's a little bit too much."

"The bigger issue is hacking and how we as a public are going to protect outselves," said Dilenschneider, who earlier listed a number of US companies which had recently become the targets of hacking.

Doocy added later: "One of the things about the media, you look at some sites and you would think that martians had landed in New Jersey - again"

Right. Because hacking over an extended period of time into the voice mail of celebrities, royalty, politicians, crime victims, and dead soldiers really isn't a big deal. Forget the fact that the people responsible for these crimes were rewarded with promotion within their criminal organization. Let's focus on the fact that we're all in danger from hacking...not that Murdoch's minions are the ones who have been caught doing the hacking.

And what the hell does he mean by "a long time ago"? For most people, "a long time ago" is in a "galaxy far far away." We're talking last decade.

And "somebody did something really bad"? Is he explaining this event to a five year old (well, given the IQ of the Fox audience, maybe)? And it wasn't "somebody": it was "somebodies," including but not limited to the head of Murdoch's UK News International. We aren't talking about the secretary stealing office supplies. We're talking about corporate criminals engaged in ongoing illegal invasions of privacy and electronic eavesdropping.

Absolute scum.

Seriously, Steve Doocy can't be called anything resembling a journalist. Dog shit is actually too noble to be muddied by association with that scumbag's name.

How stupid are Americans that Fox News can continue to dominate news ratings?

[*following long-standing policy, I tend not to link to hate groups]

I've been out of the life for a while now...

I've been married for something like fourteen years now (and when I say something like 14, what I mean is 14 years and nearly one month), and I've had kids for 11 years, so I don't live the glamorous life of the single on the dating circuit. In fact, when I was single, I still didn't live the glamorous life of the single on the dating circuit.

However, a lot of people do live those lives -- at least the dating part of it -- and they like to blog about it. I mean, why not? It's a central part of being human.

I don't habitually read these blogs, but I do read them on occasion, at least the more well-written ones. I do read DC Blogs, which is a tremendous resource. And on DC Blogs I found a link to Date Me, DC! and a really, I think, important topic: Figuring out just what the hell "No" means. Apparently for some it's a difficult lesson.

To read some relatively popular blogs that have been around a while, "No" is more or less the start of negotiations. Not their preferred start, but still a start and not an ending. Those who disagree either "don't have game" or are "betas." Perhaps.

However, to read Date Me, DC!, it seems like some people might not find it much of a fun game.

Who listens to you?

This morning I was thinking about the power of Rupert Murdoch's media empire, which in the US is most noted for Fox News. Back in the 1990's, the upstart Fox News positioned itself as a "fair and balanced" alternative to the supposedly liberal CNN. It was clever positioning, especially as CNN's "liberalness" basically consisted of having actual foreign news bureaus and professional journalists. CNN was a network who, after all, came to prominence due to their incessant drum beats for the First Gulf War, which they slickly branded and marketed.

Nevertheless, Fox News claimed to be the center and cast CNN as the left, when in reality it was CNN running a corporate journalist center while Fox allowed themselves a very partisan voice on the right. That much is old news and goes many times over to show that most people can't tell naked partisan reporting from reporting that, while still implicated in all sorts of biases, attempts to tell the story honestly, i.e. traditional journalism as taught in schools and the old school news rooms.

Fox News didn't invent such distortions, of course. William Randolph Hearst famously (perhaps apocryphally) said, "You supply the pictures, I'll supply the war." And Hearst had enormous influence through his media empire, just as Murdoch does today. I imagine Hearst may have been capable of tapping phone lines of not only celebrities, but also of crime victims, dead soldiers' families, and politicians. Hearst may also have been capable of bribing police for inside information.

We know Murdoch is capable of such things.

Murdoch will predictably argue that he had no idea what his underlings were doing. He will predictably point the finger at "rogue" elements within his empire. That was the strategy during the first fall out from the News of the World phone tapping scandals, when most of the UK thought only celebrities and footballers were targeted. Rogue elements, acting without authorization, Murdoch et al argued, were responsible for these criminal activities. However, this latest scandal directly implicates Rupert Murdoch's son James and the head of his UK branch, Rebekah Brooks. The Guardian has a great timeline here.

Let me give you a little weekend recap.

I was doing two things all weekend long (really three, but the third is connected to the first, so we'll let it go at that): baking and grading.

The third thing was volunteering, but I was volunteering to sell the baked goods that I was baking. That's the connection I was talking about.

I graded three sets of papers, one set of annotated bibliographies, and about seven sets of discussions over the weekend, beginning on Thursday. I was in that situation because I am something of a procrastinator when it comes to grading, so although I was giving feedback on projects throughout, I hadn't exactly sat down to assign formal grades to things.

And yes, I know I posted on both the grading and the baking earlier on. I'm now providing the post mortem.

The grading was miserable. I hate it. However, I dutifully plugged along and took the punishment for those weeknights during the semester that I decided sleeping was more important than grading a bit here and there (it also didn't help that I went to Seattle toward the end of the first summer session to attend a wedding...traveling is not good for my grading motivation).

The baking on the other hand, while exhausting, was a joy. It was so enjoyable in fact that following Friday night, when my pies and cookies sold at a brisk clip, I went home and baked two more pies and a few more dozen cookies. This time I rose to the challenge of a friend and produced a vegan apple pie, which essentially meant I didn't use any butter or margarine, as that's the only animal product in a fruit pie. Instead of butter/margarine (margarine contains whey, which is made of milk, so it's not vegan...something I learned this weekend), I used Crisco baking sticks with "buttery" taste.

Mm-Hmm. If they say so.

Although I didn't like it nearly so much as the butter-laden regular dough, the all vegetable shortening dough was not bad (may I never say that loud enough for Julia Child to overhear me in the Hall of the Kitchen Gods). The filling is absolutely the same: apples, flour, sugar, salt, lemon juice, and cinnamon.

I feel a great sense of accomplishment today, having both turned in my grades and sold off the baked goods, and look forward to turning my eye to more important matters such as John Boehner's tan and Michele Bachmann's pledge to oligarchy.

Baking.

One of the things I did in grad school to procrastinate was bake. If I had a paper due in a few days, the best thing I could do was back a pie or two. I've got grades due in four days, so I decided last night to bake three pies and six dozen cookies.

OK, I'm not being terribly honest.

I knew for a few weeks that I was going to be baking last night. I volunteered to supply a few baked goods to a charity sale for the local library, and so my baking wasn't this time a reaction to the impending doom of turning in my grades.

Sorry I don't have pictures.

However, I baked three apple pies. Two are double crust and one is crumb-top. The apples are braeburn and I dice them up pretty well, although I always leave a few larger chunks. I was planning on one double crust and two crumb-tops, but I had so much dough that I went with the two double-crusts. Good dough. I use the Julia Child recipe from The Way to Cook. I highly recommend it.

There's something nice and simple about flour, butter, vegetable shortening, sugar, salt, and water.

Between making the pie dough and actually filling and baking the pies, I made cookies. Three dozen are chocolate chip and three dozen are chocolate chip with walnuts. My cookies come out flat and crispy. They come out exactly like my grandmother's in fact, a point that mystifies my mother and aunt. I don't do anything special; I use The Joy of Cooking recipe.

The kids are a bit upset right now because they're not allowed to have any of the cookies.