This story just breaks my heart.  I can't begin to imagine the heartache this dog owner has felt since Halloween.  And the sickness and depravity of the people who are putting this man and his pet through this ordeal is equally unfathomable.  Our family will add Bill Whiting and Edna to our silent prayers this week.

Michael McCarthy wrote a piece in this morning's USA Today on the growing tension between university athletic departments and academic departments as the two sides compete for general university funds.  Always good to see Myles Brand, head of the NCAA, dispensing pearls of wisdom like the following:

"You're getting a lot more tension in the university. And no one is talking about it. Almost a quiet crisis," said Brand. "That tension between faculty needs, academic needs and the desire of athletic departments to be competitive is really a very serious, and growing, issue."

The average earnings of the 120 major college football coaches nationwide hit $1 million for the first time this year, according to a USA TODAY analysis published Wednesday. But Brand doesn't blame spiraling head coaching salaries for the rise in athletic department spending. Roughly 75% of a head football coach's salary is generated by outside sources, such as TV/radio deals and endorsements, he noted.

Instead, he blames the "coattails effect" of pricey assistant coaches, trainers, video technicians and equipment. "It's everyone else. It's the $400,000-$500,000 coordinator," Brand says.

Check me if I'm wrong, but to have a "coattails effect," doesn't there have to be a coat to begin with?  I mean, presumably without the multi-million dollar head coaching salaries that Brand says are not a problem, there wouldn't be the excess of half million dollar assistant coaching salaries, trainers, video technicians and equipment that are causing all the trouble.  So I guess the head coaching salaries are just an inconvenient problem that Brand doesn't want to recognize.  Better to stroke the egos of the millionaire coaches who are the faces of college athletics, and who just by coincidence happen to help the NCAA, under Brand's leadership, make billions of dollars from television revenues.

But wait.  Isn't Bob Knight, long-time bete noir of Myles Brand from their days together at Indiana University, one of the coaches with a mega-salary?  What's the world coming to?  Reminds me of the movie Ghostbusters, when the title characters are explaining to the mayor of New York the ramifications of their findings about ghostly activity in the Big Apple:

Dr Ray Stantz: Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies. Rivers and seas boiling.
Dr. Egon Spengler: Forty years of darkness. Earthquakes, volcanoes...
Winston Zeddemore: The dead rising from the grave.
Dr. Peter Venkman: Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together - mass hysteria.

None of the above is even close to the cataclysmic nature of Myles Brand and Bob Knight seeing eye to eye on the size of Knight's salary.

From perusing Hugh Hewitt's and Michelle Malkin's blogs, I see that the Boston Globe has apparently managed to "discover" that the lawn care service Mitt Romney uses for his home in Massachusetts still hires illegal aliens, despite their promises to Mr. Romney that such practices would not continue after this issue first arose earlier this year as the presidential campaign started to gather steam.

Patrick Ruffini, writing at Hugh Hewitt's blog, had this to say:

But you have to wonder what Romney was thinking using the same company that got him in hot water the year before. You would think he would have had this kind of thing squared away before he became an active candidate. It's not like he's ever at the house overseeing these guys, but that's no excuse. This is exactly the kind of treatment any candidate can expect. Do we know, for instance, who's been tending the garden on Whitehaven Street or in Chappaqua? In light of this report, perhaps we should.

Michelle Malkin, while pointing out the interesting double standards involved in questioning one's immigration status, also noted as follows:

For the record, Romney should have cut ties with the company a long time ago. Dumb decision. He should  be embarrassed.

I understand from the perspective of people who apparently have nothing better to do that find the political angle to everything in life that being angry or disappointed in Romney for not having "fixed this problem" by firing the lawn service is the obvious reaction.  But as someone who grows more disenchanted with politics and government with every passing year, I wonder why people like Ruffini and Malkin don't have the common sense to look at this situation from the perspective that maybe Romney tried to handle this like a normal person rather than a politician.

Let's assume that Romney has been using the same lawn care service for his home for the past 10 years.  I don't know how long he has lived in Massachusetts, but I believe he was running for Senate and the Governor's Mansion back in the early 90s, so it seems reasonable to think he's lived there longer than 10 years.  Provided the lawn service company is doing a good job, and the price seems acceptable, it wouldn't be surprising to find that the same company handled the work for a long stretch of time.  The same service took care of our lawn from the time our house was built in 1994 through this summer, when we had to make some financial cutbacks.  And when the time comes to bring a lawn service back, our first call will be to the service we used before.  We liked the work they did, and have some loyalty to them.

So why couldn't it be reasonable for someone like Mitt Romney to also have some loyalty to the lawn care service people he has been dealing with for years?  When the "problem" of the service hiring illegal aliens first arose, the company apparently assured / promised Romney that it wouldn't do it again.  So now it's Romney's fault for believing them and not just firing the company and bringing in someone new?  What kind of view of the small business owner does that involve?  Should we just assume that a small business owner is a liar and cut them loose because it's more politically expedient?

I find Ms. Malkin's and Mr. Ruffini's comments often times quite insightful.  But I think they've missed something on this topic.  I'm willing to give Romney points for sticking by the lawn care service company after their assurances they would no longer hire illegal aliens.  That's the normal guy, decent thing to have done, and I don't think he has anything to be embarrassed about with this story.  Quite frankly, I think Romney would have more to be embarrassed about if he had fired the lawn service company in response to the original discovery that they had hired illegal aliens.  That would have been the craven, weasely, politician approach that I am disappointed to find Ruffini and Malkin advocating.

Well, probably not.  Adverse possession is an old common law doctrine whereby someone can obtain title to property that they do not actually own.  Essentially, you have to act as if you own the property for a sufficiently long period of time (usually 20 years) without the real property owner taking steps to stop you.  This is one of those things you learn in property law during law school and then find out in practice that it's darn near impossible to succeed on this type of claim in today's world.  So it would kind of be interesting and newsworthy in the legal world to see a case involving a valid adverse possession action.

However, in this story out of Boulder, Colorado, linked by Instapundit.com, it looks to me more like a typical case of political corruption carrying the day, using adverse possession as a hook for extorting the rightful property owners.  Sounds like the idiot judge/mayor/trespasser in Boulder could use being on the receiving end of some old-time frontier justice.  Here's a taste of the story - sorry if it ruins anyone's appetite heading into Thanksgiving:

The story is so absurd, so unfair, so ludicrous, I had a difficult time believing that it could actually happen - even in Boulder.
I
t's about a couple named Don and Susie Kirlin. They moved to the city in 1980. A few years later, the Kirlins purchased a plot of land near their residence, hoping to someday build a "dream home."
"We took advantage of the market in the early '80s," says Susie Kirlin, almost apologetic for making a smart investment.

Children interfered slightly with the master plan - three of them in the next few years - postponing any development of the property.

As the children began to make their own way in life, the couple decided it was time to finally develop the property in late 2006.

By then, it was too late.

Despite owning the land, despite living only 200 yards from the property, despite hiking past it every week with their three dogs, despite spraying for weeds and fixing fences, despite paying homeowner association dues and property taxes each year, someone else had taken a shine to it. Someone powerful.

I first saw this item linked via Instapundit.com (the entire text is below, but if you click through, you can see a photo of the plane):

With exquisite timing, Boeing chooses a travel weekend that could go down in the annals of airborne horror to deliver a top-of-the-line Boeing Business Jet that will be assigned to Congress - those folks who have charged billions in air travel taxes over the decades and left us with 1930s blind-landing technology. The jet took off from Seattle this morning for its base at Scott AFB in Illinois.

Midwest and East Coast - check out this morning's Seattle weather in the picture, because it's headed your way.

The C-40C, jam-packed with 40 seats by luxury-jet specialists at Greenpoint Technologies, is the third and last of a batch ordered in 2005. They will be operated by the USAF reserve to carry Congressional delegations around the world.

Funny how nobody in Washington ever mentions these $70 million jets as an example of wasteful defense spending. Or as an example of an unjustified Air Force mission that doesn't support our soldiers on the ground.

Instapundit has posted a follow-up:

Reader Al Reasin emails: "Since congress's new luxury jet is part of the military appropriations and with congress not funding the military as the president requested, the jet should be the first causalty of the reduction in spending required to maintain support for the troops in harm's way. While the jet has been delivered, so too late to cancel it, it should be grounded. Actually all congressional fights provided by the Air Force should be grounded. Let them all take to the airways with the regular folks and experience the problems we face. And since they are so concerned about global warming, it would reduce their carbon footprint." I'm on board!

So Al, if you are a natural born U.S. citizen, and will be over the age of 35 by January 20, 2009, you may be getting at least one vote for President next fall.  Good luck and Godspeed.

From the Daily Mail:

Man 'torched £350,000 home to stop his wife getting it in divorce'

By CHRIS BROOKE -  A furious husband burnt down his £350,000 home to stop his wife receiving it in a divorce settlement, a court heard.

Gary Hooley, a builder, had previously threatened to "knock the house down brick by brick" during one of many heated rows with his wife Michelle.

With the short marriage heading for divorce, he set fire to the house they shared in a callous act of retribution committed while drunk, Sheffield Crown Court was told.

I don't think we have any Neil Diamond CDs in our music collection, though I wouldn't mind having some.  The kids would probably groove to some of his songs.

But now that Diamond has acknowledged that he was inspired to write the music and lyrics to "Sweet Caroline" by a very young Caroline Kennedy, I'm a little bit creeped out.  Maybe I'm reading this entirely the wrong way, and it's not in any way Nabokovian, but here's the relevant portion of the news story from Breitbart.com:

LOS ANGELES (AP) - Neil Diamond held onto the secret for decades, but he has finally revealed that President Kennedy's daughter was the inspiration for his smash hit "Sweet Caroline."

"I've never discussed it with anybody before—intentionally," the 66- year-old singer-songwriter told The Associated Press on Monday during a break from recording. "I thought maybe I would tell it to Caroline when I met her someday."

He got his chance last week when he performed the song via satellite at Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg's 50th birthday party.

Diamond was a "young, broke songwriter" when a photo of the president's daughter in a news magazine caught his eye.

"It was a picture of a little girl dressed to the nines in her riding gear, next to her pony," Diamond recalled. "It was such an innocent, wonderful picture, I immediately felt there was a song in there."

Years later, holed up in a hotel in Memphis, he would write the words and music in less an hour

[snip]

The tune's return to the charts leaves Diamond "speechless," he said: "That song was written 40 years ago...

Ok, so I see from Wikipedia that Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg was born in November, 1957.  That makes sense given the story above and reference to her upcoming 50th birthday.  Happy Birthday to her, yada, yada, yada.

Now here are the lyrics to the song:

Where it began
I can't begin to knowin'
But then I know it's growing strong

Was in the spring
And spring became the summer
Who'd have believed you'd come along?

Hands, touchin' hands
Reaching out
Touching me
Touching you

Sweet Caroline
Good times never seemed so good
I've been inclined
To believe it never would
But now I

Look at the night
And it don't seem so lonely
We fill it up with only two
And when I hurt
Hurtin' runs off my shoulders
How can I hurt when holding you

Warm, touchin' warm
Reachin' out
Touching me
Touching you

Sweet Caroline
Good times never seem so good
I've been inclined
To believe they never would
Oh, no, no

Sweet Caroline
Good times never seemed so good
Sweet Caroline
I believed they never could
Sweet Caroline

Again, maybe I'm completely off base in how I have heard this song.  I recall from the movie "Beautiful Girls" that it was performed as essentially a love song to a beautiful woman.  Makes sense.  But would you write a love song to a little girl that says things like:

Look at the night
And it don't seem so lonely
We fill it up with only two

and:

Warm, touchin' warm
Reachin' out
Touching me
Touching you

to a little girl between the ages of 5 and 10?  The page linked to above for the lyrics notes as follows:  "This song appears on the album "Love Songs (Remastered) (2002)" by Neil Diamond", so I guess old Neil intended it as a love song.

I'm just guessing on the math and numbers, but the news story indicates Diamond remembered a picture of Caroline Kennedy taken as a little girl wearing riding clothes and standing by her pony.  The photo apparently was published several years before Diamond wrote the song.  Diamond then tells us the song was written 40 years ago, so around the time Caroline Kennedy was 10, and the photo was from several years before that.

Puts me off my feed a little.

All right, I've held off for several hours in posting this.  I had it all set to go, and hesitated because I thought maybe I was just completely off base in thinking it vaguely wrong to dedicate this song to a young girl.  But after having received a form of confirmation that it's kind of creepy, I'm letting this one go into the ether.

   

From the AP story on Google News:

The 14th annual "City Crime Rankings: Crime in Metropolitan America" was published by CQ Press, a unit of Congressional Quarterly Inc. It is based on the FBI's Sept. 24 crime statistics report.

The report looked at 378 cities with at least 75,000 people based on per-capita rates for homicide, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary and auto theft. Each crime category was considered separately and weighted based on its seriousness, CQ Press said.

Last year's crime leader, St. Louis, fell to No. 2. Another Michigan city, Flint, ranked third, followed by Oakland Calif.; Camden, N.J.; Birmingham, Ala.; North Charleston, S.C.; Memphis, Tenn.; Richmond, Calif.; and Cleveland.

The study ranked Mission Viejo, Calif., as the safest U.S. city, followed by Clarkstown, N.Y.; Brick Township, N.J.; Amherst, N.Y.; and Sugar Land, Texas.

I have to conclude from the Feds wasting 4 years dorking around investigating whether a steroid-taking baseball player lied about whether he knew he was taking steroids that crime in Northern California has been completely eradicated for some time now.  So there's no way Oakland can be on this list.  Simliarly, it is impossible for the only city in California to be in the "safest" group to be located way down south of LA.

The only possible explanation is that the crime statistics include non-federal jurisdiction crimes so that the FBI and U.S. District Attorneys wouldn't actually be involved, they're just reporting general numbers.

this link and photo from Golf Magazine online probably need review by a decent editor.  It's an interesting picture of golfers on a glacier.  Here's the caption:

At the Drambuie World Ice Golf Championship in Uummannaq, Greenland, the temperature can fall below 50° C.

My lovely wife is the scientist in the family, but even I know that you won't find too much snow and ice if the temperature is 50 degrees centigrade.  They surely mean that temperatures "can fall to minus 50 degrees C."

Guess I shouldn't expect too much from a CNN-affiliated "news" source.

I thought Saturday Night Live stopped doing shows about 15 years ago, but apparently they are still around.  Though I see from this story from Fox News that they managed to do a live show last night despite the ongoing writer's strike:

NEW YORK  —  It wasn't live from New York as usual.

About 150 audience members in a tiny Manhattan theater were the only folks in the world to witness a totally new "Saturday Night Live" episode starring guest host Michael Cera and musical guest Yo La Tengo.

Anyone who tuned into NBC was subjected to a two-week-old rerun featuring Brian Williams and Feist, thanks to an ongoing Writers Guild of America labor strike.

I guess it would have been poor form to point out that the number of audience members in the Manhattan theater were approximately equal to the number of households nationwide that tuned into NBC for the rerun.

Interesting post from Gregory Sullivan over at Pajamas Media.  Here's a taste, but I recommend reading the whole thing:

Hillary Clinton’s big idea is to think the government can run a vertically integrated version of Medicine. I have my doubts. Bad managers like vertical integration because they are immune to outside pressure to perform. There are no upstream producers giving you things before you’re ready to process them, and no downstream vendors selling things before you’re ready to supply them. And vertically integrated monopolies run by the government don’t even have to worry about the customers. No one can go to another vendor. And the opposition party cannot offer an alternative other than the destruction of what been cobbled together, which is like asking if you’d like your ration card torn up during a famine once the thing gets going. The beast will never die once Igor pulls the switch, until it collapses under the weight of its own bureaucracy.

While Notre Dame is clearly out of its depth against football powerhouses like Air Force and Navy, you have to give some credit to their athletic department administrators for their forward thinking.  How else to explain their decision to dump Northwestern, another program that would have crushed the Irish this season, from the schedule and slip Duke into the mix.  They were even smart enough to slot Duke for their final home game to ensure the seniors didn't go out with a winless record this year for the home crowd.  Well played.

From Sports Illustrated online this morning:

Dara Torres broke the U.S. record in the women's 50-meter freestyle by swimming a 23.87 in her heat. The 40-year-old broke the mark of 24.21 Kara Lynn set on March 18, 2004.

I hope this story is "real," but, given everything that seems to be going on in big-time athletics, let's just say I need to buy more salt at the grocery today.

Breitbart.com has an update on the Homeland Security Halloween party fiasco that resulted in charges of insensitivity after an employee with dreadlocks, darkened skin, and a prison costume was awarded a prize for his costume.  From this morning's update:

Costume Flap Imperils Immigration Post

WASHINGTON (AP) - Just when it appeared Julie Myers had cleared every hurdle in her quest to officially become the nation's top immigration official, a dreadlocked wig and a prisoner's outfit could cost her the job.

Myers, director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ran into trouble earlier this month after she and two other agency managers gave the "most original" costume award to a white employee who came to the agency's Halloween party dressed as an escaped prisoner with dreadlocks and darkened skin.

...

Myers has apologized repeatedly for the costume incident, saying she was "shocked and horrified" to learn the employee had altered his skin color and conceding "it was inappropriate for me to recognize any individual wearing an escaped prisoner costume."

So let me make sure I understand this.  We want the person in CHARGE of Immigration Enforcement to not be able to recognize when one of her own employees has put on makeup as a disguise?  That explains a lot about the government's complete inability and unwillingness to close the borders.  I need to go get some whiskey for my coffee and a case of Tums...

As the father of 2 small kids, ages 6 (almost 7) and 3 (almost 4), I find myself amazed at how difficult it seems to be to find socks that fit their feet properly.  My lovely wife thinks I'm insane for continually coming home with socks from different stores, trying to find ones that both fit their feet, and stay up on their calves but without being too restrictive.

We've picked up socks at Gymboree, Children's Place, Kids' Gap, Old Navy, Target and Walmart (sorry Mom & Dad).  At this point, I've had the most luck recently with some Gold Toe product that Target is selling for girls.  Even with our daughter's notoriously finicky foot behavior, where her socks have to go on JUST so, with no bumps or things she can feel anywhere, which generally entails a process of well over a minute to put on a single sock, somehow I've hit paydirt the past few times I've grabbed socks from Target that I figured were in the right color schemes, and would hopefully fit.

I have not had as much success with socks for our son, on the other hand.  Much to my wife's dismay, I picked up a couple of different multi-sock packages from different stores in the past couple of months.  The first pack was for boys ages 4-6.  With a 4th birthday on the distant horizon of late February, I figured those would work fine.  Looked a bit large as an initial fit, but I figured with washing and drying, they'd wind up pretty much right where he'd like them.

Wrong.  They're still huge on him.  So, after repeated complaints from my lovely wife about how ridiculous these socks were, I bought a different multi-pack.  They're better, but seem rather tight through the ribbed portion of the sock that goes over the lower leg.  (There's probably some sock terminology to specifically identify and describe this portion of the sock, but I don't know what it is.  That will have to wait for another day.)  I guess at this point they'll have to do.

One final oddity that I noticed with both of the multi-packs of socks for my son, as well as the pack of socks I bought for myself recently, is that the packages are re-sealable plastic bags.  Like the kind of Ziploc bags you put leftovers in for storage.  And this is even pointed out on the bags as a selling point.  Why?  Are people storing their socks in re-sealable plastic bags in a dresser drawer for some reason?  Are they emptying out the socks and using the bag to store leftover food items?  I don't understand this marketing gimmick.  I would have bought the socks whether the bag was re-sealable or not.  What is the benefit I am getting out of this?

Maybe I should go do an online search for "re-sealable sweat sock packages" and see if there is some deep answer to this mystery.