Over at MSNBC, a news story regarding what might seem a small kerfluffle that happens quite often: a woman in a small town who wants a local art gallery to take down and destroy one of its paintings.

The trick? The painting is a portrait of Adolf Hitler. It’s hanging in a young artist’s gallery, and apparently it’s part of a gallery of “icons”, portraying various figures both good and evil. And the local paper seems to just about sum up my position on the subject.

What sharpens me on the point, however, is the fact that the woman’s comments (though she’s free to make them, as I’ll get to in a second) offer a glimpse into a problem I see too often: people seem to assume they have a “right” to not be offended. Her quote: “Freedom of speech? What happened to taste and sensitivity in our country?” Unfortunately, it’s precisely this form of argument that is so odious. It’s obvious that this woman has every right to be upset; she has a very close family reason to despise Hitler and all he stood for, and if she thinks the painting doesn’t get the portrayal right, then she’s going to be offended. On the other hand, if speech is to be censored for reasons of “taste” or “sensitivity”, then certain subjects will never be debated.

Working at Southern Tech University, I’ve seen plenty of examples of odious, disgusting speech. Anti-abortion displays like this one, bizarre displays of raw anti-semitism masquerading as “palestinian solidarity”, and so on. I worry about the violence potential of the second (especially after having been stalked on-campus by members of said racist group), but as long as they stay peaceful, I subscribe to the notion that the proper response to their hate speech is not censorship, but counter-speech exposing them and whatever factual misrepresentations (hell with it: outright lies) for what they are.

One of the difficult decisions I had to make when going with Verizon is what phone to get. I have been a Windows Mobile user for quite some time. I really just stumbled upon it through chance and circumstance. But I quickly found out how it worked, found the software that I wanted to use for it, and never looked back. That’s not to say that I ever thought Windows Mobile was perfect. It was inconsistent and not ultra-intuitive. I had to install third-party applications for things that should have been native to the OS.

But when it comes to technology, I have a conservative soul and stick to what has always worked for me. I don’t like it when software-makers do massive revamps. They typically add features I like, but they change what I have always been delightfully accustomed to. And so it was with Windows Mobile. Windows Phone 7, WM6’s successor, is a massive revamp. None of the WM6 software will be compatible. Features I’ve come to rely on with WinMo will no longer be there, including multitasking and cut and paste. The unparalleled customizability of WM was explicitly dropped. In other words, they took half the reasons I will never own an iPhone and inserted it into their OS.

Because of this, I am left to find another OS. I didn’t think this would be that big of a deal as I thought of all of the things that I don’t like about Windows Mobile and thought that maybe Android, Symbian, or the Blackberry OS might not have these limitation. I was particularly interested in Symbian and Android, but it appears that Symbian is being gradually retired as well as its primary benefactor and owner, Nokia, starts looking for alternatives. It was looking at the alternatives that made me realize all that Windows Mobile could do and that I took for granted. I was relatively sure that I was going to migrate to Android for my next phone, but to my relative shock I discovered that Android can’t do a lot of things that Windows Mobile can do and has been able to do since at least 2003.

When it comes to smartphones, I have pretty specific needs. The biggest thing is what I call The Walkman Test. Basically, I want to be able to play music and videos without the device ever having to leave my pocket or holster. That means I need to reprogram the buttons both within the OS and within the media player. What I do now is set the volume buttons to open and start playing media. My main concern with Android is that it would not be able to do this. I was also concerned that, unlike with Windows Mobile, I might not be able to redirect all audio (and not just phone calls) to a Bluetooth phone headset. Any OS will let you use a Bluetooth stereo headset, but not necessarily pipe all audio to a headset designed mostly for phone use. Even Windows Mobile makes this a challenge.

I still don’t know the degree to which I can customize buttons on Android so that it can pass The Walkman Test. I asked some Android forums the question and got zero answers and a few “Why would anyone want to do that?” questions (which is usually a sign that it can’t). But I discovered along the way something more damning: Android can barely play my videos at all. I mean, it can play videos and there are tools to convert the videos into something that Android can play, but I don’t want to have to convert a video any time I want it to play on my phone. There are precisely two video players for Android that can play standard AVI files and both are crude and reports say that the video play is choppy (and one of them is in Chinese). This is in stark contrast to Windows Mobile, where there are at least two players that can play any type of video.

Perhaps more disconcerting is that the make-up of Android makes it so that it’s unlikely that any players will be coming out any time soon. I don’t know the technical details, but the folks from CorePlayer (the makers of both of the great Windows Mobile players) have said that they are trying but the Android OS is not at all conducive to third-party apps getting the kind of direct access to the hardware to smoothly play videos. I’m guessing that’s why the video on the players that do exist is so choppy. Android has to act as an intermediary of some sort and that bogs everything down. DivX, which also has a player for Windows Mobile, has flat-out announced that it is giving up on an Android player until Android changes its specs.

I have to believe that at some point Android will get it right. What I find fascinating is that I talk to Android users about this and they simply don’t understand why this is a problem. What’s so bad about converting videos? External video types can really drain the battery so it’s a good thing this option is not available to use (the same rationale that Apple defenders use for the complete lack of Flash support). Well, I’d like to make that decision for myself. I also get questions about why it’s such a big deal to have to pull the player out every time you want to stop or start a video. It makes me want to yell “Because this is what I want to do!” and I get agitated that everyone acts like it’s such an unreasonable request when Windows Mobile has been doing it for seven years.

I guess a lot of it just comes down to what someone wants from an OS. Which is what makes questions like “What is the best smartphone OS” ultimately dumb questions. I fail to see what the big deal is behind what the iPhone’s OS can do. I don’t understand how a sleek OS is worth not being able to install any application that Apple doesn’t want you to install (or having to go to war with your phone to do so). When people say “I love the iPhone because it can do x,” I am inclined to look at those people just as blankly as they look at me when I say that I like Windows Mobile because I can do y, which no other current OS can seem to do.”

Incidentally, I got a Windows Mobile phone and absolutely love it. It’s probably the last WM phone I will buy since it’s a dead platform. I am just hoping that Android can get its act together between now and then. Or maybe Windows Phone 7.1 (which, to its credit, will be able to play my video files right out of the box) will be a little less iPhoney. I’m feeling a little more anti-iPhone than usual. Not because the iPhone is a bad device, but because it was successful for all the wrong reasons. It demonstrated all of the things that a PDA OS can be successful without. And so Palm and Microsoft follow suit, throwing things like free-flowing software support out the window (no pun intended) and essentially dumbing the phones down. Making them easier to use, but making it harder to do anything outside the sandbox.

I could of discussions have got me thinking about teachers. Conservatives have been making the case that one of the main problems with our education system is that we can’t fire bad teachers. Almost no matter how bad. Liberals argue that it’s not true that we can’t fire bad teachers or that bad teachers may be expensive but they get taken out of the classroom in any event or that job security is one of the ways that we convince good teachers to teach and that outweighs what bad teachers do. Liberals generally argue that we should pay teachers more. Or we should bribe them into teaching with job security. The idea between both of these arguments, being able to fire bad teachers or tempting better teachers with more money or job security, is that it’s important that our teachers are really good at their jobs.

When I was a junior in high school, I had a chemistry teacher that was absolutely great. I don’t like science, but he made science… tolerable. That’s about the highest comment that I can pay to a science teacher. I learned what I needed to learn to make a good grade, scored in the 80-something percentile on the standardized test, and forgot it all by the time I got into college. The following year I had a physics teacher that I absolutely loathed. She was condescending and dull. I learned what I needed to learn to make a good grade, scored in the 80-something percentile on the standardized test, and forgot it all by the time I got into college. In the seventh grade I had a terrible reading teacher that I hated and not because she challenged me. I failed the standardized test that year for reading and had to take remedial reading in the 8th grade. That year I had a teacher that was great. My parents met her and had very much the same impression. I failed the standardized test again.

Looking back, there are precisely two teachers that I can point to as having had a seriously positive or negative influence on my life. Neither case is really conclusive and one of the two had nothing to do with his lesson plan and the other may have been an outlier that I will get to in a minute. I mean, I think periodically about what teachers I had and whether I consider them good teachers or bad teachers, but I can’t look back at any but those two and say that they had any long-term effect on my education. It’s possible that Mrs. Nelson had that effect on others, but I think the good behavior was more-or-less limited to her class.

Of course, you have the Jaime Escalantes of the world that prove that good teaching can make quite the difference if only to allow smart kids in bad situations to realize that they’re actually smart. But they’re outliers. They’re unusual. A system that counts on them for success is doomed to failure. Likewise, I think that really bad teachers – the kind where kids get out learning far less than they ever would have otherwise – are also pretty rare. Maybe the teacher themselves matters far less in the aggregate than does the curriculum they teach. If a good teacher and a bad teacher are teaching the same material from the same book… does it matter?

Here’s why this might be wrong. I could really be the outlier. I am also smarter than average. Maybe it’s the middling kids that it makes a bigger difference with. I also had/have attention difficulties that made it difficult to follow the teacher in any event. Because of these things, I don’t know how much I depended on the teachers to begin with. If I was learning mostly from the book, it wouldn’t matter so much what the teacher was saying or doing. So maybe it makes a difference on the middling kids. Maybe for some kids the difference between a good teacher and a bad teacher is the difference between learning or not.

But seriously, looking back at my classmates, the largest variable was not teacher quality or teacher motivation (for those that want to encourage teachers to teach better through merit pay) but student motivation. And I don’t remember student motivation as being particularly variable within an education environment. Kids who didn’t care in one class were pretty unlikely to care in any of the others.

So if I’m right, why is there such a consensus on this issue? People who agree on nothing else seem to agree that teachers are important and that teacher quality matters. They go different ways when it comes to the implications of this belief, but it’s nigh-universally held. I think that for some ideologues right and left like it because it validates their views (whatever they are). As for everybody else? I think that we need to believe in the people we leave our kids with. We know that education is important, so the people that carry it out must therefore also be important. And if they’re important, it is important that they are good.

The other day I wrote:

For a writer, I really don’t know the answers to any of these questions and more like I probably should. I am in the camp of fictionalizing as much as possible. This is not news to Hit Coffee readers, but it’s also true in my fiction. The President, if portrayed, is never the actual president unless he absolutely has to be. Microsoft doesn’t exist. The movie stars will never be Tom Hanks and the dirty celebrities Paris Hilton unless it’s such a passing reference that I need the instant recognition.

I was thinking about this prior to having written that post or hearing about the whole Wiesel play thing. It most recently came to mind when I was watching Iron Man 2. In the movie, they show clips of Bill O’Reilly commentating and Christianne Amanpour reporting the news. I found that irritating and not just because I find Bill O’Reilly and Christianne Amanpour (and most “news” personalities and TV reporters, for that matter) irritating. I found it irritating because it blurred the lines between fact and fiction poorly. I was similarly irritated by the mock-Laughlin Group’s appearance in Watchmen.

Using real personalities or impersonators of real personalities can be an effective tool to add realism to stories. I didn’t object, for instance, when the Laughlin Group was used in either Dave or Independence Day. Both were, at least up until the aliens attacked in the latter movie, supposed to take place in something resembling the real world. So using real commentators (and in Dave, real senators) makes sense. But no one is pretending that Iron Man is realistic. No one is pretending that The Watchmen takes place in something resembling the real world. In the case of Iron Man, it’s not just that you have a guy in a power-suit and all that jazz. You can always push one anomaly, no matter how major, and say “and this is happening is a world exactly like our own!” But the Iron Man series continues to set up an Avengers movie. So you don’t just have a man in a suit, you have a dude with a magical hammer. You have a guy who took super-soldier serum during World War II, was frozen in ice, and thawed in modern day. You have a guy that through radiation becomes muscular and unintelligible. You have, in short, a world unlike our own.

And there’s nothing wrong with that! I say, embrace it! Have fun with it! Iron Man succeeds in large part because it sets out to be such a fun movie. Superhero movies trying to be realistic lays the groundwork for disappointment. X-Men, for instance, failed to embrace its superheroism and suffered for it. Watchmen, on the other hand, does try to take a distinctly unfun superhero path. But even there, the Laughlin Group doesn’t work because they explicitly chart out a different course for the history of events. Having John Laughlin around is one thing. Having him doing the exact same thing he’s doing in this world strikes me as internally inconsistent. The entire media landscape would change with Richard Nixon in his fifth term (nevermind the omnipotent blue guy).

But this isn’t about superhero movies. It’s about a lot of things. I think that at the outset of any story project that even tangentially involves politics or government, the creators need to decide how comparable their world is to our own world. A contemporary sitcom or drama, for instance, should take place in our world. Even if they throw in a fictional congressperson as a character. A show like Brothers & Sisters, which expressly involves politics, needs to make a decision one way or the other. Instead, they had a plot where Rob Lowe was a Republican character running for president against a more conservative Republican character running for president and these were the only two Republicans the plot explored… and Barack Obama was elected president. I can understand the dilemma because they want a show that is politically relevant and they also want a plot with Rob Lowe running for president, but I think they needed to make a decision one way or the other. Even if “The President” was an obvious stand-in for George W. Bush (and later Barack Obama). At the very least, it would have provided the opportunity for the president to become a character himself. The main reason that they didn’t – contemporary relevance – they threw out the window when they (a) put a Republican senator in California and more (b) made him a relevant figure in national politics (24 did the same thing, though Logan wasn’t a senator, and that sits wrong with me, too, though they did much else right as far as the internal politics goes).

In my own writing I have run into this question. My first, third, and fourth novel all take place in the same universe. I had an idea for a different branch of novels that involved a fictional president. However, when I canned that idea I found that using the Bush-Gore race as a metaphor was a super idea and I shifted it back to the real world. Then, when the fourth novel came around and I had a fictional congressperson, I had to think about it all over again (I ultimately decided that one fictional congressperson who would never go on to be president would not disrupt politics too much. And too much of the story was real-world for me to bother with fictional governance.

It’s not just politics, though. I see the same things when it comes to businesses. It’s one thing to throw a fictional company into the mix, but if that company is a powerhouse you have to account for existing powerhouses. The movie Anti-Trust failed with this. On the one hand, you have this company named Nerv that is clearly a stand-in for Microsoft. But then a reference is made to Bill Gates. And it’s difficult to imagine both Tim Robbins’s character and Bill Gates both being relevant in the course of the story. Particularly in a throwaway line just to show how much awesomer Robbins is than Gates.

This is an area where I have also struggled with in my own writing. The narrator of my fourth novel is a dot-com millionaire (though within the context of this universe, the term .com has been replaced with .co so that I don’t use real domains) in what is a cross between Yahoo and Google. In my first draft I made references to Google (in the context of it being more successful than the narrator’s product), but I also realized along the way that it didn’t really work. My character’s company actually does very much what Google does*. A world in which this company exists, Google would have had a hard time making its footprint. So in future versions, I’ll be stripping Google mentions. Kind of hard since “to google” has become a verb, but I’ll figure it out.

I had a similar problem in my third novel with a particular genre of music. There are a number of fictional bands mentioned prominently and unavoidably in the story. But at the same time, I also wanted to add real bands for context. My editor Kelvin called me on this, telling me that I needed to make a decision one way or the other. I’m eliminating the real bands. At least the current ones.

Perhaps the writer that understands the most of what I am talking about is Aaron Sorkin of The West Wing fame. Sorkin mentioned in an interview that NBC all but forced him to give Jay Leno a cameo. He hated the idea because Leno didn’t exist in The West Wing universe. I can imagine him trying to explain that to NBC executives. Sorkin also miraculously managed to avoid any mention of 9/11 (though they did have A Very Special Episode… but it didn’t involve planes into buildings). 24 succeeded on this front, too, which was really impressive for a show that regularly features Middle Eastern terrorists.

Of course, I write this on a blog where I am actually not entirely consistent. On one hand, I have the Trumanverse map with all manner of fictional states. On the other hand, I make references to real states. I’m not sure how to square this round hole. Mostly, if I’m talking current events, I talk real states. If I’m talking my life, I use fictitious ones. There is an in between point, though, where I want to mention my real state but can’t and so I will mention both real and fictional states in a single comment or post. However, that’s about maintaining anonymity. From an art standpoint, it’s a weakness in the Hit Coffee setup.

* – Actually, I had thought of their business model while I was in college before Google was a blip on the radar. People Lexis/Nexused other people rather than Googled them and Metacrawler was the search engine to beat. Ahhh, would that I had a few million in capital at the time!

There’s one for sale on 1saleaday for $30. It’s a good little MP3 player. My only two complaints are that it doesn’t handle folders, (so you’d better have your MP3s tagged the way you want them) and it’s audio jack comes out of the bottom rather than the top. The battery life is extraordinary when in stand-by mode (and not bad otherwise). I lost mine for a few weeks and it still had 40% battery when I found it. In addition to the 4GB native drive, you can also stick an SDHC in there. Audio qualify is good, I think, though my hearing isn’t great. Oh, and don’t expect much out of the video. You have to convert everything to a bloated format to watch anything.

A follow-up to this post. There is a certain amount of gray area in a case where there are two possible causes of death. If they’re intertwined, murder can still be charged. However, if the assault was incidental or was not deemed to be a felony then the prosecutors will have a much harder time doing so.

Right now, between Katie Allison Granju and the Knox County Sheriff’s Office, things are not adding up. The KCSO has all but declared that they are not going to be moving forward. Ms. Granju does not believe that this is close to being finished. Beyond disagreements over what can or cannot be charged, there are a number of inconsistencies that are not a matter of opinion.

Katie Allison Granju: Henry was beaten with a tire iron.
Knox County Sheriff’s Department: The evidence not only doesn’t support the claim that a weapon was used, but disputes it.
More Info: If no weapon was used, it’s harder to prove felony assault. Without felony assault, murder is harder to prove. Actually, according to KCSO, without a victim statement or a police officer witnessing the assault, it is impossible to prove a felony.

KCSO: The injuries from the assault may not have been substantial. The friend who picked Henry up from the incident reported only an injury near the eye. No trauma was reported at the time of the autopsy.
KAG: “Were there such injuries? Well, his medical records CLEARLY and CONSISTENTLY refer to the assault and its compounding physical impact on the other causative factor – the drug overdose.” The medical records include “Trauma. Right skull base fracture.” These records were shown to the WASO TV station. She has also stated that her doctors are willing to talk to the authorities about the assault’s contribution on Henry’s fate.
Info: According to some medical personnel in the comment section of the KNS article, even a healed fracture should show up on an autopsy. Others are saying that the Medical Examiner should have access to said medical records.

KAG: There is no mystery as to the responsible party and she has provided the names of numerous witnesses and individuals with an account of what happened.
KCSO: There was no witness to the beating itself. The witnesses she provided are all hearsay.
Info: These two claims are not mutually exclusive. Sadly.

KCSO: The Sheriff’s Office was denied access to interview Henry.
KAG: Henry was never able to give a statement of more than 2-3 words. Even so, she offered the KCSO the opportunity to try to interview him anyway (including an offer for a speech therapist to be present). They stopped by once when Henry was having an MRI done and never tried again.
Info: This falls under the category of If Ms. Granju is not outright lying, the Sheriff’s Office is being pretty dishonest.

KCSO: Alleged assault.
KAG: Not alleged! Assault!
Info: I guess it’s theoretically possible that Henry fell, hit his head, broke his jaw, etc. Or Granju is being very misleading about the extent of her son’s injuries.

KCSO: They’re being classy by not answering the question of whether Henry Granju was dealing, instead noting that the burial services are going to be commencing later in the day.
KAG: Perhaps it would have been better not to release any of this at midnight the night before slash morning of Henry’s burial. And perhaps she should have been informed first instead of having to read about all of this in the paper.

Other Thoughts: Complication matters somewhat is the fact that Henry had really started to heal from the physical injuries sustained during the attack. It makes it easier for a defense attorney down the line to argue that it was all about the drugs. This doesn’t actually demonstrate that it was the overdose all along because the nature of Henry’s injuries can have long tentacles, but it makes a prosecutor’s job harder.

The KCSO’s actions here seem to go beyond mere skepticism and “we’ll wait and see”. It seems to me they’re making it much harder for any arrest and trial to eventually occur. They’re doing a future defense team’s job for them. It seems possible that they have simply determined that it doesn’t matter what role the assault played in things they are just not going to be able to prove what they would need to prove to make their case and so they are overstating their case and making it sound like it was just an OD. It reflects better on their crime stats that way. Another disturbing possibility is that they simply dropped the ball early on and at this point they would prefer see the matter just get dropped rather than acknowledge that their failure to take it seriously early on made it more difficult to pursue more serious charges later on. And of course, I have to say another possibility is that Ms. Granju is herself in the wrong, having come to a conclusion early on and very reluctant to admit that it may have been more about the drugs and less about the assault. That’s not the direction I am leaning right now, but I’m not an unbiased observer.

Watching these old Dennis Hopper videos reminds me of how much I used to care about the NFL and how little I do now. I would say it’s something to do with the NFL, but I think when it comes to sports I am an all-or-nothing sort of guy. When I was a kid, it was baseball at the expense of everything else. Then at some point it became mostly NFL, though at the time I think I had time for both. Then it became college football and there was too much on my plate to spend much thought on the NFL or MLB (or, heaven forfend, the NBA).

The topic of trademarks has come up recently, which reminded me of something I ran across a while back when I was car-shopping: The Story of Nissan.

Uzi Nissan, that is. Uzi Nissan is an Israeli-turn-American that had the gall to use his last name for his various business ventures. Noteworthy here is that he was using the name Nissan when the car company now known as Nissan was known as Datsun in the US. That did not matter, however, as Nissan Motors took him to court anyway seeking ten million dollars in damages. Uzi Nissan ultimately prevailed, but had only a small portion of his substantial legal fees recouped.

Through Mr. Nissan’s website I read about another case of aggressive trademark protection. Apparently, a company called Entrepreneur Media (publishers of Entrepreneur Magazine) declared the word “entrepreneur” their trademark. A PR firm that took the name EntrepreneurPR was taken to court and ultimately lost a 1.4 million dollar judgment. The lawsuits are ongoing. There is a website dedicated to taking the word back from Entrepreneur Media.

Lastly, and perhaps most outrageously, Monster Cables owns the word Monster. They’ve gone after Monster.com (which, perhaps as part of a settlement, has a link to Monster Cables on their main page), the Chicago Bears (for calling themselves “The Monsters of Midway”), Fenway Park (for having “Monster seats”), Disney (“Monsters, Inc.”), and various others. I can’t remember where I first heard about this one from.

The following contains spoilers on the eighth and final season of 24.

In some ways, the 8th Season of 24 was the most interesting. A weakness of the show, in my opinion, is that the presidents on 24 tended to fall distinctly into two categories: Good and honest presidents (Presidents Palmer, President Taylor) and terrible and dishonest presidents (President Logan, Acting President Daniels). In that sense, President Keeler struck me as the only realistic president. That’s a topic for another time, but what Season 8 did was present a real fall from grace from an erstwhile good president.

One of the things that struck me about President Taylor throughout the course of the season was that, being such a good and wholesome person, she simply didn’t know how to be dishonest. Or rather, because she was so unaccustomed to bending, she couldn’t do it without breaking. I was actually with her at first. I thought that sidelining Jack Bauer, while obviously tactically a bad move (nobody sidelines Jack Bauer), to be a reasonable move under the circumstances. He threatened a peace process that far bigger than the crimes that he wanted to expose. I really thought it was Jack Bauer that was the unreasonable one.

The problem really began not just when Bauer escaped, but when she kept trying to cover everything up afterward. One can forgive her for her misjudgment on Bauer because she doesn’t know that he’s the star of a show in which he is a force of nature. But there came a point where it was obvious that she lost control. Nevermind the morality of the situation, the threat of even an unlikely exposure by Bauer represented a far greater threat than a temporarily derailed peace process. Where the situation became entirely unsustainable was when she had the reporter jailed. At that point, it was nearly impossible to imagine that she could get away with it. Even having her killed would have resulted in too many questions being asked (Bauer’s death would have been easier to cover up).

Taylor’s ultimate problem is that by being an honest person, she couldn’t bend without breaking. She didn’t know where the line was between cutthroat politics and myopathy. Someone with more experience skirting the line would have known when it was time to cut their losses.

Of course, in the end Charles Logan didn’t pull it off, either. Sort of for the opposite problem. Unlike Taylor, Logan would have been willing to do whatever it took to keep it quiet. But without any sort of moral compass beyond expediency, Logan simply didn’t know where to draw the line for practicality’s sake. In his own warped sense of morality, he too was doing the right thing. He had his own myopathy that pushed him to do some pretty bad things not only without regard to basic morality but without a complete understanding of how perceived immorality – even if what he was doing was completely right in his own eyes – could undermine his cause.

Back to Taylor for a moment, the idea struck me somewhere after Bauer escaped and prior to Merideth Reed being jailed that there was a compromise to be struck between Taylor and Bauer. Taylor wanted her peace process and Bauer wanted his justice. Had Taylor simply been willing to look the other way while Bauer extracted justice, they both could have been satisfied. President Suvarov could not have made too many waves for fear of being exposed. Of course, when Suvarov himself was discovered to be behind it all, that would have complicated things. At that point, Taylor could have offered Bauer a plane ticket to Russia and requested that he wait until then and that he cover his tracks.

In the end, neither Taylor nor Bauer would have probably consented to The Truman Plan. It was too far outside of Taylor’s character to be so aggressively amoral for the greater good even if the alternative was to back into something worse. It’s sorta like the young couple that can rationalize having unprotected sex as spur-of-the-moment but believe bringing a condom is a sign of sin because it meant that you had planned it all along and were therefore more morally culpable. She had to be pushed into it one step at a time. And Bauer’s sense of morality would likely have made allowing Suvarov to go down in history as a respectable figure of peace (having signed both Logan’s accords as well as Taylor’s) would have been too much for him to accept. Or maybe not. The guy was a former black ops operative, so he must have had some understanding that some things are best left unexposed. That’s a harder sell when his girlfriend’s body is not yet cold, however.

I’m not sure how many of you are baseball fans, so a quick rundown of a perfect game is that it’s a game in which a pitcher (or pitchers, though to date it’s only been one) does not allow a single base hit, walk, or error. Twenty-seven up, twenty-seven down (3 outs per inning, 9 innings). Only 20 have ever been thrown in the history of baseball. It’s a big deal.

In Detroit, Armand Galarraga threw a perfect game but for a blown call on the 27th batter. That this call was blown is not contested by anybody, including the umpire that blew the call. It’s infuriating and tragic.

Some, though not the Detroit Tigers, are calling for a reversal. More are asking for expanded use of instant replay. As unfortunate as this situation is, I hope that Major League Baseball does not go this route. Blown calls are part of the game. In this case, the stakes were high, but most of the time they aren’t. The result is a game with more significant delays than baseball already has. And while it would have avoided this fiasco and perhaps other injustices, the end result is not satisfaction that the calls was fair. Most disputed calls are closer than this. Most can be reviewed for hours without a clear answer. And as with football, sometimes calls that seem clear are not reversed because they are not indisputably clear.

Right now MLB has instant replay for home run calls. I don’t know that this is a really good idea, but at least in this case it’s something that you know matters a good portion of the time. It’s a question of whether there are runs (“points”, the the baseball disinclined) or not. As far as the game itself goes, this was a single or an out. Obviously, there was a lot on the line this time, but as far as wins and losses go, a single doesn’t usually count for much. I don’t know that you can count some singles as being more important than other singles, from a rule standpoint.

Whether they expand instant replay or not, I also very much support MLB Commissioner Bud Selig and the Detroit Tigers in not asking for a reversal of the call. The rules really don’t provide for it (unless maybe there’s cheating involved) and you don’t change rules midstream.