It occurred to me today that it's a long, long time from May to December, but the days grow short when you reach September.¹ Which means that by November, the days have grown short enough that Grumpy and Sneezy could drive the lane on them. The race to get home before sunset has once again become an even-money proposition, and the smart money's on the sun.

All of which means another year has slipped by us² without a major weight loss or a personal best time or an organized garage or a last will and testament. How does this happen every year?

God, in Her wisdom, has seen to it that the Yankees still haven't won a pennant in the 21st Century, so we know that there are some fronts on which the forces of evil and sloth have been reduced to a holding action. But a year that winds down with the Secretary of the Treasury holding a gun to the economy and saying, "Give me $700 billion dollars in unmarked bills or Wall Street dies," is not one you're gonna want to paste into your memory book next to the senior prom.

So I am especially pleased to brighten your skies with the announcement of the winner of this year's annual Jimmy Dean Best Crime Committed With a Sausage Award.

Some of you may have noticed that the annual Jimmy Dean Best Crime Committed With a Sausage Award has been something less than strictly annual of late. Sausage crime seems to have fallen off now that the Department of Homeland Security has put sausages on its list of dangerous terrorist devices, along with the eyeglass cleaning solution I was required to discard before my last flight.³

So you can imagine how pleased I was when loyal reader Jeff Williams of Schiff Hardin in San Francisco⁴ sent me the article describing this year's award-winning entry. The article is from the Fresno Bee.⁵ It begins, "A burglar who broke into a home just east of Fresno rubbed food seasoning over the body of one of two men as they slept in their rooms and then used an 8-inch sausage to whack the other man on the face and head before running out of the house, Fresno county sheriff's deputies said Saturday."

Wow. Breathtaking, isn't it. Read that over again and you'll begin to understand why sausage crimes get their very own award.

Food seasoning. He rubbed "Pappy's Seasoning" - a local product, highly prized in Fresno epicurean circles - on the body of a sleeping man. Why would anybody want to do that? And why would they want to do it so much they would break into a home in the dead of night to accomplish it?⁶

Unfortunately, the Bee's article does not identify WHICH "Pappy's Seasoning" was used. Obviously, the intent of the burglar is much more difficult to divine without knowing whether he used "Pappy's Choice Seasoning," "Pappy's Louisiana Hot Spice," or "Pappy's Prime Rib Rub," and I would have expected a fine paper like the Bee to have been more specific. But, as you can imagine, police are often very tight-lipped about details with sausage crime, for fear of inspiring copycat crimes, so the dearth of information on this point may have reflected official law enforcement policy as much as reportorial indolence.

As is often the case with sausage crime, the intent is largely inferable from the suspect's attire. In this case, the suspect, one Antonio Vasquez Jr., 21, of Fresno, "ran out of the house wearing only a t-shirt, boxer shorts and socks, leaving behind his wallet with his ID." Why are we not surprised by this news?

This tells us a couple of rather disturbing things. But before we get to them, let's pause for a moment to contemplate once again the unimaginably strange life of a peace officer. These poor cops were summoned to a nighttime "burglary in progress call," a serious felony that can be expected to both wake up your adrenal glands and unfasten the strap on your holster at pretty much the same time. So after preparing to confront Charles Manson, bloody knife in hand, they instead ended up arresting a nearly naked guy who had slathered seasoning rub on one sleeping victim and then whacked the other with a tube of meat. How do you survive adrenaline roller coaster rides like that with even a tenuous grip on sanity?

Alright, now that we've had a moment to thank the Lord that our son or daughter didn't go into a field as mental-health-threatening as law enforcement, let's get back to the couple of rather disturbing things I mentioned at the start of the last paragraph. Try to keep up, here. I don't have time to re-write these things into a cohesive structure with linear trains of thought. I have a day job.

First, of course, the leaving behind the wallet thing is an obvious cry for help. It would be difficult to say, "Stop me before I rub seasoning on people and hit them with a sausage again," more clearly. In fact, if you just ask yourself how many times in your life you've heard someone say, "Stop me before I rub seasoning on people and hit them with a sausage again," you will realize how difficult it must be to say that at all, much less clearly. So leaving behind your ID is probably the best way to do it.⁷

Second, it tells us the burglar apparently disrobed partially before beginning his nefarious seasoning and sausage-wielding activities.⁸ To a trained student of the criminal psyche, this speaks volumes. The difference in culpability between a fully-clothed sausage-wielding seasoning-rubber and a boxer-clad t-shirt-wearing sausage-wielding seasoning-rubber is . . . well . . . huge.

Which, of course, brings us to the sausage. The eight-inch sausage.⁹ To me, the sausage is the key to the case.

Let me explain. Antonio Vasquez allegedly¹⁰ broke into the home of two farmworkers outside Fresno, stripped to his underwear, and then began rubbing one of the men with Pappy's Seasoning and beating the other with a sausage. The men awoke, Antonio boogied, and was apprehended in a nearby field in his underwear. His ID was found at the scene, along with his pants, and he was hiding - sans pants - in a nearby field, so this is not exactly a whodunit.

Intent will be the issue here. Under California law, burglary is the entry of a building with the intent to commit a theft or a felony. If you don't have one of those intents, you aren't a burglar. So if Antonio didn't take anything, he may be able to beat the rap, if the prosecution cannot show he intended to commit a felony.

I was a prosecutor for 15 years. I can imagine the consternation generated in the D. A.'s Office by the collective effort to figure out what felony Antonio might have had in mind. I'm sure their Sausage Crimes Task Force has been burning the midnight oil trying to find a felony that fits these facts. "Let's see, what crime involves rubbing meat seasoning on your victim? Uh, well that would be . . . um . . . uh . . .that would be . . . um . . . Well, wait a minute; the guy was half-naked. Obviously, his intent with the seasoning was to . . . to . . . uh . . . Um, the sausage; don't forget the sausage. Clearly, he was going to commit the crime of . . . the crime of . . . Aw, sh_t, it's gotta be something!"

Hence, the importance of the sausage. Assault with a deadly weapon, or assault by means of force likely to produce great bodily harm would be felonies. Those are general intent crimes that wouldn't require six Freudians and a cultural anthropologist to sell to a jury. So how big and hard was the sausage? Is it the type of weapon you would expect to do serious harm to someone if used as a cudgel?

This question was directed to Lieutenant Ian Burrimond of the Fresno Sheriff's Department. Lieutenant Burrimond - a man who must have done something VERY bad in his last life to get stuck with this case - was forced to look right into the camera and say that - unfortunately - the sausage was discarded by the suspect as he fled . . . and . . . wait for it . . . wait for it . . . EATEN BY THE VICTIMS' DOG!

That's right. In the immortal words of Lieutenant Burrimond, "The dog ate the weapon."

This is, of course, not the best defense ever devised. Any kid who ever tried to explain his failure to produce a homework assignment with the claim that it was eaten by the family dog can attest to the general ineffectiveness of this strategy.

But it's better than nothing. Those dog-slandering kids didn't have Lieutenant Burrimond on their witness list. What's more, they had the burden of proof. Antonio Velasquez doesn't. He can just sit back and watch the prosecutor herniate trying to push that reasonable doubt boulder up the hill. He's got at least as good a shot as Ernesto Miranda, and we all know how that turned out.¹¹

So let's hear it for Antonio. Not only did he win this year's Jimmy Dean Award, he came up with the groundwork for the perfect burglary. Henceforth, anyone contemplating a res burg would be well-advised to take with him an 8-inch sausage and a jar of meat seasoning. Then, if your intended victims awaken or come home, strip to your underwear and start rubbing them with the seasoning, whack 'em with the sausage a coupla times, bark like a dog, and break for the door.¹²

Worst case scenario is misdemeanor time. You can do that standing on your head. And if you're as goofy as Antonio Velasquez, that's probably exactly how you'll choose to do it.

1 Of course, it occurred to Kurt Weill fifty years ago, when he wrote September Song. But don't go thinking there's nothing new in the world until you've read a little further. 

2 Let's face it, between the Veteran's Day holiday, Thanksgiving, a dozen December holidays, and the week-long bacchanalia that is my birthday, nothing much gets done after you receive the November issue of this magazine. 
3 Hard to argue with that logic: Terrorists who can read the in-flight magazine are indubitably more dangerous than terrorists who can't. 
4 That's Jeff right over there, jumping off the roof over having been outed as 1/5 of my readership. 
5 Come to think of it, maybe Jeff jumped off the roof over being outed as a reader of the Fresno Bee. That would be hard for someone living in San Francisco to explain. 
6 Especially since you can only rub meat seasoning on a sleeping man for a very short time before he ceases to be a sleeping man and becomes a very awake man. I would imagine. 
7 It is not, for example, something you can say with flowers. Or fruit. And, as near as I can determine, Hallmark hasn't even tried. 
8 My original draft said "sausage-battering" but that sounded way too culinary, somehow. It seemed to me to suggest he was getting ready to deep-fry the sausage, which may have been the case, but has not yet been charged. 
9 Insert your own tasteless joke here. My editor vetoed the three I came up with. 
10 "Allegedly" is, of course, a crucial word here. When you accuse someone of something as serious as sausage crime, you have to be careful to remind readers that he is not a sausage-wielding, seasoning-rubbing weirdo until it is proven beyond a reasonable doubt. 
11 Miranda v. Arizona (1966) 384 U. S. 436. 
12 The dog barking thing is my own addition. I think the Velasquez Defense just cries out for an insanity plea.

When novelist Kurt Vonnegut died last year, Sports Illustrated ran an obituary. This was unusual. SI has a section in which they typically run short obituaries of sports figures, but Kurt Vonnegut was not, at least at first glance, a sports figure. It got my attention.

Turns out Sports Illustrated was running a Vonnegut obituary because Vonnegut was an ex-employee. In 1954, Vonnegut was hired as part of the magazine's first staff. They had not even begun publishing yet, and Vonnegut was assigned - inter alia - to write a caption for a photograph in the first issue. He was given a photo of a horse who had jumped the rail at Aqueduct Raceway and run through the infield.

According to SI, "Vonnegut pondered the task, typed one sentence and then walked out of his office, never to return." The one sentence he typed for Sports Illustrated, before going on to write Cat's Cradle, Slaughterhouse Five, Welcome to the Monkey House, and all the other extraordinary works that made him a major figure in 20th Century American literature? "The horse jumped over the f______ fence."

That was it. That was all he could come up with. And the unutterable banality of the task and his solution of it, the prospect of coming in to work every day and writing sentences like that one, drove him right out the door.

I'm not sure whether he was demoralized by having to describe something so prosaic or inspired by how easy it had been for the horse to quit his job. Either way, it was nine years before he came back up for air with Cat's Cradle.

The story comes to mind today because I find myself able to empathize with Vonnegut. I've been sitting, staring at the material for this month's column for most of the evening - getting up every now and again for bathroom breaks and to watch my team bat(1) - and if I could just walk away and write great novels instead, I'd do it.

I've got three possibilities here, three news articles from the popular press that I could comment on. The problem is that they have, collectively, caused me to ruminate way too long on the fact I have been writing about stories like this for 25 years and in all that time we don't seem to have gotten any smarter.

Clearly, evolution is a crock. We're getting dumber and dumber. Instead of running out of stupid human tricks, we're coming up with new ones at a rate that defies my ability to keep up. I've got three examples here, and all of them make me want to turn in my homo sapiens membership card, pull a Vonnegut, and just jump the f______ fence.

Let's start with the three good old boys in Memphis who were arrested for stealing a parrot. This seems a fairly pedestrian crime, but their motive raises stupidity to an art form not previously observed outside the White House.

It seems Groucho, Harpo, and Billy-Joe had burglarized a house. While fencing their loot, they decided they'd made a huge mistake in leaving a parrot behind. The parrot had heard them talking, using each other's names. And since parrots can talk . . . .

You got it. They went back to steal the parrot for fear it would rat them out. They were loading the parrot into the car when the Memphis police showed up. A car chase ensued, ending when the Beagle Boys(2) crashed their car and the parrot flew away.

You tell me. Does that story make you proud to be a human being, or does it make you want to jump the f______ fence.

Then there's the guy in London who, according to the Orange County Register, was sentenced to 90 days in jail because he "decapitated a statue of former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher."

Guy walked into a museum with a cricket bat under his coat,(3) walked up to the eight-foot statue of Mrs. Thatcher, and started in on his best Vladdy Guerrero imitation.(4) And when the Iron Lady's statue proved to be as tough as she was, he simply abandoned the cricket bat and "used a heavy metal pole from a crowd barrier to knock off the statue's gleaming white head."(5)

Had he stopped there, he would have gone into stir with my grudging admiration for a somewhat imaginative brand of lunacy. But he had to ruin it by defending on the basis "the act was not criminal damage but ‘artistic expression and my right to interact with this broken world'."

That's pathetic. Parrots don't say things that demeaning. Horses don't say things that disgraceful. Only a human being would sink that low. That's just a shameful abuse of gray matter. They should have given him 90 days for the decapitation and 90 years for his rationalization of it. Where's the f______ fence?

But this month's winner, the one that makes me want to reconsider suicide and alcoholism(6) comes from Norway. There, according to Reuters, "A Norwegian court has acquitted a man accused of raping a sleeping woman after he said he was asleep at the time." Yep. Acquitted him. Walked him right out the door.

According to Reuters, this poor woman fell asleep on a sofa while her friends were partying all around her. She was fully clothed. She awoke to find herself naked and a man twice her age having sex with her. "The man said he was awakened by her screams for help."

Well, of course he was. Happens to me all the time. I had to stop sleeping in the nude because I kept waking up in the middle of sex with strange women.(7)

She's just lucky she woke him up with her screaming. Obviously the court felt they were sound enough sleepers that they could have been married, had children, and lost all their savings investing in American subprime loans before one of them awoke.

And, to my adamantine astonishment, the Norwegian court, by a vote of 2-1, bought this defense. Honest. They acquitted him.

Bad break for the statue whacker in London. Had he taken out his cosmic disappointment on a statue of King Harald V of Norway, he'd be showering at home today and could pick up the soap without fear.

Reuters - God bless ‘em - tried to report this with a straight face. After all, you don't want a bunch of Norwegian jihadists showing up at your offices complaining you've made fun of their judicial system. So they quoted the sleep-raper's doubtless thoroughly bemused attorney, "‘He said that he was asleep and the majority of the judges found that they could not rule out the possibility,' defense counsel Christian Riig told NRK public radio on Thursday."

But Reuters just couldn't leave it at that. Committed as they are to objectivity, they were nonetheless unable to resist adding: "Riig declined to speculate about how the man, who had been drinking, could have had sex in his sleep, apparently after undressing the woman."

I don't know, call me a cynic, but I'm betting Riig didn't want to speculate about that because he could not - because his facial muscles were so exhausted from remaining straight throughout his client's testimony AND THE RULING OF THE COURT, that he was no longer able to speak. I figure that one sentence about having somehow convinced two judges to buy this poppycock was all he could get out before his quivering lips just refused to function any more. And if you aren't satisfied by that explanation - if you don't think the strain of fighting back laughter through all of that could make you unable to utter more than one sentence - let me just point out to you that Reuters suggests the key testimony in the case might have been when "an ex-partner of the man had testified by telephone that similar things had happened to her."

This, of course, would be why she is an "ex-partner." I mean, how many times can you put up with sleep-raping without having to put your hands on your hips and call off the jam?

And, of course, this is also why she testified by telephone: She didn't want anyone to know who the THIRD person in Norway who bought this goofy story was.

Apparently in Norway, if you are too busy to bother coming to court for something as trivial as a rape case, you can just phone it in. And if your testimony is that the defendant has been a chronic sleep-raper for some time, you might want to phone it in from a phone booth, like the kidnappers do.

Since Mr. Riig is unable to speak, and I don't have the heart to call the poor prosecutor who lost this case(8), allow me instead to recap for you. Two judges in Norway believed that a drunk guy passed out at a party and awoke when the screams from the passed-out woman he was raping brought him to consciousness. Only then did he realize he had undressed the drunk lady in his sleep and was having sex with her. And this was convincing because his ex-girlfriend CALLED THE COURT and said he used to do the same thing to her (and she knew he was asleep because he told her he was). On that basis, they turned him loose, presumably with an admonition to get a little less sleep.

If that doesn't make you want to jump the f______ fence, you should read some of Vonnegut's novels. They're as plausible as the sleep-raper's story and as much in touch with reality as the Norwegian court's ruling.

Beds Notes:
(1) God bless the genius who designed baseball so the good stuff can only happen when your team is up. I get a lot of work done during the opposition's at bats.
(2) If you don't recognize the Beagle Boys as the three villains of the Uncle Scrooge and Donald Duck comic books, you are clearly not a part of my usual demographic; you may want to stop reading right now.
(3) Gotta admire that. "Metal detector, shmetal detector; until they come up with a cricket bat detector, I can do all the damage I want!"
(4) And, like Vladdy, was not the least bit deterred by the fact his target was well over his head.
(5) Memo to public building security teams: The metal detector thing is less effective if you leave large sections of heavy metal pipe accessible inside the building.
(6) And maybe advocate legislation creating another form of justifiable homicide: people too stupid to live. Texas already has a similar defense: "He needed killing."
(7) Some of whom I was married to.
(8) Or, for that matter, the dissenting judge. My guess is they're both hip-deep in serious psychotherapy by now.

I try really hard not to throw rocks at legislators.  For one thing, they have a very tough job, a very boring job, a job most of us wouldn't take unless they'd stopped hiring at the steel mill.  For another thing, if you throw a rock at a legislator, you're gonna hit him; they're as defenseless as an animal with opposable thumbs can be. 

Near as I can determine, legislators use up all their instincts for self-preservation during the decennial re-districting process.  Having successfully gerrymandered themselves into impregnable wards and boroughs cut and pasted into shapes previously known only to God and Gaudi, they are just plumb tuckered out.  Their stores of energy and imagination are so thoroughly depleted that when one of their number comes barreling through the Capitol behind the wheel of one of those zombie Cadillac bad ideas they like so much, it never occurs to them to get out of the way.  They just press the aye button and get run down like so many armadillos on a Texas highway.   

It's pitiful, really, and we shouldn't be laughing at them when it happens.  Making fun of legislators for bad ideas is like kicking cockapoos for being tiny and adorable. 

I know that. But, sadly, while my spirit is willing, my flesh is weak.  Try as I might to be nice to these people, they keep serving up column fodder, and I'm just not a good enough person to resist it. 

I would rather not say mean things about them.  They do a lot of good, and they set my salary.  But hey, I got a deadline coming up in three days.  And the folks I'm gonna throw rocks at today have nothing to do with my salary.  So another chance to rise above my own base personal interests "gang aft agley."¹

This time it's Kentucky I can't resist.  Which is really too bad.  I have a reader in New York² who has put together something he calls "The Bedsworth Safety Map."  It shows the United States with a big, red "X" in every state I dare not drive through because I have insulted them in print.  Kentucky was my last remaining corridor to the east coast.  Sigh.  On the other hand, there were only six states left on the east coast I could safely visit, so maybe it's just as well.

The Kentucky state legislature is currently wrestling with a bill that would make Kentucky Fried Chicken, "The Official Picnic Food of Kentucky."  Seriously.  "The Official Picnic Food."  Representative Charles Siler has introduced a bill that would so designate KFC's "Original Recipe."

How could anyone expect me not to tee that up?  Gandhi couldn't resist a straight line like that.³

Neither can PETA.  You remember PETA:  People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.  They're like the Sierra Club for cockapoos.  They're the kind of organization legislators should have to protect them from us rock-throwers.

PETA's very upset that Kentucky is considering "honoring" Kentucky Fried Chicken.  They loathe Kentucky Fried Chicken.  If PETA were Iran, they would consider KFC "The Great Satan."  So they're on Representative Siler like ugly on a bulldog. 

Their position, I think eloquently expressed, is that, "If the state legislature moves forward with this one, then they should change Kentucky's state bird from the cardinal to the debeaked, crippled, scalded, diseased, dead chicken."  That lovely picture is provided by one Bruce Friedrich, identified by the Lexington Herald-Leader⁴ as PETA's vice president.  If I were a state legislator, with my heretofore referenced diminished capacity for self-preservation, I would not want to run afoul⁵ of Mr. Friedrich.

But with all due respect to the formidable Mr. Friedrich, I think PETA's missing the point here.  The point is, "How has Kentucky gone 216 years without an official state picnic food?"  I mean, I can understand failing to provide health care for its citizens and neglecting the state's infrastructure and not putting up barbed wire all along its borders to protect its citizens from terrorist hordes swarming down from Ohio like so many Buckeye Visigoths . . . but how could Kentucky's legislature have shirked its responsibility to designate an official state picnic food?

Now I know what you're thinking.  You're thinking, "Isn't the mint julep already the official state picnic food of Kentucky?"  Well, apparently not.  It isn't even the official state beverage.  Milk is.  They decided that in 2005.⁶

They got lots of other official stuff.  They got an official state dance (clogging), an official state butterfly (the Viceroy), and an official state locomotive (Old 152).⁷  They've even got an official state silverware pattern, for crying out loud (Old Kentucky Bluegrass:  The Georgetown Pattern) and TWO state mottos (one in English, one in Latin, but they're different; go figure).

Yet they have NO OFFICIAL STATE PICNIC FOOD.  God bless Representative Siler for straightening that out.

Or at least trying to.  There is some opposition to Rep. Siler's bill quite apart from its PETA-antagonizing propensities.  The Ashland Daily Independent, for example, has editorialized that the official state picnic food should just be generic, unbranded fried chicken.  As it cogently points out, "not all chicken served at picnics in Kentucky is from KFC."⁸

Which reminds me, didn't the KFC people become KFC by deleting the words "Kentucky," "Fried," and "Chicken" from their corporate moniker?⁹  Didn't they make a corporate decision they did NOT WANT to be identified with Kentucky, fried foods in general and fried chicken in particular?  Are these really the people the Kentucky state legislature ought to be honoring? 

If California Pizza Kitchen decided to call itself CPK so it could better market itself to Texans, wouldn't we be a little offended?  I would be.  Especially if we'd put a bust of the founder of the company in the state capitol. 

Yep, there is a bust of Harland Sanders in the Kentucky State Capitol building.  I know this because I almost wrote about it when Pamela Anderson tried to get the governor to remove the bust a couple of years ago because of her concern about KFC waterboarding chickens.¹⁰  I spent an hour trying to write the column before deciding it was not worth all the effort just for the Pamela Anderson/Colonel Sanders bust/bust double entendres.¹¹

So I can certainly understand the feeling of some Kentuckians that they've already done enough for a company that jumped ship years ago.

Besides, there are some disturbing questions raised by some of the whereases in Representative Siler's bill.  According to the first whereas,¹² Harland Sanders opened his first restaurant in Corbin, Kentucky¹³ in 1930.  But according to the third whereas, Colonel Sanders's "Original Recipe" fried chicken was first cooked in Colonel Sanders's restaurant in 1940. 

Which means it took ten years for the Colonel to come up with his "Original Recipe?"  I'm sorry, that's a use of the word "original" I - the English major - have a little trouble with.  What fried chicken recipe was used for the ten years before the "original" recipe?  What was the universe like before the Big Bang? 

If I were Kentucky, I would want answers to these questions before I enshrined that finger lickin' good stuff in my codified statutes forever and ever.¹⁴  Can you imagine how embarrassing it would be to have to stand in Costco parking lots gathering signatures for the initiative to repeal your Official State Picnic Food designation?

But the biggest reason not to name Kentucky Fried Chicken the Official State Picnic Food of Kentucky is found in the second whereas of the resolution in support of it.  It says, "Whereas Kentucky Governor Ruby Laffoon made Harland Sanders an honorary Kentucky Colonel in recognition of his contributions to the state's cuisine in 1936 . . ." 

Governor Ruby Laffoon?!?!  That alone should be enough to keep this bill from ever becoming law.  It would violate Bedsworth's Third Law of Statutory Interpretation:  No statute that requires an admission the state once elected a man  named Ruby Laffoon as its governor can possibly be a real law.  Ignore it.

1  That's Robert Burns.  It's from "To a Mouse."  The "gang aft agley" part is Scottish dialect for "go oft awry," which is what the poem tells us happens to "the best laid plans of mice and men."  Every so often, I feel the need to include something for the benefit of those of you who think anybody could write this column - something to make you say, "Oh, jeez, you need to waste three years getting a bachelor's degree in English to write this drivel?  I couldn't do that; my pain threshold is too low.  Maybe I couldn't write this column."

2  Probably only one.  We'd have to appoint attorneys for everyone in the state before questioning them to find out if there are more, so let's just assume there's only one.

 3 Okay, maybe Gandhi could.  Gandhi did not have to fill column space every month.

4  "Spanning the globe to bring you the constant variety of sport."  Me and ABC's Wide World of Sports.

5  Or, in Kentucky's case, a-fowl.

6  And wouldn't you want to hire the lobbyist who was able to get milk declared the official state beverage in the state that invented bourbon?

7  Hell if I know.  It's a locomotive.  What would an English major know about locomotives?

8  Now there's an editorial board not afraid of controversy.

9  Or at least "entucky" "ried" and "hicken."

10  At least I think it was waterboarding.  I know it was torture of some kind.  I tried to double check with the Department of Justice, but they informed me General Mukasey is still working on that one.

11  And because at that time there were still east coast states I wanted to visit and I was hoping to keep Kentucky open on "The Bedsworth Safety Map."

12  This word apparently can only be printed in boldface fonts.  I went out and looked at a couple of documents I have that contain whereases, and, sure enough, boldface.

13  Which, lo and behold, is in Rep. Siler's district.

14   Well, at least the first one.  Maybe it is asking a little much to expect the Kentucky State Legislature to explain the Big Bang thing.  At least right now while they're gearing up for re-districting.

My wife and I work together. This means I get to spend pretty much every minute of my life with her. This sometimes gets in the way because, of course, it means I have to spend so much time giving thanks to a higher power for my incredible good fortune. Other than that, it is the unalloyed blessing everyone who knows Kelly imagines it to be.¹

For one thing, it makes for some terrific conversation on the way to work. One morning in March, for example, we spent the entire 35 minutes talking about then New York Governor Eliot Spitzer and the holocaust he now inhabits.

It was a lively and candid discussion marked by the kind of perceptive sagacity and insightful, evenhanded deliberation you've come to expect from your courts of appeal. There were elements of history and moral philosophy and sociology and religion and politics and a fair sprinkling of psychology. There was serious analysis and impressive consensus-building.

The upshot of that discussion? I am not allowed to spend more than $150 on a prostitute.

Part of this is based on the fact that if I hire a prostitute, I will need the rest of my money for a good divorce lawyer and a nice, furnished apartment at the Oakwood Gardens.²  The rest is based on our agreement that the $4400 ex-Governor Spitzer is alleged to have paid is just way out of line when the math is done conscientiously.

As to this latter point, Kelly and I figure that when you factor in the actual time of usage, the cost of one of the ex-Governor's prostitutes to me would be approximately $176,000 an hour. Which seems high.

Actually, even $4400 an hour is high when you figure that if I took the entire hour, we'd be spending most of it doing a sudoku and watching an episode of House Hunters (two episodes if we tivoed them and fast-forwarded through the commercials).

Yet somehow the governor of New York, a smart man with a graduate degree, a product of two of the finest universities in the world, a man who has spent almost fifty years on the planet and has proved repeatedly that he can both divide and multiply, considered this a good deal. Even though he was doing it on a greased high-wire suspended over a flaming pit of hungry alligators.³

What gets into people? I mean, hiring a prostitute is risky business for even the most anonymous Joe Average. You can be the manager of an auto parts store, faceless to everyone you meet, barely able to get a waitress to come to your table, but you solicit a prostitute and suddenly there will be searchlights and sirens, helicopters and news vans, and your booking photo will be fed-exed to every member of your church congregation. Guaranteed.

Ask any john who's ever been busted for it. It's a low percentage play.

But if you hire a prostitute when you're the governor of the most famous place in the solar system, you go beyond the realm of the bad idea and ascend to the level of transcendental lunacy. For crying out loud, you're a guy who's on the six o'clock news every night. You're being watched and listened to constantly. Everybody knows your face. Your chances of escaping notice are absolutely nil. You've gone from a snowball in hell to a snowflake.⁴

And I'm sure the erstwhile governor would identify with the hell metaphor right now.

So it's time for the Jay Leno question. Remember when English actor Hugh Grant, one of the most attractive and urbane men on the planet, was caught in flagrante backseato with a transvestite prostitute? At the time, he was dating Elizabeth Hurley, a woman so beautiful I would have paid her $4400 to pound on my instep with a claw hammer.⁵  So help me, everything about Grant's transgression was inexplicable.

Well, a few nights later, he appeared on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno and Leno asked him what I've always considered the single best question in the history of television journalism. Leno looked at him for about twenty seconds without saying anything and then asked the question everyone in America wanted asked, "What were you THINKING?" 

And Grant had no answer. He had the grace to admit he had no answer. But he had no answer.⁶

Nor, of course, does Spitzer. 

The talking heads do. Television is already full of pop psychologists trying to explain the inexplicable, trying to find some intellectual explanation for supremely anti-intellectual behavior. According to Slate.com, Dr. Laura tried to blame it on Mrs. Spitzer. Honest.           

Dr. Laura's theory is "When the wife does not focus in on the needs and the feelings sexually, personally, to make him feel like a man, to make him feel like a success, to make him feel like her hero, he's very susceptible to the charm of some other woman, making him feel what he needs." 

This, of course, is absolute rubbish. This might be an explanation for cheating⁷, but we're not talking about cheating. We're not talking about falling for another woman's "charm." We're talking about hiring another woman's body. This isn't an emotional faux pas, it's a commercial transaction. Blaming his wife is like blaming the trailer park operator for the tornado.

Others have suggested resort to prostitutes might indicate the governor had some issues with his mother. So now we're blaming the tornado on the trailer manufacturer. I'm sure that there are dozens of journalists doing background on the governor's mother even as I write this. Has to be Freudian, right?

No.  It doesn't.  It might or might not be Freudian, but it doesn't have to be anything - except stupid.

You want someone to blame? Blame the tornado.

You want an explanation? Here's an explanation: My gender does stupid things.

Spectacularly stupid things.

Sure, the other gender does stupid things, too. But they seem to lack my gender's sublime capacity for the sex-driven, complete double-twisting, triple axel, "Look, Ma, both hands behind my back," flaming, somersaulting, breaking-every-bone-and-crushing-your-spleen catastrophe.

Exhibits A & B:  Messrs. Grant and Spitzer. Exhibits C, D, E & F: Charlie Sheen, Eddie Murphy, Rob Lowe, Dodger pitcher Dave Stewart.⁸  Exhibit G: My own experience AS A PROSECUTOR.⁹

Having spent fifteen years in the district attorney's office, I can vouch for the fact prostitution gives prosecutors fits. It's a misdemeanor, but it's one of those third rail misdemeanors. Legally, it's a 30 watt misdemeanor; politically, it's a 20,000 volt exposed wire.

The offenders are usually sad, often sympathetic, waifs eking out a miserable substitute for a living by pitilessly demeaning themselves.¹⁰  But the voters seem to have an interest in their punishment that far outstrips the crime. They'll go to church and pray for them on Sunday, but on Tuesday, in the voting booth, they'll crucify any prosecutor perceived as not throwing the trick book at them. The result is and always has been prosecutorial schizophrenia.

My first job as a lawyer was prosecuting misdemeanors for a great district attorney named Cecil Hicks.¹¹  Cecil had a rule: Prostitutes go to jail. End of story, end of discussion, end of inquiry. No prostitution case could be dealt for a fine or community service¹² or anything else. Prostitutes had to go to jail.

It wasn't that Cecil was a rigid moralist. We weren't working for Elmer Gantry. As far as I know, he didn't consider the crime itself any more reprehensible than the dozens of other misdemeanors he did allow his deputies to plead out for less than jail time. But he was convinced prostitution would be a perfect entrée into the county for organized crime, and he was determined to keep organized crime out of Orange County. So prostitutes did jail time.

I don't know if he was right. But I know prostitutes would plead to almost anything in Los Angeles County if they could get the judge to wrap up their Orange County cases as part of the deal. Fines were merely a cost of doing business for them, but jail time was hugely counterproductive.

And I know there is virtually no organized crime presence in Orange County today.¹³  And Cecil Hicks could be elected District Attorney tomorrow if he were still alive. Which puts him considerably ahead of Governor Spitzer on at least four fronts. 

First, Cecil, rest his soul, is dead. Spitzer only wishes he were.

Second, even dead, Cecil is more electable right now than Spitzer.

Third, Cecil is buried. Spitzer will be radioactive for a thousand years; they'll have to launch his body into space in a lead-lined trash barrel.

And fourth, everybody I've ever talked to about Cecil Hicks respected him as a prosecutor and remembers him as a good and decent, fair and honorable man.  Everyone has a Cecil Hicks story, and they all involve laughter.  But even if you spend the rest of the week trying, you will be unable to find anyone who remembers ever sharing a meal with Eliot Spitzer.

So what does this have to do with you? I hope nothing. I hope you didn't need to be reminded of any of this.  But, like all cautionary tales, it has an audience - often one that nobody suspects. Maybe you're it.

But even if you're not, there's a definite bright side to this for you. Ours is a stressful profession. Sometimes it flat out beats us up. You may have had a day like that today... or a week... or more. You may have lost a summary judgment motion... or a trial... or a witness... or a partnership. You may be headed home right now with your head down.

But take heart. No matter how bad your day was. No matter how bad your week, your month, your year... it's better than Eliot Spitzer's. 

Count your blessings.

1. Did I mention Kelly reads every column?

2. Assuming, that is, that my needs cannot be met quite nicely by the nearest available funeral home.

3. Yeah, that's a bad deal for the alligators, but an even worse one for Spitzer.

4. The operative word here being "flake."

5. Now, of course, my limit would be $150.

6. He also had no Elizabeth Hurley. Ever again.

7. Or it might not be.

8. And that list, I'm embarrassed to admit, took only three minutes and no resort to the internet to compile.

9. I thought that phrase needed to be shouted in case a train happened to be going by when my wife read it.

10. Governor Spitzer's associates in The Emperor's Club notwithstanding, prostitutes are the stoop laborers of crime (no pun intended).

11. "I knew him, Horatio; a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy." And, like Hamlet's Yorick, he carried me on his back until I gradually turned into a lawyer.

12. They were already servicing the community; that's what got them in trouble.

13. There are also very few elephants - a fact I attribute to Cecil's "Elephants Go to Prison" rule.