TIME Magazine’s 2004-09-20 cover. Boing Boing has the explanation if you need it. Now, since there is zero chance that TIME’s graphic design staff didn’t know what they were doing, what I want to know is: do they still have jobs?

Nostalgia trip for the day: The Micronauts Homepage

I had a ton of these, including the unbelievably cool Rocket Tubes. They disappeared sometime in the early eighties.

Rita watched John Kerry on the Late Show with David Letterman last night and writes:

He was terrific! The Bush team’s strategy is so ridiculous and insulting because they’re trying to attack Kerry for actually using his brain to solve problems and weigh options, for taking special care when making decisions that will impact the world. Like many senators who voted to authorize Bush’s war, Kerry had to trust that the president would act wisely, but Bush ruined our country’s reputation and increased his own personal wealth, neglecting health care, education, and jobs.

Read the rest of her comments, including the “Top 10 Bush Tax Proposals” as read by Kerry, at the link above.

What could be interesting is that due to equal-access regulations, CBS has to give Bush an opportunity to appear on the show for the same amount of time. Of course, he’s been on the show before.

There’s this guy, Jarek Molski, in Woodland Hills, California. He’s a paraplegic and makes his business suing restaurants and other small business who are, he claims, not ADA-compliant. To date, he’s sued somewhere in the range of 250-500 businesses in California for up to $1.6 million each–alleging “injury and humiliation” at each and every one.

The most recent case is Roy’s Drive-In, in Salinas, in Monterey County, California. Molski has sued the 1950s-era drive-in eatery because it doesn’t have ramps to access the walk-up windows and restrooms. Beverly Patterson, wife of Roy’s owner Roger Patterson, says that the restaurant employees are always happy to provide car service (it’s a drive-in, remember) to customers who request it. Because of the suit, Roy’s will be serving their last customer today.

This is, as I said, only the most recent. Molski has sued many other restaurants and businesses, some of which have been forced to close and are still liable for harsh civil penalties. Even other equal-access activists are bemoaning Molski’s efforts, as the San Luis Obispo Tribune reports:

Mike Ward of San Luis Obispo, a former city fire chief, said Wednesday that Molski has given wheelchair users a “bad rap.”

Ward, a quadriplegic, told other members of SLOCO Access, “I don’t want to see businesses, especially the smaller ones, close down. Everybody shares the same concerns.”

Jay Feldmann of Arroyo Grande is concerned that restaurants won’t want to see disabled people and will view them as pariahs.

Bill Walther, also of Arroyo Grande, puts it in even starker terms: “We need to make T-shirts that say, ‘I’m not a terrorist.’ “

I respect the needs of people who use wheelchairs or who have access issues. I recognize the responsibility of businesses, and of society, to provide equal access to everyone. However, forcing small businesses–the backbone of the American economy–to close using these lawsuits is wrong.

Gary Peterson of the Contra Costa Times/Mercury News expounds upon the new rules of baseball, as they apply to Barry Bonds.

The incessant walking of Bonds is no longer a strategic ploy. Strategy is when you intentionally walk him with a base open in the eighth inning of a one-run game. Bonds has been walked 208 times this season — he’ll carry a 14-game walk streak into tonight’s game against San Diego — and only 42 have come in what are statistically described as “close and late” situations.

Less than half (101) have come with runners in scoring position. Only 58 have come with runners in scoring position and two out.

Walking Bonds is no longer a strategy. It is a methodology. It has become reflexive. Worse, it has become the coward’s fall-back position.

It would be difficult to support a rule change, as some (many) have said, because how can you differentiate between the intentional-unintentional (four just deliberately out of the zone) and four bad pitches? Do you require that every batter be delivered at least one hanging slider right down the middle? There’s room in game strategy for the intentional walk. Just not the way it’s currently being applied.