It’s not just peach pie, it’s Impeachment Pie, the dessert that’s become famous at Chocolate, a restaurant in downtown Santa Cruz.

“People come here just for that,” says Zeya Schindler, a veteran waiter at the restaurant. “I’m not always sure if it’s because the pie is very good, or because they want to impeach Mr. Bush.”

A new poll finds 42 percent of voters would support impeaching Bush “if it is found the President misled the nation about his reasons for going to war with Iraq.”

Support for impeachment “was much higher than I expected,” pollster John Zogby told the Washington Post.

By comparison, in October 1998, as the House moved to impeach President Bill Clinton over the Monica S. Lewinsky scandal, a Zogby poll found that 39 percent of voters supported the House action, while 56 percent opposed it.

This is what it sounds like when people are excited by new poetry—by Alli Warren’s Hounds, a chapbook released this spring without a publisher’s imprint:

Contact Alli Warren immediately and force her to sell you a copy. It is worth a thousand dollars. [K. Silem Mohammad]

UPDATE July 6, 2005—Make that more than $1000, as a copy of Hounds was stolen from a car in Los Angeles County last week, along with a purse and a camera, Warren reports on her blog, the Ingredient. It’s still missing, she said today in an e-mail.

These things are bound to happen if you don’t have an electric fence.

From The Onion:

Vatican Tightens Nocturnal Emissions Standards

Recall that Montaigne—who was always big on confession—taught us that it’s OK to talk about wet dreams. But preferably in Latin.

It’s a great time to be an entrepreneur…except that we’re entering a dark age for innovation. (The latter is from someone at the Pentagon, and everyone else discredits it. So it’s still a great time to be an entrepreneur!)

“Trivia & Bizarre items” from the online World Carrot Museum:

• Carrots produce more distilled spirit than potatoes.
• Carrots might unlock the secrets of the universe.
• If your first name is Carrot it has made you happiest when you are expressing in some creative, artistic way, and not conforming to strict routine.

As the battle over nominees to the U.S. Supreme Court approaches, a solution to the nation’s battle over church and state seems about as likely as a Sonny and Cher reunion. Noah Feldman, noting that Justice Sandra Day O’Connor was the swing vote in several Court decisions protecting what he terms “legal secularism,” suggests an answer.

Put simply, it is this: offer greater latitude for religious speech and symbols in public debate, but also impose a stricter ban on state financing of religious institutions and activities. This approach, the mirror image of O’Connor’s compromise, is drawn from the framers’ vision and the historical experience of separating church and state in America. The framers might well have been mystified by courthouse statues depicting the Ten Commandments, but they would not have objected unless the monuments were built with public money. Having made a revolution over unfair taxation, they thought of government support in terms of dollars spent, not abstract symbols.

Feldman, a law professor at NYU, is a fellow at the New America Foundation, known for its innovative take on “The Real State of the Union” in yearly articles in the Atlantic Monthly. In an argument that presumes the existence of an America that is capable of actually conducting a meaningful national conversation and arriving at agreement (rather than leaving it to courts to lurch this way and that), he earnestly sketches a route toward consensus on an issue that bitterly divides us. But is the Christian Coalition really prepared to compromise? Is the ACLU? And–the question of the week–is George Bush?

Feldman’s most resonant point bears underlining: that faith should not be a conversation stopper.

How many readers of Going Local: Creating Self-Reliant Communities in a Global Age, by Michael H. Shuman, would buy the book from Wal-Mart?

Here’s a blurb from the publisher, spotted on Wal-Mart’s web site:

Going Local shows how some cities and towns are fighting back. Refusing to be overcome by Wal-Marts and layoffs, they are taking over abandoned factories, switching to local produce and manufactured goods, and pushing banks to loan money to local citizens. Shuman details how dozens of communities are recapturing their own economies with these new strategies, investing not in outsiders but in locally owned businesses.

Wal-Mart comes to China, bringing cheap melons and electric fans shaped like sad penguins. (Via Future Now)

Wal-Mart has no stores in South Africa, where big-box discounters are not yet pervasive. (Woolworth-style variety stores are found in most malls. In fact, the Woolworth name lives on in South Africa, but here it’s an upscale department store.) Earlier this year, public-interest groups slammed Wal-Mart with their “Public Eye Award For Irresponsible Corporate Behaviour.” The groups charged the company with ignoring pleas to improve “terrible” working conditions at factories in southern Africa and elsewhere that supply clothes to Wal-Mart.

Saddam Hussein has been definitively linked to Doritos, and Low Culture calls PepsiCo to account.

A chemical in Teflon may cause cancer, according to the EPA (which evinces a sudden willingness to maybe actually Protect us).

Here’s how the part of GE that makes TV news reports the story:

WASHINGTON - With five kids, it seems Barbara Andrukonis always has something cooking in a pan. But it’s the chemical compound used to make the pan’s Teflon coating that has her — and an EPA panel — concerned.

“I think that anything that sort of isn’t the way that nature made it has to have some type of problem with it for us humans,” says Andrukonis.

Why begin the story with a ridiculous, irrelevant quote? To connect with our world, of course. NBC’s Brian Williams understands the NASCAR nation, you know. But honestly. Why not first tell us what scientists think about this danger, rather than some woman who’s only comfortable cooking with rocks.

Babies smile socially, even at just eight months of age, a new study indicates.

Each of twenty infants was left to play in a room, alone except for the baby’s mother, while researchers from Indiana University filmed the scene. Mothers were instructed to watch their babies play for half of the allotted time period and, for the other half, to read a magazine while ignoring the infant as much as possible.

How much the infants looked at their mother didn’t depend on whether their mum was reading or not – they looked at her roughly once a minute in either case. But whether or not they smiled was affected by whether their mother was looking at them. The infants rarely smiled at their mother when she was reading, but smiled roughly 50 per cent of the time when they looked at her and she was watching. The babies rarely smiled when they were facing the toys.

Much is yet to be learned about how babies experience the world. Even so fundamental a question as whether pre-linguistic children possess consciousness has been open to debate (in academia, and on Edge.org). Tufts philosopher Daniel C. Dennet doubts that babies are really conscious, in a strict sense. But UC-Berkeley psychologist Alison Gopnik argues otherwise:

I believe, but cannot prove, that babies and young children are actually more conscious, more vividly aware of their external world and internal life, than adults are.
…
I think that, for babies, every day is first love in Paris. Every wobbly step is skydiving, every game of hide and seek is Einstein in 1905.

For adults, though, life happens–all too often–when we’re not paying attention.

Can anything else in this world capture the pure wonder of possibility that we find in a baby’s smile? But that smile reminds us, too, of what we have lost.

The self-absorbed handle trauma best, a study finds.

Is that why they get to be in charge of everything?

(Via Mind Hacks)

What is the best way to sign your email? The closing, I mean. I’ve long wondered, and one day a long while back I was quite struck by the notion of asking Susan Sontag—because, well, she’d know. Now it’s too late, of course. She would not have written back, in any case, and so on top of being bereft of an answer I would feel bad, though perhaps it is high time that I be snubbed by a better class of people.

And if—implausibly—she did write back? I like to imagine that she would eschew the internetwork entirely and instead write back, months letter, in a chilly yet breezy tone, in a baroque longhand that everyone thought long ago had vanished, on skillfully folded stationery whose thinness evokes the kind of typewriter paper that used to spout holes where the periods should go, though of course she would use dark-blue fountain pen.

I’ve hardly thought about this, you see.

Actually, I have it all figured out; all but the answer, which would be so oblique as to be all but useless. What she would counsel, beneath it all, is to be original; and then she would sign it, With undiminished ennui, Susan Sontag. So I think I’ll steal that. Henceforth I will sign all of my missives With undiminished ennui, at least until my ennui abates.

Dave Chapelle is here in South Africa. No wonder no one could find him.

I still don’t know who he is, as I don’t catch much American TV these days, yet he keeps parading through my headlines day after day, a sensation so singular it deserves a name.

The Ryan Seacrest Effect. Watch for it in the DSM-V.

When I read (via A List of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago) that Living with Fran got renewed, I had a fleeting moment of “Wow, the WB gave Fran Lebowitz a show?” Imagine my disappointment when I checked out the show’s web site.