Salon.com

High drama in Milan

Milan is famous for opera and fashion, so perhaps it's appropriate that the United Nations' Kyoto Protocol conference, being held in the Italian city this week and next, has so far been characterized by high drama and public spectacle. Some 180 negotiators from around the world have been treated to rumors of deliberate sabotage and shady backroom deals, derisive public statements about the treaty from leading U.S officials, and bogus news reports that Russia had dealt a fatal blow to the beleaguered pact (one such report was summarized in yesterday's Daily Grist before the error was exposed) -- all this in just the first two days of the two-week conference.

The opening act starred Paula Dobriansky, the Bush administration's leading representative at the conference and undersecretary of state for global affairs, who published an op-ed in the Financial Times on Monday denouncing the treaty. "[T]he Kyoto Protocol [is] an unrealistic and ever-tightening regulatory straitjacket, curtailing energy consumption," she wrote.

I Like to Watch

Tracy takes on ...
"Saturday Night Live" veteran Tracy Morgan was never roll-in-the-aisles funny on that show, but between his tweaked, pouty delivery and the absurd glee of skits like "Astronaut Jones," he managed to at least bring a little original weirdness to an increasingly predictable venue.

Morgan left "SNL" in August, not to pursue a mediocre film career like so many other "SNL" veterans, but to pursue a mediocre TV career instead. Fortunately, "The Tracy Morgan Show," which premiered Tuesday night, is a lot better than at least half of the sitcoms on the air right now.

Unfortunately, though, that's not saying much. Just to put it into perspective, the supposed hit of CBS's season "Two and a Half Men" -- it's the one with Charlie Sheen and a smart-mouthed kid -- features jokes so hackneyed and story lines so strained in their pursuit of wacky mayhem that it's practically unwatchable.

Asian fetish?

Dear Tracy,

As a sex advice columnist, a woman and an Asian-American, I am hoping you will have a perspective that can help me.

I am 33 years old, and have sowed far more wild oats than I ever planned to. When I was younger, I used sex to replace many things that were missing in my life, and it took me many years to realize that I could confront my feelings and needs in healthier ways. I am now at a point in my life where I want to settle down and move on to a fulfilling and permanent relationship.

One of the biggest problems for me emotionally (I now realize) was the fact that I lost my mother at a young age. She died when I was only 7, and though I was raised by loving and wonderful parents (her parents), it left me with deep-seated issues of abandonment and hopelessness. My mother was born in Japan, and though she was Irish, she grew up speaking Japanese. She did not move to America until she was 16, and my earliest memories are of speaking Japanese at home, because she always felt more comfortable with that language.

That 1994 feeling

What if someone had sat you down in 1994 and told you, "There's this new thing called HTML, and it's going to change how we get much of our news and information"? (Maybe you were lucky enough that someone actually did this for you. It happened to me -- though it took more than one introduction for the message finally to get through.)

You would probably have thought, "'HTML'? Sheesh, couldn't they come up with a better name?"

But of course, they had: The name was the World Wide Web, a term that instantly conveyed a rich metaphor for the global orgy of linking that was about to commence.

RSS, a similarly opaque name for a similarly important technology, is at just such a moment in its history. This much-argued-over but basically elementary technical standard allows you to subscribe to blogs -- or any other source of information.

What's the big deal in that? Bigger than it looks. The simple combination of blogs and RSS presages a whole new model for personal publishing and communication online that's already taking shape.

Night raid in Baghdad

A few nights before Thanksgiving, I stood in a light but very cold rain on a dark residential street in Baghdad, loosely surrounded by two tanks, five Humvees, a prisoner transportation truck, 52 soldiers, three Iraqi translators, two armed canine handlers, and one bomb-sniffing dog named Elsa. The soldiers -- representing both infantry and armor from the 1-36 Charlie Company of the 1st Armored Division -- were preparing to raid a house where a member of the resistance supposedly lived. A dozen of the soldiers crouched, guns ready, on either side of the house's front gate. Other soldiers cordoned off the block and pointed their weapons at nearby windows and roofs.

I had chosen to spend a day with these soldiers. Just moments before, I had been sitting in a convoy's lead humvee as the whole operation sped from the soldiers' base to the target house. Iraqi cars and pedestrians scrambled to move aside as we rumbled through the nighttime city, often going the wrong way on one-way streets. Now I watched as they banged on the gate and demanded (through one of the interpreters) that the house's occupants come outside.

Body heat

Dear Cary,

I'm a female graduate student in my early 20s. A couple of months ago I met someone amazing -- let's call him Peter. He's smart, sweet, artistic, funny. We have amazing emotional chemistry. But in the first days of our acquaintance, Peter made a comment to the effect that he's most attracted to slender women. And while I'm not overweight, I know my body isn't the type he prefers.

I know that attraction is mutable, but I can't get the remark out of my head. I've always been irrationally self-conscious about my body, but I've never questioned my ability to attract men. Now I'm confused: How serious are Peter's ideals? Does my curvier body eliminate me from consideration as a romantic prospect? Or is this just a preference that could be overridden by the right woman -- maybe me?

Peter and I see each other every day; we work at adjacent desks and spend hours talking. Sometimes I feel an overwhelming affection for him; other times I am angry and disappointed that he doesn't -- or can't -- see me the way I see him.

King Kaufman’s Sports Daily

It's Jacksonville's ball, second and 10 at midfield midway through the third quarter of the Jaguars' game Sunday against the Buccaneers. The score is tied 10-10. But oh no! The play clock is running out and quarterback Byron Leftwich doesn't seem to notice! A couple of linemen stand up and signal timeout.

Too late. Officials say they didn't get it called in time and assess a 5-yard delay-of-game penalty. On the next play, second and 15 at the 45, Fred Taylor takes a handoff from Leftwich on a draw play and runs 25 yards for the first down.

That timeout and its two companions were saved and the Jaguars went on to win the game, but many, many more of these beautiful creatures are dying needlessly every weekend. That's why I'm writing to you today.

NFL head coaches routinely slaughter their precious timeouts just so they won't have to take a usually meaningless 5-yard penalty for delay of game. Of course these coaches have to pay the piper at the end of the first half or late in the game, when they're racing against the clock and can't stop it because they've squandered this valuable resource. And yet, the killing goes on.

The Giants, trailing the Buccaneers 17-13 and facing a fourth and 19 at their own 3, use their last timeout coming out of the two-minute warning.

Joe Conason’s Journal

Why is the State Department silencing Clark?
Among the topics most passionately argued by Democratic presidential candidates and their handlers is who among them would be the nominee most (or least) favored by Karl Rove. Which Democrat does the White House prefer to see win the nomination? And which of the nine is most feared as a potential challenger?

Lately Howard Dean is most often mentioned by Republicans as their favorite Democratic nominee (although they probably daydream about Al Sharpton). Dean's supporters reply that such trash talk is merely Rovian misdirection, designed to dupe primary voters into rejecting the former Vermont governor. Perhaps so, but this month the Bush administration is actually using its power to suppress news coverage of another Democratic rival.

That would be Wesley Clark, whose scheduled testimony against Slobodan Milosevic at the former Serbian dictator's genocide trial will reportedly be closed to the press and public -- at the insistence of the U.S. State Department.

Here comes the (freaked out) bride

During her engagement in the fall of 1995, Sheryl Paul found countless wedding planners offering advice about dresses and flowers and food -- but she didn't find any books that helped her with the big problems she was facing: the fear of marriage and becoming a wife, and the anxiety about leaving behind her family and single life. After all, planning a wedding and getting married should be an experience nothing short of ecstatic, right?

Not always. The engagement, the wedding and the first few months of married life are periods of constant ups and downs, says Paul, a Los Angeles-based therapist and author. But none of the wedding books she read discussed this emotional roller coaster.

So Paul, who was earning an M.A. in counseling psychology at the time, wrote her own wedding book -- "The Conscious Bride: Women Unveil Their True Feelings About Getting Hitched." "As part of my research I conducted interviews with many women and I quickly learned that I was not the only one who felt afraid and anxious while planning my wedding," says Paul. "Some women burst into tears when they were proposed to, some wanted to flush their engagement ring down the toilet, some cried on their wedding night and had no idea what was going on. They didn't have the vocabulary to name and talk about their experience."

“The Simple Life” goes to Guantanamo

The Fix

All you Bonnie Raitt boomer babes -- make room for Beyoncé. This year's Grammy Award nominations are all about hip-hop. Sure, there were nominations to be had for the older set (if they were sick or dead like Luther Vandross or Warren Zevon), but most of the nom nods went to the likes of OutKast, 50 Cent, Eminem and Jay-Z. The awards will be handed out in February in L.A. Is it still OK to listen to Nat King Cole? (E!Online)

Speaking of old rockers, not even the Boss could save the Bottom Line, it seems. The New York club, where many of the country's best acts started out, is going to close just shy of its 30th birthday unless NYU changes its mind and decides it can live with a profit-making venue on its nonprofit campus. Bruce Springsteen and others offered to pay the back rent, but a judge said the school has the upper hand so unless it change its mind, there will be classrooms instead of club chairs on West 4th. (Rolling Stone)

Right Hook

"Case (sort of) Closed"
The editors of the Weekly Standard, led by Washington neocon William Kristol, think the White House is missing a golden opportunity to reaffirm Saddam's links to al-Qaida. On Nov. 24, the Standard published an article by Stephen F. Hayes titled "Case Closed," which quoted at length a recent, secret memo from the Pentagon to the Senate Intelligence Committee that allegedly contained 16 pages of evidence corroborating Saddam's partnership with the terror network. But several mainstream news outlets questioned the validity of the report's analysis and source material, and the Department of Defense itself called the Standard story and other news reports "inaccurate." On Monday, the Standard declared that the Times, the Post and Newsweek were biased in their coverage -- a curious argument from a magazine that makes little pretense of objectivity. Though the memo was leaked to the Standard from the office of Pentagon hawk Douglas J. Feith -- and while no other media outlet has been allowed to see the leaked document -- the Standard continues to push it as a blockbuster.