Well, the Oscars are over, and we're still months from the summer blockbusters. That usually means it's time for a scientologist to do something crazy.

Yep. Right on schedule, Isaac Hayes, the voice of Chef on South Park, is no longer the voice of Chef on South Park.

Hayes, who has voiced the character Chef since the series began in 1997, released a statement through his spokesman Monday requesting a release from his contract because he "is disappointed with what he perceives as a growing insensitivity toward personal spiritual beliefs."

Um...growing insensitivity toward religion? Did Hayes not notice that he's been on the cast of South Park for nearly ten years?

I've just finished grading a practice SAT, step one in preparing for the real thing. It was, frankly, a severe reality check. The scores were, by my goals, dismal: 800 writing, 740 critical reading, and 400 math. I mean, keeping things in perspective, two out of three ain't bad, but you can see the one score on there that's got me incredibly unnerved. I'm disappointed in myself and quickly regressing back into teen-angst mode. (I'd forgotten how good standardized tests are at bringing that on.) I'll be putting a lot of effort into bringing the score up to where I want it.

It'd be nice to improve the math section as well, but whatever.

I'm treating myself to a nice evening after I take the SAT, whatever the outcome. Merce Cunningham's dance company is coming to the District, and I dropped more money than I can afford to get decent seats to my first Kennedy Center concert.



Merce Cunningham. Martha Graham's talent meets Albert Einstein's hair. What's not to like?

That is the front page headline in today's Washington Post. It's really part of a good sunday morning routine I have going here: plug in the iPod, twenty minute walk to the bagel place, breakfast sandwich, get a copy of the Post and sit outside with the spring weather, read about people stealing babies.

I saw the headline I walked into the bagel place and got the paper, and I have to admit that I immediately jumped to some conclusions. Surely this phenomena, while admittedly henious, was perhaps getting exaggerated just a little because headlines like "Electricity Dereguation: High Cost, Unmet Promises" don't pack quite the same punch as "Stealing Babies." And—I know this is hideously cruel, but it's the truth—it can be hard for me to feel that much sympathy for babies when the suburb I live in is infested with infants, a small clutch of whom are drowning out the Rachmaninov concherto I have on my iPod as we speak. So I was prepared to meditate on the necessity of being able to simulatniously condemn the indefensible depravity of abducting children and reprove the Post's yellow journalism... Hell, the chart beside the article was clearly labeled "Adoptions from China to the U.S."—and didn't show how many of of them were suspected to be adoptions of abducted children.

Then I read the article.

Despite my initial suspicions about the Post; despite the fact that actual babies have now ruined Mozart, Kayne West, and the original cast of Rent for me; despite hyperbolic headlines; this is a serious problem that deserves page A-1, above-the-fold treatment. Standard procedure for an American couple that wants to adopt a Chinese baby involves, at the penultimate stage, handing an orphanage director $3000 in cash. One aid worker estimated that less than 10% of that money will eventually end up going to the children in an orphanage. The White Swan hotel in Guangzhou—the city where adoptive parents take their new children to get visas from the State Department—gives guests "Going Home Barbie," dolls specially made by Mattel featuring Barbie and Ken and their adopted Chinese baby girl.

Chinese authorities recently busted a child-trafficking ring in Hunan provice, arresting 27 people including orphanage staff and local police officers who had filed fake reports of abandonded children. Neighbors of the Hengyang County orphanage, which, well, laundured the babies, say it sold as thirty babies a month to various orphanages. They recall six, ten, even twelve at a time being packed into vans. Hengyang is a poor county in a poor province, yet the orphanage director was driven around in a chauferred sedan. One of the defendant's lawyers is actually quoted in the post as saying "Old Lady Liang was quite well known locally for being warm-hearted and taking care of abandoned babies."

It's like the moment in M. Night Shyamalan's last film where you go from a Frank Capra-esque 18th Century village to "everything you know is a lie!" One adoptive parent from Salt Lake City, apparently competing for the Understatement of the Year award, says "it's a corrupt system." That's a typical reaction by one of the parents the Post interviews. They're shocked, ambivolent, uncertain. There's really nothing anyone could say to reassure them.

The world, after all, is a pretty unpleasant place. I was recently talking with a friend who had just found out that Americans import large amounts of pornography from former Soviet countries in Eastern Europe. I explaned, demonstrating more knowledge of the mechanics of the pornography trade than I'll admit to having in casual conversation, that Eastern Europe is one of the few places in the world where large populations of skinny, pale-skinned young people—the sort of person most Americans find attractive—are hungry and desperate. (Another such place is South Florida, but that's another post.)

In any case, child trafficking is still, in the end, a small part of the great Gordian Knot of humanitarian and international problems that is China. But it deserves a little front-page treatment, now and then.

Click here to buy a "If selling babies for profit is wrong, I don't want to be right" bumper sticker.

Just kidding. I mean about being sorry he's dead.

I never took the SAT in high school: the price paid to avoid being sucked into West High's Advanced Placement / International Baccalaureate Programme point-of-view, which is a painfully narrow place that, while not antithetical to worthwhile thought, is certainly an obstacle. We'll call it the Dan Campbell Memorial Circle of Hell, in honor of a man who is, from what I hear, dead on the inside.

Anyway, it was the price paid, and if the price strikes you as a little high, remember I have always had a pretty steep learning curve, all carefully-groomed appearances to the contrary.

Now, what I've written so far has made sense to precisely one person in the entirety of the universe—he knows who he is—so let me backtrack: I checked out of high school because the high school mindset is bullshit; however, it was a mistake not to take the SAT, and that's why I'm taking it in a three weeks.

What is the high school mindset? Here's an example: I picked up two SAT Prep books. Let's compare the introduction from the book by Publisher A with the introduction from the book by Publisher B:

Are you ready for a totally unique test prep experience? The SAT team at [Publisher A] understands what you are going through.

First, you're facing perhaps the single most important test of your high school career. Second, you're dealing with a longer, more grueling exam today—3 hours and 45 minutes to be exact—testing everything from writing to reading comprehension to reasoning to advanced math. Third, you're struggling to balance your normal activities such as sports and music with SAT prep. Finally, you're a person in need of options—the option of when to study, where to study, and most of all—how to study.

That's why you need this Program. The SAT Premier Program...

Coversely, the second book begins with an summary of the changes made in the SAT test last spring:

It still doesn't measure anything. It measures neither intelligence nor the stuff you're learning in high school. It doesn't predict college grades as well as your high school grades [my long-term prospects are dim] and the new 25-minute mini-essay scored in 60 seconds will certainly not measure how well you write.

It still underpredicts the college performance of women, minorities, and disadvantaged students. In other words, this test can make it tougher, not easier, for many of you to get into and pay for college. Historically, women have done better than men in college but worse on the SAT. For a test that is used to help predict performance in college, that's a pretty poor record.

It's still coachable in all the worst ways.

I'll admit: I spent over an hour trying to come up with a joke—any joke—that could top that first introduction. I considered mentioning that my boss, who runs a staff of more than two hundred people in fifteen states, does not need options of where to work, when to work, and how to work. Where? Her office. When? All the time. How? Hard.

I considered drawing on the similarities between "you need this Program" and the sales pitch you'd get at your local Scientology center. I considered explaining the part where they describe sitting on your ass for three and a half hours doing multiple-choice algebra is "grueling" can be accurate, if you grade on a curve and no Albanian Serbs or Gulf War Vets are taking the test.

I considered mentioning how well a person would score on the SAT if they used the phrases "totally unique" and "the option of when to study" in the grammar section of the test.

But in the end, none of my ideas really did justice to the monumental intellectual narcissism that runs through every word of that introduction. I'm not denying that it's morally admirable to say "I wanted a cool car, but I know Daddy can only really afford the two SUVs, so I'd feel bad asking," I'm just saying I don't need the book introduction equivalent of a drunken blow job in the bed of somebody else's pick-up truck to convince me to buy your product. In fact, it's kind of a turn off. So I'm just going to quietly return the thing tomorrow and exchange it for the next season of "The West Wing." I can steal something from Sorkin for my essay and it'll help my score more than any test prep book, even the one I'm not taking back.

In a bit of proof that even the worst of us can learn from our mistakes, Utah State Senator Chris Buttars has said it's "doubtful" he'll put an anti-evolution bill before the Utah Legislature again. This was after his original proposal was shot down 46-28.

Of course, there are still 28 State Representatives in Utah who care about reforming our education system, so I've conducted a scientific study that they can introduce into next year's biology courses. The study proves people other than me are 100% likely to be psychopathic serial killers. The methodology was: I visited the Crime Library's list of the world's most notorious serial killers and compared my behavior to theirs.

What is the state of education coming to in this country when a member of the Senior Executive Service—the highest ranking, most responsible employees in Civil Service, typically reporting directly to agency chiefs and cabinet secretaries—spells the word "though" with no U, G, or H in a business e-mail? Now, I feel like Andy Rooney, complaining about this, but the when the new vernacular is less precise than the old, language isn't evolving—it's devolving.

It seems some of my incisive wit and penetrating insight doesn't quite make the translation to Japanese—at least, not when I'm the one doing the translating. But hey, it's important for me to practice as much as possible, and if that means subjecting the two or three people who still read this thing to bi-lingual inanities, it's a price I'm willing to pay.

Of course, the above shouldn't be confused with anything that an actual Japanese person could, in fact, read. Because the language has two eighty letter alphabets and tens of thousands of pictograms, only three of the symbols above would actually be in that sentence if it we're written in proper Japanese.

So if you happen to be a native Japanese speaker who enjoys single sentence statements of the blindingly obvious utilizing vocabulary that would appall a seven-year-old, check back here often.

From The Legal Times, via The Corner:

Already frustrated with the Democratic Party for putting forward an anti-abortion candidate to run against Republican Sen. Rick Santorum, Kate Michelman, former president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, says she has been asked by a number of women's groups and Democratic donors to jump into the hotly contested U.S. Senate race in Pennsylvania as an independent. The final straw? When Santorum's Democratic challenger, Bob Casey, endorsed the nomination of Samuel Alito Jr. to the U.S. Supreme Court. 'After Casey announced his support for Alito, I got calls from around the country,' says Michelman, a resident of the Keystone State since 1969. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee declined to comment, and a call to EMILY's List, a group that supports abortion rights candidates for elected office, went unreturned.

From The Onion:

WASHINGTON, DC—In a press conference on the steps of the Capitol Monday, Congressional Democrats announced that, despite the scandals plaguing the Republican Party and widespread calls for change in Washington, their party will remain true to its hopeless direction.

"We are entirely capable of bungling this opportunity to regain control of the House and Senate and the trust of the American people," Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) said to scattered applause. "It will take some doing, but we're in this for the long and pointless haul."

"Some rising stars with leadership potential like [Sen. Barack] Obama (D-IL) and [New York State Attorney General Eliot] Spitzer have emerged, but don't worry: We've still got some infight left in us," Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean said. "Over the last decade, we've found a reliably losing formula, and we're sticking with it."