Regulars of this column will recall two of my previous pronouncements:

• the first, that whenever something or other goes wrong there is an immediate call from all sides -- including the opponents of 'Big Government' -- for the Government to do something about it;
  
  
• the second, that people on the political right are caught in a hopeless contradiction between moral authoritarianism and economic liberalism.

The case of the Transatlantic Twins is an interesting one in these respects. They were bought via information on the Internet but there was some double-dealing on the part of the adoption agency so that the children, Belinda and Kimberley, were sold to both the American Allen's and, then later, were then sold to the British Kilshaw's. Separating the general from the particular, there was an immediate outcry against the buying and selling of children, yet another sickening example of babies being used as commodities, as lifestyle trophies. ... More

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RECOMMENDED DAILY REQUIREMENT 02/05/01:

Isolated White Folks

So here's what happened. After we got to look at all the new stuff the company was planning on doing, a couple new plants in different parts of the country and stuff like that, a bunch of us went out to have some Happy Hour drinks. This is what these conventions is all about I guess. Raheem's first experience as a foreman.

So this White girl, from some place up in Idaho, she gets all loose and friendly-like after a couple of daiguiris. She turns to me, kindah bashful like, and says: "Can I ask you a favor?"

I says, "Sure. Why not? As long as you don't ask for my next paycheck."

She giggles, and then says the strangest thing I have ever heard: "Can I touch your hair?"

"Yeah," I said, "it don't bite." But I was thinkin' to myself, This woman never seen a Black person face-to-face before!

"It's so soft!" she says, soundin' surprised.

I'm thinkin': What? Where you come from they told you our hair be like barbed-wire? ...More

RDR 02.02.01: "Lord of the Dance" ROD AMIS continues his open-diary on life at one remove from the "normal."

RDR 02.07.01:ED CANTARELLA reports on underexposed treatments for that diagnosis of "nerves." "An Un-Nerving Medical Travesty"

Much better than "Redrum," that backwords message in the mirror to a love-starved wife of a crazed Jack Nicholson in "The Shining."

Even in the late morning mental fog from an all-night soiree' through the glittering streets of the Victorian mountain village in remotest southwestern Colorado, I vowed to, for the time being, keep the following to myself: all that stuff about the philosophical -- quite possibly, at least in my imagination -- links to William Blake, and therefore, due to his genealogical connection to Joseph of Arimathea, who lost the Holy Grail on the ship to deep and mysterious and dark Albion... "Glasnost Lost 2" DOUGLAS MC DANIEL More


POWERSSOUND: Do you own any coffee table books? They're the outsized volumes in hard covers, measuring somewhere around 9 by 12 inches, and dressed in gaudy dust jackets that shout, "I'm expensive and I make a good impression."

Sadly, such books seldom are read. For one thing, coffee table books are simply too heavy to place on one's lap in the comfort of a favored upholstered chair. Coffee table books received that moniker long ago, because that precisely described their ultimate destination.

Readers, particularly those with an interest in music, are likely candidates to buy one of the heaviest and gaudiest volumes in recent memory. And if you've been in the audience for the PBS series by Ken Burns called "Jazz: A History of America's Music" (Alfred A. Knopf, $65). Not too many of us can afford to plunk down such a price for any book, much less one devoted to jazz music. But pay attention for a few more paragraphs. You may reconsider. ..." 'JAZZ" Worthwhile Reading" BOB POWERS More


MY GLASS HOUSE: : So the pressure is on for me to return to California, the Lotus Land that I never, ever, chose to go to of my own volition. It seems that "all" my friends are there (if you listen to the Californians tell the tale.)

The whole time I lived in Cali, lots of these friends referred to me as an East Coast snob. But when I returned East, the women in my favorite bar on the Upper East Side of Manhattan got great chuckles out of referring to me, a man in his forties, as "California Boy." And people wonder why I don't feel at home anywhere....

In less than a month's time, it appears, I'll be flown out to California to do some technical writing for this new start-up. They'll pick up the tab. And, of course, one of my friends from the San Francisco Irish Mafia will make sure to give me TONS of reasons why I should move back ... "Man in the Mirror" ROD AMIS More


THE SEX COLUMN: Last week, after I delivered that major beatdown to those Fake Playaz over at Pimpit.com, one of my readers wrote in to ask if I was familiar with another sexual advisor here on the Web who goes by the moniker of "The Kidd." I have to say that, yes, as a matter of fact, I have seen the work of The Kidd and consider him my up-and-coming competition. The Kidd's Game is almost as pimptight as Charlie's, it's true. If he ever finds a major venue like this one to popularize his stuff, then I'll really start to worry. Here's why:

1. The Kidd has codified his Game for the enlightenment of you Losers in what he calls his Pimposophy (thus going head-to-head with Charlie's own Tuna Philosophy.) The boy even is getting his sign-off tight like my own; and
   
   
2. He has the humility to admit his weaknesses, like staying in that desert cesspool they call Las Vegas.