Condi Rice visited Blackburn, Lancashire and all we got was this stupid T-shirt. It seems that since Jack Straw visited Rice’s hometown of Buttfuck, Alabama, Rice promised to do the same for him the next time she was in the UK. While she was there she decided to ask Beatles’ biographer Hunter Davies what the line “4000 holes in Blackburn, Lancashire” in the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life” meant.

It means Condi is a square. Even Davies, who was never the hippest of the Fab Four’s chroniclers, thought her question too lame to be answered straight. (Lennon, legend has it, had read a newspaper article about the number of potholes in Blackburn and was no doubt amazed that someone had bothered to count them all, all the more amazed having been no doubt on acid at the time.) Why not listen to the pretty sound of the protestors instead?

For as Rice lamely admitted that mistakes were made in Iraq, she defended the rationale of the war — and was greeted by a chorus of boos wherever she went. “Four Thousand No’s in Blackburn, Lancashire” was how the protest was billed and as the Times reported, friendly faces were in short supply. “Shame on you!” they chanted, while some wore T-shirts that read, “No torture. No compromise.”

Quite a few of the hostiles were Muslims, hand-picked by Straw’s advance team. When Bush’s people select a crowd to greet the president or any of his henchpeople, no dissent is allowed. Everybody stays in line. In England it seems some care more about the holes that have been shot through Iraqui citizens in the growing civil war, a conflict Rice had a hand in creating.

The other article Lennon read that day was about the Guiness heir who killed himself in his car. The juxtaposition of the stories — the hole in the man, the holes in the road — made for a kind of art and a commentary on life’s more futile aspect.

I’d love to turn her on.

Just got back from Belize where we went for spring break (Franny’s and mine coincided, at least for a week) which was nice except for the part where we almost drowned. Belize, the former British Honduras, is chasing the same Yankee ecotourist dollar people like us have dropped in Costa Rica (see photo, left). They are just not yet as keen on the safety angle.

This time last year, for example, we took a day long whitewater rafting trip in CR. The pre-trip precautions were extensive: our guide spent nearly an hour preparing us for any eventuality — dumping the raft, say — and what to do in the rapids should that occur. Later he told me that he had worked on the Colorado River in the US and that Costa Rica safety standards were much more stringent. Having reinvented itself as the premier adventure travel destination in Central America, the government didn’t want some tragedy marring an innocent outing and making headlines back in the states.

I got the impression things were a little more…casual in Belize. The jungle lodge where we stayed the first three nights had been in business since the early eighties and was very professionally run. But the trip we took on our first full day was not quite as advertised. It was billed as a sort of jungle triathalon — horseback riding, caving and tubing down the river — but everything took significantly longer than we had been told. The horse trip was supposed to be an hour and a half — but morphed into three, a big difference when you ride a horse about once a year. (Thanks for asking about my ass.) The cave exploration was brief, but partly because the cave itself was so slick that none of our party felt safe venturing too far from the mouth.

The rude surprise was the tubing, though. We traveled with another family of three and were given five inner tubes and a canoe in which we were to slowly wend our way back to the lodge. “It will take about two hours,” we were told but when the third hour came and we were no closer to our destination, we knew something wasn’t right. Far worse, we learned the hard way that there was a dam upriver and that they were opening gates every afternoon around four, turning our lazy river run into a swift one. My daughter lost her tube, we dumped the canoe three or four times (losing some shoes and drowning my cellphone in the process) and on several hair-raising occasions paddled like crazy to get to our stranded children, reassuring them all the while that everything was as it should be.

Nobody died, of course. But in all honesty, if our kids had been younger or any of us were worse swimmers, somone could have. I thought of Lawrence Gonzalez’s great book, Deep Survival — a collection of horror stories about walk-through-the-park sorts of outings that turned into survival-of-the-fittest endurance trials — and counted my blessings. Back at the lodge they were concerned and apologetic — How about a nice pot of cocoa for the girls? — but did not seem as alarmed as they should have been. Why was there no one spotting us on either end of that journey? Why was there absolutely no instruction about tubing or canoeing down rapids? The news about the dam seemed to concern them less than where we left the canoe.

To be continued…

How heartening it was to hear that the Sex Pistols would not be showing up to be inducted in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this evening. Last month the band officially declined the honor with a hand-written note posted on their website that echoed Jon Stewart’s famous riposte to Tucker Carlson.

“We’re not your monkeys and so what?” someone — it sounds more like Johnny Rotten than Steve Jones but who knows? — scrawled. The band was speaking as one. “Your not paying attention,” the rant continued — quoting the note newspapers wrote “sic” in parantheses to demonstrate that they knew the difference between “your” and “you’re” but with the Pistols the amendment should be “sick.” It was almost thirty years ago now that the band declared rock sick unto death, a pronouncement as surprising at the news that Barry Bonds used steroids.

I missed the Pistols in their last concert at Winterland, the one where they closed with “No Fun” and Johnny squatted on the floor and famously asked the crowd, “Ever have the feeling you’ve been cheated?” I was late to the party though glimpsing them on TV I knew that I had blown it. For those who loved rock but despaired of the cocaine-and-unrequited love music of Southern California or the nauseating prog rock of the UK, they were like a shot of adrenalin straight to the heart. (In Lipstick Traces, Greil Marcus recounts how Joe Strummer, then in a rockabilly band called the 101ers, ran into Graham Parker, then playing pub rock. “Saw the Sex Pistols last night,” Joe said. “Sex…pistols?” said Graham. “Whole ‘nother thing,” Joe said sagely and the next time they met, Strummer had changed his look and sound and was writing stuff like “Janey Jones.”)

“it’s where old rockers go to die,” Rotten once said of the institution called the Rock and Roll Hall of Shame, and anyone still trying to forget the image of Sly Stone performing at the Grammies last month knows that dying in public ain’t pretty. I did finally see Johnny a few years later, perfoming with PiL, howling through numbers like “Rise,” reminding the hysterical crowd that “Anger is an energy.” For the finale he showed the crowd his bare backside, smiling all the while.

Since my copy of the New Yorker always arrives about four days late (I like to think I have the best read postman in Brooklyn; my copy of the Atlantic takes ages to get here) I only just finished Jane Mayer’s jaw-dropping account in the 2.27 issue of Navy general counsel Alberto Mora. In case you missed the headlines the story spawned — and there should have been more but the press got swept up in the story of Tom and Katie’s problems — Mora left the Navy after writing an internal memo exposing and denouncing the Bush administration’s policy of torture, the tacit and sometimes explicit permission it has handed down to torture prisoners in the ongoing, neverending war on terror, particularly those prisoners in Guantanamo Bay.

It’s a classic story of one man’s outrage in the face of moral decay and one more on the right should heed (most people on the left don’t seem to need convincing that torture is a bad thing and shouldn’t be practiced by the US). Mora is the son of parents who came from old Communist regimes (Cuba, Hungary) and had moral as well as practical objections to the advocacy of torture: how can we fight bad buys if we are doing the same things we accuse them of? “I was appalled by he whole thing,” he said of discovering the then secret policy documents (written by then WH counsel Alberto Gonzalez and admin lawyer John Yoo) that justified torturing terrorists on the basis of ticking-bomb scenarios (which Israel has used to justify torture for years and is a favorite gag in Fox TV’s 24) and the big trump card of the Patriot Act and the powers Bush believes he has to do anything in the wake of 9.11. Read the story, see if you have some outrage left.

And though Secretary of Torture Donald Rumsfeld comes off as a dependable, almost Dickensian villain (he liked to joke that forcing prisoners to stand all day was not torture because he stood in his office all day at work) and VP Cheney is an equally reliable shadow over everything — think of that big black eye in Lord of the Rings — I was left wondering about the good Christian people who blindly defend this adminstration and its policies. As I often do in such cases, I go back to Dostoevski and wonder: in what scenario would Jesus give his blessing to the torture of men? Even villainous terrorists opposed to your religion, not to mention your way of life and your right to watch 24, which is so much better on Tivo so you can zip past all the ads, so each hour in Jack Bauer’s bad bad day is only 45 minutes, sort of like being at the shrink’s…

Mora questioned one of his superiors on a technique Rummy signed off on, the “deprivation of light and auditory stimuli” — what did that mean? “Could a prisoner be locked in a completely dark cell? If so could he be kept there a month? Longer? Until he went blind? What precisely did the authority to exploit phobias permit? Could a detainee be held in a coffin? What about using dogs? Rats? How far could an interrogator push this? Until a man went insane?” The biggest exploiters of rat phobias, of course, are the agents of the government in Orwell’s 1984 but nowhere outside of a class taught by Joe Stalin in the inner circles of hell is that book held up as a teaching tool for domestic security. It is time for those who call themselves Christians and support this administration to start asking, again, what Jesus not Jack Bauer would do.

My wife and I took part in a documentary that aired on MSNBC Sunday night, entitled Love & Marriage in the 21st Century. The filmmaker, Fred Golding, followed us and three other couples around for what seemed like forever and asked lots of personal questions about money and family and and careers and sex. When it was all over, which for us was in November, we were quite sick of the whole thing (though we got to really like Fred and his assistant, Alex) and were quite glad to be done with it.

We saw the doc in its entirety in December and were both a little chagrined: I felt I came off like a middle-aged whiner worrying where his hopes and dreams went, while my wife thought she came off like an emotionally challenged career nazi. (Watching it with her, there were several occasions where she turned to me and said, “That was taken out of context” or “I also said how much I loved you right then.”) I certainly got a better sense of why, after I have written things about people that I thought were perfectly honest and representative, they have objected. Fred was doing what any director, or writer, has to do when telling a story with multiple characters: He was selecting material to make his points, using what we had said to illuminate a certain kind of modern marriage: working (always working) wife and sometimes working (trying to work) stay-at-home dad.

If nothing else, it was educational for me as a journalist though we were both kind of relieved when the network aired it opposite the Olympics, with minimal promotion. And the feedback we did get was almost entirely positive: a lot of husbands and wives saw themselves in our situtation and thought us articulate and honest. Our house looked great, too, and really, what else matters?

Probably the weirdest thing for me was the sense that I was watching my life in real time: most of it was filmed last winter and I was wearing the same coat and hat when I walked the same dog… it was like The Truman Show except the whole world wasn’t watching. They were waiting for a miracle on ice.