We're wrapping up our Commitment to Making Sense theme today with a few more cases of people displaying uncommon attachment to ideas you'll need to weigh out carefully for yourself.

Commitment to Penitence

I had no idea how tough it is to be a international athlete in Iraq these days. If you bring home the gold, they pay your expenses. Come back empty-handed, you get a date with a guy wearing a black hood.

The stories filtering out of Iraq's athletic community are beyond comprehension. Here's what happens to Iraqis who lose a big game:

They are jailed and their heads are shaved, a tremendous humiliation in the Middle East. The soles of their feet are caned, they are deprived of food and sleep, and they are chained to walls for days. Sharar Haydar, a former Iraqi soccer player, told a British paper that he was dragged through gravel, then thrown into a tank filled with raw sewage so his wounds would become infected.

Commitment to Ambience

Here's an interesting idea for a videogame: biofeedback. It's been built into the controls for a game called Relax to Win, "a race between two friendly-looking dragons named George and Georgina."

To play the game, children stick two fingers into sensor-filled pads that track galvanic skin response, a measure of electric current in the skin that rises or falls with anxiety levels. The more serene the players can make themselves, the faster their dragon moves.

Commitment to Intransigence

Bringing you today's McDonald's Lawsuit-of-the-Week are Marcus and Elaine Long of Houston. The Long's say that Marcus got a breakfast burrito that had too much pepper in it, giving him a nosebleed.

To be fair, Mr. Long is a cancer patient and has to eat bland food, so the massive amount of spice in his morning snack just about killed him.

"I looked inside the burritos and they were just black; you couldn't hardly see the egg," Elaine says.

Commitment to Tax Your Cents

You've probably noticed that most states and cities around the country are struggling with budgets in the red. In order to make up the shortfalls, local governments are increasingly turning to datamining strategies. The key idea here is to run data on residents and business owners against the fine nuances of the tax code to see if anybody owes a pet license, user fee, interstate commerce levy, whatever they can wring out of you.

Or, as Whittier accountant Thomas Theisen put it: "If you are in a situation where you have a shortfall in revenue like the city of Los Angeles does, you have to shake the trees."

Commitment to Obsolescence

When's the last time you read a fun article about Jacques Derrida, the deconstructionist guru? If it's been awhile, check out Mark Goldblatt's viscious assault on both Derrida, the documentary, and the faux-philosopher's ideas in general. Goldblatt doesn't hold anything back in his arsenal:

Indeed, the critical point to be borne in mind with regards to Derrida—the man who is the subject of the movie—is that he is not now, nor has he ever been, a philosopher in any recognizable sense of the word, nor even a trafficker in significant ideas; he is rather a intellectual con artist, a polysyllabic grifter who has duped roughly half the humanities professors in the United States—a species whose gullibility ranks them somewhere between nine-year-old boys listening to spooky campfire stories and blissful puppies chasing after nonexistent sticks—into believing that postmodernism has an underlying theoretical rationale.

Commitment to Omniscience

Last night I'm flipping around and I stop to watch a bit of CSPAN Books. David Cole, author of It's a Free Country, is being asked, "What do you think about the TIA program, is there any way to kill it?" and he says, "Well, if I was going to kill it, I'd have it run out of the Pentagon, and I'd call it the 'Total Information Awareness' program, and I'd give it a logo of a pyramid with a computer-generated eye on top of it, and I'd add the slogan 'knowledge is power', and lastly I'd put John Poindexter in charge of it."

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A laudable goal, but impossible given the polarization of opinion surrounding us. It's MLK Day, a quasi-holiday that falls to some and not to others, befitting a time when whether it's race or war, you're right and they're wrong.

Commitment to Excellence

In everything but etymology, that is. The Raven salutes the Oakland Raiders, Super-Bowl bound after 15 winless years. We look with astonishment at the Tampa Bay Bucs fans who trashed a Philly Cheesesteak shop in Dunedin, Fla., yesterday. Ed Crowley, co-owner of Laspaza's Original Steaks and Hoagies, surveyed the damage and couldn't make any sense of it:

"They assumed that we're Eagles fans," Crowley said. "But we go to every Bucs game. We're going to the Super Bowl. Why should I have to go through all these problems just because I own a Philly cheesesteak restaurant?"

Commitment to Expedience

A bunch of candidates running for public office in West Virginia had some problems with the English language last week, misspelling the names of their own parties on their official filing forms.

Four Democrats erroneously spelled their party name either as "Democart" or "Democrate." Two GOP members transposed their party name to "Repbulican" and "Repucican."

Commitment to Effluence

Meet Lionel Favrot, editor of Lyon Mag, who ran afoul of the French Beaujolais Nouveau industry by running an article that described the young vintage as "vin de merde." The winemakers sued and won a $3.5 million judgement against the magazine for "denigrating a product," an amount arrived at by levying a penalty of "one euro for every liter of Beaujolais wine produced in a year." Considering how bad this year's nouveau was, we'd say Favrot's being overcharged. The judge's opinion is an equally poor whine:

"By comparing Beaujolais to excrement, Francois Mauss and the journalist who interviewed him have gone beyond the acceptable exercise of the respective social roles of criticism," the judge ruled.

Commitment to Flatulence

You've heard that in the media industry, "there's no such thing as bad publicity," right? That seems to be the thinking behind this year's onslaught of vapid reality shows. Here's Marty Kaplan, associate dean of the USC Annenberg School for Communication and director of the Norman Lear Center on the subject of the genre:

"It's review-proof," he said, adding that for the networks "it is important people know about a show, and the attacks in free media only supplement the paid promotional budget."

Commitment to Ignorance

Speaking of Shakespeare, Patrick Camangian, an English teacher at South L.A.'s Crenshaw High School, has decided that the classics just aren't cutting it in his classroom and so he's allowing students to select, analyse, and criticize the lyrics of their favorite rap songs.

He told each of his students, who range in age from 16 to 18, to choose the song that had most influenced their lives. Among the lyrics studied were those of the late Tupac Shakur, Jay-Z and Goodie Mob.

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