It's easy to get overwhelmed in a large bookstore, or even a crowded small one. So many titles all competing for your interest. In a similar vein, sometimes you sense there is a meaningful direction to your existence you could discover, like the luminous cord that connects an astral traveler to the body in repose, but the howling wave of information static blurs your vision, causing you to drift aimlessly on an ocean of choices without end.

Don't you wish you could turn them all off? Get everything pared back to a manageable level? One suspects this is the underlying message of Neal Pollack's rant in the Stranger.

Nobody gives a shit what anti-war or pro-war writers think. Really. So shut up. That goes double for poets. Shut the hell up, poets. Everybody just shut up.

I'd like to forward this as a radical yet urgently needed concept in our conversational landscape: People can be both stupid and wrong, and still come up with a good point every now and then. That said, we'll look at some cases where these folks should just shut the hell up anyway.

Erasing History

At first glance, when you see this headline, EBay Urged to Drop Racist Collectibles, it seems like a no-brainer, right? But isn't this begging the question of whether eBay promotes a sociopolitical agenda?

Dante Lee, president of Long Beach, Calif.-based A.S.J. Media, which owns BlackNews.com, said when the n-word is typed in, "you see items that portray blacks" with a "pitch dark skin tone, exaggerated nose flares, almost as if they look like animals. I felt offended."

Ask Him to Try

Here's an interesting story that tracks President Bush's use of religious terminology, and argues that he's alienating the world's non-Christians every time he says things like, "liberty is God's gift to every human being in the world." Southern Baptist leader Richard Land thinks this kind of talk "resonates with people of religious faith."

Land said Bush has a right to draw on his own religious experience: "He speaks as a Christian of an evangelical Methodist variety in the same way Joe Lieberman speaks as a conservative Jew," said Land, president of his denomination's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. "You can't separate George Bush from his faith and you shouldn't ask him to try."

Don't Even Think About It

I know full well that you're sick of all the "nightclub fire" stories, but this one's worth a look: Nightclub stampede reopens Chicago's racial wounds.

"How could this be?" I asked myself. If ever there were a tragedy without a racial component to it, this would have to be it. Not only were all the principals, including the victims, building owner, and event promoter a homogeneous group, but so were the clowns with the pepper spray as well as the combatants they were trying to subdue. There's no racial angle to this thing whatsoever, right? Nope.

The Rev Jesse Jackson, who is based in Chicago, returned to the nightclub yesterday to demand an independent investigation that would look at the city's failings as well as any negligence on the part of the club.

Diluted Justice

Remember pharmacist Robert Courtney who got busted for watering down cancer-drug prescriptions to make an extra buck? He's in federal appeals court asking for a reduced sentence. Seems he thinks 30 years is just too much.

Attorney J.R. Hobbs argued in a brief filed Wednesday that a judge erred in giving Robert Courtney a longer sentence than called for under federal sentencing guidelines.

It's been way busy here today at Raven HQ, so if you'll pardon me, I'll shaddap. Have a great weekend.

7:01:29 PM