This morning's looking decidedly chilly, and like grumpy Robert Frost's iceman riff that "Some say the world will end in fire; Some say in ice," today's leaning toward the latter proposition. It started last night, when returning from a trip I see Penny's got the scoop on a Harvard brouhaha over a phallic snow sculpture. Built by some guys with too much time on their hands, it was demolished by a gang of firey feminists, and you can't get more symbolic than that.

Or can you? We have 30 Americans returning from Baghdad, who decided the human shield gambit wasn't worth the risk of their citizenship, and a British contingent is heading back led by the former high sheriff of Derbyshire, Godfrey Meynell, who says that he's "ashamed to be leaving" but bailing due to "pure, cold fear."

Ice logic is rational, pale blue, and it looks something like this...

Stoned Love

In case you were wondering whether it was possible to turn a dead relative into a diamond, ABC News has a feature today on LifeGem, a company that's in the business of creating a carbon copy of your dearly departed (they do pets, too). From their literature:

About half way through the standard cremation process, we separate the carbonized matter into our unique carbon curing container where it remains for the rest of the cremation.  Here the carbon cures and becomes the black powder we are all familiar with from science class.

This carbon is then placed in a sealed and uniquely identified crucible and moved into the purification phase of processing.  Once purified, the carbon is placed in our unique diamond presses and the creation of your families LifeGem begins.

As always, your loved one's remains are handled with only the utmost care and respect.

Cool Beat

Thanks to the high cost of housing in the S.F. Bay Area, some fifty-seven percent of Berkeley's 44,955 households are renters, which is totally understandable since a lot of them are students, and the average rent for a one-bedroom apartment is $914. So yesterday they held the first-ever Berkeley Rent Stabilization Board poetry slam, to give the renters a chance to be venters. Here's first-place winner Jamie Kennedy, 25, "who won the first prize of $100, from exploring with lancing verse the 'platonic master/slave relationship'":

I chose to be homeless for nine months just to escape the memory.
Every night I slept on the bus,
I hoped to run into my ex-landlord in rags so I could scream,
so sucker, without a roof you're just another one of us.

Surreal Thing

By now you've probably heard that a priceless Salvador Dali sketch was stolen from its home in cold stir at New York's Rikers Island Prison. The painting, one of Dali's "crucifixion" pieces, was worth around $500,000.

Dali, who died in 1989, sent a message to the artists of Rikers Island with his drawing. "You are artists. Don't think of your life as finished for you. With art, you have always to feel free," he wrote.

Iced-T

Yet another junior high school student is in trouble over an anti-war T-shirt. This time it's 14-year-old Ian Itani, who was suspended last week for "trying to send a message that all Arabs are not responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks."

The boy got the idea after listening to jeers from his classmates following the attacks, Colleen Itani said. He used a black marker to draw two skyscrapers and an airplane on the front of the shirt, and a bearded man wearing a headdress on the back.

Cold-Hearted

That would be our Attorney General, John Ashcroft, who has "decided to reconsider" an asylum request from a Guatemalan woman, Rodi Alvarado, who fled to the U.S. "after her husband repeatedly raped her, whipped her with electrical cords, broke windows and mirrors with her head, and vowed to kill her if she tried to leave him."

An immigration judge granted her asylum in 1996, finding that the 10 years of abuse Alvarado suffered and the persistent failure of Guatemalan authorities to protect her entitled her to relief.

More Raven on the rocks later today, natch.

2:05:24 PM