The Lafayette Journal & Courier has an article entitled price, demand boosting corn crop. Area farmers seem to be devoting about 15% of their crop to corn this year. Some of this, about 5%, is due to normal cyclical factors. (Last year soybeans were apparently the cyclically dominant crop.) However, prices are rising for corn, in part due to ethanol production demands.

When I read “more corn,” I’m a little concerned because I immediately think: 1) I’m not sure that corn-ethanol is the best (or even a very good) energy solution; and 2) I wonder if this will help increase the amount of high fructose corn syrup in our diet. I haven’t made a study of either issue, so I don’t know how valid these concerns are. But, I am reminded of a book I heard about on NPR, in passing. As I understand it, the author sort of wrote about people from the perspective of corn. From corn’s perspective, we’ve been an invaluable servant in making corn one of the dominant species on the planet. Corn’s march toward world domination continues nicely.

Sylvia Smith, writing for the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette has a column entitled Bayh still running for vice president in which she theorizes that Evan Bayh is, and always was, running for Vice President. She suspects that Sen. Bayh ran full bore through December to show what he was capable of in terms of campaigning and fund raising and then shut his efforts down before he burned any bridges with any of the potential Presidential nominees.

Other than calling George H.W. Bush’s decision to select Dan Quayle as “bold,” (a number of other adjectives come more immediately to mind), the column strikes me as solid.

I have to confess, it’s a little difficult to focus on state politics or weighty matters of any kind when the weather is this nice. My wife, Amy, decided a bike and kiddie trailer for the bike would be a nice Mother’s Day present. So, that’s what she got. So far, I’ve gotten more use out of it than she has. I used it to take Cole to his swimming lesson on Saturday. On the way back, he fell asleep, and I figured he needed it, so I just kept pedaling. In addition to riding the 4 miles back to our subdivision from the YMCA, we hit pretty much every cul-de-sac in the neighborhood. Everybody was outside, and nearly everybody was in a good mood. Very pleasant. It ended up being about a 12 mile expedition. Saturday evening, we had some neighbors over, grilled some steaks, shrimp, and corn, and drank a few beers.

More bike riding today. Amy did some gardening which led to Cole playing in the sprinkler.

Harper, on the other hand, not so keen on the sprinkler.

(My apologies for the glare off of my fish-white belly. More sprinkler fun here.)

Amy ran about 7 miles. I hit the gym for a little while (among other things, I swam about 1/4 a mile — let’s just say I have vast room for improvement in this area.) More grilling this evening.

So, like I said, not a lot of political contemplation this weekend. Which, at the end of the day, I guess is sort of the goal. You want a government working well enough and a society prosperous enough that, when it comes along, you can simply sit back and enjoy some nice weather with your family and friends. As citizens, it’s our duty to not tune out all the time. But, this is Indiana. You have to take the nice weather where you find it.

Four large drinks indeed. That’s what State Dept. of Health attorney/blogger/former prosecutor/GOP activist Terry Record told police he had to drink before he ran a red light and cut Jimmy Cash’s truck in two. According to police, he had “at least 14 beers and six shots” in the 3.5 hours he was at Brad’s Brass Flamingo before getting into his car. Blood test results were between 0.15 and 0.17. His car was allegedly going 60 mph in a 35 mph zone.

Record was fired from his job with the Marion County Prosecutor’s Office but not charged after he lied about a hit and run accident involving a parked car in Broad Ripple in November. In December, he went to work with the Indiana State Department of Health but apparently did not disclose his brief stint with the prosecutor’s office.

According to his attorney, David E. Lewis, Record is “devastated for the victim’s family and for himself.”

You know, a .15 BAC strikes me as rather low for 14 beers and 6 shots in 3.5 hours. I don’t know how alcohol translates to BAC necessarily, but back in my college days, I engaged in some binge drinking from time to time. About once a year, my roommates and I would attempt to drink a case of beer. (The ill-advised “case chase”). One of my roommates drank a 6-pack in 11 minutes and came up about an ounce shy of drinking a 12 pack in an hour. So, I know whereof I speak. I can’t fathom the concerted effort it must take to drink 14 beers and 6 shots within the course of 210 minutes, presumably while also devoting attention to friends and strippers. (And drinking at a strip club isn’t cheap, by the way). All of this on a Sunday evening. Presumably with work scheduled for the next morning.

I don’t doubt that he was drunk and ran a red light and is completely liable for killing a man. But, unless he was a raging alcoholic, the specifics of his consumption don’t seem entirely credible to me. But, maybe my college drinking buddies and I were just lightweights.

Update The Indy Star is reporting that the judge has cut Record’s bail from $100,000 to $10,000. I think I just heard the explosion of the collective heads of the people who frequent the Indy Star’s comment threads.

The kids are circling so I doubt my ability to do any justice to this post, but I wanted to at least flag an opinion column by Republican-Libertarian politician-columnist Andrew Horning in the Evansville Courier Press. He starts off, in my opinion, well enough when he criticizes a new law (HB 1033) requiring weather radios in new trailers. He notes that the legislation doesn’t provide any obligations on trailer park owners or manufacturers or on owners of existing trailers. He says the burden is on the trailer owners. Actually, looking at the legislation, it applies to a person who “installs” a trailer home in a mobile home community after June 30, 2007. He also suggests that because these radios alert not only for bad weather in the area but also for Amber alerts and national alerts, most people turn them off as annoyances and they aren’t particularly effective. I don’t know the truth of that, but it sounds like a reasonable argument.

The problem is that he uses the deficiencies of this legislation as a springboard to range far afield, warning of big government and citing the dangers of Ruby Ridge and Waco as well as the vulnerability of an unarmed populace to the likes of the Virginia Tech rampager.

(Now my daughter is physically pulling me from the chair as I type. Perhaps she would like some attention. Perhaps more later.)

Update: Now that I’ve had a chance to look at the weather radio law a little bit, I think Mr. Horning is wrong on his assessment as to who is responsible for making sure these weather radios get put in the mobile home. He says:

The law doesn’t offer assistance of any kind. It simply makes it illegal to live in a new or relocated trailer that’s not equipped with an NOAA weather-alert radio.

The law doesn’t hold trailer builders, installers or park owners liable for anything. The law targets only trailer dwellers, a demographic already burdened by food and medical bills.

HB 1033 amends IC 25-23.7 which governs “Manufactured Home Installers.” The new law says this:

Sec. 6. (a) This section applies to a person that installs a manufactured home in a mobile home community after June 30, 2007.
(b) A person shall supply a weather radio inside each manufactured home that the person installs. [Required radio features omitted] . . .
(c) The supplying of a weather radio by a person who installs a manufactured home as required by this section does not subject the person to liability for the functionality of that weather radio.

The definitions of “installer” and “installation” are set forth in IC 25-23.7-2-3 & 4. IC 25-23.7-8-2 requires that installation of a manufactured home in a mobile home community be performed by a licensed manufactured home installer. Under IC 25-23.7-7, a violation could result in loss of a license or even be deemed a Class B misdemeanor.

So, I have to conclude that, while Horning might be right that this is an overly picky, nanny-state kind of law, he is wrong when he concludes that it is unenforceable or that the burden falls directly on the mobile home owner. The direct burden (which will presumably be passed along) falls on the installer who has a financial incentive to comply with the law.

The Indy Star has an article entitled Attorney accused in fatal DUI crash about a 26 year old attorney named Terry Record who was apparently involved in a drunk driving accident that killed 46 year old Jimmy R. Cash. Record worked for the Indiana Department of Health and was active in Republican politics. He was also at least nominally a contributor to Indiana Barrister, though I can’t think of anything he wrote there. The story I expected was a matter of young guy goes out with his buddies to have a good time, has too much to drink, and the nightmare occurs. But, the Star story suggests, at least, that Mr. Record had his wake up call back in October:

[O]n Oct. 7 Indianapolis police found his car overturned on College Avenue near 22nd Street after it had struck another car. Record was not at the scene, and later he told a police officer the car may have been stolen after he left a Broad Ripple bar early that morning, taking a cab home, according to a police report.

His supervisors questioned him.

“There were some inconsistencies,” Symons said. “Based on those answers, we decided it wasn’t appropriate for him to work for us any longer.”

No charges were filed against him in that incident. The incident on Sunday night leading to the fatality took place after Record had, according to his account, “four medium sized drinks”. Witnesses on the scene reportedly indicate that he ran a red light. Record told officers that the pickup truck’s driver caused the crash, police said, and stated: “I hope the guy has insurance to fix my car.” Presumably he was not aware that the pickup truck driver was deceased at the time he made that statement.

I’m certainly not against education programs and encouraging people to drink less because of these incidents, but I also tend to think that these tragedies are also arguments for better mass transit and, perhaps, the neighborhood bar. Of course, our society has a puritanical streak that dislikes solutions that may seem to endorse sinful behavior. But still, the drinking is only one-half of the drinking and driving equation. Who knows if there was anything at all that could have prevented this situation. I don’t really have any intent to pick on Mr. Record. He’s in for a long tough road without me piling on. I just felt compelled to comment because the plight of young white male blogger lawyers resonates with me for some reason.

Update Apparently Mr. Record later changed his story about the hit and run in October. I ran across this new information at Advance Indiana, linking to an Indy Star article.

Indianapolis police found Record’s Chevy Blazer overturned and abandoned about 3:30 a.m. Oct. 7 on College Avenue near 22nd Street. The Blazer had hit a parked vehicle.

Hours later, responding officer Andrew Hannaford said Monday, Record called him and said he had taken a cab home after his sport utility vehicle had been stolen when he left his keys at a Broad Ripple bar.

Record’s story later changed. He attempted to report the vehicle stolen but instead admitted to Detective John Guilfoy that he had been driving the SUV and left the scene of the crash, said Ilnicki, a supervisor in the department’s hit-and-run division.

He was never charged with the hit & run.

And, idle thought, completely irrelevant to the story — Mr. Record was driving a Chevy Blazer in October followed by a 2000 BMW in this week’s wreck. He was briefly a Marion County deputy prosecutor, then an attorney for the Indiana Dept. of Health. I was a government attorney for a few years. The pay isn’t that great. So, I’m thinking either gifts or outside sources of income for the vehicles. Like I said, not relevant — I’m a collection attorney, so I’m always sensitive to whether income and lifestyle match up.

This was posted in the comments, but Gary Welsh at Advance Indiana flagged an item from WTHR suggesting that Record, or at least his vehicle, was suspected in another hit and run in December.

Joh Padgett at Monticello has some interesting thoughts about the fact that Record was leaving Brad’s Brass Flamingo. He says that:

The Brass Flamingo is a well known nightspot amongst Republican politicians and local law enforcement officials who socialize together regularly at the club formerly owned by reclusive millionaire Brad Hirst, who may still have tenuous connections to the club.

I’m not much of a restaurant reviewer, primarily because I’m not all that picky about what I eat. But, I’m always on the look out for good Mexican food — not so much because I’m a huge fan, but because my wife is. If we don’t find good Mexican food, then I’m inevitably going to get burnt out on bad Mexican food. So, last night we stumbled across a pretty decent joint in Lafayette called La Fiesta Burrito. The store we visited is on the north side 350 South near its intersection with 18th Street. It has the best salsa I’ve yet had in town which isn’t necessarily a high bar to surpass, and the steak tacos were pretty good as were the refried beans. The ambiance is nothing to write home about, which is just fine with me.

Oddly, the best indicator of whether I am going to enjoy Mexican food seems to be whether the establishment has Spanish language television playing and whether they have Jarritos to drink. “IF YES, THEN GOOD” (if I might revert to basic programming language here.)

I have little kids. I love video games. So, I read with interest a post over at Geekdad on the subject of how to decide which games are appropriate for your kids. My kids are still just 1 and 3, so video games haven’t really entered the scene yet, but it’s just a matter of time.

One approach, the Lego Rule:

Chris Anderson suggests an even more intriguing strategy: the “Lego Rule.”

The Lego Company, it seems, has a policy of not producing toys that replicate 20th century weapons. “You can have swords, and you can have laser guns in space, but no actual 20th century guns,” Anderson says. So his four children can play games like Halo, since it contains only futuristic, fantasy war, where you’re killing only green- or blue-blooded aliens. The same goes for Roman swordplay titles. “But it clearly walls off Grand Theft Auto.”

(I e-mailed Lego’s spokesman Michael McNally, and he confirmed the company’s Solomonic logic. Lego, he wrote, agrees that good-versus-evil combat “is at the root of children’s play scenarios, and we believe is an important part of a child’s exploration of the world.” But they don’t want it infecting the children’s perception of the real world around them, so the solution is to place it decisively in the realm of fantasy.)

Ed Brayton catches a whopper from Sen. Inhofe (R-OK):

Inhofe, speaking to the press before Cheney’s arrival, lambasted Democrats for Thursday’s Senate vote to begin withdrawal from Iraq by Oct. 1 and the press for “mischaracterizing” the reasons for U.S. involvement.

“The whole idea of weapons of mass destruction was never the issue, yet they keep trying to bring this up,” Inhofe said.

I must be part of a mass hallucination.