I saw the movie The Ring last night. Pretty scary stuff. I wouldn't recommend watching it alone in your apartment, as I did. What impressed me about the movie was its PG-13 rating. Hardly any blood in the whole movie. All the horror was in the imagery. The movie is a re-make of a Japanese movie by the same name, which is supposedly even scarier. So scary, in fact, that when it premiered in Japan people ran out of the theatres. I'm going to see if anybody in town has that version. I'm sure as hell not watching it alone, though.

A great way to test your math/logic skills is with the Monty Hall dilemma. Monty Hall, if I recall correctly, was the original host of "Let's Make a Deal!" On that show, they occasionally would do the following: there would be three doors, and ol' Monty would tell you that behind one of the doors is a new car, and behind two of them are nothing. He would ask you to pick a door. They would then open a door, but not the one you picked and not the one with the prize behind it. Monty then asks you if you want to stick to your original choice or switch to the other closed door. The question is, are your chances of winning better if you stick or switch? Somebody asked Marilyn Vos Savant this very question.

At first glance, it seems like your chances of winning are equal no matter which door you pick. 50/50. In fact, you have a 2/3 chance of winning if you switch and a 1/3 chance if you stick. Let's walk through it. Assume the car is behind door number 1. If 1 is your initial choice, you'll win the car by sticking. If 2 or 3 is your initial choice, you'll win by switching. Get it? Okay, let's say you pick door number two. Which door will they open next? Door 3, because the prize is behind door 1 and you picked door 2. You will need to switch to win. What if you start with door 3? In that case, they will open door 2 and you still have to switch to win. Only if you pick door 1 will switching not result in a win. So, out of your original three choices, two of them result in a 'switch' to win, and one results in a 'stick' to win. Thus, 2/3 chance of winning if you switch. Do you get it now? If not, try it with a friend and see. I have talked to people who swear up and down it's a 50/50 shot. No matter how I try to explain it, they won't give in. If ever there was a sign of a closed mind, that is it. Great thing about this is it's not a matter of opinion. If somebody disagrees with you and claims it's 50/50, you know they're wrong.

The more I read internet news and commentary, the more I realize the vast range of ideologies out there. And no matter how bizarre the ideology is, you can bet there's at least twenty websites devoted to it. With all of these websites, it becomes hard to tell who's telling the truth and who's not. I realized this the other day when I was having a discussion on an internet forum about the Palestine/Israel conflict. Somebody remarked that the Palestinians should have given non-violent civil disobedience a try, and if they only had Israel would have given in. I replied that they did give it a try, and that the first intifada started out without violence. It was later, when they saw they were getting nowhere, that Palestinian civilians turned to violence. They asked me for my source, and I told them the first that came to mind - Tom Friedman's book From Beirut to Jerusalem, which has a long passage where he laments that the Palestinians did not stick with civil disobedience. Some pro-Israeli zealot posted a reply with links to some websites that claimed Palestinian non-violence was a myth, and that they were violent from the start. I posted a reply basically saying that I don't care what these websites say, Tom Friedman was actually there. Not to mention that he writes for the New York Times, not some third-rate propaganda site. I then got all these replies about how the New York Times was anti-Israel, and on and on. What I realized is that no matter what idea you espouse, there will be some "news" website out there that declares it a 'myth'. Go ahead and try it. I'll bet if you dig long enough, you can find a site that claims Sept. 11 never happened and it was all an elaborate media hoax. It just goes to show you that you can't believe everything you read on the internet. In fact, you can't even believe most of it.

It's well established that personal responsiblity is no longer as important to Americans as it once was. Still, you'd think we'd still emphasize responsibility when it comes to children. Have you ever seen those shows like Maury Povich with titles like, "My eight-year old is out of control!" First, they parade these troubled kids around so everybody can see how bad they are. They usually drink, smoke, and cuss a lot. Then the mother has a crying session where she tries to make the audience feel sorry for the torment she goes through. She gets all the sympathy and the child is sent off to one of those child-abusing boot camps. It's sickening. The show's hosts never question the mother's parenting skills, which is obviously the cause of the problem. Unless you believe children are born bad, you know an eight-year old doesn't get cigarettes without the parents' sanction, at least.

With these shows, I can rest easy knowing that these people are a minority, and most adults would agree that the parents are to blame. On NBC the other day, I was confronted with the same phenomena in subtler form. Dateline did a segment on the problem of speeding through neighborhoods. They set up a news team with a bunch of police officers to pull over people who went 10 mph over the speed limit in a residential area. The show's host would then interview the culprit, berating them and asking snide questions like, "Are you afraid the grocery store will close if you don't get there fast enough?" (Like that asshole never speeds). So where I am I going with this? Well, the show's focus wasn't just speeding, but children who get hit by speeding cars. They interviewed a mother whose son died the previous year after getting hit by a car. She now leads some kind of group that encourages local police forces to clamp down on speeding. Now tell me this - if your child runs out onto the road and gets hit, whose fault is that? The child's? Not unless the child is old enough to know better. The driver's? You generally don't expect a kid to run out in front of you when you drive. It's clearly the parents' fault. Who picked the house right next to the busy street? Who let their son play near the street? Who obviously failed to teach her son not to run in front of cars? That same woman who wants to blame speeding, that's who.

Now, a driver who greatly exceeds the speed limit deserves some culpability as well. But honestly, who doesn't break these arbitrary speed limits from time to time? If the one time you speed you just happen to hit a child, did you just commit negligent homicide? That was essentially what the show claimed. They were only too happy to indulge this mother's fantasy - that she's not at all to blame for her son's death.

Oh yeah, and do you think the government that designed and built these unsafe roads will get any blame? Don't bet on it.