For the past couple weeks, when you clicked on the link to listen to the Charlie Sykes radio show online, you have been randomly greeted with a video ad for some hippie pet store in Milwaukee.  In the ad, this store pitches organic and natural dog food, what they claim leads to “less stool.”

This completely confuses me.  If the dog is eating just as much, where does the stool go?  After a week, is your dog going to weigh like 900 pounds when it retains all this magic food?  Should I be willing to pay extra for a constipated pooch?

I also thought it would be funny if this were a big selling point for how humans pick their food.  You’d walk into a Mexican restaurant and when the waiter came over, you’d be like, “boy these enchiladas on the menu look good… how much stool am I looking at with those?”

As it turns out, there are dog food brands nationwide that promise low stool counts for your dog.  There’s a 98% chance this is a total scam, similar to the movie “Envy” when Jack Black’s character makes millions of dollars selling “Va-Poo-Rize,” an aerosol that makes dog poop disappear when you spray it.

The aforementioned Milwaukee store cautions strongly against buying dog food from companies that actually advertise:

Don’t let Cable Stars that have no idea that some ingredients in “their pet food” create life barriers, convince you “their pet food” is healthy.

I’m not exactly what constitutes a “life barrier” for a dog, since it’s not like your dog is sitting at home on the computer all day watching his 401(k) go up in flames.  I think any animal that has the ability to lick itself pretty much loses the right to complain about any obstacles it may be facing in life.

Today, I got an e-mail from some marketing firm with the following subject:

“create e-mails people will want to open.”

I didn’t click on it.

Watched Glengarry Glen Ross the other night.  Just the greatest.  And in the YouTube era, I have been doing everyone a disservice by not linking to the Alec Baldwin motivational scene – which will inevitably be quoted anytime you get a groups of guys around for any period of time:

In today’s edition of the podcast, Dan Walsh of Sportsbubbler.com and I discuss:

• Body paint;
• The women’s volleyball pre-draft combine;
• Mock NFL drafts;
• Phil Mickelson’s breasts; and
• Super Bowl champion Jim Sorgi

In listening back to it, there are a couple technical glitches I need to work out – there’s a fraction of a second mismatch in our discussion and a slight echo from my headphones.  But it’s still listenable.  As listenable as two dopes who don’t know anything about sports can be.

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My new column is up at WPRI.  It sends a hypothetical letter of apology to the future for the way we’re about to screw up Wisconsin.

At the behest of my friend Jay, I finally watched the documentary “Man on Wire” last night.  And it is fantastic.  (It won the Oscar for “Best Documentary,” I believe.)  It’s about Frenchman Philippe Petit, who in 1974 walked between the Twin Towers on a cable for 45 minutes before police threated to grab him with a helicopter.  But the movie is actually more of a crime caper, as it details the whole process of smuggling all their equipment to the top of the World Trade Center, then pulling off the stunt.  It really is remarkable.

Anyway, here’s the trailer.  And if you have Netflix, the movie is available for the instant online viewing option.

Saturday’s Milwaukee Journal Sentinel speculates that the Green Bay Packers may take Ole Miss left tackle Michael Oher with the #9 pick in the first round.  I am now kicking myself, as I was going to do a post last week suggesting they take Oher, which would have made me look a lot smarter than I actually am.

Fans of the author Michael Lewis may remember Michael Oher as the subject of his outstanding 2007 book “The Blind Side.” The book traces the recent history of the left tackle in football, and why left tackles have become among the highest paid positions on the football field.  The book begins with a chapter about Lawrence Taylor breaking Joe Theismann’s leg, and how Taylor’s ability to devastate quarterbacks revolutionized the game.  Due to a combination of  LT killing quarterbacks and Bill Walsh inventing more pass-happy offenses, protecting the quarterback’s blind side has become the key to having an effective offense.

Oher grew up in Memphis, in the third poorest zip code in America.  He had 12 brothers and sisters, who were barely attended to by his crack-addicted mother.  (His father had been murdered.)  He had been in and out of foster homes, and rarely attended school – yet the Memphis public schools continued to move him through with the minimum GPA necessary.  At age 15, the father of a friend drove him out to East Memphis to try to get him into a virtually all-white Evangelical school, inhabited by Memphis’ most wealthy families.  When he showed up, he didn’t speak, and couldn’t read or write – but his sophomore year, he was 6 foot 5, 350 pounds, as nimble as a cat.  Naturally, his prowess in sports gave him a chance at this school that he may not normally have had.

A wealthy white family in Memphis took him in and made him their foster son.  They pushed him to excel in school, and eventually he began to open up.  He also became the most sought after high school offensive lineman in the country, with college coaches flooding to his school to marvel at his athletic ability.  By the time he graduated, he had overcome his 0.4 GPA to make the honor roll, and he committed to play at the alma mater of his foster parents, Ole Miss.

As is the case with any of Lewis’ books, Oher’s story is only partially about football.  It posits some difficult societal questions – how many black kids are we letting rot in the inner cities without an education simply because they don’t have any athletic ability?  How many kids do we mistakenly give up on because we think they have no capacity to learn, when their emotional problems are mainly a result of their horrific upbringing?  Oher walked into East Memphis a severely emotionally damaged 15 year-old that society had given up on – yet through the love and care of this Evangelical family, he grew into a fully-formed, mature young man.  How many other kids are out there, just like him?

In any event, it would be great if the Packers could draft him and serve as the final chapter in this astounding success story.  It also happens that he’s an amazing left tackle.

Here’s a video that runs through some of Oher’s travails:

The state budget is $5 billion in the red.  A very somber Governor Doyle told us tonight that he is reluctantly increasing every tax under the sun because that is the only way to solve this particularly-dire deficit.  We’ve trimmed the fat long ago.  Now we’re cutting muscle.  Now we’re cutting bone.  We’re already doing all the obvious stuff, you know, like turning out the lights in a building when we leave for the day, right?

Energy Conservation, DNR-Style

This is the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources building.  This picture was taken earlier this year on a weeknight moments before midnight.  But it could have been taken at any time on any night.

If you’re really looking for places to save money, Governor, maybe you and your DNR should heed the advice of grumpy dads everywhere and TURN THE DARN LIGHTS OFF WHEN YOU LEAVE A ROOM!  (And quit leaving your bikes in the driveway!  And stop using my golf clubs to play hockey!)

The fact that its Doyle’s DNR wasting electricity by leaving the whole building lit up all night like a Christmas Holiday tree is what’s particularly rich. 

DNR bureaucrats apparently can’t be bothered to flip a switch when they leave for the day, but that isn’t stopping them from telling landlords they ought to tear up their rental properties’ light fixtures and install special high-efficiency lighting. 

So the next time you pay higher taxes on capital gains or cigarettes or a hospital visit or gas or a song from iTunes, just remember, Governor Doyle has already found all the savings he can.

These are always funny.

My 3 year-old son has become a mama’s boy, and I have to admit, sometimes it’s kind of irritating.  If I try to put him to bed, or help him zip up his jacket, or get him a snack, he always yells, “no, I want mommy!”  I try to do fun things with him, like play catch or chase him around the house, but nothing seems to break the attachment he has to his mom.

But, thanks to a television show, that may be starting to change.  Yesterday afternoon, my wife got home from a walk, and gazed at a horrific sight – me and the boy, laying on the couch, hands in pants, bag of pretzels, laughing uproariously at the show “Wipeout!”  You may know it as the show where people run an obstacle course to win cash, and usually end up covered in mud or smacking their head on a giant rubber ball.  But clearly, my 3 year-old and I find it equally amusing, and spent a good amount of time doing a little man bonding yesterday.  He couldn’t stop talking about the show all night, which means I think we’re going to be watching a lot of it online.  Here’s a clip:

Also in family news, my boy has now decided he wants to pee “like a big boy,” which means, standing up.  He had been sitting on the toilet.  I think my wife showed him how to do it standing up the first time.  But, understandably, she left out the most important part – the “shake” at the end.  (Had she known about this, I would be more than a little concerned.)  So I showed him how to give it the shake – and he looked at me and started laughing uncontrollably.  It was as if the city had just given him a license to rob banks.  He then proceeded to run around the house, pants off, doing the “shake” maneuver, while I chased him.  On the plus side, I think he just qualified for half the fraternities in the U.S.

When watching basketball, you often hear announcers say a player “does all the things that don’t show up on a stat sheet.”  This outstanding article in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine about Shane Battier of the Houston Rockets explains exactly what those things are.  It’s long, but absolutely worth the read.

I wrote a column for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that ran today.  It pretty much follows up on my WPRI report of a couple weeks ago that shows both parties are to blame for the budget deficit:

At the beginning of every legislative session, both political parties vow that they finally will begin to work together. They sense that voters want them to get things done, and they pledge a new spirit of bipartisanship. Of course, their actual commitment to bipartisanship disappears quicker than a bag of marijuana near Michael Phelps, and gridlock inevitably settles in.

But for those who view bipartisanship as an end in itself, there’s good news. Every session, there is one issue on which both parties can agree and have proudly joined hands. Unfortunately for taxpayers, the issue that brings Wisconsin Democrats and Republicans together is their love of terrible budgeting. The way our Legislature and governor budget, we shouldn’t be surprised if they use “Cash 4 Gold” to bail them out of the horrendous budget deficit they created.

I believe my column was intended to counter this column that argues we should be spending more during a recession.  Apparently, that argument is so complex, it took seven people to write the pro-taxing and spending editorial.  I have occasionally been told I smell as strong as seven people, but I have never had to argue against that many at once.

Next, I will challenge all seven to a break dancing competition.

UPDATE: The fan mail is pouring in:

I wish to voice my disappointment at your ‘snarky’ first paragraph in the February 15th Crossroads section of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. The headline of the article looked intriguing, so I started reading. However, I was shocked and disappointed at the low blow you leveled at Michael Phelps. Maybe you thought you were being timely and funny, but I found it distasteful and stopped reading your article. Whatever value your article had was lost with your opening paragraph. I hope you show a higher level of class in successive articles.

Today, the U.S. Eastern District Court of Wisconsin struck down the state’s “minimum markup” law, which generally required gas stations to mark gasoline up 9.18% over the price paid at the pump. Last year, I issued a report that argued the law kept gas prices artificially high for consumers. (And for which I was called a “boob” on a Janesville radio station by a gas station owner. He may be right, but it wasn’t because of this report.)

As it turns out, my study was cited in the decision written by Judge Rudolph Randa. Take a look:

Similarly, the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute analyzed data which suggested that “the law has indeed kept gasoline prices higher than would otherwise be the case.” The Institute concluded that the Act “benefits retail gas station owners at the expense of consumers and should be repealed.” (D. 35-5 at 7). The State fails to contradict or undermine this evidence. In other words, the State confusingly argues in favor of a rule of reason but then fails to argue why the Act is a reasonable restraint.

Naturally, I believe the ruling to be correct and a good deal for consumers. And the fact that my words showed up in this important ruling is definitely going on the resume. Right next to “excels at eating with chopsticks.”

CORRECTION: It appears I spoke too soon. The citation is that of our 1998 WPRI report, not my study of last year. I had four people e-mail me, congratulating me for being in the ruling, and the actual citation was not available in the decision, which was all that was online. I just assumed that since my report said the same thing almost verbatim, that it was me. In any event, good for WPRI.

Last week, I got a couple notices that Congressman Paul Ryan was having a conference call today dealing with the stimulus package passed by the Senate.  At first, I was somewhat honored that I was invited to participate.  But then, I quickly realized that technology has fooled me into a false sense of importance.  It used to be that back in the day, if you were on a conference call with CONGRESSMAN PAUL RYAN, you actually were SOMEBODY.  But these days, with 1,000 way calling, it just means you’re one of a thousand people listening in.  Being on a conference call is meaningless – I could pick up the phone to order a Russian mail-order bride and accidentally end up on a Paul Ryan conference call.

It’s like business cards back in the day.  Remember when someone whipped out a business card, and you were like “WHOA – that guy must be important!  He has a business card!“  These days, those idiots who fly toy helicopters around the mall probably have business cards.  It’s meaningless.

This illustrated one of my fundamental rules of working in the Capitol: Any meeting to which I am invited probably isn’t important enough for me to attend.

In any event, I misread the invite, and it was 1:00 PM EASTERN TIME, not Central.  So I completely whiffed.