BERKELEY, Calif. -- It's been quite a weekend. Friday, I went with Elizabeth and one of her co-workers to Petaluma to help them get some old dentists' chairs. It was a fun ride, and Bill, her co-worker, is about 50 and has one hundred thousand stories to tell about being a hippie. That night, we tried to watch Citizen Kane, which is loosely based on the life of William Randolph Hearst, but the CD was messed up. I have to go to Blockbuster and demand a complimentary rental.

Saturday, we went to The MAiZE in Fremont. It's a five-acre corn maze and it was a blast. On the same property, they had Indian corn, gourds, squashes, and pumpkins for sale. We got some pumpkins for carving and Indian corn for putting on the wall somewhere. Indian corn is pretty.

Saturday night we visited The Pirates of Emerson, a nationally-recognized haunted house. But we weren't terribly impressed, having visited Cincinnati's U.S.S. Nightmare the year before. U.S.S. Nightmare is also nationally renowned, and it's a lot bigger. What The Pirates of Emerson did have was a 3-D haunted house, something I had never seen before. All of the drawings on the walls are done with a 3-D effect, so when you put on the 3-D glasses you're given at the beginning of the haunted house, the wall drawings look like they have depth. Ultimately, though, The Pirates of Emerson was only "okay." If you're in Ohio, visit The Haunted Schoolhouse and The Haunted Laboratory in Akron. For the low, low price of $11 per person per haunted house, you get about six floors each of terror. I'd bet the whole experience takes about an hour and a half, which is incredibly long by haunted house standards. The Haunted Schoolhouse and Laboratory are friggin' huge and provide top-notch scares. It's probably been ten years since I've visited them, but I hope they're still as amazing as when I went to see them.

Sunday, we visited Santa Cruz. The showpiece of Santa Cruz is the Boardwalk, which has been styled in the tradition of seaside amusement parks like Coney Island. It was here that I met a figure from Cleveland's past: Laffing Sal. Laffing Sal was an animatronic woman with red hair and a giant, gap-toothed smile who greeted visitors to Cleveland's now-defunct Euclid Beach Park. All she did was shake back and forth, accompained by a laugh soundtrack. She just kept on laughing. When Euclid Beach Park closed in the 1970s, like most of the seaside amusement parks around the country, Laffing Sal was purchased at auction.

Walking along the boardwalk at Santa Cruz, I spotted an animatronic figure in a window. I immediately, instinctively knew what it was. An actual-factual, functioning Laffing Sal. Holy crap! So Santa Cruz had one, too! I suddenly remembered everything my mother and great-grandmother had told me about Euclid Beach Park. They were right: Laffing Sal was freaking scary.

As it turns out, Laffing Sal was not unique to Euclid Beach Park. A placard next to her proclaimed that she was one of 300 such animatronic figures manufactured between 1930 and 1950 -- the heyday of seaside amusement parks. This particular one resided in San Francisco's Playland at the Beach amusement park until it closed in 1972.

We bought saltwater taffy and walked along the boardwalk. We rode one of the dark rides. I can't stress how awesome it is to ride an actual, old-timey dark ride. Everything in modern amusement parks -- Disneyland, Six Flags, Universal Studios -- owes its existence to rides at seaside amusement parks like this one. The Spiderman 3D ride at Universal Studios Islands of Adventure in Orlando is just a very expensive version of rides invented in the 1920s at Coney Island.

We drove back north via Half-Moon Bay and ate at a Hawaiian restaurant called Ono Hawaiian Grill, which has fantastic Hawaiian food. Go there. I demand it!

Assorted news items

If you value copyright, then don't upgrade to iTunes 6.0 just yet. JHymn, the program that allows users to retake their rights, isn't compatible with iTunes 6.0 because the encryption scheme is different from the scheme in previous versions, but the author is working on it. The iTunes Music Store's Fairplay DRM imposes limitations on end-users that are greater than the statutory limitations that copyright imposes. Copyrighting does not allow the publisher to control how you use the work in the privacy of your own home. Copyright allows you to copy a song to as many CDs as you want; iTunes does not. How odd that we must break the law (circumventing a copy-protection scheme is illegal under the DMCA, even if that copy-protection scheme breaks copyright law by being overly restrictive) in order to exercise our rights.

President Bush decided to try something new and appoint to a government post someone's who actually qualified for the job. Alan Greenspan, who has chaired the Federal Reserve Board of Governors for twenty-some years -- through Republican and Democrat administrations -- will step down Jan. 31, 2006 when his term expires. Bush's nomination for his successor, Ben Bernanke, is a former Princeton University professor, a former Federal Reserve governor, and current chief of the White House Council of Economic Advisors. Naturally, he's a Republican, but at least he knows what he's doing. Hopefully, he'll do more than "a heck of a job" as the person who can make the stock markets go up or down with a flick of the wrist.

Under the stupid guise of guarding against terrorism, the government has ordered "hundreds of universities, online communications companies, and cities to overhaul their Internet computer networks to make it easier for law enforcement authorities to monitor e-mail and other online communications." Because when government is given broad surveillance powers, it will use them wisely. Oh, wait. No, it won't.

In a last-ditch attempt to save his own ass, Tom DeLay has requested that Judge Bob Perkins, who will be overseeing DeLay's prosecution for money-laundering, recuse himself since Perkins made recent donations to the Democratic Party. Dick DeGuerin, DeLay's lawyer, is really grasping at straws. Given who some of DeGuerin's past clients were (David Koresh, e.g.), DeLay's going to need all the administrative and technical stuff in his favor that he can get.

And, finally, Harriet Miers is unqualified to be a Supreme Court justice. The bipartisan Senate Judiciary Committee asked her for a "do-over" with regard to a 50-page questionnaire she filled out for them. Both the committee's Republican leader -- Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania -- and its highest-ranking Democrat, Patrick Leahy of Vermont -- asked Miers to resubmit the questionnaire in light of "incomplete responses about her legal career, her work in the White House, her potential conflicts on cases involving the administration and the suspension of her license by the District of Columbia Bar." For example, the questionnaire asks if Miers had ever talked to anyone else about how she might rule on particular issues. Her answer: "No." One word. That was her answer. In general, the problem with her answers is that they were insufficient and not specific enough. They don't even offer do-overs in college for poor answers on essays. Why should the Supreme Court questionnaire allow a do-over if COM 135 doesn't?

That's all for now. The world is a safer place.