YES!! LATimes covers National TV-turnoff Week.
Inspired by National TV-Turnoff Week last week, the Chastangs of Eagle Rock boldly went where many parents dream of, but few ever go. They pulled the plug on their household’s four television sets, which range from a 6-inch portable to the 25-inch set in their living room. And for good measure, they banned videos, computer games and Internet surfing as well.
They didn’t do it for money, prizes or fame. They did it to remind themselves there’s a life of the mind, a life with each other, a life outside the box.
…
By Monday morning, when the week of TV deprivation officially ends, there’s something of a surprise. The TV remains off.
“This was wonderful; we are so grateful we did this,” Catherine says. “Having the television off stretches you and makes you reach within yourself. We really have to consider if we want to invite that invader back into our house,” she says.
I’ve been living without a TV since last summer and it’s been great. I get all the news I need from the radio or the internet and while I plan to eventually get a TV for watching movies, I’m happy with the status quo for the moment.

NYT: The Bears on This Message Board Had Enron Pegged
On April 12, 2001, with the stock at $57.30, one message predicted that Enron would soon be revealed as a house of cards. “The Enron executives have been operating an elaborate con scheme that has fooled even the most sophisticated analysts,” the message said. “The first sign of trouble will be an earnings shortfall followed by more warnings. Criminal charges will be brought against ENE executives for their misdeeds. Class action lawsuits will complete the demise of ENE.”
But messages posted even earlier also indicated trouble ahead. On March 1, 2000, with the stock at $69, a participant wrote: “Dig deep behind the Enron financials and you’ll see a growing mountain of off-balance-sheet debt which will eventually swallow this company. There’s a reason they layer so many subsidiaries and affiliates. Be careful.”

Kelly Osborne’s dating advice…do you really want your young daughters getting their advice from Kelly?
* * * * *
Slate: Get It Straight
The hypocrisy of blaming gays for sexual abuse by priests.
Now the bishops, the cardinals, and conservative interest groups have a new story. The problem, they say, is homosexuality. If the church gets rid of gay priests, everything will be fine. But the more questions you ask about this story, the more contradictions you find. The cardinals’ problem isn’t that they can’t keep the priesthood straight. The problem is that once again, they can’t keep their story straight.
* * * * *
Salon: Inside the X-Box
“Any of the insidery stuff they [Microsoft] just really didn’t want to get out,” he said. “The fact that the initial code name was Project Midway — they don’t want the Japanese people to know that because it will hurt their feelings.” The Battle of Midway in 1942 was the turning point of the Pacific War. Before the November 2001 launch of the Xbox, all of the players in the console hardware market — Sony, Nintendo and Sega — were Japanese firms.
I’m not offended, but I’m not surprised either.

AP Top Photos: Congressional testimony in favor of music education in public schools.
* * * * *
LAT: A Quiet Broker of the Wild
Then, in a series of transactions beginning in 1998, the organization came up with $35 million in private donations to help the U.S. Department of the Interior acquire a vast checkerboard of desert lands that together are bigger than Orange County. The Land Trust Alliance in Washington, D.C., says it is probably the biggest sale, in terms of acreage, of private land for public conservation in the U.S. The parcels stretch from Barstow to the Arizona border, a raw, khaki landscape of mountains, valleys and washes.
In its brief history, Wildlands Conservancy has demonstrated a talent for coaxing big private donations from a few wealthy benefactors and then using the money to attract public funds for major conservation purchases.
I hope to do something as significant sometime in the future.

Salon: Interview with Robert Young Pelton
The thing that’s important to understand is that the American government knows about as much as the American people know about how to prosecute this war, which is nothing. We’re learning day by day what works and what doesn’t. The thing that’s happening is that there are huge military expenditures occurring, which tends to be an animal that needs to feed itself, and that’s the part that’s bothersome. Like in Vietnam. We started by sending over advisors and helping a regime support itself, and we ended up sending half a million troops over there and really accomplishing nothing.
What happens is that the intent of the American people is correct, because we did read about and hear about things and we saw things on TV that shocked us so we responded. But we get bored; we have a, like, 120-day window in which we give a shit. After that period, we get bored and we watch something else. I think I saw a shark-attack story on TV yesterday.
We don’t realize that we went from spending zero to millions of dollars a month in a foreign country to prosecute a war and we’re really not fighting a war, we’re just sending more and more troops over and flying B-52s around in circles and so forth.
That’s the part that the media has to keep up on — what are we getting for our money? I mean, have we kicked out the bad guys? Shouldn’t we be attacking Pakistan, isn’t that where all the bad guys come from? I mean there’s this amazing disconnect between common sense and government rhetoric. Most of the people who were killed in Afghanistan were Pakistanis, not Afghans.