If I see another ribbon on an SUV

The Asylum Street Spankers' "Stick a ribbon on Your SUV" video.

Do you believe in magic?

Seems like you have two choices: To believe in prayer or not to believe. We just don't know whether it makes any difference. But the anecdotal reports are favorable.

Now there's a specific person to think on. Whether we toss globes of pink light his direction or simply visualize his brain with no swelling, I would like to ask for the help of family and friends and perhaps something greater. My brother-in-law got socked in the noggin by a softball at his weekly game earlier tonight and has a skull fracture. He's himself, joking around, but the gravity of the situation had clearly begun weighing on him just before we saw him off on the ambulance to the other hospital tonight; while we were there the doctor showed the pictures of his fractured exterior sinus bone and significantly dented sinus bone underneath (it's a lucky thing there are two bones and not just one in that spot) where a ball hit hard by a bat landed. "Skull" and "fracture" are not words you want to hear. You want to come across them in mystery novels or someone else's blog. My bro-in-law is being watched over by the docs for tonight and tomorrow; I don't know what this next 24 hours will bring but I hope it's all good.

And I wonder whether a whole lotta prayer's gonna be goin' on this weekend: the family are gathering for the wedding -- the evangelical Christian branch. (In my inner comedy routine, I've been laying it on thick, talking about where I'm from, how I grew up, and how I am now, what I choose. Who I am, making no apologies. I've been gearing up for this for a while -- maybe this would make a good screenplay and I can do it in fiction instead of doing a real stand-up act, which I think I'd suck at.)

All that said, when you read this, think some good thoughts for a guy who's just one of us. It just might make a difference in the rest of his life.

How did this beautiful cup of coffee get here?

The new documentary film Black Gold is an astounding look at what it means for the powerful at WTO talks to set a price of $0.22 for a kilo of coffee on the world market.

You might presume this topic could easily grow dull, but it never does: Directors Marc and Nick Francis select a taut bunch of stories, nicely edited and set to a well composed score that combine to keep you on edge throughout the film.

We follow a fellow who markets coffee from an Ethiopian collective, and he repeats a simple message: Africans are not fairly compensated for their crops on the world market. Prices for coffee are artificially low, keep Africans dependent on U.S. aid, and demean an entire people by not paying them what they are worth.

It's not his impassioned words that haunt us most, however, but instead the toddler girl who gets weighed and sent home with her mother and no help because she's only "semi-malnourished" and doesn't qualify for aid.

It's the fellow hacking out an beautiful coffee patch to clear it for growing chat, a narcotic leaf that folks chew to feel better and that commands a higher income per acre than coffee.

This documentary is definitely worth seeing if you are at all interested in how your cup of Starbucks got into your hand and as such is destined to be a minor classic in the growing field of food journalism (see also The Future of Food) -- it's a must-see for the conscientious omnivore.

Slim, slimmest, none

So is being able to edit your body type in your digital photos a good thing or a bad thing? What do you think when HP offers you its "Slimming" feature in their new camera software? And when its before-picture models are all perfectly healthy women? What do you think of it then?

I say if you can slim, you should also be able to fatten, change hairstyle and color, change race, age, or sex, and so on. Now that would be the fabulous application that everyone would want.

Write to HP's CEO to request better features -- and to remind him that we don't all have to look like Teri Hatcher and Lindsay Lohan.

Send the man a quarter if you ever played Trivial Pursuit

Or a dollar. You may want to after you learn of this nugget from Salon's cover story today by Louis Bayard about the book by Jeopardy uberchampion Ken Jennings, Brainiac: Adventures in the Curious, Competitive, Compulsive World of Trivia Buffs,:

"Brainiac" impresses with its diligence and its restless curiosity. Rather than simply spin out old "Jeopardy" war stories, Jennings turns the lens outward as much as possible. He showcases the lightning-fast reflexes of quiz-bowl striplings. He smuggles himself into a beer-fueled pub-trivia contest in Boston. He digs up obscure and poignant figures like Fred L. Worth, the obsessive fact compiler whose life's research was, without a word of thanks or a dime of compensation, appropriated by the inventors of Trivial Pursuit. (Worth went to court and lost.)"

I'd think the guy who made up lots of those Trivial Pursuit questions and answers deserves some credit for the work. Apparently Fred Worth's trivia volume was complete with invented (also known as wrong) answers that would guarantee people couldn't steal his work (for example: Both Worth's trivia volume and the Trivial Pursuit clue say "Philip" is the first name of Peter Falk's title character, Detective Columbo of the popular American TV series. But he is never named during the show). Think of the hours that man must have spent gathering (and making up) all those facts.

Don't you just want to send the guy a little something after reading this? I didn't even like Trivial Pursuit that much but I love games and have had hours of fun playing that game alone.

Wouldn't it be fun to make a little difference in his life? Let's find him and send him a quarter or a dollar. And I can test my two-or-three degrees of separation theory (that anyone you really want to contact is only two or three and not six people away from you).

A little always was too much for me

Molly Ivins writes here about our government's plan to adopt appropriate torture guidelines. I plan to write my congress critters. You?