I see that Apple’s price increases are supposed to have caused Amazon to raise its own. Perhaps.

Yesterday (not realizing Apple was raising prices) I finally got around to upgrading my iTunes purchases to iTunes Plus. I had 16 items, and upgrading cost me $4.60. Apparently the upgrade price of $0.30 per item didn’t go up.

On the other hand, either I screwed up and deleted the wrong files, or I got screwed by Apple, because when I count them today, I have 17 .m4a files (without DRM) and 9 .m4p files (with DRM).

I also purchased 23 songs in MP3 format from Amazon. It looked like the average price was very close to $0.99, with only a few songs costing anything else. I tend to prefer Amazon because it has greater selection and lower prices. A purist might prefer Apple’s encoding scheme to old-school MP3s. Or maybe they wouldn’t. I haven’t investigated, because MP3 is adequate for me.

Anyway, higher prices or not, it’s nice to be able to buy $25 worth of music and get 23 songs you specifically wanted.

So. What did I buy? Well, too many to list here. But a couple of examples: Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love,” Dobie Gray’s “Drift Away,” and America’s “Sister Golden Hair.” (The older I get, the more I like music from the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s.)

This is Holy Week. I have to preach three different sermons in the next six days. I also have three members of my congregation in hospital settings. So of course I would be summoned to jury duty.

I arrived at 8:30, along with 60-odd friends and neighbors. At 8:45, the judge’s admin assistant gave us a good-humored lecture about fulfilling our vital role in the cogs of justice or something like that. Then we got to see a videotape about our vital role in the cogs of justice, while she ran our summons through the bar code reader. (Two people were able to be excused at this early point on account of felony convictions. Two full-time students, on the other hand, were told to tell it to the judge.) Finally, at 10:15, we were ushered into the courtroom. After a few minutes, the bailiff told us to rise, the judge came in, and he swore us to secrecy. (Maybe. I don’t remember what, exactly, we agreed to do, because at the end, instead of saying, “so help me God,” or something like that, he only had us say, “I do.”)

He listened to people whining about having a life, etc. I told him I had an out-of-town conference coming up, but it’s far enough off that he said they could still seat me and then excuse me toward the end of the trial. That is, he’s okay with wasting a couple of weeks of my time listening to evidence and then excusing me as the trial winds down, because he doesn’t want to impose a hardship on me.

After he’d failed to excuse about 45 or 50 of us, they seated 18 in the nice seats. The judge started quizzing them about how many reasons they had to hate lawyers and cops. He also asked if they hated people who did [what the accused was accused of doing]. Only two people were able to be excused at that point: both because they personally knew San Bernadino County sheriffs deputies and had previously discussed this particular case. (Good call.)

When the judge had quizzed the 18, the two lawyers were given the opportunity to do the same. The defense lawyer was harder to listen to, partly because he was soft-spoken and partly because he’s dull. There were three points he wanted to belabor: (1) it’s okay if the defendant doesn’t testify, (2) sheriff’s deputies are neither more nor less likely to be wrong about things or even lie than normal people, and, especially, (3) you can’t convict someone just because you thought the evidence proved him guilty, but only if the evidence proved him guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. That last one must be a tricky idea to communicate, because he kept beating it like a dead horse or something.

The assistant D.A. was only a little bit better. He wanted to be sure the jurors knew that, despite what they might have heard on Matlock or Law and Order, they were permitted to convict someone based on circumstantial evidence. In fact, pretty much all he wanted was for us to ignore anything we knew about the law from TV shows. That and agreeing that people in the defendant’s situation were no less likely to lie than sheriff’s deputies.

That took us all the way to 11:30, and the judge excused us for lunch. When we came back at 1:30, we got hectored for awhile, then the lawyers took turns unloading jurors. The defense attorney got rid of a few people, but he quit after a while and pronounced himself happy with the composition of the panel. The D.A. got rid of two more, bringing us down to 12, so everything stopped so they could seat another batch of 6.

I was the first to be called to that second batch, so call me potential juror number 19. The judge quizzed us some more, then the defense attorney and the prosecutor did the same, and they began with the peremptory challenges again. The defense attorney was happy with the panel again, and the D.A. excused yet another person, and the bailiff motioned for me to go get in one of the nice seats. I sat down, and was renamed juror number 4.

That lasted for about 30 seconds, until the defense attorney asked the judge to thank and excuse me. I got my pink slip to prove I’d wasted my whole day and got out at 4:00 on the dot.

In my next post, I’ll write about why I got dumped.

Look here: four lies from the President and one from a reporter laid out by the Annenberg Center’s FactCheck.org. (Which, without casting aspersions, I think we can all agree is hardly a bastion of the Rush Limbaugh right wing. Check its staff.)

The scary thing about the piece isn’t that the President’s a liar. Nobody’s surprised by that, surely. The scary thing is the chart of Federal deficit projections midway through the “Analysis” part of the page.

This is why I don’t watch press conferences and speeches: because I don’t want to waste my time being lied to. (Well, this week I also had to try that new Mongolian Beef recipe.) There’s nothing that the President or any other politician has to say to me that I can’t wait a couple of days to hear. (I like to think of analysis pieces like this one as as the morning-after burrito for politicians.)

I don’t think I’ve posted any recipes here before, and I won’t start now. (Instead, I’ll link.)

I cooked this Mongolian Beef recipe tonight, and it was oh so good.

The fam doesn’t like it hot, so I held back on the red pepper flakes, and then added some Sriracha hot sauce.

I finished Get Smart (2008) last night. It was fair, but slightly better than I expected. It wasn’t a great spy movie, of course, but it wasn’t as funny as I expected. I was expecting nonstop slapstick, and this was simply a comedy. A fair amount of its humor was sexual, but it wasn’t always quite as heavy-handed as I was prepared for.

What was interesting to me was the problem the filmmakers set for themselves: a boy meets girl movie. How do you do that, when the boy is a bumbler — interestingly, Max was only a bumbler and not an outright idiot, as in the TV show — and the girl is an ultra-competent Jane Smith | Vesper Lynd | female Jason Bourne type? What could 99 find attractive in 86? (Answer: — spoiler alert! — he’s a good dancer.)

Warren Buffett wants us all to line up behind the president.

Buffett said he believes patriotic Republicans and Democrats will realize the nation is engaged in an economic war.

“What is required is a commander in chief that’s looked at like a commander in chief in a time of war,” Buffett said.

From LBJ’s “War on Poverty” to Jimmy Carter’s “moral equivalent of war” to Rahm Emmanuel’s “never let a serious crisis go to waste” there are always demagogues who deliberately blur the line between peace and war in order to browbeat patriotic citizens into doing whatever their leaders tell them to do.

Because, in a war, patriots do as Buffet proposes. They allow temporary curbs on their liberties in order to fight an immediate threat. (Except if the war begins in 2001 with a Republican in the White House, in which case dissent is the highest form of patriotism.)

But bad as our economic problems are, they aren’t a war.

Congress has the authority to declare war, and Obama has control of Congress. No declaration, no war. On the contrary, Congress is going about business very much as usual, passing bills for trillions of dollars in deficit spending for such vital wartime priorities like paying people to convert their analog TVs to receive digital signals.

If we were in a war, though, whom or what would it be against? I’ve never liked the phrase “War on Terror” because it’s afraid to name names, but at least it makes a pretense of doing so. Who, then, should the American people line up behind the Great Leader to fight? The rich? The bankers? Profiteers?

And what of those whose job was to keep us out of war? After Pearl Harbor, Admiral Kimmel was cashiered. If we are in a war, why is Chris Dodd still a senator? Why isn’t Franklin Raines in prison?

Finally, the reason patriots accept sacrifice in wartime is that it is temporary. Imagine if Lincoln created the Secret Service, or FDR created the CIA, and they never went away. Okay, those are bad examples. A better example is free speech, which Oliver Wendell Holmes said could be constrained during WWI when it might pose a clear and present danger. When the war ended, wartime curbs no longer applied.

But the things being done by the administration and congress are designed to inflict permanent damage on our institutions. For example, the effort to socialize health care is designed not to address an immediate threat, but to make a permanent change in our society.

The big question about Buffet’s remarks is whether he knows better. Could he really have gotten that rich if he were this obtuse? And would anybody take what he said seriously if he had said the same thing after 9-11?

Updates: to be fair to Buffet, he has recently argued against card check:

“I think the secret ballot’s pretty important in the country. You know, I’m against card check, to make a perfectly flat statement,” Buffett said.

Buffet also argued against Obama’s “I won” philosophy of larding up economic programs with Democrat payoffs:

“If you’re in a war, and we really are in an economic war, there’s a obligation to the majority to behave in ways to not go around inflaming the minority. If on Dec. 8, or maybe it was Dec. 7, when Roosevelt convened Congress to vote on the war. He didn’t say, ‘I’m throwing in about ten of my pet projects,'” Buffett said.

Good grief. The reason we insulted the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom was because the President is all worn out from pushing socialized medicine and out-of-control spending.

Barack Obama’s offhand approach to Gordon Brown’s Washington visit last week came about because the president was facing exhaustion over America’s economic crisis and is unable to focus on foreign affairs…

I’m not sure I buy it. On the one hand, it sounds nicer than the calculated-insult theory. On the other hand, surely someone on staff at the White House would advise against broadcasting our President’s limitations.

From the article:

Sources close to the White House say Mr Obama and his staff have been “overwhelmed” by the economic meltdown and have voiced concerns that the new president is not getting enough rest.

Man up, already. What was it Harry S Truman said about heat and kitchens?

(Kudus to IP.)