Ugh, went out late, came home late late, slept late late late. Just now regaining equilibrium and visual acuity.

A friend brought John Coltrane, The Classic Quartet into work the other day, and within about 10 minutes, I had bought it from Amazon. It’s an eight-disc box set that contains all of Impulse Records’ studio recordings of Coltrane quartets, and it’s just that damn good. I am slowly working my way through the discs; disc five is in my CD player right now. If you like jazz, go buy this.

From Obscure Store, a six-year-old boy who jumped out of his bath and ran to the window to try to flag down his school bus before it left has been suspended from school for sexual harassment. As part of it, the school made the boy sign a paper admitting that he understands the charges against him. Of course, you can’t blame the school district — they are probably looking to Miami, saying that if a court is currently debating whether or not Elian can sign and understand the nature of an asylum statement, then who the hell are they to say that this particular six-year-old can’t.

A good story for an episode of Law & Order: an Ohio jury found a man guilty of involuntary manslaughter after he broke into a woman’s house and literally scared her to death.

Interesting — Japanese commuter train officials think that putting mirrors across the tracks from the platforms will help deter suicides. I never knew that suicides in Japanese train stations were so high.

More about Dubya: in light of the current focus on Dubya’s death penalty obsession, Nat Hentoff takes a look at how defendants charged with non-capital crimes fare in Texas. The results are frightening; indigent defendants can wait up to six months for the appointment of a lawyer, judges admit that they take political contributions into account when appointing these lawyers, a judge has ruled that “the Constitution doesn’t say the lawyers [have] to be awake,” and Bush has vetoed every bill to try to change this offensive reality.

Sharon Underwood, the mother of a gay son in Vermont, wrote an incredibly good column in the Concord Monitor a few weeks ago responding to the Vermonters who are upset about their state’s recognition of gay civil unions.