Fascinated by the report yesterday in the Post that three Texans are suing their sometime acquaintance, the filmmaker Richard Linkletter, who, they say, wrongly appropriated their names and aspects of their high school experience for his pothead classic, Dazed and Confused. Malcolm Gladwell wrote a very smart piece on this problem in the New Yorker recently, discussing a case in which details of a real woman’s life story were, as a court found, wrongly appropriated for a fictional play.

Gladwell observed that what most upset the woman were not the parts of her own story that were put on stage, but the other parts that were not her story. The actual fictional parts, that is, those not taken from her own story. These guys from Texas, too, are upset about things “their” characters do in the movie that they didn’t do in real life.

And yet–as Gladwell observes and many others have remarked in the Texas case–how cool it would be to see your character pilfered a little for a Broadway production or a popular movie. Reminds me of another story. A friend told me about a young author she knew who’d taken up with and then moved in with an older, more established author before writing a novel about a young author who takes up with a more established author and enjoyes some success as a result. My friend’s comment to him was that she was really impressed by how he could use his own life to make literature. Oh no, he assured her, the novel was totally fictional.

Denial, you have so many faces.

The Bull Moose has a fittingly nasty post on the Washington Post‘s story of Rumsfeld in Iraq:

“Mr. Rumsfeld, seemingly caught off guard by the sharp questioning, responded that the military was producing extra armor for Humvees and trucks as fast as possible, but that the soldiers would have to cope with equipment shortages. “You go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time,” he said.

“Specialist Thomas Wilson, a scout with a Tennessee National Guard unit set to roll into Iraq this week, was the first to step forward, saying that soldiers had had to scrounge through landfills here for pieces of rusty scrap metal and bulletproof glass – what they called “hillbilly armor” – to bolt to their trucks.”

The Moose goes loose, saying:

Rumsfeld went on to explain that pure “physics” is the reason that the troops could not be supplied with sufficient armored vehicles. Pretty neat, huh? Maybe “physics” can replace “the dog ate my homework” as the universal excuse that students give their teachers for uncompleted assignments. Perhaps, in a face saving move, the President can just shift Rumsfeld over to the Education Department where Rummy can apply his novel notions of accountability to the nation’s schools – the students will love the lowering of standards.

Dick Meyer has an acidic column that looks like the pain of the scorned sports fan. He dismisses a number of reasons for the outrage about steroids, but misses one which I think is crucial:

If steroids are allowed in sports, they create a barrier-to-entry to aspiring professional athletes that I think society will find unacceptable. But what’s worse than that, is that if steroid use becomes legal, that barrier-to-entry will almost certainly slide down from professional sports, to college sports, to high-school sports. You and I may not care whether or not a linebacker from Texas has to take steroids to make the NFL, but we will care if little Jimmy has to take steroids if he wants to make his high school’s squad.

Scott Johnson points us to Stuart Taylor’s piece about the harmful effects of affirmative action on black lawyers. This could be the beginning of the end for racial preferences.

Hugh Hewitt has an email from a friend of his in the Navy:

The number ONE request at Walter Reed hospital is phone cards. The government doesn’t pay long distance phone charges and these wounded soldiers are rationing their calls home. Many will be there throughout the holidays. Really support our troops–Send phone cards of any amount to:

Medical Family Assistance Center

Walter Reed Medical Center

6900 Georgia Avenue, NW

Washington, DC 20307-5001

They say they need an “endless” supply of these–any amount

even $5 is greatly appreciated.

Sounds like an excellent idea.

Galley friend CS just told me about this intriguing ABC Primetime Live segment that ran last Thursday. Basically a softy promo job for the upcoming release of Ocean’s Twelve, it had a couple of very revealing exchanges with the cast.

Andy Garcia on Cuba:

“DIANE SAWYER: (Voice Over) And finally, there’s Andy Garcia. He, too, from a loving family but with a searing memory. His father was a wealthy businessman in Cuba, who lost everything under Fidel Castro and was forced to flee to the US. The family, with three children, had to live in a one- bedroom apartment, everything else left behind in Cuba.

“ANDY GARCIA:Part of the thing when you left there was they took everything off of you, you know. I remember specifically, my sister had a -this gold rings on her hand. And she had grown into them and they couldn’t get them off her hand. And as a child, I just remember this image of this -going through and these people are dressed in militia uniforms and beards and there’s guns everywhere. And they were trying to get this thing off her hand before letting her through. I’m going, “‘oh, my God. They’re going to cut her hand off.'”

How refreshing to hear from a Hollywooder with serious credentials on Cuba. Take that Oliver Stone, Leonardo DiCaprio, Danny Glover, and, well, all the rest of them. Here’s the other worthwhile exchange.

Matt Damon on George Bush:

“DIANE SAWYER: In the last election, [Brad] Pitt, [Matt] Damon, [George] Clooney and [Don] Cheadle, openly supported John Kerry. And Damon says, that was going to cost them millions, since Kerry would raise taxes on the rich.

“MATT DAMON: This President is giving me millions of dollars. Do you think I need that? Voting for John Kerry was financially the stupidest thing that we could do, you know. And it was worth it to us because we felt that strongly about the difference that he would have made to the country.”

Bragging about your wealth in an effort to show how politically virtuous you are. How gauche!

If you are bothered by the bizarre strain of argument which has arisen to defend steroid use, George Will is a tonic: “Athletes chemically propelled to victory do not merely overvalue winning, they misunderstand why winning is properly valued.”

Next week marks the 60th anniversary of the Battle of the Bulge. Out in bookstores, just in time, is Alex Kershaw’s The Longest Winter, the story of one American platoon that faced impossible odds in that struggle and miraculously survived. (It also makes for a terrific holiday gift for history buffs.) I recently reviewed the book in the Wall Street Journal and found it to be almost as good as Kershaw’s previous history, The Bedford Boys. It is especially relevant now, with our troops in Iraq, their resolve being tested every day. The Longest Winter is a tribute to that American resolve in times of battle.