In Virginia, they threaten Justice with jail merely for speeding

On a recent drive around the Beltway - that parking lot posing as a highway that encircles Washington, D.C. - a friend of mine named Justice confronted someone most of us have: Slow Fast-Lane Driver. My friend didn’t want to tailgate so Justice cut over two lanes to make the pass.

To Justice’s bad luck, a state trooper in an unmarked vehicle happened to witness the pass. To compound Justice’s bad luck, Justice did the deed on the Virginia side, rather than Maryland side. I recently learned that in Virginia, unlike in Maryland, speeding can be a criminal offense punishable by as much as a year in jail.

The trooper stopped Justice, and rather than issue a standard speeding ticket as in most states, Justice received a summons to court. Justice appeared in a Fairfax court this past week and was horrified to learn that Justice was being charged with the criminal offense of reckless driving. Justice observed other people with the same charge who pled guilty and only had to pay a fine and leave. Some of them had caused accidents and didn't have licenses, unlike Justice. So Justice thought that was the procedure.

Justice was wrong. The judge said to get an attorney and threatened to jail Justice when my friend asked a few questions about the situation. Justice had never had to get a lawyer before and only had a few prior speeding tickets on the record. Justice recently started a business and makes about $200 a week, but the judge denied Justice the right to a court-appointed attorney. The Judge said Justice had to spend Justice's kids' college fund and retirement money on lawyers' fees.

Welcome to Virginia, where Justice is threatened with jail time simply for speeding.

Welcome to Virginia, where the system steals kids' college money and retirees' savings.

Welcome to Virginia, where Justice is denied.

Spam market heats up

We may be officially in a recession, but you can’t tell that by the smoke being spewed at the Spam manufacturing plant in Austin, Minn.

The demand is so great for the canned meat “product” that some call Something Posing As Meat that two shifts of workers are making Spam nonstop seven days a week.

Spam “seems to do well when hard times hit,” Dan Bartel, a union rep, told the New York Times. “We’ll probably see Spam lines instead of soup lines.”

Hormel Foods Corp. makes Spam by combining ham, pork, sugar, salt, water, a “little” potato starch and a “mere hint” of sodium nitrite “to help Spam keep its [pink] color,” according to an Internet site on Spam by Hormel.

“Sounds delicious, and it is!” booms a Hormel spokesman. Without the sodium nitrite, all pork products would turn gray, and “no one wants that,” he claims.

Uh, yes, sounds, um, appetizing. But thanks, anyway. I think I’ll stick to tuna fish for my canned product fix.

How I Hacked into the BCS Computers and Put Oklahoma into the Big 12 Title Game

Ever since I was sports editor of the Richland Chronicle junior college newspaper way back in 1978, I have lobbied for a college football playoff. In the mid-1980s, I even walked some 5,000 miles across the U.S. and Europe to raise awareness for this playoff system. On the surface, I was part of a group raising awareness for an end to the Cold War, but down deep, I was walking to help give us college gridiron playoffs.

The NCAA bigwigs have ignored such pleas and actions while turning every college football season into a farce. Arguments between undefeated and one-loss teams about who really was the best team that year have been more fierce than this year’s Democratic primary battle between Barack and Hillary.

The wigs thought they had an answer with this Bowl Championship Series and their computers that supposedly choose the best two college teams in the land to play for the title. But there have always been one or more other teams with a legitimate argument that they should have played for the title.

Some years, it has not been so obvious a farce. This is not one of those years.

The eyes of Texas are popping out in anger today. And that, my friend, as John McCain would say, is how me and Joe the Plumber would want it. But then, look what happened to McCain.

Before Sunday, Texas held the coveted second spot in the BCS computer standings over Oklahoma. But even though Texas trounced Texas A&M by 40 points on Thursday and defeated Oklahoma by 10 points almost two months ago, Oklahoma surged ahead of Texas in today’s BCS standings. Oklahoma has only to beat Missouri on Saturday to cement its spot in the title game on Jan. 8 against either Alabama or Florida.

How did the Okies do it? Some say because they beat common opponents such as Texas Tech and Oklahoma State by larger margins than Texas, which actually lost to Tech. Some say because Oklahoma had a more difficult nonconference schedule than the Longhorns.

I can give you the real reason: computer hacking.

The computer systems that help decide who goes to the mythical national championship game – provided by Anderson & Hester, Richard Billingsley, Colley Matrix, Kenneth Massey, Jeff Sagarin and Peter Wolfe – are not that hard to hack. Granted, they are more difficult to break into than the presidential election computers.

It took me a couple hours Saturday evening to hack into just one of the football rankings. But my giving Oklahoma some more points to move the Sooners past Texas was enough to swing the total rankings to Oklahoma.

Sure, the USA Today coaches’ poll and Harris survey of media and former players, which actually put Texas ahead of Oklahoma, also played a part. But the computer system is so important to the final results that a few points altered by a novice hacker in just one of the six computer rankings can swing the outcome. And it did, to Oklahoma.

It’s that easy.

So I sit back today, proud of my work, as more people in Texas and elsewhere scream for a college football playoff series. Obama even said he would lobby to bring about a playoff system, between figuring out what to do with Wall Street and Iran.

I can feel the tide changing already. If I had known it would have been this easy, I’d have saved my legs some miles in the mid-1980s.