Linda Ronstadt apparently enjoys starting fights:

"My career has befuddled other people, and it's befuddled me," admitted Ronstadt, 58, who finds her fans are polarized by her nightly on-stage salute to "Fahrenheit 9/11" filmmaker Michael Moore.

"I've been dedicating a song to him – I think he's a great patriot – and it splits the audience down the middle, and they duke it out," she said.

"This is an election year, and I think we're in desperate trouble and it's time for people to speak up and not pipe down. It's a real conflict for me when I go to a concert and find out somebody in the audience is a Republican or fundamental Christian. It can cloud my enjoyment. I'd rather not know."

I'm also befuddled by her statement that she'd rather not know that "somebody in the audience" is politically not to her liking. (I think Ronstadt's use of the term "Republican or fundamental Christian" to describe opposition to Michael Moore is disingenuous.) If she doesn't "want to know" about her fans' politics, then why is she deliberately inflaming them by dedicating a song to a man whose dedication to polarization is so clearly documented? And if she really hates only Republicans and fundamentalists and only wishes to inflame and polarize them, why use Michael Moore? Why not burn George W. Bush in effigy? Or burn a Bible?

Very befuddling.

As is this comment:

"I don't understand this country sometimes and I really fear for it," she adds. "The government is making everybody in the world hate us, including the people that used to be our friends."

Anyone who disagrees with that is welcome to get in line, behind whoever she manages to rile at the Aladdin this time.

"I keep hoping that if I'm annoying enough to them, they won't hire me back," she says with a laugh.

If annoying people makes her laugh, she must split her sides over scenes like this:

The biggest excitement of the night, by a long shot, came when Ronstadt then dedicated her encore of "Desperado" to filmmaker Michael Moore, kick-starting a boo-cheer competition throughout the venue that drowned out her singing and left grown-ups in tuxes and evening gowns yelling at each other on their way to the parking lot. (Via Tim Blair.)

Career poison?

Not long ago, a science textbook was widely criticized for displaying a picture of Linda Ronstadt next to a caption reading "silicon crystal doped with arsenic impurity."

Coincidence?

Junk science?

No; it's a basic principle that in order to make a semiconductor, you must introduce an impurity into the silicon crystal -- Arsenic, or Phosphorus will do. It's called doping.

Perhaps the textbooks were right.

In my opinion, anyone who would do to her fans what Ronstadt does has a poisoned silicon chip where her heart ought to be.