C'mon, you know you love it. Initiatives, baby! The people's hands on the steering wheel of state!

We gotcha some doozies for November, like legalizing marijuana and a big water measure just in time for Arnold Schwarzenegger to leave office [and maybe go off to bust up some dams, or build 'em?]. Tune in today, ye masters of California.

And summer is arachno-season; I see new webs every morning when I trudge outside for my newspaper. I've never read any messages in them like the yowza adjectives in the webs spun in the charming book ''Charlotte's Web,'' but the bigger message is ''spiders are cool.''

They kill unhelpful insects. We smash them way, way too often, and we have way, way too many urban legends about them. On yesterday's program, our arachnid expert from the LA County Museum of Natural History shot down all the myths about violin spiders and brown recluses here in Southern California. No such thing, he declared, and like Joe DiMaggio at bat, he kept swinging at every caller's tale of such spiders and knocking it out of the park: Did you see the spider? Did you see the spider? There are spiders with a nasty bite but the only one that can do serious damage to your health around here is the classic black widow.

Not convinced? Go the Patt Morrison page and have a listen.

Me, I am not a squasher. I get a glass and a slip of paper and escort said arachnid out of my house to do his or her useful work somewhere other than my bathtub.

-- Patt Morrison

I got a teeny glimpse of the passion that fuels soccer fans around the world when we examined the premise: Does soccer ... oh, what's the technical word? Right: Does soccer suck? [Even if you missed the segment, you can listen to it online, and tap out your opinion here.]

Ferocity on both sides, the lovers and the haters. NPR commentator Frank Deford has been vicious in his assessment of soccer being, like swimming, a sport people do, not a sport they watch. A goodly number of you actually agreed, though perhaps not so acidly as Mr. Deford. Every four years, we seem to toy with soccer's affections during the World Cup, and then dump it to go back to our old ''steadies,'' football [American-style] and baseball.

And on that point of nomenclature, football vs. soccer, be sure to read what Landon Donovan told me about it in my recent Times column; he's the So Cal soccer sensation who's saved the U.S.'s bacon in the World Cup already.

TGIF, TGIC - thank goodness it's Cortines, our semi-regular session with the LAUSD superintendent. The summer's just a breather to gear up for the new school year's dispiriting budget news. What else is up in Classroom Chalkland? [Do they even use chalk anymore?]

Los Tigres del Norte, the renowned norteno band [sorry, I don't know how to do tildes in this corner of the blog universe], is playing at Disney Hall on Friday, and sabes que? [again, apologies for no upside-down question mark]: Jorge Hernandez, the band's frontman, tells me what this gig means for the brothers and cousin who are ... Los Tigres!

Burning up the phones about this one! The idea of raising money for the state coffers by selling electronic ad space on license plates went over like a lead Hindenburg.

The man behind the bill to study the idea, state Sen. Curren Price, was a good sport to come on the program today, because pretty much everybody bashed on the idea [although we didn't hear from body-shop owners, who may be thrilled at the work coming their way from all the fender benders that may result.]

The ads would only blink on if a car had stopped in traffic or at a red light, but even so, do we need more things to take our minds off driving? One of you blogged that it's ridiculous to require hands-free cell phone calls and ban texting at the wheel but go ahead and put flashing images right in front of drivers' eyes. And if you're close enough to actually see what's being advertised -- you're too close.

Steve Hymon, the former LA Times transpo guy and now author of the transit agency Metro's blog, didn't think too highly of it either -- the distraction factor first among other considerations. Me, I don't like the idea of my car as a rolling ad for things I might not even approve of. BP ads, anyone?

And imagine election season on the freeways. Would Meg Whitman be spending her tens of millions on ads on the car bumper ahead of us? An invitation to political road rage??

The money for the study is coming from the bumper-ad industry, not from taxpayers, Sen. Price reassured us, but I'm always wary of any study funded by the industry that's the object of study. Prediction: the DMV will find that this is not in the interests of Californians.

The Supreme Court lifted a ban on Monsanto using genetically modified alfalfa seeds, but the actual sowing of them will have to wait until the USDA gives the green light. The larger topic of Frankenfoods -- genetically modified food -- got a lot of you angry and you didn't hesitate to call to say so, both as growers and eaters of food.

I'm thinking we need to talk about this more, and beyond just this court case. For example, there's the subject of so-called Terminator or suicide seeds. Imagine growing a tomato plant from seed, but the seeds of that tomato are deliberately sterile, because a company ''owns'' that plant, and if you want to grow more, you've got to buy more seed. It rather upends 10,000 years of human agriculture and summons scary scenarios of barren fields and hunger ... do you agree? Or not? Here's where you say so.

We remembered comedian George Carlin two years after his death with a pair of comedians, Greg Fitzsimmons and Comedy Congress' own Ben Gleib, who said that he became a comedian because of George Carlin. Many of you had actually met him -- Tony, in a liquor store, dropped to one knee in front of Carlin and told him, ''I'm an atheist, and you're my god.'' And caller Jean met him in a grocery store, and by happenstance was right there in the hospital when Carlin was admitted and died. The silence that fell over the place, she remembered, was striking and sobering, and she cried to remember it. I choked up right along with her, and so did Ben Gleib.

Ave atque vale, Mr. Carlin.

I'm at the ALOUD series at the Central Library tonight, talking about the PBS documentary on the Chandler family and its immense influence over how Los Angeles grew and changed.

Next time, why the middle-aged have overtaken the elderly as the most suicide-prone age group, and Sebastian Junger on his documentary about U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan.

The Supreme Court just ruled that human rights advocates can be prosecuted for advising members of a foreign group the U.S. declares to be a terrorist group - even if that advice is, "Stop fighting, sit down and talk."

Could this mean than an 80-year-old USC professor, a man who was a Freedom Rider in the 1960s south and got beaten in jail by white supremacists, could go to federal prison for giving legal advice to Kurds to help them sit down and negotiate their disputes with Turkey rather than pick up weapons?

I interviewed Ralph Fertig about the pending Supreme Court case for my Los Angeles Times column earlier this year. Here it is: Fertig interview

And you can hear Fertig's reaction to the Supreme Court ruling on my program today at 2:30 p.m.

You know how Hollywood slices and dices box office numbers – Tinseltown’s magical bookkeeping can even make ‘’Titanic’’ look like it lost money. But any way they spun it, ‘’Toy Story 3’’ came up aces over the weekend, and I put in my own ticket-window spondulix to make it so.

The film reinforces what makes cartoons succeed: that they work on a grownup level at the same time they appeal on a kid level, from the sly cartoons of the 1930s to the winking wisecracks of Bullwinkle and beyond.

Film lovers especially can find more to love in ‘’TS3’’ than the contents of a toy chest. The Pixar screenwriters delivered moments of homage to ‘’Cool Hand Luke,’’ the ‘’Raiders of the Lost Ark’’ trilogy, pinches of ‘’The Great Escape’’ and dollops of Hitchcock and even Tennessee Williams.

Yet what ‘’TS3” put me most in mind of is the wonderful tale ‘’The Velveteen Rabbit.’’ The book’s subtitle is ‘’How Toys Become Real,’’ and it was written in 1922, well before movies could talk, but when every child absolutely knew that toys could.

When I was little, I read and re-read my copy until it grew as shabby as the Velveteen Rabbit himself. If you’ve read it, read it again, even if you think you’re too old for it, and if you haven’t read it, however old you are, do yourself a favor and read it.

Do yourself another favor and listen to our program on Monday to the stories Megan Stack is telling. She’s my LA Times colleague who’s covered the conflicts from Afghanistan to the Mideast almost since 9/11. She ‘s put together some astonishing and moving tales in her book, ‘’Every Man in This Village is a Liar.’’ Good title – and the stuff between the covers is just as good.

We’ll also explore the law about illegal immigration – is it a crime to be in this country without the right paperwork, or a kind of code violation, or something else? It’s evidently more nuanced than you think, and with the Obama Administration about to challenge Arizona’s law, it’s time we found out more.

I’m told the event is sold out, but on Tuesday evening, I’m at the LA Central Library for another in the Aloud series, this one about that Peabody-winning PBS documentary about the Chandler family and how it shaped the Los Angeles we live in to this day. I’ll be talking to filmmaker Peter Jones and Bill Boyarsky, author of the companion book. I know a good bit about that family and this city and even so, I learned even more.