Unqualified Offerings

My affair with Opera may be coming to an end. I’m trying out the public beta of Mozilla Firebird, which aims to be fast, light and extensible. It does feel subjectively faster. It runs Shockwave games, which I never could get Opera to do. No adware. The tabbed browsing works at least as well as [...]

From a Washington Post article on changing US counter-insurgency tactics:

Col. David Hogg, commander of the 2nd Brigade of the 4th Infantry Division, said tougher methods are being used to gather the intelligence. On Wednesday night, he said, his troops picked up the wife and daughter of an Iraqi lieutenant general. They left a note: “If [...]

Stephen Chapman of the Chicago Sun on Liberian folly:

But as we’ve learned in Iraq, the best-laid plans often go astray. How, then, can we be so confident that getting out of Liberia, a place we know much less about, will be as easy as getting in? The assumption is that because of our historic ties [...]

The Matron of All Offerings went into the hospital this weekend for some tests. Nothing too scary, thanks, but her hospital roommate is dying – some kind of heart condition. She looks like an old woman about to die, like a leaf bag that’s lost half its leaves. I haven’t seen her move in two [...]

Figures unchanged from last week. Well, you’re supposed to ease off those last few pounds, right? Like the old Lunar Landing BASIC game!
They Say you should change up your workout regimen every 4-8 weeks. Keeps you interested, keeps you from developing lazy habits, works your muscles in different ways or works different muscles. At bottom, [...]

Derek Lowe offers an appropriately inconclusive meditation on what Ritalin might have done for the aging Philip Larkin. One thing that struck me about Larkin’s letters and, despite author Andrew Motion’s best efforts to obscure the pattern, his biography: Legendarily Morose Larkin arose only after Larkin’s body began breaking down in the early 1970s – [...]

Saw the next two episodes of Spider-man on MTV tonight. In general, they lacked the odd false notes of last week’s episodes. The CGI method is still alternately intriguing and disconcerting – in noncombat situations, they often have people moving so slowly you expect Submariner to come swimming into the frame. Then they crank the [...]

the brigades of your army. StrategyPage has a table with explanatory text:

The rule of thumb is it takes three divisions to support one in the field:
o One division training/deploying,
o One division in the field, and
o One returning/recovering.
If the Army is to sustain is current deployment level, it needs 15 Divisions, just [...]

poems, an entire anthology edited by Mr. Establishment: David Lehman. Some are just bitchy. Some are too reflexive, of the “This is my fuck you poem, a poem about . . . ” variety. But some are quite enjoyable. Link courtesy of Michael Croft.

Fallout from the deaths of Uday and Qusai. Salam says reports of Iraqi doubts are real and the American occupation authorities “have fucked up again by first making the decision to kill the idiots and then not give us clear proof of their death.”
Some people remarked that the pictures of the bodies didn’t look much [...]