Unqualified Offerings

Literary critic Hugh Kenner is dead. (Via Electrolite.) That is a travesty. So is a famous computer program Kenner wrote – Kenner being, to the best of my knowledge, the only renowned scholar of modernism who was also a regular columnist for Byte magazine. Travesty is a text-transformation algorithm that makes new strings from old, [...]

Andrew C. Brown, author of The Darwin Wars, e-mails that he maintains a page of useful OpenOffice macros. As he recognized, one of his macros, which cycles through header styles, was the key to my style-change problem in OOo Writer. I downloaded his file, copied the header-change macro over, spent 10 minutes subbing my style [...]

contribution Tolkein scholarship was that of soul-singer Sam Cooke. “Don’t know much about the French-eyed Took,” Cooke avers, but this obscure relatiion on Frodo’s mother’s side was hardly central to the saga even if Cooke did know something.

Appointment in Samarra – Little new information on the arrest of the wife and daughter of Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri yesterday. The most substantial reporting comes from AP’s Jim Gomez, who writes

MacDonald gave no details on why the wife and daughter were seized, but American forces have frequently arrested relatives of fugitives to interrogate them on [...]

The Other Casualties – On Stand Down, I have a piece about a new Army News report on the high incidence of brain injuries among our wounded in Iraq.

Don’t Know Much About History – Glenn Reynolds has an odd “response” to a Julian Sanchez report on the shuttering of al-Arabiya’s Baghdad office:

I also don’t recall a lot of complaining when, under Clinton, we shut down pro-Milosevic TV stations in Yugoslavia. But that, I suppose, was different. Somehow.

Well, let’s see. According to a contemporaneous [...]

Cyber-Terror Watch – The traitors appear to have hacked the Weekly Standard site. There’s even a subtle “chickenhawk” dig:

The second thing to remember, for most of the people declaring where they’d rather fight the terrorists, is that they are not personally doing much of the fighting. Who’s to say if you were coming up [...]

Poetry Wednesday – Sasha Volokh has published quite a nice translation of an Akhmatova poem.

Imitation Tech Blog Item – Kevin Brennan writes

You can assign keyboard shortcuts to text styles in both MS Word (at least Word XP; I don’t have earlier versions handy so can’t check) and in TextMaker (a nice lightweight word processor that I like because I can use it on both my laptop and on my [...]

More good news from Iraq: We’ve arrested another wife and daughter of a fugitive:

U.S. forces in Iraq say they have arrested the wife and daughter of a top Iraqi fugitive suspected of masterminding attacks against coalition forces. A military spokesman says the wife and daughter of Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri were taken into custody Tuesday in [...]