Unqualified Offerings

Holiday Mail – Readers write about things other than the fate of Western Civilization – that is, about the sort of stuff I’ve been blogging about this weekend. Bruce Baugh:
Granted that I’m not having one myself this summer, but…right on,
brother. The whole point of a burger is to get good meat, good condiments,
and do very [...]

cook your burger inside – e.g. when there’s a blizzard or you live in Manhattan or both. (I can’t really think of another reason.) Scroll down to “Gourmet Hamburger Recipes.”
Meanwhile, could someone wise in the ways of Blogger’s new interface help Diana finally get her item-specific permalinks working? I’m given to understand it’s possible [...]

I Get It Now – Your Talking Dog has been blogging in “haiku” all week, I finally realize. Call me a pedant, but I hold with those who argue that the true form of the classical Japanese haiku in English is not three lines of syllable count 5-7-5.
Why do I disagree with your ninth-grade english [...]

Wow – Fresh Bilge reprints a powerful letter to the editors of a Vermont paper from the mother of a gay son. The letter dates from April 2000. Excerpt:
Many letters have been sent to the Valley News concerning the homosexual menace in Vermont. I am the mother of a gay son and I’ve taken enough [...]

“Other stories pushed Pentagon assertions so aggressively you could almost sense epaulets sprouting on the shoulders of editors.” – Obudsman Daniel Okrent of the New York Times offers his own retrospective on the paper’s prewar coverage of Iraq’s WSD capability. Excerpt:
No one can deny that this was a drama in which The Times played a [...]

It’s a Party Party Weekend – For your grilling pleasure, particularly if you are a frou-frou sort, MSN offers 10 gourmet hamburger recipes. All of them assume you’ve bought into the Official Ongoing Ground Meat Scare and will cook your burgers for 14 to 18(!) minutes. They tend to involve things like cilantro and porcini [...]

Ultimate Godwin’s Law Violation – Hitler was worse than Hitler.

our poets to do this most of the time. We’d do it ourselves except poets are ever so much better at it.
If you want to get away from that sort of thing, you go to Frost, who recognizes the temptation and spends much of his time relentlessly demoralizing his surroundings. That’s the whole point [...]

Trent Lott, Ledeen should not be rendered to a friendly if heavy-handed foreign government or consigned to a “special access program” so that any information he does have about any Iranian agenda he does serve can be tortured out of him. We are the United States of America and we don’t do that sort of [...]

Follow-Up – The Army corroborates some aspects of Spc. Sean Baker’s story and denies others:
The U.S. Army has confirmed the story of a former Kentucky National Guardsman who claims he was beaten by other soldiers.
Spc. Sean Baker told a Lexington, Ky., television station that he was severely beaten by U.S. soldiers at the prison camp [...]