Unqualified Offerings

Cue Lee Greenwood - TalkLeft picks up an ABC News report that, well, this:

According to Time, activities leading toward release of the 140 prisoners have accelerated since the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case. It said U.S. officials had concluded some detainees were kidnapped for reward money offered for al Qaeda and Taliban fighters.

Whoops! […]

Weekly Fitness Blog Item - 161 pounds, 32.5″ waist. Strangely for a holiday week, that’s three pounds below last Sunday, but like I said, the actual number has been bouncing around within a four-pound range. There was a typo in last week’s waist figure too - it should have read “32.75,” not 34.75.
Goal for the […]

with the graphic novel, as in ready to set it aside? Not remotely. As I suspected, I had to start writing it to figure out what I had. Now I know. I know where it’s going and, more or less, how it will get there. Bill intends to have thumbnail sketches of the first chapter […]

Metrics System Redux - Here’s a measurement I missed until now on Chief Wiggles’ blog - size of the “green zone.”

I was relieved to see the green zone expanded back to its original size as the 14th of July Bridge was closed again, after being opened for only a few weeks. The two bombings of […]

Our Man Deeds - Have just discovered the newish Deeds blog by a CPA employee in Iraq. I highly recommend it. I will confess to reading quite a bit of it “against the grain” - I think it needs to be - but it’s a useful addition to your “perspectives collection” and it has some […]

Shorter Jim Henley: Term limits, phooey. Longer Jim Henley: “The Term Limits Illusion?” at Liberty & Power.

Time’s Up - There’s been sufficient time spent appreciating the President’s gesture in visiting a group of American troops in Baghdad yesterday. Analysis may commence. Juan Cole is a good place to start. Excerpt:

Instead, the President had to sneak in and out of Iraq for a quick and dirty photo op, clearly in fear of […]

The President Went to Iraq and All I Got was this peevish resentment that it upstaged Hillary Clinton. Criminy, Hesiod, give it a rest. It’s a holiday!
By the way, you might want to look into President Clinton’s 1999 trip to Greece. Actually, all Democratic partisans prone to romanticize the Clinton Administration’s “multilateral” diplomatic success might […]

Trypto-fanned - A transfer of stuffing has been effected. I am zonked. The usual wonderful holiday dinner with my sister’s family, and the kids unusually behaved. Thankful for:
La Familia Offering, ESPECIALLY Mrs. Offering.
Certain physical constants which, if their values fell outside a narrow range, would preempt life as we know it.
Particles and fields of force.
The […]

Hear Hear - Kudos to President Bush for making a risky landing at Baghdad International Airport to spend Thanksgiving with some of our troops in theater. There’s a lot more one can say about the trip as reported, but the first thing to be said - Good for you, Mr. President - deserves to stand […]

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 […]

You don’t need to put a lot of effort into refuting Jonah Goldberg’s lame attempt to steal F.A. Hayek for conservatives. Julian Sanchez has already done it for you. Dang but those fish corpses look messy in that barrel, though.

Gene Healy sums it up:

This, then, is the legacy of unified Republican government: a tragically unnecessary war, an expanded entitlement state that eats its young, and a whole lot of stuff named after Ronald Reagan.

I think he should have called the item in question “A Dime’s Worth of Difference,” though, for reasons that will be […]

This entry from Poetry Daily the other day is actually pretty good. The trick with the commas makes the poem. That the poem already makes a certain amount of sense to me is bittersweet; the certainty that it will make more sense as time goes on, bittersweeter. That’s a word. Look, there it is at […]

So I’m fulfilling my NaGNoWriMo commitment this week, and writing my manuscript in the OpenOffice Writer module. There’s a lot to like about it. But here’s a big thing not to like. Near as I can tell, I can’t attach text styles to keyboard shortcuts. Formatting a comics script involves (in my case) cycling among […]

Bryant Durrell of Population: One instigated a new group blog devoted to roleplaying games, and invited me to join. I join Bryan, Ginger Stampley and others at 20′ by 20′ Room. Inaugural post forthcoming in which I compare non-gamers to Hitler. (Kidding!) Mission statement excerpt:

Roleplaying games are really interesting.
From that sentence, all else flows.

I’m also […]