THE TRUE NATIONAL SPORT: Unqualified Offerings has a great defense of NFL football. He also points out the goofy love of people like George Will for baseball:

It's odd that baseball gets the intellectual cachet, since football is a far more intellectually-challenging game. Offensive and defensive playbooks are famously complicated, and their intricacy and depth goes beyond the sheer volume of material to be memorized. Behind an offensive system is a set of principles given concrete expression in a precise vocabulary, combined and recombined into individual plays and entire game plans.

He also makes the point that a source of football's greatness is its rest period (which soccer and hockey and other "fast moving game" partisans love to point out, but derisively.) It adds suspense, Jim argues. And he makes this unique point:

One also hears scoffs at the idea that many football players should even be considered athletes. Aren't a lot of them fat, not to say steroid-soaked, lummoxes? Leaving aside the steroid question, a lot of football players are big, fat and tall. They're called linemen. As it happens, offensive linemen are likely to be the smartest players on the field. Other football players are much thinner and much faster. There is a mild advantage to being shortish if you are a running back and a substantial advantage to being tall if you are a receiver or a defender. Some quarterbacks are very slow and some are very fast. So let me turn the complaint around and throw in a totem word for good measure: Football makes productive use of a greater diversity of somatic types than any other sport. You can be a 340# lineman, a 240# linebacker or a 180# cornerback. What has baseball to offer the 300-pounder? Should they all just sit around feeling sorry for themselves?

NFL football is America's sport, in popularity and in society-wide importance. What other sport's championship is a national holiday?

WOOHOO: New Postrel. Virginia is not a daily blogger but she makes up for it by putting up completely quality posts. She brings the level-headedness to blog hysteria, just like you knew she would:

Bloggers have been getting pretty meta lately, writing a lot about the virtues and evolution of this medium. On her site, Joanne Jacobs offers some history, with reader assistance ("Creation of Blogworld"), and links to some blog-related items elsewhere ("Orwell's Bloggers"), with a wistful consideration of the possibility of micropayments-per-read. (It's not going to happen, although here's an alternative model that might work.) Joanne writes more as a reporter than as an advocate.

More typical are the blog promoters. Andrew Sulivan, for instance, brags "Tina Brown's Talk magazine has around the same number of subscribers per month that we have as [sic] visits." Glenn Reynolds goes him one better. His TechCentral Station column proclaims that "what is really going on is something much more profound: it's the end of the power of Big Media." It's the Reformation, says Glenn, citing Jim Bennett of UPI. Glenn is great, but this is ridiculous.

Read the whole post, of course. The Scene page is like two-thirds new stuff today. I note that she notes that somebody in A Beautiful Mind had their institution changed from Rutgers (where the guy actually went to) to Harvard (where Hollywood wants you to think he went to). What a load of crap.

I WOULD LIKE TO BE THE FIRST TO WELCOME OUR SIMIAN OVERLORDS: Boing Boing links to this piece which predicts the next step over humanity in terms of having perfect memories and super math skills will take the form of half-artificial intelligence, half simian cyborg-things. I guess we better stop eating gorillas.

SWEATSHOPS: Tim Blair comically links to this article about the downturn in the Bangladeshi economy since the attacks, which says a hundred thousand people have lost their sweatshop jobs in the past two months. The garment workers, mostly women, have the choice of factory work or going back to the farm. I like the sentiment of Tim's post.

J-E-T-S S-T-I-N-K: The Jets just died with a whimper, with time running out and going for a touchdown that wouldn't even tie the game, a play that went incomplete. The coaching was pretty suspect in what I saw. Bummer. Michelle Kwan won, though, if you were wondering.

HAPPINESS EXPLAINED: Catallaxy Files points out this article on happiness research within economics.

PRESIDENT MUSHARRAF: Gave the latest speech-of-his-life today --the previous one was when he announced he was allying with the United States. He makes good sense, and seems to be taking a firm stand towards peace with India. He positively channels LBJ at this point:

The second thing I want to talk about is the concept of Jehad in its totality. I want to dilate upon it because it is a contentious issue, requiring complete comprehension and understanding. In Islam, Jehad is not confined to armed struggles only. Have we ever thought of waging Jehad against illiteracy, poverty, backwardness and hunger? This is the larger Jehad.

Pakistan, in my opinion, needs to wage Jehad against these evils. After the battle of Khyber, the Prophet (Peace Be Upon Him) stated that Jehad-e-Asghar (Smaller Jehad) is over but Jehad-e-Akbar (Greater Jehad) has begun. This meant that armed Jehad i.e. the smaller Jehad was now over and the greater Jehad against backwardness and illiteracy had started.

Pakistan needs Jehad-e-Akbar at this juncture.

I'm not sure about this part, though:

Do we want Pakistan to become a theocratic state? Do we believe that religious education alone is enough for governance or do we want Pakistan to emerge as a progressive and dynamic Islamic welfare state?

What, those are the only two choices? I think welfare states have generally been proven bad. But this is a dynamic welfare state though. I don't know what that would look like.

MICHELLE KWAN: Just kicked a ton of ass on the tv. She looked exuberantly happy as she finished after hitting all her jumps and everything and not falling down (that's the only thing I know about figure skating, falling down=bad news.) I love the fact that she fired her coach and is doing the Olympics on her own.

Did you know she's dating a hockey player? Just like The Cutting Edge.

STATUE UPDATE: Here's a picture of it. Never mind the race-changing, they took out the guy on the right's pot belly. This is obviously a sell-out to the exercise-promotes-health-and-beauty crowd.

EEP: Charles links to this story about rampant man-boy love in Kandahar, which I thought was the more conservative part of Afghanistan. Apparently this was a prominent part of pre-Taliban life there that is now reemerging in the post-Taliban era. Say what you will about the Taliban, but at least they repressed everybody equally. Now you only get repressed if you're a woman.

Hey, weren't the ancient Greeks like that? Not like the Taliban, I mean what's reemerging after the Taliban which seems to possess a sort of general disdain for women. Not that the Afghans are going to be the cultural titans the Greeks were; more probably it indicates the all-around primitiveness of the culture there. I think.

NICE POST: From the USS Clueless on the racial transmogrification of New York firefighters from white guys into ethnically diverse guys in the statue version of that famous Iwo Jima-like flag-raising photo taken at the Trade Center site. Steven doesn't like it, but he posts a dissenting opinion too.

EQUITY WATCH: Here's something on the swing toward research exploring the biological differences between men and women.

BLOG TOOL: Here's the Google New Headlines page. It calls up different versions of the same story from different sources. Found via Boing Boing.

HUH? FILES: New Goldberg File: "Among the better and better-known blogger sites in our cozy little world are AndrewSullivan.com and KausFiles.com. The most promising up-and-comer is Glenn Reynolds's Instapundit." In what sense is Instapundit an up-and-comer?

NEW REPUBLIC PICKS UP ENRON: Yes they do. They have a similar take as The Economist's:

....Democrats want to use Enron as a vehicle for a broader indictment of the White House. They hope to link people's perceptions of the company--a secretive, arrogant, anti-worker institution that hid its cooked budget numbers with good p.r.--to their perceptions of the Bush administration. And in that way, Democrats hope to cast the White House as beholden to corporate fat cats once again--a perception they think was catching on before September 11.

This Enron thing seems to be more about perception than anything else. They also revive older stories about Enron's Kenneth Lay trying to influence White House energy policy.

Also on tnr.com: The new TRB, with Peter Beinart on South Africa's cretinous AIDS policy.

ECONOMIST PICKS UP ENRON: Their point is regardless of whether or not there's been any wrongdoing, appearances alone may hurt the Bush administration:

Whether the Bush administration can ride out the controversy will depend to some degree, of course, on whether there was any wrongdoing on the part of Mr Bush or other officials. But even in the absence of proven wrongdoing, the affair could still turn out to be uncomfortable, and prolonged. It contains elements of a classic political scandal. A huge company based in Mr Bush’s home state of Texas and led by his biggest campaign contributor files the biggest bankruptcy in American history. A small group of top executives sell shares before it collapses. At the same time thousands of employees are barred from selling, and lose not only their jobs but their life savings and pensions as well. Meanwhile there are revelations of frequent contacts between the company and top administration officials.


The problem for Mr Bush is that even if all these contacts turn out to be completely proper, the Enron case still embodies many of the doubts that Americans have about him: that he is too close to Big Business (and the energy industry in particular); and that his concerns are not the concerns of normal Americans. This is the president whom last summer Democrats were skewering for his desire to open up Alaska's oil fields supposedly “for his friends in Houston” and for allegedly letting industrialists put arsenic into drinking water.

DOG-EATING UPDATE: They're really pushing dog cuisine in Korea:

Next Monday's seminar in Koyang city on canine cuisine would feature ``Doctor Dogmeat,'' Chungchong University professor Ahn Yong-keun, who boasts 350 canine recipes, Yonhap news agency said.

Ahn would present a development strategy for the Korean dogmeat industry, suggesting Web sites on opening dogmeat restaurant franchises and developing new recipes, it said.

Also on the weird food front, Ten Turner is opening bisonburger franchises. Of course the first one's in Columbus. I expect the new Doctor Dogmeat's to open next door.

SLATE DIARY THIS WEEK: It's the travails of an immigration lawyer and it's real good. This comment stands out, I have no idea why:

Later in the day, I learn what makes America great: lefties. At the end of my meeting with client H., I write the date of his next appointment in my day planner. H.'s eyes light up: "You're writing with your left hand!" I acknowledge that I am, in fact, left-handed. In H.'s native Congo, apparently children are still strictly forbidden to write with their left hands. "There are so many left-handed people in America!" H. marvels. "Never in my life had I seen so many left-handed people until I came to America!"

I had no idea they were still forcing people to write with the non-sinister hand.

UPDATE: Yes, this is the third time I've said I had no idea in this post. Lousy stupid push-button posting for the people.....

ENRON: Ginger Stampley has what you need to know here and here. Crap, Oliver Willis has a whole page devoted to Enron.

PHILIPPINES UPDATE: We're sending troops there to train their anti-Abu Sayyaf troops. The article explains that Manila does not want foreign troops actually fighting on Philippine territory. There you go.

WHY I LIKE THE INTERNET: I can get pointers on where to get started in following Christian music. Or I could get hipped to obscure Fritz Lang movies. Or I can go on Amazon and read reviews that lead to more reviews of books I should be reading. (Amazon is like a miniature Internet, actually.) Maybe it is all run on love.

CHINA SLAMS GATES: China is awarding a big government contract to indigenous Linux-based software companies and excluding Microsoft, says this story from The Straits Times. Though apparently it's just for Beijing; Microsoft has a contract with Shanghai, according to the article. Via dangerousmeta.

ONLY OBVIOUS DEPARTMENT: Here's an op-ed from the Tacoma Tribune on why college football players should be paid. I can't think of a reason not to, except that if you pay one kind of athlete, why shouldn't all athletes get paid (like swimmers or gymnasts, sports that aren't cash cows like football and basketball.) But that's what revenue-sharing is all about, and the argument for paying college athletes is revenue-sharing, as you have these teams bringing in tons of money for their universities and seeing none of it themselves, legally, anyway. So why not share the wealth?

MODERN ISLAM: Tom on Samizdata brings the link to a Victor Davis Hanson article on what the Arab world does not get about us. Good read. Here's the quote Tom used to get your attention:

If Israel did not exist, the Arab world, in its current fit of denial, would have to invent something like it to vent its frustrations. That is not to say there may not be legitimate concerns in the struggle over Palestine, but merely that for millions of Muslims the fight over such small real estate stems from a deep psychological wound. It isn’t about lebensraum or some actual physical threat. Israel is a constant reminder that it is a nation’s culture—not its geography or size or magnitude of its oil reserves—that determines its wealth or freedom. For the Middle East to make peace with Israel would be to declare war on itself, to admit that that its own fundamental way of doing business—not the Jews—makes it poor, sick, and weak.

The first part of which reminds me of one of my favorite comic book covers, it was one of the Superman titles and was by Gil Kane, I can't find it on-line but it was one of those "imaginary stories" DC used to run, with the title: "If Superman didn't exist, someone would have to invent him." And it had these little Siegel and Schuster dopplegangers creating Superman in a sketchbook while hiding from the reptiloid alien overlords who had taken over the imaginary Earth Without Superman. Hanson's point is of course the reverse, that the Arab world needs something to hate and not something to find inspiring. If you find Superman inspiring, that is.

Hanson --though he doesn't come out and say this-- seems to have a beef with Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond, an attempt to explain Western superiority in terms of European geography, a book I have not read yet but it's on the list. Hanson wants ideas and culture to be the main thing that made the West different --which doesn't explain where that culture came from, and that's where Diamond's book comes in, I guess. I need to read more.

RISE AND FALL OF PEANUTS: Jim at Unqualified Offerings points out this Peanuts appreciation and analysis by Christopher Caldwell. Caldwell's theory is that Snoopy's takeover of Peanuts is what made it in its later years a run-of-the-mill strip. Snoopy, in the beginning, was a secondary character (like Frieda or Schroeder) and the farther Schulz embraced him and goofy dogs-are-cute humor the weaker his comics became --what Caldwell calls a "a calamitous artistic misjudgment." He also identifies the core of the good Peanuts years as Charlie Brown, Linus, and Lucy. I love this take on Charlie Brown's character:

Charlie Brown is caught in a bind, because his sense of his own worthlessness is also the source of most of his virtues. Of his worthlessness he’s fully convinced. ("They say that opposites attract...," he says of the Little Red-Headed Girl whom he can never work up the courage to meet. "She’s really something and I’m really nothing... How opposite can you get?") But Charlie Brown’s low estimation of himself means a high estimation of others. The tremendous 1959 strip in which he learns on the phone that his baby sister Sally has been born ("A BABY SISTER? I’M A FATHER! I MEAN MY DAD’S A FATHER! I’M A BROTHER! I HAVE A BABY SISTER!! I’M A BROTHER!") shows that Charlie Brown worships his family and his friends. He’s so empathetic that his favorite big-league ballplayer is not Willie Mays or Mickey Mantle but the bench-warmer Joe Shlabotnik. When Linus gives him a gripping recap of a football game in which a team facing a six-point deficit scored a spectacular touchdown with three seconds left, Charlie Brown asks only, "How did the other team feel?" He is a deeply good person.

I don't know how novel any of this is, as I don't think they're teaching Peanuts at the academy yet. (The textbook would have to be big enough to fit fifteen years of strips, which is the 1955-1970 period Caldwell calls the Golden Age.) But it's a great read if you're a Peanuts fan, or just want to read some good criticism of an important American comic strip.

ANALYSIS: From The American Prospect on why Japan isn't coming out of recession anytime soon. Here's a troubling excerpt:

As depicted in Richard Katz's book Japan: The System That Soured, Japan is composed of two economies: an extraordinarily advanced one that can compete against any other, and a backward one, sustained by government subsidies and political interests, that resembles Indonesia at its worst. In the late 1980s, the sheer superiority of top Japanese firms, along with the bubble created by bank lending, sustained the whole. But in the 1990s, as Japan's bubble burst and its most powerful firms moved offshore and acquired strong competitors, the inefficient, insolvent economy increasingly overshadowed the high-tech advanced economy.

The article is not so hot on the Bush administration's approach to Japan, or to Argentina for that matter.

There's also a review in this month's Prospect of James P. Gray's book, who was one of the "battlefield conversions" in the Reason drug issue.

GOOD POINT: On the death of WebVan from Photodude. It was a good idea but expanded too fast during the dot.com boom, he says.

HEY: Cornel West was on Bill O'Reilly tonight and they got along famously. I was disappointed. O'Reilly mentioned something about Larry Summers refusing to appear on his program before, so maybe he was nursing an old grudge by not getting on West's case, or maybe he just enjoyed talking to West.

EVEN IF YOU AVOID THE GIANT ROCK: The supernova gets you. Though the article says the supernova only wiped out molluscs when it hit Earth two million years ago.

INSOLVENT REPUBLIC OF PUNDITISTAN --HAS A RING TO IT, METHINKS: Both The Illuminated Donkey and Through The Looking Glass point out that a certain word has run its course perhaps.

Donkey's Ken Goldstein also has a good post on why Ringling Brothers versus PETA is not a case of good versus evil. I always knew clowns were scary.

GOOD ECONOMICS POST: From Megan McArdle, on why the Keynesians were/are wrong.

ANDREA SEE: Like me got a Claire Berlinski e-mail but she does a little research and googles her up. I love how dawson.com is the third site Google found.

CASTLES IN THE SAND: Saudi Arabia has knocked down an old Ottoman castle on its territory. The Turks are, of course, appalled. The castle will be replaced by a giant white cube with one door. And no satellite dishes.

GOLDEN TRIANGLE BACK IN BUSINESS: Burma I mean Myanmar is back on top of world opium production. How nice.

BY THE WAY: Here's the complete list of Mark Cuban's fines. I wanted to find a complete Rasheed Wallace technical foul list too but I can't seem to google it up. He is in the lead this season, though.

LOUSY SITUATION: American parents are lining up to adopt Afghan children, reports the Boston Globe, but it's not happening, for two big reasons:

Islam does not recognize adoption, and cultural tradition prohibits it. Orphans in Afghanistan tend to live with extended family - a cousin, aunt, or even a more distant relative. Orphans are not only defined by the loss of two parents; many Afghanistan orphanages take in children who have one parent missing, usually a father, to help relatives with the cost of another mouth to feed in a country where women routinely have six or seven children.

Even if Islam permitted the practice, logistics and US law would prevent any child from leaving the country. The US government doesn't allow adoption in devastated nations so soon after a war; the chance is too great that children designated as orphaned may have merely been separated from their parents.

Which is pretty crappy, as the article estimates there's 1 million Afghan orphans. They also mention this:

Just like during every world disaster, American families started calling adoption agencies as soon as the bombing of Afghanistan began, wondering how to give a home to the hundreds of poverty-stricken children they saw in media reports.

Is this the Jeffersonian wing of the American populace again --to use Meadian terminology? Or what? I mean, I'm glad people do that; it means as a nation we're not limited to giving money to Sally Struthers and UNICEF boxes.

TORICELLI WATCH: Here's Bret Schundler's campaign manager on the GOP's chances of winning Toricelli's Senate seat. How come Schundler isn't running? His name's out there, and he can pull a reverse-Christie Whitman and win a Senate seat after losing the governor's race. It's a good run down, though I don't know why he thinks Jon Corzine was better known than Bob Franks.

BUD SELIG STINKS: He's friends with the Twins' owner, who thinks he can get a better price from MLB if they contract his team than if he outright sells it. From the Times, again. Here's a piece from George Vecsey on the same thing.

PUTIN WATCH: The war in Chechnya is starting up again, says The Washington Post. What a sleazy war, there's abductions for ransom by Russian forces when there aren't abductions to kill people. Wouldn't it be neat if the U.N. or somebody adopted some kind of international rules for secession? Not that anybody listens to U.N. but at least then we'd have something to argue about. How did the Czechs and Slovaks do it?

"THE DAWN CAME UP LIKE THUNDER ACROSS THE COSMOS": The first appearance of starlight happened all at once and it was visually spectacular, says this New York Times article. But there's the usual disclaimer that nothing's been proven yet. Also, the guy who is making this claim says that "Perhaps 90 percent of the light from the early universe is missing." I'm no astrophysicist, but isn't 90 percent of the universe supposed to be dark matter too? Not that I have any clue what the correlation would be between those two statements.

By the way, is that "dawn came up" thing Kipling? The author references Kipling in the first paragraph and then drops that line, so it seems like it could be. I think Kipling is back in vogue these days.

BURQA-A-GO-GO: Vivienne Walt of USA Today becomes the latest person to go underburqa in Afghanistan. She reports on the differences between Kabul and Kandahar:

In dozens of interviews here throughout December, no man said women should stop wearing burqas, even though the Taliban had been routed from Kandahar, its spiritual birthplace. Their unwillingness to endorse a change didn't stem merely from the widespread support here for the Taliban. The burqa's place in Afghan society is more complicated and deeply rooted than that.

''It is from 250 years ago,'' says Haji Faqir Mohammad, 52, who repairs cars in Kandahar's central market. ''Only in King (Mohammad) Zahir Shah's time did some girls go to school without burqas,'' he adds, referring to the monarch who ruled from 1933 to 1973.

Kandahari men roundly reject a return to that freedom. ''We don't want women to be like they are in the West,'' says Juma Khan, 32, a spare-parts dealer in the city's crumbling auto-repair bazaar. ''We hope that this new government will bring a little freedom for women, but it has to agree with both Islam and Pashtun tribalism.''

She also reports that the sky-blue Afghan burqas are called chaderis, but then goes back to calling them burqas in the article. I guess I can keep calling them burqas too.

DEPRESSION: The Washington Post reports on the rise of drug therapy and the fall of talk theraphy within psychiatry as far as treating depression goes. Here, see:

As managed-care companies demanded a shift from open-ended Freudian models of treatment and lengthy periods of psychoanalysis, the antidepressants were heralded as quick and effective. An important reason they were embraced early on is that they were believed to have fewer side effects than earlier medicines.

In the period of the study and the five years since, the medicines have come to supplant psychotherapy in many settings, even though some forms of psychotherapy have been found to be as effective, and even though the combination of medicines and psychotherapy has often been found to be the most effective of all.

As far as I can tell, the entire field of clinical psychology is in a completely weird state, with people with medical degrees being mainly drug-dispensers and people without them being counselors. The article claims this is a result of insurance companies splitting behavioral care from medical care, which ensures "that the behavioral plans have no incentive to improve primary care and primary care doctors have no incentive to provide long-term behavioral care." Psych ailments are weird in general because there's probably still a stigma to them --like you're doing something wrong by being depressed-- and they're conditions, not diseases, meaning they can't be cured as of yet, only dealt with, like diabetes or something. They mention in the article that the most effective treatment is a combination of talk and drug therapy, so I don't know if that means we need better drugs or better talks.

Then the article has this sentence: "Part of a class of medicines that boosts the levels of a neurotransmitter called serotonin, Prozac and its sisters quickly came to be prescribed for a vast array of conditions and disorders." What, drugs are feminine now?

BLOG HISTORY: Oliver Willis points out this brief history of the weblog. It's particularly instructive for me; I've been only aware of the warblogs since I started this thing, which for me means mostly the recommended sites on Instapundit and Samizdata. You know, this whole blog explosion since the attacks, which isn't mentioned in Rebecca Blood's history above --which I guess is a second coming of the form. I feel like such a rube, or like Marco Polo "discovering" China, which might be the same thing. I like this paragraph (written over a year ago):

So why doesn't every bookmark list contain five weblogs? In the beginning of 1999 it really seemed that by now every bookmark list would. There was a bit of media attention and new weblogs were being created every day. It was a small, quick-growing community and it seemed to be on the edge of a wider awareness. Perhaps the tsunami of new weblogs created in the wake of Pitas and Blogger crushed the movement before it could reach critical mass; the sudden exponential growth of the community rendered it unnavigable. Weblogs, once filters of the web, suddenly became so numerous they were as confusing as the web itself. A few more articles appeared touting weblogs as the next big thing. But the average reader, hopefully clicking through to the Eatonweb portal, found herself faced with an alphabetical list of a thousand weblogs. Not knowing where to begin, she quickly retreated back to ABCnews.com.

This is kind of what I feel like seeing all the links on Oliver's page, and all the links those links lead to. Charles Johnson seems to be preserving a historical difference between warblogs and blogs by lumping the warblogs into his non-idiotarian heading and keeping the others under "bloggage." A big difference between warblogs (post 9-11 blogs) and the blogs that were there in the years before might be that warblogs are, in general, non-left leaning. Another difference could be that the warbloggers as a group might know a lot less about computers than the older bloggers but saw Glenn Reynolds posting without any kind of fancy site design, checked out blogger, found out it was easy and just started posting. That's how I started, anyhow. It would explain why most of the non-idiotarians use blogger. But both these differences are pretty speculative.

GREAT ARTICLE: From Wired on all the kids in Silicon Valley who have Aspergers syndrome. Computer programming appeals to the Aspergers mind; Aspergers minds get together in Silicon Valley, and since there's a genetic reason for Aspergers you get a whole bunch of kids with it. And here's an interview with an autism researcher from the same issue. Fascinating stuff.

MARK CUBAN WATCH: Now he's been fined $500,000 for comments after the Mavs lost to the Spurs on Saturday. Original comments here. The ESPN article points out that this is not the largest fine in sports history; that, for $1 million, belongs to former 49ers co-owner Eddie DeBartolo for something involving gambling --the article doesn't give specifics. But this has to be the largest fee in sports history for just talking out of one's ass. Don't get me wrong, though: I love Mark Cuban, but more because I hate NBA refs.

DWARF FINDS SOL: Also on the astroscience front, a brown dwarf was found orbiting a sun much like our own by Michael Liu of the University of Hawaii. It was right where the planet-forming area is supposed to be. Its discovery raises some interesting conjecture:

Finding the brown dwarf so close to the star suggests that solar systems formed around sun-like stars could come in many different shapes and planetary distributions. Liu said it is possible that there are planets similar to Earth circling the star inside the orbit of the brown dwarf. For instance, it would be possible for a planet to orbit the star at 93 million miles, the distance from Earth to the sun.

Whatever way our own solar system evolved, it's not the only way for one to evolve, is what this discovery suggests. I wonder if this'll end up being more evidence for the rare Earth hypothesis.

DARK NATTER: This article makes the interesting point that the theory of dark matter is a lesser-of-two-evils theory, as the greater-evil theory would involve changes to the laws of gravity, something nobody is ready to do. Here's a big quote to elaborate:

Perhaps scientists don’t entirely understand the way gravity works; perhaps Isaac Newton’s famous law of gravitation needs some revising. But that idea, says the University of Arizona’s Chris Impey, is not very popular.

"Definitely most astronomers are extremely unwilling to give up Newton’s law," he says. "So it’s essentially a choice of two evils: You either hypothesize that Newton’s law is wrong, and that our knowledge of the gravity theory is incomplete. Or, you hypothesize a fundamental microscopic particle that has never been detected in any physics lab, whose properties are only constrained by these astronomical observations. Which is a pretty uncomfortable position for physicists to be in."

The article even mentions the luminous ether in the same paragraph as dark matter, the ether being the proposed substance that electromagnetic waves were propagated by and which was discarded as unneccessary later. Huh.

LETTER OF THE LAW: The BBC runs this story on Chinese "hostess bars" avoiding vice prosecution by replacing female hostesses with transvestite hostesses. This is anecdotal evidence for legalizing prostitution, I imagine. Or not.

And Boing Boing has the link to this story about prostitutes in Tokyo Disneyland. And there's a ton of weird stories on that story's sidebar, too.

DAVE THOMAS: Died today, says Fox News. Apparently he's been on dialysis for a while and I know that's never good in the long-term. The short article has good details on his life --I had no idea he was inspired by Colonel Sanders himself.

IT CAN WORK, I SWEAR: Jim at Unqualified Offerings dissects my proposed CFL-NFL merger:

But UO sees some problems. First, it foresees new entitlements, with the Lower 48 required to provide the Northern Acquisitions with defenses and running games. Second, and sadly, since UO actually likes Canadian-rules football, we have no room for them here. A CFL field is 30 yards longer than a US-rules "pitch," and about a dozen yards wider too. But the trend in US football stadia has been towards ever-increasing intimacy, with the stands built closer and closer to the field. There is no chance whatsoever, for instance, of fitting a CFL gridiron into the Redskins' Fedex Field.

See, what we do is preserve the CFL franchises as they are now with the CFL rules and everything, make them play by NFL rules on NFL fields and make NFL teams play by CFL rules on CFL fields. This won't happen so often, as the CFL will become the Canadian Football Conference and submit its champion to the NFL playoffs or we'll split it down the middle into AFC Canada and NFC Canada. NFL coaches will probably bitch about having to do things different when they go to CFL cities, but they'll get used to it. I mean, it's all football, right?

Besides, if one merged the CFL with the NFL, it practically requires an end-of-season championship between the leagues. Since NFL teams can play CFL style ball if they have to (viz. Saint Louis) and CFL teams couldn't stop an NFL-grade rushing offense with a wall of zambonis, it would be pretty brutal.

Well, if we have a Canadian Football Conference we can give the Grey Cup to whoever wins that. Or we can give the eventual NFL champions the Grey Cup, a far older and nicer-looking trophy than the old football-on-a-stick. Throughout all this, I am assuming that the old quotas on American players on CFL teams will be lifted on a fully merged NFL-CFL, so there won't be a huge level-of-play difference. My plan is FOOLPROOF. I think.

Then Jim wrote: "WARNING: The preceding item contains a snare for pedants! Spot it if you can..." I....I....I don't know what a pedant is.....

WATCH ME GET SUED OR SOMETHING: The Rallying Point links to this list of Celebrity Critics of Scientology and I can't help but notice that like half of them are science fiction authors. There has to be some professional jealousy here of L. Ron Hubbard, right? They're thinking to themselves, "I coulda come up with a WAY better religion than THAT." For whatever reasons, science fiction is a kind of culty genre and it's practitioners have to walk a fine line sometimes between being artists and prophets speaking to converts and would-be converts and old L. Ron definitely embraced the prophet deal whole-hog. There are others who went half-way there into guruhood, like Kurt Vonnegut, and others who wanted to but pulled back at the last minute, like Philip K. Dick, as I think Thomas Disch mentioned in The Dreams Our Stuff Are Made Of.

By the way, here's a geek heirarchy I found via the null device (a completely great name for a blog, by the way). Science fiction authors are at the top; people who write erotic Star Trek fan fiction featuring themselves as funny animals are at the bottom.

NEW ANNE APPLEBAUM: On why you don't have to worry about the Euro ushering in a European super-state --it's already here. And it's not necessarily a bad thing, she seems to be saying, as it means Europe is not in a crisis. When and if crisis comes, then's when Europe will go back to the internal squabbling we all know and love.

JUST LET HIM GO: I thought this thing was blowing over, but now Cornel West is on Larry Summers' case again. While his back is turned, even. Link via Instapundit. My own favorite take on all this is Refugee From The Real World Summers is causing hurt feelings by not being shmoochie enough with Pampered Academic West.

CRISIS ON INFINITE BLOGS: So Charles has the link to The Illuminated Donkey --who has excellent taste in templates, I must say, and he's from the Garden State like me. And Donkey has the links to Blather and Boing Boing, and at that point I see links and links to blogs upon blogs, not just on those sites but on the sites they link to. And the majority of these blogs seem to be updated regularly. The Bloggerverse is way bigger than I thought. I mean, I know this is old news and everything. But there's a ton out there.

WHATEVER: This Opinionjournal dealie wants to present Ringling Brothers as the brave little circus standing up to PETA --as if Ringling Brothers wasn't run by nuts-- or so the evidence suggests.

Also on the PETA front is this article from the LA Times about dog-eating in Korea. Apparently during the Seoul Olympics the government tried to repress dog-eating, but now for the World Cup they're practically encouraging it. I mean, more power to them; I'm sure my cow- and pig-eating disgusts a lot of people too. Except the Koreans. I mean, is there any animal not on the average Korean restaurant menu?

I TAKE ISSUE: With Megan McArdle's comments on the new Reason. She sees an anti-redneck tone in Peter Bagge's great cartoon on Christian rock, which I thought was just exposing the internal contradictions of Christian rock, while finishing with the fact that they weren't all that different from the internal contradictions of unChristian rock. It's not online yet, but it'll probably appear here when it does. You should, of course, read as many of Peter Bagge's comics as you can find.

FLIT: Bruce points out that the Canadian troops in Afghanistan represent "the first-ever combat deployment of Canadian ground troops under American command outside the continent" --meaning by continent North America. It's all part of the slow, inexorable march towards statehood for Canada, I reckon. Which I think should only be agreed to if the CFL gets to merge with the NFL while keeping all the CFL rules (12 men on the field, goal posts in the inzone, etc.) alive in CFL stadiums, a la the American League-National League split in baseball. This is obviously the most important point to be made about any potential US-Canada merger.

EQUITY UPDATE: USA Today reports that the traffic accident rate for 16-year old girls is rising, while the rate for 16-year old boys is dropping. The percent difference for their insurance rates is shrinking too, though the number the article gives, 41%, still seems pretty big.

BY THE WAY: Instapundit has responded to kausfiles on alleged double standards regarding Glenn's treatment of Stephen Ambrose versus his treatment of Cornel West. I think Glenn got the better of kf, and always will, as long as Mickey updates his site in tiny little snippets (and saves his best stuff for the stuff he's getting paid for) while the professor goes into giant paragraphs, commentary being a hobby for him.

EXTINCTION WATCH: This time the giant rock is only 370,000 miles away. Great.

KAUSFILES: Makes the neat point that the amount of people sleeping in homeless shelters in Minneapolis has been going up regardless of whatever else was happening in the economy or with welfare reform. He then gives a warning against the rush to judgement:

Just looking at this chart, it's hard to blame any particular national policy change for the rise in homelessness. The chart does fit with the leftish explanation that blames rising urban rents (since they go up in good times even faster than in bad times). On the other hand, it also fits with the right wing explanation that Say's Law is at work here: as more beds and services are offered to the homeless -- and as their provision becomes routinized and destigmatized -- more people consciously or unconsciously wind up claiming them. ...When you next read about near-middle-class working mothers who drive to suburban food pantries to grab a free load of groceries, remember that without a whole lot more detail about these families, it's impossible to tell whether their emergence supports the first explanation (people are needier) or the second (people are less shamed).

Good stuff.

LATEST EURO STORY: One of the Euro coins may land on heads more often than tails. I expect the next Euro story to involve a water-squirting Euro coin that really no-fooling impresses the ladies at parties.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF KMART: If you ever wanted one, here it is, from Reuters. I would like a little more analysis, though, on why Kmart is losing so bad to Wal-Mart. I don't know if this is true everywhere, but at least where I live (Philly metro), the Wal-Marts are in the sticks, the Kmarts in the more urbanized areas.

FROM THE THANK YOU, SCIENCE DEPARTMENT: Science has tabbed the limit on the amount of time you can be really physically amorous with any one person: 30 months. From one of those British papers. Plus more on the differences between the genders on their approaches to S-E-X.

TAAAAALIBAN: Charles directs us to this little movie-thing about the guy answering the Taliban's phone. Like many a Saturday Night Live sketch, it has a good idea but repeats it excessively. I know Monty Python did that a lot too, but they always seemed aware of it, like they were winking at the audience: "Yes, this joke is terrible. Yes, we did it five times already. Yes, we're doing it again."

A NEW LOW IN SINO-GRAECO RELATIONS: Salon introduces Love Collision, about an astrology that combines the Greek and Chinese zodiacs. I love trying to do people one better when they ask me what my sign is by asking them what they are on the Chinese calendar --I think they should probably look into it, particularly people who are really horoscope-obsessed, the kind who are like "oh that's such a Virgo thing" and on and on. This Salon thing is offering a bigger astrology. Neat. Astrology, in my opinion, provides roundabout insight, which works for a lot of people.

WEST-SUMMERS WRAPUP: Ken Layne has a big post on the subject, where he compares Cornel West to George Hamilton. I think Hamilton knows he's a goof, though. I am reminded of older comments by Virginia Postrel on a similar subject; I include a large portion of her paragraph to provide context:

Writing in The Daily Princetonian, a former editor of the conservative Princeton Tory explains why David Horowitz would have gotten little p.r. from his anti-reparations ads there: "We're not apathetic. We simply believe in reasoned debate. When the Tory ran an article a few years ago on ex-gays, the LGBA took out an ad in the 'Prince' countering it. End of story. No burned papers, no problems." Some things don't change, and Princeton's civil, somewhat dull, political life is one of them. (This culture is one reason Peter Singer, whose academic freedom I staunchly defend, was a stupid hire. He's a glib, Harvard-style headline getter, not a Princeton-style serious scholar; not surprisingly, the philosophy department, which some rank best in the world, wouldn't have him.)

Cornel West sounds like the ultimate "Harvard-style headline getter." Why would Princeton want him?

DA DA DA DA DA DA DA DA BAT BOY: Transterrestrial Musings brings the link to this story of the future from Weekly World News, where Bat Boy is president. I may have to start following WWN, as apparently Bat Boy is a fixture there. This should also be a lesson to all of you out there that not all tabloids are the same, as the National Enquirer, which I do follow, only covers celebrities and it's COMPLETELY objective. I think.

PAT BUCHANAN --WRONG! Here's Brian Doherty picking apart Grampy Pat's new book. Doherty even lands the low blow, in the parentheses here: "To Buchanan (himself childless, though that may not be by choice), it is vital that the right people reproduce widely to prevent formerly European and American land and culture from being taken over by people of the wrong ethnic background." And I caught the end of Pat on the Bill O'Reilly show, and Bill was hardly yelling at him. I expected more from those two.

HOORAH: Duke finally lost. Now they just have to lose in March and my NCAA season is set.

OSAMA MAKEOVER: ABC News has a little tiny picture of the Westernized Osama picture. I think he wants to sell you something.

UPDATE: Rc3.org gives the link to the bigger leaflet picture.

SHARPENING THE CINEMATIC STEAK KNIVES: When I heard the soundtrack to I Am Sam was all Beatles covers, and that it was about a handicapped guy who was obsessed with the Beatles (or something), I knew we were in trouble. Now Charles Taylor in Salon has the proof:

I don't know the last time I've seen so disgraceful a display from a talented actor. It used to be that actors playing the mentally retarded suffered from a discretion that was its own kind of bad taste. They tended to downplay mannerisms and distortions of speech, and the unintentional message was that retarded people are unpleasant to watch. Penn delves into mannerisms and vocal distortions with an appalling eagerness. He makes the classic mistake of playing the handicap instead of the person. Sam....as played by Penn, he's no more than a device for an actor's display of technique, lumbering gait, distracted affect, galumphing, open-mouthed laugh and the nasal utterances of whatever strays into his brain. An actor affecting this demeanor to make fun of a retarded man would be pilloried. Penn's portrayal strikes me as equally insensitive. It's the nightmare performance of 2001.

To paraphrase that Cracker song, the worlds needs another famous actor playing a mentally handicapped person like I need a hole in the head.

Speaking of Beatles covers (and Salon), David Talbot made the point yesterday about Neil Young doing a cover of "Imagine" at that celebrity telethon and then releasing "Let's Roll." Which is a pretty bizarre contrast, but my own angle is that on the Neil Young version I can hear the lyrics a lot better than on the John Lennon original, where all you hear clearly is "Imagine there's no heaven" and then mumble mumble mumble. So I finally understand, now, that John Lennon was saying a world without religion would be the ideal one. Which as a part-time Jungian I have to sneer at, man being the religious animal and all.

WHY I READ DRUDGE: He has the weird stories, like this one about a rash of cattle mutilations in Montana. These cows are found dead with their reproductive organs removed with surgical precision. And predators won't eat the carcasses. Freaky.

I MAKE FUN OF ARGENTINA: Never minding that the home state will have four governors in one week. Due a split legislature and a week-long interregnum there will be co-governors for a week. They're even going to crash in the governor's mansion for a few days. They even get to pardon people. Link from Best of the Web.

HEEEYYY: New Hitch. Here's a quote: "Given a choice between protecting American civilians and protecting the client regimes that sponsor and coddle those who murder them, the Bush Administration has taken the second option every time." He's on about how Prince Bandar got all the bin Ladens out of the U.S. without question and with FBI blessing, apparently.

AP SAYS: "Facts Altered in Anti-Terror Effort" but it doesn't look like that big a deal. Apparently there's a doctored photo of Osama bin Laden on the surrender-Dorothy leaflets we've been dropping in Afghanistan. Hey, it's propaganda, do you expect total accuracy?

GOOD POST: From Ginger Stampley on the on-going cross-blog guns debate. She's got a take on why Ulster is a bad example of a successful armed insurgency.

D'OH DOLLY: Apparently Dolly the cloned sheep has developed arthritis and far sooner than one would expect for a sheep, which may mean a genetic defect caused by the cloning process. (The last part of that sentence is going to be in Attack Of The Clones somewhere, I betcha, read by Justin Timberlake in a monotone just before he gets slaughtered. This "'NSYNC in Star Wars II" thing is another plank in the George Lucas: Non-Genius school of Star Wars Studies.) Well, they've been telling us all along that this cloning this is far from perfected. I wonder if her forelegs will just sort of fall off next, like Simon's arm in Airplane II.

REYNOLDS BRINGS PETERS: Glenn has the link to new Ralph Peters in Opinionjournal. Ralph says, in regards to the Bush administration:

This is an oilman's administration, and long affiliation with energy affairs appears to have blinded an otherwise-superb strategic team to the abundant, well-documented evidence. Far from examining Saudi Arabia's deep and extensive complicity in supporting terror and undermining secular regimes throughout the Muslim world and beyond, the administration reflexively defends the Saudis. I do not believe the administration is intentionally dishonest--only that ties to the oil business and a half-century's assumptions prevent it from facing up to Saudi Arabia's support for, and funding of, the cruelest, most benighted and hate-filled version of one of the world's great religions.

He goes on to call Saudi Arabia the worst of both words as far as his arguments on stability versus instability go, and lists the various countries they're mucking around in (and he gives Indonesia a slight chance for continued existence as a nation, unlike his Parameters piece, where he gave it none.) Read, enjoy.

SPEAKING OF SWEET SPORT: Will Vehrs points out Kevin Holtsberry's take on the latest BCS fiasco. Gawd Nebraska got creamed, which ordinarily I'm fine with, unless when it's Miami who's doing the creaming. Shoulda been Oregon.

UPDATE: I meant, shoulda been Oregon in the title game. And why did the graphics last night have Nebraska as number two? That's the Ducks' spot.

WEST/SUMMERS UPDATE: Instapundit has a ton of stuff, of course. And Andrew Sullivan links to this ripping of West by Leon Wieseltier from 1995. I remember reading another anti-West piece more recently, I thought it was the Weekly Standard but you can't read anything old there now without paying for it. I like the Summers-West fight but am disappointed that Summers appears to be backing down; if this was wrestling they'd be kissing and making up while the audience boos. Summers-West is on the undercard of my intellectual pay-per-view, along with the Paglia-Foucault Fans Death Match, the Ted Rall-Ken Layne comedy match and the main event of Hitchens-Chomsky. Ah, sweet sport.

THE ANDREWSULLIVAN.COM REDESIGN: Man, I think this'll take some getting used to. Look at it. The text box is on the right now, and I, being an English speaker and thus wanting to read left to right, want my text box on the left. Now, obviously, my own page has the links on the left and the text on the right as well, but I don't have the split-screen style that Andrew and kausfiles have. And if you're going to go that route, I think having the text on the left ensures that you read the good stuff first and then surf the links after. It's the way I want to read things, anyhow. Maybe it's sort of an ideological web design choice on Andrew's part, putting the text box firmly on the right.

Speaking of kausfiles, he provides the link to this Jimmy Breslin column with this line: "We know how we acted in New York and doubt if it could happen anyplace else." Followed by this line: "A woman from the University of Richmond, a psychologist of the South, said, "If this was a NASCAR crowd, there would be panic." So even in moments of national tragedy the citizens of New York are still better than the rest of us. As kausfiles says, "There is some kind of clinical condition here. Even contemplating one of New York's proudest moments, Breslin can only achieve civic self-esteem by claiming superiority over those dumb rednecks." All this reminds me of this amazing anti-NYC rant from Boomer on the ConMack site which, I warn you, is not for the faint of heart.

DAVID TALBOT HAS BEEN DOING SOME THINKING: And he gives us this piece in the free area of Salon about doves turning to hawks. It's good; somebody hipped him to Walter Russell Mead and he really runs with that football --this is a review of Mead's Special Providence, in fact.

GOD MARYLAND GOT SLAUGHTERED: What a bummer. And I hate Florida. No wonder Jim Henley still hasn't posted since. Hey Jim, come back, there's always basketball.

MORE FROM THE NEW REPUBLIC: Peter Beinart has the new TRB on Muslims in South Africa, and why Islamism has its origins on the right, not the left. (As far as you can speak about such divisions these days.) Says he:

There's a lesson here for both the American left and the American right. For the left, it's that viewing militant Islam as a successor to the Third World "liberation" movements of the twentieth century (and therefore worthy of sympathy) is nutty. The Taliban surely showed that Islamism represents the opposite of gender and sexual liberation. And PAGAD and Qibla--which have allied themselves against the ANC's notions of "black" unity and empowerment--show that it often represents the opposite of racial liberation as well.

The lesson for the right is strangely similar. It's that militant Islam isn't a phenomenon of the left--powered by the anarchic poor and the intellectuals who harness them to create futuristic utopias. It's often a phenomenon driven by the American right's favorite class, the petit bourgeois: the people who tend small shops and tiny houses, who believe in family, faith, property, and order. And who see those values threatened by rising lawlessness, and by governments too corrupt and too ill-equipped to keep them safe. Such people turn to fundamentalism because it offers security, structure, and the perverse pride that comes from "standing up" to the West.

The "lesson" is based on the fact that the ANC wants to bring Muslims in, and thus can't really obviously jump in with the War On Terrorism.

IRAN AGAIN: Here's Franklin Foer in The New Republic about the role of the son of the Shah in promoting democracy. He also makes the point that current president Khatami is looking more like Gorbachev than anyone else: "a reformer, not a revolutionary." Then:

Khatami was, after all, trained in the conservative seminaries of Qum. As Fred Halliday noted in these pages ("Mohammed and Mill," October 5, 1998), his writings on Western philosophy followed praise of John Locke with passages about the hollowness of secularism. Then there's the fact that he has close allies with long histories of abetting Lebanese Hezbollah, and he has made no bones about "defend[ing] the values of the revolution"--a revolution that many Iranians now view the way Russians viewed the Bolshevik revolution in 1991.

THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS: Saw it last night, it was pretty good. It wasn't as neat and clean as Rushmore, which has its advantages and drawbacks --the drawbacks being the final wrap-up was a little forced and Owen Wilson's character was kind of grafted on when he wasn't being comic relief. The advantages were that Wilson and Wes Anderson could tell the story of a group of geniuses, instead of the one boy-genius of Rushmore, and get a little complexity and depth in there, though these guys obviously want to stay pretty far away from depth, which is --again-- a good thing.

And I guess a whole lot of famous people saw Rushmore and wanted to be in the next one, as this one has "known" actors in all the major roles. Bill Murray is kind of just there. I was all set to hate Gwyneth Paltrow but she grew on me as the movie went on. But did we really need Alec Baldwin narrating this thing? For you Rushmore fans, Max's teacher from his daydream and Max's father are both there in minor roles. And Gene Hackman was great.

PUBLISHED POSTREL: Here's Virginia's newest article from the New York Times. It's about the true elasticity of book prices, which is something real book-lovers don't often understand. Good read.

IRAN UPDATE: Yet another article (this one from USA Today) about huddled masses yearning to breathe free in Iran. Hey, they're making Coke there now. The article also makes the point that all those years of "Death to America" chants are making America more popular, not less. And --why-- it's the first appearance of the Iranian Street:

''The Iranian street is much more pro-American than the Arab street,'' says Afshin Molavi, an Iranian-American and author of a forthcoming book called Persian Pilgrimages. ''The government professes to care about the Palestinians but the people don't.''

The first appearance of the Iranian Street I've noticed, anyhow. I don't think it's talking to our old buddy, the Arab Street.

AND: There's a tiny little accompanying piece in there about the new Victoria's Secret in Tehran and other things.

IN THE NILE: Nice story about the importance of the Nile to Egypt from WorldNetDaily.

MORE ARGENTINE STUFF: Fredrik Norman has a good post on the subject.

PAT BUCHANAN BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH: Drudge brings the details on Pat Buchanan's latest volume, The Death Of The West. Immigrants and welfare states cause Europe's demise --which, I mean, he's probably right about the stifling effects of welfare states. Is it me, or is Pat Buchanan the version of Bill O'Reilly who takes himself seriously? No wonder Foxnews is winning. Anyway, the books seems to be about the non-proliferation of white people in the world. And other things; Drudge says that Pat says that "Islam has already surpassed Catholicism as the largest religion on earth." Which, of course, ignores spilts within Islam and makes Catholicism a separate entity from Christianity. But then Drudge makes Catholicism part of Christianity in the next paragraph, so this could just be Drudge being inaccurate. My own little peeve is, and I doubt I'll change anyone's mind about this, is that I hate American being lumped in with "the West." "The West" means California to me. Americans are Westerners (West Europeans) the way Romans were Greeks --to pick a no-doubt Swiss-cheese holey historical parallel. America owes a lot to the West but dang if it isn't Something Else. Well, I think so.

END OF INFINITY: Here's a New York Times article on why a universe whose expansion is accelerating will eventually be incapable of having a complete thought. Hey, wow, I'm already there, man. Since having thoughts dissipates energy you'll eventually run out of thoughts since you'll run out of energy, unless you can grow yourself at the same speed that the universe is growing --that is my condensation of the above article. You should probably read it for yourself.

OREGON SMACKED COLORADO: Now all we need is a Nebraska vistory to hasten the crumbling of the BCS edifice. Not that I want either them or Miami national champions. But playoffs will make me, for one, watch college football.

ENCOURAGING TREND: The Dreaded Purple Master blog reports on the use of nude and almost-nekkid calendars to raise funds. And I just noticed the Australian Ballet. Thank you, Yahoo Most Popular.

ON AND PERON: Yes, Argentina has its fifth president in two weeks. The new guy wants to ditch the free market. Well, okay. Doesn't a situation like this call for something drastic? I have no idea what a good short-term solution would be; the new guy is prmising a ton of public works projects. Andrew Hofer has a ton of analysis on his blog.

Andrew also tells of his impending move from Blogger. Now I am an HTML simp; without Blogger I have no blog. But --as Ev himself pointed out on the main page-- Blogger was named one of the "seven wonders of the web" by the Guardian. So maybe I don't have to worry; maybe Blogger means enough to Ev that he'll keep it up and everything, despite the nefarious Christmas attack on it. Maybe he'll find a good business model. I know for me Blogger means not having to know/deal with HTML, and there's probably a lot of other people out there like that. Blogger means convenience, and if you can provide convenience, you've got something. I ramble; my point is, I can't see Blogger going down anytime soon, as it's definitely filling a need.

WELL BOY HOWDY: Fatherhood is bad for sex life and makes men fat, says an Australian research team. Thank you, science.

BIN LADEN STILL LIVING: WorldNetDaily points out this ABC News story about the hunt for Mullah Omar and bin Laden, which has this little item:

Meanwhile, an intercepted phone call from Iran suggests that bin Laden is still alive — if not in the best of health.

A senior military official told ABCNEWS the communications, intercepted over the past few days, used a code word for the accused terrorist mastermind, and suggested "you should keep [bin Laden] off of the television. He looks bad, he looks sick and it is demoralizing to his people."

That's to be expected --I think he needs dialysis to live. But why is Iran talking up bin Laden? I thought they hated the Taliban, and the puritanical Wahabbi stuff. Maybe it was just sort of a friendly suggestion, and they went into makeup tips next.

THE FUNNIES: Glenn Reynolds links to this Tom Tomorrow strip about how 2001 the year did not live up to 2001 the movie. Typical Hollywood. I would like to add that, in 2001, there were no Giant Babies, no Pan Am flights to speak of, and no monoliths droning angsty choruses. (My brother pointed out to me that the cover of Who's Next has the four of them right after they pissed on a monolith, which must have been really obvious when it was record-sized but which I never noticed on the tiny CD cover.)

AVOID THE NOAM: Little Green Footballs points out this review from the Philadelphia Inquirer of Noam Chomsky's latest, 9-11. It is not a rave review. And Chomsky fans can't complain he's being covered up here, unless panning his book is like censoring him. Or something.