Unqualified Offerings frequently sees fellow bloggers alluding to receiving “hate mal” or just “nasty messages.” For some reason, that never happens to UO. The following letter is probably the single harshest e-mail this website has ever received, and even it crosses no bounds of propriety that UO would enforce, for all the excess of its […]

Remember the classic SNL skit, The Sinatra group, featureing a bunch of musicians in a McLaughlin-like roundtable? (Look! I find transcript for you! Blogs have many fine links, yes?) At one point Sinatra tells Luther Campbell that “You don’t need to work blue! You’ll never play the big rooms with that crap. Ask Redd Foxx. […]

Gary Farber finds an important article in Ha’aretz and draws the obvious conclusions.
UPDATE: Warning - Blogger anchors seem to be on the fritz again. Look for the Amygdala item titled “THE PERNICIOUSNESS OF THE CURRENT ISRAELI SETTLEMENT POLICY.”

Interesting e-mails re “A Fanboy’s Notes: the Morality of Power” below.
Reader/Gaming Buddy Greg Pearson writes:

…in regards to Unqualified Offerings’ superhero/villain post, the answer to that question would be Wildstorm’s The Authority by Warren Ellis (another entry on my three best comics of all time), which is based on exactly that premise. True, Ellis and […]

(This poem was published by Poetry Ireland Review in 1993. To forestall any outbreaks of cognitive dissonance I should remind readers that I supported Gulf War I at the time, and for several years afterward.)
Kuwaitis at the Beach

Armistice Day, 1991

Pieces of what we thought was the city
litter the ground.
The scraps of metal, bright as money,
jutting […]

Here’s what purports to be the complete text of Amiri Baraka’s “Who Blew Up America.” The lines are short but the poem is long. It is not, repeat not, an “aggrieved black poet with dementia” parody by the Onion. It is not the work of Scrappleface. The link is included for completists only, since there’s […]

Unqualified Offerings is “blood on the tracks.” And that’s a good thing!

This week’s reading assignment is Killing Monsters, by Gerard Jones, and this week’s assignee is Eric Garris of Antiwar.com, who, on the evidence of his imprecation against a new GI Joe toy in the Penney’s catalog, could really learn something.

Bruce Rolston of Flit weighs in. Gary Farber avers that he added an addendum to his original piece responding to Flit, but UO is darned if it can find it.

As of this CNN.com story, we are officially past the point where you can believe anything you hear about the Turkish smuggling incident. Now we are told that:
o The Turkish police let the two suspected smugglers go for “lack of evidence.” They’ve disappeared. (The smugglers, not the Turkish police.)
o The official 150g, nee […]

That Turkish Uranium bust turns out to be not kilograms worth but, well, here’s Ha’aretz:

The refined uranium caught by Turkish police Saturday weighed far less than originally thought, an official source in southwestern Turkey said Sunday.
It was originally believed that the Turkish paramilitary police had seized over 15 kg of weapons-grade uranium in the […]

Lengthy dissents from the “weapons of some destruction” meme have been issued by Gary Farber of Amygdala and Thomas Nephew of Newsrack. Gary concentrates entirely on Gregg Easterbrook’s article and omits all discussion of Unqualified Offerings’ own earlier piece on the same subject, presumably out of politeness to UO, since Gary’s piece is composed in […]

So UO’s roleplaying group has been talking about possibly doing a superhero game. We were discussing one of the problems of superhero games, which is that superheroes are structurally reactive - they spend their time thwarting the designs of bad guys. So we asked ourselves, what if you had superheroes that instead had activist agendas […]

Unqualified Offerings has been keeping Seablogger to itself, which is not very generous of it. Only partially-accurately billing itself as “A Nautical Journal,” Seablogger is the personal site of Alan Sullivan, poet, critic and old friend of Unqualified Offerings. Alan’s literary archive, Cruising with Catullus, is itself a treasure trove, just not as frequently updated. […]

Reuters reports that Turkish police arrested smugglers with 23 pounds - that’s critical mass - of weapons-grade Uranium. Glenn Reynolds reads more into the article than is actually there - he’s already convicted Iraq of being the “demand side” of the transaction. It may well be; the article doesn’t say. It could be Iraq trying […]

File this one under Hunh!

An Iraqi doctor who fled to Iran says the Iraqi leader has not appeared in public since 1998, and uses at least three men who act as his doubles. The exiled doctor says the doubles take President Saddam’s place at all appearances, including top government meetings.
Appearing on German television Thursday, […]

Christopher Hitchens, who has a lot more credibility with Unqualified offerings than anyone in the Bush Administration, offers some interesting anti-Iraq arguments in his final Nation column. Based on his own reporting, he places a high probability of an Atta-Al-Ani meeting in Praque, and he writes ruefully of friends of his among Iraqi officialdom who […]

Asked how to become a writer, Ray Bradbury famously said, First, write a million words. Asked how to become a great pro football coach, Steve Spurrier said, First, work through your Danny Wuerffel obsession.

Unlike lots and lots and lots of people, Unqualified Offerings can’t get worked up about Dick Armey’s response to a reporter’s question in Florida about the differences between liberal and conservative Jews. It seems like one of those questions whose very structure makes it impossible to answer without pissing someone off. (UO is working from […]

Eve Tushnet has an interesting item about trying political labels on for size:

…, what are my options? I can’t make up a word like “jfaoheihah” and use that to denote my political beliefs; I’m stuck with words that already exist, words that people understand.

She also doubts that the EU is a fascist superstate in the […]

Charles Kuffner of Off the Kuff was kind enough to ask me what I thought about libertarian Republican congressman Ron Paul’s recent manifesto on national security. The first thing I think is, it’s an awful lot to get through! I’m working on it, Charles, honest! but this is one statement for the Congressional Record where […]

National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said on TV that the Administration has evidence that Saddam is “sheltering members of the Al Qaeda terrorist network in Baghdad and helping bin Laden’s operatives in developing chemical weapons” and that “details of the contacts will be released later,” according to this story on FoxNews.com.
Wake Unqualified Offerings when […]

Has Greil Marcus really earned the right not to make sense? Must’ve. Unqualified Offerings was playing around with the new Google News and came across the Salon squib Marcus wrote on the terminal illness of Warren Zevon.

Playing: “Mohammed’s Radio,” the churchy live version from the 1982 “Stand in the Fire” (”Even Jimmy Carter’s got the […]

A lot of NFL observers have knocked Denver Broncos QB Brian Griese for being too injury prone. And that was before this happened.

Sensible thinking on “weapons of mass(?) destruction.” Get it from the New Republic now or get it from Unqualified Offerings three and a half freaking months ago! And the New Republic is having all sorts of bandwidth problems. You, ahem, never have to worry about that here.
(Apologies to the Washington Post for recycling their old […]

Your official Colby Cosh quote of the Day:

Any true, hardcore conservative would be happy to return us to the world of mail-order laudanum.

Why? Read all about it here.

As a public service for this site’s Canadian readers, Unqualified Offerings passes on the following warning obtained via the Elvis Costello Mailing List:

For those of you in Toronto, Sam the Record Man on Yonge (the big one) is giving out 2 free tickets to Ron Sexsmith’s wednesday show at the Phoenix when you buy his […]