Where You’ll Find Me - Blogging will be light today and tomorrow as Your Talking Dog and I rendezvous and run the Marine Corps Marathon through DC and Virginia. Heaven knows if anyone wants to come out and cheer we’d love to see you. I still look relatively like my LiveJournal picture, and I’ll be […]

Helpful Hints - Suitability of common household objects for crushing ice:
A can of Progresso soup - Good.
A Le Creuset dutch oven - Much better.

our borders is in not just practical but even rhetorical decline in George W. Bush’s Republican Party. The term “modern-liberal” has been the libertarian term of disdain for the managerialist philosophy that conquered the Democratic Party between the Progressive Era and the New Deal. The time has come to add “modern-conservative” as a description of […]

A Fanboy’s Links - Comics journalist and Stan Lee biographer Tom Spurgeon has started a new site, The Comics Reporter. I expect to make it a regular reading stop, and I expect most lovers of comics will.

the case that if the Libertarian Party produces better Presidential candidates it will get more votes. I think it’s the other way around: if the Libertarian candidate starts getting more votes it will attract better candidates. Right now the prize is not worth the effort to claim it. That would change with the increase in […]

Music Notes - What have we got for you today? The LA Times talks to Nick Lowe about his durable, protean “What’s So Funny ‘Bout Peace, Love and Understanding.” Newsweek profiles UO Main Man Elvis Costello - bonus points for finding especially angular euphemisms for the “former angry young man of new wave” cliche that […]

Kerry Ripped by Swift Boat Lesbians for Truth - And
Meanwhile, on the campaign trail, President Bush blasted Army reservists who refused to carry out a convoy supply mission in Iraq last week, saying, “What do they think this is, the Alabama National Guard?”
From The Borowitz Report.

RIP - Anthony Hecht is dead. Michael Dirda has a decent appreciation.
There were years when Hecht was my favorite living poet. The first time I met the man was in a small chain bookstore outlet I managed in an unobtrusively wealthy neighborhood of Washington, DC. I helped a grandfatherly-looking shabbily-dressed gentleman find summer reading list […]

Dept. of Famous Victories - I ran out of Samarra puns months ago, so I’ll just note that the unraveling of our latest Samarra victory took even a little less time than I anticipated:
Samarra desertions show challenge of training Iraqi recruits
BAGHDAD, Iraq - At least 300 Iraqi soldiers abandoned their 750-man unit after they were […]