Catching Up with the Five of Hearts
I've begun reading How America Lost Iraq, a book by Aaron Glantz, a war correspondent for the liberal Pacifica radio network.Glantz's premise is that the Iraqi people were extremely receptive to the U.S. after Saddam Hussein's overthrow, but their support has been lost because of the imprisonment of innocent people, an inability to restore basic services like water and electricity, and widespread anarchy.
The first chapter takes satisfaction in the downfall of Huda Amash, a Saddam loyalist who was the five of hearts on the U.S. most-wanted card deck and the highest ranking woman in Iraq. She was arrested in Baghdad in May 2003 and remains in custody, where she's reportedly suffering from breast cancer.
One of Glantz's friends, a documentary filmmaker, described how she ran a youth conference he was permitted to attend:
"Under her guidance," James [Longley] explained, "the conference was turned into a series of Stalinist rallies for the Great Leader. Attendance was mandatory. In the great hall of the convention palace children's choirs competed with dancing Japanese peace activists while odes to Saddam were screamed out in fake spontaneous outbursts from the crowd. A large number of doves were released in the hall and flew madly around the edges of the room, searching frantically for a way out. I sympathized with them entirely."
Today's Washington Post includes a commentary from a childhood friend of Amash, who grew up in D.C., asking for her release.
Her friend reveals an unusual aspect of Amash's background -- she was in the inner circle of the man who ordered her father's death:
To get around Bayesian filters, some spammers have resorted to ASCII art, spelling out words with characters and really small text.The family soon returned to Iraq, and we lost all contact with them. Maj. Ammash's career prospered; he rose to be defense minister. In 1981, however, Saddam Hussein convened a meeting of party leaders and tearfully read out the names of those of his old comrades who were to be led from the hall and shot on the spot. Salih Madhi Ammash was among them.
I've been online long enough to remember when people used to create ASCII babes you had to print to view. Back in the late '80s, whenever I retrieved a printout from the University of North Texas computer science lab, there were always a bunch of suggestive or even explicit ASCII trollops waiting to be picked up.
It wasn't easy for the object of your affection to be vulnerable to smudging.
In the comments to a Workbench entry on an alleged credit card theft, I've been debating Chad Irby on whether customers were notified properly once theft of their card information was suspected.After an exchange in which both of us seemed to become less informed over time, I decided to do something unbloglike. I contacted the site's publisher to ask when they notified customers.
ProtestWarrior confirmed that the possible theft was discovered in February, but customers were not told until a July 5 web posting on the site.
With the impending release of Atom 1.0, its creators are taking the unusual step of disowning version 0.3, which has been widely implemented by Google, Six Apart, and other developers. Sam Ruby will revise the Feed Validator to reject all 0.3 feeds with an error message later this year, even if they fully followed its spec.Mark Pilgrim on the move:
Atom 0.3 was just some guys (and gals) dicking around on a wiki.
Mark Pilgrim during the release of version 0.3:
Atom 0.3 is out. Mark Nottingham wrote the 0.3 spec. I wrote a Movable Type template. Rael Dornfest wrote a Blosxom plugin. I am now publishing a live 0.3 feed with both excerpts and full content. ... I've updated the Feed Validator to validate Atom 0.3 feeds. ... When developers update their applications to support Atom 0.3, they should support Atom autodiscovery too.
Louisiana's Road to Nowhere
Despite its name, Interstate 49 runs entirely within Louisiana, connecting the cities of Lafayette and Shreveport. The highway will link New Orleans and Kansas City, if existing plans are carried out.I appreciate the existence of this road on the 1,104-mile jaunt between Florida and Dallas, because it makes possible a jump from I-10 to I-20 while still making good time westward. But it could be the most featureless interstate I've ever driven.
There's nothing to recommend this drive. No cities or stops of interest, aside from a Semolina restaurant in Alexandria I loved until a suspect shrimp dish made me decree a no-seafood policy on road trips. No Kodak moments. No nice hotels. No traffic.
The lack of traffic's a plus, of course, but it raises the question of how such a little-needed highway got built. I'd love to find out which Louisiana politician had enough juice in Washington to get I-49 funded in the '60s and '70s.
I think I-49 induced boredom motivated another driver to road rage. Without provocation, he intentionally kept himself in my blind spot for a half hour, whether I was driving 65 mph or 85 mph. (Seemed like a dumb thing to do in a car with federal license plates that identified his agency and vehicle.)
The only sizeable city is Alexandria, but the highway deftly avoids any of its picturesque or historic areas. The last two times I've stopped, I didn't find anything but miles of grubby commercial strip malls and uninviting hotels on MacArthur Drive, so I jumped back on I-49 and kept going.
Markos Moultisas of Daily Kos is a traitor to this country, according to evidence uncovered on RedState about comedian Margaret Cho's dog:A minor point, naming one's dog after a terrorist, and lauding those who do? Yes. But a helpful reminder nonetheless of a phrase worth remembering: they're not antiwar -- just on the other side.
Don't tell anyone, but I named a dog after Molly Ivins.
El Prodigio de Rafael Palmeiro
A commenter on SportsFilter echoes the sentiment of a lot of baseball fans, describing Rafael Palmeiro as "very good for a long time, but never great."
There are two reasons Palmeiro's Hall of Fame credentials should be absolutely beyond question.
Most consecutive 100-RBI, 35-home run seasons in Major League history:
Jimmie Fox 9 Rafael Palmeiro 9 Players with at least 3,000 hits and 500 home runs:
HR RBI Hank Aaron 755 3,771 Willie Mays 660 3,283 Rafael Palmeiro 566 3,001 Eddie Murray 504 3,255
Palmeiro's a humble player and boring interview, but these numbers speak for themselves. The suggestion by Skip Bayless that he doesn't belong in the Hall should forever disqualify him from the practice of sportswriting.
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