Update

Blogger has been slow today - that is, even more than usual - and I wasn't able to post at all for most of the day. However, I wasn't lost for stimulating conversation, because I did get to meet Michael Totten this afternoon - an event that deserves, and will get, its own post.

My project for the next week is to get a handle on capacitance and inductance (my textbook helpfully explains that they're analogous to the spring and the block, respectively, of an oscillating mechanical system) in time for Thursday's final. After that, the focus shifts to polishing my computer skills and looking for work.

As for this blog, which is now almost a year old, I've been pondering setting up some kind of posting schedule so that I can better balance my time between blogging and ... uh, whatever it is that exists outside of blogging.

New Afghan Blog

Hat tip: Iraq the Model.

Waheed is the name behind Afghan Warrior, "Afghanistan's First Blog". Waheed is a 20-year-old guy who works for the US Army as an interpreter. In his debut post, he talks about the ANA (Afghan National Army) and about how things have changed since the fall of the Taliban. Go check out his blog - and mark it on your browser.

Protestors Surprise Prince Charles

Protests greet Prince Charles in New Zealand. During a recent visit to New Zealand, Prince Charles was confronted by bare-breasted women protesters. According to the article at This Is London, 'Two women launched a topless protest against Prince Charles during a walkabout in New Zealand. They took Royal security by surprise as they removed their tops within view of the prince in Wellington. One woman, 22-year-old HanaPlant, stood on a wall yards from where Charles was meeting the crowds outside the city hall. As he approached. she took her top off and started shouting "Shame on you, death to the monarchy". On her stomach were slogans including "Get your colonial hands off my breasts". Within seconds two uniformed police officers tried to cover her and she was led away in handcuffs. Minutes later a second woman, Holly Emma Goldman, staged a similar protest even closer to the prince.'

Guns don't shoot people. Cats do.

Just your typical cat-shoots-man story.

IKEA's Quandary

Reality trumps satire.

OSLO, Norway (Reuters) - Swedish home furnishings giant IKEA is guilty of sex discrimination by showing only men putting together furniture in its instruction manuals, Norway's prime minister says.

IKEA, which has more than 200 stores in 32 nations, fears it might offend Muslims by depicting women assembling everything from cupboards to beds. Its manuals show only men or cartoon figures whose sex is unclear. ...

Read the whole article here. And take a moment to reflect on the wisdom of Prime Minister Kjell Magne Bondevik's words.

New to Blogroll

Portland's own Sean La Freniere. Thanks to Michael Totten (via e-mail).

John Bolton

Just as it looked like George W. Bush might be nudging toward multilateralism, he goes and appoints John Bolton as his ambassador to the United Nations. There could be no clearer sign that the contempt for the international organization, which was such a prominent feature of Bush's first term, will extend into his second term with still greater force and eloquence.

Thank G-d.

I can't improve on the title of this Slate piece by Fred Kaplan; neither could Our House, to whom the proverbial hat tip. Go read all of John Bolton's qualifications ... and join me, won't you, in hoping that he goes on to p*** off the UN just as much as he has Fred Kaplan.

Wrongly Imprisoned, Free At Last

With ten dollars in his pocket, an innocent man in Louisiana becam a free man after 24 years in the infamous Angola prison. DNA evidence freed him. From the Chicago Tribune, via Yahoo:

In May 1981, when Michael Williams was 16, a jury here rejected his claim of innocence, deliberating for less than an hour before convicting him of the savage beating and sexual assault of his math tutor.

Arrested, tried and convicted in just three months, Williams was sentenced to hard labor for life with no possibility for parole and dispatched to the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, one of the nation's most notorious and deadly prisons.

At times the institution lived up to its reputation. In one incident, Williams said, he was stabbed 16 times.

Now, nearly 24 years after his arrest, independent DNA tests by three laboratories, including the Louisiana state crime lab, show what Williams has long contended: He is not the man who committed the crime. ...

Read the whole horrifying story here:
Jailed 24 years, freed by DNA

(Hat tip: Discarded Lies.)

Academic Bias Strikes Again

Don't miss this piece by Joel Mowbray in the Washington Examiner:

In academia today, "academic freedom" protects those who compare the 9/11 victims to Nazi higher ups, but it does not cover a professor with the temerity to challenge the beliefs of Muslim students in a single encounter which constituted, in the words of his boss, an "assault on their dignity."

That's the story of Thomas Klocek, a part-time adjunct professor at DePaul University, who happened to be on the wrong side of the political correctness fence.

With no current income and facing the possibility of losing the health insurance he desperately needs for a serious kidney condition, he has decided to go public with his fight. ...

Read the rest at the link. Hat tip: LiberalHawks.

Random Page Titles

You, too, can create random page titles. (If I can do it, anybody can.) Just follow these simple instructions.

Credits: Melissa Etheridge, The Indigo Girls, Sheryl Crow, Juliet Wyers, Joan Armatrading, Cris Williamson, Kirtana, k.d. lang.

Update

I'm nearing the end of the semester for my Physics class - the final's Thursday of next week. Blogging will be intermittent through then, while I enhance my understanding of capacitance, inductance, and ferromagnetism. (How many angels can dance in the enclosed area of an inducting coil ... ?)

Browser wars. I'm trying really hard to get excited about Firefox. Yup, I know it's got all kinds of advantages from a security standpoint. And I'll probably appreciate it better after I get finished transferring all my 250+ bookmarks over from Safari - as far as I can tell, there's no way to import them en masse. Functionally, I don't know that I see that much difference: I like that all the formatting buttons work in Firefox, but I generally get along fine with a clipboard full of blank tags. Then again, I'm still quite fond of the AOL for Windows browser - every time I blog from my PC, I find myself thinking, "Dang! This is easy!" And I get tired of those messages that say "Safari Can't Find the Server with Both Hands and a Hunting Dog." (I think Mac is a good product, but I've never shared the unreserved admiration for it that Apple cultists possess.) Now if AOL could only add some drop-down toolbar menus like Safari and FF.

Who comes up with those ads for LowerMyBills.com? Do they actually believe they're going to get business that way? The long pig swarming with flies is bad enough. But the gingerbread man giving a sperm sample is really more than I can take.

Phone Records Corroborate Armanious Suspect's Confession

... and hair and fiber samples may substantiate it further, according to this article by Tom Troncone at NorthJersey.com.

Records of a telephone call between the two men charged in the slaying of an Egyptian family corroborate a detailed admission by one of them, authorities said Monday. The confession by Edward McDonald and records of his phone call to former prison buddy Hamilton Sanchez in the hours before the killings were enough for prosecutors to charge Sanchez in the Jan. 11 massacre, authorities said. Prosecutors are still counting on evidence being processed at the FBI forensics lab in Washington to cement their case. Hair and fiber samples taken from inside the home Hossam Armanious shared with his wife and two daughters should place the two alleged killers there, said John Conway, an FBI spokesman. "Confessions are always great," Conway said. "But confessions aren't always enough to get a conviction. We do have physical evidence and a high level of confidence that the physical evidence will help link them together."

Read the whole article at the link for details of how Edward McDonald and Hamilton Sanchez allegedly plotted the robbery to repay a debt owed to an unnamed party in New York.

Dreams Into Lightning will post any further significant developments on the Armanious-Garas murders. At this point, however, it appears unlikely that any new information will change the emerging picture of the crime, which appears to have been a common robbery with an uncommonly horrible ending.