Forget HTML, CSS, RSS, XML, OPML, Google boxes, and auto-linkbacks. Want a better weblog? Read Strunk and White's The Elements of Style.

5:18:55 PM  comment []    

Schoolboy Suicide Attacks Dismay Palestinians

School over for the day, the three boys told their unsuspecting parents they were off to see friends.

Hours later, their bullet-riddled bodies were lying in the dirt outside a Jewish settlement in the Gaza Strip. Israeli troops had shot them before they could reach their target.

Suicide notes left by the 14-year-old classmates showed they knew the venture would end in their deaths.

The Israeli army said the boys, named by relatives as Youssef Zaqout, Anwar Hamdouna and Ismail Abu Nadi, had been carrying home-made pipe bombs, an axe and knives.

This is, of couse, horrible. Even Hamas thinks so. But the reaction of one of the mothers troubles me.

Zaqout's mother could hardly choke back her tears. "What can I say? They killed my boy," she sobbed.

THEY killed your boy? That seems to me something akin to John Wilkes Booth blaming Lincoln for the broken leg he suffered jumping down onto the stage at the Ford's Theater. After he'd assassinated the President.   

2:30:53 PM  comment []    

Gunmen stole gold, crucifixes, escaped monks report

Three Armenian monks, who had been held hostage by the Palestinian gunmen inside the Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity, managed to flee the church area via a side gate yesterday morning. They immediately thanked the soldiers for rescuing them.

2:20:46 PM  comment []    

In 1948, five Arab nations invaded the newly declared state of Israel. Jordan took over the West Bank, and Egypt took over the Gaza Strip, and for the next 19 years they controlled this territory yet never lifted a finger to give the "Palestinian people" their state. Arab regimes also refused to allow Arab refugees from Israel to become citizens of their respective states and herded them into "refugee camps," really Palestinian ghettos, where they were stripped of their dignity, deprived of every opportunity to prosper and made to believe that world Jewry was to blame.

I hate the idea of linking to a whacko like Mr. Kemp, but he's right about this one. And Right about just about everything else.   

2:03:30 PM  comment []    

On today's to-do list:

• create new views on the data
• build new data-entry interfaces

8:44:01 AM  comment []