Okay, I've been sold on the more permanent, nicer-looking, and hosted-by-someone-else Movable Type. All new entries are and will be at: http://gratuitous.com/clc/blog

In a triumph of guilt technology, Save the Children mails me a pen along with a bill for it. £.10 a day will get me letters, photos and an abrogation of my responsibility for global poverty. Cheap at the price, right? Except that I'm guessing that £.10 doesn't ensure that I get a unique child - I'm picturing the kids chained to tables, producing hundreds of letters a day, their penmanship getting shakier and shakier as they sip from secret flasks full of rice booze. I figure I'm doing them a favor by not contributing. I always hated writing thank-you notes.

Taliban members, shown here on vacation in glamorous Guantanamo Bay, learn valuable job skills by digging for truffles.

Conservative demagogue John Leo writes in today's column about the now-scrapped plans for a monument to New York City's firefighters. It's the standard racist complaint piece (barely cloaked in the once-fashionable anti-political correctness rant) that many of his fellow mouth-breathing demagogues have put together, but I have a visceral dislike for Leo, so I'll address his specifically. He writes:

This, to me, is fascinating. Raising the flag was a useful symbolic act, but was it heroic? It happened late in the afternoon of September 11th, long after the collapse of the towers. But leaving that aside, Leo admits that he recognizes two messages in the photo: the obvious evocation of American resilience and the heroism of white males. In other words, Leo's doing exactly what he claims we shouldn't: emphasizing race. He's upset because the ideologically-sound image of white men raising a flag might be hijacked by a sensibility which suggests that their race is unimportant. But of course he thinks race is important. He lets us know:
But the equality of imagery in the proposed bronze statue (one white, one black, one Hispanic) distorted the reality of what was essentially a display of heroism by multiculturalism's villain class, white males.
He's concluded that any rational evaluation of history would concede that the West (read: whitey) is a paragon of achievement, and any representation to the contrary must be motivated by liberal guilt. Leo doesn't mention that the fire department in the culturally diverse city of New York is only 2.7% black and 3.2% Hispanic. I wonder if it has occurred to him that the combination of (disproportionately) low minority representation and a slavish devotion to chronicling white heroism will ensure that he has few opportunities to observe the achievements of others.
I'm not sure what's worse, a cleaning service that consistently unplugs my DSL modem or being gauche enough to announce that I have a cleaning service within the first ten posts of my new weblog. If anyone asks, tell them I'm allergic to dust. Or something.
William S. Burroughs. "A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on." [Quotes of the Day] This is kinda on the weak side for WSB, but I'm testing to see how the news integration works.
There's something painfully narcissistic about starting a web log. Reworking your casual thoughts so that they're suitable for public consumption with the knowledge that you're the only one who's going to read them... well, it's easy to understand why so many on the web are just a single day's posts, left neglected. Of course, I'm probably remarking upon the narcissism to provide some ironic distance. I don't want you to confuse me with the authors of those naked, grasping web logs that scream for attention. Mine's more of polite cough in the sick ward. Right? That's convincing, right?
Because I'm tired of getting lots of mail asking for it, my handy guide to the Golden Globes.
This just in: Salon has the worst Photoshop people of all time.
I'm using a weblogging system pioneered by Adam Curry, ex-MTV VeeJay and guy voted "Most Likely to Leer At Martha Quinn" four years running. I will keep this fact in mind whenever my head gets too big.
Out of concern for the self-esteem of minority students, history texts routinely do the same false balancing act, mugging the truth so all cultures end up with at least as much achievement as the West, preferably more.

Strapless and Conrad Black