Blogging on and off since 2003
Via Terry:
You scored as Moya (Farscape). You are surrounded by muppets. But that is okay because they are your friends and have shown many times that they can be trusted. Now if only you could stop being bothered about wormholes.
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Your Ultimate Sci-Fi Profile II: which sci-fi crew would you best fit in? (pics)
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Lorem ipsum, something, something something. It appears that the ex-Sun community aggregator lost track of my blog, which is ironic since mine was the first to be included. Oh, well. Thanks to Oz for catching it, and Linda for (hopefully) fixing it.
UPDATE: Well, it looks like it still isn’t fixed. I’m back on the list of aggregated blogs, but my stuff isn’t showing up. I’m not sure why: this is a pretty vanilla WordPress configuration…..
The Iraq Body Count project has analysed the new Johns Hopkins/Lancet study and disagrees with it. It’s worth noting, of course, that the apologists for the war who have attacked the Lancet also get hysterical about the Iraq Body Count. Sane people agree that tens of thousands of civilians have been killed as a result of a morally indefensible war; the only disagreement is over the exact number. The IBC view:
There has been enormous interest and debate over the newly published Lancet Iraqi mortality estimate of 655,000 excess deaths since the invasion, 601,000 of them from violence (and including combatants with civilians). Even the latter estimate is some 12 times larger than the IBC count of violent civilian deaths reported in the international news media, which stands at something under 50,000 for the same period (although the IBC figure for this period is likely to considerably increase with the addition of as yet unprocessed data). The new Lancet estimate is also almost the same degree higher than any official records from Iraq. This contrast has provoked numerous requests for comment, and these are our first observations.
The researchers, and in particular their Iraqi colleagues who carried out the survey, should be commended for undertaking it under dangerous circumstances and with minimal resources. Efforts like theirs have consistently highlighted that much more could be done by official bodies, such as the US and UK governments, to assess the human suffering that has resulted from the invasion and occupation of Iraq.
However, our view is that there is considerable cause for scepticism regarding the estimates in the latest study, not least because of a very different conclusion reached by another random household survey, the ILCS, using a comparable method but a considerably better-distributed and much larger sample. […]
What emerges most clearly from this study is that a multi-methodological approach and much better resourced work is required. Substantially more deaths have occurred than have been recorded so far, but their number still remains highly uncertain.
John Quiggin also has some interesting thoughts about the continuing air war in Iraq, based on the US Air Force’s own reports. (Apparently the mainstream media doesn’t think it’s worth reporting. Liberal bias, innit?)
I’m not sure what rock I’ve been living under, but it took Andrew Sullivan’s poignant review of the Pet Shop Boys’ American tour to get me out from under it. Fortunately the PSB don’t hit Seattle until November 5, so I was able to score a ticket (MEZ15, H9). Now all I have to do is find the Paramount Theatre…. (OK, that was easy.)
[I’ve noticed that most US tours by European artists progress from east to west. I figure that if I watch for reviews in Boston and New York, I should still be able to buy tickets in time for Seattle shows.]
Brief summary of flight so far. 5pm BOS-ORD is delayed until 7:20pm. ATC flow control into ORD. Some passengers had been at BOS since 6am: several flights cancelled. Flight uneventful (at FL260 to stay below the weather.) Approach controller at ORD screwed up, so our flight was waved off about 5 miles out. The missed approach/go-around delayed us until 10pm CDT. Fortunately UA rebooked me on a later SEA flight (sched at 10:10pm, but now set for 11:15).
Fun and games…..
UPDATE: The ORD-SEA flight didn’t actually take off until around midnight CDT, and despite efforts to shorten the routing we landed at 1:30am PDT. There weren’t any cabs to be seen, so I wandered down to the bus stop and finished Anansi Boys while waiting for the next bus to Seattle (at 2:40am). I’m rather glad that I did: the clientele on that bus was “colourful” (and occasionally noisy)! I finally got to bed at 3:30am, woke at 7:00am, and was just 2 minutes late for my 8am breakfast meeting at Andaluca on 4th and Stewart after walking across town.
I expect to sleep well tonight…..
Yesterday evening I went to the United site to check in for my flights back to Seattle. I logged in, and saw that the BOS-ORD flight was annotated Flight not open for checkin. Hmm. I returned to the site several times during the evening, wondering whether this was a harbinger of a cancellation and re-routing. This morning I tried again; the message was the same, but a possible explanation appeared. Originally the flight was to be on a 757; the itinerary now says “767”. We’ll see….
UPDATE: They’ve now changed my seat to 15A. According to SeatGuru, this is bad: row 15 on a United 767 doesn’t have a window. Let’s hope I can change it.
UPDATE: I assumed that the plane was a domestic 767; it’s not – it’s what SeatGuru calls a 767-300 WW. And 15A is shown in red as a very poor seat. Even though it’s an exit row, it has “Restricted legroom… proximity of the toilet… can get very cold”. And when I was (finally!) able to check in, there were no other window seats available. Oh well: I guess I’ll bring along a sweatshirt.
Via Charlie in Colorado, here’s a hilarious pen commercial disguised as a graphology test.
Via Sully, a scathing piece by Olberman on the demise of Habeas Corpus.
So the flight from Denver to Boston was lousy: the guy in the middle seat next to me kept poking me (and the man in the aisle seat, I suspect) with overactive elbows. I got hardly any sleep, arrived in Brookline around 6am, and tried (and failed) to have a brief nap. As a result, after a busy Friday I slept for over 12 hours.
This morning was spent clearing out tons of stuff from the attic, carting most of it to the kerbside but shredding things like old tax returns and bank statements. (I hate emptying shredders; the stuff inevitably goes all over the floor.) Then Kate and Mark brought Tommy round, claimed some of the stuff from the attic (thanks!), and drove it home, leaving Tommy with us. (Here’s one picture for now; I’ll upload some more when I get back to Seattle.)
Eventually they returned in a noticeably emptier car, and we all went out to dinner.
As I think I’ve mentioned, one of the few drawbacks of living in Seattle is that all of one’s Amazon.com purchases are subject to Washington sales tax. So I decided to order a book and have it delivered to me here in Brookline, and although I still have a couple of other books in progress (Neil Gaiman’s Anansi Boys, and Rob Harrop’s Pro Spring), I couldn’t resist dipping into my new acquisition this evening. It’s Andrew Sullivan’s The Conservative Soul: How We Lost It, How To Get It Back. I fully intend to write a longer review of it when I finish (although I’m well aware that I said the same thing about Richard Dawkins’ wonderful book The God Delusion). However thus far I can say that Andrew Sullivan has produced a somewhat idiosyncratic definition of conservatism, followed by a devastating indictment of fundamentalisms, both religious and political. Since a significant part of his criticism is directed at the contemporary Roman Catholic church, it will be interesting to see how he manages to square this with his avowed Catholicism. Perhaps he will resort to more creative semantics – we’ll see.
So here I am at Denver airport, coming up on 11 PM. My next flight to Boston doesn’t leave until midnight. Meanwhile – I’m starving! Like a fool, I didn’t eat at SeaTac because it felt too early. I never imagined that by the time I reached Denver every single food outlet would be closed. If they are going to eliminate food service on planes, surely they should make sure that passengers can actually buy food at the airport!
And that’s all I can blog: this browser limits text field size…..