Labor-Saving Device - I meant to quote a particular passage from Lincoln the other day. Andrew Olmsted actually did. In addition to his points about our enemies and their failures, I'd like to amplify Lincoln's warning that the true threat remains national suicide. We can only defeat ourselves. Let's not.

Decent Interval - Okay, we stopped paying attention. Time to go back to shooting down civilian planes in Peru! See Walter in Denver and especially Dislogue, whose proprietor, Dan Scheltema, used to fly on those civilian missionary flights.

Crap and I should have included both these guys in the New Crew update. Next month, dammit. But you don't have to wait to start reading them.

RIP - Anything I might say about the deaths of Warren Zevon and Johnny Cash has been better said elsewhere. Go to Jesse Walker for a fine Cash tribute, and read critic Tommy Tomlinson's appreciation in the Charlotte Observer.

Cash was unquestionably of greater cultural moment, but for generational reasons, Zevon bulked much larger in my life. His friend Brian Linse has a personal remembrance that I would not want to have missed.

UPDATE: If you're as reliably late to parties as I am, you can see the video for Cash's Nine-Inch Nails cover, "Hurt," at the NME site.

Mission Accomplished? - The other side's mission, I mean. Short answer: no, not accomplished by any stretch of the imagination. But maybe they're not doing so bad. Consider the news that India won't be sending troops to Iraq even with a UN resolution - or even to Liberia:

"It's for the same reason that we turned down the (US) request to send troops to Liberia. We said we're in no position to spare troops because of the situation in our north-west sector and the kind of terrorist activity that happens in Kashmir on a daily basis," the sources said.

The point here is not so much that my good buddy Don "Keep it elevated" Rumsfeld and I were right about the unlikelihood of the UN leading to substantial manpower commitments from other countries, though of course I can't let this item go by without mentioning that. The point is this: if you imagine yourself leading a worldwide Islamist jihad against the unbelievers, you probably take heart in the reasons for India's refusal:

We said we're in no position to spare troops because of the situation in our north-west sector . . .

Your two richest and most powerful enemies, the US and India, are tied down in their respective theaters and can't hook up. This is a far cry from establishing the Caliphate, but - assymetrical warfare cliche numero uno! - you win by not losing. Against this you have to set the real damage the US and its allies have managed to inflict on the leadership of al Qaeda in the last two years.

I also suspect that India, which has long resented what it considers US favoritism toward Pakistan, gets a certain satisfaction out of blaming their non-participation on "the situation in our north-west sector."

Via Letter from Gotham, a Jay Bookman column on giving Bin Laden what he wants.

Housekeeping - Home from work today, which means time to work on the blog, which means I'm finally getting around to updating the sidebar. Much change in the links sections:

O.G. - Okay, not here. The O.G. list is frozen for all time.

New Crew - The entire old New Crew has been swapped out to other sections of the links list. The new New Crew comprises blogs that I haven't blogrolled before. These are not necessarily bloggers who like me or even know I exist, but they're blogs I feel are worth your time. My intention is to start flushing the New Crew list through regularly, so that any given month there will be a dozen fresh blogs. This is by no means all the blogs I haven't previously linked that I'd like to link. The idea is to introduce new sites in bite-sized chunks so they don't get lost in the shuffle.

Mi Hermanos - My libertarian confreres. New section. Ideological affinity has its privileges.

Team Comics/Comix - A new list of comic and semi-comic book weblogs and news sites.

Not Blogs - Didn't really update this section. Probably should have. Oh well.

Regular Reading - Removed a couple of links to dead sites. Swapped in whatever of the old New Crew didn't land on the libertarian or comics lists. Tested and updated all links. Apologies to all those who've had dead links in this section. Things are better now!

To simplify future housekeeping, I moved the sidebar into a Movable Type module. Now I can update links in one place and it will be reflected throughout the site. The days of the main page blogroll not matching the archive page blogrolls are over.

More tweaks to come this weekend, including an updated Best Of and even (gasp) a judicious introduction of categories, depending on how ambitious I get.

Mark Your Datebooks - I agree with Donald Rumsfeld!

But, Rumsfeld said, "The expectation is that you would not get a large additional number of forces as a result of an additional U.N. resolution." The key to securing Iraq, he said, lies in empowering Iraqis to govern themselves and provide their own security.

So says the Washington Post article on Rumsfeld's National Press Club lunch yesterday. Juan Cole was still suggesting, even this week, that a UN resolution could unlock four 20,000-strong divisions from countries in South and West Asia. Much as I admire Juan Cole's Iraq analysis, this is sheer fantasy.

The Secretary and I also agree about the importance of "empowering Iraqis to govern themselves and provide their own security" - to the extent that he, you know, actually means it. May I suggest that getting into firefights with such Iraqi police as do exist is not on that particular "roadmap?" (Link via Counterspin.)

Rumsfeld also apparently clarified his remarks about domestic criticism.

Rumsfeld said his observation on Monday that terrorists "take heart" when they see that opponents of the administration might prevail was "accurate." He noted that some media did not report that he also said, "we can live with a healthy debate as long as it is as elevated as possible and as civil as possible."

Need to be as elevated as possible. A clear dig at certain pro-Administration weblogs! And

"I believe in the right of everybody to say what they want to say, and it ought not to be inhibited at all," he added yesterday.

Already on it, dude.

Gosh - Via Comics Worth Reading, a by-the-numbers New York Times story about "new comics day" at Jim HANLEY's Universe in Manhattan. It's a real nice store, though I wish they had a separate display area for the week's new titles. The article seems to exist mostly to take up space, though.

Worth noting though, that, while CWR is not a blog per se, Johanna Draper Carlson does update her RSS sidebar almost daily, which means a regular supply of new links (with very pithy glosses) to comics-related stories, most of them far more interesting than the one discussed here.

I'm Famous! - Check out this headline for the proof!

British Leader Was Told Terrorists Could Gain Arms

Who knew Tony Blair was an Unqualified Offerings rea - hang on. (Reads more of article.)

The report said a Feb. 10 assessment by the top-secret Joint Intelligence Committee -- a cabinet-level body that includes the chiefs of Britain's main intelligence agencies -- concluded that the collapse of Saddam Hussein's government "would increase the risk of chemical and biological warfare technology or agents finding their way into the hands of terrorists."

Oh. So it wasn't just me saying that stuff.

That's Easy for You to Say - I'm a Muse!

You are a muse.

What legend are you?. Take the Legendary Being Quiz by Paradox

I am? Whose muse? And pay no attention to that "blending in" stuff.

Link via fellow muse, Thymewise.

Happy Birthdays - Both to Jesse Walker. His weblog turned one year old yesterday, and he himself turned 33 late last week. Mrs. Offering and I had a fine time celebrating with him and his fiancee R. in their stately Federal Hill rowhouse Saturday night, partying with Eve Tushnet, Jeremy Lott and Eric Dickson of the fine Shrubbloggers site. Possibly at my impertinent request, Jesse made his legendary (to UO readers) chili. He's got a fascinating bunch of friends to pass an evening with, too.

I Can Relate - Al Barger talks to God. "Her voice was stern and clipped, sounding very much like Ayn Rand- though that may have simply been an affectation for my benefit." It has a lot to do with what I wrote last night.

It's a Clue! - Per the Post on the new Bin Laden tape, the CIA is sure that one voice is Ayman "I am really a total rat bastard" Zawahiri, but not that the other voice is really Osama "I still suck" Bin Laden. The video was probably created in the Spring, but the audio is fresh, referring to recent affairs in Iraq.

I assume this is causing a lot of "Bin Laden's dead!" surmises, and he may well be. However:

It would be smart of Bin Laden and Zawahiri to use older video footage. The US has gotten pretty close to nabbing Bin Laden before, based on reports, by analyzing the geographic features in his videos. I figure that, wherever this tape was shot, Bin Laden has been far from there for quite some time.

Old footage makes us, Bin Laden's enemies, skeptical. But it won't have that affect on his target audience. They're predisposed to give him the benefit of the doubt where we go the other way. There are two, not necessarily incompatible, candidate explanations for Bin Laden's increasing reclusiveness: one, he can't communicate as freely because of the damage the anti-al Qaeda coalition has done to his infrastructure and the risks of exposing himself; the other, that he doesn't need to frantically prove his continued existence and relevance to swaths of the muslim world because it's what they want to believe.

Regardless, I suspect that Bin Laden is ailing to the point of inspiring this tape's real purpose: establishing Zawahiri as Bin Laden's successor. Bin Laden may even be incapacitated to the point that Zawahiri had to put the whole thing together himself. If we're lucky, this is a sign or a portent of a succession war that could cause further damage to the organization.

Ditto - Suddenly, an irresistible urge to link Dirk Deppey's disquisition on "Team Comix" and "Team Comics," the hidden similarities. (See related SPX report by Blake Bell.)

Blankets Bitching? Bingo! - Sean Collins says Blankets should definitely be read as a memoir rather than fiction. Unfortunately, as I said in my review, such a reading makes the book worse. (See two items below.)

Via Sean, a somewhat fawning interview with author Craig Thompson. This part is just strange:

THE PULSE: This is very thought-provoking subject matter explored in Blankets. What made you want to share your personal experiences in this format?

THOMPSON: Comics are a perfect medium for such stories. They're inherently personal, since a single creator can control all aspects of the story-telling, unlike film/animation which are produced by committee and gigantic studios full of hundreds of creators. And comics are inherently intimate, since a reader usually experiences the book alone, at their own pace, quietly engaging with the text and images -- it's as if they were reading a hand-drawn letter straight from the artist

A single creator can control all aspects of the storytelling, but that isn't necessarily true for any given comic. And there are those other arts too - poetry and prose - where it's at least as true that a single creator etc. It's much more likely, actually. What's clear is that comics aren't "inherently" personal.

Mind you, authors stating personal preferences as universal principles has been going on since long before Craig Thompson. (Viz. Robert Frost and William Carlos Williams.) And Franklin Harris writes that he loved Thompson's graphic novel, Goodbye, Chunky Rice. I'm going to give that one a try on his recommendation. I suspect it could be quite good.

I Don't Have Four 50s, But I Can Give You Five 40s - Man Buys Groceries With Fake $200 Bill. Guess whose picture is on the front. (Thanks to reader Oyster Gal for the tip.)

Proportion - Soon the columns, weblogs and airwaves will be full of people instructing us that we must "never forget" what happened in New York City, Washington DC and the sky above western Pennsylvania two years ago. As if any of us could or would forget the despicable acts that took place that day, the heroism, the damage, the wasted lives. What they really mean is not "remember," but dwell. Obsess. Lingeringly finger the scab. And most of all, fall in line when assured that some grand policy, however wise or unwise, is put forth in the name of that day and the atrocities that marked it.

Don't listen to these people. You and I do not need their instruction in how to remember or honor our dead. Nor need we go veiled, cowed or enraged to the end of our days to prove our memories or honor. In the time of my grandparents it was the custom to mark a year of mourning for the loss of a loved one. Women wore subdued colors; men, armbands. By these signs they notified the world that they had suffered loss. It was incumbent on the notified to recognize that those in mourning were not yet "right," that they needed time and space to come to terms.

We as a nation have had that time and that space. This the only anniversary item I will be writing.

Blankets - Craig Thompson's newest, massive graphic novel has been extravagantly overpraised, but that's not his fault. Get past the annoyance that sets in when you realize, pretty much right away, that the gushing is unwarranted, and you're left with a bildungsroman that is . . . okay, on balance. I should say apparent bildungsroman, that is, autobiographical novel rather than memoir. The protagonist is a budding cartoonist named Craig, like the author, and publisher Top Shelf's apparatus is a little coy about whether we should read the book as fiction or autobiography. It has problems either way, but since Top Shelf's catalog copy speaks of it as fiction, that's what I'm going with.

The first thing to say is that it gets better as it goes along. For one thing, the frequency of captions drops, and the captions in this book represent the most annoying narration I've encountered since Harrison Ford's voiceovers in the theatrical release of Blade Runner. Boy, does Narrator Craig want to explain things to you. He wants to explain exactly what he was feeling at the time, what other people were feeling and thinking and far too often he wants to explain what you're looking at in the artwork. I always thought that the reason it took Frank Miller to revolutionize the way superhero comics were written was that, as an illustrator, he knew to trust the art. But Artist Craig puts all too little trust in his art, so I may have to revise my theory. The captions are in first-person past tense, and this feels like a poor fit with the immediacy of sequential art. (It would be possible to author an autobiographical graphic novel or graphic memoir with first person present captions, third person present captions or no captions. Any of these strike me as better choices.) See this sample page from late in the book for an annoying caption example. This would be bad writing in a prose work. In a comic, with art capable of conveying the idea, it's even worse. Compare it to the surrounding, caption-free pages to get an idea of how much better Author Craig is when Narrator Craig shuts up. (Yes, much of the dialog is banal. They're teenagers.)

Now here's the thing: in this section of the book there is only one page captioned out of six. Earlier in the story, the ratio is more nearly reversed.

An example of the problems caused by tense choice and genre ambiguity (novel or memoir?): early in the book we learn that Craig's younger brother Phil draws too. Narrator Craig helpfully explains that his younger brother does this "as a means of spending time with me, of CONNECTING with me."(!) Late in the book, Craig ends a muted estrangement by asking his brother if he still draws. Of course, his brother says, how could I give that up? Craig and his brother have barely spoken for years, so there goes the he draws to bring us closer together theory. At that moment, you want to read Blankets as a novel, relieved to find that Author Craig has given us a classically untrustworthy narrator. Hey, authorial distance! Our storyteller is using this revelation to tell us something about his protagonist's self-absorption. But then that tense obtrudes: the book is in past tense, meaning that the Narrator Craig who so confidently and wrongly told us what his brother's love of drawing really meant has already experienced the scene where he learns that his brother draws even without him. If he still doesn't get it, he's not just untrustworthy, he's pretty much unbearable.

It's worse if we're to read Blankets as a memoir: authorial distance collapses and we're left with an unbearable author to go with our unbearable protagonist. This convinces me to stick with the fiction perspective.

Things to like: the section of the book from where Craig visits the home of his first love, Raina, through the part where he decides that, in the immortal words of Alvie Singer, "what we have here is a dead shark," is pretty good. It's the thin book struggling to get out of the fat one. Raina is a siren who has lashed herself to the mast of her splintering family and proves unwilling to take on boarders. With exceptions like the sample page caption already linked, Thompson proves himself a deft storyteller here, and demonstrates more of a facility for irony than some of the other dissenters give him credit for. Narrator Craig mostly shuts up, letting Author Craig get a thousand words (per picture) in edgewise. It's a tricky storytelling task Thompson has set himself in the teen romance section of the book - we have to see that his protagonist cuts off contact with his erstwhile love because, for once, he does understand what's going on inside another human being. This he pulls off with aplomb.

There's an even better story he probably should have told instead, which is the story of Raina's parents. She wants a divorce, he wants to patch things up. They're the most vivid secondary characters in the book, and far more interesting than the main characters. Raina's father is more likable than Craig and her mother more interesting than Raina. (And for all Narrator Craig's facile idealization of Raina as an "angel," her bundle of sublimations, generosities and urges is pretty potent.) I found the mother easy and fun to dislike, but there are hints that she very much has her side of the story. I had instinctive sympathy for the father, but got the idea that he may have done a lot to earn his present hell. At stake is not just Raina's peace of mind but the well-being of two grown retarded children the couple adopted in steadier times. A lot at stake really, much more than in the story of Craig Loves Raina. We never find out what ultimately happens with Raina's parents and their family, and I regret it.

Surrounding the teen romance and the middle aged breakup is a lot of very familiar genre baggage, The Diffident Adventures of Sensitive Lad, as it were. Overbearing father: check. Repressive background (evangelical Christianity): check. Mean kids at school: check. Early sexual abuse: check. Renunciation of repressive background: check. Saved by his creative vocation: check. Almost a century after Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the cliches of this genre have been as solidly established as those of the locked-room mystery or superhero comic. (Sensitive Lad always has, for most of his early years, a secret identity. But he desperately wants someone to discover it.)

Some of the instances of the genre are better; some are worse. This one is about typical. Somewhat unusually, it declines to dramatize the Author's struggle to master his craft. We know Young Craig draws, but we don't see his work, nor his efforts to get better at it. Since the protagonist doesn't even recognize the story's only other artist as an artist, we don't get energetic if overly assured arguments about the nature of the art in question (cartooning here). The problem with the repressive background is that, while we're told - in those captions - that young Craig felt a strong, genuine attraction to his parent's faith, I never get a vivid sense of that attraction from the words and pictures. Narrator Craig tells us he was attracted to the idea of Heaven. Unfortunately, Thompson's attempts to draw Craig's idea of heaven don't help. Well who could draw Heaven anyway, and maybe the point is how nebulous and cliche Craig's idea of the place is, but that still leaves me feeling like I'm missing the key somehow. (Thompson also draws Craig's dreamscapes - Craig tells us dreams are his most important refuge. To my taste, these aren't any more successful than his renderings of Paradise.)

So, a familiar and sometimes annoying Author Comes of Age story surrounding a pretty good story of first love and a sadly unfinished one of middle aged despair. Neither as good as its boosters insist nor a risible fraud. I'm glad I read it, but considering the price ($30), I'm glad I borrowed Eve's copy rather than buying my own.

You Should Have Thought of That Before You Left Home - Purely for the sake of argument, let's assume that Donald Rumsfeld is right that

those who have been critical of the administration's handling of the war in Iraq and its aftermath might be encouraging American foes to believe that the United States might one day walk away from the effort, as it has in past conflicts.

So? The country is the country, its politics are its politics. For reasons ranging from very good to very bad, something as big as a war is going to inspire public criticism to one degree or another. If you're a leader of the country, you're responsible for realizing that certainty and incorporating it into your decisions. Here's a rule of thumb: If your cunning plan that can not fail requires years of undivided resolute purpose to achieve highly speculative if grandiose ends, you can be pretty darn sure that this country is going to manifest a sizable bunch of critics. If it's really true that the mere existence of those critics prevents you from achieving your ends, then your plan may not be so cunning after all. Survivors of close, indeed disputed elections who got in with a plurality of the popular vote should put the rule of thumb in boldface. Such administrations should consider starting only those wars which are absolutely and clearly necessary, and only upon securing agreement on honest and accurate cause in advance.

Or do as they like, but don't be little whiners.

Unfairly Deriding the Iraqi "Foreign Minister", the Continuing Series - Al Zaman, in a poorly sourced article, reports that

Turkey will be able to determine the region in which its soldiers are to operate in.

Turskish Press says only that

Gul noted that the United States presented different proposals on region in a large geography and said, ''our preference will be important if a decision is made. We have the right to prefer.''

Nobody in the discussions seems unduly troubled that over the weekend the Iraqi foreign minister (of record) baldly rejected the idea of Turkish troops as part of a multinational Iraq force, as I noted earlier. Over to you, Tacitus.

(Shrewd readers will have observed that it was never the honorable Mr. Zebari I was deriding anyway.)

Call Me a Cockeyed Optimist - Bruce Rolston of Split Personality Disorder Blog does, on the matter of possible Bangladesh contributions to a multinational Iraq force. Very very educational item that explains just why

When you're talking peacekeeping deployments of six months to a few years (as opposed to permanent garrisons like the US and Canada in Germany), no country has ever managed to sustain much above 4% of their total military manpower abroad.

Bruce observes that Bangladesh is already just about maxed out and that he "never thought they'd be good for more than one battalion, tops." Read his analysis to find out why.

Costs of Empire, the Continuing Series - 12 marines on Liberia duty definitely have malaria and 21 others have symptoms, per CNN. (Link via Polytropos.)

Most Inconvenient - Patrick Nielsen Hayden e-mailed regarding my Small Press Expo report to remind me that

It's [Samuel R.] Delany.

so I figured I would publically razz his ass for spending his time picking at my typos instead of updating his sorely-neglected weblog. But a quick fact-check reveals that he as a ton of new material, which you should go read right away.

Arrival Day Item - From the Head Heeb:

349 years ago today, the ship St. Catherine landed at New Amsterdam carrying 23 Jewish settlers. They were not the first Jews to set foot on American soil - the merchant Solomon Franco had visited Boston in 1649 before returning to Holland - but unlike Franco, they came to stay. They were the founders of the six million strong Jewish community of the United States, and the day they landed - September 7 - is Arrival Day.

This is the first annual Arrival Day Blogburst. Arrival Day will be the first holiday of the American Jewish people rather than the Jewish religion - a celebration of the Jewish community and its contributions to the United States. As such, non-Jews as well as Jews are welcome to join in the celebration. In the wise words of Ikram Saeed, everyone is Jewish today, just as everyone is Irish on St. Patrick's Day.

I thought about writing various things for my Arrival Day item - the time I got to be the Youngest Child at a Seder (at age 24), pledging ZBT in college, the time Jewish-American culture won me ten bucks (third prize in the high school declamation contest senior year, when I read excerpts from Chaim Potok's My Name Is Asher Lev), general "cool features of American Jewish culture" (the love of learning, reasoned debate and trade are surely my favorites), the time Jorge Luis Borges and I formed a secret philosemitic cell over the holidays at the house of an antisemitc relative. But let's keep this blog true to form and celebrate a familiar art form: the American comic book.

Jewish-Americans largely built the comic book industry. Jewish-Americans created many of its greatest characters. Most of the pioneers were second-generation Americans. Some were fresh off the boat. Stan Lee (Stanley Martin Leiber). Joe Simon. Jack Kirby (Jacob Kurtzberg). Jerry Siegel and Joel Schuster. Bob Kane. Julius Schwartz. Mort Weisinger. Will Eisner. Harvey Kurtzman. Art Spiegelman. Harvey Pekar.

Names to conjure with. From humor (MAD) to superheroes to undergrounds. Superman, Batman, the Silver Age Flash - hell, Silver Age DC; hell, Silver Age Marvel too. Wacky Packages to Maus to American Splendor.

You can find various theories on how it came to be that it was American Jews who disproportionately gave us the comic book. Here's an article about the influence of Jack Kirby's faith on his work. This article on Jerry Siegel and Joel Schuster finds themes from the Jewish-American experience in the mythos of Superman. Peter Parker has long been recognized as a Woody Allen character with the proportionate strength and speed of a spider.

Whyever a cluster of gifted Jewish Americans ended up creating a vital new art form, it's appropriate that they did it in the city where, as Jonathan Edelstein reminds us, America's first Jewish residents built their homes. The American comic book is one of innumerable reasons to be glad they did.

Small Press Expo - Fun! Saw Eve Tushnet. Met Johanna Draper Carlson, proprietor of Comics Worth Reading. Had dinner with Eve and Johanna. Johanna is a longtime comics journalist and critic and her site, which is new to me, looks intriguing. She ran the Carla Speed McNeil spotlight panel, and I learned a useful Moderator Trick from the way she did it: throw open the session for questions from the floor before you've asked all of your own. Then you can easily fill any embarrassing dead air almost instantly. (Not that there was any, with a roomful of Finder fans.)

Carla Speed McNeil did not disappoint. She's a great raconteur, and as self-confident as you'd figure someone who had kept her own publishing operation going for five years would have to be. Great panel. Learned afterward that, yes, she's a Samuel R. Delany devotee, which just makes sense.

I discovered that I have become surprisingly widely known as "not Jim Hanley." Apparently, someone on a closed industry message board recently accused Jim Hanley of having said something I said, and he pointed out the misattribution. So probably three different people looked at my badge yesterday and said something along the lines of You're the guy who's not Jim Hanley, aren't you? No one could remember precisely which of my outrageous utterances came up on this board (the CBIA forum, I believe). If any reader knows, I'd love to be told.

So, memo to Dirk Deppey, when someone from the Fantagraphics booth tells you that Jim Hanley was asking after you - wasn't him.

I didn't buy much and made a lot of decisions based on price because of where I am in my allowance cycle. I was only on premises for about three hours. So I can't give you anything remotely like an Olympian view of the event. I'll talk about some specific books I bought after I've had the chance to read them. Nate Bruinooge has a report of his own in the meantime.

Johanna has some interesting stories about inappropriate reactions to her criticism by various creators. It made me think about the virtues of being an outsider of little note: I can write pretty much anything I feel like about anybody's comic, secure in the knowledge that they are extremely unlikely to either notice or care. Balance that against the pleasures of fully participating in a community of creative people who share a major love. Tricky.

Biggest disappointment: we never managed to find Sean Collins and his wife.

Weekly Fitness Blog Item - Weight 164, Waist 33", resting pulse 52. Down two pounds from last week, a miracle after the way I pigged out at Jesse Walker's birthday party last night. Pooped out on Wednesday's weight workout (legs) - just feeling a little too beat up.

In other fitness blogs, a newcomer: Zack of Procrastination isn't overweight, but he wants to change his body composition and increase his endurance. No indication yet if Zack will be posting regular updates. Weight training, Heavyhands and a lot less soda look like a good idea. Zack says he needs a substitute for coke but hates the taste of water. (I'm lucky. I love the stuff.) Iced tea made with Splenda, maybe?

Funny tale of Substitute Yoga Teacher Night from Polytropos:

It got worse as the substitute started trying to calm us into a meditative state with the placid sound of her voice. She sounded just like a female version of Ben Stein in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

Articles of note: from MSN's Weight Watchers site on "11 Ways to Help Your Partner Lose Weight." Thrust of the article?

Point one: "You can't motivate someone else to lose weight," says Jackie Raha, manager of group service development for Weight Watchers International.

I forget what the other ten are.

A primer on the still-controversial but promising glycemic index.

Mail call. Tagore Smith writes

I also wanted to mention- your volume is way too high. That "body for life" stuff is bull. You only need to lift once every 7-10 days. But you should kill yourself when you do . . . At any rate- my advice is toss that "fitness for life" bullshit. That's for fatsoes. Do some big exercises. The ones that work your big muscle groups. Work them so hard that you can't stand up afterwards. After that, go stuff yourself. You'll need the protein.. But _dont_ do eight sets of anything- that's bullshit.

Hey, six sets! Anyway, as longtime fitness blog readers know (if not exactly care), I did high-intensity weight training - specifically, SuperSlow - for several months. I learned about SuperSlow from Diana Moon. Those months corresponded with my most devoted compliance with a diet program I promised not to mention this week. I certainly lost weight, and I definitely built muscle. I gave up SuperSlow as my exclusive exercise regimen because I wasn't getting the cardiovascular benefits the protocol's devotees claimed. Far from it, actually. A few weeks into it, I felt my familiar pre-diet shortness of breath and tightness of chest returning. When I started working aerobics in again, that changed, my pulse dropped and my cholesterol edged downward.

My instinct is that BFL's elaborate six-set weight routines really are not as efficient as they could be. It doesn't make sense to me that BFL can effectively get the cardio component down to 20 minutes per session, but require two to three times that long to bang the weights. But I am building muscle, losing fat and increasing endurance, and I'm not bored. I've got to start running less (25 minutes out of my cardio hour this week) or take a tip from Zack and find a softer surface - apart from my knees and back, running this much makes my shins feel bruised. But I figure on doing the full twelve weeks of BFL before juggling my routine.

A Fanboy's Notes - One of my favorite game designers, Scott Knipe of the one-man shop Gilded Moose Games, has just started a blog. Scott is the designer of Wyrd: The Roleplaying Game of Epic Scandinavia, which may be the most intriguing game design I've ever seen.

Unqualified Offerings - Unfairly deriding the Iraqi foreign minister since September 2004!