You will be missed.

As I'm sure you've heard, her family is suggesting that donations be sent to the Lung Cancer Alliance, which fights to increase the investment in research to prevent/cure lung cancer, along with battling the idea that lung cancer victims should somehow be stagmatized.

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She crept into my mother's house in the middle of the night last night via the dog door, went into her room, and licked her hand.

I've got maybe half of the flyers torn down; I'll get the rest of them taken down tomorrow.

I'm very happy now, but I wonder what that dog got into during her 36 hours on the lam: she smells awful.

Stupid dog: she gave us a heck of a fright. I've been punishing her by feeding her treats and petting her and throwing an oversized tennis ball for her to fetch.

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We go out to grab a late lunch, or an early supper, or whatever one wants to call it.

I'm with the mom at Panera, which I love for the good food and the free WiFi.

Mom goes to the loo; I check my e-mail. When she returns, she sees that my laptop is open, and says, "there's a sign over there that says 'high-speed internet.'"

I look up at her, over my glasses.

"Oh. Is that what you're using now?"

"Yes, indeed."

"You don't have a cable hooked up, or anything."

I say nothing, because to get annoyed would mean that I naively expected she was listening to me all the times I've told her how convenient WiFi is, etc. etc., and how I only take a cable with me when I travel, in case the WiFi doesn't work.

And I do not want to appear naive.

Fortunately, the waiter shows up with my onion soup, and I realize quickly that the most magnificent thing in the world is onion soup without an excessive amount of cheese in it. Onion soup in which one can really taste the onion. And I'm too much in love with this long-overdue interpretation of the dish to care much one way or another just how often it is that my mother really does listen to the things I say.

But who knows if I'll be hanging on her every word after this . . .

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I want a print of this poster.

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Or, perhaps, until my mother's dog does.

If you live near LAX, please be on the lookout for a beautiful black pit bull wearing a purple collar.

I tried not to spazz out about it when Mandy went missing yesterday evening, but it rained today, which means that all the flyers I distributed in Westchester this afternoon (Tuesday afternoon, that is) have been ruined.

More importantly, it means that Mandy's sense of smell won't help her to get back home.

If she's still alive, that is: there are big, busy boulevards near my mother's house, and Mandy never seemed to get the idea of what a street was: most of what she does she does very quickly, very exuberently. The odds may not be that good that she's still alive.

I choose to have hope, which means my new hobby is producing flyers and placing them on lamp posts and trees near my mother's house. (My mother is 70 years old, and recovering from a hurt knee. Furthermore, I want someone to be at the house to greet the dog, should she come home.)

Therefore, you'll strictly get what I need to write in order to wind down—for the next several days, or until the heartache I feel subsides to a dull sort of thumpety-thump I can ignore.

If you can bring yourself to pray for a sweet, spirited fourteen-month-old puppy, please do so.

I just want my my mother's dog back. Other than that, I'm pretty much going through the motions right now. Working, doing housework. And thinking about my dog.

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. . . may only be on this earth for a few more days.

Pray for her, if that's the sort of thing you do.

I've tried praying, but I may just cuss God out when/if she finally succombs to the cancer. The unfairness of it all gets to me, despite the great attitude Cathy maintained: she was truly aware of what a crap shoot this life business is.

I want a miracle, folks.

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Ace is offering sex offsets, for those whose libertine lifestyles bring them wrenching guilt:

I haven't been with a woman since college, and have had little other sex during this time frame. Given the way I look, my attitude, my lack of charm, and the fact I make crap money writing a stupid moronblog—I don't expect this to change much in the ensuing years.

Especially because I'm beyond my "good years." If those were my good years, Dear Lord, I quake at the thought of middle age. So please send me some money.

Personally, I can offer gin offsets. That is, if you feel your inadequate intake of gin is putting juniper farmers out of business, I can baptize you in the sweet healing waters of a virtual martini. Send me money, and I'll drink more gin, thereby priming the juniper berry economy and bringing you boozey redemption.

UPDATE: Hackbarth has an interesting take on the potential of "checkbook environmentalism." Sure, it's funny to watch hypocritical limousine liberals use their impressive disposable incomes to dispose of guilt, but does the idea have potential for sober adults?

Carbon credits is a new market still in development. Trial and error is the name of the game. Rules need to be established that define a carbon credit. Once thatÂ’s in effect we should see the establishment of carbon credit exchanges like those for stocks, bonds, and commodities. Developing such carbon credit markets engages the powerful force of self-interest and capitalizes on dispersed knowledge which may reduce more carbon dioxide emissions at a lower cost than top-down government-mandated regulations.

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I don't know if I can endorse that.

But let me think it through.

The fact is—as some of you know—I'm a bit of a ham and cheese fanatic, and I've tried a number of approaches to this highly unkosher art form. Favorites include the slightly grilled version featured at my local chef academy's cafe that features good cheddar, and a panino with ham, jack, and mushroom served at my favorite coffee house on olive bread.

When I worked at the Foodie Magazine and we had a presentation in the conference room, I tended to order pancetta and gruyere on the company dime.

But blue cheese . . . hm. I suppose it would work, if the ham were low-key enough. Most of the time I see the cheese as providing the yin, and the ham as going yang. If the reverse were to work, it would make me very happy indeed. The challenge, always, is to create a sandwich that doesn't taste like a salt lick: in a mediocre restaurant, that's the first thing that hits you with your bad ham and cheese: salt. Ick.

I imagine if I found the right ham to go with Roaring 40s Blue, I could die right then, content. Prosciutto, maybe.

Suddenly, I'm hungry.

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It looks like Mary Katherine Ham wants to draft him almost as much as I do.

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The good news: I've recovered from producing the monthly newsletter for Ye Olde Nonprofit. It also looks like I'll finally be getting some help with some of the management work I do for them as a staffer.

In our monthly meeting yesterday morning the Chairman remarked that it was perfectly obvious I was overloaded with responsibilities, and that other people needed to start pulling their weight. And for a split second I felt offended—angry that he would insult me by suggesting I couldn't handle the extreme load I was carrying. Fortunately, I kept my mouth shut and allowed myself to be treated as if I were a human being rather than a sort of robotic super-heroine.

Are all women like this, or does it have to do with the way I was raised? It's so pathological, it's funny. Sort of.

So I'm taking it easy today: no politics. Light human-interest blogging if the spirit strikes.

Mostly I intend to work on my fiction, go to the party, and finish consuming the delicious Ellery Queen mystery I have my nose in right now.

A shout-out to Darrell: I got your writing prompt, and have a first draft of a short story based on same. I'm not sure if I'll be presenting it at the reading party today, though. It clearly isn't finished. I might just cop out and read another chapter excerpt there.

And I'll either post the story—about the woman with the mis-matched socks—or send it to you. Once it's finished, of course.

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Tom Maguire is having too much fun:

Finally, John Podhoretz provides a funny bit of testimony telling us that, although she did not recommend her hubby for the 2002 Niger trip, Ms. Wilson went to her boss accompanied by the man who did, talked to her hubby about the assignment, and wrote the recommending email. She also (per the SSCI) had recommended her hubby for his 1999 trip to Niger. So please pardon our confusion about her obvious non-involvement here. (And how will this be treated in the movie? Will Val be dragged into her boss's office at gunpoint? Or depending on how they want to position the film, the producer could have the CIA waterboard her into giving up her husband's name - good looking woman, bondage, water everywhere... just thinking out loud and trying to help. TGIF.)

Uh-huh.

Via, well . . . Maguire.

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William Branigin of WaPo:

Plame said she wasn't a lawyer and didn't know what her legal status was but said it shouldn't have mattered to the officials who learned her identity.

"They all knew that I worked with the CIA," Plame said. "They might not have known what my status was but that alone—the fact that I worked for the CIA—should have put up a red flag."

Translation: No, I wasn't really a covert agent. But I'm happy to play the victim here—particularly if I can get a seven-figure book deal out of it.

She didn't know what her status was. Words fail me.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 10:33 AM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
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And I need to live in the shadows.

Brian Flemming's lefty take from 2003 on the Vanity Fair photo flap:

Of course, a logical person would realize that Joseph Wilson and his wife could be self-promoters and at the same time it could also be also true that someone at a high-level in the White House illegally outed Plame for revenge and/or as a warning (especially since the most compelling information has come not from Wilson, but from CIA sources). And it wouldn't even matter if Plame's face were totally shown--her cover was 100% blown already (by the White House, apparently), so she'll never be undercover again, picture or no picture.

Fair enough. But was she undercover at the time? And, if so, why was she consorting with the press while undercover? And why was it distressing for someone in her office to be asked for information by the Vice President? Cliff May from the Corner remarks:

IsnÂ’t providing intelligence to the White House among the main purposes for which the CIA was created?

Evidently not. Evidently junior CIA officers have better things to do.

Does Plamegate make you feel like Alice in Wonderland? You're not alone.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 10:12 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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We could be operating without the separation of church and state, as Britain is.

What a great idea: public funding of Islamic schools, without any particular oversight.

Personally, I don't see what the European aversion to headscarves is all about, and I don't have any problem with non-Muslim girls wearing headscarves in Muslim schools. After all, we expect non-Catholic kids to wear uniforms when they go to Catholic schools, and we expect goyim men to wear yarmulkes when they attend synogogues. This is perfectly appropriate.

What I don't get—as usual—is tolerance of the intolerant. Such as accrediting or authorizing schools that refer to Jews as monkeys, and Christians as pigs. And I don't see providing public funds for educational establishments that promote values sharply at odds with those of the society at large.

Just as the Constitution wasn't meant to be a suicide pact, Classical Liberalism was not intended that way. What is going on in the West?

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Over at The American Mind, Sean Hackbarth took a look at the Emergency Appropriations bill; he's had to go on cholesterol medication just from reading it through.

I went through his digest of the spending spree: some of the allocations looked like they might even be legitimate, but not without adequate debate. Which brings us to the bad habit of treating normal spending as an emergency. Congress is supposed to provide oversight to the Executive Branch, but who provides oversight to them? A few bloggers like Sean, and that's it:

Slogging through the 2007 Emergency Supplemental put together by House Democrats you wonder what the purpose of the document really is. If you thought it was to fund continuing military operations in Iraq you’re partly right. You’d also be right if you thought it was to pay off constituencies at taxpayers’ expense. “Buying their way to defeat” sums up the Democrats’ efforts here.

But of course the Republicans have never been slouches in the "spending like drunken sailors" department, as James Joyner points out:

ThereÂ’s not much partisan hay to be made here since, goodness knows, the Republicans had more pork than a Jimmy Dean sausage factory in their bills. It does demonstrate, however, that promises to come to Washington and impose spending restraint are almost always laughably hollow. WeÂ’re barely two months into the new Democratic Congress and already any pretense is over.

This is the kind of thing that I tend to lay at Bush's feet: it's not as if he can credibly threaten to veto the bill. His track record there is abysmal, and he's not even particularly cooperative about efforts to create more transparency in spending. This is the President who led the charge to save our endangered earmarks, after all.

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My friend Professor David J. Linden of Johns Hopkins University will be on the Patt Morrison show tomorrow on KPCC, talking about his recent book, The Accidental Mind, which traces fun and quirky features/functions in our brains to the evolutionary processes that shaped the human mind.

If you don't live in the Los Angeles area, or won't be able to listen tomorrow at 2:00 p.m., it looks like you can listen later, right off of Patt Morrison's page, here. I have no idea how long they'll leave the podcasts up, though.

David has a blog, by the way: it contains fun stories from his career—a few of which I remember hearing at parties in the 70s, 80s, and 90s.

I hope he sells a lot of books, and gets oodles of readers for his blog. But fewer books than I sell. And, of course, fewer blog-readers. I'd like him to do just well enough in both arenas to be worth beating.

No, seriously: buy his book. It is written for the lay person. He's funny, and he knows craploads of interesting stuff about the brain.

UPDATE: David's been pre-empted by a harrowing tale of the firefight in Sadr City, which Morrison and her guest, Martha Raddatz, see as "a microcosm of the entire Iraq war."

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He recognizes that the most vocal Democrats want her to renounce the war, but doesn't seem to remember that the further she veers to the left for the primary, the more ground she has to gain in the general election, when it's time to tack back to the center.

Furthermore, it's still very early in terms of what's going on in Iraq and the War on Terror in general: apologizing for her vote now could cost her a lot later on.

I do think, however, that she ought to put her husband on a shorter leash: he's a brilliant politician, but he brings a lot of baggage with him, and she doesn't need that additional weight.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 11:02 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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At least for now, Google Video has the entire UK documentary online here.

It's an hour and a quarter long, so grab a whole carafe of coffee before you go over there. Very nicely done: it's accessible to non-scientists, too.

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Interesting take.

I'll admit that hybrids are still a bit of an investment, and that in strict dollars-and-cents terms it's often more practical to simply buy a fuel-efficient non-hybrid. But when I look at where electric cars were ten years ago, I'm still amazed that electric engines (or partically electric ones) have come as far as they have. And, yes: I think they have a place in leveraging us away from our sick co-dependency with the House of Saud.

The more demand goes up for hybrids, the more efficiently batteries will be produced. And the more cleanly—because Toyota and Honda are on a roll, and they won't want to spoil that.

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D'Souza's The Enemy at Home, by Stanley Kurtz, over at NRO's The Corner (where they occasionally stop interacting with each other long enough to post something for readers to read). Kurtz plays his ace in the hole: a condemnation of D'Souza's book by Richard John Neuhaus.

Et tu, Neuhaus? Then fall, DÂ’Souza.

Naturally, I thought that was rather good. But you know how I adore Shakespeare.

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