Last week, in honor of Ian Fleming (perhaps I should write "in honour"), Mark Steyn reprinted an obituary he'd written previously on the Canadian actress who played "Moneypenny" in most of the Bond films.

She is interesting, indeed. Even more interesting is the woman who is widely regarded as the model for Moneypenny, but ultimately didn't have that much in common with her except for the old Executive Assistant trait of having power out of proportion to one's rank: Vera Atkins.

There are two biographies out about Ms. Atkins: a work of journalism and a sort of romanticized version of her life that gets her hair color wrong.

She sent somewhere between 400 and 470 agents behind enemy lines into France, including around 40 women. She lost 118 agents, including a dozen women. It was Ms. Atkins who investigated their deaths, and helped to bring their killers to justice after the war at the Nuremberg Trials.

For the rest of Ms. Atkins' life, she endured criticism for having sent females to their deaths. But not, I suppose, the far larger number of males.

The NYT obit on Atkins is one of the best short summaries of her life, by the way. The Telegraph tribute is also quite good.

What an extraordinary woman.

UPDATE: For more on the women of the SOE, go to 64 Baker Street. The interface is a bit old-fashioned, but it's an amazing site—a real labor of love. (Or a "labour of love." You get the idea; we really need to agree on some trans-Atlantic spellings, style rules, and grammar, stat. It's a smaller world now than it ever was in the past.)

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This is a very clever concept; I imagine the Mattel people are feeling a bit foolish that they initially balked.

Of course, the concept depends on a society that's achieved a certain level of prosperity. Certainly, Argentina counts.

Look for a Barbie Store in the States before too long. And, thank heavens for little girls.

h/t: Fausta.

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Nice Deb is a real conservative. I may not be: I am, at my core, a libertarian. That makes me more of a Goldwater girl than anything currently on offer politically.

So we've each had huge problems with the idea of supporting McCain this fall. But the War on Terror is the biggest issue of our day, and McCain has the brains, the knowledge, the flexibility and the passion to execute it as few others could.

And then, there is this story about McCain taking time out from the campaign last summer to sit down and talk to a woman who lost her brother in Iraq. No reporters. Just John McCain, and Jimmy McCain the Marine—who would deploy to the sandbox soon.

We can do this, people. We can pull it together and vote for this man. We can even send him money and campaign for him.

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the mice will blog about whatever they darn well feel like:

I'm quite curious about how today's Latino immigrants will feel about immigration once they've been around as long as the Irish. Though perhaps we'll all be thinking whatever our robot overlords tell us by then.

Bonus: actual video of Megan, before her triumphant return; the guest-blogger of the day is Conor Friedersdorf.

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now that we're moved, it's time to adopt a soldier through Soldier's Angels. Or maybe just sign up to send care packages out to Iraq and Afghanistan.

My non-warmongering readers should remember that one of the diverse outreaches through Soldier's Angels is focused less on supporting the military, and more on helping them to meet the needs of Iraqi kids. So there is truly a program for everyone within SA—even my lefty fans!

Now that I'm going to follow up on this, it's time for the rest of you to do it, too: after all, I have a birthday coming up in July. Join an Angels outreach for my birthday! Yay!

(This is on my mind because Greta does such great work with them—as does Whatever Beth. They are good examples, and it's time to get my hands dirty.)

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Shauna has a tone poem up regarding management. She thinks she is talking about the restaurant industry, but she is talking about life: about being a mom or housewife; about owning a business; about teaching; about journalism; about the managing editor slot at a consumer magazine; about Chief of Staff at the White House; about entrepreneurism; about being a sergeant in the armed forces; about writing a sonnet; about producing a play; about managing an office or being a realtor.

Read it, whether you are a chef or not. Okay? Because we are all in middle management—even the person at the top. The owner, the CEO, the Chair of the Board—everyone is in middle management, because every single individual still answers to someone: the market, the shareholders, the need to sell product, the almighty dollar.

Whatever it is, "this is the business we've chosen." So, go. And enjoy it. Okay?

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(Via Insty, who keeps hitting my buttons with the topic of air travel suckage.)

A "New" Form of Transportation?

The only good I can imagine coming out of the slump in air travel is the possibility of high-speed rail (or even normal rail) taking over for some short flights: along the West Coast, for example, where passengers now share pokey trains with freight, and with town-to-town passengers. We can drive between Californian coastal cities, for example, much more quickly than we can get there by train.

And it would be excellent to have rail service between L.A. and Las Vegas / SF and Las Vegas—but, again: it would have to be nearly competitive with driving. If it were at least semi-equivalent to the drive (rather than nearly double the drive time), it would be especially attractive: people who want to start their drinking early would probably prefer to take a train—as would those who like to stay downtown, or on the Strip, and not bother with a car during their stay. (There are cabs in Las Vegas . . . and monorails! Just like Anaheim, but without having to cope with people who are dressed up like Mickey Mouse. In fact, Vegas is widely regarded as an amusement park for grownups . . . and grownups tend to prefer booze to cotton candy. Maybe they shouldn't, but they do.)

Making rail transportation attractive (in the West especially) would probably improve the U.S. public safety profile with respect to terrorism, since trains can't be made into flying bombs. One cannot force them off the tracks and into public facilities, government buildings, and national monuments. Can't be done, outside of action movies.

In case anyone hasn't noticed, though, the U.S. is too big a country to rely on rail. We need an air-travel renaissance so we can stop losing billions of dollars a year (see the first link in this entry).

But How Did We Get Into this High-Altitude Kettle of Fish? And What Can the Average Person Do To Make Flying Suck Less?

The problem with flying lately is the apparent unholy alliance between the TSA and some airlines, which use the need for "safety" as another excuse to essentially screw the customer. Although I do tend to shop by price, if there were an airline that made flying suck less, I'd pay more for a consistently less-bad (or even kind-of-good) experience. This is the danger and the opportunity presented by Virgin America, which I've never flown—but which is clearly going for the "fed up with flying" market. As is the express-security Flyclear service, which might be promising, but hasn't yet hit La La Land. (The blogger "Sack of Seattle," however, has high hopes for Flyclear.)

Personally, I liked the warm chocolate-chip cookies that Midwest Airlines was handing out for a while, because at least it indicated an effort to please the customer. (Have they stopped doing that? I thought I heard that they had: unfortunately, I don't have a lot of access to Midwest, since that means Going to the East Coast, which I generally only do once a year, and it's only if I luck out on the second "leg" of the journey after connecting to MW in Kansas City or wherever.)

Eric Classic points out that Southwest Airlines sucks less than most of the other airlines, whereas U.S. Air and American Airlines suck more.

Remember that Southwest isn't part of most Expedia/Hotwire/Priceline-type online booking services; neither is Continental, which also has great fares. One has to check out the "indies," in addition to seeing what the usual web sites can do for one. I believe Virgin America also has to be checked separately, apart from the Web Consortia—though I'm not positive about that.

I've had reasonably good success with Continental, provided that I know my plans a good 4-6 weeks in advance—preferably more. Their service is decent, but their fares spike when it's close to trip time.

But Surely Flying Isn't That Bad.

Vanderleun rather gloomily suggests that air travel suckage will simply get worse over time:

Food goes, blankets go, seats get jammed in, pillows vanish, oxygen is reduced, peanuts change into tasteless "freeze-baked crunchy things with salt" which come two to a pack and you only get one. Don't even get me started on Homeland Security which is just biding its time until you will be required to fly naked after an anal probe by uniformed dwarf.

I know I am far from alone when I say that after years of flying many times a year, often on a whim, I am now at the point where only the most powerful forces in life -- love and death -- can get me on a plane.

It is not that the whole experience is uncomfortable, which it is, but that the process has become -- through a Satanic collusion between the airlines and government -- utterly dehumanizing. Bean-counters and bureaucrats have combined to create the one central experience of American life in which you are reduced to a hunk of meat.

The situation for consumers is really dire. For example, I am a tiny woman. I shudder at how scrunched in I am in coach—at least with the Prozac, I'm no longer experiencing panic attacks, but I still feel like a sardine. And yet my spouse is more than a foot taller than I am, and he is still folded into the same space. We have taken to booking aisle seats across from each other, so I don't feel too hemmed in (and so I can get up to pee without crawling over people), and so A the H can stick his legs into the aisle. Of course, last time we flew it was a short flight in a small plane, and a warning was broadcast about keeping feet, knees, elbows, and shoulders out of the aisle so the beverage cart could go by. Good times for me; better times for my husband.

Flying has become a truly miserable undertaking, except for the rich, who can afford British Air and its ilk—or at least spring for first class on a normal plane. (And, of course, for the super-rich, who simply charter planes and lecture the rest of us about how we should be driving Priuses for environmental reasons.)

Back when we had money, A the H once flew business class to Southeast Asia, and swore he'd never go back to coach again. But we're very broke once more, so he flew coach to Chicago for a marathon this past summer—and came back the same way. (Keep in mind that it takes him days to gear up for a marathon, and nearly a week to recover therefrom: getting folded up for five or six hours before and after running over 26 miles is not a great idea.)

What Is To Be Done?

The point (and, as Ellen Degeneres would say, I do have one) is that the American flying industry is at a crisis point. Quality had fallen to a certain level prior to 9/11 in the name of cutting costs; just at the point when the market might have corrected that, eleven Islamofascists took out the World Trade Center—and made an attempt on the Capitol Building and the White House on the same day (once of which ended up in the side of the more-distinctive Pentagon building, and one of which ended up on a field in Pennsylvania).

After that, the airline industry hid behind the skirts of the FAA/TSA/Homeland Security, and vice versa. The entire industry began to act like a branch of the Federal government, complete with the "fuck you" undertone one sees in the worst Post Offices, the worst public schools, and the worst (that is, the most publicly subsidized) healthcare providers.

So the entire American approach to air travel must change, or wither / downsize considerably (bringing down with it the entire travel industry, and any number of tourist towns, tourist-dependent cities, and "resort communities" / vacation destinations).

I know Reynolds is always urging the rich to fly commercial, and I think that would change things a lot: fewer chartered planes would mean that the quality of flying would have to improve for those well-off folks who are flying with the hoi polloi. This is one of those situations in which doing the right thing for the environment would also mean doing the right thing for the economy. How many choices like that do we get to make? (At least the non-famous rich should try this; I do get that it's tougher for people in entertainment. I really do.)

Irrespective, there is a choice ahead for the airline industry. I hope it chooses wisely, and well. And I hope the Feds can back off enough to let it make the right decisions.

Or we are all going to be driving just about anywhere we need to go on the continental U.S.

In the meantime, figure out which airlines treat you the best, and stay loyal to them, whenever feasible. Figure out which airports have the stupidest, slowest, and surliest security staffers, and avoid them--sending letters to them to make sure they know why you're doing it. If you have particularly egregious experience with a particular airline--send a note regretfully stating that you won't be using them any more, and then blog about (in a way that will make it findable to the average curious person, such as using the phrase "XXXX Airline Sucks").

Try not the patronize the worst offenders--both in terms of airports, and in terms of airlines. They need to get the message.

UPDATE: Apparently, alliances aren't the answer, since for two airlines to communicate about price requires antitrust immunity. Heaven forfend that anyone do well in a dying industry.

One wants to weep.

UPDATE 2: There's an interesting little thread on flying here, which begins with Ed Morrissey rather uncharacteristically blaming the victim. The comments are very illuminating and instructive, though.

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Via Hackbarth, Vets for Freedom asks a few pointed questions of Senator Obama:

I think the summary would be something like "things have changed, Buddy: you might want to check it out."

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In the latest news on Myanmar, men from industrialized nations around the world are offering to save women postage—by offering to "pass your panties along to the Burmese government, cross our hearts we will" if their female friends will just hand their underwear over to save the oppressed people in Burma.

My personal feeling is that the government in Myanmar doesn't deserve my panties. They haven't earned 'em.

Not that I'm belittling the power of textiles and vaginal secretions. Nope. That's powerful stuff. But instead, I'll be sending them a picture of my Glock, which is rather more to the point.

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1 Fight with your words, not guns! But a picture is worth a thousand words. Now I'm confused. "Would you go all the way for the USO?" "Would you go all the way for the USA?"" "Lift up your dress if the answer is NO!" Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention

Posted by: Darrell at May 30, 2008 02:29 PM (yD490)

2 Hmm. First the tanktop, now the panties. Too bad my workplace doesn'r have a bunk.

Posted by: Gregory at June 01, 2008 05:01 PM (cjwF0)

3 How about if you send them to me and I promise to *not* send them to Myanmar?

Posted by: Desert Cat at June 01, 2008 06:07 PM (DIr0W)

4 The panties--or the Glock pic?

Posted by: Attila Girl at June 01, 2008 10:24 PM (1q/ac)

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Over at McArdle's digs, Henke takes a look at this piece on the perverse incentives created by the FDA.

Jon—who is, BTW, my blog-nephew, and far more successful than his Aunt Joy—suggests:

There's a research project in this for some enterprising investigator.

• Find out how many medical treatments and procedures have been declined by health insurance companies and health care providers over the past 5 years.

• Contrast that with the potential medicines, procedures and devices that have been rejected, delayed or buried in regulatory tape, and the likely treatments and procedures those would have provided.

I would speculate that you'll find the unintended consequences of FDA regulations have had a far larger impact than the cumulative declined treatments of the health care industry.

Well, yeah. But there is, as the original article points out, a mindset that can't quite make the leap of faith that might suggest we could make progress in biotech as rapidly as in computing and electronics. The only factor that can make inroads against the socialist-medicine mindset has to do with anti-aging technology that is "skin deep": because insurance isn't expected to cover cosmetic surgeries, these are more likely to be innovative than other types of medicine.

But even these often have to clear one major roadblock, and that is the FDA.

Vaguely related: I sometimes wonder how the history of health would have been different if it weren't for the Dalkon Shield. Did the pendulum swing too far in the other direction? Is that how we got into this fix?

(The longevity issue—and Henke's take thereon—got a 'Lanche yesterday.)

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He was willing to laugh at other people's jokes. That is the mark of a comic who is also a gentleman.

So long, Buddy. So long.

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Well, there is that angular part at the beginning—kind of like two incomplete triangles that are missing their hypotenuses. Then there is that other thing that is sort of like a circle, but not quite round. And yet not really an oval, either.

Those parts. The rest, I'm fine with.

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And read the entire post, which is lovely and has a nice "button." (I spend a lot of time searching for good post-buttons, but they always turn into digressions. It's hard to find something that really completes the circle in a blog entry.)

But where is Megan? She sneaked away while I was moving my digs. Never trust tall girls: never. Certainly, never get drunk around 'em.

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Or, you know: let the market determine which poison is the nicest, without the government telling us which one it wants us to have.

I'm starting to withdraw from the notion that we shouldn't make fuel out of corn or soy: if those fuels will make money, we can grow more of 'em, and feed people at the same time. The critical issue is figuring out which fuels take less land—and energy—to "produce."

Via Insty.

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But, you know: it is parked on a public street, Babe.

Push me too far, and I'll get it jump-started, re-register it, and park it across the street from you.

Then you can look at it every day. And so can the neighbors across the street who got us cited by the city for leaving our trash cans on the street overnight, the night before trash day. And oh, what fun you'll have with them, in any event!

(I know, I know: A the H won't agree to insuring the old car for another few months, and it's a mean, petty idea anyway. But somehow at this moment the notion really pleases me.

Perhaps I am a mean, petty person. Or perhaps I'm still recovering from a particularly grueling move, and tomorrow I'll go jump-start the honorable old warhorse, like a good girl.)

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Sorry, boys and girls. I know I'm supposed to see a keffiyeh here. But I don't.

Of course, I haven't talked to the Dunkin's Donuts stylist yet, so I could be off on this. But Ray's scarf just doesn't look like an Arafat special to me: the "Palestinian scarf" always looked to me like an old-fashioned American checkered tablecloth, except with black instead of red (insert Rolling Stones joke here).

The fact is, I'm not really high on any intentional use of a keffiyeh design in any outreach aimed at a mainstream American audience, but to proclaim any use of back and white as an approving reference to terrorism is plainly ridiculous: that amounts to a center-right sort of political correctness. Suddenly, the toys we get for infants are naughty advocacy on behalf of murderers. Art deco color schemes are a tip of the hat to bombers. It gets very silly very quickly.

I'm going to have to side with Linda Lowen on "scarfgate," to some degree. Particularly if the scarf at issue sports a paisley design, rather than checks, like my terrorist-loving chess set.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought we were on the side of freedom of speech, and it was the Islamic radicals / fundamentalists / terrorists / extremists who advocated either censorship—or at least a sort of walking-on-eggshells approach to expression.

So. That's that.

Oh, yeah: I've been wondering about something. Is Virginia Woolf's Lighthouse really a penis? I used to bristle at the suggestion; now I'm not so sure. The book certainly has to do with the conflict between authorship as a writer, and "authorship" as a parent. Last I knew, the penis was implicated in human reproduction . . . though of course that could change once we perfect cloning.

Isn't that what men are afraid of?

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maybe.

The spouse will be gone between tomorrow morning and Monday evening. I was hoping to sneak in a Grandma-run (a quick overnight trip to Shell Beach), and maybe even a mini cousin-run (to the Bay Area, as long as I'm halfway up the coast seeing my grandmother) this weekend, but that's clearly impossible if I want this place to be inhabitable in the next few days.

So instead of a drive up the coast I'll head to the hardware store for some switchplates, and pick up a photo from the frame place. The thrills are a mile a minute around here. (Actually, they are: the new place is beautiful, and we are a lot less overwhelmed with boxes than I feared we might be at this stage of the game.)

I tried to catch up on news, politics, and the blogging world yesterday, but I kept falling asleep over my laptop. In point of fact, I spent most of the day yesterday unconscious, and most of today unpacking.

Life is good, though I have no idea whether Western Civilization crumbled while I was focused on other things. (My concept of same being a bit analogous to the spouse's POV on football games: if my attention drifts, external events will go all to heck. It's only my continued concentration that keeps the ship afloat.)

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I just worked a 26-hour shift on the move, from 8:00 a.m. Tuesday until 9:00 a.m. Wednesday—minus twenty minutes or so, trying to sleep next to my husband on the floor of the old house in the middle of the night. We started working again at 4:00 a.m., stopping only to have a few spirited words about how pleasant it is to move from a house to a condo with half the square footage—and how great it is to sort through twelve years' worth of accumulated stuff as dawn breaks on the day the new owners are set to take possession of the House on the Hill.

We've been napping in shifts, though it's a bit warm in our new bedroom: we need window treatments in there to cut down on the glare. The first time the cable/phone person showed up, A the H took the lead. The second time, I did, while he started his nap.

I'm eating part of a leftover bagel, and drinking some milk to get some protein in me and cut the dehydration. The idea of figuring what we're going to eat tonight sounds overwhelming, as does bending over, lifting anything, or even getting dressed.

I had all kinds of plans for setting up the new kitchen very quickly, but that isn't going to happen. The new place looks great, but we are both exhausted and hurting: sometime after dawn, I realized I was sort of shuffling around like an 85-year-old. I couldn't even really walk.

Life keeps pitching, and we keep hitting.

More blogging later. Maybe.

UPDATE: The alert will notice that I've now blogged the equivalent of my eight-year "decade," or Obama's 57-state Union. I've always thought I should get some extra time each day, and I guess that desire is bound to come out every now and then . . .

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I have a hard time thinking of John McCain as Irish. But I suppose it doesn't just show up in his wartime heroism: he is, after all, the only candidate with a sense of humor.

That's worth a lot.

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Everyone knows that Memorial Day is a day to honor and remember those who lost their lives fighting for the US. Ever wonder about its origins?

Memorial Day was originally called Declaration Day. More than two dozen cities and towns lay claim to being the birthplace of Memorial Day. In May of 1966, President Lydon Baines Johnson officially declared Waterloo, New York, as the birthplace, but there is no conclusive proof they were first.

Many towns had spontaneous or planned gatherings to honor war dead in the late 1860s, following the Civil War. In 1868, General Logan officially proclaimed the day a day of remembrance and honor.

Even though Memorial Day is now a three-day weekend of beer, barbecue and discount sales, we would do well to remember those who have given their lives for a cause greater than themselves.

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