This gem, posted today, by Victor Davis Hanson, on NROnline:

There is a reason why the postbellum Afghans so far have belied predictions of instant chaos, misery, and genocide with the collapse of the Taliban, and instead are fascinated with televisions, free schools, and cell phones. They realize that we did not like the Taliban — which they hated — and so by extension now do not despise us. In the same manner, Iranians, Libyans, and Iraqis are probably more sympathetic to Americans than are Saudis, Egyptians, and Kuwaitis — whose despotic governments we either subsidize or protect. Unlike the case with the closed societies beyond the Iron Curtain in the 1940s and 1950s, Americans in this new electronic age can appeal directly to unfree peoples, both on principles of democracy and through our own often crass popular culture that by its very vibrancy is antithetical to fundamentalism and autocracy alike.

Veteran British actor Christopher Lee is off to New Zealand to shoot some new scenes for the second installment of The Lord of the Rings, "The Two Towers. " Apparently someone got word on one of the many web sites that director Peter Jackson was planning to change the way in which Lee's character, the wizard Saruman, meets his fate. In the book, the wizard is finally killed by his own twisted lieutenant. Word is that Jackson is planning to stage a dramatic fall from the battlements in which the wizard gets impaled on a spike or other protruding weapon. Anyone familiar with Lee's body of work will recognize this as a sort of in-joke, an allusion to the end of of his many Hammer films in the Dracula cycle. If it's true, it seems silly. Fans have apparently put together petitions which Lee is taking with him to New Zealand to persuade director Jackson to nix the idea. You'd think at age 80 the actor has earned a little relief from allusions to a character he hasn't played in 30 years. For more info on this, visit the actor's superb web site.

It's too bad Wayne Woodlief of the Herald wasn't around, or if he was, when all the controversy surroudning the Big Dig, construction of a second tunnel to East Boston and the INNER BELT around the city was dominating the political news of the state and city of Boston, he didn't know what was really going on. In his column in the Boston Herald this morning, Woodlief heaps a mountain of praise on former U.S. and Mass. House Speaker Thomas P. O'Neill Jr. for fathering and guiding the multi-billion-dollar Big Dig fiasco through the nation's capital and now wants to name the final leg of the Mass Turnpike connection to the Ted Williams Tunnel after him. In his column, Woodlief praised Congressman Barney Frank of Newton for backing the Big Dig, alias the depression of the Boston Central Artery. When Frank was working for the White administration, he thought the burying of the Central Artery, since tabbed the Big Dig by ad agency people paid big bucks to string motorists along, was a joke. It was Rep. Frank who once observed that it would be cheaper "to raise the city of Boston than depress the Artery." He wasn't far off! It was O'Neill who killed the Inner Belt which would have made the depression unnecessary and allowed motorists coming north from Routes 3 and 24 to circumvent downtown Boston with their links to the Melnea Cass highway in Roxbury across the Charles River over through a section of Cambridge (whoops) and reconnect with northbound routes like 3, 93 et al. And the praise Woodlief paid Dukakis Transportation Secretary Fred Salvucci who was anti-motorist and against any expansion of the state's highway program, shows how shallow his grasp of recent Bay State political history is. Woodlief also adopts the line the ad men try to sell us that the original cost of the Artery job was estimated at $2.5 billion. Not so. The Artery project began with a $1 billion price tag. But the PR boys who want to eugolize Tip have been inflating it, as if $2.5 billion isn't enough.

Ron Indrisano, whom the Boston Globe passes off as an expert on horse racing, showed once again on the weekend how inept he is at forecasting the results of major horse races in the United States and abroad. Here are his own words from the front page of this past Saturday's sports page of the Globe regarding the 127th running oi the Preakness race at Pimlico track in Baltimore Saturday:
"I didn't go to War Emblem's wedding at Churchill Downs as the front-runner led a procession through the stretch; so I am not going to his funeral in today's Preakness at Pimlico where his Triple Crown bid will die. I didn't like him in Kentucky where he won easily. How much worse can I look by not picking him in Baltimore?" Not much, but did he admit it in his follow story of the race from Page one of the big Sunday Globe sports section? Not a word! And in a sidebar story he described his pick for the race, Medglia d'Oro, as the biggest disappointment, a "total flop now headed for the grass." Maybe the Globe should put Indrisano out to pasture with his favorite horse!

The Darwin Awards are given every year, and circulated around the Net, in honor (usually posthumously) of those individuals who best demonstrate the way Natural Selection works in keeping the human race relativiely successful (by weeding out the morons among us). This year's 'winners' are no exception.

(The late) John Pernicky and his friend, (the late) Sal Hawkins, of the great state of Washington, decided to attend a local Metallica concert at the George Washington amphitheater. Having no tickets (but having had 18 beers between them), they thought it would be easy to "hop" over the nine-foot fence and sneak into the show.

They pulled their pickup truck over to the fence and the plan was for Mr. Pernicky, who was 100-pounds heavier than Mr. Hawkins to hop the fence and then assist his friend over. Unfortunately for (the late) Mr. Pernicky, there was a 30-foot drop on the other side of the fence. Having heaved himself over, he found himself crashing through a tree. His fall was abruptly halted (and broken, along with his arm) by a large branch that snagged him by his shorts. Dangling from the tree with a broken arm, he looked down and saw some bushes below him. Possibly figuring the bushes would break his fall, he removed his pocketknife and proceeded to cut away his shorts to free himself from the tree.

Finally free, Mr. Pernicky crashed into holly bushes. The sharp leaves scratched his ENTIRE body and now, without the protection of his shorts, a holly branch penetrated his rectum. To make matters worse, on landing, his pocketknife penetrated his thigh. Mr. Hawkins, seeing his friend in considerable pain and agony, threw him a rope and pull him to safety by tying the rope to the pickup truck and slowly driving away. However, in his drunken haste/state, he put the truck into reverse and crashed through the fence landing on his friend and killing him.

Police arrived to find the crashed pickup with its driver thrown 100 feet from the truck and dead at the scene from massive internal injuries. Upon moving the truck, they found John under it half-naked, scratches on his body, a holly stick in his rectum, a knife in his thigh, and his shorts dangling from a tree branch 25-feet in the air.

This may come as a surprise to some, but as Jeff Jacoby points out in today's Globe there are indeed some courageous Muslim men and women out in the world, in positions where their opinions can be heard, who are not lock-step supporters of murdering civilians and are full of a righteous wrath against those who abuse the teachings of the Koran for their deadly purposes.

Serialized novel Doctor Janeway's Plague is now up to Chapters 24 and 24. One more installment and then the process begins for casting and shooting sequences from the book.

New video up today. QuickTime of interview for local UHF station in 1984. 3/4" Umatic was still the standard for field shooting in those days, which don't seem so long ago. At least in Boston, Beta didn't finally supplant the last Umatic edit station until I was at the ABC affiliate Channel 5 in 1992. And they were the city's news leader at the time.

It now appears that the financial background of successful authors is a subject for books, perhaps because publishers deem this will be more interesting to readers than discussion of their literary work. Fine. I'd like to know how much money Stephen King and Mary Higgins Clark sock away, and what they do with it. But Alice Munro? Check out this article for a no-nonsense review of this trend in a book that snoops into the financial affairs of one of the best short story writers in the English language.

Posted three new chapters to Doctor Janeway. One of the advantages of serializing a novel is that a writer can benefit from outside critiques and commentary. In my case, very helpful insights and corrections from Cal Tech astrophysicist Scott Hughes...

If you think the Mideast crisis is hopeless, you're not alone, and here is one of the best pieces (albeit politically incorrect) about why... by NRO regular and sometime novelist John Derbyshire.

New Media posting: Today I added another clip to the Video Archive (see left frame) and also the next two installments of Doctor Janeway's Plague. The novel has attracted the attention of the good readers at today's Site of the Day: BookHaunts which features the work of independently published scribes. Based in Chicago, BookHaunts was recently featured in Pat Holt's newsletter.

Correction to bottom post: through some strange Blogger bug, the link to the Cardinal's deposition somehow got tied up with my posting designation, so it didn't actually appear below, but does appear when I click on Blogger's edit button in edit mode. Go figure....

First item: Cardinal Law's deposition, which can be found BlogThis!