Miscellany...
Category: Kitchen Sink...
Posted Tuesday, April 08, 2003 at 11:01 AM [GMT-6]

The writers over at CNN Headline News must be tickled with themselves for this blurb that's currently running on their TV ticker:

Tanks for the memories: US spokesman say's that Saddam's fleet of 800 tanks down to 19

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This entry by Mike Golding (notestips.com) seems to confirm the relative infancy of the blogging medium (phenomenon? artform? tool?). Navigation is such a fundamental part of any online communications... it's really pretty amazing that there's such a lack of consensus on the best way to do it, at least with respect to blog archives.

I wonder how many people regularly visit blog archives. I don't. I don't have time to read current posts, much less the old ones I missed. I suspect a lot of people are in this category. But that doesn't mean that a good archive navigation system isn't necessary. In fact, I might be more disposed to looking through selected archives if it didn't mean having to read/scan every entry to find items of interest. That's why I'd like to see more bloggers use headlines for their entries (like The Command Post). Even The Command Post's archives fall short in this area, however, in that there is not a list of headlines in "table of contents" form on its daily archive pages.

Of course, I'm not exactly the best person to be giving advice to other bloggers about how they need to organize their archives. Even at their best, mine are barely usable, and thanks to Blogger Pro(strate), they're currently barely accessible!

[Thanks to Simon Willison for the notestip.com link.]

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Did we or didn't we? Take Saddam out, that is. After viewing the rubble and crater, I don't see how we'll be able to give a definitive answer to that question, if such an answer depends on identification of body parts, DNA, etc.

For one thing, judging by the amount of civilian activity and clean-up efforts around the bomb site, any evidence is likely to be ruined or disposed of by the time the military equivalent of the CSI team can do its thing. For another, the force of the explosions seemed to be such that perhaps all that's left is individual DNA strands. So, DNA may be all we have to work with.

But that raises another question, which is actually the point of this rambling post. I could have sworn that I heard Katie Couric say this morning something to the effect that "we don't have a sample of Saddam's DNA, and while we do have samples of his sons-in-law, they aren't considered to be close enough relatives to help in the identification process." Now, either Katie misspoke, or I misheard, or this is more information than I really wanted to know about the Saddamite family. Perhaps this is just another one of those "cultural things." But, where I come from, having a blood relative for a son-in-law is just icky. (OK...maybe his daughters are adopted. Which raises another line of questioning...to wit: would you rather be an orphan, or Saddam's adopted child?)