Miscellany...
Category: Kitchen Sink...
Posted Tuesday, March 25, 2003 at 01:56 PM [GMT-6]

Did anyone else see Katie Couric's interview yesterday with Iraq's U.N. Ambassador, Mohammed Aldouri? Talk about a surrealistic exercise...

Couric: How do you know that was really Saddam Hussein on that broadcast (referring to the televised appearance from Sunday)?

Aldouri: Well, because I saw him right there on television.

Couric: Have you had any contact with any officials from your country within the past few days?

Aldouri: Um...yes...I have spoken with the Minister of Foreign Affairs.

Couric: No one else?

Aldouri: I am a diplomatic official. I do not have contact with political or military officials.

Then there was discussion about the impending battle looming over Baghdad, clear evidence that this is a war unlike any other. Have you ever seen an Official of the Enemy appear on American TV and present his view of the war in a relatively unimpeded fashion? I don't think I have, and if he hadn't been such an inexpert liar, I would be concerned about the propaganda impact of such exposure.

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CNN Headline News re-ran a story from a day or two ago about warblogging. This is the same story that Glenn Reynolds was exorcised about. I'm not sure what the big deal is. If the Iraqi gestapo has time to watch and take notes from CNN Headline News, they certainly can google Salam Pax's blog URL.

Interesting that the only other blog they mentioned was that of M.L. Lyke, a reporter for the Seattle Post-Intelligence (note to self: talk about a straight line...what a name for a newspaper!) embedded on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln. Her postings are for the most part "soft," a condition she laments. However, given her apparent (to me, anyway...read her and draw your own conclusions) anti-war leanings, I'd just as soon she wasn't fed any hard intelligence.

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OK, so it's not heroism of the sort we're seeing on the news, but my already high level of respect for Tiger Woods went up a notch after his performance in the final round of the Bay Hill Classic on Sunday. If you weren't paying attention, he went out on the course suffering from a severe case of food poisoning - running to the bushes after most shots to puke - and managed to turn a 5-stroke lead into an 11-stroke victory. As my wife so aptly observed, "boy, that must have really demoralized the other guys." Talk about an understatement.

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Lazy reporting in today's edition of the Midland Reporter-Telegram, concerning the newly-released racial profiling report by the police department. The report addressed the disproportionate traffic stops, searches and arrests for minority groups...but never gave us a baseline reference. Ten minutes with an Excel spreadsheet yielded this:

Sure, the numbers were in the story so that the reader could do the math...but why make us?

Incidentally, if I'm interpreting these numbers correctly, the arrest figures seems to indicate that the department is doing a pretty darn good job stopping (and searching) the right people. OTOH, that conclusion might fly in the face of the recently released Midland crime stats.

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I promise never again to complain about a west Texas dust storm. Maybe we should start calling them "stormlets."