More saber-rattling for the benefit of Syria the last few days. The timing is impeccable; nothing will tell Syria we’re serious like making threats at the same time we’re telling Iran to shape up (original). Cause we’ve got all those available troops sitting around doing nothing. In related news, the White House slip of the day (original) comes from Press Secretary Scott McClellan: David Kaye, who’s leading the Iraq survey group, which is — they’re interviewing people, they’re talking to Iraqis, they’re gathering all the intelligence to pull together a complete picture of Iran — of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction program and their weapons of mass destruction. ...

Hey, wasn’t Ann Coulter gonna start keeping a blog (original)? The date on that first post in the archives, by the way, is a lie. That sucker’s been there since late June, when they first claimed Ann was about to start blogging.

VeriSign, the curators of the .org and .com domains, just abused the living hell out of their power. As of this morning, any time you try to look up a domain name that doesn’t exist, you get an IP for one of their hosts. In layman’s terms, this means that if you mistype the domain portion of a URL in your browser — let’s say you type http://www.yankeeessuck.com — it’ll redirect to a VeriSign page. It also means that if you mistype the domain portion of an email address, your mailer will attempt to deliver that email to a VeriSign server. Most likely it’ll just bounce… but there’s no guarantee. Hope you weren’t trying to send mail to a user who happens to exist over there. ...

I have no idea how Into The Night managed to show up on DVD without me noticing, but it’s about time. Best damned yuppie goes through hell movie ever.

Hey, kids, Warren Ellis is taking the pulse of the Internet again (original). He wants your picture. I sent him mine.

I love Sundays. You get talking heads on Sundays. Here’s Secretary Rumsfeld on that 87 billion dollars. “On the other hand, if you cast it [$87 billion dollars kplzthx] directly, that the $87 billion is part of the global war on terror, and that it is a lot better to be fighting terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan than it is in the United States, and that the effort is one that has not as its purpose, I think, as you phrased it, rebuilding Iraq. Iraqis are going to have to rebuild Iraq.” ...

The Sunday London Times reported today that the US/UK WMD report is being shelved (original). (Here’s the direct link, but it’s only useful if you live in the UK or want to pay some money.) 1,400 people spent four months scouring Iraq for evidence of WMD, but found nothing. So little did they find that they won’t even publish the report. Now, at the beginning of August, David Kay was talking up his progress. At the time, it was pretty clear (original) that he was setting up the argument that Saddam was maintaining the “capacity” for WMD, rather than having any actual weapons, despite what Bush said before the war (original). ...

Excellent news out of Iraq: the IAEA found the missing uranium. This is not a WMD find; this is uranium that was looted during the war, and which has now been recovered. Congrats and thank you to the UN agency which found the stuff.

Poolhall Junkies is top of the line fare, as Christopher Walken B-movies go. We’re talking The Prophecy quality here, albeit in a completely different kind of flick. The star of the movie is a guy named Mars Callahan, who also wrote and directed the thing. His sister is America Martin, which is completely irrelevant but I thought it was cool. Anyhow, he overdirects about half the time — it’s way too stylized in places, and some of the jokes are dead corny — but when you get right down to it what you’ve got is a hustler movie with some good dialogue and an excuse for Walken and Chazz Palminteri to swagger around and do that macho cool thing they both do so well. ...

In 1972, Munich was awarded the 18th Summer Olympic Games. It was the first Olympics in Germany since the propaganda-inflected Games of 1936; as is always the case, hosting the Olympic Games was a matter of some national pride. There were 7,173 athletes from 121 nations present. Mark Spitz won his seven gold medals at that games, with seven world records. Ulrike Meyfarth became the youngest person to win a gold medal in an individual event, in the high jump, at age 16. Olga Korbut became a media star and ushered in an era of gymnastics obsession. ...