Not terribly surprisingly, some Democrats are more than willing to jump on the terror bandwagon. Want to push your domestic agenda? Bring up the war on terror! Bah. The proposals, not unlike much of what Bush has been pushing, assume that terrorists are inept idiots. In this case, you’d have to assume terrorists are incapable of stockpiling weapons. Seems an unlikely assumption to me. Via Light of Reason, and while you’re there read Silber’s quietly painful memories of growing up gay in the 60s.

TPB, a lawyer specializing in family law, got jury duty recently. I found his thoughts on jury duty from the lawyerly perspective to be particularly interesting. “There’s nothing like using fear as a motivator for people who were kind enough to show up for their civic duty.” From my experience, his suggestions on getting removed are not entirely accurate. “Act like you’re reasonably intelligent, have a decent income, and a clue about what the hell’s going on, and you’re pretty much guaranteed to get removed from a jury.” Didn’t work for me, alas. But the bit where he debates with himself as to whether he can put aside his interpretation of the law… that was the hard question for me, too, and I’m just an opinionated potzer.

There’s a hefty little thread over on the Forge about ad lib GMing. (Well, it starts out as a thread about player fulfillment and winds up as a big discussion about “No Myth” roleplaying, but you know, it’s still rock and roll to me. Ad lib GMing, with player acceptance. OK.) The early advice from Le Joueur is very solid and can be turned to slightly less extreme ends. My experience is that many players need the possibility of failure in a way that his Complication theory doesn’t really address. To put it differently: ends must be mutable in play. And… hm. Ah. ...

Coolest random name generator ever (original). It uses the US Census as the data source, and you can tune the commonality of the names. Set the obscurity factor to 1, and you get names like Jesse Hagler and Hannah Walcott. Set it to 99, and you get names like Palmer Glimp and Harland Arrindel. The big bonus utility factor is that each name links to a Google search for that name, so you can find out if it’s already been used in a way that would screw up your story.

The SF Chronicle has an interesting article (original), which claims the most watched station in post-war Iraq is Iranian national television. The New York Times backs this up. I’m a wee bit skeptical, considering how long Iran and Iraq were at war, but even if I discount the reports by 50% it’s still more reason to think that the Shia, Iran-influenced majority will be fairly hostile to American influence. I was listening to NPR the other night and some guy called in to bitch about the ingratitude of the Iraqis. He’d paid thousands of dollars in taxes to help free ‘em and they weren’t properly grateful. All I can say is that the ingratitude was predicted — but I guess since it was the left predicting it, he figured it was just more meaningless fiskable noise.

So it’s not like I’ve been on the edge of my seat awaiting the next Crow movie. However, if you tell me that Lance Mungia is directing, and that the cast includes Dennis “Time To Make The Rent” Hopper and Danny “Badass For Hire” Trejo? Sure, I’m there. We also get Edward “I Had A Career” Furlong, Tara “Eye Candy” Reid, and David “Looking For That Film Breakthrough” Boreanaz. And, as a special bonus, Tito “I’m Actually A No Holds Barred Fighter” Ortiz. (No kidding. Expect bad acting.) But still! Mungia last directed Six-String Samurai and that earns him some trust in my book. ...

“President Bush will tell Americans on Thursday evening that the major fighting in Iraq is over and the threat to the United States has ended, a Bush administration spokesman said.” No, really, that’s what he said. The threat is gone. What threat was that again? Cause as so elegantly espoused here (original), we didn’t find any threat. We found no weapons of mass destruction. No evidence that Saddam had a viable nuclear program. Saddam didn’t use the hypothetical weapons of mass destruction as a last gasp. We didn’t find any of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction in the hands of the terrorist base in Northern Iraq. ...

I got unexpected gift tickets to the Red Sox game (original) tonight. Happy times! Red Sox win, despite an in the park home run by the evil KC Royals. It turns out that if your group decides “Hey, let’s pick up beers for everyone” whenever anyone goes to the bathroom, you wind up with a lot of beer. It’s kind of a positive feedback cycle.

When I get spam that says “Copy Anything!!!!”, I kind of expect to be able to buy a product that will copy anything. I mean, what good is a universal copier if you can’t use it to produce more Winona Ryders? Apparently they were talking about CDs and DVDs. Feh.

Not surprising but rather important: the US military presence in Saudi Arabia is ending. This had been coming for a while — the Saudis didn’t let us use those bases for Gulf War II, for example. It’s also a smart move, since those troops have been the source of a lot of tension. Bin Laden will tout it as a victory, which is a minor PR coup for him, but without them there some of his support will also fade. ...