A while back I noted the Pattern Recognition annotation effort. t.rev pointed out that it sucked so far. It continues to be more criticism than annotation, but you know, it’s the kind of thing obsessives like me read. And it’s done, except for the Themes section.

“You are obviously trying to get around the fact that you are Canadian.” Yeah, I see that kind of thing all the time. Sneaky Canadian bastards. Apparently there’s an EBay seller who won’t sell to Canadians — or anyone else who isn’t part of the anti-Iraq coalition. Mind you, if you dig up their EBay policies page (original), it looks like they’ve never shipped anywhere outside the United States. Which would make this fuss about not shipping to non-coalition countries look a lot like a marketing scheme. ...

The new War News sidebar on the right is because I got tired of typing in URLs by hand; I’m gonna be glued to the news for a while and I may as well admit that and make it easier on myself. It’s not a permanent feature. I’ve mentioned most of those sites. Flit belongs to a former Canadian military guy (vague, but that’s all I know) and has some excellent unbiased analysis. Sorry about the namespace collision.

E! Online has this to say about Polanski’s Oscar: “Only in Hollywood can Roman Polanski be a convicted felon and an Oscar winner.” True enough, since — as far as I know — Hollywood is the only place they give out Oscars. It would be difficult to be any kind of an Oscar winner in, say, Des Moines.

Sometimes people do amazing things.

David Neiwert updated with another post on fascism, this one discussing the risks of abusing the word itself. Like the rest, it’s good reading.

The Spokesman Review has a warblog with some cool material — there’s a nice piece on archeologist concerns regarding the war (original), for example. The Agonist is still my choice for up to the minute news, but the Spokesman folks are taking some interesting byroutes. Also, in the spirit of disclosure, I am tickled pink by the fact that they’re linking to me. Addendum: the Spokesman infographics (original) are nice. Hope they keep up that level of quality.

I probably should have created a War category, but screw it, too late now. Onward. A couple readers have mentioned that they were intending to donate to Christopher Allbritton but hadn’t gotten around to it. Donate now if you intend to; he’s about to leave on his trip (original) and it turns out — who’d have guessed? — that he won’t be able to get to PayPal once he’s in Iraq.

Not much else to do with my night but mock the Oscars; I wasn’t gonna, but the opening montage reminded me of how painfully bad some of the Oscar winners have been. Thus, they deserve it. It’ll all go in this post so anyone reading this on Livejournal is missing all the fun.

There’s a new blog out there called The Command Post. It’s kind of a group news warblog, but the bias of the contributors is distinctly conservative and they can’t help but let it seep through. A lot. So t.rev dropped me a line pointing out this post (original), which discusses the Fedayeen Saddam, Saddam’s — actually, they sound like his special forces units. The poster compares them to the NKVD, and to illustrate the nature of the NKVD, he links to… Delta Green (original). As in the game. He links to a discussion of how the NKVD battled a secret US intelligence group over Cthulhoid horrors. ...