Recently, the Observer reported on US plans to punish Germany by pulling out US troops. This would hit Germany’s economy fairly hard. Glenn Reynolds covered this in one post. Two days later, Chirac threatened Romania and Bulgaria for their pro-US stances. Reynolds covered this, and covered this, and covered this, and covered this, and covered this, and there are another four or five references which I won’t link. Atrios, who’s more or less Glenn’s counterpart on the left, hit the Rumsfeld issue once and hasn’t commented on Chirac’s threats. No points for ignoring Chirac, but points for relative consistency. ...

So here’s what happened. About a month ago, I picked up the four phonebooks of Essential X-Men on a whim. For those unfamiliar, phonebooks are cheap black and white reprints of old comic books. It’s one of the few ways we see long runs of classic comics kept in print. These were the first umpteen issues of Chris Claremont’s run on X-Men, including the Phoenix Saga, and they are darned good. I’d never read ‘em before. The energy of the writing is very engaging, and the plotting is solid and fairly complex. This is the X-Men before they got weighed down with too much continuity. Fun. ...

Possibly I don’t want to be a writer all. Apparently there are [pitfalls](http://web.archive.org/web/20121020144701/http://web.archive.org/web/20121020144701/http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A57528-2003Feb11.html (original) “Below the Beltway (washingtonpost.com)”) (original). Sadly, I find myself tempted to actually buy the book under discussion. Fortunately, there’s no purchase information provided.

First off, the families of those killed or injured in the South Korean subway tragedy have my utmost sympathies. I want to make that clear up front, since I’m about to use it as an example to support my thesis regarding the future of terrorism. I wish it had never happened. I also know it wasn’t terrorism, but it’s relevant nonetheless. ...

I’m not in the habit of posting every little upcoming RPG release, but I gotta take note when Dan Brereton announces a Nocturnals supplement for Mutants & Masterminds. Brereton is a pretty decent writer and a great artist. His full color painted style is way outside the comic mainstream, but man is it lovely. Nocturnals is his horror comic — there’ve been a few minis and graphic novels over the years.

[AltaVista](“https://www.altavista.com/ “), my home for several years, has been bought by [Overture](http://web.archive.org/web/20081011122206/http://web.archive.org/web/20081011122206/http://www.overture.com/. (original).) (original). I think congratulations are in order. The price was $60 million in cash, plus $80 million in stock. How times have changed; AltaVista paid $163 million for Raging Bull, a few years back, and of course CMGI paid $2.9 billion for AltaVista back in the day. Still, I hope that the employees will get a small liquidity event (damn, that sounds coy these days). ...

Blogroll pruning doesn’t mean I don’t love you, it just means I can’t keep up with too many blogs. (It’s harder when you aren’t using something that pings weblogs.com, too, since then I don’t see the convenient “new!” flag. Sad but true.) It’s really no comment on quality; I dropped SCOTUSBlog which is an excellent weblog but I just don’t click through to it. Says more about me, I suspect.

This is the obligatory “wow, look at all that darned snow” entry. You’ve been warned. My driveway is snowed in so I can’t go anywhere so I have nothing better to do than to take pictures of the white stuff on the ground. I am comforted in the knowledge that various and sundry back in California will go “Wow, it must really suck to live out there.” Ha! I have a fireplace and a roaring fire going. Shows what they know. Stiff upper lip, and all that. Thumbnails follow, they link to bigger pictures, you know the drill.

As you have no doubt noticed, I’ve done a bit of a redesign, mostly based on this skin (original). I added the sidebar. Realizing that if I painstakingly redid each template before relaunching, I’d be here till April, I took a deep breath and jumped in and kicked it off, so things are gonna be a bit rough for a while.

And then I wonder: how did we go from [this](http://web.archive.org/web/20110726202231/http://web.archive.org/web/20110726202231/http://people.delphiforums.com/andybeals/thankyou.htm (original) “9-11-2001”) (original) to this?