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Not very surprisingly, the Syrian band that freaked out Anne Jacobsen has been identified. Despite this, the usual suspects (original) are still up in arms. From National Review Online: That means that our air-traffic system was expecting trouble. But rather than land the plane in Las Vegas or Omaha, it was allowed to continue on to Los Angeles without interruption, as if everything were hunky-dory on board. It certainly wasn’t. If this had been the real thing, and the musicians had instead been terrorists, nothing was stopping them from taking control of the plane or assembling a bomb in the restroom. Given the information they were working with at the time, almost everyone should have reacted differently than they did. ...

The Internet Explorer team has a blog. That’s cool. They also have a wiki. That’s mildly flabbergasting. Looks kind of like it’s working, though.

I’ve been using del.icio.us for a week and a bit now and it feels like a habit, so I will point out my personal little bookmark clickstream. The cool thing is that I can subscribe to your clickstream and get a friends page that aggregates the bookmarks of the people I find interesting. This works for me. At some point fairly soon I may hook this up to this weblog in some interesting manner. In the meantime it’s a good way to keep track of evanescent interests. And if you have a del.icio.us account that you don’t mind sharing, share it in comments.

And that’s what passes for interesting for me. Five del.icio.us links per box, one box between each pair of entries, most recent links first. All my stuff. I want a slightly lighter grey for the box color, or darker, or something. I’ll fiddle later. Also later: a big box somewhere containing just the 10 most recent del.icio.us links overall.

So yeah, missed this week’s mashup too. I was going to try and hit 52 and call it a series and take a break. I am, however, not going to get that done, at least not with weekly posts. I am burned out on doing clever things to original texts. I can come up with ideas for a mashup subject all day long, but I cannot so much come up with good things to do to the subjects. It makes my brain hurt. ...

iTunes users may be pleased to discover that much of the 9/11 Commission hearings are available via the iTunes Music Store. This link (original) will do something useful if you use iTunes, and if you don’t, I have no idea what will happen. Something useful, here, is defined as a page which contains the hearings among many other things. I’ve been unable to find a more useful direct link.

I tracked down a copy of the new Sean Stewart novel, Perfect Circle (original), and it’s good enough to be worth waiting eight years for, let alone the four years it’s been since Galveston. So no complaints here. A little about the milieu, first. It’s the modern world, akin to Mockingbird, with that touch of elemental unexplained strangeness. Like Mockingbird, it’s set in Texas; like many of Stewart’s novels, it’s about family. In the author’s notes for Mockingbird, he says that “I had in mind something that would ‘fit’ with Resurrection Man (original), but with the quantities of light and dark reversed; a scary comedy, as it were, rather than a brooding novel with occasional jokes.” I think that Perfect Circle is a better match for those words; it echoes the relationship between death and family described in Resurrection Man through a lens crafted of punk music and Texas. ...

I am eternally grateful for the presence of sane people on this planet. A summary: Annie Jacobsen got worried (original) because she was on a flight with a number of Middle Eastern men acting in a manner which she found suspicious. Cue blogosphere firestorm. Some people pointed out that no responsible flight attendant (original) would act as described. But, you know, evil Muslims are a better story. And the aforelinked sane person said “You know… that’s what devout Muslims do on long flights. They pray, because they need to pray five times per day.”

Turns out Jet Li is making his good movies over in France (original) these days. Bob Hoskins and Jet Li, together again! Plus Morgan Freeman, although I can’t watch Morgan Freeman these days without thinking of my friend Jamie’s blockbuster Morgan Freeman idea. He wants to make a movie in which Morgan Freeman is, you guessed it, the grizzled wise gentle cop chasing a serial killer. But Freeman turns out to be the killer in some particularly vile and sadistic fashion. ...

The cynical may enjoy being proven right by thirty-odd Fox News memos. It is blatantly clear that Fox News thinks of itself as the conservative defender of truth against the marauding liberal news media. We have good perp walk video of Eric Rudolph which we should use. We should NOT assume that anyone who supported or helped Eric Rudolph is a racist. No one’s in favor of murder or bombing of public places. But feelings in North Carolina may just be more complicated than the NY Times can conceive. ...