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Another useful resource this week: the BBC’s reporter diaries. The Agonist is also good — Sean-Paul is doing a good job of keeping up with the news. His head will explode within days, no doubt. Turkey has OKed US overflight, finally. There was a lot of back and forth about this, mostly related to whether or not the US was going to let Turkish troops into Northern Iraq. Turkey wants to make sure the Kurds don’t form their own state, and will do so by force as necessary. No word as to what the final deal was, but Turkey reasserted that it would send troops in after they announced they’d open airspace. That’s not good. ...

Two things. First, Amiri Baraka is an idiot and a pig and quite possibly a racist. (Although, you know, do some research (original). “It is a narrow nationalism that says the white man is the enemy… Nationalism, so-called, when it says ‘all non-blacks are our enemies,’ is sickness or criminality, in fact, a form of fascism.” You’ll never guess who wrote that. Still, set that aside: once you start with calling people a whore during your lectures, you get slotted into the idiot and pig categories. At the very least.) ...

Whoof, that was a whole lot of Malazan Empire. Yep, you betcha. I liked Deadhouse Gates a lot, and I am pleased to report that it continued to progress along lines quite different than Gardens of the Moon. The differences in setting and characters are most obvious, but around halfway through the former I realized that whereas Gardens is a novel about places, Deadhouse Gates is all about journeys. The centerpiece of Deadhouse Gates is the deeply harrowing march known as the Chain of Dogs, while Gardens revolves around the struggle for Darujhistan. ...

My little RSS project has foundered on the shoals of RSS parsing woes. If you have a raw apostrophe in your RSS feed, well-behaved RSS parsers will fail. Isn’t that fun? Amphetadesk works around this by just using XML::Simple directly, which I suppose I could do, but I’m kind of lazy. Mark Pilgrim wrote a nice ultra-liberal RSS parser but it’s in Python. Learning enough Python to make use of it would be easier than writing my own code using XML::Simple, I think. Maybe not. Not tonight, anyhow, either way. ...

Because I think it’s worth highlighting the extremes of human dignity, I link to the speech Lieutenant Colonel Tim Collins delivered before battle. This type of man is one reason why I wish both our soldiers and British soldiers well. “We go to liberate not to conquer. We will not fly our flags in their country. We are entering Iraq to free a people and the only flag which will be flown in that ancient land is their own. Show respect for them.” And: ...

Some things I’ve been reading lately: Where is Raed is a blog belonging to a young guy living in Baghdad. “air raid sirens in baghdad but the only sounds you can here are the anti-aircraft machine guns. will go now.” Kevin Sites is a CNN reporter who’s blogging from Northern Iraq; the blog is not affiliated with CNN. Christopher Allbritton is on his way to Iraq. Throw him ten bucks if you’ve got it; his series for NPR on his travels in Northern Iraq was very interesting and he needs the cash to get back there. Yay independent journalism.

Michael Swanwick is keeping a list of SF authors opposed to the war. Linked for my reference (via Making Light).

The Chicago Tribune reports that many of the recent pro-war rallies were sponsored by Clear Channel. Clear Channel is currently lobbying against proposed regulatory changes that would limit its ability to expand. This doesn’t diminish or negate the sentiments expressed by those attending, but it sure raises some interesting questions about Clear Channel.

Danger has released a developer SDK (original) for the Sidekick, with some interesting restrictions. Namely, user-developed applications can’t be transmitted to the Sidekick over the air unless they’ve been approved by both Danger and (at present) T-Mobile. Let the recrimination phase begin! I am of two minds about this. On the one hand, it’s hard to deny that part of the Palm’s success was the open SDK and the resulting flood of applications. I want to play IF on my Sidekick… oh. OK (original), then. (I swear I did not find that link before I chose my sample desired application.) Still, you get the point. ...

The other day, I was debating the legality of entering my apartment without prior notice with my landlord when my neighbor got home. My neighbor is French; I don’t know the first thing about him other than that. He’s quiet. My landlord gave up on our conversation, and started haranguing my neighbor about speaking French. “Don’t go speaking French around here! I don’t like what France has been doing!” I wimped out; I didn’t tell him that my neighbor had every right to speak French if he wanted. ...