A Yank in OzAmerica as seen from abroad, and vice versaInteresting times.- (Found July 15, 2008 ) Blogging has been light this past month (even by my standards) because real life has been unusually eventful &8212; even by my standards. I don't normally blog about my career, except to mention in passing that I work in telecommunications… but as of last week I've left the company I worked for since 1991, and my lady-love and I are planning to depart Australia in the near future. Our next stop is the U.S. West Coast, at a city to be determined (probably San Francisco or Seattle, but...http://www.ravenna.com/~forbes/index.cgi/2005/03/31#InterestingTimes The Doctor is in:- (Found July 15, 2008 ) If it weren't for Howard Dean, I'd still be on the sidelines of American politics: Interested, but not involved. Dean's grassroots organizing, and his call to civic duty, galvanized millions of people around the world &8212; myself included &8212; and his pull-no-punches presidential campaign changed the tone of the Democratic Party. I always thought the Democrats of 2000-2003 were bringing an olive branch to a knife fight: Offering the hand of bipartisanship to an uncompromising opponent..http://www.ravenna.com/~forbes/index.cgi/2005/02/13#TheDoctorIsIn Comics trips.- (Found July 15, 2008 ) When I was growing up, we didn't have a World Wide Web like you kids today: We had the Marion Daily Republican for news about our friends and neighbors, and the Southern Illinoisan for reports from the outside world. Sometimes Dad would even splurge and invest a nickel in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, but mostly we read the hometown papers. I don't remember which paper had the better comics page, but I do remember thinking they had a lot of dead weight in there. Strips like Hi and Lois or..http://www.ravenna.com/~forbes/index.cgi/2005/01/24#ComicsTrips And now a word- (Found July 15, 2008 ) The management of A Yank in Oz is flabbergasted to introduce our first commercial sponsor, an advertiser who apparently believes this blog is about a New York Yankees fan swept away by a tornado. (Well, that's one possible interpretation of the blog's name.) I had given up on the idea that blogads were going to be a lucrative source of revenue &8212; or even a source of revenue &8212; given the utter lack of response thus far… but apparently someone looked at the sophisticated,...http://www.ravenna.com/~forbes/index.cgi/2005/01/23#AndNowAWord Two worth reading:- (Found July 15, 2008 ) A commenter at The Peking Duck declares that what we now have in Iraq is "the equivalent of a kind of Vichy Government being set up," and that morally the insurgents are right to resist and the quislings are wrong to cooperate. Richard presents the opposing view with a powerful summary of why &8212; in spite of all Bush's failures and screw-ups &8212; we can't abandon the Iraqi people to the hands of the murderous few. Andrew Sullivan and Greg Djerejian take John Kerry to task for not...http://www.ravenna.com/~forbes/index.cgi/2005/01/17#TwoWorthReading Often in error, never in doubt:- (Found July 15, 2008 ) Glenn Reynolds marks the occasion of the Iraq Survey Group giving up the search for Saddam's nonexistent WMD stockpiles (link via One Hand Clapping) by tartly noting there were other reasons to go to war too, y'know, and that Bush's only mistakes were (a) listening to the CIA and (b) going to the United Nations in the first place. I've noted elsewhere the problem with Glenn's assertion that the UN road was a mistake: At the time, he praised the Bush Administration's strategy and lauded...http://www.ravenna.com/~forbes/index.cgi/2005/01/16#OftenInError |