OKAY, I THOUGHT WE WERE OVER THE WHOLE BURKA/BIKINI NONSENSE, but to my disappointment, Jim Henley informs me that we’re not. (The post to which he refers is, natch, on ##@#$! blogspot, so I couldn’t read it). However, he also steered me to this must-read post by Colby Cosh on “Touched by an Angel” and its squeamishness toward actual religion and the not-so-pleasant implications thereof.

SOME THOUGHTS ON AGING from Caterina Fake. She’s right. I’m at the age when people are sometimes surprised at how old I am, and other times surprised at how young I am, depending on how they know me and their frame of reference. And either way, it seems odd to me.

My favorite quote is from (I think) Oliver Wendell Holmes: “I don’t feel like an old man. I feel like a young man who has something seriously wrong with him.” I suspect that when I’m at an advanced age I’ll feel the same way. One hopes, of course, that by then “advanced age” will be in the high triple digits. . . .

OKAY, BLOGGER/BLOGSPOT IS REALLY FLAKING OUT: I just tried to follow this link to the Weekly James and it took me to Ev Williams’ EvHead blog! God knows what it’ll do to you.

UPDATE: Now it’s producing a “Blogspot is down for maintenance” page. Supposedly it’ll be back up at about 10:30 Eastern, so you may want to adjust your surfing accordingly.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Paul Schmidt writes wondering if Blogspot was hacked:

I don’t know about the other blogspot hosted sites, but an attempt to

access Tim Blair or the Volokhs initiates a download of an executable

(presumably a trojan).

I don’t get that, but my system is set up to block such things routinely. You should beware of any site that wants you to download software unless you’re quite sure of the reason why. Just say no to unexplained downloads.

UPDATE UPDATE: Schmidt just emailed back:

It’s happening with Mozilla (my usual browser), but IE properly shows the

“down for maintenance” message. I don’t see anything in the page source

that should cause it, but then, I’m not a web guru. If it’s still happening

after it’s working in IE, I’ll notify the blogspot admin.

Stay tuned.

ONE MORE UPDATE: Hacking fears appear to be misplaced. One reader reports that there was a notice of scheduled maintenance up last night. And reader Stephen Commiskey reports:

The webserver is configured incorrectly; the “down for maintenance”

message is accidentally set to MIME type octet-stream (used for

binaries), when it should be set to something like text/HTML.

Mozilla users can, if they like, see the message by telling Mozilla to

open the “file” with Mozilla.

Or they can live without the thrill. As I write this, Blogspot is still down though it’s after 10:30.

TONY BLAIR has released the full dossier on Saddam. Click here for the full text.

Say, didn’t they do something pretty much exactly like this shortly before the invasion of Afghanistan?

BELLESILES UPDATE: The Emory Wheel reports that Michael Bellesiles is appealing the results of the independent scholars’ review of his work, which thus must have turned out to support the critics’ charges. This is apparently the reason for Emory’s delay in acting.

CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY UPDATE: A Jewish student was reportedly beaten by an Arab student last week.

GEITNER SIMMONS HAS several good observations on the red / blue divide. Start with this one and scroll up.

JAY CARUSO IS CALLING BULLSHIT over Hesiod Theogeny’s latest “chickenblogger” posting, and I have to say he’s right to. I thought the Republic vs. Empire thing had some good points, but this is just silly name-calling. (Though I admit “Saddamite” — which came from someone other than Caruso — is no great shakes either.)

Unless, perhaps, Hesiod’s final sally was actually aimed at Al Neuharth. But then it would just be mean.

ORRIN JUDD wonders why a Reuters story on Tony Blair’s slide in the polls links it to Iraq and fails to mention the 400,000-person demonstration on a rather different topic just yesterday. Well, he doesn’t really wonder. He’s just amazed:

Perhaps it’s helpful, for comparison sake, to recall that the great March on Washington in August 1963, led by Martin Luther King Jr., and generally considered one of the most significant public demonstrations in American history, summoned “only” about 250,000 people. But would a news organization that reported on a presidential approval poll conducted over that weekend fail to even consider the effect of the protests on the resulting number? Not damn likely.

How is it possible that an anti-government protest, however inchoate its aims, that may have been twice that size, in a country that’s significantly smaller, can have had no effect on the Labor Party’s poll numbers? Reuters has truly become a disgrace over the course of the past year and this looks like a blatant attempt to blame any bit of bad news (it’s bad if you’re a Laborite anyway) on the war on terrorism (or as Reuters might call it, freedom-fighterism). It is, of course, possible that the negative numbers for Labor reflect war fears, but if so, where are the matching 400,000 folks protesting the government’s Iraq policy?

Where, indeed?

YOU REALLY CAN BUY ANYTHING ON EBAY! (Via Blogatelle).

ERIC OLSEN VS. THE RADIO TROLL: A thrilling story in one act.

SMALLPOX UPDATE: Interesting post by Lynxx Pherrett on the potential for antiviral drugs in treating smallpox.

SLATE’S JOSH DANIEL says that Steve Earle’s new album is obnoxious and tired.

JONATHAN RAUCH says that Bush is saving the U.N. from suffering a “dangerous impotence” at the hands of its supporters.

IT’S NOT ACTUALLY A “FISKING,” BUT this tart reply to Al Gore’s latest speech pretty much puts him away. Especially the response to Gore’s Jesse James remark.

All I have to add is that Jesse James, who is allegedly (without much actual evidence) an ancestor of mine, stood up for “the people against the powerful,” and I’m surprised to hear Al speak of him in such a negative fashion.

UPDATE: Henry Hanks points out that Gore was singing a different tune not long ago. And Susanna Cornett isn’t impressed:

Overall, Gore’s speech is an effort to pander to the left while reaching for the center who believe a war is the right thing. His allusions and accusations are targeted at bolstering his statesmanship, but do so only at the cost of denigrating his own country. If anyone is behaving in a calculatedly political manner, it would be Al Gore.

She’s got a link to the transcript.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Oliver Willis is defending Gore. Meanwhile, Scott Ott offers a hometown perspective and reader IMoby writes “I think this speech means Gore is running…. for the job of German Justice Minister.” Well, the position is available.

LAST UPDATE: Matthew Hoy asks: WWGD? And former Gore voter Rick Heller is reminded of the Kellogg-Briand Pact.

I LIED, THIS IS THE LAST UPDATE: Okay, even Patrick Nielsen Hayden seems to think I was seriously defending Jesse James’s honor. Uh, no. Sorry — it seemed obvious to me that it was tongue-in-cheek, but I guess it wasn’t.

JAMES MORROW REPORTS that the INS is finally expanding its visitor-registration program to include Saudis. Better late than never, I guess. Scroll down for some more good observations.

STEPHEN POLLARD writes that John Pilger and the BBC are achieving new levels of bias.

I think the shrillness is a good sign. It means they know that they’re losing.

SOMEBODY HIRE BILL QUICK! Failing that, you can buy some cool merchandise, or just leave money in his tipjar. He’s got all the bases covered.

STUART TAYLOR HAS AN INTERESTING PIECE ON AFFIRMATIVE ACTION:

Worth checked this impression by doing a tally: Of the 43 people who since 1986 had been hired or promoted by his division, 42 were black or female; only one was a white male. Worth compared notes with colleagues elsewhere. “We started understanding that there was a very deliberate effort coming from somewhere to exclude white males from getting positions. It replicated itself over and over again to the point that [by 1995] it was blatant and flagrant.”

Since 1994, all but one of the dozen or so promotions and transfers that Worth has applied for have gone to black or female applicants whom he considered no better qualified than he, and in most cases less qualified, because they had far less relevant experience and seniority. Some of them had little or no college education. (Worth has a B.S. from Washington University.) He and similarly demoralized friends would ruefully remark that HUD “may as well put ‘white males need not apply’ on the job vacancy announcements.” This pattern, which Worth initially attributed to the Clinton administration’s passion for racial and gender preferences, continued into the Bush administration. Since 1997, only one of the 16 hires and promotions in Worth’s division has gone to a white male.

Now the 55-year-old Worth is the name plaintiff in a nationwide class action against HUD and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

I think there will be a lot of suits like this in the next few years. The defendant here is kind of ironic, of course. Or maybe not.

ANDREW SULLIVAN IS ON THE CASE of NPR producer Loren Jenkins.

THE NEW REPUBLIC has finally gotten a blog. But the posts don’t have permalinks! Get ’em, guys.

UPDATE: Ask and ye shall receive.

MARK SULLIVAN administers a Fisking to Boston Globe columnist Eileen McNamara, who objected to Larry Summers’ comments on anti-semitism.

I guess McNamara considers herself and anti-anti-antisemite.

EERIE PARALLELS: Germany, then and now.

Okay, not really. But they’ve been pretty lame, and I won’t forget it. Neither, I suspect, will George W. Bush.

CENTRAL PARK JOGGER UPDATE: The MinuteMan has links to many posts.

DIPNUT HAS HIT THE BIG TIME as an, er, “featured blogger” at Salon. Well, kind of.