BACK IN THE OFFICE, and facing the inevitable stack of mail. On top is what looks like an interesting book from Oxford University Press, by Abigail Kohn: Shooters: Myths and Realities of America’s Gun Cultures. Obviously, I haven’t read it yet, but it looks like an effort to take an honest sociological look at gun owners in America, in opposition to the rather cartoonish and negative view generally found in mass media. Here’s an excerpt from the introduction:

According to some of the top journalists in the country, gun enthusiasts and NRA members are racist, stupid, ignorant about history an dpolitics, apathetic to violence, bellicose, and jingoistic. They are, quite simply, evil.

It’s difficult to imagine the media promoting these kinds of characterizations of particular ethnic or religious groups without a political firestorm. Yet these are routine characterizations of gun enthusiasts. . . .

When I began my research into gun enthusiasm and gun ownership in the mid-1990s, I learned that a number of my academic colleagues held very similar views.

The book looks quite interesting, and I’ll try to say more about it later. Now I’m off to a faculty meeting I didn’t know I had until just a few minutes ago. Sigh. Vacation’s over. . . .

I’M STILL PLAYING CATCH-UP ON THE NEWS, but Winds of Change has its war roundup and Iraq roundup features posted.

A HARDY PERENNIAL — law professors whining that their students make more than they do even before graduation.

I took a whopping paycut when I left law practice, and the gap continues to widen. Guys with my seniority are making well over a million bucks a year at big firms.

Best money I ever spent.

LAST WEEK’S COLUMN on aging research led Clayton Cramer to write that life is so bad it’s not worth extending. Or something like that.

I don’t agree. Meanwhile, here’s an interesting post on opposition to anti-aging research. My column for this week will take a further look at the subject.

UNSCAM UPDATE: It looks as if U.N. staff may have been involved:

Washington — An independent investigation of the United Nations’ controversial Iraq oil-for-food program is close to releasing an interim report this summer that is expected to focus on U.N. staff involvement in the program.

But critics and supporters of the United Nations will likely have to wait about a year before the three-member committee releases its findings to the public on a wide array of allegations of corruption and mismanagement in the massive program.

I’m shocked.

UPDATE: William Safire writes “Tear down this U.N. stonewall!”

Let’s advance this story. Two BNP Paribas sources tell me this: in a storage facility in Lower Manhattan, the bank had a large room containing some 5,000 oil-for-food file folders.

Each folder contained a copy of the bank’s letter of credit authorized by a U.N. official to pay a contractor for its shipment; a Notice of Arrival monitored by Cotecna at the Iraqi port of Umm Qasr if by ship, or the Jordanian border crossing of Trebil if by truck; and a description of the contract. The original paperwork went to the Rafidain bank in Amman, Jordan; copies of the damning documents are stored by BNP Paribas in New Jersey.

Though the U.N. purchases were supposedly to supply desperate Iraqis with food or medicine, most of this evidence deals with items like construction equipment from Russia, hundreds of Mercedes-Benz limousines from Germany and thousands of bottles of perfume from France.

The money trail grows cold; won’t some lawful authority (Hyde? Snow? Spitzer?) issue a subpoena that would start “due judicial procedure”?

Read the whole thing. And read this, too.

BACK HOME: Regular blogging will resume later.

UPDATE: Various vacation questions: No, we weren’t on Pawley’s Island, though that’s a good guess. It was St. George Island, Florida, near Apalachicola. One reader writes:

Where’s the fish?

It would help put me in the mood – I go fishing in a few weeks, in Scotland. Hooray!

Your wish is my command! That’s my brother, who agreed with my brother-in-law that it was the best fishing they’d done.

The InstaDaughter caught a shark, too, but I don’t have a picture of that. Or of her eating her first raw oyster straight out of Apalachicola Bay. (She loved it.) The Insta-Mom learned to sea kayak, and I took my 13-year-old nephew for his first open-ocean scuba dives. I hadn’t been diving in the Gulf of Mexico before, and it wasn’t bad. Visibility was about 30 feet, and there were lots of fish — spades, amberjack, mackerel, and grouper. Not the wild diversity of Grand Cayman’s reefs, but a lot of fish. We dove three wrecks: the Lumber Ship, the Kaiser Tug, and the Mexico Beach. Couldn’t do the Empire Mica, which is the premier wreck in the area, because it was too deep for a 13-year-old diver.

And, yes, I wish I were still there. . . .