MESSAGE TO BEST BUY: Two Dollar bills are legal tender. If the report’s accurate, I think this guy’s got a lawsuit. And the rest of us have a reason not to do business with Best Buy. (Via Slashdot).

YEAH, BLOGGING’S BEEN LIGHT THIS WEEKEND: Friday and Saturday I was busy with the Insta-Wife and Insta-Daughter. Today I went to a “welcome home” party for my secretary, now back from Iraq. (The doorbell at his parents’ house played The Marine Hymn — I asked his mother if it had always done that, and she replied “Just since he left for Iraq.”) Then we went out and took my grandmother — still nursing-home bound, but doing better — out to dinner. Not that I don’t love the blog, but some things take priority.

Back later.

CHRIS NOLAN looks at misogyny in San Francisco.

IT’S LIKE THE AUTO INDUSTRY IN 1972, I’M AFRAID:

College admissions decisions now arriving across the country by e-mail and snail mail are generating the annual excitement they always do. But that momentary thrill is only masking a new reality about college in America.

With faculty and administrations leading the way, political correctness and posturing — from both the left and right — is reaching dizzying heights in the land of the ivory tower. And rising right along with it is the frustration of middle-class parents, who are growing increasingly resentful of paying sky-high tuition for colleges they see offering their kids a menu of questionable courses and politically absurd campus climates that detract from the quality of a university education.

Speaking as someone working in the factory, I’m a bit worried at the increasing dissatisfaction out there. Then again, as the biggest problems seem to be at expensive private schools, perhaps those of us at public institutions will benefit.

UPDATE: A suggestion for U.S. News:

Start measuring and ranking colleges on the intellectual and political diversity of their faculties and student bodies. . . .

I’m a big fan of diversity. As my kids approach college age, I’ll be looking at the intellectual and political diversity of the schools they apply to.

To the millions of college-shopping parents and students out there: next time you’re on a campus tour, why not ask specifically about intellectual diversity? I plan to.

I suspect that’s a trend.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Various readers point out that the University of Colorado, home of Ward Churchill, is a public university. Touché

GIULIANI IN 2008? Outside the Beltway has some thoughts.

I will say that if Giuliani is “too liberal” for the Republicans to consider seriously, it’s probably a bad sign for the Republicans’ big tent.

TIM WORSTALL’S BRITBLOG ROUNDUP IS UP: Check it out.

PEACE BREAKS OUT in Indonesia:

The large and dramatic U.S. Navy relief effort in Aceh also delivered a lot of good will for the United States, and reduced the appeal of Islamic radicalism. Islamic terrorists were never very popular in the first place, and several years of arrests, bloody terror attacks and news of Islamic terrorist activities elsewhere in the world have further tarnished their image. Thus there is less religious violence. Even the separatist rebels in Aceh are pushing for a negotiated settlement. The separatists are also Islamic conservatives, and can see which way public opinion is blowing.

Sounds like good news.

LOOKING FOR EXTRATERRESTRIAL LIFE ON EARTH: At one level, this sounds a bit like searching for one’s keys where the light is better, but on the other hand, it makes some sense. Plus, a discovery that extraterrestrial life has reached Earth in the past would have significant implications for space exploration and quarantine policies. I’ve got a piece coming out in the Chicago Journal of International Law that looks at that topic briefly.

INSTA-WIFE UPDATE: Several people have written over the past few days to ask how the Insta-Wife is doing. Thanks for your interest. The answer is, pretty well. She got the go-ahead to start cardiac rehab last week, and is extremely happy to be exercising. She’s always been very athletic, and went six months without getting much exercise, which she hated. Even a modest amount of exercise has made her feel better; last night she was doing light yoga before bed.

She’s on a new and powerful anti-arrhythmic called Tikosyn, which seems to be controlling her rhythm problems quite well — they monitor her during her exercise, and she shows no rhythm problems at all, which certainly wasn’t the case before — and the side effects are less than the beta blockers. She’s on a very high dosage now, but we’re hoping they’ll back it down a bit; she still feels rather ill for an hour or so after taking it.

She’s on the road to recovery, and the overall trend is clearly upward. If it weren’t for her allergies — sadly, a standard problem in East Tennessee, where “immense biodiversity” means “every kind of pollen you can imagine, and then some” — she’d be doing even better.

Thanks very much to everyone who has asked about her, and sent good wishes and prayers. It’s all much appreciated.

AUSTIN BAY writes on peacekeeping in the Sudan.

SOMEBODY IS IMPERSONATING ME in blog comments again. If you see a comment that doesn’t sound like something I would write, it probably isn’t.

IT’S USUALLY A MISTAKE to copy things from Wikipedia without looking further into the subject. Trust me on this.

Is this part of a general slippage of standards?

UPDATE: Apparently not. At least, FreeWillBlog reports that the cribbing happened the other way around.

ANOTHER UPDATE: I notice that the Wikipedia entry on InstaPundit, now purged of major inaccuracies, contained this now-removed passage: “Reynolds has expressed scepticism about the value of [[Wikipedia]] (somewhat ironically, since the value of Wikipedia’s open process has similarities to the perceived value of the blogosphere).”

That has now been edited out, which illustrates both the strength and weakness of Wikipedia. I’m not a general Wikipedia critic, but one difference between blogs and encyclopedias — which I’m treating Wikipedia as — is that you expect something sort of finally authoritative from an encyclopedia. Not that errors won’t be corrected, etc., in future editions, but with more finality than the Wiki process produces. As I say in my FAQs, I don’t see blogs as a final authority: “As with anything else you read on the Internet, you should take what you read here as a starting point for your own research and investigation in the process of arriving at your own informed opinion (again, kind of like a card catalog) not as an ending point. I don’t knowingly link to false things without saying so, except in the case of obvious parodies, and I do my best to correct factual errors when I’m made aware of them. But a weblog is more like a rough draft than a finished product.” I guess a Wiki is, too, but somehow I expect an encyclopedia to be more of an ending point than a starting point. Perhaps that’s unfair, but I think it’s the mindset with which most people approach WikiPedia, because it ends in “pedia.” A WikiNews site would get a different reception.

MICHELLE MALKIN’S TV CAREER seems to be booming.

SEVERAL READERS have sent me links to this essay by Richard Corliss in Time, whose theme boils down to “porn was better when I was younger.”

But the most devastating take comes from the not-safe-for-work Erosblog, which observes:

The image instantly summoned in my mind is one of pity for the hypothetical wife or girlfriend of Time columnist Richard Corliss, who wrote that last squalid sentence.

Horny travelling men who don’t “summon a call girl” must be “too tired, timid or cheap”, eh?

It must surely suck to be married to that man.

Ouch. And how sad is it, really, to have to be brought up short on the subject of fidelity by a guy named “Bacchus?”

WILL COLLIER: “Unlike DeLong, I’m actually an engineer.”

SOME THOUGHTS ON THE CANADIAN SCANDALS, over at Winds of Change.

THE ANCHORESS HAS MOVED: Note the new URL.

TOM MAGUIRE HAS SOME SERIOUS QUESTIONS about the Mae Magouirk case.

UPDATE: Wizbang has more, and there’s interesting discussion in the comments both there and at Tom Maguire’s.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Here’s a report that the hospice in question denies the story.

And there’s more skepticism here.

TODAY IS THE SECOND ANNIVERSARY OF THE FALL OF BAGHDAD: Mohammed at Iraq the Model has thoughts.

UPDATE: Mohammed’s co-blogger, Omar, emails to say that this is the second anniversary of Baghdad’s rise, not its fall. He’s right, of course, and I stand corrected.

TODD ZYWICKI has more on Dartmouth’s diversity problem.

JEFF JARVIS TALKS ABOUT PRISON-BLOGGING: You can see video here.

INSTAPUNDIT HAS A NEW AFGHANISTAN PHOTO CORRESPONDENT, Major Robert Macaraeg, who conveniently enough rotated in just as Major John Tammes rotated out. Here’s a report from Kandahar:

Here are some images from the local bazaar that is held at Kandahar Air Field (KAF). Not many soldiers are allowed off KAF to go into the city of Kandahar to go shopping, due to a few obvious and not so obvious reasons. The obvious is for safety and the not so obvious is that the US Army does not want to flood the local economy with dollars and ruin it with inflation.

All the vendors are vetted and searched for prohibited items. The bazaar site is next to the air field and then it is commerce at its best.

I asked a vendor about sales tax and he said is what that? Then I explained the concept of paying taxes and he said only in America.

The little boy at the stand was a pretty good salesman and I picked up some trinkets from him.

These gentlemen are meeting a great need of soldiers here. They sell videos to the military and they cater to their taste. The videos are cheap, but the quality is sometimes lacking. One idea that Hollywood should take from these guys is to sell multiple movies (the average is six) on one disk based on a single theme. It would be a good way to move their back catalog.

I think that putting so many movies on one disk is why the quality is lacking. I’m sure the MPAA wouldn’t approve of these efforts, either . . . .

But thanks, Major. I hope we’ll see many more photos from this under-covered region.

WONDERING ABOUT THOSE VIRGIL TATUM ADS? Henry Copeland has some background.

IF YOU’RE INTERESTED IN GUN-BLOGGING, a subject on which I have been quite negligent lately, you should check out this week’s Carnival of Cordite.

And for those with differing, er, tastes, don’t miss this week’s Carnival of the Recipes.

CBS CAMERAMAN DETAINED FOR INSURGENT TIES: The Mudville Gazette has a roundup, and Robin Burk has some observations:

All of the major news outlets need to be taking a deep and critical look at the way in which they have been using locals to report news in Iraq. Whether it be hiring the translators that used to be paid by Saddam (and still may be linked to the Ba’athists) or the ‘freelancers’ that reported for CNN and other outlets from within Fallujah and elsewhere, if the networks are going to pay these people and take their reports at face value, then they are also morally and ethically aligned with them.

Many Americans see the press as not neutral, but actively opposed to U.S. war efforts. The press doesn’t seem to appreciate the depth of the problem.

UPDATE: Reader C.J. Burch emails:

The story isn’t that CBS is employing terrorists. The story is that no one is surprised CBS is employing terrorists. What’s more, I suspect that most Americans, say about 52% of them, feel that most of the MSM outlets with any presence at all in Iraq are employing terrorists.

Indeed.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Roger Simon has some Pulitzer-related thoughts.