SOMETHING ON THE COLORADO SHOOTINGS that I hadn’t heard. The gunman was stopped by an armed woman.

Remember: People don’t stop killers. People with guns do.

BLU-RAY PRICES start to plummet.

But of course!

CAUGHT YOUTHENING: Maureen Dowd’s latest column begins:

When I was a kid, we used to drive on the Beltway past the big Mormon temple outside Washington. The spires rose up like a white Oz, and some wag had spray-painted the message on a bridge beneath: “Surrender Dorothy!”

But if you’re imagining Dowd as a pigtailed six-year-old in the back of the family station wagon, think again. The temple was finished in 1974. Maureen Dowd was born in 1952. So she was a “kid” who was old enough to vote and drink. (According to this source, the graffiti first appeared in 1973, when Dowd would have been 21.) Thanks to reader Conrad Kiechel for the tip. I remember the graffiti, too, though, which was still there in the 1980s when I was a “kid” practicing law in Washington. By then Dowd was pushing 40.

UPDATE: Patrick Carroll emails:

Oh, I don’t know. In some circles our troops in Iraq are called “children”.

Besides, is there anything in her writing that suggests she ever grew up? All I ever see is teenage condescension and snark.

Good point.

ANOTHER UPDATE: A very weak defense of Dowd. Yes, the Temple was started in 1968. The graffiti wasn’t there until 1973. Then again, factchecking isn’t the strongpoint of this blogger, who can’t even spell my name right: It’s “Glenn,” not “Glen.” It’s right there next to every post . . . .

I GUESS THEY DO CARRY PRETTY MUCH EVERYTHING: Reader Paul Music sends a link to Amazon’s page listing Bestselling Items in Game and Exotic Meat. The wild boar tenderloin looks pretty tasty.

I’M BLOGGING from the Nokia 810 that I mentioned the other day. Not bad.

CRASHING THE GATES: Iranian students demonstrate for freedom. Catchy slogan: “Live free or die!”

YOU CAN SUPPORT NANOTECHNOLOGY PROGRESS and have your donation matched through the Foresight Institute challenge grant. I’m not on their Board of Directors any more, but they’re still an excellent organization. Maybe better, now that I’m not on their Board of Directors any more . . . .

REMEMBERING Evel Knievel.

BIOSHOCK takes the Game of the Year award at the Video Game Awards. Full report at the link. What’s not to love about a game that lets you “Biologically mod your body with plasmids – genetic augmentations that empower you with dozens of fantastic abilities.”

IS THE N.I.E. ACTUALLY A BUSH GAMBIT? I don’t think the Administration is that smart. But maybe that’s what they want me to think . . . .

MORE PROBLEMS FOR THE BBC: Nobody seems to know what “findability” means, but a reader suggests that it probably has something to do with paintballing . . . .

HOW TO SUPPORT MARK STEYN vs. the Canadian censors.

HERE’S MORE on the disappointing box office performance of The Golden Compass, but what’s really interesting is this:

Finally, another Iraq War-themed movie has crashed and burned. Grace is Gone (MGM/Weinstein) starring John Cusack, with an original score by Clint Eastwood, mustered only a $1,089 PTA on Friday at four locations with a projected weekend PTA of $3,594. It will be very difficult for the Weinsteins to pick this film up from the mat, and that will make an Eastwood Oscar nomination for Best Original Score an uphill climb.

I hadn’t even heard of this one, but it seems not to have impressed the reviewers. Reader Jacob Allen, who sent the link, adds: “That’s a cumulative total of $14,000 over the weekend. At $9 a pop, that means a total national audience of 1,550 or thereabouts. In NY and LA. Put it this way, ‘Grace is Gone’ may have thrown under New Line’s ‘Rendition’ at the box office. And that’s saying something. “

SOME RECOMMENDED gifts for Dads.

Plus, the perfect stocking stuffer! (Via Dave Price.)

ROAD-TEST IMPRESSIONS re Honda’s new fuel-cell car, from reader Shawn Church. And he emails some further thoughts — click “read more” to read them.

SUBURBAN SEX PARTIES DRAW COMPLAINTS: Two thoughts. (1) If my neighbors were bringing in over 100 people for canasta on a weekly basis I’d probably mind the traffic and noise; and (2) Who says middle America is stodgy?

MORE ON HIGHER EDUCATION’S DIVERSITY PROBLEM:

At a Harvard symposium in October, former Harvard president and Clinton Treasury secretary Larry Summers argued that among liberal arts and social science professors at elite graduate universities, Republicans are “the third group,” far behind Democrats and even Ralph Nader supporters. Summers mused that in Washington he was “the right half of the left,” while at Harvard he found himself “on the right half of the right.”

I know how he feels. I spent four years in the 1990s working at the centrist Brookings Institution and for the Clinton administration and felt right at home ideologically. Yet during much of my two decades in academia, I’ve been on the “far right” as one who thinks that welfare reform helped the poor, that the United States was right to fight and win the Cold War, and that environmental regulations should be balanced against property rights.

All these views — commonplace in American society and among the political class — are practically verboten in much of academia. At many of the colleges I’ve taught at or consulted for, a perusal of the speakers list and the required readings in the campus bookstore convinced me that a student could probably go through four years without ever encountering a right-of-center view portrayed in a positive light.

A sociologist I know recalls that his decision to become a registered Republican caused “a sensation” at his university. “It was as if I had become a child molester,” he said. He eventually quit academia to join a think tank because “you don’t want to be in a department where everyone hates your guts.”

Follow the link for some hard data. (Via NewsAlert.)

UPDATE: Related thoughts here.

BEWARE OF FLIRTING ROBOTS: “A program that can mimic online flirtation and then extract personal information from its unsuspecting conversation partners is making the rounds in Russian chat forums, according to security software firm PC Tools. The artificial intelligence of CyberLover’s automated chats is good enough that victims have a tough time distinguishing the ‘bot’ from a real potential suitor, PC Tools said. The software can work quickly too, establishing up to 10 relationships in 30 minutes, PC Tools said. It compiles a report on every person it meets complete with name, contact information, and photos.” More and more, we’re living in a William Gibson world.

UPDATE: Reader John Baker emails: “Professor: as much as I enjoy Gibson, ever heard of the Turing Test?”

Yeah, and it sounds like these robots are passing it in the real world on a regular basis. Though to be fair, I doubt Alan Turing envisioned administering the test with an audience of drunk, horny Russian guys.

ED DRISCOLL HAS VIDEO from the Arlington Guitar Show.

BRENDAN LOY REVIEWS The Golden Compass. Okay, but not great. “In any event, it’s not a bad movie — I mean, it’s no Eragon, certainly — but I don’t think it’s terribly good, either”

IN THE MAIL: Murdered by Mumia: A Life Sentence of Loss, Pain, and Injustice. By Maureen Faulkner, the widow of the cop Mumia Abu-Jamal killed, with Michael Smerconish.

NBC UPDATE: “NBC reversed course Saturday and decided to air a conservative group’s television ad thanking U.S. troops.”

For NBC, a PR disaster. For Freedom’s Watch, a PR coup, getting far more publicity than they would have gotten if NBC had just aired the — rather innocuous — ads.

WOULD SOMEONE PLEASE EXPLAIN THE INTERNET to A.P. reporter Naoki Schwartz? Because this headline — Blogger Threatens LA Campus Shooting — is misleading. The site in question, JuicyCampus.com, is a chatboard, not a blog. It’s almost as if somebody wanted to make bloggers look bad, though it’s probably just the result of appalling ignorance.

UPDATE: Give ’em credit for swift corrections — reader Anthony Sanchez emails to note that the headline has been changed to read “Student Threatens LA Campus Shooting.” And a note at the end of the story points out: “This version CORRECTS description of Web site as chat board instead of blog.”

Nice job.

CONGRESSIONAL DEMOCRATS’ flip-flop on waterboarding:

In September 2002, four members of Congress met in secret for a first look at a unique CIA program designed to wring vital information from reticent terrorism suspects in U.S. custody. For more than an hour, the bipartisan group, which included current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), was given a virtual tour of the CIA’s overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk.

Among the techniques described, said two officials present, was waterboarding, a practice that years later would be condemned as torture by Democrats and some Republicans on Capitol Hill. But on that day, no objections were raised. Instead, at least two lawmakers in the room asked the CIA to push harder, two U.S. officials said. . . .

“In fairness, the environment was different then because we were closer to Sept. 11 and people were still in a panic,” said one U.S. official present during the early briefings. “But there was no objecting, no hand-wringing. The attitude was, ‘We don’t care what you do to those guys as long as you get the information you need to protect the American people.’ “

Lots of people who were talking tough back then subsequently changed their tunes — out of either a sudden flowering of scruples or an unprincipled desire to go after the Bush Administration with any weapon that came to hand. But, you know, if you’re going to say “it was different back then,” it really has to be more than just an all-purpose excuse for politicians. It’s also a reason not to hang people out to dry for doing what politicians, and the public, wanted back then, when things were so “different.” Your call, but Jules Crittenden notes: “Next thing you know, someone’s going to say the Clinton co-presidency thought Saddam had a nuclear program and backed regime change.”

Yeah, and start showing videos like this. Unfair!

UPDATE: Reader Joseph Beaulieu has a difficult question for Pelosi, et al., on waterboarding: “If it was an acceptable practice five years ago, when the world was a more dangerous place, then what has happened in the past five years to make the world a less dangerous place where such harsh methods are no longer necessary?”

MORE: Dean Esmay: “Not a word of this surprises me.”

KEYSTONE KOPS IN INDONESIA: “Indonesian police mistakenly fire on Australian anti-terror chief in ambush mix up.” Er, or something worse.

(Via Rantburg.)

UPDATE: The Jakarta Post link above keeps changing. But this link to a report in the International Herald Tribune should be stable. Thanks to reader Hector Owen for the tip.