WHEN BUREAUCRATESE MEETS THE MUSIC WORLD: The Army is looking for a “Professional Celebrity Rock Music Band”.

THE NEW YORK TIMES reports that Fred Thompson is surging in South Carolina. And I just got an email from a journalist who says that crowds at Thompson events are suddenly over-capacity. Is it a tipping point for Thompson, or just a blip? Stay tuned.

CHICAGO: A place where “prostitutes are more likely to have sex with city police than they are to be arrested by them.” It’s called “protection sex.”

NEWS FROM ALGERIA: “In reaction to their defeat in Iraq (where 500 terrorism deaths a month is a low figure), many al Qaeda operators are moving to North Africa, where it’s safer (American soldiers and marines are farther away). December saw a spike in terrorism related deaths; 56 (versus six in November).”

UPDATE: Link was wrong earlier. Fixed now. Sorry!

LUKEWARM ON compact fluorescent bulbs. My own experience here. I’m still pretty happy with these.

UPDATE: Reader Dave Walter emails:

You can take the credit for most of the illumination in my home and your blog posts on cf bulbs are always illuminating, but the NY Times article you link to in ‘LUKEWARM ON compact fluorescent bulbs’ says less about the bulbs and more about the NYT (insular, complacent, reactionary, elitist, lacking balance – although they do briefly discuss “distaste for change” 3/4ths of the way through) Reminds me of all the complaints about how terrible CDs sounded when they first came out.

I started using compact fluorescent bulbs on a whim several years ago after an Ikea blow-out. Those early Ikea bulbs are pretty poor in design (they jut out of lamp shades, waiting to be whacked, or won’t fit inside housings) and light output is poor in the lower wattage ones. All, however, are still burning (whereas all the wine glasses from the same trip are long broken and the Luxor lamps held together with wire and duct tape). After reading about your experimentation on your blog, I started replacing my incandescent bulbs with the GE Soft Whites whenever they are on sale at the grocery store (joined your bulb group too) and I don’t miss incandescent bulbs at all. Actually, I had to check the lamp on my left just now to make sure that warm yellow glow really was one of those old Ikea rectangular-tube monstrosities. The greatest advantage I’ve found is using 26 watt bulbs that don’t overload my the wattage of my reading lamps and provide enough illumination so that I can read without glasses – especially useful after a few glasses of wine.

Always happy to hear about people’s experiences.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Another reader emails:

I purchased a six pack of GE Softwhite 100s (product code 47709) at Sam’s Club. I have one left in the pack, and one currently in use in a fixture. The other four have died. This is in less than one year of use, despite the fact that the pack claims these are “Guaranteed*” 5 year bulbs. The pack cost about 12 bucks. While I have no doubt that they saved me some money on electrical usage, I am underwhelmed by their reliability and longevity compared to incandescents. Just thought you’d like to know.

Yeah, that’s not saving you any money, regardless of electrical savings, given the bulbs’ price. I haven’t had any of the GE’s fail yet. However, I’m told that if you put them in enclosed fixtures where the bulb is horizontal — especially if you have incandescent bulbs in the same fixture — they won’t last as long. I had that happen with some other fluorescents that I put in a 3-bulb ceiling fixture with a couple of 60 watt incandescents. They didn’t last long, I guess because of the heat buildup from the incandescents.

I’d return those to Sam’s, anyway.

MORE: Reader Katie Kearns emails:

Not only do they not last as long in covered (or recessed) fixtures, some will have a nasty tendency to smoke and even catch on fire. There are a lot of not very safe ones out, including the one that my landlord apparently put in a closed fixture in my bathroom. I discovered this when my house was filled with the smell of burning plastic. We found it smoking quite unpleasantly. After a quick search on the net, I found out this was frighteningly common, especially for certain makes and models of lights (ours were Costco specials…). We searched through the house and found a total of 8 of these fluorescents, all of which were in inappropriate places.

This is one reason the ban on incandescents makes no sense — half the fixtures in my house are recess and/or covered. I can’t put a compact fluorescent there without creating a fire hazard! (Which I’m sure is probably worse for the environment. And my house!)

The incandescent ban is asinine.

EXTREME MORTMAN is excited about Nevada.

ECHOES OF the Fourth Century.

MY EARLIER POST on Brooks Brothers’ hellish new fashion ideas has produced various other links to heinous men’s fashion.

It’s like the Pee Wee Hermanization of the American male. What evil mastermind could be behind that? . . . Uh oh.

UPDATE: Ugh.

A SHOCKER: Anti-war Soros funded Iraq study. Say it ain’t so!

UPDATE: More thoughts here: “This is an academic scandal, insofar as these institutions have lent their brand equity to what is essentially a fraud on the public. Fortunately, they are all so well-established that they can afford for George Soros to dissipate a tiny bit of their reputation. But — and this is important — let us not hear complaints from any of these institutions about ‘anti-intellectualism in American life.’ Americans do not trust our pointy-headed institutions of higher learning in matters of public policy for very good reason.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Art Fougner, M.D., emails:

The reputation of an outstanding medical journal ( The Lancet is more highly regarded than the New
England Journal of Medicine.) has been permanently sullied. The editors should be sacked. And they complain when a drug detail man buys lunch for a doctor’s office. My God!

This goes beyond lunch.

“WHAT IS TO BE DONE?” About the Supreme Court.

CANADA’S KANGAROO COURT: On video. More here.

UPDATE: “Pure, uncompromising brilliance.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Comments from Mark Steyn.

Ms McGovern, a blandly unexceptional bureaucrat, is a classic example of the syndrome. No “vulnerable” Canadian Muslim has been attacked over the cartoons, but the cartoonists had to go into hiding, and a gang of Muslim youths turned up at their children’s grade schools, and Muslim rioters around the world threatened death to anyone who published them, and even managed to kill a few folks who had nothing to do with them. Nonetheless, upon receiving a complaint from a Saudi imam trained at an explicitly infidelophobic academy and who’s publicly called for the introduction of sharia in Canada, Shirlene McGovern decides that the purely hypothetical backlash to Muslims takes precedence over any actual backlash against anybody else.

Read the whole thing.

MORE: Canadian reader Duane Mailing emails:

WOW! Those videos are absolutely incredible! Best thing I ever heard from the mouth of a Canadian. I was laughing so hard I was crying. A real man stands and speaks the truth….in this day and age…brilliant! I never thought I’d hear anything in real life that compares to Howard Roark’s courtroom speech from Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead but I just did and I can hardly believe it. I am truly inspired by Ezra Levant.

I expect this will get a lot of attention. (Bumped)

THERE ARE NO ATHEISTS IN FOXHOLES, and there are no vegans in tsunamis.

STEVEN LANDSBURG defends Huckabee over the Fair Tax.

I’ll just add, as I’ve noted before, that many critics of the Fair Tax proposal act as if Huckabee invented it. Actually, it’s been the subject of discussion for a while, and there’s a bestselling book involved. This doesn’t make the plan a good idea — there are plenty of bestselling books that outline bad ideas — but it seems as if discussions should reflect the plan’s origins.

UPDATE: Related thoughts from Arnold Kling, who favors a “semi-fair tax.”

A LETTER TO BARACK OBAMA on race and politics.

THE NEW YORK TIMES SAYS RETURNING TROOPS ARE MURDERERS, but Marc Danziger checks the math.

Bruce Kesler has more. “The few stories the NYT’s presents, however colored for effect, are tragedies. But the greater tragedy is that we have to suffer the NYT’s agenda of defamation of another generation of veterans.”

HAPPY No Pants Subway Day!

AN INSTANT TREATMENT for Alzheimer’s disease? Bring it on!

THOMPSON VS. HUCKABEE.

UPDATE: Thompson keeps up Huckabee criticism.

ANOTHER CONSPIRACY THEORY exploded.

LOTS OF LOVE for the Audi R8. I’ll keep that in mind for whenever I want to replace the Mazda . . . and have a hundred grand or so burning a hole in my pocket.

EVENTUALLY, HOWEVER, HE’LL BE RIGHT! A roundup of Paul Krugman recession predictions.

JONAH GOLDBERG will be on C-SPAN’s Book TV tonight at 10 pm Eastern, talking about his new book. Schedule for repeats is here.

THE CARNIVAL OF CARS is up!

GLOBAL CLIMATE DATA: “A feast for cherry-pickers.”

THOUGHTS ON CAPITALISM’S PR PROBLEM. On the other hand, nothing provides better PR for capitalism than socialism, once it’s put into practice. . . .