I’M NOW WIRELESS-BLOGGING from the Mellow Mushroom on campus, seated in front of a huge HDTV carrying CNN. There still doesn’t seem to be a lot of real news, and so far the Baghdad-cam continues to be a bust.

I’m certainly a fan of the setting, though. With my former colleague Peter Morgan, I watched CNN at lunch during the last war at the late, lamented Roman Room. This place has less atmosphere and history, but better TVs and a wireless network. And the waitress is substantially more attractive than the Roman Room’s George, even if he was a Knoxville institution.

UPDATE: By popular demand, here’s a picture of the waitress. (Sorry, guys, I’m not posting her name on the Internet. She was happy to let me take her picture for the site, but . . . ) Sadly, I don’t have a picture of George, though, so you’ll have to trust me on the comparison.

Overall, I give the Mellow Mushroom’s wireless setup about a B+ or A-. It seemed a bit slow to me, as I think I was sharing a single Linksys WAP with, well, everyone else who was using it. On the other hand, today’s a bad day to judge, as the whole Internet seems a bit slow to me, and I don’t know how much of the slowness was the result of wireless bandwidth and how much was the result of the sites being slow to serve, or net congestion along the way.

The staff thought it was pretty cool to see photos posted in realtime like that. And the pizza was great, though I didn’t need to order two slices given that each slice was about the size of Detroit. Sadly, I didn’t partake of any of their dozen-or-two varieties of draft beer as I have a committee meeting in about an hour and those call for caffeine, not alcohol.