“WE HAD NO IDEA CONDITIONS WERE GOING TO BE THIS GREAT,” First Lt. Taysha Deaton of the Louisiana National Guard said about life in Iraq.

She bought [a king-size] bed from a departing soldier to replace the twin-size metal frame that came with her air-conditioned trailer on this base in western Baghdad. She also acquired a refrigerator, television, cellphone, microwave oven, boom box and DVD player, and signed up for a high-speed Internet connection.

These quotes are from a front-page NYT article, interestingly enough. The golden-toned photograph on the front page of the paper NYT – the little click-to-enlarge square at the link – makes life in Iraq look like an idealized version of college dorm life. This contrasts with the many NYT articles on the difficulties of military recruitment. There is a mention of the dramatically different conditions when one leaves the base, but overall the article almost seems intended to encourage volunteers.

THE “POLITICALLY CORRECT CORPSE.” The proprieter of an eco-friendly cemetary: “Death goes in cycles… My best guess is we’re finished with the nihilistic ‘Let’s get it done quick and throw me into the sea thing.’ Now, it’s, ‘Return me to nature and help save the planet.’ ”

FUNNY AS HELL, and funny enough to spend time in Purgatory for, says Stephen Bainbridge, so who am I not to link?

“MAKES YOU WONDER WHAT ELSE THEY TOSSED OUT.” Betsy Newmark on the 9/11 report, commenting on the news of omissions about Mohammed Atta. Here‘s the very harsh Investor’s Business Daily editorial:

[Curt Weldon, R-Pa. said] “They put stickies on the face of Mohammed Atta on the chart that the military intelligence unit had completed, and they said you can’t talk to Atta because he’s here on a green card.”

Lee Hamilton, co-chair of the 9-11 commission, said the commission “did not learn of any U.S. government knowledge prior to 9-11 of surveillance of Mohammed Atta or of his cell . . . Had we learned of it, obviously it would’ve been a major focus of our investigation.”

But they did learn of it. The New York Times reports that the 9-11 commission staff had the Able Danger data but decided not to share it with the panel members because the information sounded inconsistent with what they thought they knew about Atta.

Commission staffers plan a trip to the National Archives to retrieve their notes on Able Danger’s findings. Yes, the same National Archives where Clinton National Security Adviser Sandy Berger was caught stuffing classified documents about terrorist threats down his pants, presumably to remove them from public scrutiny.

And this is the same commission that included one Jamie Gorelick, a deputy attorney general in the Clinton Justice Department. She’s also architect of the policy that established a wall between intel and law enforcement, making “connecting the dots” before 9-11 a virtual impossibility.

“LOOKED LIKE IT WAS INTENTIONAL. Inform all units coming in from the back it could be a terror attack.” The 9/11 recordings. Listen here.

BORED IN FALLUJAH:

“Don’t you get attacked all the time?”

“Eh.”

“So what’s changed?”

“Well… there’s nothing left to watch. I’ve seen all the DVDs out there and there’s nothing left to do.”

I started naming off movies followed by all sorts of TV series on DVD that I could think of, and, sure enough, he had watched them all.

“Frank, there’s nothing left to watch! I wanna go home now.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. There seemed to be only one appropriate response. “Chickenhawk!”

THE PERFECT FAMILY VACATION BY THE LAKE… but doesn’t this campfire have WiFi?

A NEWLY DISCOVERED 400-FOOT WATERFALL in a Californian national park. “It wasn’t on a map, no one on the trail crew knew about it. People who been here 27 years had never seen it.” Amazing. We forget how big and wild this country is.

UPDATE: A reader writes:

Regarding that “undiscovered” waterfall in California, it’s important to take such news with a dose of salt. A few years ago there was a lot of hoopla over the supposed discovery of new waterfalls in a little-visited corner of Yellowstone. What really happened was that someone decided to publish their location, which had been a sort of insider’s secret, in a guidebook. The authors defined the waterfalls as undiscovered purely because information on them hadn’t appeared in print. (Basically, nothing’s real until it’s available on Amazon.com.) Local reaction ran from amusement to outrage.

I’m sure the California falls were less widely known than the Yellowstone ones, but they weren’t really undiscovered. Here’s a passage from that CNN story you linked to:

“A small band of loggers that harvested Douglas firs in the early 1950s left behind a choker cable and part of a bulldozer. A knife blade stuck in a nearby tree indicates that others have also made the trek.

But for park officials, the falls were merely a rumor for many years, said Russ Weatherbee, the wildlife biologist credited with the find.

A couple years ago, Weatherbee was cleaning out a cabinet of old maps when he stumbled across one from the 1960s marked with a note reading “Whiskeytown falls” near Crystal Creek.”

Now, officials are planning to build a trail to the falls and put them on the map. A perfectly valid response, but probably bitter news to whatever backpackers, etc., really did know about the area.

HEY, THAT’S OUR W! A reader notes this post from yesterday and writes:

“UW” has and always will be short for University of Washington, home of the Huskies. Go Dawgs.

No, no. Go Badgers. We got the W in 1848. You kids are 1861 upstarts.

UPDATE: A reader writes:

Ya, we get the same thing all the time There is one UT (THE University of Tennessee, Go Vols) founded in 1794, and we keep geeting confused with some johnny cum lately (1883) down in Texas (Hook em horns, what Kind of a mascot is that?). They even stole our School Colors. All this after we pulled thir Chestnuts out of the fire at the alamo.

IS THE NYT BOTCHING ITS COVERAGE of Air America’s problems? Brian Maloney marshalls the evidence. Clearly, the Times waited too long to report on the allegations of improper financial dealings, but did they reword what Al Franken said on the air? Maloney thinks so. He does have two different quotes. But Franken has a long talk show, and he does ramble on and repeat himself. Maybe he said both things.

From the NYT article:

[W]ord of the investigations ignited a firestorm of criticism on the Internet, especially among conservative-leaning blogs that have essentially accused the network of robbing from the poor to pay its bills.

To my ear, that sounds as though the Times did not appreciate bloggers pressuring it to report a story.

Amusingly, the NYT knocks the conservative bloggers for the robbery metaphor, but Franken himself used that metaphor on the air. He said, “I think he was robbing Peter to pay Paul.” The Times quotes Franken as saying “I think he was borrowing from Peter to pay Paul.” Did they change the quote to jibe with their attitude toward the bloggers? Even if Franken said both things, the choice of the more mealy-mouthed of two available quotes would still seem to be based on a desire to make the bloggers look rabid.

“WHERE HAS THIS HOSTILITY COME FROM?” Clive Davis on anti-Americanism in England.

POTUS, Rick Shenkman’s one-man blog, suddenly has 15 new bloggers – eminent presidential historians, including the UW’s own Stanley Kutler.

LOVING SHORT WOMEN, DAMNING KEN RUSSELL, AND SITTING AT PETER JENNING’S TABLE – some miscellaneous and perfectly composed entries from Terry Teachout’s diary.

OH, THE THEME SHOULD HAVE BEEN LAMB! Remember the best episode of “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” where the woman kills her husband by clubbing him with a frozen leg of lamb, then thaws it out, roasts it, and feeds it to the cops, who are looking for but can’t find the murder weapon? The woman was played by Barbara Bel Geddes. RIP. (Side note: that episode was written by Roald Dahl.) Bel Geddes also touched many hearts with her performance in “Vertigo,” as the woman who was not mysteriously glamorous (like Kim Novak). She’s quintessentially not sexy. We first see her, in Scene 1, discussing a bra with Jimmy Stewart:

What’s this doohickey?

It’s a brassiere! You know about those things, you’re a big boy now.

I’ve never run across one like that.

It’s brand new. Revolutionary up-lift: No shoulder straps, no back straps, but it does everything a brassiere should do. Works on the principle of the cantilevered bridge.

Later Jimmy will have a hot scene under a bridge, but with Kim, not Barbara.

UPDATE: A reader writes:

I first saw Vertigo when I was in high school in the 70s. I found it simply incomprehensible then (and still do today) that anyone (any male, I guess I should say) would have preferred Kim Novak to Barbara Bel Geddes. Not that anyone would turn their nose up at Novak (as if!); it’s just that Midge was so, so, so … hot. Those red glasses, her voice, the way she carried herself. It wasn’t a hot cha-cha-cha kind of thing; it was an understated attractiveness. You knew that if you had BBG as your girlfriend (as if!) she would be *yours* and not run off with the next guy along who was taller or better looking or richer or something (the way you knew Novak would). She was *solid*

Which is a long-winded way of saying (politely, I hope) that you are wrong, oh so wrong, when you say that BBG was “quintessentially not sexy”. I know, sexiness is in the eye of the beholder, but you’re wrong.

Aw! Half of this email reminds me of that cool old Jimmy Soul song “If You Wanna Be Happy” and half of it seems to express a genuine preference for a nice, hardcore nerdgirl.

THE VIEW FROM THE ICE BAR IN DUBLIN, from the always-wonderful Sheila Variations.

WHY IS THE FUR OF UNBORN LAMB considered especially disturbing?

“That’s just a little too much,” said the designer Carmen Marc Valvo, explaining why he draws the line at using fetal lambs…

I love the use of the word “explaining” here. What’s explanatory about “too much”? Is there some connection to the sensitivity about fetuses caused by the abortion debate? Because that really wouldn’t make any sense at all.

SHARPLY INKED DOGS AND CAT-GIRLS – including these, purportedly drawn by foot. Found via the great illustration blog Drawn! The exclamation point is in the name of the blog, though I am actually pretty excited about the blog. And am I doing a foot theme today? Stick around and find out. The trick would be to get Megan and Michael to go with the theme. We shall see.

WHEN BLOGGERS MEET AT THE CAFE, they crowd the table with laptops. No, get that thing out of the way. And now the laptop’s on the floor and she’s blogging with her feet!

DON’T “STIFLE THE GENIUS.” Supreme Court nominee John Roberts shows some commitment to federalism values:

[Senator Ron] Wyden said that he asked Judge Roberts whether he believed states should take the lead in regulating medical practice, and that the nominee replied that “uniformity across the country would stifle the genius of the founding fathers.”

Roberts seems to have disapproved of Congress’s intervention in the Schiavo case. I have to say “seems to” because he’s speaking at a high level of abstraction — quite appropriately, as everyone is gathering material to turn against him.

“CANADA IS GOING THROUGH ANOTHER SPATE OF SEPARATION ANXIETY,” says Austin Bay (at GlennReynolds.com).

SHOULDN’T JOURNALISTS APPLAUD the passing of “Jovian authority”?

AN ANTI-SPAM VICTORY FOR MICROSOFT. “We have now proven that we can take one of the most profitable spammers in the world and separate him from his money.”

UPDATE: The BBC seems to have a bit of an innumeracy problem.

TIRED OF ALL THAT MICKEY MOUSE ANALYSIS of the Disney opinion? (Oh, no, the judge let Disney pay Michael Ovitz $140 million for 14 months’ work!) The Conglomerate has a whole symposium going — 9 lawprofs strong.

WHEN BAD POLITICS HAPPEN to good bands.

IT’S A GOOD DAY to visit Day by Day.