“Did you know that abortions have gone up 25% since George Bush was president?”
No, and neither did the rest of the people who breathe the earth’s oxygen, but wherever Howard Dean lives, it’s apparently hard data.
Except that it’s not, and in that regard, we owe The Great Screamer a debt of gratitude. Not only did […]

From Wall St. Journal Best of the Web, by James Taranto:
Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League is outraged over a comment Rep. Charles Rangel made the other day, the New York Daily News’s Lloyd Grove reports:
The Iraq war “is the biggest fraud ever committed on the people of this country. . . . This is […]

Quote for the day from the diary of Fr. Alexander Yelchaninov, who was a married parish priest and schoolteacher who died in exile in Paris in 1934:

We can already ascertain that the power exercised over humanity by Christian ideas is without precedent. This is acknowledged by the enemies of Christianity themselves. Nietzsche declares that the […]

One of our friends responded to the slideshow by asking why there weren’t any pictures of me. Well,… oops. I forgot. There are pictures of me, of course, but none that quite make the cut, in my humble estimation. Like a lot of people, I don’t care for pictures with me in them. They’re annoying, […]

Okay, last mention of the trip before I get back to normal stuff. (I haven’t worried about it much because what is there to talk about? The Michael Jackson case? Give me a break.)
I finally made my way through all the photos for the British part of the trip (here’s the slideshow). Much better pictures […]

So what else do we know about Paris?
Well, it doesn’t photograph well. Or maybe it’s better to say that it doesn’t photograph right. All of the detail and the elaborate decoration and the views … it’s just not coming across in the photos. (Here’s my Paris slideshow, all the same.) So we know –

You had […]

So Paris is basically London but with more curlicues. This is what we know now.
And what else did we learn?

They speak French there. This is important, so I’ll say it again in italic. In France, the people speak French. It may not seem like privileged information, but no one had quite put it that […]

Winding up the European trip and thank goodness for that.
It’s been grand and it’s been strange, but it’s also been a long time and Greg and I are both ready to see the green, green grass of home, even if we have to spend 8 or so hours on a plane to do it. […]

Off the boat, back in London … just in time for more European anxiety over the Dutch ‘no’ vote. And from where I sit, there are human factors that seem like they made this vote a foregone conclusion.
BBC last night was full of the news of the Dutch voting down the EU constitution and what […]

Oh my. I don’t know that I’ll say much more than this — if you have any way to get to Edinburgh, do it. Of all the places we’ve been on this very fine cruise, it was the best. Not that Greenock and Dublin and Belfast and London weren’t wonderful, but Edinburgh seemed to bring […]