Audible Althouse, #22.

47 minutes of entirely Althousian talk. Take it or leave it. Do I say anything devastating about OSM? Do I say anything not about OSM? Wouldn't you like to know?

Is al-Zarqawi dead?

The AP reports:

U.S. forces sealed off a house in the northern city of Mosul where eight suspected al-Qaida members died in a gunfight - some by their own hand to avoid capture. A U.S. official said Sunday that efforts were under way to determine if terror leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was among the dead....

In Washington, a U.S. official said the identities of the terror suspects killed in the Saturday raid was unknown. Asked if they could include al-Zarqawi, the official replied: "There are efforts under way to determine if he was killed."

The official spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the information.

On Saturday, police Brig. Gen. Said Ahmed al-Jubouri said the raid was launched after a tip that top al-Qaida operatives, possibly including al-Zarqawi, were in the house in the northeastern part of the city.

During the intense gunbattle that followed, three insurgents detonated explosives and killed themselves to avoid capture, Iraqi officials said.

"Who cares why Harvard picks some students... especially when you know the guy is being less than completely honest"?

Readers over at Volokh Conspiracy react to the news that the assistant dean for admissions at Harvard Law School has a blog. But, of course, law school applicants will care, and they will read that blog trying to see through to what will help them. You can probably read between the lines and pick up some tips. There are all kinds of blogs. I'm tempted to say there are real blogs and fake blogs. There are the blogs written to express the thinking of a human individual and PR that takes the form of a blog.

When you can't attack the message, attack the messenger.

Thanks, Steven.

UPDATE: "Looks like they’re backing away like Murtha from the war," says Jeff Jarvis (who, like Steven Taylor, links to these posts from David Corn and Glenn Reynolds).

ANOTHER UPDATE: Dennis the Peasant tells his version of the history of the founding of OSM, in a post that could have been titled "The Revenge of Jethro Bodine." MORE: Dennis's previous post is on point too, and unlike the later one has a comments section.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Atrios has unleashed the commenters on Roger. I can almost empathize. It's actually a good opportunity to compare the behavior of lefty and righty commenters. The lefties, in this sample, are all over the place, in "open thread" mode, despite the assigned topic.

Elsewhere in the the left blogo-hemisphere, Kos inflicts a different kind of pain. Noting, as I have, that frequently nearly all of the headlines displayed at OSM are from Xinhua News Agency -- "the official propaganda mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party" -- Kos quips: "So, um, did OSM's $3.5 million in venture funds come from the Chinese government?" When the first commenter doesn't get the joke of his title ("OSM is Chinese Communist Party mouthpiece"), Kos explains that he's joking and adds, cogently:

[This is t]he kind of kink they should've worked out before their all-too-public launch.

That's why I'm a big fan of soft-launches. Quietly launch, work out the kinks with the help of early adopters, and then make your big splash announcement.

Yes. I really cannot fathom the thinking behind opening big with what little they had. Was it hubris? Sheer recklessness?

MORE: Funniest Kos comment: "They stole Cialis's logo." I knew that spit curl looked familiar. Spit curl. It's this. I'm not bodily-fluids blogging again. My bodily fluids post of the day was here. And what a nutty photo on Cialis's page [when I visited]. The man's hand is in the nose-thumbing position, and the couple seems to have a relationship that is the furthest thing from sexual. But I guess that's their pitch: "If a playful moment turns into the right moment, you can be ready." Nice marketing, really, encouraging guys to take the drug "just in case." Why would OSM invoke Cialis imagery? They've got a website up, "just in case," somewhere down along the line, they have something to write.

YET MORE: Dan at Riehl World View has some serious questions for Roger L. Simon:

From what I've read of Kelly [AKA Dennis the Peasant], he has attacked OSM, ... [b]ut it appears you are dodging legitimate ethics questions by suggesting it's only personal.... You asked this Dennis to share his ideas and after going quite a ways down the road with him and hitting on some new, perhaps even better ones, you simply dropped him? Is that true? Come on, Roger - you're better than this. At least I hope you are.

It's too shrewd by half for you to now say no contracts were signed. This isn't fiction writing you're into now, Roger. OSM is supposed to be about reporting credible information. If the CEO of OSM is going to kick the thing off by saying, hey, don't mind my hand shakes, they don't amount to anything, it's an ominous start.

In the end, no one cares about Kelly - if he is out, he's out. But you have started and are by design now the purported leader of a serious new venture. Might I suggest you start acting like one? Either get serious, or go back to playing around with a less than wealth enhancing blog like the rest of us.

AND EVEN MORE: Jeff Jarvis amused me with this:

Yet Open Source Media, the whatever-it-is, promises this — with more haughtiness than I’d ever heard from Dan Rather — on its prevaricating post about the name:

The goal of our enterprise is to bring gravitas and legitimacy to the blogosphere.

Oh, gag me with a mitre.

I don’t think that blogs need to have legitimacy laid upon them … and who died and made you the legitimizer?

How could the prominent bloggers who put OSM together have retained so little sense of the spirit of blogging?

ON REREADING: To that last question, why did great bloggers lose the spirit of blogging? Perhaps, it was that they wanted to expand beyond blogging and had to leave blogging behind to pursue their ambitions. Oddly, lots of people trusted them to become business managers because they were good bloggers, but the enterprise involved sloughing off the blogger's attitude. Indeed, there was never any reason to think that because a person is good at blogging he'd be good at business.

The return of Valerie Cherish?

As you may know, I loved the show "The Comeback," which, the news was, HBO did not renew. So I was happy to see this in the email:

The guy who played Lisa Kudrow's gay hairdresser came into read for a part in the movie I'm making. I told him how much I loved the show and how much I hoped another network would pick it up and he said that what he heard was that...

"The show won't be coming back but Lisa Kudrow's character will."

He didn't know anything else but it sounded promising.

Let it be true! Hmmm.... Will she be a character on "Entourage"?

By the way, "guy who played Lisa Kudrow's gay hairdresser" is the wonderful Robert Michael Morris. I wrote about him here.

MORE: From the same emailer:

You'll be glad to know that he is a very very nice man and the few minutes I had with him were a lot of fun. Very down to earth and funny. A real gentleman and exactly like his character as well -- which doesn't diminish his acting ability because being natural is the hardest thing. But he said he and Lisa Kudrow were both heartbroken and shocked at the cancellation. One executive at HBO found the show too "painful" but I guess not exquisitely painful like we fans did -- and that's all it took.

Hey, sign the petition. I can't bear to think of Robert and Lisa as heartbroken! How candyass is HBO not to stick by a show that inflicted some pain?

"Crap Cars" and the figures of speech they inspire.

Roy Blount Jr. reviews Richard Porter's book "Crap Cars":

The DeLorean DMC-12 of 1981-83, he writes, had an engine "so weak it would struggle to pull a hobo off your sister." Not since Raymond Chandler have I met a metaphor so much more powerful than would do.

Which is not to say that Porter slings figures of speech around indiscriminately. The body of the G.M. EV1 (1996-99), he tells us, resembles "a snake trapped under a rock," and so it does. With regard to performance, Porter turns phrases the way sports cars should take corners. The Chrysler K-Car (l981-89) may have "pulled Chrysler from the depths of financial trouble," he concedes, "but did it have to be such a weedy little griefbox?" The handling of the 1974-78 Datsun B210 was "like trying to steer a wheelbarrow full of logs."

Do you like the outlandishly-overstated-metaphor style of humor? Overused, isn't it? I tend to think people who feel a lot of pressure to be funny use it when they don't really have a humorous observation to make.

A new dimension of post-Katrina anger.

There is the suffering that Hurricane Katrina caused for the people of New Orleans, but there is also the enlightenment Katrina brought about how much they suffered before the hurricane:

[A]fter tasting life elsewhere, they are returning with tales of public schools that actually supply textbooks published after the Reagan era, of public housing developments that look like suburban enclaves, of government workers who are not routinely dragged off to prison after pocketing bribes.

Local leaders have realized for weeks that they must reckon with widespread anger over how they handled the relief effort. But it is dawning on them that they are also going to have to contend with demands from residents who grew accustomed, however briefly, to the virtues of other communities....

"What's wrong with our school system, and what's wrong with the people running our school board?" asked Tess Blanks, who had lived here all her life before fleeing with her husband, Horace, to the Houston area, where they discovered that the public schools for their two children were significantly better. "Our children fell right into the swing of things in Texas. So guess what? It isn't the children. It's the people running our school system."

"Yeah, we're sisters."

Children of the same sperm donor find each other and build their relationship. If you were a sperm donor, originally intent on remaining out of the picture, but you knew that a large group of your children had sought each other out and formed powerful love bonds, would you have a change of heart? What if there were dozens of your kids out there, and they all got together and started to see themselves as a big family, with you as an absent presence? Would it make you sad? Would it make you lonely?

[Two half-sisters] are considering a trip to Wilmington, Del., which Donor 150 listed as his birthplace.

Hey, maybe it's my brother. I could be your aunt. When do I get in on this extended family action?

Are gifted children "a misunderstood, marginalized resource in a culture obsessed with equity and prone to conformity"?

The "gifted child movement" thinks so. Ann Hulbert, writing in the NYT Magazine, takes them on:

In fact, youthful prodigiousness is the leading edge of a wider cultural preoccupation with early high performance in our meritocratic era. Among the educated elite, the superchild has become the model child, and the model parent is an informed advocate with an eye trained on his or her child's future prospects. The unusual fate of the precocious child - to become adultified early and yet to remain hovered over for longer - is echoed in the situation of the privileged child, ushered along a highly scheduled path of credentialed performance from cradle onward, with college and career ever in mind.

In short, thanks not least to the gifted-child movement itself, the mission of discovering and molding precocious talent has been mainstreamed more successfully than anyone expected. Once in a while, the more mundane variety of Ivy League-aspiring kids and their ambitious parents pause to ask themselves whether the ethos entails too much early pressure to compete. For truly extraordinary kids, a different version of the question arises, but it is considered less often: could it be that in the quest to pinpoint and promote exceptional youthful promise, testers and contests and advocates may have unwittingly introduced early pressure to conform, not to the crowd but to an assiduously monitored, preprofessionalized and future-oriented trajectory?

A good starting point is always: Let kids be kids. Left to their own devices, what will become of the gifted?

Look at eminences in the past, and what stands out in their childhoods is an animus toward school, a tolerance for solitude and families with lots of books. What also stands out is families with "wobble" - which means stress and, often, risk-taking parents with strong opinions - rather than bastions of supportiveness where a child's giftedness is ever in self-conscious focus. Norbert Wiener, the founder of cybernetics and himself a prodigy who went to Tufts at 11 and Harvard at 15, wrote that prodigious children need to develop a "reasonably thick skin" - to feel they aren't demonized and will find a niche, but not to expect the world to supply a spotlight. Simonton speaks of the importance of being able to be "on the failure track for a while, take time off, take a real risk."

I love the notion of "the failure track" and the suspicion that it might do you some good. "Families with 'wobble'" is kind of a cool concept too.

UPDATE: Victor Fleischer favors special programs for gifted kids. I'd like to see all kids perfectly placed with programs fine-tuned to their needs. But in an imperfect world, whose needs will be met first? Whom should we be most concerned with? If gifted kids get extra, which kids will get the magic label that gives them more? The ones with parents who fight for it? I'm just thinking about how the system plays out in real life.

"I went there to live because it seemed so simple."

Johnny Depp wants out...



... of France. "It's insane."

Is a role-playing lesson about Islam, complete with prayers, permitted in public schools?

The Ninth Circuit rejected the Establishment Clause claim:

During the history course at Excelsior School in the fall of 2001, the teacher, using an instructional guide, told the students they would adopt roles as Muslims for three weeks to help them learn what Muslims believe.

She encouraged them to use Muslim names, recited prayers in class and made them give up something for a day, such as television or candy, to simulate fasting during Ramadan. The final exam asked students for a critique of elements of Muslim culture.

U.S. District Judge Phyllis Hamilton ruled in favor of the school district in 2003, saying that the class had an instructional purpose and that students had engaged in no actual religious exercises.

The appeals court upheld her ruling Thursday in a three-paragraph decision that was not published as a precedent for future cases...

Edward White of the Thomas More Center, the attorney in the case for the two children and their parents, said he will ask the full appeals court for a rehearing. He said the panel failed to address his argument that the district violated parents' rights.

"What happened in this classroom was clearly an endorsement of religion and indoctrination of children in the Islamic religion, which would never have stood if it were a class on Christianity or Judaism,'' White said.

Isn't White correct? If he is, should we think that the school is more respectful of Islam or more respectful of Christianity? One might contend that the school is more hostile to the religion it would never make the students pretend to exercise, because of the exclusion, but I think the opposite is true. The role-playing seems acceptable to the teachers when they conceive of the religion as a manifestation of a culture and not really a religion at all. If you wouldn't do an exercise like this for all the religions, you shouldn't do it for any of them. Asking children to say prayers that they do not believe could be very offensive to those who actually believe the religion. And finding out that the school made your child recite prayers other than yours is infuriating.

"The darkness at the center" of every book about the Beatles.

John Lennon.

[Beatles biographer Bob Spitz] hits the Lennon-as-drug-addled-emotional-cripple note with jarring frequency, a riff that often obscures the bad-boy rock expressionist's outright genius—just listen to a bootleg of the "Strawberry Fields Forever" demos recorded only weeks prior to what Spitz calls Lennon's "apogee of drug taking and self-abuse."

Here's the Spitz book on Amazon, open to the Search Inside function. Find something interesting and post it in the comments. I found this on page 336, describing the recording of "Come Together":

"Shoot me!" The taunt was indicative of the way John was feeling at the time. If Yoko helped reinforce his contempt for Paul, the heroin made their differences more irrational. Convinced that Paul was stealing his thunder, if not his soul, John fought his resentment with numbness.

Not really that well written, is it? "Convinced that Paul was stealing his thunder, if not his soul" is awfully bad.

Note: "Spitz" should not count as bodily-fluids blogging. Or should it?

That gives me an idea. Hmmm.... No references to semen or pus in the entire book! There is blood, though:

[M]uch of [Yoko Ono's book] Grapefruit [John] found infuriating, scattered with outrageous instructional “pieces,” such as “Use your blood to paint. Keep painting until you faint. Keep painting until you die.” John, who loved nothing more than to whip up controversy, saw in Yoko a kindred spirit. She refused to play by anyone's rules. Yes, there was the "avant-garde crap" she perpetrated as art, but she was unlike any woman he'd ever met, a real challenge to figure out. She excited him.

"It's a bloggerly day in the blogging world/A bloggerly day for a blogger..."

In the unintentional humor category, over at OSM, the top news under "Current Headlines"-- I kid you not! -- is: "AP: Winnipeg bowler advances to semifinal of Qubica/AMF Bowling World Cup."

And in the intentional humor category... we have a winner.

Closing in...

... on the big 3 million mark. Can't think of anything to do about it -- other than to try to identify the 3 millionth person.

Jacob gives an A+.

He writes:

You know that part of Magnolia, or Jerry Maguire, or Oprah, where Tom Cruise starts singing "Save Me" or "Free Falling" or "Psycho Killer, Qu'est-Ce Que C'est?" or whatever, and you get so, so embarrassed and you have to look away? Times one hundred. For almost every second of the episode. I have hysterical blindness in my ears now. It's like the opposite of how Daredevil can hear really super-well, except the sense that's being compensated for is my sense of self.

He's describing the last episode of "The Apprentice"! Ha!

A suprising display in a State Street poster store window here in Madison.

Four posters:

1. Image: a painting of the face of a Nazi, wearing a monocle, in which is reflected the silhouette of a hanged man. Text: "This Is The Enemy."

2. Image: a painting of Hitler, cowering, under a sky full of Allied planes. Text: "When? It's Up to You."

3. Image: a photograph of what looks like a live chicken, fully plucked. Text: "I am."

4. Image: a short, very dirty hippy, wearing a soldier's helmet, on which is scrawled "Stop the War." Text: "Because I scare very easily."

What's up?

ADDED: It might be helpful to know that it's the same store I described here.