Babble

Your Sister made baked salmon and mangos last night. It’s the second time she’s made it for us, and it really is a good dish. I still haven’t made any real advances in eating seafood. I like stir-fry shrimp, but mostly I taste the lemon juice. The she-crab soup at Jason’s (which catered our wedding) is pretty good, but you mostly taste the cream of potato. I’ve had a curiosity about lobster lately, but I don’t see us running to a local fish camp for that.

The local paper is a shameful fishwrapper. Not only do they misspell “tobacco” in a headline on the front page (not two lines removed from the article’s use of the word), but they stated that, when seeing a wild turkey run “amuck” in downtown, “laughter erodded [sic] from cars.” What third-grader is writing this junk? Your Sister saw an article about an Irish group playing next Friday in Asheville and asked me to get tickets. She’s gone performance crazy. This will be her fourth show since last month and the second in April. In March we saw Nine Inch Nails, she caught A Doll’s House a week later, we’re seeing the Irish group and, two weeks after that, They Might Be Giants. She has left hibernation behind. The fishwrapper also announced a program to help the library move into a new building. Citizens are asked to check out 2 boxes of books and keep them at home until late May. Instead of returning them to the old library, you turn them in to the new one. We’ll be able to house four boxes of books. We’re such nerds; we think this will be fun, like taking care of pets.

Valerie, the French guest, emailed us late last night. She writes English better than I speak French, but I think we’ll be able to communicate alright once she gets here.

The NFL released the season schedule. The Panthers have the typically division-heavy program against Atlanta, New Orleans, and Tampa Bay, but also play Dallas, Pittsburgh, Philly, the Giants, Minnesota, Baltimore, both Ohio teams, Washington, and St. Louis. No Green Bay or Arizona this year. I think they have a good chance at making the playoffs again this year.

Picture of the Day
A gathering of Ultramen, the Japanese live-action monster fighting robot dude. I used to watch this through static on a rabbit-ear TV.

In the news
The New York Sun, a recent startup publication, reports that former Cheney aide Scooter Libby testified that his boss gave him classified (and bogus) pre-war WMD intelligence to release to the media. The permission to release the packet is alleged to have come from Bush. But Cheney said late last year that both of them have the right to declassify any information they deem fit. It remains to be seen if there’s a legal basis for that claim or the ability. Libby says he gave the info to former NY Times reporter Judith Miller. Her notes of the meeting state this was when Libby told her Valerie Plame’s name, who at the time was an undercover CIA agent. The outing of Plame is seen as retribution for her husband (Joe Wilson) writing a report denouncing the Nigeria-Iraq nuclear material theory. What this means in the short term is that, if true, the White House has lied like a rug about the administration’s knowledge and dissemination of the Plame identity all along.

Will anything come of this? Hard to say with a GOP majority in Congress, but there has been pressure from Republicans to distance themselves from the administration over bad policies. Democrats (notably Russ Feingold of Wisconsin) seek a bureaucratic hand-slap over the Iraq war hard-sell.

Oh, a new poll finds Bush’s approval rating at 36%. That’s little more than a third of the country. A third.

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Yet another mosque attack in Iraq. There was also one yesterday.

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Hamas might recognize Israel after all.

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When speaking to a House judiciary committee, Alberto Gonzalez said the president might expand the warrantless wiretapping program to include calls that take place solely in the United States. Currently (depending on who you ask), the program only can be used if one half of the call originates from another country.

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ABC’s Bob Woodruff, the anchor injured in Iraq, has left the hospital.