A bachelor should opt for throwing his dishes away rather than washing them after they have remained in his sink unwashed and festering for some number of days x.

What is the value of x?

I just read this rather interesting story about Farris Hassan, a 16-year-old from Florida whose parents are originally from Iraq. Apparently Farris traveled to Iraq by himself, without telling his parents, because he wanted to volunteer to help efforts at democracy. Pretty amazing,

The teen traveled to Kuwait, where a taxi dropped him in the desert at the Iraq border, but he could not cross there because of tightened security ahead of the Iraqi parliamentary elections on Dec. 15. He went to Beirut, Lebanon, to stay with family friends, and flew from there to Baghdad.

After his second night in Baghdad, he contacted the AP and said he had come to do research and humanitarian work. The AP called the U.S. Embassy, which sent U.S. soldiers to pick him up.

State Department officials notified his parents, and assured Atiya that her son was in Baghdad's U.S-protected Green Zone, where he would be safer than in the sector where he first contacted journalists.

"I was so anxious. Words cannot even express it," Atiya said Thursday.

Hassan does not speak Arabic and has no experience in war zones, but he wanted to find out what life was like there.

"He is very driven and he is very patriotic. He believes in democracy," his mother said.

Atiya said her son is studious, works on the school newspaper and is on the debate team. He is a member of a Republican Party club at school who spends his time reading, rather than socializing, his mother said.

"He thinks girls require too much time, and he has more important things to do. He loves history," Atiya said.

When school officials learned of Hassan's trip, they threatened to expel him, but Atiya and Hassan's father, Redha Hassan, a physician, persuaded officials to allow him to remain, Atiya said. It was not immediately clear why they wanted to expel him.

Michael Buckwald, a 17-year-old classmate, said Hassan immerses himself in subjects that he likes and was opinionated in class.

"He always struck me as a very intellectual person. He's very outspoken at the same time," Buckwald said.

Hassan is the youngest of Atiya's four children. The others are enrolled at universities.

Aside from the research he wanted to accomplish, he also wrote in an essay saying he wanted to volunteer in Iraq.

He said he wrote half the essay while in the United States, half in Kuwait, and e-mailed it to his teachers Dec. 15 while in the Kuwait City airport.

"There is a struggle in Iraq between good and evil, between those striving for freedom and liberty and those striving for death and destruction," he wrote.

Damn. Cool kid.

All I did for Christmas was go out for Chinese with a Jewish family that is friends with my family. It was kind of funny because the host kept calling out all Jewish names whenever a table opened up (after making this observation to myself, I overheard a stranger making the exact same observation). Also, I overheard the host tell someone to "Have a nice horiday," which was funny. Anyway, I had flied lice. That place had good eggrolls.

I wish I was a good blogger.

Here.

I have a friend I've known since we were really little. He's Jewish, but he's never been at all aware of his heritage. Anyway, I thought it would be funny to show him this map I have that doesn't have any countries labeled on it, and ask if he could pick out Israel on the map. After a few seconds of silence he asked, quite genuinely, "Is it in South America?"

By the way, this friend of mine insists George W. is stupid.

I think Lee may be onto something here.

Something has clobbered the networking on my computer - it looks like software and the main suspect I'm looking at is one of those Windows updates that the OS tells you will cause the ice caps to melt if you don't install. So I might not be especially fertile post-wise for the next few. Looks like once again I won't be sending anything to Weird Bill Gates (though my special homemade Holiday Crack might not be what he would have wanted anyway). Santa will weep hot tears of anger because there will be no Christmas naughty-naughty web pictures in Mudville.

Hey Mad Alchemist - heir to the secret wisdom of Le Compte de Saint Germain - is this blog set up to allow posting via email? Just curious.

Has anybody seen this show? I've seen a descent number of episodes of the American remake on NBC, and I just rented the British version (which I think I may like better, though it's a hard call, plus the Brit version only goes up to 6 episodes). Anyway, the humor (or, "humour," in the case of the British version) is very dry and deadpan, and might be a bit too alien for some people (though if you enjoyed Napoleon Dynamite, then it probably wouldn't bother you), but I really like it. It's always good to see some new and original ideas getting attention. If anybody has seen it, let's hear your thoughts on it.

Yay! I hope I did good. I am so glad to have my college algebra class behind me, but the rest of my classes I think I'm going to miss. This semester went really quick, it seemed.

Anyway, hopefully now I won't neglect the blog so much. Also, I'm assuming Fectin is done for the semester as well, so maybe we'll finally hear from him again. It seems like lately the blog has consisted almost entirely of Murel and I commenting on each other's posts.

As far as politics, I kinda feel like everything that can be said has been said to death. Not too much new that I have felt I could contribute much to. Read this, instead.

Space Moose redeems himself in the middle of a reprehensible time-travel rampage via his attempt to pre-empt the Noam Chomsky problem in the obstetrician's office (here).

We hear non-stop these days about how WalMart is evil for selling cheaper products that put small retailers out of business, and evil for providing low paying jobs to replace "better paying jobs". How come we never hear about how Amazon.com is evil for providing super cheap competition to retailers, and for completely eliminating retail jobs altogether by doing everything on computer? Major retailers like WalMart have always been around, they just haven't been quite as big as WalMart, but online retail stores are a brave, new frontier, and are creating major competition from a source that most people didn't really foresee. Why don't left-wing Luddites ever attack online stores the way they do WalMart?

From Gilbert Chesterton, the author of the Father Brown mysteries, in the chapter "The Medical Mistake" in What's Wrong with the World, comes this gem:

Now in bodily ills there is none of this difference about the ultimate ideal. The patient may or may not want quinine; but he certainly wants health. No one says "I am tired of this headache; I want some toothache," or "The only thing for this Russian influenza is a few German measles," or "Through this dark probation of catarrh I see the shining paradise of rheumatism." But exactly the whole difficulty in our public problems is that some men are aiming at cures which other men would regard as worse maladies; are offering ultimate conditions as states of health which others would uncompromisingly call states of disease. Mr. Belloc once said that he would no more part with the idea of property than with his teeth; yet to Mr. Bernard Shaw property is not a tooth, but a toothache. Lord Milner has sincerely attempted to introduce German efficiency; and many of us would as soon welcome German measles. Dr. Saleeby would honestly like to have Eugenics; but I would rather have rheumatics.

Great movie. Also a good reminder of why the UN is useless, and why military intervention in desperate situations can be a lot more humanitarian than pacifism. What a great decade of peace and prosperity the 90's were, huh?

From Right Hand of God

How come you never hear a story like, "There is an increasing call for insurgent groups to offer a plan for immediate withdrawal from Iraq, as the grim milestone of the 60,000th insurgent death rapidly approaches..."

I bet U.S. morale would be a lot higher if people recognized that for every American who dies, thirty terrorists are being killed.

If you are brave, click here for a rare surviving recording of a live performance of a band I was in in 1987. But you have to pay for your own therapy to rehabilitate yourself afterwards.

While looking for battery powered Christmas lights - one of my insane indulgences during the holiday season - I found some stuff called "table confetti." Imagine little acrylic prisms that sort of look like crystals - salt, alum, or whatever - sold in packages about the size of a pack of cigarettes.

When I saw them, I knew what to get for the people I couldn't figure out presents for. Simply take a package of table confetti and relabel it with a Sharpie as "Crack!" And then I'm ready - possibly with the addition of a green or red bow - to deliver holiday cheer to anyone.

After all, what does no one ever have enough of? (Answer: Crack.)

What are all those crystalline shapes you see on Christmas decorations? (Answer: Crack.)

What holiday confection won't cause you to put on unsightly pounds? (Answer: Crack.)

What gift cheers all hearts of all ages? (Answer: Crack.)

What says "holidays" more than any other gift? (Answer: Crack.)

Yeah, I'm pretty sure Santa's going to take a big steamy dump in my stocking this year. I can't escape justice forever.

TUA has the goods. Christopher Hitchens criticized Cindy Sheehan, and people on both the left and right, for attempting to "ventriliquize" the dead. Of course, Sheehan has nothing on this Joe Dante asshole.