I have safely returned from yesterday's birthday-induced mid-life crisis. Work and blogging is back to normal.

On Sunday I had the pleasure of meeting the charming and talented Mr. and Mrs. Xrlq, who were in the Bay Area for the weekend and stopped by for lunch. Mr. Xrlq, who studied linguistics before he went to law school, has a knack for language. Among other things, he came up with the ingenious word Idiotaryan, to describe an idiotarian from Germany, e.g. Gerhard Schroeder or Juergen Moellemann. Mrs. Xrlq expressed some concern about being a blog widow. I tried to assuage her fears by explaining that although blogging may be a time-consuming hobby, it is also an inexpensive hobby with little risk of physical danger. Furthermore, if Mr. Xrlq spends much of his free time at the computer, Mrs. Xrlq will always know where her husband is. And be sure to add the fine Xrlq blog to your reading list, if it's not there already.

Saddam Hussein is acting more and more like the guy who barricades himself into a house with a shotgun and forces a stand-off with the police. He wants to commit suicide, but not by his own hand, so he gives somebody else a reason to neutralize him. He is both refusing to dismantle the missiles that Blix has ordered him to dismantle, and asking to debate George W. Bush. Doesn't he know what happened to the last guy who challenged Bush to a debate?

Subvert the dominant paradigm: I am one of the few patrons of my neighborhood coffee-house who hasn't protested the war against Saddam. So yesterday I left a copy of Mark Steyn's recent Chicago Sun-Times column "Don't ask peaceniks to make any sense" on a table. Hopefully somebody picked up Steyn's column, read it, and learned something.