« Here’s how the Boy Emperor supports our troops ». Dr. Strangerummy made the announcement:

‘The Pentagon formally announced Thursday that it had stopped the planned return from Iraq of some 20,000 American troops, giving commanders the extra firepower they believe necessary to confront an insurgency that is taking a mounting toll on the U.S.-led coalition. The decision, announced by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld after first being reported Wednesday, breaks a promise to soldiers who were assured when they arrived in Iraq that they would stay no more than one year. By extending their tours of duty by three months, the Pentagon is acknowledging that the insurgency has ruined its plans to reduce the size of the U.S. military presence this spring. The troops had expected to return home this month after completing 12 months in Iraq.’
—MSNBC

‘A promise made is a promise kept,’ indeed. Shame on them all.

Support our troops. Bring them home.

Proof that Ann Arbor is not always a ‘sunless horror, devoid of joy and hope,’ was provided by a gigantic orange ball in the sky the last couple of days; beagles were especially grateful as they took the opportunity to get in some serious tanning. (No, he’s not mad in that last pic, he’s blinkin’ in the sunlight.)

Thank god for spring.

Weekend Magazine, The Michigan Daily’s, well, weekend magazine, put out its Best of Ann Arbor issue today and a very well-deserved Best Blog award was given to Rob over at Goodspeed Update.

We weren’t even mentioned. Alas. I’m beyond crushed.

The nod to GU is great, but the article’s true genius is the final paragraph, when ‘Arts Writer’ Ruby Robinson pens the following:

‘The future looks bright for blogging to become common practice, especially as bloggers don’t have to follow the rules of newspaper grammar and citing sources and can post articles, opinions and random thoughts with ease and comfort.’

Pardon my very loud guffaws (mixed with a tinge of righteous indignation). But that’s about the smarmiest thing I’ve seen come out of any little local newspaper in quite some time. And believe me, I’ve seen some smarmy out there.

And it comes from a paper that names umich.edu as the Best University Website in Ann Arbor and names whites as the Worst Race, and had staffers call up pizza parlors in town pretending to be drunk and confused Indians with heavy accents, a craving for jalapenos and a spotty phone reception in order to judge the quality of the service.

Isn’t it great, my fellow bloggers, to be looked-down upon by the likes of The Daily? Methinks Ms. Robinson needs to find out that many blogs are not run by 14-year-old girls writing in IM-speak about Justin Timberlake rumors.

Not that all that should take away from Rob at all; congratulations to him for all his very hard work … it’s well-deserved.

Technology is a wonderful thing … until it crashes and burns spectacularly.

We’ve had our own problems (obviously) with technology here around the manse this week; the crash of our Movable Type CMS punted us back into the dark ages of hand-coding web pages (oh the horror!).

But at least we weren’t alone. I went to the Mallett’s Creek branch of the AADL this afternoon and picked out my customary haul of movies (‘cause, after all, it’s my job; around here, Frank’s the Music Nazi, but I’m the Movie Nazi).

But when I went to the self-checkout machines, the screen was filled with an apology notice, ending with ‘See Circulation Staff.’

I went up to the circ desk (fortunately there was no line), where, after 15 tries to make the reader recognize my library card, the librarian was left scrambling for (oh the horror!) a pen and paper. The entire library system was down.

She found a few forms and a pen and wrote down my card number and then had to list the bar codes for all 12 of my movies.

This was followed by the kicker: It took her and another librarian to figure out when the movies were due back. They had difficulty deciding the date one week hence that I am to return the items. Quite a line was beginning to form at this point. Finally, they decided on April 22 as the due date (‘15 plus 7 equals 22, doesn’t it?’).

And then high technology came back to the rescue: She used a ‘Post-It’ note to write the due date and stick it on the movie box (‘Do you want one for each of your 12 movies, sir?’ she asked. ‘No thanks, that’s not necessary,’ I said, my eyes a little wide).

It’s so good to know that some technology is reliable … I simply cannot imagine what would have happened if that sticky note had not worked.

Until I straighten out the fight between Movable Type and Textpattern over my single SQL database, older comments you may have made on posts will not be available, but they are not lost. However, the commenting system is working fine, so feel free to rant away … that is all.

Today really felt like the first day of spring. Classes were sitting out holding their sessions in circles on the grass, there was some massive groovy “Goodness Day” event going on in the Diag, and every available spot on the grass was covered with sunbathers or Frisbee throwers. A lot of out-of-town visitors now too, as one of our readers predicted. It’s supposed to get up into the 70s in the next couple of days. It almost makes you wish there were a beach nearby.

Well, Textpattern is installed and working … I hope. Comments are back and we’re Movable Type/CGI/Perl-free and mostly PHP (but still XHTML Strict compliant). There are some slight differences that I’ll have to work around over the next few days.

There are still some issues; the recent articles and recent comments sections on the sidebar still need some tweaking; MT entries need to be imported; the archiving system has kinks I’ll have to work out over time; and categories are screwed for awhile for reasons I won’t go into.

I’ll have to laboriously add back all entries for the last two weeks, because of MySQL database complications I also won’t bore you with.

But it’s good to be back. Did you miss us?