Did he or didn't he? Well?

Update: He's waiting for a letter. I just bought some $0.02 stamps if you need one, Mr. Fitzgerald.

Re-Update: Atrios likes the odds. The NYT (via Americablog) says two or three weeks.

Re-Update again: Thinkprogress says it's looking bad for Bush's Brain.

A couple things that make me an angry asian man too:

Fetishists. Um, people who fetishize race, I mean. If you want to fuck a melon, I say fuck the shit out of it. But to prefer one race because of your racist stereotypes? This "exotic" and "hyper-sexual" shit has got to stop, creepy dudes.

I hope these parents take their giant wooden fork and spoon and shove them up someone's ass.

(Is the giant wooden fork and spoon thing too obscure for Salto's audience?)

[via aam, natch.]

A tax break for pet friendly landlords? I like animals as much as the next guy (except for this guy), but is this really necessary? Is pet ownership something we really need to encourage, as a matter of policy?

Ethan's off to Coachella. BigD will tenderly minister to you until I return on Tuesday. Be good, y'all!

There's been an outbreak of balls in Congress. Let's hope it lasts.

They could have appointed a replacement that Scotty didn't have to train.

This deposition clip is making the rounds:



Just so y'know, Joe Jamail isn't allowed to practice in Delaware. Not that he wants to.

The grand third entry in my compendium of favorite New York Times paragraphs/stories.

As he stuck out his tongue menacingly, his red demon eyes glaring, Lordi was surrounded by Kita, an alien-man-beast predator who plays flame-spitting drums inside a cage; Awa, a blood-splattered ghost who howls backup vocals; Ox, a zombie bull who plays bass; and Amen, a mummy in a rubber loincloth who plays guitar.

Ahhhh, the paper of record.

A truly excellent story. It is meant to be read in its entirety.

First entry in Salto's Favorite Times Paragraph Ever is here. Second is here.

Number three is definitely in the lead.

Kudos Dan Bilefsky!

Rumors at the Post have Bob Woodward resigning. Or something.

That, of course, has nothing at all to do with this. So don't even think about that. They are totally. Unrelated.

Completely.

Overheard, every week:

"Did you watch American Idol last night? It was soooo good!"

Just saw author Jonathan Safran Foer interviewed in a downtown deli. Not intentionally. I just wanted a sandwich.

A note for interviewers. If making an audio recording of an interview, you probably shouldn't do it in a busy deli with loud Muzak, next to the loud, rumbling drink coolers. Unless you want your interview subject to comment on the Billy Joel song that's fighting you for his attention.

Looks like they may have considered Salto for this job.

I recommend that you buy a shredder.

He may be a douchebag, but he knows that our Imperial Prez is a douchebag too.

Are the Decider's poll numbers low enough to prevent our rubber-stamp Congress from rolling over and making this a moot point?

Why would our oilman president start mealy-mouthing about gas prices now?

Oh. I see.

[via Froomkin]

Oh, the scandal of it all.

I'm not sure she'll be able to handle it.

I'm not sure that I buy this one. A 10 year old has the Prez invoking the twinkie defense?

If true, Horowitz is going to go batshit crazy over lefty libs corrupting children so young. In our schools, no less! Have you no decency?

...but this is well worth a read, as it is quite ha-ha funny. Well, mildly so.

Picking up on this post, the scope of the AT&T/NSA spying project is apparently incredibly vast.

According to Deep Packet ATT maintains numerous facilities that host very expensive Juniper routers for this project. As far as he knows there is no direct contract with the NSA. In other words ATT is paying for all of this. He feels that the reward is favorable treatment when ATT is bidding on less clandestine government contracts.

According to Deep Packet these Juniper routers have specially designed cards in them to shunt ALL OF THE TRAFFIC from ATT peering points to NSA analysis centers around the country. Peering traffic means not just traffic that begins and ends on ATT’s network but any traffic from networks that ATT has peering arrangements with. A quick look here indicates that is just about… everything.

BigD has a confession to make. I have had to come to terms with the fact that I am a liberal bigot. I just don't understand how people of color and/or homosexuals can be Republicans. I understand, intellectually, that people are all different and have different values and priorities. There's no such thing as a [insert group here] voter. But come on, people! Republicans don't like you. They'd get rid of you if they could.

Second confession. I don't really trust white folks. And I grew up in semi-upper-middle-class privilege! So it blows my mind that Republicans have any supporters who aren't in their klub.

Third confession. I don't really trust rich folks. And I grew up in semi-upper-middle-class privilege! As far as I'm concerned, there should be about 200 Republicans in the whole country.

I really don't understand the odious Michelle Malkin. She wrote a book about the Japanese internment, so we can assume that she at least knows that the Japanese were interned, although she might not be so clear on the exact details. If they decide to start rounding up people again, does she think that she gets a pass? If I'm ever placed in a camp, I hope it's the same one as Ms. Malkin. At least I'll get a chuckle, if not a full-on belly laugh.

Fuck. I've clearly said too much.

The big Coachella concert outside of Palm Springs, CA is coming up this weekend. I hope that this guide will help peeps have fun.

[If you find this at all useful, please leave a comment below and tell me where you're from and who you're most looking forward to seeing.]

The reason I am writing this is that there are definite things you can do to make your Coachella experience better.

We made all the mistakes you can make at Coachella '04 and survived. Barely.

The problem was that we really didn't know what we were getting into. '04 presented the perfect storm of concert evil: hellishly, hellishly hot weather, a sold-out show (for Radiohead and the Pixies), which in this case means about a hundred thousand people, and, because it was our first year, we didn't make meeting plans before people started drifting off.

If you're in a hurry, I think Tip #7 below is the most important I can possibly give you.

THE HEAT

In '04, it was about 103 when we entered the concert sometime after noon. It peaked at 106 later in the afternoon. This is hot. '05 was better, somewhere in the comparatively chilly upper nineties, at least on Saturday, if I recall correctly.

There is a huge difference between outside temperatures of 96 degrees and 106 degrees. That ten-degree span is the difference between pleasure and death. I drank ten, twelve bottles of water when it was 106 outside -- and I didn't pee once. In like ten hours. The desert air just leeches the moisture out of you when it's that hot.

Hope for the best but plan for the worst. The forecast at this point is for a high of 8994 on Saturday (with showers?) and 929497 on Sunday, which would be nice -- so it could be pretty warm. And those temps are on an upward trend. You'll stillwill need to carefully monitor your water consumption, but it won't be as critical. So...


*I'm sure the Goldenvoice people have their reasons for this. And it's fine if it's 90 outside. But if it's over 100, it's deeply, deeply unethical and rather troubling to take water away from people as they come in.


The desert sun is huge and powerful and could own you if you don't take steps.


These straw hats have become absolutely required for Coachella regulars in our group:



If it's a cool year, as seems likely at this point, the desert gets cold at night. It can drop into the fifties. As it is forecasted to do on Saturday night, for example. Last year I remember being quite cold in the last hour or so of the concert. It wasn't fun. Thus:


THE GROUNDS AND PARKING

Finding your car in past years was really difficult. There weren't enough identifying markers to tell you where you were -- and those parking lots are very, very large. They were better about marking stuff last year, using giant numbered balloons to indicate the different lots. Still:


The Coachella grounds are huge and you end up walking a lot as you make your way from concert to concert. Good shoes are important.


GROUP COMMUNICATION AND MEETUPS

In '04, we lost Eric almost immediately. He wandered off. He had no cellphone. There were 100,000 people spread out over acres and acres of land and he was gone. We made no arrangements to meet at any central point. The next time we saw him was ten hours later at the car. We worried about him. And it sucked.



THINGS TO BRING

A handy list to consult. Later items optional.


Okay. By popular request:


Another request. And oh boy it's good.


I'll add to this guide if anyone has anything else useful. Feel free to drop me a dollar in PayPal (link at right) if you feel the love.

Thanks to psychic girl, papertiger05, tainTTed, and soc for helpful comments and stolen ideas.

A monkey broke into the machine room yesterday at Salto HQ and threw poo into the gears. Everything was befouled and we had to crack out the hazmat suits.

I have very little to say about this post, except that this...

Back in the fall of 2002, six months before George W. Bush sent U.S. troops rumbling across the Kuwaiti border into Iraq, a Time reporter noted to Scott Ritter that some right-wingers were calling Ritter “the new Jane Fonda” and wondering what he’d call his new exercise video.

“If they want to have an exercise video,” snorted Ritter, “then why don’t they come here and say it to my face and I’ll give ’em an exercise video, which will be called, ‘Scott Ritter Kicking Their Ass.’”

...is absolutely the quote of the year.

E&P reporting on Friedman's column today:

So let’s assume, as Nixon might put it, that we do have George Bush to kick around for another almost-three-years. How worried should we be about the possible damage he might inflict -- and what can the press do about it?

Consider Thomas Friedman’s column in The New York Times today, and its implications.

Friedman, who still supports the Iraq war, opens by declaring that given a choice between a nuclear Iran and an attack on that country engineered by the White House, he would choose the former. That’s how little he trusts the diplomatic and military chops of Bush, Rumsfeld, Condi and Co. He cites “the level of incompetence that the Bush team has displayed in Iraq, and its refusal to acknowledge any mistakes or remove those who made them.”

But then he goes on: “I look at the Bush national security officials much the way I look at drunken drivers. I just want to take away their foreign policy driver's licenses for the next three years. Sorry, boys and girls, you have to stay home now -- or take a taxi. ... You will not be driving alone. Not with my car.”

Given a choice between a nuclear Iran and trusting action to the incompetents in the administration, Friedman chooses a nuclear Iran.

33 more months of Bush in office. What the fuck are we gonna do?

Jesus, people. Are we really this conditioned to trust technology? Does this mean that if Tony Blair were Max Headroom, he'd have no problems?

Except for the stutter, of course.

A vicious predator. Don't run. You'll just piss it off.

[via Pharyngula]

Ick.

But this is just the start. As the right falls from power, they're gonna get crazier and crazier.

Scotty's gone.

To be replaced by a tape on a 30 second loop.

Or a small television tuned to Fox News.

I'm just catching up on the Sopranos, so forgive me.

Everyone was all bitchy about dream sequences and overlooked an incredible performance by Edie Falco and a plot twist that will undoubtedly set the stage for Season Six.

Idiots.

Digby has this peevish moment from our Prez:

BUSH: I say I listen to all voices, but mine's the final decision and Don Rumsfeld is doing a fine job. He's not only transforming the military, he's fighting a war on terror. He's helping us fight a war on terror. I have strong confidence in Don Rumsfeld. I hear the voices and I read the front page and I know the speculation, but I'm the decider and I decide what is best and what's best is for Don Rumsfeld to remain as the secretary of defense. I want to thank you all very much.

At which point he stomped off in a huff. Seriously.

I resolve to use the phrase, "I'm the decider!" as often as Salto uses "mustache ride."

This is comedy. He should be relentlessly ridiculed for shit like this. He should be mocked until he becomes a national joke. He should be a punchline. The mere mention of his name should bring peals of laughter. He should be marginalized and minimized until he is treated like the unpopular lame duck that he is. Maybe then people would stop kowtowing to him, and maybe we could stop talking about FUCKING NUKING IRAN like it's the idea of a sane individual.

I've asked BigD to post for a while.

I'm too dispirited by the impending catastrophe with Iran to do much of anything.

MORE: I've asked Monster to do some posting too. But usually he gets too dirty and I have to delete all of his posts. We'll see...

By a friend on MySpace. Apparently I am to list six things about me that are weird.

Well. This is rather difficult. What does "weird" mean? Hell if I know. I guess it shouldn't be things about me that are particularly flattering. Because my first tendency is to say something semi-nice about myself like how eclectic my taste in music is -- which is basically self-promotion. And that's not all that interesting.

So here are six not particularly flattering weird things about me:

1. I really don't know how to cook. And, of those things that I do cook, almost everything contains a) mushrooms and b) onions. This is because I like mushrooms and onions and I'm semi-retarded in the kitchen.

2. I have disablingly serious emotional attachments to the following: Peanuts, Mr. T, my favorite old children's books (The Dark is Rising series), and my cat. I dote on my cat in a way that is embarrassing. It's not like I just talk to her; she, y'know, talks back. Except it's actually me that's talking?

3. I employ the following phrase so often that my roommates are now thoroughly irritated by it:

"I'd give her a mustache ride."

[Classy. -ed.]

4. I have sleep issues. Like, I twitch and stuff when I fall asleep, but that's normal. I scream in my sleep often enough that people comment on it. I also have a) leaped out of bed while sleeping, landing on my knees and hurting myself and b) tried to strangle a girlfriend while sleeping (she was OK). I don't know why I do any of this. And it doesn't worry me.

5. Although this blog is largely about politics, I find that I almost always dislike talking about politics with other people.

6. I have a really tiny television and I think the only reason I have one that's so small is out of some sort of misplaced vanity. Getting a larger television would, in my twisted mind, mean that I was a big loser. Of course I could also actually watch shit on it and enjoy it, but whatever.

I tag these six people: Zach, JPS, Ginevra, Miss Tanya, Roger Ailes (not that one), and M.J. Merriweather McBride. And I don't link to MySpace, sorry.

Berlusconi apparently out, Prodi apparently in.

Has any Bush ally won an election since the Iraq war?

It would be amusing but for the fact that everyone hates our guts.

Next up in our parade of happy:

The U.S. military is using propaganda to inflate the role of Al Qaeda in Iraq (and its leader) to keep up support for the war.

For the past two years, U.S. military leaders have been using Iraqi media and other outlets in Baghdad to publicize Zarqawi’s role in the insurgency. The documents explicitly list the "U.S. Home Audience" as one of the targets of a broader propaganda campaign.

Some senior intelligence officers believe Zarqawi’s role may have been overemphasized by the propaganda campaign, which has included leaflets, radio and television broadcasts, Internet postings and at least one leak to an American journalist. Although Zarqawi and other foreign insurgents in Iraq have conducted deadly bombing attacks, they remain "a very small part of the actual numbers," Col. Derek Harvey, who served as a military intelligence officer in Iraq and then was one of the top officers handling Iraq intelligence issues on the staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told an Army meeting at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., last summer.

Good day sunshine!

Good day sunshine!

Goooooood daaaaay suuunshiiiiine!

More scary stuff. But, coming up soon on Salto: RAINBOWS AND KITTIES!

The nuke stuff starts about halfway down.

QUESTION: Is the U.S. going to attack Iran?

SCOTT McCLELLAN: Helen, we're pursing a diplomatic solution by working with the international community. I assume you're referring to some of the media reports. Some of the media reports I've seen, which are based on anonymous outside advisors and former officials, appear to me to be based on people that do not know the administration's thinking. I think it is a lot of wild speculation. We are working with the international community, particularly the EU-3, to pursue a diplomatic solution to a serious and growing concern.

QUESTION: Does the President think that the American people would accept any kind of an attack on Iran?

SCOTT McCLELLAN: Now you're engaging in the wild speculation I just talked about. Look, those who are seeking to draw broad conclusions based on normal military contingency planning are misinformed or not knowledgeable about the administration's thinking. The international community is united in its concern about the regime obtaining a nuclear weapons capability, and that's why we are working with the international community to prevent that from happening. And we are seeking to resolve this in a diplomatic way.

QUESTION: Would the President consult with Congress before --

SCOTT McCLELLAN: Helen, I'm not going to engage in all this wild speculation. No President takes options off the table, but our focus is on working with the international community to find a diplomatic solution.

...

OK. Pay attention now.

SCOTT McCLELLAN: You're trying to get me to jump into all this wild speculation from some of the stories that came over the weekend.

QUESTION: It isn't wild.

SCOTT McCLELLAN: Sure it is. It's not based on knowledge of the administration's thinking. That's why it's wild speculation. It's based -- I saw one story that had numerous anonymous former officials and outside advisors being quoted in the story. How they possibly could understand what the administration's thinking is, is beyond me.

QUESTION: You might talk to people in the Pentagon.

QUESTION: Scott, you're familiar with what the administration is thinking --

SCOTT McCLELLAN: Absolutely. The administration is thinking that's important to work with the international community to find a diplomatic solution.

QUESTION: But are nuclear strikes on the table? You're familiar with the --

SCOTT McCLELLAN: I answered that -- I answered that in my remarks.

QUESTION: Yes or no?

SCOTT McCLELLAN: I answered that in my remarks. I won't -- I'm not going to comment further about it. It's just engaging in kind of wild speculation to get into commenting further about it.

Oh dear.

Will a cat eat its owner if the owner dies?

The Straight Dope has the unpleasant answer.

Little things like this keep my world bright an sunny even though it's been raining for five motherf*****' weeks.

Be sure to read all the way to the bottom, as it just gets better.

A patient at the Alton Mental Health Center has been charged with threatening President George W. Bush.

Arafat Nijmeh, a Palestinian who lives in Belleville, had been temporarily committed to the mental health center when he made the threat on March 18. Two psychiatric technicians called the Secret Service.

Nijmeh told federal agents the next day that "to cut off his (appendage) is not too harsh, considering what he has done to my country," according to the indictment.

After the agents began reading Nijmeh his rights, Nijmeh claimed it was a joke.

A federal grand jury this week indicted Nijmeh, 26, of 1000 Royal Heights Road, Apt. 5, on two counts of threatening the president, which carries a prison sentence of up to five years.

Legal experts said authorities may have trouble making the charges stick, though.

"I'm absolutely astonished," said J. Steven Beckett, University of Illinois law professor. "It's national security gone berserk."

...

"I think he ought to have an insanity defense because he has no intent to commit the crime because he was locked up inside a mental institution," said Southern Illinois University School of Law Professor William Schroeder. "I'm not surprised that he was charged, though. That kind of thing really gets them worked up."

But Nijmeh's criminal history may have been a factor as well.

In 2003, he pleaded guilty to aggravated battery after police said he struck a woman on the head with a rock.

*contented sigh*

Here.

Someone says Bush has reasons to be optimistic about his political future:

"History suggests that all presidents go through times like this," said Whit Ayres, a Republican consultant. "For presidents, it is not a matter of if you will run into a period like this. It is how you react to them."

Ayres said that Bush has reason for optimism, including the Medicare prescription drug program, which is popular among senior citizens who are able to navigate the complicated enrollment process and sign up, and a relatively strong economy that created 200,000 jobs over the past month.

Ha! That's rich. Dear lord.

This prescription drug thing is going to doom the Republicans at the polls with the elderly in November.

This guy be smokin' the ganja! [That's dumb. -ed.]

I knew he would pop up on YouTube eventually. Hot stuff. Hot, sad stuff. Hot, funny, carrrr-razy sad stuff.

My original audio interview with Frank is here [scroll down]. He sounded much more deranged back then. Maybe he's back on the meds.

It's being seriously planned. Fuck, this is frightening.

Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh reports a major scoop in the current edition of the New Yorker. AFP has an overview:

The administration of President George W. Bush is planning a massive bombing campaign against Iran, including use of bunker-buster nuclear bombs to destroy a key Iranian suspected nuclear weapons facility, The New Yorker magazine has reported in its April 17 issue.

...

The former intelligence officials depicts planning as “enormous,” “hectic” and “operational,” Hersh writes.

...

In recent weeks, the president has quietly initiated a series of talks on plans for Iran with a few key senators and members of the House of Representatives, including at least one Democrat, the report said.Hersh’s account is consistent with other recent reports. This week, the former deputy director at the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, Wayne White, told Forward Magazine:

In recent months I have grown increasingly concerned that the administration has been giving thought to a heavy dose of air strikes against Iran’s nuclear sector without giving enough weight to the possible ramifications of such action.

Joseph Cirincione, a respected non-proliferation expert who decribed himself as “the last remaining person in Washington who believed President George W. Bush when he said that he was committed to a diplomatic solution,” wrote in Foreign Policy Magazine last week that senior administration officials had already made up their mind about to attack Iran:

[C]olleagues with close ties to the Pentagon and the executive branch who have convinced me that some senior officials have already made up their minds: They want to hit Iran...What I previously dismissed as posturing, I now believe may be a coordinated campaign to prepare for a military strike on Iran.

Every day that he remains in office Bush is a danger to this country.

The Sy Hersh New Yorker article is here.

NSA equipment everywhere. Technofascism, here we come.

I'm so totally on someone's list it's not even funny.

AT&T provided National Security Agency eavesdroppers with full access to its customers' phone calls, and shunted its customers' internet traffic to data-mining equipment installed in a secret room in its San Francisco switching center, according to a former AT&T worker cooperating in the Electronic Frontier Foundation's lawsuit against the company.

...

According to a statement released by [Mark] Klein's attorney [Klein is a retired AT&T communications technician], an NSA agent showed up at the San Francisco switching center in 2002 to interview a management-level technician for a special job. In January 2003, Klein observed a new room being built adjacent to the room housing AT&T's #4ESS switching equipment, which is responsible for routing long distance and international calls.

"I learned that the person whom the NSA interviewed for the secret job was the person working to install equipment in this room," Klein wrote. "The regular technician work force was not allowed in the room."

Klein's job eventually included connecting internet circuits to a splitting cabinet that led to the secret room. During the course of that work, he learned from a co-worker that similar cabinets were being installed in other cities, including Seattle, San Jose, Los Angeles and San Diego.

"While doing my job, I learned that fiber optic cables from the secret room were tapping into the Worldnet (AT&T's internet service) circuits by splitting off a portion of the light signal," Klein wrote.

The split circuits included traffic from peering links connecting to other internet backbone providers, meaning that AT&T was also diverting traffic routed from its network to or from other domestic and international providers, according to Klein's statement.

The secret room also included data-mining equipment called a Narus STA 6400, "known to be used particularly by government intelligence agencies because of its ability to sift through large amounts of data looking for preprogrammed targets," according to Klein's statement.

...

Klein said he came forward because he does not believe that the Bush administration is being truthful about the extent of its extrajudicial monitoring of Americans' communications.

"Despite what we are hearing, and considering the public track record of this administration, I simply do not believe their claims that the NSA's spying program is really limited to foreign communications or is otherwise consistent with the NSA's charter or with FISA," Klein's wrote. "And unlike the controversy over targeted wiretaps of individuals' phone calls, this potential spying appears to be applied wholesale to all sorts of internet communications of countless citizens."

Frightening.

[via bigd]

Dear lord, this is too good.

The new court filing quotes from handwritten suggestions Mr. Libby gave to the White House press secretary, Scott McClellan, urging the spokesman to proclaim the vice presidential aide's innocence with the same vigor that the press secretary previously denounced as "ridiculous" suggestions that Mr. Rove might have had a hand in leaking Ms. Plame's identity.

Mr. Libby's note, as typed up by the prosecution, reads like a stanza of verse:

"People have made too much of the difference in
How I described Karl and Libby
I've talked to Libby.
I said it was ridiculous about Karl
And it is ridiculous about Libby.
Libby was not the source of the Novak story.
And he did not leak classified information."

Mr. McClellan did not adopt the talking points verbatim, but did tell reporters later that Messrs. Rove and Libby "assured me that they were not involved in this."

Are you kidding me?

Also, Scott McLellan is a one big ol' hefty tool.

He's fucked now.

Compare:



with:

Here.

I saw this at a showing of Spike Lee's "Inside Man."

It affected me.

MORE: Actual trailer here.

Bush throws out the first pitch at a Cincinnati Reds game. But very few boos. Weird, right?

No.

When the President strode to the mound to throw out the first pitch . . . he was accompanied by two injured American soldiers (Mike McNaughton, Afghanistan, and Paul Brondhaver, Iraq) and the father (John Prazynski) of another (Taylor Prazynski) who was killed in action (Afghanistan). If anyone in the capacity crowd had been predisposed to boo George Bush, that notion was dashed by the company the prez was publicly keeping.

They're brilliant, really.

It's hard for me to believe how good the twenty seafaring novels of Patrick O'Brian are. It's also exceedingly difficult to describe.

O'Brian's magnificent gift is placing you, gently but precisely, within the world of early-nineteenth-century England. No cultural relationship is spared: men and women, rich and poor, the learned and the ignorant, the military man and the scientist. How do they talk? How do they relate? How do they think? O'Brian is not didactic. He is just overpoweringly learned. You feel like you are there. And you benefit from his erudition with the greatest pleasure.

And then, over and over, he takes these people who you have grown to know so well and sticks them in Egypt, or Malaysia, or shipwrecked on a remote island in the Pacific. And those people, those representing the foreign, are rendered equally real. Magical.

His books are a jewel of English literature.

Start with Master and Commander. Don't despair, though; though it is the first book, he did not, at that point, intend to write a series. Finish the second book, Post Captain, and delight in being swept away.*

Don't take my word for it; Mamet thinks O'Brian is incredible too (Mamet is brilliant):

His Aubrey-Maturin series, 20 novels of the Royal Navy in the Napoleonic Wars, is a masterpiece. It will outlive most of today's putative literary gems as Sherlock Holmes has outlived Bulwer-Lytton, as Mark Twain has outlived Charles Reade. God bless the straightforward writer, and God bless those with the ability to amuse, provoke, surprise, shock, appall.

The purpose of literature is to Delight. To create or endorse the Scholastic is a craven desire. It may yield a low-level self-satisfaction, but how can this compare with our joy at great, generous writing? With our joy of discovery of worth in the simple and straightforward? Is this Jingoism? The use of the term's a wish to side with the powerful, the Curator, the Editor. The schoolmaster's bad enough in the schoolroom; I prefer to keep him out of my bookshelf.

*They're cheap on Amazon.

Such a crook.

Immense corruption.

I have the feeling that he may soon be spending some quality time in prison. This event is something I look forward to.

Bye-bye, sucka.

Yes, we get your point. You are all-powerful.

Enough with the rain, bitches.

A reader observed that Salto isn't as funny as it used to be. He said Salto's tone had grown "sad."

Yeah, well.

I'm motherfucking grumpy.

Fuck you!

A story that should be read with care.

MORE: 57,000 calls in 24 hours.

EVEN MORE: Understandable.

The day was so traumatic, some could not return. That was the case for Monsitah Corney, who fielded several calls from those in the towers, Mr. Rosenzweig said. She left the job soon after Sept. 11, never to answer 911 calls again.

For Ivan Goldberg, who was working as deputy director of dispatch operations for the Fire Department that day, working at the Manhattan command center that day, "changed my life forever."

"A lot of dispatchers have retired in the last four years," he said. "For me, the decision to leave the job three months after the incident was hastened by the fact that the Fire Department became a very sad place to work." He paused, and added, "I lost a lot of friends and co-workers and a first cousin."

Mr. Rosenzweig said 135 new dispatchers were trained over 18 months in 2002 and 2003, reflecting the rapid exodus. Mr. Goldberg said that rehashing the day had opened old wounds for many. But he said that, looking back, "they did the best job they could have done, given the circumstances."

It is the haunting voices on the tapes of that day, the earliest historic trace of the unfolding horror, that seem to bear out the truth of Mr. Goldberg's belief in the valor of his colleagues.

As the seconds ticked away and the end came near, sympathy for those near death shone through again and again.

"Stop talking and let the air ..." a fire dispatcher, No. 328, said at 10:17 a.m., to a man on the 97th floor of the north tower. "You're losing your oxygen. So try to be quiet and remain calm. O.K.?"

When the terrible circumstances began to slip beyond human control, the operators sometimes reached further.

"Just hold on one second, sir," a police operator said to a man on the 105th floor. "Hold on. I hear the fire alarm. They're coming. They're on their way. They're working on it. My God, this — don't worry. God is there. God is there. God is — don't worry about it. God is — don't worry."

Deep breath.