Responding to Constructive Criticism

This week, an old friend chided me for not keeping the blog up to date. “This is important,” he wrote an email. AAARGH, I know, I know. It’s this darned day job and a lot of travel that’s distracting me, not lack of interest. Anyone who works on the October-September fiscal year calendar knows that October is a terribly busy month. I’m hoping things will settle down by mid-November, but no promises. The American Anthropological Association meetings are coming up at the end of November, and I’ve got a lot of preparation to do, so it could be early December before I really get some breathing room. I’ll try to get posts up at least once a week.

Another friend said he HATED the color scheme. I thought that the white-on-black design was rather elegant, but he told me it was hard on the eyes – and I looked again at the site and realized, “Gosh, he’s right, this is horrible.” So I switched templates and hope the change makes for easier reading.

I’m editing an entry about Moazzam Begg, Tony Lagouranis and Eric Saar, and I’ll post that later this afternoon.

One more thing – if you didn’t catch the hearings for Attorney General Michael Mukasey, it was great to hear the Senate Judiciary Committee members from both sides of the aisle pushing on the torture issue. But Mukasey was cagey, saying that he’d not been read into any programs yet, so he’d not yet seen the classified documentation. This, apparently, made it impossible for him to condemn practices like waterboarding as torture. Good grief. First off, there's no evidence that cruel and inhumane practices like waterboarding are effective for anything... except making a person believe he's drowning. Secondly, torture undermines everything the United States of America represents. Isn't that enough?

Thanks, everyone, for being so supportive. I never thought I'd actually have an audience!