more embarrassment...

buried right at the back of the Post's latest article on attempts to prove the president successfully avoided service in Vietnam by protecting Texas (or was it Alabama) from foes foreign and domestic:

Bill Burkett, a retired lieutenant colonel in the Texas National Guard, said in an interview with The Washington Post this week that he overheard a speakerphone call about Bush's National Guard file in 1997, when Bush was Texas governor. Burkett said he was in a National Guard office when he overheard Joseph M. Allbaugh, then Bush's chief of staff, tell an officer in reference to Bush's military file that he "needed to make sure there was nothing to embarrass the governor."

Burkett said he later witnessed some items from Bush's file in the trash. Bush officials and Allbaugh denied these allegations. Bartlett called them "outrageous."

Where, oh, where are the people who were so outraged at Bill Clinton for being a pot-smoking, draft-dodging Rhodes scholar when it come to this coke-sniffing, draft-dodging, record-trashing inarticulate commander in chief?

sigh

OK, so, when I got home from gaming last night I found a letter had come from a possible employer. At the same time that finally getting my clearance will (if it ever happens) allow me to work fully in my current job, it will also allow me to decide if I want to take up a government agency on a job they provisionally offered me last year.

So was the letter news about this thing that I've been waiting on since, oh, this time last year? Nope, it was a cheery note from my possible future employer, letting me know that they had finally managed to finagle a name change that allows them to join the ranks of the Big Boys, the TLAs (three-letter agencies), after languishing for years with a four-letter acronym (never mind that the change involves somethign that, as an editor I would draw a big red line through and insert a marginal note to the author to never, ever think that s/he can get such a trumpery piece of word-mangling past me). They also wanted to reassure me that this name change would not affect teh status of my application (and, honestly, I can imagine a Federal agency thinking that every single process they were previously involved in should be reset by a name change, so maybe I'm "relieved" not "irritated".)

But it was to laugh and shake my head...

always more room for... books

Someone asked Neil Gaiman for recommendations of classic fantasy; he replied, in part:

Let's see... I'm not sure what's in print right now, but classic fantasies that shouldn't blend, and should make you happy to have read them would include Hope Mirrlees' Lud-in-the-Mist, Lord Dunsany's fantasies, both the short stories in volumes like Time and the Gods, and the longer books like The Charwoman's Shadow and The King of Elfland's Daughter, James Branch Cabell -- The High Place is a good place to start: it's the story of what might have happened if Bluebeard had woken, married, and tired of Sleeping Beauty, or Jurgen, or The Silver Stallion -- and then there are Ernest Bramah's Kai Lung stories, Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast books, and there's always Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday. Charles G Finney's The Circus of Dr Lao is, I think, back in print at present. T. H. White's Sword in the Stone and his Once and Future King remain marvellous...

I remember reading The King of Elfland's Daughter at an early age (I'll see if I can retrieve that from my parents' shelf next time I vist), and I have a Cabell, though not that one. I enjoyed Ernest Bramah (just recommended it to a friend myself recently), both for tis dry humour and the fact that DL Sayers was a fan. White, of course, I read and reread constantly as a kid, and since. Tried Gormenghast a few times and didn't much like it, but perhaps I should give it one more try. Haven't ever read Chesterton, and Mirrlees and Finney are new names to me.

Beautiful figures

If I won the lottery, I'm ashamed (?) to say that probably a good pile of money would go to these folks...

Perry Miniatures

and The Foundry