Other things going on in the news around the reports of Saddam Hussein’s capture:

• Modern art pieces are being added by MoMA in anticipation of its completed new building, including a Jasper Johns piece, as well as some Picasso.
• The New York Times runs out of superlatives praising The Return of the King. As Jackie Harvey would breathlessly report, can Oscar’s call be far behind?
• And, in a nod to other current events, I note the Truth Laid Bear is following the reactions of webloggers—conservative webloggers—to the capture of Saddam Hussein. Including a Jackie Harvey-esque touché to those who opposed the war, in which TLB misreads the opposition as wishing for the continued sovreignty of Saddam. I’m sorry, Mr. Bear: you must have missed the part where the President lied to our allies, the UN, and us about the reason for the war. No, Saddam does not deserve to be returned to power. But nor does he deserve to be trumpeted as the successful culmination of President Damn-the-Constitution’s fight against terrorism, while GIs are dying daily in Iraq, while al-Qaeda grows ever stronger, and while the architect of the single greatest act of war committed on US soil remains at large.

Oops. Guess the last one slipped in...

I had a dream last night about our dogs. In the dream, we owned two more, including one with a litter of puppies, and I watched helplessly as a twelve year old dog walker let go the leashes of the mother and her puppies and they disappeared into the crowd. Later in the dream, a scorpion came out from the window in the ancient hotel room where we slept (really like a stone-lined closet) and stung one of the dogs.

Anxiety is weird that way. Tonight, watching them sleep, the dreams seem far away.

A quick update on the outages. It looks like a number of Weblogger hosted sites are similarly affected, including weblogger.com. If you’re reading this RSS feed, my discussion site at http://discuss.jarretthousenorth.com will at least let you read the text; my static site at http://www.jarretthousenorth.com appears to be completely down. No word yet as to the cause of the outage.

In the interim, I’m writing more holiday reviews but will hold on posting them until I can get picture support working again. The Past Listening and Past Reading sections are similarly on hold.

This was kind of bad timing as I wanted to work on a new site design over the holidays. Hope the outage clears up soon.

It looks like the server that hosts a lot of my static content, including my images and the real CSS stylesheet for this weblog, is offline. I’ve pinged tech support. In the meantime, please “enjoy” the extra weight of inline stylesheet on each page (the last backup I had), complete with extra nostalgic old text sizes and leading.