The Martini is among the best of cocktails, if not the best. (Cocktails, unlike highballs, are undiluted with water, juice, soda, etc.)

The Martini was so popular and well-known that Ian Fleming, to characterize James Bond as a person who flouted convention, had him favor a vodka Martini (a true Martini uses gin) and had it “shaken, not stirred.” Unfortunately, the “shaken, not stirred” line lived on in the public mind as Martini knowledge waned, so that today some believe that the Martini is supposed to be shaken and not stirred, a major mistake: if you use the Martini ingredients and shake rather than stir, you get not a Martini, but a Bradford, a drink that resembles the Martini except that it’s polluted with tiny ice chips that melt rapidly and dilute the taste.

Here’s the way to prepare a true Martini: Read the rest of this entry »

Via Dan Froomkin, this story in the Washington Post has a quotation from George W. Bush that's right on target:

Sometimes leaders show up who do a great disservice to the traditions and people of a country.

He's actually not talking about himself, though he might as well be.

I'm barely begun, but I already have formed some impressions of the relative merits of Blogger versus WordPress, and they favor WordPress:

• WordPress offers categories, Blogger does not
• WordPress hasn't been crashing or slow to respond
• WordPress offers an easy way to split a long posting, with "click to read more" link.

OTOH, WordPress requires a bit more learning and exploration—but not much. And the more learning goes along with more capabilities. I'm very happy with the move.

George Bush has a track record of punishing those who tell the truth and are correct (Paul O'Neill, Larry Lindsey, General Shinseki, et al.) and rewarding those who are obsequious and wrong (George "Slam Dunk" Tenet, Donald "We Know Where the WMDs Are" Rumsfeld, et al.). Now he's done it again:

A covert effort by the Central Intelligence Agency to finance Somali warlords has drawn sharp criticism from American government officials who say the campaign has thwarted counterterrorism efforts inside Somalia and empowered the same Islamic groups it was intended to marginalize.

The criticism was expressed privately by United States government officials with direct knowledge of the debate. And the comments flared even before the apparent victory this week by Islamist militias in the country dealt a sharp setback to American policy in the region and broke the warlords' hold on the capital, Mogadishu. …

[T]he State Department's political officer for Somalia, Michael Zorick, who had been based in Nairobi, was reassigned to Chad after he sent a cable to Washington criticizing Washington's policy of paying Somali warlords.

But, as is well known, he could have been killed years ago, but Bush protected him to help justify the Iraq war (by Zarqawi's presence in Iraq–the part that Saddam Hussein did not control).

This article by Knight-Ridder provides more information about the secret gulag of torture prisons the US has created under George Bush—not our proudest moment. The article begins:

More than 20 nations - from Central Asia to Western Europe - colluded in a CIA-run "spider's web" of secret flights and prisons for abducted terrorism suspects that breach European and international human rights accords, a report to Europe's top human rights organization charged Wednesday.

"Rather than face any form of justice, suspects become entrapped in the spider's web," the report says.

The findings could further damage the United States' image in Europe and the Muslim world, where many people already are angry about the Iraq invasion, alleged torture of U.S.-held detainees and what they perceive as a Bush administration bias toward Israel.

To be fair, the Administration denies that it practices torture, despite going to great lengths (including a Presidential signing statement and a revision of the Pentagon's Field Manual on interrogation) to allow torture. And, of course, they keep everything secret and allow no Congressional oversight.

Read the rest of this entry »