The old gray lady also shines a spotlight on xkcd.

Over in the Wall Street Journal, Douglas Feith argues that shifting the goal posts has made victory in Iraq impossible. I'm not certain that I agree with him that the war was ever justified. Yet, I think he has a good point. One of the things that Bush '43 administration has managed to do is to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. After taking down the Ba'athist regime with extreme prejudice the US has made just about every mistake possible with regards to winning the peace. One of the key mistakes is redefining victory in Iraq in such a way that anything short of the creation of a stable, liberal democracy means that we've lost to the terrorists.

I busted a hearing aid today. The good news is that repairs are a flat fee. The bad news is that it's a several hundred dollar flat fee. I was about due for a visit to my friendly neighborhood audiologist anyway. My tinnitus has been more severe lately. In some ways, it's kind of groovy. It's become polytonic and set to a rhythm of sorts. In the past, it's always been a single, constant tone. The bad side is all night long, I don't if the alarm is going off or if its just the ringing in my ears. I've also noticed that even more of the edge is gone from the high range of my hearing when I don't have my hearing aids in. When I turn on the radio about all I can hear is the drums and the bass.

Yesterday was very relaxing. I went out to fly a kite with my mother and youngest daughter. After several tries, I got my kite pretty high. First I had to tie a couple small pebbles onto the butt of the kite to get it to balance right. Then I had to cut off the tails and move them to the end of the wings as the kite was unstable in the air. Once I got the modifications tweaked, I coaxed the kite so high, I ran out of string.

After the kite flying, my mother went to the store to acquire some meat products while I fired up the charcoal on the grill. Having run out of lighter fluid, I used a touch of gasoline left over from before all of my gas powered yard tools were stolen. Once the ensuing fire ball died down, the charcoal burned quite nicely. Dinner was sausages and hamburgers and hot dogs and corn on the cob and salad and fresh strawberries and Sam Adams Summer Ale and chips and guacamole and s'mores. I should build more fires.