* Jon Stewart was “characteristically brilliant”:http://s92409068.onlinehome.us/qt/0209.mov in his coverage of Bush’s Meet the Press interview. (Link is to a very big Quicktime file.) Hat tip to “Making Light”:http://www.nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/. How oh how I wish Comcast offered a limited cable service where you could pay a quarter a day in order to receive Comedy Central from 11:00-11:30 pm, Mon-Thurs. I’d pay for that.
* Joe Trippi “has a blog”:http://www.changeforamerica.com/blog/. One moment: campaign manager for the lead Democratic contender. Next moment: blogger. Ouch. But seriously, I’m looking forward to hearing what he has to say in this venue.
* Big news! Jim Henley “has abandoned libertarianism in order to become an avid Kerry supporter”:http://www.highclearing.com/archivesuo/week_2004_02_08.html#005038! Maybe that’s overstating it a little, but Jim does warm to the fact that one thing Kerry has been accusing Bush of for a while now is spreading a “culture of fear”:

Crap. I may not be able to maintain my traditional aloofness between the two major hopefuls. Because this is the overriding issue facing the country right now: will we live bravely again or will we forever shiver in post-traumatic stress from our Very Bad Day two and a half years ago? And as I’ve said over and over, what’s despicable about the Bush Administration is that it wants us to wallow in perpetual, low-grade panic. That is what I can’t forgive . . . [A] major Presidential candidate running a forthright campaign against fearmongering would have incalculable value. It would make up for everything I am fated to dislike – even hate – about John Kerry. It is the whole ball of wax. It is the national soul. It trumps fiscal policy, regulatory policy, even the particulars of how any particular politician did or did not vote on the use-of-force resolution in late 2002 or the PATRIOT Act before that. Because let the country recover its courage, and these other matters can be mastered. Keep the country in terror and we are doomed on all fronts.

Those of us who will naturally vote Democratic should be thinking about our libertarian friends who will be doing so only after much soul-searching and hand-wringing and shaking-of-their-fists-at-the-sky. Maybe we should set up a 1-800 number or support group or something. Of course, two weeks into the Kerry Administration they’ll all be at his throat whether they voted for him or not. At least in Jim’s case, you know it’ll still be worth reading.

_All hail_ Brad Choate! “Textile 2”:http://bradchoate.com/mt-plugins/textile

Does it work? *We’ll find out soon enough.* The thing that didn’t work for me before was block quotes — rather, they worked, but the margins were off.

bq. How does it look now?

We’ll know in a sec…

UPDATE: Oh well. Everything else looks cool, though, including many new tricks and abilities I’ll probably never use.

A standard batch of additions this month, and a wee bit of subdivision. The blogroll is now divided into the “Top Five” and “All the Rest.” Like any Top Five list, a couple slots will tend to be static, while the others may cycle out from month to month, depending on who’s hot. The five won’t be individually ranked.

For our starting Top Five, “Slacktivist”:http://slacktivist.typepad.com/ and “UO”:http://www.highclearing.com/ are the no-brainers, “TPM”:http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/ edges out “Calpundit”:http://calpundit.com/ by a hair, and “J&B”:http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/ and “Snarkout”:http://www.snarkout.org/ round out the bunch. “Making Light”:http://www.nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/ and “GOTM”:http://www.godofthemachine.com/ were both close to edging in.

Now for the additions:

* “Jim’s Brain Online”:http://jim.puddingbowl.org/ belongs to Jim Zoetewey, a gaming buddy from back in college.
* “Prosperic”:http://www.prosperic.blogspot.com/ belongs to Joe Porrit, yet another gamer-from-Michigan who I run into at Gencon most years. He is currently a student of Iaido, the Japanese art of sword-drawing. As in, whipping it out of the sheath, not making pictures. Either way, pretty cool.
* “one more voice in the human choir”:http://kari.anthropiccollective.org/ is yet another blog of a friend (yay nepotism!), Kari Stoel. Though she’s not much of a gamer. she _is_ getting married to a “charming Brit”:http://james.anthropiccollective.org/, so her blog is covering both wedding plans and the wild world of immigration.
* Chad Orzel’s “Uncertain Principles”:http://www.steelypips.org/principles/ fills the requisite “physics professor” slot in the blogroll. UP is one of those “been reading it for a while, so high time to add it” blogs.
* “Wonkette”:http://www.wonkette.com/, by Ana Marie Cox, is a political gossip blog — snarky, irreverent, and highly addictive. New, but well worthy of instant blogrolldom.

One problem with blogs is that after a couple of weeks, their content gets buried in the archives, with no easy way for readers to locate and read the good stuff from before they came along. When I started reading blogs, I appreciated the fact that Jim Henley included a “Best of Unqualified Offerings” section on his sidebar, and wondered why everybody didn’t do something like that. Following Jim’s lead, what follows are links to what are hopefully some of the best bits of Polytropos from 2003, grouped loosely by category.

The Lord of the Rings on Film

These items on Peter Jackson’s films were by far the most-read and most-linked Polytropos material from 2003.

• The Two Towers: Extended, Enhanced, Redeemed
• The Return of the King: A Review
• Tolkien’s Take on the Films
• Is Peter Jackson Insane?

Elanoriana

Dedicated baby talk has now been moved to Cerin Amroth, but last year consisted mostly of anticipation, to say nothing of the Big Moment itself.

• Baby Gear
• Babies R Us
• Announcing Ella
• A Paean to Nursing Mothers

Liberia

Tracking developments in Liberia is one of my pet projects for the blog; my interest in that country is somewhat personal since I lived there for a couple of years. These entries span debate over intervention to its aftermath to controversy surrounding Charles Taylor’s exile.

• Liberia
• More on Liberian Intervention
• Good Riddance, Mr. Taylor
• Liberia Readings
• Liberia Update
• Getting Away With It
• Boba Fett, Report to Calabar
• Taylor Mini-Update
• Update to the Taylor Mini-Update
• Liberia/Charles Taylor Update

Role-playing Games

Polytropos has never been short of gamer talk—some of the first entries were about Gencon, and it’s never really let up from there.

• Musings on Gamer Culture
• My Beef with D20
• Greg Costikyan Finds the Master
• Greg Costikyan Finds the Master, Part II

The Polytropos Review

Reviews of books, movies, TV shows, computer games, and one concert. I’m especially happy with the Quicksilver stuff.

• Quicksilver: A Review
• Stephenson, Pynchon, and Style
• Endless Nights Rundown
• All the King’s Men
• Tarantino’s At It Again
• An Open Letter to the Wachowski Brothers
• One More 24
• Winging It
• Alias as Superhero Comic
• Medieval Time Vacuum
• Payneful Stories

• Knights of the Old Republic
• Rockers of the Seelie Court

Miscellany

A few odds and ends.

• Next Step: Levitation
• Backgammon and Luck
• Watching the Foote-ball
• Cap’n Murphy

Yoga When You’re Alone:

1. Find forty minutes of uninterrupted time at home.
2. Move your mat, blanket, and strap to the living room floor.
3. Do yoga.

Yoga When You’re Home with the Baby:

1. Realize that just waiting for her to go to sleep won’t work — that’s why you haven’t had a chance to _do_ yoga in days.
2. Decide that you’re going to _make_ time for it, dadgummit.
3. Feed the baby. (30-40 min., depending on how leisurely she’s being about it)
4. Change the baby’s diaper. (2-10 min., depending on volume and/or leakage)
5. Try to wear her out by walking around the apartment and telling her the words for various things, even though you know full well it’s still just gobbledeegook to her. (15 min.)
6. Set her down in her Vibrating Bouncy Chair.
7. Quickly set up the yoga mat at the foot of the Chair and get started with some breathing exercises.
8. Open your eyes and notice that your daughter is smiling at you. Divert from yoga in order to tickle her tummy and make googly noises until she tires of your performance (10 min.).
9. Begin doing yoga!
10. Note with satisfaction, while coming out of “Revolved Triangle Pose”:http://www.yogajournal.com/poses/692_1.cfm, that she is asleep.
11. Fall out of “Half Moon Pose”:http://www.yogajournal.com/poses/784_1.cfm with a start when you hear your daughter giggling. She is giggling in her sleep, of course, but you find it hard not to shake the notion that she was giggling at how ridiculous you look in Half Moon Pose.
12. Get ready for “Shoulderstand”:http://www.yogajournal.com/poses/480_1.cfm (almost done!) when you’re interrupted by the baby crying. That’s right — it’s time to feed her again!
13. Wonder if you’re ever going to get to do yoga again.
14. Wonder if it matters.

(Cross-posted to “Cerin Amroth”:http://www.polytropos.org/ella/)

Stuff I’ve read and enjoyed this past week, from the blogosphere and beyond . . .

* If I hadn’t already been reading “Wonkette”:http://www.wonkette.com/, I’d want to start after “Gary Farber”:http://amygdalagf.blogspot.com/2004_01_25_amygdalagf_archive.html#107528358496514348 mentioned her. But I already was, and she continues to be great snarky fun.
* “Glen Engel-Cox”:http://www.engel-cox.org/iArchives/001425.html#001425 pairs up the Democratic candidates and other political luminaries with their Tolkienian counterparts.
* In _The Atlantic_, James Fallows “fisks the SOTU”:http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2004/01/sotu-address.htm. I like James Fallows a lot.
* Greg Costikyan, one of the original authors of the classic RPG “Paranoia”:http://www.paranoia-live.net/, speculates on the “role of PDAs”:http://costik.com/weblog/2004_01_01_blogchive.html#107547544736650899 in the life of your average Troubleshooter. Hilarious. Oh, and: Serve the Computer!
* What’s that you say? You like roleplaying games, but you wish you could sink your teeth into more writing about their structure and design, preferably something with a cartload of terms that require a detailed glossary? Ron Edwards is here to help you out, with his recent pieces on “Simulationism”:http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/15/, “Gamism”:http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/21/, and “Narrativism”:http://www.indie-rpgs.com/_articles/narr_essay.html. If you’re interested in this stuff, I promise you already know who you are. Hat tip to “Bryant Durrell”:http://popone.innocence.com/index.php.
* Everything I was going to say about the Administration’s latest sleight-of-hand regarding failures of intelligence has already been said. “Matthew Yglesias”:http://www.matthewyglesias.com/archives/002462.html#002462 has the short version, Josh Marshall has some concrete examples “here”:http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2004_02_01.html#002512 and “here”:http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2004_02_01.html#002518, and “Slacktivist”:http://slacktivist.typepad.com/slacktivist/2004/02/more_revisionis.html has some links for further reading. The fact that they’ve pulled a complete 180 with respect to the CIA should be at the front of the story, but when I read about it at all in major media, it’s buried a few paragraphs down. Example from the “Post”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6915-2004Feb2.html today: “Critics of the war and many congressional Democrats have said it is crucial to know whether White House policymakers cherry-picked the CIA’s intelligence on Iraq — dropping the many caveats and using only the most inflammatory assessments — in making its case for war.” One buried paragraph, no followup. Argh.

Last night, I found myself watching an athletic event on television. It was garish and rather violent, and the trappings around the event itself ranged from the tawdry to the hopelessly tacky.

What? No, it wasn’t pro wrestling. That was “last week”:http://www.polytropos.org/archives/000282.html. This was a football game, another cultural phenomenon with which I have only “limited experience”:http://www.polytropos.org/archives/000096.html. Judging from the fact that friend-and-loyal-reader Bryan was hosting a rather large party, and that everybody around me seemed to be fairly excited, I can only assume that this was a game of some importance. But, appearances to the contrary, it could not have been the Superbowl. The Superbowl, after all, is characterized by the large number of imaginative and entertaining commercials that air during the breaks — it’s the time when the advertising industry pulls out all the stops and tries to impress us. At last night’s game, this was manifestly not the case. With only a few exceptions, the commercials either failed to rise above the normal morass of mediocrity, or tried for something more and failed miserably. Granted, the Superbowl commercials of the past couple years haven’t been any great shakes either, but at this point it’s safe to say that a time-honored tradition that made the Superbowl watchable for the rest of us is now officially dead.

I pity all the poor journalists who have to churn out a whole article about the Superbowl commercials. There’s really not that much to say other than: they sucked. Maybe they can interview the thirteen-year-old boys who scripted all the evening’s Bud Lite ads. I came prepared to grade all the commercials and give a comprehensive rundown here; it didn’t take long to realize that that would be a colossal waste of time. (Er, rather, even _more_ of a waste of time that it would have been by definition. But else was I going to do — pay attention to the game?) Kudos to Chevrolet and AOL for airing the most watchable ads, and to “The Truth”:http://www.thetruth.com/ for the whole “Shards O’ Glass Freeze Pops” spot. Oh, and to the Panthers and Patriots for playing what, early indications to the contrary, turned out to be a pretty exciting game. Thank goodness.

As I “noted before”:http://www.polytropos.org/archives/000266.html, the big (and annoying) search news this month was that, thanks largely to the word “bikini,” almost 19% of Polytropos traffic came from search engines. I find the uptick in search engine traffic distressing simply because it makes me have to do math in order to figure out how much _real_ traffic I’m getting. Anyway, here’s a sampling of bizarre search strings that inexplicably led people to this site, hoping it would have whatever the heck it was they were looking for. No subcategories this time; just my comments in parentheses behind them.

* rowling wizard skill check d20 (I always suspected that the Harry Potter books were just the transcript of somebody’s RPG . . .)
* spandex poll survey
* embarrassing breastfeed staring spray (I would love to know why somebody was searching for this.)
* jim henley fitness weight (Hey! Somebody reads “Jim’s”:http://www.highclearing.com/ fitness posts! Now we have proof!)
* mick jagger muay thai (He’d get his butt kicked)
* really really had to pee (If your day isn’t disturbing enough yet, put that phrase into Google and browse the different sites that come up. I didn’t see Polytropos in the first hundred or so, so I’m at a total loss as to how somebody ended up here from it.)
* speaking of prayer buddhist monks in a thai monastery kneel before a gold-plated likeness of beckham (What??)
* clarendon imports swords katana (Sadly, this store doesn’t appear to by in my Clarendon.)
* unsinged or compositous or hemoflagellate or unmovingness or mythopoeic
* thom yorke and wisdom teeth
* gimli eowyn chocolate pudding (Yes! Finally!)