Sunday roundup

The collective clusterf* that is the Middle East is often so absurd that it's funny. More often, it's just tragic. Closer to home, very few doctors are willing to document asylum seekers' signs of abuse.

Maoism is more appealing in theory than in practice.

No one's saying that it's easy for countries, cities to come to terms with their history.

What's ironic about this:

""I would suggest you convert to Christ!" Benham shouted over a megaphone. Islam "forces its dogma down your throat.""

The challenges for mothers in the military are significant, but on the third page of this article, a silver lining: fathers, when there are fathers, become more active partners in the marriage and more active fathers. This stood out because I was at a party yesterday (a friend's son's first birthday) and the moms were pointing out that the dads would get bored about three seconds when they were supposed to be watching their kids, and the kids would go gravitate toward stairs and other places where they'd be best observed rather than running loose.

Gotta love the transparency:

"Accustomed to the traditional anonymity of hawala networks, Taliban supporters sometimes fill out their customer slips by plainly stating that the payment is for "heroin" or "five vehicles for Taliban commander so-and-so," said a senior U.S. law-enforcement official."

The "Yes Men" Borat Big Business.

I-Hope-There's-Beer debasement isn't limited to young women.

Michelle Singletary is right to extend the onus to both the banks and their customers. I'm the first to say that banks will be predatory, will purposely obfuscate... but as I've been going on about food labeling, people need to maintain responsibility for what they consume, and for becoming informed about their choices.

I think about this every day that I bike, to work or otherwise. Not about the Brooklyn Bridge part, obviously, but as someone who, too, has shown up to work a little late with chain grease on her hands, I've had to negotiate with my fair share of clueless pedestrians. They don't make it easy... they often sprawl over both lanes, and you try to warn them but they're in their own world.

I also thought yesterday, driving home from north of Baltimore, amid torrential rain and poor visibility, how I hadn't seen such aggressive driving in a while. I could also blog about bad signage: there's no reason that even I, as bad as my sense of direction is, should be getting lost trying to get onto 295 from the beltway, or, as the other day, on the way to FedEx on Eisenhower-- I mean, I've been driving past and through those areas for years-- but they keep changing everything on the beltway and if they sign it at all, the signs are tiny and invisible in the dark, or too close to the turnoff point for you to make a decision--but I digress.

I wonder whether the pedestrians--and joggers--realize that how much of the lobbying that has made those trails happen has come from the biking community. They should be thanking us. As Mr. Sullivan said, the revolution has begun.

One suggestion for improving Metro's reliability: its management should listen to bloggers, especially those that also spotlight riders who were raised in a barn, such as those

"...putting their feet or wet umbrellas on seats. One memorable photo showed a man on the Orange Line trimming his arm hair and brushing the clippings on the seat and floor."

Some search engines are becoming increasingly parasitic, when they've thus far been largely symbiotic.

This gets funnier as it goes along: