This just in: intelligent, insightful conservative commentator William Quick calls Reprobates "excellent". What's interesting here is that his pithy description of our lil' blog (and, presumably, his readership thereof) preceeded by a matter of days my linking to an article on hisblog, the existence of which I had been hitherto unaware.

What else is interesting is that this is the first independent confirmation I've ever had that this blog has been read by anyone other than us editors of Reprobates!

William Quick's keen characterization of Reprobates as "excellent" in fact tells me that not only is he, as I mentioned before, intelligent and insightful, but he's also witty, attractive to members of the appropriate sex, athletically and academically gifted, able to "hold his drink" and hung like a horse. In short, a lot like you and me.

So, I was discussing this whole scary middle-East warmongering type thing with Dave, and his observation was that it may all be "just over anxious hypothesizing by guys that prefer to read Jane's over Playboy". That juxtaposition of ideas left me with the mental image of Frederick's of Kabul, and their new line of adult clothing - the crotchless burqa.

Remember, you read it here first.

Uhh ... ok. Here's another serious and scary one. Take this in conjunction with the game-theory article of last week and you might want to make sure you've got ammo for your personal defense battery and all your canned food is still good from Y2K.

This is just downright disturbing.

OK - this is more like it.

Now I finally have a use for that old 60MHz first-generation Power Mac I have sitting in the basement.

OK, I get the message. A lot of the stuff I've been posting has recently become all serious, scary, and ... boring. "Give us more tits!" you say. Very well. This article does indeed contain a "tit".

For those of yewww who wike to swearch the w-e-e-e-e-b with Google

I still remember the first time I saw her. The haunted look in her stunning green eyes pierced my soul. I had no idea who she was, or where she came from, save for a vague notion that she was from the Middle East or Indian subcontinent, and probably underage.

Her face was on on the cover of a National Geographic magazine that was used in a ad for subscriptions to the veritable organization's house journal.

Her name, as it turns out, is Sharbat Gula, and after an extensive search, Nat Geo has apparently found her (again). The intervening years in Afghanistan, it seems, have not been kind to her. Read it and weep, for the days when you might have wanted to see her in Maxim are now, I believe, far behind her.

Those Canucks. I never grow tired of reading about their strange behavior.