If you hate blogs as much as I do–and I promise that you don’t–it’s good to acknowledge when they do things well. This exchange between Patterico and Rick Hasen began over an op-ed Hasen wrote for the Los Angeles Times and then migrated over to their respective blogs. It’s high-toned, smart, civil, and, I would argue, vastly superior to any sort of analogue one might find in other media formats. Advantage: Blogosphere.

Sigh.

I narrowly escaped the chaos that ensued over the weekend with the British Airways strike. Our plane actually left Heathrow on Sunday and was still on time. The flight crew apologized for what they called an “industrial action.” And to make amends for the lack of food on board (the caterers are the ones on strike), we each received £10 vouchers. We could use them anywhere in the airport. And so, like the winners in a supermarket shopping spree, the Mrs. and I pillaged the nearby Pret a Manger. I hear the ones in New York are pathetic. But the Pret at London Heathrow was exquisite–there was nothing (at least at that time) that hit the spot better than my bacon-lettuce-tomato-egg sandwich.

It was the flight going to Europe that proved more challenging: A heavy-set woman in her sixties boarded our plane and from the get-go expressed her anxiety about flying. She was also loud. And she wanted to talk to the pilot. And she told the flight attendants she took half-a-valium.

Little did we know how nervous she would be. As soon as the plane hit a bump in the air, she started howling like a dog:

Ohhhhhhh! Ohhhhhhh! Ohhhhhhh!

And with the next little skips in turbulence:

Whoa! and What’s happening!

This occurred every time the plane hit even a minor bump for the entire flight.

She had questions too. Such as “How can the pilot fly through the clouds if he can’t see?”

But it was that howling that will haunt me forever. My compliments to the flight crew of BA 216 for not letting the panic spread, for holding this woman’s hand, for explaining that turbulence is normal and having to explain what turbulence is, over and over. Her husband, meanwhile, just sat there and ignored her the entire time.

Perhaps the toughest part about returning from a week’s vacation is catching up on emails. Namely, more than 1,100 of them. But only now, at 3 in the afternoon, do I finally get to “Dating site for sexaholics.”

(More on my trip to Vienna, Austria, later.)

This Newsweek story is probably the most sympathetic snapshot of Bush that I’ve ever seen.

I note this error in the New Yorker not out of any sense of superiority, but out of admiration for how rare it is to ever find an error–or even a typo–in America’s greatest magazine. So here’s Galley Friend C.L. noting a big mistake in Peter Schjeldahl’s piece on Winslow Homer:

Schjeldahl writes: “In the second-one of Homer’s last works-two foreground ducks taking off from turbulent waters are hit by a distant hunter’s double-barrelled buckshot; one has flipped upside down, and the other is transfixed with neck straining and wings spread, startled by death.”

Anybody who’s ever hunted ducks knows that you would never, ever, ever use the word BUCKSHOT. Buckshot (like the name pretty much says) is intended for big game; birdshot (like the name pretty much says) is intended for birds. If you hit a duck with buckshot–that’s a huge if, by the way, since putting a single slug on a flying mallard at normal range would

challenge even a fantastic shooter–the thing would evaporate. You might as well shove a stick of dynamite up its ass. More to the point, a bird hit with buckshot wouldn’t look like the birds in Homer’s “Left and Right.” It would look like a puff, and a few floating feathers.

There it is. We probably won’t see a mistake in the New Yorker again until March 2007.

Unless you deal with these things on a day-to-day basis, it’s difficult to understand exactly how impressive the New Republic‘s new comprehensive archives are. Ninety years of content, all online and searchable.

Hats off to TNR.

Paul Belien has a long, interesting post about the coming German election. Belien believes that we could be heading for a German crack-up–and that that’s a good thing. I’ll be interested to hear Vic’s thoughts on the situation when he returns from Vienna.

My home-boys at Power Line have re-vamped Power Line News and it’s now working quite nicely, even on Firefox. It’s a great idea–a blog that is its own RSS aggregator–and I think it’ll be a model that lots of big media companies attempt in the future.

How great is Power Line News? I recommend it even though it doesn’t link to Galley Slaves!