Wow. Shortly after Simon Ng posted this blog entry —

. . .
today has been weird, at 3 some guy ringed the bell. I went down and recognized it was my sister’s former boyfriend. He told me he wants to get his fishing poles back. I told him to wait downstair while I get them for him. While I was searching them, he is already in the house. He is still here right now, smoking, walking all around the house with his shoes on which btw I just washed the floor 2 days ago! Hopefully he will leave soon . . .

— the visitor stabbed him to death. (Cited by Nev Dull)

Adventures of Mr Coo, a wacky bit of Flash animation from Basque-land. (Cited by JoAnne Schmitz.)

At Languagehat, some interesting brief remarks on the Belgian aristocracy’s efforts to seem less alien to Flanders.

Warren Meyer on why libertarians write blogs (cited by Arnold Kling)

Every few days I check my HTTP log to see who has linked to me. (It is entertaining sometimes too to see what search keywords led here.) The pleasure of that little chore has long been tainted by spammers; I guess it was December or so when I stopped making a note of the sources of such bogus referrals.

This week, something new and puzzling: referrals ostensibly from two hundred other WordPress blog pages – some of them two years old – that contain neither any reference to ogre.nu nor any conspicuous link to gambling, sex-pills or spamming services.

Ron Paul’s remarks on the war, to the House

useful spam-handling plugin for WordPress 1.5

a gag about clashing jargons

Sheldon Richman on the “Minuteman Project”:

. . . this “citizens’ neighborhood watch along our border” looks for foreigners who, by and large, are seeking better, more-productive lives for themselves and their children. The self-appointed American border guards inform the authorities when they find any. This strikes me as most out of keeping with the heritage of a country born in revolution, devoted to individual freedom, and skeptical of political power. The irony is that these Americans claim to be acting in the tradition of the original Minutemen, those brave early Americans who were always ready to engage the British forces during the struggle for independence.

I’ve just upgraded to a new version of WordPress. Any minute now I’ll get it looking the way I like, again.

Though this is a huge improvement over the old default template.

A little bit later: Oh dear, oh dear: my links don’t show up on the monthly archive pages. Later still: That’s a flaw of the new default template.

What d’ya know, I see I’ve been blogrolled by Sunni Maravillosa; and according to Google this blog is “related” to a page on intestinal roundworm.

Gary Becker and Richard Posner have a blog (any day now)