Watching Pillow on patrol, guarding the hearth against MLO (mouse-like objects), stirs a tickle in my mind: About thirty years ago was there a long-running ad campaign, for some luxury good, that featured a black panther? Or have I imagined it, mutating the Blackglama “what becomes a legend most” campaign in which black fur was itself the product?

(Do I still have any issues of Scientific American from that period?)

You don’t need me to tell you that the case of Maher Arar (cited by Charlie Stross) has gloomy implications. So instead I’ll remark that I’m pleased to see in the article the phrase “a Qaeda member.” If any American paper were so pedantic as to agree with me that the definite article in Al Qaeda ought to be dropped in such phrases just because we’d do so with an English phrase like The Brotherhood, I guess the New York Times would be it.

I’ve also coined the mongrel noun Qaedista but never had occasion to use it.

There’s something comically cartoonish about a black kitten in dim light: a silhouette in which the only visible features are the roundly staring eyes.

There’s a myth that if we legalise a substance it would somehow take the illegality out of it.

Keith Hellawell, UK drug czar (quoted in the .sig of Todd Larason)

We might all be spared a bit of embarrassment if sex-ed courses included a segment on protocol.

offers of housing for the displaced

An interesting item from Larry Elder:

The Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence’s website displays this oft-quoted “fact”: “The risk of homicide in the home is three times greater in households with guns.” Their website fails to mention that Dr. Arthur Kellermann, the “expert” who came up with that figure, later backpedaled after others discredited his studies for failing to follow standard scientific procedures. According to the Wall Street Journal, Dr. Kellermann now concedes, “A gun can be used to scare away an intruder without a shot being fired,” admitting that he failed to include such events in his original study. “Simply keeping a gun in the home,” Kellermann says, “may deter some criminals who fear confronting an armed homeowner.” He adds, “It is possible that reverse causation accounted for some of the association we observed between gun ownership and homicide – i.e., in a limited number of cases, people may have acquired a gun in response to a specific threat.”

I wasn’t aware that Kellermann had retracted.