Behind as always.  Maybe 40 emails I need to answer.  Phone calls to return.  I seem to have an excess of actual life at the moment. 

I’d like to post a few underwater pics of mantas for the Friday pudublog (neglected badly of late, with my apologies), but I don’t think I’ll have them developed in time.  (Mantas and pudus actually have several things in common: adorable, quiet, weirdly gorgeous, nearly defenseless.  Manta rays are a little like underwater pudus 15 feet long and covered in mucus.  A little.)

I’d catch up on all the freshest crap from our government, but it’s pretty much the same as always: more lies, more selling out of the national interest, more avoidance of admitting any individual responsibility for catastrophic incompetence, and more signs that the ill-prepared, dishonest, unnecessary, and illegal occupation of Iraq is leading into a spiral of violence of terrifying scope.

Nothing we haven’t already learned to expect on a near-daily basis.