Mark A.R. Kleiman thinks Airbus is a pretty honest name for the company’s aircraft. Considering that economy-class air travel is essentially equivalent to riding Greyhound these days (with the exception that the hassle at the airport replaces getting drooled on by hobos), Boeing might be due for a name change as well.

That said, I was pleasantly surprised by both the Boeing 717 and the service provided by AirTran on my recent trip to Pennsylvania. The aircraft (a semi-decent regional jet service to and from DFW from Memphis, and a 1930s-tech prop plane in and out of Lawton that made me feel like I was living a World War II-era propaganda film) and service provided by American Eagle on my less-recent trip to Oklahoma, however, left much to be desired. These combined experiences have done little to entice me back to employing economy class air travel for any voluntary trip of less than 1000 miles.

For the second time in two days, I have been waited on at a restaurant on the Oxford Square (last night, Proud Larry’s; tonight, Old Venice Pizza Company) by a waitress with a stud nosering. I guess they must be “in” now.

I think there’s a reasonable argument to be made supporting media outlets’ decisions to not name alleged rape victims, including that of Kobe Bryant’s accuser. That argument would seem to extend to also not naming her alleged past and present sexual partners, but apparently it doesn’t, which strikes me as a very odd double standard to be upholding in this day and age.

Robert Garcia Tagorda documents nicely Al Gore’s minor Ahmed Chalabi problem—namely, that he also treated Chalabi as a credible figure in the Iraqi exile community, at least until it came time for him to follow Howard Dean down the road of ex-DLCer dementia.

For the record, I found Chalabi less than credible, and was hardly a fan of Judith Miller’s Iraq WMD reporting, largely based on information provided by Chalabi’s pals, at the time either.

The cause of our 48-hour outage earlier this week: a borderline failing DSLAM card at the telephone exchange about a half-mile down the street. Just in case you were curious…

Here’s a brief article on Quantian (a “live Linux” CD with lots of scientific and mathematical goodies on it) I’m working on with a fellow Debianista for submission to The Political Methodologist, our humble little organized section newsletter. Any comments or feedback would be appreciated.

Ted Barlow has an eminently sensible post on how relatives of political candidates should be treated (and, as is par for the course, attracts a bevy of moonbats in the comments who disagree).

However, being a single male, I reserve the right to make light of how Jenna and/or Barbara Bush dress if they get Alexandra Kerry’d. That’s just the American way.