From the BBC:

The US Army is to apologise to the families of officers killed or wounded in action who were sent letters urging them to return to active duty.

The letters were sent to more than 5,100 Army officers listed as recently having left the military.

But this figure included about 75 officers killed in action and about 200 wounded in action.

Darn those database errors.

Some oil experts think the Iraq conflict has actually helped drive the price of oil up.

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This NYT piece looks at why one person might jump to save a total stranger from an approaching subway train when most people wouldn't.

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The NYT reports there is a serious "parking rage" problem in the city that gave the world Rice-a-roni as a treat. And that rage is playing out with attacks on parking control officers (surprise, surprise).

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Salon on the people who are really advising Dubya on Iraq: What they want is escalation, with 25,000 U.S. troops in Baghdad.

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Foreign affairs analyst Gwynne Dyer says it's to cover up his entanglements with the United States.

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That would be the theory posited in a Vanity Fair article coming out next month about poor old Conrad Black's legal troubles. (H/T to Charles Bury via CAJ-L)

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Japan's boomers and seniors are among the wealthiest citizens in the world. While Japan's media still tries to reach the young and fashionable, they are starting to make special efforts to reach the older crowd too.

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From an LAT column by Joel Stein, who wishes readers would just piss off and leave him alone (thanks, Kevin!).

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A bisexual male TV talk show host in Pakistan whose on-screen character is a married woman has managed to slip mention of sex into his dialogue without upsetting the Islamic fundamentalists (no mean feat at the best of times).

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The big one -- the only one, in NATO's eyes -- is the killing of civilians by ISAF forces.

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In a country where only 0.1 per cent of the population has access to the Web, there are 4.6 million land lines and mobile phones in Iraq. That makes mobile phones the informal news medium of choice for Iraqis when it comes to stuff like ... oh, hanging videos. :)

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From Salon (free with a day pass):

Big breasts for dummies Mannequins with giant bazooms are busting out in shop windows from coast to coast. More than just garment racks, they are a mirror of current beauty and fashion

I just checked the gmail account I have set up for this blog. There were 3,297 spam unread messages in the spam folder. Gmail deletes all spam after 30 days. So over the past 30 days, that account got pounded by a minimum of just over 100 spam messages per day.

Wacky.

In an attempt to hire better people, Google has tried to develop an algorithm to predict who'll be a great candidate. Have you written a book or own a dog? Bonus!

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Democracy Now! interviews a professor who felt CNN and the NYT shied away from the connections between the United States and former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, who was hanged early Saturday in Baghdad.

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Now might be a good time to revisit South Park: Bigger, Longer, Uncut. :)

From the NYT review by Stephen Holden:

The Devil seems to be having romantic problems. Having succumbed to the charms of Saddam Hussein (portrayed as a smiling photograph attached to a tiny cut-out figure), who has died and gone to hell, he has become the Iraqi dictator's pining love slave. The Devil is shown poring over ''Saddam Is From Mars, Satan's From Venus'' for tips on how to improve their communication. But their troubled idyll is interrupted by the war above ground, which Satan realizes is his opportunity to put in an appearance and take over the planet. Armageddon is suddenly at hand.

Last month, I regaled whoever read the post with a story of my attempt to rent the Rambo in Afghanistan movie (Remember: III, not IV!!!!!).

Here's the scene that I dimly remembered in my rapidly deteriorating mind as having some relevance to the current day, as transcribed from a DVD that I rented from the attitude-free Suspect Video on Markham:

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From the BBC: 

Child attack dog 'pit bull breed'

Child-attack dog 'pit bull breed'

Child-attack dog a prohibited pit bull

Dog that attacked child confirmed as pit bull

Child attacks dog the pit bull breed

Children attack breeding pit bull dogs

Dog children attack 'pit bull breed'

This NYT story talks about how events overtook the Bush administration's strategy in Iraq. It's a very sobering read.

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CNN promo'd a story on the search for master terrorist Osama bin Laden with the headline "Where's Obama?" Barack Obama, of course, is the junior Senator from Illinois and a probable candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008.

Unlike Osama, Obama has no known connection with al Qaeda. And his whereabouts are generally known! :^)

An excerpt from the AP story on CTV.ca:

The blunder came Monday evening on Wolf Blitzer's news show The Situation Room. Both Soledad O'Brien and Blitzer offered separate apologies during CNN's morning show Tuesday.

CNN called it a "bad typographical error" by its graphics department.

"We want to apologize for that bad typo," Blitzer said. "We also want to apologize personally to Senator Barack Obama. I'm going to be making a call to him later this morning to offer my personal apology."

The ongoing war in Afghanistan has been picked the top Canadian news story for 2006 by the country's newspaper editors and broadcasters. However, I have a small bone to pick with the CP story.

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When Poland joined the European Union, it brought some of its taste treats along with it (chocolate-covered marshallows are one example). This BBC article talks about some of the food dishes that Bulgarians and Romanians can't live without, and that may now become known to other EU palates.

Start-ups with names like Powerset, Hakia, ChaCha and Snap are hoping to beat the search king at its own game.

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Having something of a thing for snow globes, I noticed this in the NYT. But the wider lesson isn't about snow globes, its about the difference between security theatre and security that works.

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The video of Saddam Hussein being taunted by Shiite guards is not going down well with Iraq's Sunni minority, and may be cementing impressions that the Shiite-led government is a sectarian one, claims an NYT analysis.

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I'm off work until Saturday, and ice-fishing season starts today! Woo-hoo!! I thought at some point in that period, I could try my luck.

Except there's one problem.

I had pretty much written off Lake Simcoe for having any ice cover, but I thought some of the lakes in the Haliburtons would be frozen enough by now. Wrong! At least with the ones I'm familiar with.

So let's say one went another hour and change north, to North Bay. Is Lake Nippissing good to go? Nope.

How about the lakes around Temagami? Nada.

So even if you drove 5.5 hours due north of Toronto, it's still hasn't been cold enough to put three to four inches (up to 10 centimetres) of ice on the lakes, which is about the minimum needed for safe fishing.

Wow. Back in 1991, when I lived in southern Saskatchewan, I remember fishing on four inches of ice on Last Mountain Lake only four days after Remembrance Day (in fairness, it's an apples-to-oranges comparison; southern Saskatchewan is still further north than even Temagami. Last Mountain's southern tip sits at 51 degrees, 20 minutes in latitude. Temagami is about 47 degrees, four minutes. Each degree of latitude represents a distance of about 110 kilometres).

This may be a freaky warm winter, but if it's a harbinger of looming climate change, then I may have to look for a new winter pastime in future years.

Addendum

I went fishing on the Niagara River on Thursday, Jan. 4. Some fellow anglers told me they heard the only safe ice is to be found at Cochrane, about an eight-hour drive north of Toronto.

Oh, I should say no fish were harmed in the course of my fishing expedition.