The world fruitcake supply has been jeopardized by an eCommerce snafu:

I could hear the frustration in his voice as Brother Barnabas described the year’s chaos in trying to upgrade his Web site so that it could handle more orders. A year ago, this Cistercian monk at Holy Cross Abbey in Berryville, Va., was trying to find better ways to earn money for his highly regarded operation.

The monks at this abbey are known around the world for making the best fruitcake on the planet. They sell the fruitcakes, along with a few other products, to support the abbey and their charitable activities.

Problem was, their e-commerce site was antiquated, and they badly needed to move to something with more capacity and better security. The means to accomplish this was to have more bandwidth installed, and to update their e-commerce solution.

Unfortunately, it didn’t work.

There’s more, telling the whole sad story.

You can always try my own fantastic fruitcake recipe.

Cereal-only restaurant features pajama-clad waiters:

Here’s a novel shot at a new restaurant concept: An eatery devoted to serving breakfast cereal. Cereality, a Boulder, Colorado, company this Wednesday opens its first full scale, sit-down restaurant, near the campus of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. The Philly location will serve 33 kinds of name-brand cereal, along with Cereality-created cereals, and specialty items like cereal bars. The basic menu item is a blast from Saturday mornings before mom and dad woke up: any two cereals, mixed in a bowl, with milk and one topping for $2.95. How about Captain Crunch and Lucky Charms with blueberries floating in chocolate milk?

Cereality servers wear pajamas. The restaurants are starting out near college campuses, because as the New York Times reported several weeks ago on its front page, cereal is all the rage as the latest college eating trend. Cereality, which already has a cafe operating at Arizona State in Tempe, has all the air of a clever idea that will run its course. Still, I don’t think I can recall a restaurant that specialized in serving branded food from other food companies…

When confronted with the argument that whatever the United States is doing at any particular time is wrong because so much of the rest of the world thinks otherwise, I typically respond that, like Will Rogers, they don’t know nothin’ but what they read in the newspaper. Or, in other words, they’ve been indoctrinated into the beliefs they have by their governments and their news media. I’ve just found some support for my contention in the great article Hating America by Bruce Bawer (hat tip: Truth, Lies, & Common Sense via Mudville Gazette):

Things are scarcely better in neighboring Sweden. During the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, the only time I saw pro-war arguments fairly represented in the Scandinavian media was on an episode of “Oprah” that aired on Sweden’s TV4. Not surprisingly, a Swedish government agency later censured TV4 on the grounds that the program had violated media-balance guidelines. In reality, the show, which had featured participants from both sides of the issue, had plainly offended authorities by exposing Swedish viewers to something their nation’s media had otherwise shielded them from—a forceful articulation of the case for going into Iraq.4 In other European countries, to be sure, the media spectrum is broader than this; yet with the exception of Britain, no Western European nation even approaches America’s journalistic diversity. (The British courts’ recent silencing of royal rumors, moreover, reminded us that press freedom is distinctly more circumscribed in the U.K. than in the U.S.) And yet Western Europeans are regularly told by their media that it’s Americans who are fed slanted, selective news—a falsehood also given currency by Americans like Hertsgaard.

Quite lengthy but well worth a read.

This week’s Carnival of the Liberated is up over at Dean’s World. It’s a sampler of the best posts of the week from Iraqi bloggers. There’s always something interesting going on.

There’s been quite a bit of speculation in the blogosphere on the mysterious illness of Ukrainian opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko:

As Ukraine’s popular pro-Western opposition leader claimed victory Tuesday in hotly contested presidential elections, the mystery surrounding an appearance-altering illness that twice prompted him to check into a Vienna hospital persisted.

Yushchenko accused the Ukrainian authorities of poisoning him. His detractors suggested he’d eaten some bad sushi.

Adding to the intrigue, the Austrian doctors who treated him have asked foreign experts to help determine if his symptoms may have been caused by toxins found in biological weapons.

Medical experts said they may never know for sure what befell Yushchenko.

But the illness, whatever it was, has dramatically changed his appearance since he first sought treatment at Vienna’s private Rudolfinerhaus clinic on September 10.

There’s a rather repulsive before-and-after picture here.

Some medbloggers have weighed in and Dr. Thomas Boyle (goaded, perhaps, by a blogger who shall remain nameless) of CodeBlueBlog has an absolutely fabulous diagnosis-at-a-distance for you. What is it? I won’t steal his thunder—you’ll just have to read it yourself.

There’s a lot to chew on in this post from American Future and the column by Anton La Guardia from the Telegraph to which he draws our attention. Noting a proposal for reform of the UN, Mr. La Guardia writes:

There is much in the 80-page report of the “High Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change” to interest America. It takes Mr Bush’s unilateral security policy, and tries to turn it into a new international doctrine. It seeks to convince the US that it can deal with threats more effectively through collective action than alone.

The report accepts America’s conviction that the risk of terrorists obtaining weapons of mass destruction is one of the main threats facing the world. However, it argues that other threats are as important because globalisation has linked them together. For example, poverty exacerbates the danger of states collapsing, and failed states are ideal breeding grounds for terrorists. The report accepts “pre-emptive” military action against an imminent threat as part of the traditional right to self-defence. It also adopts America’s belief in “preventive” action to stop more distant threats, but only subject to approval by the Security Council.

The entire discussion of the UN and its future leaves me with far more questions than answers.

1. How has the UN Security Council contributed to collective security? US security?
2. How has the UN General Assembly contributed to collective security? US security?
3. However ineffective they might be, which body has been more effective in contributing to collective security? US security?
4. If the Security Council is more effective—as seems obvious—how does making it more closely resemble the General Assembly contribute to collective security? US security?

Marc has a number of good questions of his own.

[continue reading…]

American Future continues to do yeoman’s service on covering developments in Iran. If you want to stay informed you could do a lot worse than checking in there on a daily basis.

As I read the most recent post on American Digest:

In a stunning move to reverse the threat to democracy in the Ukraine George Soros wrote a check on Sunday to take possession of the Kiev Holiday Inn and Bali-Themed singles Bar in order the guarantee housing for some 15,000 Blue State Human Shields now inbound to the beleaguered Republic.

I thought “Let them have one-way tickets!” But I should have realized it was a cruel hoax: there is no Holiday Inn in Kiev.

Ann Althouse noticed something on a recent night out:

Speaking of sweeping (and things Japanese), on Friday evening, we parked the car on the street in front of a lit up Aikido place. Inside were about ten men in traditional Japanese clothes, holding what at first I thought were swords. But they were brooms. They were sweeping the place, possibly ritualistically, and it was such a fascinating sight that I watched them as I walked a couple steps and knocked into a telephone pole.

In every dojo to which I’ve belonged over the years we cleaned the dojo after every practice. There were the practical considerations, of course. If we didn’t clean the dojo, who would? We wouldn’t want to practice in a dirty dojo. But there were other considerations as well.

Cleaning the dojo after practice is an obligation. It shows respect for your sensei and the dojo. It reflects the appropriate martial spirit. When I taught classes it was a tradition that I always maintained.

Those aikidokas should be be happy they didn’t have to do what we did after every kendo practice. After practice we’d fasten the legs of our hakama up and wash the floor of the dojo with only our hands, feet, rags, and water. It was considered bad form for your knees to touch the ground. We’d bend over with a rag grasped in our two hands in front of us and push with our feet, our bodies effectively becoming the mops that cleaned the dojo.

We had a certain amount of disdain for the tai chi class that preceded our kendo class. They never cleaned the dojo and left it to us to sweep up after them. No martial spirit.