My Uncle Doug, Aunt Beth, and my litle cousin Betsy (she's not so little any longer, I suppose) have recently left America for an extended stay in Zambia, where Uncle Doug will study the effects of diet on recipients of a drug treatment for HIV in Lusaka. There's a facility there that's run by his university, the University of Alabama, Birmingham. I had hoped to syndicate their blog postings here, but they only have an atom feed, and our site doesn't support atom at the moment. So, you can read their blog here and get the details firsthand.

Some of you may have noticed brief downtime earlier this evening. Well, we moved to a new web hosting service. We were unhappy with our previous hosting company, and moved. We're paying a bit more now, but we're getting a 10,000% increase in our available disk space, so we think it's worth it. OK. Enjoy the site. It's not any different than before.

James Lileks often has useful things to say. Here is one of those things.

I couldn't believe when I found this. Cat and I were looking for the video she posted below (and do you know what he did?) because there was an issue with the hosting company and we couldn't get to the link on our site. Having tried several searches without success, I searched using the answer to the question. We got the video returned as the first search result.

The second result was a story about this Chinese dude who pulled a truck several meters with his penis. That's right, his penis. He didn't have a huge harness around his shoulders so he could really lean into the pull, he just had this truck attached to his penis. And he pulled it. Several meters. What's even more amazing is that he had an assistant give him a good solid kick in the 'nads as a part of his "warm up".

I'm certain that some of the advertised Black Friday "door buster" deals are really good deals. I'm dubious that it's worth sacrificing a night- or even a partial night) of sleep for them. It's dangerous out there when you're contending with mothers and/or crazed teenagers for this year's Hot Holiday Item. You could get a black eye, for goodness' sake. You could get stuck in a brawl (see the video link about half-way down the page), as is reported to have happened at one Walmart in Florida. I bet we'll hear of more similar incidents as the day progresses.

Michael Yon's latest dispatch from Iraq, Gates of Fire, is up on his blog. I've mentioned Mr. Yon here before, and I continue to enjoy his writing.

He gives readers a much different picture of the war than we normally hear. It's gritty and very real - it stands in stark contrast to the "This many Americans Died Today" we hear every day from the major news outlets. Not that our fallen soldiers aren't important, quite the contrary. But when Yon encounters a situation where there's been a casualty, he provides context. What was this or that soldier doing when they got injured or killed? Why were they doing it? What impact do the casualties have on the uninjured soldiers there in Iraq?

I posted here about what had been reported as the reason for Steven Vincent's murder in Iraq. It turns out that while the premise of the information is correct - Mr. vincent was planning to marry his interpreter - the implication that I drew from the story was incorrect.

A couple of stories have disappeared from our site. That's a nuisance. The web hosting provider moved us to a new server. I guess they took their backup before we put up our last couple of posts. We've also lost a couple of comments.

At least they didn't totally mangle the site and cause days of downtime like they did with palmersroom.com...

Check this out.

*Best viewed in IE...stinking browser-centric developers.