Feh, working all day sux. But, I'm curious: are you getting more emails than ever, from corporate concerns, begging you to click the link and check out "savings like never before!" at this or that business website? It's sort of annoying to have to sift thru a lot of "you told us it was OK to email you" spam, as you're trying to get work done, yo?

I don't do a lot of online shopping, compared to your average American consumer. But obviously it's impossible to keep an email addy "private," and once one has used an addy, it gets whored around with the same promiscuity of a desperate blogger looking to generate new traffic at a new site. But it's notable, at least to me and anectodally, to consider how many "Sale of the Century!" emails I'm getting right now, and even from business concerns I've not had relations with for years.

The saddest/funniest ones are from the garden-related businesses, who don't seem to realize that I'm a few thousand away, in terms of savings, from having the self-heating eco-correct greenhaus that would make me more inclined to want to buy plants and gardening supplies in the early dead of winter. I suspect that, economically speaking, it's going to be even more Cold, come February.

Hate the players and the game

She speaks Cebuano, Tagalog, Spanish, Korean, Japanese, and English – never finished the sixth grade – and gives head like a dream. This is what she tells me as I bum a square. A Marlboro light that smokes like a filter-less camel – we’ll talk about that later.

She left the province to come to Manila to find work because there was no money at home. At sixteen she and her childhood sweetheart had their twins. By the time they were four he was married with a child on the way and she answered an ad for a massage parlor.

But the Taliban was wrong to blow up those nonbeliever statues:

n April expedition by the Chicago-based Assyrian Academic Society, reported last week on an archaeological e-mail list run by the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute, reports the site "is in serious jeopardy of being destroyed." A local mayor has hired a construction firm to dynamite caves out of the rock hillside holding the fragile relief, the society reports, so that visitors to the park there can enjoy some shade.

"Dynamiting anywhere near the reliefs could do damage to them," says University of Chicago Assyriologist McGuire Gibson, by email. He calls the Sennacherib carving one of the most significant standing monuments of ancient Assyria. "These reliefs are almost 2700 years old, and natural processes and some old human actions have damaged them. But they are still in remarkable condition. The threat of damage to create a place where people can picnic out of the sun, without the consent or oversight of the State Board of Antiquities, would be a very bad idea."

In addition, the society reports that visitors are crawling over the relief and chipping away pieces as souvenirs.