My apartment was destroyed in a blazing inferno last night.

I'm not kidding.

I got my laptop out. I'm okay, my roommate's okay, and oddly enough, most of my personal possessions, including my sofa, look very salvagable: just smoke and soot. I think the stuffed hedgehogs will pull through. The firemen were all very nice, and my landlord has been awfully swell about this too.

I'll e-mail people once I get my laptop hooked up to the Internet somewhere. I got a cell phone this morning, so I can hook you up with the number. To make things easier, I'll be using my Gmail address for a while: I am prancelot, at et cetera.

Right now I'm still in a not-really-sure-how-to-react phase. We'll see how long this lasts.

It could easily have been a lot worse.

The New York Times has put out a really amazingly detailed and worthwhile article, if you can credit that. It's about those aluminum tubes Iraq tried to buy, back in the day. Remember them? The ones the Administration insisted were for uranium-enriching centrifuges?

Well...

It turns out that almost every single expert and nuclear scientist ever consulted about these tubes concluded that they were almost totally useless for centrifuge work, and it turns out that the tubes were in fact exact matches for tubes Iraq had purchased in the past to make short-range rockets. Let's be clear: the experts almost unanimously agreed that there was almost zero chance these tubes were for centrifuges, and they did this before 2002. Apparently no-one bothered mentioning this to George Tenet, though. That wacky CIA...What egregious blunders will they commit next? Ho ho.

Meanwhile, at the Energy Department, scientists were startled to find senior White House officials embracing a view of the tubes they considered thoroughly discredited. "I was really shocked in 2002 when I saw it was still there," Dr. Wood, the Oak Ridge adviser, said of the centrifuge claim. "I thought it had been put to bed."

...

The reports got little attention, partly because reporters did not realize they had been done with the cooperation of top Energy Department experts. The Washington Post ran a brief article about the findings on Page A18. Many major newspapers, including The Times, ran nothing at all.

Read the whole thing. It's really appalling. Bush and Cheney and Rice et alia flat-out deceived the public about a potential nuclear threat. Are these the kind of hot cherry ass-clowns you want rubbing their greasy members over our national security?

UPDATE: Here's a great couple of lines...

On Oct. 2, nine days before the Senate vote on the war resolution, the new National Intelligence Estimate was delivered to the Intelligence Committee. The most significant change from past estimates dealt with nuclear weapons; the new one agreed with Mr. Cheney that Iraq was in aggressive pursuit of the atomic bomb.

...

Today, the Intelligence Committee's report makes clear, that 93-page estimate stands as one of the most flawed documents in the history of American intelligence.

Indeed.

Dear driver who turned her #43 bus into the totally wrong lane this afternoon and ran so far off the overhead power lines that we were trapped between two lanes of busy traffic for almost 45 minutes until her supervisor showed up to push us into the correct lane,

When the Montlake Bridge went up, and all that traffic around us finally came to a halt because it was totally physically impossible for it to move at all, and that other #43 bus was stopped right there next to us just a few feet away, and it was completely safe to finally open the doors and let us all off and free us from the stuffy transit Hell of your making, did it feel good to keep the doors sealed and categorically refuse to let any of us off, ever, until we were back on track? Or are you just very incompetent?

Thanks a fucking mouthful, you useless fucking fuck.

Please get another job. One that involves never seeing me or interacting with me again. I hear there are some very exciting opportunities on the Moon these days; it's very nice at this time of the year.

Yours sincerely,
The entire HogBlog staff
(That's me!)