50% of building lumber and sheathing used in the U.S. does not come from Canada. Best figures I could come by without really getting into this is that the U.S. imported 9 billion BF of lumber Canada in the first six months of 2007. However, the U.S. produced almost 49 billion BF of lumber in 2006.

Depending on where you live in the country, you're using different lumber for framing. Most of the South from Florida to Texas is using plantation raised Southern Yellow pine, both for framing and sheathing. On the West Coast it's probably Hem-Fir from California, Oregon and Washington. The NE and upper Midwest may be getting lumber from Canada, but most of the house building in the country has been happening in the Sun Belt and in the West.

What you find coming from Canada primarily are Western Red cedar, chip products (OSB and Timberstrand). Otherwise . . .

As to the pine beetle, if it's destroying lodgepole pine forests in Canada, that's not "fiber" destined to be used in stick framing to begin with, unless it's chipped and becomes OSB. Lodgepole pine does not have the structural properties needed to be milled into framing lumber.

Hardly.

The religion's membership is stagnant in the U.S. and conversion abroad has always been spotty.

. . . I agree with the comment in Jezebel: I think that two of the women pictured would have benefited more from some cosmetic dentistry (as well as some time spent in the gym).

But like Adam Sandler, they just keep giving him money to make crap.

Maybe I'm just out of synch with the times, but it's not Ben Stiller whose career mistifies me, it's Will Ferrel's.

-- Mister Marker

Ben Stiller plays Ben Stiller in every movie he is in. He's got no range. His characters are always screwed-up nervous messes. His character in Meet The Parents was no different than he played in .

Will Ferrel, on the other hand, inhabits his characters

Duh.

Primarily because no one really needs one is the obvious and only answer.

Perhaps Rowling's decision to make Dumbledore's sexuality explicit was born out of her frustration that few readers, screenwriters included, picked up on her hints, which were particularly heavy in the final volume. The clues were subtle enough, or maybe our expectations heteronormative enough, that -- although it was a question I talked about extensively with fellow readers this summer -- the topic did not seem to get a lot of national critical attention in the weeks after the book's release.

I don't care about people's sexuality. And why it might to some extent help explain a fictional character's personality or behavior in an adult novel, as in real life, it usually just doesn't matter very much (or shouldn't anyway), and not at all in the story arch of the books about Harry Potter.

What is it with Salon's obsession with sex and sexuality? Pure tabloid titillation not unlike something Murdoch would publish. Traister needs to get a life if she really "talked extensively" with anyone about Dumbledore's sexuality. Sad.

More important, they haven't done anything for the majority of Americans who simply want us to get out of Iraq ASAP.

After an incident when there was a questionable use of a taser by a member of the Seattle Police Department, the mayor and chief of police both agreed to be tased in front of the media so as to understand the experience. Just a short burst dropped both of them to their knees.

I say Rudy ought to be boarded if he thinks it's an acceptable form of "interrogation." Supposedly, CIA agents who have been boarded last an average of 14 seconds.

Duh.

As few of us do meaningful work, including me, I'd become a househusband in a heartbeat. I'm certainly not defined by my work. I am an Austrian rather than a German - I work to live rather than live to work.

I have never understood this. Clapton was, is a great guitar player, but no better than his contemporary Jimmy Page. Ginger Baker was an average drummer, and Jack Bruce couldn't touch Paul McCartney, by far the most innovative and talented rock/pop bass player of that period, on his best days. Listen to "Paperback Writer," "Rain," and "Taxman," all recorded before Cream existed.

The Dominoes was Clapton's true super group.

. . . because they are demographically unrepresentative of the U.S. today. It's that simple.

To capture the decrepit and claustrophobic atmosphere of England in the years of Strummer's childhood -- he grew up as John Graham Mellor, the privileged kid of a British Foreign Office diplomat -- Temple borrows bits of a legendary BBC adaptation of George Orwell's "1984" (starring Peter Cushing) and the animated version of Orwell's "Animal Farm."

Strummer was a kid during the years of "Swinging London" and the flowering of British pop music in the early to mid-60s. I wouldn't actually describe that era as "claustrophobic." That would be more in keeping with the immediate post-war years.

Now the punk era and Thatcher's England, that's a different matter.

. . . perhaps you should refrain from commenting.

Not a fan of The Clash, never was. But it was a little bit funny when Joe was kicked out for not being appropriately insanely radically political, enough. -- Nulla Sallus

Joe and Paul kicked Mick Jones out of the band "officially" for not being sufficiently political. In actuality, he got booted for becoming a puffed-up rock star who couldn't bother to show up on time for rehearsal, recording sessions or even concerts, or so contend the biographies of the band.

. . . gouge his own eyes out? After all, it's his problem.

The Year of Living Dangerously was a better movie than book, and is by far the best movie Mel Gibson's ever made.