Quarter sawn, the stuff is as beautiful as quarter sawn white oak. We've been seeing more and more of it as a flooring product. Using it thusly closes a life cycle of sorts as the main source of it currently is coconut palms. They will produce fruit for about 40 years. After this, the trees must be cut down for replanting. I don't know whether date or oil palms can be used in the same fashion.

Eat organic.

Why? Man is an omnivore and nothing could be duller (or sillier - tofu "burgers"?) than a vegetarian diet.

. . . the most overrated writer of his generation. His non-fiction was completely untrustworthy and his fiction (often one in the same) almost unreadable.

When I lived in Japan, everyone seemed to be in the habit of carrying a hankerchief in order to dry their hands after using the public restroom. It was part of their accessorizing. In other words, another way of expressing who one is by what one wears and uses.

Found this as annoying as hell when I first lived there back in the late 1980s. Now, alas, most Japanese restrooms in new buildings have towels or hand driers. Something more telling, perhaps, is the come back of the Japanese style toilet. Ugh!

The Japanese are also trying to get away from the disposable chopstick by going back to the old habit of everyone carrying their own in a small chopstick case. Again, elegant and self-expressive. -- Odradek

Interesting. I was just there last summer and never saw evidence of this.

I don't know? But I bet we'll have the answer the first Wednesday in November, 2008.

Extracting the copper will be a mighty endeavor for the China Metallurgical Group (MCC), which beat out contenders from Russia, the U.K., Canada, and the U.S. to win the bid.

So, perhaps the fourth "great power" to get caught up in the Great Game? Since the 19th Century, Afghanistan has vanquished the British, the Russians, and now the U.S. Do the Chinese really think that they're going to be running a massive open pit mining operation in a country yet to be "pacified"? They can't bribe enough people to make it work.

It's not like it was a blue collar town with the factory closing. The place exists primarily for retirees and vacationers.

With more boomers retiring every year, places like Myrtle Beach will be seeing population growth, and not just seasonal. Much of what is "failing" now will get snapped because of bargain prices. The building boom continues apace in Hawaii and prices haven't even fallen there. The people moving to or buying or building in Hawaii are boomers or others bringing their money with them (there is no economy in Hawaii per se beyond tourism). The same is pretty much true of Myrtle Beach.

. . . went to central Florida either.

When I was a kid, no one who was anyone went to Myrtle Beach. (It was kind of like what Ocean City, MD is now: An eyesore.) You went to Murrells Inlet or Pawleys Island or headed north to Little River and into North Carolina. -- moira kelly

But in both cases it was before people created reasons for others to go there. In Myrtle Beach's case, it was a lot of fine golf courses. For central Florida, it's been amusement parks and, later, a lot of fine golf courses. Myrtle Beach probably has the edge as it's less likely to be affected by hurricanes and, so far as I know, has no alligators (though probably just as many sharks out on the links).

A black man winning the lily-white Iowa primary is HUGE news. Juan Williams on Fox used the word "astounded" repeatedly, and his eyes personally registered the fact. Politically incorrect though it may be, there are reasons Obama plays so well to white crowds, when previous leaders didn't. You mean we can't talk about those? Or just old conservative white men can't talk about those?

This kind of partisanship before the fact -- guilty until proven innocent -- is exactly the sort of old politics Obama is trying to overturn, and exactly the reason he succeeds where Jesse Jackson and others haven't. We really don't need to hate each other so much. -- Ban Johnson

While Bill Bennett is a certified horse's ass, what he said is true. There are cultural differences between the European, Hispanic, Asian-American, and African-American segments of American society. Some don't matter while others do. But I agree with him that Jackson and, particularly, Sharpton get next no traction outside even certain segments of the African-American community because they are somewhat buffoonish, and Sharpton's is just as big a jerk as Bennett.

I suppose the real test of color-blindness or at least "race tolerance" even among Democrats will come in the southern primaries.

If Goldberg had written a book that simply examined the spectrum of totalitarianism from the right to the left it really wouldn't matter. But like Coulter, he's not a political scientist or an historian (or even a very good writer), but a partisan hack hoping to further muddy the ideological waters in America. He no more believes that American liberalism is a descendant of fascism than does Coulter or the any of the rest of the epithet prone of the right. That's not the point. His book and Coulter's are aimed at the "dead-enders," the 30% or so of not so thoughtful Americans that still believe Iraq was involved with the 9/11 attacks, that they invasion was justified, and that Shrub is the one of the best presidents in American history.

Spend too much time on this god stuff and you'll be lucky to get support from anyone but the religious right. "Reasonable" people don't make religion a centerpiece of their politics because most people aren't religious.

Me.