I ask that question because he behaves that way at critical moments. For example, last fall he announced that he and the Sunnis were very close to agreement on settling their issues, and all that remained was their desire for a timetable for American withdrawal, and it looked like they could agree on that. Next day Rumsfeld said, "Timetables are inappropriate." (The neocons want perpetual occupation.) Next day after that, Maliki says the same thing.

So he has been pretty much a stooge. Why would he do that? One reason is that the Shiites are happy to let us do the spending, fighting and dying for them. But another may be that there is a Swiss bank account with Maliki's name on it, funded by "the company". Nothing would surprise me.

The goal may be more explicitly sexual when men do it, and the lies more blatant, but women have been doing much the same for centuries. Most of the Victorian novels are full of sisterly conspiracies aimed at landing some hunky young lord. Yes, marriage was the object. So that makes the disingenuous conspiracies OK? Truly Victorian indeed.

I remember when I was in college and in our circle of friends an iffy courtship was happening. The girl was attractive but dumb. She desperately wanted her beau to propose but felt that as graduation approached, she was losing him. The guy was very bright and I thought they were mismatched, but said nothing. The girl's roommate, also bright, stepped up to help seal the deal. She scripted the whole thing -- the breakup (aka ultimatum), the cool indifference, the alternate plans, and of course the sex embargo -- it was worthy of a good soap opera. The dumbbell was so desperately in love she almost couldn't pull it off, but she summoned up determination and what passed for her wits and did it. And the poor chump bit like a dopey fish on a wiggling worm, was hooked and reeled in to the chortles of thirty sorority girls.

So the men are more pig-like, is that all? Well, we knew that about them anyway, didn't we?

I just had to spend $500 to fix yet another massive jam-up of XP, but it now takes me a half hour every day to boot up instead of the former 20 minutes. At least the rapid accretion of page files, leading to slowdown and switching to virtual memory, has been corrected.

I have just bought a laptop which I will use as I transition my desktop to Linux. The Linux community has developed a program to run Windows applications, evidently as well as Mac can or better. Because Linux is open source, and very stable, a lot of people like me believe their computing future will be happier and more reliable than if they stick with Microsoft.

I love the Mac, but Steve Jobs hates big business (evin tho he are one) and has curled his lip at that market for 25 years, even though he is necessarily blowing off millions of small businesses as well. That's why he's in the lowest tenth percentile of the market. Linux is largely free from weird biases like that because of the open-source dynamic.

UNDERNEATH the burka. She's says she's ready, she knows he expects her to wear the polka-dot bikini, she's a good Muslim so she's not going to mislead or be unresponsive -- but she's going to finesse it. Thus have the powerless dealt with the powerful since walking upright. Here, it's funny.

But it's also a powerful scold about American superpower arrogance, currently toward the Middle East. He didn't slap her around (peremptory use of violence, currently an American tendency), but he is approaching the situation peremptorily, and he is intolerant of her religiously-based dress code. At a personal level, they need to break up and find compatible partners. At an allegorical level, the best he can do is gentle persuasion.

But that is very un-American.

No question, FNL is a fine show, deserving of an award of some kind -- like Best Prime Time Soap Opera. It's a girl show, folks. Way Venusian. There's noplace for the Martians among us to engage. HH's previous nominees all had that, even "Veronica Mars" -- conspiracies, mysteries, application of rigorous logic, or risks taken with bold action. It's the stuff that keeps people grinding their teeth in their sleep as they rest up for another day in their own fields of conflict. Sure, the femmy stuff is an important part of life -- the part that needs tending to when you're not fighting for survival. By all means let's explore our feelings deeply. But if you can't do that in ten minutes, I'm flipping the channel, ladies.

I remember this great line from "Picket Fences". The guy was talking about marriage to his girlfriend, who doubts his commitment and asks him how he sees himself in a marriage: "Well, I'll love you, and take care of you, and have fun with you, and when you want to talk about your feelings, we'll call up your sister and have her come over." Yes, let's get down, but let's "git 'er done." There's IMPORTANT stuff out there to contend with.

This is not a misogynist bias. "Ugly Betty" a winner because it is half Martian, because she's all about navigating the competitive corporate world along with bringing some decency to it. Like "30 Rock", its craziness is real enough to be engaging. But if you don't keep some Martian meat on the table, your show will get like mashed potatoes.