This week, I apologize for my sarcasm, which evidently doesn’t always translate well. Last week I snarked about the 13 things I would never blog about (or somebody should shoot me), and went on to list some pretty worthy blog topics that a lot of you in the TT community hold near and dear, including one person who is a very near and dear to me. She knows I mean no offense, but to show my contrition to the rest of you, I’m blogging about all those things I said I would never blog about last week. So here is my Thirteen Great Things to Blog About:

1. My Dog.This guy. He’s gettin’ old.
2. My Cat.She hates everybody except me and Wacky Mommy.
3. My Other Cat.The original Himself. Efficient hunter. Follows me into the bathroom and chirrups until I turn on the bathtub to dribble on his head.
4. My Health. I’m about 20 lbs. overweight, but in decent cardio shape. I’ll be in better shape when I go back to playing hockey three times a week in September.
5. My Sex Life. Sorry, my wife is censoring this one.
6. Cars. Um… I drive one. (Not sure where to go with this one.)
7. Television. It is a very bad influence on society. I don’t think children should be exposed to it. (I’m watching TV as I write this, so you understand I’m not really all that dogmatic about this.)
8. Pictures of My Children. Not going to do it. Sorry. I love the little nuggets, but I have privacy concerns.
9. Football. I grew up watching it. Isn’t that enough?
10. Basketball. I grew up watching NCAA but don’t care for the pro game.
11. Beer. Some beer tastes good. I prefer liquor.
12. Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan (I hope I spelled their names correctly). I gather they are teen show biz queens. Well cool. I hope they have talent and they make people happy and feel good about themselves just the way they are.
13. NASCAR. Look, I grew up in Iowa, and it was a regular feature of my youth to go to the Saturday night dirt track stock car races at the Muscatine County fair grounds in West Liberty. Ah, the smell of partially combusted gasoline, mixed with damp earth and oil, the roar of the engines and the smoke and moths under the lights and the wooden-spooned Frosty Malt from the concession stand under the grand stand. But NASCAR? Eh. Not so much. They’ve smoothed off all the rough edges and made it some kind of slick racing buildboards in a stadium thing.

So there: no war, no hockey and minimal snark-snark (I hope). Happy TT and Cheers to all.

I know I say this too much, but you really should read Juan Cole every day if you have any interest in what’s going on in the Middle East. Here’s his take on the Israel-Hezbollah war:

It was such a stupid war. It was thick-as-two-blocks-of-wood strategy on all sides. It was moronic for the Israelis to plan it out last year. It was idiotic for Hizbullah to cross over into Israel, kill soldiers, and take two captive. It was brain dead for the Israeli officer corps and politicians to think they could get anything positive out of bombing Lebanon back to the stone age and making a million people homeless. It was dim-witted for Hasan Nasrallah to threaten Israelis with releasing poison gases from Haifa chemical plants on them. It was obtuse for the Israelis to confront a dug-in guerrilla movement with green conventional troops marching in straight lines. It was dull of Hizbullah to fire thousands of katyushas into open fields where they mainly damaged wild grass. The few times when the rockets managed to kill someone, it was often an Arab Israeli civilian. Stupid.