SIRHAN SIRHAN HAS MOVED TO WALLA WALLA

As an update on my recent comments to the effect that it's hard to take seriously an allegedly strict fundamentalist Islamic group whose name is just a shade (indeed, just an s) short of being HamAss, I offer the name of the Afghani Taliban commander who issued a fatwa against Danish cartoonists who had drawn depictions of Mohammed, and who offered a bounty of 100 kilos of gold to anyone who assassinated said cartoonist(s): Mullah Dadullah. Really. So help me. Once again, life imitates Sesame Street, or perhaps Shel Silverstein.

Meanwhile, in an effort to nail down the gold medal in the Preposterous Bureaucratic Nomenclature event for the US, we learn that the Department of Homeland Security has undertaken a massive data sweep of the entire Internet, blogs and e-mail included, for suspicious entries or activities, and that the official name of this covert program is Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight, and Semantic Enhancement, or in acronymic terms, ADVISE. Again, absolutely true. It's painfully forced and clumsy, of course, but then, SPECTRE and UNCLE were already taken.