GRAPHICALLY YOURS Ah, motion. I've finally created some basic page headers for Caffeine and Tumbled Glass (the poetry corner of the site). Simple, clean and friendly use of typography. Because this site is all about words and thoughts. I'll be working on some of the site this weekend, so keep your grapes peeled for fresh content buried beneath the links to your right.

NOW I WANNA TANGO Nice piece on the Radio Netherlands site about the continuing Dutch fascination with the tango, but even better is the link at the bottom to Ricardo Klapwijk and Nicole Rau's tango site. All I need now is a dancing partner, a few new CDs and maybe dance lessons. Weeks and weeks of dance lessons.

ALL OILED UP Freezerbox, which publishes about as frequently as the birthing gap for locusts, tosses out an easy read on a dense, and largely covert, topic: The Central Asia Gas Project. Take Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan. Add a 1,600-kilometer natural gas pipeline. Sounds like the perfect recipe for U.S. regional involvement. Tariq Saeedi, a Pakistani journalist, paints a easily understood picture of the pipeline, its proponents and its progress -- and in the process pretty much draws a map that makes the new U.S. bases in a half-dozen Trans-Caucus states smart accidents of fate and timing. It also makes the cold shoulder being given to Iran more understandable -- the clerics in Tehran would prefer to run their own pipeline south, not west. Politics continues to be a game of geometry, not arithmetic.

ANOTHER IGNATIUS HOMERUN Columnist David Ignatius has always had a keen eye when it comes to the Middle East. Today, he unveils an interview with Sheik Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, who lives in Beirut, is regarded as the modern originator of the concept of suicide bombing, and whose articulate (and oddly moderate) views are at once full of promise and rife with despair. Fadlallah says that the Arab world is too emotional, that "their reality is a mirage," built on emotions and flase dreams, but he doesn't dismiss the despair and passion of the Palestinians entirely. And his final words echo thoughts that many Americans might find themselves in agreement with: "What we want is that when the American president gazes at the Statue of Liberty, he think not of freedom for Americans only."

THAT BLASTED MOTHER NATURE Well, the Wye Oak is dead. Now all Maryland has going for it is an aquarium. Yesterday's storms that swept through the region took out the 450-year-old Wye Oak, "the nation's largest white oak, which stood 96 feet tall and had a circumference of 31 feet, 10 inches." And despite my droll tone, I'm saddened. It was an amazing tree.

THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT An amazing, startling and utterly freakish account by ABC News' chief investigative reporter Brian Ross about Mohamed Atta's May 2000 efforts to secure loans from the Department of Agriculture to buy and modify an airplane. The piece reads like a scene from a bad movie, which just makes it all the more discomforting. Atta refusing the deal with the female department manager; discussing how he wanted to remove the seats from a six-person plane and install a massive chemical tank for crop dusting; asking questions about security at the Wolrd Trade Center; and calling Osama bin Laden a "great leader." In May 2000, the USDA official had no clue who bin Laden was -- "he could have been a character from Star Wars for all I knew." Outside of being an eerie read, the piece points to how open our system really is (not that I think it's a bad thing), and how a series of failed loan attempts in 2000 led the terrorists from the idea of blowing up small planes to the idea of hijacking and blowing up large ones.

GROOVY CENTRAL Fluffco (The Fluff Company) is home to Super Fantastico and to You Grow Girl, two hipster sites. Site one is all about bright, retro clothes and sacks and cards. Site two tells you how your garden grows. It even tells you how some other gardens grow. Stylish design, spot-on content and a hipster sensibility not seen since the early jewelbox designs from Subpop. Right here on your Internet browser.

PRE-SPEECH CLARITY Before the President freaks everyone out with his third-rate science fiction rhetoric about good and evil, take a gander at War College Professor Melvin Goodman's Q&A at the Post Online. Goodman's impulses and logic are pretty well-crafted. He makes sense. One of the better, more informative interviews I've seen in months (I mean months!) about national security, government hits and misses, and why the friggin' director of the CIA shouldn't be doing policy dinners with Arafat and Sharon. And, yes, there is a National War College.

YOUR FLAG SUCKS (DOT.COM) One of the more carefree and clever sites I've been to in months assigns letter grades to the world's flags (with comments!). Pakistan got an A: "Best use of the star and crescent. Unfortunately, it depicts something astronomically impossible, namely the eclipse of the moon by a star. But perhaps it's not a star but a nuclear satellite-weapon aimed at India?" Tuvaldo fails: "I didn't realise the horrible truth about their flag. Those stars aren't in a random arrangement at all... they're in the shape of the islands that make up the country. It's a map! On the other hand much of Tuvalu will soon be underwater owing global warming, and they'll have to remove some of those stars."

CREATIVELY FOLLOWING UP My epicyclic friend Liz sent me to this Salon article as a follow-on to my posting about cities are discovering that attracting creativity is an economically smart tactic. It's a good piece, and it succinctly summarizes Richard Florida's new book, "The Rise of the Creative Class (and how it's transforming work, leisure, community and everyday life)."

... the book says that there are three types of creativity: technological creativity, which is innovation, new products and ideas and technologies; economic creativity, which includes entrepreneurship, turning those things into new businesses and new industries; and cultural and artistic creativity, the ability to invent new ways of thinking about things, new art forms, new designs, new photos, new concepts. Those three things have to come together to spur economic growth.

CRISIS IN AFRICA People die during war, people die during peace. That seems to be the lesson from Angola, where more than a million people are officially displaced and 100,000 are suffering from acute malnutrition (read: starving to death). Groups like Concern (an Irish humanitarian organization) and the Christian Children's Fund are making real inroads at stemming the tide of despair, but sadly it's a mighty big river.

WAR, SOCCER, WAR, SOCCER Peter Maass invokes the spirit of Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski and his book "The Soccer War," which depicts the war that broke out after El Salvador kicked the crap out of Honduras on the soccer field. The war lasted 100 hours, leaving 6,000 people dead and thousands more injured. Talk about the passion. I'm currently reading Kapuscinski's newest book -- what a great writer and an amazing life. He was the first Polish correspondent assigned to Africa (in the early 60s). Bear in mind that this was when Poland was fast under the heel of the Soviet Union.

STOP MAKING SENSE The Brunching Shuttlecocks get serious for a day, providing the world with a virtually satire-free overview of web logs -- how they work and why they've suddenly stopped being dominated by 14-year-old girls and are increasingly dominated by 41-year-old white male journalists. I mean besides the fact that the Establishment gets all their good ideas from the Kids. Or Kidz. Yah, well.

ON THE HOME FRONT Wonder how the terror chase is going in the States? This news piece in the Washington Post gives a good synopsis of the problems facing the FBI as they try to keep tabs on suspected al-Quaeda players (too few agents, too many suspects, few legal reasons to do anything more than surveil); the upcoming hearings on the Hill; the anthrax investigation; and more. Sure, it's sparse on the details, but get used to it. We're at war. Or something. Ah, democracy...

AH, CHANGE. Introducing a slightly new, hopefully cleaner, look. The links have been dusted and rearranged with a few additions and subtractions. Also known as deletions. The "about" link will tell you a little more about each of the four distinct sections of the site: Buttermilk & Molasses [the web log], Caffeine [the magazine], Tumbled Glass [the poetry] and whatever the fourth one is called [the book and music reviews]. Not to mention the Archives, and a pitiful paragraph of information that tells you almost nothing about me. Them's the breaks. Two more issues of Caffeine and 20 new poems by Monday. Or bust.

THIS WEEK AT THE WAR This Center for Defense Intelligence brief raises more questions than it answers about U.S. military involvement in the Phillipines. But some things are clear: Abu Sayyaf's links to al Quaeda are shaky at best and the group is more of a criminal throng than a terror organization; the U.S. mission has done some good; and if we don't find an excuse to extend and expand the mission past the July 31 deadline, Bush's "War on Terror" runs the risk of running out of breath. The main question: Does the military want to boost the mission to get its foot back in the door of the Phillipines, or to rescue the two Americans (who incidentally were not top-of-mind for anyone during the first 18 months of their captivity)? Because there sure don't seem to be many international terror cartels hanging out there these days.

MAKING EVIL Until, oh, the start of the year, Iran was well on its way to becoming one of the more liberal countries in the Near East, according to this GWU professor in an editorial for the Christian Science Monitor (one of the more attractively designed, foreign focused, and subconsciously scary papers in the States). And Amitai Etzioni might just be right. Unfortunately, President Bush demonstrated the power of the pulpit, declaring Iran (who, incidentally, does support the extremist and terrorist groups operating in Palestine and Lebanon) part of the Club Med of Bad Guys. His words have served to unite the Iranian public, and to slow down the efforts of the reformers. Today's fact, for those who don't read this pretty insightful piece: 70 percent of Iran's population is under 30.

ANTS AS PAWNS, EGYPTIAN ARTIFACTS AND MORE The daily news updates at National Geographic are comprehensive, interesting and usually not what you'll stumble across scanning this month's issue of Bazaar. Obviously, what caught my eye this morning was this sentence: "Certain ants are manipulated in turn by a butterfly and a wasp." The butterfly larvae coerces the ant into protecting it, and then the wasp uses chemicals to get the ant to turn against the larvae. It's like Spy vs. Spy. Also this week: good articles on flooding and sewage damage impacting Egyptian archeological sites, and the hidden debate on cloning.

GOOD MORNING, PAKISTAN I think two of the best things about Dawn, Pakistan's largest English language daily, would include the facts that it has pop-up ads from Rogaine and Match.com. Third on the list would be the pretty comprehensive updates it provides on the Pakistani worldview, and on the undercurrents flowing through the Pakistan-India stand-off not covered by most U.S. media.

CREATING BETTER CITIES THROUGH CREATIVITY A stellar piece about how cities with high "creativity rankings" are growing and thriving, while the rest -- even with their nice museums and football stadiums -- are stewing in their own juices.

THE NATION HAS GONE MAD FOR SOCCER "What's soccer?" you ask. Pfah. Football, say the editors of SatireWire, makers of Onionesque bits of humor on the Web.

SIMPLE GEOMETRIC LAUGHS Today's smile, courtesy of the Brunching Shuttlecocks, who still manage to eek out more hits than misses with their punchy little site.

THE SOCCER WARS In his Sunday Times (that's London, pal) column, Andrew Sullivan raises an interesting question about America, the world and football (that's soccer to 260 million of us in the world). What he wonders, basically, is whether America's lack of passion for football contributes to its divisive role in the world. He calls it American "exceptionalism" and goes on: "But this exceptionalism is also why the bafflement between Americans and everyone else is real and difficult and sometimes dangerously close to chronic misunderstanding. Football both divides the world into ferocious nationalisms, but it also unites them. America is not a part of that cultural, emotional unification, an enterprise that genuinely does bring together the boy in Tehran and the teenager in Glasgow or Buenos Aires." For years, American Presidents and Corporations alike have wondered what it will take to make the rest of the world more like us. Perhaps it's time to start wondering how we can start being more like the rest of the world.

THE POET ON POETS I don't recall where I snagged this link to a 1942 article by poet Carl Sandburg, but I'm glad it's been snagged. The piece, appearing in The Atlantic Monthly, discusses, well, those who make poems. "Poets cry their hearts out," he writes. "If they don't they ain't poets." He begins by declaring that "Man writes the best he can about what moves him deeply," and continues (when discussing why poetry) that "Quite a case can be made out that Shakespeare wrote his plays and poems because in the time it took him to do them he couldn't think of anything else he would rather be doing." On the heels of the Einstein piece I posted a few weeks back, I'm beginning to wonder exactly when it was that thinkers stopped writing.

ONE SIDE OF THE IRANIAN COIN As this BBC news story indicates, Iran remains an important ally to the more radical Palestinian groups, several of which are meeting this week in Tehran to discuss tactics. Says the BBC: "The conference organiser, Ali-Akbar Mohtashemi - who as Iranian ambassador in Damascus was instrumental in setting up the Lebanese Hezbollah in the early 1980s - said that the Palestinian intifada, and especially the suicide bombings, had achieved more than all the Arab wars and peace talks with Israel." Leaders of Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine say suicide attacks will continue to be essential to their strategy. SIDE TWO The flip side of the Iranian situation is the natural state of affairs for closed societies in an increasingly open world. Jamileh Kadivar, a member of the Iranian Parliament, says in this interview that Iran's continued obsession with political affairs is blinding the nation to growing social divisions brought on by crime, drug abuse, and the increased disenfranchisement of women and young people. At some point, Iran will need to make a decision between global isolation and social reform -- both the European Union and the United States can play a smarter role in that process than they think.

SPY GAMES My favorite regular columnist, the Post's Howard Kurtz, culls through the weekend headlines with an eye on the continued criticism of U.S. intelligence agencies. "It's far too easy, of course, to say that government gumshoes should have stopped the terrorist attacks. But this lengthening trail of memos that weren't passed on, probes that were blocked, intelligence clues that sat in someone's in-box provides a rather unflattering portrait of insular, backside-covering bureaucracies. It's enough to recall Casey Stengel's lament about the famously inept 1962 New York Mets: 'Can't anybody here play this game?'" Kurtz goes on to indicate that the growing firestorm about who knew what and when is falling into a sadly typical Washington pattern -- he points to a Washington Post article as being one of a very few managing to avoid the trend. The FBI took their hits last week. The CIA is against the wall this week. Tomorrow, the NSA gets grilled in closed door hearings on the Hill -- look for leaks to put that agency in the dunce cap later this week. All three agencies need dramatic reform; however, planting sixteen acre fields of generalized doubt in the mind of the public about their their ability to tie their shoes is not the best role the media can play.

HOW DOES MY GARDEN GROW Yah. So I'm growing blackberry bushes in containers on my balcony. You can stop laughing in about three weeks when I'm baking cobblers. In the meantime, check out "You Grow Girl," an attractively designed website that is all about gardens and what to do with the crap after you pull it off the vine. Resources, gardening journals, tips on making your own vinegars and bath bombs. It's all right here in a pretty shade of green.

MORE MAASS Peter Maass' new weblog is a great, concise place to peruse southwest Asian goings-on. His links today on the CIA cashflow within Afghanistan are interesting, but of more interest is his nod to Kamran Khan, a Pakistani stringer whose work tends to stand out in the region as being both honest and accurate. That nod comes with a link to a good Washington Post piece about al Quaeda's newest target: Pakistan itself.

TOE-TO-TOE IN KASHMIR A concise summary in Q&A format of the current state of affairs between India and Pakistan. If you're confused as to why the two countries are on the brink of a conventional war, and as to how likely a nuclear conflict truly is, this is a good primer. And while it paints a pretty realistic picture of the serious tensions, the CSIS document also points to numerous points where diffusion can take place.