LET ME COUNT THE WAYS The New York Public Library has created an eminently useful website that features common phrases, expressions and greetings -- along with their translated equivalents in 26 languages.

BIG, DIRTY FOOTPRINTS How much of an ecological footprint do you leave in your wake? It seems that if everyone followed the Spartan lifestyle I lead, we'd need 5.7 Earths to meet our collective demands.

DIRTY LAUNDRY The Foreign Agents Registration Act basically requires the Department of Justice to maintain information on all people or organizations doing business in the United States on behalf of a foreign government. Click on "Registrant Listing" for a list of all of the foreign agents.

THE EVIL THAT MEN DO The Nation's David Corn interviews himself about his new book, a pretty damned detailed study of the lies, misleading statements and untruths uttered by President Bush. Corn does a good job of reporting and documenting, and of avoiding the name-calling and mud-slinging that is so easy to engage in when you're being adversarial.

I look at only Bush and his crew. I take their statements and policy explanations on critical issues – the Iraq war, tax cuts, global warming, homeland security, corporate crime, missile defense, stem cell research, Afghanistan reconstruction, oil drilling in Alaska, education and more – and truth-test them. My aim was to do this in a straightforward, journalistic manner. Compare Bush assertions to the known facts. I report, you decide. I ignore the media war and the left-right face-offs. For the purposes of this book, I don't care what Ann Coulter says about Democrats (that secretly they are cloning copies of Stalin and raising them to be candidates for local school board elections) or whether Fox skews right. I go straight to the top and zero in on the fellow who is in charge. His lies matter most. In fact, he has relied upon lies to reshape the world – to turn the United States into an occupying power and to implement tax cuts that will likely saddle the nation with over a trillion dollars in debt. If he's going to get away with this, I figured, then at least the fibs and fabrications he has used to achieve such ends ought to be fully documented.

HOW DO WE DOUBT THEE? There is a tidal surge of anti-Bushism sweeping the Internet. It started with MoveOn and continues to grow. Global investor-cum-social worker George Soros has launched a campaign called WE DESERVE THE TRUTH and the folks at MoveOn now have a sister site called THE DAILY MISLEAD, which examines a new mistruth from President Bush each day.

RERUN NO MORE Fred Berry, who played that oversized pipsqueak Rerun on the 1970s sitcom "What's Happening," has died. If you want the scoop on the history and personalities of the show, go no further than this exploration of "What's Happening" on TVParty.com. I still love the conclusion of the Associated Press story:

Lately, he had earned money by calling fans on the telephone, taking part in the service www.HollywoodIsCalling.com. About $30 would earn a fan a 30-second call...

...Berry married a dancer while in his 20s, and the two divorced, remarried and divorced again. Berry also married and divorced his second wife twice, most recently in 1991. He also married and divorced two other women.

ELLIOTT SMITH'S FINAL NOTE NME [New Music Express] has cobbled together some hasty tributes to singer-songwriter Elliott Smith, who apparently committed suicide yesterday. Slate captures the lonely essence of the amazing musician in this recollection.

THROWING THE BOOKS The sad thing about the five finalists for the National Book Awards is that I honestly intended to read four of them, yet have read nary a one. The CSMonitor presents their summaries of all five.

THE KID ARE [SLIGHTLY] ALRIGHT The CSMonitor chats with Dan Glickman, director of the Institute of Politics at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, about a new poll exploring the political views of today's college students.

On the political views of college students:

"College students are highly independent ... but they slightly lean Republican: 31 percent Republican, 27 percent Democrat, 38 percent independent."

On student support for President Bush:

"Defying conventional political wisdom, college students support President Bush. His approval rating is about 10 points higher among college students than the general population. While the approval rating has declined nationally it has held pretty steady among ... students."

MY NOVEL AS A POET The CSMonitor takes a look at author Peter Carey's complex, new novel, "My Life As A Fake." Carey gets all sorts of accolades for his talent as a storyteller who uses language extraordinarily well.

GET BACK, SAHIB The Post's Travis Fox and Pamela Constable have developed a compelling, five-part video production looking at daily life in Afghanistan. The areas covered -- women, refugees, warlords, movies and soldiers -- paint a visually powerful picture of a country struggling to reframe its identity and create stability.

ET TU, RUMSFELD? There are two ways to read into yesterday's leaked memo from Defense Secretary Rumsfeld about the status of the war on terror. My money is on Rumsfeld leaking it as a way to demonstrate that Defense is actively thinking about alternative approaches, and to strengthen the Bush administration's national security position going into 2004. (The alternative view is that it was actually a leak, and the administration was fumbling yesterday to figure out how best to play the memo contents.) Either way, the memo simultaneously suggests that the orchestrated campaign to stem the tide of Islamic terrorism lacks a conductor (and a score), and that there are many more longer-term policy questions than there are answers from the Bush team.

But Joseph R. Biden Jr. (Del.), the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told reporters that the memo showed Rumsfeld is "beginning to have a bit of an epiphany" and display "a little self-doubt." Biden called the memo "the first sort of introspection that I've even whiffed coming out of the civilian side of the Defense Department."

Said retired Army Gen. Wesley K. Clark, a Democratic presidential candidate, "Secretary Rumsfeld is only now acknowledging what we've known for some time -- that this administration has no plan for Iraq and no long-term strategy for fighting terrorism."

The memo echoed a theme that Rumsfeld has voiced repeatedly in the past two years -- concern that the Department of Defense, originally geared to fight big militaries around the world, is too big and slow to effectively fight small groups of terrorists. But Rumsfeld signaled fresh worries that some of the measures taken so far, such as greater use of agile special operations forces, have been "too modest and incremental."

"My impression is that we have not yet made truly bold moves, although we have made many sensible, logical moves in the right direction, but are they enough?" Rumsfeld wrote.

WORLD BEAT On Sunday, BBC Radio3 will announce the short list for its 2004 Awards for World Music. Get a sneak peek and peruse the Beeb's comprehensive world music features and reviews.

MOMMA MIA Christopher Hitchens bodyslams the Catholic Church on its rush job to affix the title of "Saint" to the name of the deceased Mother Teresa. Apparently, the innocent old dame did as much harm as good. Or at least Hitchens claims that to be the case.

During the deliberations over the Second Vatican Council, under the stewardship of Pope John XXIII, MT was to the fore in opposing all suggestions of reform. What was needed, she maintained, was more work and more faith, not doctrinal revision. Her position was ultra-reactionary and fundamentalist even in orthodox Catholic terms. Believers are indeed enjoined to abhor and eschew abortion and contraception, but they are not required to affirm that abortion and contraception are the greatest threat to world peace, as MT fantastically asserted to a dumbfounded audience when receiving the Nobel Peace Prize...

...This returns us to the medieval corruption of the church, which sold indulgences to the rich while preaching hellfire and continence to the poor. MT was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction. And she was a friend to the worst of the rich, taking misappropriated money from the atrocious Duvalier family in Haiti (whose rule she praised in return) and from Charles Keating of the Lincoln Savings and Loan. Where did that money, and all the other donations, go? The primitive hospice in Calcutta was as run down when she died as it always had been—she preferred California clinics when she got sick herself—and her order always refused to publish any audit...

...The rich world has a poor conscience, and many people liked to alleviate their own unease by sending money to a woman who seemed like an activist for "the poorest of the poor." People do not like to admit that they have been gulled or conned, so a vested interest in the myth was permitted to arise, and a lazy media never bothered to ask any follow-up questions. Many volunteers who went to Calcutta came back abruptly disillusioned by the stern ideology and poverty-loving practice of the "Missionaries of Charity," but they had no audience for their story. George Orwell's admonition in his essay on Gandhi—that saints should always be presumed guilty until proved innocent—was drowned in a Niagara of soft-hearted, soft-headed, and uninquiring propaganda.

REWARDING FAILURE Leave it to The Atlantic Monthly's Jack Beatty to write a column that spells it out so clearly. Leave it to a Democratic candidate for President to fail to use the script successfully. The premise is simple: Bush has failed at everything he has done. The obvious conclusion? Boot him out of office. The possible conclusion? Reward him with a second term.

You can preside over the most catastrophic failure of intelligence and national defense in history. Can fire no one associated with this fatal chain of blunders and bureaucratic buck-passing. Can oppose an inquest into September 11 for more than a year until pressure from the relatives of those killed on that day becomes politically toxic. Can name Henry Kissinger, that mortician of truth, to head the independent commission you finally accede to. You can start an unnecessary war that kills hundreds of Americans and as many as 7,000 Iraqi civilians—adjusted for the difference in population, the equivalent of 80,000 Americans. Can occupy Iraq without a plan to restore traffic lights, much less order. Can make American soldiers targets in a war of attrition conducted by snipers, assassins, and planters of remote-control bombs—and taunt the murderers of our young men to "bring it on." Can spend hundreds of billions of dollars on nation building—and pass the bill to America's children. (Asked to consider rescinding your tax cut for the top one percent of taxpayers for one year in order to fund the $87 billion you requested from Congress to pay for the occupation of Iraq, your Vice President said no; that would slow growth.) You can lose more jobs than any other President since Hoover. You can cut cops and after-school programs and Pell Grants and housing allowances for the poor to give tax cuts to millionaires. You can wreck the nation's finances, running up the largest deficit in history. You can permit 17,000 power plants to increase their health-endangering pollution of the air. You can lower the prestige of the United States in every country of the world by your unilateral conduct of foreign policy and puerile "you're either with us or against us" rhetoric. Above all, you can lie the country into war and your lies can be exposed—and, if a majority prefers ignorance to civic responsibility, you can still be reelected.

WALK THIS WAY It should come as no surprise to anyone who has ventured outside of a city in recent years that modern society is pretty poorly designed. One example can be found on the streets, where vast miles of concrete create a veritable prohibition on the power of the pedestrian. The CSMonitor takes a look at the work of Dan Burden and his low-tech approach to changing things.

"America is out of sync with its values," Burden tells 100 people who have gathered for a slide presentation in a school cafeteria. "We say we're for kids. We say we're for safety. We say we're for families. And we build this ..." A slide comes up of a woman pushing a stroller along the shoulder of a busy road, a toddler with her walking inches from the traffic.

Children and the elderly suffer most when the automobile conquers a town, Burden says. In a car-dominated landscape, those who can't or won't drive suffer impaired mobility, recreation, and peace of mind.

But the damage can be repaired, he says. Our towns and cities can be refashioned into places where children bike to school and their parents walk to work, where picking up a gallon of milk doesn't have to burn a pint of gasoline.

WE'RE ALL TINY GIANTS In a culture where bigger is (allegedly) better, it's refreshing to see a focus on the smaller things in life. Sometimes, you have to wonder about the American -- or human -- need to acquire, say, a 4,500-square-foot home. The CSMonitor explores the perspectives of some who are managing quite happily in 300- and 400-square-foot niches.

CHINKS IN THE ARMOR OF REPRESSION Last year's report on development in the Arab world raised eyebrows, startled no one, and quietly became a background burble barely heard beneath the rush to war. Yesterday, the United Nation's Development Programme released the 2003 Arab Human Development Report, which echoes the 2002 report's calls for more freedom, more empowerment and greater access to knowledge across the region. This second report was researched and written by Arabs, and could be a solid framework for Arabs and others to begin to reframe the debate (and the reality) in the Middle East and North Africa.

Despite the presence of significant human capital in the region, AHDR 2003 concludes that disabling constraints hamper the acquisition, diffusion and production of knowledge in Arab societies. This human capital, under more promising conditions, could offer a substantial base for an Arab knowledge renaissance.

The Report affirms that knowledge can help the region to expand the scope of human freedoms, enhance the capacity to guarantee those freedoms through good governance and achieve the higher moral human goals of justice and human dignity. It also underlines the importance of knowledge to Arab countries as a powerful driver of economic growth through higher productivity.

Its closing section puts forward a strategic vision for creating knowledge societies in the Arab world based on five pillars: Guaranteeing key freedoms; Disseminating quality education; Embedding science; Shifting towards knowledge based production; and Developing an enlightened Arab knowledge model.

AHDR 2003 makes it clear that, in the Arab civilization, the pursuit of knowledge is prompted by religion, culture, history and the human will to achieve success. Obstructions to this quest are the defective structures created by human beings- social, economic and above all political. Arabs must remove or reform these structures in order to take the place they deserve in the world of knowledge at the beginning of the knowledge millennium.

AFGHAN FILM WINS A new film from Afghanistan has won top honors at a premiere film festival in Canada.

Toronto — Afghani director Siddiq Barmak's Osama has won the top prize at the International Festival of New Film and Media in Montreal.

Osama, a joint production of Afghanistan, Japan and Ireland, was one of the first features produced in Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban almost two years ago.

The film takes the point of view of a young girl whose mother dresses her as a boy so she can avoid the restrictions of the Taliban.

The work was named after al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, who was operating training bases in the country before the Taliban's ouster.

Barmak was barred from working in the country at the time.

TAKING A CRACK David Rees continues to methodically post one or two of his "Get Your War On" strips every week. The most recent are here.

JUST THE FACTS. BUT WHICH FACTS? In the months between September 11, 2001, and the invasion of Iraq in March of 2003, the White House relied heavily on intelligence reports from the CIA and other organizations. Seymour Hirsch of The New Yorker, in this long exploration, examines some of the trends and timelines and perspectives that led the Bush administration to war -- or, in an alternate version, the Bush administration used to lead the United States to war. The bottom line is that this administration apparently worked hard at some level to eliminate many of the vetting filters used in intelligence to determine its validity. As a result, the intel cream that rose to the top tended to be faulty, skewed or just plain wrong. And the chaff that fell away unexamined tended just as often to be meaningful. And the blame for this can probably be shared between the Bush administration (for encouraging it), the CIA's George Tenet (for not pushing back), Congress (especially the Intelligence committees, for not questioning), and the media (for playing with kid gloves).

A retired C.I.A. officer described for me some of the questions that would normally arise in vetting: “Does dramatic information turned up by an overseas spy square with his access, or does it exceed his plausible reach? How does the agent behave? Is he on time for meetings?” The vetting process is especially important when one is dealing with foreign-agent reports—sensitive intelligence that can trigger profound policy decisions. In theory, no request for action should be taken directly to higher authorities—a process known as “stovepiping”—without the information on which it is based having been subjected to rigorous scrutiny.

The point is not that the President and his senior aides were consciously lying. What was taking place was much more systematic—and potentially just as troublesome. Kenneth Pollack, a former National Security Council expert on Iraq, whose book “The Threatening Storm” generally supported the use of force to remove Saddam Hussein, told me that what the Bush people did was “dismantle the existing filtering process that for fifty years had been preventing the policymakers from getting bad information. They created stovepipes to get the information they wanted directly to the top leadership. Their position is that the professional bureaucracy is deliberately and maliciously keeping information from them.

“They always had information to back up their public claims, but it was often very bad information,” Pollack continued. “They were forcing the intelligence community to defend its good information and good analysis so aggressively that the intelligence analysts didn’t have the time or the energy to go after the bad information.”

The Administration eventually got its way, a former C.I.A. official said. “The analysts at the C.I.A. were beaten down defending their assessments. And they blame George Tenet”—the C.I.A. director—“for not protecting them. I’ve never seen a government like this.”

EVERYONE JUST WANTS A LITTLE LOVIN' Peter Maass delves into the psyche of North Korea's Great Leader in this week's NYTimes Magazine. Woo.

The Dear Leader is a workaholic. Kim Jong Il sleeps four hours a night, or if he works through the night, as he sometimes does, he sleeps four hours a day. His office is a hive of activity; reports cross his desk at all hours. Dressed as always in his signature khaki jumpsuit, he reads them all, issuing instructions to aides, dashing off handwritten notes or picking up the phone at 3 a.m. and telling subordinates what should lead the news broadcasts or whom to dispatch to a prison camp. His micromanaging style is less Caligula, with whom he has often been compared, and more Jimmy Carter on an authoritarian tear.

The Dear Leader, as the North Korean media refer to him, wishes to be viewed as a modern leader. He has boasted to visitors that he has three computers in his office, though it's not known if he operates them himself or has aides who do so. His eldest son is reputed to be a computer whiz and, like sons the world over, is credited with bringing his father into the digital age. When Madeleine K. Albright, then the secretary of state, visited North Korea in 2000, Kim asked her, as he said farewell, to give him the State Department's e-mail address.

Because of weakening eyesight, the Dear Leader rarely reads newspapers; for keeping abreast of world affairs, he relies on television. It is a safe bet that he is well aware of the uproar caused by his government's confirmation, earlier this month, that it has begun making nuclear bombs from reprocessed plutonium. In a meeting a few years ago with a group of South Korean media executives, Kim explained that he began watching South Korean television in 1979. A media junkie, he also watches NHK from Japan, as well as CCTV from China and CNN. Having led his nation into chronic poverty and famine, what does he make of the enormous wealth he sees in the broadcasts and commercials?

Ordinary North Koreans would be sent to the gulag for watching Western TV, but the Dear Leader may do as he pleases, as all dictators may do as they please, and it pleases him to watch television. He especially enjoys watching tapes of the latest movies from Hollywood, some of which are believed to be sent to Pyongyang in diplomatic pouches from North Korean missions in New York and Beijing.

Kim is not known to speak Japanese or Chinese, so interpreters presumably assist him with foreign-language broadcasts; on any given evening, his interpreter might be his favorite mistress, Ko Young Hee, who was born in Japan and is assumed to speak Japanese. When Kim watches Russian television, as he says he does, he may not need an interpreter, because he spent his early years in the Soviet Union; when Russians visit, he sings them Soviet military songs. As for English, he knows at least a few words. A Japanese man who worked as Kim's personal chef wrote in a recent memoir that the Dear Leader always asked for extra helpings of toro, his favorite cut of sushi, by saying ''one more'' in English.

WE'RE NOT SINKING; THE WATER'S JUST RISING The focused team at Save Richmond lays out a musical vision for turning the city's cultural morass into a yummy bowl of well-tuned pudding.

THE GREAT ESCAPE The problem with travel, suggests Alain de Botton, is that we usually do it with ourselves. The other problem is that on normal days we have low expectations; on holidays we expect bliss.

Perhaps the deepest reason why our travels let us down stems from the perplexing fact that when we look at pictures of places we want to go to see (and imagine how happy we would be if only we were there), we are prone to forget one crucial thing: that we will have to take ourselves along with us. That is, we won't just be in India/South Africa/Australia/Prague/Peru in a direct, unmediated way, we'll be there with ourselves, still imprisoned in our own bodies and minds - with all the problems this entails...

...Another great problem of holidays is that they rob us of one of the important comforts of daily life: the expectation that things won't be perfect. In daily life, we are not supposed to be happy, we are allowed - even encouraged - to be generally dissatisfied and sad. But holidays give us no such grace. They are one time when it seems that we have failed if we cannot be happy. We are therefore prone to be not only miserable on our travels - but miserable about the fact that we are miserable.

DH Lawrence once said that if two people are in love, they will be able to have a nice time in a bare cell. I haven't yet had the opportunity to put this theory to the test, but I do know that the opposite is true. If two people are unhappy together, then no amount of luxury will ever solve the problem. In short, psychology always comes before location - something we tend to forget when booking a holiday.

TRIMMING THE FAT FROM THE NEWS The Media Channel's Danny Schechter maintains a blog focused on reading between the headlines, rummaging about in the news that fell through the cracks and taking the media to task.

IT TAKES A NATION TO RAZE A CHILD Opinions You Should Have has its own unique view of what the recent decision to put National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice in charge of Iraq's reconstruction.

Condoleezza Rice, saddled anew with the task of rebuilding Iraq, has wasted no time. She plans to spend the week looking at color swatches, trying out sofas, and finding approximately 50,000 "nice lamps."

"A country cannot find its way unless it has some nice lamps and comfortable seating," said Rice.

Donald Rumsfeld was unhappy with Bush's decision to remove him from the Iraq rebuilding equation. He found out about his ouster by reading an article in Time magazine whilst on the toilet.

"I haven't been regular since," he noted.

WHAT OTHERS SEE Jeanne Marie Laskas does what we all do, as she casts a panicked, appraising eye at her personal landscape and surfaces empty-handed only to be surprised when visitors unearth a pearl.