Birth control pills don’t work as well on fat women.

And I wondered why they always seemed to be the ones with twenty kids.

Tomorrow, I will publish Part One of my Year-End Review of the L.A. Times. (I have decided to split the review into two parts, since there’s just too much material for one post.) By the time you’re done, you’ll be tempted to ask: does this paper ever do anything right?

Of course, it’s only fair to note some of the good things the paper did this year. So I have decided to put them in a separate post, and preempt critics who say I have only bad things to say, by saying the good things first, here.

Here are some of the good things that I noticed this year in the L.A. Times:
(more…)

The L.A. Times finally printed a story about Omar and Mohammed of Iraq the Model. The story doesn’t focus exclusively on them, but discusses other Iraqi blogs as well — and, naturally, takes care to point out how far out of the mainstream of Iraqi opinion the Iraq the Model blog supposedly is.

But the [Iraq the Model] blog has also drawn sharp scrutiny for its unabashedly pro-U.S. stance, which places it in contrast to other Iraqi blogs and polls of Iraqi people. Some U.S. bloggers have even tagged the brothers “propagandists” — which they vehemently deny.

“At the beginning, they said, ‘You are not Iraqis living in Iraq. Now they say we are recruited by the CIA,” Omar lamented at a recent gathering at the Hollywood Hills home of U.S. blogger Roger L. Simon. “Maybe we are CIA agents and we don’t know,” his brother joked.

Funny: the anti-U.S. blogs are not described as having received any “sharp scrutiny.” Nor does this article provide any. Par for the course.

I haven’t disappeared. I’m visiting family and working on the Dog Trainer Year in Review post. It’s looking pretty good so far. Stay tuned.

UPDATE: Sheesh. Did you know that Movable Type puts a limit on the length of a blog post? I kept losing material, until I figured out why: the post was too long! (It’s about the length of a good-sized book chapter.)