For the last 3 days (years? decades?) the overly serious TBogg has been at the top of his game.

Go looky.

I recently discovered a website that has eaten up dozens of hours over the past two days. I wanted to share it with The Street, as I thought others might find it fun and/or useful. I can actually see how one might turn a buck using it, but I’m not ready for that yet. Forgive me if you already know about this.

The site is actually several sites, I think, but seem to be interwoven fairly well. To sign up with one is to already be able to access the others. The main two I use are 43places and 43people.

43places enables you to create or find places you have been or want to visit. You can rate the places, comment on them, invent them even, and also see who else wants to go there, bla bla bla.

43people is essentially the same, only with people. Who have you met? Who do you want to meet?
Describe the meeting. That sort of thing.

Here are my places and people:

Dave’s Peeps
Dave’s Domiciles

As I have only been on there a day and a half, I haven’t seen all the potential uses of it, but I know there are a lot of resourceful inventive types around here, so I suspect cool things may well follow.

Have fun walking down Memory and Future Lanes!

This is an outrage.

Until they’ve tested the armor they’re banning, they should let troops utilize the gear they find most efficient. While I understand the military must maintain adherence to its own standards, it should not set a standard before they have the facts. Their premature standard could cause greater risks to the troops.

I think they should delay the enforcement of the new standard until June.

Peter Daou speaks of an organization’s plan to run a security operation for a country that has been struggling to obtain protection. That nation’s media, apparently fearing a backlash from the strongman who runs the country via threats and intimidation of his own intelligence agencies and that nation’s media, have been reticent to give much coverage of that organization’s plan.

Steve Gilliard has a different perspective. He thinks the organization’s plan too closely mirrors the abysmal program of the strongman.

I have a different take than both. Yes, the plan has plenty of flaws, but it offers that country a different direction than the strongman one which has raided the public treasury to benefit his cronies while leaving the country in a barrel as a sitting duck. And yes, the nation’s media needs to be pestered by the underground democracy movement known as the Blogger Brigades, till they provide more airplay to the upstart plan.

But as one very credible media outlet has noted, the country’s citizens have grown so skeptical of the strongman that they’re very receptive to any alternative that spares them from the failed policies of the strongman:

Polls suggest that the Democrats are closing the gap on the question of which party would better safeguard the country.

In a recent Gallup Poll, 45 percent of adults said they trusted Republicans to defend them against terrorism, and 41 per