Rockin' in the Free World - You know how bands run a tape loop of songs before concerts for people who get to the show early to listen to while the roadies test the equipment and such. Via a firsthand report to the Elvis Costello Mailing List, here's the current Dixie Chicks loop:

"What's So Funny 'Bout Peace, Love and Understanding"
"Born in the USA"
“Everybody Wants to Rule the World”
“Band on the Run”
“Our Lips are Sealed”
“Your Good Girl’s Gonna Go Bad”
“It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine).”

Awfully cheeky considering how they offended all of Ghana with their insults against its leader, Flight Lieutenant Jerry Rawlings.

Not Dead Yet - A rare day off for Unqualified Offerings yesterday and most of today. A hellish couple of days at work are to blame. I plan to do better on the weekend. Remember that Free Comic Book Day is tomorrow - follow the link if you don't believe me. Meanwhile, in Elvis Costello news, EC and Diana Krall are now officially engaged. That's a full six months since he broke up with ex-wife Cait O'Riordan, late of the Pogues. And speaking of the Pogues, this interview with Shane MacGowan has an interesting discussion of Lapsed Catholicism. Now more Elvis Costello news: it's the tenth anniversary of The Juliet Letters, the art song cycle he composed and recorded with the Brodsky Quartet. Some people dislike TJL or even think it pretentious. I don't know what the hell is wrong with those people. "The Letter Home," "I Thought I'd Write to Juliet," "Jackson's, Monk and Rowe," "The Birds Will Still Be Singing" - these are powerful, mature songs.

Brodsky Paul Cassidy apparently presented a (poorly promoted and attended) tenth anniversary revue in Derry, Ireland this week. If I could get Costellonews.com to load I'd give you a link to an account of the show.

In other news, Glenn Reynolds gets one right and his readers and interlocutors spend much of the rest of the day trying to talk him out of it. And the Cogent Provocateur e-mails:

Your words are too kind ... I'm bowled over. (Though I did stop to look up magisterial: "overbearing, pompous," etc.)

People. Second-rate online dictionaries have been the cause of more unnecessary grief than all the nation's Lite Rock stations put together. Stick with the OED or the American Heritage Unabridged. The online OED costs money - a lot of money. But the American Heritage is free at the indispensible Bartleby site. There we learn that magisterial is, in the first case

1a. Of, relating to, or characteristic of a master or teacher; authoritative

The unkind connotation makes do as the third definition.

"Magisterial" is or was something of a cliche word in book publishing, and I remember more than one mirth-filled hour with university press reps finding all the instances of the word in their catalogs, when I was still in the book business. It's a marketing department's way of saying "Another great damn thick square book! Always scribble, scribble, scribble, eh, Mr. Gibbon?".

But enough about me. CP continued:

On CNN tonight, weapons control expert David Albright raises an interesting point. If US national security apparatus truly believed Iraq was full of WMD before the war, they'd be in full-scale panic now. They're not. (Any such panic would be readily apparent in Albright's professional circles.)

The obvious conclusion is one I'm reluctant to embrace but cannot easily dismiss.

Um, the government is lulling Iraq's WMDs into a false sense of security?

Meanwhile, David Corn has an amusing revised version of Bush's prewar speech as the epigraph to this article. The rest of it is stuff you read here two weeks ago, but the beginning is fun.

Mail Call - Eric Mauro writes

I liked that Cogent [Provocateur] post. I think his last couple paragraphs about fooling people are going to hit home with more voters than Bush etc expect. One piece of the "why" puzzle he misses is that the WMD story was nurtured through both Republican and Democratic administrations. Khidir Hamza was turned from a joker to Saddam's Bombmaker by Bill Clinton. There was no political opposition worth speaking of because both parties were completely corrupted, using the story to their own advantage.

Meanwhile, reader Grant Gould says he's run the numbers on gridlock and good government:

After someone made particularly perposterous claims about there being a "party of small government" (and, alarmingly, about the Republicans being that party) I put Senate, House, and presidency party makeups since 1929[1] into a spreadsheet, along with government spending as a fraction of GDP, and ran a correlation.

The House makeup had no correlation whatsoever with government size. Democrats in the Senate correlated strongly with government size. Republican presidents correlated strongly with big government. I am beginning to suspect that, from a purely functional point of view, the lesser-evil party is a carefully split ticket.

If this correlation is real then your analysis is correct and libertarians do have practical voting choices that could make a real difference. Which I, personally, would find delightful.

Republican governors seem to have a positive effect in this regard at the state level, but I haven't yet gotten that spreadsheet complete enough to say that definitively.

For more discussion - and denial, and deflection, of CP's "Operation Desert Snipe" essay and That Issue, see this Samizdata post by Jonathan Pearse and the associated comment thread.

Then I Felt Like Some Watcher of the Skies - My god. The Cogent Provocateur has uncorked what may be the first blog post to merit the word magisterial. It's basically why you shouldn't worry about my nightmare. The best writing about "missing WMDs" yet. Period. And I don't mean just the best thinking either. This item, has more fine turns of phrase and more verve than one might have expected from the medium before this.

(Note: Blogspot site. If link doesn't work, find "Operation Desert Snipe" on the main page or the April archive.)

Not So Fast There - Kos argues that "libertarians (with a small 'L') have a more natural home in the modern Democratic Party than with the GOP." Perry de Havilland, in a lengthy rebuttal, says that "Kos does not understand the nature of the pool they [sic] are fishing in." I'm inclined to cry, like Alvie Singer in Annie Hall, "You're both wrong!" But they're each right about some important things.

Perry is right about this, as far as it goes:

For example, when he wrote about how the Republicans have consistently opposed business regulation, admiringly quoting an article elsewhere decrying GOP attempts to deregulate economic matters, presumably Daily Kos thinks that having the state regulating the control of several means of production is unrelated to issues of personal liberty. Perhaps in his eyes anyone who runs a business is not a person-who-has-liberty but rather some sort of collective entity and creature of the polis to whom issues of liberty are simply not germane.

Right you are. And Kos is right about this, as far as it goes:

Traditionally, libertarians have sided with the Republican Party because of economic issues, notions of "small government", and the ever-important 2nd Amendment (gun control). It seems libertarians always assumed the courts would continue to protect their private lives from government intrusion, regardless what the wingnuts tried to do.

But things have changed. The Clinton Democratic Party balanced budgets and restrained spending -- both policies abandoned by the Borrow and Spend Bush Administration. Bush and his cronies have embarked on a coordinated and wide-spread assault on individual freedoms, keynoted by the overbearing PATRIOT Act. And Bush's judges have shown consistent hostility to notions of individual liberty -- a trend likely to worsen as Bush nominates more judges to the bench.

But how far does "it go" for either of them? Perry actually undermines his own argument, in a way, because he knows perfectly well that

Elephants and Donkeys both pretty much agree on the fact the state exist to 'do stuff' beyond keeping the barbarians from the gate and discouraging riots. The language and emphasis may be slightly different (forms of educational conscription with the tagline "No child left behind"... media control legislation described as "Fairness"... etc.), but the congress exists to do much the same sort of thing for both parties, just that whoever is their favoured group should have their snouts deeper in the trough.

Right. Righter than Kos, who simply says

Republicans promote markets free of government interference, a small government and a low or non-existent tax burden. Libertarians love this.

to which the only response is, what a wonderful world that would be! Republicans promote corporate welfare and an system of micromanaging the economy through targeted rather than universal tax breaks analogous to the plain ol' spending ideas of the Democrats.

What Perry doesn't seem to get is that, while it's probably true that " Democrats like Daily Kos cannot see that it is at the level of axioms and meta-context that libertarians disagree with them, not mere policies" (Kos' item is more about political strategy than political philosophy), the same thing or worse is true of the Republicans. They either don't understand what their own fitful "small government" rhetoric means, or worse, they employ it as an act of conscious deception. In either case, they besmirch our principles with their praxis. It's been argued by, um, me that

Their offense is much worse. They appropriate our rhetoric, drawing the support of many who appreciate our principles - small government, voluntary exchange, self-defense and free enterprise, responsibility and liberty - but they besmirch those principles by their actions. Instead of free enterprise, corporate welfare. Instead of small government, trivial nips and tucks calculated to annoy no crucial interest group, instead of free trade, price supports and tarrifs, instead of responsibility, drug wars. Republicans traduce our ideals, and the public comes to associate their practice with our principles. It's not fair, but it's the way the mind works.

Is Kos any more right than Perry? I think Kos seriously underestimates the difficulties. For instance, the Clinton era arguably gave us more fiscal prudence, but only because the Republicans saved us from his health plan. The PATRIOT Act is terrible, but Democrats voted for it, and it was Clinton who pushed the also awful Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996. Joe Biden went out of his way to get the RAVE Act on the books, fully expecting that local authorities will favor established (read: connected) venue owners while sticking it to the sorts of shoestring operators who run raves and house concerts. Those of us who lived through the 1980s remember that it was Democratic politicians who egged on the Reagan and Bush administrations to ratchet up the drug war, for political advantage. (By framing drugs as a national security issue, they aimed to shore up their weakest area with voters. I was a Democrat and a prohibitionist back then and I remember thinking what a sound strategy it was. Oy.)

Ah but. Kos isn't really talking about extremists like me. Or Perry, a different sort of extremist. Kos is talking about "lesser of two evils" libertarians, the kind who accept the inevitability of the two-party system and tend to vote Republican, proboscis pinched between thumb and forefinger. I'm not his target market - I haven't voted for a Republican or Democrat for President since my conversion. His argument is that the Dems can convince LOTE libertarians that the lesser evil has switched places. For such people, the argument ought to have some traction.

Jesse Walker has a Citings item in the June Reason that isn't online yet, surveying a Milken Institute Review article by mainstream economist Jeffrey Frankel arguing that "Republican and Democratic Presidents Have Switched Economic Policies." Frankel's survey goes back as far as the Carter Administration, but Jesse points out that "Nixon, . . . the man who gave us wage and price controls would certainly seem to fit this pattern." Now, any "switch" is from awful to less awful, but certainly Clinton was better on trade than GWB has been, and Carter began the era of deregulation.

My own suspicion is that gridlock may indeed be good government, and the best gridlock may be Democratic President-Republican Congress, what we enjoyed in the 1990s. Republicans out of power are pretty good at opposing activist government. Republicans in power stink at the task. All of which is to say, for libertarians open to voting for either major party, the call has become a lot closer than Perry gives it credit for.

I'm still not a lesser of two evils guy, though "Pax" Americana, domestic "security" legislation, trade and the strong anti-libertarian rhetoric in the mainstream conservative press make it a much closer call than it used to be. What would it take to make the Dems attractive to my sort of libertarian, besides the continued depredations of the Bush White House? Tabula Rasa has a wish list that comes pretty close to "The Democrats should adopt the Libertarian Party platform." That seems not just unlikely but asymmetrical - you'd get lip service at best on most of his issues from the Repubs, and unfeigned horror at quite a few. Plus, TR's Brett Cashman seems to want to make the Dems grovel.

My test is, perhaps, more modest: let the Dems put as much real energy into getting rid of big government they supposedly don't like as adding big government they do. Campaign on ending the drug war and mean it. Dismantle corporate welfare instead of engaging in it. Restore the personal income tax exemption to its level in 1948 dollars while eliminating all or most itemized deductions. Promise to repeal all or most of the USA-PATRIOT Act, the RAVE Act and the DMCA. Stand as firmly for free trade as Clinton did. A party that did these things would still be very much a liberal party. Hell, it would be a more liberal party than the Dems are now. It would still support regulation and tax policies that libertarians hate, but it would have a credible claim to be Kos's "party of personal liberty" in the non-economic sphere. If the Republicans did not clean up their own act, it would be a damned hard Democratic Party to say "no thanks" to.

Don't give me a line about how "Democrats would love to do all this, but they reluctantly support the status quo because otherwise it's political suicide." Even if that were true, it still makes you useless to me. What you're saying is that I have to keep trying to change the rhetorical climate to make these policies politically viable, which will leave me precious little time or inclination to boom or even vote for your wussy, my-job-uber-alles candidates.

What are our chances of getting that Democratic Party? Slim, I fear. Because I think that the unifying principle of contemporary liberalism is "It Is So Our Business." Contemporary liberalism is about faith in government, so all of its energy goes into adding what it takes to be good powers, with little left over for getting rid of what it takes to be bad. Too bad, too. It would have been glorious.

Could You Answer a Few Questions? - A couple of academic researchers are conducting a survey on why people read weblogs, presumably because other academic researchers have not, making the results publishable. You can take the survey here.

Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit.com has given us a link and further he knows
us and can verify that our survey is for academic purposes only.

Me, I looked for a link and verification on Instapundit and didn't find it, but that doesn't mean it isn't there.

Music, Music, Music - Here's a list of all the places you can get a new, limited-edition Richard Thompson EP coming out in advance of his new album. (Yeah, I'm old. I still say album.) Contents:

one song from 'The Old Kit Bag' [the forthcoming full-length CD], two live recordings of songs from Thompson's 'Semi-Detached Mock Tudor' album, and two never-before-released tracks, will be available in late April.

Get them while they're hot. (Link via the Elvis Costello Mailing List.)

Speaking of Links - Here's a good survey of Israeli blogs from the Israel21c website ("A Focus Beyond the Conflict"). It's by Israeli blogger Allison Kaplan Sommer. (Link via Head Heeb.)

Welcome - I'm in the process of updating the blogroll and such. So say hello to

Amitai Etzioni

Body and Soul

Calpundit

Dave Tepper

Josh Buermann

Kevin Holtsberry

Kieran Healy

Listen Missy

Mac Diva

Matthew Yglesias

Road to Surfdom

Tacitus

Ted Barlow

Unruled

Will Wilkinson

in their new homes to the left.

Warning to a select group of confreres: I may soon redo the New Crew section entirely, making it more "new" than most of it is. If I do, it won't mean I love the presently-included sites any less. It's just a way of helping new links keep from getting lost in the blogroll (that I admit is not even especially long).

I'm also about to add sidebar links to my RSS feeds.

Have a Nice Day - Tim Cavanaugh of Reason, raining on your parade:

The beauty of Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld is that he harbors no illusions about a serene future, for Iraq or for the United States. He knows, even if he doesn't quite come out and say, that we're going to be in the Middle East forever. There will be no disengaging—not from the Saudis, not from the Iraqis, not from the Israelis, not from anybody. This futureless land, where hatred, violence and madness constitute the coin of the realm, is our new home. That guy with the bloody head [from a Shi'ite religious festival in Karbala]? He's your new neighbor. Your children's children will be dealing with him. Say marhaba.

While We're Busy Hoping - Calpundit, noting yet another 55-gallon drum that turned out to be just a 55-gallon drum:

The fact that preliminary analysis is ultra cautious and doesn't usually pan out is perfectly normal.

Given that this is normal, however, the real question is quite different: why is the Pentagon releasing these preliminary results every time one pops up?

Not one for rhetorical questions, he continues:

Doesn't the Pentagon realize that this is eroding their credibility daily?

Of course they do, but these reports aren't aimed at journalists or news junkies like blog readers. Rather, they are designed to build up a vague impression among casual news consumers that we've been finding WMD all over the place. Say it often enough, and everyone starts to get foggy about which reports panned out and which didn't — or even whether any of them did.

Lowering the Bar - Julian said the other day that with the end of the war it's possible to resume reading Andrew Sullivan again. This turns out to be largely true, but it doesn't mean Sullivan is any more right than he was beforehand. Take today's item about the Telegraph's report of a planned 1998 meeting between the Iraqi government and an envoy of Osama Bin Laden. Sullivan:

The Sunday Telegraph's scoop of documents in Baghdad clearly linking al Qaeda with Saddam, if verified, means that an essential debate is over. Even opponents of the war against Saddam's dictatorship said they would be more inclined to support war if there were proof of a link to al Qaeda

No. "Link" is a Larouche word. We said we would be more inclined to support the war if there were proof that Saddam collaborated in the September 11, 2001 massacres in New York and Washington, or in the still-unexplained anthrax attacks later that fall. Hell, I at least would have demanded it. We are still far from having any proof of that. But we know that Pakistan, the Sudan and Saudi Arabia, among other countries, had much stronger links than any demonstrated for Iraq prior to that day, and they have gone entirely unmolested.

It may well turn out that Iraq gave material help to attacks on US soil. (Recall that I don't even dismiss out of hand claims that Timothy McVeigh was an Iraqi agent.) For instance, if the hijackers turn out to have trained at Salman Pak or to have carried passports Iraq provided, as alleged in the 9/11 victims suit, that would do it for me. We would still have to have a discussion about the consequences of our foreign policy, but we could stop discussing whether, regardless, Baathist Iraq was a threat to the United States.

We're still not there. So Sullivan gets ahead of himself when he argues

So what does a free country do when confronted with an enemy state, with WMDs, that we strongly suspect is in league with terrorists like al Qaeda, but cannot prove without invading? It's tough. My view is that, after 9/11, we have little option but to launch a pre-emptive strike and hope for retroactive justification. But I understand why people demand proof before such action. This new finding - and I bet there will be more like it - strengthens my position, I think.

Nope. Not yet.

Sullivan twofer: The next item in the same link says that France

acted in ways that make it clear that the country is not an ally of the U.S.

For that there is a strong case indeed. So maybe, like I suggested awhile ago, our hawks should stop urging France and other potentially-hostile European powers to beef up their militaries.

Welcome Back to my Nightmare - More from the LA Times. Excerpt:

By failing to secure suspect sites, Kay and others warned, the Pentagon could not guarantee that critical blueprints, weapons parts, precursor chemicals and other valuable material have not been spirited out of the country for sale to other nations or to terrorist groups.

"They've increased the proliferation threat," Kay said. "And they've made it more difficult to ever unravel what really happened. You can't reconstitute burned documents or stolen computer hard drives unless you find copies."

Terence Taylor, who heads the Washington office of the nonpartisan International Institute for Strategic Studies, said he fears there is a "real risk that certain materials could leak out" of Iraq.

(Thanks to Hesiod for the heads up. Link requires registration. You can use "laexaminer/laexaminer" thanks to Matt Welch and co.) The article includes various official excuses for the halting, chaotic and, bureaucratically-speaking, fratricidal beginnings of the hunt for Bad Things, interspersed with information about how bad things are. For instance, here's the secret location of "mobile labs" - our mobile labs:

The Pentagon hasn't supplied enough transport helicopters and military guards to the teams. This limits the teams' movements and their ability to use two highly sophisticated chemical and biological laboratories that were left at an air base in northern Kuwait in shipping containers. "They've been totally unusable," one official said.

Meanwhile . . .

So far, according to a U.S. intelligence official, the top scientists are all "sticking to the party line, that Saddam destroyed all his WMD [weapons of mass destruction] long ago."

A junior Iraqi scientist who surrendered has told U.S. interrogators that Iraq burned or destroyed chemical weapons and germ warfare equipment shortly before the war began, U.S. officials said. But the scientist joined the weapons program only in the 1990s, and "his depth and breadth of knowledge is very limited," said an official familiar with his debriefing.

Loyal reader, at this point we have to hope that those top scientists are telling the truth and that the Administration really was lying. Otherwise, we've got problems.

Because of the delays, scores of suspect Iraqi military sites, industrial complexes and offices were stripped of valuable documents, equipment and electronic data before U.S. forces or the exploitation teams reached them. Not all the looting appears to have been random, and U.S. officials believe Iraqi officials deliberately burned or removed some critical evidence to prevent detection.

Here's the thing. Reports indicate that much of the looting of the Iraqi National Museum was an inside job, possibly inspired and funded by international collectors. If an analogous situation obtains for Iraqi weapons, with outsiders (spelled a-l q-a-e-d-a) waiting for their chance to swoop in and grab their treasures off cooperative insiders - that is, if our enemies cared more about this stuff than our allies, then the Bush administration will bear a heavy responsibility for possible attacks down the road. They bear the heavy responsibility of running that risk already. Unless they knew there wasn't much of anything there in the first place, in which case they bear the responsibility of lying us into war.

I'm hoping real hard for the latter. Hey, I was hoping for the latter already, for partisan reasons, but now a keen self-preservation imperative comes into it too.

Treason D'Etre - The Brits are thinking of trying MP George Galloway for treason for a speech he made during the recent unpleasantness in Iraq urging troops to refuse to carry out their orders, according to the Observer:

The Observer can reveal that the Director of Public Prosecutions is considering pursuing the Glasgow politician for comments during the Iraq war when he called on British troops not to fight.

In an interview with Abu Dhabi TV during the Iraq conflict, Galloway said: 'The best thing British troops can do is to refuse to obey illegal orders.' Lawyers for service personnel claim his call for soldiers to dis obey what he called 'illegal orders' amount to a breach of the Incitement to Disaffection Act 1934. The maximum penalty is two years in jail.

The relevant part of the Act is Section 1, which states: 'If any person maliciously and advisedly endeavours to seduce any member of His Majesty's forces from his duty or allegiance to His Majesty, he shall be guilty of an offence.' Under the terms of the Act, the word 'maliciously' means wilfully and intentionally.

Two years is not exactly the chair, and Galloway makes an unsympathetic martyr: he seems to have paid his wife a five-figure consultancy out of the anti-sanctions fund he ran, and if documents the apparently prodigious Daily Telegraph claims to have found in Iraq are correct,

o Galloway's associates may have been scamming money from Iraq's oil-for-food program;
o Galloway's associates may have been scamming money from Iraq's oil-for-food program at his behest;
o Galloway may have essentially been an Iraqi agent paid out of the oil-for-food program.

And beyond that, he's a leftist British pol. What's to like, really?

Nevertheless, there's some question which is worse, Galloway or this "Disaffection Act" of 1934. Presumably Britain already had a law against treason, so one assumes that the sorts of behavior covered by this law were not considered definitively treasonous prior to its passage. An analogous Portuguese Disaffection Act might have covered the people putting flowers in the guns of Caetano's troops in April 1974. It's a recognized principle of international law, established by the US and Great Britain at Nuremburg, that wars can be illegal and that soldiers, officers and politicians have an affirmative duty to disobey illegal orders. Specifically, there is a duty to disobey orders to engage in a war of aggression, which is precisely what Galloway and other opponents considered Gulf War Phase II.

I suspect that, from a legal standpoint, there's a reasonable argument that such doves are wrong. As some of us have insisted over the last several months, including even some hawks, the first Gulf War never really ended. The dovish perspective on this is that any decisions Iraq made on cooperating or failing to cooperate with the United Nations inspections regime, any bellicosity of rhetoric, needed to be considered in light of a steady decade-long bombing campaign, the never-rescinded lethal finding against Saddam Hussein and the unilateral imposition of no-fly zones not contemplated in any UN resolutions. But the hawkish version has its strengths too: the Gulf War never ended. There was a cease-fire, subject to conditions, especially regarding disarmament, that Iraq never met, and a subset of the belligerents, at length, rescinded the cease-fire because of those violations. The Gulf War of 1991 may have been imprudent (my retrospective judgment) but it was in no sense illegal. Everything was nailed down tidy-like: the UN endorsed the war, for those who care about such things; the US Congress authorized force against Iraq (the Brits presumably sewed up their end); regardless of the UN, Iraq really did conquer Kuwait by force of arms, activating the accepted right of collective self-defense - if the recent conquest of Iraq really is the logical outgrowth of that legal, never-concluded war, then Galloway's obvious defense - the duty to disobey illegal orders - fails.

Of course, you can also argue that UNSC 1441 superceded the resolutions authorizing the original war and that only the US and Britain, of the permanent security council members, believed that 1441 authorized invasion without a further UNSC okay. I'm not saying the US cares or should care about UN legal sanction, or even that I do, but the Brits clearly put stock in it, so it matters for the Galloway case. There's also the argument, which I accept and have even made, that the US and Britain perverted the original UN mandate into a regime-change program it was never intended to be. Some people are beginning to suspect that Iraq really did disarm, as it claimed, which would undercut the "ceasefire violation" justifications. (More 55-gallon drums are being tested as I type.)

Well, it's a vexed issue. A political issue. And short of determining that Galloway sold his services, it should remain that rather than a legal one.

Tune in Next Week . . . - So, um, in a narrow, technical sense, also a wider, general sense, Free Comic Book Day was not yesterday. Like I said it was. Erroneously. Somehow I convinced myself that it was May. And here it's only just warming up. Reader Mary Kay Kare caught the error too. My apologies to any readers who actually made a special trip in search of freebies.

Free Comic Book Day really will be this Saturday, May 3. I wouldn't make this stuff up twice.

Weekly Fitness Blog Post - 180 pounds, 36" waist. That's the first uptick on weight since I started the diet, rising from 179 pounds last week. I blame Easter, OR it's not a problem OR it's the first sign of trouble. The pessimistic view is that my week is ending up with multiple "free days" in it. There's Wednesday night's gaming session, which usually has chips, plus, often, one weekend day with the family where we go out to eat and, possibly, some occasion at work. That's two to three contraventions of the diet a week. The optimistic view is that this was simply a week where I added some muscle mass - ironically for my first week with no weight training in a couple of months, I feel like I'm subjectively bulkier around the shoulders and arms.

Well, we'll just see. Since my waist did not expand, I'm not panicking. Funny thing is, my 36" pants are loose - but we've talked about the sheer dishonesty of American clothing sizes - or at least Target's clothing sizes - before.

Exercise: I only did three Heavyhands sessions this week rather than the official four sessions that Fortnightly Fitness Fun calls for. A half hour walk in the park last Sunday with the three-pound weights - absolutely the limit of what I could manage over that period of time, it turns out; a half hour park walk with one-pounders on Tuesday; and a half-pound dance/shadowbox session yesterday morning with dumbbells ranging from one to five pounds. Your genuinely useful information for this week: Garbage Version 2.0 is the perfect workout CD.

Thing that slapped me in the face this week: for me, at least, it's very easy to mildly injure oneself using Heavyhands. Particularly in freeform sessions, which is where the real fun is, it's easy to overdo. This week it's what feels like a mild groin pull during some overenthusiastic sidestepping yesterday morning. On the bright side: as I suspected from the kinds of next-day muscle soreness I experienced, Heavyhands is letting me work muscles that my weight-training routines have scanted, primarily the girdle of lower back and obliques, plus abs; Fortnightly Fitness Fun means any strains and pulls have a a week to heal during the slow-cadence weight-training phase.

Speaking of slow-cadence weight-training, while I can't endorse its enthusiasts' claims that it's "all the exercise you need," I can say that it's been a very safe exercise option - aside from charley horses, I haven't suffered a single genuine pull or tear.

Another thing I'm convinced of: Heavyhands or lesser aerobic options should be done at most every other day rather than every day. Aerobics too is, or should be, a muscle-building activity, and you need recovery time to build muscle. Unless you're Ah-nold maybe.

On the vitamin front, for reasons best not gone into, I'm convinced that the niacin and fiber really are clearing out my bad cholesterol, and that this is helping my blood pressure too. Famous last words. Next blood tests in early May.

That's all the fitness news for this week.