By testing condoms.

The White House is reminding people that Russia was the victim in the theater attack–the Russian government was not the aggressor, in other words. As the Chechen terrorists’ standoff fades into history, expect them to be forgotten about (most are dead anyway) and the blame all be placed with Putin. That’s not to say this mystery gas was the best way to go, but the media best not forget that most likely everyone in there would have died if action wasn’t taken.

Check out this money graf in the San Diego Union Tribune’s extremely reluctant endorsement of GOP challenger Bill Simon over Gov. Gray Davis: “So, voters are left to choose between a corrupt Davis and an incompetent Simon. Fully recognizing this choice, we come down on the side of Simon. He is, undeniably, a risk. But considering the demonstrated corruption that Davis represents, Simon is a necessary risk.”

If there was one person even less musical than my grandmother it was, apparently, Ulysses S. Grant. A reader has sent me the following quotation from Grant:

“I know only two tunes: one of them is “Yankee Doodle” and the other one isn’t.”

Meanwhile, in a frank e-mail (he confesses to having eaten green jello and “funeral potatoes”) one Mormon reader writes to say that he has never heard of Seitan, while another makes the same claim and backs up his carnivore status with a rather greedy request for “steaming heaps of charred flesh, please.” Point taken. This mystery non-meat is obviously not a Mormon thing. We know now that Seitan is favored by at least one “right-libertarian epicure”, but the claims I quoted earlier about the rest of its fan-base (“vegetarian monks of China, Russian wheat farmers [and] peasants of Southeast Asia”) must now be taken with, I suppose, a pinch of salt, but not Salt Lake City.

A reader writes to say that I was unlucky in last night’s Seitan. It can, he says, be quite good. Perhaps this is true: the guy obviously has good taste (he likes Marmite) and he is not, he claims, a “Dreherist crunchy-con”. He prefers instead to see himself as “more of a right-libertarian epicure”.

An obvious observation: We knew all we did during the Moscow hostage crisis because of cell phones. A number of families got one last convsersation in with their loved ones on 9/11 as their planes were headed to become bombs.

Here’s an interesting story from the Sunday Telegraph on the hostage rescue in Moscow. Note the report that a number of Arab fighters, “believed to be of Saudi Arabian and Yemeni origin”, were among the group that seized control of the theater.

In the current (October) issue of Vanity Fair, the editor, Graydon Carter, admits to readers that he likes to give his children what are, in reality, scrapbooks about himself. He notes that his own father “was of a generation not given to retrospective chitchat,” which would mean, I suppose, that Mr. Carter Senior would have been most unlikely to have contributed to a conservative blog. The son has obviously not inherited his father’s reticence. One year he “assembled [his] 120 favorite poems, had them typeset and bound, one copy for each child.” Last year he subjected his luckless brood to a 10-CD set of, good grief, “the 225 songs that had essentially formed the soundtrack to [his] life”, one of which is, apparently, The Internationale, that lugubrious hymn to mass murder and revolution.

Such an ordeal would be highly unlikely to occur in the not noticeably musical Stuttaford family. If such a nightmare ever had been one of our traditions, however, the briefest contribution would have come from my paternal grandmother, a woman who went through life claiming to recognize only two tunes – Abide With Me and God Save The Queen. Granny would not have needed a 10-CD set : one good old 45 RPM single would have done just fine.

Michael Meacher, a faintly ludicrous man in an extremely ludicrous job (he is Britain’s environment minister) has announced that “we [presumably the Labour Party] do not believe in capitalism. Capitalism is something that threatens inequality across the whole of society.”

In a sane world, these remarks would attract no attention. With its high taxes, intrusive regulations and relentless political correctness, Britain’s Labour government is quite obviously opposed to capitalism. It’s just that their leadership don’t like to admit it. Check out this blog at Samizdata.net to see what happened next.

“He has not formally been kicked out of the Nation of Islam, but certainly if he’s found guilty of something like this he would not be considered at all a member,” Farrakhan said.

She rarely disappoints.

There are election posters up in my neighborhood for the local congresswoman, Carolyn Maloney. Her slogan? “A Democrat who gets things done”. That’s a frightening prospect, but this choice of slogan raises an interesting question. Is Rep. Maloney saying that other Democrats don’t get things done?

Intrigued by the comment that ‘Satan’ would be on the menu, I went out last night to my first ever vegan meal. Disappointingly Beelzebub never made an appearance, although we did eat something called ‘Seitan’ . Seitan is, apparently, derived from wheat and, according to one expert, is “a staple food among vegetarian monks of China, Russian wheat farmers, peasants of Southeast Asia, and Mormons”. If that’s true, it is something of a relief that I fall into none of those categories. Seitan turned out to be a somewhat chewy – and tasteless – phenomenon. Theologians and gastronomes can unite happily over the explanation for this one disappointment in an otherwise interesting dinner. It was Seitan’s fault. That stuff is muck, evil Tofu’s even more evil twin. The chef was clearly not to blame, for the rest of the meal was delicious if a little unsatisfying for the carnivores present, something that will be remedied by feasting on burgers and (to use Mencken’s term) other “sweepings of the abattoir” all day today. There is no better way to exorcise Seitan.

NPR ran a story this morning on this weekend’s ‘peace’ demonstrations in the US. The reporter noted that many of those demonstrating were veterans of Vietnam war era protest. In a revealing slip of the tongue, one woman recalled how those protests had “ended Vietnam”.

Indeed they did. Within two years of the US withdrawal, South Vietnam had fallen to communist rule. Thousands were murdered by the new regime, an estimated 500,000-1,000,000 people (out of a population of twenty million) were incarcerated in concentration (oh sorry, ‘re-education’ ) camps for periods of up to ten years, and hundreds of thousands of boat people took the dangerous and often fatal route into exile. Quarter of a century later Vietnam remains a communist dictatorship.

Doubtless the Vietnamese are most grateful to the peace campaigners of yesteryear.

The Iraqi tyrant warned the (many now dead) Chechan terrorists, before Russian special forces stormed the place: “The tyrant of the age, namely Zionism and America, and not Russia, or China or India are our enemies,” Saddam said in a statement read on Iraqi state television. “Don’t make them hate us and Muslims.”

So a U.K. paper is reporting.

Well, not quite, actually. But passports for some of bin Laden’s wives were found on that Yemeni believed to be the pointman between some of the 9/11 hijackers (the ones in the apartment in Germany) and al Qaeda arrested in Pakistan last month.

No surprises: GOP is keeping the House, but the Senate is too close to call, according to an AP survey.

If you have noticed the theme in my posting titles this afternoon, it’s all over now, I am happy to report. It’s getting a little annoying, even to me. (If you have no idea what I am talking about, “Walk On,” and do not worry.) Why, a few readers have asked, did I start this in the first place? Good question. Nothing much, just a car radio passing by with “Where the Streets Have No Name” playing. It seemed like a kinda cool, (albeit kinda dorky) kinda fun thing to do. And, sometimes The Corner gets a little lonely and can use some surprises to keep it different from day to “Another Day.” That’s all.
And, no, I am not taking requests.