Boy Becomes Ill After Airport Security Check — he was forced to drink stream water from a one-gallon bottle he had in his backpack, because of new airline flight security regulations requiring passengers to take a drink of any beverage they are carrying as they board. He was taking the Rocky Mountain stream water back to Pennsylvania for a biology project. The Denver Channel

Bombers Gloating in Gaza as They See Goal Within Reach: “Hamas believes that the Palestinian Authority has given up on negotiating with Israel, negotiations that Hamas virulently opposed. That has led to a budding alliance between Hamas and Fatah, the organization headed by Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader, despite years of bitter and sometimes violent feuding.” NY Times

“Laughter No Longer the Best Medicine: Bumped From The Top Spot By Red-Hot Antidepressants.” Andy Borowitz

Church Out of Time: “Deep in Mexico’s rebel heartland stands a centuries-old Catholic church that has heard no mass for 30 years.” Fortean Times Interesting to me because thirty years ago, as a college undergraduate, I lived in this remote Highland Maya village conducting ethnographic research on aspects of the grafting of Catholic iconography on pre-Columbian indigenous shamanic ritual practice, as described here. The author of this article has got some of the details wrong, but not many. Of course, San Cristobal has since become both a hip ecotravel stop and a nidus of rebellion against Mexican oppression of indigenous populations, neither of would be true until long after I lived there.

Mother of all pickpockets: “…a 67-year-old wheelchair-bound grandmother with arthritis pleaded guilty to running an elaborate pickpocketing ring targeting elderly shoppers in Florida and Georgia.” ABC News

Chocolate linked to nightmares BBC

Talking Plants: “Plants have more than thorns and thistles to protect themselves—they can cry for help.” Discover

Where are the Mahirs of yesteryear?: ‘Last week, in what was surely the strangest obituary for the Web yet, the New York Times published a feature complaining that the Web is now officially washed up because it no longer provides a sufficiently diverting stream of trivial amusements.

“What attracted many people to the Web in the mid-1990’s,” read the lead article in the Times‘ Circuits section, “were the bizarre and idiosyncratic sites that began as private obsessions and swiftly grew into popular attractions” — bagatelles like the Cambridge Coffee Cam, the Fish Tank Cam, the Jennicam, the Telegarden or the ill-fated Web soap opera “The Spot.” (The latter, hardly a “private obsession,” was a thoroughly commercial undertaking from day one, but never mind.)’ I agree with this response from Salon‘s managing editor Scott Rosenberg, essentially that there’s still plenty of frivolity on the Web. Rosenberg turns to the Daypop top links list to show that what’s hot at the moment is still pretty zany. For example, right now he cites a list of Google misspellings of “Britney’ and the “weirdest computer you’ve ever seen” link. But I wonder if the purveyors of triviality may be starting to feel a little disenfranchised. An immature medium will tolerate any content as early adopters explore and play with the potentials of the medium. That’s part of what geek culture was about. But as the novelty of the Web has worn off and the mom-‘n’-pop Web-using public has become familiar with its sensibility as a medium, the urgency is to satisfy a desire for content. Ummm, how else to explain the ascendency of shopping and porn sites (as well as the increasing articulateness of the weblog culture)? Although: “A survey of internet browsing habits has seen people’s interest in online sex fall as business, travel and job searches supplant the search for smut.” silicon.com

A Master Terrorist Is Nabbed: “It is hard to overstate the significance of the capture late last week in central Pakistan of Abu Zubaydah, a top Al Qaeda terrorist trainer and operative. His seizure demonstrates that the painstaking international detective work of the current phase of the war on terror is paying off. It also shows that Pakistan, whose security forces, with help from the F.B.I. and C.I.A., landed Mr. Zubaydah, can be counted on more than some expected.” NY Times editorial

Rethinking Reagan: Was He a Man of Ideas After All?

Mr. Heclo argued that Mr. Reagan “is among that handful of American politicians, and an even smaller group of presidents, who have conducted their careers primarily as a struggle about ideas.” Contrast that to what Mr. Patterson called the view of “virtually all students of Reagan’s ideas,” that the 40th president offered no more than “the well-traveled baggage of anti-statist, anti-Communist conservatism.”

I watched, with similar revulsion, as Nixon underwent a similar reappraisal in some quarters. Thinking about it, it isn’t really so surprising. Given enough time, it is virtually certain that some opinion contrary to the prevailing consensus will emerge from the woodwork; sooner or later someone slips the reins of inhibition against saying something sufficiently provocative and foolish. Reappraisal doesn’t inherently lend credence, despite the veneer of sober academic analysis and the imprimatur of the ‘judgment of history’. Decontextualization by distance in time may make understanding less, not more, accurate. Sometimes all that reappraisal represents is which ideological spin is in the ascendency at the time.

Going Post-al? “Before their reporters lose it, the paper needs to get a blog.” Brendan Nyhan of Spinsanityfame writes in The American Prospect about the Washington Post mini-flap.