Czech premier Stanislav Gross endorses Tulip!

(Thx Doug!)

I moved, and the day before that, Blogger's interface stopped working. That's why I haven't been posting. Thanks, though, for all the traffic -- no doubt related to the by-now infamous piss-tossing story below.

CONGRATULATIONS: To Alice and Jeff Buehler, now the parents of Isadora Simone Buehler. They had the baby the old-fashioned way; that is, they didn't know if it was a boy or a girl until viewing the apparatus with their own eyes. This is convenient, since little Izzy can spend the rest of her life telling her friends she would have been "Ferris" had she been a boy.

Somehow it still amazes me that if you have sex with somebody in the right way at the right time, often though not always without much extra effort, nine months later a new little human comes out. As Jeff said to me, sitting in a crowded bar shortly after finding out Alice had a bun in the oven: "It works! Just look around you."

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I've moved to a three bedroom flat in Vrsovice, which is strange because since moving to Prague eight years and two days ago, I've never lived for any substantial time outside of Zizkov and Vinohrady.

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Here's a column I wrote for Slate two weeks ago. Of course, the Russian hostage crisis ended exactly the way I said it couldn't possibly end.

Chicago Tribune | In Prague, a tale of 2 Attas: "Surveillance cameras at Prague's Florenc bus terminal show that Atta spent some time pulling slot machine handles in the Happy Day Casino before vanishing for the next 36 hours into the twisting, cobbled streets of Prague."

Ah, magic Prague! How often I forget. Where's Angelo Rippelino when you need him? Aren't there some ghost legends about Florenc bus station?

Here's the thing that strikes me: Mohammed Atta, the same Mohammed Atta that flew the plane into the WTC, spent the night in Prague on June 2. Yet he's not registered in any of the hotels, and it's presumed he must have stayed in a private home. He's also known to have visited previously, in 1994, probably before he became a devout Muslim. This points to a strong possibility that somebody in Prague knew Atta and knows something they're not telling us. Now Prague's a pretty small place. Has anybody tried asking around?

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Say, check out this racket: Tarot cards illustrated with spooky Prague shit!