Powell says Iran trying to build a bomb. Right, sure they are. What, you say "highly classified intelligence" proves it? OK, whatever you say, Colin. Uh huh.

Keyvan Hosseini is a Prague-based blogger who works for Radio Farda. As I learned from Hossein Derakhshan, he has received death threats from the fanatics in the blogosphere.

Hosseini's most recent post is about the Velvet Revolution. Unfortunately for me, it's in Farsi.

$18,750 for a ten-year-old grilled cheese sandwich. I recently put Grilled Cheese Sandwich on the new "staff menu" at Tulip. I don't think non-Americans quite realize what an amazing thing it is, the grilled cheese. So I'll have to show them this.

Score another one for the Ministry for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice! I wonder what's they'd do with the naked weather chick...

Happy Czech State Holiday!

About that bar I mentioned below, Cho Cho Bar. They seem to have a policy, as I learned last night, that you're not allowed to leave if you can still walk straight.

UPDATE: You know, I knew it was November 17 (the day of the 1989 protests that led to the VR). I also knew it was a Czech state holiday. Oddly, it was not until late in the day that I realized it was a state holiday because it's November 17. I thought it was just some random Czech state holiday. Go figure. Anyway, a very happy 15th birthday to non-communism.

And check this out! The Cho Cho Bar was a malted ice cream treat from the 1950s.

Holiday flavored soda pop is back with a vengeance. (I guess the capitalist maxim is that if you're doing something right, find out what it is and keep doing it.)

Somebody called in sick and there's a brand new waitress tonight at Tulip. I'll be managing. I'm nervous.

So I'm rearranging the bookshelf some more just now, and it occured to me: Wouldn't it be totally weird if Freud's name were not Sigmund Freud but "Sigmund Floyd"?

You might have heard Kerry and Bush are distantly related. Well I just found out that the first First Lady of Czechoslovakia, Charlotte Garrigue Masaryk, was a distant relative of the following people: Benedict Arnold, Charles Julius Guiteau (assasin of U.S. President James A. Garfield), Adlai Stevenson, John Foster Dulles, Oliver Wendell Holmes, C.W. Post, U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant, George Kennan (architect of the Cold War containment strategy), U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a various other notables.

The problem with alphabetizing your fiction shelf -- not that I read fiction or anything -- is that you end up with books like this next to books like this.

Sayeth the Beeb:

Before the elections, Mr Stetina had received the endorsement of former President Vaclav Havel, who said that his espousal of Green causes was "something that especially draws me to him".

So I learned something today. To know-nothing Western smartypantses, Havel is a big shot intellectual and therefore a leftist. And to a certain degree this is right -- as perhaps shown by his support of a Green candidate in Czech Senate elections. Of course, his support for the U.S. before and during the war in Iraq rubs lots of lefties the wrong way. If you were to pigeon-hole him, I think you might say Havel's one of a dying breed of old-fashioned bourgeois liberals ("liberal," that is, in the J.S. Mill sense) who doesn't mind bucking political trends and pre-conceived notions of what an ex-dissident playwright intellectual is supposed to be. I know it must be an burden being perceived as the world's moral standard-bearer, but my main complaint is that he doesn't speak out enough. We need more Havel these days.