The Easter Bunny is now apparently a target for terrorist madmen. Well, drunken madmen, at least.

The best line from the article:

Authorities said the fluffy, well-padded bunny outfit protected Peterson from significant injury.

Hee hee.

I’ve been getting a number of Google hits from people searching for the singer Rachel Loy. I suppose I don’t know for a certainty that we’re not related, but… well, no offense to the Loys, but, uh, I don’t know anyone in my family who is quite this cute.

Not as cute as some people I could mention, of course. (Phew. Dodged that bullet, eh?)

For those who are interested, Rachel Loy is the Boston-area college student who penned a tribute song, called “The Same Man,” for her Marine friend in Iraq. (Lyrics and info here.) And, ahem, apparently she has sisters.

UPDATE: She has a cousin named Zak Loy!!! Holy crap!!! (That’s what Becky wants our kids’ last names to be!)

The things you learn when you blog…

Welcome to the new and improved BrendanLoy.com!!!

My server switch is complete and my blog is up and running again, so I can finally welcome you to my renovated website!

I initiated the switch from WorldWebHosters, my old host, to Logjamming, my new host, late Sunday night. It takes a while for the Internet’s DNS servers to “propagate” to the new site, and it happens at different times in different places; the switch began at around 6:00 AM Monday and was complete by around 9:30 AM, according to my logs.

Then I was unable to blog for another 36 hours or so because of technical difficulties. Those difficulties have now been resolved, and here I am!

The backbone of the site’s overhaul is my switching blogging tools from Blogger to Moveable Type, which allows for all sorts of new features. Among the highlights are blog categories (this post falls under Website News), the nifty blog search feature, and individual-post archiving, as well as an enhanced (read: actually reliable!) commenting system!

A lot of the non-blog stuff on the site is still under construction, so please bear with me. But much of the non-blog structure has changed, or will change, too. The idea of this redesign is to organize the site into five distinct categories that will actually represent its five main sections: my blog (and Becky’s and Toby’s blogs), my photos & videos, my life & my projects, my journalism, and my chosen external links. (Speaking of which, please forgive the “blah blah blah” links at left. I’ll deal with that shortly.)

This new structure is a vast improvement over the old site, which was organized into something like 14 categories, most of which were barely ever updated and none of which were my blog, which is now really the main point of the site. Basically, the site had grown and changed to the point that it no longer fit into its old design. So, I changed the design. (I have also tried to make the homepage load a bit faster than the homepage on the old site, which was something of a problem.)

I am also attempting to add an interactive photo gallery that will be easily updatable. I’m still searching for the ideal program, however. More on that as it develops.

So, in conclusion, look around. I especially encourage you to explore my blog, since a lot of the other stuff is, like I said, still under construction.

Welcome to my world!

UPDATE: Pardon me, I’m just doing a little TrackBack test here. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

Sorry for the lack of updates in recent days. I’ve been busy, well, having a life. That, and finalizing the switch of this website over to another server.

Barring unforseen circumstances, this will be the last blog entry that I will post using Blogger. From now on, I will be using Moveable Type, a more advanced blogging tool which allows for greater customization and which is hosted on a blogger’s own server instead of on a central server.

My switch from Blogger to Moveable Type is the primary reason I am switching web servers. My present host, WorldWebHosters, does not support Moveable Type, whereas my new host, Logjamming, does.

No hard feelings toward Blogger or WorldWebHosters, however. Both have been, for the most part, fantastic; I’m just evolving here. On to bigger and better things!

From fark.com: What if Fox News were around during other historical events?. This is great, seriously. Check it out.

Take a look at the headline on today’s front page:

Above: The top of the New York Times front page, April 10, 2003. Click here for a larger version showing the whole page.

Read that headline again.

U.S. FORCES TAKE CONTROL IN BAGHDAD;
BUSH ELATED; SOME RESISTANCE REMAINS.
Hussein Statue Is Toppled–
Rumsfeld Urges Caution

Okay, somebody please tell me how “Bush elated” is newsworthy, but Iraqis elated apparently is not? And how is “Rumsfeld urges caution” more important than street celebrations by a newly liberated people — celebrations that vindicate everything the Bush Administration has been saying all along about this war?

I’m not such a neocon yet that I have learned to loathe the New York Times — I actually rather like it — so I am appalled and outraged by what seems like a blatantly ideological headline choice. Those simply are NOT the biggest, most newsworthy developments of the day. They just aren’t.

All the news that seems favorable to the Bush Administration is left out of the Times’s headline, and even the impact of the statue’s destruction is muted by leaving out its destructors (the Iraqis) and stating passively that it “(Was) Toppled.” The day’s events are made to sound like an imperial conquest by the United States — which, conviently enough, comports perfectly with the antiwar left’s worldview.

As a journalist, I can understand why the Times wouldn’t have wanted to run a headline that might have suggested all Iraqs are elated, when all we know for sure is what we saw on TV. But how about this:

U.S. FORCES TAKE CONTROL IN BAGHDAD;
IRAQIS SEEN CELEBRATING IN STREETS
Some Resistance Remains–
Hussein Statue Is Toppled

Hey, anybody at the Times want to give me a job writing headlines?

Joe Biden and others are trying to sneak the awful RAVE Act into law via the much less awful Amber Alert law. Check out Becky’s column on the topic. (Becky’s column, by the way, shows up on Google News when you search for “RAVE Act,” which is kind of cool.)

UPDATE: Apparently Congress already passed it. Or at least, they passed the Amber Alert law. I’m not sure if they passed the RAVE Act portion or not, but I suspect they did.

My mom sent me this WorldNetDaily article, which states that the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review has reported that the Marines “have located a complex of tunnels underneath an Iraqi nuclear complex – apparently missed by U.N. weapons inspectors – discovering a vast array of warehouses and bombproof offices that could contain the ’smoking gun’ sought by intelligence agencies.”

Given my mom’s strong antiwar leanings, I didn’t believe it at first, and I kept on reading, waiting for the punch line. But there was none. This is the real deal; here is the referenced article, from yesterday’s paper. It states:

“It’s amazing,” said Chief Warrant Officer Darrin Flick, the battalion’s nuclear, biological and chemical warfare specialist. “I went to the off-site storage buildings, and the rad detector went off the charts. Then I opened the steel door, and there were all these drums, many, many drums, of highly radioactive material.”

“It’s going to take some very smart people a very long time to sift through everything here,” said Flick. “All this machinery. All this technology. They could do a lot of very bad things with all of this.”

My initial reaction: How the HELL did the inspectors miss this place? Even if it turns out to be something less sinister than one might immediately think, the very fact that we’ve never heard about it before — and long-time inspectors are stunned by the find — proves once and for all that inspections were never an adequate technique to disarm someone as clever and evil as Saddam.

On the other hand, if this explanation is right, maybe this is less outrageous than I think. Anyway, it will be very interesting to see how this all shakes out.

The Tribune-Review has a follow-up article today. And, of course, the blogosphere is all over this story. So is Rush Limbaugh, under the headline “Saddam’s Secret Atomic City Found.” Heh.

Stay tuned.

I didn’t post the Hartford Courant front page and photos of UConn’s national championship victory yesterday because I was busy posting about the Iraqi liberation… but, better late than never, right? So, here goes:

When I get to a high-speed connection, I’ll upload more newspaper front pages. Sorry for the delay.

UPDATE: I never got around to doing this because, well, I was busy. Thankfully, the Newseum has done the work for me, creating an archive of April 10, 2003 front pages. Click here, then click on the link that says “Baghdad Toppled (04/10/03),” and you can browse through the front pages.

The Washington Post typically gets its front page image online before just about anybody else, and today is no exception:

In the beauty of the lilies
Christ was born across the sea
With a glory in His bosom
That transfigures you and me
As He died to make men holy,
Let us die to make men free
While God is marching on.

–Battle Hymn of the Republic
Julia Ward Howe, 1819-1910

That photo is from the New York Times, showing Lance Corporal Shawn Hicks of Arizona being kissed by an Iraqi civilian and greeted by a jubilant population. Imagine how proud his family must be to see this picture. Imagine how proud he must be to be part of this historic day.

I was able to find out a little bit about Lance Cpl. Hicks, thanks to Google and Google News. Here’s a March 31 article from the Kingman Daily Miner, serving Mohave County in northwest Arizona. The article states:

Less than two years ago, Shawn Hicks was a senior at Kingman High School. Currently the Marine works at loading ammunition into a M1 Abrams tank while closing in on Baghdad. Hicks’ mother said that her son always wanted to be in law enforcement. He signed on for a four-year stint in the armed services figuring he would get out when he is 21 — the minimum age required for law enforcement work.

“With Shawn joining the Marines, it was just a Shawn thing, he wanted to play with the big toys (tanks),” Hicks stated.

And now he’s liberating the Iraqi people. How inspiring.

ScrappleFace, a humor news site, puts things in perspective:

The looting in Baghdad stopped suddenly today as Iraq’s largest organized crime family disappeared from the city.

Thousands of Baghdad residents entered government buildings in an attempt to retrieve some small portion of what had been stolen from them for the past 24 years.

Well said.

Two new posts on Becky’s blog this morning. And a bunch of new stuff from the last few days on Toby’s blog. Heh.