Blogging will continue to be sparse, at best, until the weekend. I drove to Rochester on Sunday, was interviewed for a job on Monday, and started work on Tuesday. I am now living in a motel and trying to catch up with the new job: teaching Latin in a public middle school, where there are twice as many students as books, they are not allowed to take the books home, and I missed the first four days of the school year, since I hadn't been hired yet. I really should be back at my motel preparing for tomorrow's classes.

Unfortunately, I was not able to bring my computer along on this trip, the public library has a one-hour limit on internet access, and my hour is almost up. (The computers at work are old and nearly useless: for instance, they display Pseudo-Hesiod's page in utterly illegible and unresizable 4-point type. Old Macs running Netscape, if you're wondering.)

Detailed analysis of the multifarious errors and misrepresentations (to put it as politely as possible) that have been offered by 'Hesiod' and 'Level Gaze' in their pathetic attempts to answer my 'Shropshire Challenge' will unfortunately have to wait until Friday or Saturday. It will take rather more than an hour to write up, but it will be worth the wait. I just wanted to make it clear now that my silence until then is not to be taken as implying in any way that I feel abashed or refuted by anything either of them have written.

Of course, a great deal of what they have written refutes itself, for instance (to take one tiny example) Level Gaze's suggestion that I should send my sons, brothers, nephews, and other loved ones to fight if I cannot. He assumes, falsely, that I have no loved ones in the armed forces. (If you're reading this and have been called up for active duty, give 'em Hell, Diane F. I wonder if any of the antiwarbloggers has a friend who has served in the Army National Guard, the active-duty Navy, and the Air Force Reserve. Diane loves boot camp, and switching services meant she could go three times.) Level Gaze also has a very peculiar idea of how recruitment works. It's been many years since anyone who did not work on a draft board could go and enlist another person against his will. Anyone old enough to join the armed forces is old enough to make his (or her) own decision. If 'Level Gaze' had urged me to urge my relatives and loved ones to join up, that would have been logical. Telling me to go ahead and enlist them was just stupid, and there is plenty more stupid where that came from to criticize.

While I've been busy working at my day job, Philip Shropshire has been posting up a storm over at WarbloggerWatch, while studiously avoiding any explanation of why he is not willing to lay his life on the line to help prevent a war that he professes to believe would be disastrous to a large portion of the human race. What's his excuse?

But enough for now: I have to get off this machine.