I’m off for the weekend, so just a few thoughts until I return next week.

1) Dear Dr. Dobson, don’t you realize this kind of thing annoys even Christians? It’s not your business to pronounce on whether any other man is a Christian or not, and it’s far worse than arrogant for you to redefine “Christian” to mean “public figure who speaks openly about his faith.” If you want to see an outspoken Christian in the White House, say that. And then say whom you endorse. Say whom you won’t endorse because they’re not outspoken enough, but when you say they’re not Christian enough, you’ve crossed the line. Please get over yourself. Or, rather, pay attention to your own Christianity and let Mr. Fred Thompson take care of his, both public and private. Love, A Christian

2) Speaking of Mr. Fred Thompson, I think I love him.

3) In an internet whirlwind of headline-skimming and soundbite-grabbing, you may not have 45 minutes to watch this. If you don’t have 45, trust me: watch 20 or so. A taste:

The modern liberal will invariably side with evil over good, wrong over right, and the behaviors that lead to failure over those that lead to success. … They’re convinced that … the real cause of war, poverty, crime, and injustice must be found, can only be found, in the attempt to be right. See, if nobody ever thought they were right, what would we disagree about? If we didn’t disagree, surely we wouldn’t fight. If we didn’t fight, of course we wouldn’t go to war. Without war there’d be no poverty, without poverty there’d be no crime, without crime there’d be no injustice. It’s a utopian vision, and all that’s required to usher in this utopia is the rejection of all fact, reason, evidence, logic, truth, morality and decency.

Speaking truth to flower power.

4) Your Dancing with the Stars prediction: It’ll come down to Laila Ali and–yeah, I’m as surprised as you are–Joey Fatone, formerly of N’Sync. The girl can groove, and the boy can move. The rest of the top five will be John Ratzenburger, Ian Ziering (did his mother really name him Aye-in, or is that just a conceit he plastered over Ee-in?), and Apolo Anton Ohno. The women are always at a disadvantage on this show, because if a man gets the steps right and has a little charm, he’s good to go, but if a woman doesn’t have the fiery persona of the ballroom dancer, it’s instantly all too obvious. And this season the women just aren’t feeling it so far, so it’ll be all men in the final weeks–except, of course, Laila, who could win it all if she keeps going like she has been. Football hero can mambo; boxer can mambo.

5) Last but not least, thoughts and prayers for Tony Snow.

Sarah Palin!

McCain faked this so well that he left Allah woozy. Up through last night they were running down the list of men, some crusty (Lieberman) and others not-so-much (Pawlenty), so uncertain that they even dragged Thompson back out.

Politically speaking: Flat-out awesome choice. Young, married mother of five, governor of Alaska, living symbol of ending pork-barrel spending, as it was she who killed the Bridge to Nowhere.

Come on over, disgruntled Hillary voters. Elect a pair of Republicans after eight years of the Most Hated Republicans on Earth. Be mavericks.

I’ve spent some time reading some of his position statements at Mitt’s website today and I’ll be reading more tonight and tomorrow.

And this is some savvy marketing: FredHeads for Mitt. Hey, Romney web guys & gals, I like the concept, and thanks for making a play for us poor downtrodden Thompson supporters, but some of us don’t have big ad banners, or spaces for them, on our blogs. Make me a little button similar in size to the one I already have for Fred, so that it fits neatly in my sidebar, and I’ll grab it if I decide to go for your guy. Thanks.

Update: Voting advice to benighted voters. From Xrlq. Heh.

Or, A Tale of Two Hosting Providers.

When I decided to start blogging, I looked at the hosts recommended by WordPress.org and chose DreamHost for 1) its intuitive and accessible control panel, 2) its great value for the price (read: huge disk space allotment, which sucked me in even though I couldn’t use that much space by blogging in a hundred years), 3) its hearty recommendation by several tech-minded people of my acquaintance.

“I Heart My Webhost” does not mean DreamHost. My red flags were hoisted early on by their service department, which promised answers in 24 hours but sometimes sent an auto-reply within the 24 hours and real-person answers later, and which misled me, though they say unintentionally, about the status of a domain name I was trying to reserve. Do you know how the domain-name game is played? It’s fairly cut-throat. You wait for a name to be freed from its current owner, and then you ask a registration company to get it for you. Meanwhile, several big companies, notably Network Solutions or Enom, will be snatching up any convenient one-word domain names that fall vacant and a bunch more, too, and slapping advertisements on them to see what they can get. DreamHost’s registration process couldn’t compete with these biggies and failed to get my domain. Fortunately, these companies that snap up any and all names frequently release them after a few days if they’re not making money on the adverts, so that they don’t have to pay the registration fees. I tried again. My request got stuck in DreamHost’s process, and I began to fear another company would snatch it up–again. I emailed DreamHost to ask whether anybody else could get it while they were processing it, and they assured me no, no. Meanwhile a tech friend of mine was watching the situation, unbeknownst to me, and when he saw that the domain still wasn’t registered, he registered it himself using a small registration company that pulled in the name in ten minutes while DreamHost was still twiddling its electronic thumbs.

I uneasily stayed on, but soon a spate of downtime soured me even further on the “dreamy” company. The last straw came on 9/11, when I had an important post up, part of the 2,996 project, and the site was up and down. I certainly wasn’t the only customer to endure their spotty performance; their status blog, on which they unwisely allowed comments, showed scores of understandably screechy, dissatisfied customers. I started shopping around, before my refund period was up.

Xrlq directed me to ICDSoft.

DreamHost has since been working to get its act together, and I know at least one tech guy, Allen my tech guardian, in fact, who performed the switch when I moved from DreamHost, who went with them later on. Hope they’ve got the performance to back up the talk nowadays.

Stay tuned for the exciting conclusion!