Ann Coulter’s column at Human Events now allows comments.

Run.

I’ll be around and about for the next few weeks, visiting friends and family. Blogging will be extant but possibly sporadic. Possibly prolific. Possibly ranty. Possibly random-thoughty. Possibly brief.

You just never know.

Apparently my pseudonym is the masculine version of the Welsh feminine name “Anwen.”

Oh well. the “wyn” is more appropriate to the Tolkien language I cobbled it out of (from the Rohirrim) and I know of at least two girls named “Bronwyn,” which by those rules is also a masculine name.

But this could help explain why a startlingly large percentage of the bloggers I met in NYC assumed I was a guy until they met me.

“Exit question: How much of [$750 million in U.S. aid to Pakistan] is going to end up buying weapons for Osama?”

For somebody who’s moved as much as I have, this map is pretty spare:

Create your own personalized map of the USA.

I’m including states I’ve driven through enough to see well (like Montana, which you can say you’ve visited after driving through once, it’s so big) and states I was taken through in passing when I was little, well enough to remember, but not states I was only through once, in passing. If I included every state I’ve ever been in, even only in a vehicle, in a vehicle in the dead of night, or during an airport layover, it would look more like this:

Create your own personalized map of the USA.

Better, but misleading. Lot of states I need to make a real visit to.

British girl loses lawsuit against school whose uniform policy forbids her “chastity ring” while permitting headscarves and Sikh bangles.

The court’s finding is entirely appropriate. A chastity ring is not mandated in the “rules,” such as they are, of Christianity and therefore is not a good hill to die on in opposing your school’s dress code.

Guess you better get a more oppressive religion if you want it to be accommodated. Or pick a symbol more integral to the religion if you want to win the case.

Tolkienites, all two or three of you who so far comment on this site, and any Tolkienite reading this who has not yet commented: What do you want to talk about for the Weeklyish Tolkien?

I had an idea but, lacking in form and void, it kind of dribbled away down the drain. Got a Tolkien thing you’ve never quite grokked? Lay it on me. I don’t promise to grok it to your satisfaction, but I’ll tackle it.

I’ve been wondering whether to see it or not, given that I’ve thought most of the other Harry Potter movies were pretty bad. Survey of PetiteDov says: Order of the Phoenix better than the rest and yes, Helena Bonham Carter is still crazy after all these years. Very well then. See it I shall.

Update: Speaking of Helena Bonham Carter, her grandmother was Violet Bonham Carter, née Violet Asquith, daughter of a WWI prime minister and close friend of Winston Churchill. Which I think is pretty cool.

You wouldn’t catch me hugging a man who had put a gun to my child’s head. Ever.

H/t the Hot Air headlines again, which I’m starting to think should be renamed Allah’s House of Fish in a Barrel.

Mr. Giuliani, what, exactly, are “exchange programs with Arabs and Muslims?”

I don’t understand what that even means. Exchanges between … sovereign nations? Think tanks? McDonald’s franchises? Exchanges of … students? Workers? Politicians? Pets? Hats?

Answer that before you try to sell me on anything else.

H/t: I love me some Hot Air headlines.

…but as ammo for anti-Christian people. Write your senator and tell him or her that you don’t think a country with “In God We Trust” on the currency should open sessions of the legislature with a prayer to Shiva, fine, but calling a Hindu clergyman “wicked” and his prayer an “abomination” and getting yourselves arrested for disrupting the senate chamber are the acts of puffed-up, overly sanctimonious blowhard exhibitionists with an axe to grind that, in my view, doesn’t have much to do with Christianity.

I may cry.

Because I’ll be blasted if I’m going to shut my mouth and take it if a flight attendant ever speaks to me this way:

But Penland said when they were aboard a Continental Express plane, a flight attendant became annoyed by Garren’s personality when he kept saying three words.

“As we started taxiing, he started saying ‘Bye, bye plane,’” said Penland. “At the end of her speech, she leaned over the gentleman beside me and said, ‘It’s not funny anymore. You need to shut your baby up.’”

In disbelief, Penland asked the woman if she was kidding. It was then, Penland said, the flight attendant went too far.

“She then said, ‘You know, it’s called baby Benadryl.’ And I said, ‘Well, I’m not going to drug my child so you have a pleasant flight.'”

Penland and her 19-month-old son were then–say it with me—kicked off the flight.

Penland said when the other passengers began speaking up on her behalf, the flight attendant got angrier and soon announced they were turning around and that Penland and Garren were going to be taken off the plane.

“I was crying, I was upset and I was thinking, ‘What am I going to do? I don’t have anything with me, I don’t have anymore diapers for the baby, no juice, no milk,” said Penland.

The young mother said she later learned the flight attendant told the pilot that she had threatened her. Penland said that never happened.

Emphasis mine. Another sad bequest of 9/11: Flight attendants, and other airline and TSA personnel, who have elevated petty powermongering to a pitch of rage-inducing perfection, who equate the duty to help keep the plane safe with the right to order others around for the elimination of their personal annoyances.

A fellow passenger told Channel 2’s Rachel Kim none of the other passengers had problems with Garren and that Penland never threatened the flight attendant.

Penland is considering legal action.

May she carry it to the fullest extent that the law allows, and may that flight attendant shortly have to find a job that requires more than pointing to exit doors a la Vanna White and exhibiting the bare minimum of good customer service. I’m betting she won’t even pass a laugh test.

H/t: Daddyman, who saves me a lot of valuable websurfing time by filtering Fark and passing on the stuff he knows will make me see red.

Update: Her son did not show his best side on Good Morning America when Diane Sawyer was chatting with her about the incident. I’ve stirred the hornet’s nest at Ace’s before and found a bunch of rabid child-bashers who can’t bear even the thought of a little crying disrupting the audio track of their lives. But the kid was responding to Chris, who clearly knew what he was doing with little ones. He wanted to be down playing with the toys he was offered rather than confined in his mother’s lap. Big surprise. Kids behave differently at different times in different settings. Big surprise.

Bottom line: That was a commuter plane, a small plane. Everybody on it could see and hear the incident. Sawyer said they talked to some of them. If this wasn’t the way it went down they’d have found out by now. Fire the flight attendant for lying to her captain to get an innocuous passenger thrown off. Period.