At 26P.

We are on our well-deserved and long-overdue annual vacation (typically, we take it around July 4).

Have been since 5pm, August 18.

Enjoying ourselves immensely, thank you. If you've emailed me, expect responses next week.

I finished reading Trifkovic's Sword of the Prophet Wednesday--my grim joke since has been to call it "The feel-good book of the year." Seriously--go, buy, read. Now. It will be the most important book you read in 2006. It's neither perfect nor a complete overview, but it is absolutely essential reading.

Ignorance is not bliss. Far from it.

[2008 UPDATE: I don't feel the same way about SotP these days, and cannot give it a whole-hearted recommendation. While still valuable, it is uniformly and unfairly negative about Islam as a whole--for example, I don't recall an acknowledgment of Islam's undeniably artistic and architectural achievements. Also, he doesn't handle the Islamic texts in the necessary detail (Robert Spencer is much, much better on those points.]