Good work, Sergeant.

Sgt. Kimberly Munley stopped Nidal Hasan with four well-placed bullets at close range.

"It was an amazing and an aggressive performance by this police officer," [Base Commander Lt. General Bob] Cone said.

Munley was only a few feet from Army psychiatrist Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan when she opened fire.

Wounded in the exchange of bullets, the 34-year-old Munley was reported in stable condition at a local hospital.

The diminutive Munley - she stands 5-foot-4 and weighs about 120 pounds - served as a cop in Wrightsville Beach, N.C., before she moved to Texas to enlist in the military, friends said.

She is married with two daughters and is no longer in the armed forces.

"She's the happiest, sweetest, most fun-loving girl you'd ever want to be friends with - and never want to cross," Peterson said.

Munley could not be reached Friday. In a posting on her Twitter page, she wrote: "I live a good life....a hard one, but I go to sleep peacefully @ night knowing that I may have made a difference in someone's life."

The hero cop spent Thursday night phoning fellow officers to let them know she was fine and to find out about casualties in the attack - the deadliest ever on a military base in the U.S., Cone said.

Yes, the jihadi was taken down by a woman. Given his disdain for the fair sex, that's an ironic delight.

The bigger question is why nobody intervened to address the man's obvious problems. The fellow pulled the pin on the grenade a long time ago. [Reynolds' SNL reference is absolutely perfect.]

Actually, the question answers itself: PC. And now it comes with a body count.

One last thing, a bit of unsolicited advice: cancel the pity party. The actual victims are in the morgue or the hospital right now, along with their families.

For future reference, the proper response is "How can we help?"

"Your challenge is to write crossover fanfiction combining Three's Company and Beastmaster. The story should use amnesia as a plot device."

Look on my Terrible Crossover Fanfiction Idea Generator, ye mighty, and despair!

Ok, it's not really mine, but you'll despair nonetheless.

Yeah, but...wouldn't they have to be?

An interesting, thumbs-up review of the V reboot which starts on ABC tonight.

Leaving the political subtext aside, I found this part about the religious angle interesting:

A handful of dissidents holds out against the rapturous reception given the Vs. Some are simply uneasy, such as the youthful priest Father Jack, who sharply criticizes the Vatican's embrace of the Vs as divine creations: "Rattlesnakes are God's creatures, too."

Unless they were machine life/generated, they'd have to be part of the divine creative order, correct? I'm a little nervous about the Vatican part potentially devolving into a "Visitors' Pope" plot thread, but I'll hold fire until it happens.

Discuss!

[Oh, and one more thing: it's nice to see that they preserved that part of the original, which featured a Catholic priest as a member of the resistance, one determined to convert the aliens, to boot. The Sci-Fi Channel re-broadcast the original two series over the weekend. It held up OK, but shows its age in spots. The main problem is the acting, which, apart from the ever-reliable Michael Ironside as the cynical mercenary-turned-resistance mastermind and Robert Englund as the naifish friendly (!) alien, was generally flat.

Memo to producers of sci-fi series: forget the effects budget. If you want it to work, get a good cast. That will save you even when you lose the thread of the plot. See, e.g., Galactica (2004), Battlestar.]

That's funny--I don't *feel* like Saint Joseph.

In fact, the comparison is pretty much Ludicrous City, next stop.

But that didn't stop our DRE from press-ganging Elizabeth, Heather and me to be the Holy Family in our parish's Nativity Play.

Let's see--I have a beard...and far more importantly, an infant.

Dale III heard about the possibility of being one of the angels and wanted to know if he could be in "the sword fight." It took a second, until I confirmed he was referring to the Archangel Michael expelling Satan from heaven.

I mean, Dude. Wrong scene, wrong book, and waaay too Michael Bay-ish for our restrained suburban congregants.

I don't think I'm one of those parents yet.

But my son scored his first youth flag football points ever on a two-point conversion attempt during the 'Skins victory over the Buccaneers. A professional photographer caught the scene, and persuaded me to part with hard earned cash for a permanent keepsake.



Frankly, him doing anything productive in a skill position role is slightly suspicious, given that his paternal genetics would suggest a "Hulk SMASH!" role on the defensive line, perhaps linebacker, at best. The pigskin is to be swatted at or fallen on, not carried.

Must get it from his mom's side.

Thank you for letting me borrow the Sponger for a while.

The Rev. John Shelby Spong simply couldn't care less about the Catholic provision for the Anglicans.

Which is why he wrote 400 words about it and called people who disagree with his secular hard leftist worldview segregationists and whatnot.

Both of these church leaders seem to me to be lost in the fog of antiquity. For that reason it matters little to me or to most of the world that they continue to play their ecclesiastical kindergarten games. I am quite simply not interested in this debate.

Untruer words were never spoken. *Sure* you don't care, John. I mean, *everyone* cranks out 400 words about something they could care less about, flinging the schoolyard insults all the while.

Don't worry, though--I have every confidence you'll be called for comment when the Episcopalians consecrate a Playstation as Bishop. Then you can wax flatulent about how the "truly enlightened" jettisoned such "obsolete" notions as "organicentrism" *ages* ago...

Ten years, far, far more good than bad.

Thanks, sweetheart, for saying "yes," and then "I do."

Was 1999 all that long ago?

Time to find something "tin" that doesn't suggest "foil" in the same breath.

Two barrels, one report.

Fr. Philip Powell, as is his inimitable Dominican habit (rimshot!), notes something significant about the announcement that Anglicans are getting a glidepath to entry into the Church:

That belly churning howl you heard last night in the US was the collective wailing of the English/Welsh Catholic bishops as Papa Benny ground their lib noses under his bright red shoes. What a satisfying crunch that was, is, and will be forever and forever. Amen.

That is the flip side, and strikes me as the unspoken, and deliberate, second impact from this announcement--namely, a boot to the collective backside of the British Catholic episcopate. As bad as things can be in the U.S., they have been immeasurably worse in England and Wales since the closing of the Second Vatican Council. Imagine an episcopate of Mahonys and Weaklands from Land's End to the River Tweed, and that's pretty much Catholic Britain, with a handful of exceptions. It would take decades of patient episcopal replacement to change the conditions on the ground there. Unless, of course, you were able to do something like inject a brand new ecclesial structure into the mix, independent of the local bishops, along with tens of thousands of newly-minted Catholics with zero patience for bureaucratic prog-speak.

That might tilt the playing field in a landslide hurry.

Under the circumstances, it seems likely to have been goal 1b all along.

Just my tuppence.

Anybody want to buy a house?

"The Detroit metro area now has the dubious distinction of having the lowest home prices in the country. Prices have dropped 51.7% to a median of $50,000. They're expected to fall another 9.1% and then stabilize."

A *median* of $50,000.

We should have stayed in that apartment, hon.

Nah, not really. It's nice to say you own a home. We've built something together, have a lot of good memories, and we've met a many good friends and neighbors. Can't put a price tag on that.

But we can put a price tag on the home. And it's a lot smaller than the mortgage statement...

Elizabeth Christina, October 14-15, 2009.

She just keeps getting cuter--watch the transformation over her first two days.

After 12 hours, a not-quite-successful external version, and a misplaced left arm...

Elizabeth Christina Price made her earthly debut at 8:51pm tonight, via c-section. She's 6 lbs, 9 oz and 19 inches long. And beautiful all over.

Pictures later, when the bleary goes away.

Thanks for the prayers and good wishes.