MY GRANDMOTHER, CHARLSIE FARRIOR TEAL, DIED TODAY, at about noon. It was sudden and quite unexpected; we’d all gone out to dinner Saturday and she seemed to be doing very well, but at 91, well I guess “sudden” isn’t really the word.

Got the call from my mother and headed out there, cancelling my afternoon class. Got there before the paramedics left; there were several nice deputies from the Knox County Sheriff’s Department there (they always do that when someone calls 911 to report a death) and even a Chaplain (they do that, too). They were very helpful and considerate.

Spent the afternoon dealing with funeral home stuff, etc. (the funeral will be in Birmingham, where there’s still some family, though my grandmother outlived all but one of her friends — her friend Ethel Claire, whom she met when she was 19, is still alive but has a broken hip and probably won’t make it).

My mom is spending the night with us tonight. Back later.

Meanwhile, to the right is a picture of my grandmother from last year, and below is one of her and my grandfather from Daytona in 1938. She had a long, and good, life. I’m still sorry that she died, though.

TIM WU (coauthor of Who Controls the Internet?) and I are doing a Slate book club revolving around our respective books this week. The first installment, by me, is up here.

IN THE MAIL: Orrin Judd’s new book, Redefining Sovereignty. Rather timely, I’d say.

MORE AGGREGATION: Danny Glover reviews both An Army of Davids and Crashing the Gate.

IMPOVERISHED ACADEMIC DR. RUSTY SHACKLEFORD will blog for food.

ISRAELLYCOOL will be covering the Israeli elections today. So is Allison Kaplan Sommer. And check out Vital Perspective.

JIM BENNETT SAYS that he sees an emerging consensus on immigration: “Assimilation is going with the grain of American culture and history, and must be the focal-point of any attempt to address the problem. Securing the borders is a close second. Whatever the position of the major parties, I think the popular demand for reform is so strong that some poltician will emerge to ride that horse.”

UPDATE: Here’s an interesting net immigration map, in which country sizes reflect immigration. (Via John Chilton).

JESSE WALKER WRITES on why unlicensed broadcasting shouldn’t be a crime.

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER CHARGES FRANCIS FUKUYAMA WITH “FABRICATION:”

A convenient fabrication — it gives him a foil and the story drama — but a foolish one because it can be checked.

But that’s just the beginning of a rather serious takedown. Not that his history of being wrong about, well, pretty much everything has hurt Fukuyama’s career so far.

UPDATE: Ron Butler emails: “Francis Fukuyama, the Paul Ehrlich of geopolitics?”

Pretty much.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Byron Matthews emails: “His peculiar talent is to sense the intellectual tide and quickly ride it, which makes him the David Gergen of geopolitics.”

Ouch.

PAYBACK KILLINGS: Zeyad offers a much less clinical view of the phenomenon that StrategyPage described a couple of days ago. He’s not very happy about what’s going on, to put it mildly.

Of course, Zeyad also illustrates, as he has in the past, that he’s better at reporting not just the good, but also the bad news than most of the professional reporters in Iraq.

UPDATE: A reader emails: “Zeyad is Sunni.”

True, and that’s got to color his views, but I’ve always found him to be an honest reporter and it’s not as if he’s been spouting the Ba’athist/Sunni line.

PRINCE CHARLES, ISLAMIC DISSIDENT. And yet he’s a piker compared to Camilla.

GRAND ROUNDS is up!

MODERATE MUSLIMS in Madison.

THE F.E.C. AND BLOGS — this seems like good news:

The Federal Election Commission decided Monday that the nation’s new campaign finance law will not apply to most political activity on the internet.

In a 6-0 vote, the commission decided to regulate only paid political ads placed on another person’s website.

The decision means that bloggers and online publications will not be covered by provisions of the new election law. Internet bloggers and individuals will therefore be able to use the internet to attack or support federal candidates without running afoul of campaign spending and contribution limits.

Adam Bonin — who did excellent work on this — calls it a “netroots win.” Mike Krempasky — who also did excellent work — observes: “This is a tremendous win for speech.”

AN ARMY OF TRANSLATORS: Here’s a news story on the Saddam document release.

HEH. If this report is true, it serves ’em right: “Hussain Andaryas said the publicity surrounding the Abdul Rahman case had resulted in a surge of interest in Christianity among Afghans.”

IS THE AP PLAGIARIZING BLOGS? A “we do not credit blogs” policy doesn’t sound like much of a defense. (Via Majikthise and L’Ombre de l’Olivier). Whether or not it’s plagiarism, exactly, it’s certainly tacky.

UPDATE: Jim Lindgren says the AP does credit blogs, regardless of its stated policy: “I find this story triply strange.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Roger Simon says it’s all part of the class struggle. Onward, comrades!

MOUSSAOUI says he had advance knowledge of the 9/11 attacks. This should get him the death penalty, but it also underscores the damage done by the inept investigation after his arrest. As I noted some time ago: “FBI investigators misunderstood the law, and were thus too slow to search Moussaoui even though the evidence in their possession was more than sufficient. The bureaucratic resistance to searching Moussaoui was so great that field agents in Minnesota wondered — before Sept. 11 — if Usama bin Laden had a mole in Bureau headquarters.”

MUCH MORE ON IMMIGRATION: Over at GlennReynolds.com.

FIGHTING FOR Internet freedom in Cuba.

HUGH HEWITT HAS A NEW BOOK OUT: It’s called Painting the Map Red: The Fight to Create a Permanent Republican Majority.

I wish him well with the book, but I’m not that interested in the idea of a permanent Republican majority. I’m pretty disappointed in the Republicans now, and I’d just as soon see them under whatever discipline that the notion of a not at all permanent majority provides. That doesn’t seem to be enough. . . .

HEART-FRIENDLY BACON: “Geneticists have mixed DNA from the roundworm C. elegans and pigs to produce swine with significant amounts of omega-3 fatty acids — the kind believed to stave off heart disease.” Finish your bacon, dear — it’s good for your heart!

UH OH: “The Supreme Court refused Monday to block a defamation lawsuit against The New York Times over columns that linked a former Army scientist to the 2001 anthrax killings.”

MORE ON YALE’S Taliban problem. And read this, too.

PEOPLE COMPLAIN that I usually blog about expensive cameras. Well, here’s a very cheap camera, dock, and printer bundle — 4MP, 5x optical zoom, total price just over 200 bucks. My daughter has the EasyShare camera, and it’s good, and simple to use. I don’t know about the printer.

I’ve been pretty lame about blogging on cameras, electronics, etc., because I usually do so only when I buy something, and I’ve been too busy to spend time with new gadgets lately. But here’s an earlier post, and here’s the Digital Camera Carnival that I hosted, as well as an earlier post on printers.