A failing law student kills 3 people at his school. Now I can see how he might be failing, because I’m pretty sure that mass murder is actually against the law. They probably should have taught him that.

The Norwegian finance minister enters a gay marriage.

A spiced tomato juice company gets a Royal Warrant, which means they get to advertise themselves “By appointment to Her Majesty the Queen.” You understand that in this case, we’re talking about something used for a Bloody Mary, which the Times totally missed the irony of.

The statement of charges against John Walker, who I think I’ll continue calling Johnny Taliban if you don’t mind (just as I’m planning to call Enron chairman Ken Lay “Kennie Boy,” Bush’s nickname for him, not least because “Ken Lay” sounds like it’s in Pig Latin) seem interestingly ridiculous. They’re avoiding treason charges because there are actual standards of proof for that one, which they couldn’t possibly manage. Evidently he is supposed to have known about the attacks before they occurred. Given that the actual hijackers didn’t know in advance, how likely is that? One might also ask, if it’s so freaking easy for someone to walk in off the street and be told the top secret terrorist plans, how did the CIA not manage it?

Speaking of incompetence, there’s an interesting article in Slate today on the scrambling of jets to intercept the hijacked planes on Sept 11. I’ve been wondering about the timing of that for 4 months. Now forgetting that it took the FAA quite a while to bother passing the information that was a problem on to NORAD, and that NORAD had never trained for such a mission, and that it took them several minutes to order planes into the air (and,
which the article doesn’t mention, that the planes sent to intercept the 4th plane did not come from the nearest air field to DC, which had no planes available), the author compares the mileage covered by those fighters to the time elapsed, and amazingly enough they weren’t actually flying at anywhere near top speed. Guess it wasn’t an emergency (and this was after the first plane crashed).