Candelpin bowling is making a comeback! The Boston Globe Magazine is on the story this Sunday, featuring a local star bowler named Jeff Surette:

he just wants to bowl, just wants to take what he can get from the most difficult form of bowling on the planet, a particularly New England pursuit that is as hard as a Maine winter.

Classic!

Regular readers of the blog (hi Mutt!) will recall that we mentioned the story of another local bowler back in December, when his record-breaking three-string score of 514 was kept out of the record books because the foul line sensor was not turned on.

I love xkcd.

If you’re local to Somerville (like some of us are, or were), then you’ve hopefully enjoyed a fantastic breakfast at either or both of Sound Bites and the Ball Square Café. There’s been bad blood between the two ever since Sound Bites expanded to the building next door, and the owners of the old space rented it to their son, who convinced the old Sound Bites chef to stay behind. The Somerville News’s blog picks up the story:

Police were called to Broadway today as a crowd scuffled and tried to separate the owners of SoundBites and Ball Square Cafe. It wasn’t the first time police were called to mediate Ball Square owner Mike Moccia and Yasser Mirza, of Sound Bites, but it may have been the most intense episode yet with witnesses reporting punches thrown and blood drawn.

“We have shot an amazing number of people, but to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat.”

That’s from General Stanley A. McChrystal, commander of US forces in Afghanistan, quoted in the New York Times. He’s referring specifically to soldiers at military checkpoints who engage in “escalation of force” against people, usually in vehicles, who behave in ways the soldiers perceive to be threatening.

The whole situation is extremely complicated, but it bears repeating: Afghanistan never attacked the United States. The people of Afghanistan never posed a threat to the United States. The alleged perpetrators of the attacks of September 11, 2001 were from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, and Lebanon (all nominal “allies” of the United States). The United States had no basis under international law for its invasion and occupation of Afghanistan: such behavior constitutes a war of aggression.

Sixty years ago, the United States government helped to articulate the gravity of a war of aggression: it is “not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

Nine years into this unprovoked war, the US general in charge admits “we have shot an amazing number of people, but to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat.” Though he was talking about checkpoints, his comments could easily apply to the enterprise as a whole.

What will be our reward here in the United States for such international cruelty?

“I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just” (Thomas Jefferson, 1783).