Bombing Nigeria

I laughed out loud repeatedly as I read this email exchange with a Nigerian scammer:

Something Awful: Something Awful vs. Nigeria and/or Asia

(Gee, this guy spends almost as much time in pointless email exchanges with stupid people as I do.)

He said what?

From the homepage of Doonesbury.com today come this remarkable quote from Dick Cheney:

"Maybe it's part of our national character, you know, we like to have these problems nice and neatly wrapped up, put a ribbon around it. You deploy a force, you win the war, and the problem goes away, and it doesn't work that way in the Middle East; it never has and isn't likely to in my lifetime."

—Dick Cheney, 1996

I would like to know where he said this and under what circumstances, but on the surface it makes Bush Administration policies all the more troubling, this notion that they know military action is largely futile, if not worse.

That, you know, kind of bell

Say, does anyone know what you call one of those bells that sits on a counter at a window in an office and that you use to summon a clerk or receptionist? Is there a specific term for it?