Please do allow me to deliver one very personal message. It is something that I always keep in mind while I am writing fiction. I have never gone so far as to write it on a piece of paper and paste it to the wall: rather, it is carved into the wall of my mind, and it goes something like this:

"Between a high, solid wall and an egg that breaks against it, I will always stand on the side of the egg."

Yes, no matter how right the wall may be and how wrong the egg, I will stand with the egg. Someone else will have to decide what is right and what is wrong; perhaps time or history will decide. If there were a novelist who, for whatever reason, wrote works standing with the wall, of what value would such works be?

Haruki Murakami accepts the Jerusalem Prize in Israel. Seconding Black Garterbelt: Give this man a Nobel already.

I have only one thing I hope to convey to you today. We are all human beings, individuals transcending nationality and race and religion, fragile eggs faced with a solid wall called the System. To all appearances, we have no hope of winning. The wall is too high, too strong -- and too cold. If we have any hope of victory at all, it will have to come from our believing in the utter uniqueness and irreplaceability of our own and others' souls and from the warmth we gain by joining souls together.

Take a moment to think about this. Each of us possesses a tangible, living soul. The System has no such thing. We must not allow the System to exploit us. We must not allow the System to take on a life of its own. The System did not make us: We made the System. That is all I have to say to you.

Malcolm Gladwell gets a smackdown from The Morning News. Whedon says more Dr. Horrible on the way. What happens when a space elevator breaks. How exactly it was you came to fall in love with the majesty of colors. 3-D representations of 2-D video games. Scenes from Gaza. Bush White House precisely as dickish as originally thought.

Sometimes I get the impression the right-wing doesn't take the world very seriously.

Joe The Plumber is putting down his wrenches and picking up a reporter's notebook.

The Ohio man who became a household name during the presidential campaign says he is heading to Israel as a war correspondent for the conservative Web site pjtv.com.

I'm sure there's something about this is not totally ridiculous.

He tells WNWO-TV in Toledo that he wants to let Israel's '''Average Joes' share their story.''

Aha, of course! Now it all makes sense.

Will Obama's rhetoric on civilian casualties in Palestine have any bite?

The clash of civilizations is finally over: Samuel Huntington has died.

Some of the best posts this weekend were from Josh Marshall, expressing outrage over the baseless attacks on Rashid Khalidi for no reason other than the fact that he is Palestinian:

The McCain campaign has been throwing around so much mud and smears in recent weeks that it's easy to miss just how ugly and shameful their character assassination of Rashid Khalidi is. This is an entirely respectable, highly respected scholar. To go further into making a case for him would only be to enable and indulge McCain's sordid appeal to racism. For McCain, personally, to compare Khalidi to a neo-nazi, it's just an offense McCain should never be forgiven for. It's right down in the gutter with Joe McCarthy and the worst of the worst. Khalidi is in this new McCain set piece for one reason -- as a generic Arab, to spur the idea that Obama is foreign, friendly with terrorists and possibly Muslim.