Neal Stephenson chimes in on the fact that almost no one actually gets the particulars of the Star Wars plot:

In sum, very little of the new film makes sense, taken as a freestanding narrative. What’s interesting about this is how little it matters. Millions of people are happily spending their money to watch a movie they don’t understand. What gives?

My dad’s book is building a great readership and just got covered in the SF Chronicle.

Details over at Electablog…

You’ve heard a lot of Holcaust stories, but you probably haven’t heard one like this one being covered in the SF Chronicle.

Book resurrects family name for Holocaust survivor – S.F. man recounts escaping Nazis and fighting back

Every Holocaust story is unique, but Joe Pell’s is so extraordinary it transcends the genre.

Pell’s book, “Taking Risks,” is part World War II saga, part adventure tale, part memoir. It encompasses the tragedy of the war and the triumph of the survivors. It goes from Pell’s days sleeping on leaves and digging for potatoes in the Ukrainian woods to his life among the Bay Area’s most successful businessmen.

It’s also a great read…

... The Nazi tanks were soon rolling through Manievich, and most of the Jews there were shot by Nazi soldiers going door to door or rounding them up into ghettos. Pell’s entire family—three brothers, a sister and his parents—were killed over a period of months. Pell was spared because he hid in a barn when the Nazis came to his family’s home.

With no place to go, he fled into the thick forest behind the town, and soon found others who had also escaped. They foraged for food and faced the sure death of oncoming winter, until they met a larger band of people living in the woods who had set up a camp. The group included escaped Jews, Poles, Ukrainians, Soviets and others who either had no place to go or wanted to fight the Nazis.

This group of renegades, called partisans, subsisted in the woods throughout the war, mostly safe from the Germans because the Nazi tanks couldn’t traverse the forests. At first they stole food and guns from neighboring farms at night, but later the Soviets supplied them with weapons and supplies.

The partisans, including Pell, who joined them at 18, embarked on dozens of missions to disrupt the Nazis by blowing up train tracks, bombing bridges, cutting telephone lines and damaging highways. Pell had the opportunity to take revenge upon those who had informed on his and other Jewish families.

They also fed and housed a group of about 500 refugees in the woods …

Before this week, you had to go to sites and services to which you were subscribed in order to search them and then go to a big search portal to search everything else. But they’re your subscriptions. Shouldn’t you be able to tell a search company that you want results from these paid resources?

Yeah. You should.

And yes, now you can.

Love this move by Yahoo.

The more they move the My part of My Yahoo throughout their service the better.

The Dems are holding firm on the John Bolton matter. Now the focus is that British report that the U.S. hyped intelligence on the road to war in Iraq:

From Senate Minority leader Harry Reid:

Concerns about this administration hyping intelligence and Great Britain hyping intelligence cannot be dismissed lightly … it is no small matter for us to learn whether Mr. Bolton was a party to other efforts to hype intelligence.

Won’t it seem a little stange if the Bolton nomination is the only casualty of hyping intelligence and overstating the threat to America?

The results are in from the wildly inappropriate autopsy of Terry Schiavo.

According to the medical examiner, Schiavo’s brain was only half its original and healthly size and, “Her brain was profoundly atrophied. This damage was irreversible.”

You could easily offer the same diagnosis of Frist, DeLay and the other Congressional jokers who politicized this family tragedy. Of course, now we can expect DeLay to rip the left wing field of medical examination and doctors in general. The report must be biased, right?