As you all know, I’ve been deal­ing with spam in the com­ments, track­backs, etc. It’s become a gru­el­ing effort to mod­er­ate these com­ments to keep out the riffraff. (Mind you, I’m not cen­sor­ing anyone’s views. Every­one who legit­i­mately wants to take part in the com­ments in wel­come. Penis enlarge­ment com­ments are not. If I have not approved your com­ment, it was almost surely a mis­take and not mali­cious­ness on my part.)
Any­way, I’m on a deathly slow con­nec­tion here, which fur­ther com­pli­cates the comment-moderating chore. In addi­tion, as of Wednes­day, I’m on vaca­tion for a week and I don’t plan to be online much. (Beirut awaits!) So as of tonight, I’m imple­ment­ing Type­Key reg­is­tra­tion to keep out the cretinous spam­mers and to make my com­ment mod­er­a­tion eas­ier.
You will need to reg­is­ter to leave a com­ments. Many of you have already done so. Thank you. After you’re approved, you won’t need to wait to see your com­ments show up and I won’t need to curse the heav­ens for slow net con­nec­tions in my hotel, which — no lie — some­times drop to 80 bytes/second.
(In the time it’s taken me to write this post, 31 porn com­ments have come in. I have to delete all of those. Like I don’t have enough to worry about.)
So that’s the story here with that. In other news, I’m hav­ing a hard time com­ing up with stuff to write on this blog. Every­day life in Iraq has stopped being some­thing that I observe from a West­ern, outsider’s per­spec­tive and has become … my life. It’s what I do every day. So some impres­sions of a typ­i­cal day.

• Traf­fic, and lots of it. Much of Bagh­dad is a per­pet­ual traf­fic jam in the mid­dle and hottest parts of the day. It’s crush­ing, bru­tal and leads to hair trig­gers. On Thurs­day, the mother of all traf­fic jams hit because of the street bat­tle on Haifa street, which left four Iraqi sol­diers dead and at least 15 wounded. The Iraqi police wouldn’t fire on fel­low Iraqis so they — rather use­lessly — fired near the insur­gents, hop­ing to “scare them.” Sur­prise! It didn’t work… Good job, guys.
  The rea­son I bring this up in the con­text of traf­fic jams is because I got caught on the edge of the bat­tle when my driver’s car broke down after he for­got to put coolant in the car and it over­heated. This lit­tle mishap fol­lowed his run­ning out of gas in the mid­dle of Bagh­dad because the night before he had been too tired to fill it up.
  He is no longer my dri­ver, by the way. It’s not very cool being stranded on the street in Bagh­dad. While things are get­ting bet­ter, it’s still tetchy here for west­ern­ers, and my lame attempt at a beard is fool­ing no one.
• The cops — despite their rather cow­ardly deci­sion to not shoot RPG-wielding mani­acs — are actu­ally doing their jobs, espe­cially the traf­fic cops. I saw one the other day writ­ing a ticket for a guy who had the uni­ver­sal pissed-off look and aggrieved stance of every­one who’s ever been tick­eted for ille­gal park­ing. I was so shocked to see a skinny lit­tle traf­fic cop earnestly writ­ing a ticket to some young tough — and the tick­e­tee actu­ally stand­ing for it — that I laughed out loud in delight. It was like see­ing a unicorn.
• It’s hot. I mean, really hot. You guys who com­plain that River­bend doesn’t post any­more or berate her for not lik­ing the heat, come on over here and stand around with­out A/C for days at a time. It’s get­ting up to 114 degrees F or so these days — in the shade. I’m lucky. I have A/C for a few hours at a time. Most Bagh­dadis aren’t so lucky, and they’re still frus­trated over the elec­tric­ity. And they should be. It’s been 15 months; it should be work­ing now. And before any­one comes at me with the idea that Sad­dam starved the rest of the coun­try to keep Bagh­dad in power, know this that you’re right. But from the Bagh­dadis point of view, they went from 20 hours a day to six to nine hours a day. Jonathan Thomp­son, the deputy direc­tor of the the Project Man­age­ment Office, the umbrella agency that has to spend the $18.4 bil­lion for Iraq’s recon­struc­tion told me a while back, “Now everyone’s get­ting the same amount of elec­tric­ity!” Great, that means every­one is get­ting the same crappy ser­vice. No mat­ter how much you tell them that they’re bet­ter off, it still sucks. Think how NYC would be if it only got six to nine hours of elec­tric­ity a day for 15 months. The Bronx would be in flames.
• The new gov­ern­ment has done a few things right — reserv­ing the right to declare emer­gency law — and a few things wrong — sup­port­ing the Amer­i­cans when they blow up houses in Fal­lu­jah and kill women and chil­dren. What its done right could still develop into a real prob­lem for the gov­ern­ment because it hasn’t both­ered to actu­ally declare an emer­gency any­where and peo­ple still des­per­ately want secu­rity. (Here’s a draft of the law.) There’s not a night that doesn’t go by that we journos in our lit­tle com­pound don’t hear some kind of rifle-fire, explo­sion or some oth­er­wise nasty bit or ord­nance.
  The wrong stuff is a catch-22 for Allawi & Co. If they sup­port the Amer­i­can efforts to bomb Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi into sub­mis­sion — which inevitably blow up inno­cent peo­ple — they will lose what sup­port among the Iraqi peo­ple they have now. Many Iraqis who had sup­ported Allawi for his tough-guy blus­ter turned against him when he pub­licly rah-rahed the Amer­i­cans’ bomb­ing of a house in Fal­lu­jah, which killed at least 10 peo­ple, includ­ing sev­eral women and chil­dren. But if Allawi doesn’t sup­port the Amer­i­can pur­suit of Zar­qawi — despite all evi­dence that most of the insur­gency is made up Ba’athists and home-grown Islamic extrem­ists — he runs the risk of irk­ing his pow­er­ful patrons in Wash­ing­ton, who com­mand what is still the only truly viable secu­rity force in the coun­try, except­ing the pesh merga in the north. Good luck walk­ing that tightrope, Mr. Prime Minister.

• Despite their com­plain­ing, I do see more Iraqis out in the streets and in the play­grounds later at night than I did two months when I got here. (Has it been two months already? Wow.) And some days the city feels pos­i­tively nor­mal. But all of us in the Tribe, as I call the journos here, are a lit­tle on edge because it’s a bit like some line in a movie. (“It’s quiet…” “Yeah, too quiet.”) It’s pos­si­ble the insur­gency is in a bit of a tiff at the moment, which could be a rea­son for the gen­eral down­tempo of the attacks, or per­haps they’re just wait­ing for the right time for a spec­tac­u­lar attack. At any rate, Bagh­dadis don’t seem to be wor­ry­ing too much, and it looks like they’re get­ting out more.

So those are some off-the-cuff impres­sions. I’ve been swamped with work this past week in prepa­ra­tion of my hol­i­day, with much of my efforts going here. It’s a look at the hostage indus­try, and it’s my first byline in TIME. Vivi­enne Walt, the other reporter on this, did good work on the story of Muham­mad Rifat. The story wouldn’t have worked nearly as well with­out her con­tri­bu­tion. I plan to explore more on this topic, but by plac­ing it the broader con­text of the financ­ing of the insur­gency. What other bad habits do these guys have that pays for their bomb-building? Should be inter­est­ing to find out, no?
Any­way, I prob­a­bly won’t post before I leave, so in the mean­time, enjoy your week(s) everyone.

Just got back from an overnight embed and I’m exhausted. No sleep for last two days (more or less.) And I’ve got to file for TIME and another draft due on a story I’m work­ing on. So it will be light here for a cou­ple of days.
Oh, and I just spent an hour delet­ing about 100 spam mes­sages. Jesus, I hate you guys. You can’t get on the board, so just stop try­ing, OK?