This poll is obviously not a scientific poll, but the results are interesting. The poll question in the Globe and Mail asks, “An English court has upheld a school’s ban on the wearing of the jilbab, a traditional Muslim gown. Should such clothing also be banned in Canadian schools?” I think the question is ridiculous. Why shouldn’t kids be allowed to wear their traditional clothing? What’s the problem here? I thought that Canadians would agree with me, however, just to show me that they don’t care about religious freedom they are voting 50% for and 50% against the question. What’s wrong with a little religious freedom? What’s wrong with freedom of expression?

Something Google will allow us serfs to use Gmail, but until then, the best webmail out there is Yahoo. As of today, they have upgraded their free mail service to 100 megabytes of storage space and increased the document size you can recieve to 10 megabytes. If you pay $20 a year for Yahoo plus email, you get 2 gigabytes of storage space and POP3 access so you can access Yahoo with Outlook.

Then again, at least until the latest Yahoo redesign, you could use YahooPops to get POP3 access to Yahoo mail. But I don’t think YahooPops has been working since Yahoo upgraded they mail system last night.

I’m continuing to grow pessimistic over the morality of Islam. According to this story about a recent car bombing in Baghdad:

As U.S. forces began arriving at the scene, Iraqi youths poured out from nearby alleys, some to hurl stones at them.

Dozens of people gathered around two of the vehicles targeted in the blast, jumping up and down on their roofs, hammering them with bits of debris and chanting: “There is no God but Allah. America is the enemy of Allah.”

What are their so-called religious leaders teaching these kids? I’m fine with these teenager being ticked-off at America, but to say that America is an enemy of Islam is absurd.

Is this story true? I don’t know, but as Fox News says, “We report, you decide.”

President George W. Bush

Marginal Revolution has some interesting notes about problems facing Europe:

2. Germany has recently failed in its attempt to reform the country’s antiquated store closing laws. German shops, with some exceptions, cannot stay open later than eight at night or on Sundays or major holidays. The German public strongly opposes these laws, but the small shop lobby dominates.

3. A recent survey in France suggests that 70 percent of French schoolchildren aspire to become bureaucrats rather than captains of industry. (See the IHT, June 9, “Divided We Graumble,” by Roger Cohen, p.2.)

4. The beauty of European cities typically stems from 1920 or earlier, when much of Europe was economically freer than the United States. How would U.S./Europe comparisons feel to us if all of Europe had been built after the second World War? How many people would then think that the “European way of life” is superior.

5. Guido Tabellini (FT, June 3) tells us that Europeans consume more leisure because they find it harder to get good jobs, not because of a cultural preference for the finer things in life.

I love John Kruk. How many people do you know start off an article complaining the problems with the Major League Baseball draft and end by critiquing the WB’s new show, “Superstar U.S.A,” reality TV shows, and J-Lo. I love the range of things that irritate him.

Here’s why I don’t trust Ebert:

Bottle Rocket–2 Stars
Rushmore–2 1/2 stars
Napoleon Dynamite–thumb down
Garfield: The Movie–3 StarsI loved Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, and Napoleon Dynamite, and yet Ebert hated them. Ebert could at least dislike movies that are obviously terrible–like Garfield: The Movie. Roeper hated Garfield: The Movie, but Ebert, for some reason, actually liked it. And Ebert is almost alone in him like of Garfield. According to rottentomatoes.com, only 1 other “Cream of the Crop” movie reviewer liked Garfield.

All I know is that I don’t trust Ebert as a movie critic. This is just one more reason to read rottentomatoes.com for movie reviews.

David Greenberg has an interesting article about the myths about Reagan at Slate.

Check out the Simpsons pimping a sofa drink in Japan.

Bloomberg via LGF:

Two engines from Iraqi surface-to-air missiles, including one from an Al Samoud 2 missile banned by the United Nations, have turned up in a scrap yard in the Netherlands, according to UN arms inspectors.

Representatives of the unidentified scrap yard said at least five and as many as 12 similar engines were sent to the Rotterdam location earlier this year, and more may have passed through, according to a report dated May 28 from the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission.

Unmovic, which ran inspections in Iraq before the U.S.-led invasion, said some of the materials may have been taken out of Iraq by looters and sold as scrap. Satellite photos show Iraqi sites subject to international monitoring that have been cleaned out or destroyed, according to the report.

The UN inspectors said the discovery shows the difficulty of accounting for how many banned missiles the regime of Saddam Hussein possessed before he was overthrown in a U.S.-led invasion last year. The U.S.’s Iraq Survey Group is hunting for banned arms in Iraq in the absence of the UN team.

Is there any small reason weapons of mass destructions were not found in Iraq?