I believe you should now be able to post a comment without my approval. I had to uninstall an older version of MT Blacklist, then install a newer version. I just ran a test and it worked.
Note, however, that I reserve the right to delete comments if I don’t like the content or the commenter.

Wow. These people are hardcore:

It’s less than a week since the tiny Afghan village community witnessed the execution of 25-year-old Bibi Amena for adultery, but by Tuesday life appeared to have returned to normal. Bibi was sentenced to death by local religious leaders in the Spingul valley in the isolated northeastern province of Badakhshan.
Her crime was to be found in the company of a man she was not married to.
. . .
The killing was even endorsed by Amena’a mother.
“When the verdict was announced they came to consult me and I said, ‘kill her’ she said, without emotion. “I am proud and happy that she [Amena] was killed, because she undermined the honour of the village.”

Quite a contrast from our so-called “culture of life” in America. Here we have people getting all bent out of shape and passing emergency acts of congress when someone stops artificially feeding a woman whose been brain dead for more than a decade. There, they don’t appear to be so concerned about such matters.
At any rate, these type of incidents illustrate that despite globalization, we are literally still a world from some people on the other side of the globe.

Ha ha. It’s a miracle.

It looks like another major controversy has come to an end as an LA area television station will change 75 billboards which read “Los Angeles, CA Mexico.”
Granted, I don’t live in area with much ethnic tension, and that may effect how one views this kind of thing, but I really don’t get what compels some people to make a big fuss about this kind of thing. It’s not disparaging to anyone. But there’s this:

William Gheen, president of Americans for Legal Immigration, said the change was a small victory in the larger battle of enforcing the nation’s immigration laws and securing its borders.
“Those signs offended people across the country for two sensitive reasons. There’s documentation that some large corporations are contributing to our illegal immigration problem and secondly, a large number of illegal aliens and their political activists don’t respect or acknowledge America’s territorial jurisdiction over the area and have repeatedly said, ‘It’s our land and we are taking it back.'”

I know many Americans don’t like illegal aliens for various reasons, but are they really worried the group might “take back” land to Mexico?

The Knoxville Regional Transportation Planning Organization has posted cycling map. If you’re wanting to bike in and around downtown Knoxville, this may give you some help on which roads to use. Of course your “comfort level” on the listed roads may vary.
Interestingly, the map doesn’t mark the roads immediately west of the City/County Building as “steep grades.” Guess I’m just a wimp.
More bicycle-related resources here.