A twofer this week from The Wizard, who got carried away and wrote a second column. Enjoy!Tinny. That's the word for music delivered through computer speakers off an Internet stream or an MP3 file. The sound quality is just not up to the sophisticated sounds most people want to hear when they download MP3s or play CDs. Why can't there be a way to bypass those tinny computer speakers and play your music on a good set of stereo speakers via a wireless signal -- kind of like a router? Turns out there is.

The leader of the strangers stood underneath the big ceiba tree he had slashed with his sword. He addressed the sub-chiefs assembled in front of him through the stranger who spoke Maya.“I come to you from the greatest king in the world, His Majesty Don Carlos of Spain. The mighty country of Spain lies on the other side of the Great Ocean, and we have crossed it to trade peacefully with you and to instruct you in the religion of the One True God.“His Majesty Dos Carlos commands us to come in peace, yet you attacked us and tried to kill us for no reason. We do not understand why you attacked us, but you must understand that if you try to attack us again we will kill you. You saw yesterday the power of our lightning-bearers. The lightning-bearers are still angry with you, and it is hard for us to control the death-fire they carry in their bellies…”Without warning, one of the huge metal tubes lined up on the edge of the square went off with an enormous explosion and belch of fire. No one was hurt, but just the same, Malinali fell to the ground terrified like all the sub-chiefs, who proceeded to call out to the strangers’ leader asking his forgiveness for their aggression and disobedience.

Iranian President Ahmadi Nejad has been busy putting together a cabinet for the Islamic republic. While all real power remains firmly in the clammy hands of Supreme Leader Khamenei, it's worth taking a look at some of the new ministers, if only because it tells us two important things: (1) The face the regime wishes to show to the world at large, and (2) the policies the regime intends to unleash on the long-suffering Iranian people.Let's start with the interior minister:

You saw the above-the-fold front page headlines, saw the prime time television news stories late last week about Adam Kidan being arrested by federal agents for wire fraud, right? What’s that? You never heard of Adam Kidan? Of course you haven’t because he’s a nobody. That’s why the feds politely called his lawyer and asked he show up at their offices in Florida at a convenient time for him. The fellow you read about on the front page and saw getting busted on national TV was Kidan’s business partner - someone the Washington Post and the New York Times have spent years demonizing, the infamous Jack Abramoff.

And so Malinali trudged through the forest and swamps to Pontochan, where Forearms sold her to the King and she moved into the palace - living in a palace again, but now as a slave and not a princess.Malinali became very appreciative of Ciuacuatl’s lessons, for with her skills at sewing, cooking, and medicine, she was assigned to the household staff and not put out into the maize or cacao fields for manual drudgery.Five winters passed. She became fluent in Maya, and learned how to do her work well and quietly, so as to be noticed as little as possible. She listened attentively, however, and began hearing talk of mysterious strangers who lived in gigantic war canoes. No one knew where they came from. Their skin was light and they had hair on their faces. Some wore metal on their bodies. Their canoes had carried them across the salt water from the south. They stopped at the mouth of the Pontochan River and talked to a group of Mayas but no one could understand what they were saying. They continued across the water to the north and were never seen again.

At first I thought there was a short circuit in my ouija board, because there were sparks coming out of the thing, just when I thought I’d finally connected with my old friend, the late James Jesus Angleton, former legendary head of CIA counterintelligence. But then I realized that it was, indeed, Angleton, cursing and sputtering (his poetic side — the side that made him the editor of The Yale Literary Review when he was an undergraduate in New Haven back in 1940 — somehow got lost when he got angry).ML: Hey! That used to be my ear...JJA: Sorry, sorry, but this Able Danger business is just too much.ML: You mean Congressman Curt Weldon’s discovering that a military intelligence unit called Able Danger figured out a year before 9/11 — from open sources — that Mohammed Atta was part of an al Qaeda cell inside the United States, but Clinton Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick stopped them (three times!) from telling the FBI?JJA: Damn right, but that’s not even the half of it. All these stories, all this faux shock, “oh my gosh, we knew it but we couldn’t act on it”, they just make me sick.