Well, I’ve watched a few of the new shows this week, and have some opinions.

Grey’s Anatomy: So glad it’s back. Just as funny and fun and sad and surprising as ever. Really like bringing in Meredith’s half-sister. Really hate the George/Izzy plotline.

Private Practice: Addison, you should have stayed in Seattle. Everyone in Private Practice is boring. Their lives are boring. Their patients are boring. The hospital scenes is what makes Grey’s Anatomy more than just another nighttime soap. The conflict on Private Practice? Boo-ring. Won’t be wasting my time on that one.

Ugly Betty: Huh. I’ve generally only caught the last few minutes of it, but I caught the season finale last year, and decided to watch the opener this year, and y’know, it’s a lot funnier than it used to be, and still fairly dramatic. I may have to start watching.

Big Shots: Gee, a show about man-sluts. Just what this country needed, a show about man-sluts. Great cast. Some hot guys. And it’s a show about—man-sluts. Plus, it’s a badly-written show about man-sluts. Sorry. That clip you see with the guys talking about how they’re the new women in town? They are. And they’re not nearly as interesting as the ladies of Wisteria Lane (who are going to be joined by two of my favorite soap stars this year, so waiting for Sunday to arrive).

Reaper: Kevin Smith’s new show about Jay and Silent Bob, excuse me, two other guys who merely resemble Jay and Silent Bob, working for the devil to capture souls that have escaped from Hell. It was funny and interesting. I’ll keep watching.

Men in Trees: This was a charming, sweet show that I fell in love with last year. Looking forward to seeing the rest of last year’s episodes, plus the new ones. It isn’t Gilmore Girls, but it’s a good substitute. I need my TV show/chick flick every year. Before there was Gilmore Girls, there was Sisters, and now there is Men in Trees. Now if only Joss Whedon would get another show on a network somewhere.

Shows not yet seen: Bionic Woman (have it on tape) and Pushing Daisies. And what the hell happened to Lost? When is Jericho back on?

Overall, though, not much good on TV these days. There’s Heroes, of course. And the above shows. That’s about it for me, unless you’re watching something good that I’m missing. Oh. Scrubs isn’t back yet.

No, I will not be watching the new Cavemen show. I’ve read enough about it to know it’s going to suck. There hasn’t been a decent new comedy in ages.

One step closer to home ownership. I have been officially pre-approved for a mortgage. By a big bank, not by one of those doofus mortgage brokers who lent subprime lenders money and then were surprised when they started defaulting on their loans. So now things can move forward in my search for a place to settle down.

Y’know, this is a true milestone year for me. A milestone birthday in November (all will be revealed on the 15th), a great new job, and quite probably, my name on the dotted line for home ownership.

I’m starting to feel so much less depressed about that milestone. In fact, things are downright turning around.

Yep. 5768 is my year.

Score another propaganda victory for Mad Mahmoud. He sat down with a group of religious leaders—minus, I’m proud to say, a single Jewish religious leader—and lied, denied, and redirected the questions asked of him. But now he gets to brag about how great he is for sitting down with Quakers and Mennonites and various other Christian leaders. (By the way, he refuses to come if there are any members of the Bahai faith, which is persecuted in Iran.)

After two days of prickly confrontations with critics at Columbia University and the United Nations, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran held a friendly, even warm, exchange yesterday with Christian leaders from the United States and Canada convinced that dialogue is the only way to prevent war.

The session, held under tight security at a chapel across the street from the United Nations, was a reminder that Mr. Ahmadinejad is a religious president of a religious nation who relishes speaking on a religious plane. He spent his 20 allotted minutes at the start of the two-hour meeting recounting the chain of prophets central to Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and the commonality of their messages.

He took questions from a panel that included a Quaker, a Catholic, an Anglican, a Baptist and a representative of the interfaith World Council of Churches, some of whom separately said they had been criticized by other religious leaders for sitting down with the Iranian president. Given the furor over Mr. Ahmadinejad’s earlier appearances, there was no advance publicity.

Imagine that. No publicity. Were they afraid their congregations would get upset?

The gathering, which included an audience of about 140 other religious leaders, was organized by the Mennonites and Quakers, churches known for their commitment to pacifism.

The organizers said that they had pressed hard to find a Jewish leader to join the panel of questioners, but that those invited declined because they could not win support from Jewish organizations.

Or perhaps they didn’t want to sit down with the man who organized the Iranian Holocaust Denial Conference, and who threatens the massacre of another six million Jews. Or maybe our rabbis were smarter than this woman:

“My heart was broken that there was so little support from other religions to be here,” said Mary Ellen McNish, general secretary of the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker group that helped sponsor the event. “If we don’t walk down this path of dialogue, we’re going to end up in conflagration.”

You know when dialogue works? When you’re actually having one. Asking Ahmadinejad questions and getting the same evasions and non-answers and outright lies as everyone else has gotten isn’t a dialogue. It’s yet another photo op, yet another propaganda moment, and yet another publicity coup for the Iranian president.

Though Mr. Ahmadinejad’s answers differed little, the tone of the session was a marked contrast to the verbal pummeling he received at Columbia University on Monday, when the university’s president, Lee C. Bollinger, called the Iranian president either “brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated” for his stance on the Holocaust.

At the clerics’ meeting, Albert Lobe, executive director of the Mennonite Central Committee, said pointedly, “We mean to extend to you the hospitality which a head of state deserves.”

And it made such a difference, didn’t it?

Well, no, of course not. But Mad Mahmoud gets to go home with a full set of trophies: The UN, Academia, and now a group of Christian leaders. Watch for the Iranian spin to call American Jews Zionists for not sitting down with him. Of course, he already does that, but still—let’s see what IRNA has to say.

Barbarians.

Israeli military forces killed at least eight Palestinians and wounded 25 in an airstrike and a tank-led ground operation Wednesday, the bloodiest day in the Gaza Strip since Israel declared it a “hostile territory.”

[...] The bodies in the jeep were badly disfigured, prompting different death tolls. Hospital officials said four people died, while the Army of Islam said five of its members were killed.

Dozens of Palestinians surrounded the wrecked jeep, some dipping their hands into the blood of the victims, to underscore their demand for revenge. “God is great,” the crowd chanted.

Disgusting. Tell me again how it is the Israelis who are the brutes. I won’t believe you.

Speaking of dipping hands in blood, the last of the men responsible for the hideous lynching of two Israeli reservists—whose only crime was losing their way seven years ago—was caught.

Nurzhitz and Avrahami entered Ramallah by mistake while driving to an IDF base in the area. They were stopped by Palestinian officers and taken to the local police station, where they were beaten and stabbed to death by an angry mob that stormed the station while hundreds of locals cheered the killers on.

Seven years later, and the good news is that this time, it wasn’t Iraeli blood on their hands. Still—there’s no way a people who daub themselves with the blood of slain terrorists and chant “Allahu Akbar” are going to make peace with Israel. The upcoming conference is yet another waste of time.