Yesterday, Heidi (PubliCola's brainy BookNerd) interviewed local author Lesley Hazleton—Jezebel: The Untold Story of the Bible’s Harlot Queen; Mary: A Flesh-and-Blood Biography of the Virgin Mother; and the subject of Heidi's interview, After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split in Islam.

This morning, Hazleton herself weighed in with yet another dose of scholarship.

Who says the Cola commenters aren't an erudite crew?

Today's "Comment of the Day" comes to us from Ms. Hazleton:

3. Lesley Hazleton says:

Re a ban on reproduction of faces/human images in Islam, that is formally true. But there seems to be no putting down the human desire for images. In practice, posters with such images (though never the face of Muhammad himself) are tremendously popular in the Middle East not only among Shia, but also with Sunnis. Markets and kiosks are full of them. I have one in my study of the winged horse Muhammad rode on his night flight to Jerusalem — with a beautiful woman’s head and face.

10/27/2009 AT 10:11 AM

And as long as we're skewing upwardly educated ...

Now that Erica has attracted the  Seattle Transit Blog crowd to the Cola, we're giving Chaz runner-up for his comment in today's Morning Fizz:

26. Chaz says:

@22 & @21

The diversion is higher, but remember that the throughput will also be lower because fewer cars that use the viaduct will use the DBT. Which gets to my concern. The 2008 report and rates don’t work to find the optimum toll it just seeks to set a toll to get enough money.

The problem? Well already the DBT is going to dump a lot of traffic onto city streets and I-5. Tolling at the rates they want would mean an additional 40% of traffic would avoid the tunnel and be on surface streets. If you’re going to build a multi billion dollar tunnel and then price people out of it, why build it? So we have WSDOT trying to solve the funding issue by poorly pricing the tolls. I’m not concerned as much about the manner in which we replace the AWV but WSDOT needs to complete a 2002 style study for the DBT and set the price that maximizes use not dollars. Why? Because the tunnel isn’t a business it is a transportation project.

10/27/2009 AT 2:39 PM