Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan generally gets accolades for his public pronouncements. Yesterday he got a brickbat from Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.), who blasted Greenspan as "one of the biggest political hacks we have here in Washington."First thing I thought was, "What the devil's deuce is a brickbat?" Y'olde dictionary sayeth: "A piece, especially of brick, used as a weapon or missile." Ah. So the metaphor here is internally consistent (i.e. someone can be "blasted" with a "brickbat"). That's good. A bit of further investigative research, however, yielded this picture of a very different sort of "brickbat", from the videogame Half-Life 2. Seems to me it would be hard to keep the bricks on that thing; what are those, shoe-laces? Nevertheless, it would certainly make these Senate feuds more exhilarating.