M.A.W.B. Squad

Microsoft Owns that Smiley Face

Or they will, at least, if their application to patent emoticons is approved. To which we reply...

Image swiped from here.

Yahoo Buys Konfabulator

The Apple community is not pleased considering the low level of support Yahoo has provided for Apple in the past.  I've got widgets on Dashboard, but frankly I haven't found anything I can't live without.

Pregnancy Test

The Movie.  Because they think they're ready now.

Driven to Distraction by Technology

At CNET:

The typical office worker is interrupted every three minutes by a phone call, e-mail, instant message or other distraction. The problem is that it takes about eight uninterrupted minutes for our brains to get into a really creative state.

My solution?  Work while the rest of the world sleeps.

London Liveblogs

See Perfect and Europhobia for the latest, including pictures of the four bombers being sought by police.

Is anyone else wondering if this might signal a change in Al Qaeda strategy?  In the past we've had large attacks, with lots of damage, that often took years of planning.  Then things would go quiet until the next big event.

Now, in London, we have smaller mutiple attacks in a two week period.  If this does signal a change in tactics will it make it easier for authorities to round up the cell?

Rewriting History

I call B.S.

Keegans Early Bird

The back patio isn't too bad under the shade of the umbrella.  Marty recommended what is definitely a new favorite: Raspberry Bacardi Lemonade. Yum! Yum!

First one here gets an extra credit point, right?

Update Friday:  Egg on my face.  Sigh.  If I were a liberal I could claim a disease.  (TAS = Trivia Anxiety Syndrome.  That's the ticket.) Of course, we were all happy to comply with these marching orders.

And yes, even though we won't be there to hear it, we fully expect to be booed in absentia. We would want it no other way.

Varifrank: Then and Now

Frank Martin reviews the progress we've made in the War on Terror:

In other news, Today Lebanon formed a free democratic government. This puts the score at three new secular democracies in the Muslim world and zero Christian countries overturned by the murdering Islamic butchers like Mr. Attas disgusting son....................

In 2001, they killed mostly infidels. In 2005, they kill mostly other Muslims.........

In 2001 the call for bloody Jihad was heard throughout the Islamic world. In 2005, the call for freedom and western democracy is heard throughout the Islamic world.........

They havent changed our minds on palestine, islam, saudi arabia or Jihad but they have focused our concentration about wiping them out. Weve driven them from their sanctuaries, weve changed their culture, weve taken their women from them. We've freed their slaves.

Read the whole thing.

Free University for Virgins

An HIV/AIDS prevention measure.  I kid you not.  Of course you have to be female and move to the Kayunga province in Uganda. (via The Corner.)

Life After the Left: Real Diversity

Keith Thompson declared his departure from his liberal roots in his SF Gate column in May, prompted in part by watching the Iraqi elections and the progressive response.  He follows up with Life After the Left.  (The first line is a comment from an e-mail he received.):

“I, too, dislike, what the Left has become, but the monolithic, conform-or-die right terrifies me.” If only my anxious correspondent could scan the many hundreds of smart, good-natured, reasonable (and typically quite funny) messages I got from a veritable non-monolith of readers who identified themselves with these kinds of labels: independent, libertarian, classical liberal, conservative, federalist, culturally Western, free-trading, constitutionalist, free-marketeering, religious, religious-and-secular, spiritual-but-not-religious, patriotic. This self-description, spoken more than any other, comes closest to monolithic: “I am an American.” Dangerous stuff — call out the campus grievance committee.

Don’t make me laugh. Two weeks of electronic replies to my public “goodbye to the Left” surfaced more genuine pluralism among the non-Left than I encountered during my years inside so-called “progressive”  America. The one type of diversity that isn’t there permitted — diversity of thought — echoed repeatedly in the messages that welcomed me to new political terrain.

Diversity of thought. I love those words.