Only 5 more after this 

Tonight's Sopranos episode is the 4th of the last 9. We'll have to start seeing a little more tying up of the threads begun in season 6b, don't you think? I'm counting on being blown away by the finish, so I keep thinking (hoping?) the terrorist material, only hinted at so far, will bubble up.

Unclaimed overseas Katrina aid -- seem fishy? 

Washington Post story on hundreds of millions of dollars in cash and gifts pledged by other countries to help with the Hurrcaine Katrina disaster that was either never accepted, never claimed, never used, or went to waste.

I have no trouble believing that the help didn't get to the victims due to the incompetence of the federal government bureaucracy -- that's a given in anything to do with Katrina. But I got this funny feeling when reading about it -- don't ask me why, no evidence in the article -- that the U.S. also may have been too proud to welcome the help. Does that sound completely off-base? Somehow to me it fits with our cock-sure caretaker-of-the world stance that our officials might cop an attitude of, "No, sorry. We help you." Sort of like the first time a successful child offers money or an expensive gift to a parent.

Sub to the feed of the new Woodward and Bernstein 

Were you impressed by the McClatchy group's Washington bureau reporters featured on the Bill Moyers program last Wednesday night? Me too. I was thinking while watching it that I'd have to poke around and see if one of the local member papers had a feed, but I find this morning that the bureau has its own site and feeds.

You can subscribe to a feed of reports filed by Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel. I'm assuming they always work as a team and the feed for one gets everything they both write. The bureau's site also offers an OPML file. (Except it doesn't validate.)

Idea: something like Dave's checkbox news for TV. Couldn't be that hard, could it, for a site like that to let you choose which of the individual feeds you want blended into a customized OPML subscription list for the site? No, it wouldn't. I think I might even be able to figure out how do it myself, after a great deal of fumbling around, working with templates in Expression Engine, Drupal or Word Press.

Now that's ironic 

Here's a nice example of the kind of reporting Landay and Strobel turn in, Friday's story on the annual terrorism assessment report due out this week.

Terrroist activity around the world is up from last year, with 45% of the increase coming from Iraq. Here's the ironic bit: "The U.S. intelligence community is said to be preparing a separate, classified report on terrorist 'safe havens' worldwide, and officials have debated whether Iraq meets that definition." Good lord. But as the reporters point out, a tidbit like that could be spun either way.

Don't spin the bottle 

How I wish I could believe that in working out a war funding bill, Congress will concentrate on doing what's right -- and not on how its actions might play to the crowd or be spun by the opposition. Just because Bush and Cheney are taunting them into a playing a Party game doesn't mean the Dems have to spin the bottle.

Now I get it 

I didn't get from the screenshot that the OPML Editor's Twitter friends feature also included your friends' tweets in an outline. That's pretty cool.

What if the file were written to the www directory so you could display it in a widget?

That example won't be up to date, obviously, since it's just a static version of the live file copied over.

The little buddy symbols beside each friend's name in the app make me wonder if the tool is built with bits from the Instant Outliner.