Not in line to get phones 

Hearing about people queueing up already today to buy their iPhones made me think of my older son about nine years ago or whenever it was that Star Wars Episode One came out. He was in junior high at the time, and was dying to camp out overnight for tickets. "I don't even care if there's not a line," was part of his pitch to make sure I realized how desperately he wanted to be a part of the craze.

See also the antique sociology text I posted a couple months ago.

Cracking myself up (glad somebody's amused) 

How do you like this "Do" starburst to go with the ubiquitous "New?"

Three scary words 

Washingon Post columnist Eugene Robinson writing at Truthdig:

"I’m often asked why, given my lower-than-low opinion of this administration, I don’t at least raise the subject of whether George W. Bush should be impeached. I answer with three scary words that tend to end the discussion: President Dick Cheney."

Check. That's why Dennis Kucinich wants to impeach Cheney, but Kucinich has been branded as a flake, so it can't fly, though the effort has more merit and honesty than Rahm Emanuel's proposal. He wants to cut funding of VP office expenses, which sounds like a clever way to tease out Cheney's proposterous claim that he's not part of the executive branch, but isn't it just a time-wasting parlor game?

Dear Congress:

I think most citizens just want you to do something. Out here in your country where we put you in power, we don't understand your kind of Beltway fun, and we are impatient with your tiny chess moves that are supposed to be setting up the big plays later on for issues like this and the war.

I'd say forget about impeachment and curbing power, with the exception of changes Bush-Cheney have put in that could give abuse-of-power privileges or temptations to future administrations. If you spend too much of your time on it, we'll suspect you're campaigning, even if we're Democrats, and we won't praise you for it. This gang will be gone soon anyway. Concentrate on ending the war and starting to get our reputation back in the world's eyes. We want to be the good guys again and you're supposed to be representing us.

Love,

Amy

That was crazy 

Fun experiment with Operator 11 on CalacanisCast last night. The service streams live video like Ustream, but with a bonus: the producer can switch to guests and viewers having webcams. Jason mentioned he has personally invested in it, which gives it instant cred and mentor capital.

For their pastable code they need to do something like YouTube does to let blogs like mine with a narrower column scale it down. Just adding an object tag as a wrapper on my end doesn't seem to do it, so some rescaling restriction must have been specified in the file? I don't know. What do I know. Flash befuddles me.