Michael McDaniel’s Dawning Awareness

Jana sent me a link Andrej sent to her. Yeah, it started with an email forward - what’s it to ya?

Anyway, the author declares that it’s not a fad — the generation gap is dead!

Apparently, American Idol Kellie Pickler is not a generous tipper. Well, I expect her 15 minutes are about up, anyway.

After suffering through Apple Mail’s and Entourage’s built-in spam protection, I started trying out other Mac-based spam filters. A little research yielded my first and last candidate: SpamSieve. It works with a whole host of mail clients, and has done a pretty good job so far:

Since transitioning to the Mac for my computing needs, I’ve been auditioning various feed readers. On the PC, I used NewsGator, which integrates right into Outlook, giving me a 1-stop shop for communications. Entourage isn’t Outlook, and NewsGator is Windows-only, so it’s back to a separate app for rss.

I used NetNewsWire Lite for a bit - it’s the standard, apparently, and it certainly does the job. I also tried Vienna and NewsFire, but neither of the latter two offered nearly the feature set of NNW. I was just about to pay for the full version when I came across Endo.

I started playing with it a bit and I have to say I’m impressed. I fly a lot these days, and I really like the auto-downloading of pictures. The jury is still out, but Endo is a strong competitor. Now I just need to check out the latest beta of NNW and make a decision.

The feature they’re all missing, as far as I can tell, is a way to send the article I’m reading (including both excerpt from my selection and link to the full article) to someone else via email (using my default client, of course).

National Geographic reports on a neat new species: a Yeti Crab so unusual that they’ve had to create a whole new family to classify it. How cool is that?

(From National Geographic.)

Thanks to Ben, I’ve started reading The Pesky Apostrophe. I don’t know her name, but between her amusing take on American Idol (complete with haiku bidding farewell to losers) and her tribute to Women’s History Month, I was interested enough to subscribe to her feed.

If you’re left-leaning, give it a try. Just skip past the knitting, unless you’re into that.

(and yes, haiku is and acceptable plural form of itself)

Jennifer Biddison of Townhall.com says: “[…] When President Bush took office, the debt ceiling was $5.95 trillion and hadn’t been raised since 1997. But in the last three years, the debt ceiling has been raised over 27% - and is rapidly heading toward yet another hike. Even though Congress increased the debt ceiling to $8.184 trillion last November, national debt today is nearly $8 trillion - and growing rapidly.”

(Via pesky’apostrophe.)

I’m not a big fan of Al Franken. While I’m generally liberal-minded, I find his penchant for hyperbole to be no more “fair and balanced” than Fox News. That said, however, I’m starting to wonder if he isn’t right about the Bush administration vis-a-vis his statement that they tell the truth about almost nothing.

Case in point: this Associated Press story which reveals that the administration was NOT caught with their pants down when Katrina struck. They knew what was coming. And they told us they didn’t.

Now, I’d like nothing better than to see the bums get thrown out come November and to see Bush impeached for his numerous lies and for holding himself above the law (King George IV?). That said, however, I wonder if it’ll all just be the same when the Democrats finally figure out how to win an election again.

What I mean is that we seem to increasingly live in a world of spin. Where did our outrage about being lied to go? Nobody seems to really care that Bush has lied over and over. How did Nixon and Clinton get so caught up in their respective scandals while Bush floats above it all?

Something has changed. The strong executive (King). The cynicism of the electorate. I’m not sure. But I wonder what it will take to return to some semblance of sanity in government. Now, it seems like this country is now run by an unholy alliance of the radical right and the military-industrial complex Eisenhower warned us about.