I ended up doing a patriotic activity of sorts on the 4th. I was visiting friends in Houston and they took me to the David Adickes Sculpture Work studio. Well more specifically the parking lot of said studio. If you aren’t familiar with him, Adickes did the giant busts of all the former Presidents for Presidents Park in Williamsburg, Virginia. I’m guessing that what I saw were either early drafts or retired busts as they began to fall apart. Either way it was fun. I have some more shots up on my Flickr page.

Some people believe that Osama bin Laden strategized to help Bush get re-elected.

…Ron Suskind’s The One Percent Doctrine, which draws heavily from CIA insiders. Suskind wrote that the CIA analysts based their troubling assessment on classified information, but the analysts still puzzled over exactly why bin-Laden wanted Bush to stay in office.

This reminds me to bring up another conspiracy I developed recently. I think it is highly possible that Rummy and Dick had a conversation similar to this:

R: So, we are committed to a war against terrorists and they have decided to fight it in our borders.

C: Yep. That’s bad. We’ve been doing good to keep it out of the news as long as it was in Palestine/Israel or [Wahtaever]istan.

R: Say, that’s a good point. How can we move the fight back to the middle-East?

C: It’s actually a question of who’s willing to take it. Even our worst enemies wouldn’t want the Jihad in their front yard.

R: What if we forced them to take it? Who could we force to take it?

C: Well, Shrub is itching to put the hurting on Saddam. Let’s start there!

R: Say, that sounds even better. Let’s draw the terrorists attention away from the USA and give them a target in Iraq.

&c., &c.

Those of us who rely on open-source, freeware or shareware CD software may hit an unpleasent wall soon. FreeDB — the backend database that provides many programs with the data about a specific CD, title, artist, track names — is going to die after some apparently bitter conflicts in the main developers.