An editorial both lively and informative from Hardware Central last week. You can tell it’s really good because I’m able to read it even in my dilapadated and flu-ish condition. If it holds my interest it should certainly hold yours. And did I mention the Microsoft flaming?

As ever, Roger Clarke attended Computers, Freedom + Privacy this spring; as ever he has posted a wonderful recap. I didn’t go this year and am intensely miserable about that. The recap both helps and makes me really, really wish I had.

Ethics folk, read and enjoy: A marvelous paper by Robert Kaplan on Applying The Wisdom Of The Ages To The 21st Century, courtesy of the Foreign Policy Research Institute. Particularly good if you’re a bit short on the underpinnings of (secular) Western moral reasoning. And I’m not a Hobbesean by nature, so you’re looking at a serious compliment here.

Draft-Day Woes: Call me crazy, but don’t Heisman-winning quarterbacks usually get drafted in a reasonably early round — one before, say, late June?! It’s the third and Crouch hasn’t gone yet; at this point I’m starting to think I’ll get the call before he does. This is insane. (Not a football fan? Please disregard previous. Not a Husker? Please disregard paranoid aspect of previous, other than to note we’re all quite aware that the rest of the country is conspiring against us. Again.)

If you don’t know Le Tigre, they’re a great band — fabulous in concert. And did I mention feminist? And really lefty? Love ’em. Of course, the leftist-feminist-queer message is very mainstream these days, in our just and peaceful world, which is why a bunch of Texas protesters had time to make leafleting a recent show their activism priority. Note to aforementioned Texas protesters: Put down the headphones, pick up a newspaper, and see what the socio-political landscape really is on Earth. And speaking of planets, didn’t I just see ET hailing your cab?

You must read this tremendous story from AlterNet on Greg Palast, a muckraking journalist — a well-constructed piece on a terrific subject. (Suggested alternate title: Why I Don’t Bother With The Mainstream Press.) Mr. Palast has his own site, too, which includes such gems as this absolutely dead-on analysis of what’s wrong with small-town America (Superior NE, listen up!).

Boy, nothing like reading a really wonderful book and then chasing it down with a piece of really skanky, self-orbiting criticism re same. The book was The House Of Mirth; the masturbatory exercise was Salon’s.

I love essays that display their author’s mystification with what real people read and write, particularly when it is further made clear that the writer hasn’t ventured into the depths of her local libraries in a number of years. Ms Adams calls them “nobody memoirs” and thinks they’re on the rise for whatever reason, but any patron of a slightly outdated library knows that these were wildly popular decades ago, in the early and middle portions of the twentieth century — war tales from foot soldiers, travelogues from minor diplomats’ wives, childhood memories from those who grew up as first-generation ingredients in the American melting pot, and any number of other examples of observations from the sidelines. I absolutely adore these books, whatever their literary quality, and would suggest to Ms Adams that nobodies, precisely because their lives are less visible and less known to us, make on the whole much more intriguing subjects of the casual memoir. (Which connects thematically to the previous blog item — see below.)

Great train of thought from Mike Klis in the Denver Post a few days ago: “There are thousands of men who can’t understand how anybody can watch the same movie twice. What can be more captivating than not knowing how a story is going to end? In baseball, every game has a different ending. The final outcome, in its truest form, is unpredictable. Otherwise they wouldn’t bother playing. The only known exception was the 1919 World Series, and sure enough, they made a movie about it.”

WOW. You know Time-Warner is evil, but did you know they were THIS evil?