-- In Oaxaca Mexico, they're taking time off from the recent strife to celebrate Noche de Rábanos; Night of the Radishes. Do NOT miss seeing the pictures.
-- "Flogs", blogs that are actually promotional campaigns for products, stores, even opinion influence, are lately all the rage. They happen to be a violation of federal law, specifically the Federal Trade Commission guidelines protecting consumers against misleading information.
-- Yesterday's holiday weekend document dump included the admission that the Department of Homeland Security violated the Privacy Act -- back in 2004 when it was first caught by the GAO -- by collecting too much information from US airline passengers.
Do you feel safer yet?
-- It appears that a US president did have bin Laden in his gunsights, as the ABC docu-drama "Path to 9/11" revealed, but the president was Bush and not Clinton.
-- I give our local paper a hard time, but they have some interesting news up lately (these links will be good for a week or two before the Chron moves them into the pay-per-view archives) ...
- The Selective Service System is testing its military draft machinery for the first time since 1998.
- Accenture didn't exactly get fired from their state contract, but they lost a lot of it. For essentially shitty performance. You may know Accenture as the former Andersen Consulting, of the now-defunct Arthur Andersen accounting firm (the biggest loser in the Enron affair).
- Texas gained almost 600,000 new residents this year. That is nearly the sum of one Congressional district. About 160,000 came from Louisiana alone. One word: Katrina.
- Loren Steffy reminds us that the cost of our employer-provided health insurance isn't just a financial one.
- On September 11, 1977, Bing Crosby and David Bowie sang the duet Peace on Earth/Little Drummer Boy for a Christmas TV special. Bing died of a heart attack a month later. But the song nearly didn't happen because Ziggy Stardust hated Little Drummer Boy and didn't want to sing it.
-- Barack Obama isn't considered by many African-Americans as "one of us". A startling and somewhat fascinating opinion here (from a white boy's POV, anyway) . I don't know whether this is insightful deconstruction or a destructive whisper campaign. I cannot imagine that this sort of thing would keep anyone from voting for him, but I would still be interested in the responses to this article from African-American readers of this blog.
