Hey, lookie here! The legendary Nick Mamatas has gone and written the best LJ post ever. No. Strike that. Best post ever, anywhere. Don’t be thinking it only applies to LJers, either. It also applies to Condoleezza Rice.
The design for the Pentagon 9/11 memorial has been chosen (original). I like the sound of it; it includes trees. And getting this one right is as important as getting the WTC rebuild right. CNN has a small picture (original) of the proposal.
Meanwhile, the Roman Catholic Church has taken a stand against certain aspects of text messaging. They’re OK with prayer exercises over SMS (original), but you can’t confess your sins over cell phone. Which, I gotta say, seems reasonable.
I could just spit. The Sonics traded Kenny Anderson to the Hornets for Elden Campbell. The Celtics traded Anderson for Vin Baker before the season. Baker has been an utter bust. Campbell would be a huge upgrade. This sucks more than I can possibly express.
They chose the crystalline design for the replacement WTC. They’ll be the tallest buildings in the world, and they will be pretty darned cool looking.
RSS aggregators are going in the wrong direction. Here’s the problem. A good number of my friends use LiveJournal, as do I, mostly to read their journals at this point. One of the coolest things about LJ is the friends list concept, which allows you to interleave the journals of everyone you’ve marked as a friend. Good stuff. Certainly you can do that with the various desktop RSS aggregators. ...
I know everybody says this, but man, there are a metric boatload of pretty badly formed RSS feeds out there. I have most of an application written that trawls a blogrolling.com blogroll for RSS feeds and generates a “friends” page from whatever it finds. I even respect “Last-Modified” headers. Unfortunately, everyone kicks out bad RSS. Some people also have pretty flaky RSS autodiscovery bumpf — Atrios, for example, winds up pointing my l’il robot to an RSS feed containing the last few comments on his blog. Weird. I could work around that, though, although it would kind of kill the glorious automation purity I’ve got now. ...
The Observer has a story on [US war plans](http://web.archive.org/web/20080517120556/http://web.archive.org/web/20080517120556/http://www.observer.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,610461,00.html (original) “The Observer | International | Secret US plan for Iraq war”) (original): America intends to depose Saddam Hussein by giving armed support to Iraqi opposition forces across the country… the plan, opposed by Tony Blair and other European Union leaders, threatens to blow apart the increasingly shaky international consensus behind the US-led ‘war on terrorism’. It envisages a combined operation with US bombers targeting key military installations while US forces assist opposition groups in the North and South of the country in a stage-managed uprising. One version of the plan would have US forces fighting on the ground. ...
Salon has a little puff piece of a Cronenberg interview on line, of interest probably mostly to the fanatics like me, except for one excerpt which I will provide here. When I did “The Dead Zone,” I was very happy with the film. I was very happy with the experience of mixing my blood with somebody else’s, in this case Stephen King. When you use someone else’s work as the basis, it’s something you would never do on your own, but something you really feel an incredible empathy for and connection with. The two of you mix together — why, it’s just like sex, I suddenly realized! — and you make something that didn’t exist before. ...
What does it take to sell real estate? Brass balls (original). Glengarry Glen Ross. 3.5 minutes. Rip, remix, burn.