From Trevor Bechtel:

My partner, Susan, maintains a blog written by her 2nd grade class at http://209.typepad.com

I am writing you today to drum up site visits and comments for a question she has recently posted and would like to receive comments on. I asked some of you to help in this endeavor several months ago with a different question and she appreciated all the comments then. If you choose to go, remember that there are 7 and 8 year-old children reading your comments. Thanks for your participation.

Here’s the question:

We were talking and studying about dinosaurs in our class and a debate started in one of our small groups. We want to know who was king of the jungle in the past and who is king of the jungle now?

Is your answer a fact or your opinion?

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Here are the patron saints of graphic design… [Thanks to Ian Poynter for the pointer.]

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…be sure to wear some flowers in your hair.”

Monday is the first day same-sex marriage is legal in Massachusetts. I called the Freedom to Marry group and asked where a well-wisher should go. They expect lots of people in Cambridge at 11pm on Sunday when the office will open to give out forms, etc., so they suggested that I go to my own town hall on Monday morning.

So, I’m planning on showing up at the Brookline town hall with flowers. See you there?

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The AP is reporting that the Mexican Air Force has released video tape of 11 unidentified flying lights circling one of their jets. Here’s a crappy infrared photo, which I glommed from here.

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My office is right off the TV room, um, I mean the family room, and I have no door, so my children are aware of my presence throughout the day. I sometimes wonder what they think my worklife is like, based on what they see me do.

Apparently, worklife means clicking on a keyboard for 10-14 hours a day. There are occasional phone calls, but the ones my kids see tend to be the multi-hour gabfests when I get tired of checking my email and wander around the house in shorts and a headset…

More over at Worthwhile…

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The murder of Nick Berg was horrible. He seems to have been a good-hearted man who went to Iraq because he wanted to help rebuild the country. But why is it the top headline in newspapers around the country?

If the Iraqis had murdered a civilian hostage, the media certainly would have paid attention, but I doubt it would have been the lead story. After all, Berg’s going missing on April 9 wasn’t deemed newsworthy.

Had the Iraqis murdered a hostage by beheading him, the savagery of the act would have made the story more newsworthy, especially in comparison to the humiliations at Abu Ghraib. But I doubt it would have dominated the news cycle.

This became the lead story because there’s video of the savagery.

There’s video because Al Qaeda wanted it to be the lead story.

Al Qaeda is better at manipulating our media than it is at fighting its war.

Heather knew Nick. Other reactions from Boston bloggers at Boston-online.com.

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May 6, 2004

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Here’s a link to the interview on NPR’s Fresh Air that Bill O’Reilly doesn’t want you to hear.

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George Packer of the New Yorker is on the NPR talk show, The Connection, complaining about blogs because, first, they’re addictive, and second, they’re frequently written quickly and contain shallow ideas. He assumes blogs are like second-string columnists and misses entirely the role of millions of blogs as as social phenomenon.

So, I figure I should point this out in a blog entry written quickly and without any interesting ideas.

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The Army Times, the unofficial newspaper of the US Army, is calling for Rumsfeld to resign. Here are some excerpts:

Around the halls of the Pentagon, a term of caustic derision has emerged for the enlisted soldiers at the heart of the furor over the Abu Ghraib prison scandal: the six morons who lost the war.

Indeed, the damage done to the U.S. military and the nation as a whole by the horrifying photographs of U.S. soldiers abusing Iraqi detainees at the notorious prison is incalculable.

But the folks in the Pentagon are talking about the wrong morons…

The entire affair is a failure of leadership from start to finish. From the moment they are captured, prisoners are hooded, shackled and isolated. The message to the troops: Anything goes.

…On the battlefield, Myers’ and Rumsfeld’s errors would be called a lack of situational awareness — a failure that amounts to professional negligence.

…This was not just a failure of leadership at the local command level. This was a failure that ran straight to the top. Accountability here is essential — even if that means relieving top leaders from duty in a time of war.

[Thanks to Tim Bishop for the link.]

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