There are too many Blairs, imho. In this article, Salon.com News | N.Y. Times finds more bogus Blair reports, it’s evident that the headline writer was either on early vacation or up for early promotion.

I’m reading Jeffrey Zeldman’s brand new book from New Riders press called Designing With Web Standards and it’s quite eye-opening. I do definitely believe that the way that most people (including myself) have been building websites will be obsolete in about 1 to 2 years time. I’ve realized this for a while and that CSS and XML and DOM is the future of Web computing, but it’s powerful to see Zeldman make the case coherently with an eye toward the history and mis-management of browser development. (Browsers are how we see the Web, in all its beauty and bluster.) The crusade to build more standards-based websites is a natural evolution that has coincied with every media from books to television and I welcome it with clenched teeth.

As car manufacturers like Honda and Cadillac place increasingly larger and larger corporate logos/ornaments on their cards, there is a small but growing trend of car Logo Removal. I find it kind of fascinating and I’ve only really seen it in Bed-Stuy, of course. Some of the larger SUVs, in particular (and no, well, these are not cars), will have tricked out, customized front grills and very clean, logo-less skins. Most of these vehicles are painted black. These look very, very wicked, for some reason and my reasoning is as follows:
1. The car is anonymous in the way that the Secret Service employs for its automotive machines. The car looks like a conspiracy on wheels.
2. The car looks less recreational and all about business while at the same time, it defies big business identity, corporate culture, and visual recognition. It’s small-time, mob capitalism which we are not supposed to know enough about.
3. The car is cared for personally and in a real sense, the car is re-owned or re-captured from industry itself. This ironically makes the car appear sinister and romantic, cold and palpable, smart and aloof.

Sometimes I’ll read a book to my daughter which will show a large, usually uppercase, letter next to a picture or ideogram, such as an apple or a cat. So, an “B” will be next to a bird and an “Z” will be next to a “zebra.” Nothing interesting. But when one “reads” the book, one says “B is for bird, C is for cat, D is for dog, E is for Elephant” and so on. Why is the letter “for” something? How did it originate that a letter is “for” a word? Shouldn’t it be “Bird starts with B, Cat starts with C, Dog starts with D, Elephant starts with E” — or is this just non-alliterative and unfriendly. I think a lot of our language works this way, whether it’s childhood-related or not; a series of words stick and they are used to make sense of the world regardless of their internal logic. I just wish I was more conscious of this in daily, speaking life.

I’m not sure if I live in Brooklyn, New York or São Paulo, Brasil, what with all this rain.

Mark Bowden, who writes for the Philadelphia Inquirer, and wrote Black Hawk Down has much to say about the current state of Iraqi mis-affairs in this article: U.S. has gained little if Bush lied about reason for war.

I certainly don’t mean to be an apologist for Mr. Bush, though that is what it sounds like, perhaps, in the posting below. Rather, I really believe that Mr. Bush and his strategists have their finger on history in a way that the Democrats have totally abandoned—what do the Democrats stand for in the context of their social experiments, cultural gravitas, and general disgruntlement with their own kind? Do the Dems still believe in the social contract, in a humane society replete with healthcare for all and strong employment? It’s not clear and unless they change their too subtle political ways and means, Mr. Bush will have four more years to work his magic.
Underlining all of this, for me, is that Bush and Friends know how to use (or misuse) history for their own ends (e.g. Bush on the flight deck, Bush at Auschwitz, Bush as Ike) in ways that runs circles around the well-meaning but semiotically inept Democrats.

In a little-acknowledged story, President Bush visited Auschwitz-Birkenau yesterday for about an hour and a half. I’ve had the bad fortune of visiting that site three times while I lived in Krakow. While 1.5 hours is very little time to see this incredibly large complex of Nazi death machinery, it is historically interesting to watch Mr. Bush mildly connect the dots between Saddam Hussein and the Nazis. I know that his press secretary, Ari Fleischer (who lost family in World War II), won’t go so far as to say this, but Bush is clearly setting the stage for shifting political weight to Poland and those countries most recently subjugated to Fascism and Communism; this inherently, of course, makes France and Germany (and Russia) seem violently out of touch with contemporary human rights abuses and American and Soviet involvement in saving the continent from itself between 1943 and 1945. With activists very active in Geneva right now, my prediction is that this will be one of the more important G7/G8 meetings in history.