Früvous news: The C Album is coming in May! Also, MF is making one of their rare trips to California at the end of May. See this band.

The Daily Show was in rare form last night, with Jon Stewart skewering ABC for airing news-free 'personality interviews' with the pets.com sock puppet not long after ABC's parent company Disney bought a stake in pets.com. Diane Sawyer and Charlie Gibson were both shown in clips making big doofuses of themselves.

ABC dude Sam Donaldson was the guest, and promptly 'denounced' Jon for his attacks, though I'm pretty sure he was in agreement. Stewart also asked Donaldson a very pointed, intelligent question about the election and left Donaldson temporarily speechless, never getting a good answer out of him...great fun. (That episode will be shown again at 6:00 Central tonight if you want to catch it...)

The Daily Show has a downloadable 'news minute' now, in mp3 format. I'll have to remember to go there on days I don't catch the show.

Back when I asked if there were any other interesting/worthy candidates left in the presidential race besides the two [noun]s we have from the major parties, the only recommendation I got was to check out Ralph Nader (not surprisingly, it was from the Nader-boosting MonkeyFist folk).

I haven't looked closely at him yet; my folks instilled in me a vague suspicion/dislike of Nader at an early age, though I'm not sure I ever knew what it was based on. Maybe he's worth another look.

Flag amendment defeated again; U.S. dodges 'laughingstock' label again:

• Links to articles & Congressional transcripts, thanks to Jason Levine at q.queso.com

There seems to be a big disconnect (or over-connect, I guess) in some folks' minds that the symbol of something is the same thing as what it symbolizes, and that the abuse of a symbol is equivalent to an attack on the underlying thing. It's not; if anything, it's the other way around.

Put another way: Attacks on freedom tarnish what the flag symbolizes. Attacks on the flag don't tarnish underlying freedoms.

Of course, it's so much easier to pontificate against attacks on a symbol than it is to guard against the possible narrowing of citizens' rights and liberties with every new law. Yet that's what matters, not the symbol.

P.J. of North Carolina, author of the promising new 'og Cluttered, said some very nice things about this site, for which I thank him.

As far as his wish for me to update more often (a common request): I know, I know...the problem is, these days I'm frequently overwhelmed both by work and by having a life outside of the web, and as I said a while back, my tools aren't suited to the always-posting mentality that the web-writing community encourages/demands.

(What ever happened to weekly columnists? Why isn't that an acceptable pace for web writers?)

However, just yesterday I had a near-blinding insight about how I can move forward into the more-frequently-posting world while still making it easy for myself, staying fairly consistent with my current site structure, not using meaningless serial numbers for permanent item-level links, all while staying well within my current programming skillset. I've no idea when I'll have time to actually program it, but it'll happen eventually.

I did think about using Blogger, which seems plenty adequate for many folks' purposes, and definitely offers more flexibility for free than, say, editthispage.com (which, just guessing, might be why 'designers' and other so-called 'elitists' prefer it), but my purposes are just different enough (and I'm stubborn enough) that I want to do it My Way. The cost is that I won't get a real online content-management tool anytime soon, but the benefit is that it'll do exactly what I want it to; no more, no less.

All the same, are there Blogger t-shirts available for sale? They look nifty. (Asked & answered: their site sez, "We're all out of them right now, but we plan on printing more in the near future. When we do, we'll post when and where and why and how right here.")

Repeat after me: 'Storing plain text is cheap.'

I'm also enjoying Ghost in the Machine, another relatively young 'og. To prove it, I will snatch a link from it: Chicken Run's trailer is out (from the makers of Wallace and Gromit!) (Direct link to QuickTime version, 3.3MB)

Copped from Cluttered: Gillian Anderson interviews David Duchovny [USA Today]

Wow, I've gotta stop & get some work done. Plus, I'm apparently behind on my e-mail obligations... Later!