Interesting comments on third parties, their goals, and the best ways to gain real significance in the electoral process:

• A long shot that matters [Boston Phoenix, found via Bird on a Wire via Breaching the Web]
  Seven months to go before the presidential election, and we're already well into the "Is that all there is?" phase of the campaign.
  
  ... it's true that voting for a third candidate in a close election is essentially throwing away your power to help choose the winner.
  
  ...all three minor parties with a real chance for growth -- Reform, Green, and Libertarian -- should concentrate on the handful of states where one of the two major parties is particularly weak. ... The goal should be to finish second somewhere -- if not in a state, then in a congressional district or even a county -- and establish a beachhead for future elections.

Hmmm. This makes some sense.

...grumble razzafrazzin ratsafruggin uhrrrrr...

• McCain says he may campaign with Bush soon [CNN]
  Wolf Blitzer asked McCain whether he expected to be meeting with and campaigning for Bush within the next week, two weeks or month. "I think sooner rather than later," McCain said.
  
  "My strategy is to make sure that Governor Bush is the president of the United States," he said. "I just need to reach some understandings with him."

<SIGH> At least he's still sticking to his 'Be Vice President? Are you crazy?' stance.

(Screenshot/Amanda beat me to it, but I'm posting it anyway...) The Brunching Shuttlecocks make up some new Perl functions (and even if you're not a programmer, you may still find much of it funny):

• Fuzzy Logic Functions [The B.S.]
  skim FILEHANDLE
  This function quickly looks over the data contained in FILEHANDLE, trying to get the gist of it and looking for any dirty bits or clever quotations it can use at parties to impress people.

My contribution:

sub weblog {
   print skim WEB;
}

Librarians rule:

• Librarians are heroes of Net censorship fight by Dan Gillmor [SJ Merc, from librarian.net]
  They are champions of some vital principles, "the unsung heroes of the fight for free expression, intellectual freedom and access to the Internet."
  
  They are librarians, and that was a quote from a well-deserved award that went to "librarians everywhere" on Thursday evening. The honor was one of the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Pioneer Awards, presented at the annual Computers, Freedom & Privacy conference, held this week in Toronto.
  
  "All I know is that if you want to read, it's my job to help you do it." [Karen G. Schneider]

Okay, I'm back on the weblogs.com monitor, so that's another way you can find out when I've updated. Or you can just tell me you want to be on my update list.

You can also see which weblogs I'm particularly interested in tracking.

PC Week is now going to be eWeek [ZDNet]. Yecchh.