I've spent some time away from this to catch up on work and some other stuff. I've also spent a bit of time switching tools for my weblog-maintenance; now I'm using the modern, free (for now) Radio Userland rather than the old, free, not-entirely-stable Frontier 5.0. It's a bit faster at some things, and it's more stable, but I've lost the ability to assign a keystroke to 'Make a link...' in IE (shared menus apparently aren't supported in Radio). Sigh. I have a not-so-awful workaround, though, so I'll stick with Radio.

Might have to check this out; Apple's opening a store in our backyard! Opens May 19th; maybe I'll go see the new iBook in person.

• Apple Computer Launches Retailer in Tysons [Washtech.com]
  

Ellen Goodman with more on that stupid copyright decision about 'The Wind Done Gone':

• Inheritors of 'The Wind' [Boston Globe]
  When [Pat] Conroy himself was once asked by the Mitchell estate to write an official sequel, he says he was told of two conditions: no miscegenation and no homosexuality. He rejected signing any pledge and wrote back in high dudgeon with this first line to 'his' sequel: "After Rhett Butler made love to Ashley Wilkes, he lit a cigarette and said, 'Ashley, did I ever tell you my grandmother was black?'"

"What, you don't trust us?"

• More Missing Pages [NY Times]
  House Republican leaders had to call off Thursday's planned vote on the budget resolution because two pages that were supposed to be in the document were accidentally omitted. Strangely, the two missing pages happened to contain language crucial to the compromise that had persuaded moderates to agree to the budget. Just as strangely, the budget resolution contained only a 4 percent increase in spending -- the amount George W. Bush originally wanted, not the 5 percent he had agreed to.

What to do when the Senate parliamentarian of 30+ years refuses to bend the rules more than a little to aid you in ramming through your tax plan? Fire the commie.

• Key Senate Official Loses Job in Dispute With GOP [Washington Post]
  

Two books on the death penalty that make the case for its abolition, even in the face of McVeigh:

• The Case for Mercy [Washington Post]
  CHOOSING MERCY
  A Mother of Murder Victims Pleads to End the Death Penalty
  By Antoinette Bosco
  
  WHEN THE STATE KILLS
  Capital Punishment and the American Condition
  By Austin Sarat
  

Gail Collins on Donald Rumsfeld's plan to fund a missile-target-practice "shield". (A shield would be a big dome or, heck, a force field around the 48 states and Alaska and Hawaii. What do you call a plan to shoot bullets at bullets? Hint: Not a shield.)

• Beam Me Up, Rummy [NY Times]
  "Some of the things will work, some won't and what we'll do is stop the things that won't and move forward on the things that will," he said.
  
  This sounds suspiciously like a plan to finance one's future retirement by buying only lottery tickets that are going to win. But with that kind of can- do attitude, I don't see why we're settling for a lousy missile shield. Why not decide to outfit our surveillance planes with Romulan cloaking devices, so they could hover invisibly over the rogue nation's launch sites?

More very soon.