I just saw my first McNasty TV ad about the Rev. Wright, and have been receiving low-life direct-mail on Ayres, Bama-the-Commie, etc. for weeks. And ugly Robo-Calls. McNasty doesn't have a single positive thing to offer--he's just out to scare the little-kiddie-voters with eerie recorded bullshit.

So guess what. The fact that Law Professor Barack Obama knows two other Professors just doesn't bother me. The fact that John McCain dirtied his first wife so much Ronald and Nancy Reagan dropped him as a friend and then he married the rich girl, whom he ignored while palling around with Charles Keating and she got addicted to drugs. Now there's the stiuff of a good attack ad, which of course Obama won't run because unlike "Down in Mexico's" candidate he's actually an honorable man, rather than a fake.

How about the astonishing dominance of people whose first language is English at the Olympics? At the last count 182 English speakers had medaled, versus a mere 80 for the next group, the Chinese.

I grow old, I grow old / I will wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Nobody should like the music they liked when they were 8, unless they're already enrolled in the Julliard. It's time not only to dislike current rap, but move onto better, more complex, sounds and wittier and funnier light verse. Even if you share rappers' disdain for women, try Leporello's list aria from Don Giovanni.

Lafayette? that's a good one.

Personally I'd take "The Singing Detective" over either of these soaps.

"Turner also questioned the wisdom of hearings on the subject generally, saying the Soviets used to use the Congressional Record as a source of intelligence.

"When you hold a hearing, you tell our enemies how our system works," Turner said."

And University of Virginia also employs on its faculty one of the chief Big Oil shills trying to debunk Global Warming. What's next? A holocaust denier in the History Department?

Who ever thought old NE family, Andover/Yale/Harvard just disappeared after a couple of years in the Texas? And of course he's not dumb. He's just very very very unwise, beginning with the fact that he doesn't know that he's corrupt.

Anonymous was pretty funny thinking that I meant great photographic artists with my reference to equipment enamoured "shutterbugs." I think though that anyone of a sufficient age who remembers that era knows who I mean, and exactly what boring or soft-core porn photos the repressed smucks produced. Now could anyone with such poor reading skills and lack of cultural range create a good video, even on a rilly rilly rilly fast machine he built himself? But back to the Mac Mini:

"2) Not nearly as easy to setup or as feature-laden as an iMac, since you have to attach a monitor and other devices by hand

It's small, but that isn't a huge advantage for most users, and its overall footprint is probably larger than that of the iMac, what with the separate monitor and all the cables and such you have to run out of it"

iMac set up. Plug keyboard into USB port. Plug Mouse into keyboard.

Mac Mini setup: Plug keyboard into USB port. Plug Mouse into keyboard. Plug monitor into Mini.

Maybe that's not nearly as easy, but it's not exactly hard to plug a monitor in. And "all the cables" wow--it's just a forest there. What the mini replaces, typically, is a big beige PC box---so the size savings are substantial, and the cableage the same. Anemic depends on what you want to use it for. Most users don't game and don't make movies. The point is well made though that Apple may be making a mistake by trading off profit per unit for market share -- but this year's bottom line affects all thinking when you're traded on Wall Street.

Sunspot: "they've actually exited the sub-$1000 market with these latest iMacs at a time when other vendors are offering PCs for less and less."

For some reason nobody's reported that simultaneous with the new iMac Apple has made the $599 mini now standard with a 120 gig hard-drive and 1 Meg of memory (up from 80 and 512) for the same price. Ditto the $799 mini with the Superdrive. So they haven't exited the sub $1000 market completely.

And truth is, most semi-affluent Americans don't really care about a couple of a hundred books if it means having a computer they don't have to fool with as much. I'm a lifelong (since early 80s) Apple user who's never used a PC much, and colleagues at work who hate computers constantly come to me with problems to solve on their PC's. These folks without computer aptitude would all benefit from the Mac operating system, even if it was only 5% easier to use.

Apple touts the hardware because Americans are used to thinking they have to buy stuff based on the specs. People buy cars based on how fast they can accelerate 0-60 even though the differences mostly don't matter at all.