The situation from London seems to be much the same. While I am not a big consumer of British media, I still haven't been exposed to anything mentioning the Olympics. With Athens it was in the news because of all the construction delays, but even Torino hasn't had that sort of publicity. I think this lack of promotion is not just due to NBC; have the Italians or the IOC or the sponsors (or all of the above) just dropped the ball?

According to the New York Times, Vice President Cheney is taking medication for, among other things, gout:

Mr. Cheney has been taking a long list of medications for a number of conditions, including heart disease and gout.

The article is careful, however, to not say that he has the disease:

Mr. Cheney had long suffered periodic pain in his heel, which has been diagnosed as tendonitis, and in his big toe, which has led to a murkier diagnosis: gout or osteoarthritis.

See the full article at the following address:

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?sec=health&res=9906EED81F30F933A25752C0A9609C8B63

While I am disappointed that this second movie is worse than the first (which was fun, mindless entertainment), I hope that we will at least get a DVD as good as the first movie's. The first Underworld didn't have anything particularly exciting on it, but it did have a fun commentary track with Len Wiseman, Kate Beckinsale, and Scott Speedman (for part of it). Maybe it was just co-workers making fun of each other and their movie, but I enjoyed it and this is actually what I remember best from the movie. I hope that they will do another commentary for this movie. Maybe they will see fit to mention the details of their prop department.

While one logical response would be to move manufacturing back closer to the point of sale, another would be to develop shipping methods that are less reliant or don't rely on oil. Maybe that means even bigger superfreighters in order to consolidate shipping and use less oil (though I can't tell you if that is actually more efficient; this article suggests that it might be: http://www.manbw.com/files/news/filesof4672/P9028.pdf). However, higher oil prices might lead to a search for cheaper ways of propulsion. Hydrogen fuel cells should presumably work just as well on ships as in cars (and would not have the same space or weight constraints), and very efficient solar cells might not be bad. Another interesting idea is going back to where it all started: wind power. Sails are generally unpopular for a variety of reasons, including the deck space they take that would otherwise have been devoted to containers, but huge kites seem like an interesting technology. I believe I also read a science magazine in the US making a brief mention of it sometime within the last year, but unable to find the article, a quick Google search turned up these two sites:

http://www.dcss.org/speedsl/Trans_Sailcraft.html

http://www.archi-me-des.de/archimedes_architecture_media_design/archimedes_work/hands_on/archimedes_kites/index.html

I have to say, that comment about athlete profiles was right now. I admire the fact that Olympic athletes worked hard to get there, but the networks take the theme too far, forcing you to say, "That part about your cat's death forcing you to work harder than you ever had for his memory, I'm not buying it."

The New York Times ran an article today (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/21/international/africa/21lake.html) about salt lakes in Kenya and the products developed based on the microbes in them. The Kenyan government has been trying to get foreign companies to pay some sort of compensation for this.