Craig Pfeifer gives away the secret—the secret site that is supposedly only accessible if you buy the new Counting Crows cd, that is. Man, it's good to know developers, even if they are straying into Sklyarov territory. :)

He's wrong about the content, though. On Monday they posted a link to a song from a show they did in Irving Plaza, NY, and they claim they'll update every week...

Greg Greene blogs a few articles I missed reporting conservative views on one of the Bush administration's big embarrassments. From the New York Times:

"Most striking, however, is how some conservatives who were Mr. Ashcroft's biggest promoters for his cabinet appointment after he lost his re-election to the Senate in 2000 have lost enthusiasm. They cite his anti-terrorist positions as enhancing the kind of government power that they instinctively oppose."

And Matthew Yglesias goes further:

Ultimately, Ashcroft is George Bush, just as the rest of Bush's cabinet is. It's really time for conservatives (who, unlike we liberals, might be able to exercise some influence on the administration) to name names and say that Bush — not Ashcroft, not Powell, not Mineta, not Ridge, not Rove — is doing bad things and ought to stop.

Salon: Dow roars back, up 488 points. Boy, you gotta love the market. Arrest a few executives and look what happens! Now if we could just nail a few more people in a meaningful way. Like a conviction on Enron (not their accounting partners). Or a few real Al Qaeda spooks, not their addled American "followers." Or maybe a few former executives from Halliburton.

BTW, thanks and a shout to Scott Rosenberg at Salon. Quickly becoming a must-read blog.

Forwarded from a co-worker:

If you had bought $1000.00 worth of Nortel stock one year ago, it would now be worth $49.00. With Enron, you would have $16.50 of the original $1,000.00. With Worldcom, you would have less than $5.00 left.

If you had bought $1,000.00 worth of Budweiser (the beer, not the stock) one year ago, drank all the beer, then turned in the cans for the 10 cent deposit, you would have $214.00.

Based on the above, my current investment advice is to drink heavily and recycle.

Of course, the math is dependent on the beer you choose. If you take Guinness in a can instead of Bud (about $8 for a four-pack), you'd have $50 when you got your deposit back. But it's still a better outcome than buying any of these stinkers. :)

UPDATE: As usual, my fellow bloggers are ahead of the curve. Others who have already told this joke (in different currencies with different beers): Nick at BootBlog, Jake of Jake's Jive, "Wally Street" in the guestbook of FootballPoets.com... and others, I'm sure.

...but John Vanderslice won't be if you go to his concerts. There's one in Seattle at the Crocodile Cafe on Saturday. Highly recommended. I've only heard one track off his newest, Life and Death of an American Fourtracker, and am looking forward to hearing more. (His last album, Time Travel is Lonely, was amazing--I still can't get the title track out of my head.)

Looks like George finally got broadband. I'm jealous of his short cycle... then again, the broadband fairy visited us only about five days after I got there. He writes:

In summary:

Tuesday, July 16:	DSL order placed - service center will call to set-up install
Wednesday, July 18:	Verizon calls back to schedule install (Availability next day)
Tuesday, July 23:	DSL set-up as scheduled
Total:	7 days/5 business days.

Holy cow, what's up with the market? Dow up 200, NASDAQ up 18, S&P 500 up 23... Oh wait, now the Dow is only up 168. It's clearly going to be one of those days.