• Boston Globe: Job Losses Mount in Bay State. The paper points out that while the jobless rate dropped to 5.3% last month in Massachusetts, much of that was due to people not looking any more. For the record, the jobless rate in Washington State is 6.1%.
• Clancy Ratliff: Dude, who put a screw in YOUR spring roll? How not to handle a food tainting issue.
• Tom Harpel: Visualize Your Home Directory. Disk Inventory X is a hard disk space visualizer using treemaps, the same visualization technology used by Microsoft Research’s maps of Usenet.
• Bryan Strawser: The Trouble with the Freedom Trail. Pointer to Boston Globe article about how to move the Freedom Trail away from monuments and to where the action actually happened.
• Zork over AIM (via MeFi). “You are in a maze of twisty little emoticons, all alike.” What the MeFi article doesn’t say is you can also play Hitchhiker’s Guide, Deadline, Wishbringer, or Planetfall, among others.

After rumors and accusations, a former counterterrorist official in George W. Bush’s administration (and Reagan’s, and George H. W. Bush’s, and Clinton’s) is out in print and on 60 Minutes, laying out how the administration’s criminal neglect of its duties in 2001 laid the groundwork for 9/11. Commentary by Oliver Willis and Talking Points Memo/Joshua Micah Mitchell.

Other pointers: the relevant chapter from Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them; the first rumblings of Republican smears against Clarke, with attendant debunking

There are now so many Dunkin’ Donuts stores in Boston that they are causing traffic problems, says the Boston Globe. There are currently 1.9 Dunkin’ Donuts stores per square mile in the city, and the company thinks they need more to alleviate parking lot congestion.

(God, I love the Local News Boston.com RSS feed.)

Oliver North says that liberals worry too much about conspiracy theories. This is, of course, the same Oliver North who was the principal criminal and photogenic felon for the conspiracy to sell arms to Iran and send the money to the Nicaraguan Contras while defrauding Congress. So he should know.

—Am I on Candid Camera???

(via Boing Boing)

The New York Times on Rauschenberg’s latest exhibition. I first saw his work in an exhibition in the National Gallery in 1990—a retrospective of the Rauschenberg Overseas Cultural Interchange works. I still have a print of Malaysian Flower Cave, though it’s somewhat dented from falling off dorm room walls.

A year ago yesterday: To Hell With Good Intentions. In my opinion the best installment of my Internet Lyric Poetry experiments.

I just watched the implosion of Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia about three times on network TV. Say what you like about network television, there is no better medium for high fidelity replays of vast deployments of explosive devices.

I love the quotes from Philadelphia residents in the San Jose Mercury News: “I’ve lived here 12 years, and it was a pain in the rear end.”

Bonus link: history of the Phillies’ stadiums at their official site. Bonus link #2 (mature audiences): Lyrics to Perry Farrell’s song “Porno for Pyros,” in which he shares similar feelings about the LA riots.