A few quick photos from last week, including my walk with Esta around the North End and our trip with the dogs to Cape Cod.

(Apologies. I think I promised no more gratuitous dog photos. I was clearly not thinking when I made that promise.)

A few odds and ends that have cluttered my desktop for too long:

• The Decameron Web at Brown, a “growing hypermedia archive of materials dedicated to Boccacio’s masterpiece”
• A Place for Everything—inspiration for turning our basement into something other than a dusty falling-plaster zone
• Holllinger: How the administration’s former chief hawk, Richard Perle, gets to play innocent while getting paid an undisclosed $3.1 million “performance bonus” to run Hollinger’s internal venture fund into the ground
• Slate’s Back to the Future: how Bush gets to skate away from all the stuff he f___ed up during the last three years: by pretending that it was someone else’s fault!
• Youssou N’Dour’s Egypt album, definitely on my “must listen soon” list

This is my month to stop taking things for granted, starting with today’s holiday. Labor Day, if it means anything to most Americans, probably means the last cookout, back-to-school shopping, and time to watch out for drunk drivers. It’s all too easy to forget that the holiday, which originated as an annual march by the Knights of Labor, reflects both workers’ efforts to secure saner working conditions from management and the government’s attempts to appease them while avoiding an official celebration of May Day. The benefits secured by the workers include the establishment of the eight-hour work day and 40 hour work week, overtime pay, and the ability to organize to improve working conditions—which sound awfully nostalgic to this tech worker who’s never seen any of them.. See also the Department of Labor’s official page on the holiday.

Incidentally, out of my 250 news feeds, I only found 26 mentions of "Labor Day", including:

• The Monster Blog’s Labor Day resources (courtesy Fast Company)
• Boston Globe: Bitterness shadows Labor Day breakfast
• NY Times, From Now Until Then: “Coming in the thick of political battle, this Labor Day is a good day to survey what we hold in common.”
• Slate: Why do we get Labor Day off?