eGroups provides free mailing lists (listserv, majordomo, you know) that you can use. There are so many - try searching for any topic you are interested in, there is sure to be at least one group. Many have public message archives, so it's sort of like Usenet. But lately eGroups has been getting obnoxious by putting their ads at the *top* of emails. I hope they will see the light and rescind this policy. There are competitors out there, y'know, like Topica.

Hey, cool. The Seattle Times published my letter about roundabouts.

Joel Spolsky on independent bookstores
I liked Shakespeare and Co., but, you know what? They just weren't doing what it takes to be competitive. They didn't have places to sit down. They made you check your bags. They didn't have a cafe. Their selection was much smaller than B&N -- for example, I wanted a book about bicycle touring -- B&N had a whole shelf of bicycle books; Shakespeare had one book.
Amen to that, brother. I'm so tired of reading paeans to the old independent bookstores, where I could never find the book I wanted. We're starting to see a new generation of independent bookstore, like Third Place Books in Seattle, which truly compete with the big chains.

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A woman named Babcock was denied access to a website by censorware. She was eventually able to gain access using the name Babpenis. (via Peter Langston)

Everybody's blogging the 50 Least Influential Movies Of All Time. I'm happy to say that I have only seen one of them - Zardoz (it was pretty bad). I have even avoided seeing any of the Friends-starring ones.

We did see The Klumps the other day. A strange flick, obviously targeted at a youth market, yet filled almost entirely with old man jokes about farting, impotence and sagging boobs. One thing I dislike about the Eastside is the dominance of multiplexes. You have to drive into Seattle to see anything different. You'd think someone would get the idea of devoting one of those many screens to art films.

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Jon Carroll -The Problem With New Data
We want to believe something because it fits with the other things we believe, because the people we know believe it, because the people who believe the other thing are loathsome. Alas, the universe of facts is not a democracy. If it were, I'd vote for fried pork rinds as a health food.

Want to know where Gore and Bush stand on the issues? Check out Issues2000.org "Every Presidential candidate on every issue."

There are lots of things I didn't know. Both candidates do a surprising amount of waffling on abortion, for example. And did you know they agree on the issue of trigger locks? A Gallup poll back in June showed that most people are generally unaware of Bush-Gore differences on the issues.

This blog is turning into half-journal/half-weblog. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? Good diversity or just a lack of focus? Who can say?

We managed to find a new way to waste an afternoon in Seattle: Ride the Ducks of Seattle gives you a silly tour of the city and then drives into Lake Union. Ducks (really DUKWs) are those ampibious craft dating back to WW2. I last rode one at the Wisconsin Dells, where a dog jumps across the canyon gap. In Seattle, we rode around town playing disco music and all of us quacking along on our duck calls. A lot of people we passed quacked back, or started dancing on the sidewalk, which was cool. We even drove by Jean Enerson standing outside KING5, but she didn't quack or dance. Get that woman a duck call.

TinFoil.com is all about old cylinder recordings, many from the 1890s. They transfer them to CD and publish collections. They're up to 17 CDs now. They have a streaming audio clip from the "The Laughing Record." This was the first hit record, but it was so popular that people played the cylinders many times, and clean copies are now rare.

Still more mini book reviews -

• Nanomedicine, by Robert Freitas Jr. is rather overwhelming in the detail it offers about the medical use of nanotech. And yet, for all this detail, I didn't find it that enlightening. It needs a better narrative.
• Rapid Development: Taming Wild Software Schedules, by Steve McConnell, is another of McConnell's excellent books on managing software development. He tells war stories about a number of Microsoft projects that I was involved in, one way or another, and it's always interesting to see someone else's slant on things. He has the nerve to even get into some of the personality and office politics issues that are often the crux of the matter.
• Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson. I was tempted into reading this book by my old college buddy Bill Beck. Even though it isn't science fiction, it reads like it, and that bothered me. There are just so many big plot loopholes. Of course, if the author dealt with all of them, the book would drown in exposition. And the female characters, yikes. More macho taciturn babes who like hasty sex, a la Heinlein's Friday. It just doesn't seem real with such calculated fantasy figures. Heck, it would be more realistic if they were aliens.

The P-I has a nice article today about pedal kayaks. I've seen both the Hobie Mirage and the Open Water Cadence on Lake Sammamish. They are faster and easy to propel than a regular kayak, since they use the more powerful leg muscles.

The Belief System Selector is a quiz that tells you what religion you are, or ought to be, from your answers. In my experience, people don't choose a religion based on their beliefs, but rather the reverse. They identify with a religion out of respect for momma and poppa and all their ancestors, too. Still, it's fun to see how it comes out - it pegs me as a Unitarian, which is not too far off. (Tip of the hat to Identity for this link.)

Hey musicians, here's a new way to make money: busking over the Internet. Now if you don't know, busking means playing for passersby out in public and hoping for tips in your tip jar. Well now you can have a virtual tip jar on your website and see what happens.

More book reviews:

• Bionomics: Economy as Ecosystem , by Michael Rothschild. I found this to be full of errors and kind of lame. The book compares economic entities, such as corporations, to living creatures. It's pretty much a standard apologia for right wing politics. Typical goof: he says that capitalism is the natural economy that you get when there isn't something else imposed by government. Not so - you are far more likely to get feudalism. Capitalism is pretty rare and requires definite help from the government, to enforce contracts, provide money and credit, and treat citizens as equals.
• Ulysses S. Grant, by Brooks D. Simpson. An excellent book about the rise of Grant from obscurity to general-in-chief of the Union armies. You would learn more about project management from this book than from all those trendy business and computer tomes in the best seller lists.
• Gig, by the staff of the notoriously slow-loading website Word.com. A fascinating book, frankly modeled on Studs Terkel's 1972 classic Working. People are interviewed about their jobs: temp, CEO, lawn maintenance man, nurse, escort, bookie, etc. etc. What emerges is a fascinating portrait of our society, the kind you don't get from television.