Brightrock

On Saturday, in a valiant attempt to beat the heat, we journeyed to the Coconino County Fairgrounds near Flagstaff for the Made in the Shade Beer Festival.

The drive took about two hours and was worth every minute.  Accompanied by my old friend Cynthia (in town to visit her grandma) and my new friend Alan (a local Burner who was willing to act as tour guide), I managed to break my usual habit of sitting around the hotel room on my business trips and actually got out and explored.  I should have some pictures to share once Alan and Cynthia get around to emailing them to me :-)

What the hell was I thinking?  At 109 degrees, that whole ". . . but it's a dry heat!" platitude starts to loose its appeal.  I could feel the moisture fleeing my body from the moment I got off the plane.  The battle against dehydration has begun!   

I suppose that I'm lucky to be here on business - I can hide out in the A/C all day long.  

 Boggle makes a nice diversion: Web Boggle

Gary Matthews made one of the best catches that I've ever seen against the Astros the other day. These are the kinds of plays that make baseball exciting to watch. Click on the picture to launch a video of the play. (more…)

The idea that a major news network would advocate re-establishing an "Office of Censorship" shocks me: Fox & Friends co-host Kilmeade advocated "Office of Censorship" in wake of NY Times banking surveillance story.  Did Kilmeade miss that part of civics class where they discussed the importance of a free press?  Why bother to vote if we have no right to know how the government is conducting itself?  Under existing American law, the government can already stop the publication of certain specific types of information such as troop movements.  If the New York Times had been publishing stories about upcoming raids on specific targets in Iraq, the conservative critics might have a point.  The topics covered in the recent banking stories, however, don't appear to have been particularly secret.