WHO HEARTS CANDY? Someone was bored and developed a insta-candy heart maker online. Other people were even more bored and created their own candy hearts. And judging from the general theme, those people have limited imaginations. The real question is whether you know which one I created...

DO YOU WANT TO MESS AROUND The Old 97s fan site has posted a long, long, long interview with Rhett Miller that appears in the new issue of No Depression magazine. Miller babbles on about his new CD (out in a month), the future of the Old 97s, recording with John Brionn and getting hitched to a supermodel. Among other things.

ANOTHER SPLASH IN THE WEBOSPHERE Warren Ellis writes graphic novels and screenplays and the sort. He also maintains this newsmine (a fancy phrase for a largely editorial-free weblog) called "die puny humans." He gleans good, newsy stuff. Nothing too outlandish or edgy. Not yet anyway.

LEFT BEHIND Camille Paglia gets half of the argument right, and is spot-on in some of her observations: "The language of leftism is out of date. It desperately needs reconstruction and revitalisation, if the Left is ever to regain its proper status as a voice of ethical critique of materialistic modern society." But it's not just language. The Left has become simultaneously strident and arrogant, and continues to position itself as a victim, or in the role of the emotional opposition. Before the language of the Left can change, before the Left can become an effective force again, it needs to decide who it wants to be. Once again, the Left needs to prove it can grow up, adapt and engage wisely.

IGNATIUS CHIMES IN David Ignatius remains one of my favorite business writers, foreign affairs analysts and novelists, and today he knocked another one out of my park. And I hate baseball. Ignatius looks at the Middle East, and one possible (and smart) American motive, which is to open the region up to democracy. Not a short-term objective, he says. Not a goal that can be accomplished in six months, or by invading Iraq, or settling tensions between Israel and Palestine. No, democracy in the region is 10-year project with multiple tangents, participants, baby steps. And it is "where the left and right should converge -- in supporting democracy and human rights across the Arab world. America doesn't need to go to war (beyond Iraq) or topple governments willy-nilly. It just needs to be true to its values, and never deviate from its long-term strategy for the sake of preserving the status quo." Good luck. But still...

EVERYBODY MUST GET STONED Among the many interesting tidbits served up by Howard Kurtz this morning is a look at a piece by conservative activist Grover Norquist. Norquist argues that Bush's high approval ratings are actually bad for the conservative agenda. He doesn't come right out and say it, but here's my interpretation: When things are going well and everyone loves you, you're much more cautious not to piss anyone off. (Bear in mind that when I say "everyone," I mean the 65-70% of the population that actually likes Bush.) Which is why Bush actually took more risks and did more publicly annoying things (Kyoto, Ashcroft, etc.) in the months after he was elected when 55% of the country thought he was either a) not supposed to be President, or b) stupid. Basically, Norquist argues that we need more rock throwing, and as someone who'd prefer to see a hearty left-of-center agenda take root, I couldn't agree more.

RIGHT THEY ARE Irony is dead.

DAMN THAT CAMPER VAN This year's odd music moment: Camper van Beethoven's release of its note-by-note reconstruction of Fleetwood Mac's 1979 followup to "Rumors." Apparently, it's a winner. And the San Francisco Bay Guardian gives you the backstory, ending with this thought for those of us who thought Camper rocked: "While everybody (a word that here means "that subset of the population that cares who Camper Van Beethoven are or were") is distracted by comparing these songs with Fleetwood Mac's, they're forgetting to compare them with old CVB material. Which leaves Camper free to be themselves and do whatever the fuck they want, just like they used to."

GOOD MUSICIANS GETTING BETTER There are musicians who are talented and whose music is worth listening to, and there are talented musicians who are worth listening to. Steve Earle is among the latter. After a messy career and a love affair with the drink and the dope, Earle emerged from beneath his rock and has gone prolific -- six albums in six years, producing other people's music (including Lucinda Williams'), and a book of short stories, a new acting company. He's active in anti-death penalty lobbying. Oh, yeah. He also pissed a lot of people off with a song that looked at the world from the perspective of John Walker Lindh. Salon chats him up.

CAUSE AND EFFECT Republican Tom DeLay stepped forward recently and made the case for invading Iraq, spelling it out in 8 simple arguments. Slate comes along and asks a very good question: What other countries pass DeLay's (and the White House's) Iraqi litmus test? The answer falls somewhere between 9 and 72 (depending on whether you have exceptionally strong moral clarity or you get a little fidgety now and again). I mean, hell, if we're going to be all high-and-mighty about it, we should be prepared to do it with gumption.-

HOUSE OF SAUD, WE HARDLY KNEW YA Slate lofts a grenade at the Rand Corporation in the form of a little expose on Rand analyst Laurent Murawiec, who delivered the newsmaking presentation to the Department of Defense a few weeks back that made no secrets about someone's desire to put Saudi Arabia in the crosshairs. Murawiec apparently clued a Dubai-based news organization to his real views on the Saudis that seem to have little to do with their politics: "My experience of your part of the world is that most people hate the Saudis' guts, not to make too fine a point about it. Everybody knows they are a bunch of lazy assholes that are arrogant, too big for their shoes, which behave in a consistently disgusting manner," he reportedly said. Ouch. There is, naturally, a huge amount of backpedaling going on at the Rand Corporation.%

AL QAEDA WE HARDLY KNEW YA Goodbye, Al-Qaeda (trans. "The Base"), hello Fath-e-Islam (trans. Victory of Islam). According to Asia Times, Osama bin Laden has regrouped in the solidly conservative Kunar province of Afghanistan and changed the name of his organization. Couple that with a new U.N. report that says the global, financial lockdown on al-Qaeda money has faltered and the organization is as solvent as it was a year ago.

A WHOLE LOTTA INVADING Middle East Newsline makes an unsurprising report -- Saudi Arabia is actively pursuing a nuclear weapons program. Shades of Saddam Hussein... I suppose it makes sense that after we invade the country with the second-largest reserves of oil, we should go after the first. And then there's always Pakistan. The new global motto -- Weapons of Mass Destruction: Everyone else has them, so why don't we?

APPLE: HELLSPAWN You have to scroll a bit down the page for this one, but Lord is it worth the mouse click. "Take for example Apple Computers, makers of the popular Macintosh line of computers. The real operating system hiding under the newest version of the Macintosh operating system (MacOS X) is called... Darwin! That's right, new Macs are based on Darwinism! While they currently don't advertise this fact to consumers, it is well known among the computer elite, who are mostly Atheists and Pagans. Furthermore, the Darwin OS is released under an "Open Source" license, which is just another name for Communism. They try to hide all of this under a facade of shiny, "lickable" buttons, but the truth has finally come out: Apple Computers promote Godless Darwinism and Communism." What I really want to do right now is lick my computer screen.

EQUAL TIME Yes, I turn again to The Morning News (remember: you and I work from opposite ends of this weblog -- what I post first, you read last). Dennis Mahoney explains the mystery of girls, which leads all back to where we started. Started this conversation, I mean. Not where we started, as in the womb.

THE DATING GAME I conveniently leaped to this link from mightygirl.net and was pleased to discover that it answers all of the questions I've been asked by various acquaintances who are gnashing their teeth at the behavior of the young fellows they have been seeing. Sailboat races... heh.

MIGHTY GOOD Mightygirl.net keeps it concise, keeps it clever, and seems to draw from the appropriate moments of a person's day. Oh, yeah. She used the phrase, "I like the cut of his jib."

THE POLICYMAKERS' POLICYMAKERS The Chicago Tribune ran this excellent piece recently on the Defense Policy Board, a formerly bi-partisan group that presented general policy recommendations to the Secretary of Defense that has become a conservative lobbying outfit in the halls of the Pentagon.

AN EGYPTIAN VIEW Hassan Nafaa, professor at Cairo University, has penned an interesting opinion piece for Al-Ahram Weekly that is less about a U.S. attack on Iraq and more about his notions on Pan-Arabism. Nafaa sees in the Iraqi situation an opportunity for Egypt, Saudi Arabia and other Arab states to step forward in unity with Bagdhad to boldly block the United States, which on the surface is an interesting notion. But my sense in following his thread is that it's basically a more subtle strand of the same fibre that has led Arab states into catastrophe after catastrophe since the region began shedding its colonial trappings half a century ago. century ago.

I AGAINST I Salman Rushdie dives into the conversation about the sources of anti-Americanism in today's Post with a quote from the Guardian newspaper that suggests that Americans have "a bug up their collective arse the size of Manhattan." Ouch. Rushdie continues by identifying some of the contradictions and collisions that have defined some of the global community's view on the United States, ranging from reversing course in Afghanistan, to blocking U.N. mediation in Kashmir, and of course events in Iraq and the rest of the Middle East.

SEARCH ENGINE MADNESS I just pulled the top phrases used in search engines in the month of August that drew random people to my weblog. With the exception of "campbell brown sexy" I can't imagine what drugs people are using. Then again, I always did like the way she reported the local news. Here they are: washingtonpost; campbell brown sexy; free dead celebrity biorhythms; john sarvay; kidney stone drug; mcdonalds restaurant bitching; motorcycle homer simpson image; on green dolphin streetlyrics; of american presidents on trains; rachid taha lyrics barra barra; tumbled glass.

PHIL DONAHUE: GANGBANGER Henry Jenkins, director of MIT's comparative media studies program, was invited to appear on the revived "Donahue" show to discuss violence in video games. As an expert on the subject, he should have seen the bullet coming straight at him long before he sat down in the studio. Jenkins presents a lively recap of his television-style execution, and laces it with some interesting facts about new media, old media and Grand Theft Auto 3.

DEMOCRACY OR ELSE The U.S. has an increasingly mixed record when it comes to practicing its democratic principles and holding its allies to comprehensible standards in the same arena. The Financial Times argues that this is one of the biggest mistakes the Bush Administration has made in its foreign policy. "This is not just because temporising with tyrants visits misery on citizens of the countries concerned. It is also because anything less than clarity about democracy blunts what should be a critical weapon in the campaign to uproot terror and stamp out international lawlessness," the Times writes. And calling for democracy in Iraq or withholding aid from a corrupt Egyptian government while turning a blind eye to the antics of Pakistan's Musharaf or the repression in other Central Asian states (because we want to establish military bases there) is exactly less than clear.

EMPTY STOMACHS, EMPTY WORDS? The Guardian does the work for me today, compiling a host of intelligent links that provide background on the World Summit for Sustainable Development, as well as links on food, water and environmental issues being discussed by some 65,000 summit attendees. An excellent resource.

GIVE ME A CHESTERFIELD Scary fact du jour: Both the creator of overbooked.org and Amy Mann are originally from Chesterfield County, Virginia. So am I. Shattered is my lifelong belief that I was the only interesting by-product of the sprawling, suburban enclave. Anyhoo, overbooked.org is laden with new book lists -- a way to keep track of the onslaught of pulp hitting the B&N near you. I will check this site faithfully because, Lord knows, I don't have too many books sitting about unread as it is.

MANN, OH MANN Til Tuesday's Amy Mann has a new CD hitting the streets today. Another local girl gone good, Mann has proven herself to be an exceptional songwriter chockful of mopey brilliance; this go around, she's foresworn sadness for darkness: "Whereas some of the other records were records you would listen to after breaking up with somebody, this is more the record you would listen to after your three-day coke binge in a Holiday Inn," she tells the Orlando Weekly. Her timing couldn't be better -- there's a three-day weekend coming up!

PENSIVE KATE Irish streetfighter Kate Sullivan follows advice today, fighting for her voice. Or fighting with her voice. It's wavered some since her return to the City of Angels from the land of gophers, but lately it's been sounding more and more like I imagine it should. Today she starts pensive, gets feisty and goes reflective. And she does it in 500 words or less.

KAFKA, MEET ASHCROFT Author James Bamford, whose keen perspectives make "Body of Secrets," his look at the National Security Agency, one of the more compelling nonfiction works I've read this year, delivers a stiff check to the Department of Justice. Bamford's arguments are all spot-on, and his call for Congress to hold public hearings on how Justice is conducting itself is overdue. Secret hearings, deportations, detentions and arguments that the President can legally and indefinately detain without charges any person arbitrarily designated an "enemy combatant" all pose a more significant and long-term threat to this nation than Iraq, al Qaeda or Islamic fundamentalism.

THE SLOW WHEELS OF JUSTICE It's a shame it's taken so long for the wheels of Justice to finally stop spinning and start deciding, but I'll have a beer in honor of the Federal Appeals Court in Cincinnati later. In regards to the detention of Michigan activist Rabih Haddad: "The Executive Branch seeks to uproot people's lives, outside the public eye, and behind a closed door," Senior Judge Damon J. Keith wrote in the opinion for the court. "Democracies die behind closed doors. The First Amendment, through a free press, protects the people's right to know that their government acts fairly, lawfully, and accurately in deportation proceedings."

THE BALL IS ROLLING Dick Cheney cast the first stone yesterday; Iraqi dissidents have been giving their PR marching orders; regional ambassadors are circling back in to meet with President Bush (the Saudi ambassador's in Texas today)... If you line these ducks up with some key military movements in the past several weeks, you'd probably suspect that someone's made a decision about the when and how vis-a-vis Iraq.

MY ONE TIME Don't look for a single September 11 reflective link after this one, which is today's column by Howard Kurtz about the role of journalists in covering the day's events. Kurtz has his usual well-toned lead-in, and then passes the reins to the Newseum's new book, "Running Toward Danger," about domestic journalists who suddenly became war correspondents. It's simply nicely done.

WRITING AROUND THE WORLD The 1000 Journals Project is another snazzy effort to use the web to communicate about and publicize a rather un-techy project. The journals are floating around the world -- actual physical journals -- where people add to them, then mail them back out. Some of the end results are just stellar (others, naturally, are not).

IT TAKES A BLOGGER OF MILLIONS In regards to my previous post (previous to me, next to you), where I mentioned a million weblogs floating in the ether, here's a li'l WIRED piece on why it's nigh impossible to guestimate the number of weblogs. Suffice to say, I've visited nine today and host two of my own (go ahead... try and find the second one...), so there are at least 11.

THE MIRROR PROJECT Started eons ago, The Mirror Project has blossomed and now hosts a gajillion images that people from around the world have taken of themselves reflected in the mirror. Harrumph! posts a gaggle of them during the site's summer break.

KATE'S BOOK MOMENT The thieving rock writer Kate Sullivan posts an article from the LATimes on Black Sparrow Press (okay, the legendary Black Sparrow Press... give me a break). Sometimes I get a little twitchy (I really mean a very little) about the decline of the small press, but then I mail off a half dozen manuscripts in one sitting and I wonder what in the world I'm worried about. The world's littered with small presses, and more than a million weblogs.