Random Thoughts 7/25/08

• The FBI has a nice little Top 10 list of Myths in FBI history. Sorry to you X-Files fans. Of course if you're a conspiracy theorist, this is nothing more than lies, lies, lies!!! There also a brief little story about the Kansas City Massacre of 1933.
• Today I received my fantasy football trophy! Yahoo! It's very cool, after about 15 seasons of fantasy football, with several 2nd place finishes, I finally won the championship last year. We've often awarded the trophies at the following year's draft (the only time we have everybody together), but being commissioner has its advantages.
  
• This Wall Street Journal article compares President Bush and Batman and asks, "Why is it, indeed, that the conservative values that power our defense -- values like morality, faith, self-sacrifice and the nobility of fighting for the right -- only appear in fantasy or comic-inspired films like "300," "Lord of the Rings," "Narnia," "Spiderman 3" and now "The Dark Knight"?" Read the whole thing here.
  
• If the software is "prettier," would that inspire you to use it? That the premise here, as Linux gets a two year total makeover to "make it prettier than the Mac OS." Pretty is good, but it better be intuitive, productive, and effective as well. [thanks David T. for the heads up]
• Yesterday we had, including our own, seven kids under seven years old for about twelve hours. We were babysitting our friends' kids. And it wasn't that bad! The logistics were more of a challenge but it wasn't any more stressful or any less doable from a parenting point of view.
• The Chiefs start training camp, and in many ways start over, in River Falls, Wisconsin. I wish I was more excited. But the truth is Chiefs fans are thinking long term, two or three years from now. By all counts, this year will be rough.
• Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer says that Microsoft is going to copy the way Apple does things. Hmm… interesting.
• The Seattle Supersonics, which at one point we hoped would move to the Sprint Center in KC, may have a new name when they move to Oklahoma. The rumor floating around this week is that the team will be called the Oklahoma City Thunder. Really? Thunder?