It's been a good summer. The garden is full of cherry tomatoes, collards and kale. Diving board jumping skills were attained by those that needed it. Stuff acquired includes the $320 canoe and I had an Almond Joyful at Purity Dairy.

• Presidential Update: sometime comment maker and Societ hat giver John of Argghhh! met the President of the US today.
• Update: Now that is an honest to goodness conservative protester. Go baby go! And remember - it's not just materialistic and virtue eroding. Pop culture really does suck.
• Update: Coco is magic.
• The beer blog hits 1,000 posts today. Sniff. I could have learned Finnish, Urdu and the saxophone with all that time. Or just slept in.
• This story is just hilarious for it's failure to admit the obvious conclusion:

  One of the biggest differences noted by the researchers was the emphasis put on a single story. While the mainstream media tended to revisit the same story from a different angle each day, users were happier dipping in to a variety of topics. "It was more hit and miss with a sense that they wanted to know a little about a lot of things," said Mr Rosenstiel. News editors need not hang up their notebooks and pens quite yet though. The report found that traditional news outlets such as the BBC still accounted for a quarter of the content on the user news sites. Interestingly, original content accounted for just 1%.

  Interestingly? So much for a citizen journalist revolution and so much for any hope of getting an understanding of what is going on from news 2.0. Blogs, this one included, are really just parasitic bitch sessions. Why is that not enough? Why do we have to lie to each other?
• I am not as big a fan of NFL as other sports and this is one reason. Giving out one of the harshest penalties possible for sign stealing is a joke. The interface between the activity at the sidelines and on the field should be utterly fair game as the only influence on any game should be purely restricted to the field. Disrupting messages from non-players to players should be encouraged. If you need to be told what to do minute-by-minute mid-game, you are not as good a player or not as well prepared a team as you should be.
• Scandal in the world of dwile flonking! What's that you ask? An English pub game, dontcha know. Here are the rules:

  "Flonk" is an Old English word for ale and "dwile" is a knitted floor cloth. Two teams are formed and a sugar beet is tossed to decide who is going to "flonk" first. The team which is not flonking holds hands and dances round in a circle, known as "girting". A member of the opposing team stands in the middle of the circle holding a "driveller," a 3ft wooden pole, on the end of which is a beer soaked dwile. The flonker turns anti-clockwise and flonks his dwile at the opposing circling team, scoring points depending on where he hits - three point for the head, or "wonton", two points for the chest, or "morther", and just one point for a "ripper" anywhere below the belt. If the dwile misses completely it is known as a "swadger." When this happens the team forms a line and the flonker starts to drink beer from the gazunder. The flonker must drink until the dwile has passed from hand to hand along the line. The team with the highest number of points wins, deducting one point for every player still sober at the end. Traditional dress, including hobnail boots, embroidered smock and pork pie hat, is encouraged.

  See? That makes sense. Anyway...someone stole the prize.