I just posted an entry on my spiritual blog about a marvelous series of TV interviews I've just been connected to by my friend Tony Seton. The particular video in question features an interview of Astrologer and Mystic Caroline Casey by On Faith's Sally Quinn.

In the interview, Ms. Casey says, among other things, "We are electing a story. We're electing ourselves. This is the most mythologically potent election...probably ever, or at least since the Founding Fathers." She has a few other mightily interesting tidbits to share in this highlight and the extended interview is also there. This is part of a collection of dozens of such topical interviews. What a find!

When Google announced the first release of its 3D virtual world technology Lively last week, they got the predictably huge press play anything from GoogleLand gets (and most often deserves). As it happens, I'm in the midst of a major project involving using such environments to create and conduct business, so I'm keeping a particularly keen eye on the market.

I will probably have more to say about the product itself when I have time to check it out. First, I have to install it on Windows. Yeah, that's right. Google, the folks who would be God of the Internet, still makes some products and technologies that don't work cross-browser or cross-platform. That's just stupid, bordering on unforgivable.

Is it easy to do great Web apps that run in all browsers on all OSes? Of course not. It should be, but it's not. But if anyone can and should be leading the way on that front, it's Google. That they couldn't be bothered to create this tool -- which is already such a Johnny=come-lately to the party that timeliness of delivery was clearly not an issue -- so it runs on Mac and Linux doesn't speak well for the company's understanding of the market.

There is simply no excuse for a Web-based product or tool that doesn't run across those boundaries. None. You could write the bulk of the app in NOLOH and accomplish it without a lot of sweat or thought or effort. It's just annoying when players like Google don't care enough about the need for platform agnosticism because it makes others think it's not a necessary consideration.

Regular readers of this space know the high regard in which I hold FactCheck.org and its nonpartisan analysis of political advertising and campaigning. It has, over the years, proven quite even-handed in its treatment of Democrats and Republicans, a rare find in a world of decreasing news and increasing "analysis" (aka opinions).

But today's post charging the AFl-CIO with "unduly harsh" treatment of McCain feels a bit like a group that is trying perhaps a bit too hard to be even-handed.

The ad in question says McCain "took Bush's side against increasing health care benefits for veterans." In fact, he did that and FactCheck admits it. The organization says McCain "voted to increase veterans' health care benefits, thought not by as much as Democrats proposed." That is precisely taking Bush's side. In 2004-2006, McCain voted against such increases in the amounts of $1.8 billion, $2.8 billion, and $1.5 billion. Later he supported significantly reduced bills approving $1.5 billion, a paltry $410 million and an only-slightly-better $823 million, respectively.

If the Bush Regime hadn't been so blindly and incomprehensibly opposed to veterans health benefit funding, the VA in those years would have had a combined total of $6.1 billion rather than the roughly $2.5 billion they ended up with. Thus it is absolutely legitimate to claim that McCain voted against more than 50% of veterans health benefits.

The only reason McCain keeps getting credit for being veterans' choice for the White House is because nobody in the mainstream media has the courage or intelligence to look at his voting record and examine how veterans organizations have rated his leadership in the past few years.

In what is a great move at least symbolically, Democratic Presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama has announced that he's taking his acceptance speech out of the convention arena and into an outdoor stadium that seats 75,000. That's a gutsy move given that there's no guarantee there won't be a lot of empty seats in that place that will make him look bad.

But you gotta know that a ton of people will want to be there for the event if they can get there.

The symbolism is brilliant. Every Presidential nominee in the past has accepted the nomination in front of the convention that offered it, where only party insiders and activists can go. In a sense, the acceptance speech was a way of paying homage to the party leaders. This makes a clear statement that he owes this nomination not to the partiati but to the people of America.

I don't like some of his shifts to the center of late but I have to say, this guy is a master of political theater, better than any Democrat in at least 45 years.

I see MacWorld has reviewed the Flip Video camera. Great piece of hardware and very Mac-like. My wife uses hers constantly now that we have temporarily taken custody of our seven-month-old granddaughter Mattie. This sucker is amazing. Ease of use is unbelievable. There's literally nothing to it.

The only thing the reviewer didn't comment on is that the Flip Video has a zoom lens feature as well. This sucker's well worth the price.

Molly Holzschlag has a cool idea on her blog. She suggests a new microformat called "Microtude" that would use the class attribute with various values to delineate an attitude associated with a post. For example, you could code a blog entry like this:

<p class = "sarcasm">Now there's an idea we can all get behind!</p>

I like it. Molly asked for suggestions for classes that ought to be included. Here's my start on such a list:

• anger
• disgust
• justkidding
• preachy
• belligerence

That post led me to another interesting one over at Glenn McAnally's site where a new style called "sarcastic" is being touted and a whole new movement being born.

I like WebWhimsy.

This is too funny not to share. Sent to me by my buddy George Sidman.

Back in the halcyon days of expert systems, one of the reasons a lot of us consultants and commentators found Texas Instruments' technologies to be so interesting was that they actually used their own tools in-house. There are a huge number of advantages to that, not the least of which is that technologies that are relied on by their developers are more often than not maintained and enhanced more frequently and in more useful ways than those that aren't.

That's just one more reason to love NOLOH, the exciting new Web app development environment and SuperFramework I've been using for the past 16 or so months. These guys build their own sites (apps) using NOLOH. And they add their own components to their kit bag using NOLOH "nodules" as well. As a result, they find and fix more bugs more rapidly than virtually all of the other frameworks I've checked out.

Latest example: some time in the next couple of days, the NOLOH Dev Zone will feature a new video tutorial on how to create a non-trivial app that is integrated into the NOLOH Dev Zone (and elsewhere in that app). Their Comment System -- which is a neatly hierarchical comment management component a la Huffington Post -- was written in less than 50 lines of code. The video tutorial actually walks you through how it was done. In the process, they also manage to show off some nifty features of NOLOH. Including how, in two lines of code, you can make any object fade into view on the screen. Sweetness.

All of this without a single line of HTML or JavaScript.

Get into their beta program now before their available slots fill up. Tell 'em I sent you.

GOP Presidential candidate John McCain has been going around touting the idea of repealing the law against offshore drilling as a way of helping America's energy crisis and relieving our dependence on foreign oil.

In response to critics who say offshore drilling isn't environmentally sound policy, Bush III says that during Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, "little or no spillage took place" proving that offshore drilling's newer technologies make concerns a thing of the past.

Hold on there, buster. As Salon.com reports, 174 spills totaling about 3/4 million gallons of crude were reported during those two storms. Now that's not a huge amount of oil, to be sure, but any inadvertent spillage (can there be "advertent" spillage?) is too much weighed against the loss of wildlife, damage to beaches and waterfront homes, etc.

Lest you think, however, that I believe McCain is just as useless as the man he would follow into the White House, I think his idea of a $300 million prize for the developer of the battery technology that would led to the manufacture and sale of all-electric vehicles is a darned good one. Sure, it has some holes and the question of how you pay for it has to be answered, but that's true of both candidates' plans pre-election. The idea shows McCain is capable of having a good and at least seemingly original idea about major issues.

One of the sharpest wits in American history, George Carlin, has died at 71 of heart trouble. He and Shelly Berman were my two favorite comics and I'm a big fan of comedians and comedy.

"Coincidentally" this morning's email brought me a reminder of one of his best lines. Commenting on Martha Stewart's legal problems:

'Boy, I feel a lot safer now that she's behind bars. O. J. Simpson and Kobe Bryant are still walking around; Osama Bin Laden too, but they take the ONE woman in America willing to cook, clean, and work in the yard, and they haul her off to jail.'

One of the things about getting older is you watch a lot of your friends -- and people like Carlin who only *seemed* like a friend -- move on to what's next. I'm not sad for them, but I *am* sad for me.

Give 'em Hell, George.