Ron Howard produced this gentle and entertaining endorsement of Obama. It’s kind of fun to see old characters speaking about current issues.

(Hat tip to Andrew.)

I think of James Bennett now and again, often when I’m reading Andrew Sullivan or when a new issue of The Atlantic arrives at our door. Today I came across the beautiful theAtlantic.project which combines image, sound, and provocative questions to get the brain in gear and thinking outside the box. If you have a little time on your hands, give it a peek. Good luck pulling yourself out again.

A nice collection of practical wisdom from home office inhabitants at A List Apart today.

This is me:

Use Grand Central. Grand Central is an application that masks several phone numbers as one. You input all your phone numbers and label them “home,” “mobile,” “work,” etc. The application gives you one phone number, local to your area code, that you can hand out. It’s fantastic for having one phone number and being on the road, at home, at my external office, at the coffee shop, etc.

Too bad Grand Central has not been creating new accounts for over six months now. I hope they get back in the swing of things soon.

This is not me:

Get paid. Run your business like a law firm. I use FreshBooks and Backpack. I run a journal on my daily activities. I schedule what I am working on and when I am working on it. I bill for everything (phone calls, meetings, sketching ideas). I also know how many hours I need to meet my financial goals each month, each week, each day.

OK, I get paid, but I’m not this methodical about it!

This article is a sort-of companion to a piece earlier this summer about working from home.

A wonderful music video for Obama’08. (Thanks, Mary!)

Obama ‘08 - Vote For Hope from MC Yogi on Vimeo.

I once had the privilege of going on an AIPAC-sponsored trip to Israel hosted by a wonderful fellow named David Ifshin. David and I disagreed about a lot of things on that trip, not the least about the impact a Clinton presidency would have on the Democratic party. This trip was somewhere in the years leading up to the 1992 presidential race and my dad was still considering a run himself, probably part of the reason David invited me on the trip. He was keen to have Democrats (well, anyone, really) understand what life was like in Israel, what the challenges were, what the diversity of political opinion on the ground there really was like.

That trip taught me a lot. It preceded by a few months the first intifada, and, as such, it was probably one of the most peaceful periods Israel has seen. Still, I learned a little of what living in fear of terror was like. The tension was palpable and unforgettable. After 9/11 I saw a shadow of that tension in our domestic response to being attacked.

I think of David now and then. He has since died of cancer, but his spirit lives on and I am sure thousands of people understand the situation in Israel and the Middle East better thanks to his work. Today I found a story about David and John McCain that made me miss him all over again. I wish McCain had friends like David around now to help him remember the danger of spreading hate.

[Update: photo changed to one from the trip I described.]

Ever since agreeing to participate in the Google book scan project, John Wilkin and the University of Michigan have been looking for a way to provide access to the vast digital resources they get from the project. They have today announced the HathiTrust, which includes partners from across the country (including Minnesota). This is a great site and a great start on a tough problem: can we, together, maintain free and open access to materials from our library collections? A nice story at ArsTechnica too.

Another interesting all-in-one search engine in alpha.

The program begins at 4pm; doors open at 2:30pm.

McCain and Palin have been inciting crowds to angry hatred for over a week now. Today here in Minnesota it seems that McCain is waking up to just how far over the line he has stepped. Ana Marie Cox writes from the Lakeville rally:

“I want EVERYONE to be respectful, and lets make sure we are.”

The very next questioner tried to push back on this request, noting that he needed to “tell the American the TRUTH about Barack Obama” — a not very subtle way, I think, to ask John McCain to NOT tell the truth about Barack Obama. McCain told her there’s a “difference between record and rhetoric, and I plan to talk about his record, respectfully… I don’t mean that has to reduce your ferocity, I just mean it has to be respectful.”

And then later, again, someone dangled a great big piece of low-hanging fruit in front of McCain: “I’m scared to bring up my child in a world where Barack Obama is president.”

McCain replies, “Well, I don’t want him to be president, either. I wouldn’t be running if I did. But,” and he pauses for emphasis, “you don’t have to be scared to have him be President of the United States.” A round of boos.

It’s about time and I sincerely hope McCain keeps damping down the flames. I’m just not sure its in his control any more. Playing with fire is a dangerous sport. Here’s a message I got from an email correspondent today:

The Weatherman that he worked with in Chicago is unrepentant for bombing banks and government offices and rapping [sic] a girl and his wife likewise, not to mention bombing a judges house, but he will end all nastiness in our prisons. So I want to turn my country over to that sociopathic, Acorn lawyer, marxist?

Cheney/Rove/Bush have tried to make us afraid of the other. Now we have real reason to fear for our future and we are becoming afraid of our own shadow. I tremble.

When I look at this simple Google graph of the Dow Jones Industrial from 1970 to the present I wonder if the steady state of the index ought not be down under the 2000 mark.

It looks to me like the market was comfortably under 2000 through the seventies, then started rising sharply during the Reagan administration. Then an even crazier growth occurred during the Clinton administration. The whole thing looks out of place in this picture and I wonder if it should not collapse below 2000 to become really stable.