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For as long as I live, like it or not, I'll remember 10:28 am 9/11/06 like it was yesterday. I remember the roar and the sight of the giant radio antenna on the last of two towers standing disappearing into the massive clouds of gray smoke. I remember the emergency room personnel at St. Vincent's out in the street waiting for survivors that never came and the clouds of gritty smoke and 8 x 11 sheets of paper blowing up the streets of Brooklyn. And then I remember the jumpers, those who'd rather jump than burn.

Formats and audio trends come and go, but some components are timeless. What component have you changed least often in your system?

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I was ruminating on the Dave Barry "On Hallowed Ground" essay, wondering if there was another example of great war or crisis writing I could link to, when I thought about A. J. Liebling's WWII work for <I>The New Yorker</I>.

On my way to work this morning, I noticed that the cool air felt like the first days of school. Though I often hated those first days of school, I enjoyed the feeling of this morning's cool air.

Yes, it's the fifth anniversary of 9/11 and the media coverage is relentless. However, despite all the hoopla, the solemnity of the day can still sneak up on you&mdash;it happened to Jeff Wong and me this morning as we completed out daily bike ride and came upon a memorial service for firemen and policemen from our neighborhood who died that day.

As Dave Barry points out, there apparently <I>is</I> something worse than driving while talking on a cellphone.

Peter Zylberberg of Audio Excellence in Yorkville, Toronto sends along the following warning:

Even though the calendar year starts January 1 (or, if you're in the electronics industry, with the January CES), many of us still think of Labor Day as the beginning of the year. That's when school always started&mdash;or, again if you're in the electronics industry, the week after is when CEDIA's (Custom Electronic Design & Installation Association) Expo takes place. As the show has grown over the years, it has also become the kick-off to the important (and, hopefully, lucrative) end-of-the-year sales season, with many companies debuting significant products they hope will make <I>their</I> Q4 profitable.

My eyes were inexorably drawn to a surprising headline this morning: "New Studies Say Universe Younger than Objects In It." A study by Indiana University's Michael Pierce has just been published establishing a new value for "Hubble's Constant" (the ratio of velocity to distance for distant, receding galaxies) which suggests that the universe may be as young as 7 billion years old; at the same time, researchers at Harvard are saying that the universe is somewhere between 9 and 14 billion years old. Quite a discrepancy! (A billion here, a billion there&mdash;pretty soon you're talking <I>real</I> age.)