Well, Elizabeth is off to Italy. Ciao, bella!

<I>Big Rock Candy Mountain</I> ruminates on the immigration issue and posts MP3 files of Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land" and Billy Bragg's "Waiting For the Great Leap Forward." What a perfect post: Passion, good writin', and great polemics.

I read <I>The San Francisco Gate</I> every morning as part of my my get-ready-to-work ritual, mostly, I admit, for Jon Carroll's fine column, which teaches that wit and grace mean that you don't actually have to have anything to write about (but when he <I>does</I> have something to write about, it's always a corker). Now I've added the link below, which traces the adventures of reporters Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada, who had the audacity to break the BALCO juicing scandal.

Well, no&mdash;but here's a handy chart showing you how animal sounds are portrayed in different languages. In Japanese, Huckleberry would be purring, "Goro goro."

Some unnamed genius has been blogging the Trojan War, and Achilles is now dead. Of course, he's been dead for centuries, but mother of Zeus, it seems so immediate this way.

I wrote this guy off back in the 1980s, when he essentially dismissed audiophiles as kooks&mdash;and this from a computer geek? But, by God, <I>this</I> is worth reading.