Six months ago, or more, the US government banned importation of the vile ’stryne substance known as Vegemite. Thanks to Cory Doctorow, this news is now wide… ummm spread. The Vegemite problem is solved. Now what will the FDA do about kimchi?

Amos Moses Griffin says “I’m going pink,”

Breast cancer is the most common form of cancer affecting one out of every nine females up until the age of 90. Although rare, one in 1000 men are also diagnosed with breast cancer as well. Educate yourself and consider a small donation to the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation. If you feel inclined to enter your own website in celebration of Breast Cancer Awareness month, check out Pink for October or try out the Pink October theme or the Pinky and the Brain theme

email from some nice folks thanking me for the support but kindly asking me to take down my pink monstrosity as it was more an embarrassment than anything. So I resigned myself to silent acknowledgment from afar. That is until I noticed a few bloggers releasing pink themes.

As a blogger I live off the kindness of strangers. I can rearrange the furniture pretty well but I can’t create something from scratch. I’m reliant on other good folks for themes and plugins and suck hungrily on the teat of goodwill. This morning I noticed Derek Punsalan released a free pink theme so others who may not be technological inclined can nod a show of support.

So really, why not? It’s a bridge I’ll jump off. FunkWad is going pink for October. The switch to a new theme will require ironing out a few wrinkles here and

Chris Locke points to the googler’s WorldCat extension… in your Google search precede a title with “find in a library” and the good Doctor Google will do just that.

Little bit of synchronicity here is that I just tumbled to Book Burro (hat tip to the “tech-teach,” Liz Lawley).

Book Burro is a Web 2.0 extension for Firefox and Flock. When it senses your are looking at a page that contains a book, it will overlay a small panel which when opened lists prices at online bookstores such as Amazon, Buy, Half (and many more) and whether the book is available at your library.

Book Burro is cool and it’s got that WorldCat integration too.

Check out the itinerary Amanda posted! Memphis to St. Louis to Kansas City and back to Louisville? A few hundred miles this way and a few hundred miles back! I’m happy they’re coming through Madison. I’ll try to get my fat face in a few shots, ever angling for another 15 pico-seconds of fame. Better, I’ll try to get a few pictures of Amanda and her entourage. She’s doing good work, you gotta admit it.

Watching Amanda interview Jarvis my mind wandered to the Harvard endowment. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not wandering off into the misty distance of a techno-elitist, white privilege rap. I follow Amanda with pleasure. Her perigrinations promise not the picaresque vicissitudes of — oh, Tom Jones, nor Sal Paradise, nor even “Half Cocked Jack” Shaftoe and/or the lively Eliza; but, there is a pleasant revelatory energy that she broadcasts, and a modest Miller Lite ambience that is easily associated with the contradictions inherent in undertaking a road trip, an American journey, in a hybrid SUV. So I hope I can be forgiven for wool-gathering about the Harvard endowment while Mr. TV Guide himself — one of her personal heroes — and god knows we all need personal heroes and Jarvis is as Presbyterian as the next man and bully, I say, bully… harrumph, hack-hack-hack-hack…

About the endowment… roughly US $29.2 billion, accumulated during the uninterrupted 370 year growth of the institution, which, for the arithmetically challenged was founded in September, 1636. The fund, which returned 16.7% during FY2006, performs about as well as, maybe a little better than the 461 private endowments tracked by the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO, not to be confused with some Verdi opera Babylonian king, really).

At that incredible rate of return the endowment could more than double in five years if the managers just let it ride and if no more grateful alumni made any contributions. Speaking of grateful alumni (are dropouts “alumni?”)… it’s come to my attention that the Harvard endowment is worth more than Bill Gates himself!

I’ve been mulling the almost infra dig treatment that One Web Day received. Oh, there were a gaggle of Berkmanites, past and present, who touted it and seemed genuinely jolly about the prospect. David Isenberg rolled out a nice party in Vienna! But in general it didn’t seem to get the broad positive attention that you would expect a purely altruistic effort to receive. It’s been rolling toward us for a year or more, progressing merrily like a marble on a track. Why didn’t more people know about it? Why wasn’t there a broad celebration cutting across all socio-economic classes, all ages, breaking down gender barriers, banishing ethnic distinctions, just a Mardi Gras of whoop-tee-do with festive netizens around the globe all flushed with endorphins, smiling out of their eyes and open to a wealth of new webular experiences?

Naturally I blame myself.

What did I do besides slap a dorky sticker on my laptop and sort of nibble around the edges of the occasion? Why didn’t I get out there and promote it like a cure for cancer? I don’t know. I’m sorry. Maybe I was too tied up with my PhoneCon 2.0 efforts. I’ll try to do better next year.

Josh Wolf is starting a service to allow people to blog from behind bars. being behind bars right now, it’s slow going, but here is the site…

prisonblogs.net

I don’t know what’s planned for One Web Day… plant a cyber-tree in cyber-space? I do know that I’ll virtually be there.

More…
… and more…
… and even more!

Okay… the extant literature about the yet to be celebrated OneWebDay is a little thin. That can be changed just by writing about it. What I plan for OneWebDay is to fire up the old Second Life account and look up some friends in that space.