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$9.99 for a watermelon at my grocery store. One of those round kind, smaller than a basketball.

I wonder if it has to do with the hurricanes. I heard that tomatoes from Florida have suffered. Nope, looks like things are a little brighter: crops in good shape.

My parents, who live in Florida during the winter, say the veggies aren't so great down there. You'd think they would be. Seems like when I lived in L.A. they were beautiful.

At BBC.com, blazing mouse sets fire to house.

Every time I show somebody one of those viral videos they say, "Oh yeah, I've seen that." Well I hadn't seen this one (.mpg) but I can play it ten times in a row and I still giggle every time. What makes some things that particular kind of funny, that the effect doesn't wear off right away. Does it only happen with slapstick?

It seems like some of the predictions you see are more like wishlists. Here's the Wikipedia entry I'd like to see in a few years:

Just when too many people were about to give up on New Orleans ever regaining its vitality following the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, the U.S. business community surprised the world and effected a breathtaking turnaround.

In early 2006, former presidents Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush announced a challenge to business leaders: loan us a few of your best employees for six months or a year, just the length of a maternity leave or an academic sabbatical, and don't be stingy about it.

Don't lend a junior purchasing manager, they warned; send us your sharpest most seasoned expense watcher, the one who will keep a lid on government contracts as a personal mission. Look around your organization and find creative matches, like engineers who rose through your ranks to manage other engineers but would love a chance to get their hands dirty again.

Jack Welch, former General Electric CEO, jumped on board almost immediately to reinforce the message that this was not just another "program." He said he intended to encourage, bully and even shame large and small corporations to get behind the effort. In a move that delighted amateur journalists across the globe, Welch called on bloggers to sniff out companies paying lip service to the project and heap praise on those making a difference.

By mid-2007, more than 80,000 corporate employees had served a tour of duty in New Orleans. An unexpected number -- about seven percent -- chose to move to New Orleans permanently. Most observers credit this migration with the sudden explosion of plant relocations and the establishment of regional offices in New Orleans. It's predicted that by 2010, New Orleans will overtake Atlanta as the city of choice for a company foothold in the south.

Another unanticipated by-product of the effort was a measureable improvement in race relations and the quality of life for African Americans in New Orleans. The cause? Sociologists point to the fact that temporary workers were urged to live in integrated neighborhoods. This obviated the need for school desegregation and engendered a culture of helping. As one chronicler put it, "It's a clearer task, and a more rewarding one, to help your neighbor or the parents of your children's friends."

Racial troubles have not vanished from New Orleans. Black and white critics have called the corporate help program a token do-gooders' plan and a gentrification scheme. The critics' voices tend to be muffled by the numbers: crime is down, business formation is up, homebuilding shows no end in sight.

Nice personal piece on watching portable video by David Carr in The New York Times.

"With the new iPod, I could start at the beginning of the series and view "Lost" at my leisure. The average episode lasts 44 minutes, about the length of my commute. Watching "Lost" on the bus next to a large man working his way through a crinkly bag of nuts is a deeply satisfying media experience. Goodbye crinkly nut man. Hello Claire and John Locke. (It is a bonus that the man can't see the image from the side, as hard as he tries.)

"So this is how we end up alone together. We share a coffee shop, but we are all on wireless laptops. The subway is a symphony of earplugged silence while the family trip has become a time when the kids watch DVD's in the back of the minivan. The water cooler, that nexus of chatter about the show last night, might go silent as we create disparate, customized media environments."

Nice writing. Is this the sort of thing we'll miss if traditional newspapers go away? Nope. Why should it matter how the words are delivered? There's equally polished work on the web, and there will be even more when more people are doing it for a living.

From Wired, a wrap-up on the Dalai Lama's latest meetings with neuroscientists about the benefits of meditation.

Joe Biden said two weeks ago he'll run for president if he thinks there's money and, by extension, influential support.

More people are hearing about it now since he's doing a round of interview shows on the bi-partisan proposal to make Bush provide status reports on Iraq.

What a nice change from the coy-answer mode that's so much the convention among prospective presidential candidates.

I like Biden. I like his politics, his style and his humor. I'll want to be in the Hillary camp, for sisterhood and lots of other reasons, but I do like Biden, always have. The two of them on a ticket could be just the ticket.

I do hope Hillary will be as forthright. I don't quite like the way she tries so hard to run toward the center when you (think you) know what she really believes. It's the way the game is played, I know, but it's as disingenuous as a Republican barking out his sympathy for the underclass in a stump speech.

Crazy! The FEMA director who slunk off in shame is starting a disaster preparedness consulting concern.

When I added Hil's cars to the "All the cars we've ever owned" distributed OPML directory, and read that she drives a Holden Commodore, I had to know what that was. Holden is an Oz division of GM. Car names are so funny, anywhere, any time period. At least the model name is a real word.

Personally I bristle against the marketing practice the last 15-20 years of naming products or companies with made-up words that have been scientifically determined to sound right for the purpose. Lots of times they contain part of a real word that's supposed to appeal to us. Like Acura, which I imagine is supposed to make us think of accuracy or precision. Or Accenture; what's that supposed to convey? Accent implying sharp, cutting edge incisiveness, I suppose.

Why can't we have real words?

If you want to to inclue your car list in the roll, just make an OPML file in this format:

Car make and model
   Comments
   Details

And e-mail me to tell me the URL. amybellinger ATATAT gmail.com.

I flipped through People magazine's slide show of its new "Sexiest Men Alive," and I never even heard of almost half of them.