Newley Purnell

Very cool.

CNN:

The Bush administration is “cautiously optimistic” about North Korea’s agreement to give up its nuclear program, according to a White House official.

“We are pleased that North Korea decided to abandon its nuclear program but North Korea must move forward with the next steps to dismantle,” the official told CNN on Monday.

Here’s an interesting — if alarmist* — assessment of a potential US military buildup in Paraguay.

(*I mean, c’mon, it’s not like our government has a history of meddling in Latin American affairs or anything.)

(Via Sploid.)

Paraguay, Chile, Nicaragua, Grenada, Venezuela, Chavez

“Hey, man, whaddya do in your spare time?”

“Funny you should ask. I create extremely elaborate fictional road maps.”

maps, road+maps

To all you gearheads out there who’re in search of a faster way to skip through the ads during The OC: Jack W. sends along this promising TiVo hack.

TiVo

Very cool. (Via BoingBoing.)

giraffe

Congrats to Brit and K-Fed on their bundle of joy. In a newley.com exclusive, I’m hereby sharing with you the first photo released of Baby Spears-Federline. Ain’t he cute?

Britney+Spears, baby

DC folks: I’ll be at the DCist’s first birthday party at Stetson’s tonight. Will probably arrive sometime after 7. Wendy H. and a few others will also be in attendance. Everyone’s invited, even if you don’t know who/what DCist is (I hear it’s some sort of…blob?).

Someone needs to make this happen immediately. And who knew Vin Deisel was a D&D dork?

Paragraph is a workspace for writers in NYC.

NYC, paragraph

There was another purdy sunset in DC tonight. More pics here.

Washington+DC, sunset, photos

Truth is stranger than fiction.

Gillette CEO James M. Kilts was unavailable for comment as this went to press.

(Via TMFTML.)

The+Onion, Gillette, razor

Google has just launched a new service called Blog Search. Early tinkering reveals that it works very well. And you can subscribe to RSS feeds for searches. Which is extremely useful. You have to wonder what sort of new features they plan to roll out in the future, as well.

Hello Google Blog Search, goodbye Technorati?

Google, Google+blog+search

(As seen on i hate the new yorker, via Kottke.)

New+Yorker, cartoon

I recently received a strange spam from a sender with the (ahem) evocative name of “Mastiff G. Adulterating.” (Is that particular breed prone to philandering?) The subject line was “nice gift for everybody,” and the complete text of the email read:

balcony by uttering just two words: ‘Hang him.’ To drive the convoy away as
—–

[URL redacted]

——
in just the same way. To Annushka’s credit it must be said that she was
the depths of a seedy garden, separated from the sidewalk by a fancy

Lovely in a weird sort of way. Almost reminiscent of James Wright, the great imagistic poet I studied during my undergraduate days. (Back in the fall of 1996, my last heady autumn on an American college campus, when I still believed that the workings of the world could be encapsulated in a few measured lines — “Beauty is truth, truth beauty — that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know” — I probably read this poem over 500 times.)

spam, poetry