Common Cold Edition

I'm sitting here at home with a nasty head cold. So I've got nothing better to do than crack open a cold one at 7:30 am (hey, it's helping! honest!) and braindump a few random thoughts.

• Now that Whittington guy's gone and had himself a heart attack, which is really inconsiderate of him, since the WH press people had just decided to start treating the whole episode as a big hearty joke, so to speak. They must be kicking themselves right now, wishing Cheney had just stuck with Plan A: finish the guy off, dump him in an unmarked shallow grave, and have the government cover the whole thing up. Unfortunately there were witnesses, and Cheney's gun was way too puny to contemplate taking them out as well.
  
• On a cheerier note, the Olympics are on. Sooner or later I'm going to post about why I love the Olympics, but right now I'm in a viral-induced haze. I'm up to random thoughts and tidbits, but don't ask me to bust out multiple paragraphs on the same topic. Also, my DVR is full of curling, and it beckons to me. It calls me to come and watch the gentle art of the sliding rock and the pushbroom. And like I said, I've got nothing better to do right now. One thing though: During the opening ceremony (which was the usual parade of "one damn thing after another", but even more disjointed than most), when the Italian team marched in I noticed someone holding up a sign that said something like "Saluc Ladins". Which doesn't look Italian, exactly. Google indicates this person is a native Ladin speaker, one of a number of small linguistic minorities that cluster in the Alps in Italy and nearby countries, such as Romansch in Switzerland, and Friulian in more northeasterly parts of Italy. It's kind of fun looking at pages in Ladin, since it's obviously a romance language like Italian, Spanish and French, but it's also obviously not any of those. Still, it's kind of fascinating to look at text in a language you've never seen before and be able to make out a word or two. Not everybody's happy, though. Here's a post in an Italian skiing forum where some people seemed to think the whole incident was quite embarrassing.
  
• Word on the street is that dual-core x86 iBooks may be on the way. Woohoo!
  
• And the latest shenanigans in the SCO vs. Universe case. Now SCO's trying to get even more delay in their case against IBM, filing to take a bunch of depositions against third parties (Intel, Oracle, Open Group) at the very last minute. Needless to say, IBM is Not Happy About This. IBM's also making a new attempt to get most of SCO's claims about "misused material" thrown out. The filings are worth reading even if you haven't been following the case. If the filings in this case are any indication, it seems that if you can speak and write English in a clear and logical way, these days you're destined for law school. And if you can't, you're doomed to a life of journalism.