HOW TO GIVE NOTICE
This link automatically downloads an mp3 file. It's a hysterical resignation speech by a Mobile Alabama Radio disc jockey who has decided to move on to greener pastures and uses a novel way to give her notice to her bosses at WBLX.
(Suggested by Matt McCarthy)

JILL CARROLL'S STORY
"'You're my brother, you're truly my brother,' I said in Arabic. 'Promise me you will use this gun to kill me by your own hand. I don't want that knife, I don't want the knife. Use the gun.'
(THE FOURTH PART OF THIS SEQUEL WAS PUBLISHED TODAY. FOLLOW THE LINKS)
(SEATTLE TIMES)

WONDERFUL PICTURES OF HAVANA
I'm not quite clear how to get around all of the flashy web mechanisms on this site. So, I've just posted the main site and trust that, if you want to see some truly amazing photography, especially some real street scenes of Havana, you can follow the links to his portfolio. Truly impressive.

DOUBLE SET OF BOOKS
"The Chimera is primarily known as a creature of Greek legend - a fire-breathing monster with parts of a goat and a lion with a serpent for a tail. In biology the term has come to refer to any organism that contains more than one set of genes."
(DAMN INTERESTING, unearthed by Brent Gourley)

HE'S A HOLE MAN
From the outside, William Lyttle's house in Hackney, east London, looks no different. But since the early 1960s,Lyttle has been digging a network of burrows underneath and noone knows how far they stretch. But according to the authorities, which used ultrasound scanners to ascertain the extent of the problem, almost half a century of nibbling dirt with a shovel and homemade pulley has hollowed out a web of tunnels and caverns, some 8m (26ft) deep, spreading up to 20m in every direction from his house.
(GUARDIAN, unearthed by Matt McCarthy)

9/11 TRANSCRIPTS RELEASED
The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) this week released full transcripts of the air traffic control recordings from the four flights hijacked on September 11, 2001, and meticulous Flight Path Studies for three of the flights, in response to a Freedom of Information request by the National Security Archive. The studies, posted on the Web today by the National Security Archive, provide the most detailed technical information available to date related to the hijackings, and the transcripts of the aircraft-to-ground communications are the first complete government disclosure of each flight's air traffic control recordings.

The transcripts provide additional details to the information summarized in the 9/11 Commission Report. For example, the NTSB transcript differs slightly from the Commission's text of the warning that United Airlines Flight 93 received only minutes before the hijackers attacked. At 9:23am, the Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS) shows a text message to Flight 93 reading: "BEWARE OF ANY COCKPIT INTROUSION [sic]. TWO AIRCRAFT IN NY, HIT TRADE CNTER BUILDS [sic]." Five minutes later at 9:28am Flight 93 was sending the message "***(mayday)*** (hey get out of here) ***" as it was being hijacked.
(NATIONAL SECURITY ARCHIVES)

HERE COMES CHICKEN JOHN!
"If all goes as planned, and that is no sure bet, an unlikely crew on an improbable craft will amble the Mississippi for the next month, spreading culture and chaos downriver."
(NEW YORK TIMES ARTS SECTION, unearthed by John Furman)

MOLLY THOMAS PLAYS WITH TODD SNIDER BAND ON LENO THIS WEDNESDAY!
Good friend and accomplished violinist (she "got trained" as we like to say around here) will be appearing Wednesday, August 9 on the Jay Leno Show as one of Todd Snider's musicians. Originally from Mississippi, we here in Mobile consider her a homie.

She played and sang for a group called Slow Moses and was a bartender at The Bike Shop, a local watering hole. In addition to being a wonderful musician,
she is a good friend and lovely person. She left us a few years ago for the bright lights and potential of Nashville.

I don't know who Todd Snider is but he must have great taste as he utilizes, not only Molly, but Mobile's Will Kimbrough
another wonderfully talented local guy who has also migrated to Nashville and is making waves in that orbit
.
(THANKS TO MICHAEL SMITH FOR HELP WITH THE WILL KIMBROUGH LINK)

COMUNISMO A LO CUBANO!
Everyone comes looking for their own version of Cuba. Revolutionaries find revolutions. Capitalists find dictatorship. Tourists find the perfect beach. Yet, nobody wants to see Cuba through Cuban eyes. It is a dynamic country that was not frozen in time since the Revolution of 1959, but is evolving and continually changing. There were debates on every street corner, both strong affirmations and deep criticisms of the president, Fidel Castro. And yet there is one consensus: like all citizens, Cubans passionately love their country."
(TORONTO STAR)

POT DEALERS SELL WEED ON CRAIGSLIST
The classified-advertising Web site craigslist has become popular in recent years with young, tech-savvy city dwellers seeking apartments, jobs and for-sale items. But it's also being used as an Information Age black market for some Seattle-area marijuana dealers.
(SEATTLE TIMES)

FAITH-BASED VOLUNTEERS INDICTED
Prosecutors have charged two volunteers who say they tried to save the lives of three sick migrants stranded in the desert. Daniel Strauss and Shanti Sellz are facing up to 15 years in federal prison and a half-million-dollar fine. The Border Patrol maintains that the work of the faith-based group No More Deaths was encouraging migrants to cross illegally into the United States. Part of the gravamen, the government maintains, is that the group's leaders were warned that volunteers could be arrested but that the warnings were dismissed by the group as absurd.
(NEWSDAY, unearthed by Paul Whitehurst)

PATDOWNS ALLOWED ONLY BETWEEN CONSENTING PLAYERS
Florida's courts - and now a federal district court - have sided with Valrico civics teacher Gordon Johnston, a Tampa Bay Buccaneers season ticket holder who challenged the practice of pre-game security patdowns outside the Bucs' stadium.
(ST PETERSBURG TIMES, unearthed by Paul Whitehurst)

WORLD IS GOING TO END - YOU HEARD IT HERE FIRST!
"Continuing the yellow journalism trend of marketing scary ideas, Paula Zahn Now featured a segment on whether the crisis in the Middle East is actually a prelude to the end of the world, marking the third time in nine days that CNN has devoted airtime to those claiming that the ongoing Mideast violence signals the coming of the Apocalypse.
(MEDIA MATTERS)

MERCHANDISING THE "NEW ARMAGEDDON"
Continuing the recent right wing media trend of packaging the problems in the middle east as some sort of "new apocalypse", Michael Savage irresponsibly predicted Israel is 'going to lose in Lebanon' unless it wins a 'devastating, catastrophic, overwhelming victory' in which 'nothing is left living in southern Lebanon, south of the Litani River.' Later in the program, Savage chastised the Israeli government for displaying a 'Holocaust mentality' by shying away from his proposed course for victory, adding that Israel cannot continue to 'live' unless it 'frees itself of the men who are acting as though they are still hiding in the sewers of Warsaw' and 'act[ing] like Holocaust Jews hiding in the sewer.'"
(MEDIA MATTERS)

DON'T BLOW THEIR COVER?!?
"In what has to be the biggest Barney Fife operation every conducted by the federal government, a Hartselle minister and a former Alabama State Bar President were among many people cited for alleged acts of public indecency and lewdness at Wheeler National Wildlife Refuge in Limestone and Morgan counties. The offense? Peeing in the woods."
(DECATUR DAILY NEWS)