Gore to Get Lifetime Award for Internet

Al Gore finally gets his due:

Al Gore may have been lampooned for taking credit in the Internet's development, but organizers of the Webby Awards for online achievements don't find it funny at all.
In part to "set the record straight," they will give Gore a lifetime achievement award for three decades of contributions to the Internet, said Tiffany Shlain, the awards' founder and chairwoman.
"It's just one of those instances someone did amazing work for three decades as congressman, senator and vice president and it got spun around into this political mess," Shlain said.
Vint Cerf, undisputedly one of the Internet's key inventors, will give Gore the award at a June 6 ceremony in New York.
"He is indeed due some thanks and consideration for his early contributions," Cerf said.
Gore, who boasted in a CNN interview he "took the initiative in creating the Internet," was only 21 when the Internet was born out of a Pentagon project.
But after joining Congress eight years later, he promoted high-speed telecommunications for economic growth and supported funding increases for the then-fledging network, according to the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, which presents the annual awards.
He popularized the term "information superhighway" as vice president.

Nazi-fied Dance Music

I found this a while back and thought you might be interested...

In the 1930's the Nazis had [a] love/hate relationship with swing music. They outlawed it on their homefront, throwing it into the category of "degenerate" art. But at the same time, they employed it in the service of the fatherland. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda minister, assembled a fairly competent swing band called Charlie and His Orchestra to perform Nazified versions of the jazz hits of the day. Led by an English speaking German, Karl Schwendler, Charlie and His Orchestra broadcast on the medium-wave and short-wave bands throughout the 1930s to Canada, the US and Britain.

The idea was to lure the masses in with the irrestible tonic of swing music and then slyly work in the anti-Jewish, American and British lyrics after the second or third verse. The broadcasts of Charlie and His Orchestra were not available in the Fatherland proper, but that only enhanced their legend, and they picked up an underground following in Germany as well.

The site has 22 songs you can download, and links to find more. I can't decide whether it's creepy or hilarious.

GATES VS. GOOGLE

Really interesting piece on the dynamics between Gates/Microsft and Google. Reading this led me to try out Microsoft's Deskbar (since I had Google Desktop Search I never even thought to try the Microsoft product) and it's pretty cool. Of course you have to use it in IE and that's a turn-off, but it's got a cool feature that creates a thumbnail of the page you are looking at with little markers everywhere you search terms appear, and you can scroll the page up and down by dragging the rectangle representing viewable screen area in the viewer up and down. It also integrates with Outlook, Office and Explorer so you can search from anywhere. I'm still testing to see whether their search results are any good though.

Tax Receipts Exceed Treasury Predictions

I know the WashPost is reporting this, but c'mon -- we know this isn't true! We cut taxes! Whenever we do that we just keep getting deeper and deeper in debt, as everyone knows...