To those members of the C&S; Clan (you know who you are) reading this blog :

The staff of Dahlbergcentral has just received word of its official assignment that must be completed prior to your own completion of personal assignment number 1. Said assignment the first is forthcoming as quickly as humanly possible, given the high demands of parenting, lawyering, associating, and general leisuring.

That is all.

hahahahahahahahahahahaohmanhahahahaha “city of crime” hahahahahahahahahaha

Peej, that about killed me this morning. Thanks, pal.

Via my employment, we had superdeluxeawesome lawn passes for one of the buildings on Civic Center Drive last night — front row for the Midwest’s best fireworks display. And even with our little Kodak, I managed to get some great pictures; I’ve dumped them into a Flickr slideshow for your viewing pleasure.

(While you’re at it: there’s also pictures from our trip to DC in May and from Memorial Day weekend in southeastern Ohio. I’m really getting to be friends with Flickr…)

This will be everywhere, but I wanted to point out something that caught my eye in today’s announcement of Sandra Day O’Connor’s retirement:

On Tuesday, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist said he’s been talking to Democratic leader Harry Reid about nominees for a potential vacancy on the Supreme Court but doesn’t have any inside information on whom President Bush might nominate.

“Have Senator Reid and I talked about individual names? Yes, we have in the privacy of our regular meetings,” Frist said in a speech at the Heritage Foundation. He wouldn’t say whom he and Reid had discussed or characterize their chances in front of the Senate.

Reid later offered three names of people he said would be good for the court: GOP Sens. Mel Martinez of Florida, Mike DeWine of Ohio and Mike Crapo of Idaho. They “are people who serve in the Senate now who are Republicans who I think would be outstanding Supreme Court members,” Reid said.

Reid also said that in a conversation with the justices last week, they said that “they thought what would be a good idea is to start calling people from outside the judicial system.”

Emphasis mine, of course. Had my mouth been full of coffee, I surely would have done a most impressive spit-take upon seeing the mention of Mel Martinez, former HUD Secretary during President Bush’s first term, given his controversial Senate race last year (in which he labeled his Republican primary opponent “the new darling of homosexual extremists”) and his perhaps-muddled involvement in the Terry Schiavo Congressional Fiasco this past spring — not exactly the kind of thoughtful, scholarly public figure one would expect of a nominee to the Supreme Court. Dewine got his JD from Ohio Northern in 1972 and was a prosecuting attorney in Greene County for eight years before his first election as a legislator. No private practice beyond that, so far as I know — he’s either been in the legislative or executive branches of state and federal government since that time. Crapo, at least, was a clerk on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals following his 1977 Harvard JD, but spent less time in practice than Dewine, rising to state senate in 1984.

So, without knowing anything personally about these guys’ judicial philosophies or legal scholarship or anything else one would expect to talk about in a Supreme Court nomination — is Reid serious? Getting someone from outside the judicial system is one thing; nominating career politicians to a job that’s (supposed to be) outside of partisan politics is something else.

Anyone with insight, personal or otherwise, into why any of these folks might be good candidates is invited to respond — I’m genuinely curious. (I should also note that Reid, as Senate Minority Leader, might as well be suggesting Donald Trump for all the weight I expect his comments to be given by the White House, so this is probably all heavily theoretical and hypothetical anyways…)

So I’ve been told to talk about Comfest.

What to say? The pictures here are a couple I snapped with the camphone at the Greenhorn show — Greenhorn being the guys we were there to see (since they’d done right by us at the Newport a few weeks back.) That’s our pal Steve there on bass, front and center, rocking out in the classic style. Steve would later have a Hendrixesque rocknroll meltdown on stage, smash his axe against the mike stand, dive into the crowd and get himself thrown back on stage, whereupon he crashed into the drumkit and pretty much brought a spectacular, if somewhat abrupt, end to the performance. (We probably would have taken off at that point, but we discovered that local superstars Watershed were up next, so that pretty much cemented our plans for the next hour or so.)

Glad we were there on Friday night, though, since it was hotter than blazes on Saturday. It was a pretty good evening for an outdoor show, nice breeze, and since it was early on in the weekend, the crowd wasn’t too crazy (though it sounds like it got there eventually — some photos NSFW, so you Have Been Warned). Me, I think that folks were a little awed by the manatee, myself…

We got some better pictures on Sarah’s camera (oh yeah — did I mention my most awesomest sister in the whole wide world of sports was in town for the entire weekend? WELL SHE WAS) but I haven’t seen them yet off-camera — we’ll see if any of the ones I took are, y’know, good. From about the late-night phone-call incident onward, I think our abilities were seriously in question.

When DSW announced several months ago that the store’s computers had been hacked and customer information was stolen, I was miffed that none of the reports (including the initial official press release) named the stores affected. The subsequent release named all 108 stores, but by the time they posted that, the news had died down and I had all but forgotten about the debacle.

Until I got THE LETTER.

DSW sent me a friendly little note last night to inform me that, indeed, my credit card numbers were among those stolen in the massive data heist. Not only did they get my Discover Card–the number that I’ve had so long that I know all its information by heart, including the secret number on the back–AND my debit card.

Fortunately, I do keep a close eye on transactions that post to both accounts, and I call whenever I see something I don’t recognize. Nothing has shown up yet. But still, the fact that someone else out there might be able to buy my numbers and then use them at will was enough to drive me to cancel both numbers immediately.

So now I go through the hassle of figuring out where I need to change the numbers (online bills, etc.). Maybe I should invest in one of those fingerprint credit cards after all.

An automatic mosaic generator using photos and tags found on Flickr. It’s wonderful for small or simple images, but because it seems to limit itself to about 500 photos, it’s not that detail-intensive — but still, wow.