Sanford emails? Another politician’s career takes a hit because of infidelity? Yeah, whatever. But those emails! Oh, purple prose! His speechwriter has to be cringing.

In all seriousness, though, for all the disgust and schadenfreude being aimed at his head, it appears that Sanford honestly loves this woman, and while infidelity is unforgivable in almost any circumstance, at least this is better than him boinking some intern for the hell of it.

here’s some data about the effect of Michael Jackson’s death on internet traffic:

Keynote Systems reported this evening that its monitoring showed performance problems for the web sites of ABC, AOL, CBS, CNN Money, MSNBC, NBC, SF Chronicle, and Yahoo! News. “Beginning at 5:30pm (EDT), the average speed for downloading news sites doubled from less than four seconds to almost nine seconds,” said Shawn White, Keynote’s director of external operations said. “During the same period, the average availability of sites on the index dropped from almost 100% to 86%. The index returned to normal by 9:15pm (EDT).”

I knew the nerds would come through.

sycophantic love fest that is sure to come the next few days, Lileks offers us some perspective:

But musically? As I said, Terry Lewis and Jimmy Jam had a far greater influence, and Prince a greater talent. Yes, he’s odd – a smaller, more agreeable set of demons, though, and he has an inexhaustible desire to create without freeze-drying every note into a crystalline framework, with every manufactured Yelp and Yip dropped in at the expected perfect moment.

I wouldn’t have felt any of this if the event wasn’t being treated as a near-fatal blow to Western Culture in some quarters. He called himself the King of Pop – after which fame and sales ebbed. Of the many lessons in his life, that may be the oldest.

That said: it’s no shame to have your best work behind you. It’s a pity to die young. It’s a testament to the work you did to be mourned by millions.

Talent of his caliber will be missed. And has been, truth be told, since around 1992.

Since this afternoon, my local mix station has been playing Michael Jackson every hour, on the hour in memoriam. I can only imagine that popular radio stations all over the world are doing something similar. When I went out to dinner this evening, the jukebox at the restaurant played 4 or 5 of his songs in the mere hour and a half I was there.

If there was a way to keep track of these things, I’d be interested to know just how much play, radio and otherwise, Michael Jackson got today. The numbers have got to be insane.

Michael Jackson died this afternoon—he was hospitalized earlier today after going into cardiac arrest.

For as much of a moonbat as he was in his later years, he was responsible for some of the best, most timeless pop songs of our time—I was just listening to Billie Jean on my stereo yesterday and wondering why they don’t make songs like that anymore. Talent of his caliber will be missed.

a well-deserved spanking to the New York Times for their foot-stomping tantrum over getting scooped by the WSJ on the Steve Jobs liver transplant story. Ruthless and brilliant.

(via)

And speaking of poor journalism, here’s a piece from a couple of months ago where PressThink‘s Jay Rosen took the Times to task for more lameness.

According to a blogger and Kindle owner, content publishers have put arbitrary simultaneous device limits on Kindle books. The limits vary from book to book, and there is no way for users to be able to tell what those limits are until they hit them.

But here’s the kicker. Amazon customer service reps apparently don’t know this—some of them, or at least the one this guy talked to, think that the limits aren’t on simultaneous devices, but on total number of downloads, and that once the limits are reached, the only way to be able to download the book again (if, say, you’ve upgraded your Kindle, or iPhone, or iPod Touch software to a new version and need to redownload all your books) is to repurchase it.

This is appalling for several reasons. One, that Amazon’s normally not-terrible customer service fell down on the job in spectacular fashion, and two, that it has been painfully reinforced (again) that content publishers really don’t get it. Again, why is it that people who make the effort to legitimately purchase content are the ones who get penalized? The people who pirate content aren’t affected by these draconian and ineffective measures in the least. It’s the honest ones who suffer.

Way to make sure that your customers stay loyal, guys. Jesus.

(via The Atlantic by way of InstaPundit)

I’d been using the same basic layout for quite a while with little modification, so I thought I’d change it up and take the opportunity to remove as much cruft as I could from the sidebar. The leaner, hungrier sidebar now only has the stuff that’s actually useful to most users (I think).

Less important browsing information like archives, categories and tags has now been moved into the expanded footer.

For those who are curious, the masthead font (and the heading and date font, if you happen to have it installed) is Sentinel (semibold italic in the former).

The color scheme was generated using the aid of Adobe’s neat-o kuler site—check out my public schemes. Note that Flash Player 10 is required.

They said that “about two months ago,” Steve Jobs received a liver transplant. It is thought to have resulted from a slowly metastasizing tumor—Jobs was diagnosed with a rare form of pancreatic cancer in 2004.

Gruber has some doubts about the accuracy and the sourcing of the story, but one thing is clear: Jobs is returning to work within a few weeks. Likely his activity as Apple’s CEO will diminish a bit, but it’s great to hear that he seems to be doing well.

Just made some updates to improve readability and overall structure, FYI. I’m a bit behind on reading, but I’ve got a bunch of books I’m excited to read, so I’ll be posting on those sometime soon. Woo!