Much respect to King James. Wade is done and he’s taking Miami down with him. Bosh lashes himself to the mast of a sinking ship. And Melo is who we thought he was. Discuss.

It was only a matter of time.

John Edwards Drops Out of Presidential Race
— Former Senator’s Campaign Adviser: ‘It Just Became Clear It Wasn’t Going to Happen’

Former Senator John Edwards, D-N.C., will drop out of the Democratic presidential race on Wednesday.

“It just became clear it wasn’t going to happen,” a senior Edwards adviser tells ABC News’ Rick Klein.

Edwards, who ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic nomination in 2004 before joining Senator John Kerry, D-Mass., as his vice presidential candidate, had placed poorly in several early contests, lagging behind rivals Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., and Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill. (More…)

According to the BBC, “Thomas Edison sent his agents round to the Poet Laureate’s home to record his voice on wax cylinders in 1890.” That poet laureate turns out to be none other than Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

No, the voice quality isn’t great (as you’d expect), but what a marvelous revelation – to be able to hear one of the greatest poets in English history, a man from the pre-electronic age, actually speaking.

Want to listen? Click here and enjoy as Tennyson offers up one of his classics, “The Charge of the Light Brigade.”

“Corporate America ought to be darned worried. If you are a major corporation with very sensitive technology, you have been targeted. Somebody is spying on you right now.” Todd Davis, FBI supervisor in Sacramento

There’s been a great deal of debate lately about spying – FISA and domestic spying issues, for example – and now the news that Blackwater is augmenting its army, navy and air force with its own CIA. While I’m routinely bemused by the conclusions we seem to reach (we’re about to approve a new Attorney General who doesn’t think waterboarding is torture, remember), I do welcome these kinds of discussions. The world of information and intelligence has been changing dramatically for years and our policy deliberations haven’t kept pace. It’s critical to think about what we know, how we know it, what we do with it, and the implications of not knowing it, because despite the fact that they’ve been awfully cavalier about the Constitution, our conservative friends are generally right in noting that there are bad guys in the world. In the end, the question really boils down to how can we best deal with the bogeys without becoming bad guys ourselves.

There’s one area that we aren’t talking about, though, and it’s a topic we ought to be very concerned with: corporate espionage. (More…)

I wanted to take a moment to announce this morning’s launch of Scholars and Rogues.com. Since we started the site back in April we’ve been hosted at WordPress, but it was our intent to move to our own domain when we could. The “technical glitch” that shut us down for a few hours a couple weeks back convinced us that now was the time.

In addition to subtracting the .wordpress from the URL, this move enables some neat new features, including a design that better reflects the S&R brand and some new social networking/bookmarking tools. If you like a post, you can now simply click on one of the icons that will appear at the bottom of each one to access your favorite bookmarking service (Digg, Buzzflash, Technorati, Reddit, and more).

Of course, the focus remains on the writing, and you’ll continue to get the best professional rumination possible on zero budget. We kick the new site off with a couple pieces we think some of you will appreciate. First, Mike Sheehan has scored a fantastic interview with Rolling Stone political writer Matt Taibbi, who looks like the heir apparent to the legacy of Hunter Thompson. Then we have another reflection from our newest writer, Dr. Sidicious Bonesparkle, explaining why democracy is the greatest tool for the oppression of the people in history.

Counter-intuitive? Maybe a little. But we’re not here simply to reinforce what you already think, are we? It’s probably not fair for us to say that we’re the smartest blog on the Internet, but that doesn’t mean we don’t TRY to be. And if we accidentally make people think in the process, well, forgive us. Like I say, we have no budget.

So please, stop by and have a look. Also, we ask that those of you who have S&R on your blogrolls change the URL to point to the new site, as the old one will be going away eventually. Finally, we’d appreciate it if you’d help us spread the word – pass the news along and we’ll be eternally grateful.

Thanks, and happy blogging….

Ready to have a little fun? Good, because this week’s SVR is more fun than a barrel of monkees. Doing music videos. Let’s kick it off with an ode to lip gloss. Because, you know, it be poppin’. (More…)

There’s so much badvertising in the world, so today on the Saturday Video Roundup we’re going to spend some time with some good (or at least entertaining) ads we’ve come across recently.

Let’s start with the coolest gorilla in the world. (More…)

On April 16 some colleagues and I launched Scholars & Rogues.

If you don’t know Technorati, they’re one of the top Internet ranking engines, and they currently track over 101 million blogs. So they’re a pretty significant measuring stick in the blog world.

Today, just four months and 14 days after that initial launch, S&R cracked the Technorati Top 10,000, putting us in the top 100th of 1% of all blogs in the world. (More…)

On Monday, an incoming freshman at the University of Colorado was injured in a knife attack by a mentally ill former university employee. The student is fine, fortunately, and the assailant is in custody.

As the Denver Post story notes, there are some disturbing issues where the attacker is concerned.

The suspect, identified as 39-year-old Kenton Drew Astin, worked at CU last year as a cashier at the Alferd Packer Grill at the student center. He was arrested and hospitalized Monday with serious stab wounds, the school said.

Astin was sent to a state mental hospital in 2001 after being accused of stabbing a 21-year-old Longmont man. Court records show Astin pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity on charges including attempted first-degree murder in that case. (More…)

I’m not going to dive into the telecom policy implications here, but if you thought Sprint was screwing up by firing customers who call support too often, you’re gonna love Comcast’s latest blast of genius. (More…)

I’m a poet. Whether I’m a good one or a bad one is, I suppose, open to debate. But the fundamental fact of my life and career is that the business activities that define my professional existence these days are Plan C, at best. If the world worked the way I wish it did, I’d make my living writing, publishing and teaching poetry. (And ideally, I’d be earning a living wage.)

I thought I was on this track back in the late 1980s, when I entered the Masters program in English at Iowa State University (that’s Iowa State , not the Writer’s Workshop over in Iowa City). During those two years I immersed myself in writing and produced The Rainwater Chronicles, a pretty decent book for a 20-something student. I was on my way.

But then something happened. (More…)

Jim Booth has a great (and fairly disturbing) piece on sponsored fundie proselytizing at Scholars & Rogues. Worth the read. Link here.

I finally set up my Facebook site. Yay.

It looks at the moment like Facebook is enjoying a lot of migration from different directions.

• For starters, it was only recently opened up to non-college students, so there’s a general influx of new users.
• A lot of business types appear to be abandoning LinkedIn for Facebook. I’m not unplugging my LinkedIn account yet, but the truth is that it’s never done me a scrap of good. We’ll see if I can make more hay with Facebook.
• Finally, there may be a social network-climbing dynamic at work, although it’s hard to quantify. According to one writer, there seems to be a strong class differentiation between Facebook and the increasingly downscale MySpace. In truth, once you get past band pages, I’ve never found any value at all in MySpace, either.

All things to think about if you’re a business person or a student thinking about your career.

Come see me. I need friends…