Quarter end!  Wow.  Doesn't seem like that long ago it was New Year's, and I had just restarted blogging...  And tomorrow is April Fool's, the annual silly season on the web where you can't believe anything you read (to an even larger extent than usual :)  Looking at history, four years ago Google announced Gmail.  That was the greatest April Fool's joke, because it wasn't a joke (so it was).

Also from history five years ago I wrote On Blame.  Not bad for a rookie blogger.  I still like that one a lot.

John Lott thinks The recession is a media myth.  "As any economist knows, a recession is two consecutive quarters of negative growth, and we haven't even had one single quarter of negative growth reported. The economy slowed down significantly during the end of last year, but that was after a sizzling annual GDP growth rate of 4.9 percent in the third quarter."  He could be right.  On the other hand, the credit crunch and precipitous fall in housing prices are not myths.

Here we have furniture from reclaimed wine staves.  "Furniture designer Cliff Spencer couldn't resist when he heard about a Napa winery discarding wine-stained oak. An avid user of reclaimed materials, Spencer now regularly reclaims oak staves from California wineries and transforms them into these stunning one-of-a-kind pieces for residential and commercial use. (p.s., you don’t have to be a wine aficionado to enjoy them)."  How cool is that?  I bet it smells wonderful!

TTAC reviews the Jaguar XF Supercharged.  "For those unfamiliar with Newtonian physics, that means 'Ah Jenkins. It looks as if we're all about to die.' It must be said: 420hp is a lot of power. It’s enough shove to take the 4200 lbs. XF Supercharged from naught to sixty in five seconds flat."  Sweet.  Looks like the first Jag in a while to deserve to be a Jag.  A nice present for Tata :)

Tim Oren wonders Is Vista is Microsoft's Micro Channel?  I think it is worse than that; Vista is Microsoft's OS/2.

So I have a request; could we have a way to indicate when a link takes you to a page with an embedded video, instead of a page you can read?  I have little patience for watching video and generally avoid it, but nowadays it seems like half the links on the web are to video.  Anyway thanks in advance :)

Finally, Keith Kaplan reports researchers at Stanford have identified a specific pattern of brain activity which occurs when listening to the B-52s.  Tune Channel Z (vid)!  I am not making this up.