Figure skating ... you're keeping track of this summer's action, yes? You're not just spending all your time tracking the Red Sox and their futile pursuit of the Yankees, or "the boys of winter" selected in the NBA draft, or waiting to get a copy of the 206-page Kobe transcript Michelle Goodbee forgot to copy you on, are you? If so, you may have missed the news that the 50th International Skating Union (ISU) Congress which was held about 2 weeks ago in Scheveningen, the Netherlands, has accepted the ISU new judging system, which marks the end of the 6.0 scoring system at ISU events. It awards points for a technical score combined with points awarded for five additional components - skating skills, transitions, performance/execution, choreography and interpretation. These components have their own sub-components. For example, skating skills include - overall skating quality, multi-directional skating, speed and power, cleanness and sureness of edges, glide and flow, depth and quality of edges, balance in ability of partner. Read more ...

Scoring was also among the items discussed at the second annual U.S. Figure Skating Athlete Summit which took place 19 June in Chicago.

And, speaking of getting scored on, in related news, Tonya Harding takes a beating while chasing her dream.

Seven deer on the dirt pile just beyond the empty parking lot at 6:30 and then a single deer seemingly stalking me that appeared at the corner of each meadow throughout this morning’s walk, clouds of Cabbage Whites ... more than enough for a gumbo , a weasel stare-down on the trail, juvenile Cedar Waxwing preening, a single morning glory, butterfly eggs on milkweed, chicory and that middle-eastern looking man with the thin mustache, cigarillo, coffee mug and two briefcases.

And last week ... meadows undeered, full-flowered and garishly cinema-Oz-like but thankfully no winged monkeys ... a Red Admiral, Skippers and Clouded Sulphurs on trails lined in raspberry just becoming, thistle, clover, nettle and nightshade at noon as well on another visit a swirled fogging dawn where the dew headed grass narrowed the trails and wetted my jeans, countless tiny orange-bodied spiders hung in the brush, and goldfinch gangs menaced.

After my poor showing in fantasy basketball and my lame picks for the NBA playoffs I'm thinking I should look into something completely different ... maybe something like the action at Caskets on Parade? It's too late to get into the 2004 dead pool but it could be just the right time to read the rules and study some targets of opportunity for next year.

Now that the last bucket has fallen it seems that Mina may have had the inside dish on the season. Sure Cheapseats43 had Chauncey Billups and did win the fantasy competition, but Mina, who had Richard Hamilton and Ben Wallace, picked Detroit to take it all way back when ... and her back up pick from the West was the Lakers. What can I say ... my picks were Indiana and Sacramento ... how clever was that? But next year I'm thinking ... no ... I'm not even close to thinking about next year ... I'm struggling with the more immediate issue of what coffee blend to pick up this AM ... and maybe going for a swim.

New Bedford Renascence ... a limited edition CD and book set by Carl Simmons that was the follow-up to his Anthology Folkatone Music ... Daphne had found her copy while drinking a second glass of wine for the evening and looking indifferently for music to listen to ... maybe White Ladder ... maybe some John Hiatt ... anything.

The Renascence release party had been just about a year ago at Here Be Monsters on William Street in New Bedford and Daphne had lost track of Carl and the others since then. That wasn’t so hard to understand. With influences ranging from Aaron Copeland and Woodie Guthrie to the Beach Boys and Charles Ives, Carl was not much like anything you might have expected to hear coming out of New Bedford ... a listen to Introduction To, Waterless Coathanger, Whip-poor-wool Prelude, or New Bedford Rally Round would quickly convince you of that ... he and the others at Unconcious Piano Productions were so not your mother's Tavares. Simon Cowell would not be giving Carl a call any time soon.

Daphne thought someone had told her that Carl had moved out west. Maybe Colorado? Or he was doing something with videos? She was thinking it was very unlikely that Carl had gone to "settle down in Rochester, making a living writing spinner books about surrounding towns". Where the hell was Rochester anyway?

Two hours and three more glasses of wine later, a very loosely focused Daphne was at the New Wave on North Front Street where she and Nabeeh had once seen Carl play. The Wave wasn’t the way she had remembered it at all. No, she wasn’t sorry that Nabeeh wasn’t here with her ... she wanted nothing more to do with him ... but it just wasn't the same. The very fact that she was sitting in a bar after midnight in this neighborhood, alone while surrounded by people 15 years younger than herself, and drinking another beer that she couldn’t taste seemed a sign that maybe she had a problem ... maybe she didn’t know what she wanted. Sometimes she felt she was nothing but a dreamer. Or that this, Nabeeh, the Wave, everything ... was all just a dream.

Maybe it was or wasn't a dream but it very much was a mistake to come here and another even bigger mistake to turn right instead of left when she walked out. Even if Daphne didn’t know what she wanted there were people at the Wave who did, and two of them got up to follow Daphne as she wandered away wondering where she had parked.

Good to see Yahoo make the obvious smart and easy play in response to Gmail ... I now have 100MB of storage in my free Yahoo account as well as a message size of 10MB or I will once they are done dicking with the new "smooth" inteface and come back online. 100MB is more than enough to meet my eamil needs for at least the immediate future ... now how about Yahoo bumping up the 25MB limit for my business mail account that comes with the web hosting service I buy from Yahoo and which is foolishly tied in some way I don't understand to my now supersized free Yahoo account.

Thank Google for Gmail ... you’ve made an important point about storage space ... it’s cheap so why not provide lots. And yes, tags or flags might be a better way to track emails than folders though as far as I can see threads are just an unnecessarily redundant variation on this same "where does this email belong" theme. Search might be useful ... but I’ve managed without it. And privacy is not really an issue ... where would anyone ever get the idea that email was private? I can tell you stories about folks retiring from Navy labs where their Outlook accounts were kept active for more than 6 months after they left without even the courtesy of an out-of-office message being put in place. How private does that sound? Hmmmm.

So does anyone really need a Gmail account? I’m thinking many people don't ... they are happily wedded to their current email names and email providers ... I've got Gmail accounts I can't even give away and those on Ebay are now selling for zip. Google may be missing the point ... it’s the integration of Yahoo mail with other Yahoo features such as calendar, alerts, and a My Yahoo which now includes RSS feeds in the news pages you can build that make the Yahoo package easily superior. But Yahoo is not perfect ... far from it ... they desperately need to do something about their Customer Service ... which was once at least sufficient but now seems to have degenerated into useless scrambled pseudo-random auto-responses.

If I were at Google I’d be focusing more on my search package. Though I have habitually used Google over Yahoo for search ... I have the Google script in my browser toolbar ... I'm suddenly finding Yahoo does a better job weighting a string of words without quotes than Google seems to be doing ... and Yahoo seems to be indexing my site changes faster. Sticking with Google ... for now.

And then there's Blogger ... very slick move by Google ... how did Yahoo miss this? Yikes ..enough whining about technology ... I need to get back out and run with the dogs through the flowers some more.

The "improper use of bullets kills learning". You knew this, right? Richard Mayer of the University of California thinks so. You knew he meant PowerPoint bullets, right? Richard says:

"The success of PowerPoint depends in part on the fundamental need of people to communicate with others within the same community of practice. It is worthwhile to distinguish between two possible goals in making a PowerPoint presentation - information presentation, in which the goal is to present information to the audience, and cognitive guidance, in which the goal is to guide the audience in their processing of the presented information."

Sounds to me like he's given this some thought. Hmmmm. If you care about actually communicating with your PowerPoint slides, either in information or cognitive mode ... and for some people I know the need for communication with their slides is considered optional, then maybe you would be interested in reading Cliff Atkinson at Beyond Bullets, Tony Ramos at Tony's PowerPoint Weblog or Jucca Korpela's writing about Wiio's laws, which are, or so she says, humoristically formulated serious observations by Osmo A. Wiio, a Finnish researcher of human communication, about how human communication usually fails except by accident.

I'm wondering when folks at Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology think Rico, the border collie, might be ready for PowerPoint? I'm thinking I know where he could get a job putting together presentations. And he could probably take over this blog in his spare time without missing a beat.

Paul was so engrossed in studying the current listings for mounted butterflies on Ebay that he didn’t really notice when April left for work. Cross referencing the auction offerings with information from a profusion of web sites such as ButterfliesandThings, Insect-Sale, and Ianni Butterfly Enterprises as well as his Collins Field Guide to the Butterflies of Africa, a battered copy he had found in the book shop near the hospital, required his complete concentration. It was only after he heard a car start that Paul realized April was gone. He went to the window, watched from above as she carefully edged the nose of her Toyota past the broad hedge blocking the view of oncoming traffic on the narrow road that swept along the hillside behind the apartment, then, after tensing momentarily as a lawn care van speed by while April waited, he saw her drive safely off and went back to his computer. The action on a Green-Veined Charaxes, though a specimen in only a very weak A- condition, looked particularly interesting.

April punched at the CD player looking for "Pass in Time" on "Central Reservation" by Beth Orton. She thought that whole butterfly thing that Paul was doing with those pins and the cotton and those nasty little boxes with the poor butterflies inside was so très creepy.

"Andy has some words of advice he’d like you to pass on to your friend Ana Marie."

Evan looked over to the far end of the bar where George Panagiotopoulos sat in his black rayon shirt with the asymmetric flower motif looking more than a little like a cheap imitation of Tony Soprano except T would never be sitting with his back to the doors and windows ... even at the OB where this biggest danger was a visit by Patrick Kennedy.

"Andy? You mean Andy Williams? Channeled Andy? You’re still in touch with him?"

George nodded. Evan wasn't really that surprised.

"You should know by now that I don’t have any friends which is one reason why you’re sitting over there and I’m sitting over here. And if you mean Wonkette ... that Ana Marie ... you, or Andy, or whoever, should realize that I don’t know her any better than the hundreds, or maybe thousands, of other people who read her blog ... though I’m thinking maybe I already know her better than I want to ... and I haven’t actually read her for more than a week."

"Being pretty isn’t easy ... and being easy isn’t pretty. That’s what Andy said to tell her."

Evan shook his head, raised his glass about two fingers high in a mock salute than turned back to pretending he was studying the wines behind the bar.

"Andy has some advice for you too. He says maybe you need to take a break from some of your reading. Maybe you need to get away from 'Contemplative Prayer' and 'Confessions of Saint Augustine'. He’s suggesting that you could try 'Lamb'. It’s by Christopher Moore. 'Lamb - The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal' by Christopher Moore. Yeah, that’s it. Something different. Andy thinks you’ll like it ... with all due respect, of course."

Keyboards? We don’t need no stinking keyboards ... and maybe we don’t need no stinking ISP either. Phones ... you may have heard of them ... as well as what seems to be significant recent improvements in voice recognition, and VoiceXML for integration of your spoken commands with data along with more natural speech synthesis are smoothly evolving into a service environment accessible from anywhere that, in most cases where encountered, is being built from the ground up to be a whole lot simpler to use and much more friendly than services reached by whacking on a keyboard and mousing through web pages ... maybe even more friendly than the real world. OK so Verizon Customer Service (555-1611) didn’t actually have much help for Paul and had to hand him over to a "repair representative" on multiple occasions so he could hear pleasantly spun stories from a real person about how there was a "local problem" that support crews would "resolve in a few hours" each time he called during the week that his voice mail was down ... but what about Ticketmaster (1-800-347-0808) where Evan’s purchase of tickets for Cyndi Lauper at the Melody Tent was handled completely by speaking to very intelligent and helpful software ... well, handled at least up to the point where he couldn’t understand the section number where his tickets were and had to go to Ticketmaster online to learn this ... Evan is taking the blame for this one.

Then there’s Tellme at 1-800-555-TELL where Evan can get scores or news or weather at 3 in the morning when he wakes up with a need to know ... he keeps his cell phone under his pillow for just that purpose. Or the Walgreens automated phone service where Mary renews the prescriptions that keep her healthy and sane. And now Mina had the new improved Yahoo-By-Phone where she could get her email as well as those same scores, news and weather that Evan gets from Tellme.

Can it get any better? Yes and it will. Wouldn’t voice accessible Ebay be an even more fun way to spend money on things like Stars-Behind-Bars playing cards? You know it would be.

I’m thinking that unless you’re setting up your information for easy access by phone or your web pages to be driven by server-side voice logic from a phone or maybe Voice-Over-IP then your design is so laughably last millennium as to be already nearly useless. Wake up and hear the voices along with the rest of us.

"The Snake and Daisy"? Was that the name of the gay biker pub on lower Thames Street that opened just this past winter? Or am I thinking "Snakes and Daisies" might be the names on the restroom doors in the lounge of that small nudist camp on Monhegan Island? Well, actually all I’m doing is thinking over what I saw new and different during yesterday’s high-noon hike at Sachuest Point. The anxious brown garter snake that wriggled so frantically as I approached and made no progress in getting away is lucky if it’s still alive today ... a hungry gull would have had little difficulty in snatching it for a meal then and probably has by now if gulls eat snakes. Do they? I wouldn’t know but it seems they should..

As far as daisies go ... I’ve misplaced my copy of Stalking the Wild Asparagus, or maybe I never owned one but how likely is that? Didn’t everyone who spent any time outdoors in the 60s have this book by Euell Gibbons? I’ve probably got six copies stashed away in the boxes of books in my closets. Did you want a copy. Or, if you were interested, you could get a signed first edition, fifth printing at ABEBOOKS for only $75.00. So anyway, I’m reasonably sure daisies are edible and, even if you don’t care for them as food, you can never really have too many ...spring has not arrived until you’ve seen at least twelve "day’s eyes". And spring, at least if measured in this mannner, may be a long time coming if you spend every day working.

If you’ve always wondered about the political leanings of that woman down the street who drives the Volvo with that pathetic "Heal the Ocean" bumper sticker ... you know which one I mean ... you’ve seen her in the parking lot at Clement’s market I’m sure ... or if you’re just nosy ... then the Neighbor Search at Fund Race 2004 was made for you.

Newsweek calls this use of data from the Federal Election Commission "geo-voyeurism" but you don’t care. All you want to do is see where your neighbors are contributing their money.

April DeAngelis had been more than a little crazy in this, what she called her "kiss me now" spring. She had turned 21 ... had moved out of her mother’s home in Federal Hill, away from Ronzio’s, Sicilia’s Pizzeria, Caserta Pizzeria, the tattoo parlors, the Coin-o-Matic, Gasbarro’s Liquors, Scialo’s Bakery, Almonte’s clothing store, the plaza and "La Pigna" and into Paul’s apartment at 177 where after one failed attempt at lovemaking they were now uneasy roommates. She graduated from Johnson&Wales with 3,500 others in a ceremony at the "Dunk" a week ago Saturday where Robert Kraft of the New England Patriots had spoken to everyone and then April personally when they had met accidently back stage about "responsibility" and now she was poised to leave her job at the OB to actually be "responsible" and begin a "career".

As she dashed the ice and water from the now chilled and moistened glass into the sink, then shook and poured the one-part Noilly Prat and four parts Tanqueray from the shaker, building her own version of a perfect Martini, April considered that on top of all this madness she had met and fallen in love with Jasmine ... who was black ... married ... and in at least her mid-thirties.