Saturday morning roundup

Posted on Categories Personal
  • In this world of six billion, being first at anything is difficult so I’m pleased and amused to be the top result on MSN Search for ip:207.7.108.201, which is the shared server billsaysthis.com lives on at TextDrive. Props of a similar, though more significant, result to Scoble Senior as his new Naked Conversations corporate blogging book reaches 2,160 on the Amazon sales chart.
  • With the final line Arsenal 7-0 Middlesbrough, I seem to have picked the wrong week to switch skippers on my EPL fantasy squad. Though Chelsea doesn’t play until tomorrow so Frank Lampard can pull my soy bacon out fo the fire justify my confidence by rampaging through sadsack Sunderland. Max Bretos, on today’s debut of Super Saturday, says Mick Macarthy’s bottomdwellers intrigue him and have nothing to lose though even a draw, to say nothing of what would be only their second win of the season, seems as likely as me making the US national side. In any sport.
  • Staying with football, I watched the Manchester derby this morning on FSC and really, where the heck have the big stars of Manchester United gone? Losing 3-1 to City, first time in six years they dropped all three points in the league, and naming one stretch other than van Nistlerooy’s pretty goal where they seriously troubled the host’s defense would be difficult. Instead the players seemed to spend most of their energy arguing with the referee over fouls. Didn’t see it but this result combined with a 1-0 win over Tottenham brings Liverpool to within one point of the Red Devils and second place having played two fewer games. Guess who travels to Old Trafford next Sunday? Oh yeah!
  • Steve Hannaford uses the Guidant/Johnson & Johnson/Boston Scientific biotech love triangle to proffer a plain English translation of mergerspeak. Oligopoly Watch, his blog, is good reading for those of you interested in tracking the increasingly smaller world of corporate ownership.
  • Finally, don’t miss the latest lovely astronomy photos, the Cartwheel galaxy as seen by the Galaxy Evolution Explorer’s Far Ultraviolet detector; the Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field and Planetary Camera; the Spitzer Space Telescope’s Infrared Array Camera; and the Chandra X-ray Observatory’s Advanced CCD Imaging Spectrometer-S.