The fireworks finale last night sent a rain of ash down on us. L recovered a scrap of paper fireworks casing from our blanket and hauled it home. “I like the smell.” We sat with families Locke Locke and Srmecs. Spent all day yesterday in the neighborhood pool.

While running through a swamp this morning, I wondered why we didn’t get munched by mosquitoes last night. Could it be that mosquitoes are drawn upward by the flash and roar and carbon dioxide… and then obliterated by the next round of flashes?

To celebrate, I bought Hugh Macleod’s beautiful rendition of the American flag. I’ve always loved Jasper Johns’ flags, and have been eyeing Hugh’s flag for a couple of weeks. The original is in the mail, but I do have the digital version to hoist here today. Ck it out: Hugh has shaken up his pricing — beauty comes in many prices.

Feel free to hoist this flag on your site; please give credit to Hugh Macleod …

A study by Public Administration for Traffic Safety of Spain and the Complutense University in Madrid finds that “intent listening had almost no effect on how closely the drivers paid attention to the road and the dashboard. But when the drivers were asked to talk about what they had heard, their ability to pay attention dropped by as much as a third. Even relatively simple production tasks, like relating where they were and what they were doing, had about as big an effect as requests that the researchers considered more complicated. The study found that the distraction levels were equally high when the driver was talking to a passenger or into a hands-free cellphone.”

I always love it when people gripe about advertising, particularly when Blogads gets slammed in the process. So here’s a nice anti blog ad screed from one Steve Hooker, a UK government employee:

Though I have a degree in graphics and advertising I’ve always been against advertising. Just my socialist background finds them distasteful. It’s whoever can spend enough money fooling people that their can of beans is best, not that that can is best for the person. Trickery, slight of hand, bending the truth, that’s what ads are for… If ads start to plague [link to Blogads] blogs, the near-utopian world we have right now may disappear.

Yes, Steve, God forbid that writers should get 80% of what advertisers pay, rather than the 5-10% usually passed along by traditional publishers.

I guess Steve, a guy who has the luxury of working as an “intranet builder for Government Office of West Midlands,” probably rarely faces the challenge of selling anything to anyone other than his boss or wife… so has his fingers firmly on the pulse of economic reason. It’s easy for him to think that the rest of us should do as he does.

[Update: whoops, Steve’s an entrepreneur and a nice guy. See his comment below. So much for pre-breakfast snarkiness.]

I assume Steve gets to work on a bike he built himself — Marx forbids he buy one that some lying corporation “convinced” him to drive — or better yet, walks barefoot. He drinks only tap water, since it’s the only beverage not contaminated by the slime of advertising.

Fact is, most of the products that make modernity comfortable for folks other than the elite are objects and experiences we didn’t know we’d need, things no central planner could have imagined people would ever want or afford. Each product started out as a twinkle in the eye of some deranged entrepreneur, then got tested on the entrepreneur’s friends and family and finally got popularized through — cover your ears Steve — advertising.

This dialectic of invention and advertising, product creation and demand stimulation, was good… unless you think products like refrigerators, pocket cameras, automobiles, air travel and personal computers should be used only by rich folk AND designed only by government employees. Yes, here’s a souvenir of the pre-mass-market-advertising utopio:

In fact, Steve’s post isn’t all idiocy. (In fact, he seems to be a cheerful guy and good father when you read the rest of his blog.) I agree with Steve’s final point: “The point of blogging is not to make money from eye-balls, not IMO. It maybe to make money from thought and intellect or reputation sure, nothing wrong with making money. But CPMs are eye-ball traffic, lowest common denominator.” If blogs are going to achieve their rightful advertising premiums, we’re going to have to demonstrate that they do more than provide cheap eye-balls or high clickthrus… MSN will always have more eyeballs and Drudge can always undercut our CPM. Bloggers who strive to will make money because they provide, amid the clutter and cacaphony of online life, a uniquely intimate and consistent context for entrepreneurs who need to popularize innovative ideas and intangibles.

Entrepreneur Andy Bourland has some effusive praise for Rick Bruner and Olivier Travers, two fantastic guys who’ve helped me shape Blogads.

With Google soaking up a lot of mind-share, we’ve been looking hard at refining how we present Blogads. I just had long chat with Allan Karl, an old hand in advertising who has been exploring the nexus between blogging and business. Allan offered some blunt and very useful tips on simplifying and reinforcing the Blogads message. We’ll impliment his suggestions tomorrow AM.

Rick Bruner writes: “blogs are in themselves the most inspiring movement in politics I’ve seen since I was last idealistic back in college, lo many years ago.”

Having lost out in most of the arm wrestling for the family copy of Order of the Pheonix, I’m only now nearing the end. Rowling has continued to churn out amazing fiction, but is she wearying? In the penultimate fight scene, she serves up three “lunged out of nowhere” transitions. Or more. I’ll have to reread that section and tell you.

Seyed has announced a $500 for the best blog trader. My blog portfolio is up 186% this month, but I’m number 580 out of some 7000 traders.

Spent a great afternoon in right field seats at Fenway, watching the Red Sox beat the Tigers 6 to 4. We were in the shade and got occassional breezes, but outside the day was ablaze. After the game, we walked 40 minutes along Commonwealth Avenue to the car. Having wondered all year, my son can confirm that Boston does were red sox.

On another local tangent, welcome to Steve, my first Amherst friend to be bitten by the blog bug.