The Amherst Bulletin reports:
Suspicious Activity Saturday 1:46 a.m. Police received a report of possible road rage when people on North Pleasant Street got out from their vehicle and were seen wielding a tire iron. Police said the people were just using the iron to repair a tire that had been damaged after going over a pothole.

Noise Complaints Sunday 12:41 a.m. A loud part on Phillips Street was not excessively noisy. 6:01 p.m. Yelling was heard in the area of The Boulders. It was just a man and woman whose relationshp was breaking up.

Suspicious Activity Sunday 11:18 p.m. Police spoke to a man sitting in a truck parked outside the Dunkin’ Donuts on College Street for several hours. The man checked out OK after he told police that he was just enjoying his new vehicle and lost track of time.

Suspicious Activity Wednesday 5:58 p.m. A man with long hair and a goatee knocking on the door of a Station Road home was just soliciting for the Sierra Club and was gone when police got there.

Citizen Assistance Wednesday 5:58 p.m. Teawaddle Lane residents told police that they lost their groceries somewhere between the supermarket and their home.

These make a lite reflection of the reports Ken Layne offers from Sparks.

Matt Welch, who coined the term warblog in 2001, has seen Google referals for the term jump from 27 in February to 942 in March.

Annoyed by eBay and Paypal’s increasingly restrictive policies, a group of kink vendo are trying to redirect their businesses to a new auctioneer. Network theory suggests that specialist hubs might be able to thrive and innovate when a network monopolist ignores their interests. See also this article by Christopher Null.

Former US senator and presidential candidate Gary Hart has a blog.

I’m excited to be invited to present a paper at the Vienna Blogtalk May 23-24. Thank you to Ben and Greg for critiquing my draft proposal.

Peter Merholz, my favorite info architect, has launched a multi-author blog focused on East Bay. He says “I believe that there’s a shining future in regional weblogs. They can be an amazing community resource. Particularly for communities too small to warrant a daily newspaper, but too large to be satisfied by a weekly 4-page newsletter.” Damn, I’ve got to get my Amherst blog going. (Via Corante.)

Steven Johnson writes: “in his classic novel Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut explains how the world is divided into two types of social organizations: the karass and the granfalloon. A karass is a spontaneously forming group, joined by unpredictable links, that actually gets stuff done’ as Vonnegut describes it, ‘a team that do[es] God’s Will without ever discovering what they are doing.’ A granfalloon, on the other hand, is a ‘false karass,’ a bureaucratic structure that looks like a team but is ‘meaningless in terms of the ways God gets things done.’ … When you find yourself in a karass, it’s an intuitive, unplanned experience. Getting into a granfalloon, on the other hand, usually involves showing two forms of ID. For most of the past 50 years, computers have been on the side of the granfalloons, good at maintaining bureaucratic structures and blind to more nuanced social interactions. But a new kind of software…”

Actually, although I thought he’d perfectly established the trajectory for an article about blogging, Johnson goes on to write about a piece of software the maps social interaction.

Even a poll about how often geeks shower turns to Iraq.

Blogcritics stayed above 20,000 visits yesterday, with many people linking to this round-up of Book-Film-TV-Video recommendations. Meanwhile, www.Command-Post.org’s traffic grew another 10%.

To recap why this is so impressive, Command-Post did as many page views on its third day online as Fark, a communal blog aggregating bizarre headlines, did in 1999. Day five matched Fark’s 2000. (The future? Fark did 30 million page views in 2001 and is on track to do 250 million in 2003.)

Ever the shrewd polemicist, Glenn Reynolds tars with a broad and colorful brush the BCC’s scorn for America’s ambition to oust Saddam. My favorite riposte today: “A common thread among anti-semitism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Americanism is the fear of being outdone by people willing to work harder. It’s not surprising that such a fear exists among a disproportionate number of those who take state-supported jobs.”