Matt Welch: “There are many terrific side-benefits to this blogging stuff, but one of the most elemental is that it’s easier to keep in touch, meet great new people, and make vast geographical distances seem insignificant. Pretty cool.” In point of fact, I learned in this post that my old friend Charlie Hornberger (via Prague, Budapest and Austin) finally got hitched.

We went to the NC State Fair this afternoon. We enjoyed: airguns at the Fish & Wildlife stand; giant sand sculptures; a dozen baby pigs suckling; the rabbits; a goat getting its hair cut; little brother tossing two baseballs at the piles of blocks; big sister tossing two rubber balls into a small wastebasket; a chronological display of old plows and threshers; the smells of roasted corn, silage, cotten candy and barbecue fused in the seamless die of a clear, blue fall sky. Our favorite activity by a country mile: holding the baby chicks at a table in the poultry barn.

A carnie tipped us on how use the bb-machine gun to obliterate the red star target and win a prize — rather than trying to cover the star with holes, shoot a circle around the star and cut it out. Also, he said, boys with two front top teeth missing are usually seven.

Check out the fair webcam.

Read all about the folks who own (and now control) America’s 12th largest newspaper chain: here.

Kate Kaye writes in Media Post: “Many candidates have experimented with campaign websites, email fundraising pleas and, less frequently, banner ads. Now some are beginning to display a stronger grasp of what the Web has to offer.” In recent weeks, we’ve seen a number of politically oriented businesses selling t-shirts and bumper-stickers buy blogads and have seen huge growth in page views on politially hot blogs like Political Wire, Atrios and TalkingPointsMemo. It’s only a matter of time before we see campaigns flinging Blogads. (Via Political Wire.)

A modern children’s tale: a few months back, Tamas found an orphaned magpie in his garden begging for food from Tamas’ pet turtle. Tamas adopted the magpie and brought him into the office every day, where he perched atop various computer screens. Then, one day, a flock of magpies flew past an the orphan joined them. Here’s the inquisitive fellow. Somewhere, Tamas has tape of the magpie perched atop the turtle’s shell, tapping away, saying to the hiding turtle, “come out to play!”

Retired four-star admiral Hal Gehman, who chaired the post-mortem on the Columbia debacle: “They claim that the culture in Houston is a ‘badgeless society,’ meaning it doesn’t mater what you have on your badge — you’re concerned about shuttle safety together. Well, that’s all nice, but the truth is that it does matter what badge you’re wearing. Look, if you really do have an organization that has free communication and open doors and all that kind of stuff, it takes a special kind of management to make it work. And we just don’t see that management here. Oh, they say all the right things. ‘We have open doors and e-mails, and anybody who sees a problem can raise his hand, blow a whistle, and stop the whole process.’ But then when you look at how it really works, it’s an incestuous, hierarchical system, with invisible rankings and a very strict informal chain of command. They all know that. So even though they’ve got all the trappings of commuication, you don’t actually find communication. It’s very complex. But a person brings an issue up, what caste he’s in makes all the difference. Now, again, NASA will deny this, but if you talk to people, if you really listen to people, all the time you hear ‘Well, I was afraid to speak up.’ Boy it comes across loud and clear. You listen to the meetings: ‘Anybody got anything to say?’ There are thirty people in the room, and slam! There’s nothing. We have plenty of witness statements saying, ‘If I had spoken up, it would have been at the cost of my job.’ And if you’re in the engineering department, you’re a nobody.” (Quoted by William Langewiesche in November’s Atlantic magazine.)

Having mastered Beethoven’s Minuet in G on the violin, a first grader I know has moved on to a subtler art: burping. I never mastered the trick of gulping air and letting it escape at the right raucous tempo, but this kid can crank out a dozen belches in 30 seconds. I try strenuously to frown.

Arellanes reports from the front lines in Prague.

Listening to Chris Lydon’s interview with Len Apcar, editor in chief of NYTimes.com, it’s clear Apcar takes blogs seriously. Apcar: “There are some terrifically informative blogs that are breaking news, shaping events. And… the NYTimes has always been an information leader and we cannot ignore this, we need to be involved, and thinking about it, and thinking about how it can be adapted to our purposes and our standards for our audience.”

The interview is incredibly revealing about what the Times gets… and doesn’t get about blogs. Per utterance, blogs generate more page views and passions than traditional media, and I’m pretty sure that big media simply adopting the pace and the style of blogs isn’t going to close that gap. I’ll try to transcribe more later.

I’m constantly pleasantly surprised by the blogosphere. Matt Welch posted about Atrios’ fantastic success raising money for a new laptop, and the post’s comments set off a heated but valuable brainstorming session about SoCal grocery strike.