Celebrating its 10th birthday, Amazon is going to get Harrison Ford to make the delivery to someone who orders a Raiders of the Lost arc DVD. Anna Kournikova will deliver an Adidas order. Moby will deliver his latest CD. Great fun and marketing before, during and after.

As it did during its last birthday, Amazon links to its original home page.

My colleague Peter IMs from Budapest that the authorities have cleared the city’s three biggest shopping malls — Mammut, Westend, Árkád — as a result of a bomb threat.

Apparently the threat was phoned in at 9.20 AM (that’s 40 minutes before the first London explosion.)

Folks are apparently disturbed that the public was only told of the threat at 2PM. The bombs were threatened to blow at 4PM, which was 10AM EST and has now passed.

For those of you who speak Hungarian, more news
here.

Though the thing was apparently fixed yesterday, one of our image servers seems to continue to be on the blink, which is having spill over effects on the other image servers. This should be fixed overnight.

To celebrate the fourth, we attended a parade run (twice) around a tiny lake in the hills of western North Carolina, then watched hula hoop/greasy pole-climbing/pigcalling contests. I won a dollar wagering on the winning hula-hooper but lost it backing the wrong pole-climber. After dinner, watched square dancers on a couple of abandoned tennis courts. Walking home, we squashed lightning bugs.

Last week’s events included canoeing on the New River (America’s oldest) with Wahoo, watching Horn in the West, lots of fiddling at BRAG and pottery at Montreat. The highlights: waving sparklers around a fiddler stoked camp-fire, singing Amazing Grace, hearing a young fiddler riff on Summertime. Despite occassional patches of sun, the week was soaked in fragrant green fog.

Meanwhile, Matt Welch compares the blog boom to the dotcom bubble and foresees tears: “Once the funny money was gone, so too were the celebrity journalists.”

And Steve Locke builds a pool pool as his neighbor relives a bike trip across America from 1995. 1995.