Photo: Jonah writing in a new medium, something MB sent me while I was in Oz last week.

At the check-out counter on a shopping for snacks and fluids break yesterday from shifting part of our household from storage in Pittsburg to storage in Ithaca, while Jonah bounced around tethered by one hand and the checker on the other, my standard distractions, Kezzie decided that she needed a flag. An 8" x 10" on a stick with a nice stab-Sam-pointy-final, and she looked like she stepped out of a 1940's Hollywood film fragment as she marched a few steps back and forth using a flag as a child's marching fashion accessory.

A flag. A thing I left behind a long time ago, after I'd done my service. Visual litter, except at consulates abroad, where it serves a purpose. A cult totem. A reminder of how close the MittleEuropa of the 1930's is to the present moment in a culture that chose war and would not unchoose Bush/Cheney.

I took a breath, put a foot on Jonah's foot to hold him while I used both hands to sign for the purchase and bought a little girl a pretty colored fabric on a stick, which she happily waved about until it was time to pile into the truck, when, in the interest of public safety and in the presence of latent menace, the stab-Sam-with-a-pointy-stick moment, I took it and put it under the seats.

I suppose that she'll need it today as we move into our new house.

Its going to be fun, that's it, fun.

In the past month I've driven five times from one end of the Old North West to the other, and reflected on what I've learned, and what I'm leaving, as we move from an Iowa adjacency, to northern Appalachia. From corn, soy, alfalfa rotation and silo prices and manufacturing to the more diverse, or simply different, economic regime of the east.

A "green" critique of "the pledge" (corn based ethanol) seems incomplete, and parochial, in isolation. A lot of corn sugar goes into soda pop and an enhanced sweetener stream into a large segment of the processed foods industry. Also, its all they've got. Oklahoma and Texas sweet light crude are just as far away as Gulf heavy, and wind is still under priced by coal that never pays for the direct impact of the plume down-wind, let alone the true cost of atmospheric injection of fossil carbon.

A "diversity" critique of industrial corn/soy/alfalfa/hog/chicken agriculture seems incomplete, and parochial, in isolation. Markets, and public policies, have created labor, commodity, and capital concentrations, and imagining, let alone changing these in one region in isolation fails to imagine, let alone changing these in others. Transport is more than just the Iowa-to-NYC cost in the calculation of farm margins, it is also the failure of banking and insurance, to thrive west of the Hudson.

Four years of travels in most of the United States, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana and North Dakota omitted, has been a political and economic (are those really distinct?) and social (and is that distinct too?) education. Today is the first day of my life as a Cornell Law spouse, in the modest confines of Ithaca. Constructing a house-centered family living situation and deconstructing a trailer-centered family living situation.

In 2011 the Iowa caucus song will tease the ears of hacks, and someone will test the ability of the Obama machine to repeat its success at capturing the caucus. Single Payer and the ability to articulate an economic vision grounded in Iowa, not as imagined inside the Beltway, or from Chicago, and a vigorous execution of a caucus field plan and a smart, and fully lawyered-up campaign (after all, the incumbant administration is the product of planned caucus capture in Iowa, Nevada and Texas, and many of those Obats got administration jobs and will go on the re-elect nickle in the 11/12 winter).

Single Payer is about as pervasive as an issue gets.

Good morning. My name is Eric Brunner-Williams, and I am speaking to you on behalf of the initial signatories of the Step-by-Step proposal. I represent one of the signatories as the principal of the native, aboriginal, and indigenous cultural and linguistic top-level domain project, one of many similar efforts to preserve living languages and cultures.

Along with linguistic and cultural and city and regional tld projects, we have started the Step-by-Step proposal.

We held a workshop on Monday which was well attended and we have had discussions with the relevant stakeholders, which are continuing.

After detailed discussions with many interested stakeholders, I am now presenting the Step-by-Step proposal to you, the board.

The Step-by-Step proposal is an early window, nothing more, and nothing less. We are convinced that while the still unresolved issues are relevant, a fair number of applicants fall under the RADAR and do not affect these open issues.

Applicants seeking to enter this early window should commit to the highest level of protection regarding these open issues:

• credible registration and compliance policies,
  
• recognition of legitimate protection of ip rights, and
  
• anti-phishing mechanisms,
  

through a shared binding code of conduct, implemented on a scalable platform.

The Step By Step proposal, while allowing some applications to move forward, harms none.

An early window tests the system.

Stakeholders having legitimate concerns about open issues, will be able to flag applications which do not conform to their standards, removing those applications from the early window.

Linguistic and cultural, regional and city applications mentioned in the draft of this proposal are examples. The early window is would be open to any application which is willing to commit to the higher levels of protection I mentioned previously.

We invite discussion with the board and the ICANN community. An online fora is available at stepbystep.tel.

It was seven fish, a series of carp, each two feet or longer, and there were several more gangs o' carp either spawning or simply being very close.

I put both kayaks into the water and Sam and Gracie took off up river while I got Jonah and Kezzie and I settled in the other. We stalked the big fish. Kezzie was wicked keen as a carp hawk, she'd caught a carp of enormous size three years ago when we were in Tennessee, a fish as big as she was, not something she's forgotten.

Sam rode his bike yesterday and was really happy, today he was stressed because MB was away doing laundry, hence the kayak diversion.

In the evening Grace lit the sparkler candles in the gluten-free chocolate cake she made for Sam, and Sam's face as the light from each newly lit candle increased was a study in happiness.

Senator Obama, 2003.