Dowbrigade

Shares
of Red
Hat Inc. , the world’s biggest distributor of the free Linux computer-operating
system, rose nearly 18 percent yesterday after
the company forecast that sales this quarter would exceed forecasts.

"Red Hat is the only direct way for investors to take advantage
of the significant promise of Linux," according to Katherine Egbert,
an analyst with C.E. Unterberg Towbin. The quarter’s results "prove,
for the first time, that a profitable, cash-generating business can be
built around open-source software."

Red Hat’s stock rose $1.48, or 17.62 percent, to $9.88 a share.

from
the New York Times

I
just heard Sheppard Smith on Fox News announce that US Administrator
L. Paul Bremer was in Washington today, filling the US Congress in
on the State of Iraq. Wow! That’s news!

I just have one question: When did they decide to make Iraq the 51st
State, and how did they manage to slip it by the US public? I know I’m
not the most alert guy in the world, but I try to stay abreast of the
major issues of the day, and this is the first I have heard of this one. Eat
your heart out, Puerto Rico!

Of course, it is a brilliant stroke, however they did it. Another religious,
oil-rich state with a healthy fear of immigrants and a tradition of hard
work
and ingenuity. It will also be a lot easier to get that $87 billion dollars
out of Congress now that Iraq is part of the United States. Plus, I bet
they elect two Republican senators, breaking that pesky deadlock and
freeing up the Vice President for more important duties than casting
tiebreakers.

I am glad to see the administration thinking outside the box, expanding
its support base, and diversifying the American electorate. Bagdad, of
course, will become the state capital. Wonder if they need a used monument
of the Ten Commandments?

from
the Washington Post.

Even a Blind
Kangaroo Finds an Unconscious Farmer Once in a While

A partially blind kangaroo has been hailed a hero after helping
to rescue a farmer
who suffered serious head injuries when he was hit by a falling branch.

The pet kangaroo discovered the farmer lying unconscious in a field
and alerted relatives at their home in Morwell in Gippsland, south
east Australia.
The man was checking his property for damage following a severe storm
when he was struck by
a falling branch and knocked unconscious.

The farmer was later named as 52-year-old Len Richards. His 17-year-old
daughter, Celeste, said the eastern grey kangaroo, Lulu, stood guard
over her father and "barked like a dog" to get help.

from Ananova

Paleoartist John Gurche reconstructed the fossil
apes featured in an article on ape evolution from the August issue of
Scientific American.
They are supposedly the most accurate representations of our hominid
ancestors ever created.

"For
this article I picked the five fossil apes that are the most completely
known. Thus you have Dryopithecus and Ouranopithecus,
which are probably closely related to the African great apes, including
humans. And in fact, in the final reconstructions, these two look like
African apes. Then there is Sivapithecus, which is closely related
to orangutans on almost everyone’s evolutionary tree. Sivapithecus is
really
outrageous, because it takes some of the things that make orangutan
faces stand out from other living apes to an unbelievable extreme."

from Scientific American