So everyone's heard by now that yet another private security contractor has been killed in Iraq, this one British in Fallujah. But did anybody else catch that the name of the company he works for is Custer Battles?

In other news this week, a private shipping firm is launching its new ship Titanic.

Some of these have been sitting on the scratchpad for a looong time...

• Claim vs. fact of Condoleezza Rice's testimony
• This will be dreadful, unless she *really* pulls some great lines out of her ass. (Metacritic scores the Prince and Me at 44, which sounds bad, but sounds even worse when you realise that's also what it gave the abysmal Steve Martin vehicle Cheaper by the Dozen
• Andrew Orlowski seems to hate mess pathologically; he hates blogs because they cause "noise" and he's terrified of background packet radiation. A mess-free totalitarian state seems his idea of a good time; no wonder he lives in the US, eh?
• Durn't look too bad, surprisingly.
• Do some tests was a reminder; I've done them now.
• Were they warned? Seriously, I don't think anybody seriously expected September 11th, but if they had documents saying there were Al-Qaeda affiliated terrorists in the US, and yet terrorism wasn't even one of their top priorities in 2000, then they really do deserve a kicking. Preferably out of office.
• 200 ways to be inspired with new ideas (I want to try them all!)
• My god has a plausibility quotient of 0.8
• What's so funny?
• Excellent quotes
• A fascinating article about two hermaphrodite "sisters"
• Excellent little puzzle game
• TCP/IP over avian carrier actually achieved
• The rising spires of London. Yay! A skyline at last! The Shard of Glass looks purdy, in particular.
• Top 10 things they never taught me in design school.
• So killing deeply spiritual terrorist leader Osama Bin Laden before he masterminded an atrocity would have been great. But killing deeply spiritual terrorist leader Sheikh Ahmad Yassin after he's already masterminded lots of atrocities is bad. I have some trouble following that logic. I can't advocate not blowing up bin Laden, so therefore I must support blowing up Yassin. But I don't want to blow up a guy in a wheelchair!
• Bush allows people to be fired for being gay?
• Mathematical analysis of crime levels (stopping people committing their first crime is much more important than stopping re-offenders; this goes entirely contrary to most current policing methods).
• Dutch prime minister: Harry Potter
• The Untitled project: the world without text.
• One-legged DDR
• Make your own model of the solar system to any scale
• Things not to read while listening to "the show must go on". Soooo depressing...
• Rummy gets in trouble for keeping a piece of one of the 9-11 planes (the one that hit the pentagon).
• Snakehead Terror! The Sci-fi channel continues the great tradition of making B-movies. I love them.
• Stupid premise. But it has an asian stoner!
• SevenGraff: should Gay Geeks offer free blogs?
• The first gay wedding in the US was in 1975. And in Boulder, Colorado, no less.

That's quite enough for now...