Slight change tonight to the look of the blog, but more importantly, I’ve slipped in a banner in the sidebar for an organization that I am anxious to support. 

Kiva is a non-profit that is providing a conduit for micro-lending in the third-world.  The site speaks for itself well, but I think it is worth noting that some of the most critical growth in our own country was due to the work of small loan businesses, such as the company that is now Wells Fargo Financial.  Micro-loans will make a much bigger impact on the third world than all the money that could be given through direct charity (although I support that as well, especially for disaster and initial infrastructure startup costs) because it will help people to become self-sufficient.

In the world of Baseball, my Mets are back in first place again (okay, they’re tied with Philadelphia, it’s still first place even if you have to share it).  One more regular season game left.  The Mets HAVE to win this game to be the Eastern Division Champs (if Philadelphia wins, there will be a play-off game).  If they lose, and Philadelphia loses, same situation. We’ll see what happens…

Today (Saturday) there were two excellent columns in the Wall Street Journal on the back of the Weekend Journal section.  Peggy Noonan’s column was a great treatise on why we should not get too bent out of shape about allowing Ahmadinejad to speak here in the U.S.  What was particularly inspiring to me was the last part of the column where she addressed the lack of serious discourse by candidates with those who disagree with them… this is a chronic problem even in the blog-o-sphere… ‘nuf said.

The second column was Terry Teachout’s where he wrote a very enlightening piece on the varying levels of standards for theatre criticism (professional vs. “community theatre”).  I felt his thoughts could be well applied across various disciplines.