From NYt article on OHIO The New York Times Magazine, The Multilevel Marketing of the President: "Oh, those stores aren't real,'' he said with a smile, and when I looked closer, I saw that he was right. They were merely decorative store windows, a few feet deep at most, designed to create for residents the warm aura of a bustling town center. Later, when we drove across the road to ''the Farms,'' where Ashenhurst lives, I was surprised to find that the horses peering out over white picket fences were in fact not horses at all, but rusted re-creations. There was an inescapable political undertone to this new town-house culture. The developers had designed communities of white nostalgia -- theme parks for the conservative middle class. "

DSBPI believes that the US should transfer Saddam out of its custody as soon as possible (and to an Iraqi tribunal, or world court) lest his freedom become a demand by terrorists holding something on the scale of a US city hostage with a nuclear or biological threat.

Note two stories on the front page of today's WSJ: one about Saudi pushing for the 4% cut in OPEC oil production and the other on how everyday Saudis are having to go to work in real jobs.

With the recent population explosion in the House of Saud, the oil dollars can no longer support the population in the manner to which they have become accustomed. Saudi's are now taking jobs from the legions of foreign workers that used to handle all of the dirty work in the country, unheard of five years ago. Simultaneously, we see Saudi pushing for OPEC production cuts -- in the face of tremendous Western pressure.

There is a correlation.

There is free WIFI in the Istanbul airport, DSBI discovers. How far behind can EU membership be?

The interesting thing about Google's new free email service is this line from the article about it on CNN: "To finance the service, Google will display advertising links tied to the topics discussed within the e-mails. For instance, an e-mail inquiring about an upcoming concert might include an ad from a ticket agency."

Unlike, let's say, Hotmail where there is a random ad tacked on to the bottom of the message, Google will be categorizing unstructured email content and attaching the appropriate ad in real time.

DSBPI thinks that this should be the business model for IM as well, where the IM engine would categorize your chat sessions in real time and display the appropriate ads in the window. Let's say DSBPI IM'ed its broker and asked: What is MSFT trading at? The engine should immediately present ads for TD Waterhouse, etc.

Perhaps Google's mail program will go some ways in allaying privacy concerns on this model. Or maybe Google will have to be the IM vendor that rolls this out.