Friday Melange

So it's Friday afternoon, and I'm sitting outside being caressed by a cool, early autumn breeze. I've also got a lot of other work to get through, and a variety of tabs are clogging up my Firefox window. But for the sake of the archive, let's run through them fairly quickly.

• There's a video making the rounds that shows a bunch of elementary-school students practicing a song praising "Barack Hussein Obama." The lyrics are pretty...well, they're just not right. I find it interesting that the superintendent of the school district excuses it by saying, "The recording and distribution of the class activity were unauthorized." OK, all better now.
  
• Yesterday there was a hubbub about the various world leaders attending the UN conference. Apparently, Britain's Gordon Brown repeatedly sought a few minutes with Obama, but was snubbed no fewer than five times. My reaction at the time was, sure, I bet Gordon wants a photo-op with Obama to help his sagging poll numbers, but at the absolute minimum his country has 9,000 troops in Afghanistan, where we're struggling. In short, cut the guy some slack and give him his face-time.
  
• Then of course we learn that Iran has been secretly building a hitherto unknown uranium-enrichment facility, and all of the sudden the US, UK, and France are putting up a united front at the G20 summit in Pittsburgh. Maybe those five minutes the day before would have been a good investment.