I’ve got 68 Starbucks within 5 miles of my house.

Looks like that pretty much means I live in the boonies.

This is why they don’t need billboards. There is a sign on every block.

When you sat in the Tonight Show audience for the first time, the first thing you noticed was that everything looked so much smaller than it did on TV; the desk, the guest seating, and especially that curtain from behind which Johnny Carson and his guests would emerge, night after night for three decades.

The set might have seemed smaller in person, but Johnny Carson’s televsion career will and should always be remembered as being larger than life.

I came of age during the Letterman generation, but Carson wore his television royalty like no one else. If you really want to get a perpespective on Carson’s career, try to get a peak at Bette Midler’s tribute to him on the penultimate night of his Tonight Show run. It was one of the greatest moments in television history and perfectly encapsulated a moment, a career and a television life.

Yahoo has launched a downloadable tool to put your MyYahoo on your desktop.

Check out the product pitch:

- Choose from over 250,000 RSS feeds covering virtually everything on the Web

- Search the Web using Yahoo! Search directly from your desktop

Interesting. The battle for your desktop real estate will take many forms. I’m guessing that the use of RSS for news and stock information is just an early hook. People will include their photos from Yahoo photos, etc?

I made a brief reference to this earlier, but now I’ve got the picture to prove it. Among the (very) amateur photographers working the Inauguration on Thursday was none other than Jeb Bush (or as I like to call him, Pro Tem). That seems fine. But take a look at Jeb’s choice of gear to cover this momentus event.

It’s a friggin disposable.

Forget the that his shots are going to be lousy or that the dude from the one hour photo place is going to be selling copies of Jeb’s Inaugural day memories on eBay for the next six months. The real issue here is that the use of such a weak camera is just so decidedly un-dynastic.

If Jeb is going to be the next in line, he really needs to step things up a notch. You don’t bring a water balloon to do a bunker buster’s job.

A funny thing happened on the way to freeing the world forever from the grip of tyrants and dictators…

I heard a few pundits and presidential historians describe the President’ inaugural address as radical. It was really only radical when one compares it to W’s actual actions and demeanor during his first term.

Take a look at this outtake:

America will not pretend that jailed dissidents prefer their chains, or that women welcome humiliation and servitude, or that any human being aspires to live at the mercy of bullies. We will encourage reform in other governments by making clear that success in our relations will require the decent treatment of their own people.

America’s belief in human dignity will guide our policies. Yet rights must be more than the grudging concessions of dictators. They are secured by free dissent and the participation of the governed. In the long run, there is no justice without freedom, and there can be no human rights without human liberty.

I’ve got to admit, this is pretty much how I think our government should behave. And it’s not altruism. Like the President’s speech writers, I do believe that a liberated world is a safer world.

One of the words that President Bush didn’t utter during his speech was Iraq. And yet, the speech can easily be read as an explanation for our actions related to that country.

But that is not how the war was sold. And we never had a public debate about whether or not the spread of freedom by way of an optional war is the way we want to move forward.

Once the dust had cleared, freeing the Iraqi people was the last in a long list of war marketing messages that was left standing.

And what of all of the other countries who have little respect for human rights? It seems to me that our treatment of foreign governments over the past four years has been much more closely tied to their support of W’s use of military force than to their internal treatment of their own citizens.

So I liked parts of the speech. But I’m not too sure that the direction W has taken us gets us any closer to the vision he described.

I wonder if his speech writers ever plan to run for office?