7/28: Morning Communique

THESE DAYS

The National Journal has a list of White House employees and their salaries.

Microsoft has filed a patent application dated to last Thursday that seeks to describe a technological method to identify the "exciting" moments in a baseball game, among other things.

MINNESOTA BLOG OF THE DAY

Danny Sigelman's got a new cat named Beaner. Check him out at sanspeeps.

TIME WASTERS

Gawker, Readerville, and Bloglines are just a few of the sites Forbes acknowledges in their Summer 2005 Best of the Web.

A fun collection of Japanese condom wrappers.

FREEDOM OF SPEECH

"It was unbelievable. They didn't show a lot of what really went on with the enemy attacks and the shelling. There was so much stuff that went on and somehow the tapes got mysteriously misplaced."

-- pop singer Jessica Simpson, bemoaning the fact that the more harrowing footage of her visit to Iraq didn't appear in her ABC TV special

"We have a lot of unfinished business from the Huskers. SST [one the band's early record labels] owes us a lot of money that they're never going to pay us. There's a way to remedy that but all three of us have to be on the same page. The odds of that happening are so unlikely. I've written it off and I'm focusing on the future."

-- singer/songwriter Bob Mould, in a recent Reuters interview