There’s quite a lot in a name. It’s your identity, it’s your family history and ancestry. It’s something that’s uniquely “you”, even if it’s incredibly common like “John Smith”.

It’s 8-8-08 and the Olympic games are getting underway (in spite of China’s continuing to be a world leader in censorship and human rights violations) and what’s in the news? A whole bunch of screaming headline “Breaking News” emails about how former Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards comes clean in an interview with ABC news and admits that he had an extramarital affair in 2006.

With the Olympics being in China this time around there’s more attention finally being given to China and some of the ways they’re doing things are getting a little more press than usual. It’s long overdue and still not enough.

I see that the headlines are now screaming that we’re headed for “RECORD DEFICIT IN 2009″. What’s annoying about it is that the news story I read leads the reader to believe that it’s entirely because of the sagging economy and the stimulus payments to 130 million households.

I can’t help but wonder just exactly what some of these parents were thinking when they decided to saddle a kid with a name like “Number 16 Bus Shelter”.

Sometimes I wonder if the people putting headlines on a site bother to check with each other before they do something. Judging from a couple of headlines I saw today on Iwon’s news page in the technology section (as of Jul 23, 1:06 pm (ET) anyway.):
Review: TextBuyIt fun, easy to use, but limited
Yahoo CEO [...]

In my email this recently:
msnbc.com: BREAKING NEWS: Angelina Jolie gives birth to twins, AP reports
What is it these days? are people THAT worried about what celebrities are up to? I am not a hamster, a birth announcement is something that lots of people welcome, even when they’d normally nuke other bogus news things [...]

When I heard about Phil Gramm’s comments this morning I had the same reaction that I’m sure many other Americans caught in the middle between need and greed did.

China wants to have this image of being a modern country that actually cares about their people, believes in freedoms and all that. Thing is, we don’t see a lot of that.

What it’s not is McCain’s or Obama’s position on any of the issues central to this election such as jobs, the economy, the price of fuel, alternative energy, the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan or even whether or not they’re going to agree to debate in the “anytime anywhere” kind of spirit that they were talking about some time ago.