Leave your suggestions for a caption in the comments section…We’ll pick a winner on Monday.

That is the number of US combat deaths in Iraq as of May 25th according to the Department of Defense aggregated by Iraq Coalition Casualty Count.

3,434

Since we “won” the war in 2003, the fatality count has averaged over 800 people per year.

Memorial Day is about more than a road race and burgers on the grill, please take time to remember the sacrifice that these men and women, and their families have made for all of us. Whatever the reasons for being there and independent of one’s view on what should be done to bring this sorry chapter to an end, the people who are there serving are committed, they risk their lives every day, and they serve for us.

This Memorial Day, find a veteran in your community and thank them for their service. They deserve our gratitude.

As for the current Administration and the co-dependent Congress, well…..they should take a break from decision making for the weekend. It certainly can’t hurt.

As you can see from the counter lifted from WordPress.com, the blogging site has passed 1,000,000 blogs today. Congratulations, it’s quite an accomplishment. Now the good folks at WordPress don’t need any acclamation from a piddly little web outpost like mine, but I wanted to mention this anyway.

I use WordPress for this, my personal blog, and as a content management and publishing system for my businesses. I think it’s the rarest of all software products: it does what it claims, it does it well, and it’s simple to use and extend. This is not to say the software is perfect, no software ever is. But it is darned good, one of the best I’ve ever used and I will continue to use and promote it because of its utility and performance. Great job WordPress team, we in your user community appreciate your hard work.

If you want to start a blog, use WordPress.com as a hosted solution or download and install the software for your web server at WordPress.org. You won’t regret it.

Attribution: Unknown

A friend forwarded this to me a few weeks ago in email, it cracked me up. Sometimes Apple-heads take themselves a little too seriously…poking a little fun at the product juggernaut is fun from time to time. That being said, I do love my Apple products. I sometimes get a little weary of the “cult of Apple” though…Kudos to the creator, whoever you may be.

Now let’s all sit back and gird our loins for the iPhone release next month. I predict growth of the cult! (Seriously, I do love my Apple computers and iPods and I want an iPhone in due course…)

The image above is from a great website called the History of Branding. It’s visual, click any logo and get detail on the brand’s history and other interesting facts.

For example, the “I Love NY” campaign was launched in 1977 and was inspired in part by the earlier “Virginia is for Lovers” slogan. It’s very effective – who hasn’t seen a white T-shirt with the logo printed on it? There are hundreds of these stories out there and many of them are very interesting. I think every entrepreneur hopes and dreams of having a logo and slogan with the pull that is commonly represented here.