Temptation Blocker: I am happy to announce that I have been Sudoku clean for three weeks, but if I wasn't I would use this to keep myself from playing. I wish it would have blocked Thomas Barnett from writing a follow up book. If you don't know who Barnett is, he would be surprised, the man has an ego like few others (that's my impression from his book and blog, I have no idea what he's like in person. I imagine him to be like Friedman, though, a little bit awed by his own innovative and brilliant ideas.) Anyway, he is coming out with a new book this October, to follow up his first 400+ page tome, which was incredibly repetitive and could have been 100 pages or less. Here's what Barnett says about book 2: “The challenge of the second book … was to kind of stretch the arguments further,” he says. “It’s not enough to just offer a diagnostic of what led up to Afghanistan and Iraq. “Why I wanted to write the second book is to make sure I was pushing the envelope, to continue to stay just on the edge of plausibility, where people say, ‘God, that’s never going to happen.’”

Breaking News: South Korea has cloned a dog.