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Comics: Watchmen Photoshop remix. Have a nice day.

USA: Cheney is a big fat flip-flopper. He can’t decide if the war on terror is sensitive or not. Bush is a flip-flopper, also. In fact, the GOP is running scared. They insist that Edwards and Kerry are among the most liberal senators, when they are not.

Sports: Even NBC can’t ignore the fact that the stadiums are empty in Athens. I remember the Atlanta Olympics. Tickets got sold, and people showed up to watch. It’s not happening in Athens because the tickets are too expensive and Athens is hard to reach. Beijing has plenty of people to fill the stands in 2008, but the city is sinking. Buildings are crumbling, and the airport is threatened. So 2008 may be the first Olympics called off because of overdevelopment. Plus, there’s still the threat of an international boycott over China’s handling of human rights, Taiwan or North Korea. The problems in Athens and Beijing give Paris, London and New York City some real advantages for hosting the 2012 Olympics. Then again, what sane city really wants the Olympics these days?

Tech: Dvorak devotes another column to his hatred of Microsoft Word. I rarely use the program myself, and agree with him that Word should be scrapped and completely rewritten. Frankly, I get nervous just installing MS Office on a computer these days. The process takes too long, when I include all of the service packs and patches that should be applied to fix Microsoft’s security holes.

What to do? I miss WordPerfect, but I don’t keep it installed. I prefer OpenOffice. It’s free and easy to install. OO does most of what Word can do, and includes a PDF converter. But I do encounter documents that require Microsoft Word for proper formatting, so I keep the free Microsoft Word viewer installed and ready for those misfits. It can print, so I can convert a DOC into PDF format no matter what.

OpenOffice doesn’t have anything like Access, unfortunately. So I go to another machine when I need to use a Microsoft database, which isn’t often. Instead of Outlook, I use Thunderbird, another fast and free wonder that handles e-mail. I’m still looking for a decent event and contact manager, though. When my cell phone contract is up in December, I may get a PDA phone.

Tech: John Dvorak continues his lists. Let’s look at the 10 worst PC programs. I remember all of these. Microsoft gets four entries: the truly pathetic Windows 1.0, the original Access (a telecom program!), Bob and OS/2 1.0.

Another column lists the top 10 software packages: MS Basic, Sendmail, Pagemaker, dBase II, Photoshop, MacOS, Mosaic, Apache, WordStar and VisiCalc. I would include AutoCAD and WinZIP.