While there’s no doubt that Saturday is the star of the Great American Brass Band Festival, Friday has developed into more than simply a warm-up act for the main event. Beginning with the history conference at 9 a.m. and wrapping up with a concert more than 12 hours later, Friday features a full slate of opportunities for festival-goers to get the party started, both in Danville and at venues outside the city.

To hear Newt Gingrich tell it Friday, the campaign aides who headed for the exits the day before left not because he was doing anything wrong as a presidential candidate.

It was merely a case of having sharply different notions of what a presidential campaign should look like.

Those ex-aides were locked into the old way of doing politics, the former speaker told reporters. He, on the other hand, had a transformational vision of a different kind of presidential campaign. He said:

Remember the Democrats' momentum of a couple of weeks ago? Gone, baby, gone. This week: All Weiner, all the time. Also: The John Edwards indictment. The May employment numbers give further pause to Obama's path to reelection. Plus: Does Ed Rollins joining Michele Bachmann help or hurt?

An entertaining rant against the phone number, via This is my next:

I hate phone numbers. They're a relic of an outmoded system that both wireless and wireline carriers use to keep people trapped on their services — a false technological prison built of nothing but laziness and hostility to consumers.

There's no news from them yet because the more than 24,000 pages of paper were just handed to reporters. But here's the latest:

"JUNEAU, Alaska — Alaska officials have released thousands of pages of emails sent and received by Sarah Palin [R] during her first 21 months as governor." (The Associated Press)

Over the past few months, a group that calls itself the U.S. Copyright Group has setup two operations to nab people who downloaded illegal copies of Hollywood movies.

First, in February, they brought suit against about 23,000 people who had downloaded the movie The Expendables using the peer-to-peer software BitTorrent. Then, in April, they filed a lawsuit against about 25,000 people who they say downloaded illegal copies of the Academy Award winning film, The Hurt Locker.

You have a hundred trillion of these guys in you right now. Before you were born, you had hardly any.

Back then, you were floating in amniotic fluid, protected, sanitized. Bacteria kept their distance. Until you slipped down that birth canal, you were pretty much spic-and-span.

Although several circumstances surrounding the war in Afghanistan are changing, it doesn't appear that overall U.S. strategy will change anytime soon.

The July 2011 target President Obama set back in 2009 for beginning to draw down U.S. forces is fast approaching, and he is in the process of changing the top civilian and military leadership prosecuting the war, both in country and at the Pentagon.

Meanwhile, last month's killing in Pakistan of al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden satisfied one of America's initial aims when it began its campaign in Afghanistan in 2001.

Apparently, the Pacific Northwest exudes some sunshine after all — at least if LAKE's "Roger Miller" is any indication. Written during a trip to Sweden, the lovely song appears on the band's recent Giving & Receiving, but it really comes to summery life in a recent remix by fellow Olympia, Wash., musician Shawn "Nervous" Parke. (The remix is available on the Japanese version of the new album, and as a digital single in the U.S.)

Welcome news for many:

"As promised earlier this week, a cold front will bring some heat relief to much of the Midwest and Northeast as we end the week and enter the weekend," The Weather Channel says.

But, it also cautions that "you may have to pay a price, as this same front will hang around these regions, instigating a persistent 'stormy zone.' "