Few things bring out my inner Sam Kinison than seeing Christmas merchandise in the stores in September … unless, I suppose, it’s seeing Christmas merchandise in the stores in August. Thankfully that didn’t happen to me this year, though anything sooner than the day after Thanksgiving is, in my mind, completely wrong. So when I saw shelves of holiday merchandise in the stores today, it was all I could do to hold in the primal screams. Let the humbug begin.

Yesterday’s New York Times had a pretty good article about the inevitable upcoming revision of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998.

One of the most interesting bits in the article, though, had nothing to do with COPPA: It was the mention of Ghostery, a Firefox plugin that, as their home page describes it, “tracks the trackers and gives you a roll-call of the ad networks, behavioral data providers, web publishers, and other companies interested in your activity.”

Installing Ghostery will open your eyes. You know that Big Brother is definitely out there, but did you realize to what degree he’s watching? This Mashable page, for one example, has 21 items noted by Ghostery.

Some of the items that Ghoster notes are genuinely benign. This blog post has 5 items called out by Ghostery: AddThis, Feedjit, Google +1, Google Analytics and Twitter badge. Not a whole lot of nefarious stuff happening here.

Still, it’s very much worth the few seconds it takes to install Ghostery. You’ll never look at the internet the same way again.

“I hate banks. They do nothing positive for anybody except take care of themselves. They’re first in with their fees and first out when there’s trouble.”
—Earl Warren

This is not too good. Unless, of course, one believes Facebook’s denial.

Andy Williams died today. He was 84. Here he is in February 1980 on The Muppet Show.