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It’s kind of a frothy story, but the friar who invented cappucino was just beatified. Not for his caffeine-related efforts, mind you. However, cappucino is indeed named after the Capuchin order to which he belonged. You learn something every day.

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All Apple news sites are frantically clogged right now. Not a surprise. MacInTouch: Mac news, information and analysis has some news on the Apple announcement, and I’ve pieced together some more stuff from here and there.

Three new things:

1) New iPods. Yay, 30 GB iPod. Some kind of a docking station, too, which seems unnecessary but whatever. I actually like my Firewire cable that doubles as a power cable when I go mobile so a docking station might be a step back.

2) New iTunes. Supports AAC, which is I guess MPEG-4 audio. Five bucks says that change was so that Jobs could tell the music people that his new online music thingie wouldn’t support evil MP3s. The new iTunes supports Rendezvous for auto-discovery of other iTunes users on your network. I don’t know what that means either — auto-discovery is cool but what does iTunes do with it? Shared music libraries?

Also, the new iTunes supports streaming (“streams can’t be saved”). That’s very cool and steals a march on Microsoft. Hope that works across the Internet. Also hope it’s a stream that WinAmp can read. Anyhow, it’ll take maybe a month before someone figures out how to save the streams.

3) The iTunes Music Store. 99 cents a track, tracks are AAC, and you can burn ‘em to CD. Then you can rip your CD to MP3. Jobs blasted the subscription model, but you know, emusic.com is only ten bucks a month for unlimited downloads. Jobs better have a really good music library. Emusic has a deal with a lot of labels for their back catalogs, but it also has a substantial library of current indie labels. If Jobs neglected the offbeat stuff… well, maybe not so many people care about that.

Ah. What Jobs needs is a way for people to get their music into his service easily. If he did a deal with MP3.com, for example, that’d go a long way towards solving the problem. Ease of publishing entry is the key, and you’d think Jobs would know that — it’s certainly a pitch he’s been making since the LaserWriter. It’ll be interesting to see if he listens to himself.

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Hey! Why aren’t Democrats winning the culture wars? Because conservatives are supporting college Republicans like this while liberals support college Democrats like this. Note in particular the differences between the Conservative Student Conference schedule and the Young Democrats Association schedule. On the one hand, you have a reception and a tour to Niagara Falls. On the other hand, you have lessons (or, if you like, indoctrination) on criticizing “liberal textbook bias” and becoming “a more effective advocate for your beliefs.” Also, one’s in Buffalo and one is in Washington, DC. Which city is more apropos if you want to encourage new blood to participate in the political process?

Similarly, the progressive left is blowing the Democrats away as far as student organization goes. I suspect some Democrats are blithely assuming that this chunk of the left is breeding future Democratic thinkers. Nope; this is the progressive wing of the left and it’s doing an excellent job of creating future progressive thinkers. Think Green Party.

This post should not be taken as approval of any particular segment of the left, or, for that matter, of the right. It’s just an observation, cause I’ve seen a few Democrats talking about party problems lately. Time to stop bitching about Nader and start recognizing the successful tactics of both the radical left and the radical right.

(Hey, I know I have some readers from outside the US. I am deeply curious about the sort of student outreach that exists in Australia and the UK, if there’s any.)