I don’t think I have the stomach to process a lot of the news stories commemorating the fact that it’s been seven years since 9/11—too many of them will be too mawkish, too partisan, or just too much of a reminder of sad information I already know about. But somebody’s come up with a tribute I can get behind: Exploiting Twitter’s hash-tag functionality, Twemes is collecting folks’ Twitter posts of what they were doing when the terrorists attacks occurred. (via)

Me, I was living in San Francisco at the time—home to the Examiner, which produced the best page-one on the attacks, by a mile.

On Oct. 25, 2001, September 11 became a holiday, thanks to a resolution sponsored by this charmer. Not a real holiday, mind you, rather the kind where President Bush encouraged “employers to permit their workers time off during the lunch hour to attend the noontime services to pray for our land.”

It was a perfect American solution: a holiday you don’t get off work for, a remembrance of sacrifice that requires no sacrifice whatsoever.

The next year, Bush changed the name of the holiday to Patriot Day. Calendars say Patriot Day. Crayola offers a page of warmed-over July Fourth activities to complement it.

And that’s about it. Tomorrow, heads will bow in remembrance, somebody will play “Taps,” and everyone will call it “September 11th.” No one, except maybe the president and a few maudlin gym teachers, will use the dipshit term “Patriot Day.”

Nice to see the marketplace of ideas actually working once in a while.