What a simple text-message can lead to. Two ‘poor’ Dutch students will be at the inauguration of Barack Obama in Washington tonight. They will be travelling with British business-entrepeneur Richard Branson, owner of the Virgin Group, in his private jet.

The two students, Omar Kbiri and Lennard Hulsbos, sent the businessman a text-message during a congress in Amsterdam and he immediately invited them to travel with him.

Branson was a guest-speaker at the ‘Big Improvement Day’ gathering. Mostly businessman were attending. He told the attendees he was flying to Amerika that day, to attend the inauguration of Obama.

To make his speech more interactive, the attendees were allowed to send their questions to the Englishman to a big screen via text-messages. On the question "Can you take 2 broke students to Washington DC?" Branson answered "Yes" immediately. After his speech, the two students stepped inside Bransons’ limousine and drove to the airport where Branson’s private jet was already waiting.

The two ‘poor’ students didn’t even have to pay for their hotel. A sponsor spontaneously offered to pay the bill.

I'm Dutch, I went skating and it was... fantastic! The pucture in this article is just exactly as it was. Shame it's above freezing now... fun's over.

That is... Monty Python!

I don't like milk. Except unicorn-milk, but you can't get a gallon of that at $2.25 nowadays.

Is that a serious question, aramax?

Seems like the 'machine' could also be called a 'printer', but that doesn't sound very arty (dots of acrylic or dots of ink, what's the difference?).

Now... Obama should really make McCain his secretary of state.

This post would be less interesting if it was about Cat Stevens (oh, MAN, I'm gonna comment that on EVERYTHING cat-related!).

I just discovered a very (very) large prime letter in my backyard!

... but on the other hand, I might have misread your comment.

@Ted: but he did, he shot himself in the head and died, so he's no coward after all.

Guns don't kill people, people kill people. Guns just make it a little bit easier for people to kill people. I think (watch out, this is a personal OPINION!) this lunatic wouldn't have had a chance to kill 10 people if he had used a knife...

@SD, why?

@Miss Cellania: read the comments here on neatorama on this post: http://www.neatorama.com/2008/09/20/mystery-ship-found-off-alabama-coast/#comments (keep up the good blogging, btw, I'm a fan of yours)

Just for the sake of balance: read Sam Harris' column in newsweek first (linked above) and then Victor Hanson's column at RealClearPolitics: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/09/palin_and_obamawhat_really_is.html . Those two make a very good read, back to back. I'll let you draw your own conclusions, I'm not biased at all!