Some of the best football in this country has come from Florida.

The Miami Dolphins have a proud tradition of being one of the NFL's elilte teams. The Dolphins have the distinction of being the only team to complete a season without losing a game. The upstart Jacksonville Jaguars was one game away from the Super Bowl, an amazing feat for a team only in it's second year of existence. And nearby Gainesville is the home of the National Champion University of Flordia Gators.

Down the road in Miami, the University of Miami has won it's share of National Championships.

The lowly Tampa Bay Buccaneers are the only major Florida team without a winning record.

They say the most segregated period of the week in the USA is the weekend when Americans attend their house of worship. Although it's been 40 plus years since Brown v. Board of Education and legal segregation was banned from every aspect of American life and culture, race still plays a large role in deciding what house of worship we pray in every weekend . Be it the Mosque, the Synagogue, or Church Americans voluntarily attend services in, churches [are] equally divided by race. However, just a few hours after church services, millions of Americans make th[eir] pilgrimage to bars, clubs, and stadiums around the country to watch the fall American tradition called football.

For a few hours on Saturdays and Sundays, Americans forget about the[ir] negative attitudes toward racial, cultural, and sexual stereotypes and get together [to] direct their hositillity toward anyone wearing the colors of the opposite team regardless of that team's racial, sexual or cultural background...

Esther Dyson, the chair of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), is known as much abroad for the High Tech Forums she has organized in Europe since 1989 and her investments in Russia and elsewhere as she is for the new organization she leads. Last week the tenth of Dyson's European High Tech Forums took place in Budapest, Hungary.

Though most Americans believe adoption of the new technologies surrounding the Internet and the Web have been slow, and that e-commerce has not been embraced there in the way it has here, the excitement around forums like this one belie that shallow impression. Other barriers to as immersive an Internet experience exist in Europe, including metered and tariffed telephony. And there are the attitudinal differences we have considered in this space in previous Memoirs. But the excitement level and the potential are no less high in Europe or elsewhere in the world for the networked economy.

For example, the financial and venture capital (VC) community was well represented at High Tech Europe Ten. Besides Ms. Dyson's firm Edventure --- which has investments in Forum participants like online game company Uproar, ERP software vendor Scala, and start-up debt collection service Paymentor--- VCs like Atlas Ventures, ICE Securities and Warburg Pincus were in attendance. There were also heavy-hitters like Goldman Sachs, Salomon Smith Barney, Merrill Lynch, Advent and Amadeus represented.

These are not the kind of players who show up where the prospects are moribund....