Posts - September 2007

I’ve decided that if I want to be a writer, I need to write every day. Write things that are potentially publishable.

But my god it’s hard when you’re trying to write for an unspecified publication from which you can get rejected, as opposed to writing for your familiar blog audience.

I went to Barnes & Noble today. I’d done some online research and wrote down the names of a few books on writing that I wanted to look at. Then I walked up to the huge Barnes & Noble on 5th Avenue and 18th Street, the academic-oriented one where they sell everything under the sun. In the writing section they had all the books on my list, so I looked them over. But the one that drew my eye was the one that wasn’t on my list: How to Become a Famous Writer Before You’re Dead: Your Words in Print and Your Name in Lights, by Ariel Gore.

I leafed through it, twice. I didn’t buy it because I’m trying to be very careful about buying new books after spending so much energy on getting rid of books in the past few weeks. But the title really cuts through all the subtext and gets to the core of what I want.

On the other hand, online I came across this old interview by Charlie Rose of one of my idols, David Foster Wallace (video; text). It’s the first time I’ve ever seen video of him or heard him speak. There’s something off-putting yet sexy about him.

Toward the end of the interview, they talk about fame. And this segment really made me think.

DFW: I did — I did some recreational drugs. I didn’t have the — I didn’t have the stomach to drink very much and I didn’t have the nervous system to do anything very hard. Yeah, I did some drugs. I didn’t do as many drugs as most of the people I know my age. What it turned out was I just don’t have the nervous system to handle it. That wasn’t the problem. The problem was I started out, I think, wanting to be a writer and wanting to get some attention and I got it really quick and –

ROSE: By writing.

DFW: — and realized it didn’t make me happy at all, in which case, “Hmm. Why am I writing?” You know, “What’s the purpose of this?” And I don’t think it’s substantively different from the sort of thing — you know, somebody who wants to be a really successful cost accountant, right, and be a partner of his accounting firm and achieves that at 50 and goes into something like a depression. “The brass ring I’ve been chasing does not make everything okay.” So that’s why I’m embarrassed to talk about it. It’s just not particularly interesting. It’s — what it is, is very, very average.

ROSE: Yeah. Do you see yourself chasing a brass ring now?

DFW: I — this is what’s very interesting is I — there’s part of me that wants to get attention and respect. It doesn’t really make very much difference to me because I learned in my 20s that it just doesn’t change anything and that whatever you get paid attention for is never the stuff that you think is important about yourself anyway…

I don’t know why I obsess about fame so much.

Part of it is that I want to do something I love. My therapist has said numerous times that she wants to help me find a career where I can’t wait to get out of bed every day and go to work. I’ve told her a couple of times that I wonder whether this is setting too high an expectation for myself, something I will never meet, something that will result only in disappointment. (The act of getting out of bed in the morning is itself a pain in the ass, no matter what’s waiting for me once I’m on my feet.)

And what I love to do is to read and write, but the only way you can support yourself as a writer is by getting paid for it, and the only way you can get paid for it – at least for the writing I want to do, not technical writing or copywriting – is by, in some sense, being famous.

Or maybe I should learn how to be a journalist? I don’t know.

Jim McGreevey writes about Larry Craig in today’s Washington Post. Despite McGreevey’s flaws, this is a beautifully written piece. He writes, about the shame he felt as a gay young man:

How do you live with this shame? How do you accommodate your own disappointments, your own revulsion with whom you have become? You do it by splitting in two. You rescue part of yourself, the half that stands for tradition, values and America, the part that looks like the family you came from, and you walk away from the other half the way you would abandon something spoiled, something disgusting. This is a false amputation, because the other half doesn’t stop existing.

He even touches on his own real misconduct, the hiring of Golan Cipel onto his staff.

I’m very curious about this new novel about a gay teenage superhero, whose author is profiled in the Times today.

Today is the 50th anniversary of the release of the Edsel. They first went on sale on September 4, 1957 and they were, of course, a huge flop.

The following anecdote seems unreal.

After months of sluggish sales, the crack PR team gathered to brainstorm ideas for selling Edsels. They were battered and weary and devoid of ideas until an adman named Walter “Tommy” Thomas blurted out a suggestion.

“Let’s give away a [bleeping] pony,” he said.

Much to Thomas’s amazement, his idea was not only accepted, it was expanded. The geniuses at Edsel decided to advertise a promotion in which every Edsel dealer would give away a pony. It worked like this: If you agreed to test-drive an Edsel, your name would be entered into a lottery at the dealership, with the winner getting a pony.

Ford bought 1,000 ponies and shipped them to Edsel dealers, who displayed them outside their showrooms. Many parents, egged on by their pony-loving children, traipsed in to take a test drive. Unfortunately, many of the lucky winners declined the ponies, opting instead for the alternative — $200 in cash — and soon dealers were shipping the beasts back to Detroit.

Now the Edsel folks were not only stuck with a lot of cars they couldn’t sell, they were also stuck with a lot of ponies they couldn’t give away. The cars were easy enough to store, but the ponies required food. And after they ate the food, they digested the food. And then . . . another fine mess for Edsel.

Yet another request for a doctor recommendation: can any of my readers in Manhattan recommend a good shrink who has the power to prescribe medication? I need someone who’s on my health plan. I have a list of docs on my health plan but I don’t know anything about them.

Feel free to email me or leave comments.

This morning I finished reading David Foster Wallace’s essay, “Consider the Lobster,” which appears in his anthology of the same name. (The piece originally appeared in Gourmet Magazine in 2004 and is online.) Wallace was assigned by Gourmet Magazine to attend the Maine Lobster Festival, and what he wound up writing was an exploration of the morality of eating living creatures.

In the case of lobsters, they are literally living right up until you toss them into a big pot of boiling water:

The basic scenario is that we come in from the store and make our little preparations like getting the kettle filled and boiling, and then we lift the lobsters out of the bag or whatever retail container they came in … whereupon some uncomfortable things start to happen. However stuporous the lobster is from the trip home, for instance, it tends to come alarmingly to life when placed in boiling water. If you’re tilting it from a container into the steaming kettle, the lobster will sometimes try to cling to the container’s sides or even to hook its claws over the kettle’s rim like a person trying to keep from going over the edge of a roof. And worse is when the lobster is fully immersed. Even if you cover the kettle and turn away, you can usually hear the cover rattling and clanking as the lobster tries to push it off. Or the creature’s claws scraping the sides of the kettle as it thrashes around. The lobster, in other words, behaves very much as you or I would behave if we were plunged into boiling water (with the obvious exception of screaming). A blunter way to say this is that the lobster acts as if it’s in terrible pain…

Therefore, as is not the case with cows or chicken, the chef can’t avoid the fact that the food he’s cooking used to be a living being.

I made a sandwich this morning to take to work for lunch. After I finished reading the article later on my morning commute, I thought about that sandwich: in between the bagel halves, along with the piece of munster cheese, were several perfect, sterile, oval-shaped slices of turkey meat. They had been wrapped in plastic when I bought them. They couldn’t have looked less like food. They looked like they’d rolled off a factory conveyor belt — which of course they had. And when I’d taken the plastic-wrapped package of sliced turkey out of the refrigerated case and put it in my shopping basket, it hadn’t even entered my mind that a big bird had been tightly crammed into an enclosure with hoards of other big birds, probably scared to death, or at least very unsettled (chicken producers remove the chickens’ beaks from their bodies so that the chickens don’t peck each other to death from the stress of overcrowding), and sliced pieces of that bird were now in my shopping basket.

I wound up going out to lunch with a friend instead (he’d just come back from vacation and we decided to catch up), and I got a veggie burger. I never get veggie burgers. But I got one today. This was partly because my friend is a vegetarian (well, a pescatarian) and he ordered one, but also, I just felt like not eating an animal.

It’s possible that the world would be better off if we were all vegetarians. For one thing, crops take up much less acreage than does the ground required for livestock to graze. For another, we’d have less heart disease; we’d be collectively physically healthier as a society. And for another, we wouldn’t have to deal with the messy question of eating animals.

And yet,we human beings have a natural taste for animal flesh. Hamburgers taste good! And animals are fantastic sources of protein. And didn’t the Native Americans of the Plains — those indigenous peoples we idolize as having lived, unlike our selfish selves, in harmony with the Earth — eat buffalo meat?

I don’t really have a big moral problem with eating animals. After all, we’re bigger than they are (usually), and we’re the owners of this planet (except not really), and we as a race do wonderful things (except not always). As you can tell from the parentheticals, I have some doubts. And I wouldn’t be particularly happy if some giant aliens came along and decided to stick us humans into overcrowded pens, pull out all our teeth, fatten us up, and then slaughter and roast us and wrap perfect, oval-shaped human slices in vacuum-sealed plastic.

And yet, after finishing this entry, because I didn’t eat my turkey sandwich for lunch I’m going to eat it for dinner.

We’re complicated living creatures, we humans.

As of today, there are 500 days left in the Bush presidency.

Closer than we were…

Happy birthday to Matt!

For the next 109 days, we’re the same age and I don’t have to be the older one. Yay!

Rest in peace, Jane Wyman.

I used to watch “Falcon Crest” in the mid-80s. The first thing that pops into my head now is the earthquake that Angela Channing and Cesar Romero’s character got caught in. I remember being unable to dissociate Cesar Romero from his role as The Joker.

And oh, the stories Wyman must have had about Reagan.

I think I found a new timesink.

[via kottke]

I purposely didn’t blog anything about 9/11 yesterday. On past 9/11 anniversaries, I’ve sometimes blogged about it and sometimes not, but I think yesterday was the first time that I purposely refrained.

Yesterday felt like the most normal September 11 in a long time. We had our first chorus rehearsal of the season last night. At first, a few weeks ago, it was weird to see that our first rehearsal would be on September 11, 2007, and I wondered if that was appropriate. But then I thought, you know what? Enough. It’s just another day of the year. We shouldn’t be held hostage to the calendar.

Sure, I thought about the day at certain points. I recorded MSNBC in the morning, because it was rerunning the NBC TV coverage from that morning six years ago and I wanted to save it (which I’d meant to do when it was aired last year). And I thought about my friend Doug. And after work I returned a library book at the Jefferson Market branch on 6th Avenue and 10th Street, the same intersection where I first found out six years ago what was happening. It gave me a little shiver. And at night, from our apartment window, we could see the twin beams of light shining up from Lower Manhattan.

But I don’t know what I could have said yesterday that wouldn’t have been either mawkish or callous. While the New York Times and Washington Post websites gave top coverage to the Petraeus hearings, CNN.com’s main story yesterday morning said something like, “Six Years Later: We Remember.” That “we remember” that made me want to barf. The sentimentalization of it all. As in, if you don’t cry today, you’re not a good American. Just give us the news! Don’t try to tell us what we’re feeling.

Life continues.

Matt and I saw the first preview performance of The Ritz on Saturday night. This is a revival of a 1975 Terrence McNally farce about a member of a mob family who winds up hiding out in a gay bathhouse to escape a hit on his life.

I didn’t care for the show. In fact, parts of it really irritated me. I don’t know who decided that a revival of a dated 30-year-old play with jokes about “chubby chasers” was a good idea. The apex of my irritation occurred late in the second act when the show seemed close to the end but wound up going on for another 10-15 minutes. The show wasn’t all bad — I thought Brooks Ashmanskas (as a flamboyant bathhouse patron) and Rosie Perez (as an aspiring songstress) were particularly good, and there’s a funny sendup of Pippin in the second act. But overall I was disappointed.

Better entertainment came from the elderly couple sitting next to me. I felt bad for them because they seemed confused about what was happening on stage and didn’t seem to get most of the jokes. During the intermission I heard the husband trying to explain to the wife what a gay bathhouse was. “It’s like a spa for gay people,” he said.

Then I heard them conferring quietly about something. A minute later, the husband turned to me with his Playbill opened to the cast photos. He pointed to the photo of Brooks Ashmanskas. “Which one is he?” he asked me.

I pointed to the part of the stage where Ashmanskas’s character’s bathhouse room was located. “He’s the one who uses that room,” I said.

“Oh… the gay?” he said to me.

Um…

“They’re all gay,” I said.

“Well, the prominent gay.”

“Yeah.”

I turned back to Matt.

“You know you have to blog about this,” Matt said.

And thus…

The Larry Craig bathroom has become a tourist attraction.

Perhaps you’ve heard about this California voting plan being put forth by the Republicans in a statewide referendum — the sneakily-named Presidential Election Reform Act? It would do away with the state’s winner-take-all system and instead award California’s electoral votes by Congressional district.

In 2004, Kerry won all 54 of California’s votes; had this law been in effect at the time, Kerry would have won only 31 of those votes, and Bush would have won 22 of them instead of zero. The Democratic presidential candidate routinely wins California, so this is essentially an attempt by the Republicans to award the Republican presidential candidate a number of electoral votes equivalent to those of a big state such as Ohio, Pennslyvania, or Illinois. If the 2008 election is as close as the last two elections, this plan would — if it passed — put a big dent in the Democrats’ hopes of recapturing the White House next year.

The only thing is – it’s unconstitutional.

Article II of the U.S. Constitution states, in part:

Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress…

(Emphasis added.)

Only the state legislature is allowed to determine how the state’s electoral votes are distributed. It can’t be done by a popular referendum. It’s pretty straightforward. Game, set, match.

If this referendum gets on the California ballot next spring and it passes, expect it to get blocked by a court injunction.

I would hope the U.S. Supreme Court would find it unconstitutional. Of course, Bush v. Gore should have been a clear-cut case, too — but I don’t think the Supreme Court will do it again. The law is even clearer this time. (But never say never.)

If you’re interested, read these comments to find out more.

For some reason I was on a “Brady Bunch” kick the other day. I’ve dug up the following YouTube clips of various latter-day Brady TV show openings.

First, here’s the opening to one of the episodes of “The Brady Bunch Hour,” the legendarily awful variety show from 1977 (with fake Jan).

Next, here’s the opening of the 1981 TV movie, “The Brady Girls Get Married.” This aired when I was in first grade. I was already a “Brady Bunch” fan by then, and I can’t tell you how excited I was when I first saw this movie. Visually, the opening is basically the same as the original series, but the instrumentation has been funkified.

The movie kicked off the short-lived 1981 TV series, “The Brady Brides,” which focused on Jan and Marcia and their husbands. I was so into this series. This opening has new footage and new lyrics.

From 1988, here’s the opening to “A Very Brady Christmas,” which I never saw because we were living overseas at the time. First comes a promo, and then the actual opening (about 30 seconds into the clip), and then the first scene, which gives you an overview of the totally remodeled Brady house.

Finally, the ultimate in cheese. From 1990, here’s the opening to the short-lived dramedy (remember dramedys?), “The Bradys” (with fake Marcia). The music in this one is sung by Florence Henderson, and the lyrics and her delivery are so schmaltzy, I want to drown myself in Wesson Oil. We were still living overseas when this aired, so I’d never seen this until two days ago.

1) Fred Thompson doesn’t appear to have hurt Rudy Giuliani’s presidential ambitions too much.

2) The New York Times has freed up much of its online archives.

Therefore,

1) One can contemplate a presidential race next year between Rudy Giuliani and Hillary Clinton, absurd as that seems. And:

2) One can search the New York Times archives for articles from 2000, when Giuliani and Clinton ran against each other for the U.S. Senate before Rudy dropped out due to prostate cancer.

Here are some examples.

Giuliani Basks in Glare on Mrs. Clinton, Potential Opponent
(Feb. 22, 1999)

Sounding very much like a candidate for the Senate in 2000, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani used interviews on three local and national television news programs today to criticize Hillary Rodham Clinton and to tout his own potential as New York’s next junior Senator.

As Giuliani Jabs, First Lady Plays Nice as a Campaigner
(July 31, 1999)

[A]t least for now, the First Lady is consciously avoiding direct engagement with her potential rival. And that is emerging as an early stylistic distinction between these two very high-profile candidates.

In the same week that Mr. Giuliani flew to Arkansas to draw attention to one of his recurrent criticisms of Mrs. Clinton — that she has never lived a day in New York — the First Lady has studiously avoided any mention of the Republican Mayor. That became particularly obvious at a news conference today, her third since beginning these tours, in which she softly batted aside a procession of inviting pitches from reporters intended to draw her out on the subject of her potential Republican opponent.

“I’m not going to comment on someone else’s campaign tactics,” Mrs. Clinton said…

Mayor Lashes Out, and Mrs. Clinton Says He’s Always Angry
(Dec. 23, 1999)

Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani asserted yesterday that Democrats in Washington and New York were conspiring to discredit him as he prepared to run for the United States Senate, while Hillary Rodham Clinton suggested that Mr. Giuliani was consumed by an anger that could undercut his effectiveness in Congress.

Mrs. Clinton Tries to Link Giuliani’s Policies to Bush’s
(March 11, 2000)

(I’m sure we’ll be seeing this headline next year as well!)

Just three days after the Super Tuesday presidential primary, Hillary Rodham Clinton sought today to link Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, her opponent in the race for United States Senate, with the Republican Party’s all-but-nominated presidential candidate, Gov. George W. Bush.

Best Wishes for Opponent For Senate: Break a Leg
(March 12, 2000)

After more than a year of shunning each other, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani shook hands before sitting down to the annual Inner Circle dinner show last night, where the mayor starred in a lampoon performance of “Saturday Night Fever.”

Giuliani Asserts Mrs. Clinton Is the One Polarizing the City
(March 22, 2000)

Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani said yesterday that Hillary Rodham Clinton, who has accused the mayor of racially polarizing New York City, was projecting her own feelings onto him. The mayor’s assertion came as the police shooting death of Patrick Dorismond reverberated through City Hall and the State Legislature and into the United States Senate campaign.

Mrs. Clinton Prods Giuliani to Reveal His Stand on Issues
(April 12, 2000)

(Another one we’ll be seeing again!)

Hillary Rodham Clinton asserted today that Rudolph W. Giuliani was avoiding discussion of how he would vote in the United States Senate, and said it was not enough to ask voters to judge him based solely on his record as mayor of New York, as Mr. Giuliani has suggested.

Giuliani Fighting Prostate Cancer; Unsure on Senate
(April 28, 2000)

Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani announced yesterday that he had prostate cancer in an early, treatable form. He said he hoped to continue his campaign for United States Senate, but would not make any definite decisions about the race until he had settled on a course of treatment.

Giuliani and His Wife of 16 Years Are Separating
(May 11, 2000)

Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani’s marital problems exploded yesterday in a public exchange with his wife, Donna Hanover. The mayor abruptly announced that he was seeking a separation from Ms. Hanover, and Ms. Hanover, caught unaware, then said that the couple’s troubles began years ago because of a previous relationship between the mayor and a member of his staff.

At an extraordinary, emotional news conference in Bryant Park, Mr. Giuliani also said that as he battles prostate cancer he will turn “more now than maybe I did before” to Judith Nathan, the woman he describes as a very good friend.

Mr. Giuliani did not say whether he would continue his campaign for the Senate against Hillary Rodham Clinton, but he did say that his political career was not his first concern. Speculation about other candidates raced through the city last night, reflecting Republican fears that Mr. Giuliani would withdraw.

Giuliani Quits Race for Senate
(May 20, 2000)

Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani withdrew from the most celebrated Senate race in the nation yesterday, saying that his health and his still-undecided treatment for prostate cancer were more important to him than his campaign against Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Finally, I like this quote:

Only one thing seemed to hurt New Yorkers uniformly: the end of what had promised to be a rousing political brawl between Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and his opponent, Hillary Rodham Clinton.

“I wanted to see the knockdown, mud-slinging campaign…”

We may yet see one.

Epilogue:

The mayor, the adviser insisted, never had a visceral dislike for Mrs. Clinton, even though he repeatedly attacked her as left-wing, a fake Yankee fan, a carpetbagger and without any qualifications to run for Senate.

The adviser even said that Mr. Giuliani referred to Mrs. Clinton as “a nice lady” after she grabbed his hand and said hello at the Inner Circle dinner show in Manhattan in March.

“You can’t go into battle like that,” the adviser said, referring to the campaign and Mrs. Clinton, “if you don’t want to rip their guts out.”

Finally:

Giuliani Defends Mrs. Clinton.

If you’re a fan of television history, this is great: “The NBC Story,” from NBC’s 60th anniversary year in 1986.

The gay voter’s guide to the GOP. Ostensibly directed at gay Republicans.

I like this letter in today’s Washington Post:

After reading the Sept. 21 news story about President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s request to visit the World Trade Center site, it seemed reasonable for our government to make a counteroffer.

The Iranian leader could, instead, come to the District, stand before the Holocaust Memorial Museum and deny that it was ever built.

HOWARD LEVINE

Rockville

Actually, he wouldn’t have to venture very far from Ground Zero to attend a Holocaust Museum. There’s one in lower Manhattan.

(P.S. It’s Yom Kippur. I’m hungry.)

I went to the emergency room yesterday afternoon.

Last year my parents got me a really good set of kitchen knives for Hanukkah. “They’re really sharp,” my mom said, “so be careful with them.”

You know where this is going.

Yesterday afternoon I was slicing a bagel with the serrated bread knife and I sliced into my index finger. Gushing blood, wouldn’t stop. Matt suggested we go to the emergency room, but I didn’t want to deal with that. So I kept applying pressure to my finger on and off for about 30 minutes — but it still wouldn’t stop. So we walked up to the emergency room at St. Vincent’s, a place Matt knows well, because he deals with college students and he’s always taking someone there for something or other. Like a veteran, he immediately grabbed a form and filled it out for me.

They saw me relatively quickly, and eventually the finger stopped bleeding. I did the Sunday New York Times crossword while waiting. (I hurt my right index finger, but I’m left-handed.) I wondered if I’d need stitches, but the nurse didn’t think so. They talked about maybe gluing it up, but once it stopped bleeding they decided they didn’t have to do that either. So the physician’s assistant just cleaned out the wound with saline, smeared bacitracin on it, and wrapped it in gauze. Then I got a tetanus shot.

The gauze somehow came off in the middle of the night, so this morning I washed the finger again, lathered it up with bacitracin, and put a regular ol’ bandaid on it. It’ll be fine.

But my arm is still a little sore from the tetanus shot. Bleah.

President Ahmadinejad of Iran was asked this afternoon at Columbia University about the rights of homosexuals in Iran. First he evaded the question and then he responded:

“In Iran, we don’t have homosexuals like in your country. We don’t have that in our country.”

The audience booed and hissed loudly. Some laughed, uncomfortably.

“In Iran, we do not have this phenomenon,” Mr. Ahmadinejad continued, undeterred. “I do not know who has told you that we have it. But as for women, maybe you think that maybe being a woman is a crime. It’s not a crime to be a woman. Women are the best creatures created by God. They represent the kindness, the beauty that God instills in them. Women are respected in Iran.”

This is why I’m glad he was allowed to speak at Columbia – so we can see what an idiot he is.

Regarding all the stuff going on with Ahmadinejad lately, it’s worth pointing out the following: Ahmadinejad doesn’t have ultimate power in Iran. He’s not a dictator. See here:

He may be the public face and figurehead of Iran, but he is not the final authority. The President of Iran is just a flunky: the real power, including supreme command of the military, lies with the Supreme Leader Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamanei. The President of Iran is elected by popular vote — but can we really believe that the “Council of Experts” would give any say in government to the Iranian people? Ahmadinejad runs the day-to-day affairs of the government but in all real issues of policy he has to answer to the Supreme Leader.

and here:

Political analysts [in Tehran] say they are surprised at the degree to which the West focuses on their president, saying that it reflects a general misunderstanding of their system.

Unlike in the United States, in Iran the president is not the head of state nor the commander in chief. That status is held by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, whose role combines civil and religious authority. At the moment, this president’s power comes from two sources, they say: the unqualified support of the supreme leader, and the international condemnation he manages to generate when he speaks up.

“The United States pays too much attention to Ahmadinejad,” said an Iranian political scientist who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal. “He is not that consequential.”

I’m kind of jealous of one Robert J. Inlow, who’s had 15 letters printed in the New York Times in the past three years, including today.

Barack Obama campaigned at a rally in Washington Square Park last night. We live a block north of the park, and I could hear noise and music coming from there yesterday after work. I wondered what was going on until I remembered. I didn’t go to the rally – I’m curious about Obama, but (1) I had therapy, and (2) I don’t want to stand in a crowd for two hours before Obama shows up.

There were thousands of people in the park, though. The campaign has a slideshow of photos.

Woohoo! The Republican attempt to take about 20 of California’s 55 electoral votes next year appears to be dead. (I blogged earlier about this.)

A big sigh of relief.

Paul Krugman’s op-ed in the Times today begins like this:

Sometimes it seems that the only way to make sense of the Bush administration is to imagine that it’s a vast experiment concocted by mad political scientists who want to see what happens if a nation systematically ignores everything we’ve learned over the past few centuries about how to make a modern government work.

How can that not pull you in?

So there was little amusing mini-fracas among some hip DC political bloggers this week, apparently started by this post asking why DC can’t be more like Portland in catering to white people. The writer has already regretted writing it, but not before other DC bloggers took issue with him.

That’s not the point, though. The point is this post, the best of all, about how all the people in this blog-fracas already know each other and hang out offline. Its title: “Why the blogosphere is like being trapped at a cocktail party with the same 50 people forever.”

A great moment from “The Office.”

OK – I’ve rarely posted anything about sports on this blog, but my brother is a Mets fan and occasionally it rubs off on me. So:

STUPID, STUPID METS!

They went from having a seven-game lead with 17 games left in the season – practically assuring them a playoff spot – to totally collapsing in the past couple of weeks, including losing today’s game, which means they won’t even make the playoffs at all.

I’m not really into sports that don’t involve shirtless men (i.e. swimming) or lean, muscly men (i.e. gymnastics). But something about end-of-season baseball interests me a little. I think it’s parly because of the mathematics involved, or something, and partly because baseball is a graceful sport. I’m not interested enough to watch a whole game, but if it’s near the end of a very important game and the score is close, I might watch. (Not that I watched this one – I just saw the news on the Times website.)

Anyway – stupid Mets.

I now return this blog to its usual gayness.