First Rule of G.R.O.S.S. Fight Club...

Fascinating comparison: Jack as Calvin, Tyler Durden as Hobbes, Marla Singer as Susie Derkins, and Robert Paulson as Moe. In short, Fight Club is Calvin & Hobbes, all grown up. I like it.

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Enough said, yes?

Baby updates will continue, hopefully at some sort of pace now that I'm writing over there again. Worse comes to worse, you'll certainly know when she decided to make an entrance. :-) I am, however, officially quitting politcal blogging until sometime after she makes that entrance. I have other things to focus on right now.

If you'll pardon me, I'm in the middle of scrubbing down the highchair and I've got to get back to it.

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More Presidential Candidate Comparisons

Here is an interesting analysis of Democratic candidates going back to 1964, at Eternity Road.

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Ambition To Substance Ratio

Okay, so now Lileks is writing articles that say what I want to say while saving me the keystrokes, thus helping me delay the onset of carpal tunnel. A snippet that cuts to the heart of it:

The reason is almost tautological: John Kerry wants to be president because he is John Kerry, and John Kerry is supposed to be president. Hence his campaign's flummoxed and tone-deaf response to the swift boat vets. Ban the books, sue the stations, retreat, attack. Underneath it all you can sense the confusion. How dare they attack Kerry? He's supposed to be president. It's almost treason in advance.

Exactly. Nor is he the first candidate whose reason for wanting to be President is because he wanted to be President. Think Gore, but that is just for starters. This is what I keep saying, as Deb can tell you.

I don't mean merely it's "his turn" as Lileks gets into at the end of the piece, though for the party there is some of that. Dole was a throwaway candidate whose turn it was. The parties do this regularly and hope for the best, but I am convinced they often know full well the candidate will lose and they do it anyway, because it's "right" or perhaps because competing factions converge on the safe zero.

Kerry is an "always wanted to be President" candidate who also benefits from being the obvious next nominee for the party. There's nothing to him, but they almost had to do it just because.

Gore was the same, but less of a zero. For both men it's about ego and power. Kerry rehabilitates Gore by making him look good, reminding us he had actual ideas, opinions, intelligence, and decision making ability, for all he had excess ambition and willingness to engage the Truth Warp Drive to trip into power. Perhaps that will be the story of Kerry in the end, or would have been had Gore not gone visibly insane recently.

Bush 41 had a bit of the same "always wanted" to him, if only because the idea was a kick and it was a great capstone on the resume. Perhaps that's why his heart didn't seem into the campaign for re-election; he'd gotten the office as he wanted and then it didn't matter.

Dukakis was ambitious, and enjoyed power as such, but I don't think there was anything inevitable or that he spent his life wanting to run for President. It seems more like he saw the chance, had the credentials, took a shot, and dark horsed his way in.

Nixon had at least some of the desire to be President because he wanted to be President, wanted the power and glory. Kerry makes Nixon look more principled and honest than he might otherwise, and there were places Nixon would not go. As I have mentioned before, he deserves huge credit for not contesting the stolen election in 1960. Nor was there anything inevitable about the selection of Nixon as candidate in 1968, though obviously he was the logical choice in 1960.

Anyway, it's fascinating to look at the races in terms of who each party could logically have run, who actually ran, whether they really had any expectation of winning, and whether a given candidate was all ambition and no substance, or if not, how close he came to having too high an ambition to substance ratio.

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Recipes Galore Beats Cats Galore

The frequently obeyed one has the second ever Carnival of the Recipes up for your culinary adventurism. Mmmm... food.

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Of Course

Steve Verdon has discovered a claim of terrorist responsibility surfacing for the mysteriously crashed Russian jets. Synchronize diving and you have a sport. Synchronize plane crashes and you have raised a presumption of terror. No surprise here.

Update: Steven Taylor points to evidence of explosives in the wreckage.

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Never Far Beneath The Surface

On Tuesday I was driving Deb down the highway on our way to a weekly ultrasound. It was beautiful; perfect temperature, low humidity, crystal blue sky with no more clouds than needed for picturesque contrast.

She called it a "perfect day" more than once.

The sentiment, expressed as we floated down the road, open highway, blue sky and life unrolling ahead, brought to mind another perfect day. Stunning as the blue sky was, looking at it almost burst me into tears. September 11 may be nigh on three years past, but it remains just beneath the surface.

I have more than once, without triggering words, become sad seeing a day and a sky like that. Calling it a perfect day brought it on strong, as I was sure I had read an article titled "why did it have to be such a perfect day" in the weeks following 9/11.

Well, wrong title, same sentiment. It was, after all, not a perfect day. It was a perfect morning, at first. Funny how things jumble up. I assumed I was looking for a Peggy Noonan piece. Nope. Andrew Sullivan.

Some would like it not to be right there, lurking below the surface, rocks to those who would cruise to power or away from responsibility, memory hole mines to the perilously forgetful.

Not three years after That Day, how can the Presidency and aspirations to it not be about this war, the state of this world and time, what is to become of us and them; not what went before, not a theater of the Cold War, not theatrics in aid of former enemies. We go forward, but we don't forget. We deal with the new world, striving to make it better, without dwelling in the past, striving to make that better than it truly was.

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Are We There Yet?

I put a new post with ultrasound pictures on Sadie's blog. Click the picture to go to that post.

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Wrong

The illicit war on guns should no more go after dealers than manufacturers.

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He's Right

It is a state issue. That's a no brainer.

Well, it's a state issue if you accept that marriage is the business of government whatsoever.

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Coincidences Can Add Up Swiftly

Something I had not (yet) posted about was more or less the topic of this post, on how Barnes & Noble is under attack from the left for carrying Unfit For Command, and from the right for being out of stock. Our experience was in between; online they are misleading about its availability, and the timing of its actual availability feels suspicious even if it is not. I commented:

Deb tried to order Unfit For Command from B&N; online, along with a few other books. It said the book was in stock and would ship in 3-5 days.

Since all the books had that status, it was a shock to find the order would not ship for several weeks after the order was processed! She was irate and canceled the whole thing, with some difficulty.

Turned out the culprit was that one book, advertised as immediately available, but not really available until almost the election.

Coincidence? Probably, but it's easy to assume the worst.

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Ouch

I took out a bag of rubbish Monday, and managed to trip over an old bumper that has been adjacent to the rubbish barrels for months. As far as I know, it's the doing of Slacker Dude upstairs that it is camped there, but it could be the landlord left it for some reason. You'd think I'd have missed it like all the other times, since it's such a fixture.

It was probably funny to watch, and was spectacular enough for a lady across the street to call out asking was I okay. I managed to move the bumper a significant distance while tripping and toppling forward onto the pavement. In my anger when I picked myself up, I grabbed and tossed the bumper several feet into the brush at the side of the driveway. No need to keep the danger in place.

I took a small gouge out of my right thumb, scraped, bruised, and in whatever other "swell" ways injured my right knee, injured my right arm, to a lesser degree having more to do with making existing problems flare up, injured my left arm, and apparently my left knee and back aren't too happy. Yay. I used ice on my knee for an hour or so. Eventually things seemed to settle out a bit. At first I could only type with my left hand, which makes things interesting and limited any keyboard usage. Then mousing became difficult with my right.

I could only sit so long before ending up on my back in bed part of the day letting things settle down. The knee became less swollen after a while, and eventually stopped feeling like parts were clicking in a distrubing way when I bent it.

Everything really settled down, then the knee started hurting again as I watched the Olympics. Now the back and right knee hurt intensely, right arm and hand almost as much so, and the left arm and knee think they are being left out. Time for ibuprofen, bed, and hope this is fine tomorrow and was as "no big deal" self-treatable as I thought.

Update:
Seems much better after a night of sleep. Hope it stays that way.

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Speaking Of Accurate Results

Gymnastics judging has become the new figure skating judging, in terms of sickly humorous variance from reality.

Alexei Nemov rocks, and is the height of class. Many people could take a lesson from him.

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The Word That Comes To Mind Is...

Dupe.

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