Yesterday was splendid, an almost perfect summer day, which included a long walk through the park, a bike ride, a tasty student-sponsored barbecue on campus, an easy class, a scooter ride to Volunteer Park, (where we watched a soccer-playing dog) a nice dinner with
Soapy and
Johnbai, a nice evening working at a coffee shop, and a late night movie. Just swell!
Of course, no silver lining is without its cloud, so as I went to bed, my allergies / hat fever / whatever kicked in and Otis's back started aching, so it wasn't a very restful night. And the radio just told me a little while ago that a "Pacific Cold Front" is coming in at the beginning of the week, so we'd better make hay while the sun shines!
The presidential candidate was asked if he had had premarital sex. His reply:
"My God. Let's see, did I?" he asked himself, then paused. "Oh, yeah, I had some. And you know something? It wasn't bad."The candidate whose refreshing honesty came in stark contrast to Republican Mitt Romney's "family values" response to the same question is 76-year-old former Democratic senator from Alaska
Mike Gravel. Although he is a fringe candidate, he's got some strong positions against the war and for universal health care and responses to global warming, as well as some more problematical proposals for the "Fair Tax" (a kind of VAT) and federal ballot initiatives. In any case, he's mixing it up pretty good in the early Democratic debates and might have a positive influence on the discourse. Go, Mike!
Article,
campaign website.
Free-gratis giveaway!If you've got T-Mobile service and want a new phone, here you go:
I have wound up with these two perfectly functional candy bar phones above and beyond the working phones in this house. The blue one on the left is an old school standard Nokia and has never been used and the shiny one on the right is two generations later and was used for about a year. The don't take pictures or surf the intartubes or anything, but if your buttons are sticky, they may be an easy solution for you.
Otis and I have seen two movies this week, courtesy of the Red Envelopes.
Who Killed the Electric Car? was an interesting documentary that imparted some not-so-surprising information but which did not have the weight to be a really substantial movie; it seemed more like an episode of
Nova than anything else.
The Luzhin Defence was a quirky but ultimately unsatisfying adaption of a Nabokov story about the romance of an eccentric chess master with a free-spirited young woman in the nineteen-thirties. While John Turtorro and Emily Watson did the best to sell their characters, and the plot did provide a few surprises, the film felt like an enactment of the Cliff Notes version of the book and the flashbacks to a troubled childhood felt formulaic and were more distracting than illuminating.
