I've found an apartment in Paris to rent for our honeymoon. It may not be as romantic as a suite at Le Crillon or George V, but for the same amount of money as a decent, small hotel room we are going to have a huge apartment in the 7th with Internet access, a garden, and a close view of the Eiffel Tower.
It's been cliché for at least forty years that the French love Jerry Lewis. What I was delighted to find is that the French have apparently discovered the underrated comic star of City Slickers and Home Alone. Our nearest metro stop, Dupleix, is around the corner from the Rue Daniel Stern.
In response to my inarticulate concern about increasing polarization in the political dialogue, Jed points out that he sees a lot of the opposite trend in national politics, the extreme courting of the middle on the part of both Bush and Kerry. And certainly there's something to that; the fact that the country was so evenly divided in 2000 that the contest could even get to the point where a handful of Floridians mattered so much, certainly that speaks to the power of the middle-road voter. But I still think the polarization is a more prominent trend, I'm just not sure how to get at it. I think there's something to be said for the fact that Kerry is widely reported to be both too liberal and not liberal enough, for instance. More concretely, you have things like Arlen Specter being in danger of losing his Senate seat for the crime of, so far as I can tell, being an effective senator rather than a blazing idealogue.
Following up on some other things: as for the question Jed posed about the etiquette questions, I have no idea how people are supposed to learn things. I learned the escalator rule from my eighth-grade social studies teacher, who also taught us to walk on the right (not left) side of hallways (and enforced this with a big plastic axe). The Nebula Awards were awarded this weekend, and as I'd hoped, Elizabeth Moon's thoroughly brilliant The Speed of Dark won for best novel. Finally, circumstances appear to have conspired such that Special Agency is the hot new place to discuss a DC-area madam and masseuse who once caught Wonkette's fancy. I'm not sure what to make of that one, but I think I feel dirty.
Susan, as if peering into my brain, said it pretty well. But Peter's response is also apt. I will try harder to be less paralyzed by the high, keening wail that usually accompanies my attempts to make sense of the world.
Somewhat relevant: I'm a fan of Mark Schmitt's The Decembrist, which is less of a conventional rapid-fire weblog and more of a collection of essays. His recent entry on liberal thought contains a lot of things worth talking about, but this one (despite being one of the more minor points) stuck with me:
All of us, whether we write blogs or opinion journalism in traditional outlets, face the temptation to jump at every stupid thing we see come out of the administration, and there are so many that every blog journalist can sometimes be the first to catch some outrage and garner some quick notice. I've done it, and it's usually when this weblog gets the most hits and trackbacks. To use a phrase that Bush might have used once, it's like "swatting flies" instead of maintaining the discipline to really construct an alternative vision. But there are a lot of flies, they're big and they bite.
I like this imagery; it's easy for me to imagine of a secret universe of reasonable discourse, obscured by a layer of dirt and swarming with thousands of tiny, buzzing, trivialities. Schmitt is coming from somewhere on the left, but it's pretty clearly a more universal problem. All is positioning and counter-positioning, response and counter-response. I'm reminded of a passage from Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age that, in a way, echoes Schmitt:
"The guys at the Flea Circus say that sometimes the mites go to war with each other. Like maybe someone in Shanghai makes a mite that doesn't follow the protocol, and gets his matter compiler to making a whole lot of them.... Then some Vicky--one of their Protocol Enforcement guys--makes a mite to go out and find that mite and kill it, and they get into a war. That's what's happening today, Nell. Mites fighting other mites. This dust--we call it toner--is actually the dead bodies of all those mites."
I have my pet theories about a couple things in particular that seem broken, and if I'm lucky I may eventually get a few of them into words. But it's safe to say (and no great insight) that the Internet plays a role. Many aspects of the way we talk about politics don't seem to have changed that much. We're just talking about it faster.
The Yankees are in town, which means all manner of madness, not the least of which was Fox showing Friday's game at Fenway nationally. The network coverage bumped Jerry Remy for the night in favor of Joe Buck and Tim McCarver, who covered the ALCS last fall and were eager to pick up where they had left off, trumpeting both the history of the rivalry and the mystique of the knuckleball. The production was not a golden moment for Fox Sports. Despite a cool new camera trick that tracked the frame-by-frame movement of particular pitches, things took a turn for the worse when the mechanics of the knuckler were explained by an animated monstrosity named "Scooter", who appeared to be the Fox Sports answer to the Microsoft Office Assistant.
However, Buck and McCarver do one thing that I like a lot, which is that they occasionally won't say anything at all. I first noticed them doing this last fall, when the booth would fall eerily silent after a big play, and the roar of the crowd was all you heard. With a strong crowd to back them up it's a neat trick, and one that flies so directly in the face of generations of shrieking, hollering sports announcing that I wondered if the producer had merely shut off their mikes.
Friday night, with two out in the 8th inning, Manny Ramirez botched a routine fly ball and Scott Williamson walked the bases loaded. As a mild panic took hold on the city, Alan Embree entered the game and punched out Hideki Matsui on (if memory serves me) three pitches. The crowd went nuts. Buck and McCarver were silent. It was a nice moment.