Month: October 2004

Tuesday – The VP debate was odd tv viewing. Cheney was being all mean. Edwards was trying to be persuasive. Neither made much headway, in my opinion – a draw. I suppose trying to make it a roundtable made it look silly (I know that the Cheney group liked it that way, but it’s not good debating style for viewing).

The Yankees v. Twins game on Wednesday night – a neverending game; plus, I was expecting the Yankees to never say die. Ah well.

Thursday – I finished the book I read on Saturday – The Salmon of Doubt – the last book (sort of) by Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Essentially a collection of his essays, drafts, speeches, and unpublished materials (including a half-done – obviously so – novel (or novella, to be more precise)) put together by his editor. Adams died in 2001, too soon and too young – and this book was a nice homage to his intellect, his humor, and his insight. The half-done novel was… weird. There was the sense that Adams really wasn’t sure of what to do with his ideas, and just wrote them out; his editor figured that this might as well be published, even if there was no real ending (seriously, no there wasn’t). Nonetheless, this book was decent subway reading. I will get to reading the Hitchhiker’s Guide soon enough – am looking forward to it…

More presidential debating this Friday, town hall style. (sure, let’s watch a bunch of intentionally-selected Average Joe Schmoes ask their (already approved) questions to the candidates)…. (umm, pardon me for letting a little cynicism ooze there)…. 😉

The Supreme Court reopens for business today. The major item on the docket is about sentencing guidelines this time around, but the major issue of import to me is about eminent domain. The decision may decide what happens to Brooklyn over the next 20 years. The media is interested as it had not been before in the Supreme Court, from who is going to retire, to where exactly is the highest court in the land (it’s not the velvet curtained courtroom – it’s the basketball court on the fourth floor). They even recapped how it ruled in the past that a tomato is a vegetable, not a fruit (for the purposes of an import duty).

I can’t resist blogging, can I?

NY Times’ columnist Thomas L. Friedman is back from sabbatical, with a clear theme in today’s column “Iraq: Politics or Policy?”: “We’re in trouble in Iraq. We have to immediately get the Democratic and Republican politics out of this policy and start honestly reassessing what is the maximum we can still achieve there and what every American is going to have to do to make it happen. If we do not, we’ll end up not only with a fractured Iraq, but with a fractured America, at war with itself and isolated from the world.” He reiterated this on “Face the Nation” on CBS this morning (I was channel-surfing and there he was, telling Bob Schaeffer the problem that the current administration has and how the Kerry camp isn’t all that much better; yep, Friedman’s back all right).

Seattle Mariners outfielder, Ichiro Suzuki, has broken a record for most hits within a season, and not only does it change the way Americans view Japanese players, Japanese people are apparently hoping Ichiro’s changing the way Americans view Japan as a nation and as a people. I don’t know if it we can makes such a conceptual leap, but at the least, baseball is a big thing to somewhere other than America.

You know the world has changed when dialing the 212 area code leads you to someone, who via cell phone, is in… Baghdad? Fascinating article by Ian Urbina on “Area Codes, Now Divorced From Their Areas.” Urbina notes:

In this era of mobile telecommunications, calls now connect people, not places. Cellular phones, changing governmental regulations and new Internet technology have torn area codes from geography, allowing people to have phone numbers with area codes distant from where they live. Though not new, the trend has kicked up a pitched debate among a colorful collection of technological pundits, telephone historians and Web preachers who specialize in the topic.

“For many people this will come as a deeply confusing development,” said James E. Katz, a sociologist and director of mobile communication studies at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J. “You delocalize area codes, and it’s one less North Star and one less compass point that people have to help orient themselves in an increasingly complicated world.”

It is confusing – your number(s) identify you and follow you; yet these numbers were once identifying where you were, but now you’re really mobile. Um. Ok.

Have a nice Sunday.