Monday Morning

The Good News: Current work & rehearsal schedule does allow for several hours of sleep every day.

The Bad News: They're not in a row.

So blogging may be light for a bit and you may notice a few careless errors due to sleep deprivation (instead of the usual careless errors due to laziness, apathy and distraction).

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Anthrax

Atrios and AmericaBlog wonder why the anthrax attacks have disappeared down the memory hole.

This is a strange case of collective amnesia. It was, after all, less than five years ago. And many of the people who ought to remember this best of all scarcely seem to recall its occurrence.

The anthrax attacks targeted newspapers and journalists, among others. In the fall of 2001, I sat in a newsroom full of edgy newspaper employees discussing where it might be possible to score some Cipro. I have since sat in that same newsroom as the words "no terrorist attacks since Sept. 11, 2001" came over the wire from other newsrooms, and watched in vain for any flicker of memory of that earlier edginess and its cause.

It seems "narrative" trumps memory. If you could get enough people on CNN and Fox and the Sunday morning shows to claim that there had been no Olympics in 2004, you would soon see this assertion repeated, unchallenged and uncorrected, throughout the media, including by many of the journalists who traveled to Athens to cover the games.

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Public Service Announcement:

Go see Little Miss Sunshine.

That is all.

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Brethren! This is serious stuff!

The Rev. Harry Valentine WARNS the remnant of the true faithful to take ACTION! before it is TOO LATE!

What actions, specifically, does the Rev. Valentine urge the "brethren" to take? To support "conservative Republicans (and Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-CT)" in their "religious war!" against "Islamists" and "liberals, media, academia."

That parenthetical addition of "Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-CT" seems to have resulted from Valentine's finishing his column, then going back to insert the latest RNC talking point.

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This is mainly for Steve S., who inexplicably loves this sort of thing: WFMU's on the Download.

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It's not online, but the Sept. Washington Monthly offers a profile of Dick Wadhams, "the next Republican maestro of cutthroat campaigning." Since I can't link to Rebecca Sinderbrand's fine profile, I'll link instead to this similar piece from Slate.

I'm kind of surprised that Wadham remains such a proudly public figure, even after all those stories about predatory trolling in preteen chatrooms.

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"Rehearsing for what?" you ask.

For the romantic comedy "Cakewalk" which runs Sept. 8 through Oct. 8 at the William Way Community Center in Philadelphia. I'm playing "Truitt," who is, among other things, the reluctant founder of the Paul Laramore Prenatal Clinic for Men.

Those dates were, again, Sept. 8 through Oct. 8.

Monday morning