Housekeeping

Oy, Been a crazy couple of weeks.

Annoying feature of Typepad No. 37: HTML tags left open in comments cannot be closed in subsequent comments. They can only be closed by the host/editor reopening the original comment and adding the closing tag, and if said host/editor is away from the computer for several days the comments can turn into one giant bold-cased italic. Sorry about that. (Since the italics carry over into the following comments, doesn't it seem logical that a closed tag in any following comment should correct this? Why that doesn't work is a particularly annoying mystery to me.)

Anyway, think I've gotten all the ital tags tidied up, going back to last Friday, which also happened to be the lady friend's birthday, for which I had planned to take her out for a nice, fancy dinner somewhere. That fancy dinner turned out, instead, to involve my bringing the Trader Joe's chicken broth she likes to the hospital, where the very nice but very strict nurse firmly explained that chicken broth counts as a "clear liquid" but pinot grigio does not, even though the broth is darker. And but so, after a week of unpleasant tests, including a few involving very small but still not-as-small-as-you'd-like-considering-where-they're-being-put cameras, and a weekend of demerol-enhanced Halloween movies on cable, there's now one less gallbladder and the lady friend is back home and feeling a bit better and I'm back here and able to attend again to things like closing the hanging tags in comments threads.

So, as I said, Oy.

I've missed quite a few blogworthy news items — including the sight of FBI agents right here in Everybody's Hometown, raiding the homes of Rep. Curt Weldon's daughter and of his mistress attractive, female long-time confidant. The lovely sight of the agents, in those cool windbreakers with the big yellow lettering, carrying boxes of potentially incriminating documents put the lie to Crazy Curt's claim that rumors of such an investigation were false.

It does not mean, of course, that the congressman and his cronies do not fully deserve the presumption of innocence until proven guilty. There may, after all, be a perfectly innocent explanation for why friends and relatives of Weldon's with no lobbying experience were awarded six-figure lobbying contracts on behalf of the friends and relatives of notorious Serbian war criminals and corrupt Russian businessmen.

What else? Bombshell allegations out of Colorado Springs, but unlike the allegations of corruption surrounding Weldon, these seem radically implausible, so I'm withholding judgment and waiting to hear more. … The Groot Krokodil is dead and the clutch of the ugly past is a few degrees weaker. … Lula — Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva — was re-elected as Brazil's president in a landslide victory. In Brazil, voting is mandatory — an intriguing idea I'm still trying to think about from different angles. How would American politics be different — better, worse — if we had such a rule here?

Time away from the computer meant more time reading books and I'm 100+ pages into Tom Ricks' Fiasco, meaning I've now read much more of this dismal history of the Iraq debacle than either President Bush or Condi Rice read of the National Intelligence Estimate allegedly detailing the reasons for this misadventure. The events detailed are dismal, that is, the book itself is excellent and highly recommended. My Republican friends are getting copies this Christmas.

All work and no play makes slack a dull boy, however, and there's more to the library than just politics, history and Very Bad Novels. I've been told, for example, that it's inexcusable that I've never read anything by Terry Pratchett. It probably is, but where should I begin?