Are my eyes really blue?

...if you know what's good for you, you'll stay the hell out of California.

=) =) =)

1) Family members = noncombatants. Free pass. I realize I cannot expect the same courtesy from everyone (e.g. a certain idiot drama queen, who is no less an ass clown than when he was wailing about the fifth column, and don't think switching sides gives you a pass - who the hell is checking green cards around here?) but rules are rules, and while I reluctantly concede that the spouse is tough to work around these last 20 years or so, the kids are off limits. Period. Paragraph.

2) I would feel a lot better if I could shake the nagging notion that I give more thought to what kind of toilet paper to pick up at Safeway than John McCain gave to making his selection for the second slot. Then again, I doubt the contemporary GOP considers "secessionist" a liability...

The great Jerry Reed, dead at 71. Everyone knows the movie role, but I still remember him most for such country classics as "She Got The Gold Mine, I Got The Shaft."

It's the Atwater offense. Just remember 1988 and you'll know how it's going to go. By those lights, Palin makes much more sense: her job isn't to win over disaffected Hillary voters or persuadable moderates, it's to light a fire under the base and keep them at a steady froth and hope that turnout is enough to make up the difference. That's what Quayle ended up doing, and that seems to have worked out OK at the time.

It might be enough. Then again, it might not. Problem is, you don't know how many of the Perot 19% will eventually walk back to the GOP and how many will stick with the Ds over the economic issues. In years past I would say that the Perot vote is almost 2-to-1 Republican, but given the changes in economic positions over the last 16 years, I think that independent fiscal conservatives who are ambivalent at best about the social stuff will break hard for the Democrats this time.

Too close to call at this point. I wouldn't put too much faith in polls until the end of September or so, and even then...grain of salt. Nobody knows what the ground game will produce, especially if it all turns on get-out-the-vote.

By the way, the night of a convention speech is a SUCKTASTIC time to be setting up an over-the-air antenna for your TV.

24-17. Took the lead in the second half and never relinquished it. For the second year in a row, Steve Superior's top-25 South Carolina Gamecocks founder on the rock that is the Vanderbilt Commodores. Jared Hawkins is the Vanilla Hammer of Thor and I take back 2/3 of everything I ever said against the state of Texas.

Stand by for a slew of LOL-Dores in tomorrow's RSS feed. Tonight? Black and gold, baby.

CHEW TOBACCO CHEW TOBACCO SPIT SPIT SPIT, IF YOU AIN'T A COMMODORE...

ETA: The highlight reel =)

Hang the DJ: Black & White, Birmingham's City Paper:

Men at Work and Duran Duran were just starting to put a harmless face on edgier pop. Meanwhile, Coyote—fresh from California—was quietly staking out airtime on 95 Rock with a playlist worthy of any Los Angeles DJ steeped in the hippest scenes. But in 1982, not everybody was ready for Romeo Void, an unknown band called The Cure, or even a post-punk oldies act like Joy Division. "There were death threats," Coyote recalls. "I was called a fag many times. Some of the locals considered my playing Soft Cell to be promoting the gay lifestyle."

***

This is why it took until 2001-02 for me to discover most of New Wave. Anything I did know - which was mostly late-80s stuff like Gene Loves Jezebel, Love and Rockets, later Cure and Smiths - was all because of the Coyote.

4 tree-sitters remain; all but 3 trees gone near Memorial Stadium

Simple solution: hollow-points.

I'm as environmentally conscious as the next guy, but I've had enough of this bullshit.

Sardonic, contemptuous, angry political commentary below. No one should click the link for any reason.

Bear Stearns, too big to fail. IndyMac, too big to fail. Now FNMA and FHLMC, nationalized.

Maybe it's the right move, maybe it's not, but the next person who says that the Democrats are the socialists needs to fuck off and die in a fire. Call it what you like, make up some other name, but when risk is nationalized and reward is privatized, that's as far from free-market capitalism as you can get.

Wow, the bullshit really is getting to me, isn't it?

All right, this and I'm done with the rage. I hope.

Eunomia » Kosmopolitis, Take Two: Just follow the link. Larison has addressed the problems of rural vs urban in contemporary American politics and done a hell of a better job than I could.

If you want to see what actual genuine intellectually rigorous conservative thinking is like, you need to have The American Conservative bookmarked.

Well, at least Ann and Joe have a memorial now.

Really, after seven years, there's nothing else to say at this point, except for the words "God-damnned disgrace."

Q: But Osama bin Laden is the one that — you keep talking about his lieutenants, and, yes, they are very important, but Osama bin Laden was the mastermind of 9/11 –

PERINO: No, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was the mastermind of 9/11, and he’s sitting in jail right now.

Way to move those goalposts, you dumb bitch. Obviously "dead or alive" ain't what it used to be. Seriously, I've heard of living in the moment, but it's tough to shake the sense that these morons doesn't recognize the existence of anything over 24 hours in either direction...

...This, ultimately, is what drives me absolutely insane. We have had five (ETA - seven) years to find Osama bin Laden and his primary associates in Afghanistan and Pakistan. We have had five (ETA - seven) years to study what the British and Israelis do and come up with a consistent and reliable plan for airport security. We have had five (ETA - seven) years to make sure a nuclear device won’t sail in on a container vessel into Baltimore or Oakland. We have had five (ETA - seven) years to figure out how to cope with a world where a steady supply of cheap Middle Eastern oil is not a sure thing. And yet, we are constantly sold the notion that this is an extraordinary menace, an unparalleled crisis, that this is a war unlike any other and that wildly exceptional means are needed to combat it, that the threat of terrorism is something that should throw us into a state of, well, terror.

And in the end, it should be obvious: this government, this administration, (ETA - this WHOLE COUNTRY) is simply not serious about fighting “terror.” If we were serious, we would have settled down from the first flush of panic and set about doing something serious: isolating radical Islam and reaching out to the mainstream (especially to the Islamic world outside the Middle East), stomping out the last remnants of Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and making sure we set up a working and friendly government in place of the Taliban, building a comprehensive program of air and port security for the United States, establishing plans for coping with another large-scale attack, and ensuring that other potential state actors know of the consequences for being associated with another attack - whether those actors be Iran and North Korea, or Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Sudan and Somalia. We would have planned for shared sacrifice, asked people to adjust their lifestyles to something more appropriate for wartime. We would have tried to fight the fear.

We have done none of these things. Instead, we’re bogged down in Iraq, the one leg of the “Axis of Evil” that definitely DIDN’T have a nuclear program. We’re so bogged down, in fact, that we’re ill-equipped to mount a response to Iran or North Korea if they decide to get nasty. We still do nothing about port security, to the point where a professor with a fishing boat in San Francisco Bay can whip up a more effective nuke-warning system than the Department of Homeland Security. A Category 5 hurricane with multiple days’ notice can almost completely destroy a major American city and we are unable to respond, either before or after. The Taliban are regaining control of the south of Afghanistan, the Iranians who held moments of silence for us on September 12 are no longer in control of the government, we’re pouring every liquid on the plane into a big bin in the concourse and putting shoes through X-ray machines that won’t actually show explosives, and we’re throwing around terms like “Islamic fascism” that make everyone who bows toward Mecca think we’re out to get them. We have taken the ball and run 180 degrees in the wrong direction across the board.

Not to crib too much from V for Vendetta, but it’s true: fear has become the ultimate tool of this government. Fear is enough to keep them in power, and fear is all they can offer. There’s not a plan, there’s not action, there’s only fear - fear that has to seem as raw and scary as it was on September 11, because if we’re not terrified of an immediate threat, we might look up and realize that we’re no safer now than we were five (ETA - SEVEN) years ago. This is why they keep jacking up the color-coded threat system. This is why we get the ominous mushroom-cloud-smoking-gun imagery. This is why we hear constant alarm about duct tape and liquid explosives and hype of a new threat every few weeks, especially when it seems like people might be on the verge of asking exactly what the hell the government is doing.

For them, it’s always September 12. It has to be. There always has to be an imminent threat, something that necessitates emergency powers, something to forestall questions and investigation and just demanding to know what the hell is going on here. It’s been five (ETA - SEVEN) years. FIVE (ETA - FUCKING SEVEN) YEARS. We shouldn’t still be reeling from the first punch. But nobody in charge has a plan other than to keep reeling, because perpetuating the notion that the sky could fall any second is so much easier than actually stopping it from falling.

Wake me up when September ends.

Disasterbation, n. The act of supporting Cal football.

In retrospect, it should have been obvious to a small child that this is the way to beat Cal this year: stack the box to stop the deadly Jahvid Best, overload on the pass rush, and force a quarterback in his first full season to make plays to receivers with a combined total of four catches and no starts when the season began.

Well, it worked like all hell, and as a result, Cal shat the bed in the Eastern time zone again. The fact that the team only flew into Maryland on Friday didn't help either - despite their attempt to "acclimate" to EDT while still in Berkeley, there's really no way you can stay in California and simulate DC-caliber heat and humidity.

At some point, someone is going to have to drill into Jeff Tedford's head that he has to be flexible in how he does things, and that decisions made in August are not binding on an entire season. It cost Cal the Holiday Bowl in 2004, it cost them an over-.500 season in 2007, and it probably cost them the first half today.

However, Vanderbilt put together a nice little 38-21 game. After trading score for score in the first half, the 'Dores slammed on Rice in the second half with a 17-0 performance to cap their third win of the season. Vandy gets most of their work done on the ground, with Jared Hawkins pounding up the middle and Chris Nickson a surprisingly effective runner from the QB spot who also completes the necessary passes. Put that together with a defense that tends to slam the door after halftime, and it's hard not to see some serious possibilities ahead for this team - opponents like Duke or Kentucky can certainly be had and there's no reason to think Ole Miss or Wake are by any means unbeatable. Hold tight, don't drop winnable games, don't do anything stupid, and maybe...?

Not a great day for the Pac-10 - UMN beating Arizona and BYU over UCLA by 59 isn't going to help the "Pac-1" talk - but a worse day for the Big Ten, with Wisconsin down in Fresno grasping for the only major intersectional win of the day for the conference. Cal notwithstanding, I'm still not prepared to take the "Almost College Conference" tag off until I see something impressive, and losing to Little Middle isn't the sort of thing that can be overcome with one win.

And you just know that you're going to see that clip of Jahvid Best's unfortunate intestinal reversal all over YouTube, Deadspin, and EDSBS for the rest of the year, if not the rest of his career. I'm sure he would tell you that was a lot better going down than it was coming up.

ETA: Here's how obvious the problem was: even the Junks, mostly Maryland alums and all Maryland supporters, basically said that Tedford screwed the team by not flying in until the night before, and that a 3000 mile flight is no joke. When the guys who just gave you a preposterous upset are sympathetic to your plight, you know your coach F'd up.

...I don't remember the NFL being so solicitous when the Chargers got chased by a fire, or when the Saints got run out by Katrina. So stop screwing around and move the Texans-Ravens game. Ideally, move it off the edge of a cliff, but then, I'd have been just as happy for those two to play during the hurricane...

60 degrees and overcast. Perfect. That marine layer just does amazing things in the morning - far from being gloomy or grim, having that thick gray ceiling at 8 AM is a comfort. No garish sunlight, no glare punching you right in the face, no unpleasant heating up first thing in the morning.

Fog is also what apparently drifts through the brains of assorted football officials. Setting aside the preposterous non-call of a safety that Cal forced on the Twerps just before the first half, Ed Hochuli's brain-lock in Denver suggests that the NFL has the same unnatural love for Mike Shannahan that the media once had for John McCain (though that shows signs of fraying when some bobblehead bimbo on Fox in the morning is ripping into the campaign manager). Amazingly, the play's a fumble, because the ball moved backwards...but it's *not* a turnover? I got nothing but love for Jay Cutler, pride of the Commodores, but isn't it enough that nobody ever calls the cut block above 4500 feet?

Meanwhile, yes, I have a new iPhone. I didn't want a new iPhone, but mine had an esoteric failure: something went wrong with the dock connector above and beyond the traditional "it's got lint in it" problem. It charged just fine, it would sync with no problem, but it kept thinking something was plugging into that dock connector, thus activating the screen and occasionally even warning that an unsupported peripheral was being plugged in. As a result, you could take the phone off the charger and barely touch it, and seven and a half hours later, it would show that it had been used for seven hours. That's bad arithmetic.

As it turns out, once out of warranty, the fix is a refurb unit for $199 with only a 90-day warranty. At that point, you may as well have the new one. And as it turns out, I got to keep a foundation account...so my monthly bill only goes up by about $12-15 total. At that point, it's worth it to have the new one with a full warranty (and 3G and GPS besides, which I guess I will be happy enough to use). The big trick now is the battery life...I think my old iPhone may have had this problem well before I noticed, so I'm curious to see whether I get more than a day out of the new one (especially with the new firmware, which I strongly recommend to everyone).

Oh yes - my brother-in-law has the old iPhone now. He has no fear of cracking cases and firing up soldering irons, so if he can make it work, it's his. Meanwhile, I have bought a nice silicone-grip case for my new iPhone...with a cover for the dock port.

...I don't know who had a worse weekend: the Pac-10 (four teams lost to Mountain West opponents; one week away from formally being renamed the Pac-One) or the Big Ten (beaten soundly about the head and face even before their flagship team shat the bed again). At least now we have a tiebreaker in place when it's time to decide who's going to lose to the SEC champion this year.

Yes, it's troubling that Georgia seems to have had more trouble with South Cackalacky than Vandy had...but it's not outside the realm of possibility that the Lame Gamecocks are better than their record indicates, that Georgia is actually pretty good, and that *gasp* Vandy may actually be pretty good. If you look at the AP poll, who's the first team "also receiving votes"?

Gulp.

Better beat Ole Miss.

Consider that number, $283. Not a bad little chunk of change. Three months of a really good DirecTV package. A new 16 GB iPod Touch, with your friend's employee discount. Ten rounds apiece at the 4Ps with three of your pals, tax and tip included. Cross-country airplane flight. Swank new American-made leather jacket from US Wings. (Maybe on sale. Those things have gone up.)

And you're about to spend $283 - you and every other person in this country - so that AIG can get off the hook.

That's $85 billion. That's more than Warren Buffett has. That's enough money to buy the entire NFL, all 32 teams, and start cleaning house.

Back to the old "moral hazard" again. Bear Sterns. IndyMac. Fannie and Freddie. Now AIG is the latest corpse to get stood upright and paraded around on this month's version of Weekend At Bernanke's. Almost makes you want to ask who the hell Lehman pissed off that they didn't get the complimentary reach-around.

When you have a market where everything is a game of musical chairs, but nobody ever takes a chair away, that's not capitalism, that's not conservatism, that's fucking socialist. And the free pass is being handed out courtesy of the same people who went apoplectic at the suggestion that credit card interest should be capped somewhere around 30%, because it would undermine personal responsibility.

However, if you exist above the Whiffle Line, you're far too important to ever bear the consequences of your actions. So stand by to have an iPod plucked from your wallet so that a bunch of gold-plated weasels can keep putting their name on Man U's shirts. The very least they could do is round up their executive team, march them out at halftime of the Super Bowl, randomly select one or two, and let five lucky taxpayers go to work on 'em with steel-toes and a ball bat.

Not likely, obviously. They're far too rich and important for silly shit like accountability.

Martin Sullivan. $47 million severance from AIG in July, after two quarters of record losses.

Read the whole thing.

The worst six months in the company's history is worth $47M...and an office and secretary until the end of the year. Now being paid for out of YOUR tax dollars.

Words fail me. Anything I post would probably be taken as incitement to a felony so I better shut up now.

A nice low-end MacBook Air from everybody. Yup. Uh-huh.

Look, I'm not insensitive to the notion that it would be really bad for everybody if these things went belly-up. Nor do I want to see all the janitors, secretaries, help desk donkeys, etc etc. shoved onto the street. I get that.

What I don't get is how, through all this, there are absolutely no consequences for the people who got us into this mess. You know, the innovators of NINJA loans (No Income, No Job, No Assets). The people who lent money knowing full well they were lending to bad risks. I don't want to EVER hear this put on "irresponsible borrowers" - if you've got a thousand bucks, and you decide to lend it to your drunken cousin Slick who's never held a job and who's been in rehab three times for crack addiction and who got the neighbor's sow pregnant - is it Slick's fault for taking the money, or your fault for being a FUCKING MORON??

And the Whiffle Life goes on. Dear God, in my next life, please make me a Republican so I too can be immune from the consequences of my actions.

War in Iraq. Recession at home. Me in a funk. It can only be...1991.

Four wins, no losses.

Two conference wins, no losses.

One win over a ranked foe, no losses.

Outscored opponents 51-10 in the second half.

To cap it all off, not one, not two, but FIVE AP-ranked teams lost, and five more that didn't have a loss already.

And we were the first team "also receiving votes" last week.

If the Vanderbilt Commodores aren't ranked in the Top 25 when the new poll ships on Monday, they should cancel the whole thing for the rest of the year. Because right now? Any time, any place, any team...WE WILL FEAR NO EVIL.

DYNAMITE GO VU!!!

Fourteen years it's taken...but today, the Vanderbilt Commodores are ranked #21 in the AP poll.

I'm going to go get very, very, very drunk now.

No, no, no, a thousand times no.

"We ran the economy to the brink of oblivion, so let us have $700 BILLION to bail out the firms that did it...without applying any regulation, without any sort of corrective measures, without even allowing anyone to review or approve the process. Just give us a shitpile of cash and don't worry about it, we'll take care of things."

Is there any reason - any reason AT ALL - not to expect them to make a hash of this? And don't start with that bullshit about what Obama would do, or what Clinton (either) would do. The old theoretical equivalence game is not in play here. The responsible party is the one who has fucked us sideways, so they are the ones who have to demonstrate why handing them one bazillion dollars scot-free is not THE STUPIDEST FUCKING IDEA ON THE FACE OF THE EARTH.

They really like us!

ETA: they must really like us...Vandy vs Auburn has been picked up for ESPN's prime-time game, Saturday Oct 4.

This may be the single best obituary of all time. I have my work cut out for me.

Quite frankly, the more companies there are out there producing the next generation of superphone, the better. Plus somebody needs to push the iPhone team...because the Blackberry and Windows Mobile aren't gonna do it.

T-Mobile is in a bit of a weird spot, given that their 3G is in a band nobody else in the world uses (1700 Mhz? Really?) but at least you get to reuse your 850 Mhz antenna. Sort of. (Honestly, I think it would have been better all round if they'd just given us two harmonics to begin with for mobile phones, but then, Europe kicked our ass up and down on the mobile phone front, so that ship has sailed.) But for the first time since the Pearl, T-Mob has a really compelling product that moves the bar and legitimately brings the Internet to your pocket in a way that Blackberry never did and WM6 never could. And let's not even get started on how Symbian never took off in this country...

So welcome to the fight. Your move, Apple.

ETA: After looking over the reports and liveblogs, it looks like they're going right for the gut on all the stuff the iPhone didn't ship with: physical keyboard, contexual menus, 3G out of the box, wide-open developer program, etc. So now we get to see what's doin'. I suspect that there may be some battery life issues at first, unless they've crammed in a much larger battery or Android does something truly astonishing with power management. (Pulling hard for the latter.) The fact that the phone will only launch in markets where T-Mob has already rolled out 3G, though, points up exactly why Apple skipped 3G in the first iteration of the iPhone.

Michelle Cottle basically lays down the smack on behalf of those of us who know that we're not the Chosen of God just because we grew up in East Butthole, Alabama.

And spares me writing basically the same thing all over again.

...you can take it or leave it, but I'm starting to wonder if there's something to it, and it's this:

Anything that we were hung up about when we were 13 or 14 or 15 - our body issues, our social problems, our self-consciousness and fears and anxieties - anything from that 8th and 9th grade range just gets burned into the ROM and we're stuck with it for the rest of our lives. No matter how brilliant or gorgeous or successful or lighting-our-hundreds-with-hundreds rich we get, at root, we're still the fat kid, the nerd, the burnout, the reject, the freak, the flake, the basket case. And while all your adult hangups can eventually be cured with enough drugs and therapy and liquor, the stuff that was there originally is damn near impossible to overcome, because it happened when you started being an adult. Whatever you thought you were when the switch flipped, well, you've got yourself a duck.*

This dovetails nicely with the old line about how high school IS the real world, it's just not the whole world...because anybody who thinks the real world isn't like high school needs to get out in the real world some more.

Anyway, it's a theory...

* old line about imprint theory: "if a duck hatches from its egg, and you're the first thing it sees, you got yourself a duck."

I've frequently thought that the House of Representatives is the world's biggest open-air special-needs class, and the GOP contingent a bunch of snake-handling mouth-breathers, but if this is true, it's an inspired move. Sure, the government is on the hook if things go pear-shaped, but insuring bad debt for private companies who agree to take it on - and charging them for said insurance - is a hell of a lot less of a budget-buster than buying up all the bad debt outright and hoping against hope that it's worth something someday. I mean, seriously. Put the profit potential of mortgage bonds in one hand and crap in the other and see which fills up first.

If this "toxic debt" is really something that will pay out for us in the end, then the private sector should be just as happy to make a profit on it, right? Especially with the government as the reinsurer of last resort? The best part is, it's a simple plan along the lines of FDIC insurance and it leaves the heavy lifting on the industry that got its tit in a wringer to begin with. I think the watchword for anyone working on this deal should be "elegant in its simplicity." These Rube Goldberg three-rail bank shot schemes are where shit comes unravelled.

And again, if I'm rank-and-file at Lehman, I'm climbing a bell tower with a high-powered rifle right about now...

From Gawker Media and our pals at Defamer:

Take-home text: "Hey Ryan - I'm sorry, b/c I'm covering for Lindsey's usual asst., could you tell me, who's Rosh Hashana and why would he/she affect Kristi's meeting with KN and MC?"

Now, here's the really troubling part: this person can vote.

So the "John McCain Wins The Debate!" ad pops up on the Wall Street Journal site this morning...before McCain's actually committed to showing up.

If McCain loses this election, he can put it down to one thing: the fact that while Karl Rove was a poor man's Lee Atwater, Steve Schmidt is a homeless man's Karl Rove. I thought the showrunners at Team Hillary were incompetent, but right how I think Schmidt would screw up running a lemonade stand in the driveway.

* You are not hallucinating. That's ESPN College Gameday, broadcasting this Saturday from VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY, home of the #19-ranked Commodores. Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria. Kiss your loved ones and get right with God, because the world as you know it is ending.

* Bama ranked #2 and generally regarded as a legit contender for the national championship? THIS is what Nick Saban was paid $8 million for, to wrench the Tide from humiliation to superpower in the span of 18 games. It's not the sort of thing where one or two plays would have taken everything the other way and left them 2-3, or anything like that - they're making sure that those one or two plays don't have a chance to make a difference. And that is scary stuff.

* "Horny for Zorny" shirts are going to be popping up all over DC this week. The Skins have now beaten Dallas five times in the last seven tries - say what you like about Joe GIbbs 2.0, but he did something that nobody else managed during his absence: he made the Cowboys beatable again and turned the series from a thrashing into a rivalry again. Tony Romo is, quite frankly, pwned by the Burgundy and Gold defense; he's 1-3 as a starter against Washington. At this point, I'm willing to bet that 3 teams from the NFC (B)East will go to the playoffs, and the fourth will have a better record than at least one other playoff team.

* That's all the good stuff. Now for some really incendiary commentary about the Golden Bears, after the jump...

The margin of defeat - across party lines - was provided by House members running in swing districts, who overwhelmingly voted against the package. Members of the House who are not running for re-election supported the bill in sweeping numbers.

Make of it what you will.

So with the sweeping victory over the Al-Qaeda Cowboys on Sunday, I find myself swept up in a firestorm of Potomac Fever. I was going to gush about the whole DC experience, when it occurred to me that I actually lived in Arlington. So in the interest of intellectual honesty and as part of my ongoing commitment to integrity in spaz-blogging, I have split it into two parts. Hopefully, my friends back in the 202/703/571, who gave meaning to everything below, will concur in the validity of the lists.

WHAT DC MEANS TO ME:

Hail to the Redskins. The Pub Formerly Known As The 4Ps. Sonny and Sam. Bluegrass and Go-go. EB, Cakes, Lurch and JP. Don and Mike. Half-smokes. An Irish bar every five hundred yards. The 9:30 Club. HFS, back when HFS was really HFS. The lunchtime smoking club at Signature Cigar. The escalator to Hell at Dupont Circle. Rock Creek Parkway. Throwing down with a bunch of dugout lawyers during softball games on the Mall. Walk on the left, stand on the fucking right, tourist. Drinks at the Ritz-Carlton bar after movies in Georgetown. Gospel brunch at the Corcoran. Mac McGarry hosting "It's Academic" on hungover Saturday mornings. Coffee at Xando, unless you're close enough to walk to the Mudd House. Fuzagi's "Waiting Room" for the Redskins defense, Chuck Brown's "Bustin' Loose" for the Nats and Mambo Sauce's "Welcome to DC" for the Wizards. Lou Brutus and the Minister of Information, the Evil Alan Scott. Drinking at Felix, or the Blue Room, or Lucky Bar, or the 18th St Lounge, or the 4th Estate, or Mackey's, or Recessions, or Pharmacy Bar. Barra Brava and the Screaming Eagles. The Greek Festival and homemade baklava. Standing on the Metro between a smoking-hot GWU co-ed on one side and a 2-star general in full Class A on the other. Lunch at Fran O'Brien's the Friday before the Dallas game. Greasy pizza from the place on the corner and a McDonald's that takes 45 minutes to get your order right.

WHAT NORTHERN VIRGINIA MEANS TO ME:

Turning leaves in Ballston walking down Glebe Road to Harris Teeter, or CVS, or the mall, or the movies, or the metro. Friday night in Clarendon. Swing dance lessons from Tom and Debra. Movies at Court House. Old Virginia Tobacco Company and SJ-9 cigars. The walk back up Wilson Boulevard into the setting sun after work. Plotting the demise of the leisure class in the middle of Tyson's II. Games at Bailey's in that huge frathouse basement of a bar. Christmas shopping at Pentagon City, staring four levels down into the food court. Grocery shopping at Giant and Fresh Fields. A pint at the Four Courts on the way home. World Cup watchers staggering out of the bar at 4 AM...or staggering in at 6. The original Apple Store at Tyson's I. The long drive down 7 to Landsdowne, or Stirling, or Dulles Town Center. The sandcrawlers at IAD taking you out to the jetBlue terminal. The original Five Guys on Columbia Pike. Burgers and beer at Hard Times. The daily mob scene at Potomac Mills and IKEA. High school football at Washington & Lee and Lake Braddock. Square pizza from Mario's at 3 AM, delivered. The couch at Common Grounds. The complete indispensability of the Orange Line.

Forgetting anything?

You know what I want for a president? I want someone whose brain is so fucking big it deforms their skull. I want them to be the smartest motherfucker in every room they walk in. I want other world leaders so convinced they can read their puny minds that they don't dare try to pull shit on them. When you ask them about the history of some country, I want them to smile at me and say "I'll try to put it in small words for you", and I'm not stupid.

P.J. O'Rourke, who wrote the single greatest book ever for laymen attempting to understand American government, has cancer...of a particularly survivable and embarassing sort.

Now see, if I could write like this, I wouldn't be wasting my time blathering at you donkeys.

Get well, you fascist son of a bitch. =)