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I’m ba-aaaaack!

Lovely week in France. Various adventures, more than one of them down to the craptastic quality of modern air travel.

Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the ability to leave home and be in Paris what, 14 or 15 hours later all told? That’s pretty fantastic. (The Concorde could beat that, but then the whole Concorde program is “up on bricks” like the plane I saw at DeGaulle airport, and of course I never would have been able to afford it anyway.)

But really it isn’t even so much the time of travel as the shittiness of dealing with the nuisance factor of everything. Goddamn security theater, goddamn lost bag, goddamn lines. On returning to the United States, I had to wait in three fucking lines at Philadelphia: the first was for customs, the last was for security even though I’d already gone through security in Paris (obviously this wasn’t good enough), and the other was for… I really can’t even see a pretend point to that one. Basically we lined up once to get our little custom form stamped, and then had to line up again to hand the stamped form over to another official. Uh…?

Oh well. It was still a magnificent week. If nothing else, the glorious weather alone would have made up for nearly anything. I can’t imagine much better weather for sightseeing at any point in the year, really.

Thank you, state-funded higher education and creative-worker talent market for making this possible. (more…)

As a counterpoint to yesterday’s State of the Union commentary, I would like to make note of a couple items which suggest that, if things are intractably screwed, overall, there are nonetheless some things to be glad of.

First, the permanent Orange Alert is going away, at last. Thank you, Obama and Obama administration. Sweet fucking Christ. This doesn’t really matter that much to be honest, but it still feels so good that we have a government willing to shitcan this useless, pointless, brainless fear-prompter-as-designed-by-committee-of-idiots system.

Second, more evidence that, all the shouting and spin aside, Democrats may indeed have won the war when it comes to health care.

And, while I’m sharing doom-and-gloom-dispelling links, I may as well note this one, even if it was from a week ago: Republican brand in Calif[ornia] is “dead.” I’m not sure how much good this does the rest of us but, hey, 1) it’s still a pleasant thought and 2) maybe it’s just me but, this doesn’t seem like much of an exaggeration at all, and that does seem kind of impressive.

FYI: Posting from me (i.e., the entire blog) may slow down for a while, beginning tomorrow, while I’m putting in some time at my second non-job for a week or three.

Before that, however: um, whoa. The balloon has gone up, just about, hasn’t it? I’m going to withhold further comment about this, for now; I expect this story will be with us for some time anyway.

In the meantime, I’m posting all the same because yesterday’s apparent assassination attempt was by no means the only surprising bit of news to reach me in the past 24 hours. And possibly, not even the most significant. Other unexpected findings?

Another reminder of why I read Britain’s The Independent: to get an update on what’s going on in my own frickin’ country’s legislature. If you’ve been wondering what happened with Senate reform, too, have a look. (Hint: it has not gone away again yet, at least.)

The 7-9 Seattle Seahawks upset New Orleans in the NFL playoffs; relatively-trivial, yes, but still fascinating. That 67-yard slog by Marshawn Lynch, in particular, was just astounding. “Get thee behind me, tacklers.”

And then just to really baffle me, the Times has this article about how even a law degree is apparently a ticket to little more than enormous debt and a job at Home Depot, these days. (So, anyone who earned one of those degrees and then decided to detour into library science instead, that may have been just as well?) (more…)