Blog

Work’s still pretty stressful, but it’ll all be over at noon next Friday. We’re heading down to the eastern shore in Maryland for a friend’s wedding soon.

I leave you with the Worthless Baseball Card Collection.

Just clicked over from the Yankees to the news and am watching JetBlue 292 try to emergency-land in LAX with faulty landing equipment. If you’re the praying kind, then pray for the passengers and crew.

Update: WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

Klinger really IS from Toledo.

I thought about going to the Giants-Saints game tonight, since there were tons of tickets available and it would’ve been a way to support the Red Cross efforts down in the gulf.

But then I thought about how, within 5 minutes, I would’ve been rooting for the Giants to crush the Saints, and THAT didn’t feel right. So I’m watching at home, and the Saints fumbled the kickoff, leading to a near-instant TD for the Jints. Sorry, guys.

Well, the MacArthur Grant guys just e-mailed out the list of this year’s “genius grant” recipients: 25 people each get $500,000 over 5 years, plus health coverage. The foundation called me last month to see if I’d be willing to comment in case they were checking on anyone in my professional field (pharma/biopharma stuff), but they never called for any followups.

The list is embargoed till midnight, and I’m going to respect that, geniusly enough. Unfortunately, no one I know personally got tabbed, but a friend-of-a-friend did, so I’m hoping we can cadge some free drinks & dinner off the guy.

Evidently, an ice-cream cone at Burger King offended a Muslim in the UK.

Myself, I’m offended by The King’s showboating after his INT against Bledsoe.

Katrina: The Gathering.

The President just delivered his address about the rebuilding of New Orleans and the gulf coast communities blow’d up by Katrina. He spoke from Jackson Square, which is about 400 feet away from where the official VM fiancee and I plan to get hitched next March.

Yeah, I’m using the present tense. We still plan to get married in the French Quarter in springtime.

My coworkers, family and friends have stared at me goggle-eyed when I’ve told them that we think everything’s going to go off as planned. Maybe they’ve been following the situation more disinterestedly, or just watching and reading different news-sources. They may also have fallen into the trap of reading too much into the present moment. Each day, the city’s been getting better news about the drainage, the pollution, the electricity, and more.

A week ago, you would’ve thought that we were on the verge of suffering a zombie plague. Now the mayor of New Orleans is talking about keeping the city crime-free and violence-free. Things change quickly during a disaster, and I’m betting that we’re going to see more rapid improvements (and, I hope, very few grisly discoveries).

We’ll be visiting her family down there a month from now, and I bet this very blog will tout a photo of your humble correspondent downing a Hand Grenade in the Quarter. And, sure, a beignet at Du Monde.

“There is no way to imagine America without New Orleans”? I’m glad the President and I see things eye-to-eye.

Update: The photographer we booked for the wedding just sent us an update from his first trip back into the city:

Saw Jax Brewery yesterday and even got out to walk around the back. As with the rest of the French Quarter I was very surprised how little damage. It was hard to even find a broken window anywhere in the Quarter and there was no flooding. I couldn’t really even tell if Jax had been looted. The media reports about looting downtown where VERY misleading. (even the Convention Center, that housed the thousands stranded for days seen on the news, didn’t have one single broken window!)

I would guess Jax Brewery will be open within weeks. It lifted my spirits to see the French Quarter and Garden District in such good shape.

What does the President of Belarus do when he’s in New York for the big UN shindig?

Not a lot, according to Peter Savodnik, over at Slate:

If you’re Alexander Lukashenko and you’re the president of a poor, irradiated country and even the thugs call you a thug, with your secret secret police and your thick, peasant patois, then you spend your one night in New York City in your suite at the Waldorf Towers.

I haven’t been watching any of the Senate confirmation hearings for John Roberts’ Supreme Court nominiation, but Dahlia Lithwick’s writeup about it yesterday makes me wonder if Roberts would pass a Turing Test.