Category: Politics (explicit)

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A new personal best/worst!

Thanks, federal government and state of New Jersey! I didn’t really want the other FORTY-FOUR PERCENT of my holiday bonus and online sales commission anyway!

Maybe in another year or two you can take more than half of my cash!

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Go as you pay

Here’s the lede from a story in this morning’s NYTimes:

Senate Democrats face an agonizing choice in the days ahead: find a way to raise at least $50 billion in new taxes, or undermine their most important rule [“pay as you go”] for enforcing budget discipline.

I find it telling that “don’t spend so much” doesn’t seem to be one of their choices.

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Treadmilling

I tellya, dear readers: I’ve been in overdrive at the office for about 5 months now, and it’s been burning me out something fierce. I’ve been facing one big issue of the magazine after another, plus a ton of responsibilities for our annual conference. I think it reached a point where I didn’t know how to slow down. But I figure that’s a lot better than being unemployed.

On the plus side, it means I actually hammered the crap out of our November/December issue, wrapping it up today even though it’s not due at the printer till Tuesday. Our issues have been running late all year for a variety of reasons, so I was just hoping to get this one ish out by deadline. Even though I was early, I still sprinted to the finish line, working on news pages last night and spending the early morning gathering photos for the features.

The upshot? I got the last few files to my production manager by noon, which meant I could take a half-day and chill the heck out.

In my world, that means driving down to Montclair, picking up some coffee over at Bean’s, walking around town a little (cold and drizzly today, but hey), and hitting the Book Center for a little stochastic research!

Within a minute, I opened a book to a page that provided all sorts of grist for the imagination-mill. You can expect my novel sometime around 2020.

After that score, I browsed for books on my wishlist, and ended up finding a bunch of little treasures on the cheap —

Waiting for the Weekend – Witold Rybczynski

Elvis Costello’s Armed Forces – Frank Bruno (from the 33 1/3 series of books-about-albums)

Prince’s Sign O’ the Times – Michelangelos Matos (ditto)

Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Vol. 3 – Robert Caro

The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia – Peter Hopkirk

— for a grand total of $35!

Now it’s on to a nice, relaxing weekend of wrapping up the annual NBA preview, reading Middlemarch, and, um, sleeping.

So don’t call, is what I’m saying.