Rules? In a knife fight?

My favorite Paul Newman movie is Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Primarily because it would do if I could only quote one movie for the rest of my life. :-)

Butch: What's the matter with you?
Sundance: I can't swim.
Butch: Are you crazy? The fall will probably kill you.

Just keep thinking, Butch. That's what you're good at.

Shannon & Willow

About two years ago I took these photos of the daughters of some friends.

From Wednesday, Aug. 16 2006. Mt. Vernon

From DC 2006

And this one showed up in the email today. Amazing what difference a few years makes.

From Wednesday, Aug. 16 2006. Mt. Vernon

Genius playlist based on Tangled Up in Blue

The latest version of iTunes has a new feature called "Genius Playlists". To use it, you select a song, click the "genius" button and iTunes builds a playlist out of your library that somehow correspond to the song selected.

This is the playlist proposed when I selected Tangled Up in Blue. I want to say in my defense that I do have songs written in current century, though you wouldn't know it from this list.

• Woodstock
  • Crosby, Stills & Nash
  • C.S.N. (Disc 2)


• The Weight
  • The Band
  • The Summer Of Peace, Love & Music Volume 3


• Walk On the Wild Side
  • Lou Reed
  • Lou Reed - NYC Man: The Collection


• Truckin'
  • Grateful Dead
  • American Beauty


• Tangled Up In Blue
  • Bob Dylan
  • Blood On The Tracks


• Sweet Jane
  • Cowboy Junkies
  • The Trinity Session


• Subterranean Homesick Blues
  • Bob Dylan
  • Bringing It All Back Home


• Shelter From The Storm
  • Bob Dylan
  • Blood On The Tracks


• Rhiannon
  • Fleetwood Mac
  • Fleetwood Mac


• Piece of My Heart
  • Janis Joplin
  • Best


• Over The Hills And Far Away
  • Led Zeppelin
  • Mothership [Disc 2


• Old Man
  • Neil Young
  • Live At Massey Hall 1971


• Moonshadow
  • Cat Stevens
  • Teaser and the Firecat


• Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard
  • Paul Simon
  • The Paul Simon Collection


• Jungleland
  • Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band
  • Hammersmith Odeon, London '75


• Into the Mystic
  • Van Morrison
  • Moondance


• I Shall Be Released [Live]
  • Dylan And The RTR
  • Live 1975 - The Rolling Thunder Revue
      (Bootleg Series Vol. 5) (Disc 1)


• Helpless
  • Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young
  • Deja Vu


• Help Me
  • Joni Mitchell
  • Court And Spark


• Heart Of Gold
  • Neil Young
  • Harvest


• For What It's Worth
  • Buffalo Springfield
  • Rhino Hi-Five: Buffalo Springfield - EP


• Fire And Rain
  • James Taylor
  • One Man Band


• Cinamon Girl
  • Neil Young
  • Live Rust


• Buckets Of Rain
  • Bob Dylan
  • Blood On The Tracks


• Big Yellow Taxi
  • Joni Mitchell
  • Miles Of Aisles [Live]

The outtake.

The kids.

Taken yesterday, down the street from Bernardos on Capitol.

Rudy, Rudy, Rudy

(via Kos)

Mr. noun-verb-911 on John McCain, when McCain was Rudy's opponent in the primaries:

...has never run a city, never run a state, never run a government. He has never been responsible as a mayor for the safety and security of millions of people...

And Rudy on Sen. Obama.

..he's never run a city, never run a state, never run a business. He's never had to lead people in crisis.

I commented a while ago that this election was interesting because it was the first since John Kennedy was elected that the winner would come out of the Senate.

The whole 'admin' experience is a red-herring. Or at best, not a reasonable predictor of future success. Clinton had been a governor for ever and by all accounts ran a very loose ship. W was all about process and we saw how that worked out.

I am, of course, happy to buy into the argument that Obama has run a very successful organization for the past 19 months, with a budget larger than Alaska's. (and unlike the socialist* state of Alaska, his funding came voluntarily).

* Like Saudia Arabia, most of Alaska's income comes from the Oil Industry. Alaska actually pays people to live there! Isn't that socialism? When you get money & services just for being there?

Sister update

On Tuesday the Sister and I went to Stanford Medical Center, Cancer Division and met with Dr. Wakelee. The purpose of the visit was both to get a 2nd opinion and to see if there were any clinical trials currently underway at Stanford  that might help the Sis.

To answer the latter, no. No magic wand. But we're welcome to check back.

The good news, from my perspective is that Dr. Wakelee was on board with the treatment the sister has been receiving. She might have done things slightly differently, but not substantially.

On Wednesday we had a follow-up with the primary oncologist, a Dr. Wong,  and based on the discussions with Stanford and a previous discussion with him, decided to try Tarceva. The primary benefit of this drug is that the Sister's qualify of life goes way up. Tarceva is a pill, taken daily with much softer possible side effects.

The current lifestyle while undergoing chemo therapy is to have chemo, feel like crap for 2 weeks, start to recover, wash, rinse and repeat.

With Tarceva, the hope is that 'normal' becomes the norm. We'll see. It'll take a month or more for her body to clear the toxins from the chemo.

Jesus was a Community Organizer, and Pontius Pilate was a Governor

(Sorry, it's gonna be like this for a while...)

Two different things.

First, please go read this: What a Community Organizer Does.  Sarah Palin felt compelled to mock Obama's years of community service. This article responds better than I could. 

Next, what is behind the attempt to tag Obama as an "Elite". I have no idea how a kid goes from being born to a too-young mother, raised by that mother and her parents, to earning his way into Harvard, to working for his adopted community in Chicago - and that's 'elitism'. Whereas McCain, son and grandson of Navy Admirals, marrying into wealth, is living the American dream.
So, how do you get Elite out of Obama's background? Harvard is definetly elite, but he earned it. It wasn't a legacy appointment. And he took the advantage implicit in attending Harvard and gave back to the community. (see above).

Maybe 'elite' is code for uppity.

"Just from what little I’ve seen of her and Mr. Obama, Sen. Obama, they're a member of an elitist-class individual that thinks that they're uppity," Westmoreland said.

"Westmoreland" is a U.S. Congressman! It just goes to show you, you only need a few votes to make it to the national stage.

(After first posting this, I ran across the perfect title for the post, from here)

This is my problem with the right-wing

Just the inbred hypocrisy.




And, no, you don't get to say the Democrats do it too, because then your 'all about change and kick the bastards out' Republican ticket is just more of the same (and considering that the bastards they want to throw out are Republicans just makes it more recursive.)

Not that it matters

from Edna St. Vincent Millay

"Not that it matters, not that my heart's cry
Is potent to deflect our common doom, "

I'm unclear on the benefit of pop stars speaking out on major issues, lord knows there are still starving children. But on Friday the 5th, there will be TV show that will be shown concurrently on the three major broadcast networks that aims to end cancer.

Here's some interesting facts about Lung Cancer:

Lung cancer will kill:

• More people than breast, prostate, colon, live, kidney, and melanoma cancers... combined.
• Over three times as many men as prostate cancer.
• Nearly twice as many women as breast cancer.
• An average of 439 people a day.

Over 60% of new cases are never smokers or former smokers, many of whom quit decades ago.
One in five women and one in twelve men diagnosed with lung cancer have never smoked. (My sister never smoked. We learned today that lung cancer among non-smoking women is increasing.)

This explains it, I think....

From an Op-Ed by a Hillary supporter. Money quote:

During the campaign, we scoffed at events like this, mostly because we were not capable of producing them.

"This" is Obama's acceptance speech at an outdoor stadium attended by 70-80,000 people and watched by 38 million.

I think this explains why the McCain camp has substituted 'scoffing' for political discourse. In their wildest dreams, they couldn't produce an event like this. They don't have the right candidate.