Red Sox win! (Thank goodness, because so did the Yankees. And the A’s. Darn it.)

The Cincinnati Bengals’ new quarterback, USC graduate and Heisman Trophy winner Carson Palmer, got creamed in a scrimmage against his own team’s first-string defenders Saturday.

This Sunday, here in New York (well, New Jersey, really), he gets to try his hand against the Jets. It’s a preseason game, but it will be televised on CBS 2 here, and I plan to watch. Go, Carson, go!

There are more insects in one square mile of rural land than there are people on the planet Earth, according to some radio broadcast that Becky and I heard during our Buffalo-to-Phoenix road trip.

By the way, I will be posting my final summary of that road trip, complete with lots of photos and even a Top Ten list, one of these days. Let us just say “sometime.” :)

I’m not making any endorsements yet. But the full text of Lieberman’s speech to the National Press Club is online here, and I recommend checking it out. A few excerpts:

The American dream is at risk. Because George W. Bush’s failed leadership has left our country dangerously unprepared to defend against and defeat the threat of terror. And it has clearly driven our economy right into a ditch.

Yet some in my party, fueled by understandable frustration, are grasping at failed solutions that will not meet our 21st Century needs — and will not save the nation from another four years of Republican misrule.

(more…)

Last night, 60 Minutes aired a fine report on my pet issue: seaport security. The bottom line? Exactly what you already know, if you’ve been paying attention: it’s utterly abysmal.

The standard 40-foot containers that are shipped across the ocean on boats, then loaded onto trains and trucks and sent all across the country, are probably the most likely venue for the smuggling of weapons of mass destruction (including, potentially, nuclear devices) by terrorists, and a single container-based attack could not only kill countless Americans, but would effectively shut down global commerce for a significant period of time (just as 9/11 shut down the airline industry). But we still don’t seem to get it. We’re still not defending ourselves.

Among the damning tidbits of information from the 60 Minutes broadcast:

And here’s the kicker: Congress recently passed a piece of legislation requiring increased funding for seaport security, but the White House attempted to divert the money to airport security!!!

The Bush Administration’s cynical logic here could not be more obvious: if there is another terrorist attack on U.S. soil using a commericial airliner, there will be political hell to pay; people will blame the administration for failing to prevent what happened on Sept. 11 from happening again. But if there is a different kind of attack, such as via oceanliner or via train or truck, people will probably be more forgiving; they’ll act as if the obvious was unforseeable, and will then — too late — start demanding improvements in port security.

Too conspiratorial to be true? Not if you accept my previous contention that the Bush Administration believes the war on terrorism is almost exclusively an offensive war, with the defensive component mostly for show (and political cover). Get the bad guys, the Bushies seem to think, and that will take care of everything.

Well, of course, they’re right that we need to get the bad guys. But we also need to defend ourselves at home by guarding against an attack on the most vulnerable aspect of our whole transportation system. And we aren’t doing that. And that’s inexcusable.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the Democrat who argues that he should be elected because he, unlike Bush, will adequately defend the homeland, is the Democrat who will get my vote. (UPDATE: My state’s native son, Joe Lieberman, is looking better and better on this count.)

I just hope the Bush Administration’s homeland-security failures haven’t already been tragically proven for all to see well before November 2004 rolls around.

Opinion Journal’s Best of the Web has an utterly hilarious satire of California’s political situation. I particularly love the first sentence:

California is a desert land roughly the size of Iraq.

Heh. The article goes on:

It is also an object lesson in the dangers of trying to impose democracy in a culture that is not ready for it. … Leon Panetta, himself a Californian, writes in the Los Angeles Times that California is undergoing a “breakdown in [the] trust that is essential to governing in a democracy.” … Others say a move is under way to “hijack” California’s government.

Har har. Now here’s a great statement:

What isn’t widely known is that the U.S. has a large military presence in California.

Hee hee hee.

And our troops are coming under attack from angry locals. “Two off-duty Marines were stabbed, one critically, when they and two companions were attacked by more than a dozen alleged gang members early Thursday,” KSND-TV reports from San Diego, a city in California’s south.

How many young American men and women will have to make the ultimate sacrifice before we realize it isn’t worth it? Is the Bush administration too proud to ask the U.N. for help in pacifying California? Plainly California has turned into a quagmire, and the sooner we bring our troops back home, the better.

LOL!

My first day at my new job was a stormy one — but only because of the weather. :)

En route to work in the morning, I had to sprint through a torrential downpour to reach the subway from the apartment, and despite my umbrella’s best efforts, I got completely soaked. Then, in the afternoon, an intense thunderstorm rolled through Manhattan, filling the Tribeca office where I work with the sound of loud, booming thunder — some of it coming from lightning that apparently struck just a mile or two away. Here’s a radar image of the storm:

I also saved an animated GIF of the thunderstorm moving through the city.

Weather aside, my first day on the job was actually great! I’m not going to provide details — giving a daily blow-by-blow (blog-by-blog?) of events at my workplace seems like the sort of thing that could get me into all sorts of trouble, especially considering that my boss said she followed my road trip over my web site! — but suffice it to say, it was a good day.

After work, I headed down the subway line to Brooklyn for a wee bit of apartment-hunting. I had found an advertisement on craigslist for a four-bedroom place with rooms for $475 and $600, and as it was being shown this evening, I wanted to check it out. It was quite nice, but there’s just no way I can come up with the three months’ worth of rent I’d need to pay this week (a $300 deposit pretty much immediately, then the remainder of the first month’s rent, plus a month’s-worth broker’s fee and a month’s-worth security deposit when I sign the lease). A month or two from now, I might be able to conceive of that sort of money, but not yet.

Speaking of which, my first paycheck will arrive next Wednesday. :)

Well, I’m off to my first day on the job. Wish me luck!

Here are a couple of pictures of the view from my new workplace, taken on the day of my interview. (The Empire State Building would appear much distinct on a clear day.)

And here’s a picture of the building that I’ll be working in. (It’s the tall one.)

Gotta go. TTYL!

I’ve set up a webcam.

Everything else I was planning to post today will have to wait. Sorry, folks, but I gotta go to bed… I have to get up at 6:00 AM for work tomorrow! (I don’t start till 9:00, but I want to give myself plenty of time to get down to Canal Street.)

On this, the last day before I start my new job, I’ve been doing a bit of website housecleaning. In particular, I’ve been trying to organize my ever-growing list of blog categories into a somewhat more manageable form.

MoveableType, the software that runs my blog, doesn’t yet support sub-categories, which is what I really want. So, at least for now, I’ve alphabetically organized my categories into a five artificial “meta-categories.” They are:

• Me (for posts about my life and the lives of those I’m close to)
• Local (for posts about specific places that I’m connected to)
• News (for posts about the wider world)
• Sports (self-explanatory)
• Other (catch-all for miscellaneous categories)

There are two categories that don’t fit into any meta-category: Mobile Blog (Moblog), which I intend to be sort of like its own meta-category, and Noteworthy Posts.

As you can see in the category list at right, I’ve made all the “News” categories come first on the list, even though “Local” and “Me” precede “News” in alphabetical order. I did this because I want to emphasize the news-blog aspects of the site over the personal-blog aspects for people who may find me via a Google search or a fellow-blogger’s link.

Anyway, if you have any comments on this new setup, leave ‘em here!

My dad’s portion of the Mom & Dad blog is seemingly becoming a running criticism of the phenomenon that my dad calls modern-day Gnosticism. It’s interesting. He’s got several recent posts (1, 2, 3, 4) on it.

Meanwhile, in a comment over on Jen’s blog, he gives a humorous retelling of one of his classic college stories:

There did come a hazy morning in 1967 when I awoke in my college dormroom, in the wrong bunkbed, to find a hole smashed (& that’s not all that had been Smashed) in the unlocked door’s transom, some 700 empty soda cans (yes, soda) littering the bed & the floor, and a fat guy from down the hall snoring in MY upper bunk…

And it goes on from there. :)

Speaking of Jen’s blog, she sent out an e-mail to her friends this morning telling them about her blog. She also added, “I will also plug the homepage, which is all brendan, all the time, at www.brendanloy.com.” LOL. “All Brendan, all the time” — I like that. Maybe I’ll try to add it to the homepage as some sort of official slogan. Heh.

Hello from midair! I’m using a Verizon Airfone to blog from the skies over the East Coast, en route from Charlotte, NC to New York, NY on US Airways flight 1804 (which is about an hour late). This is my first ever airborne blog post!

I’m seated in the exit row — which I specifically requested, since it has more legroom. Woohoo! It’s partly cloudy outside, and… hmm… that looks like a developing cumulonimbus cloud (thunderhead) off to our right. Turbulence ahead, perhaps?

Well anyway, I gotta go. My laptop’s battery is running low, plus, these calls cost a fortune! (But it’s so worth it just to have a post entitled “Aerial blogging.” Heh.)

I have an incredible backlog (backblog?) of stuff to post about, but it will have to wait, again — I really need to get to bed now, since I’m almost done packing. My Zak wake-up call is due in just over six hours! (I fly on U.S. Airways Flight 46 at 8:20 AM Arizona time tomorrow, arriving in Charlotte at 3:17 PM Eastern, and then I connect via Flight 1804 at 4:10 PM to LaGuardia, arriving back in New York at 5:58 PM.)

I have Sunday to mostly just relax, so I expect to do some blogging then. On Monday, of course, I start work!

The other end of the rainbow.