Democracy in America on President Obama's Address

A single funny comment from the referenced blog in the Economist.

• 9:43: Mrs Pelosi leaps up at the words "energy, health and education" as if she'd bet on them in the office pool.

Many of the (contemporaneous) reader comments that accompany the (again, contemporaneous)
posting are amusing as well.

Cheers!

A nice, feel good column from the WSJ

Published Saturday, 2/21. This column really should have (IMHO) been published one week earlier.

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• LIFE & STYLE
• FEBRUARY 21, 2009

A Long-Distance Connection

Their romance started the day before he left for Iraq -- and it grew by phone and email

By DARIN STRAUSS

Strike one against Neil Rice and Andrea Truncali: Their romance actually began as a long-distance relationship -- that precarious structure wherein lovers make do without the warm and essential things romance is meant to provide in the first place. Strike two: The relationship started the day before Neil left to serve in Iraq.

Neil was a naval lieutenant on leave; Andrea was a new doctor. They were acquaintance-friends from college; in the summer of '05 they both happened to be in a party of other Duke grads in upstate New York.

"Wow," Neil thought, during the first real conversation they'd ever had, "I never knew she was this cute and fun." (Which Andrea is, with her expressive eyebrows and Phyllis Diller laugh.)

They did some flirting. But Neil decided not to make the moves. Because not only was he heading for Iraq, but he'd also called a moratorium on dating college friends.

Still, they kept talking at this party. Or rather, Andrea talked and laughed and Neil tried to keep up with her. She has one of those rare mouths where the hydraulics of the smile are always going, and she's kind of hyper.

Neil's her opposite number: calm if not stoical, polite, a little quiet in his confidence, softly handsome with a strong chest and gentle eyes. He's the guy at the end of the evening who'll take a second to befriend dogs and children while the rest of the adults are finding their coats.

The next morning, he was readying for a drive to Kentucky -- from where he'd ship back to the Green Zone. (He was in naval intelligence, working in a palace basement, tasked with recording how many soldiers had died on a given week.) But his friend Colin had received a voicemail from Andrea: "Tell Neil if he wants to stop by and see me on his way out, he should come to Brooklyn and say goodbye."

If you're driving to Kentucky from upstate New York, Brooklyn is not exactly the place to make a stopover. But here was an intriguing offer. "Is she asking me on a date?" Neil wondered. "Where would I sleep?" He called Andrea about a mile from Colin's house and told her that Brooklyn was right on his way to Kentucky.

They made plans to meet at the Fall Café, a grungy coffee shop. Neil got there an hour early. "It's because I'm military," he says.

Neil still remembers the sight of her walking toward the window, and how his heart thumped. He hopped from his seat and met her before she got to the door. Andrea smiled when she saw him; there was, Andrea says, "a self-conscious cheek kiss."

Coffee led to dinner at an outdoor Mexican restaurant. After a few glasses of wine, the chitchat had spread out into real conversation. They talked the war, romance, life, all the heavy things. "OK," Neil thought. "I guess this is definitely a date."

Never a loquacious guy, he realized how badly he'd needed to talk to anyone. "That's not to say Andrea herself wasn't great," he says. "But I'd been in a basement alone for a long time."

They went back to her place and talked even more, when an awkward fact came up. It was after midnight. "I can sleep in my truck," Neil told her, kind of shyly. "Or can I maybe sack out on your couch?"

"I don't have a couch," she said.

"Maybe I can sleep on the floor?"

"Or my bed," Andrea said.

But then -- really -- they just kept talking. Neil was thinking: "I don't feel right trying to kiss her the day before I go to a war zone." Andrea was thinking: "Is Neil gay?"

At sunrise he finally kissed Andrea. Just a little, on the end of her bed. "I'll always remember that," Neil says.

And then it was time to go.

She thought it had been a fun night, "but I didn't even know what he was thinking, so I was trying not to think too much, myself. I guess we were on the edge of something, but neither of us was knew where it would go," she says.

Still, he called her on his drive, from West Virginia, just to tell her he missed her. He called when he got to Kentucky. He called from Kuwait. He still didn't think about where their romance could possibly be headed. That may have been the one thing they hadn't discussed -- and they still didn't, three days into their courtship.

His first night back in the Green Zone, he called her again, instead of going to sleep. He'd just taken off his Kevlar when a mortar explosion jiggled his building. Putting his helmet back on, his vest, his boots, he told her: "I have to go." But Andrea, affectionate and voluble Andrea, didn't get it. She was used to slow goodbyes with new boyfriends, and so she kept talking.

"No," he said. "You don't understand." Dust was dropping from his ceiling. The probability of other explosions loomed. "I have to go." And he got off the phone.

"That was when I realized, 'Oh, wow, he's in Iraq. And I might be dating him,''' Andrea says. "It hadn't really hit me until then, and I didn't know if that was what I wanted."

She emailed Neil the next day with another problematical fact, one that she'd kept from him. She had just broken up with an old boyfriend and was only 99% sure that she really wanted to stay broken up.

Neil got Andrea's email right after he'd received word that some men he knew had been killed. "I got angry at her message," Neil says. He sort of told her as much on email: "I can't deal, figure it out, and get back to me." Andrea says, "I thought his was a mean email."

They'd both already been in very serious relationships that had gone seriously wrong. She emailed Neil again, asking for a little time to figure things out. "Maybe because of our histories," Neil says, "we both acted more like adults." Andrea adds: "We weren't spring chickens." (They were 33.) But they decided to give this a chance -- whatever "this" meant.

They learned what "this" meant, on the fly, together. "When there's never been face-to-face contact, or any physical relationship, you're forced to get to know each other, and get creative," Neil says. Andrea sent him chocolate chip cookies that arrived stale. "People in the post office had never been so nice to me," she says.

Neil had a military cellphone; the deal was that if Andrea called him, she got a local rate. He could call home, on the taxpayers' nickel -- but only for emergencies. "I can neither confirm nor deny if I ever called her," Neil says.

They talked every day. After synching up their VCRs, they watched movies simultaneously, together and apart: "Casablanca," "It's a Wonderful Life" -- classics they knew were good because they didn't want to gamble the call on a potential stinker.

They sent intense emails, even poems, or just goofy jokes -- it was fun and serious, it was emotional and intellectual, and all conducted by phone and computer.

The calls were for Neil a daily getaway from the war, from the rubble, from the dank basement and the tallying of the dead.

For Andrea, though, Iraq was bad news that had quit humming around her ears and moved into her brain. Almost every day brought some fresh vision of disaster. And a price to pay: "Her social life was talking on the phone to me," Neil says.

They lived this way, separated and yet not, for six months. They first said "I love you" over a cellphone. "We kind of said it at the same time," Neil says. "It was obvious for both of us."

Then Neil came back.

"We were pretty sure he was going to move in with me," Andrea says. A big deal, since they'd only had one in-person date. After "processing out" at Ft. Bliss, Texas, Neil flew to Rhode Island and drove straight to Brooklyn.

"I couldn't find a parking spot," he says. "And so I remember running down the street to her building, working off the emotion, just sweating and anxious." What if everything fell short of expectation?

For fun, he waited until he was outside her apartment to call and say he was in New York. Then he knocked. When she opened the door, there was so much emotion it was hard to deal with, hard to sort through -- they just couldn't process it out. "It was so overwhelming: clumsy and fumbling," Neil says. "But it was good. It was good."

They admit it's kind of weird to learn every intimate detail about someone -- to be in love -- by your second actual date. But maybe it's a sound policy; it certainly worked for Neil and Andrea. He moved in with her the day after he got out of the military.

Eleven months later, they married. A year after that, they had a daughter. Naomi is now 3 months old.

Darin Strauss is the author of "Chang & Eng," "The Real McCoy" and "More Than It Hurts You." He teaches writing at New York University.

Any reason yesterday should have differed from any other day?

........

Scotch tasting coming soon...

In the meantime , enjoy a clip of The Fairlanes


..

A random thought,,,

Marcus recently posted details of his evening at the Order of Osiris ball.

Things I learned: (other than that I can never ride in a limo again unless I am driving)

1.) I've never seen so many lesbians in my entire life. I finally figured out that all the guys were PERFORMING.

2.) At a gay ball, where there are oodles of women in tuxes, men in full-drag ball gowns, and drunken people who just don't care, all of the bathrooms are unisex. However, a real drag queen will ONLY use the ladies room, NEVER the men's room.

3.) Ugly guys make even uglier women.

These revelations brought to mind an old Shel Silverstein song:

Well there's gonna be a freaker's ball (ha ha)
Tonight at the Freaker's Hall
And you know you're invited one and all
Uh oh

Come on baby's grease your lips
Grab your hats and swing your hips
And don't forget to bring your whips
We're going to the freaker's ball (yes)

Blow your whistle, and bang your gong
Roll up something to take along
It feels so good, it must be wrong
We're freakin' at the freaker's ball

Well all the fags and the dykes they're boogie-in' together
The leather freaks are dressed in all kinds of leather
The greatest of the sadists and the masochists too
Screaming please hit me and I'll hit you

The FBI is dancin' with the junkies
All the straights, swingin' with the funkies
Across the floor and up the wall
We're freakin' at the freaker's ball, y'all
We're freakin' at the freaker's ball

Everybody's kissing each other
Brother with sister, son with mother
Smear my body up with butter
And take me to the freaker's ball

Pass that roach please, and pour the wine
I'll kiss yours if you'll kiss mine
I'm gonna boogie 'til I'm cold blind
Freakin' at the freaker's ball

White ones, black ones, yellow ones, red ones
Necrophiliacs looking for dead ones
The greatest of the sadists and the masochists too
Screaming please hit me and I'll hit you

Everybody ballin' in batches
Pyromaniacs strikin' matches
I'm gonna itch me where it scratches
Freakin' at the freaker's ball, y'all
We're freakin' at the freaker's ball

We're at a ball
We're freakin' at the freaker's ball

(c) 1973 Tro-Essex Music Ltd.

"oddly interesting"...strange praise for Winston-Salem

ESPN's Pat Forde recently posted a very nice story about Wake Forest basketball coach Dino Gaudio.

The subject of my post, however, is his weekly Forde Minutes column in which he makes 40 different various (more of less) references (40 being the number of minutes in a regulation college game.)

I bring your attention to references 39 & 40:

Buzzer Beater

When hungry and thirsty in the oddly interesting town of Winston-Salem, N.C., The Minutes recommends a visit to the excellent Village Tavern (39). The New York strip and hot crab dip are tremendous, and the locals swear by the meat loaf. Pair your meal with a locally brewed Red Oak (40) lager and thank The Minutes later. (Caveat: This is one of the last tobacco towns in America, which means if you eat at the bar, you'll do so with smoke hovering overhead. But the help will take your mind off it by talking basketball as long as you're willing to sit there.)

I do like the Village Tavern. In fact, that's where my current squeeze first courted me when I moved to W-S back in 1989.

Aside...One time back in 1996 or so, the company I was working for engaged Arther Andersen for tax work. The local tax partner, Tim B., arrived with his tax manager Audra M. We were introduced and Audra said "I know you, you drink Johnnie Walker and your wife drinks Becks dark." I said "well, you're right, but she's not my wife." Audra spent some time as a bartender at Village Tavern while going to Wake.

Anyway....what I'm wondering about is why Winston-Salem would be considered "oddly interesting."