The new Brie Cloister, at the Cloisters.

¶ Matins: Ah, the Chinese mists in this paragraph:

Although the McCain campaign said that Mr. McCain had known about Bristol Palin’s pregnancy before he asked her mother to join him on the ticket and that he did not consider it disqualifying, top aides were vague on Monday about how and when he had learned of the pregnancy, and from whom.

¶ Tierce: The long weekend continues chez moi. I’m hosting a luncheon at one. Not that you’d know it — I haven’t even done the shopping. Katie Zezima’s story about lobster makes me wish that I could change the menu (a breeze from Mrs Crum), but Fossil Darling hates the king of crustaceans.
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¶ Matins: This entry was supposed to be a straightforward re-introduction to the canonical hours that serve, here at The Daily Blague, as a framework for everyday links. We took a summer break; now we’re back. Keep reading, if you’re interested, for a bit of bloghstory. Even if you don’t, have a great Labor Day!

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Morning

¶ Grace: Watchinig Barack Obama deliver (most of) his acceptance speech last night, I was struck by the man’s physical aptitude for leadership, and I conclude that it is his command of the pulpit that allows him to preach bedrock values without sounding old-hat.

Joe has a link to a video of the speech, and there’s a crisp, concise Editorial in the Times. But all I could think of, strangely, was Roy Jenkins’s biography of Gladstone, the most memorable political biography that I have ever read.

A very satisfying experience, that speech was, to kick off the Labor Day weekend. Enjoy it!

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Morning

¶ “G” is for Goltz: For the true skinny on what’s been going on in Georgia, visit Michael J Totten’s Middle East Journal, where reporter extraordinaire Tom Goltz — the go-to guy for what’s going on in the Caucasus — backs up Georgian government spokesman Patrick Worms, making only a few small corrections in the official account.

Noon

¶ Creative Contradiction: Lance Arthur warns that you do not want the creative director job — especially if you’re creative.

Night

¶ Bloatware: When I went back over this story, about how Best Buy is handling bloatware (the come-ons for software that are loaded by manufacturers onto new computers), I thought that there was something about customers telling a representative what they wanted; but, no: that was in this story, about camera phones.

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Morning

¶ Shrine: Okuninushi no Mikoto, the principal deity in residence at the Izumo Taisha shrine in Japan, has vacated the premises in order to facilitate periodic renovations.

Noon

¶ Delanoë: Bertrand Delanoë, the gay mayor of Paris, will seek to lead his country’s Socialist Party. A breath of fresh air after the narcissism of the Hollande-Royal team that was. (via JMG)

Night

¶ Elsewhere: Starting out in New York, right out of school and with no special resources to fall back on. I can’t imagine it! Yet a fresh crop of hopefuls arrives every year, and, right about now, the ones who are still here are celebrating a tentative first anniversary. Cara Buckley reports.

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Morning

¶ Golden Rule: If I wanted to be “hilariously misogynistic” (a controdiction in terms that only frat boys miss), I’d remind Democrats that it’s not too late to nominate Hillary Clinton! Why? Because unattractive, power-mad executives are never assassinated in this country. Only the appealing idealists, such as Lincoln and Kennedy, draw the shooters’ malice. Why, they’re already out to kill Barack Obama!

Noon

¶ Rich: Richard Reeves reviews a new hate-the-rich book, in the Telegraph.

Night

¶ Faber Finds: They’re here! As predicted years ago, by Jason Epstein: books on demand. You may have to wait a couple of weeks — and I don’t know if the titles are available here at all. But if Faber & Faber is doing it, the serious American publishers will follow suit. (via kottke.org) (more…)

Morning

¶ Denver: We can’t say what the most interesting thing about the Democratic Conventional will have been, but we can expect that it might have something to do with the media and the unmediated. On Friday, the MSM scooped (and thereby foiled) Barack Obama’s attempt to name his running mate directly to supporters’ cell phones.

Noon

¶ Safe Conduct: Anna Post, great-great-granddaughter of Emily Post, offers sensible rules of order at The Etiquette Effect, in collaboration with Hyatt Place hotels. On “Using Technology Appropriately”:

Just because you can bring your phone with you wherever you go, doesn’t mean it’s appropriate to use it. Don’t walk into a meeting or building while still on the phone and don’t bring your cell phone into a business meeting unless you are expecting an urgent call. If a client starts using their PDA during a meeting, you may choose to ignore it. A riskier proposition would be to confront him and say, “Bill, should we reschedule? This doesn’t seem to be a good time for you.” But this is the best way to send the message that you’re not going to tolerate this breach of manners.

Night

¶ Teach: David Olivier (that’s Slimbo to you) has embarked on a truly heroic adventure: teaching math to middle-schoolers in New Orleans. The (first) Week in Review.
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Morning

¶ Bar Code: In typical Times fashion, John Schwartz’s story doesn’t spell out what two graduates of a private school here actually did in connection with their “freelance science project” to expose the mislabeling of fish in New York markets and restaurants — beyond shopping, dining, and marinating morsels of fish in alcohol — but Harriets the Spy everywhere are in for a technology upgrade.

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Morning

¶ $2848: That’s how much Mrs Aaron Spelling, of Holmby Hills, California, plans to pay for a spacious pair of penthouses atop the The Century, a new Los Angeles condominium that comes equipped with, among other amenities, Israeli-trained security.

Noon

¶ Deconstruction: Wait! Don’t throw that old steam iron away! Take it apart first, and see what’s inside. (Thanks, kottke.org)

Night

¶ High Ghoul: “Create an authentic Celtic graveyard to die for!”

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Morning

¶ Settlement: The $2.7 million payout with which New York City settled lawsuits brought by fifty-two individuals who were arrested, allegedly without reason, during a 2003 protest against our Iraqi misadventure reminds us that the much bigger group of cases generated by similarly groundless police conduct during the 2004 Republican Convention must not be settled.

Noon

¶ Surprise: Imagine that! The Chinese Ministry of Culture has reneged on a promise to help out the Asia Society with a massive show of Chinese revolutionary art, up to and including the Cultural Revolution. I’m breathtook!

Night

¶ Wheeze: The Mayor sure knows how to get a conversation going. Topping the city’s bridges and skyscrapers with windmills is a very bad idea. Wasn’t the PanAm Building helipad closed for a reason? (more…)

Morning

¶ Mind the Gap: Five years ago today, Sergio Vieira de Mello, along with twenty-one other people, was killed in a Baghdad bombing that targeted his United Nations mission. Samantha Power considers the consequences.

Noon

¶ Entwistle: Do you remember the Entwistle case? (Brit murders American wife and child in Massachusetts, then flies to Nottinghamshire, where he settles in with his parents.) No, I don’t either. But Jonathan Raban makes it digitally interesting (as distinct from ghoulishly interesting), at the London Review of Books.

Night

¶ Nearby: Young upwardly-mobile Asian-Americans are not awayly-mobile. They’re cutting out the historic suburban stage; their bright new places are nearby their parents’ dumps.

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Morning

¶ Health Warning: From the Houston Chronicle: “PETA wants to advertise vegan message on border fence.” And here Mexicans were thinking that what’s distinctive about their diet was hunger.

Afternoon

¶ Alphabet: Luc Sante writes so beautifully about a night in long-ago New York that it’s hard to believe that I might not have been there. Or that it might not have happened — not quite like that, anyway.

Night

¶ OddTodd: Don’t miss OddTodd, proof that gifted people can be counted on to work their butts off for nothing. Todd claims to be unemployed; in fact, he’s just not drawing a salary. (You can help with that!)

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Morning

¶ Dolce far Niente: Susan Dominus writes about the pleasures of temps perdu: At summer camp in Maine, she and her fellow campers could while away the hours between four and six in any way they chose. No longer.

(Have a great weekend, everyone!)

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Morning

¶ Condi: You may recall that, during the hours in which she did not pine after a foregone career as a concert pianist, Condoleezza Rice was supposed to be an expert in Soviet containment. Evidently, that doesn’t have anything to do with Russia, as HuffPost writer Chris Kelly observes.

¶ Medals: Because watching television is against my religion, I’m forced to get my Olympics coverage from other sources. Happily, RomanHans is doing a prize-winning job.

Noon

¶ When, O When?: Why don’t we have gap years? Breaks between high school and college that give young people a taste of real life for a change? You’d think it would be an American specialty. Instead, it’s another example of lost mojo.

Night

¶ Dear Fr Tony: Father Tony has an advice column — and who better? If this opening Q & A is any indication, black and white will be giving way to living color.

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Morning

¶ Midweek Matinee: I’m off to the movies this morning, to catch the first showing of Tropic Thunder, and maybe get pelted by some demonstrators.

Noon

¶ Shot: Take your pick: four International Rescue Committee workers were murdered by the Taliban in Afghanistan, and the chairman of the Arkansas Democratic Party was murdered by an unidentified assailant in the United States.

Night 

¶ Arabic: Inspired by Eric, I picked up the 2-CD Michel Thomas Method Speak Arabic kit this afternoon — on my third visit to McNally Jackson in seven days.
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Morning

¶ Sore Bear: You can cluck and tsk all you like, but Russia’s invasion of Georgia is driven by very high-octane belligerence, distilled from humiliated pride. Ideology not only has nothing to do with the case on the Russian side, but is empty rhetoric in the mouths of Westerners who preach that duly elected democracies are blah blah blah. The foolish expansion of NATO has finally met with Vladimir Putin’s freeze-dried resistance.  

Noon

¶ Lunch: Nom de Plume asked  me if I was free for lunch, and Migs asked what I’d be having. Here’s an idea!

Night

¶ Nada: Hey, it’s August. Nothing is going on — niente. That’s why God (in the person of E L Kersten, PhD) invented Despair.com, which, as my friend George wrote to tell me, has changed its Web site a lot since the last time we visited.

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Morning

¶ Research: Sarah Kershaw’s story about Mark Cellura, a retired Merrill Lynch executive, put a crimp in my morning. With the help of a genealogist, Mr Cellura made contact with the adoptive family of his twin brother, Michael, who died of AIDS in 1987.

In a slightly more cheerful piece, Janet Maslin writes about First Globals, the rising generation that probably can’t wait to see the last of the likes of me.

Noon

¶ Thought for Food: Commodities development specialist Peter Baker asks some apt questions about food production, hitherto unheeding if not quite heedless.

Night

¶ Boycott: Retards of the world, unite — lobby Congress! (more…)

A while back, Édouard ran a snap of these hideous, hideous statues, which stand outside a townhouse across Fifth Avenue from the Museum. I had been trying to keep their ugliness a neighborhood secret, but É has outed it.

Morning

¶ Cards: Judith Warner writes with sad lucidity about “playing cards.” As in, “the autism card.”

Now I’m off to the movies. Have a great weekend, everybody!

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Morning

¶ Collage: I’m not sure what made Girl Talk’s “rising profile” newsworthy today, but Robert Levine’s report, “Steal This Hook? D.J. Skirts Copyright Law,” reminded me of James Surowiecki’s Financial Page in this week’s New Yorker.

Noon

¶ YourNameHere: Take a break from the important stuff you’re doing and have a laff, courtesy of Cake Wrecks, Jen’s so-far inexhaustible stream of high-larious professional disasters (these cakes weren’t baked at home, you know).

Night

¶ Book Party: I went to a marvelous party…
 

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Morning

¶ Abandon Hope, Ye Who Can’t Enter Here: The big moment, the major rite of passage in the life of an upper-middle-class child in Manhattan (and parts of Brooklyn and even the Bronx) occurs long before the agonies of adolescence: it’s the move from preschool to kindergarten. An old story! Now, at last, a few of the elementary schools are expanding. Winnie Hu reports.

Noon

¶ Introvert: A quick glance at Jonathan Rauch’s essay on introversion in The Atlantic suggests that the Blogosphere might be the hidden-in-plain-sight venue in which the introverts of the world — “a minority in the regular population but a majority in the gifted population” — conspire to take over the world.

Night

¶ Split: From next Sunday’s Times Magazine, Matt Bai’s report on the reservations that prevent the elder statesmen of the Civil Rights movement from more forthrightly supporting Barack Obama.

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