¶ Matins: You have to wonder, how much did it hurt Carly Fiorina to choke out these words:

“This is a well-qualified candidate for vice president and well-qualified to be a heartbeat away from the president,” said Carly Fiorina, a top McCain campaign adviser and former chief executive of Hewlett-Packard.

Without wishing Ms Fiorina any ill, I hope that it hurt a lot.

¶ Tierce: The lead editorial in this morning’s Times highlights the growing weirdness of Republicans: they’re running against themselves. They can do this because, for many of the Party faithful, Democrats and “liberals” are not so much an opposing political faction as a collective bogeyman right out of the Stalinist toybox. What could Mitt Romney meant by “liberal Washington,” if not some spectral equivalent of “international bourgeois financiers”?

¶ Sext: Patricia Storms collects two tales of library crime, at Booklust.

¶ Vespers: Looking for an intriguing, end-of-summer pop movie quiz? Try this one, from Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule. (more…)

¶ Matins: Oh, dear: an all-day lunch. The wonderful afternoon on the balcony has left me rather envying the Spanish gent in the photo. Or perhaps it was emptying all those bottles of wine that did me in.

It wasn’t as though we could have gone to the Oak Room. Not yet.

¶ Tierce: IRS agents are turning to YouTube for evidence of improper pastoral politicking.

¶ Sext: In a curious dispatch, the British Government has pronounced the Irish Republican Army’s ruling council “redundant.” This stops a shade short of official disbandment, and it may not satisfy the Unionists who are currently standing in the way of full devolution from Westminster to Stormont.

¶ Vespers: The charming short films of M Ward, at vimeo. In KUBM, Bennett Miller (Capote) co-directs a film with Judd Apatow (Knocked Up). Not in this lifetime.

¶ Compline: Devin Cecil-Wishing is the son of a friend from undergraduate days who has recently found me. Over the weekend, I received a link to the artist’s site, and I have to say: I want one. Be sure not to miss the lustrous works in the “Miscellaneous” category, one of them an album cover.

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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

¶ $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

¶ 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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Click here for the full Darwin.

I don’t know many people who have seen Mike Judge’s Idiocracy. I heard the other day that Mr Judge wanted to call the film The United States of Uh…merica. Yielding on that point didn’t help his movie, though; it got zip in the way of marketing. Idiocracy has had to make itself known by word of mouth. Maybe it ought to be called American Samizdat. That’s way too brainy a title, I suppose; but then non-idiotic Americans do seem to be the only demographic for the picture.

One friend duly rented the film on my say-so but couldn’t get past the first fifteen minutes. She was too horrified, not by Mr Judge’s vision of a bleak dystopian future, but by his cinéma vérité treatment of the world outside her window. If my generation of Boomers has anything to answer for (aside from living forever on medical miracles, which is not really our fault, thank you very much), it is the empowerment of morons.

The Flikr photograph made me laugh my head off. Really, I couldn’t get over it. Still can’t A moment of truly superb folly.

Morning

¶ Siné: It’s a tough case: Siné (Maurice Sinet), the Charlie Hebdo cartoonist and, ipso facto, socio-political troublemaker, has been fired over a cartoon whose cynicism might be taken for anti-Semitism. I find myself on Siné’s side. Steven Erlanger reports.

Noon

¶ Mont-Saint-Michel: In Le Figaro: Who owns Mont-Saint-Michel? The French state has owned the abbey since the Revolution, but as for the village nestled on its flanks…

¶ That’s all very well, dear, but what about the Pines?: At a restaurant in Cherry Grove, on Fire Island, you can enjoy a drink called the “JoeMyGod.”

Night

¶ Boredom:  Here’s a valiant attempt to make boredom sound creative. It doesn’t quite fly.

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Morning

¶ Fits: The interesting thing about Chris Irvine’s little story in the Telegraph is that it’s doubly true: the Chinese government will spy on Olympian cell-phone calls, and it will be furious that anybody accused it of doing so.

It’s a Remicade day — I’ll be to-ing and fro-ing from the Hospital for Special Surgery for my now quarterly infusion (down from six a year!). I won’t be getting much done on any other fronts, which is why I went to the movies last night and saw Brick Lane. Tune in tomorrow… Meanwhile, a great weekend to everyone! Hey! It’s August!

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Morning

¶ Antikythera: I’m not sure what prompted the report in Nature (which prompted the Times), but the Antikythera Device is always cool. Hey, it’s the world’s first analog computer!

Noon

¶ Uncle Bobby: Jamie Larue, a librarian in Colorado, was recently asked to reconsider the shelving of Uncle Bobby’s Wedding, by Sarah S Brannen.  Aimed at children between the ages of two to seven, Uncle Bobby’s Wedding deals with a little girl’s fear of losing her favorite uncle when he gets married. Incidentally, Uncle Bobby is marrying another man.

Mr Larue’s thoughtful — and effectively all-purpose — reply appears at his Web lob, Myliblog.com. I urge all Daily Blague visitors to read it.

Night

¶ Lordly Hudson: Among New York City’s totally unfair stack of natural advantages is the mighty Hudson, an estuary posing as a highly scenic river that, for most of the Twentieth Century, was treated as a giant sewer. John Strausbaugh’s update on improved conditions features a flabbergasting image of the deserted  castle on Bannerman’s Island, which seems second only to Chicago’s Merchandise Mart in square footage.  

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Morning

¶ Junk: For me, the political problems attending the Beijing Olympics have taken second place to the terrible air pollution that has bedeviled the city ever since — well, I don’t know for how long, but certainly since the easing of economic constraints in the 1980s. How would you like to run a mile in this?*

Noon

¶ What’s the Worst That Could Happen?: Want to know why I have trouble getting to sleep? Worrying about doofuses who ask the referenced question. Because the worst that could happen is often catastrophe, the question is not a very intelligent one. Adam Brown reports, at Cracked.  

Night

¶ Faculty: Here’s an interesting article in the Times — if you know what I mean by interesting — that appraises Barack Obama’s career as a law school professor (actually he was a “senior lecturer”).
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Morning

¶ Verdigreen: Two stories in this morning’s Times sound a retro-green note. Kim Severson writes about locavores who want to grow their own produce but can’t — or oughtn’t to — do their own gardening.* And John Tagliabue reports on the windmill revival in the Netherlands.

Noon

¶ Communion: Communion is a good thing, generally, but in the case of the Anglican Communion, I think it’s time for a sundering. (Not that it’s any of my business.)

Night

¶ Disguise: War criminal Radovan Karadzic has been arrested in Belgrade, after years of disguising himself as me. “For Bosnian Serb, a Life of Hiding in Plain Sight.”
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Morning

¶ Waste: The story is so depressing that I can barely bring myself to read it, much less post about it; but there’s no getting round its importance: In what I hope will turn out to have been the grossest civic failure of this decade, Seattle has scrapped its pay-toilet system.

Noon

¶ Yeastless: Catch up on all the new slang from Sloane Square.

¶ Rope: Jon Stewart’s montage of Talking Heads denouncing The New Yorker cover (you know which one) as tasteless, offensive, &c &c, ought to be enough, my friends, to convince you that watching any news program other than his own is bad for your brain.

¶ Department of Ahem: Just the other day, Perry Falwell of Booksaga, the Internet’s favorite bookselling blogger, solicited guest entries. It seems that “solicited” was the key word, as the last word in the entry’s first paragraph makes clear.

Night

¶ Tacet: What’s interesting about Rachel Cathcart’s story in the Times, “Donation to Same-Sex Marriage Foes Brings Boycott Calls” — aside from the story itself, which is, in the end, depressingly not-so-interesting — is the newspaper’s colossal discretion: the hotels that would be the object of the boycott are not named. Nor is a link provided. Anyone who wants to act on this story is going to have to do a little Googling.

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Morning

¶ Deck Chairs?: Something in Joshua Rosner’s tone, in “Goodbye capitalism,” his piece in the Financial Times,  makes me think of a cranky gent on one of the Titanic‘s lifeboats, complaining that passengers are no longer dressing for dinner.

Noon

¶ CrocEatDog: Sometimes, a picture is worth a thousand giggles. All right, ten giggles. Okay, a chuckle.

Night

¶ Lawn: This internal-exile/vacation thing is working so well that, after I dealt with the Book Review, I sat outside on the balcony and read. And read. And read. And then I decided to watch a movie…. But you know that prayer that Jewish men are said to begin the day with? My version goes like this: “Thank God I don’t own a car.” If I’m being really thoughtful, I add, “or a lawn.”
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Mars attacks!

Morning

¶ AntErnauts: It looks fussy, with the capital ‘E’ and all, but it’s easy to say: anternauts. It’s my coinage to describe people who don’t know enough about the Internet to be able deal with it intelligently. Combine such ignorance with police power and watch out!

Librarian William Hallowell, sadly for him, knows a thing or two about the type. He was held for thirty hours, among other affronts, because police officers lacked the basic Internet competence to know that they had picked up the wrong man. Benjamin Weiser reports.

 Noon

¶ Cool: I just bought one of these. Now I wonder if I needed it.  

Night

¶ Patience: How did flounder evolve, with both eyes on one side of their head? Slowly but surely, that’s how.

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Morning

¶ Posh: My good friend Yvonne just tipped me off to a fantastic send-up of cooking shows, starring Richard E Grant at his twitissime, “Posh Nosh.” The show is a hundred years old, so you’ve probably see it already…

Noon

¶ Mad Max: Poor Max Mosley — so to speak. For my part, I can’t imagine anything more in keeping with Formula 1 racing than recreational sado-masochism. One does wonder, though, what Lady Redesdale would have said. “Every time I see “Peer’s Daughter” in the newspaper…”

Night

¶ Cartographic: Is it or isn’t it? An optical illusion, that is. How big is England?

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Morning

¶ Tower of Eiffel: Now, here’s something I didn’t know: Gustave Eiffel worked on the construction of the Statue of Liberty, thus, according to Edward Berenson’s Op-Ed piece in today’s Times, “allowing him to test certain techniques he would use for his great tower in 1889.

Noon

¶ Attention! Yikes! “Google told to hand over millions of YouTube user details to Viacom in $1 billion case.” From the Telegraph.

Night

¶ Oops! When everyone but you is looking at your screen. Because you’ve already left for the holiday weekend.

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Morning

¶ Chant: What is it about Gregorian Chant? Why is it one of those things that are always, it seems, being “rediscovered”?

¶ Encyclopedia: In the Telegraph, the obituary of Wilf Gregg, a personnel manager with a sideline in murder. The late Mr Gregg co-edited The Encyclopedia of Serial Killers.

Noon

¶ Turner: The Turner show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art hasn’t formally opened yet, but I was able to take advantage of a members’ preview this afternoon. As I always do, the first time I see a show, I breezed through the galleries. I didn’t see any of the really famous late paintings, but still…

Night

¶ Civil Pleasures: My new Web site, which will replace Portico, has been launched.
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Morning 

¶ Murcans: Send this clip to every friend that you have. Every enemy. Every body! A vote for the Democratic Party is a vote against the Republican Star Chamber. 

Noon

¶ Carlin: Social critic and funny man George Carlin dead of heart failure, aged 71.

¶ Housebroken: Even the House at Goodwood is a course — something of a steeplechase.

Night

¶ The Awful Truth: As Avenue Q taught us, the Internet is primarily good for porn. With Google as a yardstick of community standards, expect a lot of bugs-under-a-rock-squirming.
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