"It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops. Today, October 2, a Sunday of rain and broken branches and leaf-clogged drains and slick streets, it stopped, and summer was gone. . . . It breaks my heart because it was meant to, because it was meant to foster in me again the illusion that there was something abiding, some pattern and some impulse that could come together to make a reality that would resist the corrosion; and because, after it had fostered again that most hungered-for illusion, the game was meant to stop, and betray precisely what it promised."
--from "The Green Fields of the Mind," by A. Bartlett Giamatti link

Sniper Hunt Culminates in 2 Arrests

One of America's most extraordinary manhunts culminated Thursday in the arrests of an Army veteran and a teenager, asleep at a roadside rest stop — perpetrators, authorities believe, of a bloody, three-week sniping spree that left 10 people dead and multitudes paralyzed by fear.

Wired News: Apple 'Switch' Star Flies High

Teenager Ellen Feiss, the "is-she-stoned?" star of one of Apple's new "Switch" ads, is quickly becoming a Web celebrity but not necessarily for reasons that would please the advertiser.

Dick Morris: The New York Times Push Poll

When politicians use polling to produce a political outcome, not to probe what the public genuinely thinks, newspapers condemn it as "push polling." Is push polling any better done by a liberal newspaper universally respected for its integrity?

A building blessed with tech success.

Maybe it's the location, maybe it's the water, maybe it's just good karma, but there's something about the building at 165 University Ave. that seems to breed successful tech companies.

James Lileks on the NJ election situation.

I prefer clear laws with regrettable results to judicial legerdemain in the service of “higher causes,” the nature of which vary from person to person. You can always endeavor to change the law through elected representatives who serve at the electorate’s pleasure. Letting the courts allow a hand-picked candidate who did not run in the primary to replace a primary winner who screwed up his campaign does not strike me as, ahem, genuine democracy. It's playground logic: I call do-overs. Nor would this situation be acceptable and genuine simply because it allowed for a “spirited campaign” to follow. (The previous campaign was unspirited and unenlightening in the Times’ eyes, because it consisted mostly of the challenger pointing out that he wasn’t a greasy ball of vicious, solipsistic mendacity like You Know Who.) If the government decided to have the most boring candidate shot in the streets so the other candidates could have a spirited campaign about his assassination, I wouldn't see this as an improvement.

If all of these points seem like reducto ab absurdum, well, they are - - but that's what happens when you ignore what laws say in favor of what you say they should mean.

I'm watching the news right now; Angelo Genova, the New Jersey Democratic Party Counsel, just said this:

"The right of the voter to exercize a free and competitive choice is paramount to any technical nicety that might be suggested by a time limitation in a statute."

There you have it: all campaign regulations are meaningless, because they are "technical niceties" grounded in bothersome "statutes" that prevent a "competitive" choice. This is the future of American politics, right here.

I fear at the end of it all I’ll just wish they put on togas and went back to stabbing each other on the steps. If they’re going to call themselves the Senate, they might as well act like their namesake.

Innocents Abroad (washingtonpost.com)

McDermott's and Bonior's espousal of Saddam Hussein's line, and of Gore's subtext (and Barbra Streisand's libretto), signals the recrudescence of the dogmatic distrust of U.S. power that virtually disqualified the Democratic Party from presidential politics for a generation. It gives the benefits of all doubts to America's enemies and reduces policy debates to accusations about the motives of Americans who would project U.S. power in the world.

Conservative isolationism -- America is too good for the world -- is long dead. Liberal isolationism -- the world is too good for America -- is flourishing.

Containment won't work with Saddam

From an article in the Los Angeles Times. [Registration required.]

But the Sept. 11 attacks have severely undercut containment as a way to handle Hussein, for many reasons. The terrorist attacks on America highlighted dangerous new realities. Geography no longer protects the United States. Individuals and groups are prepared to carry out mass murder against us without the slightest moral scruple; some are willing to sacrifice their own lives in doing so. Even more ominously, there is little reason to believe that the Sept. 11 attackers would not have used weapons of mass destruction had they possessed them.

Gore's Glass House (washingtonpost.com).

A pudding with no theme but much poison. Such was the foreign policy speech Al Gore delivered in San Francisco on Monday. It was a disgrace -- a series of cheap shots strung together without logic or coherence. Most of all, it was brazen. It was delivered as if there had been no Clinton-Gore administration, no 1990s.

The tone of the speech is best reflected in Gore's contemptuous dismissal of the U.S. victory in Afghanistan as "defeating a fifth-rate military power." If the Taliban were a fifth-rate military power, why didn't the Clinton-Gore administration destroy it and spare us Sept. 11?....

The New York Times reports that Gore wrote the speech "after consulting a fairly far-flung group of advisers that included Rob Reiner." Current U.S. foreign policy is the combined product of Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, Paul Wolfowitz and the president. Meanwhile, the pretender is huddling with Meathead.

Had it not been for a few little old ladies baffled by the butterfly ballot in Palm Beach, Fla., American foreign policy today would be made by Gore-Reiner instead of the Bush brain trust. Who says God doesn't smile upon the United States of America?

11 megapixel cameras are coming.

Canon's new digital camera EOS-1 Ds is demonstrated in Tokyo Thursday, Sept. 26, 2002. The newest model of EOS-1 single-lens reflex digital camera series can take 11.1 mega pixel high resolution images. Canon EOS-1 Ds will be available in the Japanese market in late November.