The forecast is for morning fog, burning off by afternoon

Tomorrow, my nephew Andrew ships out to Baghdad. I'll be worrying about his safety along with his Mom (my sister), his Dad, and his sister. The kids made him this card and we snail-mailed it. I heard from my sister that he got it in time.



My daughter and her son. James is ~5 months old now! He is holding his head up, smiling, clapping his hands, and interacting with his parents at an ever-greater level of engagement.



As I've said before, I'm such a sucker for romantic movies. My youngest and I love to watch Love, Actually, actually, and we do so quite frequently. Of the various love stories chronicled in this film, my favorite is the Jamey-Aurelia relationship.

He's an English writer whose girlfriend cheated on him (with his brother, no less.) His specialty is crime novels, and his current project is a murder mystery. He goes to France to work on the book, where he meets a young Portuguese woman who works as his housekeeper.

Neither can speak a word of the other's language, and though they quite clearly are falling in love, they part at the end of his time there, as he returns to London, and she returns to Lisbon.

You'll have to get the movie to find out when happens in the end.




Between children, flowers, ripening fruit, reading The New Yorker and The Times, cooking the kids pork ribs and fixing their lunches for tomorrow's field trip, you'd probably think I wouldn't have had time to watch baseball on TV; if so, you would be wrong.

This season is not going so well for my team, the Giants. Although they lead the league in what are known as "quality starts" (in which the starting pitcher lasts at least six innings and gives up no more than three runs, they have a losing record.

The game has changed since I was a boy. Then a "quality start," if the term had been in use, would have meant nine innings and three runs. The game has devolved into an era of specialists, much like Academe has splintered into so many esoteric sub-fields that the big, general majors of years past now seem genuinely left in the past.






The pundits seem to think the Democrats are a shoo-in to win the Presidency next year. Bush's historically low ratings, and the lack of any truly attractive candidate at this point may indeed bode ill for the Republicans. Under some scenarios, the current leading candidates (Sen. Hillary Clinton and ex-Mayor Rudy Giuliani) won't make it to the ballot.

Strange though it may seem, the names Al Gore and Newt Gingrich are back in circulation. As a veteran of covering many campaigns, I'll withhold my judgment, for now. Obama vs. Rice would have a nice symmetry.



-30-