from the Houston Chronicle:
Two freshman lawmakers from Texas, Republican Sen. John Cornyn and Democratic Rep. Chris Bell of Houston arrived shortly before Bush's speech began, shunning the get-there-early-if-you-want-to-be-on-TV strategy of other lawmakers.

"I figured as a brand new senator they'd probably put me in the back, where I couldn't be seen," Cornyn said before the speech.

"My constituents will know I'm working hard for them even if they don't see me on TV," said Bell, a former radio reporter turned lawyer turned politician.

Bart: I don't know about your creative rumblings. Take some antacid. A film script'd be better. Blogs are the cyber equivalent of public access shows, or a the soapbox at Hyde Park.

Bart: We'll see, Skippy.

Since you've switched to The Nation (you didn't respond to my question so I assume you went further left) I best key you in on some TNR stuff. They reviewed the Sam Fuller autobio; the reviewer sez Fuller's best experienced on the big screen, preferably in a seedy urban theatre.He feels Fuller got a swelled head after appearing in a Godard film in the early 60s; Fuller was past his prime by then, in the reviewer's opinion. Fuller's essential ouvre still stands for the reviewer, though, despite the reduced experience of the work in vid/dvd. I finally caught up with my TNRs. You keeping up with The Nation?

Hugo: presently I don't get either TNR or the Nation. I'd kinda like to go back to getting TNR, in part out of a sort of loyalty to ole
Stanley Kauffmann, even though I can read him on-line, of course. I signed up to get TNR's e-mail newsletter, but they stopped coming after a month. The same thing happened with the gallup poll's weekly newsletter(which was surprisingly interesting.) When I went to Gallup's site after they stopped e-mailing me, my status was listed as still getting the newsletter. I tried unsubscribing and resubscribing with Gallup, but the site just told me I was already subscribed. (Incidentally, Gallup refers to their archive as the poll vault. I know, ouch.) So when I had a similar happening w/ TNR I didn't bother to investigate. A longer explanation then you may have wanted,perhaps, but hey, who said I was as pithy as ole Bart Jimjake?

www.bookcrossing.com/, courtesy www.bookslut.com/...courtesy The Sideshow ...

Ned:I don't really understand your reluctance to click on a sight blindly, tingling with adventure. As the Tick said to Arthur,"leap before you look!"

KaZaa's parent company is suing the MPAA. I say, Go Kazaa! Go Music Morpheus! Go Grokster! The founding fathers were very specific about copyright law, and modern media titans keep pushing the envelope and keep expanding the concept of intellectual property and keep constricting the concept of fair use, and the congress and the courts seem only too happy to accomodate them.
They probably would like to outlaw libraries, while they're at it. These mothers are plenty rich already. Enough is enough.

I really am trying to fix my syntax problems. I try posting from Netscape Messenger, from Rough Draft,(a really excellent(donation-ware) word processor), and from Notepad. I really don't have the money to go out and buy Office 2000 or some other fancy-pants word-processor. I've tried double and triple spacing the space after a period, but Blogger seems to truncate it practically all of the time. I don't know what else to do within my budget.

Bart: Did you know Kevin McCarthy and Mary McCarthy were brother and sister? I think I recall you telling me this years ago.

Hugo: Actually, I think that the Paris Review interview w/ Mary McCarthy mentions this-- either in the introductory notes, or she mentions it in passing over the course of her interview. I seem to remember that when we met in '79 we surprised each other by simultaneously noting our fondness for the Paris Review interviews. Is Paris Review still around? Do they still do those interviews? And isn't italicizin' a load of fun?

Helen Thomas, veteran reporter of White House briefings for 40 years, called dubya "our worst president ever". Whoa. I was just going to say since Harding. (via terminus.)

As you can see, I still haven't got my links up-- bear with me. I guess I'll have to learn html for real this time.

From today's New York Times(24 Jan)
The Senate, on a voice vote, decides to hold up financing of Bush's Total Information Awareness program, the
" Pentagon project to search for terrorists by scanning information in Internet mail and in the commercial databases of health, financial and travel companies here and abroad."

..."Senator Ron Wyden, the Oregon Democrat who proposed the amendment, said after the vote that it passed so easily because dismayed Republican senators had told him that "this is about the most far-reaching government surveillance proposal we have ever heard about." He said the amendment means "there will be concrete checks on the government's ability to snoop on law-abiding Americans."

You Don't Get It. We're Creating JOBS!

USA Today(Jan 21st) carries this story about Bush wanting to increase the tax break on "company" cars for small businesses and the self-employed from the present $25,000 per car limit to a whopping $75,000 per car, er, vehicle. So if all those accountants stop buying Accords and ante up for 10 mile-per-gallon Suburbans and Navigators, we'll spend our way our way out of recession, or so the cowboy-in-chief seems to believe. And we'll have even more reason to tap the Alaskan wilderness (which he's been drooling over for some time now.). But while we're still on the article, here's my favorite bit:

" Bush appointee Jeffrey Runge, head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, scolded automakers at an industry conference one week ago for not making SUVs safer and more fuel efficient. He told reporters that he considers some SUVs so dangerous he wouldn't allow his family in them "if they were the last vehicles on Earth."

A stung auto industry shot back with statistics showing SUVs are very safe in the most common types of crashes.

White House spokesman Taylor Gross said Monday that the provision "is not designed to favor one vehicle over another, but rather to allow small businesses to buy more equipment and to create more jobs."

I'd like those self-righteous so-and-sos who voted for Nader to remind me again what they were voting for. I mean besides Bush, Jr in the White House of course.

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Latest Bush numbers from the Washington Post and ABC.

Another interesting web log, or at least, a pleasant one.

Success at last! Now-- I hope-- Blogger won't think that this is the blog I wanted deleted.

It must seem like I'm dithering to anyone who may have kept track of the different Blogger subdomains between which I've been bouncing back and forth this past week. At any rate, I duly note that there is a web business, unrelated to me, at hugonaut.com, and so I've concluded that my tiny little blog needs a different name, ideally one with little or no unintentional cross-referencing in search engine queries. And yes, if you want people to remember you from among the clamoring masses of bloggers Out There, it does help to have a colorful moniker, so I finally succumbed to that. Harrumph if you must.
The long and the short of it is I am taking a small break from posting to attend to other things, like library school, and to fix some technical problems with the blogging (More precisely, to figure out what I've been doing wrong!). I'll be back (here) Thursday.