Events

I don't read Maureen Dowd much any more, but yesterday she gave her column to Aaron Sorkin. Not bad: BARTLET: Well ... let me think. ...We went to war against the wrong country, Osama bin Laden just celebrated his seventh anniversary of not being caught either dead or alive, my family’s less safe than it was eight years ago, we’ve lost trillions of dollars, millions of jobs, thousands of lives and we lost an entire city due to bad weather. So, you know ... I’m a little angry. OBAMA: What would you do?...

Happy autumn, y'all.

That is all.

At the first Cubs game I went to the season, the very first pitch wound up on Waveland Avenue. The Brewers won that game 8-2, and we Cubs fans figured that was a foretaste of the entire season. Well, the Brewers lost last night, and the Cubs' magic number fell to 1 (against the Brewers). Except that yesterday, the Cubs hosted St. Louis, who got a grand slam in the 1st which pretty much set the stage for the game. Final scoreboard: Let's look at that close-up: Well, it's likely they'll clinch the...

Mark Morford thinks she-who-will-no-longer-be-named-on-this-blog-because-she's-not-running-for-President is per se an insult to women's rights, and I have to agree: [Thinking women] say: You've got to be kidding me. They say: This is what we get? This could be our historic role model? Two hundred years (OK, more like 2000) of struggle, only to have this nasty caricature of femininity try to hijack and mock and undermine it all? ... WTF? Could it be true? Are cadres of formerly Obama-leaning white women...

'Nuff said. That it went to extra innings disturbs me only a little. I'll be at the game against St. Louis tomorrow afternoon, but I won't see them clinch; the earliest that can come is at the end of Milwaukee's game at Cincinnati tomorrow night. Also, the 2009 schedules are up. The Cubs open in Houston on April 6th. No word yet on when tickets go on sale. Update: The Trib has the story of today's game.

This evening the Cubs chose (B), against Milwaukee, so the magic number remains 4.

With my days for doing this sort of thing dwindling rapidly, I took advantage of the perfect weather this morning to do a cross-country solo flight: Chicago Executive, Madison, Kenosha, back home. And, of course, I have a Google Earth file, in which you can see that I overshot the turn to final on my last landing, which mars an otherwise good track. It's not apparent from the track, though, that winds aloft were around 30 kts, which accounts for the course corrections on the long legs.

Via Krugman, a good description of how the Bush-McCain economic program resemples the Coolidge-Hoover program that caused the Great Depression: The real cause [of the Depression] was the collapse of the banking system, which followed the crash in part because Hoover believed strong fundamentals would protect the economy from disaster. For the likes of Hoover and McCain, asserting the strength of fundamentals is shorthand for saying that business leaders, with maybe a little cheerleading, can sort out...

And the magic number drops by two. Though, I gotta say, the top of the 9th was nerve-wracking—but Wood pulled through, finishing the game with a strikeout. Philadelphia has clinched the NL East, so now it's beween New York and Milwaukee for the wild card, assuming the Cubs don't choke. Oh, and the Cubs win has eliminated St. Louis.