Too damn much work this last week.  Most of you are overworked,
too, I know.  Not complaining.  Just explaining my absence.

Much catching up to do on email, the blog, actual work, and everything else. 

Probably seemed as if the post below about the Arsenal football stadium was suddenly the last word I had to say about anything.

I
almost wish it were.  The New-Watergate-Every-Day administration is so horrific
that even generating a list of lesser-reported wrongdoing in a single
week is exhausting to think about.  But there’s also good news I’d like to
share, of many kinds.  Will try shortly.

Yes, I realize many of
you need more pudus, on an almost biochemical basis.  A pudu jones is nothing to trifle with.  Working
on it.  And yes, the “Poll Of The Day” has again become something more
like “Poll Of The Last Three Months.”

There’s at least an
excuse for that.  I was asking what the administration would do to top
itself.  And now it’s coming up with a new and more absurd answer
almost every day.  It’s hard to know when to say “when.”  

Anyhow, thanks for your patience.

Working on final touches to the book and editing video today,keeping myself company with Gol TV’s broadcast of Arsenal’s weekend match against Wigan.  The last match that will ever be played at that lovely 93-year-old ground.

If you don’t follow British football, this is more than a little like tearing down Tiger Stadium. 

I’ve
only been a fan for the last three years or so, catching the bug from
watching the games with a British friend here in Los Angeles.  And I
only saw a single game in person, an otherwise rather ordinary affair
against Southampton that ended in a 2-2 tie.  But it was still a fantastic day, and I cheered my lungs out with the people nearby.  The place was packed,
and if you can imagine the tradition and atmosphere of
Wrigley Field — complete with nearby train stop and residential North
London neighborhood butting right against the stands — combined with
the all-day tailgating vibe of November football in the American midwest,
that’s what it felt like, albeit with fish & chips from a
stand on the corner instead of hot dogs.

Starting next year,
they’ll be playing a short walk away in a fancy new stadium which will
be bigger and rounder and bring in more cash.  But from the looks of things it might just feel like the
new Comiskey instead of the old.  

I’ll still cheer for Henry
and Reyes and Pires and Cole and the rest, of course, especially a week from
Wednesday, when they play Barcelona in Paris for the European title.  (Do not expect me to blog much next Wednesday.)  But I can only imagine how many more long-term fans might be thinking that it
may never be the same.

Then again, it never has been, of course.  Time does what it does…

(For previous examples in a collection I’ve recently decided to start, see here, here, here, here, and here.)

This week’s contestant? Kazakhstan, in the NYT’s words:

The Kazakh president, Nursultan A. Nazarbayev, won a third six-year term in December 2005, with 91 percent of the vote in an election that international observers said was flawed. Two opposition politicians have been murdered in six months, raising the specter of instability.

And here’s what Shotgun Dick had to say over the weekend, from the same report:

Asked afterward his opinion of democracy in Kazakhstan, the vice president endorsed the Nazarbayev government without qualification. “I have previously expressed my admiration for what has transpired here in Kazakhstan over the past 15 years,” he said, “both in terms of economic development as well as political development.”

Just because elections get fixed and opposition leaders get murdered doesn’t mean that a place isn’t a democracy, after all.  Especially if they’ve got oil.

Had slipped my mind until a friend pointed it out, but Ambien, the same drug which may have contributed to Patrick Kennedy’s all-night voting spree, has a few other significant users in Washington.

(And btw, let’s at least pay tribute to the fact that when this Kennedy is gorked out of his dome, his instinct apparently isn’t for carousing with starlets, but to drive to the Capitol and vote — frankly, America could use more drug addicts like this.)

Back in the now-forgotten distant murky past — November 2003, to be exact — this is what Colin Powell had to say about Ambien:

They

… but I saw this, too, and laughed for exactly the same reason.

Vin Scully’s remarkably-detailed reminiscence also speaks directly to the way memory works, as described in my upcoming book.  About which a great deal more soon.