It’s unseasonably cold. The economy is still in the tank. The post-election euphoria is starting to fade.
But there are still signs of a benevolent Divine Providence. Exhibit A: The Maui Invitational.
Eight teams square off in a tournament played the way basketball is supposed to be played–in a real, honest to goodness GYM. (Not one of those horrid dome affairs.) (And in case you’re wondering, the Carolina game is at 9:30 on ESPNU.)
There are worse ways to spend a cold November night!
So I ran our blog through Typealizer and here’s what it says:
The Doers are happiest with action-filled work which craves their full attention and focus. They might be very impulsive and more keen on starting something new than following it through. They might have a problem with sitting still or remaining inactive for any period of time.
attacks the United States during the Harvard-Yale game any time over the next four years, we’re screwed,” concludes David Brooks while contemplating the Obama administration thus far.
Otherwise, he thinks the Obama appointees are an impressive bunch. As do I.
It’s nice to see some understanding that being good at governing is like being good at anything else–from writing (ahem) to brain surgery. You get better by doing it.
This first year is going to be a lot like a parachute jump–there will be only one chance to get it right. So I’m glad to see some experienced folks in key jobs.
Although Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com is best known as a statistics guy (he originally did baseball statistics), his analysis is also well worth a read. Today’s analysis of the President-elect: “We should expect him [Obama] to be as methodical and meticulous about spending his political capital as he was about spending his advertising dollars and his ground game resources during the campaign.” There’s more here.
I thought it was a typo. “Keydets Beat Kentucky,” the crawl at the bottom of the screen read.
No way, I thought. The VMI Keydets were not supposed to win this game. Heck, they weren’t picked to finish in the top half of their conference. (If this had been a matchup in the NCAA tournament, everyone’s brackets would have been blown apart by this game.)
Yet there they were, running with Kentucky, out hustling Kentucky, and simply shooting the lights out in Rupp Arena.
All Virginia is proud of this scrappy team. Great job, Keydets.
Erol Onaran could be called “The Friend of the Early Adopter.” He was a Turkish immigrant who started as a TV retailer in Northern Virginia. Back in the 1980s, just as families in Arlington were buying their first home VCRs, he went into business renting videos of movies (in both Beta and VHS formats); for a long time, the store on Columbia Pike near Glebe Road was the only rental outlet in Arlington. Then in the 1990s, after selling his rental chain to Blockbuster for a gazillion dollars, he became an Internet Service Provider as the main competition to AOL in the area. I signed up for dial-up service and created my first email account: rbrink@erols.com.
Through the years, even though Erols was successively bought up by larger ISPs Starpower and RCN, I kept the @erols.com address as a cultural artifact. (One friend suggested that I must also eat at Hot Shoppes, go for ice cream at Giffords, and buy my suits at Raleighs). All was well until yesterday morning, when my email stopped cold. When I couldn’t access my account, I tried to reach a live body at Erols/Starpower/RCN to find out what the problem was. After 2-1/2 hours on the phone (2-1/4 on hold, 15 minutes with friendly but unhelpful call center personnel in the Phillipines), I learned that a subscription renewal notice had been sent to my twice removed home address several months ago. When they didn’t hear from me, they pulled the plug on my email account. Since they were discontinuing email, I asked, had they thought of sending a notice by . . . email? Umm, no. So I grumbled, gave them my credit card information over the phone, and waited to be turned back on.
Now, 24 hours later, my Erols account is still blocked and the 100 or so people who send me messages get the following back by way of explanation:
“This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification.
Delivery to the following recipients failed permanently:
* rbrink@erols.com”
Well, two can play the “permanently” game. After all these years, I’m putting Erols in my rear view mirror. My new email address is
robertbrink AT comcast DOT net
Sorry, Mr. Onaran. It was great while it lasted.
For political people, whether you won or lost, the day after the election is dedicated to finding something to do with your excess adrenaline. You obsess on returns from obscure races (alas, Bob Brink, my Republican namesake in Michigan, lost his race for Kalamazoo County Supervisor), drive around picking up yard signs in the median strip, and clean excess campaign material out of the back of your car.
In that spirit, here’s a video from the final night of the Democratic Convention in Denver that I’ve been meaning to post for a long time. Like Stevie says: Signed, Sealed, Delivered.
This is a time of hope and promise. All day yesterday, I watched as people brought their children to the polls. Last night, the reality of what our country had just done began to sink in. Here are two of my favorites stories:
About 1 a.m., my daughter Sara called. She was on U Street in Washington, scene of the riots 40 years ago. Last night, a multi-racial group gathered to celebrate the Obama victory. “We are dancing in the streets,” she said.
In Richmond, VCU students watched the election returns outside the Siegel Center. Then they marched down Broad Street to the Capitol.
Where they sang “The Star Spangled Banner.”
One of the untold stories of this election is that it brought our young people, the Millennial Generation, into the political process. They truly will change our country.
From the Arlington Democratic Joint Campaign’s e-mail listing “Final Pre-Election Volunteer Opportunities” —
“3) Minstrels for Barack: We need street musicians, jugglers, mimes, and so on to entertain voters standing in long lines on Election Day. The busiest times will be morning, 7 am to 10 am and evening, from 4 pm to 7 pm, but we can schedule during the day as well. If you are an entertainer who would like to use your talent in this way, please sign up at www.arlingtondemocrats.org”
My co-blogger tells me that in England street entertainers are called “buskers.” “Buskers for Barack” is even cooler.