Greetings from the Democratic National Convention! Every day this week, time permitting, I’ll give some snapshots (and a little video) of what’s going on in Denver.

THE FLIGHTS

The airlines and local transportation and hotel systems are doing a pretty good job of absorbing the tens of thousands of people who’ve descended on Denver in a two-day span. Travel here wasn’t without glitches: Norfolk blogger (and Clinton delegate Vivian Paige ended up getting routed through Bozeman Montana (she asks, “. . .anybody know why there is an airport there?”), and Congressman Jim Moran and his wife were reportedly bumped from their National-to-Denver flight on Sunday afternoon because the airline overbooked.

Security presence so far is comprehensive but fairly unobtrusive: I imagine it will tighten up and become more visible later in the week.

THE FLOOR

Placement of state delegations on the floor of the convention is all about real estate. I haven’t been over to the Pepsi Center yet, but on CNN Sunday I saw a floorplan that says Virginia landed on Boardwalk: we’re front and center, directly behind — Illinois. (Over the weekend, the Delaware delegation got moved from the nosebleed seats down to a more prominent place in the front.

THE FIELD TRIP

On Sunday night, the Kaine family and four busloads of Virginians headed out to a reception and concert at Red Rocks, an amphitheatre 15 miles outside Denver. The naturally formed open-air site is dominated by two 300 foot-tall sandstone monoliths that they say provide “acoustic perfection for any performance.” (I can’t attest to it personally: I had to get back to the hotel to download my videos before the concert began.)

THE FLIP VIDEO OF THE DAY

As Jon Stewart would put it, your moment of Zen: a few minutes of the field trip. See how many Virginians you can identify (starting hint: The World’s Oldest Page).

While Bob is reporting on what it’s like in Denver, I’ll be sharing thoughts on watching the convention from home. Which, I figure, is where most Democrats will be getting their news.

Today’s must read: Politico’s Roger Simon writes “Relentless: How Barack Obama outsmarted Hillary Clinton.”

Best quote so far: “The Obama campaign, it should be pointed out, did not actually foresee the future; it merely prepared for it.”

From the LA Times: “McCain, who huddled with advisors at his desert compound in Sedona, Ariz., said nothing in public. A nine-car motorcade took him to a nearby Starbucks early in the morning, where he ordered a large cappuccino.”

(For the record: here are the Starbuckses within shouting distance of Senator McCain’s home in the 48th District. There are nine of ’em.

For this political junkie, next week will be a died-and-gone-to-Heaven experience: I’ll be in Denver as an Obama delegate to the Democratic National Convention. It’ll be my first presidential convention since I was teargassed in Chicago in 1968 (well, actually I was working in a drugstore in the Loop and some of the teargas drifted over from Grant Park . . .)

I’m going to try to bring some of the sights of Denver back to my friends using a new toy: a $150 video camcorder that’s smaller than a deck of cards. You can upload videos directly from the camcorder to a laptop to Youtube on The Internets. Here’s my test run down in Richmond this morning:

As you can see, I may need to brush up a bit on my technique (like figuring out that if you try to film a scene while you’re walking, you could induce motion sickness). Still, this test roll is better than my initial try: I had the camera pointed the wrong direction and ended up with a 1-minute interview of my forehead.

So if things work out, next week I’ll post some video “Denver Reports” from the floor of the Convention. The experiment will be fun, and the experience will be unforgettable.

Napoleon Bonaparte (1769)

David Englin (1974)

Coincidence? I don’t think so.

(But seriously — happy birthday, youngster.)

It’s not often that “Swede” and “hissy fit” appear in the same headline.

“When the house is on fire, it’s better to have a psychotic fireman than no fireman at all.”

Clinton advisor Howard Wolfson

1. If all the members of the Chinese women’s gymnastics team are 16 (the minimum required age for Olympic competition), then so am I.

2. I so want to believe  it’s the stretching and the training that are helping Dara Torres win races at 41. But I don’t, quite.

3. The Olympics/Special Olympics ads are absolutely worth the gazillions of dollars Coke probably spent. The United Airlines Sumo Wrestler ads (and, come to think of it, the McCain snarky ads)? Not so much.

4. This is painful–that Krzyzewski guy apparently can coach. Members of the Redeem Team played defense. They passed to team members who had a better shot. They looked impressive.

Seinfeld famously had the Soup Nazi. Me, I have turned in to the Soup Nutsy.

At my not-so-tender age, the dentist discovered a wisdom tooth. I certainly THOUGHT I had all four wisdom teeth out — but hey, it was 35 years ago and I was on heavy pain medication at the time. What do I remember?

Anyway, the tooth had to come out, which it did. And now I can’t eat anything but soup. For a month.

The oral surgeon also offered up mashed potatoes, which I don’t like. I’ve added yogurt and pudding. And tonight, I may live large and eat a crab cake. Still, the menu choice at Chez Amundson is mostly soup or, well, soup.

The soup Nazi’s threat was always, “No soup for you!”

Sigh. I wish.

Garrison Keillor, on the “elitist” charge in Salon:

And it’s an amazing country where an Arizona multimillionaire can attack a Chicago South Sider as an elitist and hope to make it stick. The Chicagoan was brought up by a single mom who had big ambitions for him, and he got scholarshipped into Harvard Law and was made president of the law review, all of it on his own hook, whereas the Arizonan is the son of an admiral and was ushered into Annapolis though an indifferent student, much like the Current Occupant, both of them men who are very lucky that their fathers were born before they were. The Chicagoan, who grew up without a father, wrote a book on his own, using a computer. The Arizonan hired people to write his for him. But because the Chicagoan can say what he thinks and make sense and the Arizonan cannot do that for more than 30 seconds at a time, the old guy is hoping to portray the skinny guy as arrogant.