(no subject)

This is pretty great: Bush's scheduled stop in San Antonio to look like he's involved with hurricane preparation was cancelled because the sun was out and it wouldn't have looked scary. Also this sparkling repartee:

At the Federal Emergency Management Agency's command center in Washington a reporter asked him: "Sir, what good can you do going down to the hurricane zone? Might you get in the way?"

Mr. Bush quickly shot back, "One thing I won't do is get in the way."

What this article misses, in focusing on the phony choice of where and when it's best for the president to appear around a natural disaster, is that Americans weren't angry with Bush for failing to be photographed; we were angry with him for not doing his job. He could oversee recovery efforts at the White House, he could do it at his ranch, he could do it on Air Force One, and conceivably he could even do it at the site of the storm. What he can't do is oversee recovery efforts by having his picture taken at a meet-and-greet with an off-duty search-and-rescue team.

(no subject)

Found this while cleaning out the filing cabinet, in a Caroline Knapp column for The Boston Phoenix, August 18, 1995:

"There's a real passivity to the way I ended up here," says a New York-based acquaintance, a woman who moved to Manhattan from the Midwest nearly 15 years ago and simply never left, without consciously deciding to make the city her home. "I just gradually realized that my life is in New York now, that the chances of me picking up and relocating are slimmer and slimmer." That seems to be the way it works: you figure on one or two years in a new city and - presto! - you wake up one morning and realized that a full decade has passed, maybe more. You realized you've established roots, settled down in spite of yourself. You realize that leaving has ceased to be as simple or appealing an option as it once was.