¶ Matins: A week to look forward to! Close encounters with fiber-optics! The worst will be over tomorrow, when I drain the dregs of a certain four-litre container.

¶ Tierce: “I’m With Stupid”? A Times/CBS poll brings forth my inner Dick Cheney:

While just 24 percent of voters said they thought the Wright issue would matter a lot or some to them in the fall, 44 percent said it would matter a lot or some to “most people you know.” And while just 9 percent of Democrats said the issue would matter a lot to them should Mr. Obama be their party’s nominee, even that small a slice of the electorate could be a problem for Mr. Obama if he won the nomination and the contest against Mr. McCain was close.

“So what?”

¶ Vespers: Working my way through the book pile, I read something that has been sitting around for about year, Joshua Henkin’s Matrimony.

Oremus…

§ Matins. But seriously, folks, you can’t imagine how much worse this stuff used to be. It wasn’t the taste. It wasn’t even the after-taste. It was the after-coat, the furry, viscous slipcover that lingered for minutes that felt like weeks. “Did I just put that in my mouth?!” The sensation of disgusted alarm would pass, restoring my equilibrium — but just in time for the next glass. Let me tell you, four litres is a lot of funky.

I don’t know how they managed to eliminate NuLytely’s more rebarbative drawbacks, but if they hadn’t, I would probably, having long ago passed into the semi-pros, crow unendurably about my endurance.* With dead certainty, I can say that Wednesday’s will be at least my tenth “procedure.” The actual figure is probably closer to fifteen. Somewhere in the middle of all that probing, I was discovered to have an “adenotomous” tumor that might very well, if ignored, have blossomed into malignancy — in which case, you would not be reading this, and, as I married a Wall Street attorney instead of Katie Couric, my name would be known only to my loved ones.

Stay tuned for Yellow Jell-O, Versed, and “squeaky clean.”

* There are folks for whom the sheer volume (four litres) is a terrible problem. I have never been one of them. I can drink, and have drunk, four liters of almost everything.

§ Tierce. Polls, like advertising, are a terrible way of doing business. Even assuming that 601 respondents truly constitute a truly representative sample of this nation of nearly two hundred million potential voters, the questions work like Roschach tests, not objective inquiries. The question that I’ve excerpted flatters the respondent by appearing to treat him as a pundit: after telling us what you think (legitimate enough), tell us what you think the neighborhood thinks (anghnghngh).

In other news, the review of Barbara Walters’s memoir, Audition, reminds me of the sinking of the Andrea Doria, her first big story. I remember being unimpressed by the disaster because the Italian liner had only two stacks, and therefore didn’t compare, for glamour, with the Titanic. Not only that, but it was rammed not by an iceberg but by the very inglorious Stockholm, a freighter that limped into New York harbor sans bow. Are we ever more hard-hearted than we are when we’re eight years old? We’ve got all the angles figured out by then — eh comment!

§ Vespers. It’s a frustrating read. The characters are interesting, but they remain closed — to themselves as well as to the reader, I expect. That’s a fancy way of saying that, despite plenty of colorful incident, nothing happens. Matrimony ought to make a very satisfying motion picture, though. I do look forward to it!

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Monday, May 5th, 2008 at 5:30 pm. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.