Dawn, singing Steely Dan . . . .

While I still think Paul Anka has the championship title of worst song in the world, I’m amazed that this duo managed to suck every bit of angst, despair, irony and darkness out this song.

I’ve been thinking years about doing this, and finally got around to it . . .

Why didn’t he just tie piano wire around his scrotum and hang a cinderblock from it? Same effect.

In honor of Max’s recovery from an apparent case of measles (by the way, if you had gone to the public health dept, you could have been case No. 132 reported in the last few weeks) and her potential phobia of South American nuts . . . .

Pink Martini and China Forbes

I had a rip-roaring case of stomach flu once, just hours after eating Vienna Cremes cookies, and I couldn’t touch the things again for 10 years because of the memory of how well they reverse direction.

Enjoy.

and, for reference, I checked msnbc.com and cnn.com before I started just to make sure that Barack Obama still is about to announce his vice-presidential candidate any time now and hasn’t. Reminds me of that old joke, “How do you keep a moron in suspense? . . .”

Now, for all his faults, John McCain is a hero. He refused repatriation from North Vietnamese captivity as a matter of principle and honor, and I have to respect that. He’s far more of a hero than his fellow Republican and now-convict Duke Cunningham, who became the first American ace over Vietnam and went on to demonstrate his underlying lack of character while McCain got into a scrape over the savings and loan industry in the 1980s and came clean about his involvement.

Makes McCain sound like a saint, eh?

Well, while McCain certainly has a reputation as a straight talker, he also has a reputation for inconsistency, for impulsiveness, and for a general lack of depth when it comes to the more intellectual aspects of engaging in representative government. Case in point: McCain’s fellow prisoner of war Jeremiah Denton, who also became a member of Congress and who generally showed consistency and thoughtfulness during that career regardless of one’s opinion of his party choice.

As for Barack Obama, I don’t have any particular reason to doubt the general sincerity of his candidacy. I also don’t pay a great deal of attention to the McCain camp’s attempts to depict him as a rank amateur, because just about every President was an amateur at being President before they were first elected and/or sworn. Theodore Roosevelt was an amateur - albeit a reasonably gifted amateur - before he got bumped up a pay grade in 1901. Bush fils was definitely an amateur - a strong reason for the Republican National Committee to step back and think about its anti-Obama cant this late summer and fall, given that Obama hasn’t run any oil company into the ground and that he actually completed higher education with some degree of consciousness and good performance. As for Obama’s lack of military service, again refer to Bush fils and his performance as Commander-in-Chief.

Given that short-form assessment of the probable ballot choices in November, I’ve still not been even a smidge impressed with either man because they simply have lived down to the expectations upon American political candidates of the last few decades.  There’s not been many Washingtons, Lincolns or Roosevelts out there lately (and I seriously doubt that a Lincoln or Washington could get elected these days given the level of trust that government has engendered  amongst the citizenry), and McCain and Obama definitely don’t fall in their weight class. Even Reagan - perish the thought - had a concept of how he wanted to make a difference. Even more than in past years, this campaign basically has been a competition between two men presenting vague, disjointed, shifting and piecemeal platforms with damn little theme except the catch phrases of change vs. consistency. And when either candidate does happen to change a position for a good reason, then the imagery of shower shoes is dragged out for a noisy intermission.

I wish Sam Nunn would run. Probably the true architect of a resurgent moderate Democratic party that made Bill Clinton’s presidential pension possible, Nunn was no slouch on domestic and foreign policy issues and would have been a giant among candidates from 1992 to today.  And if my aunt had balls, she’d be my uncle . . .

Since Nunn’s not going to make the ticket, then let’s at least consider the issue of vice-presidential candidates. I haven;t heard of any apparently useful specimens listed among McCain’s supposed short list, but I can actually vouch personally for one of Obama’s list: Tim Kaine. I’ve known him since he ran for lieutenant governor, and have a had a few chats with him during that race and some contact since. I editorially endorsed him for his run for governor, and he’s done a pretty good job along with his predecessor Mark Warner in working through the fiscal wreckage left in Virginia by George Allen and James Gilmore. He may not be experienced in things like foreign and defense policies but, at the risk of sounding sappy and mushy, Kaine is a decent human being and has shown consistency, principle and ethics in his career.

As for Joseph Biden? What in hell was Obama thinking? Yeah, Biden has experience in foreign relations, and so did Ribbentrop, Molotov, Count Ciano and others. Biden also has shown poor judgement and even poorer skill in citing his sources.

It’s 1:07 pm Eastern time and I still haven’t checked back to see if there is a Democratic vice presidential nomination hopeful. Now I’m depressed and I’m going to stop here.

And I’m writing in Sam Nunn for President and Tim Kaine for Vice President on the first Tuesday in November.

I happen to find this bit of dichotomy touching, despite it being a love song to a straight razor . . .

And one for Stiletto, since she likes The Band . . . . (Go to comment #2 for a working link or go here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJ3LOu9IK7Y&feature=related . For some reason, it won’t allow an embed or .

Robbie Robertson (also directed by Martin Scorcese, but he didn’t have to hide a rock of coke in Robbie’s nostril like he did with Neil Young in ‘The Last Waltz’)

I have to get this one out of my system only because it bubbles up every couple of years or so and makes me sick, hateful and unclean.

In my mercifully brief West Virginia phase in journalism, there was a night desk editor at the paper whom shall be referred to only as M.

M was what one could charitably term as low aspect ratio. In real terms, she was damn near as wide as tall. Her normal choice of leggings or tights gave her the appearance of a two-legged medicine ball. Her hair was the color red one would expect in a dried pool of blood or the spatter on a slaughterhouse wall.

 One might accuse me of being mean, horrible and abusive because of her weight.

In all fairness, my description of her actually mutes my intense disgust, repulsion and almost-hatred of her for her character defects - stupidity, arrogance, vengefulness and mean-spiritedness. M expected reporters to grovel at her feet - which boggled my mind because I couldn’t swear that she’d seen them in several years - or exacted continuing revenge upon and forced tribute from anyone who would dare question her knowledge, sense and news ability.

After I left that particular news organization, she was on duty the night that Nixon died. Her contribution to the next morning’s edition was to put the article on his death on the back page of the A-section, under the weather report.

Before I left, though, she managed to perform many miracles of editorial incompetence. Several favorites of mine included her datelining many of my stories on Virginia localities in West Virginia. But my all-time favorite - and the one that ensured the withering of our tense relationship was the photograph of the Space Shuttle Endeavour.

I had accompanied a group of teachers on a field trip to Kennedy Space Center in the summer of 1992 and came back with dozens of decent photos and a pretty snappy feature story. On my return from Florida, I brought back two rolls of developed film, some captioned prints for reference, and instructions to call me at home with any questions.

One of the photos was a Saturn V rocket, stages separated and displayed in front of the center’s main office building and suitably captioned. The photo appeared in the paper a couple of days later with the caption, “Space Shuttle Endeavour, ready for launch.” (Editor’s note. And she might have gotten away with it except for two small details: the rocket was horizontal and dismantled, and there were a number of tourists milling about the rocket’s constituent parts.)

Recriminations flew, tempers flared and relations were arctic. Of course, this should not surprised me given that the paper a decade earlier ran a story about a rather gruesome suicide by shotgun with a hastily proofread headline: “Man Kills Self with Shitgun.” (Editor’s note: M was not at the paper at the time of the suicide headline and, even if she was, didn’t have the subconscious imagination to make such a wonderful fuckup.)

From the day of the ’shuttle’ photograph, my pet name for M was ‘that fat, stupid, hateful bitch.’

Some time after I left, she finally got fired for excessive mistakes. I’m amazed they caught it as fast as they did. Turns out that she now is a day editor at a community newspaper in the suburbs of Richmond, Va. They certainly got whatever they paid for.

or another reason why I’m getting a Nikon D50 before the end of the year . . .

Moon over Norton, Va., taken with an old-as-the-hills Nikon Coolpix 950 with damn near no aperature control

For those of us who - heaven forbid! - read, might I recommend for a final summer read Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals ? Speaking as a former history major, I can say with a modicum of authority that it is one of the better monographs on the political machinations and philosophical debate leading to Lincoln’s election as President. And it leaves one wondering how close things came - read and you’ll see. It’s good history and good literature.

And while I’ve gotten my Steely Dan fix for the week, I still have a spot in my black, shrivelled heart for Paris Combo. Here’s a dose for those of you wishing they were sitting in a Left Bank cafe . . .

Hopefully I’ll work up to my bitter, climactic screed on why no  candidate this year is even marginally worthy of attention as the right person at the right time to start this country turning to something better some day.

First, go see Raincoaster for great material and even better links on the propane facility explosion in Toronto earlier this morning. You’re not going to see this on Drudge Report as of 0752 US Eastern Time, but you may want to watch gas prices or your stock portfolio in a few hours.

And, while I offered admiration for Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s patriotism a few days ago, I still think Russia has the capabililty to be just as dumb and imperialist and paranoiac as Russia has been on its worst Communist or Tsarist days.

What great timing for the Olympics and the cause of world peace, especially with the People’s Republic of China as a host. Does irony get any better than that?