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I don't think that I'll get a chance to revive the Spec server anytime soon, so there are a couple of posts in non-backed-up limbo. One of them was my lamb couscous recipe, which is a shame. Another was Dave's post-LCS Red Sox post, which is somewhat dated now, but still deserves to be on the Internet. I had that one saved in my email, so here it is (again). I have received several emails and calls expressing people's well wishing regarding the Red Sox's dramatic come from behind victory over the New York Yankees. Many of these I have yet to respond to, so I feel compelled to express what is going through my head today at this historic time in baseball and my life. Maybe you have had all you can take of the melodramatic whining and pontificating of long-suffering Red Sox fans. If you have, simply delete this email. Otherwise read on..... To clear an issue up, I did not see most of this series in real time. Only the bad games. After the 19 run beat down that the...

...rabbit, kids. Who knows what November will bring? Good stuff.

The dual circumstances of thinking about museums after going to the Transit Museum yesterday and going through my old web bookmarks trying to clean stuff up led to my revisiting this page , which provides the text accompanying Michael Craig-Martin 's An oak tree at the Tate Modern. I'd tell you that to get the full effect you have to picture going to a museum and seeing a glass of water on a shelf, but I think instructing you to picture that wouldn't be keeping in spirit with the piece. Anyway, it's my favourite art, apart from Sarah's paintings, which are lovely in a slightly less wooden fashion.

I should probably post something about al Qaqaa , because how often do I get the opportunity to be both topical and scatological, but I don't really have anything to add. Other than that.

I'm spending more time writing comment on other people's blogs than posting on my own nowadays. To reward 34 's devoted reader(ship), here's a copy of the long-ass comment I just posted on Rich's blog. It's in response to Scotto's earlier post in this thread . I find it fascinating to just even know of a Republican willing to argue the type of outlandish bullshit peddled by the (soon to be ex-)administration. Okay, I'm only mildly drunk after Halloween (my costume was a hanging chad). I'm going to put aside the fact that Bush has pushed through things like a $500 billion prescription drug care plan ( lying about its cost to get Congressional approval ) or started a $225 billion war in Iraq ($70 billion of which they plan on waiting until after the election to ask for , which, if you're going to accuse anyone of putting political considerations ahead of troop considerations, it's Bush). I'll accept at face value your stated admiration of t...

So Halloween was fun. I hadn't done anything in 15 years or so up until now. I went with the White People to a party dressed as a hanging chad--"CHAD" written on a piece of masking tape on a llama wool yarn around my neck. Very funny, but it resulted in people calling me "Chad" a lot, which got annoying. The hanging chad now lives on my Schrecken Llama , which seemed appropriate given the isnad of the yarn. Here's a picture . The costume was Sarah's idea; she went as the terror alert system with appropriately coloured clothing, and Ryan was the Patriot Act, dressed up as a old-school Patriot, complete with a redployed pirate hat with Bush's face instead of a skull and bones. I've decided that next year I'm going to wear a sign saying "META" instead of "CHAD". Before all that I went with the Kerchners to the MTA's Transit Museum in lovely Downtown Brooklyn. That was another thing that I hadn't done in 15 years. It...

Well, I wasn't going to mention it after Petey did , but now that Banana's friend Catherine has been Wonkèd , I think the story has reached a sufficiently meta level for me to post about Lie Girls . But I'm only posting about how it's now news outside of our limited blogophone.

I've been drunk for like a week now, and frustrated by the server issues, and hence no recent bloggings. I have another few minutes before I have to go out and get drunk again (and don't even get me started on tomorrow), so I thought I'd pass along that little note. Love to any and all.

Okay, something has yet again happened to the crappy little Linux box in the Spec office from which 34 traditionally runs. I've been making backups, which is a smart thing, but not nightly backups, which is a stupid thing, so I've failed things over to the server in Adam's room but it's missing a couple of day's worth of content right now. I'll see what I could do about bringing everything back.

I really will do another TWit NY–I even read last week's Political Issue cover to cover–but I've been busy as fuck with recruiting and et (sic) ceteras, and there's baseball too, apparently, and you know how it goes. But this week's New Yorker has a story on the aforementioned The Note , though a quick glance indicates that one Mark Halperin seems to get a lot of credit rather than Nick. For shame.

That's my favourite .

Matty Harrison, your ex-roommate and mine (though mostly yours, and mostly if you're Dave Form), has had his Bosching band thing going for a while now. I saw him play with some other folks back at school and enjoyed them, but I haven't made it to any of the Bosch's shows. I was however very happy to see that they've made it on the iTunes Music Store , which is legitimacy in my book. The album, I like.

Much thanks to Sol, who was able to deliver the goods . I don't think posting the entire 96 megabyte video clip is a good idea, but I ripped out the commercials and extracted the audio, and got it down to under 5 megabytes for 13 minutes of pure, (rightfully) righteous bitchslappery. Enjoy

My single-minded goal, at least until I get distracted and do something else, is to find a digital copy of Jon Stewart's appearance on Crossfire today . (Yes, that's a link to an MTV News article and yes, I appreciate irony.) It was playing on the big TV in the reception area on my floor at work, and I walked by a on the way to the water closet and wondered what Jon Stewart was doing on CNN. The volume was off though, and I'm not a good enough lip-reader to make out when Stewart called Tucker Carlson a "dick." The transcript is there for those who have the patience to read things nowadays.

I didn't watch the final debate last night, as I went to the Realm of the Forms to watch the Sox game. We did put the debate on in the picture-in-picture thing, which wasn't really good for following the action, but did lead to lovely (and dare I say meta-?) televsion when the debate would go split screen to show squirming and the ballgame would go splitscreen to show men on base. There would be four or five different images on the screen at once. I tried and failed to take a picture of this using my cell phone. I TiVo-ed the debate and planned to watch it, but even I could take another 90 minutes of both men saying the same things they've said twice already. This was especially the case without having other people around to jointly mock Bush. I don't gather I missed much from what I read. I am close to finishing the Political Issue of the New Yorker though, which has a lot of interested stuff in it. So maybe we'll get a TWit NY this week.

I'd just like to note that there's now a Jamba Juice about 250 feet north of the best donut shop in the world. And that my heart goes out to the Red Sox Nation. So I'd like to note two things.

To complete the 125th Spectator Corporate Board blog roundup, Nick Schifrin writes frequently for ABC News' The Note , in case you didn't already know. There's a good chance that this is more lucrative than writing for my blog or Mike's , but I bet he doesn't get to call people "fuck" as often as he'd like.

Following up on some of Dovid Form's comments from a long, long time ago: Quarks only represent an area of science (within the brain) that are not deterministic according to human predictability. However, Jeff’y’s next step is to assume that behind a phenomenon that is non-deterministic to us, is a greater set of deterministic laws. I would go the other way, and say that behind that phenomenon is something like the incorpeal human soul…that free agent part of us where free will is found. Jeff’y is absolutely correct to say that there is no way of knowing what is behind the Quarks, but in order to rebut the scientific argument determinism, you do not need to because the scientific argument proceeds from our actions to some sort of psycho-chemistry to physics to quantum physics…which is not deterministic. Once we get there and can know now more, there is no reason to believe that all brain functions are determined by completely physical laws. That is a logically possible alternative...

I have changed my blog-a-font. You're now looking at Georgia, or Times New Roman if you don't have Georgia. I did this because of an IM conversation I had with Form when I was half asleep this morning.

I'm reading Motherless Brooklyn now. It's recommended so far, though I'm only halfway through. Scotter didn't like Gun, with Ocassional Music , though I did, but this is clearly better. What prompts me to write now is that the book is set in Cobble Hill/Carroll Gardens, and I just read a passage in which someone was sitting on a bench on the Promenade, and that's what I happen to be doing right now as I read/listen to my iPod. So that's clearly noteworthy.

As I mentioned to Scotter while watching the debate, off-road diesel-powered vehicles are never relevant in any context at any point in time, past, present, or future, so Bush's ambiguous reference to them as his first environmental accomplishment is, ummm, suspect. Unless it's off-road diesel-powered vehicles and not personal friends of Bush's and Cheney's that secretly control the nation's energy companies. Following that, the second least relevant thing ever is the fact that farm revenues are at a record high. While there still might be six independent farmers left in Missouri, I guarantee that they're not accounting for a fraction of a percent of the revenue generated by AgriBusiness, subsidized by our tax dollars. And this is what Bush chooses to mention in his closing statement. I can only hope that Bush's complete inability to admit to ever making a mistake will come off as a bit unflattering with the public. What frustrated me was that Bush is using ...

Times graf of the day : "This whole place is projecting what the show is about," said Ms. Polk, a student at Suffolk County Community College. "I mean, the beauty, the ambience, the orgy — it all enhances the Dracula feeling. When you look around, the atmosphere is beautiful."

Dude, Google totally ripped off the thing I wrote for work with their SMS info service . I didn't need $34 billion to do it, though.

Petey ("Michael") Mirer, friend of of yours and mine, now has a blog, FREE-FLOATING HOSTILITY . One could only assume the capitals are mandatory. Chances are he'll get tired after a week and just start recycling his old Spec Sports columns (I know I would if I could), but we're excited nonetheless. In the meantime, he's welcome to cover the past couple of weeks' New Yorker s or respond to some of the comments I haven't had a chance to get to yet.

There's a couple of interesting/hilarious follow-ups to last night's debate, but I assume that by now you guys know to just read Eschaton or Daily Kos yourselves. But to briefly filter that which does not filter, there's a CSPAN shot of Cheney chilling with John Edwards that contradicts Cheney's assertion that they'd never met, and Cheney instructed millions of Americans to go to factcheck.com , a decidedly partisan (but in a good way) site run by George Soros, for the "truth" about his Halliburton record. Because I don't feel like writing anything new, here's my conversation with Petey last night: (23:38:11) lithumman: What a shitty debate (23:38:12) elleon: Gettin' my fake news on. (23:38:25) lithumman: The debate was still shitty (23:38:47) lithumman: Although it would have been better with this: http://rudepundit.blogspot.com/2004/10/what-edwards-should-say-rude-version.html (23:52:06) elleon: yes (23:52:12) elleon: i agree (23:52:24) el...

I am very grateful to Petey for having told me about The Rude Pundit --though I not-so-secretly believe that Petey himself is the person behind that blog. I remember him on CNN and he was more than a little curt towards Greta von Nordstrom and Patrick Moos, which, if that's not the definition of rude punditry, I don't know what is.

For those with Time Warner New York's digital cable and built-in DVR who feel like they should be getting more use out of something they pay $131.66 a month for: I created a daily listing , updated at midnight, of all the upcoming movies on all the stations for a given day. They're sorted by the ranking that Yahoo! gives them, and only movies that got at least 2 1/2 stars are listed. So go ahead and set your TiVo each night/morning and build up a good library of movies that you'll eventually erase to make room for more repeats of Futurama .

Adam recently froze an apple, because this seemed like a good idea to him. I interviewed him a few minutes ago as he removed the apple from the freezer and started dealing with it (using a knife, fork, and spoon) in the hopes of determining whether this was in fact a good idea. The following is an abbreviated version of the full interview: Q. What are some good things about putting an apple in the freezer? A. It's cold now. It's pretty. Q. And what are some bad things? A. It's cold and it hurts. Here's a brief audio clip from the interview. This story has now officially been reported the fuck out of.

I (Heart) Huckabees is staggeringly entertaining. That's about all you need to know.

Fox News actually did this.