Just a Few Things

1) I should have mentioned that I also went to see the exhibit of Madeline Albright's pins in the Smithsonian Castle on Sunday, since it was closing that day. The story is that she used her choice of jewelry to send subtle (or not so subtle) messages to people she was meeting with. As someone who wears pins a lot, I was interested in seeing where my taste and hers overlapped. I generally like funkier, less traditional ones than she does.

2) My district has a particularly nasty Congressional race this time out. What makes it especially annoying is that we used to be represented by Tom Davis, a moderate Republican, who retired because he felt increasingly unwelcome within the Virginia Republican party. Gerry Connolly (a Democrat) won the office two years ago. As far as I can tell, he's done okay with it. I don't particularly like the man (and, yes, I've met him since he came down to my polling place the last couple of elections) but will vote for him given what an extreme right wingnut is running against him. (Where does the Virginia republican party get these people? We have an attorney general who wasted money redesigning award medals to cover up the breast of the goddess depicted on the state seal. And Keith Fimian, the candidate in question, who wants to ban not only abortion but contraception. Not that he has a chance in hell of that, but it reflects an attitude.)

But what bothers me is the campaign literature I've gotten. The Democratic Party of Virginia has sent me at least one and often two or three flyers a day - all of them with Keith Fimian's name and a summary of some of his more repellant positions on them. For a change of pace, they sometimes send out some about his various failed business enterprises. The kicker is that none of this campaign literature has Gerry Connolly's name on it!
If you know your candidate is so poorly liked that you feel you can't mention him, perhaps you should have looked for someone else to run?

3) One of my pet language peeves surfaced again yesterday. "To flush something out" comes from a hunting term and has to do with using the dogs to get the birds to fly up so you can shoot them. That is, you are creating a stimulus that gets that something out of hiding. If what you want to do is fill in the blanks in an outline, you want to flesh thing out.

Schedule Dilemmas

If we only had teleportation, these situations would be much easier to deal with. But I am constrained by current technology.

1) I am taking a redeye home from the left coast on the evening of November 5th. I'll get to IAD about 7 a.m. Which is fine since the reason for taking the redeye back is that I have tickets to a show at the Kennedy Center at 7:30 p.m.

The dilemma comes in because the 6th is also the day of the VASA Saturday Storytelling Series in Lorton. I will miss the evening concert, but I can make it to the daytime workshops. The tricky question is whether I should attempt to go for the whole daytime part or just a little of it. Right now I am leaning towards doing two workshops or, more precisely, the afternoon (1 p.m.) workshop and the story swap which follows it. The afternoon swap is scheduled to end about 4:15 and it is, theoretically, about a half hour drive home, so I that should give me plenty of time.

2) The thornier dilemma involves Gilbert and Sullivan. One of my life list goals involves seeing every G&S operetta. I don't count Thespis since it was lost and whatever productions there are of it are attempted restorations with dubious origins. But I do count Utopia Limited which is not performed very often.

The dilemma is that the New York Gilbert and Sullivan players are performing Utopia Limited for one night only at Symphony Space. It is November 21st and I don't actually have anything on my calendar that day. The problem is that it's a Sunday and I do have a commitment on that Saturday night. Going up on Sunday is no problem, as the show is at 5 p.m., but a train back here that night afterwards would get in after the metro stops running, meaning a very pricy cab ride home. I could come back in the morning. In fact, there is a 3 a.m. train which would work. But what would I do between the end of the show and when the train leaves, which is hardly enough time to make a hotel room worthwhile?

I could, in theory, fly and an early flight in the morning would be okay, but the fares are rather absurdly high right now.

Complicating things further, I am going up to NY later that week anyway, since my mother coerced me into a Thanksgiving visit. So coing into work late on Monday is something of a non-starter, especially since that week is traditionally a very hectic one here, with a high probability of lots of last minute reviews of lengthy budget documents.