AT RANDOM: Hi there. No, I don’t have anything new to say and it’s not even the usual writer’s block; it’s just me being lazy again. It is hard to be satirical, you see, when the times are satirical. The former junior Senator from Illinois is blaming all of his woes on the mess his predecessor left, as if Mr. Bush had just decided to leave the Oval Office and go golfing, leaving all of his work for the former junior Senator to do. As I remember it, the former junior Senator desperately wanted Mr. Bush’s job; he spent the better part of his senatorial term actually trying to get Mr. Bush’s job, as opposed to doing whatever it is Senators actually do in Washington, if anything; and it seems a bit unbecoming to me at this point that, having succeeded beyond his wildest dreams, he finds that his current office is not all he hoped it would be. Ah well, there are more tears spilled over answered prayers than over unanswered ones, as someone much smarter than I am once pointed out. It may have been Mayor Daley, the real one, not the one who rules the Second City now, a man who routinely sent those members of the Cook County Democratic Committee he deemed too dumb to be city aldermen to the Illinois statehouse or to Congress, in order to limit the damage they could do. That the former junior Senator never held a municipal office in Chicago tells us more about the man than his legions of fanatic followers would want us to know, I think.

If you live in North America or anywhere nearby; I’m not sure what that would cover exactly-Iceland, maybe, or Poughkeepsie?-then you’ve seen the newest TV ads for Macs. It features the dynamic duo of Mac commercials, the cool with-it kind of guy who represents the cool with-itness of Macs, assuming with-itness even counts as a word, versus the staid, plodding, definitely not with-it guy who represents PCs. The Windows guy, who looks an awful lot like me, which I find increasingly annoying the more I think about it, reassures the Mac that Windows 7 will not have the problems that Windows Vista had and that Mac should trust him this time. The ad then goes into flashback mode, with my PC doppelganger promising that each Windows operating system going back to Windows 2 would fix all the problems that the previous operating system had ("trust me”). I will leave the pros and cons of whether or not the consuming public should actually trust Microsoft to another day. I find the commercial fascinating, to tell you the truth, especially in the current political climate. Today in this our Great Republic, the Democratic Party is proposing a health care plan of Brobdingnagian proportions and Rube Goldbergesque complexity that will torpedo the American economy, and the former junior Senator from Illinois and his minions in the Congress are telling an increasingly suspicious citizenry to trust them, this time will be different. Based on the welfare state’s track record to date, this will require an Olympic gold-winning leap of faith. The end result, with or without the leap of faith or the gold medal, will still be the same. If you choose to stand in front of a moving train, the train will hit you, usually with unpleasant results. This will be true no matter how many times you choose to stand in front of the train. Ask William Huskisson, if you don’t believe me.

It is November now and the World Series is still going on. I wish that someone would think of a better system of determining the championship of baseball before the Colorado Rockies make it back to the Series. I don’t know how you feel about it, but I like being able to tell the difference between the World Series and the Stanley Cup playoffs. It's not terribly ecumenical, I know, but it's just how I feel about it.