"Undermining my electoral viability since 2001."

Two Words: Chuck Norris

This is clever stuff from the Huckster. He's had a lot of trouble raising money, but is starting to gain ground in recent Iowa polling. I do honestly think he would be the most formidable Republican candidate. His ideas are generally bad (National Sales Tax! Outlaw Abortion!) but his presentation is incredibly disarming. Unlike il Rudy -- who is sufficiently obvious in his megalomaniacal insanity -- and Romney -- who's equally clearly a used-car salesman at heart -- I think Huckabee's calm and earnest manner would probably sell very well in a country suffering from Bush Fatigue.

He comes off like your best friends square dad: kind of a downer stick in the mud, but not in a way that you initially/actively dislike, plus he wrote a book on weight loss. He's the aw-shucks Republican, the only really "feel-good" candidate on right. It would be a challenging contrast to the pragmatic effectiveness of Sen. Clinton, and I daresay he'd out-grin Obama or Edwards. Hopefully the antipathy towards his candidacy from the Money People will nip it in the bud.

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On A Lighter Note...

James Lipton: French Pimp.

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Light at the End of the Tunnel (?)

The law of diminishing returns is kicking in. This is the third straight weekend worked through, which is something I don't really mind terribly -- I've gone months and months like this before -- but which I recognize as questionable in effectiveness over time. If all you do is work, it's easy to slide into a mode of semi-constant semi-production: there's nothing to look forward to at the end of a task but the next task, so you don't really dig in and focus the way you might if, say, you had a big fun trip planned once work was done.

Yeah, 12 hour days at 66% productivity; belly up to the desk and stare into your pint of workahol, rummy. This is how so many "professional" people end up with broken relationships and no social life, I think, and it's frightening to see it might be happening to me.

Life is contrasts, a holy waltz of experience. Change is the only thing we can perceive. I believe it's true on a literal/micro level, and more importantly at a philosophical meta/macro level too. The feeling you get from moving fast isn't the speed itself, it's the delta, the change. It's physics. Force equals mass times acceleration, the difference in the velocity-vector over time. That's what we feel.

Which is a highfalutin way of saying I've been more than a little rut-stuck lately, and rolling with the dayjob 24/7 isn't helping much. I feel numb and restless. It was a convenient distraction at first, a nice excuse to shut out petty personal problems, but now we're down to the grind, and the pressure is throwing all my psychic flaws into sharper relief than ever. I'm struggling. The most important thing is to stop struggling.

Things I'm spinning my wheels over:

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Writers on Strike

If you haven't seen this already, give it a peep. It's quite funny and good. I never made any effort to get into the entertainment unions, but as someone who has paid his/her rent from time to time with my cultural production, I would like to express my solidarity with the writers.

One big union, bitches.

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