Duck and Cover

"WAITING FOR ACTION -- The United Nations Security Council, like a character in a Beckett play, has been waiting for a phantom -- a resolution from the United States declaring that Iraq has not disarmed. Security Council approval -- 9 of 15 votes are needed -- would lend international legitimacy to a war. Unlike Godot, the resolution will arrive soon."

Ah, a sentence that could only have appeared in the New York Times. Sometimes I can’t believe I read such a bougie paper. As Jeff Nygaard observes in this week’s Nygaard Notes, "In a major article [on] January 9th, the Times spelled out how the president's proposal has something for nearly everyone, especially large families and those with the highest incomes.

"The three examples they gave were a family of four earning $120,000 a year, a couple with two grown sons earning $80,000, and a single woman earning $40,000. That tells you something. At least, it tells you something if you know that the median household income for families in the United States is about $52,000 (Census Bureau, 2001 figures)."

Under ordinary circumstances, my populist heart would feel slightly guilty about my addiction to the Week in Review and my hero-worship of columnist Paul Krugman. However, this is a time for intellectualism if ever there was one.

I live in DC, about ten blocks from the Capitol. I also work with people who can (and will) tell you exactly what various toxic substances do to you and exactly how much of them would be released during a terrorist attack. The last thing I or my fellow Washingtonians want or need is to be grounded in this USA Today reality of plastic sheeting and duct tape.

Far better to read Robert Kagan's recent essay on the origins of the disparity between American and European philosophies on the use of military force. Or to count votes on the U.N. Security Council, and talk about them over beers at the Hawk & Dove. Let's retreat to the comfortable, responsibility-free status of observer and leave the worrying to someone else.

I'm even a little comforted by the knowledge that regardless of what they tell us at ready.gov, there's not much that any of us can do to save ourselves in the event of a nuclear, chemical, or biological attack. Since it's impossible to prepare for such an attack, we can all stop wondering whether we've done enough to prepare. It's a lot more fun to think about global geopolitics than to price inflatable safe rooms.

The Day After

"What I learned from Joe Millionaire is that you can’t take yourself, or reality television, too seriously."—snubbed bachelorette on tonight's Secrets of Joe Millionaire

Yesterday two feet of snow fell over Washington. This morning I floundered to work in ski pants, hiking boots, and lots of polarfleece. People were stumbling around everywhere like the survivors of a flesh-eating zombie invasion, disoriented by the glare and greeting everyone in sight as if they were happy just to see another living human.

You: striking darkhaired WM

XENIA, A STUNNING Russian brunette, 1/20/03. Red Line. You were reading a book. Had enough courage to ask you about the book and St. Petersburg, but not enough to give you my phone number. Can’t sleep. Please call.

Tonight I was out drinking with my roommate Erin when I picked up the most recent CityPaper to see movie listings. I got caught up, instead, in reading the “I Saw You” classifieds.

The Washington CityPaper is your typical “alternative weekly,” which contains local political and social coverage, film and theater reviews, and so forth. Like all weeklies the CityPaper also contains personals: men seeking women, women seeking men, men seeking men, etc. It also includes a classified section called “I Saw You” in which people reach out to those with whom they have had brief, but titilliating, contact. I like to read them and imagine the stories that surround them.

TO MY SECRET admirer who stopped by my job on 1/5. Please come back. I did not get the message until 1/13. Please come back to 2000 Penn with the roses and candy.

Occasionally they are just incredibly vague.

GEORGETOWN, M/ 28TH-ISH, 1/20. You: breathtaking blonde who was fully aware that my heart skipped a beat when I saw you. You’re not “hot,” you’re beautiful. Me: dark hair, blue eyes, long tan coat, obviously smitten. Was that an unusual exchange of glances, or do you always get that?

Some of them are poetry.

WE WERE FACING each other
on the derailed Metro.
The guy next to me,
a maniac on the phone,
made everyone laugh up their sleeves.
Why didn’t I just
smile
at you?
Sigh.

The Answer is:

THE SCHOOL DOES NOT NEED A “REGIME CHANGE”

That was what Bart was writing on the blackboard on tonight’s Simpsons.

On Saturday night my roommates and I played Trivial Pursuit. We used Erin’s brand-new copy of the Trivial Pursuit 20th Anniversary Edition. All the questions were about things, people and events occurring between 1972 and 2002. Weird. (I’m used to playing with my parents’ copy of TP, circa 1985, which has lots of questions about Jackie Kennedy Onassis, Mork and Mindy, etc.)

What was even weirder was that even though we only went through perhaps 8% of all the cards during the course of our game, the following people, places, and things turned up more than once in questions or answers:

Belarus
Alaska and moose in the same question/answer (twice)
John Updike
Josie and the Pussycats
Harry Potter references (eight times)
Millie, the Bush family dog
Nicholas Cage
Oprah
Laos

When I was a kid my mom once picked up a new copy of Trivial Pursuit that was on sale at Wal-Mart. We discovered upon playing it that the reason it was on sale was that it was the Canadian edition. So the questions were all about obscure Canadian prime ministers, the demographics of Alberta, and American TV. There was a short time, when we’d started playing but hadn’t figured out our mistake, when we all just felt really dumb. Cultural dyslexia.

State of the Rhinovirus

I have an icky cold. And tomorrow W delivers his third (penultimate!) State of the Union address. “President Bush is expected to have harsh words for Iraq” predicts CNN. What an insight. I don’t expect anything new or shocking in the speech, except of course some semblance of clarity, vocabulary, and grammar—because W will be expected to stick to the teleprompter and won’t be taking questions.

The real question is which word, phrase, or event will be the centerpiece of the State of the Union Drinking Game this year. This was a tradition within my circle of friends in college, and is one which I observe to this day. Each year we choose one word, phrase or event—typically “evildoers,” “working people” or “both sides of the aisle rise for a standing ovation”—at which we all take a drink. The trick, of course, is to choose something that will occur often enough for us to get pretty loaded, but not often enough to knock us on our asses.

I wish I’d thought to record what we used for this game each year. It might serve as some kind of historical record. I have to say that despite my political nerdiness I scarcely recall what any president has ever said in a State of the Union address, mostly because of the drinking factor. I do remember staying up “late” to watch Bill Clinton’s first with my dad. I was 13 or so and I remember microwaving triscuits with cheddar cheese on top and listening to my dad say things like “all-right!” in his earnest 1950s slang way (he’ll say things like “far out!” without a trace of irony).

Squagel is not a word

This morning, as usual, I stopped by Cosi for a coffee and a “squagel” with cinnamon-raisin “s’bread.” Why the wacky, wacky names for ordinary food? Well, you see, Cosi (formerly Xando) is DC’s own hometown Starbucks-like coffee chain. A term of its corporate charter is, therefore, that it use nonintuitive and vaguely Italian terms for its food and beverage offerings.

The worst thing about trendy little coffee chains is that they not only come up with cutesy names for their specialties and their sizes of coffee, but that they also dehumanize their clientele by forcing them to use said cutesy terminology in order to be served. The woman in front of me in line this morning, poor innocent soul, ordered a "venti" latte. The Cosi clerk then said, "what does venti mean?" "Oh, sorry," said the customer, "I meant gigante." It’s like she was speaking another language. Starbucksese.