Sunday Best

Today was a great day. We saw friends, watched football, the kids played together beautifully, and I was able to actually bend my knees, darlings! I jokingly said to the BBDD, "Thank God for antibiotics," but really--thank God for antibiotics. Three days of them and I'm feeling so much better than I did, leaving one to ponder what would happen if these bacteria all became resistant to even the big guns like doxycycline. We'd be screwed I suppose is the short answer. So--in all seriousness--I am today thanking God for antibiotics, because I now have a faint idea what arthritis must feel like, and that shit is life-changing in all the wrong ways. Not to mention my ongoing disgust that there was an arthropod attached to my body for THREE DAYS (the average amount of time necessary for the tick to "share" the Borrelia burgdorferi bacteria) without me noticing. I get that it's the size of this period: . when it "inserts its mouthparts into the body until it locates a blood source," but damn, that is Nasty with a capital N. Especially that line about "mouthparts." Eeeeew.

In other news, there is a great article in the WSJ this weekend about the ascendancy of conservative "Populist Chic" and how it has destroyed the conservative tradition that most recently ostensibly stood for education, intellectual rigor, and elite participation in our democracy as an antidote to the liberal populism/"radical chic" of the 1970's and '80s. I don't agree with all of the author's premises, but his point is a good one: "There was a time when conservative intellectuals raised the level of American public debate and helped to keep it sober. Those days are gone. As for political judgment, the promotion of Sarah Palin as a possible world leader speaks for itself. The Republican Party and the political right will survive, but the conservative intellectual tradition is already dead. And all of us, even liberals like myself, are poorer for it."
WSJ.com

A longer read is this: www.newyorker.com wherein Obama's campaign apparatus/strategy/execution are discussed at length. Exceedingly interesting window into how it was won.

And this, an article on the upsurge in babies named Barack, Michelle, Malia, Sasha or Obama: nytimes.com. Baby Sister will be all set as soon as we work to elect President Petunia Stinkyfeet in 2012. YES WE CAN!