The dreadful weather I encountered in Boston seems to have followed me back to Georgia. Intense downpours at Atlanta's Hartsfield Airport delayed my flight Wednesday night, and I didn't wind up getting home until nearly midnight.

According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, "The storm system that spawned damaging tornadoes in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama weakened by the time it reached Georgia, but still managed to dump record rainfall in Atlanta on Wednesday. The deluge caused a few minor problems across metro Atlanta. About 50 homes in the Collier Hills neighborhood were without power just before daybreak Thursday after a tree toppled onto power lines, then crushed two cars and damaged a pickup truck.

"The storms had moved eastward into the Carolinas by Thursday morning. The National Weather Service said 2.87 inches of rain was recorded by the city's official rain gauge at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, the most ever on Nov. 15. The old record for the date was 1.94 inches, set in 1914. The heavy rain also erased the city's rainfall deficit for the year. The 44.80 inches of rain so far this year is .17 inch above normal, the Weather Service said."

Fortunately, my home was not one of the 50 in Collier Hills to lose power, but my driveway was impassable due to all the wet leaves. My driveway has always been steep, but the loss of traction due to the large quantity of freshly fallen leaves caused my car to spin out and halt about halfway up the hill. I slid back down, backed up a little, gunned it and tried again. Only halfway up that time. I tried a third, and a fourth before finally making it with squealing tires on the fifth attempt.

Finally getting in the house, I found that my high-speed internet access was out Wednesday night and Thursday morning. Thursday was not quite as rainy, but still overcast and glum, and when I got home Thursday night, it took me three attempts to make it up the driveway. And the internet access was still out. Friday morning, too.

By Friday evening, I decided to call Comcast tech support, who put me through various drills ("Unplug your modem and them plug it back in. Turn off your computer and turn it back on. Simon says. . ."). When Techie Number One couldn't help me, I was connected to Techie Number Two, who walked me through various tests of my IP address before finally giving up ("I can't help you. I'm giving up. Sorry it didn't work out. You might want to try your computer's manufacturer.").

I tried everything I could think of, even removing my Norton Firewall and virus protection. Nothing. Saturday morning, the connection was still down, but when I passed by the computer a little while ago earlier this afternoon, I noticed that the Google Talk icon down in the system tray was active, and thinking that might mean that somehow I miraculously got back on line, I tried, and lo and behold, there you all were, right where you've always been.

No idea what's going on. One of those things. In the words of the now unemployed Donald Rumsfeld, stuff happens.

But excuse me now, I have some leaves on my driveway that need blowing.

Last day in Boston: This morning was the closest to a "nice" weather day I've seen in Boston since Saturday, but I still took a cab back to the Convention Center rather than walk or taking the T since I had to check out of the hotel and therefore carry my luggage with me. The view above was from my hotel window at about 7:oo am.

In the cab, I saw a Silver Line bus on Washington Ave. (St.?), dispelling my illusion that the tandem buses weren't street ready. At the end of the day, I took the Silver Line to the airport, schlepping my luggage along with me, and further noticed that the buses were running on overhead electric, not diesel. I don't recall whether the bus on Washington was electric or diesel.

This is being typed on the Logan Airport wi-fi ($7.95/day). I arrived here early (4:30) for my 6:30 flight, and now the flight has been delayed to a 7:30 departure and a 10:00 pm arrival in Atlanta. Even assuming that the flight sticks to its revised schedule and is not further delayed, by the time I pick up my checked luggage, get my car out of the park-and-ride and drive home, it will be midnight. So if you work with me, don't expect to see my fat ass in the office too early.

Boston, Day Four - This morning I discovered that I didn't need to have gotten soaked in the rain last night walking from the Convention Center to South Station - there's a stop, World Trade Center, right across the street from the Convention Center on the Silver Line. I hadn't even known there was a Silver Line - there wasn't one when I lived here in Boston back in the '70s.

This morning, though, it was still raining, so I walked from the Radisson to Boylston Station and took the Red Line to Park, switched to the Green Line and rode it to South Station, and then got on the newly-discovered Silver Line to the WTC and walked over to the Massachusetts Convention and Conference Center (MCCA, although every time I see the initials, I think "Macaca").

Anyway, the Silver Line was a double revelation to me - the first was its mere existence, and second it was my first experience riding on Bus Rapid Transit (BRT). BRT has been proposed for Atlanta's Beltline, much to the disappointment on most residents, who were hoping for light rail. Their complaints are two-fold: first, that roads, as opposed to rails, for the buses might mean that cars might later ride on the Beltline, which would then just devolve into yet another highway. The second concern, especially in my neighborhood where the path for the Beltline rail is not quite as apparent as elsewhere, is that the buses will run on our city streets, further congesting our already traffic-choked roads.

However, I could see from this morning's BRT ride that if the Beltline is developed anything like the Silver Line, these fears are unfounded. The roadway for the BRT was way too narrow for anything but a professional driver in the bus - the BRT path is nothing like a city street. In addition, the linked buses looked like they wouldn't be able to navigate very well on city streets, relieving the second concern.

All in all, the BRT experience felt very much like the light-rail experience - the bus pulled into the South Street Station Silver Line stop just like the streetcars do, the doors opened just like on the streetcars and the seats were arranged just like the streetcars. The bus proceeded through the subway tunnel just like a streetcar, and even after it came aboveground just at the WTC, the "road" still resembled track more than it resembled something you'd drive a car along.

None of these observations will be popular among the Beltline advocates who are dismayed by the very idea of it going BRT. However, based on my Silver Line ride this morning, I think the concept is compatible with the Beltline.

Oh, by the way, for no other reason than that the rain finally stopped and I could use the exercise after sitting at the conference all day, I chose to walk home tonight rather than take the Silver Line again. A nice night for walking, and the view out my window finally cleared up.

Bush should have stayed true to form and replaced Rumsfeld with Condi, just like he replaced Powell with Rice. She looks like she could clean things up in Iraq!

But anyway, it's soggy and dreary here in Boston. I walked the 1.5 miles from the Radisson to the Convention Center this morning in the damp brisk dawn air, and spent the day listening to speakers on the subjects of Smart Growth and Brownfield Redevelopments. It was raining harder by the end of the day, so I took the T from South Station to Boylston, changing from the Red Line to the Green Line at Park, to get home (I sound so Bostonian, don't I?).

After a day of hearing the praises of Smart Growth and the New Urbanism, I was tickled to see Greensmile's comments about yesterday's post on The Big Dig, namely, "What pisses me off is that [1] they made it faster to get into a town with a car and didn't add one damn parking place and [2] with a small part of the cost overruns, they could have extened all the subways by a mile or added 5 miles to the bus routes...thus eliminating the need for all of the new road capacity except the new harbor tunnels."

Agreed, and it makes me grateful to be involved with Atlanta's Beltline development, the first major urban proposal in the South that doesn't include four lanes of new highway, that couldn't qualify for a NASCAR track if the commuters were to abandon it.

The forecast tomorrow is for continued crappy weather, with a shitty front moving in sometime tomorrow afternoon. I may have to break down and take a cab to the Convention Center.

Reporting live from Boston, I'm etc.

I'm typing in this entry while sitting at a Mac in my mother's kitchen.

I'm not a big fan of Macs - especially this one sitting in my mother's kitchen. I know they have their fans - apparently devoted ones based on their brand loyalty - but I simply think they know not what they're missing.

Anyway, I'm in Boston, having successfully navigated Delta's air transit system between Hartsfield and Logan. From the airport, I took a cab to Mom's house, which had to detour through Chinatown (the cab, not my Mom's house) because the bridge between the airport and the Mass Pike is still closed after partially collapsing last summer and killing a hapless motorist.

I don't know how much Massachusetts had to pay for the "Big Dig," but if I were them, I would be pretty upset to have to have it closed for repairs a mere few months after opening. If that had happened in Georgia, someone would be out of a job by now.

Republicans are probably wondering how we could blame this on Clinton.

Anyway, shortly after arriving at Mom's, she and I headed up to the Town of Methuen, Mass. for dinner and visiting at my sister and brother-in-law's house. A fine time was had by all.

And that's about it so far. Today, we'll watch the Patriot's game (american football), apparently a Boston ritual, and then I check into my Downtown Hotel for the rest of the week.

Kind of puts the fun back in flying, doesn't it?

As I said yesterday, I'm off to Boston. Be back in a few days.

As everyone knows, the political news just seems to be getting better and better, from Rumsfeld's resignation to George Allen's concession and the associated Democratic control of the Senate; from Ken Melman stepping down to Katharine Harris subject to a recount in Florida (karma, anyone?); from doubts about John Bolton's future career to the dawning of a new age of rational climate change and energy policy. It's easy to get giddy right now, until one starts to notice great Calvinistic clouds of self-doubt beginning to form around one's head.

No, this election wasn't about any sort of national embracement of Democratic ideals and policies - whatever they were. Hell, the Dem's barely articulated any coherent platform and when they did finally open their mouths, it managed to come out as an insult to the troops.

No, this election was a rejection of the status quo, a national turning away from the sleaze and corruption of the past few years, and dissatisfaction with a costly and an increasingly apparent pointless war. But it had nothing to do with any sort of raising of the national consciousness.

I don't mean to be a Gloomy Gus, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. It's just that liberals and progressives need to keep in mind the realpolitik that they've lucked into office by being the guys not responsible for the current mess - not necessarily the guys with a better plan. Right now, John McCain has a better chance of becoming the next President than Hillary Clinton, and the nation still doesn't understand John Kerry.

On an up-note, things generally work better when the Congress and the Presidency are in the hands of different parties, and the Dems seem to have stumbled onto the formula for getting themselves elected (moderation in the south and midwest, liberalism in the west and northeast) and look like they're going to stick to that script for a while.

Anyway, that's it for now on politics. I've never been good at articulating political theory, and although I leave tomorrow morning for Boston, Massachusetts, home of Ted Kennedy and a brand-new governor, I'll let the pundits and the partisans pontificate on politics from here on in.

A Political Post

I keep tellimg myself that this blog shouldn't go political, but sometimes the news just gets too good to pass up:

PIERRE, S.D. - A woman who died two months ago won a county commissioner's race in Jerauld County on Tuesday.

But no, not that news, but this - the day after the Democrats have regained control of the House after 12 years, and seem assured of having a majority in the Senate as well (barring any Katharine Harris-style highjinks), Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld finally resigns!

I have to pinch myself to make sure I'm not dreaming.

ANCHORAGE, Alaska - A dead woman won re-election to a school board in rural Alaska after her opponent lost a coin flip meant to break an electoral tie.

HOUSTON - A slick new campaign mailer shows a smiling Republican state Rep. Glenda Dawson meeting with Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison. It reminds voters of Dawson's many notable achievements in education, economics and politics. What the ad doesn't say is that Dawson has been dead since September.

Ah, Texas. . . with dead Republicans running for office, you have to wonder how Kinky Friedman came in third in the Governor's race.

Not that things are much better other places. I live in Georgia, so I ought not to point a finger too much, but New York's new statewide database of registered voters contains as many as 77,000 dead people on its rolls, and as many as 2,600 of them have cast votes from the grave, according to an analysis by the Poughkeepsie Journal.

But, I'm already off-message. I didn't come here to talk about Rummy or dead Republicans. I came here to talk about the effects of yesterday's midterm election on environmental policy. See how easily I get distracted on politics?

Many enviros have cited yesterday's Democratic victories as a possible indicator of change to the country's environmental and global-warming policies. After all, eco-enemies like Richard Pombo were defeated, and green-leaning governors like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jennifer Granholm (Michigan) got reseated, and incoming speaker Nancy Pelosi has a long record of environmental activism, including very vocal support on getting the Maximum Contaminant Level for arsenic in drinking water reduced.

However, there is very little chance the power shift will alter Bush's opposition to binding caps on greenhouse gas emissions per the Kyoto Protocol, which he rejected in 2001 incurring the wrath of environmentalists everywhere.

Delegates and observers gathered in Nairobi for a UN climate-change conference aimed at finding a replacement for Kyoto, which expires in 2012, said Republican losses should help the environment. "This is good news for climate," said World Wildlife Federation climate-change director Hans Verolme, optimistic that Democratic control of Congress could lead to pressure on the administration to boost efforts to combat climate change. "You will see a lot of pressure on the administration to work on domestic policies that will have a positive impact on the environment as a result of the US midterm elections," he said.

"The main message from the results. . . is that the U.S. is moving substantially in the right direction, and climate is very much front and center on the political agenda in the U.S.," said Steve Sawyer, a spokesman for Greenpeace. "(But) it still doesn't mean that we're going to have national binding emissions caps in the U.S."

John Coequyt, a Greenpeace energy policy advisor, agreed that the elections may have showed greater environmental awareness among U.S. voters, but warned against exuberance, noting the polls were largely a referendum on the Iraq war, scandals and the economy. "For delegates here, it's not going to have an impact on negotiations," he said, referring to the talks in Nairobi. Still, he said, some U.S. races showed promise, particularly the re-election of Schwarzenegger, a Republican who is at deep odd with the administration over global warming. "There are a number of elections that were decided by environmental issues. You can make the argument that California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger won his re-election based on climate change," Coequyt said.

However, voters in California also rejected a renewable-energy oil tax endorsed by both Bill Clinton and Julia Roberts.

Also in California, seven-term Rep. Richard Pombo was defeated by a last-minute onslaught of campaigning by well-financed environmental groups supporting Democratic challenger Jerry McNerney, a left-leaning energy consultant who heads a company that manufactures wind turbines. National politicians on both sides of the aisle considered the race to be a high-stakes battle, with Bill Clinton stumping for McNerney and both the President and the First Lady rallying on Pombo's behalf in the campaign's final stretch.

Pombo, 45, chair of the House Resources Committee, was targeted by environmental groups riled over his support for offshore and Alaskan oil drilling and making the Endangered Species Act more palatable to land owners. McNerney, 55, has advocated devoting more government money to alternative energy sources.

As recently as three months ago, McNerney was an underdog not even supported by his own party. But more recent polls showed McNerney gaining as Pombo faced anger from voters over his stay-the-course stance on Iraq and links to disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

The race was an expensive one, with campaign contributions of more than $2.5 million pouring in on both sides. McNerney, largely funded by environmentalists, received a last-minute infusion of cash from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which had previously considered the district unwinnable. The GOP devoted more than $1 million to shore up Pombo's campaign.

McNerney won.

Meanwhile, Missouri passed the Stem Cell bill. The rabid, insane Christian right are screaming that the bill will allow human cloning, although it expressly forbids human cloning. My greatest fear following this election, however, was planted in my mind by idrmrsr, namely that Nancy Pelosi will take me to a camp and milk me of my semen even while I sleep to fertlize eggs and produce embryos to cure Michael J. Fox.

"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp posts - for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang

Blogger doesn't seem to be in a mood to let me post pictures this evening, so my Election Day blog had to go live.

Making Music

The weekend before last, my friend Nick came by and helped me set up some of his music software on my computer.

I'm not sure if I forgive him. Because I spent all of last Saturday playing and experimenting with the programs. I possess neither musical instruments nor musical abilities, so I just grabbed a bunch of random sound files that I found over on usenet, and after several hours, this was the best that I could come up with. I started in the mid- to late afternoon, and when I finished, I looked at the clock and it was almost 4 a.m. (at least it was Fall-Back Day, the national holiday for getting an extra hours sleep).

I listened to the piece over again the next Sunday morning (okay, afternoon, but it felt like morning after the late night before) and decided that I had to be able to do better than that. Surfing the net for inspiration, I found this web site where Brian Eno and David Byrne have put up all the tracks used for two of the songs from their groundbreaking "My Life In the Bush of Ghosts" (1981). They're encouraging the world to "edit, remix, sample and mutilate these tracks" any way one wants, so I took them up on their offer and generosity (I can't think of any other artists who've put their actual raw tracks on line like this), and went to work.

By the way, with every passing year, Brian Eno and I are starting to look more and more alike.

Anyway, armed with all of their cool multi-instrument percussion and other musical tracks, I fired up the software again, and came up with this. A small improvment, but too derivative of the original in my opinion (the more I tried to "improve" the track, the closer it got to sounding like "Help Me Somebody" from MLITBOG).

Anyway, I've started. I can see now that any free time that I might have thought I had left will now be taken up with looping, mixing, fading and syncing music tracks, and for that I can't really blame Nick (after all, I saw it coming).

For the record, the two tracks from last weekend are titled "The Cosmic Flame" and "Earth People." Yes, I know they're wierd.

It seems that my desire to do other things has become greater than my desire to blog, or to put it more accurately, it seems that my desire to maintain this blog on a more-or-less daily basis has become second to other desires.

Free will - we always do what we want, ultimately. Oh sure, sometimes we might think "I don't want to do what I'm doing now," but actually we prefer doing that thing we think we don't want to do more than we want the opposite.

Let me give you an example: Suppose you don't want to go to the Opera. No problem, I can relate to that. But on the other hand, your wife wants to go and for you to join her, and you don't want to disappoint her (to look at the half-full portion of the glass; the half-empty portion is you don't want to deal with her anger and nagging if you don't go). Further, you don't want to seem uncultured or poorly educated. If these latter desires (domestic tranquility and social status) outweigh the former (abhorrence of caterwauling), you'll go listen to the Opera that you had wanted to avoid.

There are many things like this. If a fugitive's desire not to be caught is greater than justice's desire to capture him, he will stay on the lam. Sure, talent plays a part in this - if the world's greatest tracker, say, is searching, if only half-heartedly, for a mentally defective jailbird, he'll probably find him, no matter how badly the unfortunate jailbird wants to stay free. But at some point, the two curves do cross and if the world's greatest tracker simply does not care whether or not his prey is ever caught, and meanwhile, the jailbird is making a consistent, concerted and conscientious effort to do everything he can think of, despite his handicap, to stay free, well then, he'll probably never get caught. David, on occasion, really does beat Goliath.

Actually, though, it doesn't really take that much effort to catch a fugitive. The great will to stay at large sooner or later is overcome by a desire to relax and finally live a "normal" life, and sooner or later most, except for the most exceptionally motivated fugitives, give up the great effort to remain at large and get lazy or get careless and wind up getting captured. The pursuer merely needs to expend a modicum of effort to maintain the search and wait for their two separate willpower lines to cross on the desire-vs-motivation graph.

Take Eric Rudolph. After bombing several Atlanta and Birmingham abortion clinics and the 1996 Olympics, his initial desire to stay free must have been very large, as he remained at large living off the land (and possibly the kindness of sympathetic homeowners) in the North Carolina mountains. His desire to not be caught was simply greater than that of the posses, search parties and Federal agents out hunting for him. But after a few freezing winters of breaking into abandoned cottages and eating out of dumpsters, his desire for comfort overcame his desire for freedom, and he got caught by a policeman who was not even specifically looking for him, just checking out the vagrant reported behind the Pizza Hut in Murphy, North Carolina.

Bin Laden's an example of the other extreme. If the United States and its "allies" were really committed to finding him and bringing him to justice, committed as much as they are to say, blundering in Iraq or perpetuating their own regimes, they would be able to flush him out of whichever cave in northern Pakistan he's chosen for this winter. However, Bin Laden's will to remain at large for the rest of his natural life will probably always exceed bourgeois desires for comfort, and his idea of "normal" probably doesn't include running a Visa card at a Walmart Supercenter or attending his high-school reunion, so unless a truly dramatic shift in America's political will were to occur, Bin Laden will probably never be caught alive.

But anyway, I 0nce had a desire, a will, for some unfathomable reason to maintain this blog on a daily basis. It wasn't always easy and it wasn't always practical, and sometimes the quality of the posts suffered for lack of sufficient attention and sometimes I cheated and backdated an entry, but I kept up with the daily blogging as best I could, despite my job, despite the endless after-hour meetings, despite what passes for my social life.

But at some point, 'round about late August looking at my blog dates, I began to lose interest in saying something, anything, every single day. I tried to compensate for my lack of interest by taking on the discipline of a dharma-based structure, but that approach only made things worse - without allowing myself the freedom to speak my mind, the blogging started to seem a true burden and a chore, and by late September, I seem to have stopped altogether.

But the Buddha always pointed to the Middle Way, avoiding one extreme or the other, so I'm going to make a last-gasp approach to this blog by following a middle way of sorts - something in between total freedom and strict discipline, between "what will he write about next?" and the didactic "Dharma Lesson Number 108."

I'm not saying "I'm back," but I never said "I'm out of here" either. Let's see how this new incarnation works out.

October 11

10/11/06 is 09/11/01 up-side-down (sort of).

Discuss among yourselves.