#57 Sunday Sundries

Worst of the Week

• Obama's Veep pick. That it HAD to be Joe Biden. I'll have more to say about his liabilities (only one, really) in a later post, but right now it's just to whine a little about the woefully LIMITED CHOICES Obama had among a less-than-stellar field of candidates for the job. Where was the would-be VP with no liabilities at all?...I ask you. Gotta blame the Dems themselves for this, I guess. After Hillary and Edwards (Whew!) Obama had a bunch of literally second- and third-stringers to pick from. No, make that strictly third-stringers: the likes of Biden and Richardson et. al. were way down in the cellar compared to the three front-runners all through the campaign. Thus, in a sense, they've already been rejected by the voters. Losers at the starting gate. The interminable nomination process wore everybody out, but it SHOULD HAVE WORKED, dammit. By rights, either Hillary Clinton or John Edwards should be our next VP of the USA. What happened?

Best of the Week

• The Olympics. Great success. And another step toward a Global Village; a big one, considering how resistant China has been historically to opening up to the world outside the "Middle Kingdom," as they refer to the place. That's right, "China" is one of our many exonyms whimsically applied to foreign countries (e.g. our "India"= their Bharata) for no good reason at all. Don't get me started. The interesting thing here is that their ages-old name for the country veritably exudes insularity, and, by implication, XENOPHOBIA, which they've been guilty of for centuries. It is (transliterated) Zhongguo= "middle or central kingdom"...center of civilization, of the world. As host to the Games, though, they did OK. Won some, lost some. Good for 'em.

• School's back in session! Keep the kids off the street. No, this isn't an indication on my part of an old-age get-off-the-grass mentality. I'd like to see them in school all year round for all the right reasons (fill in the blanks). The time has long since come to go to a year-round calendar for public schools, if only to keep up with the more enlightened CHINESE (see above) in this regard. I bring this up, too, because here in NC we've been fighting this battle for several years now. The country-club set with summer-camp kids seem to have too much pull with the courts to get it over and done. But it's inevitable.

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