The free ride is over.

My dad's account at the community college is finally closed. No more free access from home. For the moment, that means no access from home period.

In other news, my sister had a seizure this weekend. First time that's happened. I haven't had a chance to talk to her to find out exactly what happened. My mom said my sister has a history of fainting before, so she's wondering if that's all that happened. She gets released from the hospital today.

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Here's a review of The Practice of Poetry over at choriamb.

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( ten minute freewrite: lunch hour )

This is the first time I've seen Ms. Bush criticized.

First lady criticized for swift boat remark

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Spoon-Fed Election

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Our beloved receptionist had his last day Friday, and boy are we feeling his absence now. Ugh. I just put a call into my supervisor at the temp service. If I'm going to "absorb" some of the leftover responsibilities, I'm damn well not doing so for this little amount of money. More fuel to the fire.

Also, I have a job interview tomorrow. Wish me luck.

Mm-hmm.

Columnist Has Ties to Anti-Kerry Book

Among the stoutest defenders of "Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry," the best-selling book arguing that Mr. Kerry lied about his record of service in Vietnam, is the columnist Robert Novak.

In his syndicated columns and on the CNN program "Crossfire," Mr. Novak has lauded the book and referred to veterans who criticize Mr. Kerry - most notably John E. O'Neill, the book's co-author - as "real patriots."

Unmentioned in Mr. Novak's columns and television appearances, however, is a personal connection he has to the book: his son, Alex Novak, is the director of marketing for its publisher, the conservative publishing house Regnery.

In a telephone interview, Robert Novak said he saw no need to disclose the link.

"I don't think it's relevant," he said.

"I'm just functioning as a columnist with a point of view, and a strong point of view," he added.

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After all this, it seems there are really only two swing states: Ohio and Florida. It's going to be really annoying if rural Ohio commands the state.

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Cause of Most Heart Attacks Found

Take that, teetotalers!

False alarm!

I'm able to log on from home. Odd. I wonder why I couldn't this weekend? I figured since it's a new school year, and it's been a year since my dad took classes at the community college, they might go ahead and shut his account down. But, hey, I'm not complaining.

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( more mediocre poetry )

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The Angry Editor

What We've Lost: How the Bush Administration Has Curtailed Freedoms, Ravaged the Environment and Damaged America and the World is a book that has been assembled rather more than written. With great recourse to lists and bullet-point breakdowns, it audits Bush's shortcomings across every department of government, opening each chapter with one of the president's goofy quotes ("It's clearly a budget. It's got lots of numbers in it") then slamming home wave after wave of damning facts and anecdotes: that Bush tried to reclassify "manufacturing" jobs to include people who worked in fast-food joints; that teachers in Missouri were ordered to remove every third light bulb from schools to save money; that parents of soldiers in Iraq were in some cases forced to buy their children's own body-armour vests ("$1,500 retail"), plus hundreds of statistics attesting to Bush's failure to help America's poor, sick and discriminated against. The result is so overwhelming that it reads a little as if someone has fed "Bush, presidency, fuck up" into a search engine on the internet and loosely organised the results. Carter says he intended to write a short handbook, but that the more he and his researchers looked into it, the longer the book got.

"We had meetings on the research every couple of days; we went through 30,000 reports - it was daunting, what the Bush administration had done," he says. "I went into this thinking I knew maybe a 10th of it; I didn't know the 1,000th of it. I'm really crummy at deadlines - which is strange, 'cos I'm a very punctual person usually for lunches - and a really slow writer, but I had to do this in four months and worked till 2am every morning. I was saying to my kids, the one thing this book did was use my brain cells, 'cos I've been an editor so long. An editor rarely uses his brain; he uses his gut more than his brain. My brain was worn out, the tips of my fingers were worn out."