Internal Monologue

Two worrying trends in our culture, spending too much on weddings and spending too much on elective cosmetic procedures, come together : AFTER the band was chosen and the napkins color-coordinated to match her shoes, Kacey Knauer, a bride-to-be, had another critical matter to address: her skin, and the skin of the nine women in her bridal party. So Ms. Knauer, the 35-year-old owner of TempTrends, a staffing agency in Manhattan, invited her nearest and dearest — including her mother and future mother-in-law — for a night out at the TriBeCa MedSpa, replete with mimosas and cupcakes. An aesthetician assessed each woman’s face and devised a treatment plan — a quick chemical peel, say, or an injection of a wrinkle-filler. Or maybe, for a bridesmaid with age spots , a series of Fraxel laser treatments over months, allowing for recovery time. When watching historical dramas like the recent John Adams , I'm constantly amazed at how modest and understated the weddings seem. For the sake of

Doonesbury is having fun at the expense of McCain's lackluster campaign.

I didn't like this speech as much as some of his previous ones. Too much feel-goodism at the beginning. And I'm not sure his idea of adding more troops to Afghanistan is a good idea. I liked what he said about securing nuclear material and reducing nuclear arsenals, though. This is one of many security concerns that the Bush administration hasn't emphasized enough. Content of the speech aside, the images of an American being cheered by immense crowds of foreign people are very heartening.

The number of howling errors McCain has made about the Middle East (and geography in general) in this campaign is staggering and makes one wonder what kind of mental representation of the world this guy has. He's confused Shia and Sunni on multiple occasions, mentioned the non-existent Iraq/Pakistan border , and referred to Czechoslovakia multiple times as if it still existed (it split in 1993). Now he shows he's got a warped temporal representation of events in Iraq as well. In an interview with CBS , McCain claimed that "The Surge" enabled the "Sunni Awakening" or "Anbar Awakening" (where Iraqi Sunnis awoke to the fact Al Qaeda and other insurgents weren't really doing them any favors by blowing people up in their areas): McCain : I don't know how you respond to something that is such a false depiction of what actually happened. Colonel McFarlane (phonetic) was contacted by one of the major Sunni sheiks. Because of the surge we were ab

Guess who wins? These photos are awesome. Too bad there's no video.

OK, here's the quick and dirty on how to get large .pdf files (in this case, a 320+ page pdf version of the 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons Player's Handbook ) into semi-usable form on an iPhone (without hacking it): Purchase a Player's Handbook , because you should support D&D. I have my hard copy. Get a PDF of the Player's Hadbook by downloading it from a torrent site. I got mine here . Download the Universal Document Converter . Install it. It basically acts like a printer, allowing you to print a PDF as a series of jpeg files. "Print" the PDF of the Player's Handbook using the Universal Document Converter. This will give you over 300 jpeg files. Mess with the settings (jpeg quality and output dpi) so the text is legible but the files aren't too big (I used 95% quality and 200 dpi vertical and horizontal. I might try to lower quality to make files smaller for future uploads). Using Google Picasa Web , upload them to an album. Split the albu

An idea whose time has come : Seventy-five percent of Americans in a new Washington Post - ABC News poll said gay people who are open about their sexual orientation should be allowed to serve in the U.S. military , up from 62 percent in early 2001 and 44 percent in 1993. Majorities of Democrats, Republicans and independents alike now believe it is acceptable for openly gay people to serve in the U.S. armed forces. This is pretty dramatic. The Republican party should come around on this if it doesn't want to consign itself to electoral oblivion. (Any Democrats who still oppose this should come around too, of course.) I think the anti-gay marriage constitutional amendment in California won't pass (last poll has it going down 51-42 ), and that's going to be a huge watershed. I think within a few years we're going to see the end of overt anti-homosexual discrimination as a viable political strategy, and that's a huge victory. (Well, there will probably be some regi