Sometimes there is just so much I want to say, but I know this is not the place for it. That applies to both personal and professional matters; I’m pretty sure just about anyone with a weblog knows what I’m talking about.

Sometimes this page is the absolute best way to move things out of my head by putting them here. Sometimes it’s the worst. It’s the grey area in between I have trouble figuring out.

Meanwhile, read Miss Anthropy’s poem. She’s one of the reasons why the web is the Best. Medium. Ever!

Interesting comparison between Dennis Kucinich and Howard Dean. Discuss. (via This Modern World, which you really should be looking at more)

Also via TMW comes Republicans for Sharpton. Words fail.

My Blogshares portfolio (is anyone still futzing with this?) started at 500 fake dollars and 1,000 fake shares in this weblog. It’s now worth $3.7 million (fake).

For some reason this makes me think of a comic who said, “I don’t even have enough money to play the lottery. So instead, every once in a while I just look at my bus pass and say, ‘Damn.'”

Gurgle.

Last night I dreamt that I had a terrible itch on the bottom of my right foot. But when I went to scratch it, I just tickled myself and the itch remained. As usual, don’t know what this means.

Does anyone know of any *good* municipal web sites? I’m up for redesigning a small city’s web site, and it occurred to me that I don’t think I’ve ever seen a good city web site – they’re all pretty bad. If anyone knows any nice-looking, useful municipal sites, let me know in the comments. Thanks.

Seen around

Jesse was talking about getting a camera phone and starting a photoblog where you post directly from the phone to the web. Cool idea. It inspired me to take my giant Canon G1 along on my walk today. Click on the hydrant to see a few images I got. (The squirrel is for Kevin. I’m not a squirrel fan.)

Overheard near the “Harry Potter” display at Borders

Mother, grabbing giant book and dragging 7-year-old away by his hand: “OK. Let’s go get a book for you.”

Father: “Where’s the regular one?” (Clearly wanting to purchase a softcover version, not understanding the realities of book publishing.)

Mother: “It’s 1,000 pages. I guess we can’t finish it tonight.”

Bored/cynical bookseller, when I asked if people got a discount on the book for pre-ordering it: “Not any more than everyone else got.” (the book is 40 percent off)

I have no idea why anyone pre-ordered this book, especially because anyone interested enough in it to pre-order it would have heard that the initial print run was going to be something like 47 million books. (It’s actually 6.8 million, but same idea.) You could have built a house with the number of copies at this one Borders alone.

My friend Michele, the biggest Harry Potter fan I know, called me excitedly this morning (waking me up) to tell me she had procured one of the treasured volumes. I told her I would wait until she read it and then borrow hers. I’m not in a hurry to read it; I can’t even remember what happened in the last book.

Neither could Michele.

John Callender of lies.com is talking about his current pick in the Democratic presidential race, John Kerry. Kerry was among the throng of Dems who voted to allow GWB to go to war in Iraq. John C. reprinted an interesting quote from the Wall Street Journal’s OpinionJournal:

“For the sake of argument, let’s say Kerry is right and Bush perpetrated a sham. In a hypothetical general-election match-up, who would you rather choose to deal with hostile foreign leaders: a guy who’s capable of pulling off such an elaborate deception, or the sucker who fell for it?”

Good point. But the truth, of course, is even worse. I don’t believe Kerry or really anyone else on Capitol Hill took Bush’s trumped-up Iraq “evidence” seriously. So Kerry wasn’t a “sucker,” but something infinitely worse – a coward who worried more about his political future, about appearing “soft,” than about standing up for what he knew was right. For me personally, that’s a deal-breaker.

Clockwatchers

“Everything is temporary. Everything begins and ends and begins again. When I look ahead, I imagine infinite possible futures repeated like countless photocopies, a thousand blank pages, and in each one I see myself, never hiding, never sitting silently, and never just waiting and waiting and watching the world go by.”

Every time I watch “Clockwatchers,” I’m reminded what a beautiful little gem it is. Wonderful cast, sly writing, humor and pain in equal measure. Watching it with Jesse last night, I was struck by the cinematography: each shot is like a modern-day Hopper painting. I’m convinced that if he were alive today, Hopper would be depicting the same bleached, soul-draining office landscapes found in the movie.

Highly recommended.