“And I Haven’t Had A Good Day In Awhile”

It is possible that You’re So Vain is about a particular man.  It is possible that all of the details arise from one individual man.  But I doubt it.

It is far more likely that the song is about many men and no man.  Some of the details are likely made up from whole cloth, the rest from various people that she knew or heard about.  Carly was a beautiful woman from a bit of  wealth who was making a living in the music industry (the song is on her third album).  It is not a stretch to think that she had dated more than one or two vain men

On Simon’s website is a compilation of bits of interviews over the years on the subject.  In one she says:

I was at a party and somebody walked in and my friend said to me “Doesn’t he look like he’s just walked on to a yacht?”. So, I thought to myself – hmmm, let me write that in my notebook.

At times she intimates that the song is about a compilation of men.  At other times she hints it is about one man.  She seems to have a good idea of how to keep interest up.

Here we are in 2010.  Simon has barely been heard from since 1990’s Have You Seen Me Lately.  The Wikipedia discography lists eight cd releases since then, but I don’t believe there has been a lot of success with any of them.  Her latest release admits as much in its title: Never Been Gone.  She wouldn’t have to tell us that if we didn’t think she had been.

Three of those last eight cds were all covers.  One was an opera which I guess did so bad that she put a piece of it on the next cd, Letters Never Sent, in hopes that the added exposure would help.

And surprise, surprise, Never Been Gone is all covers of her own earlier (more successful) material.

And surprise, surprise, Carly sneaks in a whisper to get everyone talking about You’re So Vain once again after all these years.

For the record, I had always been a big fan of Carly Simon.  But I have not been much excited about her music since 1990.

Oh yeah.  This is my 101st post!

New for me (we haven’t been to a Home/Garden show in a few years) was the latest in metal roofing.  Several vendors were pushing metal roofing coated with the same ceramic granules that asphalt shingles are coated with.   So the high end, expensive metal roof is made to look like the cheapest available roofing product.

By this logic, the next advance in siding will be made to emulate vinyl siding.

A shudder went down my back as I typed that last sentence.

But there must have been some thought involved at the Lower Merion School District in a Philadelphia suburb.  They managed to enable themselves to spy on the students, even when the students were at home, through the laptop webcams.  This did not just happen.

This leads to the question “How did these people come to be in charge of educating our children?”

Nothing leads a child down the straight and narrow like the feeling of not being trusted, right?

To the end (not that this necessarily constitutes the end), Bayh has been less than helpful to the Democratic Party.  He drops out of the race with a couple of days left to file to run in the primary.   This isn’t enough time for someone to jump in and gather the necessary signatures to get on the primary ballot, so the candidate for the fall would be picked by the Democratic Party.

Except there was one person already out gathering signatures to run in the primary against Bayh.  Tamyra d’Ippolito, a cafe owner in Bloomington, claims to be 1000 signatures away from the number needed to get on the ballot.

I’m not confident she will make it,  but it might have been better if Bayh had waited a day or two.  It is likely that Bayh’s absence really energized d’Ippolito.

If Tamyra d’Ippolito gets the signatures she will be the only senate candidate on the primary ballot.  So she will be the Democratic candidate in the fall.  Judging by her web page, she has no political experience and she has an uphill battle to win.

I think the Democrat’s chances for winning in the fall would be much higher if the party could pick the candidate.

With luck d’Ippolito fails to get the signatures and it will make no difference.  In any event, thank-you Evan Bayh.

Hat tip to TPM.

Former Congressman and 2008 Republican presidential candidate Tom Tancredo told an audience on Thursday at the Tea Party Convention in Nashville that “people who could not even spell the word ‘vote’, or say it in English, put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House.”

“His name,” Tancredo said, “is Barack Hussein Obama.”

It is interesting how all of those voters who cannot spell the word ‘vote’ or say it in English managed to elect the candidate they wanted, isn’t it?

My response to him was that if Cabbagetown constituted a Canadian slum, then Canada was in very good shape indeed.  Yes, the neighborhood did not seem particularly high end, but a slum it was not.

This evening on HGTV’s Property Virgin program was a young man looking for his first house in Toronto.  Two of the houses he looked at were in Cabbagetown.  They were both priced over $550,000.

Geez, $550,000.  In the “slum”.   I guess I could never afford shelter in Toronto (or maybe Cabbagetown isn’t a slum…)

Republicans were crowing about socialism and government takeovers way back in the summer of 2008, and opposing virtually every policy that the Democrats put forth from the first meeting of the 111th Congress last January — a time when Obama’s approval had been in the high 60s. At first, those messages weren’t working for them — they were particularly ineffectual, for instance, for the McCain campaign, and there were lots of stories in the spring about the number of people who identified as Republican slipping to all-time lows. But the GOP stuck by their messaging strategy, and it has allowed them to frame everything that has come thereafter in ways that are more resonant with the public.

This reminds me of the NFC Championship football game between the Saints and the Vikings.  The Saints defensive game plan included an emphasis on hitting Bret Favre.  They got several hits on him but failed to sack him.  Still, they did not change the plan.  Favre threw for 310 yards, but still the Saints worked to hit Favre.  Sure enough, before the game was over, Favre rewarded them by throwing three interceptions (the stats say two because the Saints did not catch one of the balls thrown right to them).

And the Saint won.

When do we get the finding in re the quality of judgment shown by the decision…to Mirandize the underwear bomber?

I believe there was not much shortage of politicians who made public comments to the effect that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab should not have been treated as a criminal but as an enemy combatant.   Now, I am not a lawyer, but I can not help but wonder how many of those politicians helped to pass the laws that Abdulmutallab is now charged with.

It seems to me if you do not want a person who attempts to blow up an airplane treated as a criminal, then why are you criminalizing such behavior?  Oh yes.  To look tough on the subject of terrorism.

“Voters, I believe in being tough on terrorists and that’s why I helped to put laws against blowing up airplanes in the federal criminal code.  Also, because I am tough on terror, I do not believe that any terrorist should face those charges, but instead should be treated as an enemy combatant.”

Or something like that.

I suppose it is possible that treating Abdulmutallab as an enemy combatant still requires that there be established law to charge him with.  But if that established law properly belongs in the federal criminal code,  how is it differentiated from the other law that is subject to such things as Miranda rights?

This being the first time I have posted about Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, I feel compelled to mention that, in the days following Christmas, many radio and tv journalists/announcers avoided pronouncing his name and simply referred to him as “the Nigerian man.”  I thought that rather amusing.

She told me the amount I owed and I handed over the bills while she further explained that the amount was only an estimate and that we would be sent a bill after the system finished calculating the final bill.

???

I told her (with a smile on my face) that any system that could not come up with the final bill right here and now was an ef’ed up system (that’s how I said it).

And I walked away laughing.

The famed efficiency of the private sector.