Avram's journal

I was reading this mediocre essay by Jonathan Chait on Robert Bork, and I was struck with an impulse to read up on the Watergate scandal. What’s the link? Bork had been Solicitor General at the time Nixon tried to quash the investigation, and had wound up in charge of the Justice Department after the Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General had both resigned rather than fire the investigator. Bork did the firing.

This led to the creation of the Office of the Independent Council, a check on the growing power of the executive. I’d known that the office had since expired, but I hadn’t known when: At midnight on the 11th of September, 2001.

akawil tells me that this isn’t quite as eerie a coincidence as it might seem: The reason it expired then was because that was the first day Congress was back in session after summer recess; since Al Qaeda was aiming to hit Congress with United Airlines Flight 93, they’d chosen this day. But it looks to me like the recess ended the previous Tuesday, Sep 4th.

So, I’ve been really slack on my eating and exercise for about the past eight months or so. As in, lots, and crappy and pretty much not at all respectively. I’ve gained back, well, not all the weight I’ve lost, but more than half of it. My clothes are tight, and I feel like crap. And I’ve only gotten up and gone to the gym like twice in the three weeks since I rejoined.

Today I ate more crap for breakfast, and felt pretty awful for the next few hours — not guilty awful, but tired and sick and cranky awful. Though some of that might be ’cause I got to bed at 6 AM last night. (Games Club post coming up next.)

I tottered around the City Hall area, doing some electronic shopping I wanted to get done before Worldcon. I’ve now got a cellphone, the cheapest one I could get on T-Mobile’s pay-as-you-go plan. And I’ve got a new portable CD player, with MP3 capability and real battery life.

I noticed a much higher than usual proportion of anti-Bush, anti-RNC, anti-Iraq-war, and pro-abortion-rights buttons, signs, stickers, and t-shirts on passers by as I wandered around. When I got back to the WTC Path station, it was surrounded by demonstrators ringing bells to memorialize the dead and “ring out” Bush. The cumulative effect of all the bells was pretty eerie and other-worldly, like a spirits-of-the-dead scene in a Miyazaki movie. I was tempted to get a bell (I was told someone was handing them out) and walk a full circle around the site, but tired and sick and cranky, and also needing a bathroom.

Here’s the good part: After I got home (stopping off at Ground for a cold drink, a political argument, and reading a couple chapters of The Well of Lost Plots), got the cellphone plugged in and charging, figured out how to put together the CD player, I noticed I felt better. More than that, I felt a strong aversion to junk food, and a craving for fruit and veggies. With luck this’ll last into tomorrow, and maybe even sprout a craving for exercise. It feels like a return to the healthy mindset I was in a year ago.

Now it’s time to figure out how to screen-scrape the Noreascon program and chunk it into a set of Palm Datebook appointments.

The Black Table reviews proposals for the World Trade Center memorial:

It's not that these potential memorials lack the appropriate gravitas or are altogether terrible, it's just that they all feel the same. From the street level, in the shadow of a massive new World Trade Center, passersby will likely see a park. Or a reflecting pool. Or some lights. Or some combination of the three. It's as if it were half-price day on "running water over engraved stone" at the old idea shop and all these guys had coupons.