I'm feeling kind of groggy today. Our voyage back from Champaign was greatly slowed down by a delayed connecting flight in Las Vegas, so we ended up getting home well after 1am. The Vegas airport is a bit of a culinary wasteland, at least on the A and B concourses. As a consolation, they offer free wi-fi, which is depressingly rare in the airports I travel through. There were also iPod vending machines, a horrifying concept all on its own.
We were flying US Airways yesterday, a company that always amuses me with its logo: an American flag rendered in black and white, with an atrophied, starless field and the wrong number of stripes. I think the effect they were going for is "national pride reduced to soul-crushing bar-code." Anyway, their latest strategy to make ends meet in the tough airline business involves finding new ways to advertise to the passenger, right down to making the tray table into a personal billboard. The in-flight movie on the way to Vegas was
Lucky You, which is all about poker. I had to wonder if this was maybe an indirect paid advertisement, placed there to soften up the incoming tourists. The film was fairly lame. Drew Barrymore's character was paper-thin, and Eric Bana did a lot of unsubtle emoting through expression and posture, which looked pretty damn silly during the poker scenes.
On the trip home I finished Michael Chabon's most recent book,
The Yiddish Policemen's Union. It was really excellent. The author manages to be remarkably faithful to the hard-boiled detective genre while twisting each of its conventions into the something unexpected. The language is smart and artful, peppered throughout with the sort of left-field imagery that should by all rights sound forced but somehow doesn't. The story is affecting, the scene well set, and the characters fully developed. The book was a surprisingly quick read; if, like me, you've got a large backlog of books to read, I'd recommend letting this one jump the queue. Now I return to my Harry Potter re-read mission.
The news of Alberto Gonzales' resignation is very welcome to me. It is comforting to see another of Bush's faithful lose power, even if he will not face any sort of real justice. The Senate should take its confirmation power seriously this time around and make sure we get someone who values the Constitution a little more for his replacement.
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