Everyone has their Howard Hughes Moment; some more so than others. Use-while-you-hobnob vials of antibacterial hand cleaner were made for guys like Glenn Reynolds.

I was happy to be reminded by my computer that we'd gained an extra hour this morning. At the tail end of a blog-free weekend, I spent the whole time without "the urge" and at the start of this entry, I'm still not all too eager to sit down and type. Loss of interest? Nah. I'd attribute it to the fact that every now and then a task or hobby loses its appeal for a few days, but after constantly losing my attention while watching Fox News Sunday this morning, it would seem more a case of a news lull.

How is Iraq? It's progressing, slowly; ultimately, security will require the pacification of terror sources in Tehran, Damascus and Riyadh. Until then, how many times can Paul Bremer sit in front of a television camera and remind the public how many years of dedicated work are necessary to create and stabilize a democracy?

Stateside, we're hearing a familiar refrain. Senate Republicans are trying their best to redefine another setback against Democratic obstruction. Filibuster? Not a chance - not when questionably effectives, parliamentary run-arounds are possible! Little change from earlier this year. Not much change from when Trent Lott was majority or minority leader.

Not much else to talk about, especially on a weekend.

I added Who Framed Roger Rabbit to my tiny DVD collection; the movie was playing in an Albany audio-visual outlet called Coconuts and I couldn't get it out of my head, so I bought it Friday at Blockbuster. Though Roger is as annoying as he was over fifteen (fifteen!) years ago, the movie remains a classic. It's also a milestone: during the 1986 production, Robert Zemeckis did not use computer graphics for the animation.

Cell animation in a computer-dominated age will probably live out the same fate as claymation: they might return for nostalgia's sake, and then only as long as it takes before random generation can accurately mimic the characteristic flaws of both techniques. Can't see it happening? Even though tape can be found in many a studio, audio production is full of analog simulators. Every step digital technology, pictures or sounds, takes towards "analog" resolution lessens the physical value and uniqueness of the older physical tools.

Then again, the mystery of the medium could defy our attempts at progress: oil paints have been at the forefront of Western painting since the Renaissance. The simplest stuff - ground pigment in a linseed oil vehicle - and it can't be duplicated. Watercolor is no comparison; gouache is too specialized; acrylic just doesn't possess the same properties of color, brightness, texture or consistency. I should know about the last medium's comparison to oil. I used acrylic when I started painting in high school and thought it superior; when I discovered that the Syracuse painting department taught all basic classes in oil, I actually considered refusing. Needless to say, I can't remember the last time I painted a canvas with acrylic.

So - Roger Rabbit, an indulgence in the old ways as the last of its kind? Or a charming creation for an ambitious film house to return to? I'll hedge my bets; either way, I've got the proof.

I walked out of Blockbuster carrying a rented copy of bioethics cautionary Gattaca, too. How many movies succeed without a single glaring flaw or oversight? Not many. Gattaca's one. I've only seen the movie three or four times and it stands up brilliantly to the additional scrutiny. The plot is perfect, moving through a seamless, graceful, rhythmic script. The writers, directors and producers knew a thing or two about timeless movies: by not trying to make a philosophical film all things to audiences, their finished product will undoubtedly entertain beyond its time. Focus, nuance, discretion. What we need to know about the Gattaca's future world is given to us. Most films fail with too little explanation (City of Lost Children); some clot dialogue and footage with too much and push the movie into corniness, implausibility or worse (Dark City). In Gattaca, we're given just enough of everything: suspense, pathos, romance, science-fiction and action.

Even moral plays. The DVD happened to provide some additional scenes cut from the movie release - these scenes contributed to what must be one of the valuable cutting room floors in the last decade. I was surprised to see one of the scenes dive headlong into a clear pro-life statement. "What will happen to the other embryos?" asks Vincent's mother.

"They're not babies," smiles the doctor. The dialogue and blocking were obviously slanted to show the doctor's perspective as chilly. Sharply politically incorrect for the late Nineties Hollywood; a subtly religious scene like that would be forbidden today, especially with the cloning debate rising in pitch. But on a more practical level, the extended scene didn't fit. The movie's point about custom-made children had been made, so this wasn't necessary. It was cut.

Production management was another model for near-perfection; is it Two Thousand and Something or 1952? Doesn't matter - the hybrid world is a convincing future. Nothing needs to be explained, so why dwell on it?

The characters certainly don't. Jude Law's tragic wit doesn't lose its appeal after several viewings, either; he works well with Ethan Hawke's eternally likeable protagonist. Uma Thurman plays the exclusive-school uberbabe deadpan, showing emotion in about one out of every five lines. Gore Vidal murders somebody - for science, just like we always knew he would (I'd have warned you about a spoiler but really, the movie is as enjoyable with as it is without prior knowledge). Finally, I returned to the idea that although I am functionally right-handed, my dominant side - eye, hand, foot - is actually my left. Or, as my folks maintain, I began ambidextrous. (If you've seen the movie, you'll be familiar with the line that reminded me.)

Five bucks for an incredible flick that, low profile notwithstanding, will easily find its place among the last century's greats. And my own collection.

Good weekend? Good weekend. I accomplished a bundle of tasks in between the movies, too. And, looking over the last hour's typographical handiwork, I've more than made up for two days' absence. Well, then, let's see what this week has to offer, yes?

The magazine he drew for really doesn't see the whole picture. Andrew Sullivan found a subtle revision of history in the latest issue:

Classic little throw-away in a New Yorker essay this week:

The other day at the Pierre Hotel, Mikhail Gorbachev, the man who ended the Cold War, was in an elevator...

Yes, and the United States had nothing to do with it.

If the New Yorker did sports, last week's headline story would begin with, "The Chicago Cubs, who ended this year's National League Championship series..."

I'm sorry to see the legend of the Billy Goat Curse rear its ugly head; I was pulling for you guys myself. Like any contender, if the Cubbies can figure out how they ended up in the playoffs, they can find themselves at the Series' doorstep again next year.

I'm pulling for the Red Sox even though my original rationale is no longer applicable. A Sox-Cubbies World Series, you see, would have not only invited an interesting possibility of Armageddon - as my cousin in the Windy City suggested - or match up two teams that haven't been given the chance for a trophy in a while. Most importantly, regardless of who represents the National League, a Red Sox win keeps the Yankees out.

Apologies to Yankees fans - most of my father's side of the family is fiercely loyal to the best team in baseball. You've just got to understand: contempt for the Yankees is sheer jealousy. It's ingrained. It shares a few parts-per-million in our water with fluoride. We despise the Yankees because they've always had the magic touch and always will. The greatest resources, the best players, the best record. They'll always dominate the game. And we can't stand them for that. Indians and Red Sox fans are to the New York Yankees as the French and the Germans are to the United States Military.

The California scandals continue. Andrew Sullivan excerpts Daniel Weintraub's account of Schwarzenegger's Election Eve rallies:

Arnold Schwarzenegger plays guitar while Twisted Sister singer Dee Snider sings the campaign anthem, "We're not gonna take it." The rally at the state Capitol drew about 10,000 supporters and was a rainbow of ages, races and social status. No wonder the Democrats fear Schwarzenegger.

Ah, but how deep does that hipness run? Consider the following travesty: hum the hook for Snider's 1984 Devil-May-Care-Youth-Rebellion-With-Crossdressing-Optional rock anthem. Do the first two-and-a-half measures sound familiar? They should - they're melodically identical to the traditional Christmas carol "O Come, All Ye Faithful." Fast-and-loose Arnold may turn out to be an elected variation of Senator Chuck Schumer's so-called "stealth" candidates. What of the implications for Twisted Sister's Triple-Platinum Stay Hungry? I suspect the handiwork of clean-cut ballad czar Pat Boone.

If technology were a boxer I'd be technically knocked out. I lost a battle to a laptop at work yesterday - to be continued today - and through some bungling of legendary proportions, I managed to have this site pulled down for the better part of eight hours this morning. I've outdone myself, wouldn't you say?

More later.

For children, rabbits should be left to imagination - that way, nobody gets hurt.

I'm not the one to direct a person to animal-care informational sites - "animal rights" goosesteppers drive me mad - but after reading this column in National Review today I couldn't help but remember when my friends and I stumbled upon a rabbit warren. In our youthful, blissful stupidity, we children ended up driving the mother away and killing (mostly indirectly, we tried to be gentle) all but one of them. I still feel like I should be paying reparations to bunnies - if they ever formed a government, of course, to send the checks to.

There's a connection between premature bunny expiration and Mrs. Gurdon's children. I offered this helpful site if any doubt remained in her mind why the family pet chose early admission to the great clover patch in the sky.

My own advice to her? Try a dog next time. They're durable.

ALSO: And, speak of the long-eared devil, Anna is back!

Yesterday's downpours beginning in late morning, I forgot to say, ended up brightening the "dreary" day even before clouds broke that evening. I'm not certain what it was about the rain; perhaps the crisp autumn scent, an absence of the earthy aroma you smell in summer - if for nothing else, a pleasant change. The temperature was just right, too: a solid seventy degrees, not the frigid shower that makes at least some of us more than happy to battle with snow for four or five months (not as damp, better looking). And the relentless cascade was heartening, last call for all things green before moisture is served only as morning dew and varying degrees of frozen droplets. As the boss noted, we took in more rainwater than with Isabel.

Today, as any first day after a low-pressure front, climbs into the official ranks of "glorious." A steady breeze is pushing a host of cumulus to the east. I just caught sight of some seagulls, venturing in from the lake, stationary as they hung in the air, westbound, against the wind. Absent haze, the sky is one of those purer blues you'd readily look for in a Crayola box back in elementary school. The sun is neither obscured nor oppressive; it's just right. Magnificent stuff.

I'm still undecided as to whether the weather is acting as a natural opiate or whether I may simply be jaded to the biggest politics of the day. Bush goes to the United Nations today; Germany is conciliatory, Russia is brilliantly sly, France is scheming. A large portion of the president's audience will be representatives from nations who saw Iraqi freedom as either an impossibility, a trade embargo or an ideological affront. The table has been set for a few months. Does the United States need additional troops? Perhaps, but how well can you bail water when you can't plug the holes? What Iraq truly needs for its security is for Damascus and Tehran to be best noted over the next few months for public displays of their former regimes - Ba'athist and Islamist, respectively - hanging. That's what new divisions of American soldiers could occupy themselves with (undoubtedly aided, at least in Iran, by a popular revolt).

Iraqis themselves aren't particularly fond of neighbors, Arab or not, who led cheers for a dictator who abused them for twenty years; so the multicultural drive for different "faces" on the ground, as if this were a politically correct breakfast cereal commerical, is poorly reasoned at best. It's difficult to mask the rationale of adding foreign troops to offset our own as targets - that's pretty cynical, and makes a flimsy case that foreign troops already in theatre (British, Polish) aren't the only ones with the equipment and training (or numbers) to actually aid the American force.

And money - money? As it's been noted, the same opposition voices nagging the White House for money in Afghanistan have turned into well-meaning misers for none other than the federal government's primary purpose of defending the nation's security via Iraq. Yes, yes: the budget is bloated and Bush has played a part. But it's largely domestic spending - and much of it politically motivated. We are in a war. Funny how Congress, Democrat or Republican, considers cutting the military before pork.

Most of this shale will, hopefully, be smashed by White House momentum gained from Bush's speech today: Iraq can become a shining example of Near East democracy, and the beginning of the end of Islamic terrorism. If the war fails here, legitimate infrastructure spending won't mean a damn. As Condoleezza Rice put it, "freedom is priceless."

Brit Hume's interview with Bush in the Oval Office, which aired last night, followed well with words from Fred Barnes earlier in the evening: the president is giving the United Nations a gigantic benefit of the doubt, going so far in the interview as to compliment the international bureaucracy as being "good at" writing constitutions. The interview itself - I thought, at least - was untimely for any significant policy expounding or revelation. No president would risk tipping his hand the night before a diplomatic challenge, so Jacque Chirac ends up being described as "strong-willed." Intriguing as Hume's questions on Democrat challengers were, Bush was right: Why worry about them now when only one candidate is the real electoral threat? Hume followed up this - does it matter if the Democrats are, in a vacuum, trying to define issues? Bush felt confident that he could maintain his own conversation with the country.

A guarded interaction with Hume, in summary. What Bush seemed to be hinting at, though, gives today's events even more significance: Wait until the United Nations address. So, with some predictions and suggestions, we wait. And keep hope.

UPDATE: The speech was consistent with Bush's foreign policy and defiant of enabler nations' opportunism. Even the Christian Science Monitor concedes that the president has held firm to his beliefs; Clifford May of National Review picks up where the Monitor leaves out (as in, the president's strongest words):

[There] is no neutral ground. All governments that support terror are complicit in a war against civilization.

[T]hose who incite murder and celebrate suicide...have no place in any religious faith, they have no claim on the world's sympathy, and they should have no friend in this chamber.

A suitably disappointed Reagan-era bureaucrat was quoted in the Monitor article lamenting the president's unapologetic tone but indirectly acknowledged that, ultimately, it is the Constitution of the United States to which Bush is accountable, not the United Nations General Assembly - a stubborn fact of democratic sovereignty that internationalists often ignore.

May says it best: "[S]peaking frankly and truthfully to the members of the U.N. - as Jeane Kirkpatrick and Daniel Patrick Moynihan used to do - is a tradition worth reviving."

Busy, caffeinated, wrapped in dreary, overcast skies. This past weekend was a movie weekend - Star Trek: First Contact, Patton, and Citizen Kane. The first two I've seen before (and enjoy, though the antiheroism in Patton wore me out this time around), so I'll try to put together a film amateur's review of Citizen Kane this evening or tomorrow. Bravo, Mr. Welles. Until then, let Jay Nordlinger add a little levity to your day:

Said the AP in a lead, "The economy is improving for the super rich." Way to go, AP! You too can work for a Democratic presidential candidate!

Just think: from the 1950s to the late 1980s, that sort of partisan sloganeering was considered objective, mainstream journalism for the newspaper, radio and television. Yesterday afternoon I read that England's Daily Mirror began as the socialist-enabler Labor paper, as in "their paper." How many people keep that in mind when dropping the Mirror's finest into proper context? In the 19th Century, the proud partisanship of American newspapers was their primary attraction to one audience or another. Then came "objectivity," may it rest in peace. Today's mainstream vogue is a variety of perspectives, and Fox News deserves some credit for maintaining a healthy complement of articulate leftists as a foil to its rightward cast. Do we really need the veneer of absolute neutrality paraded around any longer, like that fellow at NPR who claimed in the last days of 2001 that he worked for "history"? Clocks work for history, buddy.

Nordlinger's all over the peanut gallery/Weekly World News style of Democrat red meat speeches; the Patriot Act as scapegoat; Muzak; and much, much more.

Busy. Blogging will be a rarity until this evening, when, incidentally, Isabel's remnants finally slip off to the north to leave nothing but sunshine.

In the meantime, read this incredible first sign of Iraq's youth embracing freedom and laying foundations for a peaceful, stable, prosperous future. (Via Andrew Sullivan.)

And take a look at a sky full of Koi-Nobori from this past April's Flying Carp Festival in Japan.

UPDATE: Couldn't pass this one up. IP reminds us exactly why New Europe gets it. The stronger those former Soviet satellites become over the next decades, you realize, the less direct power America will need to project - we'll have fully modern and savvy allies capable of keeping the peace and pressing despots into permanent retirement.

UPDATE II: After five. You know you've been earning your wages when you look up and notice that everybody in the office (and building, it's a Friday) has left. Even after you'd bid half of them a pleasant weekend.

So where is that sun we'd been promised? Cloud cover is gossamer, now; fair enough. Full sunshine by seven is reasonable, yes? I'll have the camera out.