I felt fine the past two days, so I ate like a normal person yesterday. Woke up with another surprise.

Good God. That means no night out tonight. My one fun day or night scheduled for the whole holiday. Manny Lehman is playing Crobar, so I thought I could finally have some fun.

Can't imagine what would happen if I pour alcohol into these intestines. Or worse, if I avoided them with other chemcials. Can you imagine the fear of being dazed an confused in a city where I know almost no one in the gayboy club scene, fearing loss of control of my sphincter.

That would be a disaster.

I'm so tempted, because my body feels fine, and my spirit feels like I'm in prison.

Plus my boss was a total--let's just wildly unprofessional. But I'm desperate, so I have to put up with working for her.

I hate my life right now. Hate, hate, hate my life.

We all know by now that Tivo is one of the late great inventions of the 20th century.

Relocating most of my existence to Chicago for the time being has only made my heart grow fonder. God I miss being away from my Tivo. Actually coming home to an empty apt, with nothing I want to do but relax for  a little while in front of the tube, and finding nothing there but all that CRAP!

Ugh. How do you people do it?

But then I noticed the downside of Tivo. You're never forced to sit through some of that crap and stumble into something you never would have chosen.

I've been meaning to sample Trading Spaces for years--just to see what the hell people are talking about; I really like to know what people are talking about--but it just held no interest for me.

That's what I thought. I now stand as the last man in America to discover Trading Spaces. And I'm a little irked with all my friends who described the appeal so poorly. They really missed it. And today I'm too lazy to try.

But I really enjoy it, and I'm thinking I might enjoy While You Were Out even more. The premise can be more fun, plus you get to look at Evan Farmer. He's a little goofy and a little slight, but he sure is cute, and he does have a lot of energy and apparently a good heart, which I find really appealing. I  like his goofy bounciness, and it's especially appealing  in such a little hottie. (Too bad about the little. Get that boy to a gym.)

(And get him a new website. The signature pic represents everything cheesy and potentially unappealing about him. Thank God he doesn't act like that on the show. The TLC bio pic provides a much better window into his personality--at least his show-personality--though it might give you the impression he's actually a little dork. Nothing of the sort.)

This is two days old, but worth the wait. (And I was sick when I first saw it, and then locked out of my blog for 24 hours).

It started Friday with a revealing piece in the Times:

Bush Advisers, With Eye on Dean, Formulate '04 Plans

President Bush's campaign has settled on a plan to run against Howard Dean that would portray him as reckless, angry and pessimistic, while framing the 2004 election as a referendum on the direction of the nation more than on the president himself, Mr. Bush's aides say.

Interesting reading there--news flash! the Times writes something interesting about the election! (note to Times editors: it was because the piece relied on reporting rather than analyzing, a consistently embarassing task for your team)--but the real story came when a hot blogger named Atrios (aka Eschaton) picked up the ball and ran with it:

It's a short post, so I'm going to take a little liberty and post the whole thing (and advise you to check out the site--really good stuff there on a regular basis):

So, I didn't go all the way back, but doing a check through a Nexis search of news transcripts back through October, the first appearance of a talking head referring to Dean as "pessimistic" or discussing his "pessimism" was Laura Ingraham on the Friday Dec. 19 Hardball, followed by Mary Matalin on the Sunday Dec. 21 Meet the Press.

Look for it to be coming out of every Republican's mouth soon, and then it will increasingly creep into "objective" reporting. The process will go something like this. First, they'll quote Bush campaign sources describing Dean as "pessimistic." Next, they'll move onto Democratic campaign sources, often anonymous, describing Dean as "pessimistic." Next, they'll stop bothering getting the quote and just write things like, "Some have criticized Dean for his unappealing pessimism..." And, then, finally, process complete, campaign analysis pieces in print and the "objective journalists" on the roundtable shows, will just write/say things like "Dean's pessimistic rhetoric..." By the end no discussion or news story about Dean will see the light of day without the word "pessimism."

Man! Talk about nailing the sloppy media, and how they play right into the hands of the evil spinmiesters. That is exactly how it works.

Bad, bad media. Pitiful media. How can they be so self-unaware.

The good news is that Gore was a big wimp, and his campaign was clueless, and the Rove machine just flattened him, but Dean is a different story altogether. Dean fights back, and a fiesty group called the Dean Defense Forces organized as early as last summer to fight back.

Very fiesty group. Often too fiesty. I was begging some of them last summer to tone it down. That was just the embryonic version of the fight-back forces. It will be a very different response this time around.

Also, those labels tend to stick a little better if they're true, or they at least appear true, and the Rove team chose really poorly with the pessimism. Dean inspires exactly the opposite. Dean lights up his supporters with a message of incredible hope. That--and not the Iraq policy the idiotic politic press keeps pointing to--is what has fueled the Dean phenom.

When they were working with a big, bland, blank canvas like Al Gore, they could paint almost any picture they wanted onto the poor sap and make it stick. Dean already has a personality. Recasting him as a pessimist is likely to prove a bridge way too far.

You're overreaching already Karl. First tangible sign I've seen that understimating Dean may really pay off for the man.

Want to start taking bets?

We never know what's on the horizon to top it, but one story that's hard not to foresee changing most of our lives is the mad cow disease story.

Just one cow, that's all it takes. "That's like saying you only saw one cockroach," my brother said yesterday. If one gets in . . .

Well, one got in, and AP has been reporting that U.S. beef producers have already lost 90% of their exports. Britain fought the problem and fought it, until they finally realized the hard truth: that the only way people were going to start eating their beef again was to slaughter the country's entire cow population. And so they did.

Can you imagine that here? Or what will happen to beef consumption if one cow becomes a hundred? I sure as hell don't want to stop eating beef. Hardly a day goes by when I don't have some. I'm not going to stop eating it the afternoon, but I can easily foresee the day I'm forced to.

I was always skeptical that you could stop something like that at a national boundary, and now one has found its way in. And it's amazing how far and wide one damn cow can travel.

Check out the AP report this morning:

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Investigators disclosed Sunday that they have found meat cut from a Holstein sick with mad cow disease was sent to four more states and one territory.

Dr. Kenneth Petersen, an Agriculture Department veterinarian, said investigators have now determined that some of the meat from the cow slaughtered Dec. 9 went to Alaska, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana and Guam. Earlier, officials had said most of the meat went to Washington and Oregon, with lesser amounts to California and Nevada, for distribution to consumers.

He stressed that the brains had been removed, so the cow posed no threat. But just wait for her little infected friends to appear.

DailyKos throws out a fascinating Stop Dean scenario this morning. (And if you're not reading Kos every day, you're missing out. He has emerged as the best politican writer in the country this season, without ever writing for a "real" publication.)

It starts with this quote from a pretty shitty Washington Post story this morning by the highly uneven Dan Balz:

Bill Carrick, one of Gephardt's advisers, said all the other candidates should be rooting for Gephardt to stop Dean in Iowa. "Every one of them needs us to win," he said. "We have to win Iowa. For better or worse this is Dean-Gephardt right now for the other candidates."

Hard not to see a lot of truth in that one, right? So Kos starts thinking: what if the other campaigns grasp the same truth by Iowa--as Dean looks more and more inevitable, and then:

The Iowa Caucuses are a peculiar beast. People cast an initial ballot for their guy. But, if their guy doesn't break the 15 percent barrier, they can change their vote to a more viable candidate. In essence, supporters will work hard to garner the votes of the other caucus goers to get their guy as many votes as possible.

In the past, each caucus was a self-contained election. There was little the candidates could do to sway the votes of their supporters. But we now have a dandy new tool called the cell phone, and the caucuses may never be the same.

In short, campaign organizers can now call each individual caucus and attempt to move their supporters en masse to whatever candidate they choose.

He fleshes out the scenarios quite nicely, and it might only take one campaign doing it--or even lots of caucusers knowing it--to eke out a victory for Gephardt in a close contest.

Scared me for a minute, but I was buoyed by the fact that a group of Dems are about as likely to get that organized and work together that well to defeat a common adversary as the outcasts on Survivor are to topple an alliance. You can watch week after week and scream at the television: "You can stop them! All you have to do is work together--it's so obvious!" until you're blue in the face. (Almost) never happens.

The second problem is that while stopping Dean has to be the #1 priority for every other campaign, they also know that the press is dying to turn this into a two-man race. That will happen eventually, but the real question is whether it will happen to late for any of them. But the only thing worse for them than a delay is to get boxed out as the alternative.

If Gep wins Iowa and the press--stupidly, but just watch them--christens the nom a Dean-Gephardt race, then they're really screwed.

So they might be more afraid of getting squeezed out before they get their shot at Dean than they are at Dean surging ahead a little longer.