Since we've come to the end of a palindromic year, it's fitting to send it out in the spirit it entered: wary and with extreme suspicion. The Lady R and your narrator are off to an extended wine tasting that will require considerable restraint on at least one of our parts to ensure a safe return home. The New Year's blog is virtually in the bag so all that's left to do is laugh in the face of danger and dare them to catch us.

This Stalinist-era Polish propaganda, "Don't fill up wrong," is an example of the industrial messages we've been battling all year. For what are eyes but the windshields of the soul, and the images that race by outside only suggest our relative position in space—we determine our conceptual orientation. Opening the door is purely the prerogative of the operator and you might want to leave it locked. We urge you to roll down the windows at the very least, or join us as we get out and run down the center line.

Dressed to the nines and ready to socialize, at the time of this writing fireworks are going off all around the compound; low-scudding rainclouds and fog make the upcoming drive an exercise in treachery with rare vintages at the finish line. Have fun tonight, because you survived magnificent odds.

9:22:15 PM       

Every now and then the mosquitoes get so annoying that you bring your hand up and slap at 'em. Sometimes you're even lucky enough to terminate one of the little devils.

So Who Is the Mosquito?

A bunch of likely candidates come to mind. How about Elizabeth Osder? A professor at USC's School of Journalism, she said, "Bloggers are navel-gazers, and they're about as interesting as friends who make you look at their scrap books." She'll probably lament that remark as much as Bill Gates regrets saying that "640k will be enough for anybody."

Was that Trent Lott we heard buzzing right before the smack? While the conventional wisdom holds that it was bloggers who kept the heat on Trent Lott's gaffe, we agree that this wasn't so much a case of blog triumphalism as much as it highlighted the role that blogging can play in tandem with mainstream journalism:

"What we're seeing more and more are webloggers breaking niche stories, and thus serving as an early warning system for traditional journalists."

If the TSA employees involved in the incident at Portland International did not violate the policy by requiring a pregnant woman to expose herself in public, will the policy be amended to allow pregnant women to be searched in private?

Consider this quote about the nature of bureaucracies:

Government bureaucracies do not have such a clear gauge of their success or failure. They do not go broke, they do not count profits, and they can claim great credit when their actions are popular without asking if their actions are effective or efficient. This does not mean that the effectiveness of government bureaucracies cannot be measured. But often it simply isn't measured.

Recently, many political scientists have proposed that measures of government effectiveness be required. [Stark (2000): Sociology]

3:07:08 PM