Electric Josh

Oooh! A massive rock slide shut down part of Montpelier yesterday. [Update: Dad has pictures.] This is actually the second massive rock slide below Cliff Street in recent memory. The first one was about ten years ago, and it crushed my friend Chris's thankfully former apartment, which was on Elm Street right at the bottom of the cliff. (The lot was just big enough to contain a gravel parking spot last time I looked.) I had spent a decent fraction of the evenings of the Summer of 1992 hanging out with all the old high school friends in that apartment discovering that I'm bad at chess, even when my opponent has had substantially more to drink than me, learning and then forgetting the rules to at least half a dozen card games that I'd be hard pressed even to name correctly, and accidentally memorizing every lyric and note on Primus's Frizzle Fry and Ministry's The Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste. We all used to wonder how painfully we would die if the cliff collapsed on us, except for the one guy who lived up on Cliff Street itself (which, perhaps unsurprisingly, is a real steep street!), who instead wondered if his house were set back sufficiently far from the cliff itself to avoid having to worry. (It has proven to be far enough back.) Good times. At any rate, one of Barb's coworkers sent pictures that she forwarded that I'll post at some point.
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So we're no longer quite so sick. This is good.
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Okay, just this one: Fear destroys what bin Laden could not. It's a late Christmas present: acknowledgement from somewhere in actual printed Press-land that maybe this whole being so afraid of the turrists that we compromise a whole bunch of core national values thing just maybe might not be very good for democracy, nor probably, indeed, even our own self interest. Snap quiz: Which two presidents, facing what seemed at the time to be dire, nation-crushing threats—worldwide economic collapse in the first case and global nuclear war (none of this pansy one-American-city whining) in the other—said, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself?" So now I'll shut up about politics again for a while.
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