Daily Blague

Thank heavens, Fossil Darling survived yesterday's steam pipe explosion. He wasn't anywhere near Grand Central Terminal yesterday, but hope does spring eternal. I spoke to him an hour ago, and he's just fine - isn't that nice.

If I don't worry much about terrorist attacks on New York, it's not because of optimism. It's because I live in a badly ageing city. The place is falling apart without any help from Osama. The one thing that we Gothamites share with the rest of the United States is a restless discomfort with the concept of maintenance. Upkeep. Do we have to?

It's  great to have Gail Collins back as an Op-Ed columnist. She gives great smackdown.

McCain campaigns have a history of misjudging the public. His advisers firmly believed his heroism as a prisoner of war would win him piles of votes. While that sounds perfectly rational, the fact is that with the exception of a few generals who actually ran a war, voters haven’t awarded points for military valor since we stopped having Whigs.

Here's a sentence for the ages: A O Scott on the new film, Hairspray.

The songs, by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, are usually adequate, occasionally inspired, and rarely inane.

Faint praise on steroids!

I saw an old movie last night. Random Harvest. One of those titles that I've always heard but never seen. Greer Garson, Ronald Colman. World War I. Amnesia, shell-shock. MGM house style almost suffocates the story before it can get going, but the atmosphere of cliché is agreeably perfumed by the two really magnificent performances.

The death of opera tenor Jerry Hadley (who sang Flamand at the first performance of Richard Strauss's Capriccio that I got to see) is strangely upsetting.