a couple of great reads that i found over at the new yorker: a completely engrossing 8,000+ word interview with alec baldwin…

He bought a coffee at Starbucks, where a young woman said something nice about “30 Rock.” “I do feel I’m entering that Clinton phase,” he said after we left. “I’m fifty. There are women who’ll go up to a young movie star and they’ll look at him, like, ‘There are certain things I really want to do with you, and it’s pretty plain to anyone why I’d want to do them with you.’ And then there are people who look at me now, at my age, and they’ll look at me and the look is ‘I can’t explain why, because it’s kind of strange . . .’ It confounds and perplexes even them. ‘In spite of the fact that you don’t look like a young leading man anymore, I’d quite like to throw you down on this blanket right now.’ A bit of that.”

…and a particularly succinct (if perhaps a little breathless) pro-Obama editorial. if you know any swing voters, send them to this link…

By contrast, Obama’s transformative message is accompanied by a sense of pragmatic calm. A tropism for unity is an essential part of his character and of his campaign. It is part of what allowed him to overcome a Democratic opponent who entered the race with tremendous advantages. It is what helped him forge a political career relying both on the liberals of Hyde Park and on the political regulars of downtown Chicago. His policy preferences are distinctly liberal, but he is determined to speak to a broad range of Americans who do not necessarily share his every value or opinion. For some who oppose him, his equanimity even under the ugliest attack seems like hauteur; for some who support him, his reluctance to counterattack in the same vein seems like self-defeating detachment. Yet it is Obama’s temperament—and not McCain’s—that seems appropriate for the office both men seek and for the volatile and dangerous era in which we live. Those who dismiss his centeredness as self-centeredness or his composure as indifference are as wrong as those who mistook Eisenhower’s stolidity for denseness or Lincoln’s humor for lack of seriousness.

i’m very excited that obama is going to be the president because he is going to fix climate change, terrorism, the economy and basically eliminate famine, injustice and evil. this will take about 2 weeks. then he will take us aboard the mothership and we will all transcend into the singularity.

something else that got my attention over the weekend: a new dvd documentary on arthur lee and love is coming out. hooray!