The Appendix Is Not Neccesary

I have completed War and Peace! All 1247 pages (including the 30-or-so pages of notes)!

I received this bundle of pages, this devastator of the wilderness as a Christmas present. So it took me a little less than 5 months of heaving and hauling it's gargantuan mass from the floor to the bed to the desk to complete the reading.

There's a lot of stuff in this book. Even after you've finished pushing through the four giant "Volumes", there's the Epilogue and the Appendix. The epilogue is a brief treatise in the philosophy of history and free-will. The Appendix is, I guess, like a polite F-you to Tolstoy's contemporary critics.

I read the appendix. Though I was tempted not to, since it was clearly labeled "Appendix" and we all know that the appendix is not necessary. However, I figured that I had already come so far, I could take ten more minutes to complete the book. And boy, you know, I didn't need to do that.

Golf? Yes, Golf.

So this weekend is the Masters golf tournament. It's actually about to wrap up in the next hour or so. I don't know much about golf. I mean, I know Tiger Woods, but I honestly never watch golf.

But for whatever reason, I am finding golf incredibly interesting. I am fascinated by this tournament.

So I find myself not only watching golf, but enjoying it. Craving it. What are the implications of this? Is it a sign that I am getting old?

Doing Anything to Win?

The big news for Democrats this morning is former presidential candidate Bill Richardson throwing his support behind Obama. It's another blow to Clinton's candidacy. Over the next few days it's possible that many prominent democrats who have been on the sidelines will drop their impartiality. So big news.

But I wanted to draw your attention to another article in the Times. This one about the role that Hillary Clinton played in the Northern Ireland Accord. Reading that article it seems apparent that Clinton's claims of being intimately involved in the process and playing an important role are not an exaggeration. She may not have been at the top of the food-chain, but she was on the scene and she was very involved in one of the more triumphant foreign-policy achievements of the Clinton administration.

The part of the article I found most significant:

The Obama campaign has responded by accusing Mrs. Clinton of exaggerating her specific role and general experience. Some of the sharpest language has come in a memorandum written by Greg Craig, a foreign policy adviser to Mr. Obama...

“It is a gross overstatement of the facts for her to claim even partial credit for bringing peace to Northern Ireland,” Mr. Craig wrote in the foreign policy memorandum, which has been distributed to reporters. Though Mrs. Clinton traveled abroad as first lady and had some contact with Irish women’s groups, he added, “at no time did she play any role in the critical negotiations that produced the peace.”

So that's basically a slander against Hillary Clinton because she's a woman, right? If I'm not misreading that memo, it's basically saying "Hillary may have done some women-y stuff while the men were making everything happen. She couldn't have been involved in important decisions."

It's misogynistic and, judging from the article, a fabrication. The author disparages a fellow democrat, calls her a liar, and smears her reputation in order to win a few political points for his candidate.

This comes directly from the Obama campaign.