I'm watching the C-SPAN tribute to Ann Richards, the feisty and wholly wonderful former governer of Texas, giving her address at the 1988 Democratic National Convention. Ms. Richards died this past week, and the world is a little greyer without her.

I daresay that if my party had any stones whatever, they would have run Ann as the candidate for President in 1988. I think Dukakis was and is a very good man, and at the time that Ann was only state treasurer, but surely no democratic candidate other than Clinton had that ability to connect with an audience, and Ann had the added fillip of being not only charismatic, charming and strong, but unassailable.

Ann Richards was perhaps this countries greatest missed opportunity.

For god's sake Hillary, take some notes.

Am I the only one that finds the Audrey Hepburn Gap commercial to be cringe-inducing? "Funny Face" era Audrey morphed into dancing to AC/DC to sell the new "skinny pants". So wrong on so many different levels, I cannot even start to list them all.

In Rememberance



They were not beloved when they were built, indeed they were seen as dinosaurs: the last gasp of urban-planning gone bad. They were in a sterile plaza that demolished the street grid of Lower Manhattan, a plaza so windswept that navigating it was nigh unto impossible. As an object, the cool beauty of the twin towers was successful as art, as a building it was less successful.

But I came across this image and it reminded me of how lovely the towers were, and on the anniversary of the horror that consumed so many lives, I thought a short elegy to their beauty was apt.