September

The 1st of September gives me an excuse to blog about time, or at least this time of year.

I miss the passing of August. Congress is gone, we spend a week in the Outer Banks, the kids are still out of school and generally much less scheduled, and football season has not yet started.

All that ends in September. Congress will be slammed trying to pass health care and get an energy and climate bill through the Senate in the next two months - where I get to redebate off shore drilling for the umpteenth time since 1985 - and Ariadne will start a new school, Burke, on September 8th.

Those are significant.

One insignificant thing that bothers me is how the Post's sports page goes from being a section devoted to all sports to one that exclusively belongs to our local, offensively-named football team. I've never liked the 'redskins' and like them even less having moved here. And the Post makes that worse but devoted articles to Daniel Snyder's temper tantrums, Clinton Portis' costumes, and every other mundane detail in between.

But this is a 'redskins' town, something even Obama can't change.

A few more sports notes

• Perhaps undercutting my previous rant, the Post also devoted a substantial column to a wrap up of the English Premier (football) League in Sunday's paper. That same space only had three paragraphs devoted to Major League Soccer, our domestic league. I wonder how much that kind of coverage hurts the development of the MLS. It's easy to catch their games on basic cable, a situation that will get worse - at least from MLS' perspective - now that ESPN as opposed to the Fox Soccer Channel has the US broadcast rights to the EPL. I imagine quite a few serious soccer fans eschew the MLS since it's easy to follow the world's best soccer league via cable, the web and now papers like the Post.
• One other note from Sunday's papers. The front page of the NY Times carried a story on Florida losing population for the first time since World War II. The mortgage and housing crisis is cited, but I also wonder if Florida is finally choking on it's own vomit. That crisis was simply the cherry on top of a state full of sprawl, crowded schools, and way too many t-shirt shops. And as Jon Stewart has noted - and Carl Hiassen has made a living chronicling - thanks to Terry Chiavo, Burmese python attacks, etc. Florida has surpassed California as the state most full of crazy people and bizarre stories. FInally, the politics there have gotten terrible, with evangelicals and suburbanites dominating state-level politics, slashing services and trying to carry out a gun-centric, anti-gays/women/choice/environmental agenda from Tallahassee. All those chickens seem to be coming home to roost (though in fairness I doubt many have moved out due to the politics, though I bet a few did in the wake of the Chiavo thing).