Work work work, work work work... Hello boys, I missed you!

Looooong time gone. For that, I lay the blame squarely at the feet of a highly challenging and deeply engaging job. That, and of course Wyatt, recently turned 1. Both are gratifying in the extreme, to be sure, but the tradeoff is collected from my cache of free time. And so.

Three items I feel obliged to sound off on:

Hillary Clinton
Obama wrapped up the nomination yesterday. And even though she wasn't my candidate, I have to say I admire and respect the support and momentum Clinton was able to cultivate. She proved out as a formidable political force, not just a holdover icon of the 90s. A real and undeniable movement coalesced around her candidacy — for which Obama deserves at least part of the credit — and I for one am glad she stuck with it as long as she did. She should stand up proudly at the convention in Denver and take every vote she gets like a badge of honor. She earned every last one of them.

The M******s
Oh the humanity. Somehow, part of me finds a little bit of solace in the fact that they're sucking this much — it makes the season more interesting than if they were just mostly sucking. Heads will, must, roll after a debacle of these proportions. It's nothing less than a fiasco.

Read a very disturbing statistic in the Times today: no team in history has ever spent $100 million and lost 100 games in the same season. The Ms are very much on pace to be the first.

It hurts, but it hurts with a wry smile. Like I keep telling Maus, this is what being a fan is all about. It's 90% pain. (I did grow up in a Chicago Cubs household, after all.)

Best Picture
Maus and I finally saw Juno, thus completing at long last our goal of seeing all 5 Best Picture nominees (a feat that before we became parents was reliably accomplished within 2 weeks of the Oscars). I have to say, this year's pack of nominees was the tightest, strongest field I've seen in a very long time. I'd be really hard pressed to pick a winner from this bunch.

There Will Be Blood was, for me, the weakest of the 5, although buoyed by a(nother) remarkable performance by Daniel Day-Lewis. Michael Clayton was a great movie, and certainly a worthy Best Picture nominee, if not a Best Picture.

The other three, though, are damn near a deadlock for me. No Country For Old Men was, as one comes to expect from the Coens, something very new and very different. Those guys defy the conventional “laws” of cinematic expression — you can never see what's coming in a Coen Brothers movie. Old Men, however, was not their magnum opus. But it was impressive.

Atonement was easily the most beautiful movie of the year. And also the most fascinating. Like Old Men, it took me in directions I didn't see coming. And then, of course, there's the delightful Juno, which was everything a movie should be. Maus nailed it when she said that of all the 5 Best Picture nominees, Juno was the only one she'd go out of her way to see again. That fact alone should probably put it over the top.

The point, though, isn't so much whether the best film won, but that all the candidates deserved to win.

Not unlike Clinton, Obama, and Edwards. A solid field is itself the real victory.