I’m back in NYC, but only for a few hours — gotta catch a train to Boston today for a one-day trip. All this traveling’s for the birds.

Everyone look out for the big red moon tonight, from 11:05 PM EST to 12:22 AM EST. (I don’t know how much ambient light there is where I’ll be in Boston, so I don’t know if I’ll get the full effect.)

Salon has the perfect expression of my feelings about Dubya:

It’s not just that he’s evasive — which he is, refusing to answer questions about his ties to contemptible racists or his position on various relevant issues or his record as governor. And it’s not that he’s so completely and utterly unprepared to rule the nation. It’s that he’s the perfect representation of the mediocrity for which we as a nation continue to settle. Government health chieftains allow a certain number of rat feces and dead bugs in each candy bar. There is actually an acceptable measurement for these sorts of things. And Bush embodies that from head to toe, from the cynicism of his empty answers to the shallowness of his uninquisitive noggin.

On this week’s Kernel Traffic, it turns out that Linux is susceptible to the same ship date creep that so many people complain about with MS products; they even discuss the “bad press” implications of stating ship dates.

I saw Hurricane yesterday night. It’s another must-see — Denzel Washington is terrific, and the story, while clearly adapted for a two-hour movie, is important. It reminded me that this country takes a mighty superior tone when reprimanding other nations for their behavior, when we have done some awful things in the past, and continue to do so to certain groups of people.

All this flap about the Confederate flag in South Carolina reminds me — my high school in Texas, Robert E. Lee High School, had the Confederate flag as our school flag. It was on almost every building on campus, in some places as big as a semi. Our school song was Dixie. If you were an athlete, you had to wear the flag on your uniform; if you protested (as some black athletes did), you were just dismissed from the team. They finally got rid of the flag and Dixie, but people tell me that the flag is still waved, and Dixie is still sung, at every sports event. (I was at the school until 1991, and that’s when they did away with both as “official” school institutions.)

Nice… call the police to report domestic violence next door, and get your dog killed.