thanks to the kindness of kriston and susan, i watched the debate tonight and at first i was terrified that kerry was going to shoot himself in the foot, but you know what? he didn't. he did fantastically. kerry looked composed, knowledgeable, and incredibly presidential. bush looked like he was grasping at straws. i can say now with confidence that i am proud and happy to vote for john kerry, and that i do believe he will be a good president.

this is rather sobering:

It's hard to pinpoint when the 'turning point' exactly began. Was it April
when the Fallujah fell out of the grasp of the Americans? Was it when Moqtada and Jish Mahdi declared war on the U.S. military? Was it when
Sadr City, home to ten percent of Iraq's population, became a nightly battlefield for the Americans? Or was it when the insurgency began
spreading from isolated pockets in the Sunni triangle to include most of Iraq? Despite President Bush's rosy assessments, Iraq remains a disaster. If under Saddam it was a 'potential' threat, under the Americans it has been transformed to 'imminent and active threat,' a
foreign policy failure bound to haunt the United States for decades to come.

Iraqis like to call this mess 'the situation.' When asked 'how are thing?' they reply: 'the situation is very bad."

What they mean by situation is this: the Iraqi government doesn't control most Iraqi cities, there are several car bombs going off each day around the country killing and injuring scores of innocent people, the
country's roads are becoming impassable and littered by hundreds of
landmines and explosive devices aimed to kill American soldiers, there are assassinations, kidnappings and beheadings. The situation, basically, means a raging barbaric guerilla war. In four days, 110 people died and over 300 got injured in Baghdad alone. The numbers are so shocking that the ministry of health -- which was attempting an exercise of public transparency by releasing the numbers -- has now stopped disclosing them.

Insurgents now attack Americans 87 times a day.

and 35 children were killed this morning in baghdad.

last night i went with susan and jennifer to two amy's for delizioso pizza, and it was everything i'd been promised. yum! we had a margherita pizza with mozzarella di bufalo and a norcia pizza, with mozzarella, roasted peppers and salami. the norcia was especially good - the margherita i liked, but wasn't blown away by it, especially since it was one of three DOC pizzas - denominazione di origine controllata, which is basically a quality assurance for food - and i expected something really amazing. anyway, two amy's is a member of the associazione verace pizza napoletana, which means association of real napolean pizza. so some of their pizzas have been certified and meet all the standards of napoletano pizza making! which is pretty awesome.

we only had the pizza, but i kept staring greedily at other people's tables and noticed that lots of the appetizers and other dishes looked really amazing as well. so i'll definitely be headed back.

post-dinner we went to jennifer's apartment across the street where she served us this delicious dome cake of awesomeness, which was filled with cream and almond slivers and chocolate and looked very pretty. it made me feel nostalgic for cooking, which i haven't really done in a long time. tommy and i used to make good dinners together all the time, but we haven't really in a while, mostly because we're terribly lazy, i suspect. the last thing i baked was some banana bread (which turned out well; however, in the banana bread i had made before that, i totally left out ALL THE SUGAR until it had been in the oven for five minutes and i stirred it in frantically. it did not turn out so great, as you might imagine).

anyway, i think it's ridiculous that i don't cook more, especially when i live in walking distance of two grocery stores (even if one of them is the obnoxious whole foods and the other is the ghetto giant). so, i wanted to beg some recipes off you all. do you have a particularly good lasanga? some butter squash soup? umm..meatloaf? or sites where you can get recipes from? really, anything. part of the reason i don't cook anymore, i think, is that i have nothing interesting to make. so let me mine your little food brains for ideas!

update: oh god. think i will have to make this.

update 2.0: when susan was driving me home last night we saw that they had begun preparations for a huge greek festival at st. sophia (i think?) so i think we should all go there on saturday and eat large quantities of greek food. (apple picking has more or less been decided for sunday.)

I'll be watching tonight's debate with interest, and only partly because Monday's Redskins loss left me desperate for a victory-by-proxy. See, I was a debater in high school. Actually, I was captain of the debate team at one point, although I wouldn't claim the "master debater" title that my friends invariably suggest when the topic comes up. Really, you guys are too kind.

I can't help but laugh at articles previewing the presidential debates that say things like "Bush's style is unusual by the traditional standards of debate". This is a silly thing to say, because while there are a lot of kinds of debate, none of them really resemble the format that we'll see tonight. Some of the more popular:

Justice Scalia:

"I even take the position that sexual orgies eliminate social tensions and ought to be encouraged"

via Atrios