i also just uploaded a bunch of photos to my flickr stream - most of me looking like a drunk ass, as usual, and i can't imagine you really want to see those. but i was walking around downtown chicago this afternoon on my way to a dinner party, and took some shots of that. the location of the dinner party was, i also thought, photo-worthy, as it was the corner condo of a building next to the drake hotel on lake shore drive with the most amazing view. here's the set of the evening.

I've finally got all of my photos from the beach uploaded — you can find them here, if you're so inclined.

And of course, I'd be remiss if I didn't link to DOG V. CRAB, the video sensation that's sweeping the internet. The two combatants both struggled for victory. The real winner? The viewing public.

The video portrays just a small part of the overall fight. Credit to Genevieve for capturing as much she did; Wreck had already cornered a ghost crab behind some fencing earlier in the day, but nobody expected him to find another one. He sniffed and jabbed for a while as the crab warily snapped at his nose — I thought it could go either way at that point. But one quick lunge from Wreck wrapped things up decisively.

Is this kind of shit just a DC thing? I'm with Rusty: these ridiculous private online clubs creep me out. Aside from the invite-only Bittorrent tracker where I'm a member, of course (ah, hypocrisy).

Judging from some recent conversations I've had, it's not just the Georgetown set, either. Sigh. I completely understand and accept that the internet revolution is a chance for our generation of geeks to play high school all over again (this time we can win!). I just wish folks were interested in doing it better.

Maybe I'm being naive about all of this. I donno — I certainly wouldn't want to make the DCist staff list open to anyone who might want to join and observe our editorial process. And I genuinely believe in a right to privacy. But these virtual cliques still leave a bad taste in my mouth.

Last night I went with Yglesias and most of the folks from work to go see Al Gore's new movie, An Inconvenient Truth. And it was good! The built-in advantage to a movie like this is that , since it consists of Al Gore showing charts for two hours, everyone automatically assumes it has to be "better than you'd think". And, somewhat paradoxically, it is.

At times it's touching; near the end it's inspiring. Above all it's convincing and well-executed. Still, I'm kind of dreading the popular reaction to it. I'd say it's a toss-up at this point — a lot of folks really want to dislike Al Gore, yet they're running out of ways to plausibly say he was wrong about, well, pretty much anything. I think any potential backlash would have to run more on wingnut vitriol than on the doubt-inducing pseudoscience that's been the global warming debate's chief currency up to this point.

We've seen the basic conservative playbook for this applied to Michael Moore. And while I'm sure this movie is more carefully constructed and vetted, the unfair criticisms of Moore worked just as well, if not better, than the substantive ones — and they could work here, too. Potential Gore-belittling strategies: freeze frames of what could be a bald spot; the segment with Gore as leader of the Vice Presidential Action Rangers, in which he gets a phone call and blows this whole oil-company-conspiracy thing wide open; or the fact that he kind of looks like he's wearing somebody else's skin, like that alien cockroach in Men In Black. And of course there are the deadly, deadly snails.

Worst of all would be if somebody found a problem with one of his slides. Climate science is complex, and I have no doubt that some caveats were elided for simplicity's sake (or maybe that's just Exxon's pernicious influence talking). I'm pretty optimistic on this score, though. He's a smart dude, right? Right.

Overall: four carbon-neutral switchgrass farms out of five. Definitely the best-produced educational video that high school science classes will see during the '06/'07 school year.