Poem for Tuesday and Schoolyard Emergency

Private Equity
By Sophie Cabot Black

To put one and one together making
Two and so on. A house appears, room
With a bed in it. To configure anyway,

Even without enough information.
We work into it, the chosen. To measure
Everything out until the one who takes over

Becomes taken. This as strategy, the art
Of how we build until management
In turn builds us, elegant the logic

Used. To draw out more than what is put in.
Everyone wants beyond; even with the one last page
As exit plan it is the return that is watched and how

We will be known. To end up where we start
Again, and to look as if we gained.

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From this week's New Yorker. Black is the author of The Descent.

I spent a wonderful relaxing Monday with Dementordelta, who arrived around lunchtime and accompanied me to Tara Thai, where we shared golden triangles and I had fabulous panang curry tofu while she had pad thai. Then we stopped at A.C. Moore to look at bags and beads before coming back to my house to watch lots of third season Due South (I skipped ahead to show her "The Ladies' Man" because I love that episode so much, then we jumped back to "Spy vs. Spy" through "Asylum"). I did not get any laundry done, nor did I clean up the living room, answer e-mail, respond to LJ comments or anything else I neglected over the weekend, but it was nice to have a stress-free day!

We had a bit of excitement in the late afternoon when, after hearing helicopters circling for several minutes, Adam went out and discovered that there were emergency vehicles surrounding the elementary school. We walked over to see and discovered that a child had apparently been injured -- no one seems to know exactly how, though there were several soccer games taking place there this afternoon from what I'm told -- and they decided his injuries required a helicopter evacuation instead of transport in one of the two ambulances on the scene (there were several police cars and a fire truck too). Our evening television consisted of the Discovery Channel's "Are We Alone?" episode of Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking, then PBS's "Stonehenge and the Ancient Britons" episode of Treasures of the Ancient World. I know I promised Sleepy Hollow pictures but I wanted to commemorate the closest I've ever been to an operating helicopter first:











People with gratuitous criticisms of Kagan from the far left and near right both need to shut up and wait till her full record is made public before making assumptions about any aspect of her as a Supreme Court justice. (We need Jon Stewart's insight, since his bit on the British elections just gave me hysterics. "The Queen will appoint Sir Winston Furchill. It has to be Sir Winston Furchill because Margaret Scratcher is a cat and we're not going to put a cat in charge! What are we, France?")