I am of an age (this is lame) wherein a Thursday night doesn't feel quite right without a TV show I really want to watch. Perhaps that's why some really bad shows succeed now on Thursday--viewers' need to fill that gap with something, anything. But still--I'm never home to watch TV Mon-Wed, so it feels all the more like....Entertain Me! Pliz. God knows cable doesn't always help with that--just more steaming piles of who-cares. Like now.

I keep tearing up - completely Pavlovian - at the slightest sign of the Flight 93 movie. 1/2 sec of the trailer makes me cry. I guess it feels...well, I certainly don't know if it's 'appropriate' or not for them to have made the movie - whatever - but this reaction isn't a flag-waving 9/11 thing, it's about how I've always wondered most about the time on the airplanes, all of them. It's those horrible *transition* times - like the nature shows I can't watch when (most of all) the lion is tearing down the zebra and the zebra's still alive. It's too much. How can we even know what that time of Knowing would have been like? That's a *long* time to know you're going to die. I hope they knew less than I think, esp those going into the towers. God. Anyhow, so the idea of living inside that hour or whatever seems excruciatingly intense, however it's played. Obviously. Argy-bargy. Can't handle it.

Trying also to make my piece with grumfy old George Ryan. I have no problem believing that the same guy could do what he did regarding the death penalty and be stupid and corrupt in other areas except...maybe I can't. In a weird way, he's been a challenge to my thinking about these things. I always *did* believe people entirely capable of both behaviors--in fact I still do--it's more that I feel a disturbing urge in me to let one go in favor of the other. I'm a fairness junkie - I don't usually work that way. The clear struggle he went through to come to the decision he did, the wholesale, moral way he went about it, changed *my* view of the death penalty and of politics. There is something biblical about it. It blocks out a lot of other things about him. He is just a goofy old pharmacist in a lots of ways (that Sneed interview with him the day after this indictment talking about power-hosing the furniture was classic), but I guess I've never had to reconcile a gesture I admire that much with anybody, whoever they are, however much additional good or bad they've demonstrated. And to do it as it happened, too, without history making it a little easier. One of his aides said that Ryan never cared about anything much administrative and was at his best only with big issues--I can see that. He probably is culpable in ways I don't wanna think about with all this indictments. But he will always been a particular kind of hero for me.

Plus - hello - I can't think of one area politician who hasn't ended his career this way (Rosty, etc.). Big huge career, end it with a horrid busted bang, then - consulting. It's the Chicago way (she says through clenched Irish teeth--it doesn't need to be said, but how fabulous IS Sean Connery in the Untouchables--way the hell fabulous).

Cold Comfort Farm on last night...oh that RUFUS SEWELL. Oy.