With a little help from my friends, I had a greatly restorative holiday weekend. Bailed on Oregon travel plans, slept enormous amounts, got out into nature and into the hot tub.

So I don't have a lot to say. I'm kind of simple Buddha happy and looking forward to upcoming travel to LA, NYC, NOLA: final whirlwind before the end of the year.

In the mean-time, I suggest Dr. Krugman's brain-growth brew. He's got a couple great posts up today. One on the creeping undercurrent of political doom which mirrors my own thoughts pretty closely:

I hope I’m wrong about all this. But my sense is that to have any hope of breaking out of this trap, Obama and company have to take risks — they have to propose new initiatives that might not pass, and be prepared to run against the do-nothing Republicans if the initiatives fail. That’s not happening now; as best as I can tell, the administration strategy is to insist that only a few minor course corrections are needed, and to wait for the jobs to start coming in.

The other alerting us to the reality of PIG IN A VAT!!!:

SCIENTISTS have grown meat in the laboratory for the first time. Experts in Holland used cells from a live pig to replicate growth in a petri dish.

This is probably a good thing. A petri dish will probably yield tastier meats than feedlots, and without all the greenhouse-gas-causing methane (or ethical objections, according to PETA).