An off-duty pirate is a good pirate in my book. They're not all swashbuckling and whatnot, trying to charm you with their faux-rowdy ways. Who decided we neede strolling pirates in our lives, anyway? At least mimes are quiet.

The new Town Point Park is a lot flatter and has a lot fewer trees, and that's about it, as far as I could tell. The end result is that Harborfest looks more like the Suffolk Peanut Festival than it used to.

Popeye Doyle chased some surrender monkeys down this stretch, I'm told. Or, to be more accurate, Gene Hackman. Or, to be even more accurate, a stunt driver pretending to be Gene Hackman pretending to be Popeye Doyle. Not that being accurate has anything to do with blogging. Apparently it's been Written, by whoever does the Writing these days, that bloggers are going to be our source for news in the near future. We're all fucked, you know that, right? We're going to know all there is to know about Michael Jackson's enlarged probate and Obama's secret basement Muslim temple and Susan Boyle and Jon and Kate and nothing about why the economy collapsed. Kind of like now, I guess. News organizations are abdicating their place in society. Cable news has become a noisy freak show. Give a hundred monkeys a hundred megaphones and they'll eventually come up with the Fox News channel. How will we ever produce another Edward R. Murrow when immoral assholes like Geraldo Rivera and Glen Beck are considered worthy of a soapbox on national tv? Sorry, I'll go take my meds now.

We had just come out of the Bacon exhibition. I love bacon. Just a scribbly drawing because it was rilly hot out on the steps, and I was hankering to find a mobbed-up bar with zebras on the wall. And so we did.

Larger here.       More photos here.

If I were ever given the task of torturing someone, and although the call hasn't come yet you never know, what I would do is I would strip them down to their skivvies, throw them to the ground and subject them to intense heat until they gave me bin Laden's street address, and if that didn't work, I would throw in clouds of mosquitos and maybe a boombox playing Eye of The Tiger. Just so you know where I was coming from when Amanda pranced into the room screaming "Fire Island! Fire Island! Fire Island!" At first, thinking she was raising an alarm, I frantically looked for the nearest exit. Then, when I realized what she was suggesting, I looked for the nearest exit with increased urgency. But cooler heads prevailed, and we hit the expressway, only to discover that 4,507,989 other New Yorkers had been struck by the very same impulse. After three or four days, we arrived at the ferry with only one soiled diaper and no left-coast vomit, for which we were grateful, and soon found ourselves in paradise, new york style. And here the snarkiness ends, because it was really quite nice. Good food, wine, and conversation was provided by A & J's friend Tory. It was great fun walking the little boardwalks and sitting on midnight beaches and whatnot. So I'm still not a beach person, but I'll make an exception like that any time. I guess nature in small doses can't hurt. Plus now I know every Michael Jackson joke that ever was.

What's all this then? I can't leave you people alone for a few days without you trashing the joint? The Comments section is a privilege, not a right, people! It's for serious, thoughtful discussion, not for juvenile folderol. Maybe next time I'll have to hire a babysitter. A babysitter named Ruben.

The smartest thing liberals can do is let conservatives talk as much as they want. Give them a forum, put them in the spotlight, give them enough of the proverbial rope. Set a microphone in front of a conservative and step away. He'll start out talking about fiscal responsibility, but within twenty minutes will be extolling the joys of torture or alienating the entire Hispanic community or accusing Michael J. Fox of faking his illness. This morning on NPR there was a panel of banking experts, one of whom was from a conservative think tank, and at one point, when the term "predatory lending" was mentioned, he said "what about predatory borrowing? Predatory borrowing is just as bad!" He elaborated: evidently there were untold numbers of people who bought adjustable rate mortgages knowing full well that they would be unable to meet the ballooning payments in ten years. Those poor innocent bankers, hoodwinked by these devious criminals! Do conservative think-tankers really think that great hordes of people signed up for ARMs, knowing full well that they would default in ten years and be thrown out of their homes, which apparently would fulfill some insane master plan known only to them? That they would be laughing all the way to the homeless shelter, snickering at the bankers they forced into collecting giant year-end bonuses despite plunging the nation into a deep recession? I encourage all you right-wingers out there to lard your conversation with the term "predatory borrowers" as much as you want, revealing your shriveled little hearts for all to see.