Thursday, July 24, 2003

I saw Tara Grubb at McCoul’s last night. It was a social event to kick off her campaign, so I can’t go into specifics about our conversation, but she seems focused on developing her weblog into a campaign tool this time around. She’s also got some other techno-tricks up her sleeve. As always, she needs to tether her big ideas to specifics. 3:23:59 PM    comment []

Today’s front-page article about my alma mater in the WSJ  (membership required) seemed curiously flat despite a promising summary: “Haverford College's efforts to court donations from J. Howard Marshall II, the Texas oil tycoon who married former Playboy playmate Anna Nicole Smith, offers a cautionary tale for colleges about pinning hopes on reluctant angels.”   But the pneumatic playmate who married the rich old man makes only a cameo appearance in the story, much of which is familiar from Anna Nicole’s own well-documented lawsuit to gain a portion of Marshall’s estate. The disputed bequest to Haverford is substantial but not enormous, and the tactics used by the college seem slick only when measured against its own self-proclaimed Quakerly standards.   I read it all, of course. 3:12:52 PM    comment []

I had that first great tomato of summer today at lunch. Ate it like an apple. It was a gift from a friend in Browns Summit, and it looked like tomatoes used to look, not like some too-perfect silicone breast of a store-bought tomatoid object that ends up tasting like cardboard. I don't even bother with the tomato facsimiles available most of the year, but now we're into the real thing. 2:10:12 PM    comment []