Jottings from the Granite Studio

It has been a busy week here. YJ is finally finished covering the 17th Party Congress (she claims to have won the office pool on the leadership selections). Personally, I’ll just be glad when we can get through breakfast and/or dinner without listening to CCTV news droning on with lists of names.

Hu Jintao, Wen Jiabao….
Wu Yi, ‘nuuuuuu’…….
Galadan ‘meeennnngg–zzuuu’……

For those not closely tuned to CCTV every morning and night, when the names of women or minority delegates are read, the announcer must demonstrate “diversity now!” by following the name with the appropriate category. How would this work on CNN? Are we really that far off?

“Hilary Clinton….woman.”
“Barack Obama…black dude.”

It’s also customary for the ethnic minority delegates to attend the meetings dressed in traditional, ceremonial garb while Han delegates wear business suits. Could you imagine Ben Nighthorse Campbell’s first days in Washington if the US Senate played by CCP rules? I’m trying very hard not to.
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Better news still, the Red Sox are in the World Series which, like an autumnal groundhog seeing its shadow, means two more weeks of slowed research productivity and postponed paper grading.

It’s strange, I’m really psyched that the Sox are in the playoffs, but it’s not like it was in 2004. First of all, beating the Indians, no matter how dramatically, is not the same as beating the Yankees. It’s just not. Second, and here I’m going to delicately suggest an analogy, when the 2004 Red Sox won the series, it was a moment I had never experienced before. I guess I always thought it would happen someday, but the longer it didn’t happen the more I thought it would never happen. Now that it might happen again, while it would still be very, very cool…it’s never quite the same as your team’s, ahem, first World Series victory. Did it just get a little uncomfortable in here? Okay, moving on…

Nevertheless, you can likely find me, laptop and books in tow, at The Rickshaw on Thursday and Friday morning, cheering on the Red Sox over breakfast and cocoa.
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Finally, some site news. Thanks to Andrew Leonard at Salon.com’s How the World Works column for linking to one of my last posts and for forcing me to the dictionary to look up ‘high dudgeon’. (Though I might describe my tone more as ‘mild pique’ but no matter.) It’s not the first time Andrew has been kind enough to mention the site, but for some reason this last post struck a chord. I’ve already had about 1200 hits today on the site and it’s not even breakfast. For what it’s worth, the recent upsurge also meant that Jottings from the Granite Studio saw it’s 50,000th unique visitor sometime last night. That’s both kind of heartening and, well, kind of scary.

Thanks to everybody for stopping by.