As Far As You Know

Today was mostly a driving day, with over seven hours in the car between the Grand Canyon and my Santa Fe destination. The trip was described to me beforehand as "boring," but I found the mostly flat landscape fascinating, as it's so different from what one would see in the Northeast. There were no deciduous trees, for one thing. Great expanses of desert or prairie were punctuated by colorful and dramatically contoured hills and mountains.

My rental car out here in the Southwest came equipped with XM satellite radio. I've been spending a lot of the time listening to the "POTUS '08" channel, which focuses on the upcoming presidential election. I got to hear a town meeting held by Barack Obama, whose articulate, thoughtful, and knowledgeable answers to foreign policy questions from the crowd elevated him considerably in my estimation. In contrast, this was followed by a Rudy Giuliani stump speech in Tampa, in which it was clear the former New York mayor is now far less than the man I came to admire in the fall of 2001; instead he has adopted every partisan bullet point possible rather than offering the maverick leadership we saw in a time of crisis.

That's what Christopher Plummer, who played Captain Von Trapp in the filmed version of The Sound Of Music, allegedly called it. Critic Pauline Kael lost her job at McCall's for blasting the film in her magazine review. I caught the tail end of the movie on TV tonight and I am still a sucker for it.

Okay, this is the last of my regular "Song Of The Day" postings. I've kept it up on a daily basis for the whole calendar year, but from now on these will be sporadic entries, when the spirit (or more precisely, a song) hits me.

This is a fitting entry for December 31: Ella Fitzgerald's version of "What Are You Doing New Year's Eve?"

I just watched the Coen brothers' latest, No Country For Old Men, based on a Cormac MacCarthy work. It's a gripping tale, set in 1980 in west Texas (not too far from where I am now), but those who get squeamish about realistic on-screen violence won't want to see this one. A strong effort, with an absolutely first-rate cast.

This is, of course, Eddie Murphy in Trading Places.