Octopus in the rain.

Today is another one of the many days when traffic is redirected in Madison so a race of some sort can take place on the city streets. Sometimes it's a competitive race, like the bike race a week or so ago that I photographed or a triathlon, and sometimes it's a fundraiser. Judging from the speed of the runners I saw as I gave my son a ride to his summer job this morning, today's race is a fundraiser. And it is pouring rain. It's rained almost continually for a month, but today's rain is the hardest yet. But the dedicated runners were out there plugging away. A lone spectator stood on the street corner under an umbrella, and the workers at the Octopus car wash--who don't get much business in the pouring rain--were standing out under the roof overhang, perhaps sympathizing a bit but enjoying the break from work that nature had bestowed on them.

I wanted to link to a picture of the Octopus and could only find this huge amateur photograph. I'd love to take a picture of it myself, but not in this rain. It's one of those odd roadside America sights, a very well-executed giant octopus, smiling and holding car wash implements in every tentacle.

As for me, I got soaking wet getting to my car which was parked too close to the overgrown hedge (a hedge that I do plan to clip some day when it dries out). Now, having overslept, I'm finally getting to the NYT, which stayed dry in its blue plastic bag. It's a good day to read the Times, do the acrostic, grade some exams, watch a movie, and eat dinner in a restaurant. There will be no inrush of comments like yesterday to distract me. I'm sad about killing the comments, but they had to go.

Last night, I looked at some of the most popular blogs and noted some of the very best ones that don't have comments: Instapundit, Talking Points Memo (which I added to the blogroll ... oh, you're up to your little posing-as-a-moderate games), Andrew Sullivan (I hope he's okay--he said he'd be back and he's been gone since Thursday), The Volokh Conspiracy ("'Bobo' appears to [be] getting incorporated into French"--the French have discovered Fantasia Barrino? I wonder if David Brooks is irked at Fantasia for usurping his coinage?). Then you have the most popular blogs that do accept comments, Eschaton and Daily Kos, which are hardcore partisan political blogs of the sort that go well with the kind of comments they draw. There's no sense that the comments there are changing the overall feeling of the blog. Kos is so political that when he tried to talk about music yesterday, he wrote: "my favorite band -- Bad Religion -- has a new DC coming out next Tuesday." It's an endless anti-Bush rally over there, and maybe a lot of people are developing their commenter style in that hothouse environment, and when they go and post in a place that is not an ongoing political rally, they just don't know how to act and don't even know how awful they sound.

You would think the left would be interested in speaking to people who are in the middle, whom they need for their side to win. Yet they were taking the attitude that it's not possible to be in the middle. I imagine their hatred of Bush is so strong that they may seriously think anyone who is even considering voting for him is a hardcore right-winger! They seem to get actively mad at you if you aren't willing to go on record denouncing the war and so forth. One of the worst qualities of left-wingers I have known is their self-flattering belief that they are the good people and that those who don't agree must be bad people. Ironically, that is the same you're-either-with-us-or-against-us attitude that I often hear them accuse Bush of taking.