“Is there any relief that can be offered to these people and their families?”

Kerry: “This is a reflection of the bad judgment this president has exercised…Our military is overextended…I’ve proposed adding two active duty divisions” And special forces to take the pressure off the National Guard and the Reserve. Returns to a common theme: “America is strongest when we are working with real alliances.” Emphasizes the cost of the war and finishes with a reference to Bush “taking his eye off Osama Bin Laden.”

Bush: The best way to provide relief for our troops is to succeed in Iraq. Poeple I’ve talked to, their spirits were high. They didn’t feel their service was a back door draft: they felt it was an opportunity to serve their country. Turns to his recurrent point about American independence: we should not have to ask permission of other countries. Argues that this is Kerry’s position.

Really? No soldier told you that they thought you were doing a bad job? I wonder why.

The Star this morning reports that Matthew Barney’s “Cremaster Cycle” is playing this month in Kansas City: “The entire ‘Cremaster’ series will be shown on three succeeding Wednesdays this month at the Tivoli Cinemas, courtesy of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art’s Electromediascope series of experimental film, video and new media.” Well, better late than never, I suppose. Tickets to this Wednesday’s showing of parts 1 and 2 are already gone, but starting Thursday you can get tix for next week.

Wait a minute, the Nelson has an “Electromediascope series of experimental film, video and new media”? Cool.

Via Scott McCloud: Time Magazine columnist Andrew D. Arnold presents a list of 25 “must-read” works of graphic literature from the last 25 years. I give enthusiastic endorsement to much of the list, but I balk at Our Cancer Year (a moving story, but not representative of Pekar’s best work, and the artwork in this one leaves me cold), The Golem’s Mighty Swing (pretty, but cheap baseball sentimentalism), and Flood (Drooker’s a great illustrator, but this word-less tale seemed kind of superficial to me). I am not crazy about From Hell, although I like much of Alan Moore’s other work. Why the heck isn’t Moore’s Watchmen on this list? Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns? Meh. Find Miller’s Batman: Year One, instead.

If you are only going to buy two of these works, I would recommend Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth and Stuck Rubber Baby, two very different but beautiful and powerfully affecting works.

Working on a PostgreSQL database with over a thousand records from late eighteenth-century exhibition catalogues of the Royal Academy, I discover I cannot alter the attributes of a column once it’s already been created.

WTF?

It’s true. You have to backup all the data, recreate the table from scratch with the column attributes you want, and then reload your backup.

At least that’s what you have to do with version 6.5.2 of PostgreSQL. It’s possible later versions allow you to do something simpler.

Just a techno-geek entry, dear reader, to bolster my street-cred with the computing crowd. ;-)

Update: On second thought, maybe the fact that I didn’t already know this does nothing for my credibility. Hmm.

A mid-day walk through the neighborhood. While we’ve had an unseasonably warm fall, it has finally turned cold. Overcast, and there’s a bit of precipitation, too. I used to hate weather like this, but now I long for days like today.

Upside: There’s a coffee processing plant in my neighborhood. The air smells good.
Downside: It’s Folger’s coffee.
Upside, part ii: There’s a good coffee shop in “Scamp’s Alley” (check out the last pair of photos in this entry from Heidi) where I can get a decent cafe americano.