• AlterBadger has seen your girlfriend.  It thinks she can do better.
• Started watching The West Wing last week.  Which begs the question:  why had I never watched The West Wing before?  My lack of sense aside, after 6 episodes of the first season it seems to me that everything I've heard about the series is genuinely true.  The nature and various aspects of politics and political issues were thoroughly and abundantly researched for the series, and to my mind everything certainly seems correct.  It helps to have a good familiarity with politics, though; anyone who never reads a newspaper would have a lot of trouble following some aspects of the show.  What I also enjoy is the humanizing of the various members of the White House.  From our perspective we see them as near-mythic figures, but really they're just people doing a job (HBO's excellent documentary By the People:  The Election of Barack Obama is another good example of the very human and candid nature of these people we read about in the news each day).  They gripe about their work, they socialize on company time, they banter... it's a good portrayal of subject matter that is usually treated with infinite gravitas.  Little things, like the use of natural lighting in the Oval Office as opposed to the floodlights that most films employ, really add up to a greater sense of realism.  It gets a bit sentimental at times, maybe a little too gushing and inspiring, but in a way it's fair; this is a series that premiered at the lowest ebb of Clinton's power, and continued through years of Bush.  It's a fantasy for Democrats.  What keeps the fantasy grounded is the fact that Democrats are usually a pretty pessimistic, cynical bunch, who are used to having to fight for every little thing they believe in.  A similar series designed for Republicans would probably end its final season with the abolition of Federal tax and the Second Coming of Jesus.  
• I guess that's it, really.  It's been a busy couple of weeks.  Visiting relatives always does that.
• This week's reading:  Still chugging along on William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, which is turning out to be a more difficult novel than I anticipated.  I don't know why I underestimated Faulkner, but for some reason I did.