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...someone just blew up a mock houses of parliament outside my window. to, yes, the sound of beethoven.

ETA: Arrrgh Minnesota Sixth, why you gotta do that to me?

(no subject)

Okay, so Obama chose this dude named Rahm Emanuel, who's a congressperson from Illinois, to be his chief of staff, right? And because of a series of events that I won't go into now, I ended up reading his wikipedia page, which, citing this article from a few years ago, claims that "there's the story of how, the night after Clinton was elected, Emanuel was so angry at the president's enemies that he stood up at a celebratory dinner with colleagues from the campaign, grabbed a steak knife and began rattling off a list of betrayers, shouting "Dead! . . . Dead! . . . Dead!" and plunging the knife into the table after every name. "When he was done, the table looked like a lunar landscape," one campaign veteran recalls. "It was like something out of The Godfather. But that's Rahm for you."".

My reaction? OH MY GOD I HAVE SEEN THAT MOVIE. (No, not the Godfather, although I have seen that too.) In Sorkin's The American President, Michael J Fox's character Lewis delivers the following line: "All right George, can I tell you something? We're gonna win this thing. We're gonna get the votes we need and we're gonna win this thing. And you know what I'm gonna do after that, I mean that very night, I'm gonna go to Sam & Harry's, I'm gonna order a big steak, and I'm gonna make a list of everybody who tried to *fuck* us this week!" And in many ways, The American President is sort of the proto-The West Wing. (Lewis is a speechwriter, but I think he's really proto-Josh.)

So Obama's pick for chief of staff is one of the inspirations for Josh Lyman? YOU GUYS. THE WEST WING. IT'S HAPPENING.

ETA: And I am just now watching the Daily Show from last night, and can we get this Harvard prof his own show so I can watch him always?