Fired up the ol’ Firefox, came hither, realised Mr. Wells is away, was filled with a Rilkean melacholy. This is probably not the best way to spend an hour on Sunday – drinking beer springs to mind – but what began as an epigram… Anyway:

The pundits’ flowers wilt, the maples sigh:
A bitter god has made the Wells run dry
For seven days: what can mere irrigation
Do against the power of vacation?
Where is the wit, and where the slashing scorn
Which made its victims wish they’d not been born?
Where is the shrewd mot juste, the artful link
To sites that make us laugh or cry or think?
Where is the guide who, when the sulfur curled
Above the pits of th’ Ott’wan netherworld
Took us in hand, described each torment, till
We trembled at the horror of the Hill?
He sits in bliss beside some quiet lake,
Of rest and reason happy to partake,
Beneath his rod the pike and bass succomb:
The frogs alone remind him of the scrum;
Now through the early autumn wood he strolls
The ceaseless brook he likens to the polls;
Compares our leaders to the craven quail
That squawk and flap beside the campaign trail,
Laments the red fir’s partisan disease,
While deer, like issues, bolt into the trees.
O Nature, bless that journalistic brain,
With all your beauties strive to keep it sane;
Meanwhile our Inkless Wellsless must remain.

Gee … Imagine if you went away in the middle of a Federal election campaign and came back to find that virtually nothing had changed?

Brammer — Congress still has to approve the bailout, and there appears to be growing skepticism in Washington over the plan. Democrats in particular are concerned that they are going to get hoodwinked into voting to pass it, only to see Republicans run against them for the next six weeks for doing so. Personally, I hope the bailout is rejected. It will be a bitter short term pill for the economy to swallow, but in this case I think the cure is worse than the disease. The long term impact of a $700 million bailout, coupled with the already troubling deficit levels in the U.S., is chilling to contemplate.