You know it's game day when the college kids who live across the street are throwing up at the curb & then rinsing with beer.

is only stimulating the economy $177.20 worth. passport renewal, 75; mailing passport packet, 4.95; cat box liners, 4.79; 4 bottles fizzy water, 1 giant chocolate bar, several pounds dark roast decaf, 18.52; crumbled blue cheese, mozzarella, basil, spinach, butter, aspirin, soy milk, 33.99; Harvey's Bristol Cream & Grahams Six Grapes ruby port, 39.95. I'm done. See you next Black Friday.

had pork for Thanksgiving, and it was NOT a spiral-sliced, honey-baked ham.

has bought more Beaujolais, gasoline, & passport photos, given blood, & visited a hospitalized student. Now: home for lunch.

is home for a few minutes to unpack, start some laundry, D then head out to Mass.

has managed to lose the key to the short bus at the restaurant, has gotten the kids back to Emory, & now awaits a locksnith

is finishing lunch with MUNers at a coffee shop where an actual baristo drew a tulip on my cap while Alison K plays overhead

is thinking that the second workshop session here at SUSMUN is going much better than the first. Anu Chakravarty on post-genocide justice.

le Beaujolais Nouveau est arrive! A light summery red for a chiily autumn day? Just hand over some dark chocolate.

I liked this documentary but walked out disappointed, and I doubt I will take the hour and a half to watch it again. The premise is (pardon the pun) electrifying. Take three wildly diverse electric guitar giants, sit them down together at a portentously-named Summit (with their instruments sitting nearby at the ready), and set up to film the results. The director (Guggenheim) should have been able to catch lightning in a bottle.

The opening sequences build anticipation. We open to a bucolic setting -- cattle, open fields, a rustic farmhouse on whose porch Jack White is cobbling something together. The scraps of wood look ready to split as nails sink into them. An old-style glass Coke bottle, a length of what looks like light-weight clothesline, and a simple pickup are all tacked down. The ramshackle thing is plugged into a humming amp, and Jack slides out a few rude notes on his one-string electric. He asks dismissively why anyone would need to buy a guitar.

Soon after, we see all the awe-inspiring panoply of gear David Evans (The Edge) uses. We hear a roadie go on about how dozens of guitars and set-ups will be used during a show, with no settings ever repeated. From White’s lowest tech to Evan’s highest. Later in the documentary, Jack opines that tech gets in the way of pure art, and throughout we hear and see his desire, his visceral need to struggle, to overcome obstacles -- even if they are obstacles of his own making; he has to be in a fight to make music. But along the way we hear and see Evans talk about working obsessively to find the right blend of equipment to get the exact sound he hears in his head to come out the speakers. Evans obsessively hunts his art down while White has to fight for it.

If we had only these two guitarists in a room talking about electric guitar music, there should be some interesting fireworks. And we are lead to believe that there will be fireworks. In the cab on the way to the Summit, White is asked what he thinks will happen when the three of them get together. His reply? Probably a fist fight. (Because art demands a struggle, remember?)

And, we have more than these two. Because along with the obsessive hunter and the pugilist, we have Jimmy Page, who comes to this picture in the most surprising of guises. He is the Guild Master. He is the Comfortable Sage. With nothing to rebel against, he IS the Establishment. We hear him reminisce through his days as an apprentice and as a journeyman. We see and hear his time doing session work, hear his reaction to realizing he was being turned nto a Muzak artist, see him walk away from music to spend time putting paint on canvas before he is drawn back in to music. But through it all, he is the confident Master, relaxed and comfortable, with nothing at stake. White has told the audience that he plans to trick these guys into revealing their secrets. Page seems to have come along for the camaraderie and enjoyment.

But Page brings something else to the documentary. Perhaps its that he’s so relaxed, so ready to have fun. We get to see him -- HIM, Jimmy Page -- playing air guitar to Link Wray’s “Rumble.” We get to hear him wax enthusiastic about that song and what it meant to him. Yes, Page goes all FanBoy on us. And plays air guitar. And that may be one of the best moments in the movie.

Because there’s precious little of the Summit on the film. We see snatches of the boys playing a few songs together, but only hear long moments from two songs (including “The Weight” (Take a load off, Fanny), which they play over the credits). But this film is mainly a frankensteined version of three separate half-hour 1st person interviews. We get about thirty minutes each of Evans, Page, and White reminiscing about their careers, and just a few sparse scenes of the three together.

In the times that they *are* on screen together, we see them watch each others hands while playing, but we don’t know if White got either of them to give up any secrets. Evans does talk to the audience about his quest to find new ways to finger old chords, ways to strip them down to new, sparser sounds, but who knows if White knew of this before he saw the final print? Were they able to learn anything from each other? Or was it just three blokes getting together to play a little music? The film never tells us.

We do get to see Evans admit to the group that he’s been playing the wrong chord in the verses of “The Weight,” to which Page replies with a polite expletive that seems to say, “so that’s what’s wrong; why didn’t I notice that? Well, no worries.” As the boys prepare this final song, they try to sort out who will sing which parts as they try to replicate The Band’s classic harmonies, and Page has to beg off of singing at all because “I’m hopeless.”

But White’s predicted fist fight never materializes. Thesis and Antithesis come together in a room with apparently no Synthesis whatsoever. And that’s a shame.

I came expecting something great and got something slightly more pleasant than a couple of VH-1 Behind the Music episodes. I wanted lightning in a bottle and came away with a summer’s evening worth of fireflies instead. That’s not a bad thing in and of itself, but it *was* mildly disappointing.

thinks It Might Get Loud

Servicemen & women: Golden Corral is feeding you Monday the 16th. (Post-Veterans' Day) Enjoy! http://goldencorral.com/military/

Wants to remind all you Vets that Applebee's is feeding you for free today. Have fun in the big, cross-service mess hall! http://ping.fm/sM8Ab

is now going to scope out a bit of the Italian Festival in Finlay Park.

just bought ancient Roman style cheeses from an Italian member of Nova Roma at the All-Local Farmer's Market. Local Romans?!?

has been awake for 38 out of the last 42 hours and is now hanging it up for a long period of unconsciousness.

is enjoying the warm, sunny afternoon before the cold & wet move back in for a few days. Hope it waits 'til after TrickRTreat

who knew that boiled egg would also work on a spinach, walnut, pear, blue cheese salad with warm berry vinaigrette?

http://www.usccb.org/healthcare/hc-bulletin-insert-10-23-09-final.pdf health care reform should protect the life and dignity of all people

http://experimentaltheology.blogspot.com/2009/08/bait-and-switch-of-contemporary.html "Many churches are jerk factories."