Spackle Camshaft? You betcha'...

I've always kind of liked the name my mother gave me at birth, Juliette. It's a family name, for one thing, going back several generations.

Plus, it has a nice old-fashioned air about it.

But I've never felt it had much power. It's a soft name. If you're named Juliette, you are going to grow up to be creative, compassionate, and a fabulous listener who also has great taste in clothes. But you are never, ever going to be an astrophysicist; an Olympic triathlete; the head of an oil company; or, for that matter, the "hot" mayor of a small cold town in Alaska.

Once I briefly changed my first name to Sidney. I felt it was a name that would take me places, but the new places turned out to be pretty much like the old places, so I switched back.

But now blogger David Harrington has rekindled my interest in power names, and today I tried out his Sarah Palin Baby Name Generator.

The name given me by The Generator was "Spackle Camshaft" -- a moniker that just reeks with inexplicable authority. Power-wise, compared to my birth name it's no contest.

My mother is not going to be at all happy about my new name, but I think you'll agree that now, at last, I have a shot at greatness.

Rhymes with Pain

So is this lucky or what? The very day that I decide to indulge myself by starting a blog to share my random hits (entirely personal and unashamedly subjective) about what's going on in the universe, or at least what's happening on my block, the Republican candidate for President of these United States makes a move I didn't see coming.

As you know by now, in a statement released at 8:30 a.m. ET this morning, the McCain/Palin campaign, entirely without irony, announced that the man who as late as last Monday was still saying the economy was fundamentally sound; the senator who before the doo-doo hit the fan was one of the unrepentant deregulators whose unshackling (read: anything goes) of mortgage and other financial institutions eight years ago helped start us down this road in the first place; the myopic politician who wrote in a magazine article published a week ago that "Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation" (one presumes that, as noted wryly by the Toronto Globe and Mail, "the piece was submitted before Lehman Brothers went belly up") was...still with me?...suspending his campaign to return to Washington to help address America's economic meltdown.

If you've got the stomach for it, you can link to a video of the candidate's announcement right this very minute at http://www.johnmccain.com/Informing/News/Speeches/Read.aspx?guid=3f8dec5a-52e2-44bf-b665-ebac609433a4

Not long after the McCain (rhymes with pain) Wednesday surprise, Barack Obama, at a news conference in Clearwater, Florida, said that while he agreed "There are times for politics and there are times to rise above politics and do what's right," he saw no need to cancel the debate, scheduled for Friday night at the University of Mississippi.

“This is exactly the time when people need to hear from the candidates,” he said, adding that “Part of the president’s job is to deal with more than one thing at once...".

And part of a senator's job too, Mr. McCain. But we can save the importance of multi-tasking for another day.