If You Can Find It

Introducing the World's Most Complicated Top. If you can't find this blouse exactly, pick up any other equally complicated, strange, well-made tops you can get your hands on. The photos of you in such a top will be solid gold thirty years from now.

Now, on to politics. Yesterday Marshall and I read John Edwards's 2003 book Four Trials cover to cover. A great read.

Explaining the germ of his interest in the law (he's a lawyer), Edwards writes:

There were no lawyers in my extended family. There were millworkers, grocery clerks, ministers, Marines, boxers--but not lawyers. And though I barely knew Doc Smith, who was the only attorney in town, television brought all kinds of dramatic justice, and injustice too, into my small world.

As a boy I was moved, and I was shaken, by The Fugitive, that series where the wrongfully accused Dr. Richard Kimble escapes prison and roams the land in search of his wife's true killer. The show's depiction of "an immocent victim of blind justice" made a powerful impression on me, as it did on my whole family, and I remember my building fury when--week after week--no one ever bothered to take Dr. Kimble's side and make things right for him, or even try. Instead there was that constant grim detective whose only job, bakrolled by some remarkably lush federal budget, I later realized, was to find this one, single man.

Maybe we need a lawyer as our next president. One who has spent at least twenty years getting pissed off on behalf of downtrodden and abused individuals and families.

When we asked some of our friends to donate to the Edwards campaign, one friend replied, via email:

Why don't I just give my money to a chimp or a
rattlesnake?  They're about the equal of a Southern
Politician.  Oh, wait... he's a lawyer too.  Here's
your money, Spanish Wrestler, El Tigre.

So wrong! (Damn Yankees.)

In the New York Times Magazine today, Deborah Solomon interviews "hip-hop guru Russell Simmons."

Q. Are there any presidential candidates who inspire you?
I talk to John Edwards more than I talk to anyone. He has said more things about the conditions we need to think about. He went to yoga with me. He did the whole class, an hour and a half. He sweated like crazy. He's in good shape, but it was hard on him.