in the Senate

We pay for cable TV now - I consider this a violation of my moral principles, but I'm a politics buff so I'm used to it - so I figured that at least for my sins I could watch the dramatic moment this morning when the U.S. Senate convened and either did or did not swear in two disputed senators.

No such luck. When I turned on the set just before session time, C-SPAN was showing the House. The House! The call-in talkers were babbling about Roland Burris, but C-SPAN was showing the House. The Senate might have been on C-SPAN2, but we don't get C-SPAN2. No other stations showed the slightest interest. PBS was showing Ernie and Bert.

By the time I found that the Washington Post web site had a live feed of the Senate floor, it was half an hour later and the swearing-in was almost over. There's Cheney offering congratulations to Mark Warner. I just bet he is.

But just after that I saw that the Senate's website had updated the list of Senators. (It still showed last year's until this morning.) Here they are. Neither of the disputed seats was filled. Durbin and Klobuchar will have to stand for Illinois and Minnesota by themselves for a while yet. Clinton and Salazar have not yet resigned; neither has Biden, even though his new job is guaranteed. None of the new senators have put up actual web sites yet; they just have placeholder sites with little biographical blurbs.

They don't count the electoral vote until Thursday, so that's the official news for the day.

one misty moisty morning

when cloudy was the weather, I drove up to Oakland for a New Year's Day party. Then I soon turned around and came back down as far as Palo Alto, because I'd been asked to review this concert.

It was the only concert going on last week that my editor could find to review, and despite interrupting my social activity it appealed to me, because those mysterious mid-period Haydn symphonies are my favorite parcel of music, and opportunities to hear good performances are too rare.