Gates

The Gates in Central Park are coming down. I'm glad. They were "cool" for a while, but I'll be happy to get my park back and ready for all the tourist mobs to make their way back to Times Square. Central Park is a beautiful place, so you don't need to put orange shower curtains up to attract crowds. I went for my Sunday walk through the park yesterday and it was packed with camera tooting folks trying to catch the Gates on their last day. Without the Gates I would have been almost alone, seeing Central Park with some left over snow from Thursday's storm, enjoying being outside on a clear, cold Sunday in Feb. They say the Gates got people in the park that don't normally come in the winter, that is their lost because the Park is great in all 4 seasons. Granted in the summer the park is more crowded than Sunday with the Gates, but people are enjoying the park for what it was built for which was not to display "art." So, the Gates was cool because of the scale, but it was nothing spectacular and it is now time for it to go away and the park to become functional again.

Iraq Vote

WOW, the NY Times columnist Thomas Friedman has some positive things to say about the Iraq vote.

In other words, this election has made it crystal clear that the Iraq war is not between fascist insurgents and America, but between the fascist insurgents and the Iraqi people. One hopes the French and Germans, whose newspapers often sound more like Al Jazeera than Al Jazeera, will wake up to this fact and throw their weight onto the right side of history.

It's about time, because whatever you thought about this war, it's not about Mr. Bush any more. It's about the aspirations of the Iraqi majority to build an alternative to Saddamism. By voting the way they did, in the face of real danger, Iraqis have earned the right to ask everyone now to put aside their squabbles and focus on what is no longer just a pipe dream but a real opportunity to implant decent, consensual government in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world.

Who would have thunk it. Now if the lunatic fringe would get past their sore loser mentality and actually admit that the Iraq vote went well and was a good thing, we'd be o.k.