Walking around at lunchtime, I saw at least three women in different places, arms folded, standing ram rod straight on the sidewalk, lips pursed into a perma-frown.
And I thought, thank God I'm not the guy she's waiting for.
(Then again, they could be thinking the same about me.)
Such are the small (very small) joys of the single life.
Baseball had previously announced that we could expect an announcement on the status of the Montreal Expos by August 18-19, at the next baseball owners meeting in Philadelphia.
No news will be made. If the Expos were coming to Washington in time for 2005, we'd already know.
Trust me on this. Ahead of a large business announcement like this one, all sorts of preparations have to be made in the background -- preparations that inevitably create just the sort of background noise that would tip us off as to what's going to happen next.
Washington is too small a town for it to be any other way. Unless we hear something more definitive in the next few days -- like rumors slipping out of the Stadium-Armory board that runs RFK Stadium -- we can expect to wait until at least the World Series, and probably longer.
I went to the movies to see The Manchurian Candidate over the weekend, and while it will never live up to the original, it was a superior thriller in its own right -- this despite the presence of Al Franken, and the paranoid allusions to the Carlyle Group (memo to conspiracy theorists: a couple of years back I dated a secretary who worked there, and it just isn't that big a deal).
The biggest gap between the original and the remake: the magnitude of the tragedy, and the emotional impact of the conclusion, isn't nearly as dramtic this time. In the original, Raymond Shaw as played by Laurence Harvey was a despicable man who had been redeemed, making his fate all the more terrible. But Shaw as played by Liev Schreiber is nothing more than a mildly pleasant cypher, powerless to prevent his manipulation and ultimate doom.
Credit the casting director on one count: though he doesn't sound anything like Harvey, Schreiber's voice casts the same sort of dissonant note that his predecessor's did in the original.
Yes,the original Manchurian Candidate was the better film version but Meryl Streep was a more polished sophisticated ogre than Angela Lansbury.