The new blog title: an explanation

So the blog has undergone a name change. Not because I'm any less taken with our president, who continues to do an excellent job, but because the innocence of the 08 election has been dissipated. When I first started blogging, I came up with the title Taking Barack to the Movies in part because my heart was touched by Obama's complaint that he couldn't get out as much as he used to; also because the election felt like the biggest movie I had ever seen  — except it was real, and developed a little bit every day, with plot twists and recurring characters. It even had its own soundtrack: first the National's 'Fake Empire', that the campaign used, then Trevor Rabin's ludicrously stirring theme from Remember The Titans, starring Denzel Washington, which played the night of the Democratic Party Convention, and again on election night, as if to prove that sometimes life can turn out as well as a Denzel Washington movie. The new title is taken from Friar Laurence's warning to the young lovers in Romeo & Juliet:— "These violent delights have violent ends / And in their triumph die, like fire and powder, / Which as they kiss consume. The sweetest honey / Is loathsome in his own deliciousness ' And in the taste confounds the appetite." Which is how I feel about a lot of things these days — summer movies, election stats, the candy from the newly-opened Sugar Shop on Baltic street.