I’m blogging today and for most of the next week from my favorite city, New Orleans. It’s a beautiful day here, the last day of JazzFest, which in terms of its impact on the city is sort of Mardi Gras Lite. For me, that means I will finally be able to get into my favorite restaurants without waiting for hours (last night at Praline Connection we were served our first bite of soul food as the clock struck midnight). It also means I’ll have time to catch up on last week’s political developments, including the Carl Hubbell screwball George W. Bush delivered on Social Security, and this week’s U.K. elections. Despite the general pre-modern ambiance of New Orleans, and its delightfully non-Washingtonian antipathy to workaholism, WiFi is becoming widely available, so I will not have to crouch in a cubicle at Kinko’s or rely on AOL dial-up to deliver pithy thoughts on a regular basis. I’m old enough to remember quite a few semi-vacations when I found myself dictating speech copy over a pay phone from late night scratchings on a yellow legal pad, much as New Orleans’ favorite fictional character, Ignatius Reilly, condensed his twisted observations on Big Chief writing tablets. So even here progress marches on–but praise God, not too much.