Are my eyes really blue?

June 2, 2008:

In our reality-based world, of course, you go for the nomination with the delegate-selection system you have, not the one you try to shat out halfway through the fifteenth round of the fight. Yes, caucuses were created to stimulate popular participation and build a base more inclined to activist participation, and superdelegates were created to counteract the influence of caucuses, and Iowa and New Hampshire get their special privileges because…because…shit, I got nothing. Nor does anyone else. At some point, the Dems will revert to a model like the GOPs, and the GOP will move closer to the Dem model to prevent what happened to them this year, and the lion will lie down with the porterhouse…

…Game Over. Everything else is bookkeeping.

This is an object lesson for Team Bernie, who failed to go to school on the shortcomings of Team HRC eight years before. Some states have primaries, and some have caucuses. Those primaries may be open to non-registered voters or they may not. Some states hand out delegates in differing proportions, some have no delegates pledged, it’s a gigantic mishmash. Your choices are to learn the system and use it to best effect, or modify and change the system – before you start. If you’ve decided that all the fines in Monopoly go to the bank instead of Free Parking, you can’t demand a chunk of change because you landed on it first after your opponent built eight houses and a hotel on the green spaces.

If you’re going to try to steal something, the smash-and-grab is never preferable to picking the lock. It’s hard to learn to pick a lock. It takes time to case the joint. You have to have a plan. That’s why heists get entire motion pictures and smash-and-grab jobs get 20 seconds in a montage with “Take My Breath Away” as comedy background music. 

The Democratic Party is ripe for a heist. It’s been done before. George McGovern was the Danny Ocean of 1970, and rebuilt a system that he could crack himself in 1972 with the greatest of ease. That he was a disastrous candidate in the general election doesn’t reflect on his cleverness in getting that nomination for himself, and it’s arguable that the superdelegates that Sanders alternately decried and banked on were a reaction to both McGovern’s cleverness and Kennedy’s kamikaze run in 1980 which fatally crippled the Carter campaign. (And arguably to Reagan’s similar feat in 1976. At that point, looking at both teams, you have to start taking precautions. Republicans didn’t, and now, Trump.)

I suspect that HRC may throw Team Sanders the sop of a place on the rules committee for 2020, and it’s possible that we may see the end of the superdelegates (who, after all this time, have never swung the nomination away from the popular-vote frontrunner). Their presence is an atavistic reminder of a time when state parties and state conventions sent delegates unhindered by caucus or primary outcomes, and the convention was a decision-making process instead of a four-night infomercial and Spring Break for poli-sci majors and small-town lawyers. But the kind of signaling process they offer can just as easily be done via endorsement now, and the elimination of the supers is probably going to be the price of peace through the autumn. One hopes that the candidates of 2020 will profit by the lesson of 1972, though: when the game starts, make sure more than one person has read the inside of the box lid.

May 23, 2008:

 

Think about it: Al Smith broke the seal on a Catholic running for national office. JFK got elected. By the time Kerry ran in 2004, it was essentially an afterthought. You couldn’t name all the Catholics on either side of the two primary races this year. Meanwhile, Jesse Jackson finished a mighty strong second for the Ds in 1988, and Obama more or less has it wrapped up now. Give it another generation and it won’t even be that big a deal. In the past, you’ve had women who were marginal candidates for President at best – Shirley Chisolm, Pat Schroeder, Carol Mosely-Braun – but none who were contenders. Hillary was serious, and by virtue of running a hard second the whole way, she’s basically made it possible for the next woman to close the deal.

And ultimately, I think that’s why the Tab-and-Virginia-Slims cohort is so outraged. It’s not that a woman’s not going to get there, because it’s going to happen inevitably, and probably sooner than you’d expect. No, the reason Ferarro, Steinem, et al are so outraged is because it’s not going to be one of them. Because when the triumph comes, and a woman puts her hand on that Bible, it’s going to be somebody other than a second-wave Baby Boomer feminist.

In the end, this is the flip side of my last post, and the reason (drum roll…here comes the worst kept secret in the entire Interweb tubes) that I’m officially backing Barack Obama for President: because he’s 47 years old. When Woodstock happened, he was 8. When Saigon fell, he was 14. He didn’t get out of high school until 2 years after Star Wars came out, and his college and graduate career was spent in the go-go 1980s. He is chronologically incapable of continuing the 40-year proxy war of the baby boomers.

Think about it: literally every single Presidential election in my lifetime has been a re-fight of 1968. The Silent Majority vs. the Great Other. The good decent hardworking white people against the coloreds, the bra-burners, the dirty hippies, the eggheads, the Communists. This is why Kevin Phillips deserves a frying pan in the nuts, no matter how much he’s repented: what he gave us was a self-propelled bullshit machine that turns our national politics into Groundhog Day with a constant loop of Buffalo Springfield in the background.

National politics will not move forward until the last Wallace supporter is strangled with the entrails of the last McGovern supporter.

Barack Obama is our best chance to break the endless cycle of Boomer narcissism…because he’s not one of them. He’s somebody who can say, yes, the Sixties were a pivotal historical moment…but guess what? The moment’s over. Put the bong and the sandals and the Confederate flags back in the attic and deal with the world as it is in 2008.

 

So. Yeah. About that.

I genuinely thought that Obama would break through. Not that he would be loved and embraced by all and lead us to the land of sweet reason and moderation, but that he would appeal to enough people that the old Sixties modality could and would be left behind, and that having him at the top of the stack rather than Hillary would mean an end to the Clinton Rules and the 90s-conspiracy-hysteria mode of politics in this country.

Man. I fucked that up.

Ninety percent of the “Clinton scandals” were giant nothingburgers invented out of whole cloth by Arkansas rubes, inflated by the right-wing noise machine and carried to term by a clueless national press. Obama doesn’t even have the peg to hang the other 10% on. And yet, for years and years we were required to act as if clinical insanity was a valid part of our national political discourse and that scorched earth was the time-honored right and proper response to a decisive presidential election.

And the GOP continues on its same accelerating path which has brought us here…to Donald Trump as its standard-bearer. And people have the gall to ask “how can this happen?” It can happen because this is what the Republican Party is. It’s what it has been aiming for since 1994. This is the inevitable result of a political party that completely eschews policy and governance in favor of sloganeering, hysterics, and good ol’ courthouse-steps shit-slinging. Don’t let the Queens accent fool you: Trump as nominee is the crowning achievement of the nationalization of Southern politics.

More mysterious to me is where the rest of the field is. Sure, Hillary seemed unbeatable as the nominee – but people thought she was in 2008 and that didn’t stop Obama and Edwards and Biden and others from jumping in the mix. Bush seemed unstoppable in 1991, but when Cuomo and Bradley dipped, there were still plenty of takers – Tsongas and Brown and Kerrey and Harkin and Clinton. There were four total challengers to Hillary, none of whom was serious and only one of whom acquired enough horsepower to become so – and ultimately it’s only in part because of him. A huge chunk of what Bernie Sanders rode in on was the “Anyone but Hillary” crowd, most of whom are probably responsible for the BernieBro phenomenon.

This is worrying. Democrats who lose don’t get another bite, not since Stevenson flopped a second time against Eisenhower in ’56. If Hillary loses in November, who’s going to carry the ball in 2020? Joe Biden, at 77? Bernie again, at 78? California governor Jerry Brown, again, at age 82 and going for a third bite at a White House he aimed for in 1976?? I don’t know anymore. There were always the young-ish Senators and governors in years gone by, or the stalwart names like a Mario Cuomo or Bill Bradley that you could easily jot down as likely contenders (and Mario Cuomo could have won in 1988, don’t think he couldn’t). Now…Cory Booker? Maybe? Gavin Newsome, if only he hadn’t committed to the state-politics track and could have stopped banging everyone in sight? Kamala Harris, if four years as a California Senator are enough to launch a national campaign?

And that lays open the biggest problem of the Obama era: the Democratic machine, nationally, is not what it used to be. State races have gone Republican because the younger Democrats seem to have forgotten that you vote for anything but President. Why were there seventeen contenders for the GOP nomination? Because even when you eliminate the jokes (Trump, Fiorina, Carson) and the has-bens and never-weres (Pataki, Gilmore), the credentials of the rest sounded broadly feasible. Young Latino Senator from Florida. Young Latino Senator from Texas. Governor of New Jersey. Governor of Wisconsin. Governor of Ohio. (Badly failed but roll with it) Young minority former-Rhodes-Scholar Governor of Louisiana. Right there you have a bigger field than the Democrats, who tried to go at Hillary with a former Governor, two former Senators and a socialist gadfly from Vermont who didn’t belong to the party a year ago.

It’s all in at this point. Win or get ready to suffer a calamity for the ages. We, as a nation, literally cannot afford for Hillary to lose, because four years of Trump would play hell with our economy – never mind our standing in the world or a million other things. This is the race of her life and she absolutely cannot blow it.

But here’s the thing…remember the turnout for Obama? Remember the beatific expressions of African-American voters of a certain age for whom Jim Crow and dogs and firehoses and the back of the bus were living memory?

Think about the Tab-and-Virginia-Slims cohort.  Think about women of a certain age, for whom living memory means a time without legal abortion. A time without legal birth control. A time without the birth control pill at all, never mind only for married women. A time when you could only get a credit card in your husband’s name. A time when you couldn’t get an apartment by yourself without your parents’ signing the lease. A time when a woman got death threats for trying to drive the time trials in the Indy 500. A time when it was taken as read that you would be obligated to quit your job because you got married.

And for these women, who thought eight years ago that they would have to live with the knowledge that even when it did happen, it wouldn’t be one of them – that second-wave feminism would be relegated to modern-day paving the way for someone in the future, that HRC would just be another step on the stairs with Stanton and Anthony and Mott and “suffragettes” and Steinem and Abzug – all of a sudden, like the Undertaker sitting bolt upright just as the ref counts two, MAH GAWD THAT’S HILLARY CLINTON’S MUSIC. No chance has suddenly become one chance. One shot. One opportunity for a generation of women to finally close the deal for one of their own.

If you don’t think they’re going to storm the gates, you might better brace yourself. Because to borrow the words of the Vice-President, this is a big fucking deal. The Women’s Libbers are going to war one last time and they aren’t gonna leave anything on the field. And if you don’t think a bunch of angry old women won’t get what they came down here for, well, you’ve never worked in local politics, have you?

So yeah, I was was wrong. 68 is plenty of time to get back in the ring for one more attempt (not least in an office where your primary opponent is 74 and your general opponent is about to turn 70). And I was wrong to think that we could get shut of the baby boomer generation without driving a stake through its heart and chopping off its head – but one of them has an opportunity to set things right before they go. We should help her take it.

So here we are.  Everybody thought it would be Hillary for the Democrats, although nobody expected it to take this long. No one seriously thought it would be Donald Trump for the Republicans until about six months ago, when it became apparent that nobody was taking shots at him and nothing he did – no stumbles, no gaffes, no outlandish statements – were enough to dent his support.  And so we get here.

Hillary is less surprising. Twenty-five years ago, I asked a friend in New England what she thought of the Democrats who were orbiting New Hampshire ahead of the 1992 race. She thought for a moment and said “you know, the only one who really impresses me is the Arkansas governor’s wife.” And a quarter-century on, after a long and winding road that no one could have predicted, here she stands, the first woman to grasp the brass ring for a major American political party.  Put her resume on a random white man – one term and change as Senator from New York, four years as Secretary of State, a decade as the functional equivalent of Special Advisor to the President – and it’s certainly as plausible as most of the candidates you get these days. Put it on, say, Hillary Smith, and in 2016 it’s by no means too thin to run on in a world where people treat Ben Carson or Carly Fiorina as anything but a joke.

But there’s that word: Clinton. Couple it with Hillary and you get the ur-demon of Republican nightmares since before Al Gore’s mule ploughed the furrow in which the first T1 cable would be laid. Hillary Clinton is shorthand for every single thing in the demonology of American conservatism: liberal, feminist, shrill, lawyer, ballbreaker, Your First Wife, corrupt and conniving and eager to enslave hardworking Americans and feed our military into the chipper shredder of Islam and political correctness. There is nothing you can say about her – or against her – that hasn’t been said multiple times already in the last two decades. If she seems stiff, paranoid, defensive – well, it’s not paranoia if they really are out to get you. And they are. And they have been.

California voters under 30 plump for Bernie over Hillary by a margin of almost 5 to 1. Part of it could be attributed to the 2008 campaign, where her march of inevitability ran on the rocks of Obama-mania and her team was rather graceless in the slow spiral to defeat. And in a potentially fatal error, much of the left bought into the memes of the right: the Clintons are corrupt, the Clintons are shady, the Clintons are conniving weasels in thrall to billionaires, perpetually on the make and eager to stab you in the back for their own gain. And a generation too young to remember Travelgate, to remember Whitewater, to remember Jerry Falwell selling lurid expose tapes about cocaine smuggling in Mena, to remember a Congressman shooting a melon or a pumpkin in his yard to prove Vince Foster couldn’t have committed suicide, too young to remember the Clinton Rules: those kids swallowed the old GOP story, hook line and sinker. And so a generation of millenials has genuinely convinced itself that a seventy-something gadfly from Vermont, an avowed socialist in a time where the GOP makes that the description for anyone left of Meghan Kelly and an avowed atheist when polling shows Americans would rather elect a Muslim or a homosexual first – that Bernie Sanders is somehow the Chosen One and that the superdelegates whose existence they decried four months ago should step in to elevate the second place finisher to the nomination as if he were a Bush.

But all Bernie can do at this point is make things worse. And he might. He’s not a Democrat, never has been, only joined the party a year ago to vie for the nomination (much to the chagrin of voters who can’t understand why you have to be a Democrat to vote in the Democratic primary in most states). Right now he’s in the same spot as Reagan in 1976 or Kennedy in 1980 or possibly Jesse Jackson in 1988 or Jerry Brown in 1992 – a second place finisher who could choose to fatally cripple the nominee. And an unpleasant number of his supporters are in the Ralph Nader 2000 spot, masturbating to their own purity and proclaiming that better Trump win than Hillary because it will cause the scales to fall from the eyes of The People and they will rise to claim their victory, and never mind how badly things go in the meantime. Electing George W. Bush was supposed to heighten the contradictions, and it got us an endless war and a jobless recession and basically stopped us entering the 21st Century.

And that matters, because waiting at the other end of the podium is the most improbable of candidates: a reality-TV figure claiming to be worth ten billion dollars who may not actually earn a half-million a year, a self-proclaimed real estate mogul whose present fortune mostly stems from licensing his name and image, an heir to great wealth who has seen four bankruptcies and three marriages and literally thousands of lawsuits. This bigot, this walking joke, this unreconstructable asshole is the Republican candidate for President of the United States, and he could yet win the office.

Because the rules have changed, and the traditional norms have been thrown out. No one would ever have considered the Presidency an entry-level job. Barack Obama’s four years in the Senate were considered dangerously thin at one point. You needed to be a governor, with executive experience, or a Senator with time served in national politics, if you wanted to be a candidate for the Oval Office.  But at one point this year, the top three GOP candidates had not a day of elected service combined between them.

The norms have gone out the door, have been going out the door since Newt Gingrich ripped up “Folkways of the Senate” and attempted to elevate Speaker of the House to Prime Minister of the United States. The vast majority of Congress knows only life since the Contract With America, when the party sorting finally completed and the white South became irrevocably Republican. And the Republicans became irrevocably white-Southern, prone to that diabolical promise of the Dixie Sickness: you can make things how they used to be again. And the Southern style of politics took hold: with no policy differences of any kind within the party, everything came down to who could sling the shit. Who would promise the biggest tax cuts. Who would promise the biggest stick of military might. Who would come closest to the line in slandering and scapegoating immigrants, or Muslims, or African-Americans, or gays, or whatever was this year’s Other.

Government ground to a halt. Candidates for executive service literally died awaiting confirmation by a Republican Congress. There were multiple shutdowns, there was very nearly a default on sovereign debt, there was the first-ever dimunition of the credit rating of the United States of America – all in the service of slinging the shit. The seated President of the United States, duly elected, was somehow not qualified for office because he was secretly Muslim, secretly Kenyan, secretly a Soviet sleeper of some kind. None of the cultural or institutional standards of American politics were left standing in the service of slinging the shit.

In such circumstances, who would the Republican faithful choose for their standard-bearer but the most adept slinger of shit? A man who would leap over the line and openly appeal to racism? A man who would say exactly what came to mind and tell people exactly what they wanted to hear, no matter how impossible or outrageous or in open conflict with reality? The message of the last decade-plus of Republican politics has been that you, the taxpayer, are not only entitled to your own opinion; you are entitled to your own facts, and there is an entire media bubble of television stations and talk radio hosts and cable news and websites and email forwards that will gladly confirm those facts for you. And this Mighty Wurlitzer, this gigantic engine of hot air and bullshit, wheezed and coughed its way to the inevitable apotheosis of what American conservative thinking has degenerated to. Fifty years from Barry Goldwater to Donald Trump, from “A choice not an echo” to “We’re going to build a wall and Mexico will pay for it.” For the GOP, every electoral victory in the 21st century has been a vindication of moving to the right – and every defeat proof that moving even further right is required. Now, there is no policy position, there is no manifesto, there’s no set of underlying beliefs – there’s just slinging the shit.

And into this void steps the best available candidate. Better than an aging socialist from Ben & Jerry country, better than a second-string mayor and governor from Maryland, better than a barely-interested Southern white male who would have been a great DLC candidate in 1992. Is she the best candidate? Not at all. She’s fatally flawed in several ways, many of which are not even her fault. In a more sane election year, with a John McCain or Bob Dole or even a John Kasich at the top of the ticket, she’d probably be deader than fucking fried chicken.  Too old (even if Reagan or Dole or McCain were older), too shrill (or any other sexist jibe you like), too scandal-riddled (even if most were the work of a lapdog press eager to feed on ‘controversy’), too much yesterday’s news. A candidate for the fantasies of aging second-wave feminists dreaming through their Tab and Virginia Slims, not for today, not for now.

But that’s not the choice on offer right now. There is no door number three. There is no splitting the difference. The choice is between a flawed woman with three decades in the public political eye and all the baggage and all the wisdom that goes with it, and the abyss.  It’s not Hillary or some blow-dried manic pixie dream governor, it’s Hillary or leadership skills honed by posing on Celebrity Apprentice. It’s Hillary or the most openly racist national candidate for office since George Wallace. It’s Hillary or admit that we don’t really care about what happens to America – and Americans – anymore, possibly for good.

Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton, age 68, of Chicago, Illinois, Wellesley ’69, Yale Law ’73 – you have exactly five months to save the world.

Like high school or college, there’s a glass roof to see through. Like junior year of college, there’s the new car smell coming from a black leather interior as I motor through warm air and a setting sun. The feedback from the graphic displays helps with the video game of trying to eke out the best possible mileage. Sometimes it’s around 38, sometimes it’s as high as 65. If I drive to work and stop at Starbucks on the way, the meter when I get out almost always says 47mpg, spot on what they pitch. I’ll be interested to see what the first full tank of gas measures out at, because we’ve had to fill up exactly once.

It feels like a car from the future, even more than the Rabbit did ten years ago. Which makes sense, because this is a hybrid drivetrain and a touch screen system that makes me wonder where to find the controls for the forward phaser array and a door that unlocks because I walked up to it. This is a Chevy sedan right out of Demolition Man, which came out just as I got that Saturn. The cars always feel like a leap forward.

Especially when the car finds the phone in my pocket via Bluetooth and starts playing without any intervention of mine. And that’s broadly feasible now, because the iPhone SE has proven its worth. In four straight days I’ve failed to drop it below 50% during the workday, despite things like downloading podcasts or adding stuff from the iCloud music library to the local storage or playing through my Bluetooth cans – or indeed through the car’s own Bluetooth.  So far, so good, and the slightest top-up from a charger kicks the battery up fast. I’m interested to see how long it goes in low-power mode, especially in an all-day-out-and-about type setting – say, tooling around town in the new car.

Because the phone itself just feels right. The smaller size has stayed comfortable in the hand, and the smaller screen hasn’t been an impediment to reading – or to writing, as I’ve hammered out long and complex stuff on the built-in keyboard (the new Google iOS GBoard has its own issues; while it swipes pretty good it’s less good for pounding on the keys, and the swipe dictionary’s choices tend to err in favor of the longest possible wrong word). I haven’t compared the camera output on a bigger display yet, but it launches fast and shoots quick – it’s ready to go as soon as you flick up from the corner of the lock screen. With a little practice, the quick-draw is almost as fast as the Moto X.

But the biggest thing is this: in the first week of use, I haven’t felt compelled to go back to the old iPhone 6, nor to pull the Moto X out for a spin. The SE is completely serviceable as the One True Phone, maybe as the One True Device in a pinch (haven’t tried to read anything beyond RSS or Economist Espresso, but maybe Kindle later, and try pairing the Bluetooth keyboard for a really really long bout of typing). It was a good idea by Apple, well executed, and right in the sweet spot.

More like these, please.

When I got my first laptop in 1999, it was the classic PowerBook G3 series. It was replaced with a slightly slimmer version, and then an iBook with Firewire. A couple years later that was replaced with a titanium PowerBook G4, the theater-aspect slab of metal, and as soon as I got to Cupertino it was replaced with the 12-inch model. Then a 15″ MacBook Pro, soon replaced by a series of black 13″ MacBooks. Then a more advanced 15″ MacBook Pro at a new job, followed by a 13″ MacBook Air, followed by the new 12″MacBook. 

I say all this to show the pattern of my laptop history: wherever possible, a laptop PC similar processing power was always replaced with a physically smaller model as soon as one was available. The main reason this didn’t happen with the iPhone was because for five years, there was only one size of iPhone. Then the new ones were a hair larger for two  years. Then for two years your only option was to go either bigger or much bigger. Until now. 

Today you can get the same processor and most of the same chipset and features in three different sizes. It’s possible to move from the iPhone 6, at 4.7″,  to a phone that’s faster and more powerful with a better camera and superior battery life – in a smaller package. And today that’s just what I did. Everything is set to go, from scratch, using my prepaid backup SIM from my Moto X. All that remains is to pair the Apple Watch, set up work MDM, and pop the SIM for the work-paid AT&T device out of the 6 and into here.

For the first time in years, I feel fully in control of my own phone situation without eating the cost of service (which in the long run is far more expensive than any handset). I like it. It’s a good arrangement. And to be honest the toughest part of banging this out on the device itself was trying to use the Gboard swipe keyboard, because despite my worries the stock 4 inch display Apple iOS keyboard is working just fine. 

I could be writing about the inanity of Trump, or how conservatives will try to use “bathroom bills” to make up for a candidate that turns off the holy rollers, but I don’t want to lose my mind and start smashing up the room like Kylo Ren, so instead I’ll fixate on the iPhone SE. Again. Because there’s no point in denying it: I really want this phone, and the only reason I haven’t bought it already is because we’re probably only four months from the announcement of a notional iPhone 7, and there is an outside ghost of a chance that it might be desirable. 

But is it really?  Go back and look at iPhones past and whether I was compelled to get them and why.

iPHONE 3G: I bought it a couple of months after it came out, just because I had shorted out my original iPhone with lint packing into the dock connector. It brought real GPS and 3G to the iPhone, so it was definitely a desirable upgrade, even though I missed the metal shell of the original.

iPHONE 3GS: Brought a video camera and more speed, but that wasn’t enough to make me buy it. Good thing, too, because that left me free for…

iPHONE 4. Honestly, it felt like I had that 3G forever, although that might just be because I dragged it abroad in 2010 and it felt SO dated by the time the iPhone 4 landed. Classic styling, HD video capture, retina display, 5 MP camera…totally worth it.

iPHONE 4S. I luck-boxed into this one when my AppleCare-covered 4 had one issue too many, and they didn’t have replacement units so free-rolled me into this one. Not a lot to compel me over its predecessor other than Siri and a slightly improved camera (8MP rather than 5, 1080p video capture rather than 720p).

iPHONE 5. The main appeal to this was being off contract and having the opportunity for work to take over my phone and put me on Verizon with its LTE footprint. Had that not been on offer, I think I would have been content to stick with the 4S. Sure, the 5 had a slightly larger screen and LTE, but the 4S brought non-LTE 4G to the phone which was honestly as fast as much of the LTE coverage I could get (yes, there was 50Mbps LTE speed at the train station, but anywhere that had 3 bars of Verizon or less – in other words, 80% of Silly Con Valley – wasn’t breaking the 8Mbps that non-LTE 4G on AT&T was routinely providing me).

iPHONE 5S. The big appeal here was to add a 64-bit processor and TouchID. Neither was enough to tempt me to spend my own money on an upgrade or change service. I honestly don’t know if it would have even were I still pushing a 4S, unless the battery and LTE were tempting (and the 4S did seem to lose battery quickly, but I don’t know how much of that was just Twitter).

iPHONE 6. This was bought purely out of the move back to AT&T. I had misgivings about the size almost from the beginning (actually from the very beginning) and my worry that the screen would offset the bigger battery seems to have been borne out, especially given the improvement in the SE over the 6S. It’s fine, but when combined with the Apple Watch there’s nothing that would compel me to take it over a 5S (and the only reason I haven’t taken over the wife’s old 5S is because of the damaged camera; even that wasn’t enough to prevent me using it for a couple of days with no problem).

iPHONE 6S. Absolutely nothing attractive about it, and in many ways a step backward. Giving up battery capacity for a “3D-Touch” gimmick reminiscent of the dumbest Samsung nonsense should have been a warning shot all the way round.

So the question is…what could the iPhone 7, so-called, have up its sleeve that would make me sorry I took it over the SE?

According to the Great Mentioner, the next iPhone is supposed to be eschewing the traditional headphone jack for something involving either the Lightning port (which has interesting implications for charging and listening at once) or wireless (which has interesting implications for battery life) and may be even thinner (which has even worse implications for battery life). There’s also talk of wireless charging, which may imply that you’re meant to set the thing on some sort of charging pad whenever you aren’t walking around with it (which is a hell of an alternative to just providing a sufficient battery in the first place, but I digress). The rumblings also include things like AMOLED displays (YES YES YES) and an all-glass body (NO NO NO). But the fact that the SE is out now, and unnumbered or otherwise designated, suggests that whatever phone emerges from Jony Ive’s skinny britches this autumn will not be another 4-inch phone.

Which is a problem. The Moto X has a 4.7” and is at the very limit of what I’m comfortable as a one-handed daily phone, and Apple’s current design choices around symmetrical bezels and physical home button/fingerprint scanner strongly suggests that they won’t be able to put a similar size display in a similar size device. Going any thinner than the 6S – already round and slippery with the camera protruding awkwardly from the rear – is absolutely idiotic, but one never knows.

Here’s the thing: in August 2015, I was expressing a desire to take over the wife’s iPhone 5S in place of my iPhone 6. Hell, the day they announced the 6S I was wishing for a 5S in the body of a 5C. It’s been pretty clear for a while what I want. I bought the iPhone 4 on launch day in 2010, the day after a crazy day of news and sports and “are you seeing this??”, and in the ensuing six years, I’ve paid for exactly one cellular phone: my Moto X. Mathematically, I guess I’m on reasonable ground to splash out for a new device. So am I at risk of buying something and being stuck with a phone I don’t want in six months?

I doubt it. I really doubt it. More and more, it looks like the only thing that’s going to move the needle on cellphones past 2013 is virtual reality, and I doubt that’s going to be an attractive enough prospect to pay for in the next 12-24 months. I could be wrong, but I’m prepared to live with it if I’m not…or to get work to replace my work phone, which after 2 years should be a straightforward proposition.

I guess I’m going to buy an SE. If nothing else, so I’ll shut up talking about it.

Once again, it’s not possible to bang out this from the device itself. But I could send it, because the Chevrolet Malibu Hybrid comes with a 3-month-or-3-GB wireless LTE hotspot, which is maybe the most unfathomable thing. Next to that, the touchscreen iPhone interface, the front and rear collision detectors, the blind-spot warning indicators and backup camera are all plausible, and the hybrid drivetrain and steering wheel radio controls and panoramic sunroof and keyless entry barely rate a mention.

It’s definitely a future jump. When I got the family’s old Monte Carlo handed down after five years and 125,000 miles, it still had an analog dial radio. The Rabbit had a custom stereo put in, but it was a couple of months before the iPhone announcement and only ever had a one-line display. This one effortlessly combines AM, FM and XM without distinguishing on the preselects and has not only a full screen display but Apple CarPlay, so plug in the phone and boom, there’s your Maps and your Podcasts and everything. And as a work colleague pointed out, making the car a dumb terminal and putting the smarts in the phone means that your car’s entertainment system is upgradable as your phone is.

The sensation of the hybrid ride is normal these days, having taken so many Prius trips since that first awkward moment in the airport lot in 2004 when I was trying to figure out where the key went and how to shift gears. Now, it’s nothing to walk up to the car, touch the button on the handle before pulling it, sit down and hit the START button and the car’s all ready to back up without a sound. It feels like a car in the future should feel.

But in many ways, this is a bet. This is the first Malibu Hybrid the dealership has sold. It was the only one on the lot, and providentially spec’d out just like we wanted, but because the true hybrid is new for 2016, there isn’t a lot of data to go by for comparison. We are the beta testers. This is a wager that Chevrolet, back from the dead with the rest of GM, has learned its lesson and gone to school on the Volt and Bolt development, and can produce a modern and contemporary car that will punch its weight with the Toyotas and Fords of the world that have been doing hybrid for a decade. (Don’t forget, Obama dumped his Chrysler 300C for a Ford Escape Hybrid once he started running for President.) This is that rarest of birds in Silicon Valley: an American-made sedan. My immediate family bought only Chevrolet from 1969 until 1993, I was raised on the bowtie as much as I was raised Democrat or Baptist, and this is a leap of faith that an American car company is something other than perpetually teetering on the precipice of doom – or worse, irrelevance.

But it’s comfortable and drives well so far.  I think this could work out. 

When I came out here, there were three conditions: stop in Reno so I could shoot some craps (which wound up with me losing the whole nut in about 10 minutes and learning a valuable lesson about trusting your gut), get DirecTV so I could get Sunday Ticket and keep watching the Redskins (officially terminated many years ago), and buy a new car to replace my 11-year-old Saturn, ideally the New Beetle I was so into.

Today, the last one is crossed off for good.

It wasn’t a Beetle by the time I got it – it was two years later and a Rabbit, built on the Mark V Golf platform (and in every way superior to the Mark IV underpinnings of the Beetle). I fit in it, even in the back seat. It was a hatchback of the type that captivated me on the honeymoon, it was actually made in Germany, it was a perfect “got nothing to prove” sort of car and it felt like a decisive break toward the future, with the blue glow of the dash and the satellite radio built in and the red lights always beaming down over the console.  And in its way, it was a trophy of the new job, because it was bought for 1% under dealer invoice on an Apple promotion. We picked it up in October 2006, and it was the capper of what was a really good year.

We called it Harvey (a name bestowed by my surrogate big sister) but it never really had the personality of my old Saturn. It would be tough to match up to the record; in ten years of ownership I think we maybe took it out of California twice (not counting the odd loop around Lake Tahoe) and never since 2010. It has 116,000 miles instead of the 205,495 Danny finished with, and those are almost all city miles, ground out in a 40-mile radius from home by a 2.5-liter 5-cylinder engine that was supposed to provide 4-cylinder mileage with V6 power but only ever worked the other way round. 2007 and 2008 were a bad time to find out your zippy little compact is only giving you an aggregate 24 miles per gallon.

On the one hand, you could argue that it didn’t deliver much in the way of excitement and adventure and really wild things. On the other hand, the adventures and excitement and really wild things are on other continents now, and I’m of an age and station where the car has only ever been registered at a single address, rather than in three different states in 13 years. And it’s not worth sinking the money that would be needed to fix the sunroof, fix the airbags, fix the transmission, sort out that annoying ticking that we’ll never know the cause of, and God only knows what else over the next three years, or five, or however long.  Better to just get an adult-sized car with a hybrid or electric drivetrain, optimize for comfort and mileage, and get on with life instead of trying to attach cosmic importance to a thing.

So long, Ploughboy Bunny. A good job well done, all in all.

* My shoulder hurts like hell. I strongly suspect there’s a pinched nerve causing it, and I need another MRI (ideally claustrophobia free) before I know for sure if the bulging disc is back, but it’s bad enough that I had an emergency visit to the chiro and got my shoulder taped eight ways from Sunday.  On a side note, add cyclobenzaprine to the list of drugs that stop working for me after 48 hours, alongside Advil, Aleve, diclofenac, Mobic, Celebrex and hydrocodone.

* My phone’s battery has gone to hell in the last couple of weeks. I don’t know if using the external battery pack managed to mess something up, but even after wiping it (twice), conditioning the battery (twice) and setting it up as new, with no backup restore, it still won’t get through an 8 hour day of normal use unless it’s in low power mode. Meanwhile, a top tip for everyone: if at all possible, change your 2 factor authentication to an SMS text rather than a code from an app, because it’s taken me three days to get into all my formerly 2FA services and there’s one I still can’t (the Chorus system at Vox Media, which appears to have no backup solution, so if I can’t restore data to my old phone I’m good and cooked).

* I probably would have bought an iPhone SE by now, except the backorder is still three weeks on every model. That may be enough to keep me on this sinking 6 right now, or at least force me to go through extensive troubleshooting to make sure it’s not the Apple Watch or the Bluetooth headset that’s causing the power loss. But oddly, the experience is making me ever more cognizant of how big this phone really is – when I switched to a borrowed 5S for a couple of days, it felt compact without being too small, and when I went back to the 6, it felt huge and ungainly. Tougher time with the keyboard on the 5S, obviously, but at the same time it seems like the keyboard in iOS 9 was a step backward generally.

* Speaking of mobile technology, it looks like we might be about to take the plunge on that Malibu Hybrid. We test-drove it, it handles well, plenty of pickup, sufficient room inside (barely, in back, but the legroom was better than the headroom), and the bells and whistles in 2016 are off the chart from where they were ten years ago. We’ll see if it comes together. While I’m not looking forward to a car payment again, it’d sure be nice to have something reliable that would go 500 miles on a tank of gas (and this will, believe it or not).

* I have made my commute a little longer in the morning, but in exchange I get a straight shot on the train, less crowding, none of the Palo Alto dickishness to deal with, and a good half hour to drink coffee and get my head together before getting into the office, and I can tell a difference between days when I do that and days when I have to just take the train straight in. Some forms of commuting are just more aggravating than others, and things go a lot better if I don’t have to kick against the bricks first thing on a Monday morning before even getting into the office.

* I’m hesitant to say this for fear of jinxing it…but things seem to be mostly going OK. Disney was great, Yosemite was great (a certain half hour or so in the morning notwithstanding), the long driving road trip portions were just fine, work is under control, politics is shitty but manageable now that we more or less know the score, my breathing is much improved, and maybe just maybe we’ve licked the allergy thing…it’s a lot easier to deal with life when all you have is a couple of obstacles rather than what looks like a straight path but a dozen pebbles in your shoe. It drives home the point: if there are things you do that make your life worse, stop doing them.

* Did I have the first and second place horses in the Derby? Why yes I did. Did I have them in some sort of parlay? Well…nope. Which is why I made a profit of $2 instead of something serious. Siiiiigh.

I stand by my remarks.