In other Rukavina news, one Josip Rukavina (with whom, to date, I share only a last name) is placed 22nd at the International Chess Festival.

Go, Josip, go…

I received an interesting email this morning from the Library of Congress; they said, in part:

The United States Library of Congress preserves the Nation’s cultural artifacts and provides enduring access to them. The Library’s traditional functions, acquiring, cataloging, preserving and serving collection materials of historical importance to the Congress and to the American people to foster education and scholarship, extend to digital materials, including Web sites. The Library has selected your site for inclusion in the historic collection of Internet materials related to the Election 2004, and we request your permission to collect and display your Web site.

The Library has developed two previous Election Web Archives, in 2000 and 2002. These Election Archives are available along with our other Web Archive collections through the Library’s Minerva Web site. The Election 2002 Web Archive illustrates how the Library catalogues archives and makes them available to researchers either onsite at the Library or through the Library’s public access Web site. This will give you an idea how your archived site may appear on our Web site.

Because of the content value of your Web site, the Library may have contacted you for permission to collect and display your site in other Web Archive collections. If you previously granted permission, we thank you for your participation, however, each new archive, including the Election 2004 Web Archive, requires separate permissions from each site owner. At this time, the Library requests your permission to collect your Web site located at the following URL…

I consented.

The tunnels of “Big Dig” — the project to bury the elevated expressway through downtown Boston — are closed during evening throughout this week, presumably because they pass near the Fleet Center, and would thus be a terrorism conduit.

Tonight, when heading out of the Center to make my way home, I noticed a “shuttle buses this way” sign in the corner of my eye. Hmmmm, I thought. Perhaps I can save the walk-subway-shuttle hassle and go direct. Sure enough, there was a special shuttle for my hotel — the Sheraton Braintree.

I made my way through the various gates and checkpoints (I had to show my credentials to be allowed to get on the bus), and ten minutes after I boarded, the bus (from the “Peter Pan” company, no less) glided down onto the “closed” expressway, allowed to do this because of a special “we’re an authorized bus” sign in the front window. We carried a Boston Police officer aboard for the entire trip — there’s one assigned to every bus.

And there was no traffic. None. We had the expressway to ourselves. This is, I hazard a guess, every Boston commuters dream. And I got to live it.

We made it to Quincy in 15 minutes flat, and I was walking in the hotel’s front door 30 minutes after we left the Fleet Center. Amazing.

And so it ends. Or at least starts its fade to black. I’m about to close the iBook here at the Fleet Center and head back to my hotel for the night. In the morning I head out to the airport and make my way back to Charlottetown. I’ll now doubt have more to say about what this experience has been like.

By the way, “that’s 30 for now” is the sign-off line that Ken Bosveld used for his column in the Waterdown Review, my old hometown paper, and the vehicle I used to attend my first political convention, 20 years ago, when John Turner beat Jean Chretien to become leader of the Liberal Party.

You will notice that a common theme here today, when not considering issues of civil liberties, has been a sort of naive wonder at how, er, “unreal” this convention seems.

I think the root of this has something to do with the fact that I am trapped inside a mental model that sees society’s governing of itself as a sort of scaled up version of an honest, thoughful conversation between two people sitting on a park bench.

Two people sitting on a park bench, I reason, can pretty effectively manage their park bench relationship, especially if they’re open-minded, more so if they are like-minded.

You scale up from that to a town council, and so on until you get to national-scale governing.

Where I break down, and the root of my naiveté, is my assumption that as you travel up this scale you don’t, of necessity, depart from the real, observable, understandable world of the park bench and enter a world of far more fluid, complex, neutrino-like forces.

It is the management of these forces — which by their nature are difficult to manage — that events like this convention are designed for. This is not a series of one-to-one conversations. It’s not even a series of one-to-many conversations. It involves using the battering ram of television to attempt to bash into the minds of enough people, in a seductive enough way, to move the pendulum in your direction.

Several readers have suggested that I get out on the floor and “talk to real delegates” by way of mitigating this primal flow with some real conversation. But real conversation is irrelevant here — what one person thinks is no longer important, for it is only as part of the collective that their nature can be shaped.

My friend Oliver says, somewhat in jest, that I should “just look for the chi” when trying to understand the measurement of “energizedness” here. And in a way he’s right: “chi” — “the vital force believed in Taoism and other Chinese thought to be inherent in all things.” it says here — is maybe what I’m talking about.

This is a butter sculpture. We are the butter. The convention is the sculptor’s chisel.

Looked at through that lens — which is indeed what the mainstream media are doing in abundance and with considerable enthusiasm — the Democrats are doing a decent job. The butter is taking shape. Dip in.

It says here that I’m a “liberal dem.” Who knew? Like the shirt says “label people, not jars.” Or was it the other way around?

Here’s some video I just shot of the “energized” Democrats here at the Fleet Center (see this post for the reason for the quotation marks).

I just came up from the first floor of the Fleet Center where I did my second interview of the day with a reporter Deutsche Welle (the first one went like this), Germany’s international broadcaster (think Radio Canada International, but from Germany; you can hear some of their programmes on the CBC Radio overnight service).

This interview, for the service’s website, was on “the blogger phenomenon,” and we chatted for a good 25 minutes about what weblogs are, how you find them, why I’m here, and so on.

Although there are others out there in the blogosphere who are complaining about how the mainstream media is all over the “blogger story” — this appears to be said either with equal parts of “we’re not the story, you idiots” and “you idiots just don’t get it, do you?” — I’m more than happy to pimp for blogging whenever possible. While people with blogs (or their immediate family, of necessity) “get” blogs, many people out there have never seen one, and have no idea whatsoever what “blogging the convention means.” If I can help the Germans understand, at the very least, why I keep a weblog, that seems like a good thing. A responsibility, even.

Christina from Deutsche Welle is looking for other bloggers here at the convention to interview tomorrow. Email me at dnc@reinvented.net if you’re interested; she’s set up down on the first floor, inside the security perimeter, so you don’t have to venture into the outside world to talk with her.

In my hit with Matthew Rainnie this morning, he asked me whether (to paraphrase) “the Democratic party was energized” as it has been characterized in the national media.

All respect to Matt, but that’s an absurd question.

An absurd question because it assumes that any one person (or, indeed, any group of people) can get their finger on the pulse of something as amorphous as a political party.

And an absurd question, even more, because it’s the kind of question that’s being inanely expounded upon 1,000 times a day here:

• “But it served to cement the loyalties of a Democratic Party that now appears energized and determined to unite in a common effort to replace President George W. Bush with Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts.” (United Press International)
• “The Democratic Party is more unified and energized going into this convention than it has ever been.” (CBS News)
• “For the first time in decades, the party is unified and energized behind its nominees…” (Roll Call)
• “Democrats are looking to their keynote speaker, Obama, to energize the base, as former President Clinton and his wife, Hillary, did Monday night.” (CBS 4 Denver)
• “Democrats, energized by their last first lady…” (San Francisco Chronicle)

Indeed a Google News search for “democratic party energized” at this hour shows 742 results.

As far as I can determine, the meter used to measure this “energy” is the “mood of the delegates” here at the Fleet Center. Al Gore says something, people clap and cheer, party is energized. Bill Clinton delivers a “rousing speech,” crowd “goes wild,” party energized.

No doubt.

But it’s just people clapping and hooting in an arena. Does it really mean anything? There are 63 million registered Democrats in this country (reference). Do the people cheering for Ted Kennedy in this room as I write this tell us anything about those people and how they will vote? Does it tell us if they are energized?

I fear this is all just a Mobius loop. A lie, you might say. A lie that feeds itself and becomes truth.

This doesn’t mean anything, really, because we all play along. I’m sitting here in the arena, there’s loud music blasting out of the PA and, hell, I’m feeling energized. Maybe I should vote for John Kerry.

My friend Oliver asked me if I could write something about the traffic here during the DNC. I just did an analog run and here are the highlights of the report, which covers traffic from 10:00 p.m. Saturday night until 7:00 p.m. (Tuesday), a period of roughly 69 hours:

• Page views: 20,212 (includes RSS readers)
• Top Referers: (doesn’t include search)
• http://www.conventionbloggers.com/ (1168)
• http://www.wonkette.com/ (850)
• http://www.nexopia.com/ (531)
• http://www.bloglines.com/ (262)
• http://www.lostremote.com/ (64)
• http://politicalwire.com/ (58)
• http://www.cyberjournalist.net/ (49)
• Most Popular Stories: (non-Toby McGuire related)
• Filling Up On Photos (1162 reads)
• What are the bloggers browsing? (543 reads)
• Monday Morning Time Crunch (333 reads)
• Disguised as a Blogger (193 reads)
• Data Transferred: 834 megabytes
• Hosts Server: 9,331
• Heaviest Traffic: 5:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. (Atlantic)
• Lightest Traffic: 5:00 a.m. to 6:00 a.m. (Atlantic)

Also of interest is that this photo of Barack Obama has been viewed about 10 times more than any other in the photo gallery. Obama is speaking at the convention at 9:27 p.m. tonight, by the way (not that it’s strictly scheduled here or anything…).