When I started at OPM last fall, I was in ASMG, which was in CTS, which was in HRPS, which is part of OPM. The Director of OPM, while not a cabinet secretary, does report directly to the President (though in practice it seems like he might reports a little bit to OMB). So my boss's boss's boss's boss's boss was Obama. Then my group reorganized, and then all of OPM reorganized, and now I'm in PRODDEV, which is in ASMB, which is in HRMS, which is in LTMS, which is in HRS, which is part of OPM. Thanks to a combination of being a Presidential Management Fellow, being in the right place at the right time, and just plain showing up, I've had lunch or dinner with all but one person in that chain, including the director (very nice guy; our lunch was postponed by the series of blizzards and when we finally did have lunch, he spent the beginning explaining the decision process behind deciding when and how to shut down the federal government due to inclement weather. I wouldn't want that job.)

As to the motorcade, I live on 19th Street, and I work on 19th Street, and Pennsylvania Avenue crosses the stretch of 19th Street that I commute on, and the White House is at 1600 Pennyslvania. So I've been stuck for coming up on ten motorcades. This is a thing that is fun exactly once. And almost all of them are Biden's motorcades, I'm assuming, because 1) they are arriving at the White House around 9 am or leaving around 5 or 6 pm, and 2) they don't have the ambulance or military command truck in the rear. On the other hand, neither of the limos had a presidential seal.

But the motorcade I got stuck behind tonight was going to the White House, not from, and did have the extra trucks, and did have somebody sitting in the back of a limo staring out whose face was consistent with Obama's.

But, when I checked the schedule,

The President will then travel to Buffalo, New York. ...

Later, the President will deliver remarks at a DCCC fundraising dinner in New York, New York. The President's remarks will be pooled press.

The President will return to Washington, DC in the evening.

All of the EU embassies in DC had an open house yesterday. The flier had room for seven embassy stamps, which I took as a challenge. The first nine embassies I went to were all a few miles from my apartment, further than Kona and I normally roam. It was nice to see the interiors of these places, but not terribly revealing since they all have intentionally public spaces where they host parties and whatnot. The lines started getting out of hand, especially for the shuttle buses, but the weather was decent. After finishing two distant legs, I came home around 3, got Kona, and went for the local embassies with time running out. Stamps only, this time, didn't want to leave Kona outside for too long.

Alas, Estonia wasn't doing any stamping, and the person doing stamping at Bulgaria had already packed up. The lines at Ireland and Greece were prohibitive. Luxembourg and Cyprus were quick operations, in and stamp and out. Portugal had already stopped admitting visitors, but the nice man went in and got me my twelfth and final stamp.

The final tally was Denmark, Italy, the UK, Finland (nicest embassy), Belgium (awful crowd control), Slovakia, Austria, Czech, Hungary, Cyprus, Luxembourg, and Portugal.

This morning Kona and I went out and visited Bulgaria again to express our dismay about the stamping situation. (We did Estonia months ago.) Below are flags from several countries Kona has visited recently, including this morning's walk. Can you guess the countries?

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This seems useful to know. To summarize:

• Louis XIV
  • under the elaborate ornament the constructive form and the strength and stability is retained
  • bolt-upright demeanor
  • sides and faces of cabinets are flat
  • acanthus leaf has a strung-out appearance, as if blown by a strong wind, and the lobes are deeply cut
• Louis XV
  • legs are bent in curves of contrary flexure ... curves become so great as to destroy all feeling of structural support.
  • sides and faces of cabinets bowed or swelled out in the middle
  • ornament abounds in shell and scroll work, intertwined with wreaths, garlands and naturalistic flowers ... The end of nearly every scroll or curve is a leaf
• Louis XVI
  • delicate turned and square tapered legs without any curves ... upright and symmetrical
  • sides and faces of cabinets are flat
  • acanthus is less free, the general flow of the leaf being in one direction

Kemp will be fine. He can be great, if he chooses. At 25, it’s as good a time as any to decide.

Brown implies that Kemp is stubbornly deciding not to be as good as he can. Is he not training hard, as Coletti hinted, or is he just not giving it 110% on the field? I feel the temptation of this kind of thinking, that poorly performing players are willfully hurting us the fans by just not being very good. Those darn Capitols, who blew a three games to one lead before losing in the first round to an eighth-seeded Montreal, just choked. They lacked the will to win.

As far as I can tell as an casual armchair analyst, the overwhelming majority of professional athletes work as hard as they can almost all the time, both in training and in games. The most successful of them will earn hundreds of millions of dollars, and that's a pretty strong incentive. And if you're not a driven, abnormally competitive person, you probably didn't persevere through the ten or twenty years of effort, starting in childhood, required to become a professional athlete. And statistical analysis has proven that, at least in baseball, there's no measurable, consistent ability to be "clutch", to outperform your baseline in high-leverage situations.

So when a sportswriter says that greatness, for Matt Kemp, is a choice, what could that choice possibly be? What could he possibly do to be greater that he hasn't already done?