I’m following up one huge announcement from last week with another huge announcement today: I’ve accepted an offer to work in the web division of TruTV in Manhattan.

It’s only a verbal offer at the moment, but I’ve heard the salary and benefits, and it all sounds good. The planned start date is Oct. 13.

TruTV used to be called CourtTV until they were bought by Turner Broadcasting last year. From the sound of it, I’ll mostly be working on their internal web site and interfacing with the Turner mothership site in Atlanta, although I might also get to work on their front end sites like trutv.com and The Smoking Gun.

The TruTV building is about three blocks from Grand Central Station, which is EXTREMELY fortunate. That means I’ll be able to take one 35-minute train ride directly from Mamaroneck to Grand Central, with no train changes and no subway.

No matter how hard I look, I can find no downside. I get to work for a TV network and its popular web sites, with a pay hike and bennies and as easy a commute as I could hope for, and I managed to snag this even as New York City’s finance economy collapses into a black hole. Right now I feel like I could cure cancer just by looking at it.

I popped the question, and she said yes.

(I wish I had a camera that could take a non-blurry photo of the ring, though. It’s really pretty — sapphire on white gold.)

Repent! The hour of the Economic Armageddon is nigh!

Our dollars have ascended to heaven, leaving their earthly wallets behind!

Two of the five Investment Banks of the Econopocalypse have fallen, and the rivers run green with their blood!

The lion has laid down with the lamb! Republicans have embraced Socialism!

REPENT! Repent your deregulatory ways!

Can I get an amen?

(…hey, better to laugh than to cry. On the upside, gold is up 13% and silver is up 18% in just one day’s trading, so I’m a little bit richer than I was yesterday.)

This series apparently debuted on Britain’s ITV2 on Sept. 10. I haven’t been able to find the first episode in the usual places — will I have to wait years and years for the US DVD release, a la Spaced?

Just because I haven’t blogged about politics lately doesn’t mean I’ve had nothing to say about it. I’ve been posting like crazy to the Sk8J and NM forums, but the stories have been moving so quickly that I didn’t know where to begin on this blog.

So I’ll just let John Scalzi pinpoint where we are at the moment.

It’s fascinating to watch the scales fall from the eyes of all the pundits who carried McCain’s water for so long. Andrew Sullivan’s rant is pretty good, but for pure schadenfrude, you can’t beat the Post’s Richard Cohen. (“I am one of the journalists accused over the years of being in the tank for McCain. Guilty.”)

What’s funny is I’ve known for YEARS that McCain is more two-faced than Harvey Dent. He was my senator for 7 years. Over and over, I watched him say one thing to the fawning press, then go the opposite way in his actions.

He publicly broke with Bush on torture, then voted with Bush on it anyway.

He righteously slagged Bush over the infamous “black baby” push poll in 2000, then not only did he chair Bush’s re-election campaign in Arizona four years later, but this year he hired the same people who created the poll.

He supported the Confederate flag during that primary, then later apologized for it. Cohen leads with that story as proof of McCain’s former stunning honesty. I call it proof that McCain will brazenly and repeatedly lie to win elections. Which — hey, guess what — is what he’s doing now.

This is not an “Ugly New McCain.” He didn’t lose his honor. Going back at least to 2000, he never had it to begin with.

If you’re like me, and I know I am, your interest won’t perk up until about halfway through this trailer, when you realize who the lead actor is and who’s singing throughout the trailer’s second half.

I can’t guarantee Repo is any good — its own web site describes it as Rocky Horror meets Blade Runner, and its release date has been knocked around for quite a while, and it co-stars… you know… her. But between Sweeney Todd and Dr. Horrible and maybe this, wouldn’t it be neat if movie musicals made a comeback, re-invented as something twisted?

…but no rest for the wicked and/or aged on the occasion. Kristie is teaching two classes this morning, and I’m suited up for a job interview in the city that will apparently last 2 1/2 hours. Whee!

Why are New Yorkers treat cheap, mediocre pizza like haute cuisine?

Since I’m with a girl who loves pizza like a ninja turtle, we’ve been to four different pizza places so far, including one just around the corner that gets rave reviews and writeups in local food guides. We even went someplace further away on a local recommendation for its “gourmet slices.” And every single one of them makes pizza the same way:

Bake a cheese pizza. Slice it and let it sit on the counter. When someone comes in, take a slice, put the topping(s) on it, and reheat it for a couple of minutes. Serve.

It doesn’t taste terrible or anything. All I’m saying is, if you order a slice of pepperoni, you’re going to get a quick, cheap slice of reheated pizza with a pool of grease on top. And they’re all like that. It’s like being surrounded by nothing but Sbarros.

So far, we haven’t found a recommendation for any place that doesn’t operate this way. My guess is that, for New Yorkers, this is simply how pizza is made. Anything else is Not Pizza.

Maybe we were spoiled by Magpies in Tucson. For me, this is how a pizza place operates:

Call in your order. (Make mine Chicken Primavera — chicken, garlic ranch, artichokes, zucchini, scallions, only $4… nom nom nom nom.) Wait 15-20 minutes. Drive to Magpies and pick up your slice freshly made from scratch. Or, alternately, eat in and get a pint of good draft beer with your meal.

Why has that business model taken hold in Tucson but (as far as I know) nowhere in the world’s greatest city-and-metro-area? My personal theory is that New Yorkers just can’t wait that long for a $4 slice… or maybe its chefs don’t want to handle phone orders. I don’t know.

And so the quest for the Perfect Slice continues…

Whose bright idea was a football doubleheader on Monday night? I just watched opening kickoff of the Broncos-Raiders game… at exactly 10:23pm local time. The game won’t end until well after 1am.

Ah well. I suppose I should just count myself lucky I get to see the Broncos opener on local TV.

Yesterday, courtesy of Hanna:

…No major damage was reported in New York, but it took just a few hours for Hanna to drop a month’s worth of rain in the metropolitan area.

The storm was responsible for flooding highways, delaying flights and halting the U.S. Open tennis tournament. Thousands of customers remain without power, mostly on Long Island.

At least three inches of rain fell over parts of New York City and nearly six inches was measured in the northern suburb of Rockland County. The metropolitan area generally gets three to four inches of rain in September.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen it rain that hard for that long. But now the deluge has passed and we have blue skies, sun, and not-quite-as-choking humidity once again. (Just before yesterday’s rain, the humidity was outrageous. The level of physical activity required for the sweat to soak through my shirt? Go outside, walk ten feet.)

Also, yesterday I realized I’m still not thinking like a local. When I read “Tropical Storm Hanna to strike New England” in an online news article, my first thought was — I’m not kidding — “Man, sucks to be them.” Immediately followed by, “Wait, that’s us!”

Yeah, I still miss the West Coast and/or Desert.

I’m getting along better these days, though. Part of it is getting used to the layout — for example, I can now navigate the subway system well enough to give advice to tourists. The other is simply a self-inflicted attitude adjustment — new month, new birthday, new outlook, looking past the pressures of life and money and doubt and yadda yadda.

I’ve been concentrating on the job hunt lately, which has not been as easy as I blithely assumed it would be. I’m not going to delve deeply into that process here, since my web site URL is easily obtained from my resume, so potential employers might read it. (That won’t stop me from blogging other topics, though.)

I WILL say that since a) the economy has been bleeding jobs all year, and b) the US financial sector, which is almost entirely based in NYC, has been at the epicenter of our economic collapse, I shouldn’t be surprised it’s been rough sledding so far. Moving cross-country during a recession was perhaps not the wisest choice, but what can ya do?

Speaking of gainful employment, Kristie’s job is finally underway. She’s teaching six classes, including two weeknights and a Sunday class (she’s there right now). It’s tough for her at the moment, but it won’t be so bad once she gets used to it — and after this semester, when she’ll be refining existing lectures rather than creating them from scratch, hopefully it will be a breeze.