GOOD: Bagels! Much better than the west coast, and at a fraction of the cost — I can walk around the corner and get egg and cheese on a toasted bagel for $1.95. Beat that, Bruegger’s.

GOOD: Delis! In Tucson, Boar’s Head meats and cheeses were a rare treat. The only places I found them were Sunflower supermarkets and an Italian deli in the northeast. Here, every little hole in the wall serves Boar’s Head, and some of the other stuff is even better.

EVIL: Humidity! And on a related note, mosquitos! Which have been eating us alive for the last week, following a couple of days of soul-sapping humidity. At the moment, I look like I have mild chicken pox, but only on my arms, upper back, and feet, which tend to be uncovered at night.

GOOD: Jews! Specifically, Jewish holidays! There are so many Jews at Kristie’s school that she gets days off for the major holidays like Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Considering how little we’ve seen each other since school started, we’ve enjoyed her last couple of days off. Of course, once I start work in Manhattan, it won’t be quite the same.

JURY STILL OUT: Seasons! Tucson has two seasons: nine months of dry, sunny heat, followed by winter. Seattle had nine months of cool, overcast rain, followed by summer. So going from wilting summertime heat and humidity to the present fall-like chill and drizzle in less than a month is taking some getting used to. I’m liking it at the moment — and looking forward to the leaves turning — but I reserve the right to hate having four actual seasons when it’s snowing and 20 degrees and my balls have frozen off and rolled into Long Island Sound.

EVIL: Eastern time zone! Everything happens so much later here that it seems like I’m always waiting for something, be it a football game or a debate (like tonight). And it makes it a lot harder to talk to my old friends in Tucson — by the time they’re ready to chat, I’m almost ready for bed.

GOOD: Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds! Or rather, the opportunity to see them, which did not exist where I used to live. They play this Saturday at the WaMu (JP Morgan?) Theater at Madison Square Garden. I’ve never seen them before in over a decade of fandom, so this is a Life List event for me.

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

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.)

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.

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?

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…

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