Classic quotes, Vol. 37

Here's a selection of some recent notable quotes, this time (again) all from my very quotable 5-year-old daughter M-:

M- (apropos of nothing one day, after she'd been playing by herself.... possibly a sign she may have been playing with her older brother too much): I would be a great astronaut-killer! (asked to elaborate) It's a guy who attacks and fights astronauts!

M- (showing off her strength, before almost falling over a basketball her little brother E- had accidentally rolled in her path): I can carry this HUGE chair, Dad! ... As long as E- keeps his BALLS out of the way...

M- (coming breathlessly into our room one morning, after we'd ignored an automated call identified as coming from my wife's teacher union): It's an URGENT call, on the answering machine-- it's an emergency! They're attacking our pensions, and our rights, and we need to vote!

M- (referring to Silly String, in a voice like a commercial): Kids LOVE this stuff!!

Internet blackout

By way of issuing the latest "Happy New Year" on record, I'm gonna opportunistically hop on a rolling train that I will simultaneously claim to have pushed out of the station myself.

That's right-- I am the sole pioneer of the Internet Blackout of Wednesday, January 18. I'm so far ahead of everyone else on this, I've already been holding strong for 17 days!

So go ahead, all you late-coming, fair-weather bandwagoners-- I've been keeping the seats nice and warm for you*, grab whichever one you like! ...Except for that one, that one's for my feet.

Here's to registering our support for defeating all freedom-destroying laws (SOPA) and decisions (Citizens United)!

---

* Don't ask how.

One-item lists, Vol. 2

Things not to say to your pregnant mother
1. D- (in response to J-'s comment that a ground squirrel looked especially fat): "Probably, it's the mom."

Things that are only slightly more fun than a spontaneous, unsedated colonscopy
1. Talking politics with old men from the country during a recession.

Unsolvable mysteries of the universe
1. My wife couldn't care less that I finally acquired some Bacon Salt to sample... This is a woman who would gladly wrap each piece of her breakfast cereal in bacon if only it wasn't so time-consuming.

Things that seem like they must be made up, but are not
1. The head of the Skoll Urgent Threats Fund, formerly head of Google's philanthropic arm, is named Dr. Brilliant. Dr. Larry Brilliant. It just seems like he's showing off every time he signs his name. Can you imagine how ecstatic his dad and mom must be? They would be, respectively, Captain and Professor Brilliant, Lord and Lady of Nerdlingshire.

Things that are ruined by rescheduling for the convenience of adults
1. Halloween. Free the 'Ween, suburbia! I hope you're having a great one today, and that you'll get out there and get you some candy (with hired orphans, if you haven't yet made your own candy-bait organ grinder monkeys) regardless of what your town or church might have declared about when or where you should be pounding on your neighbors' doors, demanding candy in exchange for their peace and security.

Book Review: Buster Climbs the Walls

I vaguely remember some Bush-era controversy over the PBS spinoff show Postcards From Buster dignifying (!!!) gay lifestyles by acknowledging them in one episode, to the point that neo-conservatives were using it as the platform du jour to justify cutting funding to PBS.


There's nothing that exciting brewing on the surface of Marc Brown's book Postcards From Buster: Buster Climbs the Walls, as it gracefully shies away from that kind of controversy. At the same time, it persistently hints at a much larger and more traumatizing subject, at least for the main character.


It's obvious from this picture that Buster's father himself is living a lie. That's right, he's clearly a normal human who's grafted novelty bunny ears to his scalp in an ill-advised effort to postpone a crushing realization for the freakishly enormous talking rabbit he's been raising as a son.

Let it go, Buster's "dad"... we've all got to cross that old bridge someday, and you'd better let Buster cross his in his own time without any more of your creepy interference. Or, failing that, at least buy yourself a goddamn bunny nose... you look ridiculous.

Other than that, the book's okay, I guess.

Corporate intelligence, Vol. 8

Once again, I'm here to demonstrate the importance of saying exactly what you mean, and nothing more. Just as I am the noble hero of literalism, picking apart your statements at will to reveal the messages you didn't know you were sending, there is a dark side to this power, and those who practice it do not show mercy even to fat, lazy, spoiled, Depressed nations.

My example this time comes from our hard-working United States Congress, doing its best as always to provide a steady, paternalistic hand guiding the feisty sled dogs of capitalism, while those dogs do their best to distract that hand with giant sacks of cash.

Paper industry starts using oil to get billions in alternative-fuel credits

Before you decide this sounds boring, let me sum it up for you, to innocently feed your disbelief and rage while you're trying to decide how you're going to make it through these next few years with both the shirt on your back and an absence of Chinese capitalist Communists laughing while they repossess Mt. Rushmore:

A few years ago, Congress passed a law meant to promote decreased use of fossil fuels. The language of this bill was so poorly chosen that at this most ideal of times, we all are now on the hook for many billions of dollars in unplanned-for expenses paying crafty companies to start mixing diesel fuel in with the renewable fuel they've traditionally created from their industrial waste.

So we have a single bright spot in a generally toxic industrial process, the usage of a waste product as fuel in place of more damaging alternatives, and these giant companies, hemorrhaging money for too long, snuff it out with a shower of diesel fuel injected into the process to qualify them as "mixing a taxable fuel with an alternative fuel."

The result for us, the taxpayers? International Paper, for example, will get "probably close to a billion a year of cash" from the IRS encouraging them to "keep mixing alternative fuels with the diesel fuel", and the manageable $61 million projected by Congress for extending this right-minded credit three months could instead "cost as much as $2 billion." The likely total payout to the top ten paper companies alone for this year is $8 billion.*

---

"The money to be gained from exploiting the tax credit so dwarfs the money to be made in making paper ... [that] the ultimate result of the credit will likely be to push paper prices down as mills churn at full capacity in order to grab as much money from the IRS as it can."

---

So at least you can get a few reams of paper way cheaper than before, for drafting all those letters to your Congresspeople. Just call me Mr. Sunshine-- I'll always find the bright side even if I have to make it myself! Maybe they can use all the extra paper to print up some more currency-- doesn't that always fix things whenever money is tight?

Remember this heartwarming story of poor word choice** as you hunker down with your industrious neighbors to help patch this sinking ship, making daily sacrifices just to get by, gladly exchanging a pay cut for a non-binding implied desire not to fire you in the immediate future.

At least SOMEONE'S making some money, right?*** That's gotta trickle down somehow... or do I need to go buy the latest edition of this classic 1983 economics textbook?

---

* $8 billion! Before all these corporate bailouts and emergency loans, that used to be an awful lot of money.

** I say "poor word choice" only assuming no Senators from paper-producing states were involved in writing this bill.

** For my readers abroad, rest assured that, as you can see, even the economic elite of America are determined to help dig a way out of the hole we've dug you all, by any means necessary.

A note upon Inauguration 2009

I needn't point out that today is a special day. We all know my preference for president, so I won't go on about that.

I just want to state for the record how disappointed I am that this inauguration is taking place in the middle of the week, and that I am not able to be there. I know that as time goes on, life will leave me even less flexible to accommodate last-minute schedule changes for opportunities like this, so I had really hoped to make it happen somehow.

Alas, J- will be left watching with all the students in her school, I'll be watching with the kids until we have to take D- to preschool, but I'll do everything I can to make sure the kids remember this day even if only in some small way (such as vague memories that I wouldn't stop yammering on about it during Duplo time).

I won't do this because we've elected "a black president" but rather because we've broken the centuries-old mold of what a president must look like, and we've started chipping away at least a bit at who he or she has to know and be indebted to.

And possibly even more important than that is the fact that even though we elected yet another candidate from our democracy-choking Two Parties, it feels like we all cast aside the many safe, easy choices this time and went with someone whose fresh ideas (at least for our current age) we listened to and specifically responded to, one way or another.

How many people were genuinely inspired by John Kerry, Bob Dole, Michael Dukakis, or either of the Bushes? These are people, among others, who benefitted from either "seeming presidential", having the right connections in a shallow pool, or just not screwing up enough to lose their party's nomination.

So for better or worse, we'll turn our back (at least for a little while) on the willfully irresponsible and damaging Bush years, and try our hand at shaping our own future. Even if Mr. Obama does nothing but speechify and Propose Big Things for four years, as long as he helps keep this momentum going, I think we can help ourselves just fine.

We can all tear down the duct tape and plastic wrap (for longer than it takes to hit the mall for the latest Thing We Don't Really Need), slide our Terror Alert Level down from Orange - Convenient Generalized Fear and Pliability to the never-before-seen Green - Commonsense Vigilance with Personal Freedom, let the sun shine on us and all our affairs, and then really start digging ourselves out of the many messes we're in.

It may make for a long few decades, but at least we can get through it with a smile and a lighter load on our shoulders. So here's to that!

Now we get down to Real Problems

You know, while I may live right next to the city where our new president ended up settling, I can't say I fully identified with him personally until I saw this picture:

"Backstage at the rally, Obama tries to calm a young supporter whose brother had taken his pretzel goldfish."*

I didn't get to see an After picture for confirmation, but I imagine him using his Dramatic Speech voice to full effect and settling this dispute within minutes.

I have to wonder if he'd be willing to lend me his services now and then in extreme emergencies, if for no other reason than as payback for all those dozens of dollars I gave him.

---

* I'm sure Pepperidge Farm would not be very happy to see their trademark genericized like this. I think we need to get out there and determine whether this was actually a Goldfish cracker or merely a regular cracker that happened to be vaguely fish shaped. If the latter, they get to start handing out lawsuits.

At long last, Pt. 4

Finally, here is the final section of my account of the Obama rally in Grant Park on election night in America. Part 1, part 2, and part 3 ran earlier this week.

...

The place was still packed and buzzing when the feed switched from CNN to the acceptance speech, and it was in listening to that landmark* speech that I felt myself really sucked in to the moment instead of floating outside it, taking notes, the way I generally do with most things in life.

I've often thought that I might have caught religion if I'd gotten to attend a so-called "black church" in my formative years instead of only visiting stale, conservative Catholic churches for various events in my extended family. Listening to this speech live was as close as I think I'll ever get, with the kinetic energy in the audience, the facial and bodily reactions of those around me, the frequent spoken responses throughout, and certain of Obama's tones in the speech itself. That sense of community, of taking part in a dialogue of both words and energy rather than sitting on my couch listening to someone talk at me from my TV, absolutely enhanced the experience in every way.

But more notably, I immediately noticed that feeling of widespread admiration for a president that I haven't known since I was 10 years old.** People who don't completely agree with this man can still admire him without feeling guilty about it, I think. I won't go on about my extremely negative feelings towards Presidents Clinton and Bush (Jr.) for their habits, attitudes, and personal character, since they're beside the point of this post.

...

After walking around a bit more to soak in the atmosphere, J- and I decided to start the slow trek back home, but not before accepting the fence-security guards' indulgence in actually peeking over at The Cool People's Rally. Also, not before I availed myself again of the remarkably uncrowded banks of portable toilets. Given the predictably low toilet-to-person ratio, the only explanatory factor I can think of is the prohibitive price of water leaving bladders empty across the park.

We took to the streets with glee, since this time almost everyone was on the move at the same time. The poor unlicensed t-shirt vendors hawking homemade wares from cardboard boxes could barely keep up with demand for their predictable products. I can understand the desire for a keepsake from such an event, but a t-shirt, and a poorly-made one at that, isn't necessarily my first choice.

J- decided she wanted one particular shirt, though, and I could console myself with the price versus other commemorative shirts she has chosen to buy, or have bought for her (ahem). All the shirts I saw were much more competitively priced than the typical unlicensed shirts offered at concerts and other events, which pleased me, but the one J- liked so much happened to be only $5, which pleased me even more.

Of course, I later pointed out to her that the likely reason it was so cheap was that while yes, the front has an interesting and imaginative design, the back says "I WAS THERE WHEN HISTORY HAPPEN AT GRANT PARK - NOV, 4TH 2008".

I cannot adequately express how much staring at the back of this otherwise nicely-designed shirt makes me twitch with a craving for unfocused violence.

But that would make me the only one, it seems, because after seeing this, I couldn't help but notice that about 15% of the ecstatic crowd marching home alongside me was wearing the same lowest-bid shirt without a hint of the shame I felt for them.

The Chicago Police reported not a single arrest at the rally,*** which is of course incredible given the attendance and the circumstances of the event, so I'm guessing either all the city's other copy editors stayed home that night or they simply aren't quite as prone to violence as I am.

...

The walk to the train stop was unbelievable, for the sheer number of people filling six-lane streets for as long as they did, controlling traffic and owning the city at least for an hour or so. I tried to capture the effect in pictures to little effect (see one example below), since I had neither a helicopter nor a camera positioned strategically in the many-storey youth hostel overlooking the exit from the park, which was filled with what were presumably visitors from abroad, waving and shouting constantly from several storeys up.

...

So I'm left now with blurred pictures and crisp memories, and I can only hope this night proves to be as momentous a turning point in modern American history as it felt like at the time.

---

* Whatever your current opinion of our President-elect, his first speech in that role is as important as it always is, and given the tenuous state of our economy, government, and society combined with Obama's youth and the fundamental change he claims to represent, this speech, as an introduction to the coming inaugural address, was monumental one way or another.

** Granted, I was right in the middle of a distinctly unscientific sample, but I'll note that I did see several small indicators that there was a healthy number of McCain supporters there for the experience as much as everyone else. It's not like everyone can easily jet out to Arizona in the middle of the work week, and given that, why not be there?

*** I'll state for the record that I did see a young man being handcuffed while face down in the street, for reasons unclear, but that was several blocks away from the rally, and for all I know he was later released without being officially arrested.

Could it be a PR move for the sake of winning the 2016 Olympics? Or could they have just been helpfully demonstrating for this fellow what they would have done had he been unruly or disrespectful.

At long last, Pt. 3

This, Part 3 of my requested account of our experience at the election day Obama rally in Grant Park, ended up being so long that I've mercifully split off a part 4 to run tomorrow (here are part 1 and part 2). Sorry to those who've had no interest in reading such a thing-- I'll be back to my usual antics on Monday.

...

After trying out a few promising spots --leaning against a precious tree, sitting on a curb, sitting in dirt, standing in the street, etc.-- near some of the other Jumbotrons, we ended up settling on a good spot right in front of one not too far from The Cool People's Rally.

This spot provided us more than enough personal space, including the ability to sit down in the grass(!), and an excellent view* of a cameraman's view of history in action. And take note that when I think of the importance of this election, it's not much to do with Obama's race, but rather the involvement of young voters (and even those not yet old enough to vote) and the generally constructive passion involved on both sides.

A lot has been said about the racial makeup of Obama supporters, at least among under-30 supporters, so I don't have much to add in noting the diversity of the people around me, and how reassuring it was to see everyone united.

One older (70s?) couple was so excited early in the evening that not only did the man offer their guest bedroom to a young male German tourist he hadn't met, but he also happily took hold of J-'s waist and moved her over bodily after insisting she could stand in front of him to get a better sightline of the distant Jumbotron (this was shortly before she was mysteriously overcome and had to retreat). As creepy as this might be normally, it somehow wasn't so much so that night, especially since she really did have a way better view from there.

Several of you have made comments expressing terror at the idea of being surrounded by this (likely underestimated) 240,000-person crowd, and while I can understand that when I remember trying to force ourselves closer and closer to the front when we first got there, the rest of the time we spent moving from point to point, having plenty of space to breathe. This is a very large park, and the borders of the unofficial rally were quite porous, so there was plenty of room for even more people, had they not been dissuaded by the mayor's bold projections of a million people showing up.

...

The screams when CNN projected Obama the winner were beyond deafening, driving me almost to the point of reaching for my cane to wave at the hoodlums on my lawn, but I had been prepared by this after nearly drowning in the tsunamis of sound as they projected him to win states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Virginia, and Florida.

Call me a curmudgeon, or more accurately, someone who remembers very distinctly the last two elections, but Wolf Blitzer telling me on election night that he thinks something will happen carries only slightly more weight than when he said the same kind of thing 6 months ago. With all the (clearly predictable) troubles with democracy-threatening electronic voting machines, I was ready to believe anything could happen, and I didn't want to jinx my outcome of choice by feeling too relaxed or confident until I at least saw a concession speech.

So as a result, I was one stone face surrounded by many thousands of people starting the party without me. But then, I'm not sure what I would have done if I had been on the same wavelength, because I've never been particularly demonstrative in public, so the world probably would have seen the same impassive face drifting through the background that CNN chose not to air, for some reason (I taped 9 hours of their coverage and didn't see myself in any of it).

...

I was glad to not be the only one listening carefully and respectfully to Sen. McCain's concession speech, and while I understood the initial smattering of boos at the sight of him, given how ugly and personal the race got by the end, I was reassured that they didn't catch on, and subsided as quickly as they had arose.

I know I'm not the only person to express the idea that if THAT John McCain had been out there on the campaign trail (and in the meeting where they picked his running mate), this race might have been much closer, a marked "downside" almost nonexistent, and the resulting presidency (whoever had won) less potentially violent and poisonous. We don't need to continue the zero-sum game that politics, and thus everyday life, has become in this century-- I hope those disappointed in the outcome can focus on the language and sentiments of the John McCain who spoke on that final night rather than the John McCain (and certainly the Sarah Palin), who spoke out on the campaign trail since the convention.

...

One more part to come tomorrow, despite my plan to do it in three parts. In case you were thinking it, no, my compulsions are not strong enough to overcome my laziness in this case, so I won't be stretching this into a part 5 for cosmic balance.

---

* This view was definitely hard-won, after I led a generally polite rebellion of our section against two unrepentantly selfish ladies standing up a few feet in front of the TV at the expense of at least a hundred or so people seated in the grass directly behind them. Democracy in action!

At long last, Pt. 2

I've never done long multi-part posts like this before (unless you count the saga of how I nearly lost an eye), but it became clear it was definitely called for this time.

You may want to read Part 1 of my experience at the election day Obama rally in Grant Park before continuing.

...

Once inside the Parallel Party Someone's Mom Organized For The Uninvited Nerds, we found that to keep the mob from storming the inexplicably opaque* fences of the Cool People's Party, at least 10 Jumbotrons were set up around the rest of the park, with the primary one alone allowing probably 60,000 people to soak in CNN's commercials** and ridiculous gimmicks for hours before and after Obama's actual speech (on a closed-circuit feed).

So we had to satisfy ourselves with watching TV while standing alongside a whole bunch of other very happy voters. Since it was immediately evident that all of these many, many spectators were exceedingly peaceful and well-mannered, this prospect wasn't as undesirable as it might have been under other circumstances. I had known for months that I wanted to be out Amongst The People for this night, no matter the outcome, and I got exactly what I came for.

J-, on the other hand, apparently got some kind of alien larvae threatening to Cesaerean itself right out of her abdomen, as was the diagnosis issued by the esteemed Doctor We-Don't-Want-To-Leave-So-We'll-Just-Play-It-By-Ear-While-Basking-In-The-Extra-Space-A-Sudden-Unexplained-Vaguely-Stomach-Related-Illness-Helpfully-Provides-In-A-Crowd.

These guys got all dressed up for nothing.

I haven't mentioned how miraculously warm it was that night, but it was over 70 degrees for three straight days, which is about 40 degrees higher than a typical November in Chicago. Clearly, it was a sign that God wants Barack Obama to be president.

This warmth was amped up at least 10 degrees in the thick of that many walking space heaters, and I'm sure the oxygen content of the air within the crowd was about half the dose required for sustaining life. Hence J-'s alien larvae decided to take evasive action by cutting power to her ears, sense of balance, and (almost) her consciousness.

It was at this point I decided to let J- lead us in a little conga line back through the crowd, issuing promises of copious vomit to anyone unwilling to make way quickly enough. I left her on a strangely unused filthy stage far from any of the Jumbotrons, and then made my way back into the madness to find some water.

Not just any water, mind you --after all, we were alongside one of the largest sources of fresh water in the world-- but rather the most expensive water I could find. Nothing's too good for my precious, and how else does one measure quality but by expense?

Luckily, I was in amongst a large, captive pool of consumers, so I felt sure I could count on Connie's Pizza to provide me with nothing but the best. After waiting out the 350 people ahead of me, I was relieved though unsurprised to find a bottle of water (not unlike the two I had confiscated at the gate) going for a patriotic $3, and knowing this stuff thus must be far better than any beverage I'd previously ingested, I readily threw down my money for a $5 slice of pizza while I was at it (since the mysteriously ill lady had decided greasy cheese would be an invaluable assistant in getting back on her feet).

...

After saluting the noble folks at Connie's (look for their Delivery Maseratis in a neighborhood near you), I again waded through a rainbow blur of human skin, dropped off the food, refolded J-'s death shroud, and headed out to find us a new base of operations. As I walked all over this sprawling park, I found several previously unnoticed McCain-sized rallies around each bend, in a layout I couldn't even begin to map out. If only the Secret Service would release some of the photos they must have been taking from their lonely helicopters up there in that restricted airspace, I could feel vindicated in my opinion of the crowd estimates.

...

Once again, you can read part 1 here, and look for part 3 tomorrow and part 4 after that.

---

* Why can't I at least watch through the short chain-link fence, under the watchful eye of security forces?? Those flimsy little fences weren't protecting ANYone.

** I can't have been the only one looking for my DVR remote to obliterate those commercials. I'd almost forgotten what an irritating experience they provide.

At long last, Pt. 1

Well, by now I've sat here and read most every article I could find related to the election and all its tangents, and after much procrastination, I'm faced with finally writing about my experience at the Obama rally in Grant Park (Chicago) on Election Day, as requested by many of you.
                                                  ...
Let me start off by saying that we did not rate tickets to the gated kingdom that was the area around the stage at the rally. I apparently missed the initial announcement that tickets were available for the asking (which probably lasted about 15 minutes), and instead I got an e-mail out of the blue from the Democratic Party the next day. I clicked the link when I saw it a few hours later, and I was immediately informed that I was on the waiting list.*

This was of course due to the fact that they offered tickets to only 32,000 people and a single guest each. Based on the fact that hundreds of thousands of people showed up to the park and the surrounding area**, I think you can tell the deck was stacked against me from the start.

So it was with a mixture of glee and disappointment that we made our way down to Grant Park that evening, alongside the expected anxiety with all those votes still to be counted.

Our 10-mile train trip in from the suburbs went flawlessly, with the relative lack of company due to our being considered very late to the party by arriving a mere 2 hours before the scheduled admission time. Our trip home was much more crowded and chaotic, though to the CTA's credit, it was still remarkably smooth.

We walked a few blocks from the L stop to the park, and had we worried about where we needed to go, we had only to join the sizable throng of latecomers still inexorably marching down the streets like it was free sample day at the cookie factory.

Impressive as we were, bending the normal flow of traffic to our will, we were but a tiny stream disappearing into the sea of human flesh already assembled in the park.

As we tried to join the party, we were of course briefly stopped by "Security" and quickly stripped of the most threatening of our contraband. That's right-- whoever thought they could get within a block of our future president with a fully loaded water bottle must have been drinking too much of something other than water before showing up.

Speaking of which, my later observations determined that giant jugs of vodka were totally cool with these guys. Also okay: portable furniture, 25-foot telescoping flagpoles, large knives (probably), and airhorns.

Basically, the golden rule seemed to be that anything cited as disallowed in the public invitations was actually encouraged, and other common-sense, life-sustaining items not mentioned therein would be fished out of your colon, if necessary.
                                                  ...
It seemed like a good idea to break this up into multiple posts, so look for part 2 tomorrow, part 3 the next day, and part 4 after that.

---

* As if people were going to be refusing these tickets-- way to get my already-generally-high hopes up higher against my better judgment, Democratic Party of Illinois. 

** I say there were much more than the 240,000 estimate I keep hearing, since I think it discounts a lot of people gathering right across the street and elsewhere in the area, as well as comings and goings over the course of many, many hours.

Exhaling after 8 years

After riding home on a wave of very happy people unaware of the time, I can't think of anything useful to say, so I'll just leave it at this. Here's to tomorrow, and all tomorrows after.

You know what you need to do

It may sound insincere, given my clear preference in this election, but I can honestly say that no matter who you're voting for, please make sure to do so today, if you haven't already.

If only everyone legally allowed would vote in every election (and then those votes were all recorded accurately before being faithfully tallied, of course), I think we'd stop being defined by the simmering dissatisfaction, constant infighting, and impotent rage coursing through this country.

If everyone just let their choices be known and then dealt with the consequences, we'd have so much more time for really important things instead of spending so much of it focusing on regrets and pointless analysis.

Anyway, enough with the sappy melodrama. Just make sure, like me, that this won't be any of you today:

Tomorrow morning after the rally, of course, all my bets are off.

Decision 2008: Trick or Treat

Just a quick Halloween rundown today, starting with this curious picture:These two strange children followed me around all day without revealing their identities or to whom they belonged. I would have called the police or Child Protective Services, but they seemed to be getting prodigious amounts of candy thrown at them, and thus I figured they might be of some use to me.

Two straight days of glorious stomachaches later, I stand by that decision. If only D- and M- could have been there... J- and I might have gotten twice as much candy.

Elsewhere, in an effort to hone her pumpkin-carving skills as well as get out the vote amongst the elementary-school and elementary-school-chaperone demographic, my sister decided that night to carve the Obama-Biden symbol into a pumpkin, with the word VOTE etched above it.

The day after Halloween, there wasn't much left of it:I can't decide whether this was an underhanded voter-suppression move by neo-conservative squirrels or merely an innocent nibbling of the alternatives by right-leaning independents who had their fill of nuts over at the Palin rally.

Speaking of nuts, I hope to be acting it with a few hundred thousand of my new closest friends in Grant Park tomorrow evening-- in case I don't post tomorrow, I'll see you all at the end of this long, strange tunnel Wednesday morning!

Unanswerable questions, Vol. 2

Here are five more questions time and thought will never be able to answer:

1. Why doesn't my wife get excited when I whittle the unread posts in my blog feed reader from over 100 down to zero?

2. Why am I so tense as our presidential election approaches, minute by minute, since I have no control over the actions of the millions of other people who will decide its outcome?*

3. Why does having an old Scrooge McDuck figurine from my childhood hidden in a box-within-a-box somewhere in our house mean that he will magically surface inside my shoe, waiting patiently to cripple me, as soon as the kids learn who he is thanks to a recent free-library-DVD-fueled DuckTales bender?

4. Continuing from the previous item, why does the mere name of the evil Flintheart Glomgold make me laugh no matter how many times I think of it, and why did I feel so compelled to get that name in print that I shoehorned it into this list?

5. Why doesn't an actual, substantive post spontaneously appear in my Drafts list, after I dutifully procrastinate for days or weeks at a time, following every bit of fairy dust that floats through my mind whenever I have a clear chance to come up with something useful?

---

* Perhaps because it's been a very long, tedious 2 years leading up to our communal attempt to erase the last 8.

Corporate Intelligence, Vol. 5

Though I was born and grew up out here in the Chicago suburbs, I lived in Northern Maine for over 3 years, until about a year and a half ago. Since that move, oblivious companies of all shapes and sizes who must hate the sight and smell of their own money took it upon themselves, with the assistance of the USPS and phone companies, to update their mailing and calling lists with my new information.

Now, this common practice makes sense for most nationally focused corporations, even if their message isn't always skewed appropriately for the drastically different region, time zone, accent, economic sphere, population density, worldview, pronunciation of various important words,* voting habits, or level of quaintness of my "new home".

What I'm really thrown by is the local businesses and organizations who seem to consider Reality Checks the province of "city slickers who don't have the sense to root for the Mighty Red Sox even when they live physically closer to Boston than we do."

Here are just two examples:

• Once we stopped getting the usual bits of local junk mail forwarded by the Post Office halfway across the country just to be immediately discarded, we started instead getting local junk mail formally addressed to our new house, trying to lure us back 1400 miles just to catch a mildly unbeatable deal on snow tires (This Weekend Only!) or The County's best interest rate on a snowmobile loan GUARANTEED!

• Lately, we've been getting automated calls from the Maine Democratic and Republican Parties, urging us to support their presidential candidate or vote against the opposing candidate, respectively. While you may say that a national campaign warrants a national calling list, you must agree that a long-distance call from Maine begging an Illinois voter to support his own Senator, elected with 70% of the vote just 4 years ago, is a senseless waste of money.

And lest you think that Democrats in Maine just don't have the time, money, or manpower to weed out useless numbers from their automatically updated phone lists, you should know that the strikingly low population of Maine allows it to have a single area code covering the entire state, and I'm pretty sure that even Thomas Edison's original autodialer** could be programmed in 10 seconds to ignore any numbers not beginning with 207.

But then where would AT&T and Verizon get the cash to buy both the ink for their Important Messages AND the souls of folks who'll speak out against Net Neutrality?

---

* Moving back, almost exclusively, from Incorrect to Correct, including, but certainly not limited to, the words permit and aunt ("aaaaaaaant"... I say if you don't live in London or Cape Cod, just give the whole "ahnt" thing a rest, already).

** Used to plant seeds in the minds of the nation's 137 early telephone adopters that Nicola Tesla fathered a black baby out of wedlock with his secret Muslim terrorist mistress, and that Alternating Current was just typical Liberal flip-flopping.

They're up in arms in Sandwich, IL

You know, folks, many of us have spent plenty of quality time mocking the Bush Administration's beating the drums of war against Iran, but though it pains me to admit it, they just might be onto something:

Iranian crowd devours world's largest sandwich

---

Iranian workers prepare[d] a giant ostrich meat sandwich in an attempt to achieve a Guinness World Record ... But as the sandwich was being measured, chaos ensued ... when the crowd started eating it before it could be [officially] measured.

---

I think we can all agree that if there are precious few habits we Americans consider "our things", among them most certainly would have to be forming angry mobs, eating compulsively whatever's put in front of us, and being the butt of everyone else's jokes.

But now the Iranians try to top all past and future competition with this madness? What are we to make of this affront to our honor, this usurpation of our primary role in global affairs? I say we move on to our second, and let slip the dogs of war!

But does anyone else really, really want a sandwich before we head out?

Given the economy, Santa may soon call in lots of "loans"

Alright, all you language lovers, now that it's been 10 years since Bill Clinton let us all know there was some uncertainty about the meaning of the word is, it's high time that a government corruption trial provide us with a new definition for what we thought to be a simple, unchanging word:

What's a gift? Sen. Stevens testifies on freebies

---

"He bought that chair as a gift, but I refused it as a gift," Stevens said. "He put it there and said it was my chair. I told him I would not accept it as a gift. We have lots of things in our house that don't belong to us. ... I refused it as a gift. I let him put it in our basement at his request."

---

Given this wonderful new definition of gift, here's a helpful (for you) list of things I'd like to indefinitely borrow from any or each of you:

• Your car.
• Some* of your money.
• A bunch of your coolest stuff, hand-selected by me.
• Your clicks on the Amazon links to the right whenever you're heading there to do your Indefinite-Loan-Granting-Season shopping. Nearly starving** would-be orphans will thank you for their commission.

---

* By some, I mean most. Thanks for understanding.
** Fussiness is an acceptable reason for starvation, right? I may need to give the Red Cross a call.

A conversation with M-: The official seal is made of sugar

Here's a deeply poignant, spontaneous conversation I had the other day with my 20-month-old daughter M- on the way home from dropping her brother off at preschool:

M-: Brackabama! I want Brackabama!

Me: You want Barack Obama to win?

M-: No.

Me: Oh, you want John McCain to win?

M-: No.

Me: Well, who do you want to win?

M-: Candy.*

Me: What?

M-: I want Candy! Can I have some?! Please?

So it's not clear to me whether she wants to see a Clark bar elected president or she's shrewdly selling her vote for one.


Editor's Note: I swear on all that is good and holy that I did not make this up.**

---

* Actually, I believe this was Ron Paul's nickname in medical school, so that counts.

** The lack of this disclaimer on previous or future posts should not be taken as an indication of fictionalization.

Important Question: Paper, Liner, Hover, or Madness?

I'm gonna keep this simple. You may take me for the head of the new Human Un-Hygenic Activities Committee, but I promise not to judge you any more than legally required by the Common Sense and Decency Act of 1937.

I simply must hear from everyone on this important issue, particularly the ladies, who are potentially the worst offenders due to understandable volume, if no other reason...

Do you sit, or have you ever sat, directly on a public toilet seat?