Actually, I haven’t yet, but I will. State primary elections are being held in Minnesota today. Luckily, polls are open until 8 PM, just in case you slept in, and were late to work, and have a lot to do so you’ll probably stay until 6 or so . . . Not that I know anyone like that. (Also, in Minnesota, your employer is legally required to allow you time off to vote.

Primaries this side of Connecticut aren’t usually very exciting, but if you live in District 5, like me (which is most of the western half of the Twin Cities), big things could be happening. It’s a heavily Democratic district; which means that whichever Democrat wins the primary will most likely take the District’s seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. If that ends up being Keith Ellison, then Minnesota will have elected the first Muslim to Congress in history.

The Washington Post did a story on Ellison yesterday; apparently local Republican bloggers have accused him of being anti-semitic because of a college tie to Lewis Farrakahn. Minnesota’s Jewish weekly, American Jewish World, has strongly endorsed Ellison, however. So has the DFL party. But the controversy has made the race close.

If you live in Minnesota, learn where to vote with this search on the Secretary of State’s Web site. And hurry.

Hey, not that I really mind sitting atop somebody’s home page for days on end, but can someone post something a little more interesting than my dopey M & Ms sidetrack? It’s embarrassing me that it’s still lingering on top of 12apostrophes. Where is everybody?

Here’s some news briefs to get you going:

• The Health Minister of South Africa—the country where 1 in 10 people has the HIV virus—has been publicly advocating vegetables and garlic as the best way to manage the disease. She went to an international AIDS conference in Toronto last month and displayed a table of vegetables. Depressing. Needless to say, the international scientific and health communities are up in arms.
• Australians having apparently started “revenge killings” of stingrays, in honor of Steve Irwin, the animal lover and conservationist. Go figure.
• In good news, ABC’s factually incorrect right-wing smear effort of a “docudrama” about 9/11 did somewhat of a flop in the ratings Sunday. Hey, there’s a reason to love football afterall. I was going to link you to the ThinkProgress article about it but their site is down.

This reminds me that yesterday, while taping a football game for duodecad or however you spell that, I saw an NFL 9/11 tribute that actually made me teary-eyed. But the thing that made me cry wasn’t the memory of the tragedy (which obviously merits mourning), but rather the memory of what could have been. The memory of how much people cared and came together then, all over the world, and how MUCH the Bush administration fucked that up. There was a brief, worldwide outpouring of sympathy and unity, and the Bush administration did everything imaginable to destroy it.

For some reason the image of crying giant athletes (don’t laugh) was a powerful reminder that goodwill en masse doesn’t come around very often, and collective emotional resonance even less. We could have done so much with that. If someone in power had really wanted to, they might even have used it to make the world a slightly better place. But maybe I’m dreaming.

I just bought some M & Ms, which I don’t think I’ve done since I was… Well, I don’t ever remember buying myself a bag of M & Ms, but I assume I have before. I mean, a small bag of M & Ms for myself, not some giant bag I throw into a bowl for a party and never look at again, except when I mindlessly stick my hand in it later and insert the M & Ms into my mouth without looking at them or remembering I did it. On those rare occasions, I could be throwing a handful of chocolate-covered ants into my mouth and wouldn’t really notice.

No, I’m saying that I bought my OWN bag, and slowly ate them, and really looked at them before I put them in my mouth. And what I want to say is, as tasty as they were (and they were), they were alarming.

What’s with the colors? And why don’t more people talk about this? They are the brightest, brashest purples and greens and blues and yellows I’ve ever seen a food item be. Food isn’t those colors. The only thing that’s any of those colors and edible is… M & Ms. Why is this? It felt like I was eating tasty Fisher Price toys, or very yummy legos.

And I could get used to this–I like bright colors a lot, and chocolate even more. But it seems so unnatural. That part’s obvious, but it got me wondering if I could somehow connect crass-looking, overly colored American candies to American culture. Yeah, that’s where I’m going with this…

I also want to be  sure everyone knows that M & Ms are actually a rip-off of Smarties, which is a Canadian, I mean originally English candy. A member of the Mars family saw some English solders eating Smarties (apparently ‘melts in your mouth, not in your hands’ was a helpful war tool) and proceeded to lift the idea. I ate Smarties in Canada when I was a kid and missed them when I couldn’t find them in the U.S. years later.

Come to think of it, Smarties were obnoxious colors too. So I guess that blows my “crass America” concept. Well, insofar as being able to use candy as the symbol, anyway.

You make a boy smile as large as Pluto. Yes, I’m obsessed. But it raises another (controversial?) idea: Big Ten college towns. Why are they so much better than other college towns around the country? If I had to choose a college town to live in, I would choose almost every Big Ten town before any other part of the country (not that I’ve been everywhere). But Ann Arbor, Bloomington, Iowa City, Madison — in my experience, they seem so much more culturally interesting, playful, civic-minded, quirky etc. than say Gainesville, Chapel Hill, Syracuse, Tallahassee etc. The only other two college towns that come to mind in that category are Eugene, Ore.  and maybe Boulder, Co. Though I’m probably just clouded by midwestern goggles.

As an illustration: a typical Saturday night in Gainesville and Madison (both towns I’ve spent some time in). Madison,all along State street, has street performers (good ones), local pubs, good and cheap dining, theater, lots of live music, and a strip of 18+ dance clubs with underdressed college students. A Saturday in downtown Gainesville, on the other hand, has a strip of 18+ dance clubs with underdressed college students and one VERY overcrowded bar for everyone else in town.

So that’s the brief observation of the day. I’m working on several projects and interviews right now for work. More later with thoughts about the nature of interviews, oral histories, and life “retold”.

Crocodile-Hunter extraordinaire Steve Irwin died yesterday in a freak accident involving a stingray. If you didn’t know, he was the Australian dare-devil environmentalist that appeared non-stop on the Discovery Channel, wrestling crocodiles, poking venomous snakes with sticks, etc.

My dad worked in Australia for a year in 1993 and, when he came back, found Steve Irwin on late, late night TV (one of his first shows). My dad loved watching this guy manhandle horrifically poisonous snakes with nonchalance. For him, I think, Irwin was a mix of the Australian cultural bravado he saw in his time down under and the familiarity with sometimes-dangerous wildlife my dad has from growing up on a farm. I don’t know if Dad read about Irwin’s death . . . but I know he’ll be sad to hear it.

Stingrays aren’t particularly dangerous at all (there are only 17 known recorded deaths by stingray), especially when you compare stingrays to the leading cause of animal-related deaths in the world, crocodiles.

On a random note, Steve Irwin’s death is one of the only things recently I’ve seen reported prominently in the NYT, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and BoingBoing.net. People liked this guy.

If I hadn’t seen Lady in the Water with Salma, I would have walked out. But since I didn’t walk out, the question is—when would I have given up hope? When Story (Bryce Dallas Howard) tells Cleveland Heep (Paul Giamatti), “Thank you for letting me wear your beautiful shirt”? (When she could have stood to ask him for some pants, too?) When the writer (M. Night Shymalan) describes his current project as being his thoughts on “all the social problems”? (Could he maybe have named one? Poverty? Pollution?) When the crossword freak drops a meta dis on movie critics that results in the movie’s one likable, relatable character—a cantankerous movie critic played to perfection by Bob Balaban—getting eaten by a grass dog?

I think I wouldn’t have made it past the scene where M. Night finds out that through his masterwork, The Cookbook, he will exert a major influence on the world—posthumously. It’s bad enough that Night had to feature such an obvious Jesus figure. It’s worse that he had to play the Jesus figure himself. Claiming persecution is a rich move for a multihyphenate millionaire at any stage. Let’s call the celebrity’s persecution claim, be it Eminem’s “They try to shut me down on MTV” three albums into his career or Lindsey Lohan’s whining about tabloid rumors on her very first single, the jump-the-shark point of the fame trajectory. Such a claim indicates that the celebrity has officially reached critical mass and will soon become that black hole of fame, the has-been.

Besides, to paraphrase Salma, sometimes people hate a moviemaker because he makes bad movies. I can’t give a good plot summary of Lady in the Water because I’m not sure what happened. Story, a narf, lands in a pool and carves out a cave beneath it. Someone needs to see her to make something happen. Once she’s seen, she needs to leave, but she can’t do it without help. People help her. She leaves. Besides the narf and the grass dog, there’s a huge eagle, tree monkeys, and a bunch of quirky oddballs. It all goes down in an apartment complex that is simultaneously in Philadelphia and the deep forest. The movie reads like an eighties children’s-fantasy movie—The Never-Ending Story, say—only with adults. It probably would have worked better with children; it’s hard to buy that a bunch of adults would have nothing better to do with their day than help Spooky Chick fly the friendly skies. But even talented children couldn’t overcome all the self-aggrandizement Night commits to film. This and King Kong are competing for the title of worst movie I’ve seen this year—and, people, I just saw Gigli.