Come up with a caption for this pic I took in Denver.

I couldn’t find any. At least not when you’re working 7 to 7 at the convention center. I did eat at the Appaloosa grill downtown, which was pretty good, but I made the mistake, out of overwhelming curiosity, of ordering the crawfish etouffee. In Denver.

I also saw a large blue bear menacing the Colorado Convention Center, and got the above pic, so all is not lost.

My voter-registration card arrived yesterday.  So, looks like I’m legal for Election Day.

Because just because he’s dead doesn’t mean he deserves a movie.  And just because he got a movie anyway doesn’t mean it’s good.  As the steadily balding and steadfastly boring cinematic pope, Thomas Kretschmann treads water for a while until a tidal wave of the usual biopic suspects (temporal fragmentation, indifference to characterization or theme, dialogue bound for Barlett’s Familiar Quotations) drags him under.

First off, “commerations” to Pulao on a prelim turn-in!

Secondly, in the upcoming elections, all the winds seem to be blowing in the right correct direction. And I must say, I’m hoping to have a big celebration on election night, but three things caught my eye today. None of these stories suggest that opinion in this country is changing, but it does remind me that it takes more than opinion to win in electoral politics.

It first takes a transparent and clear system for voting. And with the NY Times analysis of voting maching troubles that don’t even have anything to do with the potential ease of tampering, I’m mighty nervous about where we’re headed.

It is also important to remember that in the midst of all this good pre-election news, the GOP is a well-oiled machine. It works on many levels, from the big-moneyed pioneers, the lock-stock messaging of the conservative media members, the massive get out the vote campaigns, and the less-than-level Swift Boat type organizations. Nothing reminded me of that more than this story out of California. US citizens who immigrated to the US long ago have been warned in a series of mailings that if they vote they will be deported. These have been traced back to a GOP operative in California.

So while an increasingly unpopular war drags down the popularity of the GOP and scandal seems to pop up every day: bribery, extortion, sexual misconduct, voter suppression, abuse of power etc. we should all still be worried about machines: GOP, voting and otherwise.

Last point from the news today. Studies that tell you things you already knew to be obvious are in my estimation a recent phenomenon. So, for instance, the idea that, yes indeed, an antiaging hormone, marketed as being able to cease and even reverse the results of aging is a bunch of bunk.

Studies also show the pills claiming to make you fly, breathe underwater, and leap tall buildings don’t seem to work as advertised either. But in some way, we as a society do seem to need studies to prove things we already know to be a little suspect. And even with such studies, people will dismiss them and go on buying this hormone. The power to believe just about anything is one of humanity’s greatest achievements. Seriously.

And speaking of believing just about anything, with things going so well right now in the polls for the Dems, I’ll have a hard time believing it if things don’t go well for the Dems on election day, but I doubt most people will. There will be a convenient narrative for whatever happens on election day. There has to be so that the system can retain legitimacy.

And unfortunately, if things go poorly, there will never be a headline some time later that reads: “Study shows that election results in ‘06 didn’t reflect public’s voting intent.” And even if there was, we’ll all go on believing what we want to believe.

O mighty Python, O mighty Boa!
One moved fast, the other no slowah…

Hunters and agents were on your tails,
and perky blondes with skin so pale.

Boa Vs Python, Brother versus Brother;
both hunting, both hunted, pitted against the other.

Alas! I knew only one could prevail
but what if that train had derailed?
Would you still be battling, great serpent gods?
Would I still be taking midnight odds?

All I know is now it’s done,
but Komodo Vs Cobra is on at one.

Sometimes I get weird calls at work; this was one of them.

The guy started out simple enough; he had seen an ad in a magazine for a free business book, and he had read to call our number — had he reached Riverglenn Publications*?

No, we used to be Riverglenn, now we’re Streamfield; sorry, sir. Yes, we’re still located at 412 Winterset, Minneapolis. No, we don’t offer that book anymore. Must’ve been an old magazine!

And that would normally have been that. But the guy went on. He was talking from somewhere noisy; I heard clacking shoes, clanging, conversation in the background.

“OK, right. Well, I saw the ad, and I was interested because I’m going to start a mail-order business out of my home, and I was interested in how somebody sets one of those up.”

Uh-huh. I don’t really need to know this, do I? But he seemed nice enough.

“We pretty much only publish Airline Weekly, now,” I said, “so I don’t think we’d be able to help.”

“Right, I understand,” he said. The conversation in the background echoed over my end of the phone. “Well, I’m incarcerated right now, but I’ll be out in six months. I should be out in six months, if everything happens OK.”

Holy shit! No wonder he didn’t want to get off the phone. This was like his one phone call for the whole damn week.

“Oh, yeah?” I said. I wanted to say, “What’re you in for?” but that would have been just wrong.

“You just have to take each thing as it comes and try to work it out for the best, you know?,” he said. “So I have a plan, I have a couple of ideas, and I’m just taking it as it comes, you know.”

“That sounds like a good attitude to have.”

“Well, thanks for talking to me.”

“Good luck.” What do you say? “Hope you get out soon”? Sure, unless you’re a murderer or something — then I hope you don’t.

But I do hope he’s the kindly-type convict, maybe wrongfully accused by a one-armed man, and not a Hannibal Lecter-type, because he has my work address, which I confirmed for him.

* the names, addresses, and magazine titles have been changed to protect the innocent

On my way to work Thursday morning, I was greeted with a light dust of snow on my car. That’s Thursday morning like Thursday, October 12. I realize that I live in Minnesota now, but come on.

A few fast-melting flakes in Minneapolis were a little out of place for October, but nothing compared to the record-busting blizzard in Buffalo, NY on Thursday and Friday — over 22 and a half inches. The NYT headline: Snowstorm Blankets Buffalo, Killing at Least 3. Now that’s some serious snow.

Trying to read all about it, my quick google search led me down a dark path of anger and hate: right-wing Web journals and blogs.

The Wide Awakes Web site (tagline: “Your Right Wing Back-Up”) reports:

10.9 inches in Buffalo the next day.

Earliest snowfall in recorded history there.

Depew, NY: 24 inches of snow.

But we’re supposed to spend billions of dollars to “stop” global warming.

And then, over on The Right Angle blog, the Buffalo snowstorm was reported with this grain of salt:

Maybe it’s time for the liberal hysterical media to change their tune again on climate change.

This stuff is strewn about the Web; lots of jokes about Al Gore and a lot of, “Hey, snow in October? Global warming’s a joke!”

Ha ha. As counterintuitive as it might seem, a study from Colgate University in 2003 directly links heavier snowfalls around the Great Lakes (like Buffalo) to global warming:

Records of air temperature, water temperature, and lake ice suggest that the observed lake-effect snow increase during the twentieth century may be the result of warmer Great Lakes surface waters and decreased ice cover, both of which are consistent with the historic upward trend in Northern Hemispheric temperature due to global warming.

Climate and weather patterns are not as simple as the hot and cold faucets on your sink; Buffalo’s blizzard on Friday was caused by “lake-effect” or “lake-enhanced” snow; when cold air passes over warm water, picking up a bunch of moisture and dumping it off-shore. The hotter the lake, the more the snow piles up in your driveway.

The lake wasn’t particularly warm or anything, was it? From weather.com:

THE INSTABILITY PARAMETERS ARE ALMOST HISTORIC WITH SUCH A SITUATION WITH A 62 DEGREE LAKE INVOLVED MAKE THIS ALMOST UNPRECEDENTED.

Oh, right. But where did all the cold air come from this early in Autumn? Apparently, global warming fueled disasterous weather in Alsaka last week pushed it down through Canada. From Sto Ostro, Senior Meteorologist at the Weather Channel:

I have written on the impacts of climate change upon day-to-day weather patterns in these pages during the past year . . . For now, suffice it to say that I think the occurrence of this event in Alaska was not an “accident.” . . . By the way, there’s a connection betwen that system and the chilly blast about to enter the lower 48 from Canada.

When you get over 20 inches of snow in mid-October — thundersnow, with frequent lightning — don’t be so quick to discount patterns of global, catastrophic climate change when they rear their ugly heads, just because they didn’t manifest in a heat wave like you thought they might.

A couple weeks ago, Duodecad posted a link to a study by researchers at Princeton that demonstrated how easy it is to rig an electronic voting machine, and get away with it.

Here’s an update with some old news, via BoingBoing.net this week: former Yang Enterprises computer programmer Clint Curtis says that, in 2000, Rep. Tom Feeney (R) asked him to do just that — fix voting machines to spit out 51-49 splits in your favor.

Watch video of Curtis’ testimony, under oath, on YouTube.

Six years ago, Feeney was a member of the Florida legislature, as well as Yang’s corporate attorney and a registered Yang lobbyist. A year later, Curtis quit Yang. In 2002, Feeney was elected to Congress.

Curtis’ story has some holes in it. Yang Enterprises and Mr. Feeney, of course, deny the meeting ever took place. And there were no touch-screen electronic voting machines in West Palm Beach Florida in 2000 to rig at the time.

But Curtis sticks to his story, nevertheless, that Feeney asked him to write some code that could do it. He’s testified to it in court, taken a polygraph, and even staked his own Congressional bid on it, running against Feeney as a Democrat (although Curtis was a lifelong Republican).

Plus, Feeney was named one of the 20 most corrupt Congressmen in the land by a government watchdog group (the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington — good luck, guys). So there’s that.

Add my natural partisan subjectivity, the Princeton report, and I’m a believer; democracy is for sale in Florida!

This morning, I’m waiting for my advisor to send me my PhD preliminary exam questions, and as I wait, I thought I’d show

a) 4 ways how taking the preliminary exams is like having sex for the first time:

1. There’s a divide between people who’ve gone through with it and those who haven’t. All the advice that the experienced can give you is to “close your eyes and barrel your way through it.”
2. Before, your entire identity can be summed up as someone hasn’t gone through it. On the other side of the fence, people say it’s now just something they did.
3. Every now and then, you come across someone who’s experience was magical. They were fully prepared, had everything sorted out, knew exactly what to expect, and might have even had fun. For most people, it seems to have been torture while they were doing it, but at least went by very quickly.
4. You think you want to be on the other side– very, very badly. When the time is actually close, and the moment is inevitable, you suddenly wish you had just a little while longer.

b) 1 important way that taking the exams is NOT like having sex

1. You try to do it just once in your life.