hope-y halloween!

My dad went nuts again on the pumpkin this year:

basketball in space

Or something. This sounds more confusing than quidditch.

it's november 4th

There have been reports of flyers being distributed in some communities telling people they should vote on November 5th.

But it's cool, once you get to the electronic voting booth you just have to make sure the machine is properly calibrated so it doesn't flip your votes to the other party. It's as simple (ahem) as this:

But at least early voting seems to be going well.

powered by hope

I really don't like a lot of the sneering and snark flying around (I'm talking to you Rachel Maddow), but I did take a perverse pleasure in this Times profile of McCain campaigners on college campuses. Favorite part:

[Chairman of Gators for McCain] Mr. Simmons was stopped midsentence while walking through campus recently and talking on his cellphone. “What is that, a robot?” he said, exhaling noisily. “The Obama campaign has a robot set up in the plaza. It’s holding a sign that says ‘Powered by hope.’ Which I don’t think is entirely accurate.”

While I'm not ready to place faith in an Obama victory yet and am waiting to see if he can actually accomplish all this stuff he's setting out to do (my personal wish-list: building a US sustainable energy industry, universal healthcare, and trolley-cars on every street. By 2010 please, thanks!), at least this New York Magazine article brings gives an inkling of what an Obama administration would look like. At least it looks like they're doing the homework, and then some.

Also, my favorite paragraph:

...the unconventional way he ran for office, the whole bottom-up movement thing, may grant him a degree of independence unique in modern history. “Personally, I think the depth of the Obama realignment is being underestimated,” says the Republican media savant Stuart Stevens, who helped elect Bush twice. “They have basically invented their own party that is compatible with the Democratic Party but is bigger than the Democratic Party. Their e-mail list is more powerful than the DNC or RNC. In essence, Obama would be elected as an Independent with Democratic backing—like Bernie Sanders on steroids.”

Also, these kids:

q: how to steal an election? (a: in lots of little pieces)

As I mentioned yesterday, electronic voting machines look to be headed for a heap of problems on November 4th (and are already causing problems), but that's not the only problem; the placement of the checkbox for President on North Carolina ballots is reportedly so confusing that in 2004, 90,000 people who went to the polls inexplicably did not vote for President. As that Huffington Post article notes, confusing ballots disproportionately affect the poor, the elderly, and first-time voters.

The article also describes how George H.W. Bush won the 1992 North Carolina race by less than 1 percentage point, and this year looks to be just as close. People are already starting to predict landslide for Obama, but considering the wash of dubious reports emerging from potential swing states (11,000 absentee ballots not mailed in Colorado, the White House pressuring the Department of Justice to have 400,000 new voters reregister in Ohio) I would be surprised if it's that simple.

As I was canvassing for Obama in Pennsylvania this past Sunday, knocking on doors of registered voters, letting them know when and where to vote and hoping to sway undecideds to vote Democratic, one guy asked me why I was out there, because "you know he's already got it in the bag." After the above reports, and seeing things like this I'm not so sure, which is why, after casting my vote on the 4th, I'll try to get down to Pennsylvania to help make sure Obama supporters get down to the polls.

You can find out how to get involved here: http://pol.moveon.org/obama/office.html
and get rides to Philly here: http://www.cbidems.org/bus-trips-to-philly

It's a lot easier than you think and you'll be glad you did.

In case you doubt the gravity of what is at stake, here's a video of what dancing will look like under the McCain-Palin administration:

robots edging into politics, war

In the wake of hanging chads and other pesky physical impediments to expressing the will of the electorate, 24 states have switched to electronic voting, courtesy of touch screen voting machines from the folks at the cyberpunk-esque iVotronic.

But according to a post in today's Machinist, early voting in West Virginia, Texas, and Tennessee has revealed a myriad of problems in the system, from the mildly annoying way a slipped finger can result in a wrong vote to the straight up terrifying reports that some machines have simply switched Democratic votes to Republican or even Green party votes. (There have also been reports of Republican vote flipping to Obama).

In other robot news, an article in today's times about how the US has generously stopped sending troops unannounced into northern Pakistan and politely just bombing targets from the air casually mentions that the aircraft used are RQ-1 Predator "drones". Which means that the three person crew doesn't (and can't) even enter the aircraft, managing all the killing from a remote location. I'm no expert, but somehow I don't see this guy winning any hearts or minds:

everything I know about economics I learned in middle school

Amid all the schaudenfraude of AIG heads getting their multi-million dollar bonuses stripped and the defrocking of high priest Greenspan there have been a slew of pundits spewing all sorts of nonsense about how a recession will lead to people spend more time with family, value the important things in life, make a lot of us happier, yadda yadda yadda. That's not the first thing that springs to mind when you can't make house payments, and living on the street looms as a very real possibility. (I don't know about you, but New York is bloody cold right now.)

But sticking out from the cluster of financially comfortable pundits trying to console themselves with studies and figures was Margaret Atwood's eminently sensible Op-Ed piece in Tuesday's Times. This is the sort of thing that restores my faith in good writing, how two people can set out to make the same points, but only one packs any rhetorical punch. I am biased though, since I'm a huge fan of explaining political and economic behavior in analogies to middle school.

voting: just the price of a cup of coffee!

I hope the first order of business under the magical healing umbrella of the Obama administration is to eliminate studies like this.

At least come November 5th we won't have to deal with nonsense that conflates buying crap with voting. The weird thing about these 7-11 and Baskin-Robbins "pick the president by buying some of our shit" campaigns is not that they exist, but that they are only half joking. From the "7-Election" home page:

"7-Election Voters have successfully predicted the last two presidential elections - so cast your vote today, with cream and sugar!"

I take my coffee like my presidential candidates, thank you very much.

circuses

Apparently the mastermind behind one of my fondest childhood memories is retiring. Profile in the Times yesterday of Paul Binder, founder and ringmaster of "The Big Apple Circus".

So the big story for the next two days looks to be that the GOP went a little overboard dressing up Caribou Barbie, spending around $150,000 on outfits for Palin and her family since her VP nomination.

Also here is a video of Japanese chimp celebrity Pan-kun learning to ride a segway:

kicking and screaming

I've finally given up and surrendered to the 21st century. I always kind of had an antipathy for blogs, especially when they first debuted as forums for people to post a new picture of their cat for every day of the week.

After being invited by a friend to start a blog as a record of our time as American ex-pat's I wrestled with my blog as a platform for the kind of long form essays I was getting into at the time. (I'm Still In Japan). Once I left Japan I've tried to continue the thing with "Windowsills", but for a variety of reasons haven't been able to keep up with it.

In the meantime I've become a solid addict of a variety of internet sites, and got really into posting links in my gmail chat away message. Now that I'm straining against the space of that every day figure I might as well go ahead and start one of those blogs I used to hate: straight up aggregations of the detritus floating around the internet I find vaguely interesting and putting them in one place. So voila, "minor aggregations".

I'm drawing the line at Twitter though. That shit just looks manic.