Electronic Voting

As a result of the 2000 Presidential Election fiasco, America no longer has a hodgepodge of confusing and potentially unreliable voting systems. We now have a hodgepodge of confusing and potentially unreliable electronic voting systems.

To get an idea of what I'm talking about, take a look at this map of the county-by-county breakdown of voting machines being used in Pennsylvania, which also allows you to view a video showing how your particular electronic voting machine works. I live in Luzerne County, so I will be using the ES&S iVotetronic, which sounds like something out of The Jetsons. (The folks in Montgomery County will be using the Sequoia Advantage and those in York County will be using the Sequoia Edge, both of which sound like either multi-bladed razors or fancy types of NordicTracks.)

Oh, surprise, surprise: according to the Wilkes-Barre Citizen's Voice, it turns out that Luzerne County has to pay an annual maintenance fee for the fancy new voting machines, budgeted at over $252,000 for next year - $62,500 to download ballot information for two elections and $190,000 for "routine and preventative computer maintenannce, which would be completed by the electronic voting machine vendor." (The article notes that the old lever voting machines had no maintenance costs, though this is probably an underestimate; I am sure somebody spent a few minutes each year dusting the machines and applying a few drops of oil to the mechanism.) This is on top of the $2.4 million price tag for the machines, which were bought from Nebraska-based Electronic Systems and Software. It's nice to know that somebody is making a huge profit from the fiasco of 2000!

SuperG on politics

Today I went to the dentist, gave blood, got my tires rotated, got 277 digital photos printed, got an oil change and a car wash, went shopping for Thanksgiving decorations for my house, and went to church. Every one of those activities involved a considerable amout of sitting and waiting, except for the shopping, which involved a lot of fruitless searching. Now I'm tired, but that is probably because of the blood donation.

Writing about politics takes a lot out of me. I'm glad Election Day is this Tuesday. I plan on doing political posts right up until that day. Today I'm going to be lazy and link to a bunch of posts by SuperG, who says things much more passionately than I could without dropping a B-52 worth of F-bombs.

In THROW THE BUMS OUT, SuperG gives a list of reasons why it's time to end the GOP's stranglehold on the American government.

How the GOP Got Out Foxed recounts how Republican darling drug addict and chickenhawk Rush Limbaugh applied his Bill Frist-like diagnostic skills to determine that Michael J. Fox is faking his Parkinson's Disease symptoms.

Gut Feelings on the 2006 Election reminds us that all politics is local, giving us a view of the upcoming election through a North Carolina lens.

No Victory Big Enough lays it on the line: "The Republicans were the wrong party at the wrong time. George Bush has been and still is the wrong leader....This GOP world is a sick and twisted place. That won't change on November 8th. May be in January of 2009 we'll be on our way to a better world."

Go. Read.

And on Tuesday,
VOTE.

AP gets it wrong

The Associated Press has misrepresented the "stuck in Iraq" comment in an article on a mocking banner created by some troops as a response:

MINNEAPOLIS (Nov. 2) - A group of Minnesota National Guard soldiers in Iraq has made a comically misspelled sign mocking Sen. John Kerry's recent comments about the education level of troops, and their handiwork is getting plenty of attention.

Kerry's comments were never about our troops or their educational level. The fact that the AP has made this statement suggests that they have been taking their cues from Karl Rove.

Intentional deception or simple mischaracterization, their statement is false.

Time for the AP to issue a retraction and apology.

The REAL "Botched Joke"

The Bush Administration.

I don't have the energy to fight this right now. Besides, I said my piece over at Adam Felber's site.

Angry? Yes. Partisan? Hell, yeah.

It's the Gutless Cowardly Chickenhawks vs. the Vietnam Veteran. Round two. Will we let the bad guys win again?

November 7th can't come soon enough.

Watch this video, hear this song

Lauren at Please Make Rice. I Love You! has a music video posted at her site. Watch it. Listen to it. It's really quite remarkable.

You can have your record player
I think the needle's broken
It made a mess out of my 45's

You'll find yourself singing the chorus as you go about your day.

There were just too many of them

...and there was only one of me. I actually ran out of candy.

I got to the house just after 6:00 (electric candles flickering eerily in every window) and the Trick-Or-Treaters were out in force. I dragged out my orange and black storage box (served as a table and as a reserve candy stash), my big salad bowl full of candy, my bag of Hot Wheels cars, Elmo superballs, and Hello Kitty bubble wand necklaces, and my white rocking chair with a raven wired to the headrest. I turned on the porch light to announce that I was open for business, and immediately started passing out candy.

The night was beautiful, actually a little warm, not the bone-chilling cold I expected from this past weekend's weather. Kids came in groups of two or three, or singly, or as groups of a dozen or more. The groups of a dozen or more I was actually most comfortable with - these usually had two or three adults marshalling them and were fairly well-behaved. Parents collecting candy for infants kinda freaked me out - ma'am, I know you're not going to give that little baby a Starburst or a Mr. Goodbar! (At least I hope you won't.) Worse were the 18-and-up boys...what the hell were they doing out? Probably just prowling for pumpkins to smash - I saw quite a few of those on the ride home - and collecting some candy as a side bonus. As for the 18-and-up fine young ladies...there were tragically few. And don't get me started on the 50-something woman dressed as a hooker who was accompanying two little kids. I mean, come on, lady, put some effort into it, don't just wear your work clothes!

By 8:00 I was down to a handful of candies, a few Hot Wheels cars, and two Hello Kitty bubble wand necklaces. I had tapped my reserves and called for my cousin to bring me some emergency candy from across town. But it was too late. Besides, the Trick-Or-Treaters had dwindled to nothing, at least for the moment. I killed the lights and trundled my stuff back into the house.

(In the original version of this post I forgot to mention my favorite costume of the night: it was a little blonde-haired boy, maybe five years old, dressed in a black Batman costume. With all the padded muscles it looked more like the Michael Keaton version than the Christian Bale version. But, and this is the important part, no mask. Instead he was carrying a bucket shaped like Batman's head, in the same color scheme as the costume and roughly the same size as the little boy's own head. "You look like the Headless Batman!" I told him.)

As Lisa pointed out, this is the first day of Hallowhog, the season of holidays that stretches from October 31st (Halloween) through February 2nd (Groundhog Day.) Get your Hallowhog cards ready! Remember, you've only got 25% of the year to get them out - so if you're late for this Hallowhog, you're actually early for next Hallowhog!

Rock on

Aside from the speech balloons, this is an unretouched photo of a natural rock formation in Canada first brought to my attention over at Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy. The headphone cord is an access road, the earpiece is a structure of some sort, and I'm betting that the eyebrow piercing is also some sort of structure. The Mayan or Aztec Indian in the iPod "I'm Listening" pose is what most people are noticing, but one of Phil's commentors noticed the second figure on the right, who may or may not have a long, pointed beard. I recognized the hands at the left and decided these were two guys going to an Ecstasy-fueled rave.

So now you don't have to go to Mars to see a big stone face from the ground - just someplace in Canada! But as one commentor pointed out, if you turn your monitor upside-down, the illusion disappears. (It wasn't until some time later that he pointed out he was using a laptop!)

Last Rose

Blaze rose, October 28, 2006

There is one last rose in my yard, clinging to the hope that it will find a pollinator to give its brief life some meaning. It is a tiny, stunted thing, little more than an inch across. But it has all the beauty of its Summertime predecessors.

Soon this rose, too, will wither and die. And then Winter will come. But Spring and Summer will return.

More a sort of Apres-Vie

Sunflower heads, October 28, 2006

I pulled out my garden today. I started by decapitating my sunflowers with a machete, then pulling out the stalks. The ground was completely saturated, thanks in no small part to my uphill neighbor directing all of his downspouts onto our property instead of into the street. A few times I sank in the mud past my ankles, and seriously worried that my garden might have been transformed into a bed of quicksand. But in the end, I got out all the dead plants and the taller weeds. The grassy weeds I'll leave in until next Spring, to serve as erosion control.

I intend to use the sunflower heads as bird feeders this Winter. As they are kinda soaked right now I'm leaving them out to dry for a while. In the picture above you also see Royal Highness rose hips, my Marjolein Bastin garden swing, and a lilac that I planted a few years ago.

When it's time to change, you've got to rearrange

I woke up tired this morning, as I often do. I looked at one of the clocks that surround my head and saw that the hour was still 4:00. Still plenty of time to sleep, I thought. I rolled over and went back to sleep.

A brief infinity later one of my alarms was going off, a CD playing Coldplay's Clocks. That's odd, I thought. The clock radio says 4:43. Why is my other alarm going off?

The CD-playing alarm clock said 5:43. As did the little clock that gets the radio signal from the national atomic clock. As did the clock on my VCR, and the clock on the channel channel.

I seized my clock radio. Had I somehow pushed the time ahead by 11 hours? No, the clock was now showing that it was 4:45 AM. How could I have pushed it ahead 23 hours? (My clock doesn't change in reverse.)

Or had this dinky little drugstore clock radio somehow decided to "Fall Back" on its own?

This is the weekend for the change to Standard Time - or is this Daylight Saving Time now? I forget. I think the time change used to take place earlier in the month, and in the future it will take place in November. Maybe. We'll see.

So, the night of Saturday, October 28, don't forget to Fall Back. At least we get an extra hour of sleep out of the deal.

Two months 'til Boxing Day

So I walked into A.C. Moore today to pick up some last-minute Halloween stuff, and walked out with a bagful of Christmas decorations. Aaaaagh.

I have photocell-activated battery-operated LED candles in all the front windows of my house. They've been there since even before I bought the house, to give the place a lived-in look. Sort of. The clock radios that go off to NPR and talk radio throughout the day help, too.

The candles have a switch with three positions: off, on, and flicker. Right now the candles are set to "On" and activate whenever it gets dark enough, burning with a steady glow. Halloween morning I plan to go over the house just after sunrise and set all the candles to "flicker." Then, as the sun sets that evening and darkness falls upon Nanticoke, all of the candles will begin to flicker - something no one in the neighborhood has ever seen the candles in my windows do before.

Back in 1995 I worked until after 7:30 at the plant on Halloween night. I was doing data collection and analysis for the CD replication lines, and I was trying to meet everyone on every shift face to face so they would know that there was someone behind all the charts and graphs. The shifts changed at 6:00 and I stayed for another hour and a half or so, doing my song and dance and meeting some of the people who would be gathering data for me. Back in those days I parked my car in a side lot and entered and exited through the main entrance to the plant. As I was walking down the corridor to get to the lobby to leave for the night I noticed something was wrong: the fluorescent lights in the hallway and in the lobby itself were all flickering and strobing, and more than half of them were out. What little light they were giving off was dim and somewhat purple.

"What's this, something special for Halloween?" I said to the guards as I passed.

"Something wrong with the electrical system," they shrugged. They had no idea what had caused it.

Then I walked out of the plant, and into our pitch-black parking lot. Whatever had happened to the lights in the lobby and the corridor leading up to it had also taken out all of the lights in the parking lot. On Halloween.

I never did find out what was wrong with the lights.

Alternatives to candy on Halloween

I intend to spend next Tuesday evening, Halloween, sitting in a rocker on the front porch of my new house with a big bowl of candy for the trick-or-treaters. But I got to thinking: what's the point of the candy? It's getting expensive, it's bad for kids' teeth, it's bad for kids' health, and in a few days it will all be gone. Is there anything that could be passed out instead of candy?

Kmart had Hot Wheels die-cast miniature cars on sale this week, 3 for $2. On the way home from work today I picked up an even dozen. Kids in the age range of 3-to-8 years old might prefer getting a Hot Wheels car and a little candy to getting a whole lot of candy. But Hot Wheels are mainly thought of as "boy" toys. To balance things out I stopped in the party supply aisle and picked up some party favor multipacks - big Elmo superballs (about 2" across) and Hello Kitty bubble wand necklaces. While the bouncy balls are appropriate for both boys and girls, the Hello Kitty stuff is primarily for girls.

I also got some more candy to supplement the bags of candy I bought a few weeks ago. So now I have lots of candy, twelve toy cars, eight superballs, and four bubble wand necklaces. With all this stuff, I hope I get a lot of kids on Halloween night. Otherwise, whatever shall I do with all the leftover candy?

Death of a teacher

Well, so much for not blogging about death.

I was on the phone with a friend from across the country this past Sunday when a call came through: Dan Distasio had been found dead in his yard that morning.

Mr. Distasio was a classmate of my mother. He was a High School teacher (retired for several years now, I think) and was my homeroom teacher for at least one year. I had him as a teacher twenty-two years ago for Problems Of Democracy, an advanced elective Social Studies class. (Every time I hear about the band P.O.D., that's what I automatically think of.)

He was a big man with a booming voice and a gentle demeanor. He was a coach - track and field, I think. As a teacher he encouraged critical thinking, not simply the mindless regurgitation of facts phrased in a manner that was pleasing to him. He was also a good friend to my mom.

I stopped at the viewing on my way home from work. It was scheduled to go from 5:00 to 8:00. I left work at 6:30 and got into town forty minutes later to see the line stretched out the front door of the funeral home and down the street for nearly a block. I decided that this would be a good time to stop at my house to check the mail, the phone messages, and take a pit stop.

I got back to the funeral home around 7:30 and the line was just as long. I parked in the nearest spot, a block away, and took my place at the back of the line. By 8:00 I was standing near the open door of the funeral home, bathing in the welcome warmth coming from within. It was then that I discovered that the line inside the funeral home was as long as the line outside; it snaked its way through an unused parlor where memorial displays had been set up. (The picture of Mr. Distasio as a bare-assed baby made me laugh.)

After another twenty minutes or so I finally wound my way to the casket. I said a prayer and took my leave. I've never been one for chit-chat, especially not at funerals where the only person in the family that I know is the one in the casket. Besides, there were plenty of people willing to make chit-chat, and I was occupying valuable real estate where other mourners and friends and old students wanted to pay their respects. So I left.

The funeral is tomorrow.

Obituary:

Daniel J. Distasio, 73, of Phillips Street, Nanticoke, passed away Sunday (October 22, 2006) at Geisinger South Wilkes-Barre.
Born on November 9, 1932, in Nanticoke, he was a son of the late Daniel and Helen Stankiewicz Distasio.
Dan served two years in the Navy and two years in the Marines. After attaining his bachelor’s degree from King’s College, he continued on to earn his master’s degree equivalency.
Daniel was a teacher for 33 years at Nanticoke High School and was a former football coach for 12 years. He also coached girls volleyball, track and Wilkes Linebackers. He was an avid Yankee, Wilkes-Barre Penguins, Nanticoke Area Trojans and Crestwood Comets sports fan.
He was preceded in death by his brother Raymond.
Surviving are his wife of 49 years, the former Gertrude Piepon; daughter Deborah Disabatino, Mountain Top; sons Daniel Jr., Mountain Top; Jeff, Rochester, NY; Steven, Mountain Top; brother Richard, North Carolina; and grandchildren Dominick, Cassie, Jenna, Nico, Maddie, Danny III, Katie, Devon, Raegan, Stephanie and Derek.
Funeral services will be held Wednesday at 9 a.m. from the Earl W. Lohman Funeral Home, 14 W. Green St., Nanticoke, with a Mass of Christian Burial at 9:30 a.m. in Holy Trinity Church, with the Rev. James Nash officiating.
Interment will be in the Chapel Lawn Cemetery, Dallas. Friends may call this evening from 5 to 8 p.m.
In lieu of flowers, the Daniel J. Distasio Memorial Scholarship Fund is being created to provide an athletic/academic scholarship to a deserving senior student from both Nanticoke Area and Crestwood Area High Schools. Donations are to be made to the Daniel J. Distasio Memorial Fund, c/o Luzerne Foundation, 613 Baltimore Dr., Wilkes-Barre, PA 18702.

The Comics Curmudgeon

After waaay too much thinking about death and politics, The Comics Curmudgeon is just plain fun. Josh Fruhlinger provides curmudgeonly comments on a host of newspaper comic strips every day, if you're lucky.

I found out about this site, as did a lot of other people, through the CNN article "Death of a man nobody knew", about Aldo Kelrast, a spooky Captain Kangaroo-esqe Mary Worth stalker who wound up dead and (almost) unmourned. Having had very little exposure to Mary Worth it was a bit of a stretch for me to see why anyone would care about this character's death - but Josh makes you care. Now I'm glad Aldo Kerlast is dead.

My papers don't carry more than half of the comics Josh reads and offers curmudgeonly comments about, so this site is quite an education. Go visit, and see why life in The Family Circus is much, much darker than you ever realized.

Cover bands, and adding Michelle's mhryvnak.net

I was thinking about cover bands the other day. Most of the bands I go to see are cover bands, playing songs by other bands - sometimes note-perfect renditions of the songs, sometimes enhanced variations, sometimes total re-imaginings.

There is, I think, a certain snobbery around bands that suggests that cover bands are just a step above karaoke and DJ's, that the only bands that are worth listening to are ones that play all originals. Personally I don't buy that. The skills required to play music written by someone else and play it like it's coming from your heart and soul are just as valid as the skills required to play something entirely of your own creation.

Besides, a lot of big bands started as cover bands. REM, I believe, started out doing Velvet Underground covers. And beyond that, I got to thinking about classical music. When was the last time you heard a song by Bach, or Mozart, or Beethoven, or Chopin actually played or conducted by the composer? That's an easy question to answer: you haven't, because recording equipment didn't exist in their day outside of ink on paper. Every classical piece you've ever heard by one of these composers and countless others was a cover. Classical orchestras are little more than overgrown cover bands.

By the way, I'm adding Michelle's mhryvnak.net to my sidebar list. Michelle is a fellow blogger from Northeastern Pennsylvania, and was one of the earliest adds to NEPA Blogs. She is also one of my first MySpace friends. Check her out!

Sunflowers in Mourning

Sunflowers, September 18, 2006

I took this picture over a month ago when I found that the sunflowers in my garden had turned their mammoth heads to the ground. I was immediately reminded of the cover illustration from a retrospective of Van Gogh's works that was held two years after his death. (I recently dug out the book with the image in it and found that the sunflower itself is wilted, and the head is turned out to face the viewer, not pointed at the ground.*) Van Gogh's last words - "The sadness will last forever" - also came to mind.

I'm no Van Gogh expert, but the more I read about him, the less I like him as a person. Put bluntly, Van Gogh was a dick. Of course, it wasn't entirely his fault: he suffered from depression of one form or another, and his self-centeredness bordering on narcissism, his willingness to use those around him (especially his brother Theo) to fulfill his basic needs, and his inabilty to cope with the daily traumas of life may all have been symptoms of this depression.

I'm not writing this as a public service announcement on depression. I'm not writing it as a personal attack on a great artist, or even to make any broader statements about people struggling with depression, in general or in any of the many specific cases of which I'm aware.

No, I'm writing it because I just loaded a bunch of pictures from my camera onto my computer, and this was one of them, and I wanted to share it with you.

*Here is the illustration:

A series of smaller and smaller boxes

We got Minnie's cremated remains back from the vet today.

I haven't dug up any good photos of her yet - her aloofness meant she was not the most frequently photographed animal in the house. But I know I have some, and I will post them someday.

A note for people in the business world

When leaving a message on someone's voice mail, be sure to state your name coherently and give your phone number slowly and clearly. You may know your own name pretty well, and know your number like the back of your hand, but odds are the person on the other end of the line does not - or else why would you be leaving it? Most people slur their names and race through their numbers like they are reciting the legally-required "fine print" at the end of a radio car advertisement, forcing me to replay their messages over and over at slower and slower speeds, usually while a parade of people come to my desk to tell me things.

So, just do as I say and nobody gets hurt, mmmkay?

Tony Barr for Congress

When I was at the Felberpalooza a few weeks ago I had the pleasure of meeting (and biking with) Tony Barr, grassroots Democratic canditate for Congress out of Pennsylvania's 9th district. Unfortunately, as an 11th district boy I can't actually vote for him, but I will throw what support I can his way.

Fellow Felbernaut and gracious host of the Felberpalooza Murray had this to say recently about Tony Barr:

The good news is that Esquire Magazine has endorsed Tony and he talked to a reporter with the Los Angeles Times, but so far most of the media is ignoring this district. There is a reason for that. Our opponent Bill Shuster who Esquire called an underperforming representative, has made his campaign strategy to hide and hope that Tony either goes away or is not noticed by anyone. So Shuster doesn’t hold press conferences or do rallies or anything.

I spent Sunday during the day and Monday evening doing door to door then attending rubber chicken dinners with Tony. One was 2 hours drive to the west and the other was over an hour to the east.
It’s hard to imagine the pace Tony is keeping up. His school wouldn’t give him leave (It could be politically motivated) so he works there till 3:30 and then either makes an appearance or does door to door. On Monday we each arrived home after 11:00 PM and he had to be up at 5:00 the next morning.

Tony still hasn’t hit the national media and the local papers and TV don’t see a race so he works with little notice.

The campaign has gotten about $30,000 so far which is a bit less than the million that Shuster has on hand.

If the people of the district could see how much work Tony does and how little Shuster does, if they could talk to each of them, if they compared what each wants to accomplish, Tony would win in a landslide. But the game is so very stacked against him and Tony only has the deep dissatisfaction of the voters to work with.

We think that this election is a toss up. Tony has a good chance of winning but it sure won’t be easy, this district has been Republican for the past 146 years.

In the past half year, I’ve gotten to meet numerous politicians and candidates, I’ve seen the best and the worst. People like Tony who have pure motives and want to change America back to being honest and fair to its people, and others in for vengeance, self promotion and personal gain.

If you want to help out, you can send a check to one of the most honest and hard working people I know. You can find out more at www.tonybarr2006.com . You won’t find a better cause for your money.

Click on the links and have a look at Tony Barr. Support him if you can, vote for him if you can. This is one of the good guys, and we need to send a few more of them to Congress!

More on road projects and politics

One thing I forgot to mention in yesterday's post: the highway construction zones usually come more than one at a time and are usually spaced out several miles apart, so if you think you've been clever by jumping off the highway and onto parallel secondary roads, and then decide to hop back on the highway after several miles, there is a very good chance that you will simply slam right into the next construction zone. This morning I hit three zones: an unannounced zone just past Nanticoke (I specifically listened to the traffic reports this morning, and this wasn't mentioned), a sign inspection near Scranton (which I got around by taking the exit I should've taken yesterday), and then maintenance to the on-ramp back onto the highway! To top things off, the lead car in our parade of cars trying to get back onto the highway decided it would be a good idea to come to a complete stop on the on-ramp, forcing every car behind him to deal with the problem of going from zero to highway speeds as they merged back onto the interstate.

It's not just the highways that have suddenly turned into obstacle courses of construction zones. Michelle over at mhryvnak.net did a post more than a week ago on the joy of trying to navigate through Wilkes-Barre, particularly for a new mother.

So, what's the deal? Did someone find a big pile of use-it-or-lose-it road repair funds somewhere that needed to be disposed of before the end of the year? Is somebody trying to look good for election day by spreading a lot of filthy lucre in the form of road projects? Or, conversely, is someone trying to hinder voter turnout by simultaneously rendering all roads impassable?

Whatever the case, I hope things get wrapped up before Winter. Then the ice and cold and road salt and snowplows can see how much damage they can do.

Meanwhile, in an abandoned warehouse across town...
Bernie O'Hare from Lehigh Valley Ramblings has relayed the fascinating fact that all four of the Pennsylvania Green candidates who are on the Congressional ballot got there with the financial assistance of members of the Republican Party! (This doesn't even count the failed ballot bid by Carl Romanelli, which was also funded by Republicans.)

Now, I know what you're thinking: "Why would Republicans want to financially back candidates whose views in no way coincide with the views of the Republican Party and who, frankly, don't have a hope in hell of winning?" Simple, baby: divide and conquer! Republicans would as soon spit on a Green Party candidate as vote for him (or her), but some Democrats might just consider it. And every Democrat who votes for a Green candidate is a Democrat who didn't vote for a Democratic candidate!

"Ach!" you say. "That's dirty pool!" No, sweetums, that's politics. But now that you know a little bit more about how Republicans play the game, what are you gonna do about it?