Month: October 2004

The phone just rang, and Alex ran to answer it. He listened for a minute and then hung it up. A little confused, I asked him who it was.

“It was some recording telling me to vote for George W. Bush.”
“So, are you going to vote for George W. Bush?”
“Nope, I’m going to vote for John Kerry.”
“Why?”
“Because he has a canary named Sunshine.”

The Kerry campaign would be thrilled to know they’ve got another seven-year-old voter on their rolls.

There’s little doubt that I’ve become terribly cynical about our entire system of government when I see quotes like the one below, and agree wholeheartedly with them.

“Democracy is a form of government that substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.”

— George Bernard Shaw

We finally picked The Great Pumpkin and put it on the front porch with our other (normal) pumpkins.

The pumpkin weighs almost 90 pounds, and I’m sure it’s going to be a hoot to carve…

“Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”

— Carl Sagan

It’s so much fun getting the mail these days. As we enter the final few weeks of the election campaigns, it seems like every day the pile of idiotic political flyers increases. Most of them don’t even have any real content; they just have pictures of cute smiling kids and say things like “Vote for Stan Yarby… because his opponent is a loser who wants to put these kids on an express train to Siberia.” No mention of issues, no sir! It’s just a contest to see who can fling the most last-minute mud.

With that in mind, I decided to make a couple of political postcards myself. I figure they’re even more to the point, and would probably influence the voters who actually read these things.

“The direct use of force is such a poor solution to any problem, it is generally employed only by small children and large nations.”

— David Friedman

Today I received my copy of “You Never Know”, a CD released by my friend Annelise LeCheminant. She’s been working on her music for years, and finally went out, hired a producer and some studio time, and recorded an album. She started her own record label to distribute it and manage concert bookings, and suddenly she’s in showtime!

The album is fabulous, and perhaps it’s even cooler because she’s a friend and she’s on her way to the “big time”. When she hits platinum (perish the thought!) I’ll be able to brag to my friends that I knew her before her name was a household word.

Go ahead and buy a copy from her web site. It’s all fruity goodness.

From the “If I Was President” department…

I just caught a link to costofwar.com, which is a site that “tracks” the cost of the conflict in Iraq and offers various tidbits of wisdom and information. It also has a comparison function that lets you see what could have happened if the money for the war ($140 billion at the time of this writing) had instead been used for, say, public education. Nearly three million teachers could have been hired; seven million four-year college scholarships could have been offered. Since the school Alex and Kyra attend just had its science program slashed (again), I’m particularly sensitive to the waste of government money on programs that don’t truly serve the public good.

A thought-provoking quote that sums up the mission of the site:

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”

— President Dwight D. Eisenhower, April 16, 1953

“You cannot make a man by standing a sheep on its hind legs. But by standing a flock of sheep in that position you can make a crowd of men.”

— Max Beerbohm