sure fire cocktail party fun facts

 Old Dog that time lapse of the sunrise is downright beautiful.  I can't believe so much shit was going on.  Do you do this often?  Are you showing this one because it is the most spectacular?  I just read an article in the New Yorker about a guy who composes music for movies.  I wonder if this video would be even better set to music or if that would be a distraction from its, I don't know, silent grandeur.

Me and my sister take a lot of photos of sunrises, and some of them are pretty damn good, but they are static.  Also I don't think an easterly view would provide as much drama as your southerly view.  Well done Old Dog.  I look forward to seeing more in the future.

I thought I would do some internet research so I googled patriots for victory and I got like three pages of the Boston Patriots most recent win.  What did you do to earn their attention?  Just out of curiosity do the more recent ones mention Trump less prominently?  Have they begun to mention that nice young chap in the sunshine state.

The Blaze in the Everglades, I am certainly looking forward to that.  I think Trump is a natural King Kong and DeSantis has reptilian ways that make him a natural for the inscrutable Godzilla.  I also think Trump is closer to Mussolini who was kind of a clown while DeSantis has the more centered evil of Hitler.

I don't think Chicago has the favorable balance between consumers and pig farms that Fort Polk has, but our more, ahem, processed waste does make it to the farmers as some kind of sludge.  There was a story going around some years ago that there was something about the tomato seed that resisted, um, processing so that farmers kept finding tomato plants among their corn, but this turned out not to be true, which is too bad because I always found that an interesting story that helped me pick up chicks at snazzy cocktail parties.

But wait a minute corn and tomatoes, doesn't that sound like succotash?  Looking it up there are many varieties. the common element being corn.  I guess my summer meals of diced tomatoes, bell peppers, chili beans, and garbanzos and corn is a form of succotash.  How about that?

No matter how you vote somebody has to process it so it's roughly the same effort, and if it's a little more effort then it is well spent for the convenience of the voter, and the promotion of voting.  Have to say though I was less enamored of the power of the vote in 2016 than I have been in 2020 and 2022.

It would be sweet to see Two Gun Bobert go down, but in the grand scheme she is just a squeaky gnat.  Look out for Greene cozying up to Trump's fave McCarthy while the likely DeSantees of the Freedom Caucus aim to take him down.  A lively and entertaining squabble for the grand old party this postseason.

Sleet turning to snow this morning.

Vote Early, Vote Often (2)

 It's got to make more work for the clerks.  First, they have to issue and process the mail-in ballot applications, then they have to process the ballots themselves, check signatures etc.  In some states, they also have to give the voters a chance to "cure" any errors on their ballots.  

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/lauren-boebert-in-danger-as-thousands-of-votes-for-opponent-could-be-fixed/ar-AA14685d?ocid=winpstoreapp&cvid=6783a03f13b145b0b66d0be6d26a5f58

This voter ID thing could be easily solved by having the Secretary of State issue a free picture ID to everybody when they register to vote.  When the township clerks did the registering, they used to issue each registrant a plain old paper card with the instruction to show it when they went to vote.  I carried mine around for years and was never asked to show it, so I threw it into my "miscellaneous" drawer and forgot about it.  Now that the Secretary of State is doing the registering, they could make picture IDs with the same equipment that they use to make driver's licenses.  

I didn't know about the early voting centers.  Michigan just passed a law that requires nine days of early voting.  I assumed that they would use the same precinct polling places that they use now and would have to pay somebody to staff them for those nine days.  If they make early voting centers like they have in Chicago, I imagine that they will be farther from home than our local precincts.  In our relatively thinly populated area, the traveling distance to the early voting center might easily cancel out the perceived convenience of voting early.  

It's a beautiful morning

I was going to comment on what a relief it is to have weathered another election but it isn't quite over yet if my spam folder is to be believed.  I'm amazed at all the spam email I've received from MAGA candidates running in different states like Arizona, Colorado, New York, Florida, and Georgia, more than 100 since October 20th when I decided to try and track this stuff.  And since there is now a runoff in Georgia I've received more than 20 emails on behalf of Herschel Walker since November 9th.  And if Donald J. Trump can be believed, for a modest donation I can enter a lottery for a visit to Mar-a-Lago!  Despite all the names attached to the emails they all originate from one organization, patriotsforvictory, that I've never heard of.  I have no idea why I am so popular with those guys but if they want to waste their resources trying to squeeze a few bucks out of me, they can go right ahead.  But I'm glad that the spam filters for my email are working, and working well.

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A while back Uncle Ken mentioned that Chicago uses some landfills, a fact I was unaware of; I thought they burned the stuff.  The 47th Ward, my long time home, has a weekly newsletter that had a recent pitch for the disposal of Halloween pumpkins.  They mention that in Cook County 37% of landfill material is food waste and that Chicago produces 500,000 tons of organic waste a year.  Shouldn't that stuff be composted into something useful or used as animal feed?  Way back in the day while doing KP at the soon to be renamed Ft. Polk there were two trash cans, one for inedible garbage and one for edible garbage.  The edible garbage can was a foul, festering mass but its contents were sold to the local pig farmers, no doubt at a handsome profit.  We should do the same thing here; half a million tons of organic waste should be worth a lot to somebody, shouldn't it?

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And now for something completely different, here's a time lapse of this morning's sunrise from astronomical twilight to full daylight.  Turned out well, I think, considering it was shot through a dirty double-paned window.  I've never seen clouds move like that before, going in different directions at different altitudes.  This is one of my best wastes of time yet.

the first time I voted

 The reason we have mail-in and early voting is so that more people (not just black people), can vote.  Some people work on Tuesdays, some people have a hard time getting around.  What is wrong with getting more people to the polls?  Aren't we always urging people to go out and vote, why not make it easier for them?

And it doesn't make more work.  Every vote has to be counted no matter where or how it is voted.  With a mail in vote you don't need guys like me to tell you how to slip the ballot into the machine, and with big early voting centers you don't have to set up so many little neighborhood polling places.  I have to admit though that I love the neighborhood polling places.  I couldn't use mine this last time because I was away from my polling Tuesday so I went to an early vote center, and it was easy like going to the supermarket, but I didn't get that feeling like Joe America in a Rockwell painting that the friendly neighborhood place gives you.

There have been and continue to be efforts made to keep black people out of the polling places.  There are efforts to make them supply ID they may not have and their neighborhoods often get fewer polling places.  In Texas they had one drop box for each district so that the city of Houston had exactly one box the same as in all the podunk little towns.

And it takes longer to count the ballots because in places where the Trumpies have seized the legislatures they don't allow them to count any mail in ballots until after the election.

Which gets me to thinking about the first time I ever voted.  I first became eligible to vote in the 1966 mid terms, but I was pretty hippie then and voting was square.  By the time the election of 68 came around they were drafting us into that crazy Asian war so we become a bit more political.  I certainly did not like Nixon (though I had been for him back in 60), and Humphrey (Dump the Hump) was being held back from saying anything bad about the war by Lyndon.  For me at the time Dick Gregory's Peace and Freedom was the obvious solution.

But did I have the courage of my convictions?  I was afraid that once I got into that dark booth alone, that a sudden temptation to not throw my vote away might overcome me and cause me to pull the lever for (Yuck) the democratic party???  With the wisdom of youth I avoided that conundrum by never registering to vote.

By 70 I had avoided the draft by doing my CO work in Herrin IL, and Adlai III was running against Ralph Tyler Smith a bumptious blowhard from Granite City (wiki informs me that he was Karl Rove's first client) for Illinois senator.  I kind of liked egg-headed Adlai, but not enough to go to all the hard work of voting for him. 

But then Ralph Tyler Smith ran an ad where half of Adlai's head looked normal and the other half was all hair and headbands and assorted hippie crapola, the thrust being don't vote for this guy, he is a lousy hippie.  Naturally that got my dander up and I went straight out and registered and come November I pulled the lever and Adlai went on to victory, and I have voted in every election since.

Vote Early, Vote Often

 Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that I believe the last two elections were rigged or stolen,  I'm just saying that I wonder why we need all that crap like early voting and mail-in voting.  All it does is make more work for the clerks and delay the reporting of the final count.  I understand that it's supposed to benefit the colored people, but I don't know how.  I have not heard of anybody trying to prevent colored people from voting in the last 50 years, so why can't they just vote the same way as everybody else?  I have seen people standing in long lines waiting to vote on TV, but we don't have that problem here.  I've been voting since 1968, and I've only had to stand in line for more than a few minutes once in 2016.  After that one time, our precinct people set up more booths and rearranged the traffic flow in the room, and it hasn't happened since.  This year the parking lot was full, and the workers said it had been busy all day, but I was in and out of there in 15 minutes. 

election day

 One of the benefits of living in Marina City is that my polling place is just one flight of stairs beneath me.  After a few years you get to know the election judges (they are not really judges, it's just the word they use for election workers), make a little joke without being too overtly political because you know.  They are all so cheerful, they seemed to be having such a good time, that I allowed myself to becoming one.

There was some online course for the job, and online courses, how grueling can they be?  Very, it turns out.  It took about five hours and was terrifying in its detail.  Did they expect that I was going to remember all this?

The pay is not much, I think around $250 for at least fifteen hours or longer.  I wasn't in it for that, I was in it more for curiosity, to see how it worked, to have a little adventure, and a little of, I don't know, civic duty.  There had been some media stories about election deniers coming out to jam up the works, not that I expected any in my very blue district, but you never know.

My polling place was a few blocks west in one of those gleaming new steel and glass skyscrapers just east of Wolf Point.  The polls opened at six and we were there at five.  Kind of a motley crew it seems, most of us being new, including the boss, who is called an election coordinator.

We all arrived just after five, and the place looked a little set up with all the booths and stuff but there was the big metal chest o drawers locked and sealed.  The first step was the checking of numbers and the breaking and putting on of seals, always recording the numbers.  Inside was all kinds of crap, much of it electronic stuff, most of it heavy.  

The coordinator didn't seem to be very coordinated so one of the judges basically took over.  They all had manuals, dog eared and post-it noted, which I, as a late chosen did not have.  I faded into the background, doing just the simplest of tasks.  

Anyway it was hard, complicated work getting set up and it wasn't until six thirty before the first voter was able to cast his vote.

Marina City is more than half old folks, but this place was built just a couple years ago and I would say the average age was maybe a little over thirty.  And it is pretty snazzy, so I am assuming the residents have pretty high-powered jobs.  The leaders of tomorrow, as I guess we thought we would be in the days of the Mickey Mouse club, and maybe we were, but I don't know how well we did, and myself, I was on the sidelines, far from the action.  

Anyway the torch is passing to these guys with their outlandish jobs and ways.  But they were pretty nice guys and gals, they thanked us for the work we were doing and we thanked them for voting, and thinking of it now, in about two hundred voters there was not a single incident of rudeness.  And by the way, no Oath Keepers showed up to poll watch, in fact we had no poll watchers at all.  In fact I think there was very little of that threatened action anywhere in the country.

Anyway once they started coming in it was very nice.  As the guy who knew the least I was the guy who told them to take their ballots out of their privacy shields and slide them gently into the machine, and then wait to see if the machine accepted it and if so they were done and I handed them an I Voted sticker.

The second ballot was judges.  A bunch of names nobody heard of and apparently most of these kids didn't know that they could just skip that part of the ballot, and some of these guys spent maybe half an hour scrutinizing those names and I had a tremendous urge just to walk up to them and say you don't have to do that, but that would clearly have been out of line.

Anyway after that morning rush, there was nothing.  Nothing, nothing, nothing, for eight hours.  Well there was a voter every now and then, but mostly it was nothing.  We had no breaks including lunch.  Oh they sent some donuts, but you know what, fuck donuts, what's the big deal with them anyway?  There were two cold pizzas (a veggie and a cheese, how exciting) and some warm bottles of water. Eight hours of strangers staring at each other and trying to find something new on their phones to divert themselves.

About five the evening rush came and things picked up, and we thought we were close to quitting time.  But then right at the last minute some people came who were registered in a different address and wanted to switch or who had gotten a mail ballot and not mailed it and this and that and we had to use some device which wasn't working and we had to call this guy and then that guy and then do this and that.  When I say we I mean that guy who took charge I was sitting around numbed, thinking only of that nice cool fresh air outside.  It finally got settled but it set back our time for packing up, and filling that big metal chest of drawers was a lot more complicated than taking everything out.  We didn't get out till after nine thirty.

When I thought we were getting out at eight, I had thoughts of dropping in somewhere for an Italian beef and three or four quick cold ones, but at nine thirty, back and feet aching, all I wanted to do was fall into bed.  When I tuned into CNN first thing I saw was that that idiot Ron Johnson had won that election in Wisconsin and I thought oh fuck.

But by next morning it was not so bad at all.  There is a very small chance that we could keep the house and the odds in the senate are about even.  Not all that great, but way better than I had expected.  And the Trumpiest of candidates mostly lost, and maybe Trump is fading, and much of that republican chest bumping was inspired by him and now maybe there will be more, dare I say it, cooperation.  Maybe.

And Beagles now gets to enjoy another term of Gutsy Gretch's bold leadership (though I was surprised that Trumpy Tudor came so close).  And apparently the dems have taken the Michigan legislature.  Can it not be far away when bells will be ringing in the freehold as Beagles marries his gay dog?

And all in all I was impressed, the way I was when I was on jury duty, about how well random people drawn together for a common cause work together without some official boss telling them what to do.  

There is yet hope for America.

Bears Do More Than Shit in the Woods

 Like all creatures great and small, bears have their place in the grand scheme of things.  People hunt them for the same reasons they hunt other animals, for the adventure, the challenge, and because they are good to eat.  I used to try to defend hunting to non-hunters, but I don't anymore. Hunting is not for everybody, as are neither baseball, football, nor prize fighting.  The Michigan DNR issues a limited number of bear hunting permits each year in the Lower Peninsula.  Last I heard, they were holding a regular season in the Upper Peninsula where bears are more plentiful.  The intent is to maintain a sustainable population while minimizing bear-human conflicts. 

When Old Dog mentioned that bird, I thought he was talking about albatrosses.  They remain aloft, riding the thermals and swooping down to catch fish, except for once a year when they land to breed and nest.  They have a difficult time getting airborne afterwards, I suppose because they only do it once a year.  Their clumsy take off attempts have earned them the nickname "goony birds".  That godwit is a whole 'nother story.  I have no idea how they manage it.  

I didn't know that Asian Indians fed their dead people to the vultures, but I have read about certain American Indian tribes that used to do something like that.  They used to put their dead people on raised platforms and let the birds and the elements pick the skeletons clean.  They would come back later and collect the dry bones, but I don't remember what they did with them.