Tuesday, November 2, 2004

I Voted My polling place was the local elementary school. I went in armed with my sample ballot, so the whole thing, including the many propositions on the California ballot and all the local ones as well, took all of about ten minutes. I'm wearing my little "I Voted" sticker right now. We used the same paper ballots we've always used here, with which there has never, to my knowledge, been a problem. Most of the classes at the school took turns being led by their teachers into the room where we voted, just to see what voting was. The poll workers were cheerful and helpful. Now we wait. The media will start calling the returns in the Atlantic states at 5 o'clock here - the polls will be open for another three hours. While we wait, here's something with which to amuse yourselves. Did you remember to set your clock back on Sunday? I did, and enjoyed every moment of the extra hour it gave me on Sunday before facing the grim reality of coming home from work in the dark for the next five months. I have a better idea. Let's do the clock-setting thing every day! Here's how it works. Every morning at 1 a.m. we set our clocks back an hour to midnight, giving us an extra hour of sleep. We get up at 7 and go to work as usual. At noon we go to lunch, and at 1 p.m. we move our clocks forward to 2 o'clock. We leave work at 5 while it's still light out. The work day is shortened by an hour, but we still get paid for the one we skipped! Do this every day! This would not only improve productivity, it would also be a nice response to those Latin types with their daily siesta (in which I've been unsuccessfully trying to drum up interest here for years). 11:02:17 AM    comment []

At Last I've been telling myself all along that I won't get emotionally involved in this election, but it doesn't work. The other night I watched the just-released DVD "Control Room," a documentary about Al Jazeera, and how they handled the first few weeks of the war in Iraq. It's hard to not get emotionally involved in something like that. Here in the USA, we got really upset when terrorists hijacked planes and flew them into the World Trade Center, killing some 3,000 innocent civilians. Out response was to invade Iraq, who I believe didn't have anything to do with that attack. In the process, the invasion has cost the lives of more than a thousand US military people, most of whom got there by joining their local National Guard units. But we also used our highly-touted precision electronic bombs to kill some 100,000 Iraqi civilians, mostly women and children. That might be unavoidable collateral damage to us, but to the staff at Al Jazeera, those were their people, their friends. One has to wonder how terrorism is defined. Is it only terrorism when it is done to you? My newspaper ran a series of first-person reports by a marine writing an electronic diary from Iraq. A member of a "PsyOps" team, it was his job to drive a Hum-Vee down a city street with mounted loudspeakers blaring heavy metal music and taunts against insurgents believed to be holed up in the surrounding buildings. The taunting included insults against Islam in general and Mohammed in particular, and it was designed to provoke the insurgents into firing on them, so they could locate them and fire back. To me, this is insane. If this happened in your neighborhood, wouldn't you be transformed into an insurgent? Wouldn't it create more enemies than it could eliminate? Toward the end of "Control Room," one of the directors of Al Jazeera said he had complete faith in the American constitution, and that while he didn't trust our government, he had full faith that the American people would set things right. For all our sakes, I hope his faith is justified. 10:45:49 AM    comment []