A quote:

“If you are bored and disgusted by politics and don’t bother to vote, you are in effect voting for the entrenched Establishments of the two major parties, who are not dumb and are keenly aware that it’s in their interests to keep you disgusted and bored and cynical and to give you every possible psychological reason to stay at home . . . on Primary Day. By all means stay home if you want, but don’t bullshit yourself that you’re not voting. In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard’s vote.”

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been two and a half years since I last wrote about the Olympics. And it has been six and a half years since I lamented on the X-ification of the Olympics.

With the Summer Games in Beijing coming to a close in the next few days, I felt it was time to take a closer look at the sports of the XXIX Summer Olympiad.
Read the rest of this entry »

hey, whaddya know. a website. /kicks tires

as you may or may not know, the yahoos that own and operate this website all have accounts on facebook, the social network site that one can belong to without feeling like you’re a pervert (unlike its competitor, myspace). i find it somewhat fascinating to keep up with what former co-workers, college classmates, and high school friends are up to; not essential information, but certainly interesting. it also can be a bit of a time sink if i’m not careful; however, now that scrabulous has gone away, there’s much less risk of that.

Read the rest of this entry »

On a recent trip to New York I was driving to LaGuardia at the ungodly hour of 4:45 AM, when a fancy car zoomed past me with a license plate giving me the distinct feeling that I was just passed by Dom Imus.

Watching his luxury sedan speed off into the pre-dawn darkness, my recent thoughts on life and career suddenly crystallized.
Read the rest of this entry »

Per usual I was reading the Star and Tribune, and came across this article about new driving laws.

The first one I can accept: it’s now illegal to drive and text/send email from your phone. But how do you enforce that; outside of actually seeing someone typing on their phone while driving 80 down the freeway? And besides, how do you know they are texting and not dialing a number? Is making a phone call also going to be illegal?

But what concerned me more was the other set of laws aimed at teenage drivers. It would seem that teenage drivers have been severely limited in their ability to drive, any place, at any time.
Read the rest of this entry »