Steve Gould is a SF author with a fairly low output - he's only published five or six books in the last fifteen years. However, there are some really excellent juveniles in that meagre collection - specifically, the Wild Side and his first novel, Jumper. the Wild Side is definitively a juvenile - the feel is sort of like H. Beam Piper writing from a Heinlein juvenile-novel outline - but I might have mis-characterized Jumper. At the time, the wish-fulfillment aspects of the plot - victim of child abuse develops a near-godlike ability to teleport, remakes his life as he grows into adulthood - led me to think of the novel as a really, really excellent young-adult novel. The fact that he followed it up with the equally excellent the Wild Side cemented it in my imagination as such. When he started writing adult-themed novels like Blind Waves, I was a bit disappointed - while fine books, Blind Waves and Helm didn't have the spark of his earlier work, and I was afraid that he was "growing out of" his talents.

This is why I was less than enthused when I saw that he had written a sequel to Jumper, more than a decade after the publishing of the first book. Jumper had not really cried out for a sequel - the character-arc was complete, the protagonist's power was such that the real conflicts of the book wasn't between him and the various terrorists, government spooks, and father-figures, but rather within his own skull - his emotional development. That emotional arc was pretty much complete by the end of the book, with him happily married, secure, and well-employed as a freelance spook for the NSA. (Why the NSA? For some reason, the CIA doesn't exist in Gould's Jumper world, or at least, is never seen on stage or mentioned. Peculiar. I'll get back to that in a bit.)

The new novel, Reflex is being advertised primarily with a description of the plot, so I won't be spoiling anyone any further by saying that it begins with the clever kidnapping of the superpowered hero, Davy, and offers an elaborate imprisonment "A story" of operant conditioning, alternating with a "B story" of his wife's quest to find her missing husband.

As a plot-description, it sounded idiotic, a total hash of the original novel, and I had initial qualms. The way Gould moves forward with the story redeems the pulp outline, however, and I found myself tearing through the book in a single sitting. Gould definitely shows himself to be a disciple of Lois McMaster Bujold's "what's the worst thing we could do to this character" school of action-novel plotting, and it's vital to maintaining interest in such an excessively powerful personage as Davy the multilingual, unstoppable, uncontainable supernatural god-of-spies. The villains are terribly, terribly careful in their construction of constraints for the man who can disappear from any pen, any cell, any jail. They're fighting with the basic impossibility of bending to their will a man who can jump to the other side of the world from any given situation, or, even worse, the other side of the wall - right in your face. The fact that the villains make a good show of it makes that part of the novel compelling.

The other half is problematic, in a self-respect sort of way. It's unapologetically pulp, one-half authorial special-pleading, one-half wish-fulfillment, and way more fun than it ought to be. In short, Davy's wife, Millie, ends up inheriting his ability to flick back and forth through space. She "jumps". This is a violation of the premise of the original novel, in which Davy is unique, and unreplicable. There were suggestions that the talent might be genetic, or some sort of mutational freak. Nevertheless, after her husband disappears, leaving her stranded in their insanely-remote West Texas mountain place - called "the Aerie" and inaccessible except via Davy's talent - she discovers that riding along on thousands of "jumps" has somehow taught her the reflex that allows "jumping". Of course, she learns this by nearly falling to her death in an accident while trying to get back to civilization, so it's not nearly as lame as it sounds, but still - comic-booky as hell.

Gould makes some genuflections towards literary and thematic merit by tying together the "reflex" goals of the harsh, ugly operant conditioning at the centre of Davy's story, and Millie's learned reflexes as she develops the family power in her search for the villains. Gould almost pulls it off, but in the end, it's just really brilliant pulp. It isn't juvenile, however - not with all of the torture and sexuality and violent grotesqueries - and I'm not sure if I've mis-categorized the original novel, or if Gould has jumped sub-genres. The wrap-up at the end of Reflex leaves the door open for a trilogy-finale, and I suppose Gould has earned the right to a pulp-trilogy trifecta.

Gould does his best to keep the book moored in a semblance of reality. Davy does chores for the NSA in retrieving North Korean nuclear scientists, and inserting agents all over the world. Real mercenary groups are mentioned, and real situations are cited. Back when Jumper first came out, the novel's fixation on Middle Eastern terrorists seemed somewhat archaic - dated Eighties attitudes towards terrorism. You know, it was the Nineties. We were watching the end of history, and that sort of thing was old-fashioned. Now, more than a dozen years later, it makes a heck of a lot more sense. Strangely, Gould drops that line, and takes an even more old-fashioned attitude which I won't get too heavily into to avoid spoilers. Let's just say that I find his sudden anti-capitalist line a bit peculiar.

Oh, yes - the supplanting of the NSA for the CIA. Most if not all of the work Davy does for the government is through the National Security Agency - the good old "No Such Agency". The strangeness here is that the real-world NSA isn't exactly a two-fisted HUMINT-and-counterintelligence-cowboys outfit. They're wire-spooks, crypto types and electronic surveillance boffins. Instead, they're shown doing stake-outs, running security perimeters, and quarrelling with the FBI. What does this mean? Damned if I know, but it's really odd. Does Gould have a day-job at the CIA or something?

Mmm. Brilliant morning. Yellow and gold and orange with the purple-gray-green mountains in the distance.

We watched the first two episodes of Gallery Fake last night. It's this Seventies-TV-flavored, cool-jazz anime about a rogue art-dealer who specializes in authentication and counterfeiting scams. He runs a small gallery in Tokyo that specializes in really, really good fakes - the eponymous "Gallery Fake" - along with his Arabic-princess little matchstick girl of an assistant. It sounds exactly like my sort of thing, but the writer or writers just couldn't pay off on the premise. None of the scams really make sense, and you leave the episodes more confused than enlightened. He produces "real" versions of fake paintings straight from the deus ex machina, which is annoying in a narrative sense.

Furthermore, I still don't get how the deauthentication scam of the first episode works internally - the conspirators falsely label authentic paintings as fake, passing them out of the museum's collection at fire-sale prices through the suborned dealer. But how do they get back on the market as "real"? I thought the whole point of authentication was that the trail of ownership was known - the provenance of the painting, from painter to dealer to owner and so on. How do they "wash clean" the false accusation? The writers of Gallery Fake don't bother to tell us, don't fill in the gaps. Villains just look shifty and get shafted by the brilliant protagonist, and we're supposed to applaud his brilliance. Except the shafting seems to consist of the protagonist paying three times as much as he was supposed to for the Monet in question. Presumably the conspirators were the ones putting the painting up for auction, through some series of cut-outs or fronts. Didn't he just overpay the villains for their work?

It drives me a little batty, because the subject is sort of interesting. I don't understand the world of high art. I'm a prints sort of guy - a believer in the mass market and art for the general crowd. The one-off painting of unsurpassing fame and vast price is a fundamental mystery to me. The basic aesthetic quality of the multi-million dollar paintings seem to be only a slight fractionate element of the auction price. More important is the uniqueness of the work, the creator's reputation, the work's reputation, and the train of ownership. The metadata about the painting seems to drive the pricing of investor-grade art more than anything intrinsic about the thing itself.

Here is where counterfeiting and fakery become interesting. They produce work which are, on an aesthetic level, no different to my philistine eyes than the true metal stamped from the original press. Even if that aesthetic value of the false work is fractionately less than the true work, since the aesthetic value is such a minor element in the pricing of the work, the metadata surrounding both works is what is important to the investors, bidders, and curators.

The protagonist of Gallery Fake holds great thematic potential here. There are slight suggestions in the narrative that might lead one to the supposition that some fakes could be better than the original work - that the counterfeit might be aesthetically superior to the true metal. Someone who deauthenticates real work exposes the art to the open air of raw criticism - strips it of all pretense and borrowed glory, and leaves it reliant on its intrinsic, aesthetic merits. Such a protagonist would be noble in the existential sense - severing art from art history, ideology from aesthetics.

I suppose I'm expecting too much from a slight bit of fluff like Gallery Fake. But these are the ideas that come roiling to the surface when someone stirs the waters, you know?

Was just talking to an agronomist about the "Asian Rust", the fungus that's been wasting its way north through the soybean growing areas of Latin America, and that made landfall in the US last autumn. Word is that it grows on kudzu as well as soybeans, which means that it's inevitably going to become endemic to the American southeast. No way they're going to gas it out of the country if it's lurking in every kudzu patch from Gainesville to Shreveport.

The question right now is if they can deal with Asian Rust with a single fungicidal spraying per season, or if it's going to take more than that. The profit margins on soybeans are low enough, and the application cost is high enough, that more than one pass per field per year would make the whole business untenable on the east coast. Luckily, our company specializes in weather prediction for agricultural spraying purposes, which means we're in a position to offer predictions as to when the new rust is going to strike in any locality, and when the wind patterns and hydrology is best in the window-period for a fungicidal spraying.

Best case, Asian Rust just becomes one more pest for agribusinessmen to factor in their cost-benefit risk analysis. Here's hoping.

Damn.

For all of y'all coming here via the Corner, I don't usually make a big deal of it, but I work for an IT company that does a lot of GIS work, which means I get to play with a lot of mapping applications and the like. I'm not so much a map geek as an assistant to mapping professionals of a sort. However, like a lot of wargaming enthusiasts, I do have that giddy fascination for a good contoured map, the representation of reality in two-dimensional color and false-perspective.

DeLorme's Topo USA 4.0 is installed on my work machine, and to be strictly honest, it's my primary tool. We've got various real GIS applications all over the place, and I do a lot of hand-editing on detailed GPS-indexed agricultural data, but that isn't the exciting stuff, is it? Topo USA 4.0 gives the pretty, pretty pictures, and it's actually a decent resource for finding locations in the continental US. Most often, I use Mapquest if Topo USA is letting me down, but in most particulars the software beats the website, especially if you've turned on the topographic features on Topo USA. For online topographic neatness, you can always go with Topozone, but that website is essentially a really comprehensive set of digitized topographic maps at various resolutions, rather than a truly interactive map webapp. Outside of the continental US, you'll be wanting Multimap, which I've found to be pretty useful for Canadian informational searches, and for following along with American blitzkrieg warfare in the Middle East.

As with most things, Google is your first stop for finding the unknown, or refreshing the half-remembered.

Real GIS professionals play with ArcView and other, better tools, I'm told. I used to use ArcView a bit, but frankly, I'm not a real GIS professional, and it's a monstrous pain in the ass. We have our in-house GIS applications which I can't show you due to it all being only for paying customers, sorry. You can contact us if you're really interested, but I doubt we're going to get many agriculture professionals looking for GIS work around these parts, no?

I've been spending time reading the Grantville Gazette, Vol. 1. It's essentially a collection of fanfic set in Eric Flint's Grantville/Ring of Fire/1632 conceit, edited and approved by said author. The irony is that the collection is more interesting than the first volume of the series, which had serious character and writing issues.

I have a weakness for these sorts of collective Robinson Crusoe stories, going right back to Heinlein's Tunnel in the Sky. They're like boy's own adventures for entire communities. Steve Sterling, who's wrote a lot of 'em, seems to be saying in Conquistador that the appeal of these drop-the-home-town-in-Ancient-Rome stories is that they're imperialist fantasies, colonial playacting. Maybe so.

I learned the other day that the Bellefonte Wok had been located down on High Street before I moved up here. I had gotten so used to them being in in the Brockerhoff that it never occurred to me that they started out somewhere else. Ironically enough, I discovered this because an online reference site had retained this six-year-old phone and address for the Wok, while all of the paper phonebooks in the county have long since caught up to their new location. So much for the vaunted flexibility of the internet, yes?

Hiccups. I hate hiccups. How can something be so harmless while being at the same time the most misery-inducing condition known to otherwise-healthy man? The only cure I've found so far is to make like a jellyfish in my chair, completely limp. Otherwise, all the cures - gargling water, heavy breathing, tensioning, not breathing at all, bends, etc - seem to be bunk.

NPR was on about Sharon and Abbas looking to begin a "new age of peace talks". What an unfortunate prospect! To mangle Twain, the difference between a "new age of peace talks" and a "new age of peace" is the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.

OK, I'm split on the Shanley verdict. On the one hand, he sounds like a right ripe NAMBLA-founding chickenhawk. On the other hand, if there's two dozen accusers out there, how come the only one they went to court with resulted in a case built on "recovered memory" testimony? Is it some sort of statute-of-limitations bullshit? (I guess so.) As far as I can tell, "recovered memory" is nothing more than guided confabulation with an agenda; the idea that it can be used in a court of law is about as welcome to me as the prospective return of spectral evidence.

Seven in the morning is too early for "Dead Things", FX.

Well, the flu did its best to kill me dead, but I seem to still be here, so nuts to the flu. The office was a real plague ship on Thursday. I was half out of my mind with fever, and they came thisclose to renting an angel-with-burning-sword to get me to go home. The apartment is something of a mess, what with the blankets and used tissues and random crap laying about. My apartment is more a place for storing my books and crashing at night, than somewhere you'd want to be stuck in for long periods of time.

Bedding issues meant that I finally opened a Christmas gift from the relatives, and discovered that I had been gifted with a denim comforter for my bed. Denim. I guess they were out of sackcloth? Well, I suppose I exaggerate - for denim, it was remarkably soft and not-sack-cloth-ish. But it's still a coarse twillish sort of deal, where. I managed to soak the new bedsheets last night, so I suppose I'm gonna have to wash the whole load some time real soon now, anyways.

Gah! Everytime I need to go do something, I come down sick with some sort of bug. Last Friday, it was a head cold. Today, it's an incipient chest-congestion sort of thing. I *had* been planning on going to give blood this afternoon, but I can't go donate if I'm on the verge of something infectious, can I? Bah. They've been nagging me ever since I missed giving in December. Maybe it'll go away by the seventh - there's another blood drive then, over at the Elks'.

I suppose I should mention that I was off at a convention-meeting that is, in itself, a convention entire. The staff for said anime convention has grown so large that there are more staffers than there were attendee/members at the first convention, back in 1994. I'm theoretically more active in staffing than I have been for years, but I can't claim that I was all that active last weekend. I sat and read a book during the interminable discussions over revisions to the bylaws on membership definitions, and when I finished the book, I took off, while they were still working item e or f of sections a through, hrm, k maybe?

[The book was SM Stirling's Conquistador, his latest love-letter to colonials and imperialists. Well, that's a tad unkind, but really, I'm starting to spot a trend, here, what with the Draka, the Nantucket trilogy, the Peshawar Lancers, and so on. The gist of the story is that a Virginia vet found a way into an alternate-history dimension in post-WWII Oakland,CA, and founded a "Commonwealth of New Virginia" with his war buddies, and what seems like every displaced colonial population produced by the second half of the 20th century. Stirling seems to like to play with the tension between colonial racism and what he sees as the cultural, ecological, and economic virtues of the colonial lifestyle. Personally, I think he exaggerates the environmental wisdom of his hypothetical New Virginia, but hey, it's his soap-box. And you gotta respect a SF writer who spends his spare time baiting the tools on Democratic Underground.]

Otherwise, I mostly spent the weekend playing games with other staffers, and catching up with Todd Dissinger, who finally made it back up from Alabama for a ComCon. Everybody was going on about playing poker on the mailing lists, but I couldn't find a single game all weekend, which kind of irked me. So, instead, I found myself playing the old stand-bys - Citadel, History of the World, etc. We only got three rounds into History of the World - everybody got tired and bored, and called the game less than half-way through. Wimps.

A friend emailed me this site specializing in the history of Bellefonte. I just read this column about a Keystone Cops foot-chase that apparently did a full horseshoe loop around my block, from North Spring over to the alley across the street from the Moose Lodge down towards the elementary school, ending with the robber hiding in a tree and the cop scratching his head a half-block down the alley behind my place. Inconsequential, but amusing.

For consequential, you have a lot of blogs to choose from, no? Just don't fall for another action figure taken hostage by Islamic Farkers, OK?

Thinking over the current meme, my five favorite on-going manga series would probably be, in no particular order,

1) Hot Gimmick, due to its cast of likable characters, and an absolutely ravishing character-design style, for which my admiration only grows with time and familiarity. I just love that non-continuous, razored-line eye work. The soap-opera story is still working, too, although the author is getting very close to the end of her narrative rope on the main relationship by the end of the current volume - she needs to let it resolve, I think. It's not as if she can throw another violent sociopath or contrived recovered-memory trauma at the main couple every other volume, like the author of Mars did.

2) Bleach, which is just another disguised-sentai psychic-teen actioner, so I really ought to be ashamed of loving it as much as I do. But really - it's an *excellent* psychic-teens punch-em-up, with a fine sense of style, and some of the funniest, cleverest facial expressions in manga. It's built of nothing but cliche, situation, and stock-character - but the execution is so brilliant that I can't do anything other than gush.

3) Tramps Like Us, aka Kimi wa Pet, is a bit of a rarity in the manga released in the states, in that the characters are all actual, living, breathing adults. Nothing much ever really happens, but the nothing that happens just makes me happy.

4) Please Save My Earth just keeps cranking along, and it's definitely one of the series which I await, impatiently at best, every other month for the latest installment. I'm especially excited now that the story has gotten past the parts animated in the early-Nineties six-part OAV series. I can only hope that it's more Rin-and-Alice than Tamura and the rest of the stonefaces.

5) XXXholic, for the chill, stark black-and-white imagery, and Yuko, 'cause she's just cool. But Del Rey is *not* helping me keep to this love with the fourth volume's scanned-at-one-level-too-coarse ham-handed presentation. I don't care how expert the line-work is coming from the artists, if the production-line squiggles it all to pixelized mush. Damnit.

On the other end of the scale, I grabbed a few things from the Comic Swap's bargain-bin the other week, and found myself marching through Dark Horse's Club 9, which wasn't exactly attractive at $15.95, but was worth a whirl at half-price. I say marching, because it was something of a slog. There have been a number of folks talking up Club 9, but I can't see for the life of me why they would have done so, barring a knife at their collective throats, or some malicious urge to direct unwary readers towards experiences of pain and irritation.

Club 9 is a slice-of-life-sorta story about a north-country Japanese hick's young-adult life as she graduates from high school and goes off to college in Tokyo. Our protagonist Haruo is ugly, dim, unlucky, a klutz, and burdened with the worst accent since the days of Ma and Pa Kettle. Seriously, the translators make her sound like the sort of imaginary, stereotypical, inbred hillbilly that haunt the dreams of election-burned snobs all up and down the blue-state coasts. She uses idiot country similes too insane for Dan Rather, and drawls like a coke-addled Yazoo County beauty-pageant runner-up. It wouldn't be quite so bad if they were going the hush-mah-mauf sly-hick making fun of the snobs comedy route, but they aren't. We're supposed to find her endearingly naive and lovable in her stupidity. Hell, we don't even get to the titular Ginza hostess-bar setting until the back third of the first volume. Instead we have a tedious meander through baseball politics and the horrors of dorm-room hauntings and such.

It isn't as if the manga is particularly enjoyable to look at - the layouts are uninspired, and the character designs are like the retarded cousins of those early-Meiji woodcuts of cross-eyed, jellybean-faced galloots that get trotted out whenever an editor wants some offensive graphics to accompany something borderline racist and stereotypical about the Japanese. I could take that in a gag comic - but this is supposed to be about attractive, vivacious Ginza-bar hostesses! Bah, I say: Bah!

Ugh, wonderful. A skunk has crawled under the front of the office building, and is spraying its territory. We're debating how to deal with this infestation. Somebody suggested taking a sledgehammer to it. I said I'd like to see the person with reflexes fast enough to squish a mobile skunk. Even so, I can't imagine but smashing a skunk with a hammer would do anything other than splatter musk all over the place. Shooting it is right out, due to that pesky "100 yrds from inhabited building" law. Anybody got a terrier with more mean than sense?

Update: Well, I got tired of the kevetching, so I went out with our twenty-foot satellite-dish scraper to see if I couldn't convince it to move on. It was thoroughly dead - somebody found a blood trail leading under the porch, which suggests that it got hit by a car last night, and tried to burrow under the building for warmth. I couldn't get any leverage to pull it out from under the building with the scraper, so after I assured myself that it was pining for the fjords, I grabbed a heavy-duty iron rake and dug it out. It was something of a pain rolling the damned corpse to the trees at the back of the property, but I couldn't get it to carry on the end of the rake, and I was damned if I was going to touch a dead skunk with my bare hands.

Dave threatened to ban me from his apartment if I got sprayed, but dead skunks very rarely spray, so I suppose I'm off the hook. Don't know what the fuss is about. It only smells a little worse than Ben Hauger's catshit coffee.

Oh, that's excellent. Television Without Pity is covering Battlestar Galactica. I used to hang out at that website back when there were decent Joss Whedon shows on the air. Nice to have a reason to head on back.

Meme going 'round the blogsphere - describe your favorite movies in seven words, without hinting at the title.

I'm not a one for bestest favorites, but I do have my soft spots:

Weatherman wakes repeatedly to Sonny and Cher

Minnesotan hicks find plane, cash, and tragedy

Homer mugged for Southern nostalgia, oldtimey music

Urban Phildickian amnesia experiment by hatted aliens

I am Jack's description of this movie

Parisian musical with pop lyrics and absinthe

Stolen gold and doomed Shia perplex soldiers

Gunfighter dueling competition with Oedipus and Electra

Deathrow murderesses chase fame with musicial numbers

Went out to do a sit-down lunch, the Inaugural came on NPR, and I ended up eating in my car, and then sitting in the parking lot at work until Bush finished his speech. I can be a sucker for ritual and rhetoric, in the right time and place. I wonder if that yelling you could hear behind Bush during his speech was protestors, or just random yammerers in the crowd?

The substance was unexceptional, heavier on foreign policy than I expected, given recent focus on domestic policy. He managed to get through the entire speech without a single direct reference to terrorism, managing even to cite the Koran as a source of private virtue underlying public policy. He preferred to go on about freedom, and countering tyranny. There was a line about force being only a peripheral element of the advancement of democracy - the signals in the speech were all telling against further military offensives. [Update - the line is "This is not primarily the task of arms, though we will defend ourselves and our friends by force of arms when necessary." Transcript here.] I'm starting to think that rumblings about Syria and Iran are projections and phantoms. He didn't sound like someone getting ready to bang the war-drums.

Well, that was different. PSSFS has almost totally evolved past its GRANOP days; I was easily the least socialized individual at the meeting. Not only did they have milk and cookies (well, technically, milk and biscotti...) but they had them *nonironically*. At first, I thought it was some sort of Andy Kaufman thing, but no-body was goofing off on the ritual. It was just something they did. No fatheads, no geeking, no incoherent gibberish. Well, at least, not by my standards. I didn't recognize a single person there, which probably means that I was the only non-student in the crowd.

After the milk and biscotti and some club business about the new library (housed somewhere in the HUB, so we were told), they got down to the main attraction - an officer reading from a novelization of a Nickelodean kids' SF series called the Secret World of Alex Mack. I gathered that it was found during the move of the library holdings into its new digs. After the dramatic reading, they continued by watching some DVD episodes of Gargoyles, a show I really have no use for, sad to say. They still do the old four-column attendance sheet thing, but I didn't really have time to sit through an hour-and-a-half of American animation to stick around for the attendance sheet reading.

Nice to see that there is some generational improvement in the community of nerdom. Of course, it might be that the anime club has bled off all the sociopaths and Asoerger's Syndrome kiddies. But one must have hope.

I'm going to go parachute into a meeting of PSSFS, my old SF club. It's been years and years since I went to one, and I'm going to be passing through town for comic shop stock day, anyways.

I've been kind of hibernetical recently; there just isn't much of anything going on, and I barely have enough energy to do the nothing required of me. Got a rather astonishing credit card bill in the mail the other day - nothing I can't cover, easily, but still - the sort of thing that would have stopped my heart dead if I had gotten it back in my penurious post-college days. You know, back when I used to go to PSSFS on a weekly basis, and write their newsletters. I see that they've misplaced the old archives in the last re-design; I saved 'em myself, somewhere. I think. Looks like someone tried to start doing weekly newsletters through livejournal, although it seems to be defunct.

I got a look at the first three episodes of Ron Moore's new Battlestar Galactica last night. Satellite channel Sky 4 in the UK apparently got a hold of the new series early last fall, and has been broadcasting it all season long. Which would be all fine and good, except that Sky likes to put a station-identification logo permanently imbedded in the upper left corner of what would be the 4:3 section of the screen, if the show hadn't been filmed and broadcast in widescreen. Also, PAL material tends to come out funny when viewed on NTSC equipment, and all of the male characters had that characteristic PAL helium-whine.

All that aside, they were great episodes. It's rock-solid material, easily equal to the mini-series in all qualities. Spoiler-space for those of you not blessed with parasitic access to the gordiehoweverse:

The episodes don't have names, or at least, the versions I saw were nameless. If they had them, however, I would fully expect the first episode to be entitled "Thirty-three Minutes". We're introduced into the series in media res, as the rag-tag fleet races against an unexplained countdown. Fighters are scrambled, chaos on the communication lines as civilian ships slowly and painfully organize their planned "jumps" out of the scene to the next rendezvous point. As the count-down hits zero, the Cylons jump in, charging for the fleet. The defenses of the Galactica unload on them, as the rest of the fleet winks away, leaving the Galactica in a final rush to catch her fighters on the run, jumping away just before the first nukes pass through their position. They arrive at the rendezvous, and re-start the countdown clocks. Here we learn that this is something like the two-hundredth iteration of this particular cycle, and they've been running without rest or pause for five straight days. The episode itself is just as relentless and breathless as the fleet itself, with restless, urgent drums rushing the characters from each brief crisis to next, every face growing paler and every hand shakier as the minutes tick down on dozens of mechanical clocks and primitive digital displays.

The plot-threads started in the miniseries continue, seamlessly, through the three episodes viewed. Gaius Baltar continues to struggle against discovery, madly alternating between arguments with his ghost-Cylon haunt, and desperately "maintaining" before a bemused President Roslyn and an increasingly-skeptical Commander Adama, who insistently demands a "Cylon Detector" from the scientist, who made the mistake of claiming he could do so in the mini-series. Captain Lee "Apollo" Adama continues to serve as a bridge between his father-the-Commander and the President, and the scenes between the three are clearly being written as a sort of metaphor for a blended family, the President at one point exclaiming in frustration to Commander Adama that "he's *your* son", sounding for all the world like a step-mother arguing with her new husband over a problem-child from a previous marriage.

The episodes' context in the post-9/11 world is bleedingly obvious. Outside of the office on the Galactica which is being used for low-level fleet communications, the corridor is covered in the sort of "have you seen this person" collages which briefly dominated the streets of Downtown Manhattan in the wake of the attacks. In the place of the thankfully-declining body-counts of the 9/11 disasters, is a chillingly simple board mounted in the President's impromptu office, updated with a "survivor's count", with each loss tabulated with mournful exactitude.

To counter-act the somewhat claustrophobic prospect of a TV series set entirely in a series of corridors, barracks, flight-decks, and CGI, the writers re-introduced the character of "Helo", left behind on the nuked, wrecked planet of Caprica. I had expected this character to just drop out, slaughtered by the Cylons like the rest of those left behind on the colonies, but instead, his continued fight for survival on a planetary surface, which seems to be under a perpetual soaking down-pour, breaks up the dimly-lit ship-board scenes of the rest of the cast. They were able to use the revelation of "Boomer" as a hidden Cyclon to place her in both places at once, bear-leading "Helo" across the green wilderness of Caprica, while still playing her part in the primary plot on board Galactica. This hasn't paid off yet, but they've certainly planted enough questions about what the hell the Cylons are up to with this sort of thing. My guess is that the two of them are being used to ferret out survivors in the colonies for disposal, but it's just a guess right now.

The show has been extremely arc-heavy so far, to such an extent that I'm not sure if you could actually run it out-of-order without terminally disorienting all but the most fanatical viewers. It feels more like a season of the Sopranos than what I'm used to getting from broadcast or basic cable. There's very little given to the slower members of the prospective audience, which might be a ratings-issue. This isn't the tissue-paper piffle for slow-tops which characterized the original, disco-glam Battlestar Galactica, which often resembled nothing so much as Branson, Missouri in Space.

I'm really looking forward to seeing the rest of this, but I'm increasingly getting the feeling that this show isn't for the long haul - they're running through the plots at a dead run, and I wouldn't be surprised if they're intentionally writing for a one or two-season series.

Bill Whittle, whom I sometimes find a bit overbearing and didactic, has a better-than-usual take on the dearth of liberal actor-politicians. He believes that good actors are hollow people, with no real interior life or ideas of their own, and theorizes that bad actors, who have too much self to be effective in their chosen profession, have a competitive advantage in politics. I guess. Anyways, check it out - not bad.

"There are places that are below sea level."
"Luckily, most of them are under water."

-Two programmers in my office just now, discussing a possible bug with our primary GPS logging application when used at apparent below-sea-level elevations.

I'm developing Political Tourettes, and I don't know what to do about it.

Twice this weekend, I found myself bursting out into profane rants in public about irritating media-leftist-bullshit, once while eating breakfast Saturday at the Diamond Deli over the world's most worthless city newspaper, the Centre Daily Times, once again after lunch at the Mike's Video extension on the corner of Bishop and Allegheny, while browsing the new-releases racks.

I apologized at the Diamond Deli as I paid at the counter, and since they're good folk, and the outburst really had nothing to do with the help or anything in their place, things ended amicably. It was just me ranting about a Knight-Ritter syndicated account of the tsunami relief effort that dedicated paragraph after paragraph to the "UN efforts" while giving only a half-paragraph to the US and Singapore, while managing to not mention Australia *at all*. That sort of fiction passing for news coverage just enraged me beyond all control. Not a big deal - half the blogsphere consists of such media-frustration-fueled rage. But the blogsphere isn't the homey diner on the ground floor of the Crider Exchange on Allegheny; it isn't public. Luckily, the only people in the place was the proprietor and a fellow coot who was also reading the CDT, and might be expected to have some idea what I was raving like a madman about. I got a pass.

The second outburst was not so negligible. I don't go into the Mike's on Bishop all that often - I don' t know why, maybe because I tend to go out to movies more often than rent for viewing in my cramped little place. That's going to be declining as well, since the owners of the Garman Opera Theatre on High Street have recently begun playing politics heavily with their property. Last week, while going to see the Lemony Snicket kid's movie on a Sunday matinee, I discovered the big shaggy mess on the far wall of the foyer which I had thought was some kind of grade-school kids' project was actually an enormous piece of anti-war propaganda, intelligible only at a distance of four to three feet. This went only half-way towards ruining my enjoyment of a Series of Unfortunate Events, as the movie was good enough to survive my morbid sensitivity to political nuance, thus irritated and aroused by the theatre-owners' apparent need to express themselves. But now they're proudly housing an art-film hagiography of the Death-Camp Mass-Murderer as a Young Beatnik, usually identified as "the Motorcycle Diaries" in the trades. Nothing pisses me off more these days than icons of St. Che, patron saint of humorless leftism.

Which brings me to Mike's, and my early-Sunday-afternoon flameout. They had a copy of Margaret Cho's latest video, complete with Cho in drag as a Che clone on the front cover. Margaret-proud-bisexual-Cho especially pisses me off with this Che-worship. Che's third-largest set of murder-victims, after political opponents and intellectuals, was the homosexual population of Cuba. He was the ur-homophobe of the new Left. What exactly is a fag-hag, bisexual flower-of-the-Haight activist like Margaret Cho *saying* by doing cosplay as a concentration-camp commandant? It doesn't seem like a tongue-in-cheek sort of thing, a gay Mel-Brooks-in-the Producers kind of thing.

But I degress: not having really examined the new-releases closely in a while, I found that a good sixth or eighth of the titles were leftist propaganda of some stripe or the other. Copy after copy of bad "documentary", thinly-veiled agitprop fiction, and Fahrenheit 911 clones. The local Democrat I poll-watched with on Election Day was firm in her conviction that Bellefonte was a conservative town, an unenlightened town, her classes full of Neanderthal brutes and lock-step Young Republicans. If this is such a conservative town, why is the only video-shop in town full of hardcore leftist documentaries and video-rants? I had myself under control until I came to the multiple copies of Bush's Brain, after having looked at a Bush-the-coke-fiend piece called Hooves and Horns or something like that, and I snapped. Started swearing my head off, in an outside voice - I believe I said something about locking my front door and not coming out for the next ten years or so, except with a few more "fuckings" and "goddamns" garnishing the sentiment here and there. The two clerks and one young man all turned to stare, and the clerk at the desk started to inform me that this was a "family shop", and that I couldn't talk like that here. I profanely informed her that if this particular Mike's was in any way a "family" rental place, I wouldn't have known from what I routinely encounter on the shelves, and quickly left before I became any more abusive.

I'm not prepared for this politicization of my neighborhood space. It's three months after the elections, and people are still leaving their yard-signs out; I had just passed someone's set of two Kerry signs a block up Bishop, walking towards town on the way to the incident at Mikes. As I have said, I tend to be somewhat morbidly sensitive to this sort of thing; I have difficulty putting political matters out of my head once they've gotten in. One of my best methods for forgetting about politics has been film/video escapism - available locally, solely from the very places which are putting on the Che, and driving me to distraction.

Sigh. I may look into Netflix.

Reviews like this tend to get me a bit crazed. The reviewer is supposed to be reviewing Stellvia, a pretty if somewhat flawed boarding-school SF/fantasy anime from a year or two back. Fair enough. The problem comes when he confuses Stellvia's boarding-school structure for a variant on one of the sports-anime subgenres, and proceeds to simultaneously complain that the show was derivative of the sci-fi sports anime Battle Athletes Victory, and bewail its failure to be like Battle Athletes Victory. Where to start?

Stellvia is a story about a gifted young teen who ships out to a space academy training a cadre of children and teenagers who will save the battered Earth from the second bow-wave of the catastrophic supernova whose first impact smashed civilization and brought humanity to the brink of extinction. The first part of the series is quite solidly a boarding-school story, full of young people stretching their gifts out into talents in the midst of class rivalries, sempai/kouhei relationships, and constant competition. You've seen this sort of thing before, if you've read either the Harry Potter novels, or Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game. As an example of the genre, Stellvia is OK. The first half of the series is lacking in serious conflict, tends to make mountains out of molehills, and requires a massive suspension of disbelief in the risks and demands placed on the children, but overall, the show doesn't suck. It sort of feels a little like where the students in Ryvius were going before the writers of that particular series flung them off into Giant Robot of the Space Flies.

Battle Athletes Victory, for those of you reading at home, was a TV remake of OAV series which, rarely enough, improved on the original. It featured a large cast of implausible, genetically engineered female athletes, competing furiously on an orbital space station for the title of "Cosmo Beauty", a planetary queen-of-the-athletic-heap sort of deal. Stick the word "hyper" in front of most of the minor sports featured in the Olympics, throw in preposterously over-powered versions of the athletic events featured in Japanese school sports festivals, and garnish heavily with microgravity or weight boots, and you've got some sort of idea what goes on in your average BAV episode. It's loads of fun, but despite the Skiffy trappings, it's a sports anime.

Sports stories and boarding school stories share a number of characteristics - Harry Potter has Quiddich, and many sports anime have the living-in-close-quarters-with-your-peers elements central to boarding-school stories - but they're not really the same thing at all. BAV has only the slightest of interest in the hard-science details of orbital mechanics or hard-science-fiction rigor; Stellvia, while not perfectly hard science-fictional, wants very much to hold itself up as hard science fiction for the kids - in the Robert A. Heinlein tradition.

It's bad enough when otaku-come-lately stomp about and rant that a slightly-younger derivative anime is a ripoff of a slightly-older derivative anime, while displaying woeful ignorance of the actual traditions and original works which both are drawing upon; to indulge in such histrionics while mistaking the genres involved takes a special kind of negative genius.

Oh, well. It takes all kinds to make a fandom.

I'm back from Florida, but feeling deeply unambitious. I spent last night going through my manga, organizing and creating a huge pile of discards which I need to get rid of, if I'm not going to drown in a sea of pulp. I know where I can get rid of real books, at Fred Ramsey's place, even though I never actually avail myself of that opportunity. But what do you do with comics? When the last speculative bubble burst everybody remembered that mass-market printed material doesn't normally appreciate. Before then, comics shops would buy old comics; I don't think the 'Swap does that these days - at least, I don't see large shelves of used manga in the back.

Either way, my place is starting to get a bit swamped, and there's only a little space left back in the kitchen-area for another set of shelves. I suppose I could get a couple of those plastic garage-shelves and clean up the "spare" room, which is currently hip-deep in random detritus. Donate as much of my old clothes as I'll never wear, which is most of them.

Maybe it's time I actually cranked down and learned how to use E-Bay. That's how everybody else gets rid of their crap, right?

Tried to watch a DVD of the Coen Brothers' the Ladykillers this evening with my mother and grandmother, since I had remembered it as a really good movie with a good moral message when I saw it in the theatre. Bad move. I had forgotten all of the bad language and violence. Luckily, my grandmother couldn't understand one word in four of what was going on, but we quickly gave up, and put in the Sound of Music instead, until everybody fell asleep before the TV. It's been years since I last watched that movie - in fact, the last time I saw it might have been back when my mother left my sister and I in my grandmother's care way the back when. Grandma was very happy to see it again - she kept mentioning that she had seen it in the theatres. I had forgotten how beautifully shot it all was - perhaps the pan-and-scan version they showed on TV chopped a lot of it up? Had to explain to my mother why "all of these DVDs are in these narrow little boxes on the screen", and why pan-and-scan is a mutilation of films shot for the wider aspect ratios.

Ahoyhoy, camparinos. I'm down in Florida, and we got the DSL up and running yesterday. So, here I am. The drive down was mostly uneventful, except for the way the cold seemed to chase us down I-95 like a vengeful ex determined to have the last word in an argument. I had to take the dog out for a walk in a Red Roof parking lot in Fayetteville, NC at 4 in the morning, where I only discovered just how far below freezing it had gotten overnight *after* I locked myself out of the hotel, which was rather short of help. The same woman seemed to be the night bookkeeper, front-desk help, maid, janitor, and continental-breakfast caterer. I nearly froze off my unmentionables before I found the side-door with the room-key all-hours access lock. The dog didn't care - he had a coat built-in by a thoughtful if capricious nature.

I-95 is, in a certain, figurative sense, America's front driveway, which makes its reality a rather surreal let-down. The stretch between Richmond, Virginia and Jacksonville, Florida is essentially a vast swampy desert punctuated with stereotypically racist Senor Pedro billboard ads for the eastern seaboard's largest, tackiest tourist-trap, "South of the Border". Southern billboard rates must be rock-bottom cheap, because there were dozens, perhaps as many as a hundred of these billboards all along the highway throughout North Carolina - nine in the last mile leading up to the North Carolina border alone. As for the swamp, sometimes it seemed as if America was one vast marsh from the James to the St. Johns.

Florida, on the other hand, looks to be the world's largest sand bar. The part of it that my parents have picked to settle down in isn't nearly as flat as I expected, but rather is an undulating patchwork of very low, ossified sand dunes and wetlands, many of which have been drained into large ponds and lakes. It isn't as barren as it sounds, because the rain and moisture means that the sand is well-covered by lots of vegetation, but underneath it all - sand, sand, sand. This is grazing land which is quickly being overrun by the snowbird and retiree immigration. What land hasn't been built over for retirement communities is either under use by horse-breeders, or has been let go as woodlots for wandering herds of freerange cattle. This isn't orange-growing territory - that doesn't start for another county or two, southwards toward Orlando. There's a retirement community, called "the Villages", that starts a few miles to the southeast of here that is forty-five thousand souls strong, sprawling over three counties, and encompassing three dozen different golf courses within its borders. This retirement community is somewhat dwarfish by comparison, but it's still growing at the rate of one or two houses a day, every day, rain sun or showers.

The movers' truck showed up early, and they unloaded with commendable efficiency, which makes it all the more sad that they got into a serious accident not five minutes after leaving for their next stop. We passed them by on the way to lunch on Tuesday, the tractor-trailer jackedknifed across all the southbound lanes of traffic on the highway just outside of this retirement community. Some old duffer in a sedan had spun out in front of them, careening into the front of their truck, and breaking their front axle. Luckily, no-one was hurt, but the chances of them making the rest of their deliveries in time to get home for Christmas in the north is pretty slim. After that, Mom managed to start a fire in the kitchen while I was in the bathroom taking care of lunch, as it were. She had left a shipping box on the open range while she was unloading it, and had apparently spun the dials to "hot" as she set the box down. Much flame and chaos ensued, but the only damage was to Dad's nerves, as this had occurred while he was on the cel-phone with her. We wrote it all off as a decent fire-test for the many, many smoke detectors mounted way, way up the walls throughout the house. Took a while to get them all to shut off.

Dad flew in with Grandma to Orlando on Wednesday, and we drove down to meet them there. We're talking about him flying back up to drive the SUV back down here, as we couldn't find a buyer on short notice leading up to Christmas like it was. Anyone want a five-year-old Honda RAV4 with a lot of mileage, good condition?

Grandma's trying to settle in; she's 93, and she's been feeling every year the last few months or so. I've been trying to help the folks with her, but I can see it's going to be a challenge taking care of her, between the two of them. Oh, well.

My sister's going to be lapping me, coming down the afternoon of the 30th on a flight to Orlando, after I'm due to leave on a flight heading north from that same airport. She's a physical therapist, so hopefully she'll make some progress in getting Grandma situated; she's better-trained for this sort of thing than anyone currently down here, I suppose.

I'm going to be out of town for a couple weeks on family business, and probably away from the Interweb as a result. I've not been posting much, as you might have noticed. I've been writing, and tossing material recently. Mostly because what comes out is better-suited to increasing the balance of misery in the world, and I don't know that such things are worth the publishing.

I'll be helping the folks move down to Florida, to a place whose address prominiently features the phrase "nth Circle", which I figure is quite appropriate in describing a flat, hot, humid hell of a state...

Dear commie pinko superhero-pimp:

Please do not make the assumption that the prototypical American patriot is somehow wedded to the mainstream American comic. They are not. They just don't give a half a shit about the spinal-reflexive anti-American, hardcore leftist twaddle that passes for "alternative comics". Those that can stomach the five billionth iteration of "superhero comic" will buy what DC, Image, and Marvel shit onto your metaphorical docks every month. You know, with near-mathematical exactitude, how big that fraction of a fraction is. But please, don't imagine that your shelves full of Art Spiegelman's sour crap and poorly-printed Ted Rall and Tom Tommorrow reprints are going to draw anyone inclined to list to your political right into your squalid little basement shop.

They're at the bookstore across town, buying manga from an establishment which doesn't reek of geek stink patchouli.

[Yeah, yeah - I'm aware that the Beguiling is a Canadian comics shop. Who ever let fairness stand in the way of a good rant? I'm getting eye-strain from their stupid cycling-snowflakes backgrounds, and I'm feeling mean.]

Lynn Swann is talking about running for governor of the commonwealth in 2006.

I'm amused by this because Swann used to own a house two blocks down the street from my parents' house in Ross Township. We never saw him around the neighborhood - dunno if he actually lived in the house or no. I seem to remember that his wife used the place during the season, or something like that. For some reason, I thought they moved south to Georgia or the Carolinas when he retired. But, nevertheless, if he runs for governor, he'll definitely be a homie done good from my point of view. I'm kind of afraid of what that piranha Rendell will leave of Swann when he's done with him, though.

I was watching A&E yesterday, and was amused/alarmed to see that a murder had occurred in the same neighborhood a few years ago, some yunzer beating his wife to death in the hot-tub and calling it "drowning" - he's on death row now. I didn't realize it was the old neighborhood until they pulled back on his incredibly bland house and the distinctive white-elephant bulk of Ross Park Mall appeared in the background.

Although I'm in favor of the death penalty, I'm not exactly happy with this particular example - I don't consider somebody who murdered two wives to be a fit subject for execution. Copkillers? Sure - gotta protect the civil service. Mass murderers, yes - for the outrage against civil order. Serial-killers? On the "they'll never stop" theory, and the "they had it coming", yeah, sure, liquidate 'em. But I don't quite see that a guy who kills two women for the insurance money qualifies as a serial-killer. He seems like a prime candidate for life-in-prison-without-parole. That sort of doughy-pasty-white-geek will be more miserable as a lifer than on death row, anyways. Huh. Looks like a court sort-of-half-agreed with me, because his death sentence was commuted by an appellate court due to other irregularities - mostly boot-strapping between the murders of his two wives.

They had the township police chief on the program going on about how there was only one or two murders in the township every ten years or so. If that's the case, then almost all the murders in the township occur in that neighborhood, because I remember a woman having killed her husband in the basement of one of the houses across the street from Swann's place in the late Seventies. I guess I can claim that I grew up in the most dangerous neighborhood in my hometown, can't I?

Stayed at home yesterday to try to avoid further infecting the office with my germs. Everything went to hell without me there, so I suppose I'm good for something around here... daytime TV hasn't improved much since my useless-post-college-days.

The best channel was C-SPAN. They had a high-ranking general standing in front of a busy shed full of mechanics and Humvees, as he tried to explain the esoterics behind up-armoring transport vehicles in a IED&ambush war like Iraq. Thus is the state-of-the-art of spin control in 2004. The press corps wasn't totally ignorant for a change. Everybody was bending over backwards to not look like they were going to come down like a ton of bricks on the NCO who was yelling at Rumsfeld. So what's the odds look like this week on a Rumsfeld resignation? I'm guessing one in three, up from one in twenty last week. After that, they had Gen. Brooks, Robert Kaplan, and some other guy at AEI doing a panel on, of all things, spin control and information warfare. They had a lot of interesting things to say about how the administration lost the information battle over First Fallujah, and dominated the fight over the story of Second Fallujah. Interesting point - Gen. Brooks used that exact name - "Second Fallujah". How very, very 1862, don't you think?

There was a lot of lights-flickering and tv-outage later last night. When I came in this morning, I discovered that the building-site where the Mount Nittany Inn used to be, and theoretically will-be-again, BLEW UP last night. Quite spectacularly, to judge from what our secretary, who lives over that way, had to say. Apparently there's a good deal of power infrastructure up on Centre Hall Mountain by the Inn, because last night's flickering power was the outside edges of a pretty nasty series of brown-outs that took down the power here at work, and throughout Pleasant Gap and the upper reaches of Penns Valley. That Inn is snakebit, if you ask me. Time to give upon it, bury the ruins, and replace it with a tree plantation or something.

As much of a reputation Hollywood has for progressive, liberal, and leftist politics and activism, it's quite striking that the actor-politicians who have had actual, electoral success, have been, by and large, Republicans or conservatives. Ronald Reagan, governor of California and president, is, of course, the pre-eminent example, but there are secondary examples such as Clint Eastwood, one-time mayor of Carmel, California, Governor Schwarzenegger, the late Rep. Sonny Bono, and even one-time Governor Ventura of Minnesota. The only counter-example I could find was honorary "mayor" of Malibu, Martin Sheen, and could somebody tell me why a city with an actual, elected, mayor needed an unelected "honorary mayor" best known for intentionally courting arrest and incarceration at every protest compatible with his work-schedule?

Hollywood's reputation for leftism and leftish political activism is quite well-earned, and yet almost all the politicians produced by that culture have been on the right side of the dial. Why is that? Admittedly, a lot of the activism in the modern Hollywood left is aimed at electing other people to office - look at the swarms of has-beens and almost-about-to-have-beens like Whoopi Goldberg, Jeneane Garofalo, and Ben Affleck that buzzed about the Kerry campaign in the last season. Those folks are there to boost other candidates, rather than second careers of their own.

People like Alec Baldwin and Warren Beatty are always rumored to be getting into this or that, but it never pans out. For one thing, the rumors are always on a national scale - people were talking about Beatty in 2000 for the presidency. Yes, one could complain that to run for the presidency without ever having stood for even so much as the office of town dog-catcher, is deeply egotistical, but hey - that's never stopped Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Sr., or any of the retired-military types who inevitably pop up in national election cycles. Nevertheless, the successful conservative or Republican actor-politician usually shoots for something more modest, like a house representative seat, or a governorship. The presidency awaits for those who prove themselves in a starter-seat, if the constitutional ban on immigrant presidential candidates doesn't otherwise conspire against said actor-politician.

There is the theory that a Republican or conservative bent in a denizen of a leftist utopia like Hollywood breeds practical political skills in the bearer; if the soil is deep enough and properly-fertilized with ambition, a second career as a politician can grow. The successful actor-politicians are by and large just that, politicians. Activism is often confused with politics on the left; it doesn't help that we refer to performance-artists, exhibitionist lunatics and serious party operators by that same, stupidly vague term. Though the marcher-protestor-puppeteer is an ineffectual buffoon who will never make a single change in the world worth the notice, and the party operator is making connections, quietly raising funds, organizing, building pragmatically for the long-term, both are called "activist". Not that you can't find the occasional buffoon or lunatic among the party operators - look to Kos for the refutation of that easy conclusion - but it's an essentially serious business. Meanwhile, the entertainer is naturally drawn to entertaining, if meaningless, nonsense, protest and street-theatre... I know, I know - too facile. I had this theory about Reagan's activism within the Screen Actors Guild, but look at this LA Weekly article about current SAG head Mike "B.J. Honeycutt" Ferrell's unwillingness to run for greater office... eh. That writer thinks the answer is "Democratic actors are cowards", which conflicts strangely with his touting of Ferrell's Marine service.

Hrm. I'm annoyed with English today. The imperative, the past tense, and the present tense of "read" are identical. This makes it difficult to use that verb in an economical fashion.

"[I] [r]ead that as a negation of his prior position." "[I] [r]ead in the paper this morning that he's thinking about a second run at the office." "Read this statement put out by his campaign office - does that look like he's withdrawing from the race?"

This ambiguity creates a need for unnecessary verbosity. How can I be properly laconic with this sort of thing dragging me down into jabber? Bah.

Yeah, I'm here. I'm just not feeling particularly verbose.

Read the fourth (actually "4.1", which is kind of lame) volume of Planetes, which is something of a tedious let-down from previous volumes. The author seems determined to present childish selfishness, wilful ignorance, and disregard for others as praiseworthy rebellion. Kind of a shame, really. It doesn't outright suck, but it's rather whiffy - like a pile of garbage in the back-alley polluting the whole neighborhood with the faint stench of rotting tubers.

Started reading Machiavelli's Florentine History. Always interesting when a four-hundred-fifty-year-dead author comes out with a new book... Not that far in, but already I've learned that as far as Niccolo is concerned, everything awful which has ever happened to the Roman Empire and Italy has been as the result of ministers, emperors, and popes inviting northern European barbarians to intervene in local political quarrels or feuds. Not that he's got an idee fixe or anything...

Michael Totten's photolog from his tour of Libya. Striking.

I've been watching this business in the Ukraine with much interest and hope. Nothing quite so exciting and hopeful as a good people's revolution, without all the bloodshed and gunfire and ugliness. People who know better than I aren't exactly sanguine, but then, they've been wrong before, so here's hoping.

But that wasn't what I was on about. What I want to know is this: when did the Ukraine become "Ukraine"? I hadn't noticed this style change until the furor over the election broke out. Some countries have always been assigned their own definite article "the", as a preservation of some archaic distinction now lost to the mists of time: the Sudan, the Ukraine, the Gambia, the Congo etc. The Gambia and the various Congos retain their definite articles, probably due to their dual-status as both countries and terrain defined by riverine geography. The commonality between these definite-article states seems to be their primary status as geographical, above national, definition. The Sudan was a territory in the geographical sense before becoming a postcolonial state in the political sense; the Ukraine was never a state in its own right, being rather a nomadic plained expanse, debated land between the Russias and the Ottomans.

Note the distinct usages of the definite-article "the" in both of those constructions, one referring to a multiplicity of states/clans/principalities "the Russias", the other to an empire defined by the overlordship of a people "the Ottomans". A fourth usage of definite article "the" is still in official usage, the multiple-entity "the", usually associated with archipelago-states. the Bahamas and St. Vincent and the Grenadines retain these islandic definite articles, although Philipines and Maldives both seem to have lost their "the"s when my back was turned, damnit.

Now that I'm looking, the CIA hasn't yet caught up to the official US recognition of Macedonia as "Macedonia" - they still have them listed as Macedonia, the Former Yugoslav Republic of. For shame, that's been in the papers for the better part of a week and a half now. You're not reinforcing defenses of the CIA's competence and efficiency with this sort of slop, Langley.

I had to throw out my old green blanket last month, when I pulled it out and discovered that the spiders had been using it as a handy matrix for their eggsacks. Yech. That blanket has been in my family almost as long as I have. I replaced it with a cheap four-dollar blanket from Walmart. Last night I discovered *why* it was marked down to four dollars. I managed to put my foot right through it, rip, just like that. Oh, well. You get what you pay for.

Not only did the Right Stuf lard my DVD order from them with extraneous printed matter, but they also shipped an unordered, unrequested, unexpected t-shirt, three sizes too small for my fat otaku frame. I found a co-worker small enough to fit into a T medium, although he was rather irate to discover that he was the smallest employee in the company, counting all the women. Waste of shipping space, and fabric. Bah!

I went looking for manga from publishers other than Viz and Tokyo Pop last week, as those two tend to be over-represented in my reading schedule. I picked up Revenge of Mouflon from Raijin and Land of the Blindfolded from CMX, which I think is Central Park Media’s manga publishing subsidiary. [Correction - CMX is actually DC Comics' manga line. Whoops!] Mark recommended Revenge of Mouflon, but I can’t say I was that impressed. It was a worksmanlike, bland thriller, flittering around the edges of a serious subject, post-9/11 hostage drama. I’m getting a little tired of the Japanese inferiority complex about the American military, but it wasn’t as bad as some treatments, I guess...

I see that the new anime Zipang is a Japanese version of that goofy old military time-travel film the Final Countdown, except that instead of sending back the nuclear aircraft carrier Nimitz, it’s a fictional Japanese Aegis cruiser named the Mirai sent back to WWII. (“Mirai”=”future”. Real subtle there, jack.) I have to wonder how the hell they’re going to approach this. Will the creators approach the subject with any sort of objectivity, or is this a Leiji Matsumoto revere-the-heroic-ancestors sort of deal? It’s easier to revere the old butchers, imperialists, and rapists when they’re safely dead and silent, isn’t it, Mr. Japanese Nationalist Historical Blinders Guy? Meh.

Speaking of blindfolding, Land of the Blindfolded is kind of neat - your typical high-school romance, with the minor twist that the minor protagonists are both minorly psychic. The female lead is a touch precog - she sees the likely future of a subject occasionally, when she physically touches said subject. These futures can be changed by intervention, but the results are often unexpected and unintentional. The male lead can only read a person’s past, in partial visions of what definitely was. He’s envious of her vision, because she can do something about what she sees - all he can do is watch. They’re sort of a demonstration of hope and experience - she sees potential, while he can only see the truth. The first volume is sort of thin, but the author doesn’t cheat, and the story is solid in a quiet sort of way. As is usual with a short first volume, the publishers fill the pages out with minor short works from the same author, and unusually for this sort of thing, the shorts are actually worth reading on their own merits. The two shorts, one about a sports-festival romance, and the other a befuddled schoolroom haunting, are affecting and well-written. The author spends her time in the usually-frivolous freetalks discussing her art in an honest and straightforward fashion that I, at least, found refreshing.

Mark Sachs was right, Planetes’ manga is pretty damned keen. I was put off by the anime, because I didn’t appreciate its Japanese-office-comedy-in-EVA-suits approach to orbital garbage collection. It’s very possible that the manga will eventually descend into that sort of cheap, lazy slap-stick, complete with a would-be Hawkeye and office toadies, but the first volume is nothing like that. Oh, there are some of the same characters - a nicotine-crazed female pilot, the headband-wearing, boy-astronaut dreamer, a sad giant of a Russian. But the author does interesting, honest, sincere drama with these characters, in a realistic fashion, and that makes all the difference. The art also seems to stand out in a way that it didn’t in the anime - possibly it’s the heightened fantastical nature of animation over comics, but things that stand out in comics often appear common-place when transcribed to the screen. Possibly it’s the highly variable viewing-space of comics as practiced in the Japanese fashion, possibly it’s just an inherent limitation of animation, I’m not sure. Either way, th splash pages and impressionistic tones of the Planetes manga give the stories so much more resonance, so much more weight, than the anime version, that I’m left wondering about the primacy of the two arts, and whether manga-based anime is ever a good idea...

Was googling around for a description of Hephaistion's tomb, when I came across this livejournal article on Hephaistion and Alexander's postmortem travels and experiences. Some interesting archeological discussion going on there, along with a lot of Ptolemaic-era gossip. Fun stuff, and I still can't understand why rational adults can claim that Alexander's bisexuality is an invention. Yes, there's no "official documents" pointing to the facts of the matter. There *are no contemporary documents* from the period, aside from various monuments, inscriptions, coins, establishments and the like. What, you want a "Alexander+Hephaistion 4eva!" interjection in the middle of a inscription celebrating the foundation of Alexandria Bactria, or a "Give me more triemes, or I'll bugger your first-born!" in the middle of the the second letter to the Chians' demands?

This is a pretty good link-page on the Alexandrine sources. Short version? The earliest complete text is Diodorus from the first century AD; everything prior to that is only available in fragments preserved in other, later works. It's amazing - we have plenty of near-contemporary primary sourcing for events all around Alexander's life, but the great man himself? Centuries out of date, telephone-game phantasias and romantic twaddle intermixed with serious but highly secondary description. For whatever reasons, our preservers of historical documentation chose to maintain copies of Diodorus Siculus instead of Callisthenes, Arrian instead of Cleitarchus, Plutarch instead of Ptolemy. Well, I know why Plutarch instead of Ptolemy - because even the ancients preferred the Stephen Kings of the world over the Hellenistic equivalent of Richard Milhaus Nixon. Bah.

It’s definitely the silly season, with Californians pushing for a constitutional amendment to allow non-native citizens to run for president, and Vermonters (and Pacific Northwesterners!) making noise about secession. Deep Discount DVD is doing its usual quarterly sale (use the code ‘DVDTALK”), but some sort of bizarre quirk left half of my order out of the finished purchase, leaving me with porn, but no Buffy. Damnit.

The war in Iraq is getting pretty damned bloody, but it feels less insane than it did last fall. Why is that? Is this what they mean about how progress reconciles us to loss? That’s an ill thought. As penance, here’s the address for the Navy-Marine Corps Relief Society, or, alternatively, choose from Wind of Change’s list of charities.

I’m restless and nervous. I can feel my customers getting into all sorts of trouble right over the horizon, but they aren’t calling or emailing. It’s like I’m sitting in the eye of the harvest season - a brief, unearthly silence within the raging storm.

Ever since Grotesque Anatomy went tits-up, I’ve been feeling the lack of a decent manga-blog on my favorites list. I’m currently trying out Comics 212, which has a few interesting posts from the last few months which fill me with unaccustomed optimism.

There was a thank-you party for local activists last night at a hotel in Patton Township thrown by the county Republicans. Sort of a make-up for having thrown the initial victory parties on Election Night, when pollwatchers were still stuck at the various precincts, watching the counting, I guess. I knew more people there than you'd expect, given my anti-social proclivities and general lack of status within the party. (My favorite line from the night - "I don't know, I'm so far down the pecking order that I'm not actually in the Party." I managed to restrain myself from repeating that one, despite the twin temptations of pride and self-amusement.)

I ran into an old friend from my most monstrous job, free-lancing ticket-writing on private property for the Armenians in the late 90's. Melissa had been the secretary for the Armenians while I was one of their house bastards, and she reaped all of the grief I was paid to sow, since the pissed-off ticketees and towees were directed to *her* office, or *her* phone line. I've always felt guilty about that, because although those wankers generally deserved every ounce of grief they were given, it still meant that their ill-directed rage was dumped on Melissa's desk, and she certainly didn't deserve that. She said that she was working for the university now, which is a good thing, I imagine. She had a second son since the last time I saw her, and the family was doing well.

I left after about an hour. I'm just not a social person, even in the best of conditions, and aside from talking to Melissa and her husband, I didn't have much to say to the rest of the crowd other than electoral gossip. Additionally, I had a big pile of books fresh from Amazon to plow through.

I understand that Ann Vennerman has resigned as Secretary of Agriculture. The activists over at Red State are talking about a rumor that she'll be replaced by a Blue-Dog Democrat from the farm belt. I hope not - something ought to be done about the sugar and ethanol subsidies, and that would be a strong sign that no such thing is contemplated, I think. I'm not really tied-in enough with agricultural politics to know who would be a good choice; I suppose a CEO from Syngenta or Monsanto would be a good sign, if rather inciderary.

Do you know how much I hate ordering from Right Stuf? Damn Viz for running an exclusive distribution deal for Maison Ikkoku with them, anyways. Five dollars shipping and handling, they raise their prices after pre-order, and they insist on shipping their goddamn catalog and the same stupid Viz 'sampler' manga that's been handed out free to every mom-and-pop convention on both seaboards for the last year and a half. If you have the extra shipping allowance to send me all this worthless paper, then cut your extortionate S&H!

The Right Stuf catalogs are as big and heavy as the local phone book, and about as interesting. At least the local phone book has reasonably up-to-date phone numbers for the restaurants in town. Paper catalogs are fucking antique! It was cool in 1990, when Nikaku Animart's little zeroxed wads were the main connection between American anime fans and the Golden Land. Thirteen years, people! The world turns, life goes on, and catalogs aren't cool anymore!

Same goes for that idiot Boston clothier that I ordered a knit blouse from a few years ago, for my sister on a Christmas past. They keep sending me snailmail catalogs and come-ons, blowing what I estimate to be some ten dollars at bulk-mail flat rates over a three-year period, on a one-time customer who only spent forty or fifty dollars to start with. The only way I'm ever going to order from you again is if my demonic sister demands another article clothing specifically from your shop. There is no way that I'll ever, of my own inspiration and decision, buy women's clothing from a store three states away. You only got my business because I had a relative in your city. GO AWAY, MORONS.

I feel more guilt about the Pittsburgh SF club which keeps sending me their newsletter via snailmail. I think I gave them ten bucks on a one-time visit five years ago, and they've easily spent that much and more on regular mailings ever since then. I don't read them any more than I read my Simple IRA reports or my MSA bank statements - which is to say, one out of three, I'll crack it open to see what the state of the world is in that particular publication. More a sort of dimly-recalled duty, than actual interest or curiosity. This here "Interweb" thing hasn't been a goofy fad for some five years now, folks. Look into it - much cheaper than bulk-mail newsletters, and environmentally less obnoxious. Seriously.

In other news, the flags were in their street-side sockets this morning. Must be Veterans' Day.

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. The nation remembers your service and your sacrifices. We owe you so very much.

You remembered what honor was, even though some of us couldn't remember a holiday until the local, tireless borough workers waved a half-dozen flags in our groggy faces.

I've been less voluble recently because optimism and good news tends to take all the yell out of me. Bush is good for another term, so there isn't the prospect of Carter II to piss me off. The social conservatives seem to be blowing all of their good will and political capital in beating up on Specter, rather than, you know, saving it up for confirmation battles. As a bonus on that, that rat Specter is getting his, but good. He'll get his chairmanship, but in such a fashion that he'll be less of an ass that he would otherwise be. The war seems to be going well for a change, the homeland terror-warnings are declining, unemployment is down, the White House is making nice with India, there seems to be a notable lack of pogroms in the Caucasus, and Arafat is dead, dead, dead, I tell you, dead!

Ladle that on top of my recent lack of energy, and I'm a quiet kraut, I am. Flipping through some scanslations, and discovering that there's a lot of sucky shoujo manga out there. Let's hear it for the filtering effects of the licensing process! The one manga I took a real shine to, W Juliet, turns out to have just come out in the States, and in a much more readable translation than the fan efforts. Looking forward to finishing reading the Viz version tonight.

I finally finished Ann Wroe's the Perfect Prince, aka Perkin: a Story of Deception. For the longest time, I've been buying these virtuous books, and never finishing the reading of them. Hopefully this'll break that particular habit. It was a fairly interesting book, but I suppose it helps if Tey's the Daughter of Time has warped your fragile little mind. The book is, of course, a life of Perkin Warbeck, otherwise known as Richard, the Duke of York. Wroe's style tends towards the New Journalistic, and she throws in a lot of period-color commentary on social and religious ideas and habits of the early-Renaissance, late-Medieval times, as reflected in Warbeck's multiple alleged lives.

She never really commits to whether he was Piers Warbecque or Richard Plantagenet, preferring to revel in the ambiguities of the evidence. In the epilogue, she starts up a whole new line of inquiry, indicating some evidence that he might have been, in the end, truly a puppet of Margaret of Burgundy. I'd have to call foul on this sort of "evidence introduced in the epilogue", as it's just bad historical form, but her conclusive, fantastical scene of Warbeck drawn through the torments of Purgatory and brought before the Judgement Seat, for one last interrogative, asking what name he would give there in the final reckoning, makes up for many scholarly sins.

Now, you see, this is what I was talking about, when I said that pop culture wasn't cooperating with my attempt to be less political. One of my favorite writers, making noise like he's busy re-writing parts of his long, long, long-overdue book, having been inspired by the prospect of new "repression".

Why are writers such shit-heads when it comes to politics?

I want to start drifting away from politics, now that the election is over. The perpetual campaign is for professionals and fanatics - the rest of us can, should, and ought to live in a (mostly) unpoliticized world. The easiest and fastest way to accomplish this goal is to take a dive into pop culture, which is the lazy man's anti-politics. Unfortunately, pop culture doesn't seem to be cooperating, or else I'm hypersensitive. Well, we'll see... The literary world isn't cooperating, either. Walter Jon Williams' new book was delayed for a year... wish they'd give us a warning *before* it was due to ship.

I've been reading a lot of later volumes of manga series which I've already discussed. In general, there's not a lot I feel compelled to say about on-going series; if it's going well, all I can say is "isn't disappointing yet", and if it didn't pan out, what's there to say other than "no longer interesting, and no longer worth my money"?

Kare Kano, Please Save My Earth, Hikaru no Go, Bleach, Fruits Basket, Hot Gimmick, Cheeky Angel, XXXholic, Tramps Like Us - all of these are manga which I’m currently quite enthusiastic about. I grab new volumes as soon as I can find them.

Instant Teen, Peach Girl, Marmalade Boy, Miracle Girls, Planet Ladder, Vampire Game, Wild Act, Reservoir Chronicle Tsubasa - these have all disappointed me to the point where I’m no longer wasting money or time on them. Well, maybe I’ll flip through the second volume of Instant Teen, but I’m not feeling the love here.

Tuxedo Gin, X:1999, Battle Royale, and Apocalypse Meow are still on the reading list, but I’m not exactly rushing out to scour the shelves for them. Battle Royale especially - it hasn’t disappointed me on a story level, but it’s an ugly story, and I’m not exactly eager to read about schoolchildren butchering each other in the most violent ways imaginable. It’s a “boy, doesn’t mankind suck?” sort of story, which is pretty lowering. Tuxedo Gin, on the other hand, is the airiest of piffle, but it’s amiable piffle. If I’m in the store for something else, I’ll get another volume, but it’s not a priority.

Pfft. I start with the intention of talking about “pop culture”, but never get out of the fanboy ghetto. I’m starting to suspect that I’m just not a pop culture kind of guy.

Ugh. I'm feeling kind of run-down. A combination of Fall-onset asthma and general tiredness, I guess. I like Fall weather, but the sudden onset of cold, wet air does a real number on my lungs, which were badly scarred during a months-long bout with bronchitis in my teens.

The office manager was freaked out by Rush Limbaugh, whom is always being played by the meteorologist who works in the next office over from mine. He was upset over the election already, and then he ran smack dab into Rush being his usual graceless, smirking, carping self. I told said office manager that he ought to listen to Rush no more than I ought to listen to Michael Moore: it'll only end in blood and tears.

Go away, Rush, you fat, worthless blowhard. You're harshing my buzz.

All I saw of Democratic get-out-the-vote operations was my opposite numbers at Bellefonte West and their runner/supervisor, so I pretty much got the grunts-eye-view, but what I saw was pretty organized. They outnumbered me three-to-one, and were well-equipped. They were operating with blank, signed certificates, instead of specifically-assigned certificates, but one of them was the local organizer for the precinct, and she knew the neighborhood far, far better than I did. She more than made up for the two State College people who made up the rest of their pollwatching team. They cycled through as the day wore on, relieving each other and pacing themselves, while I just sat there and chugged. I think we operated at relatively equal efficiency; pollwatching isn’t really something that offers economies-of-scale - you’ve either got an attentive pollwatcher, or you don’t. Having two doesn’t give you any further benefits.

We both were striking off voters from our parties-and-interested-voters list, three columns across, strike the voter off by row as he or she votes. The runners came by for both teams at pre-arranged times, and collected a column at a time, carried off to feed the GOTV call banks. My voter’s list was a simple perforated continuous-feed roll, with the voter’s name, sex, party affiliation, phone number (if available) and registration number. Theirs was a much more complex and small-print set of 8-by-11 sheets in a similar three-column format, but with the addition of tiny addresses, and bar coding, presumably so that they could be scanned for automatic recorded-message calling. They had to mark when the voter voted on each column, which increased their work load; I just had to scratch off the voter across all current columns. This made it easier for me, but harder for the call bank people, who were making personal calls back at the victory center. That is, if they were working my lists at all. As I said earlier, Bellefonte West wasn’t a GOTV priority for the Republicans; I was there because I lived in the precinct.

Anyways, their sheets were harder to work with, and somebody had mucked things up and given them non-perforated sheets to use. They came equipped with scissors, so this was not a last-minute-cockup. The first time they had to separate a column, they managed to ruin the bar-codes, which apparently made that first column useless, and negated the first third of their calling operation from the results. They got it right the second time, and the third time, all we do is hand over the last of the columns, no detachment required.

I was as efficient as I would have preferred; I apparently missed Ray Gricar, the district attorney, when he came in with the judges and ministers. I suspect the other side made their own mistakes as well. I’ll be curious to see if the call bank people actually used what I gave to our runner. I’m still not sure if I accomplished anything other than helping the poll ladies break down the voting “machines” after they were turned off and no longer statute-sensitive. Those things are cleverly built - they fold down into compact, slightly oversized suitcases, with the legs folded under and clipped into slots recessed below the base of the “machine”. I say “machine” instead of machine, because these things are basically elaborate tables with table-lamps built into them; the only moving parts in them are designed to allow the contraption to fold in on itself for transportation and storage. I hadn’t touched the “machines” until the actual ballot-manipulating portions of the equipment had been removed and put over with the other sensitive material.

Most of the poll precinct was off limits to me and my dirty, partisan fingers, so I mostly stood around with my wrists clamped restlessly behind the small of my back, resisting the urge to be “helpful”. I hate standing around being useless.

Well, heck. I have to say, that greatly improves my opinion of Kerry. I must have mis-read his character if he was capable of conceding in this situation. Good for him - he put the good of the nation above his party interest, or at least, the perceived interest of the party among the activists. In the end, of course, the nation's interest is synonymous with the interest of the Democratic Party; when it ceases to be so, so should the party. The same is true for the Republican Party - when it ceases to align its interests with the interests of the nation - let it go, let it pass.

Enough of lawyers; there's a war to win and a country to govern. Hopefully we can get back to politics, and let go of the crusades and witch hunts.

A solid course of humble seems in order, people. I know how tempting it is to rub it in; resist it. It's a temptation. Republicans, remember: this is not a coalition for the ages - this is not carte blanche. Act with moderation and restraint. There are people out there who are going to take this as the end of civilization; let's not chase them any farther around the bend than they already are.

As hard as everyone campaigned, it was still a hair's whisker. Be humbled by a close win, and by the example of the other party's gracious concession.

On the other hand, now's about the time to do a little dance on the metaphorically whitened skull of al Queda. We managed to get through the election without the negative attentions of our Islamo-fascist enemies on these fair shores. The closest thing to such an event was the murder of a film director in Amsterdam, apparently. All that fucker bin Laden could do to interfere with our elections was to make a documentary. Four years after 9/11, and our greatest enemy has been reduced to recycling Michael Moore propaganda. That's pretty goddamn good. I was sort of expecting something this season, some sort of effort, if not a successful one.

Al Queda is starting to look like a regional threat, rather than a global one. They've been clipped, and good. This is excellent news, or rather, lack of same. It means that our national problem is less al Queda, than Iranian nukes. Of the two, I thought that internationalist terror would be the more intractable problem. I guess I was wrong.

Woo!

Oh, btw - we had a hair under 74% turnout in Bellefonte West. It was really heavy in the morning, but by ten, it eased off, and it never really took seriously off again. It was dead after seven in the evening. We kept hearing horror stories about the State College precincts and Spring Township, but the little old ladies managed to crunch through the turnout without terrible waits. I heard one of them comparing it to the "Kennedy election", which gives you some idea of how long they've been doing this sort of thing.

I was sitting and wondering how many of them come down with the flu or colds after coming in physical contact with every single active voter in a single day at the beginning of flu season. They came in before me, and were still patiently counting when my lazy ass gave up and went home to watch cable. Admittedly, I had work in the morning, but I don't feel great about that...

There's a big fuss over provisional ballots in Ohio. Don't know how that's going to work out over there, but here in Bellefonte, I have to say that it didn't look like a big partisan issue. We had less than a dozen provisional ballots in a ward with over nine hundred votes. More than half of those provisionals were due to a precinct-line dispute between the inhabitants of West 5th Avenue, on the northern edge of Bellefonte Borough, and the county. It seems that the borough border runs down the middle of West 5th Avenue, such that the north side is Spring Township, and the south side is the borough. When they reapportioned the precincts, they placed the whole of West 5th Avenue in Spring Township, such that those voters, who have been in the borough forever, and who pay borough taxes, now find themselves in the township instead. A number refused to go vote at the township building, and cast provisionals in Bellefonte West.

This year, I can't see how it matters, as there were no local offices up for election. (Didn't stop one fool from writing in a candidate for a council office which wasn't up for election, though. More on why write-ins suck later.) Next year, when these voters are deprived of the chance to vote for (or against) the people who are directly responsible for their local income taxes and setting their property taxes, I can definitely see where they'll have a serious beef.

But, as I said, more than half of our provisionals had nothing to do with party politics, and everything to do with a precinct border dispute. The one real "political" provisional was some woman who kept going on about how she had been somebody in the Clinton administration, and yadda yadda yadda.

Oh, yeah - write-ins. People, don't do write-ins. Please. For the sake of the poor little old ladies who have to stay up past midnight slaving over punch-cards on election night, if nothing else. The procedure for dealing with write-ins in a proper fashion is long, elaborate, redundant, and painful. A good 75% of the write-ins were absolute lunatic gibberish, so they didn't count for anything, even in a theoretical sense. Because the courts struck Nader off the ballot, we did have Nader write-ins. Two of them, out of more than nine hundred. The rest of the write-ins were gibberish, as people tried to vote a state representative candidate into the US representative seat, or attempted to vote for three state representative districts simultaneously, or vote for seats which weren't up for election. Happily, no-one tried to vote for Mickey Mouse for President, or Son Gokuu for Auditor General, or any other deep silliness. But the point remains: write-ins exist for one main reason - to keep cranks happy. Don't be a crank. Mad, scraggly and incoherent is no way to go through life.

A few things...

You could really tell that Bellefonte West mattered more to the Democrats than the Republicans. The Republican presence was effectively me, and I'm technically a Democrat. There were three Democratic pollwatchers, two for the party and one for "Rich Rogers", although it turned out that the guy didn't even know Rogers to see him, and was just there on a certificate signed by Rogers instead of the party. In addition, there was a rolling two-to-three activist presence outside of St. John's, doing whatever it was that they do out there outside of the ten-foot-limit, which got stretched to more like eighty because of the long, easy-to-block entrance passage to the basement of the church, enclosed on both sides by tall stone walls. I didn't get out there, so all I knew of what they were doing was through the occasional campaign sticker appearing on a voter, and the yellow paper whatever-it-was everybody was clutching.

The judge of elections made a fuss if she noticed someone wearing electioneering gear, so I didn't make myself too obnoxious on the subject, even though they were technically violations. She had to make a minor scene when the Democratic candidate for the local state rep. district, Rich Rogers, came in with his family, all of them wearing various campaign stickers and buttons. This isn't his first campaign, and he should know the electioneering laws by now; he had no business hauling his little daughter into a polling precinct wearing advertising for his campaign. I am much happier about my vote for Benninghoff now that I've seen what an idiot Rogers can be in action.

The other particularly interesting voter we had come through Bellefonte West was an honest-to-god skinhead Nazi. Shaved bald, long, villainous chin-beard, and a dark green approximation of a Waffen-SS "Tottenkopf" uniform, complete with stylized "SS" insignia, and bloused into his combat boots, paratrooper-style. When the lady collecting ballots for the box asked him what the get-up was about, he mumbled something about "army". Pretty much all the poll-workers and watchers were bug-eyed, including me, and both I and my Democratic opposites rushed to make sure that he wasn't on our lists. He wasn't - he was an independent. My best guess, based on the uniform color, was that he was a "Green" - after all, Hitler had been an environmentalist.

It's been a very busy forty-eight hours. I'll probably get into it when I have time this morning and afternoon. Long story short, I did more door-to-door, and did my pollwatching in Bellefonte, leaving about quarter to eleven when I discovered that I couldn't transmitt my numbers to the party folks, and had observed that the pollworkers were going to take at least another hour to fix a mis-count of one ballot in the ward - their totals weren't exactly adding up.

Looks like Bush lost Pennsylvania, but probably won enough across the country to carry him over the finish line. Seems the're being pokey about a bunch of states, no doubt we'll all be suspended for a while. Off to go webcrawl, and work.