My friend got a box of Unhinged boosters today. This is the second time Magic: The Gathering has done what I guess you would call a "tongue-in-cheek" set. And I've got to tell you, most of the cards are pretty funny. They've got the "Wet Willie of the Damned," the "Assquatch" (leader of all the Donkey cards), "Punctuate," which does damage to a card equal to half the punctuation marks it has in the text box, and perhaps my favorite: the "Infernal Spawn of the Infernal Spawn of Evil", an 8/8 flying, trampler with first strike.
In other moderately less geeky news, the Utah Jeopardy Champ Ken Jennings is apparently set to finally lose tonight on his 75th appearance. I had sort of hoped that he would step down voluntarily, but I guess there's an audio clip out there on the internet which reportedly is a recording of him losing on Final Jeopardy. It's too bad. While he was playing and winning, it distracted people from viewing Utah as the homebase of the evil SCO and the incompetent Orrin Hatch...
Other than that, I'm making reasonably good progress on organizing my office. Last night I basically hit the half-way point. I'm a little worried about some of the organizational choices I've made. On the top shelf of one of my book shelves I have a 4' x 1' x 6' pile of books and knowing my luck, it's hours away from breaking...
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Ross
Work has been really busy today. I guess that's what happens when there's a big holiday. All over the company, hundreds and thousands of times, someone said, "Let's wait until Monday to do that, no sense doing it the day before/after Thanksgiving." Part of the problem is that my boss, in obvious retaliation for all the French jokes I've been telling, made me be on the IT Christmas Party committee. I was designated to send out the e-mail announcing this year's contest. I put together this well-crafted gem:
This Christmas' permutation of "Do something creative and hang it in a prominent place so that your co-workers may mock you" will be stockings. We don't want to get into an etymological discussion as to what constitutes a stocking, but recycling stuff from previous years will probably be frowned upon.
Turn your stockings in to the IT secretary She'll assign them a number and hang them on the faux fireplace, so that all may bask in your festive brilliance. Prizes will be given for most creative stocking, most representative (most representative of what is left to your judgement, but we prefer, "most representative of the underlying neuroses of the person submitting the stocking") and the person who most accurately assigns the stockings to their creators.
I was a little surprised by how many people complained that the letter was too pedantic (of course they didn't use those words -- they said it had "too many big words"). Oh well, so it goes. I didn't have a chance to dig up any cool links so I'm going to recycle an oldie but a goodie.
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Ross
Tommorrow is Thanksgiving, and for most people Friday is a holiday as well, but not for me (though since I was recently chosen by the execs to be on the benefits steering committee -- I may have to suggest that). Though I think I will take a break on Friday from posting in the blog, give myself the false impression that I'm getting the day off. This evening I'm finally getting around to taking the family to see The Incredibles. My number one son I think had begun to despair that we would ever go. I'm pretty excited about it myself.
Returning to the subject of Thanksgiving, we're going to my family's house this year. My family does a pretty big production. We start with the appetizer course at noon, the main course is at two and then we have the dessert course at 4:00. At six o'clock the wheelbarrows show up to take everyone home. Of course, all the dishes get divided up; as usual I was in charge of the cheese plate for the appetizer course. I'm still trying to perfect the cheese course, but there are only tiny incremental gains to be made. Once you realize that you need to include gorgonzola and smoked gouda, you're 95% of the way to a perfect cheese plate.
Finally, from the Man-I-Wish-I-Could-Do-That Desk comes the story of a man who only needed 12 seconds to calculate the 13th root of a 100 digit number in his head.
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Ross
World of Warcraft was released today, and unlike most computer games and nearly all games of this genre (MMORPG), it's available for the Mac. The whole thing makes me want to cash in my 401k and run out and buy a Mac G5 with a 30 inch cinema display (I get weak in the knees just thinking about that big of an LCD). I guess this would be a good time to admit that I was wrong. Quite a while ago I predicted that World of Warcraft would not be released until spring of 2005 -- obviously I was wrong, but I think it's safe to call this a Winter 2004 release, in which case I wasn't off by much.
I was directed to the site nuclearterror.org by Boortz. Of particular interest is an application that will show the effects of a 10 kiloton nuclear explosion on any zipcode. I entered my zipcode, and I have to confess that I was kind of surprised by how small the blast radius was and then I realized that they were only talking about 10 kilotons which is about as small a nuclear weapon as you can get. One feature I would have like to seen is the ability to enter the zipcode and the size of the bomb (and in fact I e-mailed the site maintainer with a suggestion to that effect).
Certainly I'm no nuclear terrorism expert but a 10 kiloton bomb suggests a crude, terrorist manufactured bomb. And while that's certainly one possible scenario, I think equally if not more likely is the scenerio where the terrorists acquire a bomb from a state, possibly one of the Soviet nukes mislaid during the fall of the USSR. One of those bombs is far more likely to be in the 250 kiloton to one megaton range, and believe me, if they showed the radius of effect of one of those bombs no one would be surprised by how small it was.
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I've got 15 minutes of dead time before my next meeting, so we'll see what we can vomit forth in that time. I introduced one of my brothers-in-law to Magic (the card game, not the rabbit out of the hat) and apparently he's already hooked. He e-mailed me this morning with a bunch of questions and all but admitted that he had been hooked. I've done a lot of, shall we say, less than laudable things in my life, but introducing people to costly, time-consuming gaming addictions is probably what's going to tip the balance and result in my buns being toasted for all of eternity.
Other than that, despite my best efforts (I really try to avoid movies with a tomato rating of less than 20%), we ended up watching The Big Bounce on Saturday at the big male get-together. It was okay, but quite obviously something that should have been left a book; it just didn't translate well. I think part of the problem was there was way too much going on. To cleanse my palate I watched the original Manchurian Candidate last night, which I had never seen and which I quite enjoyed.
In any case that's all the time I have, so until tomorrow.
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Ross
It's finally Friday and it feels pretty good, particularly since next week is a "holiday week." At my work they hate having to come in on a holiday or a weekend, which means nothing, shall we say, drastic can be done on a "Friday." Next week, in addition to the normal Friday, Wednesday can also be considered a "Friday," which means that Monday and Tuesday are the only full work-days. Okay maybe I'm exagarrating things a bit, but there will still be something of a festive mood pervading the office, which always makes work a little lighter and more enjoyable.
Tomorrow Utah plays BYU in one of the biggest rivalries in the nation, primarily because it's not merely a game between schools, it's also got religious overtones as well, which makes it particularly juicy. And yes, traditionally, it's a huge game but tomorrow it's collosal. Utah has a chance to be the first non-BCS team to break into a BCS bowl. Last I checked, Utah are 21 point favorites, which is just the way I like it, but even then you can never underestimate either team.
Other than that, it might end up being a fairly slow weekend. Tonight I may or may not be playing D&D and tomorrow night we're having some kind of guys'-night-out, with the family, where we may or may not be playing Texas Hold-Em. In between I'm going to continue to shovel out my office.
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I finished the first Horatio Hornblower book -- first in order written, not in chronology. Interestingly enough, the used copy I had was old enough to reflect that fact. It's my pleasure to report that it was just as good as I had been led to believe. The plot was excellent, with several very interesting twists, and the main character was complex, interesting and believable. I think I may have to swing by the library on my way home and pick up the next two.
Of course, all this reading is keeping me from getting much work done on my main project at the moment, which is cleaning the office. I guess cleaning the office misconstrues the task somewhat -- what I'm actually attempting to do is organize the office, which as I've mentioned before, roughly resembles the Aegean Stables without a nearby river to help out. Of course, the other thing slowing me down is entropy, and by entropy I mean my children.
Finally, I happened to be watching The West Wing last night (a show I've very nearly given up on). And apparently the morale of the episode was Oil is going bye-bye and people who champion alternative energy are whack-nuts. Given the fore-ordained insanity indictment I was a little bit surprised when nuclear power was not included in the gathering of alternative fuel wackos. I guess I shouldn't be: an astonishing number of people are so anti-nuclear that their blood pressure goes up 100 points everytime the word is mentioned (unfortunately the effect is not cumulative, otherwise that might be useful). Along those lines, MIT's Technology Review just published a very interesting discussion of nuclear waste, in particular the Yucca Mountain or bust mindset which seems to dominate the conversation.
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Ross
I guess now that I've had two good days of blogs which were interesting enough to be commented on, I can go back to my usual dish of insipid blandness, with a dash uninspired commentary, a side of gamer geekiness; all drenched in a thick gravy of pathetic whining. Speaking of gamer geekiness, as I mentioned earlier I've been playing a little bit of Magic: The Gathering during lunch breaks at work. I bring this up not to bore you with blow-by-blow recaps of the games (like Rimmer and his Risk games, even though I had a real nail-biter a few days ago) but rather to point out an interesting article.
See, it turns out that the next expansion that's going to be released for Magic is called Unhinged. It's a follow-up to a set they did earlier called Unglued and the point of both sets is to have a little fun with the game. I seem to remember one of the Unglued cards made you stand up in the middle of the game and sing "I'm a Little Teapot." So in celebration of the release of Unhinged, they're releasing an FAQTIWDAWCC (Frequently Asked Questions That If We Didn't Answer Would Cause Chaos), but since they can't officially release it until Friday and in the spirit of silliness that is Unhinged, they're releasing it a few letters and numbers at a time.
Okay that was a lot of effort for not a very big pay-off, so sue me. In national news, a grilled cheese sandwich bearing the likeness of the Virgin Mary is being auctioned on E-Bay. It does appear to have mystical properties, including mold resistance and the ability to win big money at Casinos.
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It's nice to see that yesterday's entry generated some discussion. Dan Brown and Dutch Tolerance, like peanut butter and chocolate, two great tastes that taste great together. Speaking of tolerance, one of the chief complaints of the Dutch is that while traditionally (with their mix of Protestants, Catholics and Jews) tolerance has been a two-way (or I guess three-way) street, but that with the Muslims it's a one-way street. The Dutch are suppossed to be tolerant of them, but there's no expectation that the Muslims will reciprocate.
This idea struck me powerfully this morning while I was driving into work. I was listening to NPR describe the shooting in the mosque, where a Marine shot and killed a wounded and unarmed man who was laying on the floor. Now that was bad, obviously, but when you consider a) they kind of stuff "their side" is doing (kidnapping the prime ministers family, killing the director of CARE) and b) the things this wounded guy could have been getting ready to do (suicide bomber, etc.) then the question becomes how long can we continue to fight in a "civilized" fashion while our enemies fight like barbarians (or worse). And what are people smoking when they compare the Iraqi terrorists to George Washington's army?
There are two dangers here, that in fighting barbarians we will become barbarians, and that we won't. Or in other words, our "civilization" will end up being the weakness which destroys us (as oppossed to the first option when our barbarity destroys us...) In any case, the suituation is pretty messed up. A few people complained that my links, of late, have not been very interesting, so here's a link to a page full of personality tests.
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Various people were complaining that my blog, how shall we say.. sucked last week. I can easily see this -- I didn't feel very creative, nor energetic last week, and my entries obviously reflected that. Hopefully I'll be better this week, but I can't promise anything. Mediocrity got me this far and I'd hate to abandon it now. I finished Angels and Demons last night. It was pretty good; if you like Dan Brown I would certainly recommend it. If you don't, then my next question would be how do you feel about the Catholics? If you have any affection at all for them, then you probably shouldn't read anything Dan Brown writes, but that goes without saying.
The one thing you cannot claim about Angels and Demons is that it lacked ambition. The book had quite possibly the single most ambitious plot ever, and as you might imagine it failed in a number of respects, but given how ambitious it was, I suppose that was to be expected. While cleaning my office (something that still isn't even close to being done, and may account for my overall writing malaise) I found an early edition copy of the first Horatio Hornblower novel, so now that I'm done with Angels and Demons, I can read it.
In international news, the situation in the Netherlands (where I lived for two years) is developing into a real crisis. For those of you not familiar with the story, it all started when a great-grand-newphew of Vincent Van Gogh made a movie critical of the way Muslims treat women. Shortly afterwards he was murdered in broad daylight by a muslim. Suddenly, the century-old culture of tolerance had reached its breaking point. People accurately point out that while "western" culture has tried repeatedly to be tolerant and understanding of Islam, that the reverse had never been true. I read something along these lines earlier today in Slate that made my blood boil:
Meanwhile, as American Humvees broadcast messages yesterday guaranteeing that insurgents who surrender will not be harmed, a mosque blared a caustic reply: "We ask the American soldiers to surrender and we guarantee that we will kill and torture them."
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Today is once again the family campaign. When last we left our brave adventurers, they had narrowly escaped (via the insta-kill rule) two fiends from the abyss and one of them had been permanently blinded. I mention that it was permanent because generally in D&D very little is permanent, but in this cause it's a blindness of the soul, rather than the eyes so he's not getting out of it so easily. This might sound harsh until you realize that this particular player requested that his character be made blind. Yeah, it's true, while most people want to plan Han Solo or Indiana Jones or Jack Ryan (or perhaps just cut to the chase and play Harrison Ford), this player wanted to play an old blind guy.
In other news, Marvel (X-Men, Spider-Man, Hulk, etc.) is suing the makers of City of Heroes for trademark infringment. The complaint alledges that CoH provides people with the tools to mimic Marvel IP. Of course, from this arguably silly premise Marvel could go on to sue Crayola for making Crayons which could be used to draw their IP or MS Word for providing the tools to duplicate a novel, and so forth. In any case, it's obviously sad to see it come to this, particularly since I had always considered Marvel to be one of the good guys...
My reading of "Angels and Demons" continues. Whereas the beginning was not quite as good as the Da Vinci code, I'll have to say that the middle portion maybe better, or at least it was until Mr. Brown found it necessary to point out all the things that Christianity had borrowed from the Aztecs. I'm not even sure where to begin to talk about what's wrong with that.
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Ross
In recent news, Arafat is finally dead. I say 'finally' for two reasons: the first of course being that for the last week people kept saying he was dead, then someone would refute to say that, "No, he was still alive just brain dead/in a coma/had a stroke." I think all told there must have been nearly a half dozen cycles of an announcement of death and then a retraction. It's a gross generalization to say that Arafat was responsible for the entire Arab-Israeli conflict and by extension all of the problems in the middle east, but it's an equally profound mis-characterization to claim that he didn't have blood on his hands, lots of it.
The French's support of Arafat (Chirac in particular) is one of those things that I think make Americans less fond of them. I don't know if I mentioned this, but my new boss is French. Fortunately, he seems to have left most of his "French-ness" on the other side of the Atlantic. Still, it gives me plenty of opportunities to make jokes. The other day a co-worker and I had a meeting with a potentially hostile executive. He volunteered to come along and I replied by saying, "What sort of idiot brings the French along for backup?" Everybody thought it was pretty funny except the Boss, who spent the next few minutes furiously scribbling notes. Actually that's an exaggeration -- he laughed too, and I figure there's some small chance he wasn't furiously scribbling mental notes.
I started reading "Angels and Demons," the prequel to "The Da Vinci Code." So far I'm somewhat unimpressed. There are already some fairly significant plot holes, and the book is so similar to "The Da Vinci Code" that it makes the latter book seem quite derivative (intellectually, at least, on a more emotional standpoint it makes Angels and Demons seem derivative even though it was written first). Despite all that, he does write a fairly gripping yarn. My wife compared him to Agatha Christie. Sure, all of her stuff seems very similar, but it's still a good read.
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Ross
I'm not feeling very creative today so I thought I'd steal some quotes from The Onion's latest "What Do You Think?". In this issue people reflect about the Republican Majority:
What's so bad about this? Could some Democrat explain it to me in under an hour, without starting to scream or cry?
The fact that 48 percent of Americans voted for a boring placeholder like John Kerry is actually a really good sign for the Left.
So they still control the House, Senate, and Oval Office? Well, at least we still have the smug, condescending attitude that cost us the election in the first place.
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Ross
I took yesterday off to watch the kids and in between shuttling them from one activity to another, I completely forgot to post to my blog. So I guess that's one more thing I'll have to add to the list of "Things Children Are Good For." I'll put it on the end of the list right after "Wholesale Property Destruction." Actually, overall the kids did really well without their mother around -- surprising, really given their relative youth. That didn't stop them from being overjoyed to see her this morning. Perhaps they did so well because they were already resigned to her never coming back. As evidence, my number one son appeared to have already worked out a plan for finding me a new wife.
The Newsweek arrived yesterday, which is always mildly surprising since we cancelled our subscription months ago, but I was glad this time, since they were running an eight part series on the campaign (I'm not sure if it's all available on the web or not, but it looks like the first part is). I'm just about done reading it and I have to say I quite enjoyed it. For one thing, I like Kerry the man much more than I did previous to the read. They didn't have many kind things to say about the way his campaign was run, but the man himself comes out looking reasonably well. If you're interested at all in a behind the scenes look at the "war" that is a presidential election I would definitely recommend it.
Other than that there's not much to say -- the kids kept me pretty busy over the weekend, though I did manage to finally see Master and Commander which I quite enjoyed, though I fear I will probably end up reading the book -- it's just that kind of movie.
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Ross
My wife left me last night. She and my oldest daughter are off to visit her brother at Cornell, leaving me with the three youngest. I've already assumed something of a siege mentality. I'm hoarding food, rationing water and on the verge of declaring martial law. There's a fair amount of scientific evidence which leads me to believe that the youngest might not suffer any permanent mental anquish from being kept in her crib all weekend. And you've got to admit that's a lot less stress then allowing her to wander around and use permanent marker on every available surface under two feet.
One of my co-workers had their last day today. Quite a few people decided to take him to lunch on last time -- so many people that I decided not to go. As I was sitting at work, my boss text messaged me from the restuarant and told me that it was my responsibility to do something to this guy's cube before he left. Initially, as I looked around his cube, I didn't have any idea what to do, but as I looked at all of the boxs he had already packed with books, magazines and computer crap, it hit me. I'll just unpack everything. In the process, I took special care to separate the contents of each box as much as possible so that he couldn't just pick up a pile of stuff and dump it back into a box. I was particularly proud of the idea of stuffing all of the loose paper I found into his mini-fridge.
In any event, I have to leave in a few minutes and go to his farewell party. I won't be able to stay very long because I'm due back at the front by 6:30. My sister (who's watching them right now) called and she's suffered heavy casualties and is demanding I send reinforcements.
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I admire anyone who voted for Kerry. I could go on till late in the night about stupid and infuriating things Bush has done. As I've said before, I would have preferred it if Kerry had won, but, and excuse my French, man those liberals are whiny bitches!!! (or is it bitchy whiners?) Salon (which I very rarely read because it tilts so far to the left, though that was not always the case) published a story with quotes from academics and artists, and from reading it you would think that America had just turned into Soviet Russia and everyone of them was only hours away from being shipped of to the gulags.
You can read the article for yourself if you would like. However, I will warn you that you need to either be a member or watch an ad so that you can get a "day pass." There were a couple of voices of reason in the midst of the lamantations of the liberal losers (literally). They had a section from Paglia which I found particularly trenchant; at one point she said:
Democrats have got to go cold turkey on their tedious old rhetoric about the suffering masses in their World of Pain. The Democrats' condescending portraits of African-Americans and the poor are manipulative, patronizing and ultimately self-destructive. The humanistic vision of progressive liberal politics (which I subscribe to) needs to be projected in inspiring, poetic language.
And that, my friends, may be the best post-election analysis of the core reason for the Democratic Defeat I've seen yet.
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And so it ends... Fortunately my addiction to the process is much greater than my attachment to any party, and last night couldn't have gone better from a process standpoint. It had the underlying drama of the fatally flawed exit polls. It was close enough that no victor had been declared by the time I went to bed (though Bush was very solid by that time), but not so close that there was room for litigation.
Viscerally, the idea of Kerry and Edwards made me ill. But now that Bush has won, I'm realizing all of the other things that would have been nice about a Kerry victory. The gridlock (even more attractive
given how convincingly the Republicans preformed in the House and Senate), a new Secretary of Defense (I like Donald Rumsfeld okay, but his doctrine of fewer troops seems to have suffered some setbacks, and certainly it's hard to argue that Iraq couldn't use a fresh perspective), rollbacks to the DMCA and the Patriot Act, etc.
I have lots of co-workers who now feel that the world has come to an end. For myself, I don't think that presidents really have that big of an impact. As an example, I offer the 8 years of Clinton's presidency. Off the top of my head, I can't really think of some easily identifiable large event/issue/law/disaster which would have been different if we instead had 8 years of a Republican president (excepting the impeachment, but I don't think that's germane). The one difference I can think of this time around is the appointment of Supreme Court Judges. At this point it's impossible to imagine that Rehnquist will be around in 2009, so there's at least one appointee.
Lots of people consider this to be a conservative court. Now if by conservative they mean Republican, I may be able to grant that (mostly on the basis of Bush v. Gore), but if they're talking about culturally conservative or morally conservative, then I'd have to disagree. I have a hard time thinking of some core conservative issue that SCOTUS continues to rule in favor of. Course I could care less about the gay-marriage thing -- from my perspective legalization might take awhile, but I think it's inevitable. What I am mostly interested in is a stricter read of the Constitution. And I think a Bush appointee may be a better bet for that then a Kerry appointee, but in the final
analysis that doesn't seem to matter much either, since the only person possible of being sustained, has to be so lacking in opinion and spine that it's impossible to tell what he'll do.
Finally, I thought it was interesting to see Daschle get beat, but it makes sense. Last night was not a good night for the Democrats and Daschle has to share part of the blame. Kerry lost the presidency for his part, and hopefully Pelosi's day is coming (now that is a frightening woman), so it only makes sense that Daschle should get beat. Overall, I have to say this is the most fun I've had in months.
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I did an awesomely stupid/bad thing today. I voted for Kerry. No, I'm joking, I actually voted for Michael Peroutka. The really bad thing I did was accidentaly delete ALL of the comments for my blog. No, I'm not kidding; yes, that was a pretty dumb thing to do. I was trying to mass delete a whole bunch of spam comments, and since I hadn't had any "real" comments today I told it (or at least I thought I told it) to delete all comments where the date was greater than November 1st. I was sort of guessing at the syntax and instead of deleting just the comments from today, it deleted all of them...
I have a backup, but I don't think it's very recent, so most of the comments should reappear but I'm afraid that there will still be quite a few that are missing. Yes, this is definitely one of the moments that causes one to have serious self-doubts. Oh well, I guess I'll just have to add it to the list. In other news, I took the opportunity to vote bright and early at 7 am this morning as soon as the polls opened. It was quite crowded. I guess everyone basically had the same idea I did. Now to just sit back and wait for the results.
My gut tells me that Kerry will win. As I may have mentioned viscerally, I really hate the idea of Kerry winning. Intellectually, I think it's probably for the best if he does. I was heartened to get my copy of The Economist and find out that they basically mirrored my sentiments, saying that it was with "heavy heart" that they decided to endorse John Kerry. On the topic of third-party voting, I came across an interesting article which made some very interesting points about "tactical-voting" as opposed to voting for the candidate which most closely matches your ideals. Basically his conclusion is that "tactical-voting" only makes sense if you're focused on "immediate-election utility," which is only important if by some miracle the election is decided by a single vote, whereas voting your true preference has much greater utility than tactical voting in regards to "policy-shift utility" and "future-election utility." Definitely something to think about.
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Am I the only one overcome with excitement about tomorrow's election? Last I checked, Slate had the election at 269 to 269 with Bush eventually carrying the day after it ends up being decided in the House. How exciting would that be? I asked one of my co-workers if she was excited and she said, "No, I'm nauseated. I'm so nervous that Bush will be our president for another four years. There will be no wilderness left, all of us will glow from the radiation, Roe V. Wade will be overturned..." I tried to convince her that none of those things were likely to happen, but she was inconsolable.
I'm still trying to put together my list of who I'm going to vote for. I've managed to nail down all of the races except the local school board. On that one I'm having a hard time even figuring out which district I'm in so I can figure out who's even running. Normally there is a sample ballot online, but this time, try as I might, I could not find one on the Salt Lake County website. Of course there have been quite a few changes to the people on the ballot for County Mayor so maybe that's slowing them up.
Other than that the weekend was kind of interesting: two sick kids, the majority of Saturday spent scoping out potential family reunion sites and Sunday dishes. So not a lot to report there. I did run the family campaign on Friday. That was fun, and until I started talking about it just now I had almost forgotten that we had our first insta-kill on Friday (we're playing with that optional rule). The funny thing was that it wasn't even one of the regular players. My sister was sitting in because it was her birthday and her husband was out of town. I gave her the Orcish Raider card from my miniature set. Next thing I know she's rolling a 20 (which is uncommon enough at that table) then as she rolls yet another 20 when she attempts to confirm the crit. We're already at 1 in 400 odds and she still has to roll an 11 or better to confirm the insta-kill (1 in 800). She does, and there is much rejoicing.
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