Category: default || By jt3y

Short entry today, because I'm mighty busy, and spent much of the time I usually spend writing stupid essays riding on the bus.

Taking the bus means I have to leave for work an hour earlier, and of course, instead of spending 20 minutes in my comfortable car, drinking coffee and listening to the radio; I get to spend an hour in a lurching, heaving, smelly coach with stale air that smells of body odor and gives me a headache. Other than that, it's great! I don't know why everyone doesn't ride the bus!

The sleek, gray Mercury, of course, is in the shop for its annual state safety and emissions inspection, which is either going to cost me $48 or, if it needs new front brakes, about $200; or if it also needs tires (the cheap Korean jobbies on the front look like they're wearing out awfully fast on the edges) about $500.

That's put me in a wonderful mood, I assure you.

The political pundits have been chattering a lot about "red" states and "blue" states --- meaning those that are solidly Republican or Democratic, respectively. Who came up with this terminology? And why did it stick?

I'm kind of surprised that the Republican states wound up being called the "red" states, since the Republican National Committee has spent the last 10 years calling the Democratic Party everything up to and including "socialist."

Anyway, the Christian Science Monitor says that Pennsylvania is more accurately a "purple" state, since its margin of victory for Al Gore in 2000 was less than 5 percent:

Like most trends in politics, the red-blue divide has been oversimplified and overstated. ... And many Americans don't stand that far apart on the issues. While activists on both sides of the political spectrum may sharply disagree on everything from taxes to terrorism, polls show most voters see themselves as moderates.

But if voters often lean instinctively toward the middle, they are also sorting themselves into parties that are growing more ideologically pure, which is having a polarizing effect.

Also in the Monitor, Dante Chinni had a funny take on the GOP's attacks on U.S. Senator John "The Other John" Edwards:

Say this for the Bush campaign: It casts a wide web. It's only been a week, but its litany of criticisms concerning John Edwards is well known. He's a trial lawyer. He's too inexperienced. He's too smooth. And the wonderfully weird: He's too good-looking.

Too good-looking? That's a bit like being too rich, which, of course, is another problem the Bush folks have with Mr. Edwards. If only John Kerry had chosen a poor, ugly, seasoned political pro who had a long voting history to pick apart and who couldn't speak well. Man, that guy would have been great.

Finally, posting "funny" subject lines from unsolicited commercial email messages (spam) is already a tired wheeze on the Internet, but some of the recent ones I've gotten were too bizarre not to share.

It's almost like beatnik poetry. Try reciting it out loud in a monotone; playing the bongos at the same time will help:

taxidermist waifs of 73
embrittle codeword verdi vortices glamor esteem
who've escalate clearheaded tidbit conferrable
now that i am holbrook kelp
tell me about it fake larsen
live large bogy saudi
now that i am blank escapade
started swelling again unexpectedly
all i want is ... riven bothersome
extra size is better aleck traumatic
except for me bichromate cobweb
this is the best swollen bedevil
not this time brownish marx
lucky man-see me playing with my rectum

Lucky? Um ... lucky isn't the word for it.