BimbleBlog

Sonia Sotomayor was questioned by Senators today, and it largely showed why someone who is expert at speeches and formal debates (like a good politician) should not attempt "gotchas" when questioning someone with extensive courtroom experience, an environment in which cross-examination is king. I say that as a former debater who will admit that his strength was always in the speeches, not the cross-examination, but I know someone who's damned good when I see them. And her answers, at least, show she has a serious command of the format.

First example: Sotomayor's patient response to Orrin Hatch's question concerning a ruling upholding New York's ban on nunchucks.



She's a judge and she's a ninja! Note how she answers calmly and patiently, turning his question into a discussion of why a state might try to ban nunchucks and the context in which a judge would have to consider that matter.

The other example is her answer to Jeff Sessions concerning a line she often used in speeches about how she hopes a "wise latina woman" would reach a better conclusion than someone with an, um, less ethnic background, let's say. It's a dumb remark the way she used it, though the explanation she pushes in the following answer is that she meant that wise people can disagree whatever their backgrounds (the short version, anyway). I buy it well enough, since her actual decisions don't indicate a racial bias (indeed, in the much-discussed Ricci case the plaintiffs she ruled against included Hispanics), and because the line quoted from those speeches always starts with, "I would hope..."

But no matter. What I liked about her answer in the following is that Sessions mentions a Judge Cederbaum in his question, and she smiles and chuckles. He appears to get defensive at that, and insists she disagreed with said judge. And when she does answer his question, she begins by saying that her friend, Judge Cederbaum, is in the audience behind her.



I think that's further evidence that she's a ninja. The way Sessions looks down quickly when he absorbs her statement is priceless. The overall answer isn't bad either - as often as she's probably had to talk about that, she doesn't seem as impatient or annoyed about it yet as I know I would be.

Once again I'm left wondering at what the Republicans think they have to gain by pushing so hard on the "she's a racist" and "she's an activist" tracks. It should have been obvious from one-on-one interviews that she'd handle the attacks well in a hearing setting, so their maneuvers are likely to help her and hurt them. Someone needs to explain to Republican leadership that a relevant opposition party doesn't just automatically oppose everything the party in power does, they provide a logical counterpoint to the ruling party. You don't get back into power through knee-jerk reactions, you regain it by making the people you want to replace look more irresponsible with their office than you would be.

Heck, this Supreme Court nominee has handed down largely moderate, well-documented decisions in her career. Conservatives should be thrilled to have her as a nominee from a President they consider liberal - with Democrats controlling Congress he could have easily pushed through someone with views more similar to David Souter to replace him. With her on the Court it will maintain a right-leaning bias, which should be what they want. So why try to catch her off-guard with questions about nunchucks?

It's probably too late now, but the best thing they could have done was pre-empt Obama. With all the "Party of No" stuff to date, they could have asked her probing questions, declared themselves satisfied with her answers, and then supported her and voted for her. Then all the press would talk about would be how the Republicans were willing to be persuaded by her rather than about the fact that Obama nominated her, and the coveted "Hispanic vote" would shift to the right with one clever stroke. And they'd have that one throwaway vote to point to to make them look reasonable when they go back to fighting against Obama's legislative agenda.

I want competent parties competing with each other in Washington, not the farce that US politics has turned into. Maybe something will change in the next couple of decades.

So I read this neat article that talks about kidney donation, how having more live donors would benefit a lot of people who could use transplants, etc. Good stuff. And the article mentioned a National Kidney Registry that was set up to let people register to donate their kidneys. Also nifty. Then I got to the part of the article that discusses compensation for donors, and how it's illegal in the US but legal-yet-shady in some other unnamed countries, and illegal-but-possible in yet others.

So I got curious about that part, plugged "sell kidney" into Google to see what would come up, and the third result gave me this site. Why, if I could have just written a simple post about kidney donation, have I instead built up to a link to sellkidney.com? Because apart from the amusingly bad English, the right-hand sidebar on their homepage describes how you can refer a friend and get 20% of what they pay for a kidney. And even better: The special is only good until September 1. There's a special offer on buying a kidney but for a limited time only.

Stunning.

Interestingly that link follows a well-written (and blunt, and informative, and cynical) article that came in at #2 for the search (#1 was a less useful but not awful askmen.com article). It's a frank discussion of what options exist for profiting off your bodily fluids and body parts, the risks involved, and the legal issues. I'm not inclined to follow up on the possibilities (though I have already participated in some clinical trials and likely will again someday), but to me the article was a fascinating read. With a good chuckle at the sheer number of "I want to sell my kidney!" comments attached to it. My favorite being toward the end of the list, from May 29 this year, that greets one "in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ" then makes the less-than-Christian offer to donate a kidney for $150,000 plus expenses.

Most politicians would be wise enough to drop out of sight for a while after a surprise resignation. But not Sarah Palin. She just keeps on speaking, and thus keeps on giving fodder to people who think she's unhinged. On Monday she gave a bunch of interviews (which aired this morning), and TPM collected highlights. Granted, they aren't Palin fans over there, so it's not edited to show her in the best light, but it captures the gist of what she was trying to get across. Some interesting lines in there, like when she's asked why she didn't stay on the job after saying she wouldn't seek re-election. She said that would have been "politics as usual". Well...yeah, I suppose it would have been...

My favorite part is that the interviews were all done with her, in waders, getting ready to go fishing. A reason she gave for stepping down is all the time her staffers have had to put in handling her ethics complaints, and there she is on a Monday, fishing instead of working. Yeah, people are entitled to days off (and long holiday weekends), but right after complaining that your staffers are having trouble finding time to get their work done, you take a day off? And you give interviews while getting your boat ready, to emphasize that you aren't working that day? And you're quitting in a few weeks?

Yes, clearly the job is very important to her. I take it back, there's no scandal waiting in the wings. I'm siding with the people who are guessing that she just got tired of the job. It wasn't fun anymore, it was too much hard work, or she was tired of the scrutiny that came with her position. Someone quitting for the greater good and regretting leaving a job wouldn't be cheerfully giving interviews on the beach, they'd be getting their work affairs in order. They'd be setting up the transition, and finishing any work they felt was important or that they considered pet projects. Palin's behavior fits instead that of someone who's quitting and can't wait to get out. She's positively cheerful in those interviews, no appearance of regret. A burden has been lifted from her.

Yeah, those last bits are amateur long-distance psychoanalysis, but politics isn't as much fun if you only stick with facts and details.

Yeah, I know, I can't stop obsessing, even though I'm quite sure no one who reads my posts has more than a passing interest in politics, let alone Alaskan politics. I figure the same is true of any other subject I would post on too, so I'm safely in narcissistic blogging territory, right where I should be.

I wanted to mention, first, that the transcript I linked yesterday (which was posted at Talking Points Memo) accurately reflects the official transcript of Palin's speech. Which is to say, the all-caps words and exclamation points and such are not embellishments. Whoever put the official transcript together really does write like they're in high school. I saw one blogger say that it proves Palin wrote the thing by herself, but her spokeswoman/advisor Meghan Stapleton has made it obvious in the past that her communication skills are subpar, so I figure it could have been her work too. Either way it's a given it was no professional speech writer, which reinforces the idea that it was a rushed, last-minute kind of speech.

Also the blogosphere and the press alike are abuzz with speculation and will continue to be for a while I expect. Palin did try to bury the story by announcing her resignation not only on Friday afternoon (the usual time to release news you want ignored), but the day before July 4 to boot. And the day she announced the lieutenant governor will be sworn in is July 25 - a Saturday. What kind of jerk schedules a government function on a Saturday? I guess the kind of jerk who's trying desperately to keep something low-key that would generally not, in any way, be an under-the-radar sort of activity. Like a state governor resigning mid-term.

One of the reasons some bloggers have latched onto is the possibility of looming scandal. One blogger posits that federal authorities have been looking more closely into some shady business that happened while she was mayor of Wasilla. During her two terms she had a house built and the town had a sports complex built, and there have been questions for a while about whether contracts given for the sports complex were rewards for work done on her house (which Todd Palin has claimed he built himself with the help of some "contractor buddies"). It's always sounded like a case that would be hard to make, since there aren't many records regarding the construction of the house, but it certainly would be the kind of scandal Palin wouldn't want dragged out while she was preparing for another run at the governorship. I just can't see how it would make her resign right now.

Thing is, Palin didn't resign when Troopergate came up, she didn't step down when she became McCain's running mate, she went through with that even though it would inevitably be reported that she had a teenage daughter who was pregnant, and she's shrugged off all those other ethics complaints that she brought up in her resignation speech. So if she's as impervious to criticism as she appears, just why would she resign as governor? I can't even see a federal investigation pushing her to that, since she's displayed a great capacity for denial and belief in her own innocence whatever the accusation. Maybe an investigation that has overwhelming and irrefutable evidence available could do it, but I can't see the house/sporting complex thing fitting that description.

So my theory, now: She killed someone. I mean, c'mon, no smaller crime makes sense! Maybe she was driving late at night, and some old fisherman was in the street during a storm, and she ran him over, and didn't want to tell anyone, so they buried the guy in the hopes no one would trace the death back to Palin, but now they're getting strange phone calls in the middle of the night and are finding fishing lures on their doorstep when they go outside in the morning...

Yeah, it's a stretch. But it would be pretty neat, wouldn't it?

This is really what my obsession with Sarah Palin is all about. She's not a normal politician by anyone's measure. But she's not the overtly crazy type, like Michelle Bachmann claiming the census will be used to put people in internment camps, or Larry Kilgore advocating public floggings for adulterers and homosexuals. Those politicians are fun to mock, but too easy (and far scarier, since they make no effort to conceal their mental illness and still get votes). Palin is special because her disorders so neatly reflect those of bad managers I've had in some jobs - a warm facade that gets her a following of close friends and defenders, while beneath the surface lurks those convictions that critics are out to get her, that anyone who dislikes her is just jealous, and that anyone who argues with her is imbalanced. Hers is a subtle kind of crazy, and I like subtle humor.

There's also the tragic aspect that appeals to me. She could have been an amazing politician. She has the charisma and the appeal. I don't agree with her positions, so in a way I'm glad she's failing, but if she'd just done a few things differently she could have been the next Reagan. The VP nomination was a great introduction for her, and the speech that was written for her was delivered expertly. Republicans adored her. All she needed to do was listen to campaign advisors and keep her speeches low-key to make it through the campaign looking like a saint. Then she could have dropped off the public stage for a year or two to study like mad. If she'd been willing to put that time in to beef up the areas of knowledge where she'd been clearly lacking, and had had the patience to stay out of the limelight for the necessary length of time, she could have given Obama a serious run in 2012. It wouldn't have taken any more intelligence than she possesses, just a bit of caginess (or better people giving her advice).

But then, that's been politics since Obama took office. I don't know why, other than that maybe the switch in power from the Republicans to Democrats sent some people off-kilter. We had Mark Sanford, Presidential hopeful, not only admit to an affair (itself not necessarily fatal for a Republican career, strangely), but give rambling press conferences and interviews where he talks about reconciliation with his wife on the one hand and how his mistress is his "soul mate" on the other (and as he said, if King David didn't resign over the Bathsheba incident, why should he?). Bobby Jindal was a rising star, and that star went supernova when he gave a speech responding to Obama's not-state-of-the-union address - he went on camera and talked like Mr. Rogers (and if that wasn't enough, included a line making fun of spending money on volcano monitoring shortly before a volcano eruption in Alaska - and this from the Louisiana governor, of all people). And now we have Palin's bizarre resignation, claiming she'll be more successful as "that woman who couldn't hack being a governor" than she could as "that woman who is a governor".

It's all just weird. Usually the strangeness comes from the party that takes over power, since they're the ones in the limelight and they're giddy and overconfident thanks to the change in circumstance. The displaced party gets some breathing room to regroup since reporters aren't as interested in investigating them. This should be a time when Democrats should be fending off rumors and bitching about Fox News creating scandals for them. Instead most of the politicians getting the scandal press have been getting it all on their own, without reporters needing to put in any effort at all.

The text of Sarah Palin's speech can be found here.

It's...bad. I mean, like, amateurish kind of bad. Rambling and disjointed, she jumps from idea to catchphrase to mangled metaphor as she makes her way to the whole resignation thing. For example, "Only dead fish go with the flow," she said, apparently thinking that the only fish out there are spawning salmon. Of course live fish go with "the flow" too. The saying is, "Even dead fish can go with the flow," and I know this because it's the title of a book by liberal Jim Hightower. Interesting association.

"Our destiny to be reached by responsibly developing our natural resources. This land, blessed with clean air, water, wildlife, minerals, AND oil and gas. It's energy! God gave us energy."

Among a bunch of other stuff about Alaska's resources and history, she brings up a line about the state spending $2 million on ethics complaints against her. That's something her office had said not long ago too, and no one knows where that figure comes from. The published costs of the most expensive investigations total to about $250,000. The biggest of those was TrooperGate, and many of those costs came from the investigation she filed against herself so the review would be conducted by a panel she had appointed - the one that investigated the rest of those ethics complaints she cites. So yeah, she can tout that all of those were dismissed, and they were dismissed by a panel she controls. The only one that ruled that she had an ethics violation was the investigation conducted by the state congress, and they didn't apply any penalties anyway.

I'm pretty sure that someone interested in picking that speech apart could find a lot of factual errors to highlight (she "eliminated" the chef? Really? Records show she just transferred the chef from the governor's office to another part of the government to continue to cook for officials...). But that wouldn't really tell us anything we don't know about Palin already - that she has a tenuous relationship at best with the truth - so I don't really care to put time into that.

"Life is too short to compromise time and resources... it may be tempting and more comfortable to just keep your head down, plod along, and appease those who demand: 'Sit down and shut up,' but that's the worthless, easy path; that's a quitter's way out."

The quitter's way out would have been to finish her term as governor of Alaska, apparently. So instead she, um, quit. And she believes firmly in fighting for free enterprise and smaller government, but...

"I've never believed that I, nor anyone else, needs a title to do this - to make a difference... to HELP people."

This is the point where someone really needed to intervene and let her know that, while it's true you don't need a title to fight for those things, having some power can certainly help. Being a governor may be a title, but it's power too. Indeed, it's why she had said she ran for the office, and now she's apparently saying she doesn't need it to accomplish her goals. So she's ditching it.

The ethics investigations appear to be the reason she gave in that speech as to why she was stepping down. It's actually pretty hard to parse, either from reading the text or listening to her give the speech. Still, what I gleaned from it was that she originally was going to announce that she wouldn't seek re-election because the "frivolous" ethics investigations were too expensive and distracting. Then she thought about it some more and figured that lame duck governors suck, and she didn't want to be one, so she'd resign too. Really, read the speech, that's her reasoning.

And see, the liberal media is on a full-court press against her, so she also feels that she'd do more good outside the government than inside it. Or that the government would operate more smoothly along the path she's set for it if the lieutenant governor takes over for her now. Or maybe both. Again, it's not a very coherent speech.

As she says many, many times in the speech, she didn't want to be "politics as usual." So I guess, you know, she's a maverick. Which is shown in the way she's spontaneously resigning.

She concludes with more rah-rah support the troops stuff that has nothing to do with her governorship, something about people picking on her son Trig (seriously? Who? It's not like people who pick on Down's Syndrome kids would last long in journalism or politics), and then some stuff about how even though she's quitting because she can do more good from the "outside" than the "inside" of Alaskan politics, other people shouldn't be discouraged because they can do good from the "inside"! Makes complete sense.

I think I'll go with Josh Marshall on this one - the speech was improvised, the reasoning was obscured, the cover story is inconsistent, and she obsessed on those ethics investigations. So it does seem like another shoe is going to drop. Either there's a scandal lurking in the wings that she thinks would have been inevitably uncovered if she'd stayed on, or she's more mentally unstable than anyone had dreamed.

Either way, I don't think her national prospects have changed any as a result of this move. Her prospects with the public at large were dim before this anyway (just look at her polling before the Presidential election), and her base is too fanatical to let something as minor as abandoning her office get in the way (they'll blame the liberal media and call her a hero for making the sacrifice).

That's my take, anyway, on the news that Sarah Palin is stepping down as governor. It's a bit early to step down to focus on a Presidential run in 2012, and Lisa Murkowski's Senate seat will be up for a vote in 2010, so the latter seems like the most likely short-term goal for Palin. That, or she just wants to rake in the dough she could be getting from book deals and speaking engagements.

I think she'd be hilarious as a Presidential candidate. I give Republican voters enough credit that I don't think she'd make it past the primary, but it would still be an entertaining run. Palin has been able to get away with weird lies and strange obsessions while comfortable in the Alaska governor's seat or being second fiddle on a national ticket, but they just wouldn't cut it if she was the front and center candidate for President. She doesn't know when to tell a lie and then leave it alone, and she picks strange, unimportant things to lie about sometimes to boot. McCain, at least, would lie about more important things (like whether he'd ever said he wasn't an expert on the economy), stuff that was easy to debunk (there was video of him saying exactly that, which is why he'd gotten that question from a reporter), but at least he knew that you can get away with it if you say the lie, then avoid the subject as much as you can so you don't have to repeat it. Then it becomes a joke on the Daily Show, and fades from public memory right after. We expect lies from politicians, so in the long run they're usually not big deals.

Palin lied to Runner's World recently about, of all things, whether or not she "made [the campaign] swear to secrecy" about a cut she got on her hand when jogging. Talk about a silly thing to make up - there are stories from that time (right before the VP debate) where a picture is shown of her with a bandage on her hand, and the accompanying article mentions that she cut her hand on a run. It was a humanizing story, good press, so there's no rational reason now for her to, I guess, say that she didn't want to make a big deal out of it because she's a rough-and-tumble diehard runner or something. I don't know.

CBS News also just published emails from hours before the third Presidential debate where Palin complains about some minor press coverage of her husband's membership in the Alaskan Independence Party, a party whose platform is secession from the US (covered in the veneer of a referendum on the subject, but at rallies the major talk is of secession and independence). The emails are an interesting read, both because it lets you see a top campaign aide (Steve Schmidt, top advisor to McCain) try to handle his ticket's VP candidate, and because Palin basically makes stuff up to support her narrative that it's a big issue. She had one protestor say something about it at a rally, so she told Schmidt she'd gotten questions from reporters. Schmidt replied that as he understood Todd Palin had indeed been a member of the party, so she should just shrug off any questions about it. She replied by insisting that he'd only accidentally checked the box on the registration form to join the party, and anyway, the party platform wasn't at all secessionist. Schmidt then smacks her down by saying he talked to her media handlers and there had been no reporter questions, that Todd was a member of the party for seven years, and that the stuff about secession is right there on the main website for the AIP, so she should just do as he said. She stopped the emails after that, but the willingness to just invent things to bolster her point is depressing, knowing that it came from someone who has a small but fervent following in national politics. Depressing, but still funny if you like black humor.

The Onion, on Twitter:

Twitter Creator On Iran: 'I Never Intended For Twitter To Be Useful'

The bastard is taking the military option. We'll see how that works out for him. If this article is any indication, not as well as he'd hope.

I have to admit, Twitter has been amazingly useful to the protesters and to the people outside Iran trying to get an idea of what's happening there, as foreign media is largely blocked and ejected from the country. Let me be clear, I still hate Twitter. Most of its traffic is vapid teenagers and idiotic adults chattering about whatever crap comes into their heads. It's like blogs, but more instant and thus even less filtered, giving us plenty of insight into the horrifying workings of the common man's mind. All you have to do is look at what politicians are doing with Twitter to see how useless most Twitter feeds are.

I'm pleased to note that I created my own Twitter account fairly early on (March two years ago), posted twice to test it, and never touched the damned thing again. It didn't take long for the realization to strike me that no one would care about my minute-to-minute life, let alone day-to-day or month-to-month. I have many mental and emotional problems, but thankfully I've been spared that level of narcissism. My self-absorption is arrested at the blogging level.

But dammit, now this thing in Iran has happened, and Twitter's tiny messages have been the best way for the people inside Iran to communicate with the outside and with each other. It's been used to organize protests and to provide links to pictures and video. It has, in short, been essential. And I have to give it credit for that. I just wish there were a way to restrict its use to embittered populations and people who actually have useful things to say. Like fake Christopher Walken.

I've followed a filtered collection of "tweets", pictures, and video on Iran through Andrew Sullivan's blog, if anyone else is interested in poring over the unconfirmed reports, rather than waiting for real news sources to aggregate the stuff they can actually confirm later. It's somewhere between a raw feed and legitimate news - he's collected the stuff that looks the most interesting or that seems most plausible based on the number of reports and the sources, and posted those. Useful, considering most of the Twitter searches on Iran or the Iranian election mostly turn up the messages people are "helpfully" retweeting, or well-meaning kids sitting fat and safe in their US homes encouraging Iranians to keep up the good fight. "Retweet so Iranians know US groups support them!" appears, next to, "The name of the girl shot to death is Neda."

Did I mention the drawbacks of letting anyone with a cell phone or Internet access post where everyone can read it? Yeah. To be permitted to post with a "#Iran" tag, you should be required to know where to find Iran on a map first.

I feel like making some predictions. Assuming the following are true:

- The protests earlier today in Iran did indeed have a larger turnout than previous protests, as reported.

- Rafsanjani is still politically active in the halls of power in Iran, and the rumors of his resignations were untrue.

- Rafsanjani is not an idiot.

My predictions: The Supreme Leader is finished. Tomorrow is the sabbath in Iran, so the turnouts to the protests should be even larger, both from the people who won't have to work and from the successes over the last couple of days. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei endorsed the election results there twice, then appeared to back off, and has all along been calling for people to stay away from the protests. He sent the Basij to discourage protests by force back when they were small enough that they might have been stifled, but that won't work anymore. The only way the movement can be suppressed now would be with a large scale military show of force, and I don't think he can do that now and safely expect the military to go along with it on his word alone (they would have earlier in the controversy, but it's more iffy now with the movement gaining such clear popularity).

In short, the last six days have made the Supreme Leader in Iran look weak. Rafsanjani, who served as President in Iran and is currently at the head of their Assembly of Experts, is a cagey enough politician that he has to see the situation the Supreme Leader is in. The situation might change after the Ayatollah speaks tomorrow, but that seems unlikely. Rafsanjani can serve his political ambitions if he pushes for the Supreme Leader to be replaced (if they can do that - I admit I don't know Iranian politics that well).

Failing that, the ruling council in Iran will probably have to overrule the Supreme Leader on the subject of the election. I can't say whether they would push a recount or a revote, but I think they value stability more than the political status quo. They'll sacrifice Khamenei and probably Ahmadinejad if that seems like the easiest way to get the populace to settle down and get back to business as usual. All they have to do is blame them for rigging the vote (or at least for mishandling the controversy) and the people will line up behind the government again.

Resolution in favor of the protesters is more likely with Rafsanjani pushing it (since I think he would be a strong enough personality to persuade opposition of the approach), but it really feels like today was pivotal, if the turnout was as large as reported. The Supreme Leader could still violently repress the protests, but it will be hard to do now, and he'd have to have the backing of the rest of the government (and would probably need to make a lot of promises behind the scenes to boot). A recount or revote is the path of least resistance now, and if they don't see that in Tehran now, they will after the turnout Friday.

One other possibility is that Khamenei himself calls for a recount or revote. I'm not sure that would save him, and it seems unlikely that he would feel that he could comfortably do that, but it's still possible. It would let him stay in office, but it would definitely weaken his position in the government. I'm not sure the ruling council would like that result, but the reformers in Iran would.

Ah, the lack of pressure. I can make a prediction like this and lose nothing if I'm wrong. But if I'm right I get to gloat AND we get to see the Iranian government get ever-so-slightly less hardline. And I really like to gloat.

Headlines on CNN.com right now include:

Iran's supreme leader orders ballot probe
Nations asked not to recognize Iran results
Hatred, chaos and savage beatings in Tehran

And also, a few lines down...

New Miss California USA seeks calm reign

*facepalm*

Well, gee, if only someone had thought to order soldiers not to commit suicide sooner, all those soldiers wouldn't have killed themselves. Way to lead, Brigadier General Townsend.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/05/27/army.suicides/index.html

In a speech to his divisions, he explained, "Suicidal behavior...is bad," and, "This has got to stop, soldiers. It's got to stop now. Have a great week." Truly inspiring. I'm sure he consulted with all kinds of experts before deciding to take the "Just Say No" approach to suicide prevention.

Of course, this is coming from the same army that's reportedly been encouraging psychologists not to diagnose PTSD in soldiers. Nice to see them taking such good care of the men and women serving our country.

Okay, the title's an exaggeration, but still, technology is getting to be a bit much. This is my futile rant about it, and how one has to truly feel for non-nerds nowadays. Non-nerds like my mother, who I will use as an example a little later.

I rented the blu-ray version of "Taken". Decent movie, didn't bowl me over but it was a good action-packed thriller kind of thing - my viewing time wasn't wasted, but the time investment was greater than it should have been. See, the blu-ray disc had a problem on my player, a Sony BDP-S301 - close to a couple years old now, but sheesh, it's just a fancy DVD player, how hard should it be to use?

This is how hard. First of all, the blasted thing takes forever to start up, it always does. So a minute spent waiting for the machine just to turn on. Then I put the disc in. Another minute waiting for it to load, while a blue bar fills and empties repeatedly (thank you, Sony, for the pointless progress bar). And then...the FBI warning. Gee, I don't remember my regular DVD player having much trouble loading that static screen. After that the trailers begin. Dammit. Hit "Menu", and...loading again. Sonofacrap. Another minute goes by as the menu slowly loads, the blue bar of pointlessness keeping me company until it's replaced by some bars that rotate in a circle. Still pointless, but at least it doesn't try to give the illusion of progress.

At last the menu is up. I have to choose between the theatrical and the unrated version. So I try to use the remote to select one and...nothing. Select doesn't work, the arrows don't change the highlighted choice, no responses at all. Can't watch the movie no matter what I try.

And so, after all that, comes the point where the nerdiness helps. Because without at least a little of it, you're stuck with a movie that won't play and nothing to do about it. My mother would have either returned the movie without getting to see it, or been stuck on the phone with tech support at this point. Neither is a fate I would wish upon her.

I sit down at my Mac, I hit Sony's website, go to the support section, and find the downloads page for my player. It has a dropdown menu to select my operating system. Huh. Well, "DVD player" isn't listed, just...a bunch of Windows variants. Sony, you jerks. Fine, fine...After confirming that there is an updated firmware, and that the download is an EXE file, I boot up my Windows box and download the 50 meg file there. I run it, expecting some needlessly complicated installer or the like, but instead it's just an autoextractor. For an ISO file.

So you see, even if my poor dear mother had made it so far as to go hunting for newer firmware, she, owning only a Mac, would have been stymied by a Windows-specific program that she had to download just to extract a goddamned ISO file that can be burned to a disc from any operating system. Smooth, Sony. Very smooth.

From there it was easy enough to burn the disc. And then pop it into the player. And then wait for it to install. And wait. And keep on waiting. It took more than a half hour to complete the firmware update. And I had wait to make sure it was done, because the instructions said something about how it might eject the disc and look like it was off, but then it would turn back on and resume the update so for God's sake don't touch it when it does that!!! It turns out that's what it looked like when it was done too. Nice of them to tell me.

So with all that done, I put the blu-ray disc back in. And waited another minute for the FBI warning to load. And then wait another minute for the menu to load. And then it worked and I could watch the blasted thing.

After watching another FBI warning. This warning was blue, and the first one was red, so I guess there was something different between the two of them that warranted wasting my time with another FBI warning that I couldn't skip. Then came a splash screen for 20th Century Fox DVD or something, which I only really know because it was at that point, since I figured it was indeed working, that I decided to pause the disc to grab a drink before I settled in. Only I couldn't pause it. That function was "forbidden" was the message I got when I tried to pause it. Sons of bitches.

When the movie started, then I was allowed to pause. Thanks so much.

Forty-five minutes after I'd originally planned to watch the movie, I got to watch the movie. Hey, movie industry, you know what else would have taken me 45 minutes? Pirating your damned film. Think about that next time you want to push a half-assed standard on the unsuspecting public in the form of subpar hardware you charge hundreds of dollars for but has to be maintained as if it were a computer instead of the entertainment appliance it's supposed to be. If I pirate it I don't have to update the player, but more importantly, I don't have to sit through the warnings I've seen a thousand times and the trailers I didn't even want to see the first time. And pirating is easier for the mere mortals who are not nerdy enough to know to check for firmware updates on your website because of whatever buggy code made that one movie not play.

*grumbles*

Just wanted to brag about a stroke of luck (I get so little): I hit the library today, and in their bookstore (they sell used books people have donated) I picked up a copy of Robert K. Massie's The Romanovs: The Final Chapter, which is one of those books I'd been meaning to get around to borrowing someday anyway. I'd liked Massie's Castles of Steel, so $2 seemed like a decent investment in a hardcover copy that was in pretty much pristine condition.

After I left I looked inside, and lo and behold: Not only is it a first printing, but there's a bookplate on the title page with the author's autograph. I am pleased.

I'm a history buff - I may have mentioned that before. So I found a New York Times article from 1999 to be fascinating reading.

The subject of the article was a Congressional bill that broke down Depression-era regulation that prevented banks, insurance companies, and securities firms from operating under the same corporate umbrella. Its implementation was pretty much bipartisan - it passed in the Republican-dominated Congress of the time, and was signed into law by Democratic President Bill Clinton.

The decision to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 provoked dire warnings from a handful of dissenters that the deregulation of Wall Street would someday wreak havoc on the nation's financial system. The original idea behind Glass-Steagall was that separation between bankers and brokers would reduce the potential conflicts of interest that were thought to have contributed to the speculative stock frenzy before the Depression.

The bill's sponsors disagreed, and weren't out to destroy our financial system or anything so dire. They simply believed that the regulations were outdated:

"The world changes, and we have to change with it," said Senator Phil Gramm of Texas, who wrote the law that will bear his name along with the two other main Republican sponsors, Representative Jim Leach of Iowa and Representative Thomas J. Bliley Jr. of Virginia. "We have a new century coming, and we have an opportunity to dominate that century the same way we dominated this century. Glass-Steagall, in the midst of the Great Depression, came at a time when the thinking was that the government was the answer. In this era of economic prosperity, we have decided that freedom is the answer."

The best response to that in the article, and the quote that jumped out at the person who discovered the article, was from a Senator from North Dakota:

"'I think we will look back in 10 years' time and say we should not have done this but we did because we forgot the lessons of the past, and that that which is true in the 1930's is true in 2010,'" said Senator Byron L. Dorgan, Democrat of North Dakota. "'I wasn't around during the 1930's or the debate over Glass-Steagall. But I was here in the early 1980's when it was decided to allow the expansion of savings and loans. We have now decided in the name of modernization to forget the lessons of the past, of safety and of soundness.'"

I really have to salute that kind of prescience. It would be eerie if it hadn't been based on a simple reading of history. Here it is ten years later, and it's that deregulation that contributed a great deal to our current financial crisis. Without all the consolidation of companies, the bursting of the real estate bubble might have crippled securities traders and financial speculators, but it wouldn't have demolished giant banks and financial corporations. Instead Dorgan was a modern Cassandra, telling us what would happen and when, and went unheeded.

I'm reminded by that article that all the noise over bonuses for employees of failed companies is just a sideshow. Eighty years from now no one will care if a few people got bonuses they shouldn't have, they'll just care whether or not we fixed the problems that got us here to begin with. So far I don't think any steps have been taken in that direction, just a stimulus package intended to stop the bleeding. Economic triage, if you will. The debate on how to fix the problem so it won't happen again is still to come, and it will be long and ugly, filled with ideological arguments as much as sound ones, and will probably be characterized by many misrepresentations of the past. Here's hoping that if another Cassandra speaks up, we'll listen this time (even though, technically, that person would then not be a Cassandra. Details, details).

Some fun facts until then, since we're already seeing some people trying to rewrite history in preparation for the "how do we fix things" debate:

- The Great Depression was not started by President Roosevelt. FDR didn't take office until well after the stock market crash that's widely considered the marker of the depression's beginning. There's a reason the collections of shantytowns for the homeless at that time were called "Hoovervilles".

- A spending freeze won't help. I'm not even asserting here that massive government spending is the answer, just pointing out that a spending freeze was the first thing President Hoover tried in order to jump-start the economy from the Great Depression. Not only did it not help, every indication is that it made things worse.

- World War 2 did not end the Great Depression. Economic indicators showed the economy improving well before the US became active in World War 2. Maybe the economy improved because of the New Deal, maybe it would have improved on its own without intervention, that's something people can and will disagree on. But it was definitely on its way out before the war. Side note: The economic stimulus that was provided by World War 2 came from the same thing the New Deal tried, and the same thing Obama is trying: Massive government spending and borrowing. If the New Deal hadn't happened and the Great Depression had lasted until the US got into the war, the method of stimulating the economy would have been the same - it just would have involved spending the government money in question on the military rather than on infrastructure.

The argument over how to fix the economy in the long run won't happen soon, I think. It might not even happen until next year, since we're still trying to fix the economy in the short term, and Obama wants to push through his health care and education reforms, and we still have troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. But it'll happen. When it does, be informed, and bring your popcorn. There will be a lot of heated tempers on Capitol Hill, and a lot of mudslinging in the press.

I picked up Wii Music with my four-year-old niece in mind. I need things to distract her, you see, because otherwise she leads me around the house giving me commands like, "Put this necklace on," and, "Let's play school. You sit down and I'll tell you what to do." I've been trying to find games she would like, because so far the only games she likes run on Windows, which means she takes over my gaming computer to play them. And there are only two games she likes anyway. One is Purble Place, which came with Vista, which she calls "Muffin Man" because of a cake-making game. The other is World of Warcraft, which she calls "the girl game" because the best she's figured out to do with it is instruct me in creating a female avatar for her ("Now change the hair color"), including naming her (she types "Dwhkkuxz" and declares it reads "Hannah"). Then she makes her new girl walk around in a starting area. She's figured out how to occasionally get into combat (and seems to enjoy deciding who lives and who dies - "That dog is nice, we leave him alone. I'll kill that other one"), but it still isn't a game she can quite play to its full potential.

But I digress. This is about Wii Music. I picked it up because some reviews I read made it sound like it could be the sort of freeform game that I could drop her in front of and she could have a fun time with it. She's been taking dancing lessons and has always been into music and singing, so it seemed like it might be a good fit. Little did I realize that, while I think it might be something she'll enjoy, it's something I'll enjoy too. It's one of those rare games that has stuff in it to appeal to a variety of ages, though ultimately I think the game will have the most lasting appeal for people who would enjoy creating their own mixes of other people's tunes.

Wii Music isn't Guitar Hero, or really like other rhythm games I've played. It's more like Apple's Garage Band program, in game form. The core of the game is Jam Sessions, where you select an instrument, a part (melody, harmony, chords, rhythm, etc.), and a song, then "play" your instrument during the song kind of any way you'd like. The game plays a metronome sound to help you with the beat, but doesn't judge or score you on whether you keep it. When you play your instrument you aren't choosing the pitch, just when the instrument makes a note - the game takes care of what note is played based on where you are in the song. So when you play a guitar instrument you make the motions of strumming the guitar to determine when it's played, but you don't push buttons to pick your notes - just to control whether or not a note is sustained, or to play a chord instead of a single note, or to add vibrato.

It is, in short, a creative effort more than a game where you're looking to score points. After the session ends you can replay it to see how it sounds, and you have the option of saving a video of your performance (which you can share with friends online, if you're especially proud of it). You assign a score to the video when you save it, but that's solely to help you remember how much you liked it, not something the game uses to determine any unlocks. So the meat of the game is that you play instruments during different tunes, and try to add your own individual style to the performance, and then decide how much you like the result.

This sounds simplistic, and it certainly can be. One option when starting a jam session lets the game randomly pick a song, a style, an instrument, and a role for you, and then you just hop in and see what happens. Very simple. But it can be a lot more complex than that. When you set up a custom jam session, where you select the song, instrument, and role yourself, the style isn't assigned for you, and any backup the game makes just plays a traditional accompaniment (and yes, you can have multiple players on multiple instruments for a jam session, which seems like it would be a lot of fun). Once you've finished playing in that one role, however, you can go back and overdub what you've done so far into the same tune, with you playing a different role. It lets you create your own absolutely unique take on the music. There are even tutorials that teach you what types of rhythms determine a style (jazz, swing, polka, reggae, rock, etc.), so when you go in and play the different roles in a song, you can apply that knowledge to completely change the composer's intent. Want to play La Bamba in a classical style? Or Ode to Joy as a march? Go for it - all it takes is the time and will to get the rhythms right, and then hop into the harmony and melody and freestyle in a way that goes along with your chosen approach.

Playing the instruments isn't as much fun as it could be if you were creating your own notes, to be honest. There are different ways to hold and use the controllers for different types of instruments, but they boil down to moving to play notes, or pushing buttons to play notes. There's some fun in playing air guitar or air violin, but it can get a bit confusing if you're familiar with an instrument and they don't quite emulate it when you're playing it with the Wii controllers. The violin style, for example, uses the motion of moving the bow to determine volume - the actual notes are played when you push a button on the "neck". For someone who played violin, that gets a bit confusing (since I'm used to the bow motion being what plays and starts a new note, while the neck just determines pitch). I guess the instrument playing adds a bit of variety and makes it more like a game, but at times I kind of wished I could just push buttons on a regular controller to get the same effects.

There are three minigames in Wii Music to go along with the jam sessions. They're kind of fun, but a real mixed bag. One has you in the role of conductor for an orchestra, setting the tempo by waving the baton controller, and sometimes pushing a button to emphasize some notes. You get points from keeping a consistent tempo, I think. Unfortunately for the music buff in me, the "conducting" consists solely of waving the baton up and down - real conducting involves more motion of the baton, with the beat of the piece determining the pattern of motion. So it's kind of fun, but not for long - there's only so much excitement one can get from just trying to keep a beat by waving up and down. The second minigame has you playing two colored handbells during a tune (one for each hand), playing each at the right time as the colored bell symbols scroll across the screen. Classic rhythm game stuff, not bad. The third game is for the music buffs, I'd say, since it's an assortment of exercises in quiz form. The questions include picking the musician playing the highest or lowest pitch out of a group, or picking out which instrument in an ensemble played the wrong note, or shuffling players around to make them form a specific tune. I certainly wouldn't ask my niece to play it, but I had fun with it.

There's also a lessons section of the game, mostly there as a tutorial for the game, but as I mentioned previously it includes a section on different styles of music. The first basic lesson introduces you to the instruments and jam sessions, and you're forced through it the first time you start the game. The second lesson teaches about overdubbing, and it's that one that includes advanced topics for about twenty musical styles, letting you play each role in a tune to see what sort of rhythms set that style. It seems like a good way to learn about styles if you're looking to learn, to be honest.

The game does unlock new instruments and songs as you play it. Some unlocks come from the minigames (just completing them, it doesn't appear to be based on your score), while others come as you save more videos from jam sessions. Since none of the unlocks appear tied to a certain performance in minigames or the like, they should all eventually be accessible to just about any player, whatever their musical talent. There are 50 songs in all, and a ton of instruments on top of that, including a variety of pianos and guitars, all sorts of traditional band and orchestral instruments, and some stranger ones (like cat and dog sounds). The songs range from classical music (Ode to Joy, Carmen), to pop music (La Bamba, Daydream Believer), to traditional tunes (Frere Jacque, Twinkle Twinkle Little Star), to video game music (the Zelda and Mario themes). Combine the variety of music with the variety of instruments and you have a lot of potential for entertainment if you're someone who would enjoy getting creative with familiar songs.

I can't say for certain that this will distract my niece for long, but it has distracted me more than I thought it would. The instrument playing takes getting used to, and I'm a bit annoyed at having to save poorer efforts in order to unlock new instruments and songs, but I enjoy just being able to hop into a jam session with a computer-controlled backup band and play however I feel like playing. It's like a musical, family-friendly Grand Theft Auto, where the most enjoyment is to be had when you just abandon the script and wander randomly around town making your own fun. Well, or not. Maybe you get the idea.

Spoiler-free review. Short version: I really enjoyed it.

For those who have read the comic (er, I mean, graphic novel) that Watchmen is based on: You'll enjoy it more than those who haven't. Such is the way with adaptations. They tend to make it kind of noticeable that they were based on a book, so I think having read the book will help fill in some gaps. The adaptation is very faithful in most of the important ways, and the most pivotal scenes were amazingly well-done. The ending is different while preserving the original theme - they had to streamline things to fit stuff into movie form, so there's no boat of artists, no Black Ship interludes (though I did see talk of them putting the Black Ship sequences on the DVDs as a bonus), and the growing tension is reflected in Presidential War Room meetings rather than scenes on the streets of New York. There's also a little more sentimentality toward the end, Hollywood style. Some of it annoyed me a little, but some I really liked and thought added to the movie nicely. So that I'll call a draw - it worked for me, it might not work for everyone (I certainly like the original ending better, I'm just saying that a couple elements they added to the movie would have worked in the comic).

For those who haven't read the graphic novel, first a plot summary: Watchmen takes place in an alternate reality 1985. In that reality, costumed heroes started showing up in the US around 1930. Around 1960, the first truly superpowered being, Dr. Manhattan, made his appearance. He and other heroes participated in the Vietnam War, helping the US win it. In the movie's 1985, the US and the USSR are on the brink of nuclear war. The costumed heroes are almost all in retirement or working for the government following a public backlash against them in the 1970s. Now someone has murdered one of their number, and a couple of them start to investigate why.

The strength of the comic was that along with a nightmare backdrop of nuclear armageddon, a big part of the story concerned the heroes themselves: how they got into that business, what they got out of it, and what they had become as a result. The movie tries to stay true to that theme and mostly succeeds. It seems a bit abrupt at times (since some events that had taken place over the course of more than one of the original 12 issues get compressed into one scene), but by and large I think it works. I think that if you haven't read the comics, you will still enjoy the movie - you just might get irritated sometimes when an event or a change of heart seems a bit too sudden or contrived. If you can get past that, you'll like the show.

The national conflict portrayed, that of the threat of nuclear war hanging over the head of humanity, is honestly pretty dated now. Hopefully modern viewers can suspend their disbelief and get into that part of the story. Younger viewers might find that hardest, since they won't remember just how inevitable World War 3 felt in the 80s.

Also, fair warning to movie-goers: This movie has a penis. Well, y'know, more than one, but most of them stay in trousers. Dr. Manhattan tends to walk around naked, which was easy to obscure in comic book form. The director decided to just let it all hang out rather than make him put on pants, which I think was a good move. It just means, well...penis (and breasts in some places, but we're used to those in mainstream movies). Also, there is graphic violence, for those who don't want to watch it or expose their kids to it (more than was in the comic, really, but I guess the director either wanted to emphasize the action more, or thought it would add to the movie's gritty "feel").

So I was browsing Andrew Sullivan's blog and one entry concerned a short (awesome) video with a misheard lyric. I clicked the link that he got the video from, and it mentioned Language Log's take on the video. And lo and behold, just a few comments into that page, there was one comment that mentioned Sylvar by name.

So there we go. Two degrees of separation between Sylvar and Andrew Sullivan, conservative blogger for The Atlantic. It's a small world indeed.

I see that Steam has Defense Grid: The Awakening discounted to $15 until the end of the month, and I've been playing it more lately, so what the hell: My review.

Defense Grid is a single-player tower defense game in a futuristic "protect your planet from the mysterious enemy" kind of setting. If you can get your tower defense fix easily from Warcraft 3 maps, or are content with Desktop Tower Defense, then you don't really need to read any further - it's the same concept, just with some additions and changes made possible by using an engine designed specifically for a TD game, rather than a strategy game hammered into the form of TD. If you've been wanting a TD game that's geared toward a single player experience and has features that aren't possible in the WC3 engine, like three dimensions and line of sight for towers, Defense Grid is worth a try.

For those who haven't tried a tower defense game, the basic gist of it is: Enemies come out of one or more parts of the map, then progress across the map toward one or more exits. The goal is to build defensive towers on the map that will destroy the enemies before they can reach the exits. Each enemy you kill grants more resources to build or upgrade more towers, and as the map progresses the enemies will also get progressively tougher. The fun, then, comes from designing a strategy for picking and laying out towers, as well as adjusting your strategy on the fly as you gain more resources for new and better towers.

Defense Grid has all the expected elements of tower defense. There are different types of enemies (fast ones, tough ones, bosses, flying ones, etc.), and there are ten tower types with two upgrades each. Different towers can be more effective against some enemies than others. The twenty maps are a mix of maze-type maps (where the enemies follow a set path, and you arrange towers along that path) and maps that are part maze, part open (so that it's advantageous to arrange towers on those maps to either create a mini-maze in an open space, or to use towers to block some paths on the map to force enemies to take longer routes to the exit).

The game has three dimensions, unlike WC3 tower defense maps, so towers are affected by line of sight issues, both from terrain and other towers. This adds a very nice bit of extra complexity to tower placement. Placing one gun tower behind another means that when an enemy walks by the front gun tower, the one in the rear won't be able to fire on it. When the enemy is to either side of the front tower, however, the rear tower has line of sight and can attack it. Some towers have area effects or lob their projectiles, making them better choices for the rear lines. Others have slower rates of fire and long range, so they don't lose as many chances to fire on enemies when another tower creates a blind spot for them. And a tower's range is calculated on the z axis as well as on its own plane, so placing a long-range tower on the edge of a high platform does allow it to fire on enemies a level or two below. Overall it adds to the fun of working out your strategy, since tower placement has to be concerned not just with where the enemy will be but also where your other towers will be.

Rather than having "lives" that are lost when enemies reach the exit, you're protecting a power source that has several "cores". When an enemy makes it to your power source it grabs one to three cores (depending on the enemy) and tries to make it to the exit with them. If you destroy an enemy carrying cores, the freed cores will slowly make their way back to your power source, and can be picked up by a passing enemy if they cross paths with one. So while the power source does add an extra waypoint for enemies in their journey from the entrance to the exit, an enemy can grab a dropped power core and take off on a different route to the exit than normal if you aren't careful.

There is a campaign that introduces you to the maps, but the story is pretty simplistic. As you progress through the campaign it opens up more towers, helping newcomers ease into the game, as well as introducing new enemy types. Once you beat a map in the campaign mode you open several other modes of play for that map - one mode gives you stronger enemies, another will send endless waves at you until you lose, another gives you a flat number of resources for tower building at the outset but you don't earn any as the game goes on, and a couple others. It definitely adds to the replay value of the game.

The Steam version of Defense Grid includes Steam achievements, if you like to have those bragging rights attached to your account. Since the game can be purchased from other online distributors as well, I assume that's a Steam-only feature.

Defense Grid isn't perfect, of course. For starters, while the twenty maps included with the game seem well-designed, there isn't a map editor or any additional maps to download at this time. There also isn't any multiplayer, which is a shame - multiplayer TD is a blast. The developer has said in a forum post that they've looked at multiplayer and would love to add it, but it doesn't sound like they would manage to do it anytime soon. It also suffers a bit from the fact that it is just a TD game, and doesn't support any other modes or extra play types like one could get from downloading many of the WC3 TD variant maps out there. Still, for the price, the game can be forgiven for its focus, I would say - you get a lot of good fun for the money.

In short, Defense Grid is a solid game of tower defense with enough twists in its design to make it stand out from other tower defense efforts. If you enjoy that style of gameplay and can live without multiplayer, or if you dig up their demo and think it looks like fun, it's worth buying.

Back in September I went to my cousin’s wedding in Maine, along with my mother, my two sisters, and my niece. While I was on a layover on the way there I wrote up a complaint about how the trip had gone so far and shared it with some friends. It was well-received (who doesn’t like schadenfreude?), so I wrote more entries as the trip continued. I kept meaning to clean up those entries and post them to my blog for all to see, and I finally, months later, have done so. Hope you enjoy my pain.
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2008-09-04 10:07 am

This belongs in a blog, I admit, but I'm bored in an airport. Plus I know some friends enjoy laughing at my family.

Today I'm flying with my mother, my two sisters, and my young niece to Maine for my cousin's wedding. I am sitting in Washington, DC's airport waiting for a connecting flight and watching the carry-on luggage, alone. My mother is sitting outside the security gate. But better to start at the beginning.

My sisters arrived at the airport 45 minutes before departure. My one sister (something of a flake) boldly walked in first, motioning me to follow her as she joined the wrong line (she had our paper tickets, which is a different line from the e-tickets). Once I directed her to the right line (she objected, considering herself a more experienced traveler, but her experience is dated and she has only traveled farther than me, not more often), I explained to her that we would need everyone there to check their luggage so we could check in. I also let her know there would be a charge for the first piece of checked luggage (thank you US Airways) and that the airport we would fly into was three and a half hours away from our destination. She looked cross. She booked the flight.

Check-in took fifteen minutes, between: the other sister straggling in only after writing up address tags for all her bags, her car seat, and stroller; my mother coming in from smoking a cigarette; and the poor ticket attendant trying to juggle us all. We got to security, and after passing through had a bit of a panic when my niece's stroller disappeared. After a couple minutes of searching we realized that Flake Sister had grabbed it when she ran on ahead of us while we put our shoes back on (we're not used to her showing that kind of initiative).

Right when we caught up with my rogue sister she dropped her luggage at my feet and said she would be right back. Meanwhile the plane was boarding, the line of passengers growing ever shorter. I convinced my mother and other sister to board while I watched the bags. Several minutes later my missing sister reappeared, clutching some kind of Hot Pocket-like egg pastry concoction that she had walked across the airport to buy. We were the last aboard, but at least we didn't hold anything up.

On the plane, the kid started talking loudly and excitedly about the plane starting up and everything. It was cute, but noisy. Flake Sister said to the girl, "You shouldn't talk so loud right now." Her mother replied, "Shut up, it's a public plane, she can be as loud as she wants." I really can't believe I'm related to these people. Later in the flight the mother pulled out a portable DVD player, cranked the volume up, and put on Toy Story to keep the kid entertained and everyone around us annoyed. I really hate that kind of person when I fly, and now it turns out I'm closely related to one of them. Sigh.

When we debarked in Reagan airport to wait for our connecting flight, my sisters and my niece vanished to who-knows-where, and my mother went looking for someplace to smoke. "Bring your boarding pass," I said to her, "in case you need to get back in."

Needless to say she did not bring her boarding pass. And my sisters weren't answering their phones. And I was watching all the bags, so I couldn't bring the boarding pass to the front. "I was sure they'd take my word for it when I wanted to come back in." *facepalm*

While writing this one of my sisters showed up and watched the bags so I could take the boarding pass to my mother. "Just bring it to the security area and you can hand it to me," she said. She was, of course, wrong. I had to walk out of the secure area entirely to reach her. Which meant walking back in through security. Which, of course, means remove the belt, the shoes, and the fifty electronic gadgets I tend to carry with me for amusement.

Then I got back to my computer, and started typing this again. And then one of my sisters delivered my niece to me with a cruel grin. "She asked for you." Then my sister vanished again, and left me alone to entertain the tyke. So here I sit, helping the little one play dress-up for some magnetic Disney figures or something.

I miss traveling alone.
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2008-09-05 4:48 pm

A friend asked if I was expecting the trip to be a sort of hapless misadventure. I absolutely did. To be honest I wasn't too keen on going to this, but I knew that if my mother went I'd need to go and keep an eye on her. The sad part is that I am not an organized person, and tend not to do much in the way of planning when I travel alone. But I guess compared to the rest of my family I'm OCD.

It actually is good to see my cousins on this side of the family again. It's been something close to 20 years, for various reasons, so no one looked the way anyone remembered. My cousins expected me to be 15 feet tall and ready to throw them through a window (yes, I am much older than them). I expected them to be gangly adolescents whom I would have to throw out a window.

The bride is pretty and charming, which makes me hate my cousin, of course. She seems to be one of those very determined hostesses - I overheard her telling my cousin about how she tried to set up one of my sisters with one of her friends already, and at another point last night she spotted me sitting quietly on the porch and tried to get me to join "the gang" in some effort at bar-hopping. I had to tell her no repeatedly, since she didn't seem to understand the concept of being utterly exhausted and preferring to hold out for sleep over mingling.

See, the fun didn't stop after the flight to Portland. The drive from Portland, Maine to the town where the wedding was to be held, Bar Harbor, is 3.5 hours via the quickest route. That's a lot of time to spend with so much family. But to make things even better, one sister announced that we needed to take Route 1: The Scenic Route. That meant not taking the fastest way there. Indeed, there were times when the GPS unit in the rental, which was left on "calculate fastest route" would tell me to just turn around and go backwards so far that I would go completely off the visible map. And the best part is that it didn't actually get that "scenic" until an hour into the drive. And that scene was an outlet mall.

My mother loves shopping and loves bargains. We had to stop. And we apparently had to spend four hours walking from shop to shop. After a while we all wound up going separate ways, mostly because my mother was slowly browsing specific stores and my Flake Sister was zipping through every store, while my other sister and I just wanted to leave (tending to a kid for that long in the midst of mostly clothing shops is, well, not fun). Remember that bit about the Flake Sister running off on her own to continue rabid shopping, it will come up later.

As it got toward dinner time we asked around and found a good place for lobster rolls nearby. We got the gang together. Flake Sister decided she would fetch the car and drive it over near the restaurant so we could leave that much more quickly when we were done. She ran off. My mother wanted to check one last thing, so she sent my other sister, my niece, and me off to the restaurant to grab a table. So off to the restaurant I went, and down I sat. And waited.

Fifteen minutes later my mother was nowhere to be seen. My phone rang, and it was Flake Sister. She had forgotten what the rental car looked like and had been wandering the parking lot all that time trying to remember. I described the car, then explained that she could hit the "unlock" button on the keychain remote and listen for a car to make noise. She thanked me and hung up.

Ten minutes later my mother finally walked in. By then my sister and I had given up and ordered for ourselves. Then Flake Sister called to say that she was in the car at last, but had forgotten where the restaurant was. I gave her directions and hung up.

The food came. We started to eat. I was halfway through my lobster roll when Flake Sister finally walked in, having at last fetched the car from where it had been parked, a five-minute walk away from the restaurant. She sat down, decided she wasn't hungry, complained that we were taking too long, and went out to wait in the car.

A quick interjection: The lobster roll was fantastic, and the clam chowder I got was some of the best I've ever had. So if you're ever in Freeport and stumble across the outlet shops there (all right there along Route 1 at a point where it's Main Street in Freeport), I do recommend stopping at the Corsican for food. It's just up the street from the Mangy Moose.

So, back to the car we finally went. I tried to talk them into letting me go back to the Interstate, but I was voted down because Route 1 Is The Scenic Route. They also argued that Route 1 just about paralleled the freeway at that point, which was true, but it was also true that the speed limit was 35 mph in some places, as opposed to 65 mph on the freeway.

After a half hour or so, Flake Sister began to bitch. Note that Flake Sister normally has a very sweet disposition. I am not used to her bitching. But something about the trip had inspired her to complain that we were taking too long, and doing everything wrong. She who had lingered at the shops and taken a half hour to fetch the car, she who had insisted on taking The Scenic Route, was complaining that the trip was taking too long.

After establishing herself as the Person We All Hated for the trip, once we got much closer to our destination (having at long last convinced them that after it got dark, The Scenic Route was a waste of our time) my sister insisted that we drop her off at the cottage where everyone was meeting before hitting the hotel where my mother, other sister, and niece would be staying, even though the hotel was on the way to the cottage. We told her no. She sulked. When I was helping to carry luggage up to the hotel room, she stayed in the car. Again, she is normally a very sweet, accommodating person. But boy, she was not such last night.

Eventually we got to the cottage. I got to see my cousins. Flake Sister took off for the booze. I went through several introductions, then had the tyke pawned off on me. I spent the evening, not mingling (which I'm not good at anyway), but walking up and down stairs with my niece as she instructed me in what to say when playing with her. This is why she likes me so much - I do what she says.

At one point I ran into Flake Sister with some guy. She introduced him as Drew. He said hi and put his arm around her when she introduced me. I announced (deadpan) that now that he had dared to touch my sister his life was forfeit. Disappointingly, he went silent for several seconds, then mumbled something about some martial art or other. Honestly, if she's going to find a random guy at a party, she should at least find someone with some semblance of wit. Responding with a corny threat of returned violence is boring. I think she realized that too, as she ditched him a little bit later.

During all of this my mother was talking to some guy on the porch. I don't know who he was, or what they were talking about, but they talked for about three hours. I know this because she was the person with the car keys, and I wanted to get my stuff out of the car so I could sleep. I was too polite to interrupt her, mostly because I kept thinking that she had to end that conversation on her own eventually. I was wrong. It's a good thing I keep a crossword puzzle program on my phone for occasions like that.

I did eventually just make my mother give me the keys. Naturally Flake Sister had vanished again, and I had to bring her stuff in too (we were sharing the one room in the cottage we had). I slept. Sleeping was good.

The next morning Flake Sister told me her plan for the morning was to make my mother and sister bring the car over here, then she would take the car, alone, and go hiking, alone. "You guys will be fine, you don't need to go anywhere." I think she said as much to my other sister, because they took several hours to get ready to leave the hotel. Meanwhile Flake Sister fumed and complained about how she needed to leave. She finally got so impatient that she left to walk to their hotel so she could hurry them along.

While I waited I got to play Computer Hero. There's a wireless router here, it turns out, but it wasn't working, I was told. I asked my cousin for the network password. "Oh, don't bother, it's broken." Yes, well, I didn't ask for your professional opinion, I asked for the password. He finally gave it to me, and showed me where the router was. In the end it turned out they had given my cousin the wrong WEP password. I learned this by logging into the router's admin interface. I do so love it when they leave the login as the default "admin/admin". Don't bother, indeed.

After that was done my mother called. She was going to bring the car over here, then I would drive them to a breakfast joint they wanted to try ("The Two Cats"), and then I was going to pick up Flake Sister before rejoining them. You see, Flake Sister didn't remember my directions to the hotel (1 mile away), and walked about a mile too far before calling for help.

So, I went to the rescue. Picked up Flake Sister. Stopped at the hotel for the stroller my mother had forgotten. Paused to appreciate the view (fourth floor with a balcony overlooking the bay - gorgeous). Rolled my eyes as my sister brushed off the great view of the bay, even though the point of her hike was to see neat vistas. Went back down to the car. Then my sister realized that for her hike she wanted a bag from their hotel room. As I stood by the car, door open, looking the other way, she hopped in the car, backed up, and hit me with the car door hard enough to make me stagger. I scolded her, she fetched the bag, we drove to the restaurant. I walked behind the car to get the stroller from the trunk. At that point she started to back the car up so she could leave. With me behind it. I shouted and she stopped.

She will not be driving the car again while I'm anywhere near it.

So at last, I can relax, right? Heck no. The restaurant closes at 1, and I walked in at 12:55. I ordered some food anyway, since I saw my mother and sister hadn't made much headway on their meals. The Two Cats in Bar Harbor is excellent, by the by, their omelettes are delicious (though the orange juice, while fresh squeezed, leaves much to be desired for someone from Florida. Must have been California oranges). So I ate my meal quickly because I'm the kind of person who hates making wait staff stay late (even though I know they tend to factor people ordering at the last minute into scheduling shifts).

After that I think I get to go back to the cottage and take advantage of the newly "restored" Internet connection. Nah, it's time to walk downtown and shop! And since "shop" means "walk into places selling cheap jewelry and kitsch", for me it's a time to babysit the tyke and/or her stroller while everyone else pokes around in shops I have no interest in.

Later, my Flake Sister calls, she's on her way to us. She's bloodied herself some during her hike (which, it seems, was at a park that was more like rock climbing than hiking), is exhausted, but is also in a better mood. After she gets there she goes up onto a lawn on a hill and lays down, spread-eagled, to cool off. This is not bright because she is wearing short athletic shorts and the hill puts her about at eye level for people walking down one of the streets. I have to be the one to break this to her because everyone else is shopping. And no, I didn't get any pictures, before some jerk asks.

Finally we leave the shops and get back to the cottage...just in time for everyone to change for the rehearsal dinner. And just enough time for me to write about how much work this "vacation" has been. At least I did find a really hideous moose magnet. Hideous is good.
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2008-09-06 12:17 am

As I neared my last entry’s close, my niece appeared to summon me to the rehearsal dinner. “Jered, come ON!” When I tried to explain that I needed another couple of minutes, she started hitting keys and trying to force the laptop closed. Meanwhile I could hear her mother calling her from downstairs, with no idea where the kid went. That was actually kind of comforting, since I’d assumed she was sent to make sure I wasn’t late to the dinner. Not that I could have held a grudge if that had been the case. Last night the way we dragged my mother away from the guy she had cornered for all that time was to tell my niece to grab her pants leg and pull her to us. So kids have their uses I suppose.

A friend responded to one of my previous entries, “You tell a story like Garrison Keiller. Only with more impotent hate.” I think that may be one of the nicest things anyone has ever said to me. Now I imagine these posts being read by someone with a droning voice and an obsession with Lutherans who lead lives of quiet desperation. I think that presentation definitely adds something to the narrative.

I had seen Drew, the fellow I “threatened” and who had such a banal response, throughout the day in the kitchen. He never met my eyes. I think he took me seriously. I always worry when someone takes me seriously when I threaten them with death the first time I meet them. I mean, c’mon, the sort of person who wants to kill you as soon as they meet you wouldn’t give you a warning first! Think, people!

Drew made the potato salad served at the rehearsal dinner. The potato salad was awful. The spices weren’t bad, actually, but the potatoes were undercooked. You just can’t enjoy a potato salad with undercooked potatoes. Ruins the flavor and the texture both. Such a shame, Drew. Such a shame.

The rest of the dinner was kind of, well, stunning. When I was told “lobster on the beach” two images came to mind. The first was of a beach. We didn’t have one of those, we had a tent outside the cottage. Still, that’s a minor detail, since I didn’t particularly want to get sand in my food anyway. The other image was of a plate with a few shreds of lobster drowned in a white sauce and served over white rice with a side of canned green beans (you have to cut costs somewhere). What I got was an entire lobster, in the shell, complete with rubber bands around the claws. There were also mussels and corn on the cob. And, of course, that poor potato salad, which had been slaved over for so long by a lone cook trying to make enough to serve all those people (around 75), and which turned out so horribly compared to the seafood provided by professional caterers. I’m starting to feel sorry for Drew.

The lobster was mighty tasty. The mussels were excellent. Even the corn was good. And there were enough lobsters for seconds. So if any reader has harbored any doubts up to this point that my family is insane, take note of the fact that the rehearsal dinner was the responsibility of the groom’s parent (as it is traditionally, I’m told). Those would be my relatives. These same relatives are the ones who complained that they couldn’t help replace my grandmother’s dying car because they had a lot of bills to pay. The “bills” turned out to be a bedroom set. The bedroom set wasn’t even an original purchase - the bedroom set was the result of a return. As it was told to me, my aunt bought an end table, realized she didn’t like it, tried to return it, and was told she could only get store credit. So she had to use the store credit from returning one end table to buy a bedroom set. And thus could not afford to split the cost on a used car for my grandmother. As explanations for sudden poverty go, “We have to buy 100 live lobsters for a wedding rehearsal dinner,” actually sounds less crazy than, “We returned an end table so we had to buy a bedroom set.”

Those funny little plastic lobster bibs were given out to all the guests along with the food. We were told we had to wear them. My theory on those is that so long as everyone is wearing plastic lobster bibs there’s no way they can be made to look even more ridiculous. That allows them to eat their lobster in comfort, free from the fear that their neighbor might cast them a scornful glance as they struggle to rip the tail off, then start scraping at the meat because that green stuff doesn’t look at all appetizing, then try to work out where to put the shell because their plate is already covered with mussels, corn on the cob, and a heap of untouched potato salad.

During dessert (blueberry pie) my cousin’s friend Billy sat next to me and we chatted a while. My mother vaguely remembered Billy. At one point he stepped away and she asked my sister and I if he was the one who was kind of a jerk to us when we were kids. My sister replied, “No, mom, that was Ralphie, who lived next door. Billy was the doofus.” I nodded in agreement. Doofus was the perfect description of how we remembered him, kind of funny-looking and always trying to get us to play with him. He grew up well, as most kids do, though the eager-to-pleaseness lingers in a good way (he would frequently hop up to help empty trash cans and the like). Billy’s starting a company that helps real estate agents set up websites for their properties, and gave me his business card. I wish Billy the best of luck.

Speaking of “best”, I learned that there is a potential scandal building around Billy. Billy is the best man because he’s been good friends with the groom since they were in diapers, but a friend of the bride and groom named Tony felt he should have gotten the honor and there’s been open rivalry between them since they met. Tony strikes me as flaming gay (by behavior, I don’t know his actual sexual orientation, I just wanted to easily describe his manner using a horrible stereotype because I’m not a nice person at all), so I’m eager to see a face-off between the earnest puppy-like Billy and the snarky, bitchy Tony. I hope it happens during that “If anyone knows of a reason why these two should not be wed” part, because that’s always a great time for comedy.

After dessert (of which I was forced to have a second piece because my niece had cut me one and brought it to me, and I was ordered not to break her heart) they had toasts to the soon-to-be-wed couple. For me, it was pretty depressing - all that stuff about love and a long life together and how well they get along and all those other things people say at toasts for this kind of thing. So when they announced at the end of the toast that it was time for Bingo, I was quite ready to leave.

Wait, Bingo? Let me check...Yep, Bingo. I didn’t just make that up because I was trying to introduce more nonsensical anecdotes to make my family seem funny. In this case it’s the bride’s family seeming funny - Bingo is a tradition at their weddings. Or family events. Or something. I was too busy being puzzled to actually listen to the explanation, which is to my detriment I suppose. Now the puzzling will never cease, and I will be haunted by the Bingo games I never attended.

For lo and behold, an excuse was offered up from an unexpected quarter: My niece. Just before the dinner I had been complaining that most of my vacation consisted of babysitting, either because my niece hunted me down like a dog and forced me to play with her stuffed animals (“pretend he’s supposed to do a trick but doesn’t want to”), or because everyone else had abandoned me to shop or chat or hide behind a door until we’d passed. Indeed, my sister took my complaints to heart, and when she was going to drive back to the hotel to change for the dinner she grabbed my mother and told her to watch my niece. “Don’t wander off, watch the baby. I don’t want Jered to have to do it again, he’s been watching her all day.” Very kind of her. Naturally, the moment she left, my mother started chatting with someone, followed them as they walked away, and I was left alone on the porch with my niece, who by that time had me helping her put magnetized dresses on magnetized Disney characters on a surface that was supposed to be magnetized too but was about as magnetic as a plank of wood. It meant my role in the game was to pick up little magnets off the floor for her. But really, the point is that my niece has kept me busy a lot.

Well, during the toast my niece started to get cranky, covering her ears during the applause and shouting at me over the talking (telling me to pretend I was named Telula and she was named Cheetah - she never got to give me more details, she got shushed by her mother then). A little later she started singing loudly. Then more quietly. Then she conked out. Then she started snoring, something none of us had heard her do before.

So there was my little niece, fast asleep, and nowhere handy to put her. The beds in the cottage are about four feet off the ground for some reason, and the tyke has made a habit of rolling around a lot and falling off beds - with a hardwood floor, that kind of drop could hurt. But y’know, sis, if you drive us back to the hotel, you can put your daughter to bed and I can stay there to keep watch over her. “Are you sure? I don’t want you to have to miss Bingo.” “I realize this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, but for the good of the family, I suppose I could go back to the hotel and read a good book instead.”

And thus I got my first time to myself for the whole trip, lounging in one bed, flipping through a book, while my niece dozed quietly on the other. The most active she got was in her tossing and turning on the bed - by the time her mother returned to take me back to the cottage the kid was stretched out in a pose reminiscent of Hermes on an FTD logo. My mother took pictures so she could save them and pull them out when my niece is a teenager and has company over. That’s not me imagining a reason for the picture-taking, either, that’s what she said when she was pulling the camera out of her purse.

Back at the cottage, all is silent. Most everyone is gone on the bar-hopping that followed Bingo. This is a darned nice cottage when it isn’t packed full of strangers, I must say. The only noise is the wind blowing through trees outside my window, and the rattle of the rings on the “privacy curtain” between the rooms.

I think I’ll go “accidentally” lock the doors and hope no one thought to bring a key.
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2008-09-06 12:45 am

When I got back to the cottage about an hour and a half ago, someone was in the bathroom outside my room. I hadn’t heard any activity for an hour, so when I checked again and confirmed that yes, the door was locked and yes, the light was on, I knocked and asked if everything was all right. Still no answer. Now, a half hour after that, I heard them unlock the door and walk out. Either they had fallen asleep and I woke them, or I do not want to set foot in that bathroom tonight. Possibly both.

I also wandered downstairs for a glass of water and ran into a cute girl, a friend of the bride’s. She complimented my slippers. She also asked if I knew where she could find any before-bed snacks, and I was forced to say no, and we parted ways.

I say “forced to say no” because I do, in fact, have some snacks I brought with me: Beef jerky and mixed nuts. But I realized before offering them that it would be trouble to offer an unfamiliar girl in her pajamas “beef jerky and mixed nuts” as before-bed snacks. The answer would be just suggestive enough to get me punched, but not suggestive enough to make an embarrassed joke out of it. So keeping them to myself seems like the wisest move I could have made under the circumstances.
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2008-09-06 10:20 am

I was asked for pictures so people could put faces to my descriptions. My laptop has few family pictures on it, since it’s the machine that gets used a lot for eBay. So I have a lot of pictures of Army surplus bags and Megatron, but not so many of relatives. Still, I posted pictures of my sisters and my niece on a page, and I’ll add one of my mother (and some more recent ones of those other three) when I take them at the wedding this evening. I even named my sisters, which I don’t bother doing here - why give you names to remember?

http://www.molerat.com/Family/Mixed_Nuts.html

Shouldn’t be anything exciting to report before the wedding since it’s drizzling outside. So no park visit or the like. The womenfolk went shopping again, and were amazed to learn that I was content to sit back at the cottage rather than go along. Still, the hullaballoo surrounding their attempt at exodus was amusing enough. My Aunt was trying to call my mother, but her calls were going straight to voicemail. Curiously, we learned later that my mother was trying to call my Aunt, but her calls were going straight to voicemail too. Identical twins really do think alike! Eerie. My Flake Sister wanted to help by calling my mother too, but she couldn’t find her phone. She’s not very good at keeping track of her phone. She’d left it in the bathroom the morning before - when I finished with my shower I put it on a dresser in our bedroom. Later as I munched on some breakfast she wandered past and mentioned that she’d been looking for her phone for an hour with no luck. I shrugged helplessly as I shoved more quiche into my mouth. It was good quiche.
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2008-09-06 11:52 pm

Ah, that was almost like a day off, up to the wedding. I wandered around town a little bit, but the whale watching tour I’d hoped to latch onto was down for repairs. Grabbed a pastrami melt for lunch because I was sick to death of seafood. That was hard to find - every eatery in this touristy area has lobster main dishes and lobster and crab variants all over their menu. It was also a cruise ship day, it seems, since one was parked out in the harbor blocking my view of the horizon. Glad I got a few pictures out there yesterday. So yeah, the lunch was about the only good thing to come out of my solo walkabout, since the rest of it was crawling with tourists and all the more intriguing shops weren’t open on a Saturday. There was a clock maker’s shop, for example. That would have been awesome, wish I’d walked past it yesterday.

The girl who complimented my slippers wandered past my room after I returned and got excited when she saw I had Internet access. Very nice woman, but she’s married. Damn. Every female here is married or attached except my sisters, apparently. She checked her mail, we chatted a bit, and then Flake Sister came by and they started discussing what they were wearing to the wedding. They asked me the question as a courtesy, knowing that my answer would of course be, “a suit.” I have it easy as a guy, and I know it. I can own one suit and wear it to weddings, job interviews, and funerals, and only have to worry about the shirt and tie to go with it. My sister displayed what she had brought along, two summer dresses and some kind of dressy pants and tank top kind of thing. Or whatever that kind of shirt was called. I don’t give a damn, I’m a guy, I only have to wear a suit. I headed to the sitting room to read while she changed. She kept coming and telling me I could come back to the room, then kicking me out when she changed her mind and wanted to wear something else. She wore each outfit twice by my count. She would change again when either she looked at it in the mirror and didn’t like it, or she ran into someone who told her they’d liked what she’d been wearing before it better. Ultimately I think my aunt said the summer dresses weren’t the right kind of dressy for the wedding and she went with the pants/shirt thing. Me, I went with a suit.

Of course, it wasn’t necessarily that easy for me. I haven’t tied a tie for a long time. I had to look it up on the Internet to refresh my memory (when I tried it I wound up leaving out a loop). I do so love the Internet.

It sounds like things were going about as well for my other sister and my mother as it did for my Flake Sister. My mother complained after they arrived that my sister was hounding her to hurry so much that she forgot both her cell phone and her camera in the hotel. That meant that I was assigned the task of family photographer.

This was not an easy job for me. The things I prefer to photograph are things I find interesting, and for which a memory isn’t always enough. I can remember what my cousin looks like in a tuxedo just fine, so it’s not something I instinctively go to take a picture of. I’m far more interested in the relatives who feel compelled to run into the shot while the professional photographer is getting into position so they can fix a pants leg, adjust a floral arrangement, or brush a bug off someone’s sleeve. That’s the kind of thing cameras were made for, the slices of life that are made better when frozen in time. Not a posed smile, but the look of surprise when they turn and find a camera in their face.

Still, I did as I was told. Repeatedly. In a disapproving tone when it didn’t occur to me to jump up and photograph some uninteresting event like the bride’s entrance. C’mon, we saw her yesterday and the day before that, why do I need a picture of her now?

After the wedding itself my work wasn’t done, of course. Then the professional photographer was posing people again, gathering relatives and friends in various combinations and different poses. So of course then I had to leech off his professional arrangements and take pictures over his shoulder, because they told me to. It made me feel dirty, like I was copying his work without giving him credit. I hate copyright infringement. At least I got some good shots of overzealous relatives ducking into the poor man’s shot repeatedly to ruin his carefully laid poses over some out-of-place rose petal on the ground.

I got to talking to Billy after the photos were done and he pointed out that I would be happier sitting with him and his friends than sitting with my niece. I agreed, but didn’t feel that I’d get that chance. I forgot that he had an in with the bride. We had assigned seats for dinner, and I was smack in the middle of his friends. Good conversation there. I learned later that my sisters had both been seated next to eligible bachelors, but while I was between two women, both were attached though unmarried. The bride was definitely trying to play matchmaker, but I was right, there were no available women other than my sisters at this shindig. *shakes fist*

One of the women next to me reminded me a lot of my friend Kyla, actually. Acerbic wit and recognition of my cultural references. Not as abusive toward me, but then she hadn’t really gotten to know me yet. She also had good eyes - she spotted a floral arrangement at another table that had caught fire. Her boyfriend went over and blew it out. No one at the other table ever appears to have noticed. It was kind of a shame, the dinner would have been much more exciting if one of the old ladies had seen it first and screamed.

Ours was the “Mad Max” table. I learned after I sat down that it was originally the “Stepford Wives” table, but that someone swapped table placards when they saw their choices. As retaliation the Stepford Wives stole our bottle of white wine and made us come to them with our glasses if we wanted some. I tried to foment a plot to steal the Stepford Wives’ gasoline because it would have been IC, but I just got blank looks. Not a lot of RPers at the table, it seemed.

Dinner was paella. That kind of food is always fun to see who’s squeamish when they find the calamari or octopus with recognizable tentacles, and who asks for the rejected tentacles so they can eat them instead. The Kyla-like woman to my left loved them, the woman to my right (Billy’s girlfriend) was revolted.

Oh, they all called Billy “Bill”. I suppose I should try to do that. But then, I suppose I also shouldn’t bitch about my family in so public a way. So screw that, Billy it is.

I tried to ingratiate myself to my newfound group of friends by helping them deface the bride and groom’s car. They had soap, streamers, and balloons. The balloons were, I think, the cheapest and worst it might be possible to find. They were incredibly hard to inflate (“You’ll know it’s inflated when you see double”) and popped with little provocation. I was trying to tape them behind the wheels of the car so they’d pop when they backed out, but they popped the moment they touched the gravel. Or the side of the car. Or my hand. So I didn’t make a very good impression there. At least they understood me when I insisted that I’m a software guy, not a hardware guy.

It started pouring rain while we were working on the car, so I wound up holding umbrellas for people mostly. That I can do - believe it or not, I have some kind of crazy courtesy gene in me that compels me to do that kind of thing anyway. I got puzzled looks from the lesbian couple helping us when I held an umbrella over them at one point. I don’t think they’re used to guys doing that. Such a world we live in.

The rain was good since I didn’t mind getting wet, but most other people did. I could sit on the porch and watch people try to sprint from the huge tent where the dinner had been held over to the cottage while wearing high heels and a skirt. The clever ones grabbed an unused trash bag, cut a hole in it for their head, and used that for the jog through the downpour.

It was while I watched the people trying to scramble across the rapidly muddying lawn that I spotted my Flake Sister making out with Drew. There’s just no accounting for taste. Though I did hear that he tore up the dance floor while I was messing with the wedding vehicle - he used to be a swing instructor.

At the end of the evening Billy and I talked about hitting DragonCon this time next year (he and his friends all live in Atlanta). I always have wanted to go to DragonCon. Billy’s all right, even if he doesn’t have any 70s in World of Warcraft (he has a couple 60s, but quit when he got tired of the grind long ago). Yes, I do feel it’s okay to judge people by their success with computer games. At least I make allowances for a mix of games - it works in his favor that he and his friends have been playing Settlers of Catan on an Xbox 360 back at their bed and breakfast.

There were a few points in the evening where I had to watch my niece, but not as often as previous nights. Most of the time there were plenty of other people who were befriending her and giving her gifts, because apparently lots of people like three-year-olds. She also ran into a four-year-old there, and we learned that my niece’s psychosis is contagious. They started running around clawing at people’s legs and yowling. I learned later that they were both playing at being Willow (my cat, who is unfriendly with everyone but me).

This new friend of hers was a little girl, of course. I learned her opinion of little boys yesterday. She had asked me then, “When you were my age, were you a little girl or a little boy?” Caught off-guard by the unexpected question, I answered, “A little boy.” “Oh,” she said, sounding disappointed, “I thought you were a little girl. I don’t like little boys.” The games where she gives me necklaces to wear are making more sense now.

As the evening drew to a close I dug an umbrella out of my laptop bag and gave it to my mother for the walk to the car. She was surprised I had thought to bring one, apparently not remembering that as we left Florida we knew there was a possibility that a hurricane would follow us up here. She promptly set the umbrella down somewhere and forgot all about it, as she’d run into a disgruntled Iraq vet who got caught in a feedback loop with her as they both bitched about how much they hated Bush. There’s a surprising emphasis on progressive politics at this gathering, given that I’d expect a few more varied opinions in such a gathering of several families. What really confuses me about it all is that I guess they’ve been without someone to argue with for so long that they’re seeing opportunities where there are none. The Iraq vet told me I “look like a Republican” (I was in a suit, I suppose, and didn’t smell like an unbathed hippie). A couple nights ago someone was talking politics near where I sat and interrupted themselves to ask me, “You aren’t a conservative Christian, are you?” I offered to burn a book for them. It seemed to go over well. I do know how to play to an audience (had it been conservatives asking me if I were a liberal atheist, I would have asked if they were looking to score some pot. I’m happy to make fun of either group).

After I escaped the clutches of the disgruntled vet (I never even got his name, he was abruptly spirited away mid-sentence by his wife) I tracked down the umbrella and gave it to my sister, who was trying to find all the presents my niece had received and then scattered throughout the cottage. She offered me a camera she’d picked up off a table thinking it was mine. It wasn’t. She looked around furtively, set it down on another table, and expressed hope that the real owner would find it eventually.

Tomorrow morning is brunch, then the long drive back to the airport. If we want to make the flight in time we pretty much need to bolt out the door the moment the brunch is over. I would bet money on us running late, and on the drive to the airport being hell. On the bright side, it’s a direct flight (who knew there would be one from Portland, Maine to Tampa?), so no layover. This will all be over soon.
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2008-09-08 1:40 am

Ah, at last, the accidental travelogue draws to a close...

My mother called me this morning. She told me that she wanted to go to Acadia National Park before we left town, but since we wanted to hit the brunch the bride and groom were throwing, we’d have to go beforehand and be quick. So a drive through the park, pretty much. Fine, I said. I was up already, and Flake Sister was stirring, it should be no problem. I hung up and finished packing my bags so I could load them into the car quickly when my mother, sister, and niece should arrive. Which presumably would be soon.

I finished packing. My sister started packing. I wandered downstairs and looked around - no car. I clomped back upstairs and grabbed my book. Flake Sister finished most of her packing. Still no car.

Flash forward a ways in time. Brunch starts. The car arrives. Or, more specifically, I go downstairs to find my mother, sister, and niece eating brunch as if they had intended to arrive just in time for the food, not an hour and a half beforehand. Anticipating that they would want to finish eating quickly so they would have time to drive through the park, I fetched my bags and put them in the car. I of course had to rearrange the bags that were already in the car, since they had been packed with no regard for the bags my sister and I would be adding to it. But that should come as no surprise to anyone by this time.

I had to go upstairs and fetch my sister’s bags and put them in the car too. But again, no surprise.

That done, I went to the kitchen to find that a frenzy of guests had made short work of most of the brunch food. The eggs were plentiful (and delicious), but the bread was mostly gone and I could find only one limp piece of bacon half-hidden under a paper towel in the kitchen.

As I ate I confirmed with my family that yes, they really did want to drive through the park. My mother especially wanted to go because she’d only ever been to one national park, and this would be her second. I didn’t completely grasp the logic, but the important concept I came away with was that by golly, they wanted to go to the park.

To aid them in their goal of visiting the park before we absolutely had to drive to the airport I did what any good son/brother would do: I lied. I overestimated how long the drive to the airport would take, I kept secret the fact that the flight had been postponed, and I caught each of them alone and told them that everyone else was ready and waiting for them so we could leave right now and still have time to catch the flight home. Every time I talked to someone the response was, “Oh, I’m ready too, I’ll leave now.” But they wouldn’t. They would run into one more person to talk to, or decide that the niece’s shoes needed to be washed, or get a new plate of eggs. And I would be standing in front of the cottage, alone and feeling like a tool.

I finally got them all out to the street at about the time when I’d told them we absolutely had to start driving for the airport. My mother sighed when she learned that we wouldn’t have time for the park. “That place was just so hard to get out of.”

I insisted on driving. Both sisters complained and asked what gave me the right to demand to drive. “My name is on the rental agreement” wasn’t really enough to satisfy them, so they only reluctantly acquiesced when I said we could change driver when we stopped for gas. The real reason I wanted to drive was because by this time I absolutely hated all of them, and if my hands weren’t occupied on the steering wheel they would be free to reach for someone’s throat if I let my guard down.

Naturally, this being absolutely the time they thought we needed to leave for the airport, they agreed that we should stop for lobster rolls. Yes. Right after brunch. Perfect time for lunch. But again, their hearts were set on it, so I stopped. I’m a softy, and they hadn’t gotten to go to the park, after all. They proceeded to take about as long to buy lobster rolls as it would have taken to drive through the park. Naturally.

When we finally got on the road things went okay for a while. I’d convinced the niece to watch “Howl’s Moving Castle” instead of “Toy Story” for the hundredth time, which I think helped the general mood quite a bit. Flake Sister had discovered her new Blackberry had Internet access, so she and my other sister were looking up the latest updates on Big Brother. My mother dozed. This was a good time.

When I did stop for gas no one else wanted to drive. I’m not sure if that was a victory for me or not. Either they realized that someone else in the driver’s seat might get too easily sidetracked and not get us to the airport on time, or they were too comfortable in the backseat to want to be the patsy up front getting their seat kicked repeatedly by the three-year-old.

The peace didn’t last, of course. With about 45 minutes left to the drive my sisters started taking shots at each other. It was light-hearted at first, but got more malicious as time went on. I was pleased.

Shortly before the airport I stopped to fill the gas tank in anticipation of returning the rental. The filling station I stopped at was so self-serve that the convenience store associated with it was closed. This did not please Flake Sister. “Can we go to another gas station? I want water.” I explained that we were ten minutes away from the airport, and she could find water there. She got sulky. I felt no remorse.

Before returning the car we unloaded the bags on the curbside. An attendant with a cart came over to ask if we wanted help, but we waved him off since I was doing fine taking the bags out of the back. Then when I had the bags on the sidewalk, I turned to see that the car itself was littered with jackets, purses, and various detritus. We’d barely spent any time in the car all weekend, and had only driven that day for about three hours, so I could only assume that someone had opened a portal to an alternate, garbage-filled dimension while I wasn’t looking. Indeed, when I turned around, there were sometimes more purses in the car than the last time I had looked. “That’s not mine, so I put it on the passenger seat,” I was told once. That we were trying to empty the car so it could be returned was not an idea that had occurred to anyone else, it seems.

The guy with the cart was watching us all that time. When he saw me hold my head in despair, he came over again. “Are you sure you don’t want help?” I answered at the same time as my sister, who had just finished freeing her daughter from the car seat: “HELP US!” As he started to load his cart, and I grabbed the purses in the car and threw them onto the curb with gleeful abandon, my mother grabbed my arm angrily. “You didn’t ask him how much it would cost,” she whispered fiercely. I stared back blankly. “He can have my left testicle if that’s the price, he’s taking those damned bags.” I left her fuming as I climbed into the finally-empty car and sped off to rental return.

When I got back to them at the ticket counter they were still checking in, of course. Flake Sister’s bag was too heavy, so she took some of her purchases out and put them in my mother’s bag to get it under 50 pounds, thus avoiding an extra fee. My mother took me aside meanwhile and explained that it was a dollar a bag to use that cart, and what if it had been two dollars a bag? I felt my sanity begin to slip away.

Once the bags were all checked in, Flake Sister reverted back to Experienced Traveler, striding ahead regally, exuding confidence, knowing exactly where she was going and expecting the rest of us to follow her lead.

She had, of course, left her purse behind. Good thing Experienced Traveler was accompanied by Not An Unobservant Moron this particular day.

We struggled through security, Experienced Traveler still in the forefront. When she got through security well ahead of the rest of us, who were trying to juggle our own belongings as well as those of my niece, she zipped off to a bar to order beer and calamari. This is why she was nowhere nearby when Security looked in Experienced Traveler’s purse and found the jam she had picked up at the first gas station.

My mother had been carrying the purse, she of the earlier, “I was sure they would trust me and let me back through security.” So of course she tried to talk them into just letting her bring the jam onto the plane. That went over as well as could be expected, so next she looked around, announced loudly, “Where the hell is your sister?” and pulled out her cellphone. My mother’s end of the conversation sounded something like this:

“You had jam in your purse.”
“You can’t bring jam on the plane.”
“No, I will not throw it away, that would be a waste. We need to check your backpack as luggage or something.”
“WILL YOU JUST GET YOUR ASS OVER HERE?!?”

Experienced Traveler made an appearance only long enough to giggle, say that she didn’t want to check her backpack, and that she didn’t want to leave her beer alone. My mother, still refusing to let the jam go to waste, agreed to let a TSA agent escort her back to the check-in counter to check her own carry-on bag with the jam inside. When she got there she learned that checking another bag would cost twenty dollars, so instead she slipped the jam into one of the bags that had already been checked in, which was fortunately still near the counter.

It’s worth noting that the bag she picked was my bag. And the compartment she picked to slip the jam into was the compartment holding my suit. Luckily the jam did not wind up breaking or leaking during the trip home, thanks for asking.

When my mother got back from the baggage check, Experienced Traveler was just returning from her beer. And right then they announced the boarding call for our flight. So I would like to gloat: My timing was perfect. I CALLED IT, BITCHES. They fought tooth and nail, they did everything they could to make us late, but I KNEW. The lesson I took away from that: It’s always best to lie your ass off when traveling with female relatives. “We don’t have to get there too early.” OH YES WE FUCKING WELL DO.

Ahem. Sorry. Just had to get that off my chest. It had been building all weekend.

My mother sat next to me on the flight and was cranky. She complained because she couldn’t have a window seat, and we weren’t all seated together. Her favorite airline is Southwest because they’re cheap, and she kept pointing out that Southwest doesn’t assign seats until you check in or somesuch. I didn’t think there would be any point to explaining to her that as late as we got to check-in counters on that trip, we would have had seats even farther apart under that approach. Instead I reminded her that we could have had more choice seats if we’d booked the flight earlier. She groused that we should have booked the flight two months ahead of time instead of just one month. I pointed out that it was only a month ahead of time when she finally committed to going to the wedding, so we couldn’t have bought the tickets earlier because of her. She then complained that I was a terrible son, and wasn’t worth the labor pains she’d gone through at 2 in the morning thirty-five years ago, and had she mentioned how long she was in labor with me?

I put on headphones at that point, but I still had to turn the iPod off for take-off and landing. Our plane was going from Maine to Florida, but it made a stop in Baltimore so we had to sit through a couple take-offs and landings. I got to hear things from her like:

“Why would anyone want to fly to Baltimore? It’s supposed to be a real shithole.”
“We’re the only group flying directly from Maine to Tampa? You’re kidding me!” (Serious, not sarcastic)
“Why would anyone want to fly to Tampa? It’s a real shithole.”
“When I travel again I am not bringing this much food.”

That last one was because of Flake Sister. Having gotten over being Experienced Traveler, she spent the flight harassing my mother for snacks. She called across the aisle (and another passenger), “Mom, I want something to eat.” My mother then helpfully pulled a package of Goldfish Crackers out of her bag and showed them to her. “Yes, give me the Goldfish!” The crackers got passed to her via my other sister, who was entertaining her kid with my laptop and a Spongebob video. Flake Sister ate one cracker, scrunched up her face, and gave the crackers back. “What else do you have? I don’t want Goldfish.” Out came a bag of peanuts, and the scene repeated, sans crackers, avec legumes. Five minutes later they cycled back to the Goldfish again. You get the idea.

At last the plane landed for the final time, and we were free. Well, almost free. You still have to get off of a plane after landing, and when you’re in the very back it means you’re the last ones off. And if it’s the last flight of the night for the plane they turn off the air conditioning before you can escape. Flake Sister was so eager to get out of there that once the aisle cleared enough for her to get out she leaped up, grabbed her bag from the overhead compartment, and nearly decapitated some poor girl standing nearby. She used momentum from swinging the bag to start a sprint for the exit. I did my best to look unrelated to her.

The luggage was already sitting on immobile conveyor belts when we got down to it. My mother marveled at the speed with which they had unloaded the baggage. I pointed out that it took us so long to get down there after being last off the plane while trying to wrangle a three-year-old that almost everyone else on the flight had already taken their bags and left. She continued to marvel. I hope when I’m that age I’m able to look at the world with that kind of childlike wonder. Well, without being in a second childhood, that is.

When my mother’s boyfriend picked us up it was with great relief that I loaded the bags into the trunk and collapsed into the backseat. My sisters had a different ride, so I was finally free of them. I half-listened to the boyfriend’s tales of my cat hissing and growling whenever he set foot into my room to fill her food bowl. I had more important things on my mind, like the bunny slippers in my suitcase that were still wet from being too near an open window when the rain started the night before, or the umbrella of mine my mother had just admitted she had lost in Maine, or the fact that I could download Spore later that evening.

Most important of all, I was hungry for something without lobster in it. Hooray for Taco Bell. I don’t always know what’s in it, but I can be certain it’s not lobster.

I voted. Make sure the rest of you folks in the US do the same, whoever you favor.

This was my mother's boyfriend's first time voting, ever. This morning before we left the house he went over the sample ballot with us, asking how we thought he should vote, and explaining the amendments and ballot questions. He got to sit through my mother and I arguing about some candidates - she was pushing for a straight party-line vote, while I was going by recommendations in the paper and suggesting some Republican incumbents who seemed to be doing decent jobs. When we got to a section titled "Soil and Water Conservation", with two candidates with no parties, and no recommendations from the paper, we told him to just pick one at random. At that point his nascent faith in the electoral process was nipped in the bud, as he realized just how arbitrary local politics really is.

The lines here in Florida are crazy long, even after the insanely long lines we had for early voting. Really, for the last day of early voting at the library near me (Saturday, there was some early voting on Sunday too but it was only at two locations in the whole damned county), there were cars parked along both sides of the four-lane street for a half-mile in either direction, plus cars filling nearby parking lots (a church and an office complex), and probably more I couldn't see on the street behind the library. You'd think with that much turnout the lines on Election Day wouldn't be too bad, but when the polls opened at my voting location this morning the line had at least a hundred people in it. The line was still growing when I was leaving.

I didn't see swarms of poll observers or anything in the park where I voted, but then I'm not in a district that would attract that kind of attention (i.e., the residents are mostly white). I did make sure my mother would call me if there's any trouble there - if there is, I want to go see!

First in line to vote, because he'd gotten there the earliest, was a young soldier in uniform with one leg in a cast, leaning on his crutches. That's a stirring sight.

I sat in line with my mother's boyfriend, putting on a Vaudevillian act for the other hapless souls sitting in line, heckling poll workers and poking fun at anything else that came to mind. Since we got there an hour early we were only tenth in line or so. That meant we got chairs, and it meant we got to spend that hour staring at the goddamned table with the goddamned creamer and goddamned cups and no goddamned coffee. Despite the cool weather (for Florida - about 60 degrees), they didn't finally put coffee out until the polls opened - at which point we were milling inside anyway. When we entered a warm hallway those of us who hadn't thought to wear long sleeves breathed a sigh of relief, and then we walked into the room with the ballots. That's when we learned the room was air conditioned to exactly the same temperature as it was outside. The only conclusion I can draw from the experience is that poll workers hate people.

The lines to get ballots moved slowly because the workers they'd assigned to those tables were 80 years old and legally blind. You give your name, they flip through some pages trying to find your name, and you spend a couple minutes fidgeting uncomfortably until you can't bear it anymore, grab the book, and flip it back to the page the lady had turned past five times already so you can just get on with voting. That's about how it went.

To vote in Florida you need to present photo ID and an ID with your signature on it. My mother's boyfriend presented his license, which didn't have his signature on it, so the lady behind the table asked him for a credit card. He pulled one out that he hadn't signed yet. She handed it back to him and asked him to sign it. So he did, right in front of her, and handed it back, and in that way our great democracy was protected from voter fraud.

There's also some rule that the lady behind the table has to verify your identity by having you tell her your address. She looked uncomfortable when she asked me to do it, because my address was right there on the page in front of her, and on the driver's license I'd handed her. She actually apologized to me for making me do it - she didn't understand the point of it either.

Last big election, Florida had big fancy voting machines. Those didn't go over so well - too many problems. So this year they went to all optical scan ballots, which means the "machines" people use to vote consist of a plastic divider resting on top of a plastic table. It warms my heart to see that someone in Florida recognized that sometimes low-tech is a perfectly acceptable way to go. No levers, no screens, no weird buttons, and no chads - just go behind the divider and the only machine back there is a gel-ink pen.

When the Florida ballot is filled out, you take it to a machine that rests on top of what looks disturbingly like a huge trash can. There's a slot to feed in your ballot, and it scans it quickly to check for any problems, then displays a message that your ballot is approved when it's done. Again, simple, and it gives immediate feedback to the voter. I just hope that isn't really a trash can that the ballot drops into.

Of course, the simple machine still gave some locations trouble, according to the news this morning. This is kind of weird, since we had a ballot back in August that used the same machines, and that served as a good, low-traffic trial run for the system (I know this because I went in with my mother the night before that election and helped them put the new machine together and figure the system out). But then, I guess I shouldn't put anything past Floridians when it comes to voting. I'm pretty sure that somehow Pat Buchanan will get most of the votes in Palm Beach.

Now that I have voted, there is a lot I can do with my sticker, it turns out. Starbucks will give out a free coffee today to anyone who goes in and says they voted (no sticker required). Ben and Jerry's is giving out free ice cream. Krispy Kreme is giving a free donut to anyone who comes in with an "I Voted" sticker. Free is good. If you're on the fence about voting today, remember that not only is it your civic duty, but you can get free stuff out of it.

UPDATE: I talked to my mother around lunchtime. The line has petered out to nothing - they still get voters, but there's almost no wait. It might be that their polling place is fairly efficient, but it looks like the early rush was from people worried because of the turnout for early voting along with people voting before work. I wouldn't be surprised if the crowds pick up again in the evening as people vote before heading home.

This is good news for me. I'll be trying to drag my grandmother to vote in a bit, and if there's any kind of line she'll almost certainly balk. Time spent in line would be time better spent comparing the prices of canned cat food in the grocery store, after all. "Get out your calculator, and see whether it's cheaper to buy four of this brand or twelve of this other one. I know Fluffy likes this one more, but Impy isn't a fan." Besides, she doesn't like McCain, and she thinks Obama is "ugly and has big ears," so she isn't enthusiastic about either candidate.

UPDATE UPDATE: The polling place for my grandmother had a steady stream of people, but very little wait - the traffic was just about on par with how quickly everyone could vote. The workers were very upbeat and friendly, greeting everyone at the door and joking with kids. When one worker discovered a college student was voting for the first time, he announced it and led the other workers in a cheer (much to the poor girl's chagrin).

Going in, my grandmother paused to talk to a black man who greeted us outside the church hosting the voting. He had some front teeth missing, and spoke with a slight accent I couldn't identify. She asked, "Where are you from?"

"Tampa," he replied, his smile frozen on his face.

"No, I mean originally."

The smile somehow froze even, um, frozener. "Rochester."

"Oh, upstate! Bah. Well, I always ask people where they're from when I hear a New York accent." She hobbled blithely on inside while the man blinked in surprise, and he and I both relaxed visibly. My grandmother is a complete nut, but I learned something today: That woman can identify a New York accent no matter how slight or obscured.

While I sat on a bench waiting for my grandmother to vote, a worker joked with a kid who came in with his mother, "Are you voting for Mickey or Minnie?" The child replied, "Who's Minnie?" Two women at a check-in table said, shocked, "Why, she's Mickey Mouse's wife!" They complained for a bit about how kids these days have no appreciation for the classic cartoons like Mickey Mouse or the Flintstones.

After the mother had dragged the little one off to a voting booth I sprang a joke on the pair of women that I just couldn't suppress. I've been tracking politics too closely to resist. "Are you sure Mickey and Minnie are married," I asked. "They could be domestic partners!"

The women blinked at me, and then one of them laughed. The other frowned thoughtfully. "I thought that was just gays." We had a friendly discussion about Amendment 2 on the Florida ballot, which is aimed at ruling out benefits for gay partners, but which has been more controversial than might be usual because the wording, many believe, would also remove domestic registries that are used by heterosexual couples who don't wish to marry (like divorced couples seeking to preserve health benefits for one member of the pair, or older couples who feel they're too old to marry but want visitation rights in hospitals). The one woman was convinced that the amendment would only apply to same-sex couples, while the other wasn't so sure.

I tried to stay objective when I described it, conscious of the fact that I was sitting in a polling place at the time, and a biased description of a ballot measure just felt wrong so close to people getting ready to vote. I mean, I think it's a dumb, pointless amendment - there are already laws in Florida preventing gay marriage, so amending the state constitution right now just seems punitive and mean-spirited, even if the wording weren't a pile of crap. But alas for restraint - when we got to the point in that conversation when I might normally have made that assertion, I shrugged helplessly and said, "I'm not a lawyer - that's just what I've heard the controversy is." Then I went back to fiddling with Picross on my faithful Nintendo DS. Ah, little numbers and pixels, you provide me with such solace in times such as those.

Yes, I am a grown man who plays handheld electronic games in public. Don't knock it, it beats boredom and fits in a pocket.

Once I gathered my grandmother into her van we pulled out of the parking lot with a cluster of people holding McCain signs on one side of the parking lot entrance, and a couple of people holding Obama signs on the other side. They were cheerfully ignoring each other, waving enthusiastically at every car that passed. I didn't hear anyone honk, it would have been interesting to see which side would take credit for the acknowledgment.

After letting my grandmother fuss around in a drugstore, then trying to get a free chicken sandwich (alas, Chick-Fil-A stopped giving sandwiches away earlier in the day, but they did give us coupons for free sandwiches on another visit), I took her home. On the drive to my own home I passed a few different polling places, all with a decent number of cars in the lots but none of the lines extending outside that marked every day of early voting. Having so many more polling places out there really makes a difference (early voting in Florida only took place at public libraries).

In a few minutes the polls here will close (though it will be another hour before polls close in the panhandle), and I'll get to talk to my mother about how things went. I would wager her response will be the same as it was at lunchtime - very smooth, with no problems. Florida seems to have come a long way since 2000 (even if this isn't necessarily a very representative district - mostly white and middle class, in Carrollwood for those familiar with the Tampa area). I'll also get to pick her up and go back to Chick-Fil-A to see if my mother can get a sandwich coupon too. The woman does love her coupons.