Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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   for want of ballot diversity
Tuesday, November 8 2011

It was warm, sunny day, of the sort one never takes for granted in November. These are good days to do things like gather up the summer's garden hoses so they won't be lost under the snow and snap like twigs when they're eventually tripped over in cold weather. But even with temperatures in the 60s, hose tends to be a little too stiff to roll up; it's best to leave it baking in the sun before trying.
I also took the opportunity to cut my hair for the first time in months. I did so down by the greenhouse in front of a full-length mirror. (As always, I let the hair clippings accumulate on the ground for critters to recycle in their nests.) Gretchen's verdict when she saw the damage was the same always: it looked good in the front, but in the back, it looked like it had been done by a "mental patient."

Gretchen voted earlier in the day, and I was just going to blow it off this year. But then the local Democratic party took note of the fact that I hadn't voted and left a message on my machine, and then Gretchen convinced me I had to vote against one of the local asshole Esopus Valley landowners (his land actually borders our own) who was running for something. So, after having Gretchen fix the worst errors in my self-inflicted haircut, I dragged my ass down the mountain and voted. I was careful not to vote for any candidate who was running as both a Democrat and a Republican (or as both a Working Families Party candidate and a Conservative Party candidate). In two such cases I wrote Gretchen's name in the write-in part of the optically-read ballot. Next year we'll have to get more people to write her in to some office. Though she's not a strong believer in democracy, she'd make an awesome despot.

Meanwhile Gretchen had made a pot of delicious bow tie noodles in a creamy sauce featuring chunks of the chick pea-and-rice tempeh we'd bought yesterday. The tempeh seemed extra funky and chunky, and I mean that in a good way.

This evening, like many progressive satan-loving liberals, I was elated by the results of election day. A grotesque ballot initiative that would have amended the Mississippi constitution to define "personhood" as beginning at conception went down to a surprisingly bad defeat. While I know of a few exceptions, for the most part Mississipians are willfully-ignorant religious kooks, but evidently they're not crazy enough to give up their birth control pills. If it can't pass in Mississippi, it's difficult to see where such a ballot initiative could pass.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?111108

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