TV ‘news’ drives me nuts. I discover that we can pick up the CBC in Windsor with the rabbit ears. We bail on ABC and their ultra-annoying coverage. I can only imagine what the others are like; ABC is about the best of the bunch. And that’s so very sad. Oh, Canada!

Sinking feeling. 94% of the precincts in Florida are in and there is a 300,000+ lead for the emperor. Kerry is running behind in Ohio as well. If he loses Ohio, it’s pretty much all over. Not a good night. At this point, my cautious optimism has given way to quiet alarm.

The Boy Emperor announces an unprecedented event: he invites the press into the White House’s intimate setting so he can use the power of the office to address people still voting in open states and beg for their vote. First, it’s outrageous, typical of him. Second, it’s a sign, to me, that Rove et. al. is a bit nervous about...

We’re at 102 for the Emperor and 77 for Kerry. A bit nail-biting, but the evening is VERY young …

And now more states are called. Kerry has 77 EVs and Bush 66. So far, so good. CNN’s coverage is beyond awful. And I’m NOT tuning in to the Fascist News Network for love or money, until it’s time to see their downfallen, crestfallen faces when Kerry gives his victory speech. Mood remains cautiously optimistic.

So. Here we go. Are we going to dump the Emperor and his fascist extremist agenda? Is sanity returning to the White House? Officially, Kentucky, Indiana, West Virginia and Georgia have been called for Bush; Vermont for Kerry. But exit polling looks good. ‘Cautiously optimistic.’

Yeah, baby. I just voted an hour ago. It totally rocked. Our precinct is at Temple Beth Emreth on Packard. I arrived at 16:00 and got a great parking spot up front; I left at 16:15. 15 minutes from start to finish. There was no one in the ‘M to Z’ line and I filled out my ‘application to vote’...

Election day is here … It’s amazing to me, more than anything else, just to hear the conversations around me today. The media likes to portray the American populace as thoughtless, partisan, and angry. I saw just the opposite today. There were thoughtful, reasoned, sober discussions on the bus, at the polling site, everywhere I went. People have been thinking,...

Well, I guess there’s one nice benefit to all of this argument over gay marriage: better scripts from Hollywood. Riiiiight.

I was listening to some “undecided voters” whine about their conflictedness on the radio. If you’re still undecided on November 2 about who should be in the White House for the next four years, after over a year of relentless news coverage, attack ads, vituperation, vitriol, controversy, and fury, all I can say is, “Huh?”

The 40+-mph gusts this weekend have put an abrupt end to fall color, at least in my neighborhood. Almost all the trees were bare and stark this afternoon when I walked to the bus stop. The trees on campus seem to have weathered it a little better, but they’re starting to fade, too. Autumn is short this year.

There’s supposed to be snow showers later in the week ….. All this crazy Scandinavian can say is, it’s about time …..

I found this info at the excellent site Electoral-Vote.com this afternoon that is worth distributing as widely as possible. Find out today where your polling place is by calling your county clerk or checking www.mypollingplace.com. Alternatively, call 1-866-MYVOTE1 to find your polling place. Check the hours the polls are open with your city or county clerk. Print the League of...

Tomorrow is pretty much the most critical election I’ve seen in my 41 years on the planet. Voter turnout is expected to be the highest it’s been since I was a child. Fascist volunteers will be at polling sites in key states, just waiting to pounce on the unwary who are in the wrong polling place. They know that the...

Tomorrow is pretty much the most critical election I’ve seen in my 41 years on the planet. Voter turnout is expected to be the highest it’s been since I was a child. Fascist volunteers will be at polling sites in key states, just waiting to pounce on the unwary who are in the wrong polling place. They know that the...

Happy Hallowe’en from the Scary Angel Beagle, everyone!

From the crowd that brought us ‘shrink the government to a size where it can be drowned in a bathtub’ comes « a truly brilliant idea »: ‘The Bush administration is threatening to shut an airfield at Midway Atoll in the mid-Pacific that has been available as an emergency landing site for decades. The airlines say the closing would force...

Speaking of Ohio, « Johnny Reb Asscroft is up to his usual tricks »: ‘Bush administration lawyers argued in three closely contested states last week that only the Justice Department, and not voters themselves, may sue to enforce the voting rights set out in the Help America Vote Act, which was passed in the aftermath of the disputed 2000 election....

       « Our Life in Michigan – Strolling Around Northside Elementary School »

Wow … fog in Ann Arbor. Who knew? Reminds me of San Francisco.

Another summery (sort of) day today, though it was windier and a little chillier. It’s supposed to start storming again tonight, though, so we’ll see how long the rain lasts. Last night there was an amazing lunar eclipse, the last that will be visible in Michigan till March 2007 (seems a long time away, though 2 years and 4 months...

« No comment needed ».

There was a big article on the front page of the Michigan Daily this morning about a student who got hit by a car yesterday evening as she was crossing Bonisteel and Murfin on North Campus. A Department of Public safety representative said that speeding is more rampant on North Campus because there are fewer stop signs on North Campus....

It was almost muggy tonight when I walked home from campus at around 7.30. The temps were in the low 60s, but the humidity was up in the 70-80% range. It’s almost the end of October, and it’s like the middle of summer. The only way you can tell it’s autumn riught now is that we’ve passed the peak of...

The ASquared database was hosed last night; thank god for Google caching. If you made a comment yesterday, it’s probably lost, however. We apologize for the inconvenience. Our web host, Textdrive, is very dissatisfied with the server farm in Texas and is moving to a new provider. They’re ironing things out and it should get better soon.

It was a busy week, one of the busier I’ve had at SI. I had a poster presentation on Wednesday afternoon based on some of the work in my summer directed field experience with the IPL (as did about 60 or 70 other SI students, based on their various DFEs), and I had a screening interview on Friday afternoon for...

It’s official: Snow due anyday now, since Dairy Queen is now closed for the season.        « Our Life in Michigan – Rainy Saturday Afternoon | Fall Peak Colors »

       « Our Life in Michigan – Fall Campus Colors »

Fascinating (and welcome) ghost-town feel to Ann Arbor today (the grim Scandinavian weather added to that feel). The center of town was completely deserted. Liberty Street was like a graveyard. Ambrosia, which has more and more become almost impossible to find an empty seat in, was blessedly empty except for a couple of students and an employer interviewing an earnest...

When I see the kind of ominous, implacable steel-gray overcast skies I saw today, I start wondering if maybe Dixie Franklin wasn’t right when she called post-summer Michigan a “sunless horror, devoid of joy and hope,” except that with a year’s experience, I realize that the weather here can change on a dime. It’s supposed to be sunny on Wednesday...

It’s cold, my hands hurt. The fall colors are gorgeous and I wish I were a better photographer who could capture some of the magic. I love October best of all, but it’s also sad, because one of my least favorite months, November, is howling like a wolf at the door. In November, my skin dries out and is itchy...

Meanwhile, « badly mismanaged Delta Air Lines reports that it is running out of cash »: ‘Delta Air Lines, which is struggling to avoid a bankruptcy filing, said yesterday that it expected to lose as much as $675 million for the third quarter and that it was using cash at a steep rate. The news from Delta, reported in a...

I was feeling sorry for myself on the way home last night (the usual grad student complaints and kvetches, not worth going into detail about) until a trio of first-year biz school students got on the bus and started exchanging grim graveyard jokes with one another about how they were failing all of their classes but it really didn’t matter...

Yesterday was the beginning of the term “study break” (what a joke) and also of (true) autumn: rain most of the day (not heavy, but not sporadic, either), windy conditions, and cold that that was deep enough to make me actually rue not having brought my gloves and a heavy jacket. I waited for the bus last night, and, predictably,...

It’s currently 39 on its way down to 35 degrees overnight. It’s the 16th of October. I’d say I want to move back south to New Mexico, but I’m told Santa Fe got a huge snow dump the other day. I’m not going to be warm again until May, am I?

Banned from the bike though I am, I did manage to sneak a ride tonight. I had a meeting with a client on the UM campus. So I loaded the Bobcat into the Jeep and drove to a parking spot as close as I could get, then got out the bike and rode the six last blocks. I hate walking...

Little-noticed news today includes news that Gulf War Syndrome-suffering veterans are probably suffering from exposure to toxic chemicals, something the Pentagon has been lying about for over a decade; a revealing report in the Times that shows that private freight railroads have been engaged in a decades-long pattern of death- and injury-causing neglect and have then hidden behind Amtrak, which...

A couple of law students were on the bus this morning. East Coasters, from the sound of it: “We had a big fight this morning.” “What about?” “She started shouting at me. ‘I can’t believe you made me move to this sh*t place!’” “Dude, that sounds rough.” “Yeah. Well. I told her, ‘At least we aren’t in Ithaca!’”

“I’m doing really well. It’s really brutal, and I’m really stressed out, but I’m doing well.” A first-year grad stuent, apparently, on her cell phone.

The crowd in the Diag on Friday was relatively small (only about 100, if you believe the Daily), but everybody there was passionate and in a defiant mood, even though the overriding mood of the times is one of fear and (sometimes) despair. Ralph Williams, who has been in the English Department here since 1969, gave a short but powerful...

The Michigan Daily carried a headline in yesterday’s edition: “Coming Out rally highlights empowerment.” That has got to be one of the dullest, innocuous, sleep-deprived headlines ever. (I know because I wrote a lot of the other dullest headlines ever when I was a page editor in college.) Anyway, the other unsuccessful aspect of this article was that it spoke...

It was kind of chilly yesterday, but today it was back to sun and nearly 70-degree temps. I see the National Weather Service is predicting “showers likely” for the rest of the week; I’ll believe it when I see it. Today I walked around campus in a bulky zippered sweatshirt because I thought it would be cold. I felt like...

Very sad news in the paper this morning: ’ The Yankee Air Museum, a popular air history attraction at the Willow Run Airport near Ypsilanti, burned to the ground Saturday evening when a fast-moving fire swept through the building, destroying priceless aviation artifacts and two airplanes. ‘Three of the museum’s most prized aircraft—a C-47, B-25D and B-17G restored to flying...

Yet another gorgeous, mild, cloudless October morning in Ann Arbor … what is this, California? Yesterday we took a drive during the big game between UM and Minnesota and the trees had exploded with color seemingly overnight, with a riot of reds and yellows and oranges everywhere you looked. Absolutely stupendous. If there’s no other reason to live in Ann...

[What, no questions about us faggots and our families and how evil we are?] Kerry: 1. Won’t cede sovereignty over US, but our country is strongest when we lead alliances.2. I have plan to hunt down and kill terrorists and get things better in Iraq. 3. We have a crisis here in the middle class … healthcare … schools and...

Three instances of your mistakes and how you corrected it: Emperor says … he has made decisions. Beat. Says he’ll take responsibility for tactical problems in war. On big decisions in Iraq and Afghanistan weren’t mistakes. Trying to trap me into saying it was wrong. Again gets hyper defensive on Iraq. Goes way off on Saddam. And tax cuts. Made...

Kerry on abortion: I respect the belief about life and when it begins. Raised a Catholic. Helped lead me yesterday and today. I can’t take an article of faith and legislate it for someone who doesn’t share it. I can’t do that. I can council people. I can talk about responsibility and abstinence. I have to represent ALL the people....

Emperor: ‘I’m NOT TELLING!’ That’s supposed to be funny? Strict interpretation. Personal opinion. Here’s who I wouldn’t pick. Invokes Pledge case. Dred Scott case (??!!). What appalling ignorance of American history. No litmus test except for interpretation. Kerry’s response goes to Bush’s words four years ago … we need conservative judges. His two favorites are Scalia and Thomas. I don’t...