Live from the W.Va Voter Protection Project in Wheeling, W. Va. The big news is- no news. So far, no one has called to complain about any sort of voter supression or inappropriate behavior.

No word on other states. W. Va was likely to be quiet, given that the local government is Dems not Republicans (unlike FL and OH). Still, it's good to be bored. As they said in the training: we're in the recount prevention business.

Stay tuned . . . .

A Wetmachine Quasi-Editorial Endorsement (speaking for myself only, not all Wetmachiners).

I was talking with my old man last night by telephone. He's a retired guy, spent his whole life in finance. Was Chief Financial Officer for three different multi-national companies, and at one time president of a national society of CFOs. A depression kid who came from nothing, he was a “Flying Fortress” navigator in 1945, worked his way through college (driving 18-wheelers) and put all seven of his children through college, and several of us through private high school as well. He follows monetary policy as naturally as I follow baseball. He voted for Eisenhower and Nixon, and has always extolled the values of work, private enterprise, and initiative.

My brother Mike and I went to Xavier High School in New York CIty, a Jesuit, military school whose most famous grad is Antonin Scalia. My father's motto is “a place for everything and everything in its place.”

What do you suppose he thinks about Kerry and Bush? [Read More!]

In any honest election (which this may not be), I predict a Kerry landslide tomorrow. Why? See below. [Read More!]

I started a new job yesterday. My job is to help invent the future. [Read More!]

While busier than I could have imagined, I just have to share this.

According to the Daily Oregonian, the Department of Homeland Security is now keeping us safe from Rubik's Cube Knock-Offs. What next threat to our national security will they foil? Perhaps they will save us from those counterfeit “Garfield” dolls with suction cups? (Does anyone even _buy_ Rubik's Cubes anymore?)

Stay tuned . . .

Allergic to cats but still want one? You could medicate yourself constantly or, through the miracle of bioengineering, get in line to buy a hypo-allergenic cat. The marketers over at Allerca call it a “lifestyle pet.” Um... ok, I guess that's a better term than Frankenpet...


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I know Harold has just posted that he expect to be swamped until after election day, but I, for one, am very anxious to hear a Sausage Factory opinion on all the Sinclair Broadcasting fiasco, the Pappas
story, and other issues related to the public airwaves, media consolidation, and democracy.

We know you're busy, Harold, and we'll all wait if we have to. But this is just to let you know that there are at least a few of us out here who really do look to Sausage Factory to help us make sense of this confusing, and scary, nexus.

Sorry I've been absent so long, and unlikely to have time for any real lengthy stuff until after election day. But my friend Carol passed this on to me and I need to share.

Nothing new here for anyone who has read my previous stuff, but I'm pleased to see Joss Whedon selling it.

Stay tuned . . . .

Well, this one is just.... out there. Researchers at the Univeristy of Florida managed to grow neurons from a rat's brain in a jar, and have it control a flight simulator.

It appears the primary goal of the research was to determine how the brain processes information. So, this really isn't a mad scientist trying to create a race of rat-brained killer robots. At least, not yet.

(Link lifted from BoingBoing.)

I've always been interested in the “fake it to make it” credo, which is pretending that you are something until you become that thing.

Fiction writers contiually create realities that exist on paper until someone later makes it real (like Heinlein's waldos). When governments create realities, then what? Cyberpunk author William Gibson has begun to blog again. In a post Sun, Oct. 17, he quotes an article from the New York Times Magazine by Ron Suskind.

In the quoted section, Suskind recounts a conversation with an unnamed senior advisor to Bush.

'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out.'

That level of arrogance, of certainty, scares the heck out of me.
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