Well, now that we’ve stopped arguing, it looks like we have an opportunity to settle this once and for all.

The Political Machine is a strategy game in which players take on the role of campaign manager for a US Presidential candidate. They must put all their political knowledge to the test as they campaign around the country in an effort to win enough voters to their cause to win on election day.

It’s got online multiplayer, so all we need to do is all buy the game, set up a bracket system, and play a tournament, each as our chosen candidate. We’ll all vote for the preferred candidate of the big winner.

I’ve been jogging with Christian from the office for the last couple of months. We were doing lunchtime runs, but having that degenerate into 90 minutes or so was cutting into productive time. So we switched to trying to head out between 6 and 7 in the morning.

I worked late last night and grabbed pizza at Chris’ place in Newport before heading back to Mystic. Law and Order was on; a case about a crime of passion between a Liza Minelli impersonator and his lover. One of the male witnesses, insunating that the murder suspect was cheating on the deceased was revealing an interesting phone call where a different man answered the suspect’s phone, and said. “You have male company at 6 AM, it’s probably not your jogging partner.”

Chris and I both died laughing.

(Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)

(And the story reads terribly in my opinion)

Your tax dollars at work doing a good thing: the National Highway Traffic Safety Adminstration released updated crash and roll-over stats in their Buying Safer Car: NCAP.

Hey y’all –

Just wanted to drop a note by way of explaination of my recent silences. First, life’s caught up to me and I’m busier than a sailor on shore leave at the office – life is good, but between trying to be a dad and husband, and reading IEEE standards, not so much time for blogging. It’s compounded by my Reserves Annual Training coming up the first couple weeks in September (Woo Hoo! Norway!), and others in the office taking vacation.

Second – I feel somewhat responsible for the rancorous turn the porch has taken recently, and want to spin that down.

Seriously, though, where am I going to be able to make the biggest difference – stumping for GW or participating on the school board? Teddy Kennedy was right when he said that all politics is local. The tragedy of the last 4 decades is the nationalization of elections, setting neighbor against neighbor while our freedoms and ability to control our communities has been co-opted by Washington. Setting
economic policy on a national level is a farce – the 80’s and 90’s were great for the west and the sun belt, but were hideous for the Rust Belt. National economic policy favored free trade and intellectual policy; environmental law, high labor costs, and product liability concerns strangled older manufacturing operations. Likewise education – teaching programming works well for Austin and San Jose;
Groton (HQ to Pfizer) would do well to focus on chemistry, or arts to fuel the tourist trades.

“Being informed” is kind of a red herring, when the information being passed by national media is seriously colored and filtered by the issues the editorial boards want to pass (see NYT’s recent confession and the VRWC talk show hosts). It’s entirely possible to find something new to be paralyzed by every day; does that help or hinder? I’m starting to think it’s better to find a way to contribute, and keep on trying to make things better.

So I’ll continue to be around; but have a half dozen things higher on my list of priorities (Namely ranking picks for the FFL drafts I’ve got next week – my baseball season has ended up being highly depressing).

Good news for at least one of the BPB’ers. XMRadio is gearing up for the coming fall football season by adding college sports radio channels for the ACC and PAC-10. They’ll be carrying basketball later on, too. If by some chance you happen to be stuck in a sports zone that’s not your preference…say, somewhere on the West Coast, and one of your alma maters is some college like…um, let’s say UNC then this might be a way to at least hear the games that won’t be broadcast in your area.