I think I have figured out how the Universe actually works. More on that later.

If Tim Tebow were to offer tone control advice to the members in the band, would that make him an embouchure quarterback?

Shots from the 2008 Greater Gainesville are up on the site.

I can’t thank promoter Brian Elliot enough for the amazing job he’s done resurrecting bodybuilding here in my hometown. Probably 90 percent of the competitors were going on stage for their first competition, and that’s always a promising sign. The show was amazingly well-lit, and ran as smoothly as any I’ve seen.

Everyone had an enjoyable time and I’m already looking forward to the show next year.

Next shows to go up: the 2008 All Forces and the 2008 All South.

(BTW, carelessly erasing the flurry of “Vote for Me!” ads from the latest political carnival, I accidentally deleted a phone call from one of the competitors asking about shots from the Gainesville. Please shoot me an email, thanks.)

• The line when I voted this morning wasn’t bad at all. It was crowded, but there were plenty of open stations.

  I had had the idea of creating an “express lane” for those who had cast ballots in the previous two elections, but it turns out not to have been needed.

• Here’s one reason polls should be banned: They favor the two-party system.

  Suppose a large number of people wish to vote for a third-party candidate. If the media has skewed the polls by saying Party D has or is getting a lead (not that they would ever do that), then the third-party voter is likely to cast his vote for Party R, his second choice, even though it wasn’t necessary to do so. Perhaps worse, Party R now has a perceived mandate.

  Eliminating election-day polls will require a self-imposed restriction by the news media, so it will never happen.

  Of course an alternative to this would be to allow people to vote against a candidate rather than for one. This might be surprisingly popular with the “Anybody but ______” crowd.

• Typical of the liberal “We have to win at any cost” mentatlity, there’s been a “Businesses for Obama” full-page ad in the paper the last few days. It contains a highly misleading graph showing America’s finances over the past four presidents.

  Of course Clinton comes off looking like a magician, because the way he juggled the books it looks as though we were making huge profits and reducing our national debt.

  It overlooks the facts that Reagan inherited a foreign mess from Carter but still managed to end the Cold War, that Clinton inherited the Internet boom and let it bubble and burst, and most importantly, that Clinton financed his “recovery” in large part by gutting military maintenance spending.

  Most people wouldn’t notice that vulnerability in our military preparedness. But someone did and, perceiving us to be weak, attacked. Good thinking, Bill.

  The graph then shows a huge spike in deficit spending after W. took office. This makes sense. Before he could do anything after 9/11, Bush had to bring the military back to full preparedness—to “pay off the Clinton credit card”, as it were.

  That debt doesn’t show up in the graph, though. It only shows dollars and cents.

  Point of all this is that, in the words of Twain, “there are lies, there are damn lies, then there are statistics”.

• I’ve slung stink at both candidates over the last few weeks. When the election is over, and sometime before the impeachments begin, I’ll remove at least the ones regarding the winner. Whoever ends up in the office, the position itself deserves our respect and support, and there are things you can say about a candidate that aren’t appropriate when referencing a sitting President.

  I’m not taking back anything about Garry Trudeau, though. When the day comes that our enemies have nothing to throw at us but sarcastic artists, he will be the perfect choice for leader. Until then, I wish he’d stop meddling.

There was a plane this afternoon towing a banner that said, “Vote Obama Today!” Which is interesting because early voting has ended and the regular election is tomorrow.

Normally I wouldn’t be concerned about anyone being foolish enough to choose the leader of the free world based on a sign hanging out the a$$-end of a toy plane.

But these days, I worry, greatly, about the future of our country.

Do we really have enough gullible people to elect Obama?

Despite having been fooled once by the Democrat mantra “We will change things!” in 2006, is there really a majority who believe that Obama can provide solutions elusive to experts, simply because he says he can with such conviction?

Are that many Americans really so far removed from reality?

For several days now there’s been a van parked in front of one of the buildings on the University campus, essentially offering to drive people downtown to vote if they promise to vote for Obama.

I was wishing we could have the police remove them from the premises. Of course they would complain about the people’s right to vote and right to free speech. To which I would respond,

“Just because you have an individual right

does not mean that the state or local government

can’t constrain the exercise of that right.”

—Barack Obama

which is a direct quote from Obama in the Pennsylvania debates in 2008.

Surely you got all the change you wanted on 9/11.

“Yes we can.” —Barack Obama

“Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.” —Dr. Ian Malcolm

All this brouhaha about “truthiness” has me jealous and enraged—so much so that I was compelled to create my own cool meme.

Even facts which are chock-full of truthiness pale in comparison to those which are unquestionably scientificky.

Sure, the word has been on the Internet since at least 2002, but I didn’t find that out until after I’d thunk it up.

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Just when you think businesses had no clue left to lose….

Dell is now selling new computers with Windows XP—if you pay a $99 downgrade fee.

Hey, Microsoft—How can it be a downgrade if it costs more? If people are paying this fee, doesn’t that mean it’s actually an upgrade—that Vista isn’t as good as XP?

Hey, Dell—If “downgrades” are $99, why can’t I buy a system, upgrade from Vista to Linux, and get $99 back?

I’ve always liked Ron Paul, but he didn’t do himself or the country any favors when he declined to run on the same ticket as Libertarian candidate Bob Barr.

Here’s how I had briefly imagined things working out:

• Dr Paul accepts the invitation, or at least counter-offers to run for President with Barr moving to veep. I think Bob would have jumped at the chance.


• Dr Paul’s tremendous grass-roots support energizes an already-healthy Libertarian movement.


• Seeing a viable opportunity for a pair of A rated candidates to win the election, versus the C+ rated Republican candidate, the NRA throws its resources and recommendation to the Libertarian party. That’s six million votes, stated conservatively. Suddenly, at public demand, there are three parties in the debates.


• Sensing the fallacy of the two-party argument “Voting for a third-party candidate is throwing your vote away”, millions of disaffected conservatives cast their ballots for Barr and Paul.


• Having now an actual separation between the tenets of the two leading parties, the Democrat platform is forced to withstand the harsh light of fact and reason. Obama is still charismatic and enjoys broad media support, but the contradictions and fallacies in the Democrat wishlist are exposed for all to see.


• Barr and Paul win the election, and by leveraging their broad popular support, work immediately and tirelessly to remove and rebuild our broken tax system, resulting in an unprecedented surge in the economy, billions of dollars in inefficiencies recovered, immigration issues mitigated, and sufficient revenue to fully fund all current Federal entitlement programs and even begin paying down the national debt.


• Most importantly, with Fair Tax in place, they have kicked down the stanchions that had been supporting the two-party system, and removed the ability of self-interested factions to subject American voters to economic blackmail.

Well, anyway, it was a nice dream for the few days it lasted.

I would have been much more impressed with Microsoft’s Mojave Experiment if they’d done a double-blind test wherein the OS represented as “Mojave” was really a similarly badge-stripped, tricked-out version of, say, Ubuntu with KDE 4, or perhaps Linux Mint—then compared Vista’s numbers to the others.

Or if they’d asked the users to try to print to an all-in-one device that hadn’t had the drivers updated yet.

Microsoft’s proposal, that Vista’s shortcomings are due to marketing issues, distracts the company from its real chores of fixing the problems before the Windows 7 ship date.

Tonight I ate at a popular national restaurant—never mind which one, but it rhymes with “Fracker Carol”—and in the adjoining store, I noticed that there were Hallowe’en objects mixed in with all of the normal year-round fare.

That was all right, but here we are just getting October well under way, and they’ve already rolled out their Christmas merchandise, and it’s already starting to shoulder its way in among the other seasonal merchandise.

Needless to say, that juxtaposition is not graceful. Not at all.

I am fraught with the image of the three Wise Men delivering their gifts of gold, myrrh, and Frankenstein.

Following the lead of our Democrat canvassers, as they used to say in Chicago in the Good Old Days, “Election time is here—vote early, vote often!”

Shots from the 2008 Southeastern USA are up on the site. Hey, only 8 days out this time. ;)

The lighting at this show was excellent, and I think the shots reflect that.

I had taken the “new” motorcycle (it’s a 1995 BMW R100 airhead that I absolutely love) down for its first real road trip and so was a little jounced around by the time I arrived.

But the show went well, and I managed to take care of all my other chores while I was down there too—even managed to take in most of the Gators giving LSU all they could handle, and on a 42 inch plasma screen too. All in all, a good trip.

Next up: the first annual Greater Gainesville, and can it be possible that the lighting here was even better than the Southeastern? All this and my first take on Bibble Pro. Stay tuned.

You have to give Barack Obama mad props for courage. He’s jumping in way over his head, without a road map or prior art for guidance. He can’t possibly be ignorant of this fact.

The only problem is that America in its current state might not be able to survive someone’s experiment in personal growth.

Shots from the 2008 Lakeland contest are up on the site.

Not my best work, I think I must have been distracted by the architecture again.