Month: November 2004

vocabulary

Daily Candy’s Lexicon IX

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I received these words and definitions in my inbox this morning courtesy of Daily Candy. I thought I’d share:

beighborhood
n. Area populated by good-looking people. (“Let’s go downtown. Fifth Street has turned into a total beighborhood.”)

DIZO
n. Acronym. Describes (busy, working, all-too-typical) couple: Dual Income, Zero Orgasm.

Earnest Hemorrhage
n. A man who is oppressively forthcoming with every thought and feeling. Antonym: Ernest Hemingway, linguistically stingy author.

foxymoron
n. One who is incredibly dumb but incredibly cute, who simultaneously attracts and repels. (“I’m so ashamed. I hooked up with that foxymoron last night.”)

GHaG
n. Acronym. Girl-Hating Girl. The one whose only friends are guys.

hobeau
n. A less-than-hygienic boyfriend. (“Better open the window. Here come Gloria and her hobeau.”)

nontourage
n. A group of undesirable sycophants. (“The party was fun until Justin showed up with his nontourage.”)

pharmasecrecy
n. The secret bond one has with her pharmacist. (“Only Mr. Myers knows the truth about my little Klonopin/Paxil/laxative habit.”)

showflake
n. Person who chronically misses every appointment (e.g., haircuts, doctor visits, dinners). (“Is Louisa going to show, or is she pulling a showflake again?”)

SoDeeWah
n. Socialite/designer/whatever. The model/actress/ whatever of the ’00s. You know the type.

staremaster
n. Gym dandies who constantly check themselves out in the mirror. (“If that staremaster touches his pecs one more time …”)

politics

Evidence Mounts That The Vote May Have Been Hacked

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Reading this article has further infuriated me – I was pissed off that Kerry threw in the towel and went down without a fight the day after Election Day but now I’m really pissed off. I keep reading more and more info about how the election would have been rigged and while at first I thought it was one or two isolated incidents, now I’m starting to believe a bit in a conspiracy here. Yes, I know its easier to think that “we were hacked” instead of “we lost” but the facts are the facts. After the jump, read an article I grabbed from CNN.com on 11/05/2004 about one such “interesting anomaly.”

Thanks Chris for making my blood boil…

Glitch gave Bush extra votes in Ohio

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — An error with an electronic voting system gave President Bush 3,893 extra votes in suburban Columbus, elections officials said.

Franklin County’s unofficial results had Bush receiving 4,258 votes to Democrat John Kerry’s 260 votes in a precinct in Gahanna. Records show only 638 voters cast ballots in that precinct.

Bush actually received 365 votes in the precinct, Matthew Damschroder, director of the Franklin County Board of Elections, told The Columbus Dispatch.

State and county election officials did not immediately respond to requests by The Associated Press for more details about the voting system and its vendor, and whether the error, if repeated elsewhere in Ohio, could have affected the outcome.

Bush won the state by more than 136,000 votes, according to unofficial results, and Kerry conceded the election on Wednesday after acknowledging that 155,000 provisional ballots yet to be counted in Ohio would not change the result. (Full Ohio results)

The Secretary of State’s Office said Friday it could not revise Bush’s total until the county reported the error.

The Ohio glitch is among a handful of computer troubles that have emerged since Tuesday’s elections. (Touchscreen voting troubles reported)

In one North Carolina county, more than 4,500 votes were lost because officials mistakenly believed a computer that stored ballots electronically could hold more data than it did. And in San Francisco, a malfunction with custom voting software could delay efforts to declare the winners of four races for county supervisor.

In the Ohio precinct in question, the votes are recorded onto a cartridge. On one of the three machines at that precinct, a malfunction occurred in the recording process, Damschroder said. He could not explain how the malfunction occurred.

Damschroder said people who had seen poll results on the election board’s Web site called to point out the discrepancy. The error would have been discovered when the official count for the election is performed later this month, he said.

The reader also recorded zero votes in a county commissioner race on the machine.

Workers checked the cartridge against memory banks in the voting machine and each showed that 115 people voted for Bush on that machine. With the other machines, the total for Bush in the precinct added up to 365 votes.

Meanwhile, in San Francisco, a glitch occurred with software designed for the city’s new “ranked-choice voting,” in which voters list their top three choices for municipal offices. If no candidate gets a majority of first-place votes outright, voters’ second and third-place preferences are then distributed among candidates who weren’t eliminated in the first round. (E-vote goes smoothly, but experts skeptical)

When the San Francisco Department of Elections tried a test run on Wednesday of the program that does the redistribution, some of the votes didn’t get counted and skewed the results, director John Arntz said.

“All the information is there,” Arntz said. “It’s just not arriving the way it was supposed to.”

A technician from the Omaha, Neb. company that designed the software, Election Systems & Software Inc., was working to diagnose and fix the problem.

politics

More Election 2004 Info

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I have a feeling that I’m going to be posting info about the 2004 election for a long, long time. I still need to post about how both the Red Sox and George Bush won this year – I mean, what else will happen? Will the magnetic poles flip sometime before New Year’s Eve? That isn’t supposed to happen for another 10,000 years or so but who knows, it’s been that kind of year.

Here are two things that I was sent today that I would like to share, the first is funny and the second will really make you think:

>> A proposed cover of Time Magazine that probably won’t be published anytime soon.

>> An interesting comparison of maps. In one corner, a map of the U.S. Pre-Civil War. In the other corner, a map of how the country voted this year.

Thanks Phyllis for sending

ramblings

Frontline Show to Watch on 11/9

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Hurry up and watch this upcoming Frontline on PBS about how “the multibillion-dollar ‘persuasion industries’ of advertising and public relations and how marketers have developed new ways of integrating their messages deeper into the fabric of our lives.” It sounds interesting, compelling, slightly scary and yes, I work at a marketing company so there will be a serving of guilt along with this program for me at least.

I’m saying “hurry up and watch” because who knows how much longer PBS will survive in this “New America.” For illustration, here is part of a post that I got on BoingBoing from someone named Molly:

I got a very clear picture of his base constituency when having a discussion over lunch with some co-workers about our favorite children’s shows. I was commenting on how much I liked Sesame Street, and one woman (a very vocal Christian conservative) said, “Oooh.. Sesame Street is too tolerant for me”. To my horror, several other women nodded their heads in agreement. I guess I didn’t even think there was such a thing as too tolerant.

Yikes.

politics

New Map of America post-2004 Election

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While this map might not make it into the Rand McNally atlas, it maybe should. I’m sort of surprised today about how I’m not as angry as I thought I’d be. I’ve almost, dare I say it, moved to the acceptance stage of grief. I think the answer to my lack of anger today is religion, namely my religion.


I’m Jewish, therefore I’m used to ALWAYS being in the minority. I asked my father at 12:37 AM on Wednesday morning, “Why do I always have to be in the minority? I mean, i know I’m Jewish so being a minority is sort of baked into my existence but look at that map [red state/blue state] – there is almost no blue on it! It is seriously depressing. Its like the entire U.S. is against us.” His response was, “Smart people will always be in the minority. It’s a fact of life that you need to deal with.”

Unfortunately, as this election was one between those who chose illusion over reality, I think he’s right….

Thanks to Kevin Moeller [via Erik Neu] for providing the map

politics

Election 2004: Gore Vidal's take on it BEFORE it happened

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I’m not sure who MC is in the exchange before but GV is Gore Vidal. It would be scary if the election was still coming up but now that we know we are going to suffer through another 4 years of GWB, its downright frightening. Read below:

MC: Speaking of elections, is George W. Bush going to be re-elected next year?

GV: No. At least if there is a fair election, an election that is not electronic. That would be dangerous. We don’t want an election without a paper trail. The makers of the voting machines say no one can look inside of them, because they would reveal trade secrets. What secrets? Isn’t their job to count votes? Or do they get secret messages from Mars? Is the cure for cancer inside the machines? I mean, come on. And all three owners of the companies who make these machines are donors to the Bush administration. Is this not corruption? So Bush will probably win if the country is covered with these balloting machines. He can’t lose.

MC: But Gore, aren’t you still enough of a believer in the democratic instincts of ordinary people to think that, in the end, those sorts of conspiracies eventually fall apart?

GV: Oh no! I find they only get stronger, more entrenched. Who would have thought that Harry Truman’s plans to militarize America would have come as far as we are today? All the money we have wasted on the military, while our schools are nowhere. There is no health care; we know the litany. We get nothing back for our taxes. I wouldn’t have thought that would have lasted the last 50 years, which I lived through. But it did last.

GV: But getting back to Bush. If we use old-fashioned paper ballots and have them counted in the precinct where they are cast, he will be swept from office. He’s made every error you can. He’s wrecked the economy. Unemployment is up. People can’t find jobs. Poverty is up. It’s a total mess. How does he make such a mess? Well, he is plainly very stupid. But the people around him are not. They want to stay in power.

MC: You paint a very dark picture of the current administration and of the American political system in general. But at a deeper, more societal level, isn’t there still a democratic underpinning?

GV: No. There are some memories of what we once were. There are still a few old people around who remember the New Deal, which was the last time we had a government that showed some interest in the welfare of the American people. Now we have governments, in the last 20 to 30 years, that care only about the welfare of the rich.

MC: Is Bush the worst president we’ve ever had?

GV: Well, nobody has ever wrecked the Bill of Rights as he has. Other presidents have dodged around it, but no president before this one has so put the Bill of Rights at risk. No one has proposed preemptive war before. And two countries in a row that have done no harm to us have been bombed.

MC: How do you think the current war in Iraq is going to play out?

GV: I think we will go down the tubes right with it. With each action Bush ever more enrages the Muslims. And there are a billion of them. And sooner or later they will have a Saladin who will pull them together, and they will come after us. And it won’t be pretty.

Thanks Phyllis!