The rain held off yesterday until after 3pm. Overcast and cool was nice. Once we were wet anyway, we hit the water rides. Then it got cold!
I’m using my phone to write this post. I switched to the Samsung keyboard, which has a swipe function. It works better than swype. Swype has gotten so bad I can’t use it for anything more than a sentence or two.
The TV here is nothing but political ads. Must be an election coming up….
Get out and vote. Every one is going to be important, especially on your local issues.
N
52º and cloudy where the amusement parks close when the teens go back to school and the beaches close a couple of weeks later.
Surfers on the lakes? Sure. Not GREAT waves, but enough to keep them happy.
All set for election day tomorrow. I have all my supplies, my map, my route, and my contact card. For the entire 14 hours I’ll be working to make sure people can vote without talking politics. Then I’ll drink a couple of beers while I watch the returns come in. It’s a great way to spend election day.
I am an early riser so I go just as the polls open and zip in and out. I already know who and how I am voting so there is no dithering over the ballot.
JimL, thanks for stepping up to the plate and volunteering. We need people like you to keep the system running smoothly. At this time in my life it is just not in me to do that kind of volunteering. Maybe in the future.
My wife used to volunteer as an election worker, but gave it up after a while because of all the sillyness. I helped with the setup heavy lifting, but never saw much of the operation. The nonsense would never be tolerated in a business. 95% of the general public are brainless, and this in a community with above average intelligence (Lake Woebegone?)
Been an absentee voter for decades, so all this was a revelation to me. I still deliver our ballots personally on election day, because I don’t trust the mail. Since we live in a very conservative part of California, our mailed ballots would likely end up in some car trunk, but would never be “discovered.”
Assuming you can trust the peope who collect the ballots: I’ve never seen the point to going to the actual polling place and standing in line. Voting by mail is massively easier.
Anyhow, I’ll sure be glad when the midterms are over – even over here, we’re hearing about it every damned day.
Meanwhile, we have an interesting referendum coming up. There are more and more international agreements, and Switzerland tends to sign up for all of them. In many cases, this leads to conflicts, for example, where the European Court of Human Rights told us that we could not deport a criminal migrant, because his country was too dangerous for him. This despite a Swiss law stating that criminal migrants must be deported.
This referendum states that the Swiss constitution takes precedence over international agreements, unless it is an issue of “fundamental” human rights. In the example mentioned, the EHCR would therefore be denied the right to overrule Swiss law and Swiss courts.
Needless to say, the politicians are vehemently against this. The populace is pretty evenly split. I wish the pro and con positions would do a better job of laying out exactly what “fundamental human rights” are (it’s apparently a gray zone), and what international agreements would be affected. Anyhow, interesting times.
Assuming you can trust the peope who collect the ballots: I’ve never seen the point to going to the actual polling place and standing in line. Voting by mail is massively easier.
I do agree. There is no line for absentee voters. There is a locked box just outside the formal area, and there are so few who deliver ballots that I have never seen anyone else ahead of me. Waste Management probably picks up that locked box and “processes” it.
Does remind me that apparently paper ballots, no matter how they arrive, are not counted until a day or so later, usually long after the elections are over. Of course, the “official” outcome isn’t determined until about a month later, so every vote does get counted. Every vote that isn’t “lost” 😉
Dilbert: “the longest ten minutes of my life”
http://dilbert.com/strip/2018-11-04
Heh.
A science fiction video with Sissy Spacek:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gIhrPGyu6U
Cute and a little sad.
The populace is pretty evenly split.
That reminds me. I have always marveled at how most issues and offices are decided by votes verrry close to even. Maybe someone more versed in statistics could explain this (not likely,) but we as a city, state, and country we seem pretty balanced XXXXXXXX evenly divided. I have heard the term landslide used on an outcome that was only a few points from even. We have to go back to the nineteenth century to find huge differences in the vote. Maybe the cheaters are just more sensitive to being found out. Oops, there goes my cynicism again.
Daylight Savings Time and Stonehenge:
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/7320de8c5d5c6f5153e2dad2a146f516812fceae75eaef5330d4360350a289b9.jpg
and
https://www.gocomics.com/bc/2018/11/04
Arlo and Janis: Young Frankenstein
https://www.gocomics.com/arloandjanis/2018/11/03
Double Heh.
I don’t know about you, Tovariche, but here the absentees are counted at the same time as the regular ballots. They’re bubble-fill-in cards, and they’re scanned in the election office by one clerk while another is processing the CF cards from the (air-gapped) voting machines. (If you vote by absentee and want to change your vote, show up at YOUR polling place, get YOUR ballot, and tear it up. Then vote on the machine.)
Could they cheat? Sure. But you’d have to hack one heck of a lot of people to pull it off, and somebody would talk.
I didn’t have much confidence in the ballots until I got involved. Now I have reasonable confidence in the process. (The electorate, on the other hand….)
Daylight Savings Time and Stonehenge
I didn’t understand Daylight Savings Time until I lived north of the 45th parallel during our sentence -er- tenure in Vantucky. Absent “Spring Forward”, the sun would be up by 4:30 during the two weeks on either side of the Summer Solstice.
I also understand why Florida wants DST year-round — later sunsets are good for beach bar business.
@lynn @13:08
It’s a good gag, but there’s a fundamental error. Those aren’t the stones at Stonehenge, they’re at Avebury (GIYF) and all these monuments aren’t accurate enough to indicate time-of-day. They indicate sunrise or sunset on specific days of the year, mostly the solstices and equinoxes.
The Avebury stone circle is much larger than the standing stones at Stonehenge, but it’s much less impressive, since the eponymous village is built inside the Neolithic circle, which is several hundred metres across (it’s not exactly circular)
Geoff
Election trust is very low these days. Too many stories of “found ballots” find there way into the news. Usually at the state or local levels where a few hundred or only a few dozen ballots can make a difference. I’m sure some are apocryphal but many are not.
I am hoping that there are plenty of people like JimL out there to raise the hue and cry if they see any shenanigans.
I think I’m spoiled. I checked some of the more outspoken sites on the ‘net and I’m in shock. Some of these folks (at least the sites I’ve checked) are losing it.
Shocked. Just shocked. Are they really THAT unhinged? What will they do on Wednesday morning?
JimL said:
We can only hope they will jump from the nearest 10-story building.
I fixed my truck door today. 13mm socket with a u-joint for two bolts and a 13mm box/open ended wrench for the third bolt. I loosened the hinge bolts going into the frame a bit, lifted the other end of the door and propped it up with a 1×4 scrap on a 5 gallon bucket.
And did it all again with a thicker scrap of wood because I wanted a tiny bit more lift. To allow for wear. Not difficult.
The engine keeps setting a PO441 code. Which can be a cracked hose from the charcoal canisters. Which would release pressure. Or a bad gas cap doing the same. But it holds pressure. There’s a solenoid purge valve gizmo near the fuse box. I pulled it off, whacked it with a screw driver and squirted in some carb cleaner.
It’s now fixed or I buy a $30 part.
The truck doesn’t care about purging the charcoal canisters. The computer does.
Edit: I adjusted the top hinge.
Are they really THAT unhinged? What will they do on Wednesday morning?
Unhinged: Stressed out demorats are eating their feelings and drinking heavily to get through mid-terms
So, yes.
Dilbert: “the longest ten minutes of my life”
The Boss neglected to mention his BMW convertible, purchased direct from the factory in Germany using money from bonus checks awarded for shorting the budget for employee training.
I’m over the “service animals” on flights. The airlines are cowards.
https://www.kptv.com/delta-air-lines-apologizes-after-man-sits-in-dog-feces/article_825b3058-81b4-5a81-a0a8-5b419509427d.html
At the mouse. Nice day, nice weather.
N
At the mouse. Nice day, nice weather.
I take it that you just grabbed the girls and left. Sounds like an educational opportunity that should be an excused absence.
Saw a great article for you in the latest Guns and Ammo magazine. “A tactical belt for your nightstand”.
I have read a lot of mentions of the “service animal” craze in the US. What is it, that anyone caters to these idiots? It’s a serious disservice to those people who really do have, and need, a service animal, like my blind student.
It sounds like lots of the lefties are about to need emotional emotional support animals. Sure hope there is a red wave, in place of the blue one they are praying for.
For those who missed it: At AccordingToHoyt a guest author has a three-part column about those caravans approaching the US border. They are indeed supported by NGOs and other organizations. Some stretches they appear to have been carried by bus, they are being fed and otherwise cared for.
There’s a group of 20k or so “refugees” in Croatia, hoping to break into Austria and thence into the rest of Europe. Supposed to be Syrians, but going into the camp, apparently you mostly hear Pakistani, and it’s all young males. Fed and watered by the UN. If the UN has so much money, they ought to pay to transport them all back home.
The Swiss government is still planning on signing this idiotic UN Compact on Migration – but they aren’t getting away with it in secret. It’s finally hit the news, and at least the right-wing politicians are now making waves. The lefties point out “it contains no legal obligations”, which is true, but no excuse. The whole thing is about how to support and encourage migration, which has got to be the wrong goal.
Two years ago, after I got home from the courthouse, I opened my first beer & started looking for coverage of the results. I expected a Trump concession speech (in his own way, which would have been entertaining), and then off to bed. With Romney, it was 2 or 3 beers. I expected the same.
So it didn’t happen, and it was into the wee hours, and I had a pretty good light going. I was bouncing around the tech sites (which had free coverage), and I could see all the techies (who all seem to be liberal/progressive-leaning) losing their grip. Not one of them declared Trump the winner, and most of them just said “we’re ending it here.”
So this morning, this popped into my facecrack feed:
Daily Caller
And I have to wonder – are they figuring it out?
No predictions from me – I’m too involved. But I’ll be glad to comment when this is all over. I’ll compare my expectations with results.
I have read a lot of mentions of the “service animal” craze in the US. What is it, that anyone caters to these idiots? It’s a serious disservice to those people who really do have, and need, a service animal, like my blind student.
Someone discovered a loophole in the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) which, interpreted in a particular way, requires acceptance of the animal’s presence without the owner presenting documentation of the “service” capacity.
A lawsuit will be necessary to clarify the law, and with the possible exception of Publix in Florida, no major corporation has stepped up to the challenge.
Airlines, on the other hand, have complete authority over the animals’ presence on a plane. Beyond in-your-face situations like the documentary filmmaker who wanted to travel with his therapy peacock and film the adventure, the airlines have more or less looked the other way, to the point of some even allowing “therapy pigs”.
I sat next to a service pig on one flight. Big ol’ whore with too much makeup and perfume. She was disgusting and intruded into my seat.
Ray, you’re deplorable.
TWO thumbs up.
I do NOT wear too much perfume!
Ray, you’re deplorable.
TWO thumbs up.
Heh.
My brother in the film business is good friends with Sissy, her husband, and kids. He’s done a number of high profile movies with her and her husband (he’s an art director).
Not a loophole. You are allowed to ask what specific service the animal provides. If it’s not legitimate, they can refuse service. “Emotional support animals” are not covered under ADA.