Hello Peoples!

"Hello Peoples!"-- Robert Downey Jr. as Hungarian Director Franz Mazur in Hugo Pool


Welcome to my new blog. This will now be your source for all the information you will need to inform your paltry existence. Repeat: This will now be your source for all the information you will need to inform your paltry existence.

It is now the day after Columbus Day and there is something in the air. Luckily in our house we have an Ionic Breeze to take care of that. Yes, the air is clear here, but in many homes across the nation the great unwashed will be be dealing with the musky odor of another Yankees-Red Sox playoff series. The Yankees have A-Rod back and hopefully Mariano Rivera, while the Red Sox will be once again depending on their wacky haircuts and penchant for high-fiving each other. My A's will be watching from their modest homes, hopefully at least equipped with those Ionic Breezes, if not plasma TVs.

Meanwhile, there are only three weeks to go until Judgment Day, so all of you righties out there, repent! San Francisco will be trying out ranked-choice voting for local offices for the first time, the only major U.S. municipality to have done so in recent history. This little experiment will probably not got a lot of press, but carries almost as much import as the presidential election itself. But with the City By the Bay's recent election day problems -- including the floating ballot-box tops a few years back -- one can only pray they don't fuck this one up.

And while he could (or should) be backing ranked-choice voting, the scrapping of the electoral college, proportional representation and the like, Tuesday Nov. 2nd will more likely find Ralph Nader screwing over his backers, and other liberals, again by handing the election to Bush. He can rail all he wants about the lack of choices in Washington and the likeness between the two parties, but the only way that a third-party candidate will ever be elected to national office is to fight for voting reform. The once-effective advocate for the little guy is now focusing his energies in the wrong place entirely. In fact, some experts believe that if the U.S. populace had voted via one ranked-choice voting system (pairwise voting -- where your ranking of candidates is split into head-to-head races between candidates) Nader may actually have WON four years ago. Has anyone told him this? Ralph, fight for pairwise voting, don't bang all of our heads against the wall with your spoiler effort.

We all await the third presidential debate tomorrow as well. At least those of us that can still claim to be surprised as to the hollow attacks of the Bush administration (as delivered through the lump on W's back), the parching dryness (get an Ionic Breeze!) of John Kerry's policyspeak and the disconnect between the view of the cable news pundits and the great unwashed they claim to represent -- who, if you remember, are actually watching Yankees-Red Sox.

And if you think about it, there are many similarities between these two battles. Here are just a few:

1. The Red Sox haven't won a World Series since 1918. A sitting Senator hasn't won the presidency since Kennedy in 1960.

2. It is a battle between the two biggest payrolls in baseball. And on election day we will choose between a rich oilman (by birth) and a rich ketchup baron (by marriage).

3. There has been much talk about hair. Johnny Damon's, Kevin Millar's, Bronson Arroyo's. There has also been much talk about John Edwards' coiffure and Cheney's lack thereof.

4. Anyone But Yanks (or if you're me, Anyone But Sox). Anyone But Bush.

5. The Red Sox are hard-hitting, have all the tools, but many people just don't like their personality. John Kerry, well, you know where I'm going with this.

6. The Yankees have managed, over the past several years, to alienate most of the world, just like someone else we know.

But if John Kerry's chances are somehow tied in with the Red Sox's fate, I don't know what to do, maybe I could sleep through all of this. Or maybe I just need to buy another Ionic Breeze and take what comes. At least my house will smell nice when the end days arrive.