Perils of Caffeine in the Evening

I walked down to the University District to do some pre-Christmas shopping last week, and found a few curiosities to shoot.

.

A novel way to show your support for the UW Huskies.  I clench my butt-cheeks and hurry by, just in case the intent is not gender-specific.

I’m flying to Tucson again today for two days of dealing with auditors.  Fun in the sun - NOT!!!

Quite often, I’m flying on Northwest, where I have “elite” status and get upgraded to first class frequently (for no good reason I can think of except that I fly too much), or on Alaska or Continental, which honors Northwest elites.  Today, however, I’m on Delta, which thinks, despite ample evidence to the contrary, that I’m just another unwashed creep to be tasered and prodded to my seat in coach class.

I’ll survive, I think - I’ve still got the blue-collar grit from when I was a poverty-stricken stranger to the nation’s airport concourses.  Bring on your ersatz ham sandwiche and Sun chip “dinners”.  I’ll eat every crumb and STILL exit the plane under my own power.

I was a TSA “selectee” again today, most likely because my outbound and return tickets are on different airlines.  Always happens when I do that.  When you’re a “selectee”, you get funnelled to a separate chute in the TSA abattoir, and one person goes through ALL your carry-ons while another waves a wand over your entire body, looking for marketable transplantable organs.  The woman pawing through my backpack knocked my Canon S300 camera onto the floor.  She handed it to me and asked me if it still worked, and I removed it and took her picture.  I’ll post it tonight if it’s any good.  Wonder I wasn’t shot, but she had a good sense of humor about it, and, after all, I was the injured party. 

The comfort to you, dear citizens, is that TSA has once again ensured the flying public that I’m not an imminent threat. 

A venerable local high-tech company, WRQ, Inc., was sold by its founders to a venture capital group.  That in and of itself isn’t really bloggable news (we have our standards here), but a euphemistic term used by someone in the article to describe the deal hit my funny bone:

“I saw the whole thing as so positive,” she said. “It was a joyous moment for a long-term company in our community to have a liquidity event of this particular kind, where it didn’t mean redeployments and downsizing and having the headquarters move.”

“Liquidity event”?  Hilarious.  What would a birth be to this person - a “uterine anomaly”?  It’s kinda “liquid”, too, actually.  My hat’s off to her, this term will stick with me and go directly to work.

I didn’t realize until I read this article what a monumental mess the “hand recount” of the votes in Washington’s governor’s race will be.  Three-person teams will be assigned something like 11,000 ballots to count, under the beneficent gaze of “observers” from both political parties.  In precincts where touch-screen voting was used, ballots will be printed out, one vote per page, and hand-counted.  Raise your hand if you think they’ll come out with the same 42-vote margin. 

I began to realize that the idea of a “winner” in this race is more a philosophical, chimerical concept than a mathematical one:

“There is a margin of error in connection with any measurement system, whether we’re counting fish in a lake or counting votes for a governor,” said Kirk Wolter, a statistics professor at the University of Chicago who did research on what happened in Florida during the 2000 presidential election.

It’s startling to me to look at the electoral process as approximate, asymptotic, rather than precise.  A poli-sci professor in the article said

“You folks would do as well to flip a coin as to try to determine who actually won.”

I suggested as much last week, and I’m more inclined, seriously, to see it settled with that simple arbitrary, binary mechanism.

And it’s still hard for me to reconcile that the state that voted for John Kerry and Patty Murray also voted for Dino Rossi.  And the answer might just be, as Knute Berger in the Seattle Weekly wrote:

One almost certain legacy is that her campaign’s incompetence has jeopardized other Democrats by validating the GOP strategy: U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell is in serious trouble in 2006 if she draws a Republican opponent who can match her money and her centrism and has a campaign message that connects with voters. The wonkish Cantwell, like Gregoire, is vulnerable as a smart insider who loves policy details but has little ability to paint the big picture for the folks back home. It’s one reason she lost her House seat to another faux GOP moderate, Rick White, in 1994. And there might be sexism at work, too: The GOP has discovered that tough ladies are vulnerable to soft soccer dads.

I thought Murray would be by far the most vulnerable of our two senators, but perhaps we’d better shake off our torpor and start working for Cantwell.

Just think of the possible offspring of this marriage - Fox News coming at you from all the Clear Channel radio outlets.   Resistance is futile!

(Here’s Clear Channel’s “public service message” to Florida commuters):

My flight home from Tucson left just before sunset Friday night.  We headed northwest over the Grand Canyon, and passed over the red rock area of southern Utah just at sunset.  As the angle of the sun became more horizontal, the rocks seemed to glow with their own luminescence.  I felt like a rube snapping pictures out the window, while my first class cabinmates read or watched movies in their road warrior nonchalance.  The view was just gorgeous, and I gaped out the window until it was dark.

On the second picture at the bottom, check out the little volcanic cones.

I flew into Phoenix Wednesday, worked there for the day, then drove to Tucson in the evening. There was not much on the way that was very enticing for dinner other than fast food/truckstop stuff, so I just drove through and stopped at a grocery store on the way to check into my hotel.

I came across a special on cooked shrimp and thought it would be a nice, low-fat respite from burritos and burgers.  I didn’t notice until I got to my room that they were frozen solid, 30 or so shellfish popsicles.  The instructions said to thaw them overnight, but I wasn’t in a mood to wait, so I cranked up the heat on the hvac unit and they were good to go in about 15 minutes.

Regretted not having any marshmallows to roast.

I’m in Tucson again for a couple of days.  It’s clear and sunny, if not overly warm, but the only sun I’ll see is through the office window.

I did get some eye candy on the flight down, however.  At right is the Grand Canyon from my window.

As my fellow Seattleite BlueSky points out today, Washington’s secretary of state as certified the election of Dino Rossi as governor, after a “machine” recount that disclosed him winning by 42 votes.  He rightly lays the blame for the loss, (as I have previously) to a lame campaign run by Christine Gregoire and the Democratic party, but I’m not sure I agree with his assertion that it doesn’t matter whether there’s a Republican or a “New” Democrat in office.  While a centrist Democrat is unlikely to press for change (as the disappointing reign of Gary Locke attests), a Republican of Rossi’s ilk will do plenty of damage in the department heads he appoints to administer and enforce, departments like Ecology, Fish & Wildlife, Revenue, etc. 

While both legislative bodies are in Democrat hands for the first time in many years, the margin is thin and certainly not veto-proof.  I expect to hear a constant refrain about the “business climate” from Rossi’s bunch, as a blanket reason to ease enforcement and promulgation of environmental protection, growth management, forest practices and consumer protection. 

A hand recount is possible if either party wants to pay for it, but a total recount is prohibitively expensive, something like $700,000.  The state Democratic party doesn’t have that kind of money.  I read somewhere that the national party will contribute some funds, and that the Kerry campaign might have $200,000 to ante up.  I’m hoping that donors who might have been thinking of helping congressman Jim McDermott pay his fine for passing on a taped conversation of Ohio Republican John Boehner.  McDermott had the opportunity to settle the case for $10,000 and stupidly passed on it, and the party has better use for the money.

Meanwhile, Gary Locke, on his way out the door, mentioned in passing that the state faces a $1.6 billion deficit, and suggested that new tax revenue must be raised to cover it.  This deficit would seem to be a direct result of his decision NOT  to seek new revenue when faced with a similar situation in the last budget cycle.  One begins to see why he didn’t seek another term.

It all adds up to an extended election hangover for us here in Washington, and we can’t get so distracted by it that we don’t allow enough time to get our earplugs in for the State of the Union address.