Fortune Telling

Wanna know what modern fortune-telling looks like?

Visit this site http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/

No no cards depicting sacrificial rams or spilled goblets of wine or a burning tree. Just numbers. Numbers and numbers and numbers and charts and graphs and median trackers...a whole industry built around trying to divine the future, who will be the next president? There are those who conduct polls, and there are those who rate pollsters and create aggregate polls and cast the bones of those polls into an iron pan and tell us what the polls mean based on how they land.

Future telling is alive and well. And I'm obsessed with it.

So far the oracles are telling us Obama will win.

Campaign Madness

OOF...these next two weeks will be excruciating. 

McCain is sure to close in on Obama in the polls as undecided voters come home to roost, and of course that gives me the jitters.

McCain is hauling the spectre of Socialism up from the depths of his vast lifespan. Seriously...the Red Scare is fading fast among younger generations. The younger folks weren't raised on images of bread lines, nuclear holocost, Communist thought control, and check points of the Iron Curtain.

"Socialist Candiate" is only gonna resonate with the Older Base.

And what's up with this Socialist accusation anyway? Obama wants to END Socialism in the United States. McCain wants to use OUR MONEY to send another $300 Billion to banks. Now that's what I call redistribution of wealth. So...what...if  people on the bottom are getting a break it's called Socialism, but if people at the top are getting a break it's called Capitalism?

Screw that. We've been there. We've done that. It's darn near burried us.

I Went To A Campaign Event And A Hockey Game Broke Out

It's hockey season. Big fellas on ice zooming with enough momentum to splatter a moose against the wall, what's not to love?

This year Sarah Palin dropped the ceremonial first puck amidst loud boos and a backdrop of Obama / Biden signs.  What on earth was the McCain camp thinking? 

"Hey, let's go to a clasically roudy sporting event in a state where McCain trails by double digits. It's a fantastic opportunity, we have little to gain and a lot to lose! I can't imagine why we WOULDN'T do it."

Sometimes it seems like McCain is TRYING to lose.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

And McCain is campaigning in Iowa trying to flip the state from the Obama camp, but he's behind by double-digits in many polls Apparently he thinks that since it's a rural state that Bush won last year, and next to Nebraska it's his best last hope of getting to the magic 270. That he's even bothering to go there shows how little he understands Iowa folk. I'm married to an Iowa folk, and spend ten years of my life there. And I can tell you, people in Iowa aren't just smart people, but the're also stubborn as the day is long. Once they've decided where their vote's going, there's no way they'll change their mind. And they're also a very politically minded people, so I doubt there's a significant number of undecideds there...polls are showing around a 5% undecided rate. In a state where the last poll was 13% points against McCain and the average poll has him lagging 11.8% points behind, he could carry all the undecideds and still get his ass handed to him. 

Note to McCain: Forget Iowa. And stay away from hockey games.

Tubers, Apples, and Wood

Fall is all about tubers, apples, and wood. We break out the crock pot while I start to subtract from the wood pile I spent the summer adding to. Then we make food with various combinations of potatoes, carrots, turnips, and beets. Meanwhile the mud room smells of macintosh apples, cuz that's where we store the great bags of 'em.

I love Fall.