there must be fifty ways to win an election

...besides being the candidate with the best interests of one's constituents more at heart...

to list a few:

• suppress contributions to your opponent by making nonsupporters doubt income dependability


• make sure your supporters vote early


• challenge the registration of probable nonsupporters


• on election day, tie up traffic in areas dominated by nonsupporters


• hack the voting machine

Just a reminder that confidence in the integrity of the process is a prerequisite to faith in democracy.

may you live in interesting times

Oh, MY! Airliner bombings narrowly averted, Israeli troops back in Lebanon, and now a possible breakthrough in the JonBenet Ramsey case! What was it we were concerned about before all of this hit the front page? I don't remember.

Actually, I'd been living in something of a cocoon, with my attention more-or-less glued to what's in store for and from Apple Computer, with the approach of Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference, now already a week in the past. Good stuff, if you're an Apple fan, but maybe a bit abstruse for a general audience. Check back in January for the more accessible MacWorld version.

I live in Boulder, so that Ramsey case development is real news, although I haven't followed it as closely as I might have had I not gone straight to Google to run a search on the name "John Mark Karr" when there were only two results instead of seven million, and made the mistake of clicking on one of those links. (No, I am *NOT* going to post it!) I also made the mistake of assuming, probably wrongly, that the page that link pointed to was his own. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn't; I don't need to know bad enough to take another look.

Cocoons can be nice, but I'm trading the old one in on a roomier model.

more changes

I should have known it would happen. I'd been ignoring all participatory options on the web -- other than The WELL -- for so long that, when I finally decided to leap over the wall, I really didn't know which of the available tools to use nor exactly what I meant to use them for.

I started out, just a couple of weeks ago, by creating a Google group, which I've already chosen to let languish for the time being, having replaced it with a blog for the same purpose. (The group may eventually come in handy, particularly if Google has plans for an update to the group software comparable to the one they're now rolling out for Blogger, so I don't want to close it, not just yet in any case.)

And, just this morning, I started a second special purpose blog.

I'll try not to go hog-wild with this, being at least a nominal believer in Occam's razor, but it made sense to spin off at least these two projects rather than to try to deal with either one of them in a general purpose blog.

sunlight on snow banks

"snowmelt" was my login on The Well for awhile, and "lacy ice + heat" was a pseudonym I used there.

It's supposed to evoke the thought of being high in the mountains on a sunny day and watching as the accumulated snow slowly melts and gathers together into little streams that go plunging down the mountain side.

But it's a double entendre, and the idea of melting through deception is also intended.

Just two different kinds of warmth... ;-)