Pima ballot error has some observers crying foul

PowerTalk 1210 has confirmed that some 16,000 Pima County voters will be getting a second, shorter ballot, because the first one contains an error in one race.  Some feel the decision to send a replacement ballot has the potential to adversely effect every county-wide race on the ballot.
Here’s what happened.   In addition to all the other county-wide and state-wide races before them, voters in the Continental School District in the Sahuarita area also are making choices in a school board race.  Three names are on the ballot, along with the instruction, “VOTE FOR NOT MORE THAN THREE.”  The instruction should have said to vote for no more than two. 

Siding Spring: The plague comet?

For all of human history, our race has associated comets with plague and other disasters.

Bizarre human behavior.  Mass violence.  A plague.  And now a comet.  Okay, this is getting weird.  Damned weird.  And believe it or not, it fits a pattern.

A couple of years ago, I began to notice a disturbing trend.  After many years in the TV news business, like all other news professionals I had become used to a daily menu of violence, mayhem and unrest of various forms.  But a new type of story began to emerge that was disturbing even by those standards.  For one, incidents of random mass gun violence, which had started to be a problem late in the 20th century, were increasing in their number and pace.  But other incidents began to pop up that were, although typically less violent, even more bizarre and hard to explain.  You’d hear about a traveler on a passenger jet suddenly deciding to urinate on a fellow passenger—not just one incident, but one after another just like it.  Or something similar would happen on a public bus, or on a passenger train, and so on.  And then there were increasingly bizarre random acts of violence, such as the Florida man who suddenly decided one day to eat a stranger’s face off.  And the naked man who attacked travelers at a BART station in San Francisco.  There was the private pilot who decided to ram his plane into an IRS office.  And the guy who deliberately decapitated himself with a chainsaw.  And other incidents too brutal and grotesque to describe here. 

Surrendering the penis

Boy, was Freud ever right about that penis envy thing.  And it’s getting uglier by the day.  The next step, in the name of gender equality, is obvious.

Over the past four days, via my morning newspaper and various news websites, I have been exposed to the following:

1.  A long-winded column in which the author bitterly complains that two male celebrities momentarily preferred to talk to each other, rather than to her, at a dinner party (it couldn't possibly be that they had something to say to each other or that she was simply uninteresting; oh, no, it was the latest proof of Worldwide Male Sexism).

2.  A story about a man getting fired for having drawn a cartoon depicting, ahem, male genitalia; the poor schlub now worries, rightfully so, that he'll never work again.

A personal update for my readers and radio listeners

I have some news to share with readers and listeners who’ve been following my recent attempts to reinvent myself after a 33-year career in TV news.  The print publication of my science fiction novel, A Journal of the Crazy Year, is now set for early January.  And I’ve just learned that it’s been selected for review by Publisher’s Weekly.

To get the review, I had to send in two copies of the finished book, and then survive two selection rounds.  Once ready, the review will go up on their website and possibly be included in their weekly magazine as well.  There’s no guarantee that I’ll get a good review, of course.  But the fact that the book did make it through those first two competitive rounds has me feeling hopeful, as does the fact that reader reviews for the Kindle edition were very good overall.  The sci-fi site Fantascize.com also gave that edition a thumbs up last year, calling it a “thrilling narrative” and writing some nice words about the huge amount of real-life medical research I put into the novel. 

More Musings about Weird Coincidences and Strange Happenings

Has anything like this ever happened to you?

When I was very young, one night I looked out my bedroom window and saw lights dancing in the night.  I was lying on my back at the time on a bed that had been secured with a safety rail, having just graduated from a crib.  This was before my sister was born, which means that I could only have been about two and a half years old.  The lights were flying back and forth in front of my window, as naturally as a fish might swim in an aquarium.  I looked more closely.  Some of the lights had faces.  One of them was quite ugly, like the visage of an old Halloween-style witch or hag.  Even so, I didn’t feel frightened, just enchanted.  But I wanted to tell my mommy about it.  So I crawled out of bed, went into my parents’ bedroom, and climbed into bed with them.  Motioning with my hands, I tried to describe what I had seen.  Mom didn’t understand what I was attempting to say, or even that I was trying to say anything.  Hugging me close, she told me to go to sleep.  I lay staring out the window for some time before finally drifting off.

Attack of the Cybercats III

The problem is worse than I thought.

I have now delved back more than 30 years into my photo archive.  Applying the special filters I discovered a few weeks ago to bring out details not visible to the naked eye, I’ve discovered more instances of cats appearing to have strange and mystical mind-bending powers over humans.  In fact, I’m starting to wonder whether all cats have this ability.  The alternative is to believe that my family in particular has somehow been targeted.  

Below is the latest photographic evidence.