That was last week. It's not like that anymore. It looked like this at Centennial Lakes, where I went to vote.

I was headed to the polling place when I noticed there was a polling place around the corner, in the Fire Station. Hmm. It's closer. This is probably it! I went inside, and told the lady my last name.

"James," she said, automatically. Okay well that's nice. She couldn't find me in the system, but I said I had moved - oh, well, you'll have to register. Fine! Over to the other table. Gave her my name. "Oh, I read you all the time!" she said. And that's nice too. I suppose my demographic was election judges, or people who could be, or admired them. If they're newspaper readers of a certain age, they might think well of Amy Klobuchar, running for Guber, because they read her father in the paper. I like Amy, because I think she's old-school DFL / Nordic-model social compact / Wendy Anderson holding up a fish Minnesota liberal at odds with the DSA Metro surge, but I don't know if that particular ideological levee is made of concrete or sand. I disagreed with her father on a lot of things (not that he noticed or cared) and he was never particularly friendly when I ran into him on the radio station, but he did love Minnesota in that way we all did, once.

Anyway, the poll official couldn't get my address to take, and it turned out I was in the wrong place.

"But I'm just around the corner!" I said, adding "at the Fred!" Somehow Fred status was not enough. As it turned out this polling location was a temporary one, used by people who had gone to the Library before it was razed. The Library is about six blocks from Centennial Lakes, but I am not yet wise in the ways of Edina, so fine, no problem. Off to . . .

It was 1 PM, and empty. I voted, and was given a sticker. I always feel like I'm getting one of those balloons you got at the pediatrician that said "From My Doctor For Being Good" even if you'd screamed and cried when you got a shot. The man at the ballot-reading machine said "Thank you for voting," and I wanted to say "You're welcome! I wrote in Hitler for every office!" because voting's all well and good, but it does matter what you vote for, no? Thank you for doing your part to advance every cause to which I am opposed with every molecule of my being! But I get it. This is how we solve our problems, or at least produce a new group of officials who will take a different approach to not solving our problems.

I was watching that video of the raving student who attacked the Jewish student for noting wryly that her ordinary garb would not be popular in Islamic countries, and she was quite clear at the end in expressing her desire to kill the Jew, and heck, anyone else who's Jew-adjacent. If you're sufficiently online you see the lol kys a lot. These people do not thank you for voting.

Which brings us to the matter of the Bloody T-Shirt. My feed has a series of headlines about the Minnesota Election Judge who was wearing a white shirt with a bloodstain. It was thought to be a reference to Charlie Kirk, and as such, some people were outraged. I'm not using the word lightly, since everyone is always outraged these days. It was later revealed that the judge was a Republican, and it was a Halloween T-shirt that's been around for a while. There was a similar controversy in Tucson last year, this time concerning some math teachers. I found the shirt for sale online, and it appears to preceded Kirk's assassination.

I'm not sure what the shirt is supposed to mean, except that the wearer has used violence to overcome a difficult situation. As far as I can tell, it's not a callback to some gory movie, or a reference to some quip in a book or a meme. It's just a bloody shirt with a phrase.

Interpreting it as a Kirk reference is entirely reasonable, though. If you saw all the Kirkiversary posts on X, or all the pictures people gleefully posted of themselves wearing white "Freedom" shirts with a bloodstain to indicate the bullet wound, of course that's what you'd think. I expect the old lady didn’t know, not being terminally online, but you can absolutely understand why someone would conclude it was one of innumerable happy recreations of Kirk's death.

The people who celebrate don't bother me as much as the people who wouldn't do it themselves, but, y'know, kinda understand why someone would?

Anyway. Wet day all around, no let up. A damp-dog-smell day. Gym, a bit of shopping, mindful of the new budget, no frills. Leftover Chicken Burger dinner for supper, absolutely delicious with Lundsnbyerly's Sriracha Mustard sauce and a big salad of spinach and something else that has a bitter taste so you say "it's not iceberg, must be healthy." I finished two projects I'd been picking away at all day, two 14-page websites on 40s culture. Now listening to swank French downbeat chill sung by some husky chanteuse who's been bruised by l'amour but is wiser for it. I think. She could be complaining about the historical trends in petrol prices, but probably not.

Ah: just translated the line she repeats, and it's "I don't remember taking this path."

People say Reddit is a cesspool, and that's not quite accurate. There are many useful, factual, smart, reasoned subreddits. A lot depends on the moderators. You can tell a moderator has the cliched Reddit mindset when you see a rule like "4. Transwomen are women" and it's a subreddit devoted to fountain pens.

I was reading about the Paris riots in a subreddit devoted to Lost Architecture. As with 2020, you are sternly discouraged from mourning property destruction, which only shows you are missing the real issue.

Don't get me wrong, bro, I'm totally on board with burning museums, if they're the ones that need burning.

This one is fun, because it contains accusations of "state worship" from people who want to hand the state all sorts of sweeping powers, providing the state's objectives align with theirs.

Again, the reassurance: don't get me wrong I totally understand burning down a building that has an office where people make money in a way that abrades my ideology, but City Hall?

This is the moderate view.

On X, the purest expression of the argument:

Of course the local resident and the city's money could be traced back to stolen colonial wealth, since that term has been redefined to encompass all money not yet in the hands of the State.

I also enjoy reading the local subreddits to see how people frame and discuss current events. Nothing is ever surprising. You will have someone say something sane - always preceded by establishing bonafides: “I’m a lifelong socialist and F Trump,” which means the arguments are meant in good faith, not from a PLACE OF HATE. This just means it’s generally ignored or quietly downvoted.

So: there was a big screaming mess at the Union Depot at The Bundle Halal Fall Event. Private party, lots of vendors, religious requirement for being a vendor. There was some sort of dispute that caused everyone to stampede for the exits. This slotted alongside the series of shootings around town at places and events not previously known for shootings, but if you note the rise in clan / gang warfare, you’re being jerked around by bots. The following replies are an almost perfect Reddit sequence:

The last one shifts the blame where all the right-thinking people know blame resides, so the matter is closed.

Elsewhere, in Dinkytown, a massive police presence. There have been many instances in the last few years when the police have had to flood into the neighborhood and break up late-night mobs of Youts who do not live in Dinkytown.

In the instance above, we don’t shift the blame, but move the topic to something that the right-thinking people can agree upon again. Cars bad!

On the matter of drug use in parks and encampments, we begin with an unserious comment and proceed to through the expected sequence of non-sequiturs:

Related: we have The Serious Good-Faith Question, followed by insanity from someone who lives entirely online, followed by another reasonable response, followed by a rephrasing of the general idea that suffuses Reddit: you really can’t do anything because everything is problematic within the current capitalist hellscape, so the hellscape has to go.

On AI, and the need to restrict and suppress it, because the Nerd Reich (their term for the billionaires who are trying to turn the country into a fascist hellhole - well, it's already that, so, a much more fascisty hellyhole:

Very Ministry of Truth here. If you object to the means by which the content was produced, and your objection is nothing more than ecological, the content should be censored.

Why bother with these things? To know how the other side defines the issues, to know what constitutes the center, to know what describes the extremities, the unacceptable comprimises, the heresies. Because this is what turns out to be mainstream later, thanks to people who don't necessarly agree but understand why their roommate wore a bloody Kirk shirt, and anyway they don't want to be one of those people who are always against the good things because they understand nothing and hate everything. And the next thing you know you have bike protests to drive by the Jewish businesses to let the "zios" know they're "disgusting humans," and no one peeps at all, because c'mon: seriously? You're defending Jews? In 2026?

It’s 1961.

Cue the Billy Joel lyric: TROUBLE IN THE D-R

Must have been bad if it made the front page, no? Somehow you suspect they kept these things hushed up unless they knew everyone knew, and they had to say something.

What did he do?

		Oh COME ON

I really don’t think kids were keen to read the naughty parts of 1984.

His wife's obit, in 2012, indicated that they were divorced, eventually. In 1961 they started to produce maple syrup.

You had to work on some of these heds. They spoke their own language.

Such faith in these treaties and statements and appeals and calls and moratoriums.

The perils of rural life.

Adjust your cow assumptions accordingly

Just having cows in the barn generated enough heat to keep the pipes flowing?

Wikipedia:

Lamour returned to movies with a cameo in the final "Road" film, The Road to Hong Kong (1962); she was replaced as a love interest by Joan Collins because Bing Crosby wanted a younger actress. However, Bob Hope would not do the film without Lamour, so she appeared in an extended cameo.

Good for Bob. Seems like a rare act of decency.

That will do! See you around.