I posted this four years ago on Election Day, but it’s always worth re-visiting. Here is George Carlin’s take on the whole “Democracy” thing:

You may have noticed that there’s one thing I don’t complain about: Politicians. Everybody complains about politicians. Everybody says, “They suck”. But where do people think these politicians come from? They don’t fall out of the sky. They don’t pass through a membrane from another reality. No, they come from American homes, American families, American schools, American churches, American businesses, and they’re elected by American voters. This is the best we can do, folks. It’s what our system produces: Garbage in, garbage out.

….I have solved this political dilemma in a very direct way: I don’t vote. On Election Day, I stay home. I firmly believe that if you vote, you have no right to complain. Now, some people like to twist that around. They say, “If you don’t vote, you have no right to complain”, but where’s the logic in that? If you vote, and you elect dishonest, incompetent politicians, and they get into office and screw everything up, you are responsible for what they have done. You voted them in. You caused the problem. You have no right to complain.

I, on the other hand, who did not vote — who did not even leave the house on Election Day — am in no way responsible for that these politicians have done and have every right to complain about the mess that you created.

Do I agree? No. Of course not. Well, not really. Maybe a little. You know, part of me. Half of me, actually. Or more than half. I just think it’s fun pulling the little levers.

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With the exception of the NYS Comptroller’s race, I’ll be voting for Democrats across the board tomorrow. In that particular race, I’ll be voting Green since the incumbent Democrat is a crook. (I may actually vote Green for Governor as well, seeing as how Elliot Spitzer can’t possibly lose but the Green Party would benefit from getting as many votes as it can, but I won’t make that decision until I’m standing in the booth.)

Lots of people say that voting a straight party ticket is bad, but I don’t really see that, except in extreme cases (if there wasn’t a Green candidate for Comptroller, I’d probably abstain). When confronted with an incompetent Democrat versus a competent Republican, I either abstain or vote for the nearest convenient liberal party, and for me, I don’t think my interests are served if I help elect someone whose stands on the issues don’t mirror mine. So for me, primary day is the time to exercise my distaste for incumbency.

And besides, I’m generally of the view that the national Republican Party is a cesspool, and my antipathy towards them extends downward, since today’s local Republicans are tomorrow’s national Republicans. So it’s all Democrats for me. I don’t put a whole lot of stock in independence as a voter. I’m a Democrat because there are certain things I believe and certain things I value and certain things I want my country to do and to be, and I cast my votes accordingly, and with the full knowledge that I’ll never get everything I want, because nobody ever does.

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You know, I’ve actually come to look forward to the ads Elliot Spitzer is running on TV in his campaign for Governor of New York, just because they’re all incredibly positive ads. (He has this luxury, of course, because his Republican opponent has zero chance of winning. If Spitzer were in an actual race, he’d be running as much muck ads as anybody else.)

Anyway, the main ad Spitzer’s been showing has him listing his “To Do list” upon taking office: he’s gonna reform Medicaid, and reduce property taxes, improve our schools, and so on. (I can’t help but watch that ad and think, “Shit, why didn’t anybody else think of that!”)

But anyway, I wonder if maybe Spitzer’s first task upon taking office shouldn’t be to hire some new typists in Albany, after a typo has resulted in the state’s drunk driving law being currently unenforceable. Oops.

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Not really feeling much like blogging the last few days, so here are some quick links to stuff.

:: After a very long fallow period, I’ve started offering merchandise again on eBay. There is a link in the sidebar to all of my auctions. Currently I’m offering a number of books, but some music may come later. No, I do not currently plan to sell any of my overalls.

:: Paul has a cyber-stalker.

:: Guy Gavriel Kay has another movie deal: he will be doing his own screenplay adaptation for The Last Light of the Sun, which is his most recent novel (at least until Ysabel comes out early next year). Of course, this means that GGK’s main focus over the coming year will be that screenplay as opposed to prepping another book. Sigh. (GGK’s The Lions of Al-Rassan is the other of his novels currently under movie development.)

:: I keep forgetting that Mrs. M-Mv posted a while back about St. Crispian’s Day, made famous in the greatest pep-talk ever written, the speech put in the lips of King Henry V by William Shakespeare in the play cleverly entitled, Henry V. She recommends watching the Kenneth Branagh film of the play, and I second that recommendation; but failing that, you can hear Branagh giving that speech here. (I’ve linked AmericanRhetoric.com before, but it’s been a while and it’s a great site full of speechy, oratorical goodness.)

:: Apologies to the Bears and Vikings fans among my readers, because I’m really gonna miss Brett Favre when he retires. I love watching that guy.

:: Another reason why my job is cooler than your job: this week I got to do a lot of jobs in which one of these was my primary tool.

:: I’ll say more about it some other time, but for now let me just note that last night I finally found a movie with a final line that’s as good as Casablanca‘s “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship”: The Wind and the Lion, which ends with Sean Connery saying to a friend: “Is there nothing in your life worth losing everything for?”

:: During the week of Thanksgiving, this blog will be on hiatus. I’ll make an official announcement then, but regular readers should be aware, because I’ll probably kick off December with a second installment of Ask Me Anything!, and the week I’m off will be query-submission time. So start thinking! (Heck, you can even start asking stuff if you want, but no answers will be forthcoming until after that hiatus.)

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Hey, Buffalo readers: what restaurants in this area do Thanksgiving dinner? Restaurants in the Southtowns or in Cheektowaga are preferred. Thanks!

(I moved this post up because no one commented! Come on, Buffalo bloggers — surely someone knows a restaurant that does T-giving dinner!)

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[Updated Below]

I’m almost ready to give up, folks. It’s not that I want to drink the Kool-Aid, God knows, and it’s not that everyone else is drinking the Kool-Aid. It’s just that the damn Kool-Aid won’t go away, and all I want the Kool-Aid to do is go away.

I’m almost ready to just go ahead and admit that, yes indeedy, Bill Belichick is God and Tom Brady is his prophet.

The other night the Stupid Patriots beat the snot out of the Vikings, but that’s not what got me. The next morning, I’m on the way into work, and I tune in briefly to our local sports-radio station to hear a snippet of Belichick at his press round-up after the game. Noting that his team had just racked up something like 600 passing yards and nine TDs — well, not quite, but that’s what it always feels like when these guys are playing — Belichick said, about as matter-of-factly as any coach has ever said anything, something along the lines of “Yeah, we didn’t think we could run on these guys, so we just figured we’d throw it a lot.”

There’s a salty adage about how some folks can fall into a bucket of shit and come out smelling like a rose, but somehow the Stupid Patriots never even fall into buckets of shit. It’s like the buckets turn into rosebeds before their feet ever hit them.

Yeah, I’m ready to give up.

As for other football stuff, we’re at roughly the halfway mark in the season, which is usually when the playoff races are starting to shape up and when a number of teams have already fallen completely out of contention. And that means, as much as I might not want to admit it, that it’s time to start comparing my pre-season predictions with what’s come about. Oy.

Here are the teams that would make the playoffs today, with my predictions in brackets:

AFC East: New England (New England)
AFC North: Baltimore (Pittsburgh)
AFC South: Indianapolis (Jacksonville)
AFC West: Denver (Denver)
AFC Wildcards: San Diego, Cincinnati (Indianapolis, Cincinnati)

NFC East: NYGiants (Dallas)
NFC North: Chicago (Minnesota)
NFC South: New Orleans (Carolina)
NFC West: Seattle (Seattle)
NFC Wildcards: Atlanta, Minnesota (Philadelphia, Tampa Bay)

Well.

Only three teams that I picked to win divisions are actually leading divisions right now, although if the playoffs started today, six of the teams I picked to make the postseason would be there. Not very good. (It’s also my usual level of prediction success, which puts my football prognostication skills in pretty harsh light.)

My Super Bowl prediction was Carolina versus Jacksonville. Currently, neither of those teams make the playoffs, and the Panthers look especially troubled after the way they fell apart against the Cowboys the other night. I have trouble believing the Saints are going to last, but the Panthers would also have to leap-frog the Falcons. I also didn’t think that the StuPats would be that great this year, and that they’d win the AFC East with a likely 10-6 record or thereabouts. Instead, they’re on pace again for 12-4 or better. Oy.

And I’m astounded that the Bills have the same record right now as the defending Super Bowl champions.

(How are the Bills doing, by the way? They’re at 2-5, which has them roughly on pace for the 5-11 neighborhood. Since I projected them at 6-10, they’re right about where I thought they’d be. But I hoped they’d be playing better football, and losing more because of inexperience than because of a lack of heart and a continued emphasis on always making the stupid play when a smart one would work better.)

And now, about the NFL in general: What would I do if I became Commissioner? What things would I “fix”? Hmmmmmm!

1. Do something about rookie salaries. This is insane. In every other sport, you have to play a while before you get the huge money, but in the NFL, you get huge money right out of college if you’re a high draft pick. That means that bad teams that are trying to rebuild instead end up with huge salary cap hits when they pick high in the draft. It’s bad enough if you get a mega-superstar, but it can hurt you even worse if that high draft pick is a bust. The Bills are still feeling the pain for drafting Mike Williams five years ago.

The big difference here is that we’re talking about football, which is by far the most physically harmful game of the major sports. I’ve read that the average tenure of an NFL player is only four or five seasons, so there’s an argument to be made that these guys need to make their money a lot sooner than your typical NBA or MLB guy. But still, the whole thing is out of whack. I’d have some kind of salary structure where you got certain money based on where you’re drafted, and that’s it — and that all players enter with two-year contracts only. Therefore, rookies would have incentive to play well and compete for starting jobs.

2. Preserve replay. I have no problem with the way replay works right now.

3. Change the Safety as follows: if the tackle is made while the ball is still in the end zone, the offensive team would still have to do the free kick on the next play, but the two points would no longer be awarded. Why? Well, I hate the two points because this is football’s only scoring situation where points are awarded even though nothing is done with the ball. Instead, it’s a function of where the ball is when forward progress is halted. Ick. A touchdown exists when the ball crosses the goal line, or when a legal catch is made inside the end zone. Simple. Ditto the field goal: the ball goes through the uprights, it’s three points. But on a safety, points are awarded due to a failure to do something with the ball? I don’t like that.

Second, two points on a safety screws up my overtime fix.

Which brings me to:

4. Overtime. I’d eliminate sudden death (at least at the outset of the OT period), and I’d eliminate the coin flip. (In fact, see below!) The visiting team would receive the ball first, and regular play would resume with the game being decided thusly: the first team to have the lead after each team has completed one possession of the ball would win.

Let’s assume the Bills are playing the Dolphins, and it’s 20-20 as the 4th quarter ends. OK? So, in OT, the Bills kick off to the Dolphins. Assume the Dolphins get a field goal. Now the Dolphins would kick off to the Bills, and now the Bills must score at least a field goal to keep the game alive.

Now, we’re 23-20 in OT with the Bills getting the ball. What happens? Well:

:: Bills score a touchdown, making the score 26-23. Game over. Both teams have had possession.

:: Bills score a field goal, retying the game at 23-23. Game continues, with Bills kicking off to Miami again. Now we’re back into sudden death. This seems fair to me, because the Bills had a chance to score a touchdown and win outright, didn’t they? And here they can still win; just now they have to keep Miami off the board entirely.

:: Bills commit a turnover or lose the ball on downs. Game over. They couldn’t convert their opportunity to score.

Of course, you can still have some funky situations here. In our hypothetical 20-20 Bills-Dolphins game, suppose on their first snap on their first OT possession, the Miami quarterback throws an interception that’s returned for a touchdown. The game would end right there, because both teams will have had possession, and the Bills will have the lead!

(And here’s where awarding two points for a safety screws things up. If Miami gives up a safety in my OT scheme, and then free-kicks to the Bills, the Bills have the ball and the lead in OT, which means they should win the second they recover the free kick! Clearly that makes no sense.)

5. Eliminate the coin toss. The coin toss is stupid. Basketball and hockey have “up-for-grabs” situations, but clearly that can’t work for football. I prefer baseball’s approach: the home team bats in the bottom of every inning, and that’s how it is. So I’d have the visiting team always receive the game’s opening kickoff, and have the home team always receive the second-half kickoff. This might help local TV ratings on some games, as well; even when the Bills are getting spanked in the first half I always at least watch the first drive of the second half, to see if they’re able to do anything. I’d also eliminate this business of picking the goal to defend. I’d have every stadium designate one end zone as the “Visitors” end zone, and that’s the one they defend to start with.

6. Cut preseason to two games. Four games is stupid in this day and age when teams are constantly practicing. This isn’t the days of yore anymore, when teams would only convene for minicamp and then training camp during the offseason.

7. Compensate for eliminating preseason by extending the regular season to eighteen games. Yes, this would mean more wear-and-tear on the players, so I’d compensate there by increasing rosters to 65 players, from 53. Surely that would make the players’ union happy?

8. Prohibit the networks from using Niagara Falls as their standard ‘local color’ shot from Buffalo during Bills games. The TV people always have a camera set up somewhere around the locality they’re in for any given game, and they cut to the ‘local cam’ during station-breaks and other television timeouts. Here in Buffalo, they almost always show Niagara Falls. We’ve got other stuff here, and sixteen times a year, we’ve got a national TV crew showing it off to some other locality! They know about Niagara Falls. How about showing them something else???

And thus would the NFL cement its position supreme in American sports for decades to come!

UPDATE 11-3-06: The point is made in comments that the two points are awared in a safety to make the yielding of a safety more unpalatable. If no points are awarded, teams backed up to their own goal lines would voluntarily give up the safety in order to regain field position when the free kick takes place from the 30 yard line. That’s a good point, one which I failed to appreciate. But since I still don’t like awarding points to a team that doesn’t have possession of the ball, I’d adjust for this by moving the free kick back. No two points, but free kick from the goal line itself. That would make resulting field position very bad indeed for the team giving up the safety; the opposing team would likely have, at most, twenty yards or so to pick up just to move into field goal range. So: no points, but free kick from the goal line. That ought to make a safety bad enough that teams won’t want to give it up.

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[Updated below]

Literally: I don’t give a shit.

These kinds of inadvertent gaffes happen all the time in politics, and they generally fall into two camps: statements that are ill-considered but mainly harmless, and statements that are genuinely revealing of something the speaker believes. I think that Kerry’s gaffe falls into the former category; his “botched joke” explanation rings perfectly true, given that the wording of the actual joke is so close to what actually came out of Kerry’s mouth. Another famed example, I think, of gaffes that don’t reflect what the speaker believes is Gerald Ford’s “There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe” in his 1976 debate with Jimmy Carter; ditto the diastrous Ronald Reagan joke that we were about to start bombing Russia in five minutes.

Gaffes that are actually revealing of character? Well, Trent Lott’s idiotic paean to Strom Thurmond leaps to mind, as does Dick Armey referring to Barney Frank as “Barney Fag”. And of course, there’s a third category: gaffes which were never gaffes at all, but which thanks to relentless pressing of talking points and a passive media that presents talking points as news, come to be seen as gaffes. Here we have Kerry’s old “I voted for it before I voted against it”, and Al Gore’s “claim” that he had “invented the Internet”.

So I don’t give a shit about what John Kerry said. What I do care about is how much ink is being spilled over it, and the media’s fascination with it. I actually don’t have a problem with Republicans pounding it; that’s the way the game is played. But it pisses me off that the media just lets this non-story become a huge story. Really: how much consideration should Kerry’s tongue-tripping be given by a voter in, say, Virginia, when said voter comes to pull the lever for George Allen or Jim Webb? Obviously, none whatsoever.

Serious things are decided by our elections — and yet, here we are, acting like kittens who have just seen a ball go bouncing by. Ugh.

UPDATE 11-3-06: In comments, Lynn states that she thinks Kerry was indeed voicing how he actually feels about the troops (i.e., that they’re stupid). This is an unbelievable stretch, given that there is no evidence at all other than this gaffe that Kerry believes any such thing, and given that the actual prepared remarks of the speech contain the joke as it was supposed to have been read. What’s more plausible, then? That Kerry simply mangled his prepared text, or that he mangled it in such a way as to reveal something simmering deep in his subconscious? Note that Kerry himself enlisted in the armed forces after graduating from an Ivy League institution, so it would be a bit odd for him to believe that enlisted men are dolts who only go into the armed forces because they can’t do anything else.

On a related note, Kevin Drum notes how weird it is that so experienced a speaker as John Kerry would botch a prepared text like that. But that’s not weird at all! Remember all those “blooper” shows that used to be on TV, all the time? The ones that would consist of nothing but clips of newsreaders mangling prepared texts that were right in front of them? Remember Ronald Reagan, when reading from a prepared text in greeting Prince Charles and his wife, addressing Diana, Princess of Wales, as “Princess David”? Remember George H.W. Bush, reading from a prepared text, tripping over the line “We’ve had setbacks” and saying instead, “We’ve had sex”? Remember the 1980 Democratic National Convention, when in his acceptance speech, Jimmy Carter paid tribute to a long line of historical Democrats, which went very nicely until he got to Hubert H. Humphrey and called him “Hubert Horatio Hornblower”?

People screw up prepared texts all the time, whether they’re Great Communicators or tongue-tied peanut farmers. That’s one reason public speaking scares so many people. That’s why the scene in Four Weddings and a Funeral when the Anglican Priest completely bungles his first-ever trip through the marriage liturgy (“Father, Son, and Holy Spigot”) is funny. That we’re making this big a deal out of Kerry bungling his speech says far more about us than it does about John Kerry.

UPDATE II: I’m shutting off comments on this post now. There’s really nothing useful to be gained in hashing over the degree to which John Kerry is an arrogant SOB, after all. He’s not on any ballot this year, and should he end up on a ballot in 2008, nothing I say here is going to convince anyone that Kerry doesn’t secretly loathe the men and women in our armed services.

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Kevin Drum has trouble deciphering this paragraph, from this review of a Yo Yo Ma concert:

Yo-Yo Ma is the world’s most popular cellist. That is not to say that he is the world’s finest cellist. The Finnish virtuoso Anssi Karttunen, for one, can more effectively make Elliott Carter’s Cello Concerto sound like music than can Ma, although it was written for him. Others play bluegrass, tangos and Kyrgyz traditional music more authentically than he.

I’m not sure what to make of this, either. Is the author suggesting that Ma isn’t the world’s finest cellist because in every area of music that has inspired Ma to take up his bow, he isn’t the best? Or is he somehow suggesting that Ma could only be the world’s finest cellist if he was the best in every one of those genres?

And what of the Carter concerto? So what? Lots of great musicians are great at some music, and less so in others. You want to hear some great Wagner? Georg Solti’s your conductor. You want to hear some great Berlioz? You’re better off avoiding what little Berlioz Solti recorded, then.

I’m not arguing that Ma is the world’s greatest cellist, or that he isn’t. I find the idea kind of weird, anyway. Surely he’d be on the shortlist of the world’s greatest cellists, anyway, so this graf is really pretty meaningless except as a way of giving the writer a way of demonstrating his musical street-cred. The whole review is pretty odd, actually; the critic seems to put a lot of stock in stage mannerisms, even going so far as to describe the way Ma walked onto the stage. Heavens, who cares?

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I was just noodling about the apartment a bit, waiting for The Amazing Race to come on, not paying a whole lot of attention to Andy Rooney on 60 Minutes, mainly because I find Rooney palatable in print but nigh-unbearable on the tee-vee. But I caught that he was talking about cities, for some reason, and he said something really bizarre: “I didn’t know that Pittsburgh is on an island, just like New York City.”

I have no idea what the hell Rooney was talking about, because Pittsburgh is not on an island. Sure, the three rivers there have some small islands, no doubt, but downtown Pittsburgh is not on an island to any degree that, say, Manhattan is.

I think Andy Rooney has officially lost it.

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