After all the hoopla about voting machines and pregnant chads and turning away voters that is going on all over the country our voting experiences was a bit of a letdown. We entered the basement room of the Beverly Library and were greeted by several elderly volunteers who checked us off their list. We received our ballots and were ushered to the “voting booth” (a row of rickety, sectioned, counters.)

I took my stubby golf pencil and began to fill in the little ovals. But what to answer? A..? B…? C…? oh wait… Kerry..? Bush…? Legalize Marijuana…? I had a hard time staying inside the lines due to Peter’s vigorous coloring.

All in all we went, we voted, we checked out some library books. What more is there to say?

For anyone who is interested, this is the ballot that Becky and I will be voting on later today, as residents of Beverly, Massachusetts, Ward 2, Precinct 1.

Of the local candidates, we’ve received flyers at home from Mary Grant and Frank Cousins. I’m not sure that I’ve even heard of any of the other local candidates, and I definitely had no clue that there were two Questions on the ballot.

The Boston Globe has an Election 2004 section. The Globe has historically endorsed Democratic candidates, but their election page at least provides some information on local candidates and issues.

Update
I’ve collected some articles, reports, and letters regarding the various local candidates who are not running unopposed:

State Representatives for Beverly:
Mary Grant, responding to a questionaire in the Beverly Citizen.
Jack Murray, responding to the same questionaire.
Donato Paglia, again responding to the same questionaire.
Beverly Citizen Editorial: Mary Grant for state rep

Can’t find anything to link to on the Sheriff’s race, and the rest of the candidates are running unopposed. I guess that gives us less to focus on!

Update
Here’s the Project Vote Smart page for our locality.

I read a post over at Jesse Ruderman’s blog on how he calculated that one could win the Presidential election with only 21% of the popular vote. His article is somewhat dense with technical terms, at least for the casual reader, but I think it would be an interesting read for anyone.

Jesse’s article got me thinking about frustrating this whole election thing is. Even after reading news articles, blog entries, fact check websites, websites from any of the parties, watching numerous TV ads, listening to various radio ads… I am still one of those annoying undecided voters.
Continue reading →

Heh.

Also, heh.

And a little extra serving of heh.

We’ve all been hearing alot lately about the current status of the Flu Vaccination. Frankly, I’ve heard more than I really care to. I know that the flu is dangerous to certain groups of people and I think that they should get a shot. For everyone else… Read this!

***Flu Vaccine Substitute|http://www.boston.com/news/odd/articles/2004/10/14/chicken_soup_replaces_flu_vaccine/***

CNN.com – Schwarzenegger backs speedier killing of strays – Jun 25, 2004

“I’ll be back – to kill your cat.”

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts has made available its complete list of tax delinquents. You can ***see the top ten business and individual delinquents|http://dorapps.dor.state.ma.us/disclosure/home.asp***, or ***search for delinquencies by delinquent type and/or the city|http://dorapps.dor.state.ma.us/disclosure/home.asp***.

See if your favorite restaurant is on the list, then boycott them until they pay up! Or, see if your friends and neighbors are on the list, and refuse to return that hammer you borrowed until they cough up the dough!

Hours of fun!

As Becky and I have driven in and out of Boston the past week, it’s been amazing to see the open spaces where the double-decker bridge used to be. The Big Dig project is really making progress tearing down all of that old stuff, and as the Boston Globe reports this morning, all of that leftover metal ***isn’t just being thrown out|http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2004/04/25/he_could_call_it_his_big_digs/?rss_id=Boston%20Globe%20–%20City%20/%20Region%20News***. Now that would be a sight… 🙂

As most of you have already heard, Charles McCoy, the prime suspect in the Ohio I-270 sniper shootings was ***arrested in Las Vegas|http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/Midwest/03/17/ohio.highway.shootings/index.html***. Meanwhile, his family back home in Ohio has issued this statement, acccording to CNN:

qqq|Charlie, we all love you very, very much, and we are very concerned about your well-being right now. Everything is going to be OK,” said Amy Walton outside the family home.|qqq

How exactly is everything going to be OK for him? What a load of baloney.

On top of all this, it appears that ***Amy|http://waltondammerunprwdot.org/g/*** leads a parallel life back in Ohio. Think of the frequent flier miles! 😉

I’m sure their website has been around for a while, but just today I discovered that my old hometown newspaper, ***The Mount Vernon News|http://www.mountvernonnews.com/index.html***, has a website… and a pretty decent one at that. They even have an RSS feed! (Though the link isn’t public – you must make an email request to obtain it.) How progressive. Even ***Beverly’s paper|http://www.townonline.com/beverly/*** doesn’t have an RSS feed. Let’s not even talk about the ***Salem paper’s website|http://www.salemnews.com/***.