While I was in the UK last month, my friend Adrian challenged me to come up with a Canadian joke. I failed. He apparently collects them for some unfathomable reason, perhaps because they are rare. If any readers have some to contribute, I'm sure he'd be grateful.
Meanwhile, here's a sample from Adrian's collection:
Q: How do you get 20 teenage Canadian boys to get out of a swimming pool?
I have no idea what to make of this.
Allegedly, a down-ticket Democrat polled 257,000 more votes than Kerry in Ohio. If true — and the web site offers some county-by-county vote figures — that's very odd, as barring the most unusual circumstances the top of the ticket polls well ahead of candidates with very limited advertising budgets. (spotted via Cosmic Iguana)
Bush is currently believed to have carried Ohio by circa 130,000 votes, although exit polls showed a narrow Kerry win. Were Kerry to have won Ohio he would have won the electoral collage although not, on current counts, the popular vote.
The Ohio vote count has had its oddities, notably the apparently false claim that the count in Warren County had to be held behind closed doors without the usual observers due to an FBI terror warning that … didn't exist. It would be enough to make you suspect some hanky-panky were we not all in the grips of … of what exactly?
The BBC calls it Rise of the anoraks (“anoraks” being English slang for people who wear uncool windbreakers and study science or math). Demos, probably the UK's most interesting think tank, calls it The Pro-Am Revolution: How enthusiasts are changing our economy and society.
Demos says that the people it calls “Pro-Ams”—meaning “amateurs who pursue a hobby to a professional standard” including serious amateur astronomers and open source coders—should receive government funding to “promote community cohesion”.
It's nice to see the bottom-up revolution being noticed. Whether it needs subsidizing, though, and how one would do so without distorting it (and without enormous waste), seem like fairly hard questions. But I haven't yet read the full report.
Admittedly, the competition is not exactly tough, but based on Kudos where deserved, I suspect that Tony Hall, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Food and Agricultural Agencies, is GWB's best appointee.
As an experiment, I will be closing down comments on all posts that haven't had any comments for a few weeks. The idea is to shrink the target for comment spammers — I had hundreds of comment spams over the weekend despite MT-Blacklist and I'm getting more than a little fed up swatting it all.
While you and I were worrying about the budget — borrow more money to fund the move away from guaranteed social security???? — The American Street has been Waiting for a Protein to Shift.
Flu pandemic? If this keeps up I'm expecting a Biblical Flood.
Oh, wait. Global warming means Florida is going to be under water.
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