I recently received the best gift from Hekate: a copy of Change Your Underwear Twice a Week: Lessons from the Golden Age of Classroom Filmstrips by Danny Gregory. I thoroughly embarrassed myself in her living room by hooting like a chimpanzee as I thumbed through it. Even if you aren’t old enough to remember these filmstrips (heck, most of them were before my time), get this book. It’s seriously worth it. I’m still giggling over it.

Thank you, Hek. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Click the link in the title, dammit.

The reality of e-voting shenanigans that everyone feared has begun to trickle in. Apparently a voting machine in Franklin county recorded 4,258 votes for Bush in a precinct where there were only 638 total votes cast. One wonders: if this is discovered to be a consistent error pattern throughout the state, will the reduced total for Bush be enough to push Kerry over the top? Realistically, probably not; but I still believe in a place called Hope.

I’m including the entire article because it’s short and the Columbus Dispatch requires registration. You can get a bugmenot sign-in and read the original article here.

Computer error at voting machine gives Bush 3,893 extra votes

Associated Press

COLUMBUS, Ohio – A computer error with a voting machine cartridge gave President Bush 3,893 extra votes in a Gahanna precinct.

Franklin County’s unofficial results gave Bush 4,258 votes to Democratic challenger John Kerry’s 260 votes in Precinct 1B. Records show only 638 voters cast ballots in that precinct.

Matthew Damschroder, director of the Franklin County Board of Elections, said Bush received 365 votes there. The other 13 voters who cast ballots either voted for other candidates or did not vote for president.

Damschroder said he received some calls Thursday from people who saw the error when reading the list of poll results on the election board’s Web site.

He said the error would have been discovered when the official canvass for the election is performed later this month.

Damschroder said after Precinct 1B closed, a cartridge from one of three voting machines at the polling place generated a faulty number at a computerized reading station.

The reader also recorded zero votes in a county commissioner race.

Damschroder said the cartridge was retested Thursday and there were no problems. He couldn’t explain why the computer reader malfunctioned.

Workers checked the cartridge against memory banks in the voting machine Thursday and each showed that 115 people voted for Bush on that machine. With the other machines, the total for Bush in the precinct added up to 365 votes.

–I came across an editorial written by musician Brian Eno. It’s from early 2003, but still very relevant. An exerpt:

When Europeans make such criticisms, Americans assume we’re envious. “They want what we’ve got,” the thinking goes, “and if they can’t get it, they’re going to stop us from having it.” But does everyone want what America has? Well, we like some of it but could do without the rest: among the highest rates of violent crime, economic inequality, functional illiteracy, incarceration and drug use in the developed world. President Bush recently declared that the U.S. was “the single surviving model of human progress.” Maybe some Americans think this self-evident, but the rest of us see it as a clumsy arrogance born of ignorance.

Europeans tend to regard free national health services, unemployment benefits, social housing and so on as pretty good models of human progress. We think it’s important — civilized, in fact — to help people who fall through society’s cracks. This isn’t just altruism, but an understanding that having too many losers in society hurts everyone. It’s better for everybody to have a stake in society than to have a resentful underclass bent on wrecking things. To many Americans, this sounds like socialism, big government, the nanny state. But so what? The result is: Europe has less gun crime and homicide, less poverty and arguably a higher quality of life than the U.S., which makes a lot of us wonder why America doesn’t want some of what we’ve got.

Other good reads:
–John Updike reviews Robert Alter’s new translation of the Pentateuch

–After Arafat, What? by Dennis Ross

–Thomas Friedman, Two Nations Under God