So, when I found the site, I was of course curious which, if any, of my neighbors had contributed to the yes campaign. We had a no on 8 sign in our window for the month or so before the election, and didn’t see any yes on 8 signs in my immediate neighborhood, but I do remember driving past them to and from work, and eightmaps.com did show me that some folks near where I live had contributed. I’ve heard a couple folks on the radio talking about places where this information is available, and that it has led to harassment of people and some folks have resigned from their jobs after their donations were revealed.

Which leads to my real point, which is now that I have this information, what do I do with it? I didn’t recognize anyone that I know, which I suppose makes things a bit easier, but there are thing there. The nVidia executive who donated $10,000 — I’ve bought nVidia video cards for my computer before, but maybe next time I’ll think more about ATI. Of course, I don’t really know how many donations any ATI executives may have made, and they’re big companies, so it may not be quite as cut and dried as that.

But, what if I found my dentist there — not that I have, but what if? He’s a nice guy, and a good dentist, but he does own his own practice, and I’d hate to think that he is using the money I pay for teeth cleanings to deny my fellow citizens their rights. There are a lot of dentists in the valley, and I’m sure a lot of them are good ones. I could find another dentist if I needed to.

And that’s what I’ll do. I’m not going to go out of my way, but if I find out that the folks at my favorite restaurant were big donors, well, I guess I can find another place to eat, because there are a lot of restaurants and many of them have good food. If the manager at my auto repair shop chipped in $500, well, I like him but I’ll miss him. Years ago, I found out that Orson Scott Card, a science fiction writer of some acclaim, was a pretty virulent homophobe. I haven’t bought or read his books since, because I don’t want to be giving money to, well, to a troglodyte. There are plenty of good science fiction writers out there, and the sooner the world says “you are dead to us because, even though your books may be good, you yourself are a horrible person” the better off we’ll be.

And, I’m not going to tell you who I answered, other than to say “Kevin” for seat 4 since he was the only choice in their survey ( apparently, Karen as a write-in doesn’t rate as poll-worthy ). They also asked two questions, vaguely about the two “big” issues in the campaign, namely whether the city should look at a stadium and what the city should do about the Kaiser site development. I couldn’t answer anything about the second question, since it will eventually come before the Planning Commission.

And, the reason this is at all blog-entry worthy at all, other than my sheer amazement that someone is doing local, city-council level polling, was that the nice woman doing the survey had almost no idea how to pronounce anyone’s names, and she kept calling it “Santa Clarita”. After we were done I asked her a couple questions about how many calls she was making, and how it seemed to be going ( apparently lots of people just don’t know who they’re going to vote for ), and told her how to pronounce everyone’s names. Except Ciaran, since I have no idea how to pronounce that one.

I’ve been playing Star Wars: The Force Unleashed on my Wii ( and having fun ), but somehow I never thought it would get Lord Vader on my case…

One cool thing is that every once in a while folks contact me and really get the joke, and want to share it themselves with folks. I’ve had people email me and say that they saw my ad somewhere, and want to write about it on their blog, or they just link to me in a post on their site. And, in those cases where it’s been a site linking to me in a language other than English, I get to have fun using Google to translate it back into English and then laugh at the wacky words and ideas that seemingly are expressed.

I got such a email a couple months back, from Nerraux with The Awful Show, which is a “radio” show that tapes every week and mostly plays on the “interwebs”. I listened to a couple of their shows, and appeared on their latest show, episode 116. I suspect they get a lot of their listeners via iTunes or a later podcast-type download, but they also have a bunch of folks listening to them do the show live every week, which is pretty brave — I’d never try to do Keith Explains! live ( except for the friends in the audience ), mostly because I think half the humor is the stuff I think of to put up in the subtitles and images as the show goes by, and it always takes a couple hours for me to think of enough funny stuff to pep up the 28 minutes of talking I do each time.

Anyway, I had fun. If you just want to listen to just my part, it’s here and about 20 minutes or so in length. Hearing it again, and even while I was doing it, I can think of so many “better” things I could have said in most cases, and sometimes it was hard to break into the conversation because they all know each other and know when to chime in and make jokes about things. Twenty minutes goes by really fast, much faster than it seems when I’m taping Keith Explains. It’s probably because on my show I’m really only playing off myself — as I say things, I also think of stuff I can put up as text later, and so I leave “space” for it, but when other folks are involved everything goes by a lot faster. I had the same thoughts after I was on Sebastian in the Morning earlier this summer. But, as I said, I had fun and they say they did too, so everyone’s happy.

So, I suspect if I get another 30 or 40 tries, I could finally get this thing right.

This last year, I took a set of pictures from the front just before the session started, just so everyone would see what it’s like for us. Mostly, it’s people as far as the eye can see. For a couple seconds each year it’s kind of intimidating, then I remember that most of those folks actually like us.

Which, assuming that I’m actually remembering the quote somewhat accurately, and given that it’s been years since I read it, an that I’m really remembering the first time I read it, back when I was probably about 14, so that it made more of an impression on me than it would not ( although, again, if I’m remembering it at all correctly ) is still one heck of a line.

And, the reason it came to me, while heading to what was to be a somewhat boring afternoon, is that coming on about the 1,000th page of a long, intricate adventure where stuff has happened and ( worse ) where lots of stuff hasn’t happened in between all of the stuff occasionally happening, was that at the time it surprised me because, up till then, the elves had been pretty kick ass. Sure, there was too much poetry and “Go here and tell random Elf-name-starting-with-the-letter-G this.”, and back and forth, but you wouldn’t want to fuck with the elves because they had power and abilities beyond those of the average folk. Among other things, they were pretty much immortal, so they could take their time before screwing you over completely.

And yet, it was the end. Sure, they didn’t really know it. Not yet; at least for lots of them. The upper level ones knew, and the rest were slowly coming to the realization that the world had moved on past them, and what awaited each of them was a trip on a boat to the lands over the sea to the east — to their deaths, essentially.

So, why do I mention this? Suddenly it occurred to me that maybe this is exactly where the USA is today — on top of the world, don’t fuck with us for a long time, and then… well, its over, save for the cleaning up and packing of the bags. It’s someone else’s turn.

And, if the age of the Elves is past, whose age is it now?

So, to address this, we thought of a product that should exist, and probably does, but we’re too lazy to google and find it so we made it up ourselves.  Yours for $9.99!

Anyway, I’ve bought a lot of Lego sets recently, because since I don’t have children I’m forced to buy my own toys and I’ve got disposable income for stuff like…

the Lego Death Star II.

It took me about 6 months to complete, but most of that time it was set aside because I didn’t have room or time to work on it. All told, I probably could have finished it in about 2 weeks of evenings if I’d worked straight.

If, say, a married guy with two kids ( one boy, one girl, both cute as a button ) comes here from Texas and falls in love with another dude, and gets a quickie marriage, is he a bigamist in Texas?

Even though Texas doesn’t recognize the gay marriage?

Obviously, I have too much time on my hands.

Then, anxiously waiting for it to get delivered. For a while I was afraid I’d sent it to the wrong address, but eventually someone did pick it up…

Now, go take a look at this clip from the Stephen Colbert show, Tuesday May 13th. In particular, pay attention around the 3:00 minute mark.

????????

See! He got my product and he’s been using it! I’m so happy!