Take two thick slices of Noonie's day old bread, smear Honey Cup honey mustard
liberally over both. Cover both slices with green leaf lettuce. Then on one slice only lay smoked turkey on the lettuce,
a tomato slice on the turkey and sprinkle it with shredded carrot. Then on the lay a slice of provolone cheese over the
carrot then a green pepper ring on top of the cheese. Sprikle with sprouts. Cover with the other slice, lettuce side down.
The letuce should be stuck to the bread with honey mustard so it doesn't fall off when you turn it upside down to cover the
sandwich. Slice sandwich in half with a knife. Wrap in tightly in plastic wrap. Use too much wrap. Tape on label. Tadaaa!
Weighs one pound. Costs Four Bucks.
"Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses
yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your
teeming shore, Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed,
to me: I lift my lamp beside the golden door."
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers,
and effects,
against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and
no warrants shall issue,
but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and
particularly describing the place
to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Ethan Allen Tower
"During the 1992 campaign, Bill Clinton
sometimes spoke of a 'twofer' (two for the price of one) presidency,
implying that Hillary would play an important role in his
administration."
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Duis ligula lorem,
consequat eget, tristique nec, auctor quis, purus. Vivamus ut sem. Fusce aliquam nunc vitae purus.
Whatever things
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Duis ligula lorem,
consequat eget, tristique nec, auctor quis, purus. Vivamus ut sem. Fusce aliquam nunc vitae purus.
Happy Anniversary Poopsie
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
My beautiful wife Poopsie and I have been married three years today. In that time we have produced two perfect children and had a lot of fun.
I love you Poopsie. You made me the luckiest guy ever. Sushi and candle light after work tonight... xoxoxoxo!
Also- as of Friday the web poll on the front page of the Burlington Free Press Online has a disclaimer: "This is not intended to be a scientific sample of local and national opinion."
That was never there before. On Friday I made the suggestion to one of their editors and it appeared a couple of hours later. BurlingtonPol readers know respondents to such polls are self-selected and therefore don't represent any population beyond themselves, but I doubt all Free Press readers realize that.
Also, The Free Press seems to be trying to cut in on iBurlington's turf, by inviting citizen journalists to be co-opted into doing Gannett's work for them free. One would hope when the Free Press accepts news sent by Joe Public they vet a it little. Do they? I don't know.
Who loves the intersection of Pearl Street/Colchester Ave and North/South Prospect Streets? It's especially awesome when you're waiting at the north-south traffic light and it turns green. The roads are eschew and nobody knows what to do. It's Mad Max out there. There's a vacuous, lawless 20 square foot plot in the middle of that intersection- sort of a rogue little nation onto itself that I'll dub "Thunderdomastan" for the moment because I have to get to work...
This presidential election's media campaigns are underway. I just looked at videos from the two presumptive major party nominees, Clinton and Romney. Clinton makes use of her husband, and Romney makes use of his wife. Obviously we know Clinton's husband pretty well, and we assume that since he'll be her top advisor, her policies will look like those that brought peace and prosperity throughout the nineties.
Romney has his wife talk into the camera with a Christmas tree behind her for thirteen minutes. She talks like an average woman and she looks incredibly hot for her age. Romney's vids are all soft sell bullshit, but they will play well in his nomination quest. Yesterday Romney drew blood from both Thompson and Giuliani, when a supporter said his wife Ann was a starter wife and trophy wife "all in one."
Right now both sides are tailoring their message to win party nominations. If the campaigns are smart they are saving their opponents web media in real time on their own servers because the medium is the message and they are both fluid. What's on your opponent's web site today will not necessarily be there tomorrow. Today the focus is to win the nomination, tomorrow, the general. Different messages. Different web content.
Thank you very much to Philip Baruth, John Odum and the rest of the GMD posse for putting on the barbecue at North Beach yesterday. Yanna, Koko, Poopsie and I had great time!
Briggs Reports this morning that Councilor Ed Adrian will seek to table all amendments to the new zoning ordinance while Councilors Jane Knodell and Kurt Wright want to ram them through before letting the public think about them further.
Anonymous said... It's all semantics, isn't it? I mean, Vermont law requires a paper ballot. So what are you worried about? Monday, July 09, 2007
Haik Bedrosian said... No. It isn't all semantics. Law is fluid. I'd feel better were "Paper Ballot! Paper Trail!" imbedded in the VT and US Constitutions and the UN Charter for that matter, but it isn't. All we have is one little regular state law.
This is not a joke. This is urgent. As recently as last November, the congressional election in Florida's thirteenth district was stolen using paperless touch-screen "voting" devices. There is no recourse or possible way to audit the results. The result stood and the district will vote on paper next time. Paper.
I do not want my secretary of state contemplating any perceived "efficiencies" vis-a-vis paperless "voting." That's like considering the aesthetic improvement from rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic.
It is impossible to audit (truly audit) elections held using touch-screen or paperless devices. If it can't be audited, it can't be trusted. If it can't be trusted, the people can't have confidence and democracy is destroyed.
That's what I'm worried about. Wednesday, July 11, 2007
I don't really care about this story, but it sends me down memory lane back to high school when my girlfriend at the time read Sassy like it was her job. Click the classic cover with Kurt and Courtney to read the wiki article. That particular issue was on the shelf at Waldenbooks in the Burlington Square Mall when Waldenbooks was where Bertha Church is now (near to the elevators).
I don't know why I was in New York, but is the first half of the nineties anyway- I wore a used blazer and had a 35mm camera around my neck when I made my way up to the floor in the skyscraper where Sassy lived. I didn't belong there but they were nice and gave me a tour. I saw all the actual "Help Me" letters splayed out on a desk and I was introduced to Jane Pratt herself.
Sassy even granted me an unpaid internship. To do what? I don't remember. I couldn't take it as I lived in Burlington, but just consider this another log on the fire of what might have been for me. Maybe in a dozen years or so when my daughter enters the fray of teen culture I'll be in a position to start my own magazine for girls. She can tell me what's what and I'll write it all down.
You know...It isn't as if it hadn't occurred to me to write Deb Markowitz about "Paper Ballot! Paper Trail!" before. I've hesitated to do that because I was afraid of what her answer might be.
Anyway, I finally did write to her yesterday. Her response was helpful and somewhat reassuring, but not entirely satisfying. She said it was already written in Vermont Law which she gave me:
CHAPTER 51. CONDUCT OF ELECTIONS Subchapter II. Ballots § 2478. Number of paper ballots to be printed and furnished (a) For primary elections, the secretary of state shall furnish each town with a sufficient number of printed ballots based on the history of voter turnout in the town and in consultation with the town clerk. (b) For general elections, the secretary of state shall furnish each town with a number of printed ballots approximately equal to 100 percent of the number of voters on the checklist for the primary election. (c) If necessary due to unusual growth of the checklist, a town clerk may request additional ballots from the secretary of state at least 40 days before the election. (d) For local ballots, the town clerk shall cause such number of ballots to be printed and furnished as the board of civil authority shall designate. (e)No voting shall occur in any general election which does not use printed ballots. (Added 1977, No. 269 (Adj. Sess.), § 1; amended 1979, No. 200 (Adj. Sess.), § 48; 1981, No. 239 (Adj. Sess.), § 15; amended 1985, No. 109 (Adj. Sess.); 1991, No. 127 (Adj. Sess.); 2003, No. 94 (Adj. Sess.), § [emphasis added]
That's great! Thank You to the state reps, senators and governor who made that happen- whoever the hell you happen to be! I love you.
The thing is Deborah Markowitz, I believe, is a genuinely nice person. I think because of this she tried to take an extra step to reassure me, that unfortunately had the opposite effect. She said even if we put the paper trail issue aside, she didn't believe electronic voting would make sense in Vermont because the "efficiencies" that make it "attractive" in other states are not "relevant" here because they are too expensive.
Um...ah, yeah...(I'm doing Bill Lumbergh ) See, the thing is- it doesn't matter how efficient it is or how attractive that efficiency may make it for an elections officer- paperless voting is worthless. It cannot be audited and that is a fact. Look it up- or better yet, just use your common sense. When you use a touch screen and the program inside the machine records the vote falsely, the voter does not know. Nobody knows, except perhaps the hacker responsible for the flipped vote. How can you recount that? What are you counting? Ether? Finger Prints? That vote is in there baby, and that race is over. Look at Florida-13 for crying out loud! Touch screen machines produced an election with 18,000 undervotes under highly dubious conditions. That baby is still in court and Florida is returning to paper. Hallelluya!
And get it straight. A "paper trail" is meaningless unless it consists of a "paper ballot" The vote must be recorded on something physical, AKA, real, AKA paper- and it must be verified by the voter before it cast. It is true that a touch screen voting machine will produce a printed receipt, but as they say "garbage in, garbage out." If a bug or glitch flipped a vote, that receipt would just mimic the flipped vote. It doesn't tell us squat about the intent of the voter. Nobody can verify a vote if no physical record of it exists.
So although I'm glad the Secretary of State has at least some reason to oppose the scourge of e-voting, I'd prefer it if her primary reason for opposing electronic voting had more to do with the bedrock principle of sound, verifiable elections- and less to do with some false ideas about cost and efficiency. If an election is meaningless it isn't efficient and it's a total waste of money. Not only that- it cuts at the heart of democracy.
In any event, Deb was very gracious to respond to my email so quickly and provide me with the text of the Vermont Paper Ballot Law. I like her. She didn't get more votes than Jim Douglas or Bernie Sanders for nothing.
Something is more than nothing. The difference between something and nothing will always be infinitely greater than the difference between something and more. Don't try to tell me 2 is to 1 as 1 is to 0. Zero is totally different than all the other numbers.
I saw Senator Dick Lugar (R) from Indiana tonight on Charlie Rose. Remind me to tell Steve Benen what he said.
I am uninspired at work, but at least I have a job... for now. I want to go back to working for myself. Back to sandwiches, I guess, but this time days, not nights and office workers, not college kids.
We live in the seat of a worldwide empire. You don't care about my sandwich dreams, and We don't care about all the suffering and death in other countries. The things we catch wind of we don't fully believe. Did we slaughter 3000 Panamanians in 1989? Was there a lot of construction and banging on the 34th floor before 9-11. Was it Marvin Bush?
We don't fully believe it because we're afraid to and the post-modern diffusion of information give us an easy out. Bullshit like this blog is democratizing media, but the flip-side is nobody really knows what to believe any more. Anybody can deny anything and it's harder to check the facts. Who you gonna believe? PoliticsVermont? Wikipedia? With all due respect to Shay Totten and the last days of the Guardian- if it's online only, it isn't a newspaper. That's one of the larger points I try to make with this blog. I put things up and take them down, or I leave them up and change them. None of this electronic mumbo jumbo means a damn until you print it out on a piece of paper and hold it in your hand. You people ought to know that.
What else? I'm too tired to be writing, but I have to unfortunately. It's the only thing I do that is remotely artistic nowadays. I'm feeling like a ghost. Nobody is safe unless we all are safe, and not all of us are safe. Many many brothers and sisters all over the world are being brutally murdered, or worse. Also, nobody is free unless we all are free. I'm free and I still can't find freedom. Nelson Mandela was in jail for 27 years and he was free the whole time. Nothing makes any sense and everything is its own opposite. It's also defined by the total absence of everything it isn't. You people ought to know that.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or
prohibiting the free exercise thereof;
or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of
the people peaceably to assemble,
and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Click Sticker to get one.
Yours free with Paypal donation of any amount.
Amendment VII
In suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars,
the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury,
shall be otherwise reexamined in any court of the United States,
than according to the rules of the common law.
"Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses
yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your
teeming shore, Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed,
to me: I lift my lamp beside the golden door."
-Emma Lazarus, 1883
--------------------------
Church Street Energy System
--------------------------
Powered by
"The Medium is the Message."
Whatever things
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Duis ligula lorem,
consequat eget, tristique nec, auctor quis, purus. Vivamus ut sem. Fusce aliquam nunc vitae purus.
Whatever things
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Duis ligula lorem,
consequat eget, tristique nec, auctor quis, purus. Vivamus ut sem. Fusce aliquam nunc vitae purus.
Junktique's New Site
Junktique's Old Site
Jessica Sklar
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyNJbNbmUUkmfGLaBuqicz0Zvqt-1zb2AzXdfm1qMXh8AfpmG9leXo0dm_wo-26BNSQz0sc5nzPl7NU4PdQjb1wqbgKf1-A7vG2K8EsV40igIcBQahcPJFPCUfHFy3aSWN2yi8qg/s1600/henry%2527s.jpg")
