Main

What?

Why?

Nouns

Old Stuff

Mail

<#include std-apology.h>

Well, yet another "punch in the gut or kick in the head" presidential election is rolling our way, and for the first time I'm seriously considering just NOT VOTING. George W. Bush disgusts me. Al Gore fails to impress me on so many levels. I don't get the excitement about Ralph Nader. Pat Buchanan makes me ashamed to be American. And those are the only candidates who are getting any media coverage whatsoever. That's it? Those are my choices? Punch in the gut, kick in the head, slap in the face, or hydrochloric acid enema? No wonder NONE OF THE ABOVE sounds so promising.

There's a website that I discovered in the 1996 presidential campaign, and visited frequently for the 1998 senatorial campaign here in Virginia. It's http://www.vote-smart.org. I may have mentioned this back when Bush & Gore hadn't been anointed as their respective party's goons. They have a page that lists all the candidates, and links to those candidate's answers to the National Political Awareness Test (NPAT).

The NPAT is (and you better believe I'm quoting this straight from their website) "a non-biased, no-wiggle-room candidate questionnaire. The NPAT tests a candidate's willingness to articulate his or her specific issue positions in a manner that is straight forward and easily accessible to the voting public. Its purpose is to give the voter instant information on how a candidate stands on the issues that are important to citizens."

I love the NPAT, since it cuts through the mealy-mouthed candidate-speak and makes them define their positions. For the 1996 election, both Bush and Dole had taken the NPAT. In 1998, both of the Virginia senatorial candidates had taken the NPAT. This year... guess who's taken the NPAT? Not Bush. Or Gore. Or Nader. Or Buchanan. Well, that's lovely. None of them is willing to articulate their positions. Oh, I can visit their websites, and read something, but I really think the NPAT is the best way to compare candidates, so you can really decide who to support.

I'll be eligible to run for president in 2010. Yes, I've thought about it.

So, to cover a vastly different topic, Liz and I have been out shopping for furniture. Specifically, a living room set. There are an astounding number of furniture designs out there that have obviously been created by someone who intended their sofa as an object d'arte, and not something for human beings to sit in. For all those confused furniture designers out there, let me please give two quick tips on design.

1. People will be sitting in your sofas, most often facing forward. Therefore, you'll want something for their backs to rest against. This means two things. First, generally, you want the back of the sofa to be higher than the arms. Secondly, you want to use cushions instead of throw-pillows as your means of padding the back "wall" of the couch. Pillows can get knocked around, kicked out of order, pulled onto the floor by the cat, all sorts of things. Cushions are relatively sedentary, and generally much more comfortable than those little pillows.
2. Ugly is ugly. Champagne gold, lime green, incandescent purple, and puce are colors that no one but designers want to have show up in their houses.

What I really hate about furniture shopping is that the salespeople are almost always commission-only employees, so they exhibit a level of desperation usually only found in crack addicts. I hate having things pushed on me, and that's what salespeople working on commission do. If the online furniture places weren't so ridiculously expensive, I'd probably try to push Liz to consider it more.

That's all for now. I've got a couple other things I'm kicking around (all completely uncalled for, but that's about par for the course around here), but at the glacial pace I'm turning things out, I wouldn't look for them soon. :-)