typewriting

From Hickok Sports, a history of archery:

The modern sport of target archery originated in England during the 14th century, when the longbow became the English army's most important weapon, first at the Battle of Crecy (1346) and later at Poitiers and Agincourt. From 1330 to 1414, English kings banned all other sports because they diverted time from archery and a royal decree of 1363 required all Englishmen to practice archery on Sundays and holidays.

[...]

Roving, the predecessor of modern field archery, grew out of casual hunting with bow and arrow. Archers are presented with targets of various shapes and sizes, simulating small animals, and they shoot at unknown ranges over rough ground, not a prepared course.

Such "roving" sounds a lot like modern golf. What lead me to read about ancient archery was this little detail: at the end of a "roving" archery match, the archers would shoot an arrow back toward the location at which they began the course. This would be analogous to hitting a golf ball from the 18th hole back to the 1st tee. Depending on the geography of the course, this could be quite a distance, so often the shot was fired up rather high. It wasn't really part of the competition — just a traditional conclusion.

The upshot of this history lesson is that the concluding upwards shot became known as the "upshot," first in archery, and then as a common metaphor, as it is still used today.

Living in Iowa, it’s hard to avoid conversations about ethanol. And working for an advertising agency that previously represented the ethanol industry and continues to represent ethanol-related businesses causes the topic to come up in conversation for me more often than for the average Iowan even. I use ethanol in my car, as does most anyone who hasn’t put much thought into it. It’s commonly six cents cheaper. Who wouldn’t go with six cents cheaper?

Well, I’ve talked to a few people who wouldn’t go with six cents cheaper. Their logic comes down to efficiency. While ethanol is cheaper, it actually takes your car more ethanol to produce the same amount of energy, so you’re getting few miles-per-gallon with ethanol vs. standard unleaded gas. “Meh,” I told myself, “that’s a worthwhile tradeoff for a cleaner planet.” Then the ethanol dissenters typically suggest that the process of creating ethanol actually creates more pollution. After a few of these conversations, I decided to do some testing and find out the truth by the numbers.

82% of statistics are made up, so I set out to make up my own, in the only context that matters to me: my own car, a 1997 Buick LeSabre. Lacking the resources to test the pollution from my car (much less the processing plant at which my ethanol was produced), I decided to test what I could: the fuel efficiency of ethanol. Over the past couple months I’ve been recording all of my gas purchases, as well as my mileage between them.

The process of figuring out miles-per-gallon was actually a bit confusing to me at first, so I’ll explain it here. When I fill up my tank, I reset my trip odometer. On my next refill, I know how many miles I’ve gone while emptying my tank, and the amount I put in to refill the tank is equal to the amount of gas I must have used while traveling those miles, because a full tank is always the same size. So by dividing those miles by those gallons, I have a miles-per-gallon number.

This gets confusing when testing different types of gas, because the number of gallons on my current fill-up is actually the number of gallons used with the previous fill-up’s type of gas. I repeated this process several times, and attempted to get as close to a full tank as possible to avoid the previous tank skewing the efficiency of the current tank as I switched back and forth between 10% ethanol and 0% ethanol unleaded gas.

So that’s my methodology. Here are the numbers:

Notice that I added a Highway/City driving variable to the data. I quickly noticed that my numbers weren’t nearly as steady as I was expecting, and I believe my hunch that this variance is primary due to highway vs. city driving is borne out by the numbers above. So the first conclusion is that any variance in efficiency between ethanol and non-ethanol gas is much smaller than the variance between city and highway driving. Those of us concerned about fuel-efficiency need to be working to make our cities more hospitable to walking and biking more than we need to be debating the merits of ethanol. Nonetheless, on to debating the merits of ethanol.

It’s clear to me from the numbers above that ethanol is indeed less fuel efficient than non-ethanol gas in my car. However, the difference is very slight, and it is more than offset by the standard price difference of six cents per gallon. Figuring that in, the average miles-per-dollar figures (for highway miles only, as I’m still finishing my tank of city-driving ethanol) are: 12.74 for ethanol and 12.21 for non-ethanol. So despite the lower fuel efficiency of ethanol, the price difference means that for every dollar I spend, I’m going more miles by using ethanol in my car. With this in mind, I intend to continue using ethanol.

But what about the pollution? Well, I’m not sure about the pollution. I haven’t seen any actual numbers on that, so all I have to go on is what other people say they heard somewhere. Some people say ethanol is better than non-ethanol gas for the environment overall (notably a former client of my employer says this quite often), while others say it’s worse. If anyone has any numbers on this, I’d be interested to see them. But lacking any testable numbers, it seems to me everyone is just arguing whatever reinforces their own beliefs.

And yes, I’m aware that dark forces (e.g. Archer Daniels Midland Company) are at work making corn an artificially prominent part of the American (and increasingly world) economy in everything from ethanol to high fructose corn syrup to construction materials. And maybe when I’ve finished reading Omnivore’s Dilemma this will be enough to convince me to act against my own immediate economic interests. But for now, I’m sticking with the six cents cheaper at the pump and the half a mile-per-dollar more on the road I get with ethanol. As the standard disclaimer says, your mileage may vary, and I’d encourage everyone to do their own testing in their own cars.

A few days ago, I got a new laptop from work. It’s a MacBook Pro, and I really like it. I’ve moved all of my old files and applications over from my old laptop, checked that everything is working okay, installed Parallels to use for testing in Internet Explorer, and played Minesweeper in Windows XP. With all of those important tasks out of the way, I started playing with a new application that came on the new laptop: Comic Life.

As the name suggests, Comic Life makes it easy to make comic strips. It’s a lot of fun to use, and my first completed comic, previously destined to be an article with far too many words and too few pictures, is below.

This was inspired by an article on Don to Earth (and many conversations I’ve had about protein). The photo is from pedrosimoes7 on Flickr.

This evening I heard the phrase “concentration camp” on NPR and starting thinking about what that phrase means. In common use, “concentrate” is both a noun and a verb. Juice comes in a concentrate, it's pushed together in a small space. Or students are told to concentrate, to focus on what they should be doing. Either of these are an incredible euphemism for Nazi death camps, but which euphemism have we adopted? Do concentration camps concentrate people? Do they force people to concentrate? Do they concentrate death? And why is there an English-language euphemism for an atrocity carried out by Germans anyway?

The answer to the latter question, from Wikipedia: the term “concentration camp” was first used to describe British internment camps in the Second Boer War. After gold was discovered Transvaal, British citizens flocked to the country, where they found the native population less than hospitable. To secure the rights of their own resource-exploiting citizens, the British entered a war against a Boer insurgency.

The conditions in the camps were very unhealthy and the food rations were meager. The wives and children of men who were still fighting were given smaller rations than others. The poor diet and inadequate hygiene led to endemic contagious diseases such as measles, typhoid and dysentery. Coupled with a shortage of medical facilities, this led to large numbers of deaths — a report after the war concluded that 27,927 Boers (of whom 22,074 were children under 16) and 14,154 black Africans had died of starvation, disease and exposure in the concentration camps

Photo from Hennie Barnard’s The Concentration Camps

So when the Germans later rounded up a group of people they didn’t like and started killing them, the phrase “concentration camp” was used because it had already been used as a euphemism for similar British atrocities. On top of the story of a superpower invading another country to control its natural resources, the word “insurgency” particular caught my attention here, with thoughts of the insurgency in Iraq. Were concentration camps a standard means of fighting insurgencies?

Indeed they were. The list of concentration camps throughout history is full of attempts to contain insurgent populations during armed invasions. Most recently, in 2001 the Russian military gathered up twenty thousand men and boys in Chechnia. Over 80% died. More immediately, the US military continues to entertain the idea of registering and rationing food to Iraqi residents, in the interest of controlling the insurgent population.

Lieutenant Colonel James S. Corum of the US Army recently wrote about various strategies for dealing with insurgencies, in the context of possible application to America’s military activities in Iraq, in FIGHTING INSURGENTS--NO SHORTCUTS TO SUCCESS [PDF, 3kb]:

International law and the traditional rules of war allow for some very firm tactics employed to coerce and control populations. For example, to cut off support for rebels in pro-insurgent districts, Kitson advocated that government forces commandeer and carefully control all food stocks. Food was rationed by the police and army only to registered village residents, and whole villages would be cordoned off to prevent extra food from being brought in. If the villagers wanted to give food to the rebels, they could do so only if they starved themselves. The British also figured that, if the insurgents came in the night and took the peoples’ carefully rationed food, people would eventually inform on the insurgents rather than face hunger. Such tactics were not only effective, but also legal.

The good thing about Kitson’s approach to waging a counterinsurgency campaign strictly within the rule of law is that it generally works. The downside is that such an approach to counterinsurgency and intelligence takes a long time, and success is measured not in any dramatic terms but in small, local, and incremental victories. It should be no surprise that some of our intelligence personnel and leaders might instinctively opt for the Trinquier approach with its promise of quick and decisive results, when our military doctrine is filled with adjectives such as “rapid” and “decisive” to describe the American mode of warfare. Yet the traditionally successful counterinsurgency doctrines are peppered with adjectives such as “methodical,” “systematic,” and “long-term.”

Emphasis added. The downside of internment under threat of starvation, according to the US Army’s assessment, is not that it’s morally reprehensible; it just takes a long time to starve people to death. Our national unwillingness to concentrate on the “victory” some would imagine in Iraq has prevented us from establishing concentration camps. May our impatience save our souls.

I’m going to start reviewing books, mostly because doing so will require me to start reading books again. Before this week, I hadn’t read a book in at least a year. I read a lot, but not books. I spend much of my time reading articles online from a wide variety of sources. And I periodically listen to audio books. But there’s some small niche of media that only really works in a book. Articles can’t possibly develop ideas in the same depth, and audio books always leave less room for imagination with the reader’s tone heavily influencing interpretation.

So I’m going to start reading books again, and the first book was Kino No Tabi. This book was lent to me by my librarian friend Libby, who read it before me. It was a good transition from my previous all-article reading diet to a new book-inclusive meal plan because it’s both relatively short and broken up into small chapters that could easily be read as independent stories.

Kino No Tabi was originally Japanese, but I read the English translation. I took Japanese back in university, so I can tell you that the title means "Kino of Tabi." Kino is the name of the main character, and I’m not sure what "Tabi" means. It might be some conjugation of the word "eat." I’m not sure.

Anyway, the story is basically that Kino rides a motorcycle from city to city and has different adventures in each city. Also, the motorcycle talks. That’s the kind of thing that would be incredibly distracting in a movie or audio book, but doesn’t seem very strange in the book. Without going into too much detail the adventures in each city are the kind of simple stories that reflect some larger idea about life in general.

Basically, Kino No Tabi is The Little Prince, only not as long, nor as good. I was interested enough to read to the end, but I don’t expect to read the next in the series. Oh yeah, there’s a series, called The Beautiful World. I don’t know if the second book has been translated to English yet or not.

Since I last read a book over a year ago, I learned that I don’t need to finish everything I start reading. That’s common sense, of course, but I never really learned it until I had too many articles in my aggregator and too many other things I wanted to do. I finally started reading things until I was no longer interested and then closing them, without the feeling I once had that I was missing out on something important by not finishing what I’d started.

So now I’m ready to apply that lesson to books. And while I won’t given an especially positive review of Kino No Tabi, it should say something that I finished it. It was good enough to finish but not good enough to continue the series. Let’s call that five out of ten stars, as a reference point for my future book reviews. Next up: The Omnivore’s Dilemma, which I won in the first annual Weaver family Christmas-in-November book exchange bingo tournament. Everyone won a book — more peer pressure to read books.

I was just reading about Miranda warnings, looking for evidence that we don’t lose our rights if we’re arrested for murder, much less when we join a homeowners association. I’ve seen a surprising number of Americans suggesting otherwise today. But much more interesting than a “Satanic” peace wreath (I totally saw that coming) was this:

Ten years after the ruling in the case that bears his name, Miranda was killed in a knife fight at a Phoenix bar; his suspected killer was read the “Miranda warning” and declined to give a statement. He was released and promptly fled to Mexico. The Miranda murder case became a “closed file.”

That’s the problem with rights: everyone has them.

Yesterday I was listening to Dave Zobl’s “Thanksgiving Day” and thinking it would be nice to share it on the holiday. But then I thought it was probably not licensed for that kind of distribution (I couldn’t find anything to say for sure). Then I thought “well, all those kids over at YouTube seem to get away with that by putting song in video, so it would be more pain to extract it than it would be worth.

So I made a video of the song with images from Flickr licensed under Creative Commons attribution. But when I went to upload it to YouTube, it never finished. While I was waiting for it to finish, I decided I don't really want to start uploading videos to YouTube anyway. I have plenty of space on my own hosting accounts, so why give someone else control over my content? Sure the social aspect of YouTube is appealing, but I wasn’t really sure how to go about that, and it didn’t upload anyway.

So I was finally able to upload it here this morning, and here’s the video I made. I hope you enjoy it and get some more Dave Zobl music as a result:

This video requires Flash Player, which you can download free.

Note: Oops. Turns out his name is Zobl, not Zobi as I included in the video and this description. I’ve corrected the description, but I’m not going to re-render and re-convert the video right today. I found his website, and he has two songs for free download, so I’m assuming he’d be okay with this kind of re-use of his music.

My sister-in-law, the one who was recently re-married in the Catholic church, is pregnant. Does it count as a shotgun wedding if you’re already married with children? Anyway, after her re-wedding ceremony, at the party where Ward pondered deep questions of names and knowing, people were talking about names for the upcoming child. Several names were suggested, and most discarded. But all of the suggestions were first names. They hadn’t moved on to middle names yet.

Patrick, the soon-to-be older brother, is pretty sure the child is going to be a boy. His logic is that he already has two sisters, so a boy is required to even out the gender imbalance. This boy has a future in statistics. He doesn’t quite understand middle names though. His middle name is “Julius,” and when he’s in trouble, he’s “Patrick Julius,” so he’s familiar with his own middle name.

But as the first names were suggested at the party, Patrick tried them out by testing what he assumed would be the full name of this boy. “John” became “John Julius Namoff.” “Robert” became “Robert Julius Namoff.” It soon became clear that Patrick thought all boys in his family will have the same middle name.

When he was younger, Patrick’s cousin Alex apparently had a different confusion about middle names. He once thought he had two middle names, “Ander” and “Michael.” Because when he was in trouble, his mother would say what he heard as “Alex Ander Michael,” actually “Alexander Michael.” Silly kids.

But middle names are clearly counter-intuitive. Why do we have them? Wikipedia offers a few reasons, but none of them seem worth the trouble. I think if I have a child to name, I’ll lobby hard for no middle name. If they grow up and find they don’t have enough names, they can always add more later. But I don’t really need to establish a line of royal ancestry or anything, so I don’t see any reason to give a child a third name before they have a personality to attach it to.

My friend JJ recently gave me an additional name. A while back, I made the mistake of talking about my self-diagnosis of Asperger’s. Shortly after that, JJ introduced me to another friend of his, also named Scott. To differentiate between us, he has since referred to me and introduced me as his “autistic friend Scott.” So to JJ’s friends, my middle name is effectively “autistic.” Lucky for me, anyone who knows JJ just passes right over this as we meet.

I have a similar additional name for JJ, but mine is non-verbal. Whenever I talk about JJ with people who have met him, I make sure to clarify exactly who I’m discussing by moving my hands around where my hair would be if it were as large as JJ’s. So his middle name is effectively a hand motion about four inches from the head.

My "autistic" name has a small problem: I’m not actually autistic. And JJ’s hand-wavey name has a problem whenever he gets a haircut. But I think these ad hoc additions to our family and given names are far superior to middle names. I think that’s enough about names for now. On to faces?

In case you were wondering what I tend to write about here, I just made what the web geeks call a “tag cloud” for these articles. It’s weighted to recent writing because I only started adding tags to my articles recently.

I was actually a bit surprised that politics is the most common tag, but I suspect that’s more a reflection of my tagging style than my writing topics. I think I actually write more about technology than politics (though I no longer write about technology at all here since I started a separate site for that), but I tend to tag the technology articles with something more specific than “technology,” whereas the various political topics all just go under “politics.”

About a year after I met her, my friend Becca decided to change her name. I don’t think she ever had it legally changed or anything, but she started asking people to call her “Dora,” and we did. And suddenly she was “Dora,” and people would mention “Becca,” and I wouldn’t know who they were talking about, and then they’d say, “You know, Becca-Dora.”

I never heard an explanation of what brought about this desire to change her name. I think I asked her and she said something like “just because.” At the time, we were both studying existentialism, I as a casual student, and Becca-Dora as a philosophy major in the middle of writing a senior thesis on “Freedom and Facticity.” I couldn’t tell you what “Freedom and Facticity” means exactly, but at the time I suspected that had something to do with the name change. It seemed a sort of philosophy-in-action demonstration of how much we define our selves. If you want to be Dora, it turns out you can just start being Dora.

But at some point after we graduated, Dora decided she wanted to be Becca again, and so everyone called her Becca again. And now Dora is just a vague idea of … something. Whatever the reason was for Dora, I can only assume from the later reversal that it wasn’t a very good reason to change names.

My uncle, on the other hand, had what I think is a very good reason to change his name, but he never did. I didn’t hear this story until I was old enough to think it was odd that no one had told me earlier. But here it is: my grandparents’ first child was named “Kenneth Eugene.” This child died three days after birth. Then they had another child, and they named him … “Kenneth Eugene.” This second Kenneth Eugene is my uncle Ken.

So that’s weird, right? I’m pretty sure I would change my name if I found out I was named after my dead older brother. But I almost changed my name because it’s hard to spell, so I’m probably not the best person to judge what would be a good reason to change one’s name. Most people never change their names, but are there any social norms for those who do? I don’t see any. It’s name-changing anarchy out there. Anyone can do it, and no one does. Maybe that’s what “Freedom and Facticity” means.

A few weeks ago, my sister-in-law was re-married in the Catholic church. After the ceremony, we went to a party at the house of a friend of the re-couple. The friend had a child, named “Ward,” and my mother-in-law (I think it was her — my memory is poor) knew the family, so she said “Hi Ward” as we were entering the house. And Ward immediately asked “How do you know my name?” From his point of view, I suppose this was a complete stranger addressing him by name, so that was a reasonable question to ask.

My AIM login is “imnotscott”. Back in the day, I went to sign up for an AOL account to use instant messenger, and when asked to choose a login, I chose “scott”. There were maybe twenty million AOL accounts at the time, and apparently one of them claimed “scott” before me. Go figure. So defeated in my attempt to be “scott” on AIM, I went with “imnotscott” instead. If I can’t be myself, I’ll be not myself. Take that AOL!

So now I have my AIM login posted in various public locations around the web, and occassionally I’ll get a message from a complete stranger. They’ll often start the conversation with something like “Hi Scott.” And my first thought is generally “How do you know my name?” But I say “Hi” instead and then seek out a little context for the conversation.

I guess names mean more when we’re younger. Our names are more a representation of our selves when there’s less of us to represent. We know our parents really know us when they call us out with our middle names, because they know all three parts of us. But over time we become something that the names don’t fully describe. When someone says “Scott Michael Reynen,” are they talking about me or the guy I was ten years ago or the kid I was twenty years ago? My name is no longer equivalent to myself.

Some day Ward’s response when someone walks into his house and says ’Hi Ward” will be more like “Hi. What are you doing in my house?” But for now he just wants to know how we know his name.

My last name is “Reynen.” Chances are good that you just pronounced that incorrectly in your head as you read it. Chances are also good that if I spoke it aloud to you, you’d spell it wrong. And then you’d probably pronounce it wrong still. It’s a horrible name for someone like me who is interested in efficient communication. So I’ve thought a lot about changing it.

When I was younger (is 26 old enough to say that?), I thought about changing the whole thing: first, middle, and last name. My ideas for new names were awful. “Justin Case” is one I remember. I’m sure glad I didn’t follow through on that idea. I would have had to pull a Prince and try to undo the damage.

Later, I thought about just replacing my last namewith my middle name. “Scott Michael” sounds okay. But for a long time, I didn’t know how to spell “Michael,” so I worried that wouldn’t actually solve the spelling problem. (Turns out most people could spell my middle name better than I could.) Plus, it makes me think of George Michael, and I’m not really a fan.

After that, I didn’t seriously consider changing my name until I got married. Unfortunately, my wife’s last name is “Montgomerie,” which is not exactly a step up on the ease-of-spelling scale. So I kept my last name, and she kept hers, which leads to the question of what last name we might give to potential children. All I know is, it certainly will not be “Montgomerie-Reynen.” I wouldn’t inflict that kind of pain on my worst enemy, much less a child. So maybe a completely new last name would be good. Any proposals?

A while back I was thinking about my grandfathers. I believe I was listening to some radio program in which a man was sharing a memory of his grandfather. Both of my grandfathers are dead, and I remember very little about them. I know a lot more about them than I actually remember, from stories others have told me or pictures I’ve seen. But I think what I remember is more interesting. I remember two things about both of my grandfathers.

My mother’s father was Charles Weaver. The first thing I remember about him is puzzles. We did puzzles together. Big puzzles with small pieces. They took a long time, and being a kid, I did very little of the work. Usually the puzzles were completed by my grandfather late one night as I slept. But he’d always leave out one piece, so when I woke in the morning, I had that satisfaction of completing the puzzle, even though I didn’t do the work. So my grandfather Weaver taught me to be lazy.

The second thing I remember is that he wouldn’t repeat himself. He would say something when I wasn’t listening, and I would say “what?” and he just wouldn’t respond. I think he explained this once as an attempt to encourage listening. Or maybe that was just how I thought of it — I’m not sure. Either way, this taught me not to let my principles turn me into a jerk, a lesson I apply less consistantly than laziness.

My father’s father was Cornelius Reynen. He was a minister, but I don’t remember him ministering in any professional capacity. I think maybe he had retired by the time I was born. I do remember two things about him that revolved around his ministry. The first was the post-dinner Bible readings at his house. My brothers and I were expected to sit around the table after the meal while he read to us from the Bible.

I don’t think it was even the interesting stories either — just whatever happened to come next. Sometimes he would ask us questions at the end to make sure we were paying attention. It was a horrible experience for a child. But from it, I learned how to never be bored, by thinking.

My second memory of this grandfather was Rummikub, which my family would play with him in the evening. If you’re not familiar with Rummikub, it’s almost exactly like Rummy, only with tiles instead of cards. You might ask: why would anyone bother with tiles instead of cards? Well, because playing cards are evil, naturally.

Granted, there are some slight differences between Rummy and Rummikub that make playing with tiles a little easier. But Cornelius, my grandfather, wasn’t interested in those differences, as far as I could tell. He was interested in avoiding cards because he was raised with and maintained the idea that playing cards are evil. So from playing Rummikub I learned to keep faith bounded by reason.

That’s it. That’s all I remember. I wish there were more, but given the small amount of time I spent with my grandfathers, I think these are pretty good lessons to take away. They’ve served me well so far. When I die some day, I hope the lessons I unintentionally pass down will be so useful.

Most likely you arrived here thinking you were heading to weblog.randomchaos.com. I’m sorry to inform you that weblog.randomchaos.com no longer exists. On the bright side, typewriting.org, this site, is here as a replacement. And it comes with a shiny new design and shiny new functionality.

I’ve spent a lot of time moving everything over, redirecting all the old to the new, and trying to get it all looking pretty in the major browsers. Some things still look ugly in IE, but that’s the norm for IE users, so I’m going to stop fighting with it for now. Otherwise, I think it’s all pretty close to what I had in mind back when I said Surely muted earth tones will improve my writing.

So if you notice anything broken or confusing, please let me know with the fancy new comment form. Otherwise, it’s time for me to get back to writing.

On the off chance that someone stumbled upon this unaware that Nov. 7, 2006 is an election day, it is. And you should vote. Unless you’re not registered, in which case you should register. Unless you’re not old enough to register, in which case you should look forward to growing older. Unless you’re not American, in which case you should vote in your own country. Unless you don’t have elections in your own country, in which case you should watch in bitter resentment as Americans take our democracy for granted.

Finally, I’m done. A few people have commented to me that I’m putting a lot of work into my votes here. It probably shouldn’t take this much work to vote thoughtfully, as candidates would ideally be forthcoming with clear positions on issues. But voting thoughtfully also shouldn’t be exceptional enough that it’s worth a comment. Unfortunately, voting itself is still exceptional in America.

In my fantasy America, election day is a national holiday during which we celebrate living democracy. Businesses would shut down and we’d have nothing better to do than to vote thoughtfully. We’d all have election day parties, at which showing up without an "I voted" sticker would be like showing up at a Halloween party without a costume, or showing up at a birthday party without a gift.

But until that happens, this is the democracy we have, and these are the ovals I filled in on my ballot. Now who are you voting for? And why?

Between the Court of Appeals, District Court, and District Associate Judges, I am asked to decide if eleven different judges should keep their jobs. Prior to recieving my ballot, I knew nothing about any of them. I started looking for information on each of them, but I didn’t find much. But then I found the Iowa State Bar Association’s reviews of each judge. From a single document, I was able to see what dozens of lawyers thought about every judge in the state. The votes for retention are very high in general, so I set my bar at 90%. If more than 90% of the responding lawyers voted to retain a given judge, I did the same. If less than 90% of lawyers voted to retain, I voted against.

As a result, I voted for retention on Anuradha Vaitheswaran, Van D. Zimmer, John C. Miller, Eliza J. Ovrom, Artis I. Reis, Carol L. Coppola, Carol S. Egly, and Louise M. Jacobs. I voted against retention for Donna L. Paulsen, Gregory D. Brandt, and William A. Price. I expect all of these judges will be retained, but I hope the slightly lower percentages on election day might cause some judge to improve Punctuality for court proceedings or Clarity and quality of written opinions.

There are five candidates for the Polk County Agricultural Extension Council. My ballot instructs me to vote for no more than five. I found nothing online suggesting there is anything wrong with any of the candidates. So I voted for them all.

There are three candidates for Soil and Water Conservation District Commissioner: Donald Soutter, Jane Clark, and Shirley Danskin-White. I voted for Jane Clark, the only candidate who had any information I could find online.

There are thee candidates for Polk County Public Hospital Trustee. My ballot instructs me to choose two. It’s a refreshing change for such a local office to have actual competition. Unfortunately, the competitors don’t seem to care much about getting votes. Karen Ellis is the only candidate with a website I could find. So I voted for her first. But I couldn’t find any information two help me choose between the other two, Mary B. Fuller and David Harkness. As I said earlier, I think we need more women in government, so I voted for Fuller.

I believe deeply that the lesson of Marie Antoinette (the lesson omitted from Marie Antoinette) is the critical one: You can indulge, and enjoy, for now, it is true; but sooner or later an angry mob will come round smashing your chandeliers and disconnecting your body at the neck.

— Ezra Kilty. It’s the first noble truth: an angry mob will come round smashing your chandeliers.

John P. Sarcone, running as a Democrat, is the only candidate for Polk County Attorney. He’s a sixteen year incumbent. Everything about him — from his too-much-teeth smile to his "I like puppies" position against methamphetamines — make him seem a little suspicious. But I voted for him.

There are three candidates for County Recorder. Tim Brien is the incumbent, but he lost the primary to Julie M. Haggerty. As I mentioned earlier, he intially blamed Michael Mauro, Commissioner of Elections, implying that he rigged the election. But then he dropped his challenge, saying he didn’t believe he could get a fair result.

Apparently he does think he can get a fair result in the general election, even though Michael Mauro is still Commissioner of Elections, because he’s running as an independent. So I don’t trust Tim Brien, and this distrust makes me like Michael Mauro and Julie M. Haggerty more.

The third candidate is Christopher D. Hagenow, running as a Republican. If you follow that link to his website, and the link from there to his blog, you’ notice he doesn’t talk about issues much, and he seems as interested in the Nussle for Governor campaign as his own. As I mentioned in my discussion of the Governor race, I don’t trust Nussle, so by association, I distrust Hagenow.

If it wasn’t already obvious, I voted for Julie M. Haggerty for County Recorder.

Polk County Treasurer is yet another boring race on my ballot, with only one candidate. Mary Maloney is the only candidate, running as Democrat. She looks good enough, so I voted for her.

I don’t know what exactly the Board of Supervisors supervises, but this is another interesting race. The two candidates are John F. Mauro, running as a Democrat, and Gene Phillips, on the ballot by petition. This happens to be the fourth time these two candidates have run against each other. In the 1998 Democratic primary, Mauro won by less than three hundred votes. Then Phillips ran as an independent in the general election and won, also by less than three hundred votes. Then in 2002, Mauro ran against Phillips again and won, this time by a substantial margin.

So Mauro is the incumbent and he won last time. But he’s also on the CIETC board, and although he doesn’t have the direct connection to corruption that Abdul-Samad appears to have, it doesn’t really look good for anyone on that board. Mauro’s best response to the attention was Hopefully, they won't hold me responsible for something I didn't have any control over.

Well, I do hold him responsible for the lack of control. And it’s also Phillips’ turn to win. Oh yeah, and Mauro doesn’t live in the district. So I voted for Gene Phillips.

The Iowa State Representative election is probably the most interesting vote I made. This is the first race involving the CIETC scandal. Apparently a lot of money went into the Central Iowa Employment and Training Consortium, and not a lot of employment and training came out. Ako Abdul-Samad, running as a Democrat, was on the CIETC board, and didn’t convince me that he was innocent of the corruption charges being tossed at him. He lost my vote.

Jack Whitver, running as a Republican, successfully lost my vote by showing up at Abdul-Samad’s house after being told Abdul-Samad was unavailable due to family illness. Even assuming charitably that Abdul-Samad was lying about the family illness, that still makes Whitver a political moron.

Luckily I have two other candidates in this race. Brett Blanchfield, running as a Libertarian, gets points for being the only candidate to bother answering a candidate survey from the Iowa Prosperity Project. And he also gets points for living just a few houses down from me. But he’s campaigning on issues like repealing the mandatory seatbelt law. I can sympathize with the general libertarian desire to streamline government, but if seatbelts are the first (or second, or even twentieth) place a candidate identifies waste in government, he’s lost my vote.

That leaves only Jeff Johannsen. Lucky for me, Johannsen looks like a candidate for whom I can vote without reservation. He wants to help make health insurance more available and affordable to small businesses and neighborhoods [...] to increase availability of assisted living to those with low to moderate incomes [...] to promote the cleanup of neighborhoods and discourages urban sprawl, according to the Des Moines Register. That all sounds good to me, so I voted for Johannsen.

State Senator is yet another Iowa race with only one candidate. I was expecting more interesting politics from the host of the first primary in the nation. The candidate is Jack Hatch, running as a Democrat. Aside from his website, the first thing I found about him was a record that he introduced a bill allowing possession of marijuana for therapeutic purposes. That made me a little happier about voting for the only candidate.

There is only one candidate for Attorney General in Iowa. Apparently law is less important than agriculature in Iowa. The candidate, Tom Miller, is a Democrat, and looks good enough. He’s apparently cares enough about his stance against predatory lending to issue a statement on the issue. So I voted for Tom Miller.

Iowa has two candidates for Secretary of Agriculture. Agriculture is important in Iowa. The Democratic candidate is Denise O’Brien. The Republican candidate is Bill Northey. Browsing their respective websites, you’ll notice Northey talks about “vision” while O’Brien talks about “issues.” O’Brien wins round one. Northey is a board member of Ag Ventures Alliance. O’Brien and her husband Larry Harris have operated a family farm near Atlantic, Iowa since 1976 where they milked cows until 1995. They now raise poultry, apples, and strawberries using organic practices. O’Brien wins round two. No round three. I voted for O’Brien.

I’ve fallen a bit behind in my Election 2006 series because none of my previous theories about my laptop’s narcolepsy really worked. When it started falling asleep during work, I moved to a new (for me) laptop. That’s update number one.

Number two is that, contrary to my expectations of the plot of Battlestar Galactica season three, it appears the good guys have pretty much already won only three weeks in. I haven’t watched the week three show yet, but if the foreshadowing in the week two show and the title of Dave’s recent post (which I haven’t read yet for fear of spoiling week three) are any indication, what I thought was going to take the whole season is already over. So hopefully what comes next will have a little more moral ambiguity.

And I’ll get back to devaluing the privacy of our election process when I return from yet another weekend trip. Hopefully I’ll finish before election day.

There’s only one candidate for Treasurer of State in Iowa, and he is Michael Fitzgerald. He’s already Treasurer of State, hasn’t embarrassed himself, and he appears to be responsible for The Great Iowa Treasure Hunt, a pretty cool website that allows Iowa residents to search for abandoned property. Not that it matters when no one else is running, but I voted for him.

Iowa has two candidates for Secretary of State. Michael Mauro, the Democratic Party candidate, is currently the Polk County Auditor and Commissioner of Elections. In that role, he’s involved in dispute surrounding the primary election for County Recorder, but I’ll get into that later. This election was decided for me by Maruo’s opponent. It turns out Mary Ann Hanusa, the Republican Party candidate, doesn’t actually live in Iowa, according to Daily Kos. In an otherwise uninteresting race, that’s enough to lose my vote. I went with Mauro.

Before anyone starts to wonder why I didn’t just color in the party-line vote oval, I wanted to skip ahead to the State Auditor race, in which I voted for the Republican candidate David A. Vaudt. Now it’s true that Vaudt is the only candidate on the ballot in this race, and it’s also true that I searched for other write-in options.

But when I didn’t find any alternatives to Vaudt or skipping the race, I looked in depth at Vaudt’s website, and a few newspaper articles involving Vaudt, and I found no good reason not to vote for him. Like Boswell, Vaudt won my vote by not disqualifying himself. I’m not sure, but Vaudt may be the first Republican I’ve ever voted for.

There are three candidates for US Representative from the Third District of Iowa, where I live. Helen Meyers, of the Socialist Workers Party, has no website. I really don’t think a website is too much to ask of a candidate for US Representative. That leaves just two: Leonard L. Boswell, running as a Democrat and Jeff Lamberti, running as a Republican.

I don’t expect it will surprise anyone who read of my inclination to vote for a Green Party candidate for Governor that I voted for Boswell in this race. Both campaign websites include the same stock "I like puppies" kind of political rhetoric, void of specific positions on specific issues. But Lamberti scared me away by calling himself a conservative leader. I take that a euphemism for a willingness to have the government dictate who can and can not get married, and that’s a good way to lose my vote. Boswell won my vote by not disqualifying himself.

There are five candidates for Governor of Iowa, with Lieutenant Governor running on the same tickets so I chose them together. The first out of contention is Mary J. Martin, running in the Socialist Workers Party. She’s out because she has no website. There are some less important offices for which I’ll let a candidate get by without a website, but not Governor.

Next out is Kevin Litten, running in the Libertarian Party. H