Click images for desktop size: "Men In Hats" by Dimage I love my dogs.
Out shoveling snow early this morning, a nasty heavy snow with an 3 inch undercurrent of re-freezing slush. I was shoveling because there's a promise of freezing rain (is that what I thought of as sleet?).
The pups were all out with me, gallivanting and having a wonderful time. The only problem I had with that is that they have to always be within the 3 X 3 area I declare as my personal space.
So fascinated with the idea that I might actually do something interesting that they had to be as close as possible. Clearly I've never done much interesting but if I ever should they can't bear the idea of missing it.
I liked their enthusiastic curiosity, even if it did make a drudge task longer and harder.
While laughing at them dogs made me think of Fifo and the old Fidonet. The fore runner of email.
Back in that ancient time of 14400 baud dial up modems it took a person to set up an electronic Bulletin Board, (BBS). Sometimes they were set up by lonely kids or lonelier men and women, as a way to talk to people somehow. Some guys were a bit more far seeing. The internet didn't exist but they conceived of an idea to build a network from from the disparate BBS's.
You joined Fido and your commitment was that you logged in at least 4 times a day and downloaded the Fido Mail. Then I, as a guy who logged into your BBS could go in and pick up my mail . . . at its best this meant I could get an email in less that 4 hours . . . In the days before the Bell break up, before MCI and Sprint this seemed rather incredible. When local calls were always free and snail mail took about a week from NYC and 2 weeks from Europe to get a long letter in four hours for FREE was, well, the start of something bigger.
With the internet came email, which was my personal favorite, and USENET, which I still adore (and enjoy the fact that it is, for the most part, pretty much ignored and neglected) and the WWW. So much information and it was just there. So cool. It was a kid who told me about it, how I could find almost everything on "the web".

Click images for desktop size: "Old" by Unknown It was easy to imagine a new world, a world with information freely available to anyone, to everyone. All that information naturally led you to an informed opinion.
What goods an opinion unless you can lay it on somebody.
This led to a whole lot of personal "web pages". Just like in "real life" the opinions expressed were mighty extreme. And it always seemed that the more extreme the stand, the more out there and the insane the logic the more it was supported by links to other web pages written by similarly uneducated people. So you had uneducated distillation of facts being used to support another uneducated illogical distillation of facts where each of these peoples take their opinion and through some alchemy transform their opinions into hard facts.
(I do put a lot of value into education. I have degrees, sure, but mine are in the arts which puts their value, especially when considering complicated matters, slightly below a trade school diploma. In fact I consider that a trade school diploma would be a better investment than an MFA. It takes training of a kind I don't have to absorb conflicting and sometimes con-contiguous info and pare it down to a single seed of truth. I don't have it and neither do any of the pandering jerks on TV and radio who sell cock-eyed opinions for sponsorship dollars.)
There was no way to comment on a web page. So the only thing to do was to create your own web page to refute the other guys claims. It was a lot of fun. It got so big that they invented the Web Log, like this one.
With a web log you didn't have to learn html you just started posting your opinions. And it just keeps growing.
Its freedom. I like that a plenty. You need no credentials you just need to get it out there and you're on the same footing, the same distribution level as the New York Times. (Same goes for music and books too!)

Click images for desktop size: "Superman" by Jim Lee & DC Comics Anyway, that's what I was thinking about while I shoveled the snow and watched the dogs while they looked to see if I did anything interesting.

The primaries are sort of drawing to a conclusion.
I didn't get to vote. I still don't feel that strongly about anybody running to register with a party. There's not even anyone I hate enough to vote against them. That is a sorry state of affairs when with all this mess we're in no one can even rise vitriol. Sorry for me and the country. I'll vote for the candidates I guess after someone else decides who they should be.
I thought the primary results themselves were pretty interesting, and some of them even horrifying.
Fo the Democrats it looks like a dog fight between Clinton and Obama. You can see how this can only help the super underdog Republicans.
As a guy who once voted for Jerry Brown for Governor and then Mike Curb for Lt Governor I get kind of evilly wry at the idea of a Clinton/Obama ticket. It also seems like a sure loser somehow.
I did notice that in the states Obama won, he won huge - landslide type figures. While where Clinton won she won by decent but hardly overpowering margins (except in New York and Arkansas where she cleaned up big time.)
For me the biggest shock was that Clinton took about 60% of the hispanic vote!
While I find something distasteful about Obama's plans to handle immigration I find Clinton's record to be disgusting. Maybe the guys already over the border don't want anyone else coming cross.
On the Republican side McCain seems like a slightly less evil Bush. I like that he's despised by for being too moderate a conservative. Only a declared racist idiot like Rush Limbaugh would take someone to task for being rational.
What has to be keeping the Democrats happy is that Huckabee too enough delegates to broker himself a position of power at the Republican convention.
Huckabee seems like a reasonable enough guy. And his opinions aren't lunacy when applied to a family but they seem mad dog theocracy when you take them and inflict them on a nation, especially a nation so deeply wounded by Bush and these same Republicans.
Huckabee seems one of those things I run into but can respect, a good man with wildly divergent opinions on life.
So that is my wildly uneducated but well informed opinion on the nation's politics.

I'm considering using Lightbox for the images here. Its a javascript that opens up a separate translucent window when you click on an image. I'm not sure if you can still grab the image and drag it to your desktop. I'm still experimenting.