Quiet Declarations

Can anyone tell me the difference between Gatorade Rain, Gatorade Fierce, Gatorade Frost, G2, and the original Gatorade?  Because they’re all sitting next to each other in the drink fridge at the convenience store, and I think I’ve tried them all, and I don’t think there’s actually a difference.

And if there is a difference, Gatorade needs to hire a marketing firm that can actually explain it to me!  All I know is that Gatorade Rain is the one where Peyton Manning comes out of a football.

I didn’t check the line, but Vanderbilt was probably favored over Tennessee for the first time in 50 years.  Too bad they decided not to show up.  I’m headed to NC this weekend to watch Vandy (6-5) play Wake Forest (6-5), and thanks to laying an egg against UT this weekend will likely determine whether I get to spend part of my holiday in Birmingham or Shreveport.  Wa hoo.

On the pro side, the previously undefeated Titans were spanked by Brett Favre and the Jets.  I have to say that, while I would have liked for them to win, I’d rather go ahead and have that loss so they can focus on securing homefield advantage.  I just wish it hadn’t come to a team that actually has a chance of catching them in the standings.  Ah well, their next game is against the hapless 0-11 Lions on Thanskgiving Day.  Let’s just hope they decide not to embarrass themselves on national TV.

I’ve written before about why I dislike Sex and the City.  Well, I was skimming Versus, a culture-themed Vanderbilt student publication, today and stumbled across a column by Brandon Heriford saying what I probably would have said if I had decided to write about liking SATC.  So, quick plug for him for saving me the time.

Back in November 2007 I regretfully reported the indefinite delay of 24 due to the writers’ strike.  The series is set to resume this January, but first, morally flawed invinsible superhero Jack Bauer returns to prime-time tomorrow night with a two-hour movie designed to set up the new season, begin the process of writing the wrongs from a fairly pathetic (comparatively) sixth season, and whet our appetites for another Jack Attack.

John McCain on Jack Bauer from an appearance on The View back in September:

“My hero is Jack Bauer,” he said. “He always escapes. I never escape.”

Some commentary on best seasons.  My ranking from best to worst: 5,2,4,1,3,6 (with special commendation for originality for season 1).  Wikipedia has a good refresher on plot synopses.

Jack Bauer facts here and here.  “When life gave Jack Bauer lemons, he used them to kill terrorists. Jack Bauer fucking hates lemonade.”

There’s a good case to be made.  Okay, it’s not the most salient issue out there, but it’s still a cause I can get behind.  Clock-changing is ridiculous, but even more so if it doesn’t even really work.

Wow, I knew the Capitol Visitors Center opening was delayed, but this is ridiculous.  I guess the CVC finally opens next month., which is good for it, because right now the best thing anyone can say about it is that the construction project is doing a good job of portraying how the Hill operates.

With a 31-24 win at Kentucky, Vanderbilt football made it to 6-4 and became bowl eligible for the first time since 1982 — the longest streak of ineligibility in the nation by eight years.   Congratulations!

Now, does this mean they will actually be invited to play in a bowl?  Signs point to yes.  The Southeastern Conference has contracted bowl tie-ins with nine bowls, and that’s likely to increase to ten if an SEC team makes it to the national championship.  The worst-case scenario has Vandy finishing in a tie with Kentucky for the ninth-best record in the SEC (with Vandy holding the head-to-head victory), if the standings are an issue.  Tack on the fact that Vanderbilt hasn’t been to a bowl in 28 years, meanings its fans are likely to travel well, and you’ve got a pretty sure bet.

In my view, the likely bowl contenders are: the Papajohns.com Bowl in Birmingham or the Independence Bowl in Shreveport if we lose out, the Music City Bowl in Nashville or the Liberty Bowl in Memphis if we split our two remaining games, and an outside chance at the Chick-Fil-A Bowl in Atlanta if we win out.  If you’re a fan and you want to actually make a trip out of it, pray for Atlanta.

This weekend I returned from a 17-day vacation — my first lengthy break in over three years.  What follows is a brief chronicle of my adventures.

I set two major goals for my vacation:

1) To spend as much time as possible in relative isolation — perhaps around people, but not as much interaction with them.  DC can be a little snug sometimes, and I needed a break from people overload.

2) To force myself to not work for a while, both to teach myself to delegate and to encourage my colleagues to find other avenues to deal with some of their requests.

As some know, when I decided to attend college close to home I promised myself I would try to visit at least one new state per month so I could venture out — a promise I managed to keep for over two years.  (Unsurprisingly, it gets much harder as the states get farther away.)  My goal was to hit all 48 continental states, but I finished school five states short.  For this trip I thought it might be relaxing to go finish what I started.

So, where did I go?  Here’s a map to show you — air travel in blue, train travel in green, and driving in red.

A few disjointed thoughts about my travels:

-Prior to heading westward, I attended the Titans’ Monday Night Football victory over the Colts.  Monday Night Football games are the best and you should all try one sometime.  Related: rock on, still-undefeated Titans.

-Portland has an unusually large number of people who have obviously come there to find themselves.  I will never get used to young people begging on the streets.  I always thought unconventional dress, hair, piercings, etc. was an expression of individualism, until I found a whole town of them.  Not so individual here.  I saw a sign for a Portland singles website and joked that it must be for all the sorority girls who can’t find a date in this town.  It reminds me of my visit to Toronto.  I fully expect that Portlanders don’t understand why we can’t all just get along… in a town where everyone looks and behaves pretty much the same.

-While in Portland, I went to the Brass Horse, a pretty famous microbrew pub owned by this famous beer dude Don Younger.  He’s so hardcore that Rogue named a beer after him!  He was in the bar the night I was there, and he looked every bit as hardcore in person — he totally ripped a customer a new one for reading a newspaper at the bar instead of talking to people.  Also, I think he looks like this dude from Braveheart.

-Horizon Air is the best airline ever.

-Spokane takes great pride in its “Heart of the Inland Northwest” brand.  Fair enough — it’s too far east to have much in common with seafaring towns like Seattle and there’s definitely something special about the scenery.  It might be a requirement to take up some sort of routine outdoor activity to live there.

-If you can find a way to take the train through northwest Montana, do it.  The train goes right through Glacier National Park, which is simply beautiful.  Downside: North Dakota is pretty boring, and it’s pretty hard to find somewhere logical to get off between Spokane and Minneapolis.  Also, these long distance trains don’t have outlets like the northeastern commuter trains do.  Bring lots of books.

-One of the riskier parts of my trip was transferring from train to car in an unfamiliar small town late at night.  I wanted to get off in western North Dakota and drive to Mount Rushmore without too much backtracking, but I had to find a town large enough to have a rental car company.  That town was Minot, North Dakota, population 36,000 and nicknamed “Magic City” for a reason too stupid to share.  I ended up walking over a mile to the Minot “International” Airport to get the car I’d reserved.  Don’t ask me why I feel this way, but there’s just something very strange about walking to an airport.

-I spent election eve in Rapid City, South Dakota.  When I heard about the joyous mobs running through the streets in DC I looked out my window to see if I could locate a joyous mob of South Dakotans running toward Mount Rushmore, but alas, it was not to be.

-Mount Rushmore was very cool, but it definitely didn’t surpass my expectations.  Definitely a one-and-done monument.  The observation deck is so far away that you’ll get a much better experience watching it on HDTV.  Now if I could have hiked up the mountain and walked on Jefferson’s head, that would have been cool.  The Black Hills are totally awesome though.  This would be a great place for a camping trip, and they even have lodges for aging campers like me.

-I needed to get to Chicago, and it was more cost effective to get back on a train than to keep driving my rental car all over creation.  I also needed to see Nebraska, my final state.  To kill two birds with one stone, I decided to drive to Omaha and catch the “California Zephyr” from San Francisco to Chicago.  I drove through a Midwestern thunderstorm and arrived without incident.

-On my brief two days of car travel, I almost hit several deer and at least one bison!  I did hit many tumbleweeds.  Judging from one carcass, at least one person hit what was definitely either a badger or a wolverine — hard to tell with roadkill.  I hit neither.

-Omaha is another city very proud of its reputation, this time as “Gateway to the Heartland.”  It appears as though their entire urban planning strategy is to make the first 1000 yards of every entrance to town as beautiful as possible.  Casinos are illegal in Nebraska but not in neighboring Iowa, so Iowa built a bunch of casinos right on the waterfront and Omahanians (over half the state’s population) just cross the river.  Plus Omaha just built a $20 million pedestrian bridge across the Missouri River that dumps out right next to them!  Morons.

-In honor of completing my tour of the continental U.S. I treated myself to an Omaha steak dinner — bleu-cheese topped filet minon with sauteed mushroom tops and a lettuce wedge with house bleu cheese dreesing.

-The train from Omaha to Chicago was nearly five hours late, which was frustrating.  I also suffered a minor bout of food poisoning from the train food, which slowed me down a bit in Chicago.  I still had a good time though — I hung out with old friends, watched the Vandy-Florida debacle with the local alumni chapter, and visited a couple of tea and coffee shops.  I thought about going to the Titans-Bears game, but decided to watch it with friends from the warmth of a living room instead.  New Soldier Field, by the way, looks either like an alien spaceship or a giant toilet landed in downtown Chicago.

-Two investments that served me very well on my trip: my Verizon subscription and my cell-to-laptop connector.  I had cell access literally the entire trip, even in the most remote parts of Montana, and as a result I could also connect my computer to the internet whenever I wanted.

All right, that’s pretty much.  Not too much to tell, as I intentionally kept the trip low-key.  It was a very good break, and long enough that I’m actually looking forward to getting back.  I’ll get caught up on current events soon, and a return to the blogging scene will follow.

Four years ago I blogged up a storm before, during, and after the election.  This year will be different, because I am on vacation.  I’m out of DC and won’t get to experience the [joy/agony] of [victory/defeat] with my a city full of polticos who will no doubt be [gloating/crying] for [weeks/months] about how the world is going to be [saved/destroyed] [in spite of/thanks to] those [evil/moronic] guys on the other side of the aisle.

So instead, here’s a disjointed series of my final election-related thoughts, and then I’m going to go enjoy me some great outdoors.

Heresy #1.  This is not the most important election of our lifetimes.  I suppose it might be the most important presidential election of a generation if you define generation very narrowly.  But with the benefit of historical perspective, we can look at 1964, 1968, and 1980 all as more defining than I expect this election to be, and my guess is I haven’t yet seen what I will ultimately consider the most important election of my lifetime.  There’s simply not enough difference between the two major candidates to make that case, at least not until we see what the next four years actually bring.

Heresy #2. There is no “change” candidate, and there is no “maverick.”  Remember when you got all bent out of shape about the expansion of executive power?  Think anybody’s gonna worry about curbing executive power in the next adminstration?  You know those healthcare and energy plans McCain and Obama have?  Think they’re gonna look anything like how they look today after 535 congressmen have their way with them?  Remember when you got all bent out of shape about that war?  Think either candidate is going to strongly defy the advice of the generals on the ground?  Sure there is some difference between the candidates, and of course the issues may change, but in four years we’re going to yet again learn (or more likely, yet again observe and ignore) a very important lesson: you don’t change Washington, it changes you.

Heresy #3.  I have serious, serious problems with populism and elitism.  Populism is way worse, in my view, because although individuals are generally resourceful and resilient when it comes to their own affairs, they are really really dumb when it comes to making choices for others.  Few serious people prefer a democracy over a republic, and with good reason.  This would seem to be a case to support a candidate who was some kind of demigod, who we could all trust to understand the world around us better than our feeble attempts to grasp it.  Except that I have a problem with elitism too.  I believe a trained monkey could execute the actual duties conferred on the chief executive as per the Constitution — and in fact, a trained monkey would be a pretty awesome president because Congress would take back all the governing authority that overreaching presidents have stolen from it over the years.  This would actually seem like a pretty good case to support a President Palin… except that she’s a populist, the likes of whom I hated on in my previous point.  So never mind.

Heresy #4.  Although I am pro-change, I’ve decided I am anti-hope.  Being pro-change means you want things to be different, and it amazes me that a candidate can actually win an presidency pretty much by using the word “change” over and over again.  Best.  Marketing.  Ever.  But I’m anti-hope, because I believe the emotional tide of public opinion can be very dangerous, and all else equal I think people ought to be generally skeptical of any government but especially skeptical of one armed with the power of hope.  Too much hope for government means too much faith in government which rarely makes us better off.

Heresy #5.  I love negative ads.  (Since I’m anti-hope, this shouldn’t be altogether surprising.)  Vanderbilt political science professor John Geer is all over this with his research, by the way — negative ads are the ones that actually tell you stuff about the candidates’ records.  If we’re going to have laws regulating political ads, there oughta be one requiring that all ads be negative so we can get down to the red meat.  Plus, really crappy negative ads are way funnier than really crappy positive ones.

Heresy #6: I think my new favorite voter is the single-issue voter.  I used to think this voter wasn’t sufficiently nuanced to grasp the important differences in the specific policies, temperament, leadership style, etc. but I recently changed my mind.  The single-issue voter is where it’s at, because they know what’s important to them and they stick to their guns (or if you prefer, religion, stance on abortion, position on the war, or general ideological bent) and they don’t keep changing their most important issue depending on who they’re talking to.  And a real single-issue voter picks their candidate without regard for party, which is rare and worthy of respect.  Conversely, a fake single issue voter says an issue matters and then picks something else when a party they don’t like adopts it, which is crap.

Heresy #7: I think my least favorite voter is the bait-and-switch voter – which probably includes most voters.  By bait-and-switch, I mean essentially choosing a candidate to support for particular conscious or subconscious reasons, and then picking up alternate justifications as they go along. Example: people who say “I was considering voting for [McCain/Obama] until I heard about [position/incident] but now there’s just no way I can support them.” Sure, this happens sometimes with truly undecided voters, but 90% of the people who do this are not really undecided and are just experimenting with retroactive justifications in order to try and win debates at the bar.

Heresy #8.  Truly undecided voters are possibly the most clever voters of all, but they are probably morons.  And I say this having spent nearly the entire election as one of them.  What’s left to say about either of the candidates?  Undecideds are in many cases voters who are leaning in a direction but are afraid of or unwilling to reveal that they made a decision, for any number of plausible reasons.  The rest of the undecideds — the truly wishy-washy – are putting way too much mental energy into this thing.  Each of you only has one freakin’ vote, and you’ll probably cancel each other out in most cases anyway.  One caviat: you have to be able to justify your vote in bar room conversations for years to come, so maybe it does matter that much for intensely selfish reasons.  But you undecideds who don’t get into bar room conversations, I don’t know what you’re all worked up about.

Heresy #9.  Building on the previous point, I think which candidate’s supporters/opponents a voter has to put up with on a daily basis matters more to his or her life than any action by the candidates themselves.  Some people are bandwagon voters: they don’t want to contradict the group they have to interact with, and they don’t want to have a target on their back if they vote differently than their social group and things turn out badly.  My preferences, on the other hand, are decidedly contrarian: the more vocal or annoying a group gets, the less I want to support their guy.  The problem with this position is that like most people, I have to understand that my opinions are highly subject to the people I hang around with and the political makeup of my region, which means than even though this is a particularly salient rationale it’s also sort of a tragic one.

Heresy #10.  I wish we wouldn’t pressure people to vote.  I’d rather voting were more like driving: virtually all citizens of a certain age are legally allowed, and most people do, but we don’t rebuke people who have a decent reason for not driving and we do admonish people who suck at it.   I’m not saying we should take away anyone’s voting rights, but it does seem dumb to try and bully or chastize people who don’t feel informed, engaged, opinionated, or affected enough to vote otherwise, or who are conscientious objectors.  If the state of our freedom was really such that we would lose the right to vote if we chose not to exercise it, I suspect this would be the least of our worries.

Finally — yes, I voted, so those of you who believe I am going to hell, the gas chambers, or the gulag for considering otherwise can breathe a sigh of relief.  I submitted my absentee ballot for the state of Tennessee.  I am not voting in a swing state, and although I am increasingly sympathetic to certain arguments against voting, I happen to like knowing what people are going through when they vote and I do enjoy exercising my right to do so.  For arguments for or against voting, including some interesting stuff about voting libertarian, or not voting at all, go read through the this recent exchange at Volokh.

I hope you all have a very pleasant election day, free of shouting or gloating or crying.  Expect large font sizes in the newspaper headlines tomorrow.  I’m off to enjoy the rest of my vacation.