Minnesota Public Radio offers a look at some of the challenged ballots in that state’s hotly contested Senate race. The ballot image above is, inexplicably, quite authentic:
This Beltrami County voter cast their ballot for Al Franken, but also put “Lizard People” as a write-in candidate, not only in the U.S. Senate race, but for several others. The county auditor/treasurer ruled that the vote should not be counted because it’s considered an overvote. Representatives for Franken challenged that decision.
Update: The Lizard People voter comes forward.
Is Justice the electro Milli Vanilli? According to Terry Church, the above photo makes a hard case for it:
The MIDI controller on the left ain’t plugged in, but the tall fuzzy-haired one is pretending that it is — he’s got an intense concentrated look on his face whilst moving the faders and knobs. Busted!
Church tries to cut the duo some slack, offering that “anyone with a shred of understanding of how the music is made knows that it’s near impossible to play electronic music 100% live,” so as someone with a shred of that understanding, I’d like to posit a different argument: If you feel forced to resort to “playing” a machine that isn’t even plugged in, you should probably just follow the example of countless electronic music legends and stay in the studio.
Tom Ackerman wants you to know what it feels like to be on the losing side of Proposition 8. He calls it an “experiment with language, love, and law”:
I no longer recognize marriage. It’s a new thing I’m trying.
Turns out it’s fun.
Yesterday I called a woman’s spouse her boyfriend.
She says, correcting me, “He’s my husband,”
“Oh,” I say, “I no longer recognize marriage.”In a moment they feel what it’s like to have their relationship downgraded, and to have a much taken-for-granted right called into question because of another’s beliefs.
The Never-Ending Polaroid
I’ve actually been meaning to post this for a while, but I figured now was a good time to poke my friend Bob in the chest and say, “Hey, you said the website would be up in September!” But seriously, this was a really great project: Starting with himself, Bob took a series of almost 600 polaroids featuring people holding a polaroid of the person holding the previous polaroid of the person holding the previous polaroid — and so on. If memory serves, I think I’m somewhere in the middle, on tour in Virginia in 2002, holding a polaroid of Chris Walla.
Like so many of us, Simon Doonan — the legendary creative director for Barneys New York and California-wed husband of design icon of Jonathan Adler — has taken to the streets in the wake of Proposition 8. And this time, it’s personal:
This is a new feeling for me. In the past, I’ve never quite managed to fully embrace an irate activist identity. At the ultra-feisty ACT UP demos in the 1980s, I always felt sad rather than mad, the deaths of so many of my pals producing despair rather than rage. Now that my civil rights are being dangled in front of me by a bunch of straight drears with bad shoes, I am starting to get cranky. Watch out. Beware the fury of a patient window dresser.
Choire Sicha on Anderson Cooper 360:
Right now, his show is pretty much everything it shouldn’t be, and I suspect he knows it. The relentless story-teasing of things that are coming “after the break” and “in the next hour” is awful — it’s like a 4:45 p.m. promo for a small-town affiliate’s local news program. The constant use of the phrase “breaking news” applied to items of dubious news value that were perhaps “breaking” between five and eight hours ago is insulting and actually enraging. Apparently there is also a live in-studio webcam, which I will never turn to, and there is a young woman with very smart glasses who comes and delivers little “breaking news” updates that I have already read on the internet in the afternoon elsewhere. Recently she brought in her dog.
There are a couple of issues at play here: For one, if CNN — a 24-hour news network — wishes to remain competitive with the 24-hour world wide web, then star journalists like Anderson Cooper need to offer more than mere reporting. The blogs are there for “breaking news”; evening television shows like Cooper’s are there to digest these issues and offer a few well thought-out insights before the morning news cycle begins.
Which is the other, more depressing problem about 360: Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow, for all their own shortcomings, offer both incisive opinions and a non-invasive glimpse into who they are outside of the studio. As for Cooper? Forget about coming out of the closet, we don’t even really know his personal opinion of Proposition 8. For as much as I love him, he’s becoming somewhat of a handsome teleprompter.
Where’s the Love?
In eight years of office, I can’t remember ever feeling very sympathetic for George W. Bush. But watching this video of the G20 summit over the weekend — wherein none of the world’s leaders want to shake his hand, and he morphs into a wounded puppy upon realizing it — just didn’t have that same schadenfreude punch to it. (Maybe I’m getting old.) Says Rick Sanchez, “He seems like the most unpopular kid in high school. The one nobody liked.” (via)
This week marks the thirtieth anniversary of the Jonestown massacre, in which the pastor Jim Jones ordered more than 900 of his followers to literally drink the Kool-Aid — this one, laced with cyanide. As community leaders and politicians began to reflect on how they let this happen, a thesis emerged:
“From my perspective,” says California congresswoman Jackie Speier, “the Peoples Temple got out of hand because the political leadership in San Francisco was indebted to Jim Jones.”
It was that theme that dominated Tuesday’s memorial service at the mass grave in Oakland. In an emotional and highly charged address, the Rev. Amos Brown, bishop at San Francisco’s Third Baptist Church and president of the San Francisco NAACP, warned the mourners to beware of religious leaders who claim to have all the answers and insinuate themselves into politics, as Jones did so effectively in San Francisco.
“Good religion elevates folk, it teaches people to think for themselves. Good religion isn’t authoritarian. Good religion isn’t bigoted,” he said. “Open up your eyes, America. America isn’t a theocracy, it’s a democracy. …And that is the lesson we must learn from Jonestown.”
