I have the distinct and sinking feeling that in the next 10-15 years the current Russian-Georgian war is going to be viewed as a watershed event which began a serious historic shift in the world balance of power.

There has been some noise about all the swimming records that have been falling lately. I’m surprised no one has suggested performance enhancing drugs as a possible culprit. If not that, then perhaps the Chinese made a mistake and built the pool in yards instead of meters. :-)

…If no one is running.

SNEEDVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — All it takes is one vote to win. Just ask a Tennessee woman who was elected constable by voting for herself.

Angela Tuttle, 32, said her father encouraged her to run as a write-in candidate because no one else was vying for one of the positions in Hancock County, which is in northeastern Tennessee.

Tuttle said her husband initially didn’t even realize she was running.

”I finally told him about a month before the election,” she told The Associated Press on Friday. Her husband didn’t think she would win, but now he ”just grins at her,” she said.

Hancock County election officials said 131 voters of the 674 registered in the 3rd District voted Thursday. Tuttle’s vote was the only one cast in the constable race. She will be sworn in Dec. 1.

The certified nursing assistant and mother of a 10-year-old son will help serve warrants and patrol neighborhoods in her district. She said her father, a longtime constable who won his own re-election in another district, will ”show her the ropes.”

This is the stupidest idea EVAR!

Fed up with his students’ complete inability to spell common English correctly, a British academic has suggested it may be time to accept “variant spellings” as legitimate.

Rather than grammarians getting in a huff about “argument” being spelled “arguement” or “opportunity” as “opertunity,” why not accept anything that’s phonetically (fonetickly anyone?) correct as long as it can be understood?

My only solace is that it came from the British so I can be spared the “stupid American” jokes.

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;\xT8 66IZ   N 4 X DTZHD=;==QX.

Ari and I actually did something very similar to this while we were courting: we took a train all the way from Washington DC to New Haven, CT to see Avery Brooks play King Lear (of the Olmec.  Good to see we’re not the only ones.

Following up on my previous post on the issue of high oil prices, I keep hearing the Democrats and Republicans attack each other on the radio every morning on the way to work. The common thread theme they both echo is that the other side “doesn’t have a plan to lower prices in the short term” and “will only work in the long term”. Holy cow! Is this what we’ve come to? A society so obsessed with short term reward that calling someone’s plan a long term idea is a negative? Let me emphasize: We need a long term plan for energy in this country. Our current course of action is headed for long term disaster and all congress can think about is pandering long enough to get reelected in November. Ugh.