Oh democracy

I get to go and vote against Arnold Schwarzenegger today - yet another one of those things I never imagined I'd be doing. (Another was sitting on the beach listening to my mom recount the plot of "Thong Girl 3" over the phone.) And then I get to go to work and stay late while we see what havoc the electronic voting machines wreak. At least there will be pizza! Democracy = pizza!

Art Boy has some great snapshots from our Halloween-location road trip. Evidently the one of me in front of the Myers House, holding my sunglasses like a butcher knife, was not good enough for him. Hmph.

We saw "Borat" the other night. I love Borat dearly. I have been comforted this election season by thinking of the episode where he goes door-to-door with a candidate saying "If you do not vote for my friend, he will take power!" And the movie was funny, but he really goes out of his way to make people miserably uncomfortable, and it sat poorly with me afterward. Yes, great comedy provokes, and Richard Pryor, and blah blah; I've read several essays on this subject. But it's just mean to smash up a guy's antique store because he has some Confederate-flag items, and to humiliate a dining society because they live on Secession Drive. I don't find it very cricket for an Englishman to come over and act like Confederate flags are all crazy. I know they all wrote papers in school on the civil-rights movement and think American Southerners are just savage, but perhaps they should deal with their own problems. Anyway, it wasn't all bad. We did love the frat boys on the bus. (Even though they were Southern, and he got some racist comments out of them; that was their own fault.)

Today's book: "Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife" by Mary Roach. I'm disappointed in this one. It's got some great trivia but her writing style is way too snarky; it reads like some editor called her up and told her she needed to sound more like Sarah Vowell. Every other sentence is a completely irrelevant aside. It doesn't deserve its beautiful cover (which is prettier than the one Powells is selling).