If you’re a liberal minded DC resident like I am (whatever that means), things can’t get much better than they are today. After billions of dollars were spent around the country to create annoying ad campaigns, our citizens have spoken, and voilà! It’s out with the Republicans. Bush even threw his new enemies an olive branch by kicking Rumsfeld out. What’s next, DC statehood with representation for our taxation? The tide has changed my friends, and the outlook is good.

While I’m talking about reasons to be happy, let’s talk about how beautiful the Fall colors are right now. Summer has warm weather but I sure don’t miss those 95 degree, 100% humidity days. Spring brings the city back to life and gives the cherry blossoms a reason to pop (and gives us a reason to drink on a roof deck). Winter just plain sucks. But Fall gives us Halloween, reasons to wear our favorite sweaters, and as my friend says, Fall is “boot season”. But don’t forget about how amazing the landscape looks as Eye Captain shows us so well. Who would have guessed that Rock Creek could look so good? The colors are dripping in his photo and the water is as smooth as glass. It makes me want to take a deep breath and yell, “Only two more years of Bush!”

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Front View Blue

Originally uploaded by tbridge.

If you wandered around the city today and happened to lay eyes on two beautiful Ferrari Fioranos, it’s because they’re here as part of the Ferrari Panamerican 20000, a trip from Belo Horizonte, Brazil to New York, NY, by way of the Panama Isthmus, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Houston and then on to DC. This morning they scheduled a fuel stop in Ashburn, so I trekked out there despite my election hangover and my fatigue to see these monster cars.

Wow. What incredibly sexy vehicles. Sadly, I didn’t get to take it on a test drive, but after their fuel stop in Ashburn, they were headed downtown for pictures, and thence to the Italian Embassy for a big Ferrari party. I hear they’re even putting the cars inside. Anyhow, keep an eye out, they’ll be around all of today and will be heading to Detroit tomorrow morning.

I hope the drivers take I-68, that’s the kind of interstate that those cars are absolutely made for. Want more pictures? I’ve got a whole Flickr set for you. My new desktop is this shot

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I worked as an election official in the 12th precinct of Arlington County on election day. My day began at 4:55am when we opened the doors to the Fairlington Community Center, and it ended just before 9pm, when we had all signed off on the reports from the day’s endeavours, packed and sealed them, signed them yet again, and gave them to our Chief Judge to be delivered to the Arlington County Board of Election. Contained below are some of my thoughts on working as a election official, some of the details of the day, and some general commentary on elections as a whole. DC is, if nothing else, a town of elections. We depend on them for our importance, derive much of our residency from the results of them, and much of what happens here is because of them, in a way that most other places can barely begin to touch.

I arrived at a little before 5am, as the precinct was opened. We unpacked the large locked cart that arrived the day before (or earlier that morning, I’m not sure), and the chief unpacked her kit that she had audited the night before, and that gave us what we needed to start the machines. We had 5 AVS “WinVOTE” boxes that are little more than platforms for embedded WinXP and a special software/hardware combination that makes the voting process possible. Several of us were given smart cards keys on lanyards that we were not permitted to remove except to give to another election officer. At that point we took the oath of office, well before the sun rose.

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This election saw some interesting divisions on subjects based on locale, as Tom mentioned in the comments over here. This site has some neat drill-down you can do on all the Virginia contests, both by region and county. You can see the Webb-Allen race by region and what a huge skew the area containing Arlington and the area containing Newport News had for Webb, or how for some reason Greensville and Campbell county were the only two to get a majority of no votes on question 2 about the powers of the general assembly. Maybe I’m just a big numbers nerd, but I think looking at the distributions is neat even on issues I didn’t give a toss about.

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Salon’s Video Dog feature, which I normally find one step below useless, has compiled a somewhat interesting top and bottom ten political spots of the season. Of the ten worst, this spot from the Allen-Webb contest is #2. Somewhat surprisingly – at least to those of us who find little to like in MacacAllen or Ms Ogeny Webb – it’s not from either campaign; it’s from VoteVets.org, and according to the nonpartisan group FactCheck.org, it’s complete bunk.

Between this and the queer-hatin’ I’m real proud to be here.

Darned HTML. Did I remember to close the sarcasm tag?

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Here’s the tally for yesterday’s Virginia State Marriage Amendment voting that denies civil unions, domestic partnerships and any “other arrangement” between same-sex couples that purports to bestow the benefits of marriage:

There you go, 57% of Virginians have permanently denied families of same-sex couples the legal protections and financial stability offered by civil marriage and the lesser benefits that could be achieved through civil unions, domestic partnerships or other forms of legal recognition.

And via a state constitutional amendment too. Like a state law wasn’t enought discrimination.

If you are gay and live in Virginia, let this be a loud a clear call to move north of the Potomac. While Virginia’s anti-gay war continues unabated, DC is way more welcoming to those of the homosexual persuasion.

First off, we kiss you! Then, you can get caught out at Stead or cruised on Match or at the Bling Bling Giant. Hell, we’ll even elect you (or two) to the city council.

So don’t put up with the outright discrimination and underlying hatred, come north, come to DC. We’re so liberal, we have hermaphrodic bass!

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photo by Dominique Dierick

Tomorrow the planet Mercury will pass between us and the sun, though it’s not something you’ll be able to view with the naked eye. You could go look at a larger version of the photo to the right or you could head to the King Street Parking Garage at Montgomery College in Silver Spring. They’ll have equipment there for both fair weather (ie, not cloudy) and foul. If you’d rather not lever yourself out of your easy chair I suppose you could always watch the Exploratorium’s webcast…

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photo courtesy of Sam Felder

Before the results of the constitutional amendment vote come in and I lose my temper, I just wanted to say to all of you Virginians who got out and voted today: I’m proud of you. The Times Dispatch quotes numbers indicating that at 2pm today, with a full 5 hours more to go, over 30% of you in Fairfax had come out and votes. In Loudoun it was somewhere between 25 and 40%. It’s not the Newport News numbers of 60%, but it’s still a good mid-day turnout on a non-Presidential election and may indicate a highest-ever turnout for us in an off-year. Thanks for getting out there and making your voice heard.

even if you voted wrong

Whoops, sorry.

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…you can call 1-866-OUR-VOTE, the hotline for the National Campaign for Fair Elections. Don’t be shy or embarrassed – the statistic being bandied about is that 1/3 of the electorate will be voting on new machines which would contitute a HUGE rollout in the computer business.

Sadly, voting now is in the computer business.

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No, I don’t think everything posted on the Daily Kos is legit. This one almost sounds like urban legend to me (it’s got too many elements of a group of hoaxes), but, this one hits close to home. Apparently some folks are being told that if they vote today, they’ll be arrested:

Tim Daly from Clarendon got a call saying that if he votes Tuesday, he will be arrested. A recording of his voicemail can be found online at: www.webbforsenate.com/media/phone_message.wav

The transcript from his voicemail reads:

“This message is for Timothy Daly. This is the Virginia Elections Commission. We’ve determined you are registered in New York to vote. Therefore, you will not be allowed to cast your vote on Tuesday. If you do show up, you will be charged criminally.”

Daly has been registered to vote in Virginia since 1998, and he has voted for the last several cycles with no problem. He has filed a criminal complaint with the Commonwealth’s attorney in Arlington.

Just so you know: polling locations are not changed by phone calls. They’re especially not changed on the day before election without a fire or other similar disaster, and no one from Montana is gonna be advising Arlington citizens if this is so. Show up. Bring ID. Vote. The worst that can happen is that you show up, you’re not on the voter rolls, and you’ll have to vote a provisional ballot. Those are reviewed by the elections board and then either counted if they’re valid or discarded if they’re not.

Show up. Vote. That simple.

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I’m up a bit later tonight than I’d hoped. My alarm is going off tomorrow at 4:20. AM. My lunch is ready for packing in the fridge, my clothes are laid out ready to be worn. I am taking a pen, a notebook, and my cellphone (off). I’m nervous, which I did not expect. I can’t put my finger on it, it’s either an excited nervous, or a truly anxious nervous. It’s a grave responsibilty, to hold someone’s franchise as your responsibility, and I’m both excited about enabling folks, and scared that I might screw it up.

Tomorrow night, late, I’ll be posting my reflections on the day. If there’s anything you want to know about working as an election officer in Arlington, please leave it in the comments, and I’ll be glad to answer it as part of my entry tomorrow night.

Vote tomorrow. It’s your franchise, your county, your city, your community. Engage yourself. Don’t just sit back and yell, vote and be part of the system. Don’t like how it’s run? Run for office yourself. Be part of the system. Be part of the process.

This post appeared in its original form at DC Metblogs

How do you not love that? If it was the employee lot I’d have thought it might have been a deliberate joke, but they were gone when I walked back out after my transaction.

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There was an interesting article in the Post magazine section this weekend about scholarships being offered to the now-adult students affected when Prince Edward County shut down its public schools for five years rather than integrate.

It was an interesting and personal look on an issue that I (admittedly) don’t know a lot about. For example, I had no idea that Prince Edward County was party to the famous Brown v. Board of Education decision. I had never heard that PE had shut down the schools and opened a privately-funded school for white students, leaving black children with a choice to either go without schooling or move out of the county to live with relatives.

You should check it out- the people interviewed for the piece have really interesting stories.

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Photo by DC Metroblogger

This is the theater at last night’s showing of Borat. Note that everyone was very aware that this movie sold out and yet what is up with the empty seat?

That lone empty seat between these two groups.

Is it too hard to sit next to another group, especially when you know the show is sold out? Might it inconvenience you all that much to scoot over so there are sets of empty seats?

No one wants to sit alone in a group of others, sans their preferred supermodel.

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Tomorrow is election day across the greater DC area (and the rest of the US, too) and that means lots of running around town trying to get to your polling place to vote. If you can’t afford your own transportation, though, in Montgomery County and Prince George’s County, there’s a cab company coming to your rescue, as they’ll be giving free cab rides to your polling place and back starting at 10am tomorrow and concluding at 1pm so the cabbies can still make a day’s wages. While most of the cabbies cannot vote themselves, they’re still interested in making the process work. It’s all being coordinated through CASA Maryland, so give them a call if you’re interested in a ride to the polls tomorrow.

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No, not the incessant squabbling of my upstairs neighbors. They’re in it for the long haul. I’m talking about the endless parade of political calls made by call-o-matics and volunteers begging me, pleading with me, to vote for the candidate. If I answer the phone one more time and it’s Tim Kaine or Jim Webb or George Allen or John McCain or So-and-so from the Webb/Moran campaigns, I’m going to let forth a stream of invective I will not be responsible for.

My temper was swollen yesterday when the woman from the Webb/Moran campaign asked me if she could count on my vote for her candidates. She was a sweet old lady with a 202 number, so chances are they weren’t “her” candidates by a long shot, and I said “Maybe for Webb, Never for Moran.” There was a shocked silence. “er, okay then” she responded to the empty air as the phone was already arcing down the parabola into the cradle from whence it had been plucked far too often. Do these things really work? Do they annoy more people than they get votes out of? There has to be a way to put a stop to these damn calls.

There’s just 24 hours to go here, just a day left, and I’ll be out for most of it. If you need me today, I’ll be on my cell, there’s no way I’m answering the house phone.

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Photo by DC Metroblogger

Borat had fun in DC. Here he is enjoying Gay Pride Parade.

He then crossed the Potomac and everything went bear shit and ball sack.

Key take away from Borat: don’t get out of the boat. Stay in DC.

Oh, and buy your tickets in advance.

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Photo by DC Metroblogger

This is the movie board at Regal Cinemas in Chinatown. Note that Borat is sold out for both the 6.15 and 7.15 showing.

Out for my once-a-year movie watching, I decided at the last minute (5.55) that Borat would be good fun on a Sunday.

I was not alone.

Who knew that people still went to movies in DC? What with Internet, politics, and local news to distract us.

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Photo by DC Metroblogger

Do you have a supermodel in your life? Does he/she/it drive a car? Might you wanna get serious special points?

Then I would suggest a humble act: wash the car.

No, I don’t mean you, exactly, that might break a nail. I mean taking it to a car wash, where professionals clean and vacuum it.

Humble yet very effective, you will be rewarded. I can’t promise chocolate croissants, I’m still waiting for that myself, but who knows?

And you will not unless you wash the car.

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Photo by DC Metroblogger

Even with the crisp chill in the air, the Mt Pleasant farmer’s market has tasty treats for sale.

Fresh fall produce from apples to pumpkins and even buffalo meat.

An added bonus: Heller’s Bakery is next door with hot coffee and sweat treats.

Combined, the two make my hood a great Saturday morning destination!

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