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In this post about computerized voting (and the frightening possibility that it might be extremely easy to manipulate), Bob Harris writes:

I do have a degree in electrical engineering… from almost 20 years ago. Punchcard systems were just becoming obsolete, we had rotary phones in the dorms, and a modem was still a gizmo the size of a shoebox into which you squooshed the phone receiver itself. In short, we lived like animals.

The instant obsolesence is why I became a writer. The rate of punctuation in a sentence doesn’t double every 18 friggin’ months, and you never have some 22-year-old looming over your shoulder, shaking his head, saying “dude… you’re still using adverbs…?”

Which I found amusing. The computerized voting software, however… Well, I can’t feign expertise either — unlike Harris, I was a writer first and would, I think, make a lousy engineer — but, if implemented in its current form, it looks like it could be the worst thing to happen to American politics since…well, since our current president was “elected”. As Atrios writes: “Can this stuff possibly be the real software?! It’s not some cheesy demo?”

Happy days are here again

The skies above are clear again

So let’s sing a song of cheer again

Happy days are here again — Jack Yellen & Milton Alger

Our long national nightmare is over. Thanks to the discussion board at Angels from Another Pin, I’ve just learned that Michael Savage has been fired. This, I’m sure, comes as a great blow to the five or six people watching his show every week (it helps to have a big family, don’t it, Mike?). The rest of us can just be happy that MSNBC finally came to its senses, or at least realized what most everyone else knew from the get-go: putting Savage on the air was a mistake.

I really do go out of my way to avoid cable news programs, but Savage’s presence on MSNBC has always pissed me off. As I wrote in my comments on a Salon profile back in March, “Savage is just a hate-mongering nutjob. The Salon article is interesting in that it suggests this is just the latest in a string of personas, a guise adopted by a man who wants to be noticed at all costs (and spewing hate and inane rhetoric is as good a way as any). But it’s a guise that has no business on national television.” On the rare occasion I’ve stumbled upon his program, however, what struck me most was not the hate and rhetoric but the ineptitude with which Savage spewed it. Say what you will about Bill O’Reilly (and I’ve said more than I’ve ever wanted to here), the man at least knows how to entertain his target audience. Michael Savage wasn’t just a nutjob; he was a boring nutjob. It’s genuinely nice to see him gone.

I’m heading home to New York in a couple of hours for the 4th of July weekend. Try not to break anything while I’m gone.

In the meantime, here are a couple (1, 2) of pictures of the new puppy, Tucker, my parents brought home around Memorial Day. Have a great weekend.

“I believe that writers ought regularly to read the dictionary, paying particular attention to the etymologies of words, as a way of discovering and mapping out the skeleto-muscular system, or perhaps more accurately the deep and fundamental genome, of English. Reading Nabokov is a fair substitute. His perspective on his adopted home–I mean English–like that of all immigrants, is often far keener than that of natives, far more alert to the connective tissues of etymology, chance resemblance, homonymy, and foreign influences.” — Michael Chabon

Just felt like sharing.