… that McCain would be four more years of the same hateful rhetoric. I hope this is enough to convince some of the undecided — get the word out to your fence-sitting friends, everyone!

What a tool this guy is. A humorless, cruel jerk, and consistently un-Presidential. ‘Course, what’s Presidential and what’s not has changed a lot lately, too.

Lizzie drove to Champaign and back today, and in the process bought herself a Happy Meal so she could bring Nora the toy.

I love this toy. Perhaps it’s my love of Gorey-esque sadness, but I’ve never seen a toy that so looks like it’s about to cry. It’s just so deliciously sad.

I was already planning a trip to McDonald’s tomorrow to get my own Sad Meal when Lizzie and Nora appeared and displayed what they had been working on for the past fifteen minutes: a festive hat for the Sad Meal bunny. It feels a little wrong to laugh so hard at something so sad, but it’s hard to resist. I just hope it knows that I do it with all the dark love in the world.

The geek world is bubbling with theories about who cut three undersea cables connecting the Middle East and parts of Asia to the Internets. Most experts say it was ship anchors. Most tin-foil-hat types have other ideas.

This stewed for a while on Slashdot, and then someone anonymously posted this, reminiscent of William Hughes Mearns:

Last night while sitting in my chair
I pinged a host that wasn’t there
It wasn’t there again today
The host resolved to NSA.

I know this makes me nerdy on a couple levels, but I thought it was the most brilliant response to the Slashdot paranoia machine in a long time.

I’m watching Dirty Jobs, a show on Discovery hosted by Mike Rowe. He’s working at a zoo today, and he talked to a very nice Asian-American man named, oddly enough, Magnus. Magnus is a poo collector at the zoo — he drives a truck around the zoo, gets out, collects poo from all the animals, and drives it back to someplace I’d probably never want to go to. When asked if this was the bottom rung, Magnus disagreed — turns out he started in guest relations and was promoted to poo collector. Moreover, when asked whether he preferred dealing with the public or collecting poo all day, Magnus paused and eventually said, “I guess I’d take the poo.”

I think there may be no better defining parable to explain the customer service experiences I’ve been having recently. And this is not meant to only disparage the customer service representatives I’ve been talking to — I mean this also as an observation (which I can back up from even my limited retail experience) that the public can be so unpleasant and abusive to service representatives that they would prefer a 40-hour week of poo.

Maybe I need to declare a truce with customer service. Once we both accept that we’d rather not be talking to each other, stark efficiency may find purchase and free us both from the itchy bonds of knowing each other.