Hard to know where to start or what to say. The Onion ran the headline, Nation's Poor Elects Nation's Rich. That summed up for me. The mind boggles.

It was gratifying to hear this morning that former Pres. Clinton joined Sen. Kerry for a rally in Pennsylvania. I still think that VP Gore could have won . . . by a larger margin . . . if he had requested help from Pres. Clinton. Now if Sen. Kerry heads for Florida with the campaign crew he's assembled and sets up camp, he'll win.

These are two of my favorite words to see linked together. I like logic in connection with polis becaue it reminds me that I don't think that logic is the tool for doing the work of a city. That work is conceived differently by different people, but I think of it as the work of giving substance to the social contract, i.e. tuning the economy to feed, clothe, shelter, heal and educate.

Having just watched debate no. 3 (held in Tempe, Arizona), I have grown tired of trying to anticipate whether other viewers will or will not evaluate issues on whether the candidates seemed "likable."

I'm getting exercised by the media failure to challenge Bush's denial of income from what factcheck.org called a "timber growing enterprise."

When Kerry pointed out that the definition Bush used during the debate of "small business owner" included anyone who reported even a dollar of income on their Fed. Income Return, Schedule C, Bush mocked Kerry for suggesting that he had a timber company.

This is to note the arrival of the new, new science fiction.

The new science fiction was new in the sense that stories focused on human rather than technical changes in a futuristic context of humans interfacing with electronics.

Okay debate no. 2 from St. Louis ended a couple of hours ago. My vote for best line was (surprise) Kerry's about generals winning the war and presidents having to win the peace. Its mind-boggling to me that anyone can take the current administration seriously on any issue. That said, I think Kerry won the exchange on two points. The first was the Canadian drug import question. Kerry said he was for it, and Bush tried to say he wanted to make sure the drugs were safe first. The second and d

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer ran a great story on debate no. 2 called Darth Cheney meets Luke Edwards. I think Luke Skywalker is a poor fictional avatar for John Edwards. Darth is fine for the VP though. It can substitute my former favorite nickname, Dick I-hate-puppies Cheney. I will be glued to the set!

The Washington Post carried an editorial confirming my firm impression that Kerry decisively won the first debate this past week. Newsweek also published poll results showing that Kerry has pulled ahead of Bush in the overall race.

Bush may have slipped into a risky rhetorical stance by attacking Kerry as a flip-flopper, etc. As pointed out in the Post editorial, if the electorate decides the situation on the ground in Iraq is worsening, Bush has left no room for changing directions.

I struggled with math and science all of my life. Now that I'm done with school, I've been able to go back to the many, many topics that stumped me and explore more slowly. Its been wonderful. HP Friedrichs wrote a pair of books that have really brightened my existence. The first is Voice of the Crystal, and the second is Intstruments of Amplification. In both books, the writer tries to isolate key aspects of electronics to build homemade components. Its very fun, and he's an exceptionall

This is to surface after a long, enjoyable spring and summer. The weather feels to me like autumn this morning, and I realized I had written nothing in my Slashdot journal since winter.

A friend of mine loaned me Barrel Fever, and, after a slow start, I was entertained. Naked and Me Talk Pretty One Day followed and got me past entertaining and into edifying.

The writing reminds me of another close friend who suffered a brain aneurysm on the threshhold of law school graduation and a federal clerkship. Her personality "changed" and friends exhausted themselves speculating about "cognitive deficits" and her loss of inhibitions.

My brother is helping me learn how to do a command line application to produce legal documents. The final product is intended to run with a minimalist Linux distro on a floppy. Lawyers and advocates can use it to produce legal documents in remote rural offices with old computers.

Today I recopied his C code into a text editor on my Linux partition. When it was done, I emailed it to him for further instructions. Next I need to compile it and (I'm expecting) debug, debug, debug.

Today my Slackware 9.1 partition is operational --- finally! This time three years ago, I had no idea what a partition was let alone Slackware. Slack was dispensed only by Bob Dobbs.

Its a banner day for this tech newbie.

The next step is to add Linux at my office. I already use Mozilla and Openoffice. Time to learn how to give WinXP second chair.

-- This Way Comes.

As a small town divorce lawyer, I occasionally hear other lawyers speculate about where they went wrong on their career path. Sometimes, on a particularly stressful day, this takes the form of joking about wanting to run a plant nursery. Other times, too often, I read in the obituaries about an attorney who unexpectedly took his own life.