Sooo last century
Every time I vote in Alachua County I wonder about our last-century ballot technology,
And then I dutifully take up the proffered magic marker and proceed to mark my candidate preferences, one by one, by filling in the little bubbles.
Like we were still living in some sort of primitive society.
But then I heard about what’s going on in Tennessee – where voters are selecting Democrats only to see the names of their GOP opponents mysteriously show up on the screen.
Thank you, Alachua County, for sticking with last century (dare I say primitive?) technology so we can select the correct this century candidates of our choice.
But signing glass?
Speaking of this century voting technology, for most of my lifetime I have been dutifully signing my name on paper with ink – we’re talking centuries old tech – to prove that I am who I say I am before receiving my ballot.
But now I’m conveying my signature via e-pen on a glass surface, which is then preserved in the guts of the machinery.
I dunno about you, but I have never managed to provide an e-signature that looks even remotely like the one I have been jotting down on paper, with ink, for most of my life.
Does that matter? Maybe not.
But in an election where armies of poll watchers are going to challenge the authenticity of ballots under any pretense imaginable, will my scrawled artificial John Hancock hold up under someone’s jaded scrutiny?
Gee, I certainly hope so.
Not just another Saturday night
When I was a young editorial writer – many, many years ago – I frequently wrote about one particularly troubling aspect of America’s deadly infatuation with guns.
That being the Saturday Night Special.
They were handguns so cheaply and poorly made that they were both easy to obtain…and about as likely to blow up in the user’s hand as deliver an accurate bullet to the intended target.
Apropos of nothing at all, consider this headline in Sunday morning’s Sun: “Eleven people shot in Tallahassee after FAMU homecoming game.”
Very little is known as yet about who shot who and why. But I’m gonna go out on a limb here and guess that, based on the body count, the shooters were not using Saturday night Specials.
Which brings me to the most troubling aspect of our ongoing and increasingly deadlier infatuation with guns.
The technology of dispensing lots and lots of bullets in very little time has gotten so efficient…so good?…that the old Saturday Night Specials we once considered to be such a problem might as well be Colonial era muskets.
Damn, but we Americans are getting better and better at deploying this century’s technology to improve the art of mowing each other down.
Our plus-sized autoAmerican dream
Of course, we Americans are not only obsessed with ever more deadly guns, we are increasingly seduced by ever bigger, ever faster, and ever more expensive pickups and SUVs.
And why not? Texas-sized pickups are as autoAmerican as apple pie.
Oops, bad news for owners of America’s best selling vehicle. Filling up your Ford F-150 now costs about $85 more a month than it did last year at this time.
“A bigger car is just going to end up consuming a lot more gas over time, and that means people are going to end up spending more money as a result,” Yonah Freemark, author of a new analysis on rising gas prices told Streetsblog USA.
“Driving is inevitably going to be super expensive,” Freemark said. “It’s not like there’s a great way out of it.”
Still, every smoggy cloud has a silver lining. The really good thing about the F-150 is that it’s big enough to live in when the price of gas finally drives you out of house and home.
