If you ask me just how it is I came to pick this particular set of candidates, and some of you might, I might just refer you to The Caustic Tart:

The politicians, in the end, win. They’ve successfully muddied the waters. So how to decide who to vote for? Being a libertarian, I think I’m left with two solid options: pick the least lying liar, or make a choice based on who I dislike the least.

I haven’t yet resorted to flipping a coin, but I’m not entirely ruling it out either.

No goblins this year, though someone felt compelled to call me on the landline at 5:46, 5:48 and 5:51 am, which I suppose qualifies as a trick: it certainly wasn’t anything resembling a treat.

Incidentally, I must object to the characterization of these minimal packages as “Fun Size”; no way is there enough in any one of them to qualify as Fun.

News Item: Iran has said it would offer cash incentives to travel agencies to encourage Western tourists to visit the country, giving a premium for Americans, the official Islamic Republic News Agency reported Tuesday. The proposal is Iran’s latest bid to reach out to ordinary Americans in an attempt by the Islamic Republic’s political leadership to show that its quarrel is with the U.S. administration — not U.S. citizens.

The old American Embassy will hold 66 persons, more or less indefinitely.

(Via Francis W. Porretto.)

Oklahoma City is looking for an Urban Design Consultant.

More specifically:

Over the last decade the center city has benefited from $2.4 billion in public and private investment. In addition, several new design districts and specialized review of development proposals have been developed to address a growing and changing city. In order to ensure that new development of this scale, value and impact promotes sustainability and quality growth of our city, the City Council allocated resources for four new positions to support an enhanced urban design function as part of the FY 2006-2007 budget. The Planning Department has created an Urban Design and Planning Division to house this staff and oversee this function. A high-level professional advisor is needed to supplement the expertise of staff for guidance and advice in developing the City’s Urban Design Program, including review of high profile projects, and the development of design guidelines and procedures consistent with national standards.

The beginning of wisdom is the point where you realize you don’t know everything.

Reprinted from Valentine’s Day:

[T]he Playboy Advisor once took on a three-pronged question from a reader who was (1) worried about sexually-transmitted diseases, (2) suffering from premature ejaculation, and (3) dissatisfied with the size of the unit. The Advisor recommended:

1. Wear a condom.

2. Wear two condoms.
3. Wear three condoms.

This sort of additive protection, as it were, does not work on PCs. After reviewing some of the more questionable decisions made by our end users, we have determined that the efficiency of one’s antivirus protection varies inversely with the square of the number of antivirus products installed on any one box.

In other words, if you have two AV programs running, you have one-fourth the protection; three of them, one-ninth. (Spyware detectors and such interact differently, and cannot be so easily quantified.)

And no, you don’t want to know how many we found on [description of machine redacted].

Construction on the Great Wall of China began around the year 215 B.C.

If you grew up in the South, you might recognize “B.C.” as the brand name of a headache powder. Kehaar is having aches and pains of his own, but it hasn’t stopped him from bringing you Carnival of the Vanities #215, the first (and still the oldest) of the blog compilations, awaiting your inspection as soon as you break away from this place.

Yesterday was all GOP; today the Democrats drop in.

• A card with a photo of all the statewide Democratic candidates, with the tag “Experienced Leaders You Can Trust.” Brad Henry’s in the middle; the tall guys at the ends are Cody Graves and Lloyd Fields.

• A letter from Dana Orwig, addressed to “Dear Neighbor,” complains about Trebor Worthen’s “misleading and untrue allegations,” and says, “In view of the trend of Mr Worthen’s mailings, I suspect his campaign has further plans to ‘go negative’.” (I’ve mentioned this tendency before.)

See the wire? That’s what we’re down to.

Then again, I had a good excuse: dinner date. We hit the Elephant Bar east of Penn Square. No political implications, and the food was pretty decent: I had the misoyaki pork loin, she had something called the Shrimp Adventure Platter. I never thought of shrimp having adventures, but maybe that’s just me.

Meanwhile, the Hornets began the regular season with a W: 91-87 over the Celtics in Boston, and from a cursory look at the box score, I have to assume that it wasn’t pretty. Still, it’s a win, and I’ll take it.

Leo Kottke, guitarist extraordinaire, has also been known to sing, but he’s not fond of his voice: it sounds, he said, like “geese farts on a muggy day.”

Which brings us to the lovely Gwendolyn, who, after a cold start, emits a flatulent-goose sound of her own. I took this description to the Infiniti store, where they told me that it’s the starter getting old and (un)cranky, and so long as the car actually starts, I shouldn’t worry about it. “I’ve heard them go two, three years like that,” said the service manager. And, well, cold starts are going to be more common, what with November being here, so I suppose I should get used to the noise. I have about half a dozen Leo Kottke albums; maybe I’ll copy them to CD and listen to them during the warmup.

There’s just no way I can pass up linking to a piece which includes “How to Meet Naked Montanans” in its title.

Especially, you know, since otherwise normal people are trying to persuade me that Montana sucks.

(Inspired, if that’s the word, by this Fark thread.)

And they didn’t get one, either:

Thieves last week led archaeologists to the graves of three royal dentists, located near to the Step Pyramid of King Djoser, believed to be Egypt’s oldest pyramid.

Zahi Hawass, chief of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, told … reporters that the tombs date back more than 4,000 years to the 5th Dynasty. They were meant to honor a chief dentist and two others who treated the pharaohs and their families.

Although their services were in demand by the powerful, the dentists likely did not share in their wealth. The tombs, which did not contain their mummies, were built of mudbrick and limestone, not the pure limestone preferred by ancient Egypt’s upper class.

Back in the day when General Motors was struggling to keep its market share below 50 percent, dentists and lawyers and such, even if they could afford Cadillacs, tended to buy Buicks and Oldsmobiles, lest their clientele wonder if maybe they might be getting overcharged. The idea that there’s historical precedent for this sort of modesty is just this side of fascinating.

This is not to say, though, that the dentists weren’t protective of what was theirs:

[O]ne of [the tombs] included a curse warning that anyone who violated the sanctity of the grave would be eaten by a crocodile and a snake.

It could have been worse: the curse could have included root-canal work.

(Stolen from Scribal Terror.)

Susan B., this past Sunday:

This evening, somebody (calling himself “Enlightenment”, natch) posted a long screed in the comments to the previous post that hit on every single 9/11 “truther” talking point imaginable. It was in one long chunk of text, rather than being split up into paragraphs, which just added to the craziness.

Let me reiterate…. this crap is not allowed on my blog. The main reason is it’s disrespectful of everyone who died in the 9/11 attacks and their families. The other reason is that it’s stupid, ridiculous nonsense. Anyone who posts this crap in my comments will be banned and will have their comment removed.

The individual in question arrived here today with the same screed. I read it over, was planning to approve it, then remembered where I heard the name.

I read it again. It’s medium-grade moonbattery, but that’s not quite enough, in my view, to warrant junking the comment. I’ve approved worse. (I daresay I’ve written worse.)

Then I pulled a phrase out of the middle of it and sent it to Google, and discovered at least four places where the entire screed has already been enshrined, indicating that it’s hardly needed here; it’s a traveling text dump, nothing more.

So I’ve decided on this incredibly sub-Solomonic compromise: I won’t post it here, but I’ll put up a link to a place where it’s already up, and you can read it for yourself if you so desire.

One oversized card today, on behalf of Jim Roth, asserting that he “has made Oklahoma County safer,” a reference to road and bridge improvements in District 1.

Overall, I think I’ve gotten more mail from the Roth campaign than from any other this year.

There’s a scene in Bill Forsyth’s Gregory’s Girl that’s always stuck with me. It appears that someone has it bad for Gregory’s younger sister; in fact, the someone in question says admiringly, “She’s only ten, but she has the body of a woman of thirteen.”

At the time, this seemed innocent and goofy. Twenty-five years later, it sounds like a warning shot: somewhere between then and now it became de rigueur to turn tween girls into oversexed Bratz. A week doesn’t go by that I don’t get some Googler looking for risqué photos — even fake risqué photos — of twelve-year-old Dakota Fanning. One could argue, I suppose, that I don’t deal well with female sexuality of any sort, and maybe that’s even true, but I can’t see any upside to having middle-school students looking like tired call girls.

Enter Up Stream Girl, which aims to be the anti-Abercrombie and/or Fitch:

We founded Up Stream Girl with a desire to provide fashion apparel with a more feminine, classic look for girls, teens and juniors. The kind of clothes we had when we were younger, but with today’s fashion — the fashion which makes these clothes great! Fun and cool colors, new fabrics and great styles. We call these “Today’s Classics”.

We know today’s girls can be demanding when it comes to the clothes they wear. And they should be. They want clothes that make them look and feel both beautiful and feminine. We also know that our girls face challenges that we never had when we were their age. The clothes a girl wears says a lot about her. The confidence she shows, her beauty, her character, and her belief in herself, can all be inspired by the clothes she wears.

And surely there has to be a middle ground between the burqa and the “Who needs brains when I’ve got these?” T-shirts.

(Discovered here.)

Life in Erica’s world:

We have this system for electronic document routing. You upload your doc, fill out some things, and then everyone who needs to review it gets an email. They make notes and sign electronically. You manage those notes, fix your doc up all purty-like, and then it goes around again for e-sigs for approval.

“Cumbersome” is putting it mildly. So why not this?

When you log into the system, you have a list of all your docs that are in review or approval, and you have a list of everyone else’s docs that you need to review or approve.

What I’m really really wishing for is an RSS feed for my list of docs, so that whenever someone leaves a note or signs off, I can aggregate that information somewhere, instead of having to go back to that list and refresh, refresh, refresh.

Yeah, it might be a pain in the tuchas to set up — once — but if people’s time is worth anything at all, and surely it is, the return on investment should be considerable.

(Why, yes, I do use Lotus Notes. How did you guess?)

Zimmerman wasn’t exactly wroth, but he was definitely perplexed. He didn’t mind so much when somebody called “Bobby the Poet” put out a Hardly-Worthit version of “Positively White Christmas” or something like that, and he admitted to a guffaw or two when that Weird Al guy ran backwards and forwards at the same time. In the same song, yet.

But he didn’t quite know what to make of Chastity Rome-Sick Blues. Okay, the girl was way cute, if a tad fumble-fingered, and she looked the part. (Johanna? Forget those visions.) Besides, whoever heard of a music video made to promote a book? He shook his head in amazement and pressed the Watch Again button. “Funny,” he finally said. “And it beats the hell out of watching parking meters.”

Neil Kramer reads Cosmopolitan so you don’t have to, and finds stuff like this:

Guys are looking to avoid that overeager girl who goes out of her way to show everyone exactly how intelligent she is. If you find yourself using the names Hemingway, Dostoevsky, or Nietzsche more than once per conversation, you may be guilty of academic name-dropping, which reeks of insecurity.

The hottest woman I ever met had a Ph.D. in medieval French literature or some such thing. And you know what? Not once did it ever occur to me that she might be able to correct my misapprehensions (if any) about Molière’s Tartuffe, nor would it have bothered me greatly if she had.

I suspect Neilochka is dipping into the Double Secret Irony stash for this:

There’s a reason the librarian always TAKES OFF the glasses. We like the woman to be stupider than us. Of course, a woman should read, but preferably material like Cosmopolitan, chick-lit, or maybe a few mommyblogger blogs. Nothing too heady. Men are known to be better in math and science, so please don’t try [to] show off any of your math skills. It is a real turn-off. The only mathematical term you should be using in conversation with a man you are dating is “big,” as in “My Gawd, you are so big!”

Either that, or he’s letting the wang do the talking again.

Now if you’ll excuse me, Michel Houellebecq awaits.

In the waning days, it’s a GOP blitz. Here’s what showed up today:

• A Trebor Worthen trifecta: three items from the Republican State Leadership Committee, all touting Worthen’s tax stances — and all citing the same bill: HB 1172, which scissored the top end of the income tax and repealed the estate tax. The RSLC’s mailer, Targeted Creative Communications, Inc., has yet to figure out that there have been three owners of this house since the one to which these items were addressed.

• Another RSLC card, magazine-sized: “Oklahoma State House Republicans: They did what they said they would do.” See the previous item for address concerns.
• Two cards from Cliff Branan in what appears to be somebody’s handwriting. (If it’s a font, it’s a good one; seldom do any two iterations of the same letter look alike.) One of these is actually addressed to me.

Question to the readership: Should I include items which due to mail delays didn’t show up until Election Day or after? Or should I knock this off after Monday evening?

I am now prepared to argue that the Hornets have learned to play defense. The Bees picked up a startling 53 rebounds, led by Tyson Chandler with 15. (And after fouling out in the first game, Chandler was cooler tonight, getting called only twice.) And there was offense: five Hornets in double figures. There was just the faintest hint of Third-Quarter Drought™, but a 12-2 run at the beginning of the fourth put the Hornets back in front to stay, spoiling the Pacers’ opening night in Indianapolis, 100-91.

Thirty-nine of those 100 points (and 19 of those boards) came from the bench, another indication that maybe this team actually has depth. And since Peja isn’t hitting the 3-ball — he’s 2-9 so far this year — it’s a good thing that Rasual Butler can still drain the occasional trey. (He had two tonight in the fourth quarter.)

And there’s this: against the Celtics last year, the Bees were 0-2; against the Pacers, 0-2. Personnel changes or no, I have to believe that there was some sense of payback out there. Moreover, last year’s Hornets won only 14 road games all season. Getting two early has to be gratifying.

Having ruined opening night for two teams now, the Hornets will have two opening nights of their own: Sunday in New Orleans against the Rockets, and Tuesday at the Ford Center against the Warriors.

It does, however, meet the part of the definition that calls for a dream that makes you sit up and take notice, so I’ll mention it here.

I’m on the periphery of a popular local eatery/takeout joint when I pick up on the crowd buzz, and what I’m picking up is implausible in the extreme: they’ve set up separate entrances marked “Straight” and “Gay.” Shades of the Southern South, I’m thinking, and what the hell for?

On an impulse, I went in through the “Gay” entrance and noticed that no one was checking credentials, assuming such a thing were possible. I walked over to the “Straight” entrance: nobody watching that door either.

And the crowd seemed about twice as big as usual, so obviously the artificial constraints, or whatever they were, weren’t discouraging customers.

I’m still puzzling over what, if anything, I am to make of this brief tale, except to note that people of any description have little use for attempts to pigeonhole them.

I question the timing. About five months after Sandy and Bambi fought to the death on a lonesome Oklahoma two-lane, the Oklahoman comes up with a piece on deer/auto collisions.

Things I didn’t know:

• October and November are the prime months for such things around here, inasmuch as it’s mating season.

• Nationwide there are about 1.5 million accidents involving deer, resulting in $1.1 billion in damage. (This works out to $733 per incident, a figure at which I wince: my insurance adjuster told me they just stopped counting at six thousand.)
• So-called “deer whistles,” which are supposed to repel the critters, don’t.

I may buy one of those whistles anyway, since friends swear by them; but I’ll pass it off as a tiger whistle.

“But there aren’t any tigers for ten thousand miles!”

“See how well it works?”

It’s yet another GOP blitz, with basically the same mailing issues they’ve had before (see prior installments), and these items fall into three general categories:

• Cliff Branan (positive): “Why We Believe Cliff Branan is a Great State Senator,” with paragraphs by seemingly everybody from David Boren to the owners of Bennett’s Decal and Label. Two copies received.

• Trebor Worthen (positive): A handwritten card similar to the one I got from Branan yesterday. I don’t think the text was machine-generated, and I note in passing that Worthen’s penmanship is worse than Branan’s, though still far better than mine.
• Trebor Worthen (negative): This was the first look I’ve had at the “misleading and untrue allegations” Dana Orwig says Worthen has made. The most obvious problem with the list is that Worthen provides a source for only one of four alleged Orwig statements, and makes an unwarranted extrapolation from that one: one’s position on medical marijuana is not an infallible indication of one’s position on other proscribed drugs. (And that source, incidentally, is the 2006 Libertarian Candidate Survey, which Worthen apparently couldn’t be bothered to take himself.)

On these mailing matters: Assuming that these addresses are obtained from voter-registration records of some sort, I’m wondering if maybe Mrs T (not her real initial), who lived here until 1997 or so, is still listed on the rolls at this address. Maybe I’ll ask a staffer at the polling place on Tuesday if she’s still in the book. (Better yet, maybe I’ll ask Don Danz to come down and vote on her behalf.)

Addendum, 1 pm: As the block captain for the Neighborhood Association, I deliver the monthly newsletter on my block, and as I made the rounds today, I noticed a couple of flyers that had beaten me to the front doors. Here’s what I found:

• A card with Dana Orwig’s photo and a sticker giving the location of the polling place.

• A pair of sheets from Dave Mehlhaff, the larger of which complains that Jim Roth is getting outside-the-area contributions from the Victory Fund, a national GLBT PAC, and plays the by-now-dogeared “radical homosexual agenda” card. The Fund is indeed taking contributions for Roth; as for the “agenda,” well, I attended the United States Holocaust Museum’s traveling exhibit of gay and lesbian Holocaust victims, which Roth helped to bring here, and which Mehlhaff presumably would have preferred to be kept under wraps.

I have one concern: that people will come home, find all this stuff on their doors, and suspect they are in some way connected. They aren’t. Orwig and Mehlhaff are political opposites; what’s more, the Mayfair Heights Neighborhood Association has endorsed no candidates for office, and the arrival of its newsletter on this date was timed to remind residents of the monthly meeting Tuesday night, at which Ward 2 Councilman Sam Bowman (not up for reelection this year) will speak.

Venomous Kate is looking for the 50 Most Depressing Songs, apparently to inspire her upcoming novel. Please feel free to make recommendations to her.

I suggested Jimmy Ruffin’s “What Becomes of the Brokenhearted,” which is a world-class downer, but I didn’t mention this: at one time the song contained a spoken-word intro which was perhaps intended to set the mood, but which didn’t make it into the version released to the general public. After listening to it, I don’t miss it at all:

A world filled with love is a wonderful sight
Being in love is one’s heart’s delight
But that look of love isn’t on my face
That enchanted feeling has been replaced

Somebody, maybe Berry Gordy himself, heard that and thought it was just too much.

This isn’t quite an isolated incident: right before the last verse of the Shangri-Las’ heartrending “I Can Never Go Home Anymore,” at about the 2:30 point, Mary Weiss originally half-cried, half-whispered, “Listen, I’m not finished.” The line was mixed out of the 45 and wasn’t heard again for decades. (And this, too, is a Depressing Song, what with mother dying and runaway daughter contrite.)

Still, if we want Serious Discomfort in a pop tune, we call upon King Crimson, which in its first two albums was wont to work up implausible titles like “‘Epitaph’ including ‘March for No Reason’ and ‘Tomorrow and Tomorrow’,” from which we extract this example of finely-crafted angst:

The wall on which the prophets wrote
Is cracking at the seams
Upon the instruments of death
The sunlight brightly gleams
When every man is torn apart
With nightmares and with dreams
Will no one lay the laurel wreath
As silence drowns the screams

Confusion will be my epitaph
As I crawl a cracked and broken path
If we make it we can all sit back and laugh
But I fear tomorrow I’ll be crying

This might be laughable were it not so perfectly orchestrated: the song (which runs over eight and a half minutes, with only one more verse and a repeat of the verse/chorus above) is carefully calculated to resonate against your last nerve, making seemingly-adolescent rubbish into a true Tale of Terror.

(Lyricist Pete Sinfield, incidentally, is responsible for the unofficial name of my workplace, but that’s another tale of terror story.)

And the Princess of Darkness and the SpiderLad mean business. (Ages: Laney, 3½; Jackson, 8 months; furnishings in the background, God only knows.)

Each issue of The Week has a section called “Good Week For…” and “Bad Week For…”, usually with four of each.

This is apparently a Bad Week for Men, and here’s why:

[A] British study revealed that the average man spends a full six months of his life staring at women in a slack-jawed trance of frustrated desire.

Finally, I’m above average at something.

Kent Hovind, evangelist and proprietor of Pensacola’s Dinosaur Adventure Land creationist theme park, is facing 288 years in prison after conviction on 58 counts of tax fraud.

Hovind and his wife Jo, who could draw up to 225 years, had argued that they were working for God and that therefore their earnings, and those of their employees, were not subject to taxation. The park itself was closed in April because it had been built without a permit and because Escambia County authorities had never been allowed to inspect the premises. “Right now Caesar demands a building permit,” quipped Mike Whitehead, chair of the County Commission.

Sentencing will be on the 9th of January.

(Via Secular Blasphemy.)

Paul Mauriat, the orchestra leader whose 1968 recording of “Love Is Blue” is, to these ears, the second-best French instrumental ever, has died in Perpignan, in southern France near the Spanish border.

Born in Marseille in 1925, Mauriat led his own band during the 1940s, subsequently working with Charles Aznavour and honing his own reputation as a classical pianist. Maintenance of that reputation perhaps led him to release his pop records, starting in 1957, under various pseudonyms; in 1962, as “Del Roma,” he got his first hit as a composer, cowriting (with Franck Pourcel and lyricist Jacques Plante) “Chariot,” a massive hit for Petula Clark. (The next year, an English-language version was a smash in the US for Little Peggy March, under the title “I Will Follow Him.”)

You might figure from that particular example that Mauriat was an exponent of strong melodies, and let the words come in where they will, and you’d be correct. Pierre Cour’s lyrics to “L’Amour est Bleu,” first sung by Vicky Leandros at the 1967 Eurovision Song Contest — it placed fourth — were clearly secondary to André Popp’s music, and when Mauriat recorded it in 1968, he cast it as a sort of neo-Baroque string piece with harpsichord accents. It sold zillions on the Continent and (as Philips 40495) made #1 in the States, the fifth-biggest instrumental, as Casey Kasem says, of the Rock Era. I’m on my third copy of the single.

Starting with Blooming Hits, the LP containing “Love Is Blue,” the next few Mauriat album covers, at least in the US, could be described as Blatantly Sexy, peaking with the late-’68 Mauriat Magic, which produced two minor singles: “Même si tu revenais,” otherwise known as “Love in Every Room,” and a version of John Phillips’ “San Francisco,” which you remember with Scott McKenzie advising you to wear some flowers in your hair.

Mauriat also built a name for himself in the Far East, signing with the Japanese Pony Canyon label in 1994 and touring in Japan as late as 1998. His orchestra, still bearing his name, continues to perform. “Love Is Blue,” to my knowledge, has never gone out of print, and Blooming Hits was just reissued on CD by Collectors’ Choice Music.

And that first-best French instrumental? Right here.

GMO Urban Ministries is an offshoot of Greater Mount Olive Baptist Church on Oklahoma City’s largely-black northeast side. They’ve scheduled five public forums through the next year in an effort to “reconnect and revitalize” the black community. The first of them was Saturday, at which OU Black Studies instructor Kevin McPherson laid it on the line:

Why would you expect the very people who made you slaves to save you?

Okay, there’s just a hint of Distrust Whitey in there, and it’s not like I’ve haven’t heard it before. Cue the Temptations’ single “Ball of Confusion,” as they rattle off sound bites from the incessant media blitz, and pick up on Eddie Kendricks: “Vote for me and I’ll set you free!”

But I don’t think Dr McPherson was baiting anyone, especially when you look at what he said in the context of, say, this:

Much of northeast Oklahoma City, formerly the geographic heart of the black community, is no longer owned by blacks, said John Pettis of the Oklahoma Housing Finance Agency.

“Until we go back to owning this community, we can’t determine its destination,” Pettis said.

Or this:

Parents have to regain control of their families, discipline their children and instill character and morals, said Wayne Reid of the Eastside Capitol Gateway Main Street program.

“For so long, we’ve allowed the community to raise our children, then we wake up one morning, and we don’t know who that person is in the house,” Reid said.

So jump a couple years forward in the soundtrack of the city, to the point where James Brown says “I don’t want nobody to give me nothing / Open up the door, I’ll get it myself.” Abject declarations of white guilt, however well they may play on the nightly news, don’t mean a thing to the Hardest Working Man in Show Business. And I suspect Kevin McPherson doesn’t want to hear them either: there’s work to be done.

A couple of years ago, with crude oil in the $52 range and my DeskJet at work demanding yet another ink cartridge, I sat down with a calculator and determined the price of HP ink per 42-gallon barrel. The results were predictable yet still amazing: $292,900, more than you’d pay for even Dom Perignon in this quantity.

Gizmodo is now reporting that HP ink costs even more than human blood: 71 cents per milliliter for the contents of an HP 45 cartridge, versus 40 cents for the claret, Barrett.

And actually, it’s worse than they say, because they’re comparing with the 45, a relatively old unit (I use them in my ancient 720C at home) that has less-predatory pricing than newer models. My work box takes the HP 56, which holds a mere 19 ml (versus 42 for the 45) and costs even more than $30. So 42nd and Treadmill has to fork over, not $0.71/ml, but $1.84.

Does this mean that nothing on earth costs more than HP ink? No, it does not.

(Observed at Scribal Terror.)

I’ve already posted my endorsements, such as they are; regular readers may have ascertained the level of enthusiasm from the context, and have certainly noticed that I didn’t mention any party connections.

So here’s the Shorter Version, with party designation included, and 1 through 5 to indicate the firmness of my support. (Something about which I don’t care in the slightest would score zero, but then it wouldn’t get an endorsement, would it?)

5th Congressional District: David Hunter (D) (3)
Governor: Brad Henry (D) (4)
Lieutenant Governor: Jari Askins (D) (4)
Corporation Commission: Bob Anthony (R) (5)
Treasurer: Scott Meacham (D) (3)
Labor Commissioner: Brenda Reneau (R) (3)
Attorney General: Drew Edmondson (D) (3)
Insurance Commissioner: Kim Holland (D) (4)
State Auditor: Jeff McMahan (D) (2)
District Attorney: David Prater (D) (2)
Senate 40: Cliff Branan (R) (4)
House 87: Dana Orwig (D) (4)
Assessor: Leonard Sullivan (R) (5)
District 1 Commisioner: Jim Roth (D) (5)

Of people not on my ballot, I like Andrew Rice (D, Senate 46), Fred Jordan (R, House 69), Jennifer Seal (D, House 85), Lance Cargill (R, House 96), John Trebilcock (R, House 98), and J. M. Branum (I, House 99).

State questions:
724: Yes (5)
725: Yes (1)
733: Yes (5)
734: Yes (4)