Wednesday, January 02, 2008

First Blog of 2008


As the title says, the first blog of 2008. No pressure but I've got to come up with something good, that will set the tone for all blogs of the future.

So here is what I'm thinking on the second day of 2008; is anyone at all interested in the US election? Be honest haven't these people been running since the last election in November 2004? Tomorrow starts the first of the primaries and although Iowa is officially a 'caucus', it's still the start of something the MSM will call interesting as if to justify the money that has been spent and all those reporters running around the back roads of Iowa in search of a story.

The end result will be someone will get the caucus which means:

The Iowa caucus is an electoral event in which Iowa residents elect delegates to the county convention to which their precinct belongs. (There are 99 counties in Iowa (as of 2008), therefore, 99 conventions.) These county conventions then select delegates for both Iowa's Congressional District Convention and the State Convention—these eventually choosing the delegates for the National Convention. The Iowa caucus is noteworthy for the amount of media attention it receives during U.S. presidential election years: Since 1972, the Iowa caucus has been the first major electoral event of the nominating process for President of the United States. It has served as an early indication of which candidates for President might win the nomination of their political party at that party's national convention. The next Iowa caucus is on January 3, 2008.


So in other words, what happens tomorrow is Iowans will elect the delegates who will elect the delegates to attend the various National Conventions that will take place in the summer of 2008. All I can say is 'thank you' to Wikipedia for explaining that to me. If I can further sum it all up it means, precisely nothing but has meant a lot of service industries in Iowa has done well with all the reporters, candidates, candidate workers going throughout the 99 counties of Iowa.

Hey, more power to Iowa.

In other news: Lake Superior State University located in Sault Ste. Marie Michigan has come up with its lists of banned words. Now this is not a suppression of First Amendment Rights rather a desire to remove words and phrases that have overstayed their welcome. They are overused, hackneyed, trite and generally annoying, the by-product of people parroting the 'cool' phrases of the day.

The full list is here. The banned word/phrase of the year is Perfect Storm. It started out as a book and later a movie. The premise was the convergence of a number of conditions that would bring about a perfect combination of absolutely horrible weather. Now it's used to describe any and everything that could be possibly bad.

But all is not doom and gloom, there is good news. First and foremost, you can now order your very own CrankyGeeks T-Shirt. That is true, after months of teasing and promises, Jinx has designed and put out for purchase a t shirt dedicated to one of the better vidcasts out there, CrankyGeeks with John C. Dvorak. Buy yours now.

The only other bit of news is the Dell Axim X3i is working well, it's recharging in its very cool cradle for both charging the battery and syncing it with the computer.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I've been fortunate to miss the preponderance of Perfect Storm usages. But last year there was a glut of "Kevin 07"ses, from the Australian federal election. That was bad enough, even though I voted for the bloke; at least he wasn't a Coalition candidate.

It reminds me of the overuse of 'tsunami' a few years back. That was annoying enough, especially since I kept using it in its proper, unemotive use. Some people.... *grrrrrr*

Anonymous said...

"More power to Iowa?" Primary Thought Forms Gone Cosmic
From a Big BANG out in Iowa