I brought clementines, but I think I want something carby.

So the dog is Fred Thompson?

Well, he was born in Tennessee.

I can't explain it, but this building is totally awesome: Mitsubishi's elevator-testing tower

Mitsubishi has erected a tall, skinny, hollow tower filled with elevator shafts for testing high-speed lifts:

The 173m-high (567ft) structure is called Solae and dominates the skyline of Inazawa City...

The 5bn-yen ($50m;£25m) project will allow Mitsubishi to test new drives, gears, cables and other lift systems.

Don't even get me STARTED on the Electoral College. I went several rounds with my mom last week because I refuse to believe that something the All-Wise Founders thought up in the eighteenth century must necessarily be the best way over two centuries later.

I look at this way. If we had a one person, one vote system would there be any call to go with the electoral college system instead? I grew up in Kansas where voting for the president is for all practical purposes just a waste of time.

You know how presidential election campaigns start earlier and earlier? Here's a guy who started campaigning for the 2008 election back in 1908....

From the April 16, 1908 Cedar Rapids Evening Gazette:

Charles Vaden Barton, "the count," one of the choicest cranks that ever infested the capital, has arrived from Seattle to open his campaign to elect himself president in 2008. He announces that he is the John the Baptist of the millennium, and as he has special arrangements by which he beats the undertakers and cannot die, he can start his presidential campaign a long time ahead and work up sentiment gradually. So he is starting 100 years ahead, and expects that by the time he is elected the millennium will begin coincident with his inauguration.

I wonder how that's working out for him....

Ok, if I had the time and/or the resources, I would spend both tying that yahoo to whichever candidate I could.

Second day of Weight Watchers, still hanging in. I realized that I could overcome my afternoon hunger problem by just treating my lunch as the first of a series of snacks--IOW, instead of having a filling meal, with, say, a bowl of soup or leftovers from dinner with a piece of fruit and some yogurt, I just eat the soup or leftovers and save the fruit and yogurt to have for snacks later. That way I have more than one afternoon snack and can sort of spread the food intake to keep the hunger pangs down.

It's weird. No matter how much or how little I eat, I get extremely hungry in the afternoon. Morning and evening it's easier to control my eating because it's more, "Yeah, kinda hungry," than "OMG must eat now food food food must have."

Oh, other discovery? Healthy Choice chicken and rice soup is GROSS. Bland but oddly metallic. Will not purchase again.

I had the same reaction to their chicken noodle. Blegh.

YES I CHANGED MY MIND. I'm the boss of this, that's my perogative.

grumble Learning curve, people, learning curve. And no one wrote procedures, so I'm making it up here.

Ooh. Did we go away for a few minutes?