And since "jerk" is short for "jerkoff" it means the same as "wanker."

But isn't "tosspot" related to "tosser" and therefore pretty much a reference to wanking?

Are there any British coloquialisms for stupid people that aren't naughty?

Wanker, pillock, berk, bugger - all pretty much kid inappropriate.

Equinox in four minutes...

Hey, I was waiting to post that. In four three minutes....

Happy equinox! It's Fall! (Except for you tosspots in the Southern Hemisphere, who get Spring.)

So in my obsessive tracking of polls and the electoral map, some encouraging news from Electoral-vote.com. For the first time since I've been looking, Obama has the 270 he needs.

We have eight presidential polls today. They confirm what is rapidly becoming the conventional wisdom: Florida and Virginia are very close and Iowa is going to be a blowout for Obama. Minnesota, normally a blue state, is surprisingly close today, but most polls this year have shown Obama way ahead there.

Four national polls all show that the Republicans' postconvention bounce has faded, as it always does. All four polls show Obama in the lead again, as he was before the two conventions. The polls are Gallup (Obama +4), Hotline (Obama +1), Rasmussen (Obama +1) and Research 2000 (Obama +7).

And this was also interesting to me:

Newsweek did some detective work and found out how many cars John and Cindy McCain have: 13. Some are foreign cars and some are American made. Barack and Michelle Obama have one car, a Ford Escape hybrid.

CNN hasn't updated their map since Friday.

Meh. It's unethical to cancel a CouchSurfer on a day's notice, is it? But my best friend wants to sleepover at my place!

Oof. I can have them both, but I want to spend time with my friend. She didn't come here in the past two months, and we have a lot to talk about.

Happy fall/spring!!

I have been thinking about the Emmys, and have decided I'm the most happy about Zeljko Ivanek winning, and I've never seen Damages!

An excellent article on how we got into this sub-prime mortgage mess: [link]

Yeah, deregulation of banking institutions has not had the most optimal of track records.

This book looks cool: Corrupted Science: the history, cause, effect and state of bad science

This part of the review stands out:

After this delightful and enervating overview, Grant moves on to different social causes of fraud: ideological scientists who fooled themselves (for example, the discoverers of "menstrual rays" and other improbable phenomena)

Huh? Menstrual rays? WTF? Google was of no help - two of the three matches were to reviews of this book....

Maybe "menstrual rays" were conjectured to cause womens' periods to sync?

Barack and Michelle Obama have one car, a Ford Escape hybrid.

Ha! First reaction is amusement at the "of course it's a hybrid!" and the one car, one house, how much more normal can you get? Second reaction is how do you manage those two lives with one car?