I accidentally left my ballot on the kitchen counter when I left on this trip. Oops. So I dot get to vote for the socialist for city council, or for the mayor over the gay state senator (but then, I'm not actually against him, so who cares?)

VA split things up so there's an important election every year. So I get a governor's race and a state assembly race. I did the early voting because, leave the house by 6:15 to get to work on time (at least when I-66 isn't jammed from Vienna Metro back past Fairfax County Parkway, like it was today) and then leave at 4:00 for a 5:30 doctor appointment that ends about 6:20, doesn't exactly make it easy to vote between 6:00 a.m and 7:00 p.m. And I have at least 4 uberpriority, do-it-now projects at work, so taking the day off isn't an option.

Mmmm...Whoppers.

such language, flea!

I'm a bit disappointed in humanity this morning. I found out last night that a big fannish meltdown/kerfuffle I was involved in way back in 2000, in which I defended the members of a mailing list I was on from unwarranted accusations of being nasty MSTers who publicly mocked people for writing bad stories--it was a whole big thing involving violations of privacy and people getting kicked off fandom-wide mailing lists and all sorts of ridiculousness-- anyway, I found out last night that I'd been lied to all along. The friends I was defending had in fact done what the entire list was accused of, and they'd let me and a couple of other people take the heat for them in public.

It was a huge controversy at the time, but I'd never doubted that I was right. Turns out not so much.

I'm kind of baffled and sad. I don't know what I'd have done at the time, probably told them to own up to it and at least apologize to the individual writers. But I never got the choice, and in the end the only person who comes out looking good is someone who was universally considered to be basically batshit: she found me several years later, not long before she died, and apologized for thinking that I had been involved in it all.

I don't really know what to think. But it saddens me to have people I really trusted both not be what I thought they were, and to have lied to me about it for so long.

I voted!

I am totally stymied on the mayoral candidates, because I like both of them more or less the same amount, and each of them has positions I don't like, in equal proportion. I'm leaning Cranley but won't be fussed if Qualls wins.

I'm voting yes on 1 to keep you employed. (And a steady stream of books coming my way.)

Oh dear, Consuela. That sounds like a mess. (PS: What are MSTers?)

My small amount of research confirms that I'm basically OK in my no-white-men current voting strategy, although I might throw a vote the way of a friend-of-a-friend who I apparently went to high school with. I thought his name was familiar, but it's a common name.

My small amount of research confirms that I'm basically OK in my no-white-men current voting strategy, although I might throw a vote the way of a friend-of-a-friend who I apparently went to high school with. I thought his name was familiar, but it's a common name.

Hah. My roommate and I used that for several down-ballot races as a strategy one year. Vote for the woman or the minority or best of all the minority woman, if there was no obvious choice. Though a few races were white men vs white men and we had to guess from their bios in the voter guide ("this guy says e was in the peace corps, should that win?")

PS: What are MSTers?

People who mock things like the Mystery Science Theater guys. They basically set up a website where they would post paragraphs of someone's story and make fun of the writing, the characterizations, etc. It's not unknown in fandom, but it's generally considered a slap in the face of the community, and these people made it even worse by mocking one of the other people on our very small mailing list. She reacted badly, figured out who it was, and gave away her Yahoogroups password so that several other people we didn't know could read all our mail for weeks.

Luckily, I've had plenty of good choices this year who are not white men! I'm not saying I would reject the best candidate if it were a white man, but when there are a bunch of people who all seem fine? Yeah.

People who mock things like the Mystery Science Theater guys.

Ah. Yikes. You know, I'm no angel, but rule one of talking shit is keep it LOCKED DOWN.