Candidate 1: You have a nice platform, but nobody knows it. Quit branding the other guy a rubber stamp (no pun intended) and campaign on the damn platform already!

Candidate 2: I have already voted absentee. Granted, you have no way of knowing that, but sending a recorded message to my phone twice in one hour at 10 in the evening is not a good way to gain or retain my support.

I'm reading a book about Vipassana meditation - a form of Buddhist mediation - and the author is spending quite a bit of time defining his terms. Which makes sense; a lot of possible definitions for meditation are inaccurate (i.e., "MEDITATION GIVES US REAL ULTIMATE POWER. MONKS FLIP OUT AND KILL PEOPLE ALL THE TIME!"), and even the correct ones vary widely (i.e., Vipassana meditation is very different from other styles of meditation). I came across the following:

The second Zen approach used in the Rinzai school is that of tricking the mind out of conscious thought and into pure awareness. This is done by giving the student an unsolvable riddle which he must solve anyway, and by placing him in a horrendous training situation. Since he cannot flee from the pain of the situation, he must flee into a pure experience of the moment. There is nowhere else to go. Zen is tough. It is effective for many people, but it is really tough.

I think MIT was founded by a Zen Buddhist. It is effective, but ... well, as anyone who's tried to drink from a firehose can tell you, it is tough. MIT as a path to enlightenment ... hmm ...

I found an excellent post about Disability-related campaign ads at Disability Studies/Temple U. The Thug Voter ad is particularly interesting.

Yay [verbatim]: "You're going to call that variable x? But x doesn't mean anything. It's a bad variable name. I've been telling you that for the last twenty minutes. I'm going to squint at you kind of funny now."

Boo [paraphrase]: "We're going to put you on Monistat." Yes, put a cold thick ointment in my ear, which needs to be open (a) so I can hear and (b) so it can drain pus (when the fungus gets bad enough). Did I mention that it looked cold? "Oh, you mean you have a custom-formulated drug with an anti-fungal that insurance didn't cover? I forgot that. Yes, we can use that."

This will either turn out really well, or it will blow up in my face. And yet I'm going to do it anyway ... will I never learn?

Interesting: Mark Foley was the main sponsor of the ADA Notification Act. For those of you not already aware, it would've weakened the ADA by requiring 90 days of notice before pursuing legal action against an entity not complying with the ADA - as if 15 years wasn't enough time! As if the ADA has attracted ambulance chasers!

It remains unclear (to me, anyway) whether someone else will pick this bill up and sponsor it now that Foley is gone.

I just wrote a 60 word email. With 6 acronyms, not counting the "MIT" in our email addresses. (Ok, five different acronyms ... but 6 instances of an acronym). 10% acronymicity. And none of them can really be expanded in this context.

Thank goodness it's addressed to a professor here, or I'd be looking seriously odd. I wonder if you could do a study on the patterns of wear on the Shift and Caps-Lock keys here? Maybe even predict the likelihood that a given keyboard belongs to someone here based on the patterns of wear?