If only…

Boy, do I hate lifting weights. I don’t have this attitude towards the other exercise I do — I like taking a long walk every day, no matter what the weather, and I even like doing some easy yoga and calisthenics in the morning. But even though I know I need to do it, I have never liked lifting weights.

Then I got bronchitis last winter and really was too sick to lift weights, and somehow I just never started up again. This past Thursday I finally dusted of the weight bench and the barbell and the dumbbells and spent forty minutes lifting. I was surprised at how good it felt. My body does not like sitting at meetings, and sitting at bedsides, and sitting at more meetings, and sitting in front of a computer; my body likes it best when I’m doing moderately hard physical labor. I lifted weights again tonight, and once again I feel great — more cheerful, more alert, happier.

If I could only keep it up, keep lifting weights three times a week like you’re supposed to do, I’d probably feel that good all the time. If only…

Autumn watch

It has been peculiarly warm this fall, even warmer than you’d expect in this era of global climate change. The days are short and sunset comes at 4:30, but the air feels like late spring, not early November. Because it’s so warm, the wintering birds haven’t bothered to come to the ocean yet — they’ll stay inland as long as there’s no ice on the water.

There may not be many wintering birds on the harbor, but there have been a number of freighters coming into the Port of New Bedford. In the middle of the day, we heard a huge deep horn sound once down on the waterfront, and when we walked down to the waterfront in the late afternoon, we saw Brazilian Reefer (IMO 8300377), a big refrigerated cargo ship, berthed at the end of the State Pier. I looked her up online, and discovered that she measures nearly 475 feet in length overall — she took up the entire end of the pier, and even stuck out a little bit at each end. We stood for a while and watched as they unloaded the ship. Being a bird nerd I guess I’d rather look at wintering birds, but it was pretty good watching two of the four ten-ton derricks on a 475 foot ship unload fruit onto the pier where waiting forklifts scooped them up and put them into waiting semi trucks.

See ya in 2012

Now that Obama and Biden won the presidential election,C’thulhu and Shoggoth have closed down their campaign headquarters and returned to R’lyeh to sleep, dreaming, until it’s time to start another campaign. Campaign workers tried to convince them to eat Sarah Palin before they left, but they said they preferred to let her continue to gibber in Alaska because it reminded them of themselves (though not as much as Ted Stevens reminds them of themselves).

Good news, bad news

Good news: Barack Obama won. Now we won’t have to deal with press coverage of Sarah Palin’s dead mooses. Instead, Sasha and Malia will be living in the White House, and their dad has promised them a new puppy. How cool is that?

Bad news: California banned gay marriage. Stupid move. This may lead San Francisco and Hollywood to secede from the rest of the state. Or maybe the best and brightest from San Francisco and Hollywood will move to Massachusetts where gay marriage is legal.

Voting in New Bedford

My polling place is the old New Bedford Hotel, now public housing. At 11:30, I walked past the people waiting to go into the Mo Life Food Pantry in the basement of the building, up the steps of the main entrance, through the door, and down the hall to the usual polling place. No lines. There was one person ahead of me at the table where the poll workers check you in.

“Address?” said the poll worker. The man in front of me gave his address. “Name?” she said. He gave his name. “You’re not on the list,” she said. “I’ve always voted here,” he said. “Have you moved recently?” she asked. “Yes, I moved last March,” he replied. The poll worker passed him on to another poll worker, who determined that the man had moved to another precinct, and thus now voted at another polling place. I waited five minutes while they straightened him out, but I don’t think that counts as waiting in line.

I got my ballot and went into the voting booth. In the next booth over, I could hear a conversation between a younger man and an older man. “That says Obama,” said the younger man. The older man grunted. “Do you like Obama?” said the younger man. The older man said something like, Who are the others? The younger man read through the list of presidential candidates. “Obama,” grunted the older man. “OK, mark it here. U.S. Senator is next,” said the younger man, “so do you like Kerry?” Again, the older man wanted the whole list of names read off, but this time the older man didn’t want to vote for any of them. “Congressman,” said the younger man, “Barney Frank.” “I like Barney Frank,” said the older man. “Then mark it right here,” said the younger man. By this time, I was done voting, so I left the voting booth, being very careful to not look at who was in the booth next to me.

A poll worker checked me out, and I fed my paper ballot into the scanner. The scanner has a digital display showing how many ballots have been cast, and after my ballot went in it read 402. I usually vote in the late morning, and usually there have only been a hundred or so votes cast by that time.

Revolution

Twenty months ago, when the campaign really started heating up, I didn’t think I’d be able to put up with the insanity and inanity of the typical U.S. presidential campaign for all those months. Twenty months of attack ads — twenty months of avoiding the issues — twenty months of insanity and inanity.

But I was wrong. This has been a fascinating presidential campaign. The primary elections were full of unexpected plots twists:– Mitt Romney going down so quickly, John McCain campaigning so well and wrapping it up so early, the epic battle bewteen Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. In the summer, between the effective end of the primaries and their official nominations, the two presumptive candidates began sparring with each other, and we kept waiting for the attack ads — who would be the first to be vicious?

Finally, I have been absolutely riveted by the last two months or so of this presidential campaign:– McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin as running mate was an utter surprise; I was sure Obama’s race would play a bigger role but it really didn’t; and the financial meltdown changed absolutely everything. As Justin Webb of the BBC put it, “In spite of all the loose talk of the decline of American influence, this is, once again, the greatest political show on earth.”

And Webb captured the real importance of this campaign in a little anecdote. He was in Denver, at the Democratic national convention, when he saw a motorcade begin to form…

Suddenly, in front of me there is activity. Men in grey suits are talking into their sleeves. Huge, sleek cars are being revved. Motorbikes are getting into formation.

It is not [Obama], it is his family.

As the SUVs pass — including several with the doors and back windows open, men with large automatic weapons looking out with keen hard glares — I catch just a glimpse of the children, of 10-year-old Malia and seven-year-old Sasha peering out. I think their mother was sitting in the middle.

This is the true revolution.

There have been, after all, prominent black politicians for decades now, men and women afforded the full protection and respect that the nation can muster.

But seeing little black children gathered up into the arms of the secret service, surrounded by people who would die rather than let them die, is to see something that must truly make the racists of Americas past revolve in their graves.

I do not think Barack Obama will win or lose because of his race, but if he does win, the real moment you will know that America has changed is not when he takes the oath, but when we see pictures of tiny people padding along the White House corridors — a black First Family — representing America and American-ness. [“The Greatest Political Show on Earth”.]

Even the real possibility of a black First Family is a revolution. What a presidential campaign this has been — and it’s not done being boring yet. I’ll doubtless be blogging frequently tomorrow — hope you drop by and leave a comment about your election day experiences.

The ineffectiveness of racism as a political strategy

So at Folk Choir rehearsal tonight, I heard about an incident that happened here in southeastern Massachusetts, which happened roughly like this:– white woman with two black children in tow walks into a store, a couple of young white men ask her if she’s going to vote for Obama, she says yes, they say they hope Obama doesn’t get into the White House because then it would be the “black house,” the N-word was thrown around, and that was the end of that. Well, that was the end of that except for going home and taking a long hot shower to wash the slime off, and then calling some friends to tell them about it, one of whom was a member of our choir.

Oh yes indeedy, there are people like that here in liberal, blue-state Massachusetts. But you know what? The effectiveness of racism as a political strategy is finally waning. Obama is going to win this state and all twelve of its electoral college votes no matter what those two young white men said. And I think most of us would agree that throwing the N-word at a couple of little kids in order to support your own political candidate is only going to make your candidate look bad. So we have made progress, since back when I was a kid, thirty or forty years ago (all right, forty years ago), veiled racial slurs were still an effective political weapon. No matter who wins tomorrow (and at the moment the polls are leaning towards giving Obama the electoral college vote), this is the year we discovered that racism, no matter how veiled, just doesn’t work very well as a political strategy any more.

On the other hand, it looks like calling someone a Muslim has become a pretty effective political weapon. No wonder I hate politics.