UNDERDOG of PERFECTION

I’ve spent a lot of time tonight on the New York Times website, much of it reading about the long strange trip of Sarah Palin as well as the paper’s endorsement of Barack Obama.

The latter article also led me to an interesting interactive feature on the Times’ various presidential endorsements from 1860 to the present day. Aside from picking the winner in 22 of the 37 elections (59.5%) over the past 148 years, the Times has also provided some photographic evidence for the (not terribly revelatory) theory SLP and I have, that the presidency ages a person like few other jobs (outside of, perhaps, coal mining) could. Witness below the shocking deteriorations that a mere 4 years in the Oval Office can produce.

First up we have Honest Abe. Now we all know that his first term was probably about as rough as any in the history of the country. And it shows.

I’m not an historian, so I must confess I don’t know much about what was going on in the mid-1880s. Whatever it was, I get the impression Grover could have done with a little less of it.

In 1912, voters had just one question: Is this Mr. Wilson, who fancies himself a President-to-be, in fact, a bogey-man? By 1916, they had their answer.

By the time FDR took office, the suckitude of the job had once again reached levels not seen in 70-odd years. The only things we have to fear are fear itself and premature aging due to the rigors of the highest political office in the land. Having to pretend you aren’t paralyzed isn’t exactly all it’s cracked up to be, either.

Now, in 1980 Jimmy Carter at least does not show the ravaging physical deterioration typical of an incumbent. I suspect it may be due to the cannabis everyone in the country was smoking so heavily at the time (or so I’ve been led to believe). So he still has that youthful glow, but it’s clear nonetheless that something has harshed his mellow.

We all remember well enough what was keeping the smile on Bill’s face by 1996. But everything else in his life brought on the gray hair.

If your mind wasn’t already made up, maybe your childhood TV friends can convince you…

Tonight I made some updates to my portfolio page, and it got me thinking back to all of the projects I’ve worked on over the years, going back to my first professional web design gig right out of college in 1996.

Wowee-zowee. I really can’t believe this is still up. It was one of the last websites I designed at that first job out of college. The site went up in the fall of 1998, just before I left California to move back to Minnesota (the first time). It’s kind of shocking to see that the site doesn’t seem to have changed one bit… even the poor-quality digital photos I took with a then-state-of-the-art Apple QuickTake 100, the first digital camera I had ever seen, at the opening day of the Los Angeles County Fair in 1998 are still there (and promoted on the home page as if they’re hot news).

I remember that day as if it were yesterday. First off, let’s get some perspective. There are just shy of 10 million people living in Los Angeles county. That’s almost twice as many people as in the entire state of Minnesota. I wouldn’t necessarily say that that means the LA County Fair is twice the size of the Minnesota State Fair, because the Minnesota State Fair is disproportionately huge. But the LA County Fair is friggin’ huge in its own right, especially for a county fair. I recall standing in line for 2 hours in sweltering late summer heat just to get through the ticket booth, and I was wearing long pants because I had come straight from work and hadn’t really anticipated this turning into an all-day affair. Once inside, I squeezed my way through the teeming throngs to the appropriate exhibition hall, only to discover that it, too, was friggin’ huge, and I had no idea which booth CDW was in. Eventually I did find the booth, but Lenny (wonderful, wonderful Lenny) was nowhere to be seen. So I took my pictures and left.

OK, I guess that’s kind of a lame story. But that’s what I was up to ten years ago.

But wait… that’s not the only decade-old site I built that’s still essentially intact. There are many, many, many, many, many, many, many more.

Quite a legacy I left behind in California, no?

Wow, the things you discover on the Internet. It all started out so innocently. I was just trying to locate a photo I saw once before. It was of a one-lane road, in Germany I think, with a security arm. There were no barricades on the sides of the road though, not even a curb, and you could see in the photo a well-worn path in the grass median next to the arm where cars had simply driven around it. A great metaphorical image.

Unfortunately, I can’t remember where I saw it. It was a couple of years ago. So I resorted to just trying whatever keywords I could think of in Google and hoping for the best. No luck. I was thinking it might have been on a Demotivators poster, so I added that word to my search. I still didn’t find it, but I did find a page devoted to testimonials from “recovering Mormons” regarding their former church’s practice of requiring its members to wear special undergarments at all times (even in the intimate company of their spouses). This is the kind of seemingly ludicrous (to an outsider) practice that you occasionally hear about regarding “other” religions and think they must be jokes concocted by detractors. And yet, it turns out to be true.

Now, I can certainly understand the church’s (less than noble, in my opinion) motivations for imposing this kind of restriction on its members. I just can’t believe anyone would actually go along with it.

I just got an email from the Barack Obama campaign regarding an appalling new mailer just sent out by the RNC. This is really disgusting. Please do what you can to help Barack Obama get elected and bring some respectability back to the Oval Office.