When the aliens come, it will be my responsibility to keep them from abducting or contacting my family.

I take this on, not as a way of protecting my family, but for the greater good. There's no way humanity, or the aliens, would benefit, and if I fail to keep the parties separate, much confusion could result.

While it's only to be expected that one member of our family (me) would know just about everything about just about everything, judging from our Thanksgiving meal together, everyone in my family is pretty much an expert about anything you care to name. Not only are we all brilliant, we're all quite noisy about it.

There's no way the aliens should be led to think that all humans are like this. Meeting us would skew their research, and not in any good direction.

When we're not busy shouting over each other in an effort to make our voice heard, we're sulking because no one listens to us. Again, not typical. I've met quite a number of families over the years, and every one of them would be a better candidate for alien study.

I'm sure that we'd all rush out to see the glimmering, silvery spacecraft and its inhabitants, but I'm equally certain that I'll need to do everything in my power to prevent it. Not all members of my family would be easily distracted by shiny objects, but I'm hoping. Perhaps they'd be swayed by another of my famous recitations about growing up with black and white television.

What I'll have to do, when the aliens come hunting, is to point them to a reasonable family. The good news is, just about any I could name would be better representatives of the planet Earth than mine would be.

I just hope those aliens have room on their ship for me, too.

The robots will be thrilled to have another entry from me to parse.

Earlier this month I was suffering from a case of lactose intolerance, but I'm happy to say that it may have been the 48 hour variety. Or, it may have been an unyet unknown one, in which case, if it kills me, I can have a disease named after me. Since I have to die of something, anyway, I could do worse than be the first person with something. It worked for Lou Gherig.

My lactose intolerance may have mutated into cream soda intolerance, and I haven't heard of anyone having that before.

It's more likely, though less romantic, to think that I wasn't intolerant of anything, which would make me proud. I'm not fond of intolerance, not a big fan of it. I think what may have been happening is that I was going too long between meals and was wolfing my dinners down, or maybe just swallowing too quickly and taking in one part air to one part liquid.

I panicked, of course, when my evenings were filled with burps and other gaseous developments and tummy aches, but I took the extreme measure of diagnosing myself and bought some of those lactaid aid pills. Since I often drink half a gallon of milk a day (sometimes more) and have no desire to stop that, I was happy when I could drink that with impunity. I think that may be a lot of milk for a grown adult to stomach, but you have no idea how good it tastes when it's going down. I just can't stop swallowing, once I get started.

Yes, I have a drinking problem, and this may be an unexplored symptom. I just love swallowing. Repetitively. Over and over.

Now I'm feeling better.

At my last job when I wasn't busy grumbling about how we were counting kisses to measure love, a metaphor I was very proud of, I responded to a lot of suggestions by saying "Just because you can, doesn't make it a good idea."

I was thinking of that the other day when, for the first time in years, I was at a gas station filling up my car, which took 5.94 gallons. When I was first driving, not only did we have the old pumps with the analog display like the odometer, but the gallons advanced much quicker than the dollars did.

Those old pumps, which couldn't display prices over one dollar a gallon, were accurate enough to have kept the American motorist on the road for the first fifty years of driving, I'm guessing, but when we advanced to the computer-controlled, digital pumps, we suddenly realized that we could needlessly measure the gasoline dispensed. As if that helps anyone.

I've long been a fan of slide rules, which got me through high school. I have no idea whatever happend to the large ones in my math classrooms that were nearly as long as the blackboard, but I'd like to think they ended up somewhere. As calculators and computers have replaced them, I can't help thinking back to how much of the world was engineered and built to "slide rule accuracy," a term whose loss I regret nearly as much as "jungle."

Slide rule accuracy, as I understood it, meant three digits. That's not very many, but somehow it worked and, just as importantly, was always a number I could understand. We can now easily calculate things out to ten or one hundred digits and, having that ability, do so. The thing is, I'm not convinced that it honestly adds anything of value.

Do I really need to know, to five digits, the percent of my expenditures that go to food? I have to admit that 27.847% gets rounded off by me to 25%, or one quarter of my expenses. That's a figure I can understand, one that makes sense to me, and one that gives me a ballpark figure I can live with.

I noticed this obsession with needless accuracy when I got my first digital watch. Instead of telling me the time, I read 11:47, and then had to visualize that before I knew that it was quarter to twelve. Few things are more annoying than asking someone with a digital for the time: they'll read off the digits instead of saying "it's almost noon," or some such answer that actually gives you what you need to know.

I can no track my gasoline usage to one-thousandth of a gallon. Last time I checked, that was 3.78541ccs, or, as I like to call it, three and a quarter. I'm guessing that's about a thimble full, and is unneccassirly complex. It does permit me, however, to calculate my mileage to thousandths as well, or five and a half feet.

I think that's silly.

The elections are over, which means I can expect my telephone calls to once again be from, you know, people. Not that Clint Eastwood isn't a person, mind you, it's just that as soon as I hear a recorded voice I hang up, so I have no idea who I was hanging up on.

I did pretty good this year, getting many of the propositions right. I missed the one about the sex offenders, and I'm more than a bit sickened that so many of my fellow citizens want to tag anyone, no matter how loathsome, with a GPS monitoring anklet. Who knew?

I spread my votes around, like I think you're supposed to, between all the parties (except Republican and that one that sounds like Nazis), but I think only the Democrats won anything. I guess that now that the elections are over they'll forget all that partisan rancor and sit around the campfire singing cumbaya together. I did find it interesting that so many of the Democrats campaigned using the "my opponent voted along party lines 97% of the time" and never mentioned that they, too, voted along party lines 97% of the time. I guess if it's your party the argument doesn't hold, or maybe then it's a virtue, not a flaw.

I hardly got any mail today.

And I'm willing to predict that Rumsfeld's "resignation" will keep the Democratic "thumping" of the Republicans from dominating tomorrow's front pages.

A couple facts:

If everyone in the US who is eligible to vote did vote, the House of Representatives would stay just about the same (assuming that everyone voted for their registered party) because that's how the districts are drawn. **cough cough**gerrymandering**cough cough**

About forty percent of the eligible voters are expected to vote Tuesday.

I know a lot of people yell about the way the districts have been drawn. I'd be upset, too, if this was a new thing or a Carl Rove invention, but I learned the word when I was about thirteen, which was during Johnson's administration. I have a hunch it predates even those old and dusty days.

Face it: the party in power will always redraw the districts in a way more beneficial to its interests. It's supposed to, and is one of the reasons both parties struggle so hard to win. What we can do is vote. Given the predicted turnout, whichever side has more people show up to vote will win, and there's quite a lot of built-in slack.