Unlike Ted Kennedy or Marcia Pappas, if I recommend any candidate it won't make the news. That's fine with me: I don't want to deal with reporters.

Still, this has to be one of the better campaigns. We've had freepers going batty over Fred Thompson, who acted as if he was as excited about becoming president as a sane person, the reappearance of Bill Clinton all over my TV, and a surprising appearance by the reclusive Carolyn Kennedy. Instead of the more usual "gain momentum in the first couple states and waltz to the convention," we've had real races going on in both of the major parties.

Neither of which I belong to, but that's another matter.

I have nothing to back this up, no facts or research or data or anything, but I get the impression from most partisans I talk with that they see the American public, politically, as falling into a dumbbell curve. Their side is large, and the other side is equally substantial and is, for all reasonable people, worthy of only disdain. These partisans look at the political landscape as a battlefield, something I don't agree with.

I've met a grand total of two politicians in my life, but that's not including Dwight Eisenhower who I saw riding in a big car at a Rose Parade. Still, from what I've seen on TV, I have to say that they're all pretty likable. I guess they have to be,  but more than that, I don't see any of them as being the personification of evil. I seriously doubt that any of them wake up thinking of ways to further injure the world or move a step or two closer to world domination. They often have plans and ideas that I disagree with, but I don't think those stem from malice.

Similar to religious beliefs, I can like people with whom I politically disagree. I don't have much use for our current president, but I bet if I spent some time with him that I'd enjoy it. We just wouldn't talk politics.

I'm a bit concerned about what I hear from political scientists and pundits, however. If they're right, many women, especially older women, are voting with their tits this year and backing Hillary. I'm not a woman, and I don't claim to understand them, but I have to shake my head when I hear how so many of them are voting for her because "She's a woman, and we should have a woman president."  That sort of thinking, that any woman will do, runs against my grain.

It's true that I've been enamored with Obama since last August or so. It has nothing to do with his policies, about which I'm mostly ignorant, I just think he's what I want in a president. I can listen to him without wincing and even get inspired on occasion, and I'm one of those who thinks that nothing political ever lasts very long. It seems to me that half the work of any administration is undoing the work of the last one, especially if the other side held the office.

I guess voting for a woman because you're one makes sense, but only if you think the two genders are at war, maybe the same war you fight against the opposing party.

In spite of my many accomplishments and adventures, it's not true that I've done everything. Not only have I failed to attempt most of the current crop of extreme activities, but I've also missed many far more normal rights of human passage.

For example, I've never really been on a diet.

Part of the reason for that, of course, is that I'm a guy, and we're eternally attractive and don't have to worry about our looks at all, much less losing them. I spend as little time looking at myself in a mirror as I do working on New Year's resolutions, and I've never owned a bathroom scale in my life.

One thing I may have in common with dieters, however, is sudden cravings and obsessions with food. The times when I've been hungry I find myself thinking about food, although in my everyday life I think about food going in only slightly more often than I do about it coming out, which is to say, rarely at best.

The past couple of nights, though, I've found myself thinking about particular foods. I'm not sure why, I'm not particularly hungry, but it intrigues me nonetheless. Maybe it's some primal, physical response, a way of my body alerting me to needing something. That would be pretty cool, if my body did that.

That would require my body to be able to take inventory, something I'm not sure it's capable of. It would also require my body to have some manner of cross-reference, and that's a step that would floor me. Why my body needs a particular mineral or something isn't much of a mystery, but why it thinks that craving can best be fixed by a pastrami sandwich is.

But that was the other day. Right now I'm thinking about, of all things, cheddar cheese. I think I used to like cheddar cheese, but that was before I gave much thought at all to any food, before I was thirty. I always thought of cheddar cheese as something routinely layered on hamburgers, shredded over a taco, or melted between two slices of bread in a pan, but pretty much took it for granted.

Then, I got married and my wife made some comment about orange cheese, and I quickly wised up. We ate lots of cheese when I was married, fine Italian ones, and I soon learned to appreciate just how tasty and good a truly fine cheese could be.

Which is why it's so surprising to me, now, to want a slice of cheddar.

Maybe it's a comfort food thing, or a retreat, or maybe my body knows something I do not.

The FDA, I hear, has decided that cloned beef, pork, and goat is fit for human consumption and can be sold without any special labels. This has gotten some people quite upset, and I'm not quite sure why. Maybe there's chemicals involved, or something like that.

Now, I admit there's something of an "eww" factor, but there has to be more to it than that. We've been cloning plants for years, eons even, and I've never heard so much of a peep about that. My grandmother, a saintly woman if ever I knew one, would regularly go on walks around the neighborhood, collecting "slips" from plants she wanted to grown. Once she got them back here, in a few months we'd have a genetically identical plant growing in our own yard.

Okay, maybe the neighbors could complain about that, but they never did. They never caught her, either, which may have something to do with it.

As to these cloned animals, I should admit that I'm no rancher. Nor am I a biologist or dietitian. I have, however, seen my fair share of ads, movies, and TV shows where they show those fast-talking auctioneers, the kind they have at cattle and sheep auctions. I once spent an afternoon in a sheep tent at a county fair where I learned that the 4-H kids use Woolite to wash their sheep, but I'm not sure that's relevant here.

These cloned cattle, for instance, go for around five to ten thousand a pop, which I don't think is cheap. There's no reason to believe, now, anyway, that anyone is going to be buying any cloned steer and slaughtering it, not for that initial cost. I have no idea what a calf usually goes for, but I doubt it's this kind of serious money.

What I'm suspecting is that the animals chosen for cloning are especially good at producing milk, impregnating, or something like that. Or, they could have especially supple hides. What I'm guessing the market for these cloned animals is, is to have them in the herd. I expect they cost about as much to raise as a normally produced calf, so there's no reason for any rancher to buy one at, say, ten times the cost of a normal calf just to slaughter it.

Even if they were, I'm not sure I should care. Last I knew, cloning wasn't some sort of Frankenstein process. It's more of an in vitro fertilization type thing, with DNA pushed into some cell that's later implanted in some womb.

The one thing it isn't is Soylent Green, but a lot of people are acting as if it were.

Another of those presidential primaries is scheduled for tomorrow, but I doubt that will prevent anyone from still talking about the last one.

You see, everybody thought one guy would win, but instead of that, his opponent did.

In the week that followed, media people began assuring "never again" would they make such a mistake and they spent no small amount of time wondering aloud how such a thing could have happened. The best part of this, for me, was that they mostly discussed it among themselves. This makes sense because it was their loss of credibility that was most evident and important to them.

Politics may all be local, but reality is downright personal.

A number of possible reasons for the disparity between the polls and the actual results were offered, but by now most everyone has settled on it being women. I'm fairly confident that we'll never know for sure, if only because we can't check how people voted against how they said they would or did. That's the thing about secret balloting.

No one is talking much any more about the Bradley or Dinkins effect, where people say they'll vote for an African-American but don't, and I don't know if that has anything to do with it or not. Iowa, where Obama won, sheds no light on that, either, since it was a public caucus and not a secret vote.

Twice in the week of continuing coverage I heard interviews with actual pollsters, who make a damn decent living coming up with numbers for the newscasters and pundits to talk about. The guy I like best, the one who runs the Pew polls, came up with I thought was the best answer, though that may be mostly because I like him. According to him, his initial thought was that more of Hillary's supporters simply refused to answer or take part in the polls.

To get the thousand or so answers from which to develop a statistically relevant sample, the pollsters have to ask lots of people. The overwhelming number of people politely (or not) refuse, and it's entirely possible that a large chunk of women, whom we’ll say voted for Hillary, were put off by the people conducting the polls.

It may have been something as simple as them not caring to discuss their intimate, political ideas with some kid covered with tattoos.

The other thing, not to be overlooked, is that the polls all stopped gathering information a few days before the vote. A lot can happen in a few days, so I’m not willing to think it’s all and only a large number of women flocking to a sister in need. I don’t know anything about women, but I doubt they’re likely to consider gender a trump card.

Most of them already realize they rule the world.

Our weekend of storms is long over, and none did any damage that I could see around here except the third one, S2008-003, or as I call it, Craig.

I don't consider knocking leaves or branches from trees to be damage, not even if they hit something, and I'm sure more dramatic effects were seen elsewhere, but around here only two things suffered.

One is a gate that I built that shouldn't have lasted very long, anyway. It's as wide as a driveway and constructed of 2X4s. To say that it has little longitudinal strength would be apt. It features a wheel to help it move, but it rocks and sways as much as it pivots when I open or close it.

Now it rocks and sways even more. It does this because the Simpson strong tie that was holding one of the vertical pieces to the top board stopped tying the two pieces of lumber together strongly. Or, to be precise, at all.

I'm blaming it on storm damage, no doubt from a getting whacked by a branch.

That's an annoyance, especially when I need to open the gate to move the trash cans to and from the street, but since that's about the only time I use the damn thing, I can postpone doing anything about it for quite awhile. At least until after I find my screw gun. No, I haven't found it yet. Yes, I'm still sure I will. No, I haven't checked those last couple places because then I'd know for sure if it was there or not.

Consider it Schrödinger's Screw Gun.

The other calamity was far more ... calamitous. As has happened once or twice before, I lost my Internet connection. I also lost the phone line that comes with my ADSL, but that's of lesser importance. The good thing about having wired it all myself is that I'm usually pretty sure where the problem lies: with something I did myself.

I was saved a lot of time-consuming testing when the wire I wasn't stripping and fiddling with broke. It's always good to find a solid problem, and a dangling wire fits that description to a T. The fact that neither wire is coppery concerns me a bit, but I can put off pulling a new line for a little while longer. I have a plan to do so without crawling under the house, which I'm loathe to do, but there's no need to rush into it.

Most everything else I've built held together, including the roof. That's important (to me). Poor Timmy got soaked again, but I have a plan to prevent that, too.

In the meantime, I survived.

new title: Unheeded Advice

As might be expected, I've receive my fair share of advice over the years, most of which I've acted on in the time-tested way of passing along to someone else.

It should come as no surprise that I'm upset about hurricanes. Not because we don't have them here on the west (or left) coast so I don't get to witness their ferocity and majesty up close, but because they are so special that they get names.

Naming things is very important in some parts of the world. I've heard that God, himself, gave Adam the task of assigning names to all the animals, even the ones he'd be unlikely to ever see in Eden, and from birth on, kids are taught the names of everything they run across. Or, over. Or, around.

Later in life we use names to show off how important and knowledgeable we are. We're not taking seriously if we can't tell someone the name of some thing, and it is in this way that we annoint people as experts.

When, in fact, they're merely people who've bothered to memorize mostly arbitrary words, but that's not the point.

According to the weather experts and an unending series of annoying pop-ups from my web browser that alert me to severe weather conditions, a series of “major” storms were set to strike California this weekend. Three, I believe, was the number, but none of these storms have names.

I’ve mentioned before how much more serious and smart we are than we were when I was growing up, all innocent and uninformed. Then, it used to rain, which meant I’d need to put on my yellow slicker before walking to school. Now, of course, no one walks to school because the streets are fairly bristeling with child molestors and gang members, none of whom existed when I was young. None, that is, except that weird, creepy guy down the street that we all knew about and avoided, but who had great candy for Halloween and, perhaps, other occasions.

Now, it no longer rains. Instead, we have rain showers, storms, or, best of all, rain events. These all sound much more professional and adult, and it’s no surprise that people use the terms to sound even more important than they really are. There’s nothing like adding useless verbage to inflate one’s ego.

The storms, such as they were, arrived here around eleven yesterday morning, with a smattering of drops that didn’t even get my dog wet. By night, however, the wind began gusting and much more water fell from the sky. I also momentarily lost power about four times last night before deciding that I didn’t want to subject my poor, ailing computer(s) to any more drastic experiences. It wasn’t doing them any good, and it was making me frustrated and scared.

I’m not sure if the power was going out from something inside my home, from lightning strikes on the power system, or from some other cause. I didn’t hear any thunder, but I wouldn’t expect a storm that doesn’t deserve a name to be dramatic enough to have any.

Right before I wanted to add an entry, I lost power again and considered that a sign. The wind may have blown with even greater velocity during the night, and even greater amounts of water may have fallen from the sky, but in my little corner of the world very little worth writing about happened.

If the next two storms are anything like the first, I have nothing to fear, not like the people in the rest of the state who will wish they had a name to give this atmospheric phenomenon so that they could talk about it later.

One way, the best way, for me to tell that things are getting political is the sudden and continuing appearance of Indians all over my TV.

I have no idea if it happens elsewhere, in the rest of the states, but here in California it seems we can't hold an election that doesn't include at least one proposition about Indian gaming something-or-other. Every time an election rolls around, and at no other time, sad or happy Indians and their sad or happy non-Indian counterparts fill all available commercial time with ads predicting gloom and doom if some proposition either fails or passes.

By my unofficial and completely made-up count, we've had two dozen such propositions this century alone. In every one of them, the rights and rewards of Indians to build or keep casinos is it stake, along with the future of California, the nation, and the world.

These ads, which I routinely ignore, are very emotional pieces, as you can imagine, which explains the sadness or glee I remarked on earlier. The strange thing is, as critical and far-reaching the passage or defeat of such propositions is set forth, I have no idea how any of them were ultimately decided.

Nor have I seen any cataclysmic results. It's almost as if the dire predictions were inflated, but I can hardly believe that.

I have three or four Indian casinos that I can easily visit, and there's probably more than that I don't know about. I've been to a grand total of one, but only witnessed a mildly important prize fight there as part of research for a book I'd written and never gambled.

!@(boxing1.jpg:L120 popimg: "2ndPlace")

The fight achieved its mildly famous categorization, by the way, as serving as an example of how *not* to box. The one guy, Campbell, who was winning, dropped his hands to his waist to taunt his opponent in a demonstration of smugness that earned him a quick left that knocked his lights out. If I remember, we all went "Woo."

Anyway, some new proposition that will decide the fate of California Indians and the state as a whole must be on the new ballot. I have no idea how I'll vote on it, or how I've voted on any of the past ones, since my only criteria is which side has the commercials that annoy or pander to me the less.

I gotta say, tho, that things are looking up for my man Barack!

Any day that starts with more tiger news is, in my opinion, a good one. I can't explain why I'm so fascinated with the story, not when reasonable people see nothing to it, but I am.

Part of my interest is that I'll never know what happened. If those involved haven't spoken yet, they probably never will and the total absence of any hard facts means the truth will rest the side with the attorney who can do the best job of arguing.

This, by the way, is what is meant by "civilization," the very thing that is prized by so many people. These laws, and these lawyers, have given us a government that we can truly be proud of.

Anyway, the tiger's not coming back, and I'm sad about that.

The entire notion of making resolutions for the new year goes hand-in-hand with the idea of bettering yourself, something I don't need to do. I'm already pretty damn good and am mostly waiting for the rest of the world to wise up and catch up.

Still, there's a few things I'd like to do in the coming year, and a couple things I anticipate happening whether or not I want them to.

I'd like some resolution on selfishness and the environment. Many of the things that are good for me, personally, are worse for the world at large. I need to remember that whenever I'm confronted with one of those "if it saves just one person" arguments, which invariably result in more suffering for everyone involved. Sure, that hypothetical person may live, but she will do so in a world that's somehow reduced by being marginally more annoying or inconvenient.

I'm looking forward to the Olympics as I always do, but not all the people I expect to complain about it being in China. The right will trot out all sorts of things about communist countries and the environmentalists will complain about the air in Beijing. Somehow the games will go on, even the useless events with horses, the US will win an embarrassing number of medals, and idiots will consider that as evidence that we won the Olympics.

We'll have an election, too, with more rancor on each side than is healthy. People on both sides will never consider anyone or anything on the opposing side to have any merit and will continue to demonize and hate the opposition. This will let them feel better about themselves, though, so I guess it's rewarding, if sad.

I fully expect energy costs to rise and the dollar to fall, and I'm thinking the stock market will be pretty cold for the first half of the year. The war and current administration will continue to upset me, and global corporations will still receive my ire. It will be another bumper year for farmers, though, at least financially.

I won't make any noticeable progress on learning Morse code, but I won't think about it, either. I may or may not lose weight, but since I haven't weighed myself since sometime in 2005 I doubt I'll notice any change. I'd like to lose weight and shape up, sure, but I'm convinced it will take more than that, so progress is unlikely.

I know I ate at El Pollo Loco once last year, but it really wasn't my choice. I also bought far more things from publicly traded companies than I should have, so I'd like to reduce that. It's hard, though.

I need to become a better person, but I don't feel much like changing. I want results, but mostly effortless ones, so in that sense this year looks to be like all the others I've experienced.

I want to be loved and respected and desired just like everybody else, but I'm not those are resolutions. I need to change how I think and react, but I don't predict I will.