The Think Tank

Hello again,

I also wanted to let you all know that I have been doing a lot of work on thinktankgallery.com as well. It now has two sides: thinktankgallery.com, which is where we are attempting to sell our photos (and framing and matting as well); and friends.thinktankgallery.com, which is the photo sharing site for friends and family.

The only real difference between them is that the commercial site is limited to only those shots that I think are worth selling, and the friends site is unfiltered.

Everything on both sites is available in prints or greeting cards, and matting and framing is available as well.  So…  if you know anyone who would like to buy some photos, we now have a way to do that!  And if you just wanna keep up on what we are doing, check out the friends site!

Hello everyone!  If you have been checking this site recently you know that I have been terribly negligent in my posting duties.  Well!  In the immortal words of Woody Guthrie, “The times they are a changin’!”

As I’m sure you’ve noticed, I’ve made a few changes: cheifly I have made this an actual blog site.  This will make it a lot easier to update on my end, which will hopefully mean that I will do it more often, and it also allows you to post your own comments!  Should be fun.

I haven’t transferred my older posts yet nor have I moved any of the content from the old “Adventures” area.   I will hopefully be able to do both of those things in the future.  For now though I hope you enjoy the new site, keep checking back as I will be soon be adding additional content.

Oh… and  I will also be updating www.thinktankbrewery.com in the near future as well.  So be sure to check there in the coming weeks too!

It feels to many of us as if the presidential race has been going on since 2004, and in many ways I suppose that it has. But it officially kicks off tomorrow (January 3rd) in Iowa. I’m sort of a political nerd so I have been following the goings-on pretty closely since the ’06 Mid-Terms, but for those of you who haven’t, there has been some interesting developments leading up to tomorrow’s Midwest caucus.

First off, there’s a great deal of confusion regarding exactly what the differences are between a Primary and a Caucus. I myself was confused, so I’ll start there. I do think it is important to point out that each state political party sets the rules for their own system for nominating delegates, so the procedures and requirements not only vary from state to state, but from party to party within the same state as well.

For instance, in Iowa the Republican Caucus is non-binding, meaning that the caucus-goers will select the candidate they want their delegates to vote for at the Republican Convention in the summer, but those delegates are in no way required to cast their votes for that candidate. The Republicans also operate their Caucus on a winner-take-all basis, so the one who finishes first gets all the delegate’s votes and the runner-ups get none.

Contrast that to the Democrats, who operate their Caucus in a different fashion: the Caucus decisions are binding on the Dem’s side, and the “winner” gets the largest portion of the delegates’ votes, while the rest are divided between the other “viable” candidates. “Viable” candidates are those who finish with more then 15 percent of the caucus-goers’ votes.

Lets start out with the basic differences between Caucuses and Primaries.

♦ In a Primary system, voters fill out secret ballots and deposit them at designated voting booths just as we do in a general election. The polling centers are open all day and the time required to cast your vote is very short. Here in Oregon, we have a primary system, and since we are the only state in the Union with Vote-By-Mail, we don’t even have to go a polling station. Generally speaking, voters are only allowed to vote for candidates running in their declared political party, meaning registered Democrats can only vote for Democratic candidates, and registered Republican’s can only vote for Republican candidates. Registered Independents and those without declared allegiances are not able to vote in Oregon’s presidential primary, and I think that holds true for the other states as well, though I do not know that for certain.

♦ Caucus systems vary somewhat from state to state, but share many of the same basics. Voters are required to meet at specified locations throughout the state at specific times of day and participate in a town-hall style debate. Everyone votes – or in some cases stand in groups – and is divided into camps representing their favorite candidates. The people who are unsure who they are going to support are gathered together and those unallied folks become the target of everyone’s attention, as the other camps engage the undecided voters in vigorous debates to convince them to caucus for their chosen candidate. This process can take many hours and restricts the franchise to those who are capable of showing up at the stated time of day and specific location- if you have to work, or you can’t get a babysitter, the road is washed out, your car has a flat or you are agoraphobic, you get screwed. It does have the benefit however of adding a very personal touch to the campaigning process: instead of getting your information from television commercials which have been carefully crafted by anonymous PR firms, “Caucusers” are influenced by arguments made by their neighbors and friends. After the undecideds have been swayed, another vote is taken – or a headcount, if everyone is standing in groups – and a winner is declared.

I mentioned candidate “viability” before. The idea of “viability” can lead to interesting developments: let’s say that when the initial tally is taken to divide the camps Clinton has 23 percent, Obama 22 and Edwards 22 as well and therefore are all “valid”. That leaves the remaining 37% divided between Biden, Dodd, Richardson, Kucinich and all the Undecideds. But what would happen if the Dodd and Biden camps decided to lend their support to Kucinich? Suddenly he could be “valid” without any help from the undecided voters at all! In the at scenario, if he can manage to snag some of the unaligned voters, he could not only be a “valid” candidate, he could be the winner. It’s pretty weird stuff.

13 states use the Caucus system for assigning their delegates to the Party Nominating Conventions, as well as the District of Columbia and two US Protectorates, Guam & Puerto Rico.

Iowa is of particular import because it votes first, even though it is generally accepted that Iowa on the whole is not necessarily representative of the nation on the whole, and to make matters even worse only 6 percent of Iowans bother to caucus at all. Many people claim that this makes the results of Iowa caucus meaningless on a national candidate level, but in reality Iowa plays a pretty important role, even if it is only a psychological one: Candidates that win or place well in Iowa get a big bump in press coverage, especially if the winner is someone who has been considered an underdog to that point. With the surge in media coverage comes new donors and an image as a “winner” which can in turn translate into momentum which can carry over into some of the bigger states that vote in the next couple of weeks.

Iowans have a strong track record of selecting the underdog candidate, which has often times had the effect of starting the avalanche that leads to an eventual Nomination. One of their most famous unexpected picks was former Georgia Governor and peanut farmer Jimmy Carter, who of course went on to be President. Another is John Kerry, who was almost unheard of before the Iowa Caucus, but went on to become the Democratic Nominee in 2004 and very nearly became President.
More often then not, however, the Iowa winner tends to fall short in the general election, including George H.W. Bush (in his reelection bid) and John McCain. However, runner-ups tend to have a much better chance of arriving at the White House; Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan & George W. Bush all failed to win Iowa but did finish in the top three before continuing on to their Party’s Nomination and the Presidency.

This year the whole nomination process has been moved up. Wanting to have their states play a bigger role in the selection of candidates and thereby diminishing the importance of smaller, early-voting states like Iowa and New Hampshire, the Secretary of States for Michigan, Florida and several others moved their primaries ahead of the earliest voting date set by both the Republican and the Democrat Party’s. Since Iowa and New Hampshire both have a State Constitutional requirements to vote first, this forced them to move up also, and so started a tug-of-war between the States and the Party’s. There was even speculation that Iowa might caucus before Christmas of 2007! Instead, they settled on January 3rd in Iowa and January 8th in New Hampshire.

Since both of those states are required to vote first by state law, the Democrats did not penalized Iowa or New Hampshire for moving ahead of the February 5th early voting restriction. Both party’s penalized other states that moved ahead and forced the Iowa and New Hampshire date changes, chiefly Michigan and Florida, though there are others.

As I mentioned earlier, the two Party’s are responsible for creating their own primary and caucus rules, and therefore came up with different punishments for moving ahead of February 5th, known as “Super Tuesday” because so many states cast their votes on that day.

The Dem’s decided to punish Michigan and Florida for moving ahead by removing all of the delegates provided by those states at the Nominating Convention, completly removing the influence they had hoped to enhance in the first place. The Republicans, on the other hand, decided to count delegates from all of the states but penalized those states voting before February 5th by eliminating half of their delegates from the Convention. The states that will be penalized by the Republican’s are: Wyoming, New Hampshire, Michigan, Nevada, South Carolina and Florida. Iowa was not penalized because the result of the Republican side of the caucus is not binding.

Oregon does not vote until May 20, meaning that in all likelihood the Nominees will effectively be chosen before we ever even cast our ballots.

The latest Republican poll numbers from Des Moines Daily Register show Huckabee with 32% of likely caucus voters, Romney with 26%, McCain with 13%, Ron Paul with 9%, Fred Thompson with 9% and Rudy Giuliani with 5%.

The Democratic side is a tighter race at the top, with Obama at 32%, Clinton at 25%, Edwards at 24%, Richardson at 6%, Biden at 4%, Dodd at 2% and Kucinich at 1%.

The Primary calendar is listed below for your reference. States followed by a C are Caucus states.

Geeks have always been around.  There has never been a time when there wasn’t some dweeb wedged in his locker doing the quarterback’s homework, or captaining the Chess team, or rocking the fashion world with polyester blazers and plaid shorts.

They’ve always been there, their contributions to the world wildly accepted and devotedly followed, but the geeks themselves have always been overlooked, overshadowed by the things they invent and principles they uncover.  Without nerds and geeks, we wouldn’t have things like rockets, or lasers, or coffee grinders, or guns, or in fact the very freedoms that we hold dear; without those beloved civic nerds we now call the Founding Fathers the Good Ol’ US of A wouldn’t exist.  Without geeks like Copernicus, we wouldn’t have an understanding of how our universe works, and without dweebs like Leonardo da Vinci and  his extensive work on human corpses we wouldn’t even understand how our own bodies function.  Both of those men paid a heavy price for their nerdiness, they were each placed under house arrest and threatened with death.

And while very few of them have been banished by the Church or governmental bodies, we can’t forget about the computer nerds, those awkward souls who burned through the night, staring past horn-rimmed glasses with tape on the bridge while they created not only the very device you are now using to read this blog (a word invented by some nameless geek out there), but the whole damn internet as well, something that has without doubt revolutionized the whole planet.

But for all of those accomplishments, the geek has widely been depicted as a symbol of ridicule.  Sure there are a few examples of geeks who have made it to the top, names like the ones I mentioned above, and let us not forget guys like Bill Gates and our very own Paul Allen.  But even when they achieved their successes and put their names into the everyday lexicon of millions, geeks on the whole have still been widely overlooked.  Superhero’s are never geeks, at least not fulltime.  Sure, Clark Kent is pretty geeky, and as the mild mannered reporter Lois Lane won’t look twice at him, but what happens when he slips into those bright blue tights and shows off the studly muscles?  Suddenly he’s hot shit, not nerdy any more at all!  He’s sure of himself, confident, even flirtatious.  And who wouldn’t be, leaping buildings in single bounds, bouncing bullets off his biceps and beatin’ down the bad guys?   With those glasses ditched in the nearest phone booth, Lois is on him like a rat on a Cheeto, despite the fact that he’s wearing his underwear on the outside.

Want another example?  How about Star Trek, the holy bible of all geekdome?  Who got the chicks?  Who got to sit in the big chair with the fancy buttons?  Who got the Admiral’s stars?  Kirk, that’s who.  Not Spock, the ultra nerd who figured everything out, not Bones the medical geek who brought everyone back from certain death, not Scotty the engine dweeb that always got the ship out of there just in the nick of time.  After twenty stinkin’ years who was holed up in the fancy office at Starfleet Command and who was still schlepping away at the same damn jobs they’d had when they were just out of the Academy?  The guy who threw the punches, that’s who.  Hell, Kirk was so cool that he earned the wrath of Kahn, one of the baddest bad asses ever to roam the galaxy.  And then who saved the day?  Was it Kirk?  No!  Spock killed himself to save the crew and the ship.  So who’s the cool one?

I can go on all day.  On the show Knightrider, did anyone ever see the geeks who built the talking car, who kept him running, who changed his oil and rotated his tires and flipped his DIP switches?  Nope, you saw the Hoff riding around in a sweet car with some big-haired beauty.

Occasionally you’d get a Revenge of the Nerds type of deal that would float past to remind everyone that geeks are okay people, and if you can manage to out think the jocks and make them look like idiots you might have a shot with the female lead character, but those were few and far between and didn’t do all that well at the box office.  And of course, they were comedies.

You see, this is a topic near and dear to my heart.  I am an affirmed geek.  In fact, I might easily qualify as an ubergeek, which is to say that I am a geek across many plains: I know that HTTP (which is how every web address in the world begins) stands for Hyper Text Transfer Protocol; I know that a full grown male Dwarf would weigh somewhere close to 400 pounds; I know what James T. Kirk’s middle name is; I know that a Vampire which is not effected by sunlight is called a Daywalker; I know that other then Luke Skywalker Wedge Antilles was the only Rebel pilot to survive all major battles against the Empire; I know that Freddy Kruger has four blades on his hands while Wolverine only has three; I know what a Muggle is; and I have actually taken part in a conversation debating the morality of blowing up the Deathstar while civilian contractors were undoubtedly still onboard.  I didn’t realize, however, that Megatron was Optimus Prime’s brother until this summer, but hey, continuing education is a wonderful thing.

My point is this: geeks are breaking out of our respective corners and going broadband (nice pun, eh?), and the entertainment industry is finally realizing that they have a new target demographic: nerds who have unlimited amounts of money to spend on movies and memorabilia because, frankly, imaginary girlfriends are a hell of a lot cheaper then their living counterparts.  Think about it: movies based on comic books are blockbusters, revamped and somewhat disappointing Star Wars stories turn in huge numbers and convince crowds of thousands to sit outside in the rain just to have the honor of being the first nerd through the doors, just as fantasy movies do with Lord of the Rings geeks.  Geek TV shows from the 80’s like Battlestar Galactica and Bionic Woman are topping the weekly ratings even though the women are wearing bras, removing the primary appeal from original shows.
The cool thing is that since we are footing the bill, our nerdy TV personas are starting to get cool.  NBC was even brave enough to make geeks into full on Heroes.  Time traveling Hiro Nakamura is an unabashed computer geek who plays video games at work until he discovers his ability and learns to fight supervillians while wearing a starched white button-down, but unlike the days of Superman when you had to be studly to win the hearts of the ladies, it’s his wiggly cheeks and kind nature that attract women.  And Clair’s badass dad Noah Bennet actually wears horn-rimmed Nerdglass.   But don’t let the specs fool ya’, no one is going to shove him into his locker or give him a swirly.  Then there’s Chuck, where Charles Bartowsky is the head of a Nerd Herd at a chain electronics store who also just happens to be the only guy who can save the world week after week.  Oh yeah, and in his off time he is steadily convincing the totally hot CIA chick to fall in love with him.

And then there’s Harry Potter.

The popularity of J.K. Rawling’s epic seven book saga of young witches and wizards is something no one would have predicted.  Even I, who likes to think of myself as belonging to the upper crust of the geek hierarchy, eventually fell prey to the series and got hooked, doing little else with my time but listening to the audiobooks for a three week span of time.  Which is sadly saying that I was in fact too geeky even to pick up a book, I had to listen to it on my iPod.

But even I, super nerd that I arguably am, was shocked and dismayed by what I discovered today:  At colleges all across this country people have formed Quidditch teams and managed to make the sport of league-based Muggle Quidditch a reality.

I shit you not.

For you people reading this who have actually gotten laid this year and therefore clearly have better things to do with your time then read Harry Potter, you might not fully understand what I am talking about.  Let me explain: Quidditch is the only real sport played by witches and wizards, and they take it very seriously.  About as seriously as crazy Europeans take soccer.  The rules are fairly simple and somewhat resemble soccer, except that it all takes place while flying around on broomsticks.

Let me clarify that point: in order to play Quidditch you have to be able to fly around on a broomstick.

Not to be deterred, however, this group of seven collegiate teams – lead by Vassar University – have adapted the game so all us Muggles (non-magical beings) can play it too.  How do they do it, you ask?  Well, it’s simple really.  They dress up in crazy robes, put goggles on their heads, clamp a broomstick between their thighs and have at it!  In the books J.K. Rawling explained that the only way to win the game is to catch the Snitch, a small, winged, golden ball that flies randomly around the Pitch and must be captured by one of the teams’ Seekers.  In the “Muggle” version, the Snitch is portrayed by a person who stuffs a tennis ball into a tubesock tied around their waste and runs wildly around the field trying not to get cought.

I shit you not.

If you don’t believe me, here is the link to a video of a practice session on Youtube.  Since this is only a practice session, they aren’t wearing their robes, but in a radio interview with one of the players I was assured that on game day everyone is wearing their best robes.

I shit you not.

It just goes to show that there is always a bigger nerd out there.  Sometimes even a whole field full of them.

And it shows one other thing too: you can take the nerd outdoors, you can even make him a jock, but he’ll probably never get lucky with a cheerleader.

I shit you not.

I checked my email the other day and I found a plea in there for me to sign a petition to insist that the motto “In God We Trust” be placed on the new $1 coins featuring likenesses all of the US Presidents.  Personally, I do not feel that “In God We Trust” should be on our national currency.  I think the idea of the government officially sanctioning one religion over others is a mistake that has historically lead to the subjugation of followers of other faiths, not to mention the hardships endured by people of no particular faith at all.

To that same end, I do not feel that our Pledge of Allegiance should include the line “Under God”, which it did not contain until 1957 when President Eisenhower pushed the Congress to have it added.  In his presidential memoirs he has said he wanted to have it added as a way of psychologically differentiating  ourselves from the Soviet Union, not for any particularly religious reasons.

With only a few minutes of internet research I was able to find that, regardless of my personal beliefs as to the national sanctioning of religion, the email was pointless.  The new coins will indeed have the phrase upon them, though it will appear in small lettering cut into the edge of the coin instead of its more traditional place of honor along the top edge.

Along the way I found out several things that I thought I would share.  Read on and you will find some interesting fact:

The first mention of inscribing our currency with a salute to the Christian Deity appears in a letter written to Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase by Reverend M. R. Watkinson of Ridleyville, Pennsylvania in 1861.  He wrote: “One fact touching our currency has hitherto been seriously overlooked. I mean the recognition of the Almighty God in some form on our coins.”  He went on to describe the coin he would like to see minted: “What I propose is that instead of the goddess of liberty we shall have next inside the 13 stars a ring inscribed with the words PERPETUAL UNION; within the ring the allseeing eye, crowned with a halo; beneath this eye the American flag, bearing in its field stars equal to the number of the States united; in the folds of the bars the words GOD, LIBERTY, LAW.”

Secretary Chase was moved by the letter and that very same week instructed the Director of the Philadelphia Mint to create a new coin honoring Almighty God.  His letter began: “Dear Sir: No nation can be strong except in the strength of God, or safe except in His defense. The trust of our people in God should be declared on our national coins.  You will cause a device to be prepared without unnecessary delay with a motto expressing in the fewest and tersest words possible this national recognition.”

A strange thing for a country with a supposed separation of church and state, but I digress.

Thanks to an Act of Congress in 1837 the design of US coins could not be changed without a further Act of Congress, which was passed in 1863.  The final designs for the new one cent, two cent and three cent coins were submitted to Chase for his approval, bearing the motto “Our Country; Our God”.  Chase wrote back to the Director of the Mint with this suggestion: ” I approve your mottoes, only suggesting that on that with the Washington obverse the motto should begin with the word OUR, so as to read OUR GOD AND OUR COUNTRY. And on that with the shield, it should be changed so as to read: IN GOD WE TRUST”.

Chase’s motto was adopted and first appeared on the two cent coin in 1864.  The phrase appeared on several different coins, but was not uniformly used until the Coinage Act of 1873 was passed, which instructed the Secretary of the Treasury to “cause the motto IN GOD WE TRUST to be inscribed on such coins as shall admit of such motto.”

That is not to say that the phrase has been in constant use ever since.  It disappeared and reappeared on the penny and nickels several times throughout the years, until 1938 when it began its uninterrupted reign.  In 1956 President Eisenhower approved a joint resolution of the 84th Congress declaring “In God We Trust” our national motto, and allowed the phrase to be printed on paper money for the first time in 1957.

The new $1 Presidential coins are the latest attempt in an ongoing program by the Department of the Treasury and the Mint to replace paper singles with coins, at an approximated savings of $500 million dollars in annual printing expenses, since coins are much more durable then paper bills.  Their previous attempts with Susan B. Anthony dollars and the golden Sacagawea coins were met with only a luke warm response from the public, despite the fact that most other countries have converted their smaller denominations to coins without incident.

The next new coin in this program to replace paper bills was announced at the same time but has drawn very little attention: a 24-karat $10 piece featuring the First Ladies of the United States.  This coin is set for release at the end of 2007