Word: weirdness
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...poll watchers in the small Georgia town of Dallas had a problem. The weather was humid and rainy. Now their vote-counting machine was rejecting thousands of punch-card ballots because the cardboard had warped in the damp night air. What to do? Break out the blow-dryers! "As weird as it sounds, it's standard procedure," says Fran Watson, election superintendent for Paulding County, where Dallas is located. "We blow a hair dryer over them, and then they'll go through...
...would be a shame to allow this fascinatingly weird election to intrude upon the holiday. Thanksgiving is supposed to be amiable, bloated, and somnolent. No doubt it will be so, all over America - in those sections of America (the coasts, the upper mid-West) that are colored blue for Gore, and in those vast stretches everywhere else that are red for Bush. But the peace of Thanksgiving tables will inevitably be troubled - red uncles in full howl against blue in-laws. We vacillate between indignation and resignation, and we play with a perplexing intuition that the loser wins...
Also in this issue, Eric Pooley and our Washington bureau report on how the next President will try to govern, and Richard Lacayo looks at the legal intricacies in Florida. Eminent historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. compares this election to weird ones in the past, and Jeff Greenfield and Kevin Phillips analyze the logic of the Electoral College better than I did with my daughter. Our veteran Hugh Sidey, who helped organize the gathering of former Presidents last week at the bicentennial of the White House, writes about that historic mansion and interviews President Bush about his son. Among the other...
...through something that does, like a VCR. Once your DVR is up and running, you plug it into a phone jack, so that it can download the week's program listings. (ReplayTV automatically makes a short phone call every morning at around 2; it's like having a weird nocturnal robot roommate...
...Imus imitations. It savors of precisely the poison that it condemns. Indeed, the political malaise we suffer from is usually attended by self-disgust. That is one of the dangers of the current situation. But rather than self-loathing, this election - two inadequate candidates fighting to a weird, ignominious tie, with no expectation even that the winner will be the less lousy - should rouse Americans to self-examination...