Live blogging Election Day 2008
By Mark Czerniec
November 4, 2008 9:17 AM

9:17 a.m. — I've got some leftover sauce reheating in the microwave. I'll mix it with the egg noodles boiling on the stove and call it breakfast. MSNBC is on my TV, and I can see my local polling place from my living room window. It's 61 sunny and clear degrees outside, and a lot of people are walking to and from voting. Dan Rather says Virginia will be a big early indicator. Man, this is an exciting day for news/politics geeks like me — and also for the rest of the world, apparently.

9:37 a.m. &mdash MSNBC's Mika Brzezinski has just awkwardly caught Dan Rather "trying to think." She has an interesting edge, and seems to be at least a little skeptical about Obama. Most people credit Ronald Reagan with ending the Cold War, but I think Mika's dad played a big role.

9:53 a.m. &mdash Ralph Henkes was my middle school gym coach. Today, he was also one of Racine's first voters.

Continued …

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I voted
By Mark Czerniec
October 22, 2008 2:45 PM

Amy voted too. We voted early.

We have been receiving the notices from the Obama campaign and seeing how they urge people to vote early. They even have a Web site, VoteForChange.com, to help Americans find out how to vote early.

Still, I wasn't completely persuaded. I like going to my polling place on Election Day. I like giving our names to the poll workers and getting the little slip with my voter number on it. I like personally inserting my ballot into the machine and hearing the beep. I love getting the little "I voted" sticker and wearing it all day. It all feels so official. It's really fun and kind of moving to be participating along with all the other local voters — sometimes, in a huge national decision.

Early voting here in Racine, Wisconsin, on the other hand, involves going down to City Hall (730 Washington Ave.) during regular business hours (8:00 a.m. - 4:55 p.m.) and filling out an absentee ballot at the City Clerk's office.

This all seemed a little awkward and alien to me. If I fill out a ballot today, what happens to it between now and November 4? How do I know it will be counted? Couldn't someone just throw it away or something?

Continued …

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The 1:10 a.m. call
By Mark Czerniec
October 13, 2008 4:02 PM

Because I get up for work at 4:15 on weekdays, I was in a deep, dreaming sleep this morning at 1:10 a.m.

That's when the phone rang.

In order to cut through any music playing during the day, and because I may have played my guitar a little too loudly in my youth, our phone is set to a somewhat piercing ringtone. In the middle of the night, it's especially startling.

But really, at that hour, any sort of call can make your blood run cold. My heart began pounding wildly as Amy picked up the handset and answered, "Hello?"

I could hear only the faintest voice coming from the phone.

My mind started racing though family and friends, wondering who had died, or who been hurt or fallen seriously ill. I started preparing to visit an emergency room — possibly even as a patient, since my heart was pounding so hard.

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Racine's minute in the World News spotlight
By Mark Czerniec
October 11, 2008 12:30 PM

ABC's World News with Charles Gibson devoted this past week to a "Great American Battleground Bus Tour" gimmick which purported to give Gibson and his viewers insight into real, live heartland voters in cities like Dayton, Bowling Green, Indianapolis, Davenport — and right here in Racine, Wisconsin. The visit to Racine has been in the planning stages since May.

Curious to see our local story showcased and our humble souls laid bare for America's edification, Amy and I drove downtown late on the afternoon of October 9 and found several of the central blocks of Main Street closed to traffic. ABC's promotional bus and their satellite trucks had been parked alongside the Johnson Building since early morning, with a total crew of 25 or 30 working all day to crank out the half-hour broadcast.

As this particular Thursday progressed, visits with local residents were reportedly scrapped in favor of an exclusive interview with Republican presidential nominee John McCain in Milwaukee. Meanwhile, American stock markets had gone from frighteningly bad to even worse, plunging during the last hour of trading. The Dow finally closed down 679 points, making for the worst day in Wall Street's worst week ever.

Continued …

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Brightonwoods Orchard
By Mark Czerniec
September 26, 2008 12:57 PM

Just a quick reminder that we're now well into apple season, and that one of the best places in our area to experience this fleeting magnificence is Brightonwoods Orchard near Burlington, Wisconsin.

Brightonwoods is not an orchard you visit to pick apples right from the trees. As shown above, the apples are pre-picked and sorted into handy bins inside an outbuilding. You just grab a bag and select the ones you want. This way, the apples are taken from the trees by people who know what they're doing — and we, the apple-loving consumers, do not have to traipse through an orchard slipping on rotten apples and getting poked by branches while reaching for the fruit.

What's special about Brightonwoods is the wide variety of unusual heirloom or heritage apples they grow and sell. Each type is accompanied by a short description with notes on its qualities as far as eating, cooking, and storage are concerned.

In addition to apples, Brightonwoods Orchard offers some outstanding apple cider, plus other produce, such as the delicious delicata squash we first encountered there.

Across the yard in the big barn you'll find the ÆppelTreow Winery, which is definitely something to tour and sample. However, having purchased a couple of bottles of their table wines, I still do not believe that good wine comes from either apples or Wisconsin. I will stick with their hard cider.

Both operations are located at 1072 288th Ave (a.k.a. Kenosha County Highway "B"), about 8 miles east of Burlington and immediately north of Richard Bong State Recreation Area, making for a picturesque drive through the surrounding scenery.

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Goodnight, America
By Mark Czerniec
September 21, 2008 5:00 PM

I cannot process what is unfolding here in the U.S.A. over the last few days. A crushing, amorphous weight has me plastered to the sofa in front of the TV. My breathing is labored, and my heart stops beating every now and then for ten or fifteen seconds. I have the odd sense that aspects of time have been suspended, or are moving in slow motion. These feelings are similar to those produced by witnessing a horrific accident, except that they are lasting not for minutes, but for days.

Really, I have only felt like this one other time in my life, beginning on the morning of September 11, 2001.

The realization that America has been clobbered again apparently hit home in Washington on Thursday night. News reports describe a secret evening meeting at the U.S. Capitol regarding our being "maybe days away from a complete meltdown of our financial system," according to Sen. Chris Dodd. The people who were there speak of being stunned and gulping and silent. They allude to a tightening knot, and perhaps pantomime a plummeting bird, but that is far as they will go in articulating what exactly has happened to us.

Continued …

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Everything That Happens Will Happen Today
By Mark Czerniec
September 15, 2008 5:15 PM

It actually started happening a couple of weeks ago when I read the Will Hermes review in Rolling Stone. More familiar with David Byrne than with Brian Eno, I have always gotten an oddly warm feeling from certain Talking Heads songs, and especially the songs on Little Creatures. That album had a certain kind of innocent optimism which I could use right about now (and I'm not the only one), so I was happy to read about this new "radiantly tuneful set" of "folk electronic gospel" and "how music heals." Hallelujah.

But I launched iTunes, searched, and lo, it was nowhere to be found. Just what I needed — another obstacle of the stupid music industry on which to stub my psychic toe.

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Four weeks wandering Web 2.0
By Mark Czerniec
September 11, 2008 6:28 PM

Nothing in particular has inspired any new blog posts here in recent weeks. Instead, I've spent much of my free time playing around with a few of the endless new gizmos that are hatching every minute in the now four-year-old world of "Web 2.0," the cross-fed, componentized river of vital and stupid information that has supplanted much of the previous, segregated Web of static pages and discrete sites.

For our ancestors, adjusting the world to their liking meant hard physical labor, sweat, and bloody knuckles. Now, spending so much of our lives in virtual worlds, we simply click. And click. And click.

It has occurred to me that, between setting preferences and updating software, it would be quite possible to spend your entire life in front of a computer without ever doing anything useful whatsoever. When you multiply that sort of tweaking potential across an ever-expanding number of interconnected social networking profiles all over the Web, there are simply no minutes left to sleep, or to have a face-to-face conversation, or to watch a movie or read a book or play guitar or ride a bike.

Many of the thingamajigs I have tried ended up feeling like a waste of time.

On the other hand, I do constantly thirst for knowledge and intelligence beyond my own block. I want to know what is happening now &mdash and now — and now — in any one of a bunch of specific subject areas. Toward that end, a couple of the doohickeys I've been tinkering with have actually proven handy or delightful or both.

Twitter

I wrote about Twitter back in April of 2007 when it first exploded, and I basically dismissed it. Since then, MySpace has copied the idea, and I have occasionally posted short status messages there for no good reason.

About a month ago, however, Steve Dahl opted out of writing a 450-word blog entry each day in favor of posting to his Twitter account, and so I gave Twitter another spin. It actually isn't as pointless as I had assumed, once you give it a chance.

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Warning in America: Andrew J. Bacevich on Bill Moyers Journal
By Mark Czerniec
August 18, 2008 1:55 PM

We modern Americans are marvels of indolence. We'll slap magnetic "Support our troops" ribbons on our minivans and surrender our freedoms to telephone companies if that's what it takes to keep from having to protect our freedoms, but let anyone even suggest keeping our tires properly inflated and suddenly that sacred line between abstract consent and literal effort has been crossed and we are downright indignant.

You would think we would be doomed with an attitude like this, and you would be right.

On Friday, the same day I had been thinking that I wanted more and better TV on my computer, I ran across a posting at Lifehacker about Miro, an iTunesy kind of video player that also downloads fresh video content for you as it becomes available. The first thing I downloaded with it was Friday's installment of Bill Moyers Journal, a favorite PBS interview show.

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Saddleback forum followup
By Mark Czerniec
August 18, 2008 1:05 PM

There were a number of interesting moments in Saturday night's "Saddleback Civil Forum on the Presidency," but one that I have not seen mentioned came as part of John McCain's response to a question about taxes. Part 5 of Pastor Rick Warren's transcript quotes McCain as saying:

In fact, I want to give working Americans a better shot at having a better life and we all know the challenges, my friends, if I could be serious. Americans tonight in California and all over America are sitting at the kitchen table, recently and suddenly lost a job, can't afford to stay in their home, education for their kids, affordable health care, these are tough problems. These are tough problems. You talk to them every day.

Q: All the time?

Every day. My friends, we have got to give them hope and confidence in the future. That's what we need to give them and I can inspire them. I can lead and I know that our best days are ahead of us.

Hope? People who have lost their jobs and homes lack inspiration and so McCain is going to give them hope? Isn't this exactly the thrust of his attacks on Barack Obama?

Also, according to the New York Times, Rev. Warren's vaunted "cone of silence" appears to have been nothing more than a joking reference to Get Smart — funny methodology from a man putting the ethics of two potential presidents under his own microscope. Maybe this will come up when Warren guests on Larry King Live tonight.

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