The wheelchair is a Democratic magnet…

I was working at a campaign event tonight and managed to meet Senator Edwards before he went on stage. My impression after 5 minutes: he’s a very warm and approachable guy. He took a few minutes to sign some things for other volunteers and was quite gracious with everyone, including myself. Best of all, no condescension on his part that I could detect.
And here’s another with my nurse Lori, who managed to temporarily pick up her tongue off the floor.

Edwards gave a good speech, which kept with his “Two Americas” theme. Heavy on domestic issues like health care, education, national service, and balancing the budget. Sorry I’m not being more descriptive, but I’m beat. More tomorrow.

Microsoft may have actually done something right the first time. Early reviews of their SP2 update for Windows XP have been unusually positive, especially for a Microsoft product. The day may finally be at hand when friends and relatives no longer need me to remove gobs of malware from their computers. I haven’t downloaded it myself yet, mostly because I’m lazy and I figure I’ll wait for the automatic updater to notify me. But they still can’t convince me to switch back to Internet Explorer.
The Olympics begin tomorrow and the media is desperately trying to get me to care. For some reason, I’m not all that enthusiastic this time around. I had a higher level of interest back in 2000 because I thought Sydney was such a lovely city (and I still want to get there someday). And while I’m sure Athens has its charms, I haven’t been impressed with their overall level of preparation and my gut feeling is that it’s going to be even more poorly organized than the 1996 Games in Atlanta. But as long as nobody dies during the next week and a half, I suppose you can call that a success.

The Onion is going to launch a Twin Cities edition in September. It will be good to have another weekly paper in town, as City Pages hasn’t had any real competition since the Twin Cities Reader folded in 1997. I’ll probably stick with the on-line edition, but it will be interesting to read their coverage of the local scene. It’s not clear if the new edition will have satire directed at our region. We certainly offer plenty of material, ranging from our stoic Nordic culture to the monstrosity that is the Mall of America.
Things are not going well when our President is laughed at by the audience he’s addressing. Listen to the crowd react to Bush’s insightful and cogent analysis of tribal sovereignty issues. It borders on the absurd. it reminds me of law school and some of the lamer answers I heard in response to a professor’s question, when the person was absolutely clueless but kept blathering on in the hopes of saying something that might approximate coherence.

Att the wedding reception last night, I sat with another U of M Law School alumni. We attorneys must have an invisible aura that subconsciously identifies us to each other. It’s weird.
I was channel-surfing last night and caught some of Def Poetry. Poetry slams have always struck me as emphasizing style over substance. That’s not necessarily a bad thing; I enjoyed most of the performances I saw. They had a visceral punch that is an order of magnitude different from the experience of reading a poem to yourself. The hip-hop influence on slam culture was also evident. Most of the performances shared a theme of oppression and injustice. Didn’t see any performers with disabilities, though. Maybe after I finish the book, I’ll try my hand at a slam and wow the crowd with my mad, ventilator-syncopated verse.
The LA Times has an article about the hardships faced by Iraqi war veterans who are being shipped home with severe disabilities. Like I keep saying, this is the real story of the war’s ongoing casualty count. Thousands of newly disabled men and women who are taxing the resources of an already underfunded Veterans Administration. At the same time, these disabled veterans may be able to muster the political clout to spur advances in assistive technology that would benefit other people with disabilities as well. Some good has to come out of this whole mess.
CNN is doing a documentary on the SETI project tonight. I am, of course, TiVo’ing it. I hope it’s not condescending: “Watch the funny scientists search for little green men.”

I was getting my van fixed today when I ran into another guy waiting there with his sister. He recognized me from my blog, which caught me by surprise. It’s still weird when blog life and real life intersect. He also had the same model of new wheelchair that I recently got. Except that he was actually, y’know, using his instead of waiting for it to be fixed.
They picked Alan Keyes to run against Obama? Keyes? Well, I guess someone has to take their turn in the barrel, and it might as well be him.