Well, the vote is over. It's times like this that I wish Frank Zappa were still alive - I would love to hear him expound on the recall - heck, he might even have run. I'm sure he would have made a better governor than Arnold, and I sure would have stumped for him.

I'd also love to hear his take on the whole RIAA vs. filesharing thing. Arguably one of the earliest, most prolific, and most successful indie label self-promoters, he was also very conscious of both where the money goes and intellectual property rights.

If you ever get a chance, you should read The Real Frank Zappa Book. He had a lot of interesting ideas like this one: to stop people from laundering huge sums of cash for illicit purposes, periodically change the color of the money to force people to exchange the old color for the new color - then if someone has, say, $150,000 in large bills, they got some 'splainin' to do.

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By the way, I did vote yesterday. I voted against the recall and for Bustamante. I should note that I'm not at all surprised by the outcome.

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I get a couple hundred spam messages a day that make it through our company's spam filter, and the trend lately seems to be offers for vicodin, which has got to be illegal.

I understand the spammers' theory of direct marketing - if you contact 1,000,000 people, and 0.01% respond, then that's 100 orders, right?

But I mean, come on, I'm sitting here thinking, 'what kind of idiot in their right mind actually opens a message from Abdul Moran (my apologies to Abdul, I'm assuming they don't know someone by that name) with the subject line 'ma-ke yo'urs-elf a m^an lohwljivyxtkd' and ends up sending that guy their credit card for an order of pills from naturalherb.biz?'

But then I remember that I live in a county where 65% of the people voted for the recall, and for Arnold, and fully half of all people are below average in intelligence.

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To end this post on a much happier note, my investment portfolio briefly peeked its head above break-even for the first time in about three years - Go Tech Stocks! Go S&P 500!

posted by Chris at 5:22 PM Permalink