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Just as people want governmental services without the pain of taxes, they also want democratic procedures without the pain of witnessing what comes along with those procedures. Political observers have failed to understand this situation no doubt partly because many of us enjoy watching the give and take of politics. In this, we are quite different from ordinary people.

– John Hibbing and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse, Congress as Public Enemy

[M]ost of the opinions captured by conventional polling are cognitively threadbare.

–Experimenting with a Democratic Ideal:
Deliberative Polling and Public Opinion
James Fishkin, Stanford University

Now that’s a spicy meatball.

My friend Javal, a much better photographer than I, produced some real gems on his recent trip up to Sturgis. Included in his latest collection are no growling hogs, but plenty of beauty both natural and unnatural. Take a look.

Photos from last month’s Black Hills Climbing Trip are up, finally. (”Finally up” would have ended the sentence with a preposition, and that is something up with which I shall not put.)

The climbing season’s pretty much over for me and my lame lateral meniscus. Anyone out there who’s succesfully, yet inexpensively, treated this apparently quite important piece o’ cartilage?

The new Firefox switch site is a good shot at a near-indescribably critical project: Convincing users worldwide to stop using the insecure, user-unfriendly, nonstandard and generally atrocious Internet Explorer, which Micro$haft stopped developing after it won the first battles of the Browser Wars.

Some suggestions for the switch site’s improvement, in no particular order of importance:

• Rotate the photos atop the page to include more diverse faces, especially in age terms. That is, more middle-aged and old people.
• Consider creating separate content for “average Joes and Janes” and “Web professionals.” Dumb the former content way, way down and make it relevant.
• Create a printer-formatted one-page document with pictorial download and installation instructions. If I ever get time, I might just do this and offer it up for anyone to do with what they will.

Even if they leave the site as is, the Firefox - Switch creators deserve ample pats on the back.

Remember those ads in the backs of comic books for GRIT, the amazing yet seldom-seen publication with which “fellows” could run their own business and achieve happiness and prosperity and earn (probably) chintzy prizes? “Super Marketing: Ads from the Comic Books” has a delightfully superannuated GRIT ad online, as well as scans of ads for favorites like Charles Atlas (where the muscled bully kicks sand on the 98-pound weakling, motivating said weakling to become a muscled bully himself with help from the Charles Atlas bodybuilding system) and Amazing Live Sea Monkeys (”a BOWLFUL of HAPPINESS”).

(Seems like happiness was in general short supply, no?)

So I’ve seen with my own eyes Amazing Live Sea Monkeys and muscled bullies (both really close up, and one more uncomfortably close than the other). But I’ve never seen a copy of GRIT.

Have you?