Voting Machines Elect One Of Their Own As President

The next time I see this house, someone else will be living there. It's a nice house, but the job that goes with it just seems really, really stressful.

Half-related note - about a half-hour after I took this picture, George W. Bush landed somewhere in the vicinity in his fancy helicopter. Apparently the only helicopter allowed to fly that close to the White House post-September 11th is one with the president in it, so we can use our reasoning skills to deduce that it was him. It was pretty neat.

Did anyone else vote on a paper ballot? Is my city completely behind the times? I like voting, I like coloring - finish-the-arrow paper ballots are where it's at - and there's no danger of them becoming sentient and taking over the planet (a major concern with electronic voting machines)!

It occurred to me when I got to the pub on Tuesday night to watch election coverage (on cable!) and play the pub quiz with friends, that I'd forgotten to hit "record" on my VCR to tape the election returns (yes, I still have a VCR, and no I do not have cable). Because either way it ended up, this election was a huge deal and I like to have things like that to view later.

A few seconds later it occurred to me, still in the pub, that every minute of the presidential election returns of 2008 is probably available somewhere on the Internet. For free. Kids will probably watch the concession and acceptance speeches in school generations from now (maybe they'll beam holograms of Wolf Blitzer and Anderson Cooper into their classrooms to tell them all about this exciting moment in our country's history!). Can we say that about any other election in American history? How cool!

Seriously though, the holograms? Really very silly. This was the election... OF THE FUTURE!

I should to try to find CNN's return coverage, because from where I was sitting, this is what happened (the following took place over approximately seventeen seconds):

Anderson Cooper: Do be do be do, hey! Looks like the polls in California are closing soon. We'll have the results from those western states as soon as we receive them.
Me: Oh, wow - California's such a big state, I suppose it will take them a little while to count thos-
CNN: BARACK OBAMA ELECTED PRESIDENT
Me and everyone else in pub: *several seconds of stunned silence*
Me: Wait, what? How... what just happened? Is that true?
Entire country: *freaks out*

Now, I'm sure that isn't quite what happened... but that's how I'm to remember it unless I re-watch it. I wonder what people did back in the days before insta-coverage. This is an incredibly interesting time to be alive.