The X-Box Story

So, in the words of Ron White, "I told you that story so I can tell you this story."
This, my friends, is "that story".

It was some months ago now that I was playing a hand of cards with my boys. One of them, a gentleman with an infamous reputation for being a terrible cards player for how often he becomes distracted, became (you guessed it!) distracted and immediately slams his cards on the table. His eyes bugging halfway out of his head, he leaned over the table and into my face.
"HEY!" He exclaimed, "Do you have an XBOX?"

I leaned back so as not to catch another whiff of what he'd had for lunch (meatloaf and green beans, as far as I could guess), and shot a look at the other two patients. They were putting their own cards in order and were paying Patient 1 no attention. I should have followed suit, but being the fool I am, I answered.
"Uh... yeah. Yeah, I have an XBox."
He leaned forward again. How you doin', greenbeans and- a hint of vanilla? "DO YOU PLAY IT?"

I leaned back again, inadvertently scootching my chair a ways. "...No. Nah, man I don't. I'm too busy."

That was a bald-faced lie; I was certainly not too busy to play my XBox, I was in fact quite busy saving the universe as Commander Sheppard. But this guy knows his movies and video games, so I didn't even want to risk the potential for a conversation about the finer points of taking a Reaper to the mattresses. (I was also worried that it might branch into a conversation about taking Miranda to the mattresses, know what I mean?)

Anyhow. Where was I? Oh yes. I'd just told him that I was too busy to play video games.
"I'm too busy," says I.
"CAN I HAVE IT?!"

I blinked. He... wanted my XBox? My unit is so restrictive they can't even have a calendar on their wall. Not even a poster. They don't even have their own clothes on my unit!
"Um... no. You can't. Play... play your hand."
"I can't have it?"
"No."
"Aw."

A moment passed, and for a brief, shining second, I thought I could go back to my favorite work pastime; ignoring this person. But alas.
"WHERE D'YOU LIVE?"

Before I could respond to this, Patient 2 decides to offer me some advice.
"Yoooouuuu bettah not tell him wheah you live," he said sagely, never taking his eyes up from his hand, "Or yooouu wake up one morn', thinkin' you got an Ecks-Bawks but you WONT HAVE SHEEEYIT."

My cards are now everywhere. I have spit onto the table and probably onto Patients 2 and 3- but if 3 gets hit by my spray, I don't see his reaction; if 2 has been hit, he doesn't care. He ignores my reaction completely.
"Yoooouuuu wake up one morn', thinkin' you got an Ecks-Bawks, but he be PLAYIN' yo' Ecks-Bawks at YO' MOMMA'S HOUSE."

Mechanical Horses!

So last night I tried to go and watch Skyfall. Unfortunately for my eyeballs, the movie was sold out and I didn't get to watch it. Fortunately for my eyeballs, on my way back to my car I stumbled across... this.

That's right, bicycle polo. Just a bunch of dudes, rollin' around a dry ice rink, playing a gentlemanly game of bike polo. Turns out there's a whole league of people that play this state-wide, and apparently a Lafayette team are the defending state champions! There wasn't a huge crowd, as you can see, and my video is only what my phone could take- but I wanted to share it, since it reinforces my belief that you find the coolest things when you're not actively looking for them.

That's all for today.

I Dream of Gringo

I have a confession to male.
It’s only three days since the election, and I’ve already engaged in my personal self-harming action of choice. No, dear reader, I am not a cutter; I do not binge and purge; I do not engage in fits of manic spending or sexual abandon (except in the case of your mom). No, my demon is a far darker creature, more apt to ignore the immediate gratification of self-mutilation and partake in the soul-crushing long game.

I’ve started reading about the 2016 election cycle.

“How can this be?!” You might ask, and you’d be justified in your confusion. After all, we just got done with the whole blasted mess, how can I be so full of hatred for my sanity that I’m already looking up information regarding an event that won’t take place until I’m 30?
Because, my friend, in four years we may have the chance to see a deathblow leveled against a major political party. I’ll do my best to prognosticate about this with as little bias as possible, even though the claim itself may appear biased to begin with. I’m simply exploring a possibility.

Obama killed it with non-whites. No reason trying to call this anything other than what it was; it was an absolute stomping. I could waste my time trying to explain why this took place, but rather than do that I’d like to extrapolate outwards. Let’s look at Latinos, for example. They’re the fastest-growing population in the country; according to Pew research they accounted for 46% of the nation’s growth between 2000 and 2010- this group jumped from contributing about 35,306,000 people to our population… to 50,478,000. That increase is enormous. Latinos increased their number by almost half over ten years, coming to ~16% of our entire population. By contrast? Us white boys only got together with enough white girls to bring the Gringo vote from 194.5 million to 196.8 million (that’s about half a percent increase). While that’s still a huge head start, the gap is closing by leaps and bounds.
Now consider this. Assuming similar rates of population growth over the next ten and twenty years, we could be looking at an American electorate with a Latino population of 112 million or so, compared to a White population only a few million higher than it currently is.

Why is this important?
In an electorate that decides its President by a margin of only a few million votes here or there, any one population that is growing faster that the others must be paid special attention to; pretending that the population growth of Latinos isn’t important is political suicide. Similarly equitable to electoral seppuku is taking a hard-right stance on immigration issues, as Mitt Romney did by supporting “self-deportation”, which is essentially hoping that illegal immigrants find the atmosphere of the country so unfavorable that they get up and leave on their own. Other conservative standpoints, such as building a wall on “every mile, on every yard, on every foot, on every inch of the southern border” do the Republican brand no favors with people of Latino heritage. (It’s also a completely untenable construction project, but that’s beside the point).

All of these issues for conservatives combine into a possibility that if, within the next four years, immigration reform can be attained? The credit could very easily go to President Obama and the Democrats. I’m not going to speculate about the staying power of the DREAM Act (or something like it) if its passed early in Obama’s second term; nor will I speculate about the number of Latinos (or voters in general) this could net the Democrats come 2016. What I can say is that any cursory inspection of the news will reveal how powerful an issue immigration reform is for the Latino community; a poll conducted by Latin Insights on behalf of Fox News in March of 2012 revealed 90% support for President Obama’s DREAM Act. Pew Research’s Hispanic Center found that 91% of Latinos supported DREAM; 84% supported giving in-state tuition to undocumented students.

TL;DR: This is a big fucking deal.

…Which brings me back to my original claim. I went out on a limb and said that we could witness a deathblow to a major American political party, and I stand by that possibility. Republicans currently stand almost entirely on the wrong side of this issue, politically speaking. Never mind who’s actually right or wrong; the fastest growing population in America says immigration reform is a huge deal, and the Republican party couldn’t trip over itself fast enough to tack further and further to the right on the issue. They very well could have saved their election efforts if they hadn’t have alienated this key demographic. If they continue to talk about border-length fences and self-deportation, or -as some have suggested- if they react to their recent loss by deciding they haven’t been conservative enough, I would think they can expect to continue losing seats in both houses. And that trend, combined with the losses experienced from most other minorities, could spell the deathknell of their party.

Or the Tea Party 2 could come along and prove me wrong. But only time will tell.

Things I Learned on Election Night

It's finally over.

Election Night has come and gone; the ceaseless campaign machine can grind to a halt and the talking heads can give their vocal chords a rest (aside from a few remaining blowhards). I won't try to hide my elation at the country's collective decisions- but I do want to take a brief moment and talk about what all just happened here.

1) President Obama, smug as ever, keeps his job.

I was clearly an Obama supporter. I think he's done a lot of good in the face of an unprecedented amount of conservative obstructionism. A Romney Presidency would have disappointed me, make no mistake. Now- I wasn't one of the "I'm moving to Canada!" liberals that were bemoaning our possible fate, but the worries I had were as follows: If Romney had won, I was afraid that liberals would have become embittered and taken up the mantle of obstructionism, and the whole damn process would have started all over again. With Obama retaining his job, and Democrats gaining ground in both the House and the Senate, I'm hoping that conservative stonewalling will have lost some of its steam. The same ideologues that said their top priority was to make Obama a one-term President will hopefully see how far that got them, and be more willing to come to the table and make realistic offers.

2) People set up a firewall vote about marriage equality and reproductive rights. 

Four out of four states (including my home state, Maryland! Woooo!) either supported marriage equality or rejected state constitutional amendments to define marriage as between a man and a woman. The reverses a trend of anti-equality ballots, and could send an interesting message. Also on the list of things that split heavily against Republicans were two big names who came out as being ignorant-at-best and anti-womens'-rights at worst, Todd Akin and Richard Murdock. They're the proud owners of the "legitimate rape" and "God intended rape-borne babies" statements, and voters turned out in droves to tell them where to stuff their opinions. These two factors taken together could signal a warning to surviving conservatives that running on social issues such as these is political suicide- and if that does end up being the takeaway from this election, that could have enormous ramifications in the culture wars.

3) Puerto Rico voted to become a state.

No, really. They've apparently voted this down two or three times before, but this time it passed with a 61% majority. I know nothing about the pros and cons of accepting another state into the union, but at the moment it's being drowned out by MSNBC's congratulatory orgy and FoxNews' sob-fest, so I figured it needed mentioning.

So what comes now?

Well, there's that whole automatic tax-increase and spending-cut thing that comes up this winter that needs dealing with; we've still got beef with Syria and we're still at or around 8% unemployment. There's no shortage of things that need work. But, what I plan to do personally is write to my state's national House and Senate members, be they Democrats or Republicans, and tell them to work together. I will tell them that I'm mailing their counterparts across the aisle, saying the same thing. Because now that this whole battle is over and done with, we have too much to do to keep saying "Well, he suggested it, so in the interest of increasing our potential wins in two or four years, I'm voting against it". The hyper-partisanship needs to cool.