================================================================== Stuck In Traffic "Current Events, Cultural Phenomena, True Stories" Issue #36 - December, 2000 Contents: Cultural Phenomena: A Guide To Manual Vote Counting Cultural Phenomena: Movie Review: Bedazzled Cultural Phenomena: Movie Review: The Grinch True Story: Tractor Hackers =================================== Cultural Phenomena A Guide To Manual Vote Counting Don’t ask me how I came into possession of this document….. Dear Election Worker, On behalf of All American across the country, we Thank You for volunteering to help in the manual recount of ballots in your county. We know that this is going to be a difficult and tedious task for you over the next few days. Many of you would probably prefer to spend this time of Thanksgiving with your friends and family. Truly, we appreciate your sacrifice. We are sure you are aware of the importance of this recount, the Presidency of the United States will, quite literally, be passing through your hands over the next few days. We know that spending long hours at a tedious task can be tiring and frustrating. There's sure to be confusion among you about how to count the votes. To help you make these very difficult decisions, we offer these guidelines to help you make sure that the will of the people is accurately and fairly expressed. * Voters have been confused by the layout of the ballot in some counties. As you have seen on CNN, voters that cast their ballots for Buchanan actually intended to vote for Gore. Therefore any ballots you see that have been cast for both Buchanan and Gore should be counted for Gore. After all, CNN has not shown any Buchanan supporters who have claimed to accidentally voted for Gore, have they? * No major news network has interviewed any Buchanan supporters in the counties where manual recounts are being done. Therefore you can assume that there are no Buchanan supporters in counties were manual recounts are underway. Any ballots that were cast for Buchanan alone were cast accidentally by Gore supporters who were confused by the ballot. These ballots should be counted as votes cast for Gore. * While it is true that persons convicted of a felony lose their right to vote in elections, one must also take into consideration those who have been wrongfully convicted. As you know, Florida's current governor is not only a Republican, he has close familial ties with George W. Bush. One can safely assume that Democrats currently incarcerated in Florida are political prisoners, not felons and their votes for Gore should be counted. * There has been much confusion on how many corners of the chads on the Gore row must be detached before they can be counted as a Gore vote. While the rule for the initial re-count required that at least 2 corners of the chad be detached, the new rule is that only one chad must be detached. Making any sort of mark on the ballot would indicate a vote for Gore. As you know, many Gore voters were confused by the ballot. So even if the chads on other candidate's rows are cleanly separated, a partially detached chad on the Gore row would indicate a confused Gore supporter, not a supporter for another candidate. * As you know, Gore offered a much larger increase in social security spending for the elderly than George Bush. Likewise Gore promised to pay more for prescription drugs than Bush did. One can safely assume then that the elderly are favoring Gore exclusively. But many of the elderly, in their prescription drug deprived state do not have the strength to punch their way through the ballot. Therefore any "pregnant," "dimpled," "lumpy," ballot chads on the Gore row of the ballot , or any Gore chads that look like they exhibit any convex or potentially convex tendencies should be counted for Gore, regardless of whether or not any corners of the chad were actually detached. * Any ballots for George W. Bush which are detached, but not cleanly detached from the edges of the ballot should be considered invalid votes and not counted. Any fibers of the chad which remain on the ballot, may reflect a last second change of intent on the part of the voter. You would not mistakenly count a Bush vote that might have changed his or her mind at the last second. * Any ballots for which the George Bush chad has been detached, but may nonetheless be manually reaffixed to the ballot with adhesive tape, glue, or laminate should be reattached and not counted. Such reassembly should be done as quietly and discreetly as possible, so as not to disturb the other vote counters in the room. * As you know, Republican voters are only able to force themselves to vote for George Bush under heavy per pressure. And given the opportunity to vote in private, they would not cast their vote for Bush. So if no vote counters are observing while you inspect a ballot that has been cast for Bush, please place it on the Gore pile so you can better reflect the voter's private, inner intent. * While it is widely anticipated that absentee ballots will heavily favor George Bush, there is some confusion as to what qualifies as a valid absentee ballot. The correct interpretation is that no absentee ballots are valid. How can an absent person vote? If they aren't there, who's going to make the mark? A person absent from the ballot can't mark it, and anyone who can mark the ballot is present at the ballot and therefore does not qualify as an "absentee." Thank you for your kind attention to these matters. We appreciate your sacrifice, your flexibility, and your creativity as human beings. We're sure you'll use every means possible to ensure the end results reflect the will of the right people. =================================== Cultural Phenomena Bedazzled ** 1/2 Brendan Fraser plays Elliott, the geeky computer jock with no social skills whatsoever and the self-confidence to match. Elizabeth Hurley plays The Devil, who for some reason decides it's time to pick on Elliott. She offers him 7 wishes in exchange for his soul. Naturally skeptical, Elliott finally gives into the offer when confronted to win the girl of his dreams. And at this point we slip into the that age-old comedy about Men trying to figure out What Women Want. And by the time Elliott loses his soul, we've taken a quick trip through all the basic stereotypes of Men and Women, poking good natured fun at all our preconceptions. Perhaps it's not done with quite the style and panache as the 1967 version of Bedazzled. But it's a fun movie. Just don't expect to many surprises along the way. =================================== Cultural Phenomena The Grinch *** 1/2 It seems that for people of my generation, those of us who are too young to be Baby Boomers and yet too old to be Gen X'ers, the whole notion of a Currier and Ives Christmas has been replaced with a new set of cultural icons. For us, Thanksgiving is not complete with out watching "It's a Wonsderful Life" and Christmas isn't complete without watching "A Charlie Brown Christmsas" and, of course, "The Grinch Who Stole Christmas." I was a little worried when I heard that there was going to be a movie version of this classic animated feature. Too often, such efforts get the visuals correct but inject their own message into the movie that wasn't there in the original. I needn't have worried, Director Ron Howard stayed true to the spirit of the story and managed to recreate Who-ville so accurately it was scary. What's amazing to me is that the script writers worked in several of the classic scenes from the animated feature into the movie script. But the real marvel is Jim Carrey's ability to recreate the mannerisms of the cartoon Grinch. The man is truly amazing. =================================== True Story Tractor Hackers Finally, this year, as the North Carolina State Fair opened for the first time in the new millennium, I gave myself the pleasure of attending the annual Tractor Pull competition. I had been promising myself I would go for three or four years, but the other Fair events usually took up all my time. I’m a big fan of the State Fair. Farmers and Ranchers from all over the state gather at the fair grounds in Raleigh to display their livestock, their produce, and their skills at various agricultural tasks. It’s loads of fun. In one building at the fair grounds, they have displays of produce. Cabbages, tomatoes, squash, corn, okra, melons, and that specialty of North Carolina, sweet potatoes! The pumpkin exhibit was especially impressive, displaying an award winning 780 pound pumpkin, grown by a kid in his back yard. As you walk around, people are offering you free samples of their food and produce. Free peanuts, free pickles, free hush puppies, free Brunswick Stew. It was a cornucopia of free food. The livestock exhibits, though a bit smelly, are fun too. Cows, bulls, horses, goats all being judged by whatever criteria one judges these creatures by. Some had blue ribbons, some had red, some had no ribbons at all. To tell the truth, they all looked pretty much the same to me. But as I always say, “where else are you going to get an opportunity to pet a goat?” This year, I didn’t ride the Ferris Wheel, the Roller Coasters, or any of the other carnival rides. I wanted to go to the Tractor Pull instead. But I did take time to browse through the many food stands. There are some foods that, as far as I know, are only available at The State Fair. For example, I have never seen roasted corn offered at a restaurant. I have never seen funnel cakes sold anywhere else. Fried candy bars (honest, I’m not making this up) can be found no where else. My sins of gluttony were indulged at the Greek Gyro food stand and the Hot Wisconsin Fried cheese stand. Gyros, compared to the rest of the food at the State Fair, could arguably be said to be semi-healthy. But the sharp Wisconsin cheddar cheese, rolled in corn meal, deep fried, and then dipped in sour cream and jalapenos can, in no way whatsoever, be considered the least bit healthy. But it was delicious! Score one for the libertines. Pleasantly stuffed with junk food, my friend Lee and I headed for the Tractor Pull arena. It was packed. Who would have had any idea this could be so popular? The arena was an oval shaped dirt track, similar to a horse race track, but I think it was a little smaller. In the infield of the track, all the tractor pull contestants had their trucks and campers and their make-shift garages set up. Even though it was dark, you could tell there was constant activity in the infield as people worked on their trucks up until the very last minute. The stands were filled to capacity with spectators. I was pleasantly surprised at how well integrated the crowd was. The stereotype for these sorts of events would dictate that it be an all-white event, the assumption being that blacks and minorities are not welcome at such things. But, I’m pleased to say that in North Carolina at least, the stereotype is wrong. Whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Oriental people mixed and mingled politely. On the whole, the crowd was well mannered. Gap Kids were no where to be found. The brand names on clothing tended to be car and truck companies, not fashion labels. It’s a bit shocking, actually, to see such flagrant disregard for fashion mandates. It’s also extremely cool in a non-hip sort of way. Which is not to say that people were shabbily dressed. I saw plenty of well dressed ladies sporting heels, painted finger nails and make up. More than a few guys had shown up in their best western boots, buckles, and shirts. But mostly people were just being themselves not putting on appearances. Before the competition could get started, of course, we paid our respects to Our Country and Our Veterans. And I don’t mean a half-hearted rendition of the Star Spangled Banner. A local junior ROTC squad marched in the American Flag and the North Carolina flag, while “I’m proud to be an American” played over the speakers. Then we had both the Pledge of Allegiance and the Star Spangled Banner. Everyone participated, except perhaps those who had not quite yet learned enough English. I was a good sight to see. After that, we could get down to the business of the night, the Tractor Pull! The tractor pull competition rules are established by the National Tractor Pull Association. Like everyone else in the New Millennium, they have a web site which explains it all. Check out http://www.tpull.com/. I had never been to a tractor pull before, so I didn’t quite know what to expect, and I never quite picked up on all the rules. But I understood enough to follow along. It’s not a race. They don’t use the entire oval of the track. They just use the straight way in front of the stands. They divide it up into two lanes and alternate the tractor pulls between the two lanes. While a truck is making a pull in one lane, the other lane is being readied for the next tractor. The competition is not, as I had thought, about how much weight a tractor can pull, but which truck among the contestants can pull the same amount of weight the farthest. There are several classes of “Tractors” too. One class of tractor actually looks like a tractor, but the other classes of “tractors” are really heavily modified pick-up trucks. As I understand the event, the pickups are divided into two-wheel drive trucks and 4 wheel drive trucks. It is unclear to me if any of the tractor drivers get corporate sponsorships or not. One thing’s for sure, they plaster company logos all over the trucks. They all sport nifty paint jobs. To call these machine’s “tractors” requires a significant stretch of the imagination. I’m sure that none of these machines has ever spent a day in an actual field pulling farm equipment. These are machines designed from the ground up to haul tremendously heavy loads. The other interesting thing about the competition is that they don’t just dump all the weight on at once. They add it on at a steady fixed rate once the truck has started. After I thought about it, this makes sense. If you put all that weight on at once, then either the truck can pull it or it can’t. But if you add the weight at a fixed rate as the truck moves down the track, then you get to see the truck actually moving. And you get to see the tires dig their way into the dirt as the load gets heavier and heavier. You get to see the tractor slow down little by little as it tries its best to make it to the end of the 300 foot track. It’s much more photogenic that way. So each truck takes its turn at the end of the track and pulls to the end of the track until it stops. Then a laser aligned device tells the judges exactly how far the tractor pulled its load. Unlike many competitions, where the race starts out the same for all the contestants and the finisher ends in a blaze of glory, tractor pulls work the other way around. There is a big difference in the way the various trucks make it off the starting line. And you can tell right away whether the current truck has a prayer of making it to the end of the track or not. But all the trucks end up the same, a dead stand still. Also unlike many other forms of sport, it’s vitally important that the tractor driver know when to stop. Obviously the driver wants to take the truck as far as it will go. But on the other hand, there’s a real risk of destroying your engine and transmission if you don’t stop at the right time. So tractor drivers have to balance the competitive spirit against sensibility or they will ruin their investment. I saw several trucks that night which had to be towed off the track because their engine had been ruined. As each tractor takes its turn, the host of the event would tell you the name of the driver, where he was from, and a little bit about their truck pulling history. He would also tell you a little bit about the truck, how it was constructed, what made it different from the other trucks. All of this would have been very interesting, but the roar of the truck motors tended to drown it all out. Like NASCAR racing events, there is tremendous car brand loyalty among the spectators and the hosts know how to use this to get the crowd excited. The spectators might not know the driver of a particular driver, but if the tractor was of a brand they supported, they would yell for the driver like crazy. In addition to the three car companies. (Ford, Chevy, Dodge) John Deer and International Harvester were represented at the Tractor Pull. As far as this crowd is concerned, no other motor companies exist. I did not keep count, but I bet there were about one hundred pull attempts that night. And they burn a lot of fuel to go just a couple of hundred feet. Soon the entire arena was filled with a hazy smoke that slowly drifted up into the clear October sky, dimming the full moon that happened to be shining that night. I have never seen such volumes of thick black smoke spew from any sort of engine that quickly. It gave you a good sense of just how much horse power was being produced in those engines. It’s almost as much fun to watch the drivers work on their machines as it is to watch the actual pull. These are not machines you can go out to your local truck dealer an buy. These machines are as unique as the individual that built them. They are also as temperamental as person who made them. Rarely did a tractor pull up to the starting line and not need some last minute adjustments under the hood. When you think about it, this makes sense. Some skill is needed to drive the tractor down the track. You have to know how to rev up the power so your truck doesn’t flip over, you have to keep the truck going straight under the heavy load. But the real skill needed for a tractor pull is not the driving skill but the skill at putting the thing together. In order to successfully pull that amount of weight down a track, you need an extremely powerful engine, which can consume fuel and air at a much higher rate that normal machinery, and you have to have a transmission and suspension that is not going to buckle under that much torque. I thought I had nothing in common with these people. I thought that I was in an alien culture. I would not have imagined that I could sympathize so strongly with the tractor pullers. As a software engineer by trade, I spend my days thinking about abstract concepts like “protocols,” “data models” and “object oriented designs” But as I watched tractor driver diving under the hoods of their tractors just before their pull it occurred to me that these men are true craftsman. And I would even hazard a comparison between tractor drivers and software hackers. Tractor drivers build unique machines, pushing the limits of their craft in odd, interesting directions. No two tractors are the same, yet they are all designed for the same purpose. In a similar way, software hackers artisans of their craft, often inventing innovative, if odd, ways of solving the same problems. Every software hacker has his or her own style that’s evident in every line of code they write. Teams of programmers can often look at some code and tell you which team member wrote it, based on the coding style. The one big difference between software hackers and these tractor drivers is that the tractor drivers drew a crowd. People paid money to see these guys display their wares and the results of their labor. As the smoke drifted across the pale moon, I realized that my hand was instinctively grabbing at a monkey wrench that wasn’t there. ======================================= About Stuck In Traffic Stuck In Traffic is a monthly magazine dedicated to evaluating current events, examining cultural phenomena, and sharing true stories. Why "Stuck In Traffic"? Because getting stuck in traffic is good for you. It's an opportunity to think, ponder, and reflect on all things, from the personal to the global. As Robert Pirsig wrote in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, "Let's consider a reevaluation of the situation in which we assume that the stuckness now occurring, the zero of consciousness, isn't the worst of all possible situations, but the best possible situation you could be in. After all, it's exactly this stuckness that Zen Buddhists go to so much trouble to induce...." Contact Information All queries, submissions, subscription requests, comments, and hate-mail should be sent to Calvin Powers via E-mail (powers@attglibal.net). Copyright Notice Stuck In Traffic is published and copyrighted by Calvin Powers who reserves all rights. Individual articles are copyrighted by their respective authors. Unsigned articles are authored by Calvin Powers. Availability The Web based version of Stuck In Traffic can be found at http://www.StuckInTraffic.com/ To subscribe to the free e-mail edition of Stuck In Traffic, go to http://www.onelist.com/community/StuckInTraffic Trades If you publish a 'zine and would like to trade issues or ad-space, send your zine or ad to either address above. Alliances Stuck in Traffic supports the Blue Ribbon Campaign for free speech online. See http://www.eff.org/blueribbon.html for more information. 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