Assemble in the same place (ideally one small suburban den) one fairly well-exposed power strip and approximately six to eight ounces of soda.

Add two active children. Stirring is not required, as they are entirely self-agitating.

All ingredients will naturally begin to mix together. Recipe yields one baked broadband router power supply. For added zest, ensure that the replacement part is no longer made in this hemisphere, and that any loaned network equipment from neighbors do not seem to play nice with your ISP. Sprinkle liberally with curses. Serves an entire family for a weekend.

When one entertains the thought of briskly serving up a portion of shoe leather to the hindquarters of a fellow living creature, it’s usually in the context of smaller, younger, annoying individuals who so richly deserve their Shinola suppository. As such, I was surprised to find myself thinking about dishing out a dose to a septuagenarian woman at my local supermarket.

I don’t normally think about kicking old women into the gutter, despite anything you may have read on the police blotter, but this one really raised my ire, because, in a trice, she represented an entire class of people who deserve every ounce of contempt my little black heart can muster. Who are these scoundrels? Who is it that causes the spontaneous ignition of my tinder-dry hatred? People who don’t vote, that’s who.

Some punk kid (gloriously, I am now old enough to start using that term) had been hired by unknown parties to loiter in front of the supermarket and ask everyone exiting the building whether or not they were registered to vote. He was armed with a pocketful of pens and a number of voter registration forms rubber-banded to a clipboard. I detected no campaign materials of any kind about his person, and, later, when he asked me if I was registered to vote, he made no attempt to solicit my opinion on any political matter, or, indeed, to make any kind of small talk.

I was outside talking on the phone, prior to my search for comestibles, and the fellow was doing his job, asking people if they were registered to vote. My attention was initially absorbed elsewhere, but I couldn’t help listening to this crone’s loud, vehement responses to this most nobly civic-minded of questions. After she replied that she wasn’t registered to vote, he tried, of course, to get her onto the rolls. Their exchange went like this:

Vote Guy: "It only takes a minute to register, ma’am."
Crone: "No! I said NO, damnit!"
Vote Guy: "OK, I’m sorry."
Crone: "I’m NOT going to vote", she screeched, "and I said NO, NO, NO!"

After screaming at this poor guy, who hadn’t been in her face or anything, she angrily pushed her cart away as fast as her wrinkled, scabrous legs could possibly manage the task. Whatever the hell her problem was, I don’t know. Perhaps she’d been gang-raped by a roving band of precinct captains as a youth, or suffered from an acute allergy to patriotic bunting. Instead of these somewhat more fanciful theories, though, I posit instead that she was simply a raging bitch. This was reason enough to administer a hardy measure of pedal kinesis to her ossified haunches, but why such an extreme reaction to voting?

I thought about this as I purchased my groceries. On the way out, the kid asked me if I was registered to vote, and I proudly affirmed this. I stopped my cart and made an idle comment about his shabby treatment at the hands of the old hag, to which he responded with a politely noncommital smile and shrug. I asked him how many people blow him off or refuse to register. He quoted a figure of 30%. I didn’t dig any deeper to find out how that broke down between those who just ignored him and those miserable failures who decline to do their duty, though I think it’s reasonable to assume that a large amount of the latter would be counted among the former.

Thirty percent! Pretty much one in three. Astounding. Yet even this figure pales in comparison with the statistics showing that only 51.3% of us, nationwide, could actually be bothered to drag their fucking carcasses to the booths. (Proud Minnesota had the best showing, at 69.8%, while the slackass Hawaiians brought up the rear with a shameful 40.5%). Overall, that’s pretty messed up, given the importance of voting. That’s right, it’s Important, with a capital "I", but too many people just don’t get that message. Are you one of them?

If so, maybe you don’t vote because you think "my vote doesn’t count". Well, since the last Presidential election was decided by a margin of only 537 votes, that rather blows your excuse out of the water, doesn’t it? Maybe you don’t vote becase "they’re all corrupt, and it doesn’t matter who wins". Did you ever stop to think that maybe if we all actually paid attention to candidates and the issues, we might stand a chance of weeding out some of these losers? Some people pay far more attention to whether or not the beans in their six-dollar cup of coffee came from Popayan or Narino. "I’m too lazy" really doesn’t sound like a good excuse, does it?

Then there’s my personal favorite, "politics doesn’t affect my life anyway". Sure, right, like the politics that founded this country that gave you the unfortunate right to think that. The politics that created the laws to give you that bullshit parking ticket, make you pay taxes, and stand in line at the DMV. The politics that ultimately allow you to watch porn, drink beer on the Sabbath as you kick back in front of the TV, or not have to worry about your door being kicked in by the police because you practice the wrong religion. The politics that created the stable foundation that lead to enough freedom and wealth so that you can sit on your can, reading this website on the technological marvel that is your computer, from the comfort of wherever it is you are. Sure, politics don’t affect your life at all, no sir.

I’ll cut to the point. Get your ass out there and VOTE in November, because otherwise, someday, you’re in for a rather nasty surprise when the rest of us show up at your door for National Fucking You With Steak Knives Day and all you can recall, in your bewilderment, is that you tuned out last week on some hazy notion of people discussing something boring like kitchen utensils.

I’ll be the one ringing your bell.

It’s so chillingly obvious, that the Global Conspiracy, in their various guises of the Illuminati, alien Greys, FEMA, the IRS, the Communists, Zionists, and the Bilderbergers have been able to hide it for decades in plain sight .

Just an innocent southern Asian rice dish, or something far more sinister? The connection is clear, when they’re displayed side by side. There is no recorded instance of them having been seen together in public. Why have our "elected" officials remained silent, despite the evidence? What don’t they want you to know?

Somewhere in my neighborhood, right now, a man is committing a vile crime against the community, singing in what sounds like Tagalog to accordion music blaring from a karaoke machine. This, in and of itself, is not the crime. The outrage is that his rig is loud, and his singing is very, very, very bad. He is enthusiastic, but sounds as if he is both drunk and severely wounded. It’s more of an ululating howl accompanied by music. If, after tonight’s posts, I am not heard from again, it is because I have done the Right Thing for the community and violently silenced him, resulting in my incarceration.

While investigating a customer problem today, I came across a really odd student name: Jumulak. It was this kid’s middle name. Now, if his first and surnames had been similarly strange, I would have chalked it up to somebody from foreign lands, but "Kevin J. Eklund" is quite whitebread, with just a hint of Norse influence.

Intruiged, I Googled "jumulak". All that mighty search engine could find was the name of a French show dog ("Odal’s jumulak de volotchanka rusalki", there’s a mouthful), and the fact that the Warruwi region in northern Australia holds a Jumulak festival during Naidoc Week.

While I’m sure Odal’s jumulak de volotchanka rusalki is a fine beast indeed, and the Warruwi Jumulak Festival is not to be missed if you happen to be there during Naidoc week, it didn’t bring me any closer to a full comprehension of the reasoning behind this exotic moniker. Was the kid named after a Frenchman’s Australian dog? Just one of those weird things, I guess.

(The student’s full name was changed slightly to protect his privacy. Except his inexplicable middle name.)

It’s part of my job to sift through titanic amounts of customer data, looking for malformed records, missing values, or other such database gremlins and freaks that cause so much consternation to administrators, to say nothing of the hapless users who generally have to be led by the nose to find the Enter key. One side effect of this is that, as the application I support is used exclusively by educational institutions, I have gained much insight into how schools have been conducting their grave affair of molding the flower of our republic, the Leaders of Tomorrow’s World. Let me just state for the record that Tomorrow’s World may well be doomed.

I’m sure you, gentle reader, have heard the asinine stories of kids having to lug around 40 pounds of books because the lockers were removed because drugs might be hidden there. I’m sure that cured those schools’ drug problems. Too bad all those 10-year-olds are now on Vicodin to help with their chronic back problems, but that’s okay, because officially dispensed psychoactive drugs for kids are A-OK, at least in some circles (that’s a good article, by the way, and fairly well balanced). One of my colleagues had a chat with a school IT director who told her that all the lockers were removed "because some kids left food in them". What, were whole raw squids being left in them? Do janitor contracts now include a "no icky things" clause? The mind boggles.

Some of these schools have some seriously messed up schedules. Back in the lost mists of time when I matriculated through my state’s public school system, we had eight periods in our high school day. Four morning classes, lunch, four afternoon classes, and then you went home, if you were a slugabout like I was, with no standing extracurricular obligations like band practice, football, or a willing and attractive member of the opposite gender. Well, for high school, most people were content to stop at willing, but I digress.

One school I had the displeasure of dealing with used nine rotating days and twenty-five periods. Instead of a kid being able to rely on, say, always having Biology after lunch in 5th period, they have a Biology class where the "period" on the schedule looks like: 14-16(A,B,E) 7, 10-14(C) 2,3(D) 20-25(H). That’s one class. A through H are the days that they rotate in sequence, so that alphanumeric jumble means that this poor, defenseless child has Biology in periods 14-16 on A, B, and E days, 10-14 on C days, and so on and so forth, and, again, that’s just for one freakin’ class It’s a wonder they know which room they should be in (assuming that they do). Good grief.

I asked a former teacher I work with about that, and she said that these schedules are usually derived by the unholy interaction between two camps: school administrators and parents. The administrators have lots of degrees and theory, but haven’t ever taught a day in their lives. They pick up the idea, say, that "children learn math better after lunch when taught in two-hour blocks" from some highfalutin University study, so they implement it. Well, then parents hear this, and just shrug, until they hear that their kid has been scheduled for a morning math class, because, let’s face it, there aren’t enough math teacher to teach everyone at once. "How dare you!" they fulminate. "Why should our children be punished?", they say. "You’ve set our children up to fail!" The administrators are then forced to juggle things around so everybody gets a little slice of the after-lunch math class, nobody gets the full effect of the already dubious theory, the schedules are incredibly complex, and nobody is really happy.

Then there’s the places that have just plain bizarre concepts, like having three semesters (what?) and four trimesters. I kid you not. I’ve seen it myself. Or the guy with the title of Technology Director for a district of 10,000 students who has to have the advanced concept of the right-click explained to him. Repeatedly. For fifteen minutes straight. Or the database administrator who, when asked if she was on the Mac or Windows platform, said that she didn’t know. Where do they find these people? How did they get their jobs? I have no idea.

They’re doomed. DOOMED, I tell you!