I've experienced a political confluence since some of the bloggers from the UK wrote about the recent election, and this past weekend, two friends of mine ran for local political office to keep their seats as city council members.
My friends both won, partly because of my considerable influence in the local political landscape and also because they ran unopposed. For the UK readers, I had nothing to do with David Cameron's win.
After thousands of years voting has not changed all that much, computerized touchscreen voting booths with smartcard ballots were used this past weekend. It's written in ancient sources that ancient Greeks used a large show of hands to vote and that an estimator (who I'm certain was impartial in every vote) tallied it all up.
Romans were fond of giving everyone black and white pebbles so the voter could drop the color representing their choice into a voting pot. I wonder if when exiting the polling place (comitia), there were laws about not checking the pockets of voters? A candidate's thugs might have threatened to beat the tar out of people who still had the 'wrong' stone in their possession.
But luckily, the pot and stoner voting (smoothly increasing hits, oops there's another one) was usually used to pass or repeal laws instead of candidate selection. Leges Tabellariae moved the ancients away from pebbles and into paper or lead tablets for the votes, at which time the ancient Romans sneered at the slightly more ancient Romans and called them animals.
After thousands of years voting has not changed all that much, computerized touchscreen voting booths with smartcard ballots were used this past weekend. It's written in ancient sources that ancient Greeks used a large show of hands to vote and that an estimator (who I'm certain was impartial in every vote) tallied it all up.
Romans were fond of giving everyone black and white pebbles so the voter could drop the color representing their choice into a voting pot. I wonder if when exiting the polling place (comitia), there were laws about not checking the pockets of voters? A candidate's thugs might have threatened to beat the tar out of people who still had the 'wrong' stone in their possession.
But luckily, the pot and stoner voting (smoothly increasing hits, oops there's another one) was usually used to pass or repeal laws instead of candidate selection. Leges Tabellariae moved the ancients away from pebbles and into paper or lead tablets for the votes, at which time the ancient Romans sneered at the slightly more ancient Romans and called them animals.
To change topics completely, has anyone ever had a sunburn so painful, it feels like you are floating down a 'lazy river' of fire on your back? Or maybe two hundred midgets are putting out their cigarettes on your back simultaneously?
I was out working on stone this weekend and forgot to wear a shirt, or sunscreen. And I'm paying for it now, still, dearly. Normally I notice the sun starting to affect me, but the cool wind kept me unaware that outside was actually a convection oven.
