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I’m very nervous about tomorrow’s elections in the U.S.  In a sane world, this would be a cake walk for the Democrats.  All economic indicators are up.  Nobody in the U.S. is getting Ebola.  And all the Republicans do is scream about abortion and propose bills that  would  criminalize miscarriages, block appointments, threaten to cause more problems with Obamacare, and try to cut social security, while removing environmental regulations.  They are pro-pollution, pro-war, and corrupt as the day is long.  Mitch McConnell has committed at least one felony this week, and that’s not counting the cocaine found on his father-in-laws boat.

Nice lady springing her violent psychopath son and his even zanier friend out of the loony bin

Yet all the pollsters expect them to do well.  I’ve got my fingers crossed that the pollsters are wrong, that we take Kentucky and Georgia and hang onto Iowa, but there’s nothing more I can say.

So, I’ll just give you a movie review.  Just watched Silver Linings Playbook with Helena.  She didn’t really stay entirely awake for the whole thing, but I’m used to that.  Doesn’t necessarily make it a bad movie.

I don’t know why but I was expecting a romantic comedy.  Through the first scene in group therapy, I kept waiting for something funny to happen, especially with all the cryptic references to ‘the incident,’ but then they flashed back to the incident and, oh, I see, nothing particularly comical about this  film at all, except maybe in a David Lynch lite  kind of way.

By the Shakespearean definition  you could call it a comedy because nobody got killed, except Tommy, and he was dead before the film started and didn’t have too much to do with the whole thing except for being the whole reason Jennifer Lawrence was crazy.

In fact, it did fit the modern format of a romantic comedy, from meeting under comical circumstances, to lots of over the top arguments, to winning the  dance contest (well, they  only got a 5 and none of the other contestants could understand why they were cheering that but it meant they won the bet and Robert de Niro got to keep his restaurant and then Bradley Cooper told Jennifer Lawrence that he was in love with her after all and they lived happily ever after.

So, except for all the dark, depressing shit about violence, and delusion, and neuroses, and people taking advantage of each other, and except for the ridiculous message that betting your whole life savings on a football game is not a bad idea if you have totally got all your lucky charms figured out, it would have worked O.K. as a comedy.

As is, I give it about a 7.5, maybe an 8.  It was original, it was different, and the acting was great.

Cheerleaders from 3 NFL teams: the Buffalo Bills, the Oakland Raiders and the Cincinnatti Bengals have sued their teams for paying them less than minimum wage.  Significantly less.

I hope they win.  They are treating them like waitresses, except nobody tips the cheerleaders, and I also think it’s wrong that there’s an exception to minimum wage laws for wait staff.  Originally, tipping meant they got a little bit extra, it made it a pretty good job.  By paying them less than minimum wage, it means they NEED those tips and get snippy with customers in those instances when, for whatever reason,  they’re not forthcoming.

But cheerleaders!  They are a big part of the entertainment at a football game.  They are professionals.  They are uniquely qualified.  Admittedly, a quarterback would be harder to replace than a cheerleader, but not just any girl off the street could do it.  To start with, you need to be mega-hot.  Secondly, you have to have at least enough athleticism to jump up and down for an hour, probably closer to two, and enough dedication to memorize a few choreographed routines.

I’m not saying they need to get player like salaries.  A couple million bucks  a year would be a bit much for  what they do, but less than minimum wage is absurd.  They put in hours.  They attend practices.  They do shlocky PR events in shopping malls and sometimes don’t get paid for it at all.

The way things stand now, cheerleaders make less than the hot dog vendors, less than the janitors and groundskeepers, less than the ticket takers, and that’s not  right.

Also, while we’re at it – why is the NFL tax exempt?  Seriously, it is.

The mind’s going to boggle either way.  Either the universe and time itself was created in a big bang several billion years ago, and neither time nor space existed before that, as Neil DeGrasse Tyson keeps telling us, or, as I think, there had to be, before the big bang, other big bangs, and so far back into forever, ad infinitum, turtles all the way down.

(There might also be parallel universes and stuff, but I’m not even going to get into that here.  Some day, but for probably the next few thousand years or so, this universe will be enough.)

See, they keep saying time did not exist before the big bang, but I don’t see it that way.  Time is a term people use for the measurement of time, which is arbitrary, but it is a man made concept for measuring something that does exist.  Therefore, it exists.  And since it is an abstract concept, it existed just as much at a time before matter or energy or consciousnesses.

There was one second before the big bang, and there was a hundred years before the big bang.  Just because there was no consciousness to perceive it, no energy or matter for it to affect, doesn’t mean that amount of time didn’t pass, from the end of the last universe to the beginning of our own.

But, either way, there are vastnesses which are logically and emotionally incomprehensible to us.  The mind boggles.

Most of America’s ‘pundits,’ a class of people who apparently get paid money to guess about stuff even though their track record is no better than your crazy neighbor, seem to think that Lindsey Graham ( R-SC) committed a major gaffe when he was recorded as saying “white guys in male-only clubs are going to do great when I’m president,’  at a gathering of white males.

Lindsey “never going to be President anyway” Graham

I don’t think so.  Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think Lindsey Graham would make a good president and I don’t think he ever will be president, but as long as we’re just talking horse race, he didn’t hurt his chances at all if he decides to run.

Since he’s not actually a candidate for president at this point, this will all be quickly forgotten.  Most people are more focused on the elections coming up Tuesday.  For that matter, people are more focused on Halloween than on anything Lindsey Graham said.

Also, he seems to be fairly successfully playing it off as just a joke.  He did not try to deny making the comment.  That’s smart.

Third, there is his base…I mean his real base, not the ignorant bozos who vote for him because years of listening to Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and worse have convinced them that Democrats are in league with Satan.  I’m talking about the wealthy donors.  He just told them they’d do great, and they knew exactly what he meant.

I hope I’m wrong.  I’d be very happy if his comment sparked a tsunami of outrage, destroying his career.  But I’m not holding my breath.

Casey Nocket is an aspiring young artist from New York City.  She is also a nature lover, so it is no surprise that she wanted to tour America’s magnificent natural parks.  Yosemite, Crater Lake, the Grand Canyon, Zion, places luck that.  She is a groundbreaking, unconventional artist, not to be limited to

Acrylic on Rock, overlooking Crater Lake

painting landscapes on canvas.  Casey Nocket decided to paint directly on the rocks.

She was so knocked out by her own artistic genius that she took photos of her colorful work, her addition to the natural landscape.  She posted those photos to Instagram.  Other people saw them and shared them to  places like Reddit and facebook.  Soon, many people had seen Casey’s art.

Some people did not appreciate her vision.  Some people called it ‘graffiti’ (because it’s graffiti) and ‘vandalism’ (because it’s vandalism).  Some people even reported her to the police,  who should have no trouble finding her, because she’s all over the internet.

Poor Casey.  “Maybe next time I’ll just paint on the tombstones in a cemetery,” she said.  “Maybe then people won’t get so excited.”

No, Casey.  Maybe next time you should try actually painting something on canvas.  If you are any good (which you are not) people will want to look at it.  And our natural heritage will be preserved.