DrBacchus' Journal

I'm going to be in New Orleans on election day, at ApacheCon, so today I went down to the County Clerk office and cast my vote for the president of the United States, as well as a variety of local elections.

This year, I was (I think) rather well informed about our national races - the president, the senate, and the congress - but woefully ignorant about the local races. And, really, what difference does it actually make who the commissioner of soil and water is, and why is this an elected position?

It's ironic that one of my biggest complaints about the national government is how much power is at the federal level, rather than at the state level, yet when I had a chance to affect the composition of the state supreme court, I was utterly uninformed. It's so very hard to follow what's going on in local politics when really the only local media outlet is the Herald Leader, which is so completely biased on every issue it's almost impossible to get a balanced view of anything.

Perhaps I'll do better next time.

Today I attended the Kentucky Bourbon Festival with Greg Stein and Bruno Bowden. We attended the Barrel Rolling contest, which was amazing. Men and women who work in the distilleries compete to see how fast they can roll full Bourbon barrels around a track of wooden rails, and roll them into a chute such that they reach the end with the rubber bung pointing up - so they have to know which end up they need to be when they go into the chute.

It was just amazing how fast these folks were. I left to come home before it was all over, but stayed long enough to see the mens' individual, women's individual, and the womens' team event.

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The Wilmore Daily Photo is now on City Daily Photo.

The Song
10-Aug-2008
Via Three Word Wednesday

The rumble of the generator,
unnoticed for its ubiquity,
suddenly ceased, leaving a palpable
silence, my ears full of cattails and kapok,
the pitch well of the night suddenly
towering above me, my hands invisible
before my face.

And as my stunned eyes, long dazzled
by the shriek of the city,
recovered, a miracle
burst forth overhead.
A million, trillion stars,
unnoticed in the fluorescent cacophony,
turned the sky into a spilled puddle of milk,
understanding for the first time
the Via Lactea - the Milky Way -
unseen by most of us in this over-enlightened age.

Down by the river
the bullfrog adjusts his harmony
to compensate for the missing generator,
and the song goes on.