Wow, what an experience.

The primary's over, but it looks like i'm still going to be on the still pace for the next month or two; won't be back in the state until the 29th, so there probably won't be alot of time for blogging.

In a way though, that's probably a good thing considering how discourse is different in real life than on the virtual life of the internet, there was a good article on Slate the other day about it.

Things might change, but it's good to talk to you all again.

Hi all,

Things have been hectic, but I just wanted to say that i'll try to come back on a regular basis in a few weeks (55 hour/7 day/500 mile weeks take alot out of you), but before I go, I wanted to respond to Rick's post in regards to the tolls here in Merrimack.

Rick is right in regards to the feeling that Merrimack residents have towards the rest of New Hampshire, that since we're wedged in between the largest and second largest cities, we're easily exploited and ignored. 3 of the state's 10 tollbooths are in Merrimack. We have several superfund sites, one of which was ignored for years until a certain ex-Congressman was up for re-election.

This sort of outlook is common in town considering that we've only had one real advocate in the past decade who didn't call 03054 their zip code, and no, it wasn't Craig Benson, who did little more during his term than that one photo op Rick alluded to, but our current Executive Councillor, Deb Pignatelli.

Councillor Pignatelli's efforts on trying to get toll relief have been widely documented, ranging from the Boston Globe, the Union Leader,and New Hampshire Public Radio, just to name a few.

But, as the hopelessness is palpable, and there seems to be no way to defeat it.

In my opinion, the only way we'll ever get a solution is to change the mindset that used to be the norm in the Granite State and is thankfully slowly fading away: the whole  "You're on your own" mentality. I'd like to say that that mentality is just on the right, but while it's definately a key part of consevatism, Democrats from elsewhere in the state have not been much better in helping alleviate the toll injustice we face in Merrimack.

In the end, it's not a partisan issue, but one of geography and political convenience. Merrimack retains its mentality as an amalgam of three towns that merged in the 1850s (Reed's Ferry, Thornton's Ferry and Souhegan Village), and its officials and citizens have not been able to remove that mindset and unite as a political force to stand up to the demographically superior neighbors to the northeast and south that have no problem taking advantage of differences.

Although I try to bring people together rather than divide them, irregardless of differences in politics or geography or anything else, this place has shown me that I often can't do that under the stress of the internet as I am now. There are already enough divisive voices out there, and I do not want to be another one.

Good post on Blue Hampshire reiterating what I said a few weeks ago.

Bob, the benefactor for NH Insider is right, BNN is a good tool to publicize the site. Still, I can't accept BNN as an objective tool for NH blog rankings until all of this shadowy business is fleshed out about what BNN is there to accomplish, considering that NH Insider Bloggers are consistently at the top of the rankings, but the Concord Monitor says that BNN calls Granite Grok #1.

The title of this post is also the current population of the US(302,141,520) estimated by the Census Department times 24, or how many hours we as a nation have to spend in one day.

A third of those hours (2,417,132,160), will be spent on sleeping, assuming that the average American doesn't deviate very far from the average human sleep cycle of 8 hours. Another 8 hours will be spent at work/school/whatever on average, and let's for the sake of argument assume that doesn't deviate too far.

And let us also oversimplify and not include the youngest third and the oldest third of the population in this equation, just for the ease of doing the math here, so we'd only be including the 8 hours of free time in the median third of the US population.

That ends up as 1,595,307,226 hours.  Or, if you put them end to end, 182,112.7 years.

That is a powerful number right there: only a third of the day of a third of our population combined equals about 40 times longer than human history.

It's just mindboggling. I mean, if that third of our population could somehow combine into one person for that 8 hours a day, we could theoretically construct the Empire State Building in about 6 minutes and 20 seconds, build the Panama Canal in a little more than 18 minutes, or complete the Apollo Program in around 9 days and 16 hours

Theory doesn't always work in reality, and that theory definately wouldn't. People need relaxation, and they have different views and priorities so there is no way that number could ever be achieved, and even then, the logistics of trying to get 100,000,000 people in one place to build a skyscraper in 6 minutes would probably take far longer that it would to build the skyscraper in the first place, as well as the fact that what a brain surgeon can achieve in their time is alot different than what a minimum wage employee can achieve in their time, so not all of those hours would equal the same thing.

Still, I find those garguantan numbers comforting when people tell me all the time that they don't have enough time and there aren't any solutions to the problems we face as a nation today. It's easy to forget that great things can be accomplished when you're preoccupied with small things.

After all, we as a nation have more than 7 billion hours every day once you realize that you as a citizen realize that you're not alone out there.  

I figured i'd respond to the other two posts with that title considering that one of them was yet another attempt at voter discrimation by the far right wing operatives, and that polls deserve alot more praise than what they get from reactionary forces looking to blame something.

 There's only one poll that's a completely accurate depiction of the public's opinion when it comes to government, and that's at the end of election day(although even those aren't always completely accurate, as we saw with electronic voting vote stealing in 2004 and the hanging chads of 2000). However, human beings like to know how they're doing.

Scoreboards, report cards, speedometers, scales.... Our world is permeated with measurement of how we progress. Why would politics be any different? 

The only problem with polls is that when it comes to how we view politics, they should be a map rather than a compass. There's always more than one way to get to a destination, and more often than not we're coming from different places, but polls and surveys and other tools used to gauge public sentiment are just ways we can get a good idea of what public opinion looks like right now.

And even then, those "maps", like other maps, are just representations of something in reality, and not all representations of reality correspond exactly to reality, particularly with the rapidly changing sentiments of public opinion.