Good-bye Athena account. You were fun while you lasted. You provided convenient storage and ubiquitous access while I needed it, social networking mechanisms until I didn't, and a short-and-sweet e-mail access that slowly gathered more and more junk mail. My user ID and Kerberos principal will probably still linger on, but those will be distant memories in my mind in a few years. So long.

Getting back to Earth, I quite literally talked to a thousand people yesterday, which means my voice was dropping out around six or seven o'clock. Voter turnout was fantastic. In the precinct that I worked there were about 1400 votes out of a voting population of about 2000. By the end of the night I was quite exhausted and non-functional, though part of that could be attributed to my waking up at two in the morning the night before and not able to get back to sleep. By five I just gave up and started my morning routine in preparation to arrive at the polls by 6:30.

And now Massachusetts has a Republican senator again. I'm not a big fan of Scott Brown, but I'm taking a wait-and-see approach. Also I don't want to sleep with Brown or Coakley, but I was amused by Brian McGrory's column in the Globe comparing the election to a bad weekend hangover. "Oh, you bad boy. You bad, bad boy."

Addendum: the cheap-ass umbrella I bought from CVS a week ago? It died in yesterday's icky-but-surely-not-windy weather. Maybe I should really go for the "Unbreakable Walking-Stick Umbrella" (video also on Youtube). But it's not foldable :(

jadia told me last night that Bush had told China pretty bluntly to be more like Taiwan. I was incredulous, but sure enough, we found the article about it in the Globe.

• Be more like Taiwan, Bush urges Beijing (The Guardian)
• Bush urges Chinese to grant more freedom (The Boston Globe)

In other news, I got an unlabeled pack of little anchovies (anchovy fry? maybe it's some other fish) from the Lotte Mart across the street from Random. It's been years since I've seen them and they make me so happy ^_^ And I discovered that Chinese okra is probably much better if you peel it.

Rumor has it that the Communist Party of China is preparing a panda and a golden monkey as gifts following talks with the chairmen of the Nationalist and People First parties in Taiwan. Of course, there is now a petition out to protest the use of endangered species for political reasons (in Chinese):

抗議政治人物拿動物的生命當贈禮 讓貓熊及金絲猴留在牠原有的棲息地

There is even talk of returning the favor with native monkeys of Taiwan! What will politicians think of next?