Tomorrow is Blog Action Day 2008. That’s a day when folks across the blogosphere take a respite from their normal topics and talk about a common cause. This year, that cause is poverty.

I was all set to write a screed about how evil it is to feed X pounds of feed to a cow to get a pound of beef, to a pig to get a pound of pork and so on. I started looking around the Web to get some numbers to fill in there and I found animal rights folks saying one thing and meat producers saying another. Now I’d be lying if I said I gave both of those equal weight but you know what? I think we’re just talking past each other.

We’re all mammals here (or so I assume, apologies to any visitors from Alpha Centari) and we eat food. Different kinds of food probably but food none the less. If you eat a pound of food do you gain a pound of weight? I doubt it. Some calories get burned off just through normal life processes, like keeping your heart beating, your brain going and your last meal digesting. And you probably got some exercise. Maybe not a lot but you walked around a little, maybe climbed some steps, picked something up. All that takes energy. And that energy comes from your food.

It’s not that much different for a cow, a pig or a chicken for that matter. As a side note, any bird keepers out there know, the phrase “eat like a bird” was not coined by anyone who had to feed a bird. No matter how horrible the conditions they suffer under, animals burn calories. Those are calories that are not being used by a person, potentially a poor person who needs those calories to live.

If we can cut out the middleman, we can provide more food to people around the world. And until all people have enough to eat, how can we justify giving the food to animals just so the “modern” world can get a hamburger?

When the District of Columbia went to the polls in September for their primary, things were a little more interesting than most folks recognized at the time. 326 people voted at the Reeves Center precinct but when the computer media containing their votes was inserted into the counting computer, 1,500 write-in ballots appeared.

DC authorities have investigated and the answer? Static. Yep, like one DC Council member said, “You mean if I’m rubbing my shoes on the way to vote, I’m going to upset the entire voting process in the District of Columbia and then the nation?” Yes, and if you can sneak a cat and a balloon into your polling place, you can bring down the entire free world. Or something like that.

Have a good weekend everybody!

I listened to the VP debate last night while I was in the kitchen making lunch for today so I wasn’t always paying the closest of attention. But I thought I heard Senator Biden say something and then I was able to confirm it by looking at the NYT’s transcript of the debate. It passed unremarked at the time so I wasn’t sure if I had just heard wrong or what. Here’s the comment:

When we kicked — along with France, we kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon, I said and Barack said, “Move NATO forces in there. Fill the vacuum, because if you don’t know — if you don’t, Hezbollah will control it.”

Now what’s happened? Hezbollah is a legitimate part of the government in the country immediately to the north of Israel.

You mean America, and France, have gone to war in Lebanon and no one noticed? I’m sorry but that seems like a pretty major thing to have missed. And this is the guy who’s supposed to be the foreign policy expert? The only time I can remember us in Lebanon was 1982 which sadly led to a number of dead Marines and us beating a rather hasty retreat. Certainly not “kicked Hezbollah out”. And as Senator Obama was a student at Columbia at that time, he probably wasn’t being asked for his opinion of it.

So what was Senator Binden thinking? I honestly can’t figure it out. As far as I can tell, no one has kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon, hence the second paragraph of the remarks. So it’s not that. Maybe he meant Syria got kicked out? Well, they kind of did but it certainly wasn’t us or the French who did it. That was the Lebanese people. Remember the Cedar Revolution?

Bottom Line for me, I’m sticking with Cthulhu in ‘08. Why settle for the lesser evil?

That’s the headline on a BBC story. But before you start eying your gin and tonic suspiciously, take a look at the list of ingredients her ‘cocktail’ contained. Baileys, chilli, tequila, absinthe, ouzo, vodka, cider and gin. I’m sorry but I count enough stuff in there for at least three different drinks. Letting the guy behind the bar dump the last little bit of what ever he has back there in your glass just isn’t a good idea. A chemical reaction the doctors are calling it. I’d say we’re lucky it wasn’t a nuclear reaction! I’ll be sticking with my Floradora’s, thank you very much.