Our friends Bart and Heather drove to Kansas City last week to see us and, coincidentally, also had tickets to see The Police. I'm sure we were the higher priority, but we'll take what we can get. They emailed me yesterday and told me about Bart's life-changing haircut over the weekend.

Bart says, "that while getting my haircut over the weekend, I told my stylist about the The Police concert. When she finished my hair, she turned me around in the chair to see how it looked. At that point I told her that I was really impressed with the ultra-cool picture of Sting she had hanging over her mirror. She laughed and said, 'That is no picture of Sting, that’s an ultra-cool picture of you!'"

Heather explains, "Oh brother. This all stems from when Bart was 15 years old and a girl in a record store told him he looked like Sting. Oh, the things we cling to from our youth."

The haircut lead to an afternoon amateur photo shoot of Bart posing as Sting. There is a wee bit of a resemblance, I admit, but I'll let you be the judge. :-)

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Last week we went to see The Police at the Sprint Center who are on the North American leg of their impressive Lets-Get-Back-Together-Because-We-Can-Make-a-Bazillion-Dollars Tour. Unsurprisingly, they were still really good.

What was surprising was that Sting didn’t mention his name once, instead giving all his onstage props to guitarist Andy Summer and drummer Stewart Copeland. Considering that The Police broke up because Sting’s head got big enough to fill a stadium on its own, he probably talked them into doing the tour by saying that he’s more humble now and that it’ll be all about you guys and the band - not me.” Well, that and the bazillion dollars.

I have three observations. The first is that Sting is tiny, but in remarkably good shape for a man his age. The second is that out of the thousands of people there I counted less than five people under 30 years old. That may have something to do with the ticket prices as much as the era The Police are from. The third observation is that Sting named the name of the city he was in correctly: Kansas City, Missouri.

Three weeks ago we saw Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová perform at The Uptown Theater. They’re Irish and had never been to Kansas City and were on a tour promoting their Academy Award winning album “The Swell Season” from the movie “Once”. In his thick Dublin drawl, Glen proudly said that it was great to be in Kansas. After a low chorus of grumbling from the audience he was corrected by someone and said, “Missouri? Kansas City is in Missouri?” There was a bit more confusion as someone pointed out that there is a Kansas City, Kansas, too.

This identity problem extends beyond bands, too. In the early 1990s, I remember there was a brief flap when Alex Trebek during an episode of “Jeopardy!” gave an answer for his contestants: “This city is a suburb of Kansas City, Missouri” with the correct answer being “Kansas City, Kansas” as though it were a novel trivia question. The Kansas-side people weren’t happy being called a suburb.

A Modest Proposal

All of this points to a deeper problem of having a city name that is the same as that of another state. People know that New York City is in New York. By the same logic, Kansas City should be in Kansas, which it is, except for the other Kansas City.

Kansas City, Missouri should change it’s name to Missouri City, Missouri. The problem is that a Missouri City exists already. This small town, however, was originally called Atchison, which I propose is what it should revert back to again. This, in turn, would create confusion with Atchison, Kansas, a city named for a Missouri Senator. So if we rename Atchison, Kansas… Oh, nevermind.

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I went to see Jim Slattery launch his bid to become a U.S. Senator for Kansas yesterday at the KU Edwards campus in Overland Park. He was doing a whirlwind announcement beginning the day in Topeka, then Wyandotte County, and later in the day in Wichita. I asked him if he planned on breaking speed limits to race from one place to another and he laughed and said, “that’s what planes are for.” Of course.

I had never been to an event like this before. When I arrived, the cameras were still setting up and the TV camera people unapologetically placed themselves in front of everyone who had come to see him speak. I guess there’s some logic to it, seeing as how more people would see this on TV than in person, but I wondered if fewer people come to live speeches because the experience is so overwhelmingly one of standing behind a mountain of A.V. equipment.

By the time the event started there were maybe 50-60 people there including his family and a couple of staff members. He was introduced by Lt. Governor Mark Parkinson who talked, unsurprisingly, about the need for change. Then, flanked on his sides by his family, Jim Slattery spoke convincingly about how since he’s been out of politics things have gone to hell in a handbasket (my words, not his) and we needed to tackle the national debt and handle national security better.

Later in the day, I heard that Senator Pat Roberts, who is seeking his third Senate term, issued an ad criticizing Slattery for his work as a lobbyist in Washington. “He stopped working for Kansas 14 years ago and made millions for himself,” the ad says.

But I can tell you first-hand that’s not true.

The company I work for, based in Overland Park, contacted Jim Slattery three years ago to help us. We designed a radical new technology called Air2Air that helps power plants conserve large amounts of water. But the technology we designed is really big and no customer wants to spend a few million dollars on something that’s never been built before no matter how promising the science is.

We asked Jim Slattery to help us because we’d heard that he helps out Kansas companies.

Jim’s work in Washington helped raise the issue of water conservation and the importance of sustainable water supplies, resulting in stronger incentives for water conservation in the Energy Act of 2005.  Subsequently, we successfully received a grant from the DOE to perform a test of this technology in a full-sized power plant.

It was a fantastic success and now we have inquiries and requests from all over the world. So, as a lobbyist, he helped a Kansas company thrive and helped the U.S. energy infrastructure, which is what our politicians should be doing. Maybe Senator Roberts needs to take a lesson from Jim Slattery.

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Several weeks ago, I attended the Kansas Caucuses and was elected to be a delegate to the 3rd District Convention, which was this last Saturday. This is where the other delegates from our congressional district get together and decide who will represent us at the National Democratic Convention, which is held in Denver this year, in August.

It’s another election, really. The people who won at the Caucuses can now campaign to become a National Delegate. They don’t have to, but most do. It’s a pretty big deal.

The 3rd District, which serves Johnson, Wyandotte, and Douglas counties, gets to send five people --- two men and three women— to the National Convention as Obama delegates. I think Hillary’s group got to send three people. The proportion is based on the percentage of the popular vote in the Caucuses. Kansas tries to send the same number of women and men, so I assume another district somewhere is sending three men and two women for Obama.

Usually, there’s not much drama at the National Convention. There is rarely a surprise because the nominee has it all wrapped up by then. John McCain, for example, clinched the Republican nomination weeks ago. However, the Hillary/Obama fight might not be resolved by then and no one knows exactly what might happen. Delegates get to vote for whom they support and they may end up deciding the outcome. These delegates have the same voting power as one of the SuperDelegates you may have heard so much about, except they’re pledged to vote for a particular candidate in the first round of voting. After that, anything is possible.

The Campaign

I filed my paperwork with the state party six weeks ago. That got my name on the ballot. I promptly began work designing my really cool Obama buttons with “Sean Tevis for National Delegate” on them.

Then came the letters. The first one came about four weeks ago. Another came a week later. The trickle became a flood and last week I was getting about five letters a day, and that doesn’t even include the e-mails. These were all other people running for National Delegate introducing themselves and making their case why they’d be an excellent choice.

I got phone calls, too. A high school teacher, a former journalist, a tech guy in Lawrence, an 18-year-old kid from Baldwin, and others all called me. They would introduce themselves and we’d chat for a bit and I learned that there were 78 people running against me. I was becoming overwhelmed and they were, too. No one I talked to had any real idea of what criteria they should use to pick from this huge field of candidates.

I stepped up my own campaign efforts. I sent a nicely designed e-mail newsletter to every delegate hoping to stand out from the crowd. My strategy was that everyone would have a favorite candidate, but I wanted to be their second choice. It seemed to me that when everyone is roughly the same you’d want someone who would complement your first choice rather than duplicate them. I also gave them a list of criteria I would use to judge candidates and then neatly inserted myself into them.

The Convention

The Convention was held at Mill Valley High School in Shawnee. Registration began at 1 p.m. and the event began at 2 p.m. sharp. Due to an error in Google Maps’ driving directions, I didn’t show up until 1:50 p.m.—missing out on valuable campaign time. I arrived deeply frustrated and anxious and sat in the middle of the auditorium between the Clinton and Obama sides trying to chat up people as the District Chair called the convention to order. We heard from Senatorial candidate Jim Slattery who gave a confident speech about how we need to rally to defeat Senator Pat Roberts this fall.

The Hillary supporters then located to another room since we’re electing delegates based on whom they support. Obama people vote for Obama candidates, so listening to Hillary candidates would have been pointless.

Then came the speeches. Everyone had three minutes to address the audience. If you do the math, that’s close to four hours of speeches. The men went first, then the women, and all alphabetically. That put me (a “T") toward the end of the men and roughly in the middle of the entire group. I would have preferred to have been first or last, but that was the least of my worries since I hadn’t written my speech ahead of time.

The Controversy

One of the Convention organizers, Kristi Boone, talked about how we should handle things like applause, and lining up to keep the speeches moving. While doing this, she mentioned a printed flyer that she said were “recommended candidates.” She was holding one up as she did this and I must admit I hadn’t even looked at it, being buried in dozens of campaign flyers already. Kristi was one of the people on this list.

Her statement caused a ripple of unrest throughout the audience and some people shouted objections along with a few boos. One person asked, “If these are the recommended candidates, then why are we even having an election?” Many cheered this person on. Others wanted to know if the outcome was pre-determined.

The Obama campaign official in Wyandotte County, Stanley Adams, stepped in to explain. “No, no” he said. “Nothing is pre-determined.” He explained that these people who had worked so hard on the campaign had merely put themselves all on one sheet for easy identification. We were free to vote for whom we liked.

Later, in a speech by a man whose name I didn’t catch, he asked how many of us had been “vetted” by the Obama campaign. No one had. “But the people on this list have”, he said. “And that’s old-style back room politics the kind of which I thought Obama stood against.” He was visibly angry.

Kristi explained during her speech that the people on the list were the principal Obama campaign organizers. They’d all been formally recommended by the Obama campaign.

The Speeches

These are some notes I took from just a portion of all the speakers we listened to:

• Allan Abrams is a professional arbitrator who fells that his skills would be valuable at a convention. He’s Jewish and introduced his business partner, a Muslim, and talked about peace.
• Stanley Adams ran the Obama campaign in Wyandotte County and has put in hundreds of hours knocking on doors and running phone banks.
• Jimmy Banks talked about Rev. Wright and told us how he was U.S. Marine and a doctor for LBJ in the 1960s before becoming a preacher in Chicago and that the sound bites we’ve heard in the media miss the bigger picture.
• Todd Barrett is finishing medical school in five days and cares about health care.
• Paul Davis is the State Representative in Lawrence and has a nice voice.
• Matt Gibson is a scientist.
• Justin Hitt is 17 years old and goes to the high school we’re sitting in. He’s on the debate team and is student body vice-president.
• David Haley is the State Representative in Wyandotte County and withdrew from consideration because there are so many qualified candidates.
• Matt Lehrman said his wife’s birthday was today.
• John O’Connel said his wife passed away recently.
• Kristi Boone is the Johnson County chair for the Obama campaign and addressed the controversy noted above by saying she wasn’t sorry for having put her life on hold to work for the cause and that she shouldn’t be penalized for it. Most people visibly agreed with this.
• Debra Crane is a native New Yorker with lots of attitude and who cracked everyone up.
• Mozella Dyer knows Roberts Rules of Order and was the most exciting speaker I saw all afternoon.
• Alyce Edwards is school teacher at Arrowhead in Kansas City. She’s really nice and talked about the real need for hope and inspiration.
• Heather Getz says she doesn’t have a man in her life because “who could compete with Barack Obama?”
• Sheila Hartney says she’s a RINO hunter - Republican In Name Only.
• Marcie Inzer read a poem called “Republicans are Red, Democrats are Blue” and I couldn’t write it down fast enough to post here, but it was cute.
• Kathy Kircher is another person who put in hundreds of hours doing hard campaigning. Several other speakers withdrew to support her.
• “Older Woman” whose name I didn’t catch likened Obama to a character called The Golden Man in James Michener’s “Hawaii”
• Neela Barton is the daughter of Mexican immigrants and wore a big pink hat.
• Caroline Meritt was named after Caroline Kennedy. There were lots of JFK and RFK references today.
• Mahnaz Shabir spoke of being a minority faith in America, runs a website called americanmuslimwoman.com, and owns her own consulting business.
• K.O. Strohbehn brought a flowery hat but promised her kids she wouldn’t wear it. She’s a friend of mine on FaceBook now.
• Hilary Tilkins wore a shirt that read “Hillary for Obama”.
• Stefanie Tracy said she’s wanted a woman President since she was a little girl until she met Obama and says that, unlike Bush, she can admit when she’s wrong.
• Valdenia C. Winn is another State Representative from Wyandotte County and likes to build coalitions.

Resolution

My speech was amazing, according to dozens of people who came up to me afterward. It felt really good to get up in front of an auditorium and to just let the passion and the words flow. A Johnson County Democratic official asked me if I was interested in running for State Senate and he didn’t seem to be joking.

I didn’t win. I came close, but in the end we chose Stanley Adams, the man who had poured his life into the campaign, and Rep. Paul Davis who is a remarkable person. I wasn’t disappointed at all. I came away more enthusiastic about the future than when I went in and I met some great people, too. But, I’ll definitely be back in 2012. :-)

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This week at work we’ve had unusually spirited discussions surrounding “Battlestar Galactica” that have roamed from plot lines and character development to more abstract ideas like what true AI machines would really want and the role of religion in shaping a culture. And it’s not just the geeks and nerds at work who are watching and asking these questions.

There have been other TV shows in the past that get normal people to collectively ask a question. “Dallas” in the 1980s had Who shot J.R.? and “Twin Peaks” had Who killed Laura Palmer?. With “BSG” as we call it, the question is Who is the 12th Cylon?. I’d like to publicly make my picks before he/she is revealed, possibly this Friday.

A big clue was revealed in the Entertainment Weekly “Last Supper” photo where there is a missing person at the table. President Laura Roslin was my favorite choice as the 12th at the end of last season, because she has strange shared visions linked with other known Cylons. But the Entertainment Weekly story rules her out. So here are my picks in descending order:

1) Admiral Cain - She’s psychotic and so amazingly uber-patriotic that as a Cylon she’s make an overwhelming enemy to humans. The writers put a lot of time into her for the special two-hour movie “Razor” last fall so bringing back her character would bring a lot of well-laid groundwork.

2) Zak Adama - They brought him up again last episode by asking Admiral Adama if he wouldn’t love his son even if he found out he was a Cylon. That could be foreshadowing and it puts Admiral Adama, Apollo, and Starbuck into a very weird place emotionally and might shake allegiances.

3) Bulldog - This minor character we saw in only one episode as a pilot who was captured by the Cylons years ago and who escaped to find the humans. He suffered a psychological breakdown and we haven’t seen him since. It would be easy to “activate” his character as a person who’s been working in the background, out of sight this entire time.

4) Lt. Commander Gaeta - It’s doubtful, but he’s always been around as the “good soldier” who is also brilliant. It might be interesting to see.

One of my co-workers suggested that the “trigger” song used to activate a dormant Cylon at the end of last season instead of “All Along the Watchtower” should have been a variation of Simon and Garfunkel’s (brace yourself) “The Sounds of Cylons.”

Also, everyone I’ve talked to agrees so far that Dualla would be a horrible choice to be the 12th Cylon. Tom Zarek might be a decent choice, too, but no one believes it will be for some reason. It’s a shame the show is on it’s last season, but it’s been an amazing ride.

Go see it for yourself. And while you’re there, add me as a “frink”. :-)

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I’ve shed all my freelance clients over the years except for one: an ob/gyn office in Phoenix, Arizona. I flew out there this weekend to meet with some of their staff and to train them how to post things to their website. I think it’s best to leave their name out of this, so the image above is the view from my hotel room rather than of their office.

During my Saturday afternoon session I asked if patients were finding the doctor’s bios on the website useful.

“Sort of,” said Vicki, the 40-something front desk receptionist. “They don’t care about credentials nearly as much as what the doctor looks like.”

This shocked me a bit. After all, I would never choose a doctor based on their physical appearance. It just doesn’t matter to me. I pressed Vicki for some examples.

“Oh, sure” she said. “You get women who only want a woman doctor and some want men doctors. Then they’ll ask how old they are. Some want younger and some want older - sometimes much older—doctors. It’s important to them. Older women just don’t trust doctors younger than they are. And then you get all sorts of requests beyond that.”

“Like what?” I asked.

“Race is pretty important,” she said matter-of-factly. White women like white doctors and African-American women like African-American doctors — usually. We have Asian doctors on staff and people will ask if they speak English. There’s a lot of pre-conceived notions out there. We also get a lot of requests for a Mormon doctor. They don’t want to be touched by someone who’s not a Mormon.”

I couldn’t believe that really mattered, but Vicki assured me it does.

“Recently, one woman left the exam room in the middle of her visit and came up to the front desk and requested to see a different doctor. We asked why and the woman said she thought her male doctor was too young and too good-looking. She asked, ‘Do you have any ugly doctors?’”

“How did you handle that?” I asked.

“We told her no. There’s no way we were going to ask one of the other doctors to step in because we thought he was the ugliest one we had.”

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My Aunt Glenda bought an old farmhouse in Weston, Missouri about two years ago and she’s slowly been restoring and modernizing it. She invited the family there for Easter this last Sunday and showed off how much work she’s done to this house built in the 1840s. “Mary would be proud,” she said.

“Mary?” I asked. “Mary who?”

“Mary Owen,” she said. “She was Abraham Lincoln’s first fiancee. She lived here.”

In autumn 1836, Abraham Lincoln, then a 27 year-old Illinois representative studying law, agreed to marry Mary S. Owens, whom he had met three years earlier. He proposed by mail. Who gets engaged by mail to a girl he hasn’t set eyes on in three years? Abraham Lincoln, apparently.

Upon her arrival, Abe found himself in a predicament. Mary was not nearly as beautiful as he remembered. In fact, as he explained to another friend: “I knew she was over-size, but she now appeared a fair match for Falstaff; ...her skin was too full of fat to permit its contracting in to wrinkles; but from her want of teeth, weather-beaten appearance in general, and… I was not at all pleased with her.”

He decided to play it cool toward her, but said he’d keep his promise to marry her. This is honest Abe we’re talking about, after all. She picked up on the hint, however, and promptly dumped him. Afterward, Lincoln wrote, “I have come to the conclusion to never again think of marrying.”

Mary Owens moved to Platte County, Missouri (present day Weston) and built a small farmhouse with her sisters — the same farmhouse where my Aunt Glenda just finished installing heated bathroom floors.

I’m sure Mary would have been proud.

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We went to Omaha last Friday with friends to see Bruce Springsteen at the Qwest Center, which is a lot like the Sprint Center in Kansas City except that it’s three hours away and requires us to rent a hotel room there for the night. If Kansas City is good enough for Garth Brooks to play there nine nights in a row, why can’t The Boss commit to one night there, too?

We sucked it up and reserved the last available room in the Marriott Courtyard downtown and consequently ended up with a suite on the top floor that, as it turns out, is the only room in the building with a balcony.

The concert was great. Bruce played for 2½ hours to a sold-out crowd of more than 17,000 fans. Or so I heard, anyway.

Michelle and our friends Bart, Heather, and their 5-year-old son went off to catch the show while I stayed back in the hotel room because I didn’t commit in time to buy a ticket. This fact didn’t really bother me until everyone went off to the show leaving me behind in our monstrous balconied suite. I tried reading, but wasn’t that interested, and then I channel-surfed for a bit (FYI—”The Return of Jezebel James” is unbearably bad). And then I went out on the balcony to soak in the Omaha night.

And that’s when I saw dancing-with-dog guy in a hotel room window across the street from me. His curtains were wide open and I see a guy dressed in white underwear briefs sort of glide by his window. “That was odd,” I thought. Then he comes back by doing a slow turn this time and I see that he’s carrying a small-ish dog in his arms whose paws are outstretched over his shoulders. He disappeared beyond his window and I stood there, transfixed, waiting for him to return.

One minute became five. Then ten. It was cold out and I decided to give up when he suddenly appeared again, this time holding the dog closer to his chest. He rocked back and forth to some music I couldn’t hear and held the dog up so he/she could see out the window. “I have to get a picture of this!” I thought. I dashed back into my hotel room and got my camera, but when I returned he was gone and his curtains were closed. My disappointment at missing dancing-with-dog guy was greater than missing Bruce Springsteen. So I waited. And I waited. Finally, I gave up and went back inside.

Michelle called me a little bit later to take her picture as she was walking back to the hotel after the concert. She’s one of the people in this picture down on the street. “We had a great time,” she said. “You missed something amazing.”

“Yes,” I replied. “I think I did.”

UPDATE: Michelle sent me this photo she took of the stage from her cell phone.

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I made a shirt for Pi Day (March 14 = 3.14) to wear today. We’re leaving on a four hour car trip to Omaha today so I sort of rushed it as a last minute idea. I quickly made a stencil and then I spray painted over it on a shirt.

What I neglected to take into consideration is that oil-based paints smell to high heaven for quite a while afterwards, which in a small car for four hours is a bad thing. Sadly, I got to wear my Pi Shirt for approximately 3.14 minutes before I had to discard it. Maybe next year…

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I have a peculiar and sometimes embarrassing affliction that only surfaces when 1) I’m around someone with a noticeable accent and 2) when I’ve been drinking a fair amount. I’ve had this weird inclination since I was in high school when after a drink or two I’d start to sound like Dudley Moore.

Thankfully, it went away (mostly) during college affecting me only when I was around English-speaking people, which was mercifully rare, or when someone mentioned Australia, which happened twice. The power of suggestion would then take over the part of my brain that controls my tongue and suddenly I was Crocodile Dundee’s long lost brother.

I still shudder at the time when I met an apartment full of curious Chi Omega sorority girls at a party and I tried to cover myself by explaining that I was in an acting class and that I was in training for a role in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida. Why that play? I have no idea, since I’ve never read it.

I hadn’t given this drinking/accent problem much thought since college, but it came to full fruition last week at a conference I was speaking at in Napa Valley, California.

A funny thing about conferences is that despite whatever “glamorous” locale it takes place at, you’re probably going to spend most of your time in the hotel your conference takes place in. The Napa Marriott, for example, is a nice place, but it’s not noticeably different on the inside from other Marriott hotels except for the wine-themed artwork on the walls. For the 90 percent of the time you spend indoors you might as well be at the Marriott in Overland Park, Kansas and you would never know the difference.

I had the pleasure of speaking to about 150 or so sales people from my company who were from several places around the world. I got to meet many of them personally during our scheduled late afternoon activities that consisted of visiting vineyards and “wine tasting” which I found out is like calling an all-you-can-eat buffet a “food tasting”.

At a buffet you can find the section of dubious steamed veggies and try a tiny bit before you move on to the buttered mashed potatoes and really go to town on them. Wine tasting works the same way. You may try the Sauvignon Blanc and the other whites, but then you find the Pinot Noir and suddenly you’re using words like “bouquet”, “character”, “full-bodied” and “vigorous” to describe a dozen successive glasses of the same wine.

It was at the Silverado Vineyards that I met Chris from England. The conversation turned from wine to the differences between the BBC and American television. Without warning, my awful English accent turned itself on. “So, ‘ave you seen the la’ist Doctor Who?” I asked. He looked at me, puzzled. “Sean, awe you ‘aving a bit o’ fun wi’ me?” he asked.

“Nooo,” I replied in my fake brogue. What was I going to do? The acting class excuse wouldn’t fly here. I did a bit of quick thinking and said, “I’m just tryin’ to place th’ whereabouts ya from. Are you from Wooster (Worcester), b’ chance?”

It turned out he was, which is amazing because I have no idea where that is.

“That’s great!” he said, “Try and guess Darek’s accent!” He grabbed me and took me over to another British person. I’m pretty sure I have no idea what accent comes from where, but I do know geography well. In my mind I’d pick a middling-sized city or area and name it. “I think you’re from the Lakes District. Or maybe Ayrshire,” I said. “Very close. That’s great for an American!” said Darek.

Over the next hour I became a Professor Henry Higgins, missing an accent’s locale badly only once, but saving myself from having to explain my very odd drinking/accent problem.

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Current Google Drive-By Estimate: Sunday, August 12th, 2007

Google added their amazing Street View to their maps of Kansas City and surrounding area last week. If you haven’t seen it, it means that on any map of the area, you can click the “Street View” button in the top right corner and then click on any “blue highlighted” street and a 360 degree panorama pops up.

One of the first things I checked was my house, of course. Judging by the greenery, and the state of how trimmed my bushes are, I think the Google Photo Van must have driven through Olathe in late summer. But when? My car is in the driveway and it’s during the day, so it must have been on a weekend. When I checked out the house from the front street instead of the side stret, I see Michelle’s F-150, which we sold on August 19th or very close to it.

I’m going to look for bank signs or other clues now. It’s become a mission for me. I must find the date!

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Last Tuesday I had little idea what a caucus actually was as I drove through a snowstorm to my official caucus location at Gardner/Edgerton High School. I had heard vague stories when Iowa had theirs about small groups of people casting ballots in someone’s living room. It was nothing like that. It was much more like a high school pep rally.

I arrived just after the doors opened at 7 p.m. and I still had to wait in line 30 minutes. By the time I made it to the front, the line was out the front door with dozens more standing out in the snowstorm waiting to get in. One of the organizers told me that in 2004 they had 40 people show up. This year they expected 200. By the time they closed the doors at 8 p.m. there were more than 900 people inside and many more were turned away — all in a snowstorm!

I took a seat in the auditorium near the front. They asked you to choose a section to sit in based on which candidate you preferred. I chose Barack Obama’s section. I will not turn my site into yet another political blog, so the only speech-ifying I’ll make is to say that I chose him after reading endorsements from Lawrence Lessig and Randall Munroe who both care about most of the same Internet issues that I do.

The crowd had been sporadically breaking out into chants in support of their candidates. One section of the auditorium would begin chanting “HILL - A - RY, HILL- A- RY” over and over which elicited an equivalent “O - BAM - A, O - BAM - A” from another section. It was cute at first, but after almost an hour it began to grow tiresome. At 8:20 p.m. our Caucus leader made an announcement that there were still a few hundred people whose registrations weren’t processed and that they expected that the Caucus wouldn’t begin until after 9 p.m.

The chants started again, but you could feel the crowd fatigue. I told some of the people who were sitting around me (whom I had gotten to know well over the past hour) that we needed to change the tempo to get the audience engaged. A guy wearing a much-loved K-State ballcap sitting in the next row told me to get off my can and do it myself. So I did.

I had the front of the Obama section chant “Ba-Rack” and answered by the back of the auditorium with “O-Bam-A”. I ran up and down the aisles pumping my fists and shouting with the crowd. We did that for a few cycles and it effectively cut off the Hillary people. Always end with a rousing applause/cheer when you sense the audience losing energy during a chant, by the way. It caps the cheer off nicely and gives a sense of accomplishment, as corny as that sounds. The Obama campaign organizers loved it.

Around 8:45 p.m. I had a new idea. I borrowed the University of Kansas Rock Chalk chant but changed the words to “Baaa - raaaack ---- O Bammmm aaaaa” followed by a fervent cheer. I wish I had it on video. I was going up and down the aisles leading about 500 to 600 people in what sounds like a battalion of monks in a church. They went wild.

I tried other things, too. I grabbed one of the Hillary leaders and began a “No More Bush” chant that brought everyone together in a common cause. By the time the Caucus started at 9:30 p.m. I was pretty tired, but everyone in the Obama camp near me congratulated me. That’s when one woman said to me, “you should run for Delegate.” More on that in a minute.

We proceeded with the Caucus by counting off everyone in the auditorium, in each of the candidate’s sections, one by one. The results were tallied and Barack Obama won with over 70 percent of the vote. Now this is Gardner, Kansas - it’s predominantly rural and white. For Obama to do as well as he did and to hear the praise put on him by what I call the Wal-Mart crowd is pretty amazing.

The Caucus ended at 10:15 p.m. Everyone was thanked and the announcement was made that if you wanted to run for Delegate to the State Convention then you could stay and make a speech to be followed by a vote. Because of the vote breakdown, Obama would get 8 delegates and Hillary 4 from our district. Of Obama’s eight, four men and four women would be selected. I had no idea what any of this meant.

About 40-45 people stayed to run for delegate. There was the county prosecutor, the baptist minister, the pediatrician who worked in impoverished neighborhoods, the State Senator, the retired naval aviator, the firefighter, the guy who organized and ran the caucus, three high school teachers, the poli-sci kid from the community college, a School Board member who had just switched from the Republican party that night, a dozen others, and me.

We all gave speeches and got to vote for four people. Long story short - I won. I’ll be a delegate to the State Convention on April 12th.

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About six or seven weeks ago we visited Paris where I again had the opportunity to try out my high school-quality French and offend the locals in new and interesting ways.

One evening we went to an off-the-beaten path restaurant recommended to us by a friend who lives in the city. I first said to the hostess who seats people, “Pardon moi”. Every sentence out of my mouth that week began with a Pardon because a) it’s polite and b) it alerts the person that I have no idea what I’m saying. She looked up and said, “oui” and as I tried to explain stumblingly that we would like a table she just grabbed the menus and started walking away. Was she implying that we go away? I took the chance that she was showing us to a table and followed her.

None of the staff spoke English. There were no tourists in this small restaurant and at a nearby table it was obvious that a group of young French people were talking about us. I nervously asked for a menu and our waiter, a gruff 50-something year-old man we think was the owner, walked over and set down a chalkboard with items written illegibly on it. We made the best of it and guessed at some of the items. My accent, I thought, was flawless. The table of young French people who were enjoying themselves too much, however, told me otherwise.

I ordered the onion soup for myself, which as it turns out, is actually French onion soup. That makes sense, I thought. Instead of a bowl though, they delivered an entire turine. As they set my gallon of onion soup in front of me the waiter said “haute”. You could see a measure of concern or concentration as he tried to tell me it was hot. In America, where everyone warns you at a Starbucks that the coffee is hot, when it rarely is, I didn’t really pay attention. For the next two weeks I had a red burn on my hand from accidentally touching the side of the turine. I remember it as my cauldron of French onion soup.

After an hour of drinking wine and waiting for my cauldron of soup to cool I excused myself to find the restroom. I wandered to the back of the restaurant and saw a narrow flight of stairs that went up. I climbed them and found a door, which I opened and realized that I had walked into the owner’s apartment. There were lots of pictures of cats, I remember. I quickly left so I didn’t start an international incident.

I found the restroom, which was behind a sliding door that looked like a utility closet. The lights were off and it was so dark in there I wasn’t sure. So I went inside, closed the door, and then began feeling around for the light switch. I felt around in the dark for maybe a minute or two when I hear from outside the door the voice of the owner/waiter say, ”Exteerieur. I sheepishly slid open the door and poked my head out to see the owner sitting at a nearby table with some women, smoking a cigarette, and looking at me, the strange American. I flipped the switch on the exterior wall and went back inside. The women laughed and the owner just shook his head and returned his attention to them. “Merci!” I said.

Despite the struggles, I loved the place.

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Our Christmas Cards have all been mailed (at last!). This year we went for a recursive art photo cover that alternates between me, Michelle, and then both of us together in front of the house. If you look carefully down to the 12th level “in” there’s a teeny, tiny photo of Richard Nixon and Elvis shaking hands.

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