Ensure *your* right to vote

A great page, GottaVote, summarizes the requirements for voting for each state, so you can see whether you will need new ID, what documents are required, and how long you have to get things straightened out. Look it up, be sure you have what you need to have your say in November.

Our once-proud nation...

This is a sentence that we shouldn't allow to be truth:

Almost half of middle-class workers, 49 percent, will be poor or near poor in retirement, living on a food budget of about $5 a day.

Seventy-five percent have less than $30k in their retirement accounts on the day they depart -- this seems like a clear failure of the 401k model (and a clear explanation of all the elders visible in low-end service jobs). We need to get sane about this before we're right back in the postwar grandma-eats-dogfood days -- actually, I guess we are already. Shameful.

Quote of the day (political edition)

If you were to design a tailor-made plutocratic villain to run for the Presidency in the post-crisis Occupy era, you could barely do better than Mitt Romney. The guy quite literally has the very job and personality that Gordon Gekko's character was based on.

- David Atkins

New kitten!

Yes, we have gotten a new kitten. There was some advance promise to Speck that such a thing would occur this summer, and the wealth of summer kitten rescues gave us a heap of choices. (Those visits are pretty good recreation in themselves!) So here he is, Milo!

He's still living in a bedroom, being sniffed (and sometimes growled at) under the door by our other cats, but we've let him out for a few supervised adventures, and we hope to be introducing him around more formally in the next couple of days. The cats are bitter, but I hope his insistent and resilient playfulness will win them over.

As for us, we're pretty taken with him -- he prances up to anybody who comes into the room, looking for love and/or play, and he has slept many nights already snuggled in the curve of my neck -- and Speck is making her peace with the high energy and unpredictable pointiness of kittens (which I think are different in reality than imagination). One forgets, however, how much feist and play there are in a small kitten, and right now his energies peak around midnight, so it's not uniformly good for our sleep or toes...

This is what happens when summer eats you

That is, you end up with a giant backlog of links and no time to really make a post out of them. Or even hope that anybody will want to sort through them. But here are a bunch of things I've caught in my net over the last few months in the category of Cheerful Bits, yay!

Happy

• College-grad sea-turtle knows all!
• Wolves discuss the Trayvon Martin case
• Death by chocolate and other dangerous desserts
• Fotoshop, the beauty regimin
• Mad Men - The Carousel scene (video)
• Teenager has never seen a record before (sigh)
• Puppets re-enact no-cameras-allowed corruption trial on the nightly news
• Happiness
• Lego man sent to space by Toronto teens
• It Just Goes On and On -- pay it forward, in action
• The Greatest Speech Ever Made - Charlie Chaplin
• That’s no ordinary rabbit. (he herds sheep!)
• Happy Birthday, William Shatner -- that first video, I just...
• Hollywood edition of SOPA
• To My Old Master
• “Spilled Semen” Amendment to Personhood Bill Offered by Oklahoma Democrat; more here, and also Ohio Bill Would Require Men Submit Affidavit From Sex Partner Confirming Impotence Before Receiving Viagra
• Top 10 Reasons Why Men Shouldn’t Be Ordained
• OMG: McDonald’s Does the Right Thing
• Slut Shaming and Why it's Wrong (teenagers, kick our butts!)
• A Note About Panther Pride
• Instapaper Placebo (sob!)
• How to get more likes on Facebook
• Laser de-printer lifts ink from paper, leaving it ready to be reused -- more efficient than recycling!
• The Free Universal Construction Kit
• THIS is why we invest in science. This.
• Man Walks All Day to Create Spectacular Snow Patterns
• Why power generators are terrified of solar; related: Germany sets new solar power record, institute says
• "It Gets Better" at BYU
• Onion: Obama Launches More Realistic 'I Have Big Ideas But We'll See How It Goes' Campaign Slogan
• Lincoln High School in Walla Walla, WA, tries new approach to school discipline — suspensions drop 85% (less Zero Tolerance, more understanding)
• A child's to-do list
• Valentine dilemma (LOL!)

Fascinating

• Eight lazy ways to lose weight
• Touch interfaces everywhere (using sound!)
• This is What Happens When You Give Thousands of Stickers to Thousands of Kids
• How Doctors Die -- It’s Not Like the Rest of Us, But It Should Be
• Can walking reduce the deficit?
• People using pseudonyms post the highest-quality comments, Disqus says -- so there!
• Stranger Danger Dispelled By Bears And Kindness
• New York City gets a Software Engineering High School
• President John Tyler's grandsons are still alive!!
• Mercenary hacker to the stars -- superorganization of organized crime
• Why Sharing Passwords With Your Girlfriend/Boyfriend Is A Spectacularly Bad Idea
• Tunnel to the Other Side of the Earth -- find out on a map what's on the opposite side
• A Swiss idea for removing space junk
• Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo -- I had it, if only for a moment...
• Tim Ferriss explains how to hyperdecant wine
• Forty-five procedures doctors don’t think doctors should do
• 7 Commonly Corrected Grammar Errors (That Aren't Mistakes)
• Feel Me, a new way to connect
• Writing Across Gender
• Gay rights in the US, state by state
• Tact Filters -- great insight
• Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is (also very insightful); follow-up here
• When Data Clashes with Common Sense
• What’s better for heating a mug of water: The stove or the microwave? (I love the Internet!) related: Burning Desire for Efficiency
• Clang -- for those who fantasize about realistic swordplay
• Perspective