"Do you think Alice is gonna come tonight?"
"Well, technically, she's suspended, but maybe a boat party doesn't count."
"Oh, yeah, 'cause technically it's international waters, isn't it?"
"We're on a river in the middle of London, you wet wipe."

Leon County, Florida's mail ballot envelope design placed the words "return service requested" 0.236 inches away from its election office's return address, when it was supposed to be a quarter-inch, leading the USPS to reject it on September 2, the Tallahassee Democrat reports. The county's supervisor of elections, Mark Earley, called it "ridiculous."

I know some will say it's fake news since the ridiculous hundredths of an inch complaint was overturned, but it's the Pilkunnussija complaint that Republicans seem to be ready to use to break this election. Its been such a nice week weather-wise. It feels great to have windows open, no heating or cooling needed, like somehow you're more in touch with the earth, maybe grab a little more blanket...

On the other hand, I can really feel how we're on the time of year when the the time for sunrise and sunset is changing most rapidly (a long time ago I wrote a little visualizer to get a feel for how that works - see it here)

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Please raise your right hand: I pledge to the greatest president in the history of the United States that loves us so much he can't even breathe. That I will go out with my family, my friends. I'll do it anyway. (I don't care if I am registered or not, I am going to cheat like hell like they do. There have never been bigger cheaters. ) I'm going to go out and get my friends, my family and we are going to vote on Nov. 3, or we are going to vote before that.

That "loves us so much he can't even breathe" part... yikes.

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Like Adam Bonica comments, "My favorite thing about this poll is that 'Accepting a luxury jet from Qatar while the Trump Organization pursues business opportunities in the Gulf' came in last. Deeper bench than the '92 Dream Team."

Links and connections to 9/11 and the WTC on the 25th anniversary of the tragedy:

* Lynette was there working at one One World Financial Center: facebook.com/share/p/14qpGSz7e2b/ . You should read her story. The sense of fear and overwhelming uncertainty of that day should not be forgotten.

* My mom had lived in NYC in the mid 1990s, and was there with Salvation Army support service after the (too easy to forget) 1993 WTC bombing. She had been moved to London by 2001, but here are notes from visiting Ground Zero as an SA rep 6 months later: kirk.is/2002/03/15

* My connection was minor; I had worked in the South Tower for a few days in 1997 or so, and then we happened to visit the area two years to the day before the attack, 9/11/1999. Those stories here: kirk.is/2001/09/13

* Like Lynette points out - we can't forget the trauma people in this nation faced, but also how it was used to justify other violence:
"best info fast. Judge whether good enough [to] hit S.H. [Saddam Hussein] @ same time. Not only UBL [Osama bin Laden]."
"Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not."
--Transcriptions from one of Donald Rumsfeld aides right after 9/11 and the WTC.

* Why were the terrorists so focused on WTC? Besides the towers' physical and financial prominence, this article about how the towers incorporated Middle Eastern themes has stuck with me. Such a vision of a blended world is anathema to all kinds of fundamentalists.
(And a reminder that when you let the fundamentalists dictate what some belief system is, the terrorists win.)

(Oh, and for what it's worth: my experience on the day - I remember hearing about a plane crash on NPR, in the parking lot of the Whole Foods on Route 3 near Burlington. First reports were it might have been a small plane, and I thought about that bomber airplane that ran into the Empire State Building during WW2... figured if buildings survived that, a small plane shouldn't be a problem.)

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Weirdness as a kid you figure out years later

One day, possibly quite soon, OpenAI's lawyers are going to claim that an agent they own doing something illegal is not their fault because the agent is its own legal person.

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