Worcester Election Commission

In the year 2000 I wrote the Worcester election Commission to inform them that the previous two owners of my house were still regstered to vote at my address. In response that letter I was assurred that it was an anomoly and they couldn't imagine how it happened because they had a system that corrected for such things, it would be corrected promptly. Every election since I have checked the people registered at my address, and sure enough, nothing has changed.

In December 2008, having lost my job, I thought it would be a nice, public-spirited thing to do, and wouldn't hurt my resume either, to offer to perform an analysis of the voter "deregistration system" and recommend or build a solution to whatever problem is discovered in the analysis phase. In a month I got no reply - not even an acknowledgement that the proposal was received - so I sent a followup note asking for confirmation that the original note had been received and asking what the disposition was. Here is the response I got from the City Clerk.

Mr. Payne,

I received, read and appreciate the content of your December 4, 2008 email. The work that is involved in the maintenance of the databases at the City Clerk and Election Commission Offices is aptly attended to by the staff. Thank you for taking time to write.

David J. Rushford
Worcester City
Clerk
508-799-1122 - desk
508-826-1595 - mobile

To which I replied,

Perhaps then, you can explain the extra people who have been registered
to vote at my address for the past 10 years.

- Steve Payne

I don't expect a reply. Clearly, Mr. Rushford was being as polite as he could be with me when he wrote his reply. While I don't think this is a matter of serious importance, especially in these days of extreme busget shortfalls which are crippling all levels of government in their abilties to cover their areas of responsibility, and especially in Massachusetts where Republicans in office are pretty rare, it is also abhorent to me that my town appears to have a problem with inaccurate voter registration rolls and the person reponsible claims that the area is being "aptly attended to". It sounds like such a Bush Administration response to an issue being raised. Rushford may be right, but I would venture a guess that he has no idea if it is being aptly attended to or not. Probabaly all he really knows is that people are getting registered, people vote, and votes are tallied. Worst case is that he is complicit in preserving the inaccuracies for the purposes of swinging elections one way or another. I am frankly surprised that a civil servant is taking such an attitude since he would look pretty bad if this issue ever got broad exposure.

Is it worth raising the issue to another level - bringing it to the attention of the press, for example? I probably won't do it because to do so, acknowledging that it is not an important issue, makes it just a pissing contest with Rushford and who wants to lose that contest?

This whole thing though, reminds me that I still $300 being held hostage by an auto insurance company in NJ. These days where the failure of oversight and regulaory agengies is being exposed left and right illustrates that the NJ Insurance Commissioners office is not alone in its failure to protect consumers from greed and corruption in financial organizations. More on this later.

Internet Backgammon

I am an internet backgammon addict, but I only play the version that comes with Windows. It is infuriating...correction, the other people who play are infuriating. I suppose that is what comes of playing anonymously. Here is a short list of the things that piss me off about people who play that game.

1. People who just quit (not resigning just bailing from the game) in the middle of the game. Hey, phones ring, people come to the door, the boss stops in your office, the tea kettle starts singing - lots of things can interrupt a game. But when people quit it is almost invariably immediately after you get two successive great rolls. Double sizes is the most common roll to be followed by the opponent quitting.
2. Chatty opponents. I had an opponent the other day who posted "nice roll" about 10 times in two games, but in my opinion, he was the one getting the opportunistic great rolls.
3. Annoying opponents. The most annoying was a guy who started out just being chatty, commenting on nearly every roll. I switched off chat. Then the opponent took to replaying hits - he would hit, then take it back, then hit again, over and over.
4. People who think they are playing chess. They take a really long time to move. My question is, if these people have ranked themselves "expert", what the hell is taking them so long to decide on each move?
5. "Experts" who aren't. Players self-rank, so anyone can call themselves an expert. I suspect some beginners have decided that the way to learn is to play experts, so they rank themselves an expert to get more games with experts. I don't mind playing beginners - its really fun sometimes to see how your typical moves and strategies work against people who have barely a clue what they (or you) are doing. But it is annoying to play a person who is a clear beginner who is calling himself an expert.

Annoying things about the MS version of the game:
1. The server routinely locks up. Every few games the server will just die on you.
2. I am not sure if this is an implementation of some arcane backgammon rule or not, but the MS game will not allow you to double sometimes. It is always toward the end of the game, but I can;t determine what the exact conditions are. The "double" button becomes disabled inexplicably.
3. Can't resign when you are on the bar and your opponent has a complete inner table. The game tells you that you have no moves and doesn't present the "roll" button, but it should let you click "resign".

I think I'll look for a game where you have to earn your skill level and where you aren't anonymous, so rude behavior is pinned to your name.

My brother-in-law gave me a small collection of hats for Christmas. One of the hats was a University of Minnesota ball cap. On the back is stitched "Golden Gophers" in gold thread. I got to thinking about mascot names. The choice for UMinn was natural enough. After all, you probably can't swing a cat without hitting a gopher in Minnesota. A choice like "Golden Scorpions" would have been a stretch, although ridiculous choices in mascot are not that uncommon.

I especially like the "golden" part of the name. Normally, schools/teams don't have an adjective before the fearsome noun: the Eagles; the Bulldogs; etc. But the ones that have adjectives are much more interesting: the Fighting Irish; the Deamon Deacons; the Crimson Tide. Here is a link to Wikipedia's list of college mascots: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colleges_by_mascot

My alma mater is NYU and I played soccer while I was there. At no time in my tenure at NYU was I aware of a mascot name. Of course, NYU sports at that time flew very far under the radar. We had two varsity sports, soccer and fencing. My father, who was a professor at NYU, told me that the mascot was "The Violets", which I accepted as truth, but I never heard that fact around campus. In fact, the school color was violet (not purple) and we had a symbol, the torch, but as far as I know, no mascot. According to my alumni news, NYU has a mascot now, the Bobcat. This relates back to what I said earlier about ridiculous choices in mascot. Has there ever been a bobcat in Manhattan? What about the NYU "Drunken Homeless", "Street Psychotics", "Subway Fugitives"? The most fearsome would be "the Washington Square Mimes".

A few years ago my kids' school decided that they needed a new mascot. They had been the Bulldogs, a mascot that is claimed by schools in every third town in New England and beyond. If you check the Wikipedia list above, you'll see Bulldogs is also popular with colleges. I have no idea why the Bulldog was chosen originally to be the mascot of the school. Maybe they wanted to sidle up to Yale, who uses a Bulldog as a mascot, but calls their teams the Elis, don't they? I suppose you have to be a Skull and Bones member to know how that came about. After an all-school contest, a new mascot was chosen, "the Shoreliners", which was a train. OK, a train track runs behind the school, but it is a little used branch freight line. The street in front of the school is Shore Drive. You can see the derivation of the new mascot, but it is not much better than the Bulldogs. For reasons that are not clear to me, the new mascot initiative was dropped, so the school is still, along with many of their rivals, the Bulldogs.

Using adjectives, I'll bet we could spice up the mascot naming considerably. Why not the "Rabid Bulldogs". "Flesh-eating Pit Bulls"? Moving it back to Worcester, they could have gone with "Disabled Civil Servants" or, one of my favorites, the "Quinsigmoids". "Indian Lake Tide" (they drop the level of the lake every winter and refill in spring).

• "The Gay Tower"
• "Brattle Stop" (may have to buy the rights to this name)
• "I-190ers", doesn't slip off the tongue too well does it?

Where this is going reminds me of the contests Worcester Magazine used to run where readers could send in their slogans for the city. There were some real beauts. If I can find them, I'll post them.

To wrap it up, mascots are fun - some more than others. I encourage you all to get your kids' schools to engage in a renaming process. It brings out the really ridiculous in nearly everyone for lost of different reasons. Work on your alma maters too. Challenge them to update their mascots, history be damned. Get a mascot that does some heavy lifting. "The Crimson"? Really? That's as bad as "The Violets", but suffers from being actually used. I'll bet the Harvard Lampoon could come up with a better mascot. Maybe they have already.

Got any favorites? Got any suggestions for mascots? Post them.