If

...you're going to drink all day, you have to start in the morning. I saw that stuck on a car window yesterday, sort of in the area where you might have a campaign slogan--and realized it might just be the driver's idea of just such a slogan and I smiled.

Perhaps like you, I always assume a 'drink' is something with alcohol but it's possible that's not what the sticker is all about. Perhaps, it's really just another way of saying 'do what you do, but do it well.'

Professional baseball games are nine innings-American football has four quarters, golf has eighteen holes in a round, etc. We rarely if ever watch only the first twenty minutes of an athletic contest (unless it's the hundred yards dash and in that case, if we're still watching now might be a good time to release the 'pause' button the TiVo) so maybe the 'come early, stay late' approach works in more of our lives than just, well, just on bumper stickers.

As we hit the summer season, we'll have lots of distractions that will keep us from the hard work of evaluating the people who are standing for the general elections, at all levels of all tickets this fall. I'll nag enough about it as we go along that I don't want to harsh your buzz today (we've got Euro 2008 matches to watch, my friend, and some of that is best accomplished starting early) but in the coming weeks and months, unless you're planning on moving to your own country on your planet, we'll need to look into, and at, who we are and where we want to go as this election draws nearer.

I'll defer to minds greater than mine (= everyone else) but while it's not sitting for a course final, how we decide, alone with our thoughts and a computer scanner in the booth this November will have an impact on us, our families and beyond. The butterfly's beating wings can do more than create a Storm Force Ten on an alien, distant shore and we may well have to set a course into the wind in order to escape the conspiring currents.
-bill kenny