He that blesseth his friend with a loud voice, rising early in the morning, it shall be counted a curse to him.
Proverbs 27:14

It is much better to remain silent and let everybody think you are a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.
Abraham Lincoln [restating Proverbs 17:28]

A conservative government is an organized hypocrisy.
Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield

Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives.
John Stuart Mill

While people have been focusing on Ohio and the governor’s race in Washington, my old hometown, San Diego, has been having fun with the mayor’s office.

You don’t have to be crazy or a crook to be elected mayor of San Diego, but most former mayors tend to fall into one of those categories.

The election is non-partisan, which normally means it is a contest among Republicans, as the town and county has much in common with Orange County, i.e. “conservative”, Republican, insane, and fiscally mismanaged. Roger Hedgecock is a former mayor who provided entertainment with his multiple re-trials for financial “errors in judgment”.

The San Diego Union-Tribune has a story on the attempts to install the individual who actually received the largest number of votes, write-in candidate Donna Frye, rather than the current mayor, Dick Murphy.

I know and did work for two of the attorneys involved: Bruce Henderson and Mike Aguirre, so I won’t comment on why I think one of them has nested with a group of crows that no self-respecting legal eagle would ever fly with.

For those who don’t know the basics of this: more than enough votes to make Ms. Frye the uncontested winner have been thrown out because the voters wrote in her name but didn’t fill-in the circle next to that name.

The BBC has before and after aerial photos of Banda Aceh in an update from Sumatra. The pictures make manifest the power of the wave.

It is hard for me to understand that the local people who have lived by the shore all their lives didn’t understand that the water being pulled suddenly back into the ocean meant a huge wave would be coming. It wasn’t just children who went out on the newly exposed seabed to pick up grounded fish, but adults from the villages that were caught away from the shoreline when the wave struck.

I don’t like the water and have never been dumb enough to buy a boat [AKA a hole in the water into which you pour money]. I can swim and scuba dive. I can actually stand up on a surfboard and exercise some control over it. I could, if necessary, build a watercraft and sail it to a given destination even without a following wind, but I wouldn’t do it by choice. In spite of that I learned a very important rule about the water: if the water is doing something that fish can’t handle, you sure can’t handle it, so get away.

For example, if there are dead fish on the surface of a body of water, don’t go swimming in that water and don’t drink it. If the water is sucked away from the shore so quickly that the fish can’t stay wet, something bad is going to happen. It may be an overcautious approach, but it works for me.

[Update at 7:23pm]: More “before & after” photography via Len at Dark Bilious Vapors