I guess it depends on where you are, Reece. In my neck of the woods, early voting meant as much as a six-hour wait, and the addition of lengthy walks to get to the polling places, because many of the locations wouldn't allow voters to park on site. I waited until today, drove up to within a hundred yards of the entrance (drove only because my mother was with me and couldn't walk the one block up the hill from our house to the polling place)), and waited about the hour and a half before I voting. Wish I'd paid more attention, but My Cousin Rachel is a really good read...
---------[ Received Mail Content ]---------- Subject : Re: [scifinoir2] Obama Vs. McCain In 10 Sci-Fi Movies Date : Tue, 4 Nov 2008 21:17:20 +0000 From : [EMAIL PROTECTED] To : "SciFi2" <scifinoir2@yahoogroups.com> Early voting must be nice! Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Tue, 04 Nov 2008 18:29:30 To: Subject: Re: [scifinoir2] Obama Vs. McCain In 10 Sci-Fi Movies Voted early last Friday here in the ATL... -------------- Original message -------------- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Anybody else at the polls yet? Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T From: "Tracey de Morsella" Date: Tue, 4 Nov 2008 12:50:37 -0800 To: ; 'Albert Fields'; ; CINQUE; 'Cleo'; ; ; ; 'Kai Pettaway'; ; ; 'Kera'; ; 'Michael Gordon'; ; ; 'Seku Brathwaite'; 'Valery Jean'; 'Wendell Theophilus Smith'; 'Whitney J Evans'; CC: ; 'Glenn Sigler'; ; ; 'paul demorsella'; 'Chris de Morsella'; Aradia \(Rae\) Corenti Subject: [scifinoir2] Obama Vs. McCain In 10 Sci-Fi Movies Obama Vs. McCain In 10 Sci-Fi Movies http://www.scifi.com/scifiwire/index.php?category=0&id=61799 My fellow Americans, science fiction has anticipated our current national dilemma: forever wars, economic collapse, mutant zombies running in the streets. Since we're already facing a bunch of science fictional scenarios made real, which candidate would best handle the real tests facing the nation: Democrat Barack Obama or Republican John McCain? "Change You Can Believe in" is great, so long as abominations from the hollow earth aren't trying to change your very DNA, and putting "Country First" might not be enough when the whole damned species is threatened by lizard-faced extra-dimensional organ harvesters. Take the following scenarios from SF movies: 1. The Movie: Escape From New York. The President: Donald Pleasence. The Crisis: With all of Manhattan turned into a maximum-security federal prison, a Patty Hearst-like teenybopper Tania take-off terrorist seizes Air Force One and crashes it into Midtown, where the Prez is taken hostage by a gang of convicts led by the voice of Chef himself, Isaac Hayes! Candidate best suited for the crisis: Obama As a former community organizer, he's got a track record in difficult urban settings in which times are tough; even though Hayes' predecessor as the boss of New York, Rudy Giuliani, might diss it, this is valuable experience! And hey ... if you listen to certain talk-radio ranters, Obama really knows how to talk to domestic terrorists in really "palsy-walsy" terms! It might make it easier for Obama to get the New York State vote, but with 8 million votes in Manhattan negated (felons can't vote in New York State), those 31 electoral votes might get trimmed down some. 2. The Movie: Superman II. The President: E.G. Marshall. The Crisis: Phantom Zone escapees Ursa, Non and General Zod use their incredible superpowers to subdue the "Planet Houston" (OK ... "Earth"), raiding the White House and forcing a comically toupee'd president (whose rug makes Joe Biden's hair plugs look as natural as Fabio's mane) to kneel before Zod and swear fealty to the Kryptonian criminal. Candidate best suited for the crisis: McCain His "Secure Borders" policy would apply to Kryptonians, too (even though if he extended it to include Smallville, Kan., he might alienate Sen. Brownback and lose six electoral votes in the process). 'Sides, ... who wouldn't want to see a catfight between Ursa and Palin (under whose jurisdiction Superman's Fortress of Solitude would fall, assuming it's not on federal land)? 3. The Movie: Independence Day. The President: Bill Pullman. The Crisis: A bunch of really nasty and hostile aliens take a page from Clarke's Childhood's End and make it real as they park giant spacecraft over the world's cities and proceed to blow them up. A ragtag bunch of refugees must rise up and fight the invaders. Candidate best suited for the crisis: McCain At the climax, President Pullman clambers into a fighter jet and joins an assault on the aliens. Well, we know who's got the edge there, don't we, even though he might be a little rusty after 40 or so years? The crisis forces the Prez to nuke Houston, so that's 34 electoral votes from Texas vaporized into shiny, shiny fallout. 4. The Movie: Fail Safe. The President: Henry Fonda. The Crisis: Six Vindicator bombers are screeching their way into Russia. Having gone past their "fail safe" points, they can't be recalled, so the Prez must get on the Moscow hotline (along with translator Larry Hagman) to help the Soviets bring down the squadron before Moscow is nuked to glowing rubble while a hawkish academic named Professor Groeteschele (Walter Matthau) offers tips on how to use this SNAFU to end the Russkies once and for all. Candidate best suited for the crisis: Obama As the character Professor Groeteschele is partly based on Henry Kissinger (and also on RAND Corp. bigwig and On Escalation author Herman Kahn), Obama would provide some balance to the situation. 5. The Movie: Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. The President: Peter Sellers. The Crisis: Rogue general Jack D. Ripper thinks his impotence is caused by the damned Commies' putting fluoride in the water, thus polluting his "purity of essence." The only reasonable thing to do in such a situation is seize control of a nuke-laden bomber wing and make the Russkies pay. President Merkin Muffley must assemble his top advisors, including the mysterious Dr. Strangelove, in the War Room to deal with the situation. Candidate best suited for the crisis: McCain As Dr. Strangelove is partly based on Henry Kissinger (along with physicist Edward Teller), and Dr. Hank himself has endorsed McCain, McCain would know how to talk to the guy. 6. The Movie(s): the X-Men films. The President(s): Cotter Smith, Josef Sommer. The Crisis: Increases in the number of mutants with superpowers, some under the leadership of Magneto, are out to advance the mutant cause at the expense of normal Americans. Candidate best suited to handle the crisis: Obama McCain, speaking at the advocacy group The Discovery Institute last year, courted creationists as part of his base, so he threatens to alienate some of his supporters by addressing mutation at all, which could be seen as an endorsement of the theory of evolution. 7. The Movie: Mars Attacks! The President: Jack Nicholson. The Crisis: A bunch of flying saucers from Mars go all "Ray Harryhausen" on the U.S., attacking landmarks like the Washington Monument and the Vegas Strip. Candidate best suited to handle the crisis: McCain With regard to dealing with the fining of aliensin the U.S.--which some critics called "amnesty"--McCain said: "It is no more amnesty than I am a Martian!" This is clear indication that he's prepared to deal with domestic issues in extraterrestrial terms. 8. The Movie: Escape From L.A. The President: Cliff Robertson. The Crisis: After an earthquake has turned Los Angeles into an island prison bordered by what is now the "San Fernando Sea," a Che Guevara knock-off "Manchurian Candidates" the President's daughter--through groovy Peter Max holograms sent to her via the Internet--and compels her to come to L.A. as his love bunny. As the First Daughter just happens to have the codes that will activate a superweapon capable of sending human culture back into the Stone Age, this is more dire than the Bush twins running off for a weekend. Candidate best suited to handle the crisis: Obama McCain/Palin's "Real America" rhetoric seems to exclude the Left Coast, despite the 55 big, fat, juicy electoral votes in California. 9. The Movie: The Simpsons Movie. The President: Arnold Schwarzenegger (voiced by Harry Shearer). The Crisis: After Homer contaminates Lake Springfield with a big canister of pig poop--a catastrophe that leads to a pretty dramatic squirrel mutation--the EPA places all of Springfield under a Logan's Run-like giant glass dome to contain the crisis. Candidate best suited to handle the crisis: McCain It's a maverick-y move to put a town under a giant glass dome, and over the course of the movie the Simpsons escape the dome via a Florida-like sinkhole, escape to Alaska and return to Springfield once they see an ad selling a soon-to-be-bombed Springfield as the next Arizona-like Grand Canyon. With three such crucial states in play by implication, McCain had better be on the ball with this sitch. 10. The Movie: Idiocracy. The President: Terry Crews. The Crisis: In this riff on C.M. Kornbluth's "The Marching Morons," the propensity of dumb people to breed like, ... well, ... dumb people has resulted 500 years later in a country of idiots living amid miles-high towers of garbage. The crops are failing because they are being irrigated with a Gatorade-like "thirst mutilator" drink rather than water, and the economy is imploding. Candidate best suited to handle the crisis: Obama Central to Idiocracyis a trial in which Joe Bauers--a regular schmuck in our time who is put into suspended animation and awakens in the future as the smartest man in the world--is put on trial for not paying his hospital bill via a barcode tattoo. Unlike Idiocracy's President Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho--whose qualifications to be Commander in Chief include being a former porn star and Ultimate Smackdown Champion--Obama is a lawyer and could have a pretty good handle on things without blurring the executive, legislative and judicial branches too much. Who's the best SF president? It's a tie. The final vote is up to you on Nov. 4! --Michael Marano
