Forgive my language but...But Barack Obama ROCK THE FUCKING HOUSE PARTY LAST NIGHT!!! Great Speech! Great Candidate! Here is my synopsis:

I am Barack Obama and I accept your nomination. Republicans SUCK. Have you seen the shit they've done to our country over the last eight years? Look don't worry, if you make me president I'll fix all of that, plus I'll make things even better. By the way, my opponent, John McCain, you know the old guy who is rich as hell but seems to losing his short term memory, Well he is one of those Republicans that have been screwing up so badly. America is a great country and if you vote for me it will continue to be a great country. If you vote republican you're stupid...and you hate kids and gays and Mexicans and puppies.

See what I mean, it was a great speech.

Read this column in the NY Times.

Good question CDR.

I am not pumped up about Biden as a running mate or anything, but I think he is a good choice. He certainly fills out the ticket in terms of general experience and foreign policy experience specifically. Plus, Biden doesn't seem to take shit from anybody. He won't be afraid to attack McCain or defend the democratic party from the Republican attack machine. Those are definitely qualities that will help Obama win the election...

But I don't see this election coming down to VP picks or to party platforms or policy statements by the candidates. I think this will come down to media coverage of the candidates. John McCain is certainly good for a joke by the Late Night Comics, but I think the media is giving him remarkably favorable coverage and free pass after free pass on really important issues. Why don't they go after him for repeatedly confusing Shiite and Sunni's Muslim groups in Iraq? If Obama were to come out and say that Alqeda in Iraq were getting supplies and training from Iran, there would be a field day of reports about his inexperience. McCain gets a free pass. McCain has essentially accused Obama of attempted treason in his statements saying "Obama would risk losing a war just win a political campaign! He Tried to legislate failure in Iraq!" Where is the outcry about that outlandish statement? What do you think the media would say if Obama made similar comments about McCain? "John McCain would rather spend billions more dollars and risk thousands of American lives than admit he made a mistake engaging in the Iraq war and bring our troops home! All to make a political point!" Just imagine it.

So yeah Biden seems like a good choice we need a fighter on the ticket, and I like Biden as a person. He did have one of the best lines of any in the plethora of Democratic debates last fall: "...every thing out of Rudy Guliani mouth is a noun, a verb and 9-11."

He also added: "This is a guy who lived in one house for five and a half years -- in prison," referring to the prisoner of war camp that McCain was in during the Vietnam War.

This is just getting pathetic. The above statement by a McCain Campaing worker was in response to Obama's assertion that McCain's huge numbers of personal homes (4) and property holding (>10)is evidence that the main has little or no capacity to understand the struggles that American's face in today's economy. What the FUCK does that have to do with being a POW in the 1970's?!? McCain's constant evocation of his prisoner of war status is becoming reminiscent of Rudy Guliani's constant references to 911. After what the Republicans did to Jon Kerry's war record and heroic service in the 2004 election we should not stand for this kind of crap. There were delegates at the Republican National Convention in 2004 wearing little band-aids with little purple hearts painted onto them in a putrid attempt to mock Kerry's war injuries. A now we are expected to sit down and shut up every time they bring up McCain's war record. Well that is Bullshit! Obama should call them out for using POW's as a distractions and a prop. I want to see a quote in some news article where Obama asks "What does being a POW have to do with today's Mortgage and housing Crisis? Why bring that up?"

We drove to the Hamptons and back over the weekend. The lovely, beautiful, over crowded Hamptons. I swear I saw Woody Allen crossing the street with a shiite, I mean a sunni, I mean Soon-Yi, in Amagansett. Whilst there I came up with two awesome business plans to pursue just in case this "Scientist" thing doesn't work.

1) Establish a Hamptons based "boy band" and call it the "Hamp-tones" How Clever is that?!? I would rake in the dough with my boys singing sweet harmonies at country clubs and bat mitvahs. Their first single would be something along the lines of "Life's a Beach." Yes, I know also very original and clever.

or

2) Open a Hamptons micro-brewery and call it "BEER Hampton." That business is bound to be a success. I am basing that judgment on the longevity of cleverly named businesses like "Book Hampton," "Furniture Hampton," and "IceScream Hampton." Ok those last two I made up, but I think "IceScream Hampton" might be another great business idea. Think of it... an ice cream store where customers have to yell, shout or scream their orders at the counter attendants. No one would want to work there, but everybody would want to get their ice cream there.

This morning I used a card catalog to look up this book in the library in my office building. A Card Catalog?!? Really? I haven't used one of those since probably 1996. It is good to know that the US Government is totally on top of things and at the cutting edge of information technology.

As for the book: Likelihood by A. W. F. Edwards. It should be a doosey of a mathematical theory and practice book. I bet there is not one mention of birds with in the text.

All day at work yesterday I had the wonderful of the Theme song to Clifford the Big Red Dog stuck in my head:

Clifford needed Emily
So she chose him for her own
and her love made Clifford grow so big
the Shmaowards (?) had to leave their home

I LOVE CLIFFORD THE BIG RED DOG!

The things is that I don't love Clifford the Big Red Dog, and I definitely don't love the song...I am going to go listen to some Rage against the Machine to try and cleanse my palate.

The meeting is over. All systems are go on the survival analysis.

In other news. It sickens me that Republicans are openly mocking Barack Obama's suggestion that Americans practice vigilant monitoring of tire pressure in their cars to try and improve fuel efficiency and reduce daily/weekly/monthly gas costs for American Families. Careful tire pressure maintenance would likely save people far more money than some bullshit "gas tax holiday" proposed by John McCain that would bankrupt our national highway system, and it would affect gas costs now instead of 15 years from now like McCain's other big energy proposal - off shore drilling. These Republicans are a bunch of assholes who are not at all serious about improving your standard of living, alleviating gas expenditure pressures, or truly solving America's dependency on oil. They are serious about pointing out Obama's middle name sounds Muslim, Obama is some sort of tire pressure pussy, and that every American should wear sunscreen.

I've got a kind of big meeting today. It starts in an hour actually. I am presenting a proposed methodology for estimating annual survival of migrating birds contingent upon weight during the migration period. I am presenting it to a committee of my "collaborators" on this post-doc project and the whole thing makes me a bit nervous, cause I am anything but an expert on the methodology. Surely this is nothing compared to my comprehensive exams or my dissertation defense, but some how I am more nervous about it.

I finished re-reading Ken Kesey's Sometimes a Great Notion a couple weeks ago. I read this book initially in 2000 after spending 3 months in the mountains of Southern Oregon working as a field assistant on a forest bird monitoring project. I really loved Oregon, the mountains, the trees, the wildlife. I saw my first bear there, also 2nd through 7th bear. I heard my first and only Spotted Owl, we hooted at each other for a few minutes. I lived in a log-cabin in a national forest on the slopes of Pelican Butte on the shores of the Upper Klamath Wildlife Refuge. It was beautiful there.

This book by Kesey really captures some of the residual wild spirit of rural Oregon. It is epic book and the narrative is difficult to follow since Kesey slides from the internal monologue of one character to another with out notice. But the shifting narrator is essential to understanding the complexity of the human relations in the story and the true reasons behind why the characters in the book do what they do. Everyone has a back story; their own damaged egos and psyches that influences the way they interact with and perceive the actions of every other character in the book. Kesey's writing style exposes the nature and complexity of human relations. In the end this book is not so much about Oregon, but about being a person with complex familial relations and personal baggage and how that affects so much of our lives with out our explicitly thinking about it.

I recommend it.

Five years ago today the Hot Librarian and I were stuck at the airport for like 6 or 8 hours. We were waiting to start our Honeymoon. My Cousin Kevin was there. It was awesome. Life has been pretty much great ever since.

Dork alert:
I just cant believe that I work here. I am working on a survival estimation project and working with three guys who's paper's I've been reading for years years now. The first time I met one of them 6 years ago we were using his text book in my statistics class at the time and I was all nervous cause I thought I was meeting a celebrity. Now I see and work with him on a weekly basis. PINCH ME!

I spent the week in Shepherdstown West Virginia last week. It was quite nice to awake each morning to the sounds of Wood Thrush and Eastern Towhee singing in the forest. I missed home something fierce though. WV is not nearly as shitty as I have been led to believe. All I've ever done there is drive on through as quickly as possible on my way to some place important and pretty...like Missouri. HA! That was hilarious! Get it cause Missouri is neither important or pretty. Its' not even a battle ground state anymore cause all the ultra-Christians are out breeding the reasonable and rational people. I digress...the point is, West Virginia isn't a total shit hole.