Degrees of Separation

2 posts in one swell foop!

I watched a fascinating program just now on the Science Channel about networks and connections and it got me thinking about my connectedness and I must admit I was gobsmacked.
Here are a few of the connections I could think of:

• I am 2 handshakes away from Theodore Roosevelt (my grandmother, as a very young child, attended William McKinley's funeral where she shook hands with TR.)
  
  
  
• 2 from President Barak Obama
  
• 3 from Queen Elizabeth II
  
  
  
• 3 from Peter Jackson and therefore 4 from the entire cast of LOTR by one route; 2 and 3 by another
  
• 5 from Albert Einstein
  
  
  
• 2 from Liberty Hyde Bailey
  
• 4 from NC Wyeth
  
  
  
• 2 from Kevin Bacon (had to add that one...)
  
• 2 from Paul McCartney
  
• 2 from Bo Bo Brazil, originator of the Coco-bop
  
  
  
  (Bo Bo's on the right, not delivering a Coco-bop, but such is life.)
  
  

And I am just a nobody originally from a tiny village in Ohio, now from a small city in upstate NY. None of these are connections that I could call upon, they are merely handshakes but still it boggles my mind. Wow...

Voting and Hoping

Today is, in case you just dropped in from another dimension, election day. I did my duty, and gratefully so, this morning at my new polling place, the Wiltwyck Firestation on Frog Alley. Shortly after I moved here to Kingston I walked the hundred feet or so down the block to the Board of Elections and changed my registration to my new address. I had read earlier that day about how some folks uprooted in situations similar to mine had neglected to change their voting address with their county boards and because of the rules in their state were ineligible to vote in the upcoming elections. I am a member of the first cohort of 18 year-olds eligible to vote, and barring 2 school board elections and a library vote or two, I have voted in every election since that time- I take my franchise very seriously and did not want to miss this one. I remember going with my mother when she voted at the school, comparing all the different, and anonymous, shoes and legs set off by the booths' curtains and then suddenly, it was my babysitter, or someone from the hardware store attached to those shoes. I frankly do not understand people who don't vote, but there you are.

I have spent the rest of the day organizing, cleaning and attending to the many small chores that needed doing, a little more unpacking- nothing terribly creative or important but just about all I could handle. I know it is anticipation of the outcome of the vote. I am very hopeful it will be Obama/Biden. I am also terrified that by some horrible circumstance it will be McCain/Bible Spice. Even though I am very well aware that the outcome is out of my hands, I am still unable to settle to anything serious or focussed. I am not listening to the radio or the television, I have had the music of Samuel Barber, Percy Grainger, and Ralph Vaughn-Williams on rotation.

I must say I much prefer the English system- the day of the election, there is a crew standing by to remove the old PM's worldly possessions and bring in the new PM's, if that is way the citizens choose. Why wait? Speculating on the amount of damage Bush/Cheney could and probably will do to our rights and freedoms in these last days of his reign makes my blood run cold. Oh, now I am getting all fussed up again; time to go for a walk and be in the present.