Day: November 2, 2004

Dr. Seuss (Theodor Seuss Geisel, 1904-1991) was a life-long cartoonist: in high school in Springfield, Massachusetts; in college at Dartmouth (Class of 1925); as an adman in New York City before World War II; in his many children’s books, beginning with To Think That I Saw it on Mulberry Street (1937). Because of the fame of his children’s books (and because we often misunderstand these books) and because his political cartoons have remained largely unknown, we do not think of Dr. Seuss as a political cartoonist. But for two years, 1941-1943, he was the chief editorial cartoonist for the New York newspaper PM (1940-1948), and for that journal he drew over 400 editorial cartoons.

The Constitution mandates that the U.S. House then would choose the president on Jan. 6 from among the top three candidates. Each state’s delegation gets one vote, meaning that states as large as California and as tiny as Rhode Island have an equal say. Since Republicans rule in a majority of states, a simple look at a map of “red” versus “blue” states shows that the House would almost certainly elect Bush.

But the Senate would elect the vice president. Each senator who is elected in November would get one vote. Republicans now barely control the Senate, but that may flip in November, depending on a few close races. If the Senate goes Democrat, it would choose Edwards, setting up a bizarre Bush-Edwards White House.

But the Senate could split 50-50, as in 2000. If that happens, Vice President Dick Cheney, who casts the tie-breaker in the Senate, could possibly re-elect himself as vice president.

I got some new Altoids tins, borrowed a Dremel tool from Mitchell, and purchased brand new firewire connectors from NTC. Here’s my second, cleaner, tighter, much nicer attempt at a sweet external battery pack for iPod.

Few people realize in these days when satellite dishes are found on every other rooftop that, back in the early sixties somewhere in the hilltops near the northern italian city of Turin, two young italian brothers were prying into the most guarded secrets of the mighty Soviet Union. The space race was in full swing, providing the battleground for a vital propaganda confrontation between East and West, in the midst of the cold war.

The geographical location of their station proved particularly suitable for the reception of soviet space vehicles, which regularly overflew Northern Italy during their approach to the soviet tracking centers in the Caucasus.
Using an array of advanced equipment, the two young italians soon learned which radio frequencies to monitor and how to predict the overfly times of the various space probes.
One day in early 1961, weeks before Yuri Gagarin’s epic space flight, instead of the usual beeping tones which they had become accustomed to hear, they were startled by a sound which signaled a new chapter in the history of mankind: there, in the listening center of “Torre Bert”, these two young students heard, clearly and unequivocally, the beat of a failing heart and the last gasping breaths of a dying cosmonaut.