It’s amazing how a simple thing like laryngitis can reveal so much. I’ve painfully realized just how much I talk to my dog. And myself. Ow.

1) The Senate rejected a bill popular among 90% of Americans that would’ve strengthened background checks on gun purchases.

2) Several news outlets incorrectly announced that a dark skinned man was identified as a suspect in the Boston bombings.

3) Meteorology’s classification as a science was called into question yet again in Colorado.

The difference is that meteorologists are tasked with the difficult job of predicting the future. The Congress and the news media are supposed to work with facts that exist in the present. Let’s do better today. Go team!

Because he disagrees with gun control legislation, this man threatened Colorado state Rep. Rhonda Fields and her daughter by writing, amongst other things, that he hoped “somebody Giffords both of [their] asses with a gun.”

Clearly a very clever man, he used Rep. Gabby Giffords’ name as a verb that apparently means “to indiscriminately shoot men, women, and children in the head, with intent to cause maximum carnage.” He also wanted to make it clear that he didn’t just want them shot, but shot “with a gun.”

This story is even more horrible than it initially appears to be. Back in 2005, Rep. Fields’ son and one of his friends were shot at a July 4 party. Three people, including her son’s friend, were killed in this incident. But her son survived. He survived, only to be shot and killed, himself, along with his fiancée, before he could testify in court against the gunman that killed his friend.

Threatening Rep. Fields with gun violence was not only extremely cruel in light of her family’s tragic past–it was also a painfully stupid way to argue against gun regulation. People like this only serve to make people that want more gun control want even more gun control. This man is not mentally ill, he just thought it was okay to threaten someone with a gun to get his way.

–Reid.

I don’t understand why the President had to fire a gun to discuss guns, but lawmakers don’t even need vaginas to take away women’s rights.

This Tuesday, our trivia team was bursting with knowledge. Perhaps this was due to our special ringer, recently-returned-home victorious Field Dictator Director of northern New Hampshire for the Obama campaign, my sister Rebecca! I’m exceptionally proud of her and all the hard work she did to get the President re-elected. So maybe I’m just a little biased–the whole trivia team was really on the ball. Plus we had Rebecca! So it was both.

After the first six rounds, we were kicking some ass. Lots of ass, in fact. We had three perfect rounds in a row. We were in first place, with a decent lead over our nearest challenger. Honestly, this is very unusual for us. Normally, after six rounds, we’re doing okay or just fine, but we really tend to pull ahead in the seventh and final round. Even in championship tournaments, we always rule as kings and queens over good ol’ Round Seven.

This week, however, the monarchy fell. We bombed Round Seven. We racked up a bunch of negative points and knocked ourselves out of the money. It was a really weird, bizarro trivia night.

The question that really did us in (and which continues to haunt me) was, “To which basic taste group does MSG belong?” The question’s grammatical correctness was almost certainly not as beautifully as that… but I suppose that’s really beside the point. Anyway, I answered that MSG was “salty,” with which my team agreed, hands down.

The real answer was “umami.” I did not know that this was even a thing. But it is. For some reason, something about the word “umami” doesn’t really seem to fit in with the words “sour,” “sweet,” “bitter,” and “salty.” It turns out that “umami” is a Japanese word that means “savory.” It also turns out that we already have a word for that in English. I mean, if it just means “savory,” why not use the English word for “savory” (“savory”) instead of the Japanese word for “savory?”

Also, what exactly is savory? I’d say it’s something that makes me go, “Mmmm… this tastes good.” Surely, though, each individual person must have different things that make them say, “Mmmm,” right? So it would seem very hard to be scientifically objective about this taste category. Bitter I know–I’m always bitter.

It turns out this is just another one of those things they’re teaching kids in elementary school these days that’s way different from what we learned in elementary school. Five tastes! Five oceans! Eight planets! What is happening to our education system?! And more importantly, do you know any fifth graders who might want to join my trivia team?

–Reid.

Thank you to my cousin Ivan Martinez. Thank you to my friends Matt McDole, Henry Berkowitz, and Melissa Bland. Thank you to all veterans. Thank you to all the many families of veterans. Thank you for the sacrifices that each and every one of you have made and continue to make. What you do does not go unnoticed. I hope that one day, we can properly show you the entirety of our gratitude and the the depth of our respect by providing all veterans with everything they need–and deserve–when they return home.

–Reid.

I really like the web comics over at xkcd, because they’re usually very clever and/or very relatable.

This particular comic (look down), posted last week, happened to particularly strike my fancy (don’t worry, we exchanged insurance info). Maybe it’s because I’m a huge presidential history nerd (I guess I could’ve simply said “nerd” and that would have sufficed… oh well). I don’t mind political analysis based on things like numbers and facts and the truth, but I’m really, really tired of analysis that is just dumb. I realize that this is a bold stance and that I am very brave to stand like this. Thank you.

PRO TIP: If you have trouble reading the comic because it’s too small, you can click on it for the original, big, readable version! If you have trouble reading this comic because it bores you or you think stick figures are lazy cartooning, you should probably just keep that to yourself.

–Reid.

During Tuesday night’s second presidential debate, my longtime friend David Reiman posted the following on Facebook:

It needs to be said one more time, and very clearly. Mitt Romney, when asked about equality in hiring and in pay, implied that he and his advisors had to dig to find qualified female applicants – and he had to make accommodations for them so that they could get home in time to make dinner.

HOW DARE YOU, DAVID REIMAN! You know damn well exactly what Mitt Romney meant about pay equity for women! READ THE TRANSCRIPT! FACTS were laid out–there was no implying going on, whatsoever! Read the points below, in which I set the record straight by presenting each of Romney’s facts at face value–absolutely nothing more, absolutely nothing less–also, I’m rather presumptuous.

1) Romney only learned about pay inequity for women upon becoming governor, after a measly 27 years of being a businessman.

2) Romney chose to surround himself with gubernatorial advisors that did not believe women were qualified for jobs in the executive branch of state government, and/or feared girls for the part they played in the great cooties epidemic.

3) Romney’s team, considering women utterly and completely inept, asked a bunch of women’s groups for proof that “qualified women” actually existed. It took the concerted effort of the entire team going through whole binders full of women to convince them that these creatures were more than mere myth.

4) Romney knew he had to be flexible with the women that ended up in his cabinet because they are always so wishy-washy. He made accommodations for women’s traditional gender roles, like taking care of the kids and cooking dinner. Although he did not mention wives setting out a pipe, slippers, and snifter of brandy by the fire for their husbands, so they could relax upon arriving home from actual business work, it is clear he would have said this if that liberal Candy Crowley hadn’t kept interrupting him.

5) In the bright future Mitt Romney will deliver, businessmen will be so desperate for employees that they might even be willing to think about possibly looking into the option of hiring some women, maybe. If they feel like it.

–Reid.

Below is a transcript of the specific portion of the second presidential debate to which I’ve referred, as retrieved from CNN.com.

CROWLEY: Governor Romney, pay equity for women?

ROMNEY: Thank you. An important topic, and one which I learned a great deal about, particularly as I was serving as governor of my state, because I had the chance to pull together a cabinet and all the applicants seemed to be men.

And I – and I went to my staff, and I said, “How come all the people for these jobs are – are all men.” They said, “Well, these are the people that have the qualifications.” And I said, “Well, gosh, can’t we – can’t we find some – some women that are also
qualified?”

And – and so we – we took a concerted effort to go out and find women who had backgrounds that could be qualified to become members of our cabinet.

I went to a number of women’s groups and said, “Can you help us find folks,” and they brought us whole binders full of women.

I was proud of the fact that after I staffed my Cabinet and my senior staff, that the University of New York in Albany did a survey of all 50 states, and concluded that mine had more women in senior leadership positions than any other state in America.

Now one of the reasons I was able to get so many good women to be part of that team was because of our recruiting effort. But number two, because I recognized that if you’re going to have women in the workforce that sometimes you need to be more flexible. My chief of staff, for instance, had two kids that were still in school.

She said, I can’t be here until 7 or 8 o’clock at night. I need to be able to get home at 5 o’clock so I can be there for making
dinner for my kids and being with them when they get home from school. So we said fine. Let’s have a flexible schedule so you can have hours that work for you.

We’re going to have to have employers in the new economy, in the economy I’m going to bring to play, that are going to be so anxious to get good workers they’re going to be anxious to hire women.

Reider’s Note: For this year’s anniversary of 9/11, I didn’t want to link to the account I wrote eleven years ago about that day, as I’ve done many times over the past ten years. I wrote and rewrote this entry several times yesterday, but I felt it was just too lofty. So I decided to scrap it.

Loftiness be damned. This is really how I feel.

Eleven years ago, I experienced the worst day of my life. In the days and weeks that followed, I witnessed and felt grief unlike any I had known before. But I also witnessed the greatest of human compassion. For a brief, beautiful blink of an eye, the day-to-day pettiness of division that creeps into so many of our lives was nowhere to be seen nor heard. In the cold, miserable shadow of the loss of thousands of lives, of innocents and of heroes, of ordinary human beings just like you and me, we momentarily achieved something remarkable: we put ourselves aside and joined together.

We have a duty to continue honoring all the victims of that day, from those who perished as a result of a hijacked airplane to those who still suffer terribly from that day’s previously implausible carnage to those who have given their lives in its memory over the intervening years. To do so, we must honor the living. At first glance, differences that serve to alienate us from one another are much easier to see and to accept as the whole picture. By committing ourselves to the much more difficult task of actively seeking out those things we share in common, those things that bind us together as members of the same human race, we prove that we, the survivors, are capable of learning and growing and making ours into a better world.

As long as we exist, there will be unexpected terrors and tragedies. We should not look to define ourselves by how we try to circumvent these inevitable pains and sorrows. Rather, we should work on defining ourselves by how we choose to react to these things. We must fight the many impulses to surrender to cynicism, fear, anger, and contentedness with the world as it is. We must each, individually, grow beyond these seductive primal instincts, and come together in respect and mutual understanding and, yes, even in love–for more than just the fleeting blink of an eye. In doing so, we will prove that the cruel and violent hatred that so often accompanies intolerance, that obscene brutal force that destroyed so many lives on September 11, 2001, and continues to destroy so many lives today, does not control us.

That is how we truly honor the fallen.

–Reid.

Mom and I just wrapped filming a commercial for Democrat Joe Miklosi’s run for US Representative. Mom is a star! I’m more of a comet.