I don’t know if you’ve seen the stories coming out this week, but apparently quite a few schools have banned tag, touch football and (I shit you not) other unsupervised chase games from their grounds. The reason, apparantly, is that parents might sue if their kid is hurt.  Now I have no idea what’s happened in the courts where we’ve gone from, “yeah, you smashed his car when drunk, you owe him punitive damages” to “yeah, your kid fell during recess, the school owes him damages”, but I do know it’s completely ridiculous.

My hunch, though, is that lawyers are only the excuse for what might be called the Nancification of America.  For most of human history, cats were getting married at 12, having kids at 12.  Now they can’t play tag in 5th grade because whiny parents are overprotective to the extreme.  I know this hasn’t been going on forever.  I’m only 22.  I remember back in the day.  We didn’t know what a “playdate” was.  If I wanted to hang out with a friend, I walked to his house.  If we wanted something to do, we’d get the guys together for a game of tackle football at the Maple St. park or go climb in the Bear Cave up Highland Park.  What’s going on today?

I should preemptively say that I’m going to be shocked on Halloween when I hear that kids don’t go trick-or-treating anymore because it’s too dangerous.

So there’s an election coming up.  The last two elections, I’ve voted a ticket that included Democrats, Republicans, Independents, Libertarians…everyone.  I always voted for the best man for the job, whether or not he or she had a chance to win.  This year, I think I’m voting a straight Democratic ticket.  What’s going on with the Republican party?  They don’t support the things that would make me vote for them - small government, individual rights, subsidiarity, humble foreign policy, global leadership, competitive markets - and are, essentially, corrupt as balls.  The K Street lobbyists have the Republicans in their pocket.  Even worse, Bush was a pretty disappointing president to begin with, and unlike a fine wine, he doesn’t get better with age.  The incompetence and nepotism is astounding.  I hope I never have to vote a straight ticket again, but that’s what times have come to.

Two trips coming up: DC on Nov. 13 and 14 for a Matlab conference (which I’m psyched for mostly because I got a good rate at the Madison, which is quite a swanky hotel) and then Eugene from Dec. 24 to Jan. 1.  This 9 to 5, 5 days a week is killing me, for real.