I haven’t checked these numbers (boring!), but according to the Tax Policy Institute, Obama’s tax plan is going to hork you — if you make over $227,000 per year.

If you make under $112,000 per year, your taxes will decrease under Obama’s plan.

McCain’s plan reduces taxes for everybody (especially the super-rich), unless, of course, you count the dollar collapse from the giant deficit as a tax.

Takes a little patience…

Time for a little sexism, I guess.

When I go to the gym, I do a little cardio stuff (usually elliptical or rowing), and a quick circuit of weight machines.  I work up a sweat, cool off in the pool, and pat myself on the back.

There are lots of women working out, but the vast majority of them seem to have a phobia of exercise.  They do the weight machines, but they set them on the lowest settings, so they’re bench pressing ten pounds.  Here’s a tip, ladies:  When you lat pull 15 pounds, the weight of your own arms keeps the weights in equilibrium, so you’re actually doing less work than simply lifting your arms over your head.  And hey, those step machines have resistance settings for a reason!

It’s as if they fear that a single drop of sweat could drain their lifeblood.

I hate to criticize anybody who’s exercising, even if it’s totally lame. Heck, I think most Americans would double their exercise if they just parked their car across the street, and they’d triple it if they just lost the remote control.  Any exercise is better than nothing. But come on!  If you’re going to go to the gym, work a little.

The aversion to sweat doesn’t seem to exist in the girls in the other room doing the aerobics routines — and they’re hotter than the ones pretending to exercise in the main room.

OK, I’ll shut up now, before some musclebound girl kicks my ass.

On a whim I picked up a collection of Shirley Jackson (best known for the horrifying tale, “The Lottery“) short stories.

One of my favorites is “Seven Types of Ambiguity.” For me, this is a chilling tale of human evil. It enrages me every time I read it.

This probably makes me weird. Surely few who read this story would words like “chilling,” “evil,” and “rage” when describing it.

Here’s the plot:

A couple comes into a bookstore. They buy some books. They leave.  The end.

So why does it make me so angry? For the same reason books by the yard make me angry. To me, books are the core of civilization. Have some respect.

When Katrina hit New Orleans, I was deeply saddened by the flooding of several public libraries, whose entire rare books collections were ruined or lost. People come and go, but knowledge is forever.

In McCain’s speech on foreign policy, several times he repeated a statement that kind of flabbergasted me.  “I know how to win wars.”  It’s a great thing to know, and he says it with great confidence, but, um, what wars has he won again?

He was in the military, as a pilot.  Pilots fight battles, not wars.

He did go to the Naval Academy at Annapolis, but his not-quite-dead-last class ranking (894th out of 899) isn’t exactly confidence inspiring.

I can’t help but suspect that I know two dozen gaming nerds who know more about how to win wars than McCain.

I’m going to finish by saying something nice about McCain.  When he was a POW in Vietnam, they offered to release him early because his father was an admiral, but he refused repatriation until every soldier captured before him was released. I respect that. It shows toughness, and courage, and principles.

But this old man has no business being president. Sorry.

Yesterday we were talking about the Supreme Court, and I talked about how my vast respect for them was hugely diminished by the 2000 election decision.  I was disgusted that all the biggest supporters of states’ rights reversed their longime policies to make a blatantly partisan decision to stop counting votes.  Disgusting.

I spooneristically referred to this as the “Bore v. Goosh” decision.

Growing up, my first observation of homosexuality was in the movie Deathtrap (Spoilers ahead!) with Michael Caine and Christopher Reeve. When they kissed onscreen, it blew my mind. It had absolutely never occurred to me that guys might do that. At sixteen, it was the most perverse thing I had ever seen.

Now that I think about it, there was a brief reference to homosexuality in Logan’s Run (”Do you prefer women?”), but I didn’t get it. The nudity in that movie also blew my eleven-year-old mind, but it thrilled me, instead of giving me the willies. I guess I’m pretty straight.

Until I went to Europe (at seventeen), I had no idea how repressed America was (and is) sexually. I always thought we were pretty progressive — heck, we don’t even make women wear veils! European ads and beaches let me know how dark a puritan state we live in.

In college, we had a discussion about homosexuality, and I blurted out that that sort of thing didn’t happen in Alaska — there were no gay people in my high school. Then my brain sort of caught up with my mouth, and, thinking back, there were at least four gay — or at least bi — people in my senior class (of about 30). That well-groomed nice young man who always hung out with the girls but never went on dates? Duh! We just didn’t know what to look for.

Here’s my question: Did he know he was gay, or did he, without the benefit of Deathtrap, just think he was weird somehow?

I love gay men and women, but the thought of male homosexual sex still creeps me out. Sorry. (Female homosexual sex, oddly, is hot. Again, sorry.) My brain knows it’s fine, but my gut has been culturally programmed toward homophobia. And if that same cultural gut-level programming affects gay people — and it must — then it’s a wonder they’re not all head cases.

Gay people rock. I’m sorry I’m a homophobic idiot sometimes.

Whenever I see weird stuff in the grocery store, I buy it. A lot of the time it’s just as vile as it sounds (wheat grass juice is a lot like licking a lawnmower, for example), but sometimes you find something cool and new.

We ate Mangosteens in Hong Kong, but the dried ones taste like, um… Well, let’s just say the packaging represents it reasonably.

I don’t believe in using credit cards for credit.  I pretty much exclusively use a debit card, but on the rare occasion I use a credit card, I pay it off immediately.  Interest is a huge waste of money.  I always buy cars cash, and we even paid cash for our house.  Other than student loans, I’ve never had debt.

Which is not to say I don’t have a bunch of credit cards. My policy is that I’ll sign up for any credit card that pays me at least $30 to do so.  It’s not uncommon at all — “Sign up for the airline credit card now, and save 10% on this purchase!”  “Apply for the Amazon card, and get $40 off your next order!”  I sign up, save some money, and when the credit card comes in the mail, I toss it in a drawer without ever calling the number on the sticker to activate it.  And then I pay it off in full, immediately.  (Once I was a week late, and they dinged me with a $30 fee.  I called them and got them to reverse it, but it helps me understand what their business plan is.)

Anyway, when my wallet was stolen, and I’m without local friends and family, that drawer full of unactivated cards came in pretty handy.  I pulled one out at random (well, two — the first one had already expired), called the number to activate it, and I’m back in the swing.

And without my entire wallet, I was worried about what I was going to use as ID to get a new license or cash from my bank, but then I remembered my passport.  Done.  Mary carries her passport in her purse, so I’m not sure what she’d do if it got snatched.

The iPhone folks were nice, and offered to give me a loaner phone to use until the iPhone G3 comes out on Friday.  They were unwilling to remotely detonate the old one, which was disappointing.  Ah, well.

My wallet and iPhone were stolen from my gym locker while I was showering.

Thieves suck, but they especially suck when they cause more damage than they get.  If they had just pilfered the cash (some $300), they would have gotten roughly the same benefit, but the cost to me would have been much lower.  The annoyance of replacing my credit cards (they were canceled within 15 minutes, so had a value of approximately zero), library card, video rental card, and so forth, as well as my driver’s license is worse than the cash loss.

The iPhone isn’t quite valueless to them, but it’s certainly not worth as much as it is to me.  On the plus side, I’ll have an excuse to replace it with a 3G iPhone on Friday.

Mary’s out of town for two weeks, and I’m sort of broke.  My bank won’t give me money without a driver’s license, and the DMV won’t give me a new license unless I pay them in cash.  I’m going to be out panhandling to get back up to speed.