lay of the land

I have been told by a few people that a map of the Lenox food court would aid in enjoying reading the entries related to The Great Food Project. For those people, I present the following map:

I have also been told by people that it's a bit disappointing that some of the choices are fairly pedestrian, such as Burger King or Taco Bell. That may be true, but all these ordinary restaurants add up to a food court that has more choices than any other food court that I can think of. Still, by the time that I end the Great Food Court Project, will I be disenchanted by this level of choice? Will I just eat at Great Wraps and Chick-fil-a all the time? Do food court restaurants even matter? These are the questions I hope to answer over the course of the project.

Anyways, now that you know all the choices I face in conducting this experiment, feel free to leave comments with your vote of where I should go next. I will consider them, but bear in mind that ultimately, I must vote with my stomach.

coney island moon

Nathan’s Famous is a Coney Island institution. It has been selling hot dogs since 1916, and it also holds the Fourth of July hot dog eating contest, when we celebrate America by watching small Japanese men set hot dog eating records. What then, is Nathan’s Famous doing in the Lenox Mall Food Court?

Lest anyone has forgotten, today I resumed the Great Food Court Project, or my attempt to eat at every restaurant in the mall food court that is a short walk from my office. Today I was in the mood for hot dogs.

I honestly don’t remember Nathan’s presence in the food court from my earlier stint in Atlanta, and I thought it was exclusively in Coney Island and in the New York New York casino in Las Vegas. But a quick glimpse at the Nathan’s website showed me how wrong I was---this restaurant is everywhere! There are numerous outposts in Tokyo, which I guess is how the Japanese practice for world domination, and weirdly, Kuwait. Also, it’s possible that Nathan’s might be trying to take over the world; they’ve bought Kenny Rogers Roasters and a sub company and a fish company. Let’s keep an eye on this, people.

Anyways, the Nathan’s in Lenox has possibly the world’s worst placed menu, which requires kind of leaning in to the restaurant to see what they have…this might be the reason that not many people were ordering from there. Or it might be the social bias that exists against hot dogs in our culture. Either one. Because of the weirdly placed menu, I can’t report on everything they offered, but let’s just say I saw a little menu item known as “hot dog nuggets.”

I settled on a chili cheese hot dog, a hot dog with sautéed onions and an order of fries. I preferred the hot dog with sautéed onions to the chili cheese dog, even though I lost some onions down the front of my shirt when I took a bite. They sauté those onions in magic. The fries were great---they are gigantic crinkle cut fries that were bigger than my fingers.

While I ate, I tried to read the little info sheet that lines the trays (it was a little tricky to read with the gobs of chili cheese that fell onto it). What I learned is that nine U.S. presidents have eaten Nathan’s, and that when King George and Queen Elizabeth came to visit America, FDR served them Nathan’s.

Nathan’s got its start when a guy named Nathan fell in love with this girl named Ida at this hot dog place they were working. They decided to start their own hot dog stand and sold hot dogs for a nickel and the rest is history from what it sounds like.

I thoroughly enjoyed my meal, but I will say that a lunch of hot dogs makes it a little hard to go back and work for a few more hours. Even on the short walk back to the office I felt like I was going to die. Hot dog juice was oozing through my pores.

Easter weekend

Friday afternoon I took off from work a bit early to drive to Asheville and go to Good Friday services with my dad, although my dad and I loosely defined Good Friday services as a Greg Brown concert. If you are my boss and you have happened to find this, and you have an issue with how I defined Good Friday services in my request to leave early, then let me know and I’ll play you some Greg Brown songs. I think the case can be made that I got about the same amount of religion as if I’d been in a church.

Greg Brown is a folk singer who never met a t-shirt that he liked (there are lots of photographs of him in wife beaters or with no shirt at all), and he was one of my first concerts back in the day. He sings songs that make Iowa sound like a great place to live, but to get back to my first paragraph, he sings some songs that are about growing up with a pentacostal preacher father who spoke in tongues. An interesting thing about Greg Brown is that he is married to folk singer Iris Dement. Perhaps this is not interesting to you, but in the folk music world, this is huge. I can still remember when my dad emailed me to tell me this gossip. For folk music fans, there’s not a lot of juicy gossip, but this is sort of the equivalent of a Jay-Z/Beyonce hookup in our world.

I was also particularly excited about the opening act, Sarah Lee Guthrie and Johnny Irion. If Sarah Lee’s last name looks familiar, she is the granddaughter of Woody Guthrie and the daughter of Arlo. Sarah Lee Guthrie and Johnny Irion are married, which is interesting, but not as much as the Greg Brown/Iris Dement thing. Anyways, Sarah Lee and Johnny are a great little duo with wonderful songs. They also sang a new Woody Guthrie song, one of the thousands that he left with lyrics but no music. Greg Brown brought Sarah Lee and Johnny back out to sing on his encores but it was pretty clear he wasn’t telling them what songs he was going to play. It was a great concert.

I am happy to report that the Easter bunny made it to our house this morning. The whole family went to the early Easter service. It was my first time having Easter with my family in years which was nice. I would have to say that my favorite moment was right after the offertory, when my mom leaned over and whispered how one time, when she was a little girl, she took a new doll with her to church. And she folded up the dollar that she was going to give for the offering into her doll’s hand, so the doll could give the offering. But then the whole doll fell into the collection plate. Luckily God gave it back to her.

For our Easter meal, we had homemade macaroni and cheese. I mean, we had other things as well, including ham, green beans and biscuits, but from the way my dad carried on about it, you would have thought the only thing we had was macaroni and cheese. Basically, a few weeks ago, my dad requested macaroni for Easter. But Mom said that if he wanted it, he had to make it. So today Dad set to work cooking and just went on and on about how great this macaroni was going to be, and how it was made from this old recipe that he found when he was serving in the army in Korea. They don’t have macaroni and cheese in Korea, and he really wanted some. So he went to a Korean fortune teller and the fortune teller gave him this recipe, and that’s what he made for us today.

Actually, the recipe just came from a magazine. My dad has never actually been to Korea, nor did he serve in the army. We just decided that the recipe needed a more interesting back story than coming from a magazine.

Then this evening I drove back to Atlanta. About an hour into the trip, I pass this gold mining place; I went there once on a field trip in elementary school. If there’s a tip I can give you about going to a gold mining place, it’s don’t wear white. But anyways, the gold mining place is the kind of place where you pay some money and they give you a bucket of dirt and you look for rocks and then the appraiser will tell you if you found anything worth any money. It’s a really big place. But today, I noticed that they have some land for sale behind the gold mining place. So if anyone is looking to buy any land in the mountains of North Carolina, I would recommend buying there. Because you might be buying a land filled with gold! Gold, I tell you!

How to win your March Madness office pool!

It’s March Madness time! This is a time where you might need to pretend to be interested about sports in order to talk to your coworkers or impress your friends. If so, you may be wondering how to pick winning teams and collect your office pool. Here are some ways to fill out a bracket:
1. Ask your dad to fill it out for you
2. Do research about the players, how the teams have played this season, blah blah blah.
3. Judge the teams based solely on how they sound, stereotypes, gossip and gut reaction.

Or, you can adopt my special scientific method, which I have outlined below. Get your lucky gambling pen ready, follow the steps for each round, and be sure to give me a cut if you win.

The First 64
Always pick the number one seed in the first round.

Pick any schools that have the same name as your friends and loved ones. I have a brother named George who I like pretty well, so I picked George Mason, Georgetown, and Georgia.

Give religious sounding schools the benefit of having God on their side. If you do this, then St. Joseph’s, St. Mary’s, Temple and Brigham Young all advance.

Pick three schools with funny names. In the first round, I picked Purdue, Gonzaga and Oral Roberts.

Then choose two places that don’t sound very fun to go. Assume that people who go there don’t have much to do and focus intensely on sports to fill their time. I went with South Alabama and Western Kentucky. Conversely, pick two places that you do like to go; I went with Arizona and Oregon.

Then select all the remaining schools that have the color red in their jerseys. When opposing teams both have red in their colors, pick the higher seeded teams. This advances Washington State, Louisville, American, UNLV, USC and Stanford.

To finish off this round in your bracket, pick the school that comes first alphabetically.

Second Round
Pick the number one seed in the second round.

For all other slots, pick the school with more vowels in its name, not counting the word “college” or “university.” One exception to this rule is wherever “Duke” shows up, you are allowed to pick Duke, even if it has less vowels than Arizona.

In the case that some schools have the same number of vowels in their name, pick the one that is higher in the U.S. News and World Report rankings.

Sweet Sixteen
In this round, you can only pick three of the number one seeds. One of them will be upset. Bye bye UCLA.

After selecting the number one seeds, eliminate any remaining schools that have two names, i.e., South Alabama. After the two-names are gone, pick the schools with the shorter names.

Crazy Eights
To get to the Final Four, your school has to have a lot of fans, so pick the school from the more populous state.

Final Four
At this point, it’s finally time to take a look at the school’s mascot. Identify all the remaining school’s mascots. Personally, I have these left:
North Carolina (Ram) vs Kansas (Jayhawk)
Stanford (Cardinal) vs Duke (Blue Devil)

Now, we’re not trying to pick which one is the coolest mascot, although that method would probably work. Instead, think about which mascot would be more delicious to eat. As a poultry fan, I think I would probably enjoy eating jayhawks and cardinals more than I would enjoy eating rams or blue devils. Immediately eliminate the mascot you are more likely to want to eat, because this is a sign of weakness.

The Big Game
At this point, I am left with North Carolina vs. Duke. This is every North Carolinian’s favorite match-up, unless that North Carolinian was raised by a UVA fan, as I was. I’m going with North Carolina cause I’ve been hearing good things.

tornado drill

As you might have heard, there were some tornadoes in Atlanta this weekend. I wasn’t going to write about it, because I wouldn’t want to diminish the problems of people that were affected by the tornado with my silly blog. I was never in any danger, and I dislike when people exaggerate their response to things that are merely proximate to them for attention.

But then I thought about how little I’ve been posting lately, and I figured, if you can’t get a blog entry out of a tornado blowing through town, then what can you get a blog entry out of?

Friday night I started noticing flashes of light. At first, they were small…I thought it might have even been someone on the adjoining balcony taking flash pictures. Then they got bigger and bigger. Gigantic flashes of lightening every five seconds or so. By the time that I was ready to go to bed, one crack of lightening would seem to cut the sky in half. The lower half of the sky never seemed to go dark. Instead, it was more like a brownish-red, lit up by the constant lightening.

It was a pretty cool light show, but I never thought it might have been associated with anything bigger. I do remember thinking it was kind of weird that it wasn’t really raining, and I was a tiny bit worried because it was that kind of lightening that feels like it’s right in front of you. In middle school, I had a science teacher who had been struck by lightening not once, but twice. So from a young age, I have been fairly worried about being struck by lightening. Because I know it can strike the same place twice, contrary to what people would have you believe.

I saw on the news that night there was damage to the Georgia Dome, so I knew something was up. That night it was hard to get to sleep because of the continuous lightening. So ended Friday night.

Saturday morning, I checked CNN and learned it was a tornado. Looked at pictures of damage. I also learned from CNN that Atlanta was “bracing for more storms.” So I settled in for a Saturday of bracing for a storm. I thought about doing my taxes because that seemed to fall under the category of getting your affairs in order, but instead I just watched television.

At one point I checked weather.com and there was a gigantic red box telling me that I WAS IN DANGER AND NEEDED TO SEEK SHELTER IMMEDIATELY. I figured the shelter of my apartment would have to continue to suffice. Do you think a lot of people check weather.com from outside and need to seek shelter? I was confused about that.

Around 4 pm or so, there had been no storm and I wanted to open my balcony door for a little bit of air. Well, right after I did, the deluge began. There was giant hail and rough winds. I definitely learned an important lesson—do not stop bracing for a storm until CNN gives you the all-clear! CNN told me we were still bracing, and I should have listened.

But that storm ended fairly quickly. That night I was having dinner with a friend, and we worried somewhat that going out would be tempting the fates, as if we weren’t properly bracing for the storm. Instead, we decided going out to a restaurant was a sort of celebration of life.

We went to an Italian restaurant, and while we were eating, all these kids in prom attire came in. The waiter told us that some of the proms had been cancelled for weather, but that the kids were going out anyways. There was one girl who had a very ornate braiding design in her hair that was topped off with a peacock feather. I don’t know much about hair, but that was obviously a very expensive up-do, and I hope for her sake that her prom wasn’t cancelled. Also I hope no peacocks died in the making of her hairstyle.

Sunday dawned bright and beautiful, probably the most beautiful Atlanta day since I moved down here. I guess this was the little known calm AFTER the storm.

And that was Tornado ’08. I’m glad I survived, because the new season of Dancing with the Stars started tonight. Steve Guttenberg is on, people! Get ready for the Gutt!

It's a dirty job, but someone's gotta do it.

I have been at my new job two months now. Things are going good, except for a few occupational hazards that I thought I’d share with you now:

--Ink. My office has these nice fountain pens, where the ink comes out all wet and professional looking. Big girl pens, I guess you could call them. Well, not a day of work has gone by where I haven’t come home with ink all over me or my clothing. It’s like that stuff just wants to cover every surface it comes in contact with, because it’s not like I’m not careful with the pens. No matter what I do, I’m getting some on me. This could lead to the threat of ink poisoning.

Well, never mind. I just did some research on ink poisoning and apparently it doesn’t exist. Ink is only bad if you swallow a lot of it. But still. All this ink is hazardous to my clothes and to my general outward appearance. I don’t want people thinking that I’m unkempt.

--The second occupational hazard I face is laziness. Not work-related laziness, because I’m working hard as ever, but bathroom laziness. See, the entire bathroom at the office is automated. The toilet flushes itself. You put your hands under the sink and the water comes out. You wave your hands and get a paper towel. Normally, I hate this system, because inevitably the toilet flushes too soon or not at all, the water doesn’t really allow for a proper handwashing, and the towel is never the appropriate size. But here’s the kicker. I have become reliant on this level of automation in my restroom. When I go to other public restrooms, I just assume they’re automated. On more than one occasion, I have forgotten to turn a sink off because I think it’s going to turn itself off. And other people look at me weird and turn them off for me. That is embarrassing! We’re in a drought! I can’t be forgetting to turn off faucets!

--Aspartame. My office has ten bazillion kinds of soda. I have started calling it the freezer of death, because sugar’s bad for you right? Well, I am starting to think that I have developed some sort of intolerance for aspartame as well. That’s right, glorious aspartame, the life force that gives us diet soda. I don’t want to tell you what symptoms I had to Google to figure out I am getting too sensitive to aspartame, but well, let’s just say I feel much better the days I don’t drink it. But I still want to! But it gives you brain cancer! I’m so conflicted!

--The next occupational hazard is perhaps the most important. I am starting to think I have either arthritis or carpal tunnel syndrome. Basically I sit at a computer and type all day and I probably don’t do it ergonomically correctly. So there are days where my hands get very tired and sore, to kind of bad degrees, actually. I mean, now that the health insurance has kicked in, I gotta get it checked out. Especially because I have identified a whole host of other diseases that I might have as a result of hand pain, thanks to Google. What if I have Lyme disease, people? What if there are ticks in the office? That would deserve a completely separate bullet point if my hands weren’t getting tired.

--If I am not typing, then I am usually reading, which is the last occupational hazard I’ll mention. It’s a very real threat, because when I read at a desk (as opposed to on a couch or in bed), then I cup my chin in my hand. Lately that is leading to a lot of breakouts in the chin region. I am trying to keep my hands off my face but then I can’t find a comfortable position. Also, reading and comprehending things in a short timeframe, which I must do, has been known to lead to head explosion.

So these are my occupational hazards. I know they’re not the worst in the world. It’s not like I’m fighting monkeys or handling garbage. But still. I have to live every day with the threat of chin zits and head explosion.

black-haired girl

This was a good weekend, musically. Saturday I went to see Jesse Malin, who is a good person to listen to if you’ve ever wondered what would happen if Bruce Springsteen and Ryan Adams had a baby who became a singer who wore extremely tight jeans. The guy works with both Bruce Springsteen and Ryan Adams quite a bit so I guess the similarity makes sense. He played at the very un-rock-and-roll time of 6 pm but then I guess he rock-starred it up a bit by not showing up on stage for an hour and a half. He does this thing near the end of the show which I guess is his calling card, which is asking the audience to sit down on the floor and sing along to a cover song with him. To bring everyone together, I guess. Perhaps this was uncool of me, but I squatted. I know too many people who have thrown up in that bar to be comfortable sitting.

Tonight I went to see Antje Duvekot and Ellis Paul. Both are folk singers. Antje Duvekot is kind of like if Patty Griffin and Patty Larkin had a baby but the baby was born in Germany. Ellis Paul is…well, I’m running out of ways to describe potential musical parents. Lookswise, it might be kind of like if Carson Kresssley and Sean Penn had a baby. I don’t know. Both of them put on a good show. They’re both the type that sing confessional songs with acoustic guitar and while I love that, it might be hard for me to describe them in a way that you could differentiate them from other folk singers. Antje Duvekot (I didn’t hear anyone pronounce her name the same way twice so I can’t help you there) had a song in a Bank of America commercial and Ellis Paul has had a few songs in Farrelly Brothers movies.

I was sitting at the bar next to these two girls, who might have been sisters. One was married and one had a boyfriend. Only the boyfriend was there. I spent a lot of time between sets trying to figure these girls out. They talked about topics as diverse as their pedicures and the cost of Maker’s Mark at various locales across the country. The only time I really heard the boyfriend talk was when he told his girlfriend that she looked much better with make-up than without. At this point I snorted beer out of my nose but I tried to cover it up, like it was a sneeze. Friends, it is painful to have beer come out of your nose. And a waste of good beer.

Anyways, if you are interested, here are some song samples from YouTube:
Jesse Malin singing with The Boss:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=izaexqdC29c

Antje Duvekot singing:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=AKnTpRvdQJI

Ellis Paul singing:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=HC8Ndis1ucU

honk

So, I spent three years in Seattle, the home of passive-aggressive driving, where it's somehow okay to drive 45 mph on the interstate, it's bizarrely thought that bikes can go as fast as cars, and drivers routinely speed up and slow down when they know people are trying to get in their lane. Now I live in Atlanta, where it's okay to honk if you don't like the song that's playing on your radio. I mean, there is a fair amount of honking. At first, I couldn't overcome my Seattle driving shyness, so I would just say "honk" to myself, or say, "that was a honker!" if I thought the offense was grievous enough. But now I am really coming into my own and using the horn a little more.

The problem with honking is it's so imprecise. People are so dumb that they may not even know why you are honking at them, and then they will never learn their lesson. I prefer more direct, concise communication. So I think we should redo car horns so that they convey the messages below, perhaps through actual words, or perhaps through different series of notes that are universally accepted to mean things such as these:

--I don't mind that you are slowing down and turning, because that is a part of driving, but put a blinker on, dumbass.

--I do mind that you are slowing down and turning, because you are slowing down too far in distance from the point at which you are actually turning.

-- I do mind that you are slowing down and turning, because you are taking that turn way too slow. I mean, a wheelchair could beat you on that turn.

--If you're going to switch lanes, please do it quickly and efficiently.

--I see no reason why you can't be going faster!

--Stop creeping over into my lane; it makes me nervous!

--I think your cell phone is impairing your ability to drive.

--I think the dog that you insist on putting in your lap is impairing your ability to drive.

--Do you notice how everyone is passing you on the right? That is because the left lane is for faster people.

--Driving with earphones is irresponsible and illegal.

--You know that parking space was mine, asshole.

--It's a really awful thing to zip by a line of cars waiting patiently for something (a left hand turn, interstate access) and then expect us to let you in.

--I am just letting one person into the flow of traffic right now, buddy. Stop trying to edge your way in.

--A warning horn to tell people that if I let you into traffic, you better move fast so that we both make it through the upcoming light. If you make it through the upcoming light and I don't, face the wrath of an angrier horn.

--Don't litter, jackass.

I will probably add more as time goes on.

Now I realize that these are quite time-consuming to put out into the world, but I think it's necessary. I also know that personally, my reflexes are such that while my brain is saying "honk," my hand may not be getting to the horn fast enough. So of course, having multiple horns that mean different things will just be impossible. What I hope we can do is rig this horn system so that the horn can just tell by the sweat on my palms or the pressure of my hand exactly what horn I need. What I am saying, in conclusion, is that I need a horn system that reads my mind and then conveys my thoughts to any offending drivers in my path. I don't think that's so much to ask for.

LBJ's dead.

One of the reasons I’m happy to live in Atlanta is that I can get home easily if there’s some sort of family event or a good concert in Asheville. This weekend there was both! The good concert was Lucy Kaplansky, who’s a folk singer and one-third of the folk supergroup Cry Cry Cry which I have previously mentioned. I haven’t really listened to a lot of Lucy since high school, but the concert keyed me into some things I had been missing. During the concerts, Lucy told a lot of adorable stories about her five-year-old daughter, Molly. When I heard Lucy had a daughter named Molly, I thought that perhaps I might be the inspiration for the name, because in high school, I saw a fair number of Lucy Kaplansky shows and she always signed an autograph for me. My uncle even got her to sign one, “To Molly, my favorite fan” or something like that. So anyways, I thought that all those autographs for me might have made her think, “I must have a daughter named Molly also!” But it turns out her grandmother’s name is Molly.

The opening act…I don’t remember his name, but he did a weird/interesting thing where he played along to his CD during some songs, but the CD was staggered a bit behind him, so it was sort of like singing in the round, with himself. I don’t know if that makes sense. He sang a song about babies dying at birth and a song that he said he wrote to explain to his 20-month-old daughter what a funeral was, because they had to take her to a funeral. I would say that the song was a little inappropriate for a 20-month-old because it had a lot of drinking and also, I think a funeral is a pretty good time to spring for a babysitter.

Anyways, the fun family event was the American Political Items Collectors (APIC) Spring Show in Greensboro, NC!!! Now, some of you who read this blog know that my father has collected political memorabilia since he was 10 years old. Things like campaign buttons and posters and weird presidential toys. When I was little, we completely renovated our basement so it could be like a campaign memorabilia museum. I spent a lot of time down there.

You find buttons by going to antique stores and to APIC shows. When I was little, I’d have to go down to the basement before an APIC show and look at all the buttons and try to memorize what Dad had in the collection, so that at the show, he could say, “Do we have this Goldwater button?” and I would say yes or no. Eventually I started to get it wrong and there were duplicates and then I went to college so now Dad has scanned all his buttons and put them in a binder and this makes going to APIC shows infinitely less stressful for me.

We found some pretty good buttons this year. I learned that LBJ is dead in terms of the value of his buttons, and my dad and a dealer had a pretty engaging conversation about cardboard backing vs. pinbacks on buttons. Some weird guy came up to my brother and showed him a picture of a Christmas tree that had political buttons on it, which you may think would be sort of a one-sided topic but as it turns out, my family also has a Christmas tree with political items that we put up every year. I saw a ferrotype of Lincoln that was selling for $3000. Other than that, it was a lot of middle-aged guys looking at buttons.

After the button show, my dad got horribly sick, but he still went through the button book and showed me some of his favorite buttons. I tried to take pictures of some buttons to put up here, but it turns out buttons don’t photograph well. But here’s what he pointed out:
--A McKinley goldbug. This is a bug with pictures of the candidates in the wings. William Jennings Bryan had silverbugs because the issue of the day was whether the country was going to have the gold standard or the silver standard.

--A Woodrow Wilson Peace Preparedness button that my dad likes because he bought it for a dime when he was ten.

--A button of FDR driving a boat. The button says, Don’t change pilots, re-elect FDR.

--The Landon sunflowers. Alf Landon was from Kansas and a lot of his buttons are brown with yellow petals on the border.

--The Willkie and Roosevelt slogan pins. Man oh man Willkie buttons are the most fun buttons of all! Here’s the deal with Willkie. He was a Democrat who switched parties to run against FDR in 1940, when FDR was up for this third term. People went ape-shit for Willkie, and this manifested itself through thousands of different buttons. They say fairly clever things like “Don’t be a third term-ite,” and the immense number of them led the FDR camp to release a button that said “All you can get from Willkie is buttons.” One of my dad’s favorite buttons is a button that says “Will” and dangling down from the button is a key. Will-key. Willkie. This is probably my favorite button of all-time as well. If my current job doesn’t pan out, I’m just going to become a Wendell Willkie scholar. He was fairly dapper as well.

--An Ike and Dick button that has a matching Mamie and Pat button. Fun fact: political items with two people on them are called jugates!

--A PT pontoon button for JFK. This was JFK’s favorite as well…he used to keep them in his pockets and hand them out to supporters.

--Goldwater buttons—My dad just loves Goldwater buttons. That is probably his specialty. There are a lot of buttons that say “A choice not an echo” or “In your heart you know he’s right” or simply, AuH20.

--Flashers. This one is not candidate-specific. Dad just likes all flasher buttons. They’re the ones you hold and then you move them and they say something different. This weekend we got a cool one that at one angle is a picture of Adlai Stevenson, and at the other angle, it says “Madly for Adlai.”

Also this weekend I came up with the word “Barackulous” which is like miraculous, but meant to denote a Barack Obama miracle. It is sadly too long to fit on a button.