Daily Life in an Ivory Basement

I have a habit of occasionally sending odd e-mails to my postdoc lab mailing list, for reasons that I cannot adequately explain. Here's the latest one:

Dear Bronner-Fraser Lab,

I would like to thank you all for your private letters of support;
between the blizzards of Colorado, the floods of Texas, and the
red-v-blue fighting in Michigan, it's been a tough year for us newly
independent Bronner-Fraser-ites!

Now that McCain has withdrawn his cadre from Michigan and Obama has
successfully captured the bastion of Michigan State (strategically
located next to the capitol of Michigan!), I expect the out-and-out
party fighting to die down, at least in the streets of Lansing.  While
fiercely partisan Reds will probably continue to snipe at us for a
while, Obama continues to clear Lansing block-by-block in his advance
with forces of crushing superiority.  However, the newly added wrinkle
of the pro- and anti-bailout forces (or, as they're known locally, the
Inflationists and the Depressionists) leads me to believe that we are
not long for peace here; more on that soon.

Overall, we've been very lucky.  Our compound is located far enough
away from densely populated areas that we haven't been affected much
by the fighting, and some of our local friends who are less fortunate
have bolstered our ranks.  Armored vehicles continue to roam the main
roads, but again, we're not close enough to them to be affected.  We
do have a local supply of drinking water, and so far the mine fields
are holding up; I do worry a bit about the ammo situation, but I've
directed everyone to switch away from automatics until we get a new
shipment in.

Internet has not been interrupted, although this is a mixed blessing;
I've had to stop communicating with one of the few remaining die-hard
conservatives I know, because his e-mails were correlated with attacks
by the local McCain militia.  I have come to believe that he was
hitting me with pro-Palin blogs as a distraction technique, although I
quickly saw through the tactic -- even the conservatives don't think
she's viable any more.

Anyway, I'll continue to keep you all updated as the fight continues.

best,
--titus

Please send ammo!

I sent this e-mail to a local friend who lost his mind a few years back and started voting Republican. His response suggests that there's a platform some Dems could maybe consider running on...

If the Dems want to make me their electoral love slave:

once they get power, toss out the TSA crap.

I'm serious.  And I can't even pretend to be able to do more
than rationalize this.  But for some reason, TSA and the
exasperation of air travel has come to exemplify in my head
everything I hate about how the WoT is currently being prosecuted.

Go figure.

Heh.

--titus