New York State of Mind

So one of the things that's been keeping me busy lately is doing my duties as a good New Yorker. For the first time I actually got to vote in a voting booth. Since I was registered in CT, though I lived in RI and NY since I was voting age, I would always end up doing an absentee ballot. My absentee ballot voting was always pretty comical in CT since the town is so small that I would run into all sorts of people I knew and the town selectman(highest office) would usually be hanging out in his overalls. Now that I live in Carroll Gardens I felt inspired to get all neighborhoody and vote here. I voted for all the Working Families candidates which because of fusion voting can come from all sorts of parties. Well actually I also voted for David Pechefsky, the Green Party candidate, for councilperson but he lost out to the Brad Lander the Democrat- oh well the WFP and my favorite bagel shop like him so I'm sure he'll be fine.

Statewide Bloomberg won again. Booo. Gawker had a great post about why you shouldn't vote for him, it lays it all out without being boring. Unfortunately everyone was sort of comparing the race to the Kerry /Bush race. No one likes Bloomberg but no cared much about Thompson either. I heard Thompson say some good stuff about education and working class issues on NPR last spring and it made me like him and be sure he'd get the WFP's backing....but its hard to go up against the $100 million that Bloomberg put into his campaign. I couldn't even check my gmail without Bloomberg ads popping up. Also it really started to seem like even the NPR folks were siding with him. Everyone was going on and on about how he had a 19% lead in the polls but then he won with only 51% of the votes and a 5% lead on Thompson. Oh well.

On a more positive note John Liu became the first Asian person to hold a city wide seat when he was voted in by 76% of the vote to replace Thompson as NY City Comptroller. Also Margaret Chin won with 86% of the vote to become the first Chinese person to represent Chinatown on the city council. So the election overall was pretty good news with the exception of this tool:


















So aside from that I also had jury duty last Thursday which ended up not being that bad. After discussing tactics such as dressing up like American Girl Doll Kirsten in an effort to not get picked, it turned out that I never even got closed to getting picked so good thing I didn't invest in the real girl sized Kirsten's Christmas outfit. It turns out that I got jury summons in both CT and NY, which made me think of the 30 Rock where they contrast jury duty in Chicago with jury duty in New York. I thought that maybe showing up with 3 hours of sleep and a hangover would do the trick but then I realized it was just like that 30 Rock episode and looking crazy will get you nowhere.

Chicago


New York