Woo hoo! BTW Day lives! Last year, the gang and I celebrated the first ever Blue Tree Whacking Day, a day of merriment and antix (I want to spell antics properly, but I've been outvoted; so, in the context of BTW, I have to use the approved misspelling). To learn more about Blue Tree Whacking, visit www.bluetreewhacking.com. Oh, wait, you can't! Because Steeze hasn't fixed it yet! Anyway, I'll reference BTW and hyperlink to the site once it's back up and running... Kevin! Activities included a pilgrimage to Toledo to see the traveling Star Wars museum exhibit, Good E. Bag Wednesday Super Special Christmas Edition, and The Hour That Nobody Wanted 3. This year, the Star Wars exhibit has moved on, nobody is willing to do The Hour That Nobody Wanted in the cold again, and January 2 is a Thursday, so no Good E. Bag Wednesday. (In theory, we could celebrate BTW Day on New Year's Day, a Wednesday, but that's a day for watching twelve or more hours of college football, one final feast before the eight month famine until next season.) Fortunately, the Bald Mountain, our wise parliamentarian, has ruled that we may have a one-time only, special exception Good E. Bag Thursday, or as I like to call it, Good E. Bag "Wednesday." Christmas, Emma's wedding, the rock show, and BTW Day: life is good.

More on that front: last night the Flying Dutchman was walking around the house chanting, "Al Bore no more in 2004!" With former Vice President Gore's decision not to seek the Democratic nomination for president, the 2004 elections have gotten interesting again. Between the war on terror and the midterm elections, President Bush looks like a formidable opponent; but now, the Democrats are no longer burdened by having a clear-cut frontrunner. The primary thing Gore had going for him was that he won the nation-wide popular vote in 2000; however, after 9/11 the American people have neither patience nor tolerance for assertions that Bush is not the rightful president. And lest we forget, Gore somehow managed to lose the 2000 election to a pre-9/11 W., a man widely believed to be an imbecile, even by some of us who voted for him. The debacle in Floida aside, Gore lost the election. He was the sitting vice president to a personally popular president and had sat in office during an incredibly long period of robust economic growth, and yet his race against the Shrub was so close that one state decided the outcome. His campaign was lackluster at best, a mishmash of robotic speeches, indecypherable themes, and horrid public swallowings of his fascist wife's face. With Clinton's record to run on, an inanimate carbon rod should have been able to beat W. by a margin that resembled Reagan-Mondale ('84) more than Kennedy-Nixon ('60). The inevitable conclusion is that Al Gore's just a loser.

So, the Democrats may be better off without him. At the very least, now there will be a fight for the nomination, and that might actually result in something the Democrats haven't had in decades: new ideas. As I see it, the two leading contenders are Senator John Kerry (Mass.) and Senator Joe Lieberman (Conn.). Kerry represents the left wing of the party, Lieberman very much the right. Some have forwarded the name of Senator John Edwards (N.C.), but I believe him to be too young and too ambitious to risk a potentially disastrous campaign so early in his career. It is interesting to note that no one has successfully run from the Senate since JFK in 1960. LBJ stopped off at the Naval Observatory before ascending to the White House; though he hadn't held elective office in eight years prior to his inauguration, Nixon had most recently been Vice President, too. Ford and G. Bush were V.P.s, previously serving in the House (both of them) and almost every possible appointed position in government (Bush). Carter, Reagan, Clinton, and G.W. Bush were all governors. Does this bode ill for Mr.s Kerry and Lieberman? Probably. But, hey, there are two years until the next election, and in December 1998 who had ever heard of George W. Bush?