Halloween night chez Althouse.

1. I'm cooking up a large pot of Bolognese sauce to last us for a few days of repetitive but incredibly delicious eating. [UPDATE: I got an email request for the recipe. It's just the one in the wonderful "Classic Italian Cookbook." I've always used red and not white wine, though. I hope Marcella doesn't mind.]

2. I'm catching up with with the Sunday news shows and keeping an eye out for bloggables.

3. I'm answering computerized phone calls, as indicated previously.

4. I'm jumping up whenever the doorbell rings, grabbing my big bowl of Halloween-style Kit-Kat bars (i.e., orange-colored, white chocolate Kit-Kats), and answering the door. The last group was an adorable trio of animal-suited tiny kids: Tigger, a hyena, and a ladybug.

UPDATE: Two boys, maybe 9 years old, show up, one in a monster suit, another in just a nice pin-striped suit.

So what are you? A man ... but any particular type of man?

I'm an insurance salesman!

Ooh! That is scary!

Here's my card.

The card says:

Trust Me Insurance Services

I.M. Scheister

Pay me now and you'll never see me again.

Next were two girls, also maybe 9. One was Elvis. The other was dressed in a school uniform and had nicely done stage makeup creating the illusion of scissors and a pencil stabbed into her head:

You're Elvis.

Yes.

And you, you're a character from some horror movie I haven't seen?

No.

You're a schoolgirl ...

Yes ...

You're a schoolgirl who hates school!

Yes!

ANOTHER UPDATE: A young girl dresses as Leah LaBelle. A group of young boys all follow a sports theme (referee, Cubs fan) but one of them violates the theme and is a burglar. I question the referee guy about the theme of the group and he tells me the burglar guy "just sneaked in." Good save!

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Chris takes the next doorbell ring (after pausing last night's TiVo'd SNL with Kate Winslet).

Anything good?

Eh ... one was George Bush.

AND YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Five high school kids: two Greek philosophers, two hippies, and one pimp! I asked the pimp what he was doing hanging around with philosophers and hippies. Pimp had no good answer.

AND AGAIN, A HALLOWEEN UPDATE: Two girls, maybe 14, one is the old classic, a cat. The other:

You're ... you're 80s Girl!

Yeah.

With leg warmers!

Yeah.

Leg warmers rule!

Who the #*!^ is Hal Linden?

He seems to think he's famous enough to do a recorded phone call where he just says "This is Hal Linden" and then goes on to warn that "seniors" -- thanks, pal! -- need to worry about George Bush's plan to "privatize social security." You know, the last call I got was from Al Gore and I was none too pleased with that. But Hal Linden! You've got to be kidding me! If Hal Linden wants to alert me about any political issues, he'd be presumptuous even to give me a personal call. But a recorded call? Man, I just hung up on Al Gore half an hour ago.

Okay, okay, don't email me. I Googled him. So he's Barney #*!^-ing Miller. Now I know what you think of me, Kerry campaign. It's really a collection of insults: I'm old, I watch crap TV, and I want my money. Actually, it's all somewhat true. But if I'm old, I'm old enough to remember when the Democratic Party appealed to our idealism and assumed we would vote for the good of others. (That's why I'm a registered Democrat.) And if I watch crap TV, it's not crap TV with Hal Linden. And reminding me that I care about my money doesn't point me in the direction of voting for Democrats.

A survey.

Here is a survey (from professors at Southern Illinois University-Carbondale and University of Tennessee-Knoxville) studying "the motivations for accessing the Web, weblogs, chat rooms, bulletin boards and other Internet resources for political information." It would be good of you to fill it out, which you can do until 11/16/04. I'm told it "has been approved by the University of Tennessee institutional review board and is being conducted for academic purposes only and follows strict privacy protocols" and that "all responses are confidential and anonymous."

Adding up the Electoral College votes and really caring about Hawaii.

I'm looking at the averages on the polls in the battleground states at Real Clear Politics and plugging the results for each state into the calculator here. Bush has 290 electoral votes to Kerry's 248. That's giving Bush Ohio, by breaking the tie and averaging the four most recent polls (which show Bush 2.9 percentage points ahead). But let's take away Ohio: Bush still wins with 270. And that's giving Kerry Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. The shockingly decisive factor: Hawaii! But why is the most recent poll for Hawaii (showing Bush up by 1 point) over 10 days old? With all this polling madness, you'd think someone would take a poll out there. And to think Hawaii will be voting ever so much later than everyone else, when we will already have heard announcements of who has won Florida, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. If Kerry wins Pennsylvania and Ohio, but not Florida, it seems to me that Hawaii will be monumentally important. How strange! If Bush wins Florida and Ohio, Kerry is lost.

The Republicans are sending Cheney out to Hawaii today, and maybe the state will appreciate the high level attention. The Democrats have only sent Al Gore and Alexandra Kerry (1,000 people turned out). Not that I want to help Kerry win, but don't you think they'd better jet their man Edwards out there tomorrow? They do have Clinton appearing on Hawaiian TV by satellite. In a classic example of micro-campaigning, he pitched Kerry's "support for the Akaka bill that brings federal recognition to native-Hawaiians and compensation for Filipino war veterans."

But judging from the "Campaign 2004" page for the Honolulu Advertiser (the state's biggest newspaper), they don't look that excited about the attention. The big feature is the mayoral election (and the big issue is the one local politics issue that I get excited about: light rail).

Jesus arrested!

And his credit card was maxed out, so he couldn't pay the bail.

Much as I'd like to just leave you with the link, I'm going to have to copy out some of the story, because it's from the Wisconsin State Journal, which lets its links die after a day or two.

It was the kind of night when Jesus and Superman were arrested for having liquor on the street.

Actually, there were three Supermen, all from out of town, so perhaps they didn't hear that city ordinance bans open intoxicants, even on State Street over Halloween weekend. And Jesus worried aloud to police that his credit card was "maxed out," and thus he would be unable to pay the bail required for out-of-state transgressors before release.

State Street sidewalks were swarming by 8 p.m. Saturday. By 9 p.m., Madison police reported 63 arrests, primarily citations for breaking city laws regarding open intoxicants, spokeswoman Emily Samson said.

Not bad, compared to previous years, when store windows were smashed and some very foolish people thought that stealing is okay when done in a large, funloving group.

Costumes singled out for description in the WSJ:

guys posing as elderly Hooters waitresses, their usually attractive figures sagging below their costumes ...

The white-painted upper torso of Troy Kieler, 29, of Madison, protruded above a column made with square white cushions at top and bottom connected by a tubular sheet. "I am Pluto," he said, staying in character. "My arms broke off years ago. All I've got now is my pedestal."

The prize for best get-up Saturday likely will go to Mike Jolin, 30, and Jesse Emden, 26, of Madison, struggling in 7- foot, 6-inch metal and foam transformer costumes.

Yeah, I know, why didn't I go down to State Street and get some pictures? I just didn't. Sorry.

UPDATE: It sounds to me as though the big crowd behaved reasonably well this year -- okay, a bonfire, a little something-that-required-a-spritz-of-tear-gas -- but Mayor Dave Cieslewicz is saying, "I have had enough. This must come to an end." Party pooper!

Great cartoon.

Hey, I registered for the Atlanta-Journal Constitution's website so I could bring you the link to this very well-drawn Mike Luckovich cartoon about the Supreme Court, so maybe you'll put up with the long registration process so you can look at it. (I saw the cartoon in the paper NYT, but couldn't get a link there.)

UPDATE: A reader sends this registration-free link.

Voters to bin Laden: Crawl back into your hole!

What if you taped a video, and no one cared?

"The Year of Passion."

Here's a link to the article on the front page of the NYT Week in Review section, but you won't be able to see the whole illustration unless you get the paper version. You can, however, get a sense of the style of the illustrator, Ward Sutton. The paper NYT bursts with cartoon characters of various sorts, including a blogger, but the NYT perversely deprives us bloggers of the opportunity to link to the picture of the blogger, giving us only the vying veterans, the Texan "W" lady, and the black "Anybody But Bush" guy. Oh well. I'll describe the blogger guy. First, of course, it's a guy. Just to make sure you can tell he's a blogger, on the screen of his laptop are the words "MY BLOG." He's sitting at a little table, and on the table, along with his laptop, are a mug of black coffee and two stacks of magazines. He's wearing a T-shirt and jeans and little rectangular glasses. And he's got a goatee. So I guess he's an anti-Bush blogger. Maybe not. Could be some young libertarian guy.

The article itself? The author, Todd S. Purdum, reminds us that in past years, we complained about too much apathy. I'm a little apathetic about his article though. It's nowhere near as good as Sutton's illustration. He mostly says there's been passion in our politics this time around and that passion has its good and bad points. But I couldn't find a paragraph pithy enough to quote. He gives some respect to the internet:

If the Internet has been the source of vicious blogs and half-baked rumors, it has also often been a worthy watchdog on the mainstream media, a direct route to the candidates' records and official Web sites and a means of instantly checking their half-truths and evasions through nonpartisan outlets like FactCheck.org at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Center.

But no respect for blogs in that! Blogs are, in the conventional wisdom of MSM, "vicious."

UPDATE: I'd also like to link to Lloyd Dangle's cool cartoon on "Page Two" of The Week in Review, but can't find it on line. It's called "Lawyers, Florida Welcomes You" and has six drawings of 1950s style non-chain motels, with names like Sharks Nest Motel and Supreme Motor Court.

Election Day predictions of the meteorological kind.

It's close enough to Election Day to check the weather reports and say all the usual things about voting and the weather. I see it's going to rain here in Madison on Tuesday. But I thought God wanted Kerry to win!

The bin Laden "rebranding."

Some intelligence community experts, according to this L.A. Times report, read bin Laden's new message as an attempt at "rebranding":

"In some ways the tone of the message is as intriguing, and alarming, as the timing," said a U.S. official familiar with the tape, and the intelligence community's analysis of it. "The absence of an explicit threat does represent a different point of emphasis for this guy."

The fear is that bin Laden is trying to follow the pattern of the Palestine Liberation Organization, Hezbollah and the Irish Republican Army, which "evolved from violent militant groups into broader organizations with influential, widely accepted political wings."

Must we fight about politics?

Here's a piece in the NYT Style section (with a photograph that had me thinking way too much about the implications of the ketchup bottle). There are the couples who break up because they don't share political views and there are those who do the Carville/Matalin thing and report that: "It was an enhancement to our chemistry and sexual energy."

"To be honest, I couldn't imagine being anywhere else today."

Yes, of course, be honest if you want to be in politics. Chelsea Clinton speaks in Kissimmee, Florida at a rally for John Kerry (link via Drudge).

Two Madison still lifes: Election Year 2004 .

Let me say this about that.

I didn't understand much about politics when I was 12, but I nevertheless bought the wildly popular LP "The First Family." Vaughn Meader, who brilliantly impersonated President Kennedy on that record, died yesterday. People talk today about how comedy shows, especially "The Daily Show," are the place where young people learn the about politics, but "The First Family" worked like that too. I was a big Nixon supporter in 1960, quite simply because my parents were. I wore a big button to school -- in fourth grade -- that shifted back and forth between the face of Nixon and that of his running mate Lodge -- through the magic of that technology used in old crucifixion pictures to make Jesus Christ's eyes open and close. I loved Nixon then because my parents supported him. Yet when Vaughn Meader's brilliant comedy record came out, hit number one, and its tracks were played on Top 40 radio as if they were rock and roll singles, I went out and bought the record album. And there was something about that record that invited me in to the Kennedy mystique. Comedy can do things like that.

When Kennedy was killed, the great record became unplayable, and Vaughn Meader went from being one of the coolest people in the country to a person that no one wanted to talk about.

Mr. Meader often referred to Nov. 22, 1963, as "the day I died."

He drifted into alcohol and drugs before experiencing what he described as a religious awakening in the late 1960's. In recent years, he worked as the manager of a pub restaurant in Hallowell, Me., and performed in small clubs as pianist and singer, specializing in gospel and bluegrass.

Who could feel much sympathy for the comedy man, when we were all mourning our President? No celebrity has ever risen and fallen like Vaughn Meader. But thanks for the great fun you brought us back in those golden days, and goodbye.

UPDATE: I don't know why I didn't think to look it up before, but you can buy "The First Family" on CD, and even listen to some clips, which show how great Meader's Kennedy impersonation was.

Speaking of email.

Do you ever wonder what stories are being pitched to me in the email that I don't post on? Well, I can't really tell you, because then I'd be posting on them, wouldn't I? But suffice it to say, especially now, in the final days before the election, there are several subjects that I'm getting numerous emails about, that people would like to use blogs to turn into the issue of the day. Have I become a gatekeeper? Well, I'll keep this gate at least.

Email advice of the day.

This is the kicker from an email, responding to this post over on Instapundit and chiding me for not telling the world that the Osama bin Laden video "is fake, a phony, not the real thing":

Your a law student, well if you want to be a real lawyer, not a government lawyer working in an agency or on a commission, YOU'D BETTER SMARTEN UP.