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George Carlin is dead

Anyone reading this blog knows I gave up the sauce some time ago. My sobriety will be 13 years long on June 22 if I don’t drink and I don’t die. I thank God for my sobriety and consider it a gift — a gift of family, friends, financial well being, spiritual well being, all the things that make my life worth living.

Nevertheless, here’s a list of 40 Things Every Drunkard Should Do Before He Dies from Modern Drunkard Magazine. I must say that this is a list of which I approve. If you are going to do something, do it well. I have a personal favorite that I would put on the list, and that is that I once tore out the yellow pages for Taverns and went to all of them alphabetically from A to P. I have been places you wouldn’t believe, I guarantee.

My son and I have a certain penchant for a kind of old school manners and value of the best (not always the most expensive). We like nice pens and calling cards and thank you notes and such. We both believe in personal style. I like my son, quite apart from being his father — he’s the kind of guy I like to hang around because he’s funny and smart. I think he would approve of the list, if declining to try to live up to any cheap magazine’s crude tongue-in-cheek list himself. I’ve done a good bit of the 40, although far from them all. I don’t even want to know Jack’s score.

My daughter, Rebecca, on the other hand, no doubt sees such a list as utter foolishness and has no admiration for drunkards. She’s far too practical to see the romance of such a list. Thank God. Women like my daughter actually have to grow up and be sensible once they’ve had a couple of my grandchildren. It’s an unfortunate requirement, but there it is.

Jack and I are unencumbered by such reasonable obstacles because, as everyone knows, men grow older but not up.

Speaking of silly rules, today is the first day of summer and all and I just got my white silk pants from the cleaners and I’m going to dress in the way that my friend The Gary calls “A guy in search of a marina.”

Blogblah

Just looking at the presidential race through the lens of the electoral map as I’ve set it out below, I’d say Richardson of N.M. is Obama’s best choice of the conventional lists. New Mexico, Colorado and Nevada are “in play” as battleground states and that’s 19 electoral votes total from the three (Ohio has 20 and Michigan has 17, to give you perspective).

With Richardson’s ability to shore up Obama’s Latino vote (Bush got 40% of Latinos in ‘04 and McCain is currently polling about 30%), the N.M. Gov. can also play a little mischief in Texas and if not win that state, at least make McCain spend scarce money in what should be a very red state.

If the Latino vote in the Southwest (as opposed to Puerto Ricans in New York and Cubans in Fla.) is 85% Dem, then even McCain’s home state of Arizona goes into play.

Just mentioning the Florida Cubans reminds me that a poll has now shown an Obama lead down there, but it’s mostly seen as an “outlier”, an unreliable result. That result, however, may look more real once Floridians start thinking about Gulfshore beaches exposed to offshore drilling, as McCain proposed this week.