A certain amount of artistic license with the Star Spangled Banner, even in ordinary circumstances, is understandable. It is admirable, even, when it adds subtlly to the pride of experience of hearing the country's National Anthem. Done properly, with the skills of the artist never overshadowing respect for the music, it glorifies the song, the listeners, and the country... and, though least of all, it glorifies the singer.

And yes, there are certain places where the usual sensibilities do not apply, e.g., the open field in Woodstock, New York. And there are certain contexts where the rules are easily understood to be different, e.g., a musical event of such size and variety that it could not help but be the defining moment of the political and cultural changes of its time. And there are certain artists who possess unique skills that no other musician can match, along with the inspiration to use them, e.g., Jimi Hendrix... Put all these elements together, and taking great liberties with The Star Spangled Banner can be a triumphant musical restatement, driven by and inspiring patriotism in new ways. In such very rare cases, taking great liberties is a show of genius and a show of respect.

An ordinary football stadium is not such a place. The beginning of an ordinary football game is not such a context. And as of now, I don't know who the vocal quartet was that performed at tonight's Patriot's - Jets NFL game, but they were not in the league of Jimi Hendrix. This was not a rare case, and there was no show of genius, not to mention no show of respect.

What I heard tonight in the broadcast of this football game took license far beyond any reasonable limit..

The continual stream of melodic deviations and flourishes taken by the singers was so great that they could have glorified only the singers themselves... if those flourishes and deviations had actually worked. In actuality, though, they were so discordant in several places that they didn't even succeed in that.. They only brought more disrespect on themselves, while showing disrespect to the song, the listeners, and the country.

It was offensive.

I blame the Super Bowl, and other major sporting events, where promoters have created too much of a spotlight on the singers of the national anthem, encouraging them to push the envelope too much, taking more liberties than appropriate -- though usually at least with a level of musicality that keeps it from being offensive.

P.S. It's a pure coincidence that I've mentioned Jimi Hendrix in two posts today, after never having done so in this blog before. I think.

As power trios go, few if any compared to The Jimi Hendrix Experience. Now, drummer Mitch Mitchell, the last surviving member of the original Experience lineup has passed away.

Little Wing on the iPod now.

I don't think I had ever really, truly experienced pandemonium before. I had seen it on TV, but never actually been in the middle of it.

I have experienced and reacted to many wonderful things in my life, and of course a few stand alone without any possible comparison to anything else. The best of those moments have been shared with family, of course, but last night I shared such a moment with a few hundred people, most of whom I had only known for a few days, weeks, or months.

It felt good. It was, for a moment or two, totally overwhelming. It felt like a huge weight was lifted off my back. At first I didn't understand why. It took a while to figure it out.

Late last night, I promised "more later", with the intention of telling the story of my day. Here it is. It's a bit long.

More on this later. I am totally spent.

It is way more than a cliché to say that this is an incredibly important election. I truly believe that our future, and our children's future depends on it.

The last week has been intense. Very intense. In the past ten days, I have put in five full days of volunteer work for the Nashua Campaign for Change, and at least a couple of hours on all the other days. I have done phone-banking, data entry, transportation of canvassers to and from their turf, transportation of literature from the campaign office to the staging site, and more. I have put up campaign signs, and I have taken them down, repaired, and replaced them after they were vandalized. (More on that in a bit.) And then there's tomorrow...

Election day here in New Hamspshire will see an unprecedented Get Out The Vote effort from our campaign. More than a thousand, and perhaps several thousand, canvassers will come through our staging area and cover routes in Nashua and surrounding towns. Many will drive themselves, but there will be bus-loads coming in from neighboring states where the result has never been in doubt. The buses have been coming on weekends for over a month now, but tomorrow we will have more -- lots more -- buses than we've had on any given day. And individual canvassers will walk more, too. But I won't be at the staging area, and I won't be driving canvassers. I'll be a poll-watcher.

I volunteered for the poll-watching job because it seems like a personal challenge. You see, the job of a poll-watcher is to be quiet most of the time and remain unobtrusive. Anyone who knows me can attest to how challenging that will be It's also a very important job for the campaign. It's not just that we're there to assure the fairness of the vote. Through a system of watchers and runners, we feed information back to the campaign organizers that helps them make decisions throughout the day on allocation of resources. It's a sophisticated operation, and the other side their own poll-watchers and their own systems in place. Turnout is expected to be huge this year. I've heard an estimate of 85%.

Don't think all this effort makes a difference? Consider this: in 2000, there were 566,796 votes cast in New Hampshire. In 2004, with both parties mounting large-scale GOTV efforts, there were 676,227 votes cast. That's a 19% increase in overall turnout. And because minor party candidates got about 23,000 fewer votes in 2004 than they had in 2000, in order to turn a 7,000 vote loss in 2000 into a 9,000 vote win, the Democratic party actually had to turn out 74,500 more voters in 2004, for a 28% increase in the Democratic vote, because the GOP turned out 58,500 more voters.

Now, a certain amount of this increased turnout was due to passions on both sides running higher, but with numbers like that there is no denying that a good piece of it came from the "ground game", and I'm proud to be a part of it. We, on both sides of the get out the vote effort, are pro-democracy. And being pro-democracy is being pro-American.

Even if you are not in a position where you can be a formal volunteer for the campaign of your choice, you can help. Call your friends and family. Pester them. Get them to go to the polls. Drive them if they need a ride. Watch their children if they need someone to do that.

Votes matter. Every vote matters. Here in New Hampshire, we had the closest election for US Senate in history. That was in 1974, when I was 14 and several years before I lived in the state -- but my grandparents lived here and I was well aware of the what went on. The initial count gave the election to the Republican candidate, Louis Wyman, by 355 votes. A recount then gave the election to the Democrat, John Durkin, by 10 votes. A second recount gave the election back to Wyman by just two votes, which was ruled the final count by the governor, and so the two vote margin stands as the official election result. There were still disputed ballots, though, and Durkin appealed to the Senate itself. A deadlock resulted and dragged on well into 1975, and finally an agreement was reached to re-seat the prior incumbent and hold a new election, which Durkin then won by a wide margin, with record turnout. Loads of people who didn't vote in the initial election turned out, and they delivered a decisive result. Votes matter.

Last night, at approximately 10:30 PM, I placed two 2'x4' political signs on properties on a major street leading into and out of my neighborhood, with the permission of the two homeowners, of course. I then went to the local campaign headquarters and joined other volunteers doing data entry work. At approximately 12:15 AM, less than two hours later, I drove past one of the signs on my way home. It had been spray-painted with a swastika.

The paint was obviously fresh, and I was able to do a quick repair job and get the sign re-posted within an half hour, although for expedience I just left it suspended on the frame rather than attached. In the morning I took my staple gun with me in the car, stopped at the sign site, and finished the repair. There are lots of smear marks, as the thinner does dissolve some of the sign's ink, too, but from a distance the sign still looks ok.

I did not take a picture of the vandalized sign. I probably should have, for the record, but you'll just have to trust me on this. On the other hand, I do have access to a picture taken of a larger sign that was just a few blocks away, which was vandalized the same way a week ago. (I won't post it, but if you really need to see it, ask.)

You see, sadly, this is not an isolated incident. Sign vandalism is highly prevalent here, and last weekend, several of our large signs around town were vandalized with swastikas, and the word "terrorist". This has happened elsewhere, too.

It is, unfortunately, doubtful that the brainless idiots who are doing this will be caught. And I am being generous. These are people who painted a universally-recognized symbol of vile hatred on a sign that is on a street that first graders walk down to get to school. "Brainless idiot" is a compliment in comparison to what I really feel about them, but I will not waste any more time thinking about what to call them. I just intend to defeat them.

The signs I am talking about, as regular readers will have already figured out, are Obama signs, but there are reports that the same thing has happened to McCain signs, too. So, when I say it is time to reject the politics of hate, that goes for both sides. People doing that need to be defeated, too. Opposition to hatred, and its symbols, is a non-partisan requirement. I fear for our country if both sides in this election, whatever the result, do not step back after it is over and completely purge their ranks of the extremists and hate-mongers who spread fear based on outright falsehoods, and either spew hatred themselves or tolerate and stir into a frenzy those who do it on their behalf.

Here's a guide to the upcoming switchover to digital TV, made especially for senior citizens

About six weeks ago, shortly after Senator McCain named Governor Palin as his running mate, I proposed an experiment. The idea was to use social software to engage in a structured discussion on the subject of whether executive experience matters. I planned to first provide a proposed structure for the discussion revolving around a series of scales for measuring different factors that contribute to types of experience that might (or might not) be important qualifications for the President and Vice President, and also a series of scales for measuring different factors that define how successful a President is in office. After a comment period on the structure itself, and some adjustments as per the wise suggestions of readers, I then intended to start digging through reliable sources with good biographical information of the last ten or so Presidents, compile my own scores for each of them on the various scales -- and give my specific justifications. Then the ideas was to open it up again for discussion and make adjustments as per the consensus of wise readers (which I'm possibly unrealistically optimistic about achieving ). After all the numbers were in, a consensus on relevance of executive experience should be apparent.

Admittedly, this would have not been a rigorously scientific (or even rigorously social scientific) study, but it could at least have been fun. Unfortunately, I wasn't going to start it and do a half-assed job, so I put it off until I could find the time to really do a good job on it. That time never came. :Liife and work have not really let up much, and I have been doing increasing amounts of volunteer campaign work -- to the point that I'm now putting in time 2 or 3 weekday evenings and one weekend day every week at the local Obama-Biden office, and I've also taken two days off to volunteer at campaign events. I was there tonight phone-banking, and my contacts to previously undecided voters went 9 to 1 in favor of Senator Obama, by far the widest margin I've seen so far. As good as that happened to feel, however, I take nothing at all for granted. Until November 5th, campaign work is the highest priority I've got for my disecretionary time. I've scheduled vacation days at work on election day and the day before, in order to put in full days volunteering.

Anyhow, even though I never got the experiment off the ground, that doesn't mean I haven't spent a good deal of time thinking about the question of whether executive experience matters. I certainly do have my own feeling about the subject, and I've come to my own conclusion, which is that there are certainly many types of experience that do matter and it is probably possible to rigorously categorize them and correlate some of them (probably weakly) to Presidential success, but "executive experience" is a very loose term that isn't going to map consistently to any specific subset of these categories of experience.... So the question of executive experience is IMHO invalid, and a much wider question about many different types of experience is really the valid one.

This isn't the Joe The Plumber whose name was featured in the debate last night. But I'll bet he's getting lots of attention this morning, anyhow. I'll bet he's getting offers for his domain name, at least.