Surgical Strikes

Normally, I wouldn’t have set foot in the store, but my mother-in-law gave me a gift card to Brooks Brothers. And I have to admit, the shirts are pretty nice. No, the Country Club Collection isn’t quite right for the owner of the domain name 365dumps.com, but a certain selection of their non-iron dress shirts are pretty sharp. I’m trying to dress like a grownup, and now that I’m out of the sitcom biz, that means actually dressing like a grownup. If it wasn’t for the prices, I could get used to letting these Brooks Brothers dress me. Although I’d probably have to order online. Because the store… well, it was straight up Brooks Brothers.

Upstairs, I saw a youngish woman checking a text message on her phone who was instantly admonished by a guy in horn-rims and bowtie: “The phone? Really? That’s about five demerits.” I hadn’t heard that word since middle school, when the precursor to detention was a “demerit.” Five? That would have been two detentions and halfway to another. I guess those Brooks Brothers really don’t like their employees checking their phones!

And seeing the other clientele, I saw why: downstairs, a short man was yelling about where he should arrange for the shirts he’d been custom ordering for years. It was unclear why he was so angry, and I suspect he was used to people snapping to attention when he spoke. After all, before sales and gift cards, the cheap shirts were 80 bucks a pop. Guys who cough up the kind scratch the custom jobbies must go for and still don’t look sharp… well, those guys expect to be treated a certain way.

Me, I expected to be treated like Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman. I’m dressing better these days, but I’m sure they knew I wasn’t a regular well before I pulled out the gift card. But rather than shun us, they tried to indoctrinate us, giving us free men and women’s Brooks Brothers scents. Later, over beers and fries down the street at Charley’s, Meaghan applied hers and started laughing hysterically. “I smell like the moms at my middle school!” Mine was deemed more palatable, so I guess now if I’m going to scent myself, I’ll be able to decide whether it’s a Marc Jacobs day or a Brooks Brothers day. Frankly, I’m having trouble envisioning much of 2009 being either.

The only real major life change since I last updated here regularly is that the wife and I were able to say what so many gentiles said to me coming back from winter break in sixth grade: We got Nintendo for Christmas! It’s kind of a big deal — the last time I had an up to date video game system was the Nintendo Entertainment system. I lost interest in it by high school but it had already been lapped by the Sega Genesis anyway. I went to college before the Playstation reconfigured the gaming landscape, so except for the ironic return of Atari 2600 every few years, this is the first time I’ve really had video games around in twenty years. Good lord I feel old.

And I guess when you’ve been out of touch this long, it’s hard to change; so far we’ve spent most of our Wii time playing old NES games. Super Mario Brothers for Meaghan, Punch Out!!! and the Legend of Zelda for me. We downloaded these the first night we had the machine and can only defend the amount we’ve played them by saying that we’ve had colds! We’ve been sick! That’s why I have five pieces of Triforce and the magic sword. I imagine I’ll lose interest in these games the exact same way I did in the late 80s, but by then the baseball game I just ordered through half.com should be here. And maybe I can ask for Guitar Hero for my birthday.

I resisted for a long time, thinking it was wipe out any last hopes of me being productive. But now I’m realizing that it’s cut into my web-surfing/TV time. And now that the election is over and I don’t need to keep refreshing Talking Points Memo every five minutes, it’s probably okay for me to shift my attention toward guiding a video game baseball team to victory.

My goodness gracious, I will never ever ever get tired of that joke. It only works one day a year — when Meaghan woke up, I informed her she hadn’t walked the dog all year — so I try to max it out as best as I can. I tried it on the other end (”I’m done cooking pasta for the year”) but it just didn’t have that same satisfaction as announcing that was the best lunch I’ve had all year.

2008 was, to quote one of my ex-bosses describing the first Wallflowers album, a stinking loaf of shit. So far 2009 has been okay, although the cold I developed on Xmas hasn’t quite yet run its course. (I’ve been sick all year!) But I’m generally optimistic that things will look up this year. Among other things, we’re only a few weeks away from entering a truly different world on Jan. 20. I spent a chunk of my early 2009 reading the remarkable Vanity Fair oral history of the Bush administration, which contains tidbits like a former staffer referring to the president as “Sarah Palin-like” and Rumsfeld explaining on Sept. 11 that they’d have to bomb Iraq to prove America’s might — Afghanistan just didn’t have enough targets. Incredibly depressing to see all the scandals of the Bush years laid out chronologically, but it has the happy ending of knowing the new guy is not going to wave off intelligence briefings becausse he’s “not a big reader.” History will judge these eight years much more harshly than we can possibly understand right now.

(For a funnier, much shorter rundown of the Bush horrors, Tom Tomorrow again delivers.)

On to housekeeping: you wouldn’t know by looking at it, but we’re at new web hosting. For the nerds: some script kept flipping out and maxing up resources for the whole server. Each time I assumed it had to do with spambots preying on Wordpress vulnerabilities, but now I think it was something else. Anyway, it happened one too many times and I got a nice email from my hosting site saying, “See ya round like a donut.” So I spent a few days reassembling things (minus the script that I suspect was the problem; we’ll see) and here we are. Rebuilding some of the non-blog pages will be an early task for MMIX.

In news that more directly affects YOU, the beloved reader, one of my new years resolutions is to write every single day. This has been my resolution a few times (including last year) and we all know how well people keep these things. But hey, it’s Jan 1, a day for optimism and a clean start. So, here we go.

I’ve owned my new winter coat for about a month, but didn’t really feel like it was mine until I spilled coffee on it this morning.

The girl I had my first date with in 1988 tracked me down on facebook and, in subsequent conversation, revealed she didn’t actually know it was a date until nearly ten years later. Maybe now she understands why I was weird to her at my bar mitzvah.

When I went to write another facebook to let her know she’d been promoted to first0date status, I discovered she’d defriended me! With a bit of investigation, I learned she’d deleted her facebook account altogether… but not before complaining in a status update about being sick of pretending people weren’t hateful to her just because they were her online “friends.” She might not have meant me, but I did kinda dump her, so maybe she did. Sure, the furthest we ever went was me making a half-assed attempt to put my arm around her during an in-theater viewing of Look Who’s Talking, Too. But nobody likes to be dumped 17 years ago. I’m sure it was me.

Then last night, one of the high school friends who does not find me hateful posted several embarrassing photos of me from when I was 14, plus a photo from my senior prom in which I’m wearing a blue tux and bowling shoes. Somehow in the context of facebook, I can finally see why nobody thought I was as cool as I thought I was. That’s because I wasn’t cool. It’s not visible in the photo, but this was from the era when I had one long sideburn, one very short sideburn. You can try to forget your dorky past, or you can have 415 facebook friends. Apparently it’s either/or.

My other fascinating blast from the past was another old friend from my preteen years: my beloved Swiss army knife. I’m not exactly sure when I got it, but my scouting career ended in 1986, so I know it predates junior high. I remember poring over the LL Bean catalog, salivating over various knives, trying to decide which combination of tools would best fit my lifestyle. I decided I could begrudgingly live without a fish scaler, but not without a saw. Anyway, last night as I spent nearly an hour fitting our new Xmas tree into our old Xmas tress stand, I needed a way to remove some small branch stumps that were mucking things up. Lo and behold, after more than 20 years, I finally did something with the saw other than open it and fantasize about all the stuff I was going to saw.

And yes, I had a bar mitzvah and now I have a tree. I make no apologies.

* * *

As for Big Secret Project X, previously alluded to in this space, it’s been pushed to the start of 2009. So it gives me even more time to try to irrationally get your hopes up.

They’re not TPS reports, but given my relationship with them, they might as well be.

(Real posts eventually. Big Secret Project X to be revealed as soon as Monday.)

Today, while listening to the song “Motörhead” by the band Motörhead off the album Motörhead, I thought of the song “Bo Diddley” by Bo Diddley off Bo Diddley. After some hard thinking, I came up with “Black Sabbath” by Black Sabbath off Black Sabbath. There are lots of song-album double-ups, and even a few band-song ones. But the other song-band-album trifectas I could think of lacked the purity of A=B=C as above:

- “(Them from) The Monkees” by the Monkees off The Monkees
- “In a Big Country” by Big Country off the greatest hits album In a Big Country
- “Bob Dylan’s Dream” and “Bob Dylan’s Blues” by Bob Dylan off The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan
- countless other Bo Diddley permutations

Others?

Haven’t been able to compose a fully formed blog post in a few days, so here are a few half-baked ones:

• The two hallmarks of Dan 7.0 are 1) more sweater vests, and 2) tighter trousers. Not like 1980s glam metal tight, but not as baggy as I’ve been rockin’ for a long time. It also meant a slimmer-fitting pea coat for winter, which is nice but won’t fit accomodate both gloves in the pocket. So I now clip them together and let one dangle. Will this mean I don’t lose my gloves or that I just finally lose both instead of just the one? Stay tuned!
• Slow work day? Well, I just spent 10 minutes watching of people puking on Youtube. It started out innocently after a blog entry on Brent Scowcroft led me to search for footage of George HW Bush puking on the Japanese prime minister. Soon enough, I got here.
• A guy working at my local independent bookstore was wearing a shirt that said “Read Joyce.” He recommended I start with The Dubliners, and when I confessed I had Ulysses on my shelf but was intimidated by it, he said, “It’s just a book, it’s not going to hurt you.” I hope my retelling doesn’t make that sound snarky because it was actually delivered in a kind and reassuring way. So just a reminder this holiday season to buy local. And if you’re looking for books in Cambridge, shop at Porter Square Books.
• As for my non-Joyce reading, I got through 150 pages of Inifnite Jest last summer and the first four essays in Consider the Lobster this week and now, at the risk of speaking ill of the dead, I can safely say I’m good on David Foster Wallace. He was clearly incredibly smart and talented. I just find his stylistic choices  insufferable; the footnote thing reminds me too much of the guy I knew in LA whose “thing” it was to wear mismatched socks all the time.
• That said, his death is still very sad. DFW, not the sock guy. Sock guy’s doing fine.
• Got a mysterious email last night asking me to audition for a role on a popular Disney channel show. Turns out the email was meant for someone else. But for one brief moment, I really thought I was on the verge of becoming the next Mr. Belding. Ten years ago, maybe I could have been Screech…

A month or two ago, we had an extra squash and I decided to invent a soup. By some odd miracle, it turned out pretty delicious. I’m not usually one for sharing recipes on this blog — not because I feel they’re proprietary, just boring. But this month’s Simple Nourishtment newsletter contained a recipe that looked slightly similar to mine, and it inspired me to share this with the world. But since I find recipe posts not always the most scintillating, I’m going to try to jazz it up with an in-your-face attitude and jokes. I’m typing this out with no confidence that I can actually deliver squash jokes. But I guess we’ll find out in a minute.

1. Cut a squash in half, scoop out the seeds and set aside to accidentally burn while toasting later. Put the two pieces of squash in a pyrex dish and roast at 450 for, like, an hour or so. I did acorn squash face up and butternut squash face down. Basically cook it until it’s soft when you stab it with a fork. Just cook the shit out of it. If you can find squash without shit to be cooked out, that might save you some time. (See? Squash jokes are hard.)
2. Cut up a couple carrots, dice some ginger, add enough vegetable stock to cover, preferably homemade. I make my stock by saving vegetable scraps — carrot peels, onion skins, lettuce nubs, broccoli pantsuits, etc — and boiling with a peppercorn or two until the water seems brothy. It’s much better than store-bought, and costs you nothing but time. Simmer the carrots and ginger until everything’s squishy. Does using the word “squishy” in a recipe count as a joke? What if I use “squashy” later?
3. Scoop out the squash and put in food processor or blender. Add the carrots, ginger, and stock, blend until smooth. If it’s too thick, add more stock. If you’re too thick, try night classes. Dear god, is this what Henny Yougman’s cooking blog would look like?
4. Return everything to the pot, heat until it seems hot enough for soup. If it gets too thin, boil it down. If it gets too thick, add more stock. If it gets too squashy, order a pizza. (Take my soup — please!) Add salt, pepper, and a dab of butter. Season until it tastes awesome.
5. Eat it up.
6. Crap it out.
7. The end

Okay, I’m pretty sure I’m ready for the Food Network.

• A piece explaining why the four Harvard freshman douches at the Pats-Jets game were so douchey, and why it reminded me my much I have trust-funders eager to “drop the H-bomb.” Abandoned because most Harvard kids are actually harmless and because I didn’t want to be too much of a jerk.
• Revisiting a bad experience with a blogger who was total biatch after Kerry lost, patting myself on the back for not rubbing her nose in it this year, then rubbing her nose in it. Abandoned because I don’t like starting fights with bloggers, even with realy bad bloggers who also happen to be mouth-breathing look-at-me! types. And also because of the hypocrisy of the false high road. (NB: hypocrisy of false high road still achieved!)
• A note that Antonin Scalia on 60 Minutes reminded me of Wallace Shawn. Abandoned because I couldn’t find a Princess Bride photo that looked enough like Scalia to prove my point.
• A Youtube of a very wonderful childhood PSA that Meaghan discovered was actually Boston-specific. Abandoned because I had designs on starting a Boston-themed group blog and thought this would be a perfect post. But despite purchasing a domain name (and nearly $20 worth of web hosting!) I abandoned the blog idea, or at least indefinitely delayed it. I’ll post the YouTube here soon.
• A piece wondering what it meant that people suddenly felt comfortable talking to me about “ebonics” and “Chinamen.” Abandoned because I couldn’t wrangle a thesis. And because we elected Obama president and therefore ended racism. (Right?)
• A long-standing half-written post that I feel like one day I can clean up and submit to McSweeney’s, although the longer it sits there, the more certain I become it won’t be accepted if and I ever touch it. Which I don’t.

In other news, I’m now semi-obsessed with the nerdy and hilarious xkcd, as my friends are learning via email each time I come across one that applies to them. Highly recommended — and be sure to hover your cursor over it for a bonus popup message!

Hello, ladies, Dan Tobin here. How are you? Good, I hope. Well, I’m writing to ask you a small favor. As we progress through fall and into winter, you’ll no doubt be striving to insulate yourself from the cold. Jacket, gloves, scarf, hats. All very nice, all very useful. But when you get inside where it’s toasty warm, I have one request:

Keep the scarf on.

It’s a small request, but an important one. And everybody wins: you stay toasty and I get to see you wearing a scarf. With the shortened daylight hours and the cold weather sapping our spirits, seeings the pretty ladies of Boston wearing scarves indoors brings a ray of light to an otherwise dreary winter. So do me this favor and grant the world a simple act of maximum cuteness. In return, I will give you a nice smile and possibly a pie.

Yours truly,
Dan Tobin

Reading my main man Matt’s post on Obama’s victory as a triumph of marketing, I realized this was as good a time as any to wax poetic about an oddly overlooked decision the campaign made early on that I found pretty brilliant:

Right from the get-go, this became the symbol of Obama’s campaign. Every campaign is eventually defined by a bumper sticker or graphical representation of some sort. But Obama chose a color scheme and a font, right from the early days of the primary, and he ran with it. It became The Obama Font and The Obama Symbol, which was splashed on everything. It was a triumph of branding, and after a while, just showing the symbol with no words was enough to say “Barack Obama for President, 2008.” They smartly reocgnized the power of good iconogrpahy.

More than that, the choice took the approach that a political candidate, like everything else in 2008, is a product. Cynical, but true. And people like when their products have really cool packaging. Can you think of any other product that uses a simple, elegant, understated design model, who understand that slick packaging can get people increasingly excited about the product?

Welcome to the Barackintosh presidency. Not only does he use a Mac… he is a Mac.

Don’t wear big dark-framed glasses. It makes you look like you have a fake nose that’s attached to the glasses. And that’s okay if you want to look like MC Hammer on crack. But if you don’t use a work like looptid, try different glasses.

As we settle into the prelude to the actual Obama administration, I’ve been slowly working through the mind-blowingly awesome Newsweek “How He Did It” issue. If you’re a lowgrade political junkie or just an Obama fan, it’s really a must-read. I’m enjoying the print version (pretty pictures!) but it’s also online.

And to all the naysayers who instantly started doubting that Obama can heal the world, well of course he’s not going to fix everything. But he’s coming from the right place, and a lot of good is going to get done. Like his early signal that’s he’s going to shut down Guantanamo, hopefully allowing us to begin to turn the page on probably the worst offense of the last eight years (if you include torture as a subset of Gitmo, which I sadly do). Would John McCain have made this call when his election was not even a week old? Considering he strongly considered Mr. Double Guantanamo as his running mate?

Anyway, as you can see I’m having trouble settling back into the non-political posts. But I’m trying. We have Veteran’s Day of at work, so I gave myself a four-day weekend and spent yesterday being a real man: dishes, laundry, trip to Bed Bath & Beyond, and preparation of bouef bourgignon for my bread-winning spouse. It all turned out well, even if the garlic mashed potatoes were a minor disaster (not enough garlic, way too much cream). I just read that Julie & Julia book and now I want to up my cooking game, probably on the French side of things. Also, we participate in a meat CSA and we’ve let things stockpile, so our freezer now contains upwards of 20 lbs. of meat, much of it ground beef. So yesterday I bought a meatloaf pan, which means if anyone has a good recipe, I’ll play housewife and snatch that up. I feel like my mom’s recipe featured large spikes that connected with wires to the inside of the microwave and then poked into the meatloaf at key points. This is from when microwaves were supposed to replace ovens and you were advised to cook the Thanksgiving turkey in there.

They’re Gap socks, striped, and they’re a really good thickness. Not too thin, not too thick, good elastic. And you can’t find them any more. All the Gap socks they have now are too thin and too elasticky. I even went online to try to find last year’s model and failed. It’s rough.

Why socks? Well, I thought it would be nice is I could write one blog entry this week without making myself cry. (So far so good.) I just hadn’t fully realized how deeply invested I was in this election on a pure emotional level, and I certainly didn’t understand how deep the wounds of the Bush administration had been to me personally. And then to come out with a real sense of optimism… it’s like when the Red Sox won in 2004, except that it actually matters. The world will actually be affected, and the White Sox won’t come along and beat us next year.

So, after an election season that went on and on and on, I’m finally ready to put it to bed. I know I didn’t turn this blog into all politics all the time (until the last few weeks, that is). But I’m ready to go back interspersing the serious alongside the silly in what has become the Surgical Stikes model. With the election and broken blog distracting me, I forgot that Halloween was the five-year anniversary of this space. 3926 posts (and 8 more since). And my little shut-down really made me realize how tied to this thing I am. Just like a high school girlfriend, you can take it for granted, but as soon as the blog dumps you and threatens to go out with the captain of the basketball team, you suddenly realize how much she means to you and how you can’t live without her.

Anyway, I’m back. I have many things to say over the coming weeks/months/years; about generational changes in hip hop, about a guy in my office I irrationally hate because of his shoes, about stuff I like and dislike. More of the Red Sox posts will end up at Bugs and Cranks, and more of the politics will end up at The Reaction, although there’ll be plenty of cross-posting here, too. So it’s a new day for America, but for Surgical Strikes it’s pretty much the same day it’s been since I stopped writing 12 posts a day. Did I just blogg all over my shirt? I reckon I did.

From: Prexy43 [Bush]
To: LiberalJerkwad [Tobin]
Subject: what now? oh, that what now

First Tony Romo goes down, now this. Motherfucker.

Well, I gotta say, I was overwhelmed Tuesday. I never thought I’d live to see the day, and I’m still in shock — a Democrap won the popular vote, the Electoral College, a majority of votes, AND the White House? And he didn’t even need the Supreme Court or Ross Perot! If Mr. Cheney was capable of emotion, he’d be inconsolable. Me, I’m just bummin’. I mean, I’m starting to take this shit personally.

It’s not enough you had to hand the country to the Democraps, you had to go and do it landslide-style, with an expanding Congressional majority and states that are usually reliable for our team. Yeah, I’m looking at you, Indiana. Peyton Manning can go eat a dick as far as I’m concerned. And Virginia, deflowered and defiled by the Dems? Plus, you did it with a guy who was a million percent different from me in every way except that we both eat food and crap out crap. How can I not take that as a slap in my gorgeous face?

You know, I really, really believed in 2004 that I represented the beliefs of a majority of the United States. Sure, the elections were close, but I started to think more people agreed with my views than not. Two years later, I got worried, and now I don’t what to think. Was it all a lie? Did I only win in 2004 because I scared people and Kerry was a big ol’ dud? Did I only win in 2000 because my bro ran Florida and Mr. Rove tricked people into thinking I was a “compassionate conservative”? Were the last eight years more about shrewd and shameless campaign tactics than a widely popular ideology?

That’s for nerds to figure out. What we can work on now is what happens between you and me.

I started writing you a week after the 2004 election. It was a way for you to deal with your anger, your sadness, your ovehelming feeling that you’d misjudged your country and that the America you thought you lived in was a lie. Your secret hopes that we’d come around and fulfill our promise as a nation started to feel like a sad fantasy, and it was devastating to feel that. When I won, everything you’d feared about this country seemed like it had come true, and there was no way out.

So I started writing you emails to help you work through that, to channel your anger and sadness, to share it with others who felt just as betrayed, and who felt like maybe a little gallows humor would make it all hurt a little bit less, especially if you knew there were others who felt the same way.

Well, now we’ve got Prexy-elect Obama. I know you don’t think it’s magically all better just because the candidate you fell for 15 months ago actually won the damn thing. I know you feel hopeful and think irony is dead and suddenly emails from the Prexy don’t feel like the right medicine any more.

But sooner or later, you’ll need this space. Because you can kill all the monsters in the room, but as soon as come back, we’ll be regrouped and ready to steal your heart containers ago. It won’t be me any more, but like Ice-T said, there’ll be another one after me — a hustler. I don’t know if it’ll be Palin or Romney or whoever emerges from this clusterfuck as the next GOP standard-bearer. But in the end, you’ll still want this outlet, even if you no longer viscerally need it the same way you used to.

So you go soak it up for a while. Snark and sarcasm is not where you’re at right now, and if you can ride the positivity train for a while, even I can sign off on that. But whenever you’re ready to start dishing the satire, throwing the razor blades, ridiculing the ridiculousness, I’ll be right here waiting. Until then, god bless America. You pussy.

-W

I still haven’t had a chance to read many post-election reactions, but I read enough last night to know that Barack Obama’s historic win will be amply covered and contextualized by writers much better than me. In the heat of the moment I promised 1000 reasons for exultant joy, but for now I’ll just offer two, one about race, and one about America.

1.

In the runup to the election, I was listening to lot of Curtis Mayfield because I wanted socially aware black music with a strain of positivity. In the epic “(Don’t Worry) If There’s a Hell Below We’re All Going To Go,” he starts listing problems destroying the black community, then sarcastically points out that “Nixon says don’t worry.” Something about his tone really drove home for me how distanced the black community of the early ’70s felt from the presidency. After all, it was Nixon who relied on the “southern strategy” of exploiting white racism to win elections. Of course they felt disconnected.

Last night, as I watched a tearful Jesse Jackson and several black commentators trying to hold it together, I thought about people others they wished could have lived to see this day. For me, it’s Curtis (and Toot). Waiting for the T this morning, I tried listening to the outrageous optimism of “Move On Up” and it was all I could do not to start crying:

Just move on up, and keep on wishing,
Remember your dreams are your only schemes, so keep on pushing

There’s so much to be said about race and this moment, but for now I’ll just say this: keep on pushing.

2.

Saturday and Sunday we made calls for Obama, and there were plenty of people, but Tuesday was more striking. We heard a lot about Obama’s “ground game,” but seeing a packed room firsthand made me realize what was really happening. In this one call-center in Massachusetts, we had over 400 people choosing to skip a day of work to help elect Barack Obama. I dialed 250 numbers and I can’t say for sure that I produced a single vote, but something much bigger happened.

Every person in that room, just like in rooms across the country, on canvassing shifts, and at home logged on to the website — by participating in the process, we felt we had a stake in the campaign. And with a victory, we may just start to can feel like we have a stake in our government, too.Even if you didn’t get involved, there’s no such thing as a fair-weather supporter of the United States: you’re welcome to come aboard any time.

And that’s what our democracy was supposed to be: a government of the people, by the people, for the people. Today, for the first time in my life, it really feels that way, and I am hopeful for a brighter tomorrow and a better world.

Exultant joy for a thousand reasons… I’ll tell you all about some of them tomorrow. Tonight, we just bask.

I know a lot of people feel Election Day is a time when we should put aside politics and encourage everyone to vote no matter who for. Well, funk dat. Elections are ALL ABOUT politics, and one the one day it really matters, I ain’t putting no sock in it. I side with South Park: you should definitely vote, but only if you’re voting for my candidate. If you’re a McCain supporter, you know what, voting is hard, and when has one vote ever made a difference? Go to work, read about football, let someone else worry about it.

But if you want to turn the page on the last eight years, if you want to bring true change to America, if you want to take back your democracy and send a message to the world that America is a great nation… basically, if you want to see Barack Obama in the White House the way I do, then get out there and VOTE! Let’s make Barack Obama the next President of the United States.

Only prediction I’ll make here: Turnout is 40% higher than the 2004 total.

PS: My secret weapon is here. When the Red Sox and Celtics were on the verge of championships the last two years, we watched the deciding game with Jason and they won both times. We were separated for the 2008 Super Bowl and the result, while happy for him, was sad for us. So tonight we’ll be watching returns at Jason’s with fingers crossed; somewhere, Barack Obama just smiled a little

In Game 7 of the 2004 ALCS, the Red Sox jumped out to an early lead against the Yankees, who’d thoroughly dominated the Sox for what seemed like eternity. In the 7th inning, we had a monstrous 8-1 lead, and yet not a soul in Red Sox Nation was comfortable. “They’re still the Red Sox,” we collectively thought. “They’re going to find a way to screw this up.” We thought back to our eighth inning lead in 2003 and how the Yankees came back to crush us like always.

Now Obama has a huge lead in the polls and his supporters are thinking, “He’s still a Democrat. He’s going to find a way to screw this up.” We even point to the optimism heading into 2004 and how the GOP crushed us like always. Of course, we now forget that John Kerry never had an 8-1 lead. It was more like we were heading into the 9th trailing 5-4, but instead of Mariano Rivera coming out, for some reason it was Paul Quantrill. “Oh, we can get to this guy,” we all thought. “We’ll totally win!” And then a few weak ground-outs later, Bush was reelected.

But we’re now staring at a 10-3 lead in the ninth and McCain’s staring hard at his bench, wondering if he should have pulled the trigger on Tim Pawlenty at the trading deadline. We could still lose this thing, no doubt, and there will be no counting of chickens. This is time to knuckle under, but not to panic. In 2004, Curt Schilling went directly from the Rolling Rally to Ohio to stump for Bush; the state went red and I’ve never forgiven him. This weekend the big Schill was stumping for McCain in New Hampshire, comparing McCain’s situation to being down 0-3 against the Yankees in 2004. As I see it, that’s the right series, but the wrong lesson.

* * *

I’ve blogged about what I’m doing for the campaign not to boast or try to make you feel badly, but hopefully to encourage anyone interested in the outcome of this election to, as James Brown once said, Get up, get into it, get involved. Until this weekend I’d given money, worn the button and T-shirt, and composed a lot of blog posts. I finally feel like I’m doing something, and I wish I’d done more. If you want your candidate to win this thing as badly as I want mine to, go make some Get Out The Vote calls from a call-center, from home, or even from work. The signs posted at our call center yesterday said, “Elections are won in the last 72 hours.” Polls don’t matter if your people don’t get out to vote. So tomorrow, vote. But if you really care, do what Meaghan and I are doing: take the day off from work, head to your local call center, and make a difference. Your children’s children will thank you.