I haven’t voted yet myself. Instead I roused myself at 5AM fed the cats and sat down to write what I’ve decided will be one of the many books I’ve threatened to write about the Duluth School Board over the years. I’ll just do it in installments on the blog like one of Charles Dicken’s serialized novels. I’ll actually attempt to apply more rigorous proof reading while I’m at it.
As the polls opened at 7AM I parked near London Road and 26th Avenue East and took a half dozen Alanna Oswald lawnsigns to the corner. There were already two other Alanna supporters there so I took up my station kitty-corner from them where the London Road traffic enters the Interstate. We were joined by a forth sign waver and then two more folks walking dogs joined us out of the blue making it six of us. My right arm is sore from all the waving I did. I’d say roughly half of the several thousand cars that passed had drivers who stared straight ahead. I presume they would have done this no matter who the signs were for. The other half gave us friendly head nods or waved back. I did get three birds flipped at me. One old fellow who did this leaned over toward me for emphasis and one young fellow gave me both barrels for a total of three fingers. I decided I wouldn’t want their votes anyway.
I heard a funny story while there. The other day a group of sign wavers from the DFL showed up briefly at the location where 21st Avenue East enters Interstate 35 but they only stopped briefly and then planted twenty or thirty DFL and labor endorsed candidate’s lawnsigns in a tight cluster by the exit and left. It was a tepid display of campaign enthusiasm.
The funny thing is that the flock of signs was outed on Facebook. Someone set up a webpage for people to send pictures of illegally placed lawnsigns in Duluth. (By the way I can’t find it) This cluster of signs were on public property and too near the road. After they were outed someone wrote in to explain that the signs were on the Labor Temple’s property (Union property). Someone else checked and found that this was untrue. It is public property.
Whoo boy. You can’t get away with anything in the Internet world. And speaking of that I just checked my blog’s stats. At the end of yesterday, a day shy of the Ides of September, I had 2,094 “unique” visitors to the blog so far this month. A hundred-six of these folks spent over an hour reading it. Cool. The last time I broke 4,000 visitors in a single month was during the school board election two years ago. One month I had over 7,000 visitors. If they were all from Duluth that’s got to be close to the number of people who actually voted that year. It would be gratifying to beat that record this year.
