Finally back on schedule.  Sorry for falling behind.

Boston was fun, but the lack of sleep ... not so much.  It was good to see my birth mother's brother John and his wife Sharon and her two sons Trevor and Doug.  I also got to chill for a couple of hours with a cutie at my brother's reception (I'm a sucker for vegetarian yoga instructors.)  And there was a great comeback at Fenway that I missed but many of the clan attended.  Can't wait for the next reunion in another few years.

A couple of stories that interested me this week were

1. Mother Teresa was an agnostic.

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1655415-1,00.html

As an atheist, I have mixed feelings.  It's good that she had enough sense to recognize the utter absurdity of many of the claims made by organized religion, but it's too bad that she kept her feelings private and that she in fact wanted her private papers destroyed upon her death.

2. Republicans trying to steal the 2008 election with a California voter initiative.

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2007/08/06/070806taco_talk_hertzberg

They're trying to get a ballot initiative passed so that instead of having the electoral college votes in California distributed on a winner-take-all basis (like they are in virtually every state) they're distributed on some kind of proportional basis (so if you get 40% of the votes you get 40% of the electoral college votes.) 

On the surface, that sounds fair enough.  But if you only pass this initiative in the granddaddy of Democratic states and not in any Republican states, you're basically making our transition to a banana republic official.  If all the Republican states are winner-take-all and the biggest Democratic state assigns its electoral votes in some proportional manner, it's easy for a Republican to win the White House and yet receive only 45% of the popular vote.