i can't find the words

There is one thing worse than getting spam text messages: getting so many spam messages so quickly that you can’t delete one without two more arriving. Seriously, what the heck is this?:

“$AMT5: NO PD ENTRIES AVAILABLE WU31
- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – -
<BGTN.SYSOPS@WESTERNUNION.COM>”

It’s especially bad when you’re, say, drifting off to sleep and your phone suddenly does the “Hooray text message!” tone 25 times in a row. Sometimes throwing your phone down the hallway is entirely justified. Gah.

Did I mention that I am a card-carrying Democrat? By this I mean that I am a registered Democrat and that I carry my voter registration in my wallet. I’m a card-carrying AAA member, Floridian and Target shopper by the same token.

I’m not a Democrat, of course. (Right, even though I work at a newspaper. Please direct your complaints to the reader advocate.) So why the wrong-party registration? Well, Florida is one of those states with closed primaries, and I needed a better reason than just judgeships to go stand in an old people’s building (my precinct is an old people’s building!) for 15 minutes on a September Tuesday.

“My” candidates didn’t win, except for the judges. A socially liberal politician doesn’t have much of a chance in this state, even among purely Democratic voters. So, sorry Rod Smith, but Jim Davis (no, not the Garfield cartoonist) will be the second-place finisher to Charlie Crist in November’s gubernatorial contest.

In that upcoming election, 90 percent of the voters will opt for Crist or Davis. I will vote for neither one; I disagree with each man on just as many issues as I agree with him. Unfortunately, it’s the same way with a lot of that 90 percent. Save for Ross Perot and Bernie Sanders, we’ve been suckered into a two-part system for the last 94 years. And that’s unfortunate because those two parties become eerily similar as elections draw near.

This is certainly not a perfect country, and it is not located in a perfect world. And we are not perfect, not a one of us, and our politics will always be flawed. And that’s OK. But we should at least educate ourselves a little better if we plan to vote (which we should plan to do, at least every other year, let’s face it). There’s always the National Political Awareness Test, but people are lazy and it can be a bit unwieldy. (Plus, I’m not so sure about its matching capabilities — it aligned me with a candidate whose main goal appears to be teaching Florida’s youngsters to swim.)

And then there is the World’s Smallest Political Quiz, which promises to chart your political tendencies after a mere 10 questions. Amazing! This is what I look like:

That’s not surprising. The problem is that the test, via its wording, is definitely biased in that direction and it assumes that all issues are equally important. Oh, and it’s part of a pro-libertarianism Web site. If you take it, you will probably be a libertarian. But really, do you care about a national ID card as much as you do about government subsidies? Of course not. (Or, if you do, maybe you care less about drug use or welfare or something. You get the point.)

Some clever Internet searching helped me find The Enhanced Precision Political Quiz, which was basically created to address the Smallest Quiz’ shortcomings. It is composed of 11 questions (which I think are worded more fairly), each with at least five answers. And then you are asked to rate the importance of each question/issue. Call me selfish, but Social Security, at more than $2,000 a year, ranks a little higher on my list than does immigration reform. Anyway, here is what I look like:

Pretty much the same, but so much better.

At any rate, I invite you to take the second quiz, or, for kicks, take both of them. And let me know what you scored. And maybe take that knowledge to the polls in November?

Work is sometimes boring, and a surefire way to keep entertained is to browse the wires for strange or interesting stories. Well, tonight I hit the motherlode:

LONDON — McDonald’s has bowed to the pressure of the hedgehog lobby.
McDonald’s Corp. said Friday that it has redesigned the cups for its McFlurry dessert so that they no longer pose a danger to the spiky woodland creatures.

I am not making this up.

The British Hedgehog Preservation Society (which I think may have been the working title of a famous Kinks album at one point) had been pressuring the fast-food giant to change the cups for years. Apparently hedgehogs, spiky little gluttons that they are, will stick their heads into a discarded McFlurry in an attempt to salvage some of the melty ice-cream treat left at the bottom. But the cup’s design traps the hungry little guys, and then they starve to death unless someone happens to walk by and perform a dramatic hedgehog rescue.

Again, I am NOT making this up.

Now, it’s common knowledge that hedgehogs are cute, and, wanting to alert Jacksonville’s newspaper readers to the plight of these adorable, noble creatures, I told my boss that we absolutely had to get the story somewhere in the paper. And then I laughed uncontrollably. Hedgehogs! Stuck in cups!

(By the way, how awesome of a place is Great Britain if this is seen as a major problem? The implication is that the country is overrun with hedgehogs. Why can’t the U.S. be overrun with hedgehogs? Whom do we have to bribe to get an infestation of them?)

Several minutes later, after looking at pictures of hedgehogs on Google — hedgehogs swimming in bathtubs and hedgehogs with flowers on their foreheads — I determined that the only thing better than a story about hedgehogs getting stuck in cups would be a picture of one such cupheaded beast. I mean, how ridiculous is that?

…

AP photo wire, you are my hero: