And then Hosting Matters went down. Seems as though I was sharing space with another blogger, and the server just wasn't big enough for the two of us. After HM relocated him to another server - no doubt violating myriad sections of the Geneva Convention in the process - things picked back up.
Election Day was, in most senses, very pleasant, although I wouldn't say it ended well. I started out by waiting in line an hour to vote. Some people weren't so lucky. Others weren't so persistent. And it was the remainder that put the unknown Cary Kennedy into the Colorado Treasurer's office over the eminently qualified Mark Hillman. I didn't actually get to use the new and improved electronic voting machines, each personally programmed by Karl Rove, but maybe next time.
(Last night on Backbone Radio, we interviewed Jim Spencer, who compared Mayor Hickenlooper's abdication of responsibility to what he imagined Mayor Daley Pere would have done. In fact, Mayor Daley Pere would have had the ballots filled out and counted beforehand.)
Fortunately, there was a Standing-in-Line Center right near DU, where I was to lecture Prof. Christina Foust's class on politics and communications. Students don't get to see real live conservatives in their natural habitat very often, and I don't get a chance to speak uninterrupted very often, so that part was a win-win.
In fact, the class was pretty typical of college classes. Some of the students were more engaged than others, with a few carrying the question-burden for the rest. Most listened attentively for most of the time, and a few were off planning that evening's entertainment. On the whole, though, I thought it was a fair discussion. The students were intelligent but not treacherous, and the class was certainly not the ambush that one hears so much about on college campuses. While I tried to bring it back to blogging & its role in the conservative movement, the students seemed more interested in discussing politics and some economics, so we stayed there most of the time.
I have to admit, I fumbled one question rather badly. One girl asked why we should care if Western Europe went Muslim. I responded, truthfully enough, that while we were good at building airplanes and world financial centers, they seemed good at crashing airplanes into such centers, and that the two were not morally equivalent. There was, of course, a better answer.
I should have asked her if she, as a woman, wanted to go to graduate school in France, only to find that the pre-landing announcement included instructions for donning the burka before deplaning at the Ayatollah Khomeini International Airport in Paris, that her student experience would include a relatively constant low-level fear of gang rape, punctuated by brief, but high, moments of such tension, and whether or not the murder of her classmate by her brother, for the crime of dating that cute Christian fellow across the aisle, would constitue sufficient reason for not wanting France to lose its intifada.
She probably would have just blinked at me. Clearly some students - like the Air Force ROTC cadet in the front row - understand what we're up against. For some others, it just requires too much imagination.
After that, a whirlwind trip to Charlotte and Dallas for a company visit. I can't talk much about the company visit just yet. I will, however, put in a plug for Gleiberman's, Charlotte's answer to the East Side Kosher Deli. Very good food, very pleasant service (although at a slightly Southern pace), and Malta. No, Malta.
And then last week, the server went down and recovered.