At 1:38 PM -0500 on 11/10/00, Furlong, Steven wrote:

Robert Hettinga wrote:

...

...The one person I fear more than Tim May, maybe even my Roslindale Attorney, being me dear Mum... :-))

You think you got it bad? _My_ mom is a small-town deputy. And she drives a pickup. The only saving grace is there isn't a shotgun rack in the pickup.

*My* mom will be 79 next month. She has spent most of her spare hours, as long as I can remember, in Republican politics in various places, from El Paso to St. Thomas to Anchorage to St. Louis to Dallas, and, finally, to Albuquerque, where she's now lived for almost 20 years. The Republican Party being where, as most people probably know, the women do all the work and the men just walk around like they own the place -- just so you know where *I* got it from. :-). She retired with real estate broker's licenses in three states that I know about, Missouri, Alaska, and Texas. Maybe also New Mexico, too, for all I know. She's personally gotten a couple of dozen people elected, the one of longest record being Alaska's Congressman Don Young, for whom she run an RCC-decorated phone-room get-out-the-vote operation. Young's still on the Hill, stuffing those pork barrels and with yours and my money and packing them off the almost-wilds of Alaska, or at least Los Anchorage, where all his votes *really* live. One of her memories (besides telling Ronald Reagan to his face in no uncertain terms that he was damn well going to get Carter elected in 1976 if he didn't sit down and shut up :-)) was baby-sitting one George Herbert Walker Bush one St. Louis day in the middle 70's, when he was between jobs and nobody really wanted to talk to him at the time... At the moment, if she's not contemplating the Ruin of the American Republic at the Hands of Albert Gore, Jr. (our favorite scenario was him buying off the electoral college), her having been a poll-judge at almost every election I can remember until the last few, she's probably yelling "Recount!", into the phone, at the top of her lungs, an the Appropriate Duly-Constituted Legal Official about that something-hundred-vote squeaker in New Mexico that she *knows* Bush *really* won. :-). Cheers, RAH -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'