melannen | Election day!

You know that old saying about how democracy is like sausage: you'll feel much better about it if you never see it in progress?

Yeah, don't ever sign up as an election judge or a meat inspector.

(Also, Candidate Middlebrooks' wife showed up to observe and get immediate vote totals. Guess how many times I accidentally called her Mrs. Milliband! Go on, guess!)

Here are the Completely Useless Skills^{(pat. pending)} I showed off to my fellow election judges while waiting to see if any voters would actually show up for a non-presidential primary election where none of the races were being seriously contested.

House of Cards: So the real key to your basic house of cards is the /\ arch. Take two cards, line them up back to back, and then hold them in the thumb and finger of one hand by their upper two corners, with the bottom edges swung apart to make a /\ shape. You can use your other fingers or hand to open out the bottom, but most of the weight should still hang from the upper two corners.

Place this /\ very carefully on a somewhat rough horizontal surface, with the upper edges of the cards lined up as closely as possible, and when it feels right, let go, and your /\ should stand up by itself.

Now do another of those next to the first, and then carefully place a card flat across the two arches, making a sort of trilithon. Congratulations! You now have the only skill you need to make houses of cards of arbitrary size! You can make it longer by adding new /\ and flat pieces to the ends, and then you can put another row of /\ and horizontals on top of the first pieces, and so on until you run out of cards!

Once you have the trilithon down, you're gold. A series of /\ arches with horizontals is actually surprisingly stable, and will stand up to all kind of fumblefingers and nervous tremors. The tricky part is when you have one /\ and you have to get the other up before you can put a horizontal on. Also, keeping it balanced, and making sure upper layers don't get too heavy for the base (which will depend on your cardstock.)

Also, having the sheerbloodlymindedness and vast amounts of free time to keep rebuilding after every inevitable time you've almost got another layer ready and then it all tumbles down.

'Beaded' paperclip necklace: Make a papeclip chain the length you want the necklace to be. (If you don't know how to do this, I can't help you.) Take a great many stickers of standard size and shape, of a shape that's symmetrical around one axis, and of a size that's about a quarter inch shorter than your paperclips. Put a sticker on each paperclip, arranged so that the paperclips can still swing freely at the joints. Then turn the necklace over, and line up a sticker on the back of each previous sticker, sticky side to sticky side.

(This was something of a group effort and actually got given away to a voter to wear out canvassing. \o/)

Paper Spring: Take two longish, narrowish strips of paper. (If you don't have a roll of stickers, straw wrappers work.)

Line up the ends of the two strips so they make an L shape with the corners overlapping at 90%. Accordion fold the two strips over each other - folding the first strip over the second, then the second strip over than fold, and so on, until you get to the end of one of the strips. Trim ends. Make it go bouncy bouncy. Tada!

Kleenex carnation: This process should be pretty familiar to anybody who's made a tissue-paper tropical flower, but it has the added benefit of looking amazingly like a real flower, and being made with supplies you can find pretty much anywhere.

Take at least two Kleenex or similar multi-ply disposable tissues, unfold completely (but do *not* un-ply), and then fold in half the long way. Then accordion fold up, with the fold parallel to the short side, and then fold as narrow as possible (something less that .5" is best. Take a paperclip, piece of string, bit of wire, or anything else hand, and tie or wraparound approximately the halfway point of the folded bundle, as tightly as possible. The take scissors or a knife, and cut the ends of either side of the bundle. (One end will be folds; cut the folds entirely off. Then cut the other end to about the same length to even it.)

At this point, if you have a marker, sharpie, ink pad, or similar source of liquid dye, you can color just the ends of the bundle for a cheap carnation-y effect.

Next, starting one one end, very carefuly separate the top layer of kleenex (separating the two plies if necessary) and pull it to the tie in the center, as far up as you can without tearing. Repeat for all layers on that side, then do the same on the other side.

Then do whatever you can with supplies at hand to turn what you used to tie the center into something resembling a stem.

Paperclip tesseract:Do this using the Flatland method, basically: make a square out of paperclips by linking four paperclips together at four corners. Then make a another square the same way. Then make a cube by taking four more paperclips, and connecting each corner on one square to the corresponding corner on the other square. Then make another cube the same way.

Then (this is the mathematically non-rigourous 'just fudge it' step), delink one vertex of one of your cubes, and then interlace it with the other cube by putting each edge you just delinked through a face of the other cube, and relinking the vertex inside the other cube.

Then take eight more paperclips and connect each vertex of one cube to the corresponding vertex of the other cube.

There are only two tricky bits here. The first is that every time you make a vertex out of three or more paperclips, make sure every paperclip is laced through every other paperclip involved in the vertex. The second is keeping track of which vertex corresponds to which and what you've already connected, as the thing repeatedly collapses into chaos. I recommend getting colored paperclips and color-coding them.

Once you have made all the interlinks, stare into your hypercube as you manipulate it in a strangely hypnotic way in an attempt to make sense of the strange orders within it, and try to get it to take and hold a shape - any shape - in 3D space. Be amazed at the way it seems to collapse into a chaotic tangle the minute you stop putting tension on it, but always easily pulls open again. Then go visit Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Which and Mrs. Who (assuming, of course, that they have not already turned up to vote in the primary, which is the sort of thing Mrs. Whatsits, Whiches, and Whoes tend to do.)

If you ever reach the point where you attempt to create a 5-cube by making two hypercubes out of paperclips and the connecting them, congratulations! You have outdone even me at useless skills!

(Oh, and some voters actually did show up! Although many of them were confused and thought they were there to vote on something else entirely. This is, sadly, true.)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Then go visit Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Which and Mrs. Who (assuming, of course, that they have not already turned up to vote in the primary, which is the sort of thing Mrs. Whatsits, Whiches, and Whoes tend to do.)

you just made me snork diet coke. thank you.

Observing the interesting variety of people who vote in an off-year primary is half the fun!

...i qualify as none of the above, yet i voted. i was #41.

on the other hand, i suspect that once i progress in age to what i envision theirs to be, give or take, i will be described as one of those three.

um, did that make sense?

I voted today! At 6PM! And was the eightieth person to vote in my electoral district. My wife was 79. My kid did not count.

We had shiny new electronic machines. They were...interesting? They did not make that nice clanky noise. I like the clanky noise.

Hooray! I think our polling place had something like 250 total, but at least fifty of them showed up by mistake. (We made them vote anyway.)

We have Diebold touchscreens. They are shoddily built and badly designed! I hate them. (Especially compared to the perfectly nice - and recountable - scantron ballots we used before 2000.)

We've just upgraded to scantron-style ballots. With a fancy machine that says "thank you for voting!" in front of a flag and an eagle ~~and Stephen Colbert~~.

Go you, making people vote anyway! Nearly all our races in my primary were uncontested, so I literally voted for Attorney General and Senator. No wonder no one showed up.

Your useless skills are AWESOME, especially the last one. Am wondering now if I have paperclips somewhere.

I was never much of a fan of Madelaine L'Engle, but the two things I picked up from A Wrinkle In Time was that everybody should have two skills: One, have memorized a very long chunk of non-repetive text, to recite protectively in case of brainwashing or mind control; and two, to build a working model of a tesseract. :D

Paperclip tesseract: I know what I'm doing next time the boss is out of the office! Seriously, though, we do need to do something with the millions of non-archival paperclips we remove from collections; that is as good an idea as any.

I don't want it to sound more useful a skill than it is! Seriously, it does not look impressive at all; the only thing to do with it is make it, manipulate while you try to figure out what shape it is/how it folds up, and then take it apart again. (Though there are probably other shapes you could make! I wonder if a version of the Hoberman sphere would work at all...)

Election day!

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