My younger brother Chris and his fiancé Lindsay are in town this week. With Chris’s help, Lindsay is realizing her long-time dream of opening her own fashion boutique in Georgetown, and they have come to New York on a buying trip.

Chris is a strapping country boy who once swore he would never set foot in a city. He owns rifles, hangs hunting trophies on his wall, and used to drive a pick-up truck painted in hues of desert camouflage.

I took great pleasure in highlighting this image of him when I pointed out he had made a trip to Manhattan to buy pretty dresses.

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In other news, it’s time to mention politics again here on your favorite Upside-down Hippopotamus and mine. Here is a very, very important way Americans can make a difference.

Few people know that the great electoral debacle in Florida 2000 was not so much about hanging chads as suspicious returns from new touch-screen voting machines largely manufactured by a company called Diebold. Diebold is run by a right-wing nut who has openly promised to deliver results for the Republican party, and in fact, Diebold machines have returned very suspicious victories for Republican candidates in several races since then. This sounds like a conspiracy theory, but it isn’t . . . this is a quick synopsis of many, many articles and discussions all over the web right now.

The problem is that the whole hanging-chad business has tipped popular opinion toward these electronic machines, and Diebold has a large number of contracts all over the country for the 2004 elections. For many reasons (highlighted in a study done at my alma mater, Johns Hopkins), Diebold’s machines are easy to tamper with, and the tampering is impossible to detect. It would not be an exaggeration to say that if these machines are largely adopted as-is, democracy as we knew it in America is over.

You can get a calm overview of this appalling situation here, and a rather alarmist (although I think it’s impossible to be too alarmist about this) overview here. The text of some leaked internal Diebold emails is here. These are three of many, many, many places to get information online.

When you are sufficiently terrified, click here to help sponsor a resolution making this dangerous form of voting more accurate and verifiable.