Sounding the horn on the blog bears no penalty and so I can proceed.

It is late. My train is speeding into darkness along the New Haven -- Grand Central corridor. I am reading the New Yorker and, in the gloom of the dark night, I suddenly I realize that our toast may well fall butter-side down in our laps. Let me explain.

The Talk of the Town column recalls Murphy's Law. Originally states as "If there's a wrong way to do it, he will" (since I am obsessing about politics, a certain candidate comes to mind), it evolved into the general proposition that "Anything that can go wrong will," or, as it is often formulated across the ocean (in Britain) -- "Bad things happen at the most inopportune times." In England, an advertisement basically sums it up thus: "Not only will your toast fall butter-side down; your toaster will break--the day after your guarantee runs out." And, the New Yorker article suggests that this is more than folk-wisdom. Life's events catapult in unfortunate directions in a synchronized march toward doomsday with some regularity. At the very least, it can be demonstrated that you are more likely to be stuck in a traffic jam if you need to be somewhere in a hurry.

I haven't read the headlines today yet, but I can translate this all too well into the political arena. Imagine this chain of absurdities: Kerry says Lambert instead of Lambeau while munching on a brat which he mistakenly refers to as a br-aaa-t (rhymes with hat), while wiping goose blood from his newly acquired hunting jacket, and 1000 voters, apparently with the minds of boiled turnips, catch all this on TV, gasp in shock, and fill out their swing state ballots for the "other guy." The electoral tallying machine crunches out the bleak reality. Ten electoral votes put one guy over the top and we have 4 more years of an administration that basically ensures the demise of the world as we know it. Or at the very least, hacks away at equality, civil rights, global dialogue and environmental resource conservation because the gut of one person tells him that this is what must happen. Have I taken Murphy's Law too far?

We are eleven days away. I have every right to honk scenarios of horror and gloom. Let me pause now and take a look at some headlines. Maybe that will cheer me up.

UPDATE: 50 to 46 doesn't do it for me.

(*see "forty-second street pre-election diary" post, September 22, for explanation of post title)