What Might have Been and Another Canada Tip

My friend Sooz took this great pic­ture of Howard Dean a few years ago, when he came to Boston for a spe­cial Ral­ly called ‘Democ­ra­cy, Free­dom, Action’ in Cop­ley Square. I remem­ber it well, because I designed the T‑Shirts for the event. (the front of the shirt had those words in white type on a blue shirt, the back had the date and ‘I was there’). The pic­ture brought a lot of nos­tal­gia for me for the recent past. This was per­haps near the height of Dean’s pop­u­lar­i­ty. He had enor­mous crowds in New York, Seat­tle and Philadel­phia. His pic­ture appeared on the cov­ers of both Time and NewsWeek. As you can see by the pic­ture, there was quite a wind. I remem­ber that well too, because I was pret­ty far back in the crowd, hold­ing up one pole of an enor­mous sign (for­got what it said, but it was prob­a­bly some­thing like the ‘Bean­town is Dean­town’ sign at the podi­um). The wind threat­ened to pull us down, so there were some moments of excite­ment not entire­ly due to the speak­er. In just a short time, Dean would lose the Iowa Cau­cus­es and then crash to earth as a result of his famous ‘scream’ (which was real­ly just a pep talk with the direc­tion­al mike for the Pub­lic Address sys­tem fed direct­ly into the news cov­er­age source input).

Dean is now chair­man of the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty, but already the press is try­ing to por­tray him as a hot­head, and that oth­er Democ­rats are ‘dis­tanc­ing them­selves from him’ because he dared utter the words “I think Tom Delay ought to go back to Hous­ton, where he can serve his jail sen­tence” at the Mass State Con­ven­tion a month or so ago. I admire the fact that Dean still has the guts to stand up to the Repub­li­cans, but as you can see, he can’t win against a media and gov­ern­ment dom­i­nat­ed by the forces that con­tin­ue to mar­gin­al­ize him. He would have made a hell of a great Pres­i­dent (not just a good one), and now he’s just paint­ed as a snarling crack­pot who the rest of the par­ty claims does not rep­re­sent them.

Back to Reality
The tag sale is over. We sold most of what we need­ed to, and it was bet­ter than leav­ing it on the curb (although not much). The remain­ing large items, with the excep­tion of our bed, are already spo­ken for. I think I might just leave a mes­sage on Craig’s list detail­ing where the bed will be on the morn­ing that we leave, and hope that some sharp-eyed neti­zen will pick it up. With the excep­tion of the bag and the frame, it’s like new, so hope­ful­ly it will be a nice find. My par­ents gra­cious­ly bought the piano — it’s being shipped to my broth­er in Seat­tle, where he will be able to play it — as I will when I vis­it him.
More Immi­gra­tion Tips
Anoth­er in my series of tips to those who want to emi­grate to Canada:
Get your dri­ving record, which you can order direct­ly from your local Depart­ment of Motor Vehi­cles. Do not use drivingrecord.com, who utter­ly botched my order and actu­al­ly can­celled it. Good thing they did, as I was near­ly stuck pay­ing twice as much by rely­ing on their lit­tle (if any) added value.
Why do you need your dri­ving record? Two reasons:

1. If you want to get a Cana­di­an dri­ver’s license and want to avoid hav­ing to first get a learn­er’s per­mit and then hav­ing to take a dri­ving test (and pay the fees for these), the dri­ving record comes in handy.
2. If your dri­ving record is good, it can help get you a dis­count on your auto insur­ance. Appar­ent­ly this can add up to $50 a month in sav­ings, accord­ing to one report I saw.