Including this awesome close up of a dead roasted pig with its tongue sticking out.

Technorati Tags: Richmond, wtf

This weekend RMSzero, fetzer and I traveled to Jacksonville by way of Savannah to see our Hokies lose yet again to a mediocre Florida State team. That’s the only thing I am going to say about football. The trip still rocked mostly because we elected to stay the night in Savannah (awesome) instead of Jacksonville (lame).

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So havoc and I went on a crazy adventure to an abandoned cemetery. While there we found a crypt that had been broken into. The grave robbers smashed the old wooden coffins, and broke the marble lids of the newer coffins. It was insane.

To prove it, I saw a human skull:

More photos here:

• MaxPower’s flickr
• havoc’s flickr

RMS and I attended the Tim Kaine rally this Sunday. Havoc attended too, but the unwashed masses prevented our meet up. He did however snap this great shot of the group on stage:

Let’s get this straight. Barack Obama is a celebrity. People — including me — love that guy. He just doesn’t feel like a politician when he speaks: nothing he says sounds contrived or forced. He was the crowd favorite on Sunday and received more applause than even Tim Kaine.

It was apparent to me after watching Obama speak and then watching Tim Kaine speak immediately after,
that Obama is a level 9 wizard of politics while Kaine is something like a level 2 n00b. Obama posses a certain something — I’m going to say “a personality” — that Kaine just doesn’t have. Whatever that certain something is, it is what gets Obama mentioned as a presidential candidate while Kaine is left to slug it out against Jerry Kilgore.

Obama mostly told stories from his own campaign for US Senator and then said things like “Democrats are good, and so is Tim Kaine!” I could take or leave some of the things he said. The Democrats are sometimes just directly opposed to small government / states rights, and yall know that’s how I roll. In my heart of hearts I want Barack Obama to become the John McCain of the Democrats and do things because they are the right thing to do, not because the Party says so. But hey, it is his freshman year, it takes time to become a maverick.

Tim Kaine’s speech was less than enthralling. He spent a good fifteen minutes talking about how bad Jerry Kilgore was for not promising to run a positive campaign. It felt internally inconsistent to me. But hey, what do I know?

I do know this, actually: some people are crazy about their political party affiliation. The only thing I can relate it to is college football. People there were intense about anything anyone said. It kind of blows my mind.

RMSzero and I took a road trip to Hooville this weekend to weigh in on the state of political blogging in Virginia. I wore my VT regalia just in case anyone assumed I was a hoo loyalist. The experience was interesting, amazing and hilarious.

Meeting people from the i-net in meatspace always creeps me out, and this experience was no different. I met Waldo, Rick Sincere, Norman, John and a would-be delegate from Fairfax but who in fact had lost her race. We pointed out to her that NoVA sucks. Oops. I also saw some of the dudes from SicSemper but they peaced out after lunch and I didn’t get a chance to talk to them. Also, I think Waldo’s mom may be hot. Just a thought.

When RMS and I arrived we picked a table that soon became the kid’s table — a mostly college aged table. The whole event was kind of like a middle school dance in a way, with people acting polite and awkward. “Awesome” and “Amazing” would be two words I would use to describe it.

Things discussed:

What makes up a good government. Interesting to see what people thought — especially the libertarian-to-the-max guy and the (possible delegate?) guy from south west Virginia who’s every argument began with “When I talk to people in the Country Store…”

Campaign finance laws and regulations. A fellow by the name of Scott(or Chris?) Piper gave an interesting presentation on the laws that apply specifically to political bloggers. If you run a blog, pay more than 200$ for hosting, and encourage people to vote for or against a specific candidate then you are required by law to report your hosting fee as a campaign contribution. Learning is fun. I think in general the room was full of outrage — which was kind of silly. Luckily the gov’t only counts actual money as a contribution, not time. So fear not Haduken.com readers.

The Virginia Way. Then a guy talked about the Virginia Way™ what that means. I learned that Governor Byrd sux0rz’d.

Blogger code of ethics. A proposed universal — at least to Virginia — blogger code of ethics set off the best discussion of the day. I think the room was split down the middle between people who feel like self-regulation is one step down the road toward government regulation and people who thought self-regulation would add to blogger legitimacy. Given the huge spectrum of blogs — even within the political blogs genre — the specifics of a universal code of ethics would be difficult if not impossible to nail down. But I think I could get behind a graduated code of ethics, much like the creative commons copyright. As long as the least restrictive version was something like “When I use sources I will cite them” or something similar.

Afterwards we had a great conversation with John from Church Hill People’s News. He is an awesome dude and we are going to get beers sometime.

So there you have it. My thoughts on the first Virginia Political Bloggers Summit. Jim Bacon of Bacon’s Rebellion (best named blog ever) has news on a follow-up conference:

The Creative Change Center in Richmond has offered to host and organize a follow-up blogging conference if there is any interest in one. I see this conference as being very hands-on, digging into the nitty gritty of blogging operations. I’m very open to any suggestions of topics to be addressed, and would welcome the participation of anyone who would like to play an organizing role. Communicate through this blog or by e-mailing me at jabacon@baconsrebellion.com.

If you don’t read anything else from the Uganda e-mail thread, you may at least be interested in this. This blew my mind.

Some of you may know that after the team arrived and settled in at Canaan, I then headed north to spend about a week in the Ugandan war zone. My main goal was to try to get a few orphans out of the war zone, and back down safely to Canaan.

An astounding e-mail of swashbuckling adventure follows . . .

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Van and his Texan sidekick, named, what else, Dustin the Texan, take a surreal and drug-riddled joy ride to the Horse Races of Northern Virginia, partly in tribute to the late Hunter S. Thompson, and partly in an effort to make political connections for fun and profit. For some reason, the son of the Prime Minister of Australia is there, wearing fancy boots. (Includes 1 picture of some random chicks wearing silly hats.)

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