All clear!

The one year check-up is now official. Nothing amiss on either of the CT scans and everything else looks good too. Today I even had a chance to meet with my surgeon who look down my throat and probed around on my neck -- somehow that visual and hands-on exam was even more reassuring than the high tech scans. To celebrate we met the Schultz's for dinner tonight at the 71 Bar -- better than expected food and great company! Life is good...

Attended John Judge's talk at BSU last night and he is actually quite compelling in person; not the ranting conspiracy theorist I feared he might turn out to be -- plus he had a refreshingly off-beat sense of humor. I left (after three hours -- many people still there!) realizing that the most important citizen work in a democracy doesn't involve the presidential election and that all the acrimony of recent weeks is symptomatic of a deeper structural flaw in our two-party system. He (almost?) convinced me that representative democracy is an anachronism in the age of the internet and needs to be tranformed in a direct, participatory democracy. /dps